EQMM, November 2009 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Novelette: THE CASE OF THE PISS-POOR GOLD by Lee Goldberg

Fans of the Monk TV series and followers of Lee Goldberg's tie-in novels about the obsessive compulsive San Francisco P.I. are in for a treat. Mr. Goldberg's winter 2009 book in the Monk series, Mr. Monk inTrouble, contains this stand-alone short story. It stars not TV's Adrian Monk but an ancestor of his, Old West assayer Artemis Monk, who shares some of Adrian's obsessions, but has to cope with them amid the filth of an 1855 mining town.

Trouble, California, 1855

A dream killed my husband Hank Guthrie before his twenty-fifth year.

We'd been working this barren patch of dirt in Kansas, trying to make it into a farm and having no luck at it, when he read about all the gold that was sprinkled on the ground out west in California.

The newspapers said the riverbeds there were lined with gold and that anybody with two good arms, a shovel, and a tin pan could earn at least a hundred dollars a day without breaking a sweat. It sounded too good to be true, but that didn't stop every poor farmer from catching gold fever anyway.

My Hank was one of them.

I tried to talk sense to him, but his mind was set on abandoning the farm, packing up what little we had, and heading to California.

I could hardly blame him for wanting to go.

When you're killing yourself trying to grow a crop in a land as ornery, dry, and infertile as my old granny, you want to believe there's an easier way.

I knew California couldn't be the paradise of gold that the newspapers made it out to be, but I figured we couldn't be any worse off than we already were. Besides, I was raised to obey my husband no matter how thickheaded, foolhardy, and stubborn he might be.

So in 1852 we teamed up with four other families and went west. Along the way, we lost nearly all of our cattle and had to toss our stove, our dishes, my momma's candlesticks, and just about every possession we had to lighten our load. Those losses were nothing compared to the human toll. Half of our party died of cholera.

The way west was littered with valuables, graves, and animal carcasses from Kansas to California. More than once during those long, brutal months I wondered what wealth could await us that could match what we'd all lost.

I took it as a bad omen of what was to come. If that wasn't enough of a sign, the first California mining camp we rolled into was named Trouble.

I'd have preferred to stop in a place called Opportunity, Happiness, or Serenity, but I suppose it could have been worse. The place could have been called Futility, Misery, or Death, all of which would have been a more accurate description of what awaited us.

It certainly wasn't a pretty place. The main street was a mire of mud, sawdust, rocks, and horse droppings with an occasional wood plank or two flung atop it to make crossing less of a slog.

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