by Louise Penny
Parker thanked her and set out in that direction. Five minutes later he climbed the front steps of a white-painted home and rapped on the front door. The small woman who answered the knock looked about as old as Cole Bennett was, which made sense. Twenty-two years ago she would’ve been about the right age to have a twelve-year-old child. She was holding what looked like a damp washcloth.
Mentally crossing his fingers, Parker identified himself and, without giving a reason, asked if he might meet her son and ask him a few questions.
She stared at Parker a long time before answering. “You can certainly meet him,” she said at last. “But I’m afraid questions won’t do any good.”
“Excuse me?”
She heaved a sigh and motioned him inside. The house was old but neatly kept. Parker followed her down a dark hallway and through a door to a room containing nothing but a bed and two small tables on each side. Propped up on pillows in the bed was a pale, thin-faced man in his thirties, with sandy hair. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and peaceful. His forehead and cheeks looked wet. Parker now understood the washcloth.
When Parker turned to look at her, Daisy Truitt gave him a sad smile. “My poor boy Wilson. He’s been that way six months now,” she said. “Got kicked by a mare while he was trying to shoe her. Doc says it caught him square in the left temple, at just the wrong place. When his brother got here he went out and shot the horse dead, not that that did anybody any good.” She studied her visitor again and added, “He can’t speak, Mr. Parker—he can’t even hear us. Could I be of some help instead, with your questions?”
Parker, stunned, shook his head. “I doubt it, ma’am. Unless he might possibly have told you something—anything—about the day Jesse Ford was killed, up at the Ewing place.”
She looked shocked. “Wilson? No, I’m afraid not. I doubt he knew anything about that.”
“Well, then, I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“No bother at all.”
They retraced their steps to the front door, but Parker was barely aware of it. His legs felt heavy, like chunks of firewood. What a disappointing way to end his search. And his assignment.
Parker thanked Mrs. Truitt again at the door and was turning to leave when it hit him. He stopped and looked at her in the gathering twilight. “You said his brother shot the horse?”
“That’s right. My second son.”
“You have another son?”
“Two years younger,” she said. “His name’s Tommy.”
Parker swallowed. “Could he have known Andrew Ewing? The marshal’s boy?”
“Oh my, yes. Those two were best friends.”
Tommy Truitt, it turned out, lived in the town of Hopeful, about half a day’s ride from Dodge. Will Parker, hopeful now also, sent a wire that night to his wife and another to his brother, Robert, at the agency’s home office. He assured Bitsy he’d try to be back by the end of the week and informed his brother that he had met with Cole Bennett and was making progress. He rewarded himself with a thick steak at a café called Delmonico’s and a beer at the Long Branch, and after that retired to his hotel to sleep the sleep of the weary and guiltless.
Or at least the weary.
It was hard, Parker had decided, to escape the past. Years ago, young and reckless, he had chosen all the wrong friends and all the wrong endeavors, and his steely nerves and uncanny skill with firearms soon found him steady employment and built him a reputation from Fort Smith to Deadwood. Inevitably, many who heard about Charlie Parker wanted to challenge him, and those who did died. When maturity and self-preservation finally convinced him to give up gun work, he went East, started using his middle name instead, and landed a job with the Pinkertons in Washington, one that required brains over bravado. Since then he’d done some security work, even a stint as a deputy, before joining his brother at Parker Investigations in San Francisco.
Even now, though, after all this time, a lot of people remembered the name Charlie Parker. When that happened he usually pled ignorance, which occasionally worked. He doubted that it had worked with Cole Bennett.
What a career change, Parker thought. He’d gone from being a hired gun to being a liar.
He fell asleep wondering which was worse.
Will Parker got up early, had a leisurely breakfast, and rode into Hopeful just past noon. The town was appropriately named, he decided; there seemed to be nowhere for it to go but up. He counted a dozen dreary houses and half-a-dozen dreary stores, all clustered around the intersection of a sluggish creek and a muddy road. He hoped Tommy Truitt lived on this side of the creek. The wooden bridge looked too rickety to support a man, much less a man on a horse.
At one of the buildings—a sort of combination saloon and dry-goods store—he was told that Truitt owned a small ranch west of town. There was no real road out that way, but the directions Parker received seemed simple enough. An hour later he found the spread.
He also found Tommy Truitt, on his knees in the doorway of a barn, shoeing a gray horse. Given the family history, Parker figured it to be a scary task. The horseshoer looked up as Parker rode in and eased the gray’s foreleg to the ground. Something about the man’s eyes verified that he was the son of the woman Parker had spoken to the night before.
Parker stopped ten feet away and propped both arms on his saddle horn. “I’ve come a ways to find you, Mr. Truitt. Can I interrupt your work for a while?”
Truitt put down his tools, stood, and sleeved sweat from his brow. “Don’t know. I’m having an awful good time here.”
Both of them smiled.
“Help yourself to water for you and your horse,” Truitt said, pointing to a well and bucket. “I’ll be right with you.”
Fifteen minutes later introductions were made and Parker’s task was explained. The two of them sat in rockers on the front porch of the house. Truitt’s wife and daughter, he said, were visiting his wife’s mother, in town. Chickens pecked and strutted in the dusty yard, and small white clouds cast moving pools of shade across the flatlands. The wind was chilly.
Tommy Truitt exhaled a deep sigh. “Yes, I was there that day,” he answered. “And no, I’ve never spoken of it to anybody, not even my ma and pa.”
“You didn’t tell your brother?”
“So you know about Wilson? A sad thing, that horse kicking him. I go over as often as I can, help Ma with chores . . .” Truitt paused, adrift in his thoughts. Then he blinked and said, “No, I never told him. Wilson was a bit older, and for some reason we never got along. Guess that’s why I played so much with Andrew.”
Parker, wondering how to proceed, decided to be direct. “Do you remember what happened that day?”
“I’ll never forget it,” Tommy Truitt murmured.
A silence fell, during which Parker had the good sense to keep quiet. After a full minute or more, Truitt took a long breath and said, “We’d been playing in a patch of woods behind his house, with a bow and arrow we’d made out of sticks and a springy branch. We were trying to shoot a rabbit, and Andrew kept saying we needed that old eight-gauge shotgun his pa had, not a homemade bow and a little stick with an arrowhead tied to the end. He said his pa had put away all his weapons when he retired, but Andrew knew where the shotgun was stored. He said we ought to sneak it out and shoot that rabbit. Said there wouldn’t be nothing left but a cotton tail.”
He stopped for a beat, and Parker saw him smiling a little at the memory. The smile didn’t last long.
“That was when we heard hoofbeats, coming down the road from town,” Truitt said. “By the time we got back to the house—”
—three horses were tied to the porch rail. Tommy Truitt didn’t recognize any of them.
He and Andrew climbed the steps, crept inside, and found three men in the kitchen with guns drawn and Andrew’s father sprawled on the floor with blood on his forehead. Greenish white peas were scattered on the floor, some still in their hulls, along with a broken bowl and an overturned chair. Tommy figured the intrud
ers must’ve caught the marshal shelling peas and hit him with a gun barrel. “Pa?” Andrew cried.
When Marshal Ewing saw them—Andrew’s pa would always be Marshal Ewing to Tommy—he propped himself up on one elbow and groaned, “Run, boys. Get outta here.”
One of the three men told him, in a bored voice, to shut up. This was the ringleader, Tommy could see that. He was the oldest and the meanest-looking too. He had dragged one of the kitchen chairs over to the wall beside the spot where Andrew’s father was lying and was sitting in it, leaning back against the wall. The glare he gave the two boys sent chills up Tommy’s spine. The man said to one of his friends, ‘Get rid of ’em, Dixon.”
For just a second Tommy wondered what he meant, and then understood. The man the leader had spoken to seemed to understand too. “No,” he said.
The leader turned to face Dixon. “What did you say?”
“I said no. I’m not shootin’ any kids, Jesse.”
It was then that Tommy knew who the leader was. Jesse Ford. He’d heard the name mentioned in town. Tommy had thought Ford was in jail.
But he wasn’t. He was here, in Andrew’s house, sitting in a chair against the wall and pointing a gun at Andrew’s pa, lying at his feet. It felt like a dream, a scary one. But it was real.
“Then I guess I’ll have to,” Jesse Ford said.
“No.” Dixon shook his head. “Nobody’s shootin’ a kid.”
The two men stared at each other for what seemed a long time. Sam Ewing was still propped on one elbow, opening and closing his eyes and breathing hard. Finally Ford said, “What do you suggest, then? We can’t let ’em go—they done seen us, and can tell the Law.”
“So can that woman we saw in the field a few miles back. She got a good look at us.”
“We shoulda killed her too,” Ford muttered.
“Jesse’s right, Dixon,” the other man said, a short guy with a face like a weasel’s. “I’ll do it if you won’t.”
Ignoring him, Dixon said, “We don’t have to kill ’em. We could tie ’em up. Or lock ’em up someplace. All we need is time to get this done and get far enough away.”
“You could lock us in the pantry,” young Andrew said, speaking for the first time. Tommy turned in surprise to look at him, and so did everyone else. Even Marshal Ewing’s eyes were open now, and watching.
“It’s right there,” Andrew added, his voice shaky, and pointed to the wall against which Jesse Ford’s chair was leaning. “The only door’s just around the corner, and it locks.”
“Who in the hell would put a lock on a pantry?” Ford growled.
“My ma, years ago. She kept stuff in there, kerosene and poison and such, that I wasn’t supposed to get into.”
Dixon walked to the corner, then came back. “It has a latch, with an open padlock on it.”
Jesse Ford sighed and nodded. “Get ’em in there, then.”
Within seconds the two boys found themselves inside the long, dim pantry. Dixon had steered them through the door, and afterward Tommy heard the lock snap shut. Narrow bars of light seeped in under the door and through the spaces between the wall boards.
The first thing Tommy heard, from the other side of the shared wall, was Jesse Ford’s voice: “You men go outside, you and Dixon both. Bring the horses round to the back door here and wait for me. I won’t be long.”
“You gonna kill him?” Weasel Face said.
“That’s what I came here for. Now get out, both of you.”
Tommy, who had been listening and peering into the kitchen through the tiny slits between the boards, heard Andrew moving around in the back of the pantry. “What are you doing?” he whispered. Andrew didn’t answer.
On the other side of the wall—Tommy could see the dark outline of Jesse Ford’s back as he sat in the chair only inches away—Ford said, “Well, well, Marshal. Here we are, just you and me. You beginning to be sorry you killed my brother?”
Weakly, Sam Ewing said, “Wish I’d had a chance to kill you too.”
Ford cackled a laugh. “I got news for you, Marshal. Them two boys of yours are gonna die too, soon as I finish with you. I’ll just shoot the lock off the door and take care of ’em both. Might have to shoot Dixon too, afterwards. Looks like he ain’t got the grit I thought he had.”
All of a sudden Tommy felt Andrew pushing him aside. Andrew had something in his hands, but Tommy couldn’t make it out. He was about to whisper a question when Andrew placed one end of whatever he was holding—a long stick?—against the wall Ford was leaning back on and squatted down behind it.
“Ain’t no use wastin’ time,” Ford’s voice said. Tommy heard the click of a pistol being cocked. “This is for Dalt—”
Jesse Ford never finished the sentence. Tommy heard an explosion—it sounded like a blast of dynamite only inches from his right ear—and suddenly there was a fist-sized hole in the pantry wall. Light poured in from the kitchen, smoky gray light, and then he saw Andrew standing beside him. Andrew was saying something to him, shouting it, his lips moving, but Tommy could hear nothing. Finally he saw Andrew motion to him to get down. Tommy ducked and heard yet another explosion, above his head. He looked up to see that the pantry door was open, the wood splintered in a huge circle around the spot where the lock had been. Andrew stormed past him and out the door, holding his pa’s double-barreled eight-gauge, and Tommy stumbled after him, ears ringing. Andrew was reloading as he ran, stuffing in fresh shells.
There was no need. They rounded the corner to find the kitchen empty. Jesse Ford’s body was lying in the middle of the floor, lying where Andrew had blown him out of the chair and forward six or seven feet. Marshal Ewing was nowhere to be seen. Blood was everywhere.
Before Tommy could get his mind around all this, he heard—through his left ear—a pistol shot, and followed Andrew out the back door. Standing there in the yard were two men: Dixon and Marshal Ewing. Dixon had his hands raised, and Ewing was leaning against a tree, his smoking revolver pointed and rock-steady. At first Tommy wondered where Ewing had found a pistol, then realized it must’ve been Jesse Ford’s, picked up off the kitchen floor after Andrew had shot him. A short distance away, lying at the feet of one of the three horses, was the motionless body of Weasel Face. His shirt was bloody and a gun lay in the dust beside him.
For a long moment no one said a word. The boys gawked at the two men and the two men stared at each other. Somewhere nearby a crow cawed.
With the back of his hand Andrew’s father wiped blood from his eyes. He was covered with it, from head to toe, and Tommy realized most of it was Jesse Ford’s.
“Give me a reason I shouldn’t kill you,” Marshal Ewing said.
Dixon shook his head. He looked sad, and strangely unafraid. “I can’t.”
Ewing cast a quick glance at his son and Tommy, then said to Dixon, “You don’t seem the same kind of man as those other two were. What are you doing in this bunch?”
“I’m more like them than not,” Dixon said. “But there’s some things I won’t do.”
“Like murder a child.”
“Yes.”
Another long silence passed.
“Get out of here, Mr. Dixon. And don’t come back.”
Without a word, Dixon lowered his hands, walked to his horse, mounted up, and rode away. Tommy and the two Ewings watched until he disappeared around the curve of the trail.
Then Andrew put the shotgun down and ran to his father. Tommy did too. Marshal Ewing scooped both of them into his arms, then stopped when his son cried out in pain. As it turned out, Andrew’s right shoulder was badly sprained from the kick of the eight-gauge. And he had even fired it a second time, Tommy remembered, to blow away the door lock.
All three of them, as if at a signal, turned to look at the shotgun lying in the dirt.
“Guess I won’t bother hiding it anymore,” Ewing said.
“And that’s what happened.” Tommy Truitt looked at Parker and shrugged. “They’re all gone now. Marshal Ewing, An
drew, everybody. Except me.”
Parker nodded. He had started out taking notes but had soon quit and just listened. “You all agreed, I guess, never to talk about it.”
“That’s right. To anybody. And the marshal insisted on hiding the fact that Andrew was the one who killed Jesse Ford and that I was even there at all. If anyone else ever showed up looking for revenge, he said, simpler was better. Three men came, two died, one got away.”
Parker wondered what it would feel like to live through that and never tell anyone about it. Maybe telling it, at long last, had helped a little.
“Andrew was a tough kid,” Truitt said. “And smart. He talked a bunch of killers into locking us in a room that had a gun hidden in it.”
Parker nodded. “Smart and lucky. Lucky two of the three men were outside, lucky that Jesse Ford sat where he did, lucky that Sam Ewing was on the floor, underneath the line of fire.”
Truitt didn’t reply. He just sat, slowly rocking, looking out at the flat plains and his memories. After a while he blinked and studied Parker’s face. “You said you came a long way for this. Did you get what you needed?”
“I got what my client needed. You cleared up a lot of things.”
“Now I plan to forget about it,” Truitt said.
He rose to his feet, and Parker followed.
“You’re welcome to stay for supper,” Truitt said. “My family’ll be home soon.”
“Much obliged, but I need to go.” Parker turned to leave, then paused. “One question. You said you’d heard the name Jesse Ford before all this happened.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, he wasn’t the only one did gun work back then. Ever hear of Pete Lawson, or Merrill Smith, or Charlie Parker?”
Truitt thought a moment, then shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Good,” Parker said.