by Tony Healey
“Where are we going?” she asked him when they were out in the sun, her big hat shielding her eyes from the glare.
“I thought you’d like to come help me get dinner,” Glendon said.
Myra shook her head. “You know I despise hunting.”
“And yet you’re such a good shot. Listen, I’ll do the hunting,” Glendon said. “You’ll keep me company.”
“If you insist.”
The house lay behind them, the children running around it, playing tag and yelling at the tops of their voices. It occurred to Myra that Glendon probably just wanted five minutes’ peace and was using their little walk as an excuse. Who was she to deny her brother five minutes’ peace? In some way she understood why that might have been the case, given the racket the children were making. Myra loved her niece and nephew, but had no desire to have children herself. She was reluctant even to take a partner, though there had been some courtship over the years. After all, even she had urges. . . . But the entanglements of a relationship—and all the fuss that came with it—seemed more a burden around her neck than something to be considered a real accomplishment.
Myra cleared her throat. “Can I ask you something?”
Glendon glanced back at her. He carried his rifle in the crook of his arm, the way their father had when they were growing up in Elam Hollow, Nebraska. Her brother seemed completely at ease out here in this little piece of the world he’d made for himself. “Go on.”
“Do you think I’m destined to be on my own?”
Her brother laughed. “Such a peculiar question, sis. I don’t know. How about I throw that one back your way, huh? Do you feel you are?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I don’t think anyone is ever destined to be alone,” Glendon said. “You know, you should really think about settling down with someone. It worries me, you being on your own all the time. Nobody looking out for you or making you feel safe.”
“It worries you?”
“Of course it does. There’s only us now. When Mother died a few years ago is when I got to thinking about it. Not that she’d ever say, but Mother for sure worried about you being a spinster and all. Like I do.”
Spinster, Myra thought with disdain. How she detested that word, that label! She looked up at the blue sky, felt the sun on her face, inhaled deeply the fresh, clean air. There was rosemary growing somewhere nearby. On the walk back, she’d try to find it. This was fine country. She understood why Glendon had been so intent on setting down roots in Amity Creek. “You shouldn’t fret about me. I can take care of myself.”
“Oh, I know all too well that you can. But that doesn’t mean I don’t concern myself with wondering if you’re lonely or not. It’s nice, having somebody. I got Celia, and she’s got me. You bear each other. You hold each other up. Is that making sense to you?”
“I guess so,” Myra said.
Glendon stopped, crouched down and, with a gentle movement of his hand, urged her to do the same. Up ahead, several fat hares nibbled at the grass, their ears pricked, big black eyes taking everything in. One shot, Myra thought. One shot, then they’ll scamper, running in all directions.
She waited for Glendon to take aim, but to Myra’s surprise, he offered her the rifle instead. “No, no, you do it,” she said, adamant she did not wish to take part.
Glendon shook his head. Pressed the rifle into her hands. “Go on. You know you want to.”
“I already told you I detest hunting,” Myra whispered.
“Well, we all gotta eat. Don’t want your niece and nephew to go hungry, now, do you?”
Myra begrudgingly accepted the weapon. “Damn you, Glendon. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”
“Like a baby.”
Myra would never have admitted so to her brother, but sometimes holding a gun was like slipping on a pair of comfortable old slippers. Her left hand supported the barrel. Her right found the trigger. She took to the sights like a pro and lined up her shot. Myra was conscious of the tack of the breeze and how it would alter the course of her shot. She could feel her own breathing and knew that with each inhale and exhale the gunsight wavered by degrees that would see the shot either strike true or go wide. Myra drew a breath, held it and took the shot. Her finger squeezed the trigger, the rifle unloaded and the hare fell back with such force that later, when she thought back to it, she reckoned she must have knocked the soul out of the creature. The gunshot echoed around them like a thunderclap, startling a dozen or so sparrows from bushes nearby. They flapped into the air, panicked, blurred black against the blue. As Myra had thought, the other hares scattered the second the rifle fired. They knew that sound; they knew what that sound meant.
Glendon walked over, collected the hare by the ears and held it up for her to see. “Nice shot!” he said.
The animal was huge. There was a gaping hole in its face, one half of its skull decimated by the rifle shot tearing through one side and exiting the other. The blood trickled down its gray fur and Myra thought of the man she’d shot and killed. How she had watched his blood pool out beneath him, forming a wide scarlet puddle. When he’d tried to run from her, Myra’s instinct had been to fire the gun in her hand. The shot hit him square between the shoulder blades, knocking him face-first to the floor. She’d still been in shock an hour later as the law in Boseman tried in vain to determine what had happened. They’d kept assuring her, “You’re not in trouble, miss,” but none of it was making an ounce of sense to her. She’d sat with her hands wrapped around a glass of brandy they’d given her to take the edge off the shock, not that it helped, and struggled to describe what had taken place and how she’d come to kill a man.
Glendon admired the hare. “Celia will be real happy with this one. You wait till you taste her stew.”
They started back to the house, Myra with the rifle, Glendon carrying the dead hare. “Is it as good as Mother’s?”
That stumped Glendon. He looked at her, one eyebrow cocked. “That’s an unfair question. It’s not right, asking a man to choose between his wife and his mama.”
Myra chuckled. “Well, you have to decide. Say there’s a gun to your head. Who cooks a better stew, Celia or Mother?”
“Now that’s just plain cruel, sis!”
Myra’s nose caught the scent of rosemary again. She searched the ground, finally locating the hardy herb not far from where she was standing. “This will do nicely. Mother always put rosemary in her stew,” she said, pulling several stems free from the plant, then continuing back to the house.
Glendon groaned and said, “How about we keep that between us, okay? Just tell Celia it’s your idea to put it in there.”
* * *
* * *
After dinner, Glendon stood out front drawing from his pipe, so locked in thought that he didn’t notice Myra take a seat on the porch next to him until he turned and looked directly at her. “Damn, sis! How long you been sittin’ there?”
“Long enough for you not to notice.” Myra regarded him, noting the worry on his face that had not been present when she first arrived. “What troubles you? I noticed through dinner there was a black cloud over you.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Glendon lied, pulling up the chair next to her and falling into it with a sigh.
“Come on . . .” She studied her brother, looking for a sign of something, anything, that might explain what plagued him.
He looked down at the pipe in his hands. “Well, I got some bother with a cattle rancher wants to buy this place. He asked me to sell. I said no. But he’s persistent,” he said, his voice hushed. Inside, Celia ushered the two children upstairs, oblivious to their conversation out front. “Turns up every week or so. Asks how I’m doing. Whether or not I’ve considered his offer, that kind of thing. He’s becoming a pain in my hind end.”
“How long has this been going on?”
Glendon sh
rugged. “A while.”
“Does this man threaten you?” Myra demanded.
“No, but I’ve a feeling he will do eventually. It’s the only way it can go.”
The moment hung between them, and neither Myra nor Glendon spoke until he cleared his throat and said, “He can make all the threats he likes. There ain’t no way in hell I’m selling to that son of a bitch. No way.”
“What’s the name?” Myra asked.
“Jack Denton.”
“What is he offering?”
Glendon clucked his tongue, looking out at the immediate landscape caught beneath the spell of night and the twilit world beyond no man could make claim to. You got your little slice of the pie; the rest was for the Maker. “Don’t matter what his offer is. I’m not selling. I picked this land. Bought it fair and square. I built this damn house. Set the foundations myself. A lot of work, a lot of blood and toil. I didn’t put in everything I had just to sign it over to that son of a gun.”
“So who is Jack Denton? What’s he about?”
“Big shot around here. Holds a lot of influence, I guess you could say. Uses intimidation to get what he wants. He’s got his eye on this place because it’s right next to his land and he can graze his cattle here. Maybe because I got the well, too.” He got up, stepped down off the porch and walked to the well in the middle of the courtyard. Myra followed him and watched as he lowered a bucket down into the inky blackness at the well’s bottom. He cranked the handle and brought the bucket up, full to the brim with ice-cold water. “Taste that.”
Myra placed both hands in the bucket, cupped them and lifted a pool of the water to her mouth. She drank, thankful for its refreshment. “That is good water,” she said. “Freshest I’ve ever tasted.”
“Hard to find sometimes, a natural well like that,” Glendon said, tipping the bucket back in. “I don’t think he even knew it was here. But he does know now he’s seen I’ve built it up from what it was before, just a hole in the ground.”
“There must be other water sources,” Myra said.
“Sure are but not so handy as this,” Glendon said, looking around him at the house he’d built. “I do like to think he looks at this place and feels some kind of . . . envy, I guess the word is. I don’t know. Denton and those lackeys he employs intend on hounding me until I give in. But I won’t sell to nobody. I worked hard for this place. I can’t put a price to it. It’s not for sale.”
He offered the pipe to Myra. She took it, drew once and slowly exhaled the thick white smoke, managing to refrain from coughing as she let it go. She passed the pipe back. They went inside the house. Celia came downstairs from dealing with the children.
She turned to her husband. “Looked like you two were havin’ a fairly serious conversation out there.”
“He was telling me about this Jack Denton character wanting to buy the place.”
Celia held her husband’s hand. “We’ve already told him no, haven’t we? We’re not selling for anyone.”
“That’s right,” Glendon said. He stood with his free hand against one of the upright timbers he’d set in place when the house had been erected. “Over my dead body.”
* * *
* * *
Now, a year later, Myra stood facing that same timber beam and placed her hand against the spot where Glendon had had his hand. The same pattern of grain, the same knots. Myra closed her eyes, felt the tears come and did not fight them back. It was useless to keep the floodgates up any longer, futile to refuse her feelings, as raw as they were. She had to acknowledge there was a good chance Jack Denton was involved in some way. For all she knew, there wasn’t any connection between the previous summer and the deaths of Glendon, Celia, Matthew and Maria. But would a man truly kill in cold blood just to get what he wanted? Did he really desire Glendon’s land to the extent that he was willing to commit murder to obtain it? It seemed outlandish when she thought about it. And yet Myra knew it was very possible.
When she’d shot that trespasser in the back and watched him bleed out, she’d done so in defense of her property. To stop him taking what was hers. Was that man any different from Jack Denton?
No. It was reasonable to assume Denton had escalated his harassment in the year between her visit and the murder. It was similarly reasonable to assume that for some reason he’d decided to take care of matters once and for all, to get the land, get what he coveted. In that regard Denton was no different from the unnamed individual who’d forced his way into her home several years ago armed with a knife. The man she’d shot and killed.
Myra went outside to get some air. Her head hummed, the house full of ghosts, their haunted voices crowding in to drown out her own thoughts. She found herself searching the brush at the front edge of the property for signs of sparrows, but they seemed to have moved on. Myra went inside to her belongings, found the cloth sack containing her pistol and gun belt and carried the weapon outside. She stood in the courtyard, raised the pistol up into the air and fired a single shot. The sound echoed and echoed around her, and sure enough, the sparrows rose, startled, into the open range of the sky.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The worst part was knowing where to begin. After an hour or so of searching the house for Glendon’s deeds and papers, Myra found them in a heavy metal lockbox in the bedroom. She proceeded to sit on the floor in the corner of the room and lay the papers out around her, sorting them. It was all there—the deeds to the land, the house, his stock, everything. There was a will leaving everything to his wife, Celia, and their children. And in the remote circumstance that they were not available to inherit it all, everything was to go to his next of kin: Myra.
She put the will down and rubbed at her eyes. It made it all simultaneously simple and complicated. Everything went to her, which was easy enough to understand. No need for a lawyer when she had the paper in her hands. Not yet anyway.
Myra told herself she would see to it that Glendon’s hard work was not squandered. But it got complicated when she thought about Jack Denton wanting the land, and that same land now belonging to her alone. Because it meant that the target on her brother’s back was surely sighted on hers now, and that notion did not fill her with confidence. That Denton might begin to harass her in the manner in which he’d been harassing her brother made her uneasy. Did he really think he could force people to do his bidding? Did he think that was how the world worked?
When she was done examining her brother’s documents, Myra tackled her next big task: preparing her family’s burial clothes. She was choosing the last outfits they’d ever wear. If souls were destined for the stars, mortal remains were destined for the earth. The elevation of the spiritual and the return to Mother Nature of the physical. Everything that had been stripped out of the soil going back in.
For Matthew she found a little suit and shirt. For Maria a nice dress. Sensible. Respectful. Appropriate. She flattened them out with her hands, then hugged them to her, breathing in the smells of the clothes and what she imagined to be the faint scents of her niece and nephew. The smell of their skin after they’d spent a day in the sun, playing and doing what children do. That smell was innocence and goodness—it broke her heart that their light had been torn from the world and extinguished.
* * *
* * *
In the evening, Deputy Boyd Mitchell rode up as Myra was washing her hands and face at the well. She’d cleaned out the stable and wound up covered in light brown dust for her troubles. Tackling the stable had raised the question again of the whereabouts of her brother’s horses. They’d either been stolen or set loose. Either way, it was criminal. Throughout the day she’d become increasingly aware that she’d need to hire some hands to keep the place going. Her brother had never told her whom he employed, but they had to be local. Myra dabbed her face and hands dry from washing them as the deputy approached.
“Evening, Miss Hart. Deputy Mitchell,” the d
eputy said, tipping his hat. She could see his tin deputy’s badge to prove his position. Myra watched as he got down from the horse and hitched it to one of the posts on the front porch. He extended his hand to her and they shook.
“Nice to meet you, Deputy. Sheriff Abernathy said he’d send you out here.”
“He’s a man of his word. Is that coffee I smell?”
“Sure is,” Myra said. She led the way inside the house. “Follow me through. I’ll fetch us both a cup.”
Mitchell removed his hat upon entering the house. “Looks different to how it did last I was here,” he said.
Myra cast her eyes away, hurt by the remark. She knew what he was getting at. The blood. The bodies of her family, slaughtered needlessly and mercilessly.
“I apologize. I spoke out of turn,” Mitchell said quickly. “I only meant to say you’ve done a mighty fine job in here, is all.”
“I tidied up in here, tried to get it looking as it did when I last visited,” Myra said, acknowledging the intent of the deputy’s comment—even if it had been misjudged. “But the bulk of the cleaning I cannot take praise for.”
Mitchell frowned at her. “Oh? How so, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“The newcomer in town, Ethan. He brought me here last night and took care of a lot of it. I think to save me from the horror of it all.”
Mitchell nodded slowly. “I saw you’ve had some kind of fire out front. That his work, too?”
“I made the fire. He brought out everything that was ruined and we got rid of it all. Had to be done. I didn’t like doing it. But I couldn’t be in here with it looking that way. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Deputy Mitchell set his hat down on the big table. “Maybe you didn’t expect it to be as gruesome as it was.”