Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  “This here belongs to you, I guess,” Lang said.

  Henry frowned. “What is that?”

  “Some kind of unlawful substance, I figure,” Lang said.

  “The hell you talkin’ about?” Evie said, her expression already giving up her anxiety.

  “Like I said, Miss Chandler, this ain’t none o’ your business. This here is business between Henry Quinn and the Redbird County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “So I’m asking,” Henry said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Lang smiled like a lizard. “Seems we got some marie-joo-ana here, son. A good deal of it. All wrapped up like a Christmas present and your fingerprints all over. That’s what we got, son, and that’s what’s gonna git you right back in Reeves. Correct me if I am wrong, but you’re on parole.”

  Henry knew then what they’d done. Riggs had sent him over to Lang’s with the parking tickets. Lang never took that parcel of tickets off of him, asking him to set it down on the table. Used that wrapper to bundle up some weed, and now they had him.

  The world closed in a little. Lang was right; Henry was on parole; one violation and he was back at the county farm for another year, and then whatever they could slap on the tail end for possession, maybe intent to supply.

  “Now, seein’ as how you been stayin’ here, you’ll find that I done searched the house for more drug evidence,” Lang said. “You may find things a little all over the place, so to speak, but you have to be thorough, you know?”

  “You son of a bitch, Alvin Lang,” Evie hissed. “You goddamned spineless asshole son of a bitch.”

  Lang frowned, though the expression was mocking. “You be careful with that sharp tongue, there, missie,” he said, “or you’re gon’ find yourself with a charge o’ complicity to sell and supply this here primo numero uno Mexicana weed.

  “Now all that remains is for me to search your vehicle, Mr. Quinn, and you can either let me do that right here and now, or I can send for a truck and we’ll get it towed in and taken apart.”

  “What the—” Evie started, but Henry grabbed her arm.

  “Do it,” he told Lang. “I know what you’re looking for, and you ain’t gonna find it.”

  Lang didn’t hesitate. He took his time, and he was thorough, and when he was done, he looked at Henry Quinn and they both knew what the search had really been about.

  “I know what Sheriff Riggs wants, Deputy … I just don’t know why. Did he kill the girl? Is that what happened? Did Sheriff Riggs kill his own niece?”

  Lang shook his head. “I have no clue what you’re talkin’ about, son,” he replied.

  “What is he hiding, Deputy Lang? Why is he so afraid?”

  “Afraid? Carson Riggs afraid? Is that what you think?” Lang laughed dryly. “Day I see Carson Riggs afraid of anything is the day I know the whole world is done for.”

  Henry nodded slowly. “You got what you wanted,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ back to Reeves. Not for nothin’. You tell Sheriff Riggs that we is all done and dusted on this business. I’ll be stayin’ a while, I guess, over in Ozona, but let’s call it a little postrelease R ’n’ R. Then I’ll be on my way and you won’t ever hear from me again.”

  Lang smiled. “Knew you weren’t dumb, Henry Quinn, and Sheriff Riggs ain’t a man to bear a grudge. However, things will stay just as they are until we see you’re gone for good. This ain’t a game, Mr. Quinn. We ain’t friends, and we ain’t never gonna be friends.” Lang took a step forward, looked at Henry, turned and looked at Evie. “You make your own bed, you gotta lie in it. You been told a coupla times to mind your own affairs and not be concernin’ yourself with anyone else’s, but you saw fit to keep on kicking the dog. Well, even the most patient dog is gonna get up and bite you, you know? This one’s got big teeth, bigger than you think, and this dog has been around a long time and has gotten himself some mighty important friends. Are we seein’ eye to eye, Henry Quinn?”

  “Tell you the truth, Deputy, I was of a mind to give up anyway,” Henry said. “This is some harebrained scheme that ain’t gonna come to any good.”

  Lang nodded. “Sheriff Riggs said you would see sense. Said you had your head set the right way.” He tossed the bag in through the window of the car and opened the door.

  As a parting word, he added, “Sometimes a man gets bullheadedness confused with keeping his word and suchlike. They ain’t the same thing, I assure you. Smart man is the man who knows when to quit.”

  Evie stepped forward, once again intent on making a speech.

  Henry grabbed her hand and once again shook his head. “No, Evie.”

  Lang smiled. “Listen to the man, Evie Chandler,” he said. “And listen good … Pushin’ on this thing ain’t gonna serve no one no good.”

  Lang put on his sunglasses, got behind the wheel, and slammed the car door behind him. The engine kicked into life, and he cut out of the drive and started down the highway.

  Evie stood silent for a moment, and then she turned to Henry with a look of disbelief on her face.

  “You are not the man I thought you were,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Quittin’ like this … givin’ up on this thing.”

  “Who’s quittin’?” he replied. “He came here to find Evan’s letter. They can look for a month of Sundays. They ain’t never gonna find it. However, now they’ve made me angry.”

  Evie smiled wryly. “Let’s go see what kind of mess Alvin Lang has made, eh?”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The truth—hard like a bullet—came out. Inevitable it may have been, but the way in which Carson became apprised of it could never have been predicted.

  Doc Sperling and Warren Garfield, Calvary’s only lawyer, were thick as thieves. Drunk one night, Sperling let it slip. Ida Garfield, chairwoman of the church committee, overheard. Fact was that she didn’t so much overhear as eavesdrop. To say she was interested in the business of others was an understatement of significance, and being married to a lawyer gave her all manner of opportunity to inveigle her way into the unsuspecting confidences of those who would have preferred her to remain ignorant. She knew, for example, that misdemeanors were perpetrated by all and sundry, everything from Clarence Ames’s multiple parking and speeding violations to George Eakins’s impropriety with a young woman from Sanderson who’d been hired by Mrs. Eakins to assist with the school bake sale. Girl said that George Eakins was drunk and put his hands someplace where they really shouldn’t have been; Carson Riggs calmed the whole thing down, convinced the girl there was nothing to pursue in the way of legal action, sent her packing, never to be heard of again. Nevertheless, there was a conversation in the Garfield kitchen a day or two later. Present were Warren, Sheriff Riggs, and George Eakins. Ida did not catch the details of the discussion, but bade George farewell when he left. To say he looked sheepish would have been putting it mildly; the man looked positively crestfallen. Ida Garfield guessed that Sheriff Carson Riggs went on being Sheriff Carson Riggs for a very simple reason: He knew what he knew, and—most important—he kept records.

  One time Ida asked her husband if he and Carson Riggs were in collusion, if they were in fact keeping the collective menfolk of Calvary in their sway with a litany of unexposed crimes, all of which could become public knowledge in the event of a betrayal.

  “Where you get these ideas from, I do not know,” Warren told his wife. “Guess you’ve been reading those trashy True Detective magazines in the hair salon.”

  Dismiss it he may have done, but Ida read her husband far more closely and with far greater interest than any True Detective magazine, and he was no gifted liar. He and Carson Riggs were up to no good. She knew it in her bones.

  Thus, when she got wind of Rebecca Riggs’s pregnancy being something other than it was, she could not withhold herself from having a quiet word with Grace Riggs when next she saw her. Take three yards of bull-hide rein and lash Ida Garfield’s tongue to a hitching post and still she’d find a way to g
ossip.

  Grace had known all along. Grace had known it from the moment she saw Evan return from the Wyatt farm that night of the party. Had Rebecca Wyatt wanted a parting gift from Evan Riggs, something personal with which to remember him, she could not have asked for something better or more permanent. Maybe it was female intuition, maybe simply because she was Evan’s mother, but a sense of quiet and certain anxiety had been present among her thoughts since that fateful February night.

  Sunday, July twenty-fourth, the vast majority of Calvary’s womenfolk huddling for postchurch chatter while the men smoked cigarettes and discussed whatever men discussed, Ida steered Grace aside and cornered her.

  “I got the notion there might be some awkwardness on the way,” Ida said.

  Grace frowned. At that point she could not surmise what Ida was implying. Ida was always rooting for scents like some sort of tactful bloodhound.

  “Word has it that the new Mrs. Riggs—”

  Grace knew then. How she knew—more to the point, how Ida knew—was irrelevant. She cut the woman short. “Ida,” she said, doing all she could to maintain an implacable composure, “if you concerned yourself with your own affairs with the same diligence as you concern yourself with the affairs of others, then your stoop would be a great deal cleaner.”

  “Well, I don’t know what on earth you mean by that, Grace Riggs,” Ida Garfield retorted. Her indignation was not feigned; as with all hypocrites, her hypocrisy was unknown to herself, the suggestion of any such thing met with nothing but dismay and disbelief.

  “I mean nothing by it,” Grace said, “save that Proverbs tells us that whoever keeps their mouth and their tongue keeps themselves out of trouble.”

  “You are quoting Scriptures at me, Grace?” Ida said, this time feigning hurt.

  “Ephesians, chapter four, verse twenty-nine, Ida. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”

  Hindsight told Grace Riggs that she had perpetrated an act of aggression tantamount to declaration of war. Hindsight told her that she should have bitten her tongue. Her wish to reprimand Ida Garfield had been nothing more than defensive, a knee-jerk response to the threat of discovery. It has been said that emotional responses to criticism are merely efforts to obscure the fact that the criticism is justified. So it was the case here, for the sharpest spike of hindsight, the one that drew blood, was Grace’s knowledge that she could have dissuaded Evan from walking Rebecca home that night and she had not. In truth, perhaps she had made some subconscious wish for something such as this to happen. Secretly, Rebecca’s acceptance of Carson’s proposal had troubled her more than she had ever let on, even to William. Rebecca should have married Evan. Evan needed someone like Rebecca far more than Carson ever did or ever would. Unanchored, Evan was a ship adrift, the kind of ship that gravitated toward rocky outcrops and hull-shredding reefs as if a magnet for such things.

  “Your response tells me all I need to know,” Ida Garfield said, and the impulse to knock the woman on her ass was almost overwhelming.

  Grace withheld herself, not only because it was Sunday, the minister and Calvary’s entire congregation in hailing distance, but because she didn’t wish to give Ida Garfield the satisfaction of proving herself superior.

  Grace let it go, at least for that moment, but when dinner was done, she took Rebecca aside and told her that she knew.

  “Know what?” Rebecca asked, her cheeks already colored, her eyes deer-in-headlight wide.

  “Let’s not play games, my dear,” Grace said. “What’s done is done. There’s no going backward. No one, least of all you and Evan, can undo what happened that night.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Rebecca Riggs, married little more than four months, broke down. She sobbed like a spring runoff, and Grace merely held her.

  Carson appeared at one point to find out what in tarnation was going on out on the porch, but Grace waved him away with three words sufficient to communicate that not only was his presence unwanted, but he wouldn’t understand it anyway.

  “Just woman things …” she whispered, and Carson vanished like a ghost.

  Grace held her new daughter-in-law for a long time. She even cried herself, for she knew that whatever would unravel now would unravel their lives completely. They were in this together, neck-deep, no hope of rescue, and what transpired was dependent exclusively upon Carson’s reaction to the news. A fuse had been lit, but the power and consequences of the explosion were utterly unknown. This was no Globe Salute. What it actually was, they had no inkling, save that it would be bad. That much they knew for sure. It would be bad.

  An hour or so later, Grace told William to drive Rebecca over to her father’s place. She told him not to ask questions of the girl.

  “Just take her, William,” she said. “Just take her home and we’ll talk when you get back.”

  Carson was in the kitchen.

  “What the hell is going on, Ma?” he said.

  “She’s pregnant, Carson. Get used to all manner of things you don’t understand.”

  “But she’s my wife. She should stay here with me.”

  “Well, what you think she should do and what she wants to do are not always going to be the same thing, son. It’s called marriage. Deal with it.”

  “But—”

  “The conversation is done, Carson. You go on to bed. Let me deal with all of this.”

  Carson kissed his mother good night and went to his room, a room still decorated with Carson’s childhood and teenage years, a room he and Rebecca used when they were staying over at the Riggs farm. He could have headed back to the apartment in town, but he was not of a mind to. He was of a troubled mind, to be honest. Blessed with little more than his limited male intuition, he still knew something was awry.

  It was past midnight when William Riggs returned home to find his wife still dressed and wide-awake in the kitchen. On the table in front of her was a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. William knew from experience that here was the clearest sign he could ever get that trouble was afoot.

  “Sit down,” she said. “I already had a drink. You better have a couple.”

  She told him then, straight as could be.

  “Rebecca is going to have Evan’s baby. Night of the party before Evan left, that’s what happened and this is the result.”

  William Riggs sat and looked at his wife without comment, without the slightest change of expression.

  “Did your heart stop, William?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “But it’ll start again in a moment.”

  “So we need to make some decisions.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Some decisions.”

  “You just sit there awhile,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready to work on this.”

  “Evan knows?”

  Grace shook her head. “No. Only people who know are Rebecca, me, you, Doc Sperling and the Garfields.”

  William’s eyes opened wide. “Ida Garfield knows?”

  “She made it clear that there was something awry in the Riggs household. You know how she is, William.”

  “So if she knows, then the whole of Calvary knows.”

  Grace nodded. “And if they don’t, I give it a day before they do.”

  “And how is Rebecca?”

  “I don’t know, William, and neither does she. To have done that and then married Carson is as wrong as it gets, but there’s no use beating her to death about it. People make mistakes. Adults are no different from kids. No matter how bad the decisions they make, the reason is always the same. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “If we don’t tell Carson, he will find out from somewhere else. If we don’t tell Evan, then Carson will tell him. What will happen, I don’t know, but my fear is that one or both of them will wind up dead.” He paused for a moment, then added, “There is no way to hide this, is there?”

/>   “If it were just us, if there were no one else involved … if it had been someone other than her husband’s brother, then maybe we could hide it. Premature births happen all the time. But it is her husband’s brother and there are other people who know. Doc Sperling, Warren Garfield, his wife …” Grace sighed, shook her head resignedly. “Lord knows who else by now.”

  William Riggs closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. His insides felt hot and twisted. “Christ Jesus Almighty on a bicycle,” he said under his breath.

  “This is what they call life,” Grace said. “There’s no accounting for it. No one ever told us it’d be easy.”

  “No one told us it’d be this tough.”

  “Are you mad with Evan?”

  “He’s my son, Grace. Drives me crazy, want to knock his silly head off, but no, I can’t be mad with him.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We find a time to tell Carson and we tell him.”

  “There is not going to be a good time for that, William.”

  “I know, my sweet, but there are going to be times that are worse than others.”

  Neither of them spoke for a little while, and then William Riggs reached for the whiskey bottle and filled both glasses.

  “Girls would have been less trouble,” William said.

  Grace gave a wry smile. “Knowing us, we’d have had two girls just like Rebecca Wyatt.”

  “Or worse.”

  Grace laughed, William laughed with her, and thus they did not hear the retreating footsteps of Carson Riggs as he made his way back from the shadowed end of the hallway to his room.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It was Glenn Chandler they approached, and though unexpected, there was a certain inevitability to it. At least that’s how he felt.

  Returning to the house, seeing the disaster zone that it had become—books pulled from shelves, clothes turned out of drawers, boxes of private papers spilled left and right, mattresses upended, cupboards emptied, their contents left strewn along the landing—Chandler knew that Riggs had sent a very clear message. Where the hell Evie was, he did not know. No doubt somewhere with Henry Quinn, and that was the man Chandler needed to talk to.