by Stuart Woods
“Oh, no!” Scotty changed her voice to a whisper. “What’s going on?”
“All right, now hang up and tell Sally your father is sick and you have to drive to Atlanta right now.”
“I can’t do that. It’s going to be crazy here when Bo gets back.”
“Just do as I tell you. Leave, but don’t go home, and don’t go to the cabin. Go out to the Kelly place, and when you get there, park your car behind the house so it won’t be seen from the road. I’ll be waiting for you. Got that?”
“All right; whatever you say.”
Howell hung up and started for the Kelly farm. He drove fast, and when he turned in the drive, he continued until his car was out of sight, behind the house. Leonie came out the back door to meet him.
“What is it?” she asked, and she didn’t sound very hospitable.
“A lot has happened,” Howell said to her, “and a whole lot more is going to happen.” He took her arm and walked her into the kitchen. “First of all, I’m sorry about the scene at the shopping center. I apologize. I think I understand, and I want to help.”
“I don’t need your help,” she said, icily.
“Yes, you do,” he said, “but let’s not argue about that, now. Eric Sutherland is dead, and I have a feeling Bo Scully may be looking for me before the day is out. Can I stay here until after dark? I don’t think he’ll come here.”
She looked as shocked as he had expected her to. “Well, all right, sure. What’s – ”
“Later. First there’s something I need to know, and I hope you can help me. Do you know why Bo’s engagement to Joyce O’Coineen was broken?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Do you know why the younger girl, Kathleen, was taken out of school?”
“No, I was only about eight when all that happened. There was a lot of whispering going on in the house, but I never understood what was happening.”
“Then I’ve got to talk with your mother.”
Leonie shook her head. “You can’t, she’s asleep, and I don’t want to wake her. She’s in a bad way, John.”
“I know that, but I think this may be more important to her than to me.”
“Leonie?” The call came, weakly, from the direction of Mama Kelly’s room.
“Just a minute,” Leonie said. She went to her mother.
Howell fidgeted in the kitchen. A moment later, Leonie came back.
“All right, you can go in, but just for a minute. And please don’t get her excited.”
“I hope I won’t. Listen, Scotty is going to be here in a minute. I hope you don’t mind if she stays awhile, too.”
Leonie shrugged. “Oh, hell, why not?”
Howell took a deep breath and headed for Mama Kelly.
34
Lorna Kelly stopped talking and closed her eyes. Howell watched her anxiously for a moment; her breathing was shallow, but peaceful. There was something like a smile on her face. Finally, he understood why Donal O’Coineen had taken Kathleen out of school in Sutherland, but the information didn’t seem to help him very much. It simply added another twist to the mystery of the family’s disappearance.
Lorna opened her eyes again and gazed levelly at him. “She is in danger,” the old woman said quite clearly. “Little Kathleen is in danger, and so are you.”
Howell took her hand. “Do you really believe she’s still alive?” he asked. She had said something like this before, and after all that had happened to him since, it made less sense than ever.
“She is as alive as you are,” Lorna Kelly replied. “I can feel her presence at this moment. You must protect her. You are all she has to save her.” She closed her eyes again and seem to sink into unconsciousness, her jaw becoming slack.
Howell didn’t wish to tire her; he placed her hand under the covers and walked back into the living room. Scotty had arrived; she and Leonie sat on opposite sides of the room, eyeing each other warily.
“Your mother is sleeping,” he said to Leonie, looking from one woman to the other. “I take it you two have met.”
“Did you find out what you needed to know?” Leonie asked, ignoring his question.
Howell smiled. “Well, she says I know all I need to. You know how she is. I’ve still got some things to figure out. She also says this is her last day on earth.”
Leonie nodded. “Then it is,” she said. “I’d better ring Father Harry.”
Scotty suddenly spoke up. “Why am I here? What’s going on?”
“I think Bo is going to want you and me out of circulation tonight, and he has an excuse, now.” He told Scotty and Leonie about his visit to Eric Sutherland’s house that morning. “Since I found the body, and since you and I are associated, he might use that as an excuse to hold us for questioning while he conducts his business. Tomorrow, when he’s all done, he’d release us, and if he’s planning to quit, then it would be just about impossible to pin anything on him after tonight.”
“He’s really going to be annoyed when he comes back and finds me gone,” Scotty said.
“I hope he thinks you’re on your way to Atlanta,” Howell said.
Scotty still looked worried. “That office is jumping,” she said. “People have been calling in for the last hour wanting to know what’s happening out at Sutherland’s.”
Howell laughed aloud. “Good God, Scotty, I think you’re worried about getting fired! Well, you’ve worked your last day for the Sutherland County Sheriffs Department, whatever happens.”
Scotty brightened. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Leonie said.“
Howell explained who Scotty was and what she was doing in Sutherland. “We think Bo’s going to be up to something at the county airport tonight, and if we can catch him at it, then Scotty has her story, and Sutherland County will get a new sheriff. By the way, can we get to the landing strip from here on foot?”
Leonie nodded. “Sure, but it might be slow going. There’s no path or anything. I suppose it’s about half a mile. Maybe less.”
“Good. I don’t think we can risk it in a car.”
“What time will you go up there?”
“I think just before dark.”
“Then you’ll have supper with us.”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“Well, I’d better look in on Mama, then I’ve got some things to do in the kitchen.” Leonie left them.
“Listen,” Scotty said, “if we go up there before dark, aren’t we more likely to be seen, if there’s somebody there already?”
“Maybe, but we’re more likely to see somebody else, too, and I don’t want to be thrashing around a patch of strange woods at night, making a lot of unnecessary noise and waving a flashlight around.” Howell saw Leonie leave her mother’s room and head toward the kitchen. Now seemed like a good time. “Excuse me, I’ve got to talk to Leonie about her mother.”
Howell walked to the kitchen and found Leonie shelling peas. He sat down at the kitchen table next to her and picked up a handful. “I’ll give you a hand.”
“I expect you’re wanted out there,” she said, coolly, nodding toward the living room.
Howell ignored the gibe. “I’ve found out a lot of things, today,” he said, cracking open a pod and emptying the peas into a bowl along with hers. “I found out, for instance, why you were shoplifting.”
Leonie flushed. “Can’t you just forget about that?”
“I guess a single girl in a town this size can’t just walk into the drugstore and buy a pregnancy-testing kit. Might as well advertise in the local paper. It was positive, wasn’t it?”
She continued shelling peas in silence.
“No, I can’t forget about it,” he said.
“It’s not your responsibility,” she said, her voice softer. “It was my decision. You had nothing to do with it. Well, not very much, anyway.”
“It’s my responsibility, too. I understand, now, why you thought it was the
only way.”
“It is the only way,” she said. “Who’d marry me?” She looked him in the eye. “You?”
“I’m already married,” Howell said, and they both knew it was an evasive answer.
She didn’t call him on it. “I don’t want anything more from you. I’ve got what I want, what I’ve wanted for a long time. I’m content.”
“Are you sure you ought to be content? You’re entitled to a life of your own, you know. Why don’t you get out of here when you’re mother’s gone? Make a new start somewhere.“
“I have responsibilities,” she said. “Brian and Mary depend on me. I can’t just lock them away someplace. Dermot’s different, he’s an independent soul. But I can’t abandon the twins.”
“I see,” he said.
“I’m not sure you do see,” she came back quickly. “People like you are footloose; you go where you want to, when you want to. You don’t let yourselves get tied down with things as ordinary as family.”
Now it was Howell’s turn to flush.
“I don’t think you understand that other people are born into situations – or just accept them, live with them and do the best they can.”
“Sure, I understand that.”
“No, not really, John. It’s something you’ve never learned. Maybe it’s the reporter in you; you dig into something, get what you want out of it, then move on. When you’ve finished whatever it is you want to do here, you’ll leave, and you won’t come back. You’ll put yourself first, and I guess that’s the right thing for someone like you to do.”
“Look, I want to help you. I… ‘
“No.” She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t make commitments you may not be able to keep. You’ll just have that much more guilt to bear when you don’t keep them. I meant what I said. I trapped you. It was my decision, and I knew what I was doing at the time. I didn’t do it lightly, and I know how to bear the responsibility I’ve taken on. You owe me nothing. That’s the way I want it.”
“All right,” Howell said, pushing back from the table, “if that’s what you want.” He left her and went into the living room. Scotty was asleep on the sofa. Dermot and the twins had come from somewhere and were sitting on the front porch. Dermot was picking at his mandolin. Howell sat down in a comfortable chair and picked up the photograph he had seen on his first visit to the house.
Kathleen O’Coineen stared back at him with huge eyes. The priest had been right; she was startlingly beautiful. She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine in the picture. There was still that familiarity about her. He thought, for a moment, that he knew why, but then he heard a car engine. He parted the curtains slightly and looked out. A sheriffs car was pulling into the Kelly driveway. Howell stepped away from the window. Bo had moved faster than he had expected. There was no place to run. He’d have to go along and hope McCauliffe could get him out in time.
He peeked carefully through the curtains again. The car had stopped in the drive. The reflection on the windshield concealed the driver; Howell thought he must be taking a careful look at the house, and he was glad that he and Scotty had parked out back. Then the car backed into the road and drove away toward town.
Howell sank back into the armchair and let his pulse return to normal. Then he leaned back and let himself doze. What had he been thinking about before? He was too sleepy to care. He had wrestled with too much today. His mind needed to gather itself for what was ahead.
35
When Howell woke up, the priest was coming out of Lorna Kelly’s bedroom. He nodded to Howell.
“Father Harry, how are you?”
“I’m fine, m’boy, fine,” the priest answered.
Howell pointed toward the bedroom and raised his eyebrows.
“She’s asleep, bless her heart,” Father Harry said, “and you look as though you could use a few more winks, yourself.” He waved and went toward the kitchen.
At six o’clock Scotty woke him, and they went in to supper. All of them dined quietly in the old-fashioned kitchen on fried chicken, fresh corn and peas, cornbread muffins, and iced tea. Father Harry, alone, seemed to have been sipping something else. Howell remembered meals like this from his childhood, at the homes of family friends whose people were dying, except at those meals, the food had been brought by sympathetic neighbors. Apart from her family, there was no one to attend Lorna Kelly’s death but an alcoholic priest and two fugitives.
They lingered over coffee until the sun was nearly on the horizon. Scotty got her camera gear from her car, and Howell gave her the film. He went back into the house.
“Can I borrow a flashlight?” he asked Leonie.
“Sure,” she said. She went to a cupboard and brought back a large, six-volt model. “Listen,” she said, tentatively. “I’d like to see this again.” She looked up at him. “And I’d like it delivered in person.”
He smiled at her and touched her cheek. “I’ll be careful. There’s not much to this; we’re just going to go up there and perch in the woods and take some pictures and come back.”
“See that you do. The baby might want to meet his father one of these days.” She handed him a thermos of coffee and a paper bag. “You might get hungry.”
Howell nodded and turned to join Scotty. They left the Kellys’ backyard and entered the woods, picking their way through the trees and brush. The sun was below the treetops, and dusk was nearly upon them. They tried to hurry, to be in position before it got dark. They were climbing slightly.
Twenty minutes later, the ground leveled off, and they came to the edge of the airfield and stopped, still well into the trees. Howell looked at the windsock. He pointed to the little shack next to a couple of small aircraft near the end of the runway. “Let’s work our way down there. Any airplane is going to land in that direction, and it seems like a natural sort of meeting place, anyway.”
In the fading light, they circled a quarter of the way around the airfield, walking as quietly as possible and not using the flashlight. They saw no one, no cars, nothing that hadn’t been there when they arrived. In the trees near the end of the runway, perhaps thirty yards from the shed, they found a depression in the ground, well padded with pine needles.
“This looks good,” Howell said, masking the flashlight with his hand and playing it briefly over the ground. It was something like a sandtrap on a golf course. The ground seemed to fall away rapidly from there. In the last moments of light, Howell could see tops of trees below them, and, in the distance, the lake. “The pine needles won’t make much noise when we move around. A lot better than leaves. What’s the longest lens you’ve got?”
“A one-fifty to two-fifty zoom, but it’s not very fast.”
“My friend says it doesn’t have to be. That film will make it look like daylight.”
“Good.” She sighted through the camera toward the shed. “Jesus, I can’t see much. It’s just as well the film can. We’ve got six rolls; I’ll use the motor drive; we’ll practically have movies of this event.”
“I hope to God there is an event,” he said.
“They’re going to be here at three-thirty,” Scotty said, firmly. “That’s what the teletype said, and I believe it.”
Howell looked at his illuminated watch. “Just past nine,” he said. “A long wait.”
The wind whistled through the trees and rustled the pine leaves around them. Scotty snuggled up close and Howell put his arm around her.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to take this film back to Atlanta, write a big lead story, and hold up the Atlanta Constitution for the biggest raise in the history of the newspaper business.”
Howell laughed. “And what if they won’t sit still for it?”
“Then I’ll just call up AP or UPI or maybe the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the New York Times.”
Howell had once held that job himself. “They’d go for it, all right.”
“You think this story could get me on the Times?”
“It might. I think you’d
be better off going back to the Constitution with it, though. Then, after you won your Pulitzer, you can accept the Times’s offer.”
She dug him in the ribs. “Listen, I’m serious about all this!”
“Jesus, don’t I know it!” he laughed. “I hope it comes off just the way you want it to.”
“Johnny, what do you want? What are you going to do after you finish the book?” She sounded as if she really wanted to know, so he told her everything he knew.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think maybe I’ve reached a point in my life where I should go back and figure out what’s happened to me, instead of always chasing what’s going to happen next.”
“Hey, there’s a country song in there somewhere. I think you ought to fool around with that a little and send it to Willie Nelson.”
“Aw, shut up.”
“Why don’t you go back to the Times?” she asked. “You said everybody could go back once.”
“Funny you should mention that,” he snorted. “I got an offer from the Times today. Nairobi.”
“Are you kidding? That’s great! You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know what Nairobi means? It isn’t just the Serengeti Plain and the game parks, you know, you cover the whole continent. It’s Africa. The asshole of the planet. It’s flying to hell and back on poorly maintained, forty-year-old C-47s flown by half-trained African pilots; getting hassled by the police in South Africa; interviewing insane master sergeants who are suddenly running countries; having to look at the swollen bellies and pitiful eyes of starving kids; bribing customs officials in backwoods airports; having beggars hanging all over you every time you walk down a street; and finally, getting a bullet in the back of the head from some jungle corporal with a superiority complex and not enough reading skills to understand your press credentials. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Gee, you sound really interested.”
“Interested? Do you know the sadistic sons of bitches would probably make me learn Swahili? They’re sticklers for their boys knowing the language, they are.”