A Reckoning in the Back Country

by Terry Shames

  For now, the question is, how is he going to respond to going outside in the rain? As if he understands what I’m thinking, he puts his paws over his face and wriggles.

  I’m thinking all of this by way of avoiding the topic of Wendy Gleason. I intended to take my mind off Ellen, but I didn’t intend for it to happen that way.

  Thank goodness the phone rings, and I have to get up to answer it. And then I wish I hadn’t. “And what might your plan be now?” Jenny’s voice is amused, but knowing her I suspect she isn’t altogether okay with me sneaking around with Wendy behind Ellen’s back.

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Is that why you’ve got a date to see Wendy Gleason tonight?”

  “What time is it? News travels fast.”

  “It’s eight o’clock. Jess was on the phone with me an hour ago, wondering if you were a good person. I wasn’t sure what to tell her.” She snickers.

  “I just got up. Let me call in a while when I’ve had a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m on my way to work. Some of us have a sense of responsibility.” She hangs up, leaving me laughing.

  It turns out that Dusty doesn’t care if it’s raining. He takes care of business and gives himself a little shake as soon as he’s inside, and promptly falls over from the motion. I get a good laugh out of it. I take him into the bathroom and towel him off.

  Over coffee, I complain to Dusty because I’m eating plain toast since Loretta is out of town. I could use a piece of her coffee cake about now. Then I remember Wendy’s lemon pie. Turns out it goes down well with coffee.

  I remind myself that I actually have a job to do. Dusty and I get to the office at nine o’clock.

  The first thing I do is call the garage to have Lewis Wilkins’s SUV picked up. There are a few new, minor matters to tend to. Ollie Olson has left a message that someone painted his car with slogans. I go over to see him and can’t help laughing. Ollie is something of a ladies’ man, and apparently he has ticked off his current ladylove. The slogans have to do with his philandering ways. When I point out that the “paint” is lipstick, he grumbles, but I tell him unless he wants me to put his friend in jail, maybe it’s best to just wash the car and not make too much of it.

  Then there is a garden issue to deal with, which is mostly a way for Nellie Black to get some attention. She’s always complaining that the neighbor’s terrier digs up the garden. The garden in question is lying fallow for the fall, so there can’t be much damage. But I spend a little time chatting with Nellie. It turns out her daughter didn’t come home for Thanksgiving and she feels sorry for herself.

  Finally, I have some free time to go over and talk to people at the lake whose properties border on the woods where Lewis Wilkins’s body was found, to find out if they heard anything unusual the night he was killed. A couple of the houses are locked up tight, so it’s unlikely that anyone was around to hear anything. Of the others that might have been in earshot, they’ve all heard about the body being found, but none of them has anything useful to add to the information I have.

  One woman is here alone and wants to know if I think she should be worried. “Usually my husband comes with me, but he’s on a trip and I wanted to come out here and get away from it all. I’ve always wanted to write a book, and that’s what I’m doing.”

  I tell her to lock her doors. “And get to know your neighbors. Have their phone numbers handy in case you need help.”

  When I run out of people to talk to in the immediate vicinity, I sit in my car and stare at the lake through the rain-streaked windshield and consider my next moves. Lewis Wilkins made a terrible mistake with a patient and paid for it dearly after a lawsuit. Now he has been brutally murdered. I need to dig deeper to find out if the two things are connected.

  In addition to the medical situation, his family seemed to have gone off-kilter. His kids were angry, his wife anxious, and he had become secretive. Was he having an affair that went wrong? His only friend in town, Dooley Phillips, claims that if he was, Dooley never saw signs of it.

  To cloud the issue there’s an abandoned SUV with a brand-new gun in it and a boat that has never been used, despite Wilkins telling his wife frequently that he was going fishing. I’m having trouble making sense of it all.

  I’ve been putting off tackling Wilkins’s computer. It’s locked up back at the office. I know how to use a computer, but I’m not an expert, and I don’t have much of an idea what to look for. Still, I can take a look at his e-mails, the history of what he looked at on the Internet, and see if he has any files that might tell me something useful.

  First I drop by Town Café and grab a bowl of chili. Seems like the perfect meal on a rainy day. Everybody must be home eating leftovers, because the place is almost deserted, which is fine by me. Being alone gives me a chance to argue with myself about whether I ought to call Wendy Gleason and beg off going to her place tonight. The conclusion I come to is that I will go, but I’ll tell her that I am involved with someone else. Even though Ellen and I don’t have a formal understanding, I would consider it two-timing to see Wendy on the sly.

  Opening up someone’s computer is the same as digging into a woman’s handbag. It feels like a personal violation. But of course this man is dead, and I’m going to look through the computer in order to get a handle on what he might have been up to that got him killed.

  As Margaret suggested, her husband’s computer password is the same one he used for his phone, and as far as I can see his computer setup is typical. He has icons at the bottom of the screen that show he has the usual array of applications. What I’m interested in is his e-mails. He has a number of folders set up for the usual—banking, receipts, personal e-mails, and so on. But the one that catches my eye is called “Mal,” which I take to mean “malpractice.”

  It sounds innocuous enough, but what I find stuns me. It’s a daily exercise in hatred. The woman who sued Wilkins was not satisfied with money. She wanted her pound of flesh as well. I scroll down day after day of e-mails from her describing to him the struggles she faces. Fury springs off every page. “You are not fit to be called a doctor. You are a devil who steals people’s lives. I hope your life is one day as blighted as mine.” This goes on, stretching back for months.

  Why did he keep them? Did he feel guilty? I wonder why he didn’t change his e-mail address, or delete the messages unread. It’s possible that he reported them to the police or to an attorney and was instructed to keep them. It occurs to me that despite Wilkins’s daughter’s claim that he never took responsibility for his error, maybe he did feel guilty and those e-mails felt like proper punishment.

  And why did she send them? Does a mistake and revenge have to be perpetuated forever? It’s like some epic struggle between two people in hell. Such hatred can eat at a person. Did this woman finally break and decide the only way she could be satisfied was to know he was dead? Did she arrange for him to be killed?

  I wonder if Wilkins ever told his wife about the messages. Surely she would have told me. Or maybe he did tell her, but she never saw them and didn’t realize how venomous they were.

  I go through other e-mails but find nothing else of note. Then I start on the Internet history. Lewis Wilkins seemed interested in guns and an odd assortment of online betting pools for sports. He looked up a lot of gun shows. Most gun shows are in big-city convention centers, but the ones he noted are in small to mid-size towns. And then I remember Harley Lunsford’s comments about the connection between dogfighting and gun shows. The gun shows Wilkins looked up would be ideal places for illegal dogfighting sites. Was that what got him killed?

  The phone rings. It’s Doc England. “I heard from somebody else who had a dog taken. I think it’s high time something got done. This poor woman lives by herself out on the outskirts of town, and that dog was everything to her.”

  “When did the dog disappear?”

  “Last night. She left him out because she’s had a problem with foxes getting into her chickens.”
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br />   “She didn’t hear anything?”

  “I didn’t ask her. She was feeling pretty bad.”

  “I’ll go out and talk to her.”

  When I hang up, I want to kick something. Whoever has taken those dogs has got to be found.

  I call the woman whose dog got taken and she says she’d rather wait until tomorrow to talk to me, that a neighbor has come over and she’s too upset to talk now.

  It’s late afternoon, and Dusty is trying to climb out of his box and practicing a squeaky sound that will most likely become a bark one day. I’m ready to call it a day. It’s raining hard, so I rummage around in the closet and find a piece of heavy plastic to throw over the box. I dash out to my truck and shove it into the passenger seat. By the time I climb into the cab, I’m drenched. Between the rain and Thanksgiving food hangover, the whole town is quiet as a tomb. I don’t meet one car on the road on my way home.

  I leave Dusty inside the house while I go down to the pasture to check on the cows. Several of them are huddled in the shed, out of the rain, with another handful standing under trees. There are always a few that don’t seem the least bit bothered by weather.

  While I get ready to drive over to Bryan to see Wendy, I admit to myself that I’m nervous. Nervous like I remember from when I was a teenager. I try to think if I’ve ever felt like this with Ellen, even when we first started seeing each other. I don’t know what it means that I don’t think I did. It always seemed like we just got along well.

  I fuss over whether to wear jeans or khaki pants and what shirt I should wear. Once I turn to see Dusty watching me, and I swear he has a smirk on his face. “What are you looking at?” I ask.

  He takes that as an invitation to rush at one of my boots that has fallen over. They’re my fancy boots, black, hand-tooled. I bought them in Austin a few years ago and haven’t worn them much. “You leave teeth marks on those boots at your peril,” I say.

  Wendy lives in a sprawling ranch-style house in an older part of town, on what I estimate to be at least a half-acre lot surrounded by a rustic crisscrossed log fence. The front yard, lit up by outdoor spotlights, is a grassy expanse dotted with pecan trees. There’s a hammock slung between two trees with a table next to it. I imagine Wendy lying out there, reading with a glass of iced tea at hand.

  When I ring the doorbell, the door is opened by a teenaged girl who appears to have been crying. She’s short and a little pudgy, with a round face sprinkled with acne. For a second I wonder if I have the wrong address, but she calls out, “Aunt Wendy, he’s here.”

  Wendy comes rushing in, wearing an oversized apron and holding a wooden spoon. As she approaches behind the teenager, she makes a “zip it” motion across her lips, nodding toward the girl and raising her eyebrows.

  I hold my hand out to the girl and introduce myself. She hesitates and looks back at her aunt as if unsure whether she should shake hands with me “This is my niece, Tammy. Say hello, Tammy,” she says.

  The girl shakes my hand, ducking her head.

  Wendy takes me by the arm. “Come on in. I hope you like lasagna. It’s my specialty.”

  “I like Italian food.” I’ve brought a bottle of wine, and I hold it out to her. “Red. I hope that goes with it.”

  “Perfect.” Her eyes hold mine, and then she says, “Tammy, would you take this into the kitchen?”

  As soon as the girl is gone, Wendy whispers, “I’m so sorry. She showed up on my doorstep an hour ago. She and her mom had a big fight. I couldn’t turn her away.”

  “Of course not. But I have to tell you, the puppy is in the car. He can stay there if . . .”

  The girl is back in a flash, as if she sensed that we were going to talk about her.

  “Bring him in right now!” Wendy says.

  Tammy looks suspicious. “Bring who in?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I bring the box into the entry, aware, as I set it down, that it’s starting to look shabby. The puppy has been chewing on it and scratching at the bottom.

  Tammy squeals when she sees the puppy. I tell her his name is Dusty. Wendy grins. “You like that name, huh?”

  After that, Tammy carries Dusty everywhere and sticks to us like glue, as if she has been assigned to make sure Wendy and I behave ourselves. Wendy makes a couple of efforts to get rid of her, asking if she has homework (I did it at school), asking if she wants to use her computer (nope), and if she wants to watch TV (there’s nothing on).

  The meal is delicious, and Wendy manages to keep up a lively conversation, even though Tammy is not a happy child and complains about school and her teachers; about her mother (apparently her father is a saint); and about her conniving best friend. Once, when Tammy is rattling on about her math teacher, Wendy catches my eye and lifts an eyebrow. Then I feel her foot rub against my leg. After that, it’s all I can do to follow what the girl is saying and make appropriate comments.

  Finally Wendy says, “Tammy are you still seeing that same boy?”

  Tammy’s eyes flash. “You mean Duck?”

  “The one your mother doesn’t approve of?”

  “She refuses to get to know him. He’s really nice.”

  “Nice enough to get arrested for attempted burglary?”

  Tammy’s hands curl into fists. “She told you that? Did she also tell you it was a misunderstanding? He didn’t intend to rob anyone. He went to the wrong house. He was looking for a friend of his.” Her lower lip juts out.

  “Honey, it’s hard for me to believe that. What does your daddy say?”

  She shrugs. “He goes along with whatever she says.” She shoots a resentful glance at me. “Do we have to talk about it in front of a stranger?”

  “Not if you don’t want to. I thought it might be interesting to get Samuel’s perspective on your friend Donald, since he’s chief of police over in Jarrett Creek.”

  The girl sits up straight. “He’s a chief of police?” Her lip curls. “He looks like a regular person.”

  “That may be the nicest thing anybody has said about me this month,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Your friend’s name is Donald?”

  She shrugs. “Everybody calls him Duck.” She says it without a hint of humor.

  “Why don’t you tell me Duck’s version of what happened?”

  Wendy does the footsie thing again, so it must have been the right thing to say.

  “Well . . .” Tammy draws out the word, suddenly shy now that she’s been given the floor. “Just before school started in the fall, him and his friend Gordy were supposed to hang out. Gordy told Duck where he was going to be, but when Duck got there nobody answered the door. Duck thought maybe Gordy was around back, so he went into the backyard.” She looks uneasily between Wendy and me. “And then the cops showed up, and they were really rough on him.” She’s left a noticeable gap between Duck going into the backyard and the police arriving.

  “What do you mean rough on him?” I ask.

  With an injured tone, she says, “They handcuffed him and threw him on the floor.” The floor. Not the ground. Which means he was inside the house.

  “So he was inside the house?”

  “The door was unlocked. He thought it was okay to go inside.”

  Wendy gets up and quietly starts taking dishes into the kitchen.

  “Why wasn’t his friend there?” I ask.

  “He gave Duck the wrong address. It wasn’t Duck’s fault!”

  “So when Duck’s friend Gordy told the police that Duck was telling the truth, they released him?” I doubt this, but I want to ask the question in such a way that she can see it’s a reasonable assumption, and maybe it will help her draw a more rational conclusion than she has.

  “No. That rat Gordy said he didn’t know anything about it.”

  “I see. Then they probably didn’t charge Duck, because unless somebody has been in trouble before, police will usually give people the benefit of the doubt—unless he had broken into the house, of course.”

  “I
told you, the door was unlocked! He didn’t have to break in.”

  “Exactly where did they find him?” Wendy is standing in the kitchen door.

  “You don’t believe him, either. I can tell.” She juts her lower lip out like a three-year-old.

  “Just trying to picture exactly what happened.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Can I play with Dusty?”

  “Let’s have dessert first,” Wendy says.

  She serves chess pie. “It’s been a long time since I had chess pie.” If I see more of Wendy, she’s going to fatten me up. The thought catches me up short. What do I mean if I see more of her? I have no intention of two-timing Ellen. It’s unfortunate that Tammy is here, as I haven’t had a chance to tell Wendy that I have a prior commitment. Well, not commitment exactly, but prior interest.

  The phone rings in the kitchen, and Wendy says, “That will be your mother.”

  “I don’t want to talk to her,” Tammy says.

  Wendy goes off to answer it, and as the minutes stretch on with a low murmur, I try to think of something to talk to Tammy about, but I come up empty. When Wendy comes back, she says, “Your mamma wants to come over and talk.”

  I get up. “That sounds like my cue to get on the road.”

  “You don’t have to,” Wendy says.

  “I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  She sees me to the door and closes it behind her, even though it’s chilly. “I’m really sorry we didn’t have time to get better acquainted,” she says, and puts her hands on my chest. “Do you suppose we could try again?”

  “I . . .”

  Before I can say anything else, she gets on tiptoes and slips her arms around my neck and kisses me. I pull her in close. And I tell her that yes, we should definitely try again. “But let me take you out.” I name a restaurant that I’ve been to a couple of times when I had business here in Bryan. “Tomorrow night?”