by Donis Casey
Reverend Edmond stopped speaking abruptly and looked off into space. He teared up and took a moment to wipe his eyes with a corner of his enormous white handkerchief before he continued. “I don’t understand how he could abandon us so easily. We loved him and we thought he loved us. He didn’t even leave a note! His betrayal broke Alma’s poor heart, for it gave out not three weeks later and she died.”
Alafair leaned forward to grasp the Reverend’s forearm. “Oh, Mr. Edmond, I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head. “I’ve not heard a word of Reed since. If he had returned after Alma died, I fear I would not have taken him back.”
He glanced down at her hand, covering his on the arm of his chair. When he looked back up, his expression had changed to one of extraordinary sadness and resignation. “What happened to him?”
“I’m afraid he was stabbed, sir,” Scott told him. “Who did it, we do not yet know.”
“Could it have been Ira?”
“No, sir. According to Reed, Ira was killed last year by a white-haired man. Reed had taken it upon himself to find this man and avenge his brother’s death.” Scott told the Reverend all he knew of the circumstances of his foster son’s death. Reverend Edmond listened in silence, only an occasional look of puzzlement passing over his face. When Scott finished, the Reverend spent a long moment digesting the information.
“Do you have any idea who this white-haired man might be?” Scott asked, at length.
“I do not. I know little enough of Reed’s past. Neither he nor Ira had a birth certificate that my lawyer could find, nor was either birth registered with the Creek Nation. All we knew of him was the name of his mother. Or at least the name she gave when she brought him here. Superintendent Walker told us that he was able to find a woman with the same name in the Creek tribal rolls, but she disappeared after leaving off her boy and no one knows where she went. She never told us anything about his father. We always figured the boys were just by-blows of some passing White wastrel.”
“No father? Do you remember what the mother called herself?”
Edmond pondered for a moment. “I’m not entirely sure.” He stood and went to a large roll top desk in the corner of the room, opened a bottom drawer and rummaged around a bit before retrieving a sheaf of papers and returning to his chair. He wet a thumb and riffled through the stack until he found the page he was looking for and pulled it out. He perused the document and nodded. “Yes, I do remember correctly. When Alma and I were attempting to locate the mother, Superintendent Walker gave us these records of his enrollment. The mother said her name was Jenny.”
“Jenny?” Scott said. “The mother said her name was Jenny?”
“Jenny. Yes. Mr. Walker only saw her once, a pretty young Creek woman, he said, small, and well-spoken.”
“And she said she was Reed’s mother?”
A brief flash of annoyance at Scott’s incredulity touched Edmond’s eyes. “I don’t think Mr. Walker would have lied about such a thing. He’s a godly man.”
***
Alafair could hardly wait for Scott to climb into the driver’s side of the Ford after he cranked the engine. “Wasn’t Lucretia Goingback’s daughter named Jenny?”
Scott pulled the automobile’s door closed with a firm click and let out the hand brake. “Jenny was the daughter’s name, yes. I don’t know that Reed’s mother is the same woman, but it’s quite the coincidence if she ain’t. When the Reverend called the mother Jenny, that threw me for a loop. I had just about decided that Crying Blood and his brother Ira were those two younger sons of Lucretia and Hawkins.”
“Well, I still think that may be so, Scott. It all fits. Could it be that Jenny claimed to be Reed’s mother just so she could turn him over to the Boarding School?”
They began to move down the street. “Maybe. On the other hand, maybe Reed was Jenny’s son. I did get the feeling that the reason Uncle Peter fell out with Roane Hawkins was because he was a wastrel and unkind to the ladies. Or maybe the boy’s ma is somebody else altogether.”
“I’ll declare! How are we ever going to know which was the boy’s mother?”
“Unless we can locate Jenny, or Lucretia, or Roane Hawkins, and they tell us, I don’t think we are. Besides, what difference can it possibly make now which is the ma? The poor child is dead, and I want to find out who killed him.”
Chapter Forty-seven
Shaw led his mare away from the copse that surrounded the ruined homestead and back into the sharp afternoon light. The air smelled fresh after the close mustiness of the cabin interior and he took a deep breath. He could smell the acrid crispness of dying leaves and the faint tang of a fire somewhere in the distance. If I were blind and deaf, he thought, I could tell it’s fall by the smell.
He walked to the center of the clearing a few yards in front of the house to the fire pit they had used on their camping trip. The rock-lined, blackened, ashy, pit was there long before he and his kinfolks showed up to hunt birds a week ago. The Hawkins’ and the Goingbacks before them had probably used this pit for years to make fire for washing, cooking, tempering wood, melting lead for bullets. And who knows, this may have been an old Creek hunting camp for years before that.
He relieved the mare of the blanket roll and saddle bags and began to make his own camp. He had cleaned out the fire pit and arranged kindling in the bottom and was in the brush, gathering dry sticks and pieces of wood, when he saw his mare Hannah, still hobbled in the clearing, lift her head and prick her ears toward the rough path that led through the woods.
He straightened, clutching his armload of firewood to his chest, and listened.
Hannah snorted, switched her tail. Shaw could finally hear the dry-leaf crunch and snap of someone moving toward the clearing on horseback. He took two steps back, fading into the shadow of the trees before putting down the wood and curling his fingers around the butt of his sidearm.
Hannah stretched her neck and curled her lip, tasting the air, then emitted a whinny of greeting. The approaching mount answered immediately and Shaw dropped his hand from the revolver, relieved and surprised at once. He recognized that neigh and the flash of a copper-colored flank through the trees as the animal approached.
He stamped out through the brush, no longer concerned with stealth. “Gee Dub, is that you? Damn it, boy, I like to shot you! What are you doing here?”
Gee Dub reined in, shocked in spite of himself to hear his father curse. “Well, Dad, I came to get you. And before you rip off my hide, I’ll tell you that it was either me or Mama, and I figured you’d have better success dealing with me.”
“This scrape don’t concern you, son. It’s between me and that haint out there in the woods.”
One corner of Gee Dub’s lip twitched. “I beg to differ, Daddy. If you get killed, I reckon I may as well not even bother going home to face Mama again but just mount up and ride myself off a cliff.”
“I could say the same thing, Gee. How’d you know where to find me?”
“When Kurt told us you’d decided to go after the killer, I figured it had to be back here that you’d start looking. This is where everything started going south.”
Several of Shaw’s emotions were fighting for the upper hand as he watched the tall, rangy, young man step down out of his stirrup and loop his reins over the saddle horn. The truth was, he was glad to see him. He was glad for the company, glad to have another soul on his side. Shaw was confident in his own abilities as a marksman, but it did cross his mind that this boy of his was a natural born shootist, a prodigy with a rifle, perhaps the best shot he had ever seen.
But shooting game was one thing. Shooting a human being was a soul burden he wouldn’t wish on an enemy, much less his beloved eldest son. “Capturing a child-murdering ghost is going to be hard enough for me without having to worry about you.”
Gee Dub didn’t respond. He slid his rifle from its holster on the horse’s flank and turned to face Shaw, awaiting instructions.
Shaw nodded at t
he firearm, his mind suddenly made up. “You brought your Winchester? Good.” He leaned in, lowering his voice in case an eavesdropper lurked nearby. “There’s a stream back there behind the house. Take Penny and Hannah and water them. Then I want you to picket them back up there in that blind we used last time, as stealthy as you can. I wouldn’t put it past our haint to go after the horses.”
***
By the time Gee Dub returned, Shaw was feeding a new fire in the pit.
“You find anything in the house?” Gee Dub asked him.
“Nothing human has been in there for a spell.”
Gee Dub sat down on the ground. The heat from the fire felt good. The shadows were long and the temperature was dropping rapidly. The air felt damp, too. He could see Shaw’s breath in the air. There would likely be another fog tonight. “So how are you aiming to find this murderer, assuming that he actually came back here like Crying Blood thought? If even Mr. Skimmingmoon’s bloodhounds couldn’t get a handle on him, I don’t hold out much hope for our chances.”
Shaw didn’t look up from feeding branches into the nascent fire. “I expect he’ll find us.”
“You think he’s watching us right now?”
“I think he only comes out at night.”
“How’d you decide that?”
“Something Crying Blood said to me before he got killed.”
“So we have to run him down in the dark, on top of everything?”
Shaw smiled at the skeptical note in Gee Dub’s voice, but he didn’t feel the need to explain his thinking to his son. Besides, there was no way to explain the unexplainable. Gee Dub folded his arms around his knees and regarded Shaw quietly, waiting for him to elaborate.
“I aim to lure him,” was all Shaw said.
Gee Dub adjusted his hat. He had worn the old black Stetson for so many years that it was losing its shape and the brim tended to flop down on one side. He could tell this line of questioning wasn’t going to be very productive. He decided to try another approach. “So you think he’s on to you being here already?”
Shaw finally sat back from the fire and dusted the wood ash off his hands. “Son, I think he’s been on to me ever since that child walked into our camp during the night. Crying Blood thought he was after the white-haired man for killing his brother. But I believe that it was the other way around. I think the killer has been after those boys from the beginning. Crying Blood couldn’t call to mind anything much about his family. Then his brother Ira brought him out here to show him where they sprang from and that’s when the haint got a look at them. The law decided that Ira broke his neck by accident, but the kid told me he saw a white-haired man bending over the body. I reckon our killer haunts these woods and only leaves when he aims to track his victim and do murder. He accomplished his task when he killed the boy, and I think he high tailed it on back here.”
“Do you think he’ll come after you eventually?”
“Don’t matter what he intends now. He killed a young’un, and I mean to see he pays for it.”
“We are going to capture him and turn him over to the law, aren’t we, Dad?” Gee Dub hesitated before he asked the question for fear of offending, but he had only seen that look in his father’s eye once before. He didn’t care to see it again.
Shaw noted Gee Dub’s tone with a hint of irony. “If we can, son.”
Chapter Forty-eight
It was almost dark by the time Scott and Alafair reached the front gate of the Tucker farm. Alafair could hardly get her legs to work when she moved to get out of the auto and open the gate for Scott to drive through. Neither of them had said a word since Council Hill. Alafair was so tired she could hardly see straight. She had reformulated her whole opinion about the comfort and convenience of long-distance automobile travel.
“What’s going on?” Scott said, causing her to start to consciousness and look over at him. He gestured with his chin and she peered with bleary eyes in the direction he had pointed. They were close enough to the house now to see that several of the more grown-up offspring were in the front yard, standing together in a roiling, gesticulating group and engaged in an earnest debate about something. All heads turned toward them as the Model T bumped down the bare dirt drive.
Martha broke off from the group and came out through the front gate to meet them.
“Mama, Cousin Scott, thank goodness you’re finally home! Daddy’s gone and Gee Dub has gone after him!”
Alafair gaped at her from the open window, her tired brain refusing to function properly. “Gee Dub’s home?”
It was Scott who asked the proper question. “Where’d your daddy take off to, hon? What’s he taken it into his head to do?”
***
John Lee and Phoebe had come over, bringing Grace and Zeltha, who were both clamoring for their mothers to pick them up as the group milled around on the front porch. That was as far from the Ford as they had managed to make it before the story of Shaw’s quest had begun spilling out. Martha, Mary, and Phoebe looked worried. Kurt and John Lee were eager to take action. Charlie was so excited that his tongue wouldn’t get around his words properly. Somehow, Scott and Alafair managed to get the tale in spite of many tellers all talking at once.
Scott held up a hand for silence before he attempted a summary of what he had heard. “So Shaw has an idea that the killer is gone back to Oktaha and has set out to find him. But when Gee Dub came home and heard about it, he decided to go after him and try to talk him into coming home before your mama found out.”
“Well, that was the idea,” Martha said. “But if Gee had found him and been able to persuade him to give up this crazy idea, they’d have been home by now.”
Scott and Alafair eyed one another in silence for a long moment.
Long experience had taught Alafair to have faith in Shaw’s instincts. She also knew that Shaw Tucker was not a man to act rashly. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew it was dangerous. Why else would he have gone to such particular lengths to conceal his plans from everyone? From her?
There was a thing that Shaw had to do and it didn’t matter whether she understood or not.
She could tell by Scott’s expression that he had the same thought. “Alafair, I reckon I’ll go fetch James as soon as it gets light and have him lead me out there to Uncle Peter’s place.”
The older girls all began to protest at once, but Martha’s voice overrode her sisters’. “You have to go after him now, Cousin Scott, before somebody gets shot!”
“I’ll go with you, Sheriff,” John Lee offered. Kurt was already half-way down the porch steps in his eagerness to be off.
“Stop!” Scott bellowed, arresting Kurt’s forward motion and casting a pall of shocked silence over all. “I’ll be the judge of what I have to do, children. I think your daddy’s on a wild goose chase, so I have my doubts that he’ll get into any trouble tonight. Even if the killer has gone back there, Shaw’ll have to do some mighty fancy tracking to find him. And I didn’t hear anything about him taking any dogs, either.” He turned to face Alafair, who was standing next to him with a wide-eyed Grace on her hip. “Alafair, you’ve been close with your opinion. If you think it’d set your mind at ease, I’ll go back into town right now and trade this bone-shaker of a Ford for my horse, roust out James, and set out tonight to try and find Shaw and Gee Dub.”
Do it, she thought. Go after him this minute and bring him back to me. If anything happens to my boy, I don’t know what I’ll do. But if I lose Shaw it’ll be the end of the world. “I think you’ll have a better chance of finding them tomorrow,” she said.
***
Scott was ready for this trip to be over. The two miles of country road between his cousin’s farm and town seemed almost as long to him as the entire last leg of their trip back up from Eufaula. He was desperate to get home and let his wife Hattie fuss over him. He had told her that it was unlikely they would be back until after dark, and so she was probably expecting him about now. He wondered if she had a p
ot roast simmering on the stove. She knew that pot roast was his favorite.
But no matter how loudly that pot roast was calling him duty called even louder, and he stopped at the jailhouse to check up on his flame-haired deputy, Trenton Calder, and find out if anything of interest had happened while he was away.
Trent met him at the street door and ushered him inside. Scott sank into a wooden chair and allowed the youngster to pour him a mugful of potent, twelve-hour-old, jailhouse coffee. It tasted like lye water, but it was hot and full of caffeine and Scott sipped at it gratefully.
Trent leaned back on one of the desks in the front office and gave his boss a moment to gather himself before he spoke. “How’d it go? Did you find out anything?”
Scott nodded. “A bunch. We found the boy’s family. His name was Reed Edmond, and it seems he was born out on that property of Mr. McBride’s. His mother left him at the Creek Boarding School in Eufaula when he was just a little tyke and he ended up getting adopted by a minister and his wife out there.”
“Well, I’ll be!”
“And when I took Miz Tucker home,” Scott began, “we found out that…”
“Talking about Mr. McBride…” Trent interrupted him. Scott swallowed his sentence, more interested in what he was hearing than in relating the details of his exhausting day. Trent continued. “…he came by here this afternoon about four and asked that you come out and see him as soon as you got back.”
Scott blinked. “I thought he was in Okmulgee.”
“Well, he’s back now. Said he had some real important information for you about the dead boy.”
“What is it?”
Trent’s expression didn’t change, but his redhead’s complexion betrayed him, and he flushed. “He wouldn’t tell me, Sheriff. He said it was for your ears alone.”