Becky paused again and looked up from a shard of glass she was digging from Sara’s belly button.
“You’ve never heard that saying? Don’t put the cart before the horse? What are you, five years old?”
“Well, I’m not a dinosaur like you, apparently.”
Sara smiled.
“You’d better want it, child. I have tweezers in my hand and I can pinch you so hard…”
“Okay, sorry. You do look awfully young for a dinosaur…”
Jordan asked, “So what does it mean?”
“It means basically to chill out and wait and see. Don’t assume something is going to happen. Because it might not, and then you’ve worried yourself silly for nothing.
“Tillie said whatever her final plans were she was in no real hurry to leave.
“And if she does leave eventually, she said nothing about taking Millicent with her. So don’t put the cart before the horse. Don’t worry yourself unnecessarily. There’s plenty of time to worry later if need be.”
She poured water from a bottle onto Sara’s midsection and wiped it with a cotton towel.
“Okay, sweetheart. I think that’s all of them. I want you to rub your hands over your body and see if you can feel any I’ve missed, okay?”
While Sara did so Becky went to work on her feet.
“My goodness. Running up those stairs and along that road made a mess of these things as well…”
-46-
Tom stood next to John Castro and Deputy Charlie Sikes. They were looking at a still-smoldering pile of ashes and debris.
The remnants of what once had been one of the nicest homes on the street.
They were discussing their options.
“As I see it,” Tom said, “We don’t have a choice but to dig it out.
“If we don’t, we won’t know for sure whether the killer got away. If he managed to escape after Sara got out, he might have made his way into the woods. He might hole up somewhere and heal.
“Then he might come back and seek vengeance on Sara.
“Or kill someone else instead. This might not be the end of it.”
Charlie was less than enthused about the idea.
“I don’t know, Sheriff. Sara said he was injured from the blast. And that she knocked him cold.
“I have to believe that the odds are against an injured man regaining consciousness in time to crawl up a set of burning steps and to safety before the house collapsed around him.
“Maybe it’s just me, but I think digging through the rubble all the way to the basement looking for bones is a big waste of time.”
Tom was in one of his grumpy moods.
The kind Sara liked to call his “Archie Bunker moods.”
“Well now,” Tom said. “I guess it’s a damn good thing I’m the sheriff and you’re not.”
He snarled at Charlie and continued.
“And that means I’m the one who gets to decide whether we dig or not. Not you.”
Charlie knew he was beat.
“Yes, sir. No offense intended. I’m just sick and tired of this whole serial killer thing, that’s all.”
Tom softened just a bit.
He actually liked Charlie. Charlie reminded him in a lot of ways of his son Caleb.
Of course if Charlie had been Tom’s son, Tom would have spanked him a lot more when he was young.
Then perhaps Charlie wouldn’t have been so damned lazy.
John offered his opinion by saying, “It’ll be way too hot to dig through for a day or two. Beneath the surface the debris is still smoldering.
“What’s your game plan for the meantime, Tom?”
“I want to give the guys a day off. They deserve it after looking so hard for Sara for the last few days.
“Then we’re getting back out there. I’ll not have another woman get murdered on my watch. We’ll keep searching until we find the killer holed up somewhere or this mess cools off enough for us to dig through it and find his remains.”
They inspected the back yard of the home, between the house and the woods.
There were no evident drag marks which might indicate an injured man crawled away from the flames.
No sign of blood or pieces of burned skin either.
All indications were that Jeff Barnett didn’t make it out alive.
But Tom had taken too much for granted lately.
He’d taken it for granted that Sara could drive freely at night with a killer on the loose without being taken.
Tom felt directly responsible for that.
He’d taken it for granted that the body they’d found and buried was Sara.
The killer had outsmarted them. He felt responsible for that as well.
He resolved never to take things for granted again.
He’d come to realize how critically important not doing so could be.
“So I’m off duty today, boss?”
Charlie was beat, like everybody else, and desperately wanted to go home to get some sleep.
Tom said, “Yes, Charlie. Go home and rest. Be back here at 8 a.m. tomorrow. We’ll check the debris pile and if it’s cool enough we’ll start digging.
“If it’s still too hot we’ll start a grid search, fanning out from here. Just in case he’s still out there somewhere.”
Tom turned back to John Castro.
“I know you’re tired, John. And I really appreciate the help you’ve been. But I’m headed out on a new mission. If you still have it in you I’d like to invite you along.”
“No problem, Tom. Where are we going?”
“The body we thought was Sara’s was once a living, breathing woman. She didn’t deserve to die, and she doesn’t deserve to be buried without us knowing her name and saying a prayer over her grave for her.
“And she needs to be correctly identified so we can put her proper name on her grave marker.
“We can’t bring her back. But we can do that much for her.”
“I’m with you, Tom. Let’s go knock on some doors.”
As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult.
The first door they knocked on was a quarter mile down the road, Anne’s next door neighbors.
But there was no answer.
Tom picked up a boy’s bicycle on the front porch and examined a faded marking, in a child’s scrawl, made a couple of years before with a blue Sharpie.
It read, “Jason Miller,” and sparked a sad memory in Tom’s mind.
“We won’t find anyone here,” Tom said matter-of-factly.
“The Millers are all dead. Murder suicide more than a year ago. The father decided he couldn’t take it anymore, so he shot the whole family and then himself.”
“Sad. That’s happened too much lately.”
“Yep. What’s even more sad is that it’s become so common I forgot about it until I saw young Jason’s name.”
At the next house, another quarter mile up the road, a woman named Jessica answered the door.
“Hello, ma’am. I’m Sheriff Tom Haskins. This is my new deputy, John Castro.
“We were wondering if you knew the woman who lived two houses west of here.”
“Two houses west? You mean Anne Walker. Is she okay?”
“Well, we hope so, ma’am. But we’re not sure. Did she live there alone?”
“Yes. Well, her and her two horses. She had a dog until some monster shot him about a year ago. Skinned him on the spot and took the meat. The bastard. Never did find out who it was.”
“Yes, ma’am. We found a body at her place. A small body, too badly burned to make an identification.”
“If it was a small body it was likely hers. She was a little bitty woman. Kind as kind could be. You say she was burned?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Was she killed by that killer you’ve been looking for?”
“Yes, ma’am. We have reason to believe she was.”
She went silent for a moment.
Anne wasn’t a friend, exactly. S
he was more a casual acquaintance.
But she was a neighbor.
And neighbors are supposed to watch over one another.
She regretted not going over to Anne’s more often to see how she was doing.
Or sending her husband to check on her.
A single woman, living alone, was perhaps too easy a target for the killer to pass up.
It seemed Tom wasn’t alone in the guilt he was feeling.
There was enough to go around.
“Have you caught him yet?”
“We think so, ma’am, but won’t know for sure for a couple of days. You folks stay on your toes just in case.
“And thank you for the information.”
-47-
An unseasonably cool night made it possible for Tom and Charlie to start digging through the debris.
Tom gave John Castro the option of helping but he chose not to.
“If it’s all the same to you, Tom, I’ll help in the search. I’ve seen my share of ashes, and way more than my share of burned bodies.
“I’ve been worried that some of your volunteers may not be up to the task of confronting an armed felon. I’d rather be out there where I can be more good if they find him and things get ugly.”
“Thank you for your honesty, John. And you’re right. Some of the men are a bit green.
“I accepted their help because I was desperate to find Sarah. But some of them have never fired a gun in anger and would be at a severe disadvantage if they were up against our killer one on one.
“Why don’t you take my car and stay more or less in the middle of the main search area?
“I’ll tell everybody if they get a hot lead or think they’ve found him, to contact you immediately but to stay back until you get there.”
“Thanks, Tom.”
Piece by piece Tom and Charlie dragged aside the unburned pieces of lumber and other materials
They were very careful not to fall into the huge pit which used to be the basement, and once all the large pieces were out of the way Charlie used an aluminum ladder to climb down into the void.
There the going was even rougher, as the ashes and debris were waist deep.
Charlie volunteered to go in, wearing a fireman’s thermal suit and boots he’d borrowed from Fire Station Number 1 in downtown Kerrville.
Even through the insulated trousers he could feel the heat against his lower legs.
Tom took each large piece of debris as Charlie threw it out of the hole and tossed it as far away as he could to get it out of the way.
After several hours they were covered with sweat.
Charlie strongly resembled a burned marshmallow. He was covered from head to toe with sweat, which of course was covered with ash.
The ash stuck like glue to his wet clothing.
“I’ve never been so miserable in my life,” Charlie said before spitting several times. Every time he spoke more ash flew into his open mouth.
Tom said with a sadistic laugh, “I’m just sorry I didn’t bring Scott’s camera along with us.”
By late afternoon the debris pile was down considerably. All the big pieces were gone now, and what was left were small pieces and ash.
It still came up to Charlie’s knees.
“I’ll tell you what,” Tom suggested. “Why don’t we call it a day and come back in the morning?”
“Let’s give it another few minutes,” Charlie said. “I have an idea.”
Up until then they’d been working blind as Charlie walked back and forth digging through the ash for large pieces to bail out.
Their thinking had been to remove as much debris as possible so he could work his way through the rest of it, filling one five-gallon bucket after another. Eventually, they reasoned, they’d either empty the basement completely or find evidence of a body.
But Charlie realized they didn’t have to be neat about it.
This was definitely a crime scene, sure.
But none of the items they found would ever be collected as evidence.
There would never be any lab technicians poring over what they found. No scientific testing.
No trial to present the evidence they found.
They were here for one reason and one reason only: to determine whether there was a human body buried within the ashes.
And Charlie thought he had a better way.
“Where did Sara say she clobbered the guy?”
“She said he rolled down the stairs and she hit him where he landed.”
Charlie looked around at the blackened basement walls.
On the opposite side from where he stood he saw them: Charred iron supports, bolted into the concrete wall, ten inches apart. Each one was higher than the one before it, and lower than the one after it.
These were the supports which connected the stairs to the basement walls.
He walked slowly and deliberately through the ash to the opposite wall.
“This is like wading through heavy sand,” he complained.
When he made it to the other wall he examined it closely.
“Now I’m guessing the basement door was there, in that corner.”
He moved over a bit, until he was about the center of the wall.
“Now if the bottom step was about there, and if he rolled just a few feet past the bottom step, he would have been somewhere around this area.”
He started feeling around with his feet until he stepped on something hard and relatively round.
“And that means if whatever I just stepped on that feels like a soccer ball probably isn’t a soccer ball at all.”
He reached down into the muck with both hands and felt around.
After a few seconds he came up holding a human skull.
It was charred black and had several clumps of burned skin and hair hanging from it.
“What do you think,” he asked Tom with a macabre laugh. “Does he look like the sketch?”
He tossed the skull aside and made his way to the ladder.
Once back on the grass of Anne’s back yard he vomited.
Tom said, “I’ve seen enough to call this case closed. Come on, let’s turn on her well pump and hose you off. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
-48-
John and Hannah and his two girls had hastened their move to Junction to help out in the search for Sara.
When they arrived there was no time for frivolities; no time to even get settled, really.
Now that Sara was back home where she belonged and was well on her way to healing, things were almost back to normal.
Normal, that is, except that the compound was a lot more crowded than usual.
Tillie’s unexpected arrival, as welcome as she was, made the situation worse.
It didn’t help that they still hadn’t been able to pin Tillie down on whether she was going to stay for the long term.
“As much as I appreciate the offer, I just don’t see myself as a country girl,” she said as many times as they asked her about her long term plans. “Yes, I used to have a flower garden. But living the life of a farmer and chasing fireflies at night for entertainment, that’s just never where I saw myself.
“Still, I must say the comfort of living in a compound where I feel safe from the outside is rather appealing.”
Tillie had come a long way from the frail and timid woman she’d been when she embarked on her walk across the country.
But one thing still hadn’t changed.
She still had a hard time making up her mind.
Millicent, on the other hand, had no problem speaking her own mind.
“Aunt Tillie, I love you so much. I’ve always considered you a second mother to me. It’s always been my dream that you came to live with us in San Antonio.
“But San Antonio is not an option anymore. It’s too dangerous and it’s too big. This is my new home. Sara and Jordan have adopted me and I love them very much too now.
“If you leave I’ll have to choose between you and Sara to be my new mom. And I don’t want to do that. If I chose to go with you I would feel I was betraying Sara and everyone else here. They’ve all been so wonderful and loving to me, and I would repay them by abandoning them.
“Most of all I would be betraying Charles.
“Charles and I took a pin and poked our fingers one day right after we met at the orphanage.
“Then we mixed our blood together.
“It was what they call a ‘blood oath.’
“We swore to each other that we would always be together. We’d always have each other’s backs. So that no matter what else happened, how bad things got, each of us would have at least one other person out there who loved us and would protect us.
“And we’d never be completely alone.
“If you left and I decided to go with you I’d have to break that oath to Charles.
“And I don’t think he or I would ever be the same.
“I’d be somebody who was forever known as someone who couldn’t keep her word.
“And Charles would know that no matter how solemn and sincere someone is when they make him a promise they will always break it.
“Because honestly, if he learns he can’t trust me, how in the world can he ever trust anyone?”
They were the words of a wise old woman, coming from the mouth of a tiny girl.
And they made sense.
In essence, Millicent made up Tillie’s mind for her.
“Well, after considering all that, I guess I have no choice but to stay. If the invitation is still open,” Tillie said as she looked to Scott and Becky for confirmation it was.
“Of course it’s still open,” Scott said. “You’re welcome to stay the rest of your life, if you don’t mind becoming one of us.”
“I’d like that, and thank you.
“But, it’s just so crowded here. Are you sure you have room for another body?”
Tom interjected, “Oh, don’t worry about that. John and I have been talking and we have a remedy for that.”
-49-
“On the far side of Kerrville is a big beautiful orange building that’s chock full of building supplies.
It Can't Be Her Page 15