by George Wier
From memory I made the front steps. I counted in my head and felt for and found the three steps up, one after the other, then the less-solid and slight give of the front porch. I winced with each slow step to the front door, expecting a squeak that never came.
Behind the screen door the front door was wide open. I couldn’t see this, but I could feel it and hear it. There was a quality of blackness about the doorway, a yawningness which had far more solidity about it than any cave a hundred feet underground, and also it seemed to absorb the sounds of the night: the slow, intermittent drip of water-soaked trees and brush, cars cutting through swaths of water along the highway in the distance, and seemingly my own breath and heartbeat.
I took my time opening the screen door, waiting for the beginning of a squeak or rattle that could give me away. Nothing.
I slipped through.
*****
I felt the presence the moment I stepped inside.
Someone was there inside the house, and they knew I was there as well. And it wasn’t Freddie.
I moved a hand to the left wall slowly, touched it, then felt back behind the door, straining my arm to reach without moving the door, if it were at all possible.
My fingers groped until I found what I was searching for. Mary Jo’s shotgun was there. Loaded? I had no way of knowing. Knowing her it was likely. Safety on? Maybe I could figure that one out by feel.
I tipped it toward me with one finger covering the hole of the barrel and it came away from the wall with only a faint whisper.
The other one hadn’t heard. The other one, the knowing, waiting presence, was at least a room away and possibly further.
I hefted the shotgun in my hands, leveling it at the darkness and feeling for the safety. I found it, a small flat and round protrusion on the right side an inch behind and above the trigger guard, felt the circular groove in it. The safety was off. If I had to pull the trigger, I would hear a second gun blast that night — or nothing at all. It was the possibility of that ‘nothing at all’ that nearly unnerved me. I’ve never been any good with shooting dice, lottery tickets, slot machines, or other games of chance.
Holding the gun close to me so as not gouge anything with it and set up a racket, I took my first tentative steps into the room and very nearly blundered into the first trap that had been set for me.
My left wrist made contact with something and I flinched back, my breath caught in my throat.
I felt forward with my left hand and encountered the object. A chair — one of the kitchen chairs by the feel of it.
I stepped around it, slowly.
To my right should be a large sofa, an easy chair with an ottoman, a TV, but I no longer trusted the picture in my head of the inside of Brad and Mary Jo’s house. What’s the old tasteless joke? If you want to drive a blind man crazy, re-arrange the furniture.
And that was it. I had hit on it.
This was a game, a very nasty game, and the opponent was nearby.
Five paces. Ten. I was in the hallway that led to the kitchen, my feelers out for the other presence.
The presence had moved, probably while I was messing around with the chair. It was to my left now, somewhere behind the wall that led from the kitchen and back bathroom through Mary Jo’s bedroom.
We were circling each other.
A droplet of wetness struck my hand and I almost started. It was my own sweat. The room was cold and carried the strong odor of rain mingled with dusty window-screen, but I was sweating and my nerves were frayed to near the snapping point. My calf muscles were bunched and tightened, and if I didn’t loosen up soon I would be seized by a bad leg cramp that might be my undoing.
The kitchen and another trap.
A lamp was there between the kitchen table and the stove. I bumped it and it fell forward, and in attempting to catch it, I pushed it forward even faster. It rattled, thumped and rolled and came to rest against the stove to my right. At the same time the house creaked and the faintest of footsteps moved quickly behind me from Mary Jo’s room into the living room.
I quickly reached down and stood the lamp up where it had been and stepped toward the open back door and lodged myself behind the door.
The other was in the hallway.
He came on slowly, quietly.
My finger itched on the trigger. It jumped and moved, the tiniest of twitches. I realized I wasn’t breathing and forced myself to exhale, slowly.
I paused before drawing a breath in, and heard the other’s breath.
The presence stopped, a dozen feet away.
I opened my mouth all the way so as to breathe in silently and this worked.
He was there, just past the lamp.
My vision began playing tricks on me. My mind conjured a demonic smile there in the dark, the smile of a demented child perhaps, with an insect trapped in a jar upon which it planned to deal slow torture and study the effect.
There was a quiet noise from outside, not ten feet away.
“Bill?” Mary Jo’s voice called out.
The other presence in the kitchen reacted instantly. It turned and ran down the hallway toward the living room.
“Mary Jo,” I hissed, “stay right there. Don’t move.”
I didn’t wait for a response, but ran across the room, knocked the lamp aside with yet another crash, and ran down the hallway toward the dimmest of lights from the front door. The screen door banged shut as I entered the living room.
I went out the front door at a dead run and could see nothing. I paused for a heartbeat, listening.
Distant wet smacking sounds, feet running over water-sogged ground to my right. There was a stand of trees there and the remains of a barbed-wire fence.
I ran in that direction and got a lance of pain in my right shoulder and nearly lost the shotgun. It spun me around and I nearly fell. It was a tree branch. If I had been a foot to the right it would have impaled my windpipe.
I stopped, took stock.
No sound. Nothing.
I waited two long minutes, then gave up and returned to Mary Jo.
*****
“Who was it?” Mary Jo asked.
“I dunno. He got away. Fast son of a bitch. Let’s get the lights on and have a look inside.”
“I’m scared, Bill,” she said in the night.
“I’ve got your shotgun, Mary Jo.”
“Bill?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?” I asked.
“I meant to load it,” she said. “It’s empty. The shells are in a box on the floor behind the front door.”
So much for games of chance.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The power had been turned off at the electrical box outside Mary Jo’s bedroom window. Just a simple flip of a switch and the power was back on, but every indoor light had been turned off and every light-emitting device inside had been unplugged. Whoever had been there had wanted complete darkness.
Mud was tracked all through the house by a large pair of rubber-soled boots. He had come in the front door and had gone out the back and around again. The tracks led into the bedroom and bathroom and all over the small study area. Brad’s papers were in disarray. No way to know what was missing.
Also, we found the worst when we came to Mary Jo’s bedroom.
Freddie was dead.
His cold and naked form lay supine in the center of Mary Jo’s bed. His eyes were still open, staring blankly at the ceiling. Also — and this was the worst part — there wasn’t a single mark on his body.
*****
Mary Jo shed no tears. Neither did I.
Freddie was unlovable — had been as long as I’d known him. Possibly he had a friend — someone, somewhere who would shed a tear at the news of his death. But thus far I had not heard rumor of such a person.
A new set of county sheriff’s officials and coroner’s office officials were there and we began the rigamarole all over again.
I did
n’t mention anything about the shooting of Terry Throck-morton to the deputies. Mary Jo did her best to try to take as much heat off of me as she could, telling the first set of guys on the scene that she had been with me since we had left that afternoon to go see Brad’s body at the hospital. The two deputies, a fellow named Jim Cook and one named Lawson Cooper, were no more than reserve deputies — guys who wore a badge and a gun but who were deputy sheriffs for their own jollies, drawing down no pay. I’d done a stint of that myself once, before I figured out that I didn’t care much for busting people.
“Look, Mr. Travis,” Deputy Cook said as Deputy Cooper dropped a sheet over Freddie’s cold body in the next room. The door was still open. “Doesn’t it strike you as a little odd that we got two dead brothers here in two days?”
“I’d say more like two and a half days,” I said. “And be respectful of the missus here, please.” I gestured toward Mary Jo.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Cook said. “But still. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” I said, and no sooner than the words were out of my mouth that I remembered the journal under the front seat of my car. Were some of the answers there? That was a long shot. I itched to have a look at it.
“Oh boy,” Lawson said, “here comes the cavalry.”
Out the front window there were several sets of headlights and red and blue flashers coming up the driveway.
*****
We stood outside on Mary Jo’s front porch. Mary Jo was inside, sitting down. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to her soon. She’d been through enough shocks, and I didn’t want anyone needling her. At the very least I’d coached her to sit and stay quiet and just watch.
The sheriff was there, a slim woman with the unlikely name of Larrabeth Williams, the first black female sheriff in one of the most conservative counties in the state. Her rise to local power had made national headlines when the incumbent sheriff had dropped dead of a massive heart attack two weeks after the primaries. No other conservative had run against him in the primaries, and Ms. Williams was the Democratic candidate. The Republicans had sued to have the election overturned and the Democrats had counter-sued. One minute she was a shoo-in, the next minute she was out, and a senior deputy was running for the sheriff’s spot with the weight of most of the local establishment behind him. Then, three days before the election the issue had made it all the way to the Supreme Court where it took all of fifteen minutes to reverse everything.
Larrabeth Williams was the only name on the ticket other than the Independent, and she won ninety-five percent of the votes in one of the lowest voter-turnout elections in the county’s history. The Texas Monthly had done a full article on her, complete with posed photos of Ms. Williams jogging and wearing American flag running shorts. Julie loved the picture and had put it in her scrap book.
“Do I know you?” she asked me.
A moth flittered around the porch light above us.
“No ma’am,” I said. “But I know you.”
“Oh. Texas Monthly?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Shoot. I never jogged a day in my life, and I didn’t even jog that day. It was all put-up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Why is there a dead man in there?”
“Somebody killed him,” I said.
She looked at me with disbelieving eyes, then rolled them.
“Good Lord. I know that. What I want to know is why and who.”
“I know you do,” I said.
“I got a call on the way over here. Somebody recognized your name over the police radio.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You shot a man just a few hours ago.”
“Seems like last week,” I said.
“Tell me what happened.”
I explained it, or did my best without overtly lying to her. I let her believe what she wanted to believe. Then she surprised the hell out of me when I was done.
“You may fool other people, Mr. Travis, but you aren’t fooling this girl. Sandy Jones shot and killed Throckmorton. And you were there and decided to protect him. He’s not supposed to have a gun, so you made it your gun and got your stories all straight so that Sandy wouldn’t go back to prison because he’s got more children than God. How am I doing so far?”
“Well... I — .”
“That’s just what I thought. You listen to me, William B. Travis. This is my county. I didn’t think I’d win and I didn’t want to. It was sort of like Nichelle Nichols landing that role on Star Trek. It was the last thing I wanted, but now I’ve got to do it. So you and your lady friend are going to take a little ride with me and we’re going to sort all this out. You’re going to tell me everything, and I mean everything.”
I studied her face. She was all of thirty years old and she wore a thick Kevlar vest underneath her brown uniform, likely to protect her from everybody, not just criminals. Her face was a creamy chocolate color and her eyes seemed to be a pupil-less black. She was stern and hard on the exterior, but I had the notion that kittens, small babies, old people and invalids could make her melt. And I found myself admiring the hell out of her.
“How’d you know so quick about Sandy Jones?”
“He’s my cousin,” she said.
I laughed.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”
*****
I retrieved the journal from under my front seat, locked my car and went in and spoke briefly with Mary Jo. I explained to her that the sheriff was waiting and that I trusted her. She gave me a smile and took my hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We were in the Sheriff’s cruiser parked off the shoulder of the highway a mile from Mary Jo’s house.
She turned her engine off and rolled her window down. Her police radio continued to squawk away. I waited, listening to the night. Larrabeth reached over and turned off her radio.
“Well?” she said.
“You have to know how a company is put together,” I began, and over the next hour told her everything I knew.
*****
“This is written in French, Bill,” Larrabeth said. “Nobody writes like this anymore. Not even in France.”
“You can read French?” I asked.
“Yes. I took it high school, then two semesters of it in college before switching my major to social work.”
“Where’d you go to school?” Mary Jo asked her from the rear seat.
“Prairie View A&M. I’m a black female. Where else would I go to college in this state? I didn’t have the grades for Ivy League, and Prairie View is sixty miles from here.”
“Oh,” Mary Jo said.
Larrabeth flipped through the journal with care. The pages were brittle, ancient.
“Is there a date?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Please give it a try.”
“Oh, I don’t have to try. I can read this stuff.”
I sat back in the shotgun seat of the Sheriff’s cruiser and waited. A glance at my watch revealed the hour: 2:40 a.m. Somewhere in a hospital room, my wife was holding my new born baby girl.
“‘From the journal of Louis du Orly, Master, Le Royale.’ This entry says ‘July 16, 1673'.”
I whistled.
“‘Today Le Royale was driven upon the shoals of the Brazos de Dios by the Devil Wind, and here we removed the contents of the hold. She is being stripped naked of anything we may need in the coming weeks and months, perhaps years ahead.’ What’s this about, Bill? This thing is nearly four-hundred years old.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw a cave painting of the ship with these two eyes, down near where they keep the spent nuclear core rods.”
“Remind me to get someone to check you out with a Geiger-counter,” she said.
“Please,” I said. “Keep reading.”
“‘A party of savages has been watching us from the far shore. They are almost...’ what’s this word... I t
hink — “phantoms, but I sense their eyes, watching our every movement. Perhaps we merely puzzle them. It is to be hoped they are not cannibals, as those of the coast of Corpus Christi.’”
“He’s referring to Karankawa Indians,” Mary Jo said. “Texas’ coastal cannibals. They were some of the first encountered.”
“Shit,” Larrabeth said.
“Keep reading,” Mary Jo said.
“‘Three of the men have died with the falling sickness. They were hardy veterans of our campaigns against the Spaniards, and were buried in shallow mud graves which we have covered with stones to keep the wild animals from defiling them. There are shrieks in the night the like of which I have never heard. It chills the blood. The Devil Storm has passed away to the north of us, and now the wind which was once behind us blows in our faces and the rains will not stop.’
“That’s all for that date.”
“Please,” I said, “don’t stop now.”
“Next entry, ‘July 20, 1673. The way home is barred. There is a huge wall of mud between us and the sea. I have burned the ship to the water line. There is no going home. There is only this place and the wild lands ahead.’”
“Okay,” I said. “More?”
“Yeah. A lot more. ‘August 1, 1673. I believe today is the first of August. Somewhere I have lost a day, perhaps two. The ship is gone, and I cannot bear the sight of her ribs sticking up from the mud. We have moved our encampment into the forest along the bank and have set up lean-tos. The mosquitoes are fierce. The savages have approached us, bringing food. They wish peace, and peace I will give them. I will attempt to learn the language of this strange people. They tap their chests and say “Noffa-sot”. It may mean “man”, or “leader”, or the name of their clan. I have gestured towards them and said “Nava-sotta” and “friend”, and thump my heart, to which they reply “tay-has”, and smile. We are saved.’”
“They found the Navasota Indians. That was luck,” I said.
“Yeah,” Larrabeth said and flipped another page. “There’s more here. And this next entry looks like a doozy.”