by Tony Healey
“Do you think there was anybody in town who held a grudge against my brother?” Myra asked the sheriff.
He shook his head. “Not in town, no. We get trouble, Miss Hart, but nothing that ever involved or concerned your brother. He was a good, law-abiding citizen.”
“I know he was.”
Sheriff Abernathy rose. “I shan’t take up any more of your time. I know you have a lot to deal with right now.” He walked her to the door. “Where are you staying tonight?”
“My brother’s place.”
The color drained from the old man’s face. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Miss Hart, it ain’t safe.”
Myra stood with her hands poised on her hips. “I’m not completely defenseless, Sheriff. I can look after myself.”
“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “But trouble came to your brother’s doorstep once before. There’s nothing stopping it coming again.”
“I know,” Myra said.
“God as my witness, I’ll do everything in my power to keep you from harm’s way, Miss Hart. But for now, do an old man a favor and reconsider this. Stay in town. We got a perfectly fine guesthouse. Reasonable rates for a room, too.”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid I’m set on staying out there, Sheriff. Getting everything in order.”
“As you like,” he said regretfully. The sheriff walked her back out into the baking-hot sunshine, slipping on his hat once again. “I’ll send my deputy by in a day or two to check in on you.”
“I’d appreciate that, Sheriff.”
“Can I ask one last question?”
“Sure, Sheriff, what would you like to know?”
“Are you looking at selling the place?” he asked, keen eyes watching for her reaction.
Myra took a moment to reply. The fact was, she hadn’t given it serious thought. Her only instinct had been to see her family laid to rest and get the house and land in order. What came next hadn’t even passed through her mind.
“I don’t know. I can’t rightly say if I’ll feel a desire to hold onto the place or get as far away from it as possible.”
The sheriff accepted this answer. “Okay, then,” he said. He placed one hand on her upper arm and looked at her intently. “Just be aware there are folk around town who will be looking to buy your brother’s place and some who have had designs on it since day one. Ain’t nobody pure of heart when it comes to property, land and money. Don’t trust no one.”
She climbed back up into the cart with Ethan’s aid.
“Wouldn’t mind a chat with you, too,” Sheriff Abernathy said as Ethan walked back around the cart.
“I have no objection,” he said. “But can I get the lady where she’s gotta go first?”
“Of course.”
“Appreciate it,” Ethan said. “I told the smithy I’d carry out this errand, and once I say I’m gonna do something, I like to stick to my word.”
The sheriff tilted his head slightly. “I’ve no objection to a man keeping his word, no objection at all. You stayin’ there in the livery tonight like I heard?”
“Sure am. Should be back just after dark.”
“I’ll come by, see if I catch you,” Abernathy said.
Ethan bade the sheriff good day and set the horses to moving again. When Myra glanced back, the sheriff was standing on the porch of his office, watching them. She wondered what he wanted to ask her driver about—could it be to do with the murders? But she did not suspect Ethan was that kind of man. Most likely the two men had some other business to discuss that couldn’t be spoken about in her presence. Myra chanced a look at Ethan’s gun belt. The silver shooters shone in the sunlight. She did not doubt that he had ever shot anybody. Perhaps that happened to be the “line of work” he’d avoided talking about.
“Something you want to ask me?” Ethan asked.
She looked up. He’d clearly seen her sizing up his guns. “No.”
“Okay, then,” Ethan said.
* * *
* * *
On the other side of town, Gil Bercow assisted her in getting down from the cart, the bones and veins of his hand jutting out. From the sunken angle of his cheeks and the heavy set of his yellow eyes, Bercow looked as though he would be enjoying the comfort of one of his own caskets soon enough.
“Thank you,” Myra said.
“This way,” Bercow said, showing her to his place of work. She looked back at Ethan, sitting up in the cart fixing himself a smoke. He raised a hand. “I’ll wait right here, ma’am. Take all the time you want.”
Bercow escorted her inside to a back room where Glendon, Celia, Maria and Matthew lay in open coffins. Bercow had positioned them with their arms crossing their chests. Chins down, eyes closed with coins weighing the lids down. They’d turned blue now, as if they’d fallen asleep in a blizzard and frozen to death.
Myra had expected tears to come, but they did not. Instead the fear and anxiety she had felt seemed to melt away, and she was left with only a hollow feeling deep down inside. It took her a moment to recognize what it was—outrage.
“Take all the time you need,” Bercow said in a soft, frail voice, backing out of the room with his head down. He closed the door softly.
Myra approached Matthew’s casket. He looked like an ashen doll. She ran the back of her hand across her nephew’s smooth cheek. He was cold but firm to the touch. She laid her palm on the top of his head, on his soft hair. Death was so final, wasn’t it? As if bodies were posable clay until death, when they became hard, as if they’d been fired and set in a kiln. Made into statues and monuments of their former selves.
She looked at Celia and then at little Maria. Her sister-in-law looked so scared. Her face had set hard into an expression of anguish and sadness. Maria, by comparison, looked peaceful and at rest. Myra touched the top of her niece’s head, as she had done to Matthew. The coins covering their eyes reflected the light, flashing as Myra moved around the room, taking them all in.
The undertaker hadn’t redressed any of them. They all still had on the clothes they’d been wearing when they were murdered. The blood had dried, and though Bercow had tried to clean some of it away, much of it remained. Glendon was the worst to look at. Shot in the face at close range, he was barely recognizable. She stood over him for a moment, then had to turn her back and close her eyes, clenched fist to her mouth to stifle a cry of anguish that seemed to rise from the deepest part of her and beg to be let loose.
Not here. Not now.
She breathed. Calmed herself. Pushed her pain back down. Turned back around and looked once again at her brother in his casket. Face obliterated, little more than a mash of flesh and bone. Myra vowed there and then that she would not let this go, would not allow his killer to get away with it. She would avenge them all if it was the last thing she ever did.
Myra opened the door and stepped out. She drew a deep breath and took from it what strength she needed to maintain her composure. “Thank you for taking care of them,” she told Bercow. “What will I owe you?”
Bercow bowed his head slowly. “We can discuss that later on,” he said slowly. “Don’t think on that right now. We can discuss the particulars after, when all is said and done.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
He opened his hands. “Least I could do,” he said. “I am so very sorry.”
“Thank you for your kind words, Mr. Bercow.”
He turned to his young apprentice. “Wade, see the lady back onto her mode of transport, please.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“Goodbye, Miss Hart,” Bercow murmured.
* * *
* * *
Back on the cart, Myra asked Ethan to take her straight to her brother’s place.
“Right you are,” he said. They rode on in silence until t
hey’d left the town limits and were heading out into the open land along an unmarked rutted road. “What a sunset. Looks like the world’s on fire.”
Feels like it, Myra thought.
She looked away, fighting the tears, as they continued on their way beneath a sky falling to pale pink, with brushstrokes of amber clouds marking the sunset. The wind pushed up out of nowhere, filled with dandelion tops like soft clumps of white cloud, and Myra thought of her family back there in their boxes. Bercow and his nephew would most definitely have the lids back on now. Sealing them in darkness.
CHAPTER FOUR
The pastureland was dotted with grazing cattle. Ethan navigated a gravel wash, the cart trundling through a shallow creek at which several cattle were bent low, drinking. The beasts looked up, tails swishing, but paid them no further mind. Ethan explained to Myra that Warren had detailed the directions to him and that they weren’t likely to get lost. It did not fill her with confidence.
They rejoined a dirt road and Myra took the opportunity to tell Ethan she thought the sheriff was suspicious of his presence in Amity Creek. Ethan was unfussed. He slipped a half-smoked cigarillo into his mouth and lit it. “Tell me something I don’t know. In my travels I’ve encountered a dozen sheriffs in as many towns. Men like that are paid to be suspicious of folk. I know the sort.”
“I just thought I should tell you,” Myra said.
“Why?”
The question confused her. “I don’t know. In case you’re in some kind of trouble, I guess.”
Ethan brushed the matter of his personal safety aside in a way that surprised her. “Trouble often has a way of finding me, whether I’m prepared for it or not.”
Myra looked at him. “Can I ask you something?”
He exhaled a stream of smoke into the breeze. “Shoot.”
“Why exactly are you in town?” She wanted to be direct in the hope that she’d get a direct answer in return. “I mean no offense, but I do not for one second believe that you are simply stopping in Amity Creek on your way to somewhere. I think you’re here with a purpose in mind.”
“What makes you say that?”
“A gut feeling.”
“I reckon those feelings of yours serve you well, Miss Hart.” Ethan drew again on the cigarillo, the end of it flaring orange with heat. He looked ahead of them, eyes hardening. After a moment had passed, he said, “I got dealings with somebody, and I caught wind they’re in town. In Amity Creek.”
“What kind of dealings?”
He hesitated. “The kind only one of you walks away from,” he said, a hint of regret in his voice.
“I see.” Myra swallowed. Her gaze shifted once more to the silver shooters on his gun belt. “How did you find out they’re here?”
“I’ve been all over looking for this individual. Over state lines. Over mountains. I’ve journeyed high and low, been places you wouldn’t imagine are real, and met folk you wouldn’t believe exist in this world. Once I started looking, something got in me, and I never stopped. Anyway, I caught a lucky break and heard tell of a man matching his description living here in Amity.”
“Won’t this man know you’re in town?”
Ethan smiled. “Maybe he knows there’s a stranger in town, but he won’t know it’s me. Most likely he will not have any recollection of me, to tell the truth,” he said, his smile fading. “He will know who I am when I’m done here. He will know that in every fiber of his being. Once he knows my name, he will know all he needs to know.”
“Sounds like a world of trouble to me,” Myra said.
“Like I said, Miss Hart, trouble has a way of finding me. Don’t matter when. Don’t matter where. Trouble, trouble, trouble. All over the damn place,” he said, breaking out in dry laughter.
Along the western horizon, a pile of white cloud contended with the pink sky. Myra watched a hawk of some kind wheel beneath the white, on the hunt, keenly waiting for its moment to strike. She thought that Ethan was like that hawk. Come to town on the hunt and was now circling, waiting for his moment to come. Waiting to plummet from the sky with his claws outstretched. Ready to take a life he deemed owed to him, for reasons she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
Myra looked at the faint trace of a scar up one side of his neck. It made sense for a man finding trouble wherever he went to have accumulated his fair share of wounds and scars. It made her wonder what other scars he might be hiding.
Ethan shifted in his seat. He drew the last of the cigarillo and extinguished it between his thumb and forefinger before pitching it away. “Did you grow up here in this country?” he asked, peering about.
“Here? No, no, no.”
“Your brother?”
She shook her head. “No, we hail from Nebraska. From the prairies.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes,” Myra said, bemused. “Why do you ask?”
“I grew up in Nebraska.”
“Do you ever visit?”
The humor drained from his expression and he was all seriousness. “No, I haven’t been back there since I was a young man,” he said. “Long, long time.”
“Why not?” she asked, head cocked as she regarded the edges of his profile. The man from Nebraska.
Ethan’s face grew serious. “Got a lot of ghosts there and I’d kinda like to leave ’em where they are, if you take my meaning.”
“I do.”
“I was just thinking what a pretty kind of place this is,” Ethan said.
It seemed to Myra that he genuinely appreciated the countryside and the sweep of the landscape around him. As if he took it all in and wanted to see it all so that he could hold it tight within the embrace of his memory. She had the same inclination. The whole train journey to Amity Creek, she had watched from the window as the land changed. She’d tried to absorb everything she was seeing as the train thundered north.
“It is pretty.”
“It’s the kinda place I can see somebody setting down roots and making a life for themselves. I guess that’s what your brother was doin’ out here.”
Myra thought of Glendon telling her that he’d bought the land and that he planned on building a big house there in which to raise a family. He’d had the dream, and he’d made it a reality. Myra remembered when he’d written to announce that the house was done. She was proud of him then and proud of him now. But the difference was that now her pride in his achievements felt hollow and worthless because she could never again tell him how much it meant to her, how his accomplishment in making something of himself made her feel similarly accomplished.
Now he’d never know.
All that Glendon had been. All he’d wanted or sought. All of it, his wife and children, gone forever.
Ethan was looking at her.
“I’m fine,” she lied, her voice cracking from the raw emotion coursing through her. The grief ebbed and flowed like the tide that had lapped against their feet at the riverside as children. Escaping their chores for an hour to paddle in the water on a hot day.
Ethan leaned forward. “Hey,” he said, pointing ahead of them.
Myra followed his gaze.
Up ahead, her brother’s house stood huge against the horizon. He’d built the kind of home anyone would be in awe of. But the day was heading toward darkness and Myra felt a shudder course through her at the thought of going in there and seeing where her brother and his family had been killed.
No evidence, the sheriff had told her. But what of the blood everywhere? The house itself was evidence of their brutal murder. It was a monument to their cruel slaughter in the night.
“Look at this place,” Ethan said, impressed. “Your brother didn’t do things by halves, did he?”
An old well stood in the middle of the front courtyard. On a previous visit, Glendon had told her that when he first bought the land, the well had been little more than
a hole in the ground with a few planks thrown across it. Glendon had built it up with bricks and fitted a hand-cranked pulley for a bucket. She remembered the taste of that water, as cold and sweet as any she’d ever had.
Ethan brought the cart to a standstill in front of the house and got down to remove her bags from the back. Myra climbed down from the front and surveyed her surroundings. The light was falling, casting long shadows. She saw cattle in the fields that constituted her brother’s land, and beyond them woodland. The mountains caught the dusk, their snowy edges aflame with burning sunset.
The house was dark and foreboding.
It was not cold and yet she shivered. Myra felt the chill of it work its way down her spine. Ethan appeared with her bags in his hands. “Want me to take them in?”
Myra drew a deep breath. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
She reached the front door and eased it open with her hand. It had almost been blown off of its hinges, the outer frame hanging loose. “Must’ve forced their way in.”
Ethan examined the doorframe. “It took somebody big to force this door open.”
“How big?”
His eyebrows rose. “Big.”
They entered the house. It took a moment for her eyes to become accustomed to the dimness, but soon she was able to see the carnage that had been left in the wake of the murders. Dinner table turned over with all the accompanying mess. Chairs thrown across the room, one of them broken. A pool of congealed blood on the floor, along with what could only be clumps of flesh and skull. Her hand went to her mouth, and she turned away with her eyes closed, but she could not stop the vomit from coming. It rose up into her throat within an instant. Myra shoved past Ethan, ran outside and vomited onto the dirt. She stood that way, doubled over, hands braced on her knees, as her stomach cramped.
Ethan emerged from the house. He’d set the bags down somewhere, out of the way. He went to the well and drew a bucket of water, pulling it up on the rope by turning the handle. The winch screeched in protest but did not stop operating.