Jane looked up at her and smiled. “I’d wondered about that. I mean, I know it wasn’t going to be like a pirate cache of gold coins.”
“No, but they were pretty sophisticated. So, the gold would have been formed into bars before shipping and it would’ve been relatively small in bulk, and thus easy to carry on a stagecoach. There were guards the whole time it was loaded. And there were actually two armed guards on board, and the driver was armed, as well. I sincerely doubt that one person could have been responsible. And then the dead men had to be buried, the stagecoach dismantled and made to ‘disappear’ and the gold hidden somewhere. It was a pretty complex operation.”
“One they must have been planning for a long time,” Jane agreed. “Two guards and an armed driver. So, maybe a party of three?”
“And someone in the know,” Kelsey said. “Only someone working for the mine, someone involved in its administration, would be aware of exactly when the gold was due to leave the mine.”
Jane glanced down at her book. “Well, this is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It could have been almost anyone living in the area at the time except...” She paused. “The administrators at the mine would have known—but local enforcement must have known, too.”
“Yes, I imagine they would alert the sheriff’s office.”
“Okay,” Jane said, thinking it out as she spoke, still and staring down at the pages in front of her. “We know that Hardy was shot before the stagecoach was attacked. What if Hardy suspected something concerning the sheriff and the deputy—something he’d picked up in jail because he could hear them when they talked? So Aaron Munson was afraid Hardy would blow the whistle on them before they got the gold. He went in and shot Hardy—never imagining that the townspeople would react so violently.”
“That’s possible. But it would mean Munson was dead when the stagecoach was robbed—and disappeared from the face of the earth.”
“But not Fogerty!” Jane said. “His book points at a man named Tod Green, a man claiming to be a rancher, who was in town at the time. A guy called Eamon McNulty was the director at the theater. McNulty and Green got into a huge argument and they had a duel in the street. Green died.”
“What happened to McNulty?” Kelsey asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t found another reference to him, other than the fight.”
“Okay, say the sheriff, his deputy and McNulty were in on it together. They set this Tod Green guy up to take the fall. Munson was lynched before the robbery, so he was no longer a player. But Hardy suspected what was going on and he told Sage McCormick about it. Sage disappears. We’re virtually certain she was murdered because her body was found in the theater.”
“Then there’s Red Marston, who disappeared the same night as Sage,” Jane said. “He might have been part of the conspiracy. People thought Sage ran off with Red Marston, but if Fogerty was involved, the rumor makes sense—Fogerty is the one who implied that Sage had gone off with Red. So, let’s say Red was part of this, and he did care for Sage. Maybe he didn’t want her killed, and because he wouldn’t take part in the murder, he had to go, too.” Jane wrinkled her nose. “This is getting really complicated.”
“No kidding.” Kelsey frowned. “But if Fogerty and McNulty came out of it alive, why didn’t they take the gold and get out of town when it all blew over?”
“I don’t know. That is a dilemma. And I doubt Fogerty admitted anything in a book he wrote himself,” Jane said.
“No. I wonder about Eamon McNulty, though.” Kelsey pulled out her phone. “I’ll look for him on Google.”
Jane waited, watching her.
“‘Eamon McNulty, renowned actor, director, theater manager,’” Kelsey read. “‘Born April 2, 1833, in New York City, New York, died June 4, 1873, Lily, Arizona, of a suspected aneurysm.’” Kelsey looked up at Jane. “It goes on to talk about his start as a poor Irish kid working in the bawdy houses of Five Points, getting a leg up in legitimate theater, staging some of the hits of the day. After critical success and financial failure, he accepted a request to manage the infamous Gilded Lily, in Lily, Arizona, where he brought in artists like Sage McCormick and Daniel Easton, known for their brilliance on the stage.”
“What if McNulty was the one who stashed the gold—maybe lying about where it was or keeping it a secret. And then he up and dies of natural causes!” Jane said. “That would mean Fogerty had to spend the rest of his life looking for the gold. But since he didn’t find it—and he’d gotten rid of all witnesses—he wrote a book!”
“Why would he do that? Although he wasn’t a half-bad writer.”
“I guess he wanted his version of Lily’s history to be the one future generations accepted as truth,” Kelsey said. “But how does that affect what’s happening now?”