Cottonwood

by Scott Phillips

Genres: General Fiction; Westerns; Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

From the author of New York Times Notable book The Ice Harvest, a cult classic of Western noir set in a 19th century Kansas frontier town rocked by a series of brutal murders

Introducing photographer and saloon owner Bill Ogden. Perfect for fans of Deadwood and Justified

In 1872, Cottonwood, Kansas, is a one-horse speck on the map; a community of run-down farms, dusty roads, and two-bit crooks. Self-educated saloon owner and photographer Bill Ogden looks on his adopted town with an eye to making a profit or getting out. His brains and ambition bring him to the attention of one Marc Leval, a wealthy Chicago developer with big plans for the small town. The advent of the railroad and rumors of a cattle trail turn Cottonwood into a wild and wooly boomtown—and with Leval as a partner, Ogden dreams of bringing civilization to the prairie.

But civilizing the Great Plains was never that simple. While many in Cottonwood distrust Leval’s motives, and mob violence threatens to derail the town’s dreams of greatness, Ogden finds himself dangerously obsessed with Leval’s stunningly beautiful wife. Meanwhile, plying its sinister trade unnoticed, an apparently ordinary local farm family quietly butchers traveling salesmen, weary travelers, and other unsuspecting wanderers.

In his own inimitable brand of narrative wizardry, Scott Phillips traces the metamorphosis of a frontier town that becomes a lightning rod for sin, corruption, and murder. He also brings to life actual crimes that befell Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s, carried out by a strange clan who popularly became known as the Bloody Benders. Brilliantly written, maliciously fun, and full of many surprises, Cottonwood is historical fiction at its finest.

Release date: June 4, 2024

Publisher: Soho Crime

Print pages: 384

Sample

1
COTTONWOOD, KANSAS
December 1872
The Grass Widows

There was no visible sign the day had broken when I poked my head out of the warm, dark pocket of my buffalo robe and into the stinging air of the blacksmith’s loft where I made my bed. Up the street, though, I could hear a wagon rolling over the uneven ground, its driver cursing his team, the dry hinges of the big doors of the livery as they swung open, banging as they glided over the occasional chunk of frozen mud, someone idiotically ringing the bell that hung from a post in front of the Cottonwood Hotel. Ordinarily by this hour the blacksmith’s boisterous activity would have awakened me, but he appeared to be late in arriving, so I rose shivering from the straw, stretched and pulled on trousers and shirt and then, clutching the robe about me, climbed down from the loft.
     I started the smith’s fire for him and stood before it for a minute or two, until I felt able to haul on my boots and overcoat and step out the door. Unlatching the padlock I walked one of the big square doors outward and found the day scarcely any brighter than when I’d closed my eyes the night before, the sky like cold ash and threatening snow. I couldn’t leave the fire unattended and was about to douse it when the blacksmith showed himself, wheezing and spitting chunks of milky phlegm onto the rock-hard ground.
     “Morning, Bill. See you got the fire going.”
     “You don’t sound too good, Otis.”
     “Nope.” His enormous, grizzled mustache and the narrow patch of wavy black beard under his lower lip were encrusted with frozen saliva and worse.
     “You ought to be home in bed.”
     He made a horrible noise in his throat, that of half-solid matter being reluctantly dislodged, and spat into the fire, appearing to take some comfort in watching the stuff spatter and shrink therein. “The hell I ought. I got work to be done.” Otis’s apprentice, an industrious and formerly reliable young man of eighteen or nineteen by the name of Perkey, had gone off two months earlier to visit his ailing, widowed mother in the town of Lawrence and failed to return, and now it was all poor Otis could do to keep the livery supplied with horseshoes.
     “All right, then. Stop in after lunch and get yourself a shot on the house.”
     He grunted his assent and began fortifying the small blaze I’d started, and I walked off stiff-legged up the street to the hotel, where six other men, laborers sharing a room, sat at the main table of the dining room. There I got a tin cup of coffee like axle grease and horseshit along with a plate of biscuits, and set about eating them as quickly as I could.
     “Where’ve you been sleeping, Bill, to get your hair all afright like that?” The serving girl touched her hand to my hair, which must have been considerably askew. I pushed the hand away without a word or a direct look. “I believe I’ll get you a comb for Christmas” she said as she headed out of the tiny dining room with a jaunty wiggle of her hind end, her long, wavy dark red hair shaking to the rhythm of her teasing laugh.
     Two or three of the others at the table laughed with her. “Appears Miss Katie’s taken a shine to old Bill,” Tim Niedel said, his voice slow and high-pitched, his face wrinkled and flushed. This time of year his face was plain white and went bright pink when he laughed or got sore, but in the summertime he burned so brown even with a straw hat on that only his red hair kept him from being taken for an Indian. Tim had helped me build the saloon a year and a half previous, and when he had cash he was a customer there as well; he and the others were currently at work on a new house of such scale and ostentation that it seemed to belong in another town entirely. Its owners were as yet absentees and known only to the foreman of the project; there was speculation that their decision to locate their house in Cottonwood had been prematurely made, that once they actually saw our underdeveloped little settlement they’d dismantle the thing for reassembly in the more civilized climes of Independence or Fort Scott, or even Wichita.
     “She takes a shine to anyone’s possessed of a cock and balls, Tim,” his neighbor answered in a lovely baritone that could be heard bellowing hymns on Sundays at Methodist services in the meeting hall down the street. Though she didn’t live in town, the woman under discussion often attended those services herself; as neither man had troubled to lower his tone, she must have heard their remarks.
     When she came back in she was still grinning, and she flicked a dishrag at Tim Niedel’s head and then at his chum’s. The other four seemed not to know anyone was in the room with them, so intent were they on shoveling down their corn mush. I gave Katie her dime and a half and went out, ignoring her efforts to get me properly bundled before I got out the door. It wasn’t that I wanted to step out into the punishing morning air with my coat undone; I just didn’t want her hands on me, and I couldn’t have said exactly why.
     On the wall next to the door of the hotel I saw that the proprietors had allowed her to post a fresh copy of her flyer:
 
PROF. MISS KATIE BENDER

can heal all sorts of diseases; can cure
blindness, fits, deafness and all such diseases,
also deaf and dumbness.
Residence, 14 miles east of Independence, on the
road from independence to Osage Mission one and
one half miles south east of Norahead Station.

Katie Bender
June 18,1872
 
     Beneath the printing she had scrawled apply within. Katie’s sporadic attendance at Christian services hadn’t affected her primary vocation as a spirit guide and faith healer, which for a while had earned her something of a following in Cottonwood and the surrounding towns. I hadn’t heard much about it of late, probably since her clientele hadn’t notably prospered or healed or become lucky in love.
     There wasn’t time to ponder the question, though; even in the midst of winter there were things that needed doing every morning, and that time of year I only kept one hired man. I mounted my rheumatic old nag and rode the three miles out to my claim thinking about the day when the income from the saloon would allow me to hire more and be done with farmwork forever.