by Hank Early
“I just found out myself, Earl. Remember, I was in jail?”
“Right. Sorry about that.”
“Fuck the apologies. I’m just glad you’re alive. I’ve been calling and calling your phone. And don’t worry, I fed Goose.”
“Thanks. How did you get out?”
“Just what you said to do. I laid low by the gate and waited until Mindy was on her way out. Hell, she even gave me a lift. She’s really cool …”
“Isn’t she a bit young for you?”
“Look who’s talking. How old was Mary?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“And how old are you?”
“It’s different.”
“She’s actually only ten years younger than me.”
I realized I didn’t exactly know how old Ronnie was. I’d assumed he was in his late thirties. Maybe I was wrong.
“Okay. So, did you find out what’s going on out there?”
“I found out a lot. But I need you to come pick me up.”
“I got the boys coming over in an hour to finish the studio.”
“Cancel it. When this is over, I’ll help you build it myself.”
“Well, shit, Earl, I’d like that very much. Maybe you could be our manager.”
“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t really see that happening. I honestly didn’t know what I’d do when I found Rufus and got to the bottom of Weston’s and Joe’s deaths.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Ronnie said.
“Great. Meet me at Virginia’s trailer. And Ronnie, could you bring me some lunch?”
“Big Mac or quarter-pounder with cheese?”
“Both.”
“Jesus.”
“Just hurry.”
“Will do, and Earl?”
“What?”
“Looooose!”
I laughed and hung up the phone. Roscoe was sitting on the couch staring at me. “Earl happy?” he said.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Earl happy.” At least for the moment, I mentally added, and then walked over and sat down beside him, tousling his curly dark hair.
50
Ronnie’s sister, Wanda, woke up and came into the den. She’d gained weight, and her eyes seemed more focused than I remembered. Good signs, I thought. She shot me a look filled with disdain.
“What are you doing here?”
“Just needed to use the phone.”
“You’re not here to take my kids away again, are you?”
“No. I’m not here for that.”
“Good, because we’re doing all right.” She pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, revealing a half dozen scars from the inside of her elbow down to her wrist. “See. Old. I haven’t stuck a needle in this arm in nearly four months.”
“I think that’s great.”
“Still drink, though. I guess you’re going to tell me I can’t do that too.”
“No. I wouldn’t ever tell you that.”
“Well.”
“Ronnie’s on his way over to pick me up.”
She nodded warily. “I guess … well, do you want a cup of coffee or something?”
“Water would be nice.”
“You don’t want to drink the water here.”
“Why’s that?”
“The well water is tainted.”
“Do you have bottled?”
She rolled her eyes at this obviously unreasonable request but walked into the kitchen and returned with a warm bottle of Walmart-brand water. She tossed it to me, and I unscrewed the top and drank deeply.
“Damn,” she said. “Thirsty man. What have you been doing? Some of that private investigating?”
“Yeah. In fact, I wanted to ask if you’d heard of someone.”
“Who?”
I decided to start with the brothers Zachariah had mentioned. “The Wolf Brothers?”
She laughed. “I’ve seen them once or twice. Saw their handiwork, too.”
“Handiwork?”
“Yeah, go on down to the end of the road and hang a left. You’ll see what they done to Robert Jimmy’s place.”
“Robert Jimmy?”
“That’s what I said.”
“What did they do?”
“Knocked his trailer off the blocks. Took a sledgehammer to the outside of it, beat the hell out of it. Smashed the windows. Threw the furniture outside. Probably would have killed him, too, if Doug Farmer hadn’t of showed up with a shotgun. People know Doug’s just crazy enough to shoot a man without even thinking twice. I reckon the Wolf Brothers has got some human in them after all, because they seemed to know this too and left out of there. What I heard, anyway.”
“Did anybody call the police?”
“Shit, are you kidding? The new sheriff is worse than the last one, and people say the last one wouldn’t show his face out here except for to visit one of them prostitutes in the woods behind the park.”
“Where is this?”
“That girlfriend ain’t getting the job done?” She looked at Virginia and Roscoe, both watching her closely. “Take your brother out to play, Virginia.”
“It’s hot outside today.”
It was odd. Normally a teenager saying something like that to her mother would have sounded like backtalk, but from Virginia, it sounded patient, almost loving. Definitely wise.
“Okay,” Wanda said. “Go to his room, then. Let him build some Legos.”
“Okay,” Virginia said. She took Roscoe’s hand and pulled him off the couch. He started to cry, but she bent down and whispered something in his ear. He grinned. They left the room.
Wanda sat down next to me.
“You really want to go to one of those skinny girls in the woods? Good way to catch something, you know? And I’ll bet a man like you could find it for free if he had a mind to.” She put a hand on my knee.
I slid over on the couch, causing her hand to fall away from my knee. “I’m not looking for it,” I said. “I’m on a case.”
She frowned. “Well, I reckon that woman of yours keeps you pretty satisfied, then.”
I wasn’t about to get into my breakup with Mary, so I ignored her and pushed on.
“I’m looking for somebody named Harriet Duncan.”
She shook her head. “Never heard of her.”
“How about a man named Zachariah?”
“Yeah. He lives just down the way.”
“He always act funny?”
“Depends on what you mean by funny.”
“Like his britches are on fire and he has to go somewhere fast?”
She shook her head. “I ain’t never seen that man do nothing faster than it takes to catch a fish. He’s about the slowest-moving man I ever saw.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was the impression I had, too.” I stood and walked over to the window, pulling down the shade for a look at his trailer. Was he still inside? The old truck was still parked there. I just hoped Ronnie was here before he got in it and pulled away. I had a feeling I might be interested in where he was going.
“So,” I said, still looking out the window. “What else do you know about the Wolf Brothers?”
“Not a lot. Like I said, I seen them a time or two. They’re always together. Look like they don’t even know how to speak or nothing. I guess that’s why folks call them the Wolf Brothers.”
“Dark-haired boys, in their twenties, probably? One of them has a kind of bowl cut?”
“Yeah, that’s them. You seen them before?”
“Yeah, up near my place in the Fingers. But folks up there call them the Hill Brothers.”
“They get around.”
“Any idea what their story is?”
She shook her head. “There’s legends and shit. Hey, want to go for a drink?”
It sounded like the best damned idea in the world. Not that I had any interest in Wanda. The part that sounded great was bellying up to the bar with a kindred spirit and forgetting about the world for a while. God, just the thought of it and I could already
taste the whiskey.
“You got these kids,” I said. “And Ronnie’s on his way to pick me up. My friend Rufus is missing.”
“The blind man?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I reckon he fell into some gorge somewhere. The rain’ll wash him out.”
I shook my head. “He’s alive. I think someone took him.”
“Or killed him.”
She had a point. Why was I so convinced Rufus was alive? If somebody needed to get rid of him because they thought he might know something about Harriet, then wouldn’t killing him be the best way?
The door to Zachariah’s trailer opened. He walked out, wearing a hat (and a shirt) and carrying a walking stick instead of a fishing rod. He looked around, almost as if checking to see if anyone was watching him. Then he headed down the road, back toward the river.
“Tell Ronnie I’ll be back in a few minutes. Tell him to wait on me …” I glanced at the phone Virginia had let me use earlier. “Better yet, can I borrow that phone?”
“I don’t think so,” Wanda said.
I winced. I hated being the bad guy, but sometimes it just couldn’t be avoided.
I let the blinds fall back into place, and I walked over and pocketed the phone. “I’ll bring it back. Tell Ronnie to call me on this number when he gets here.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“I probably deserve that,” I said, and headed out into the heat of midday, still hungry, still tired, but at least I’d had some water. It would have to do for now.
51
Zachariah walked slowly now, carefully picking his way through the woods, taking trails that were barely trails at all, just footpaths worn into the dirt forest floor. I kept a good distance from him, and at least twice believed he’d spotted me, but each time he looked away and continued moving. Perhaps his eyes were bad?
Or maybe he had spotted me. Maybe he was leading me somewhere I didn’t want to go.
It didn’t matter. I’d never believed in shying away from a trap. Hell, I actually enjoyed the sensation of being led into danger. It was just the way I was built. People probably thought that was brave, but I knew better. I would have traded the ability to not be frightened by the bad guys for the ability to face everyday life alone in a heartbeat.
All told, I followed him through the woods for nearly an hour before the trees began to clear and I saw a tiny, weather-beaten shack situated at the edge of a meadow. A dirt road ran off through the woods in another direction, and a few pickup trucks had taken it to get here. They were parked off in the grass a few yards from the shack’s shady yard. Two women sat in chairs under the shade tree, drinking from Dixie cups. They smiled at Zachariah like they knew him. One of them was wearing earbuds, and she pulled one out to listen to what he said.
I watched from the edge of the trees, taking the women in. I was pretty sure they were prostitutes. Had I followed the old man all the way out here just to watch him get his rocks off?
He spoke to the women for a few moments before one of them pointed off to the left of the trailer. I followed her finger and saw a woman I’d failed to notice earlier. Like the women in the chairs, she was seated, but her seat had wheels. She was about my age, maybe a little older. She had long blonde hair and wore no makeup. Her face was lean and pretty and slightly birdlike. She saw Zachariah and waved at him. Zachariah hurried over to her and leaned over so they could embrace.
I stepped out of the woods and headed toward the woman in the wheelchair. One of the women at the table—she was a blonde, about thirty, with bad teeth but surprisingly good skin—got up and stepped in front of me.
“Hey. You looking for an hour? Maybe two?”
“No thanks.” I tried to step past her.
“She doesn’t work here.”
“I’m not here for sex,” I said, and continued to walk toward Zachariah, who saw me coming and said something to the woman in the wheelchair. She nodded and reached for something underneath the chair. When she straightened up, she was holding a sawed-off shotgun. She aimed it right at my face.
“Who are you?”
“That’s him,” Zachariah said. “Must have followed me here. I’m sorry.”
“I’m Earl Marcus,” I said. “I make no secret of my identity. I’m looking for a woman named Harriet Duncan.”
Zachariah shook his head. “I told you I ain’t never heard of no Harriet Duncan.”
“What about you?” I said to the woman in the wheelchair. “Have you heard of her?”
She lowered the gun slightly. “What do you want her for?”
“So you have heard of her?”
Zachariah stepped forward. “Hey, leave her alone. She just wants to live her life and not be bothered, okay?”
“You’re Harriet?” I could see it now. The photo of the smiling and sad girl came back to me, and I saw that girl hidden inside the aging face of the woman sitting before me.
She said nothing, but she didn’t have to. She lowered the gun completely, laying it across her lap.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I need to talk to you about your time at the Harden School.”
She frowned. “That’s not happening.”
“It’s urgent.”
She looked around, lifting her hands to the sky. The heat had settled into this place, giving it a languid, almost sleepy feel. The women were sitting at the tables again, drinking and smoking. Zachariah stood off to my right, a single bead of sweat tunneling into one of the deep creases on his face.
“I don’t see any urgency,” she said at last.
“Sometimes appearances can be deceiving. Why all the secrecy, anyway? The Wolf Brothers are looking for you, aren’t they?”
“You know the Wolf Brothers?”
“I know of them.”
She rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows of them. You can’t live in this godforsaken county if you don’t know of them. I’m talking about actually knowing them.”
“Do you know them?”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Mr. Marcus. I’m not sure what you’re trying to dig up, but I’m very happy here. The girls take care of me. Say what you want about the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold myth, I believe it. The girls that have worked in that trailer over the years come and go, but there’s always one or two willing to take care of me.” She glared at me, the sadness I’d seen in the Polaroid now charged with anger. “It ain’t every twenty-year-old who’s willing to help a stranger to the outhouse. Those women are some of the finest people I’ve ever known.”
It was time to pull out my ace card.
“Did you know Rufus Gribble?” I said.
Harriet was still, her eyes focused on something far away, off in the trees behind me, and I thought maybe hearing the name had peeled back the curtains of her past.
“He’s my friend too,” I said. “And now he’s missing. I was wondering if you might be able to help me find him.”
One of the girls was coming over. A brunette this time. A pretty girl, and I wondered how she’d ended up here, helping to take care of a woman in a wheelchair and servicing other men for money. How did any of us end up anywhere? It was easy to think that all was random in the universe, but whenever I thought that, I felt like giving up, buckling under to the dense mass of cosmic nothingness, and giving up had never been something I’d been able to do for very long.
No, we were all here because this was where we’d put ourselves. There were forces, sure. They worked on a person like gravity and the burden of age, but if you fought back, you could move the needle at least a little bit. And that was why I was here. I’d been looking for the needle of justice, and it had led me to this hollow in the woods with these people, broken and dismayed. Now, maybe if we all put our backs into it …
“Rufus is still alive?” she said.
“Yeah. Well, as far as I know. The last time I saw him was at your sister’s house.”
“My sister? Which one?”
; “Lyda. The older one.”
“What did she look like?”
I shrugged. “Dark hair. Some wrinkles. Probably in her sixties.”
“Good. Savanna is blonde. Unless she dyed her hair to fool you.”
I shrugged. It hadn’t looked dyed.
“I’ll talk to you,” she said.
Zachariah stepped away from me, shaking his head. “You sure about this, Harriet?”
“I’m sure. It’s past time. Besides, I know who took Rufus.”
52
I followed them even deeper into the woods, toward the cave I’d come through, to a tiny one-room shack with an outhouse about twenty yards away. A well-worn path led to it, and I imagined the struggle Harriet had to go through just to take a shit, and felt the whole of the cosmos pushing down on me again. I stood up a little straighter and kept walking.
Inside the shack, Zachariah and I sat across from Harriet at a wooden table.
Zachariah asked if he could make coffee, but Harriet told him to get the whiskey instead.
“You don’t mind sharing the same bottle, do you?” she said. “I never did get around to getting any glasses.”
“I don’t mind.”
The bottle made its way around the table twice before Harriet asked the question I’d been waiting for. “How’d you find me?”
“I followed Zachariah.”
“How’d you find him?”
The bottle came back to me, and I allowed myself a small sip. “Luck, I guess.” I laughed. “It started out as bad luck, there was some scary stuff in the middle, and then I got lucky again.”
“He just come up on me while I was fishing. He came from the caves, Harriet, just like you.” Zachariah shook his head when I passed the bottle to him. Harriet reached for it and held it.
“You came from the caves?”
“That’s right. Maybe I should back up.”
“Go for it.”
I tried to think where to start. That was the problem with mysteries. The real ones were like circles that defied time and space.
“A couple of weeks ago, I found a dead man in my front yard.” That was how I began. I didn’t leave out anything, except for the stuff about Mary and Daphne. That seemed like a different mystery that had somehow gotten wrapped up in this one. I told her about coming to the school and finding out about Eddie Walsh. I had to break the narrative there to go back and explain the nature of my relationship with Jeb Walsh and Sheriff Argent, and how that was the reason I hadn’t reported the body in the first place. When I got to this part, Harriet shook her head in disbelief.