“Maybe so. But she knows something. She might know who took Cass’s body away. Or maybe her mother was able to tell her something before she died.”
“So you’re going to hunt Mallory down like an animal. She’s the victim, the innocent.”
“It’s my call. The mob that killed her mother is still out there. And who do you suppose they’d most like to see dead? Unless you give Ira away, the only witness is your good friend, Mallory.”
The two men stared at one another in an uneasy silence.
“This is very personal to you, isn’t it, Sheriff?”
“You got that one right, Mr. Butler. It’s just real damn personal. Let me tell you the other little detail that keeps me awake at night. Cass locked Kathy in the closet and probably told her to keep quiet. Maybe she made a game of it. I figure Cass saw them coming from the bedroom window, and there was just time to save Kathy. The mob figured on Cass being alone in the house. Damn near every kid in town was supposed to be on that riverboat. Now if Kathy had heard her mother screaming, you think she would have kept quiet? Not that kid. So it’s a safe bet she didn’t hear anything at all.”
“What about the noise from the mob?”
“I told you it was a quiet kill. They never made any noise – no yelling – nothing like what you’d expect. Maybe there was some conversation. She might have overheard that. And later there might have been words between Kathy and her mother – I’m hoping for words, but Kathy never heard screams. I figure Cass kept quiet all the time those bastards were taking turns at her with rocks. She didn’t want them to know the kid was in the house. Can you picture it? I can. I see it every damn day of my life. I see a woman standing up to a mob, terrified, in pain, and never letting out a sound. I couldn’t have done that. Could you?”
The sheriff stepped into the hall. “One of them came back for the body.” He pointed toward the back stairs. “She must have been carried out that way. By the time I got here, those steps had been wiped clean, and the hall carpet was damp between this room and the back stairs, like somebody’d scrubbed it. Odd thing, isn’t it? One staircase full of blood, and the other one tidied up.”
In silence, they walked down the main staircase and left the house. The sheriff was standing by the open door of his car when the dog came back to the front yard.
“I couldn’t stop what was done to the mother, but no one will get to the kid. I guarantee that. I’ll get her back and she’ll stay in jail until she talks to me. And remember, Mr. Butler, word about the jailbreak will be out soon enough. Don’t speed it up, all right?”
The dog came slow and growling. His teeth were bared, and they seemed longer. He looked larger, too, as he headed for the sheriff, eyes glowing red in a trick of the light. He snarled and snapped at the air, biting a path to the man. The old dog was possessed by a completely different animal, younger, with purpose and teeth. There was a deadly occupation in the stalking stride.
Jessop never moved. He showed no fear of the dog, as though he and the animal had been through this before. The sheriff only waited patiently until the growling subsided.
The dog stopped ten feet from the man. He raised his muzzle and sniffed at the air. Then the old Lab lost his footing in a sorry confusion of missteps and nearly fell. In that moment, he was made old again, gray and slow. He turned and walked away, moving with a pitiful drag of the hind leg.
Charles watched the sheriff’s car drive off, soiling the air with clouds of fine brown dust.
A dark figure stood in the shadows at the far side of the house. The man walked slowly into the light, which dappled his golden skin. Henry Roth’s smile was dazzling today. Absent was the suspicion of yesterday morning, which had probably been reinforced when Mallory told him to send Charles away.
Something had changed.
Charles walked up to the man and shook his hand. In the clearing behind Henry, the black Lab had settled down near a pan of water and a half-finished bowl of food. The animal was sleeping now, and caught up in some chase of an old dog’s dreams, one hind leg stirring into movement as he slept.
The sculptor’s hands moved into language. He pointed at the sleeping Lab. “He was near death when Augusta found him. That was the morning after Cass’s murder.”
“They stoned the dog?”
Henry nodded. “Augusta did what she could, but he was so badly broken, she had to call in a vet. The doctor offered to put him down for free. The sheriff would not allow it. He paid a staggering amount of money to keep the dog alive. It was months before the animal could even walk.”
“The dog doesn’t seem to like the sheriff.”
“The car confused him. He hates the sight of it. Tom usually parks it down the road.”
The dog rolled in the dirt and moaned. This animal should have died long ago. What kept him alive?
Charles rejected the idea that the dog was waiting for Mallory. Still, the thought kept creeping back to him.
“Why wouldn’t the sheriff let the animal die?”
Henry shrugged. More specific with his hands, he said, “I don’t think there was any one reason. It was Kathy’s dog, and Tom loved Kathy. But later, he realized the dog was a way to add to his list.”
“List?”
“A list of people who were in the mob – like Travis.”
“Travis? The deputy who had the heart attack?”
“The same. The sheriff suspected Travis the first time the dog attacked him. Tom only kept the man on the job so he could torture him. It was Travis’s job to take the dog to the vet. The dog lost one of its teeth smashing into the glass window of the car door. In his younger days, he nearly took a leg off the deputy. Travis screamed like a woman until I pulled the dog off him.”
“Is it possible that the dog caused the deputy’s heart attack?”
“No. Travis wouldn’t go near the dog unless I was with him. I was late the day he had his heart attack. He probably just turned around and drove back to town. I always helped him load the dog into the car, and then I’d ride along to the vet’s, so I could walk the dog home. The vet says he needs the exercise. Over seventeen years of walking the dog, I’ve added a few people to my own list.”
In answer to Charles’s silent query, he added, “We never speak of lists, but Tom and I both keep them.”
“So the sheriff figured the dog recognized Travis.”
Henry nodded. “Tom also used the dog to torture Alma Furgueson. She was the purple-haired woman you saw running through the square yesterday. Alma was a creature of habit. Every Saturday when she did her grocery shopping at the Levee Market, the sheriff and the dog would be there waiting for her.”
“The dog recognized her?”
“No. Alma recognized the dog, and she was afraid. Tom and the dog would stare at her for a while and then walk away. Finally, she went to pieces. She was always a little crazy, but then she got worse. Talks to herself now – cries all the time. The sheriff did that to her. Don’t make an enemy of that man.”
“You think he’s dangerous?”
“One day, he caught Fred Laurie shooting at the dog. The fool missed the dog three times. The sheriff beat the living hell out of that man.”
“And you added Fred Laurie to the list.”
“That day, two of the Laurie brothers made my list. They were tight – Fred and Ray. And violent. Maybe that’s why Malcolm never gave them any money – easier to keep them reined in. But anyone could have bought the pair of them for fifty dollars, and it would not be the first time they did rough work for money.”
“And what about Babe?”
“I suppose I never gave much thought to Babe on any account.”
Henry picked up the sack of dog food and carried it in his arms.
Charles followed him to the back of the house, where he stored the sack in a garden shed. When his hands were free again, Henry asked, “Have you seen enough of the house?”
Charles nodded. Henry was so much more talkative today, more forthcoming. The radi
cal change in the man’s attitude nagged at him.
“Mallory wants you to go. I think that might be a good idea. This place seems tranquil, but now you understand it can be very dangerous.”
“I won’t go.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“You’ve seen Mallory today, haven’t you?”
Henry ignored the question, as they walked by the side of the house. “It’s important that you know what you’re dealing with.” He stopped to look down at the ground. “This is where Cass was stoned. By the tracks in the wet ground, the sheriff figured around thirty people turned out for this murder.”
Charles was thinking of the six-year-old child, locked in a closet while a mob killed her mother.
“When 1 arrived that next morning, I could hear the music inside the house. It was an old record player. The needle was stuck. It played the same five notes over and over.”
“The sheriff believes the stoning was done in silence.”
“Yes, it was very strange.”
“Henry, there’s a problem with the logic. The sheriff said it was a silent kill. He reasoned that if Kathy had heard screams or shouting, she would have called out to her mother. They would have found the child and killed her, too.”
Henry was nodding in agreement with this.
“But why didn’t the sheriff jump to the conclusion that the noise of the mob muffled the sound of a screaming child? He made such a point of the silent kill. As though he knew it for a fact, but how?”
“He was out of town when Cass died, but he probably knows more details than the people who were here that day.”
“But the silence? This was a violent murder – the act of a mob.”
Henry pointed to the circular beds of flowers ringed by stones. “Those flowers were not trampled. The people actually walked around them. No branches were broken on the shrubs. No twigs were snapped on the lower branches of the trees. There were no running prints on the ground. The only signs of violence were the rocks and the blood. They didn’t rush her in anger – they assembled here for a killing. And when they were done with Cass and the dog, they quietly walked away. Tom figured that out by the stride of the prints.”
And perhaps Mallory had backed that up. “You know where she is, don’t you?”
Henry Roth only looked down at his silent hands, and walked around to the front of the house.
“I know Mallory broke out of jail this morning. Won’t you – ”
“She’s fine. Don’t worry about her. She’s more concerned about finding a safe place for you. I suggest you check out of Betty’s tonight, and we’ll put your car in my shed. You can stay with me.”
Charles followed him out to the road. “Thank you, but I was planning on going to the tent show tonight, the memorial service for Babe Laurie. Malcolm offered me a front-row seat.”
“It would be best to go through Owltown on foot. Many people will be coming for the service. The road will be bumper-to-bumper traffic from the highway. So much easier to walk. And you don’t want anyone to follow your car back to my place.”
Now they left the wider road to take a path into the cemetery, which lay between this house and Henry’s.
“Augusta says Owltown is dangerous at night, and the sheriff doesn’t think it’s safe to go walking there in the daylight.”
“Tonight, all the really dangerous people will be in church.”
They were approaching the cemetery when Charles stopped on the path. He was listening to the unaccompanied lyrics of a Puccini aria. The disembodied voice was so beautiful, so delicate in its perfect phrasing, glass-fragile in the highest notes. They rounded the trees and beheld Ira singing to the statue that so resembled Cass Shelley and her daughter.
The young man was all the sheriff had said he was, talented beyond reason. Carved cherubs poised over neighboring graves, wing and body frozen in flight, as though straining to catch each sweet note flowing by on the air as Ira sang to his audience of marble and granite, sandstone and common rock.
Charles well understood the isolation of the wildly gifted child. He had some personal sense of what Ira’s early years had been like. And he had sad professional knowledge of what lay in the future. Dr. Shelley’s notes had concurred: Ira would never develop subtle social skills, and so he would never understand the flirtations of a girl, for he would be unable to read any expression of tenderness or willingness. That sweet phase would pass him by.
But, according to Cass Shelley, Ira could play complex scores of music, note-perfect. He could follow the slow evolution of clouds with patience beyond a Buddhist master, and he was on intimate terms with the constellations, calling every star by name. The sheriff had said that Ira could sing with the angels. Cass Shelley’s journal said he was one, ‘with wings unseen by the vast majority of beings, who had only the one temporal, solid context for life on earth.’
The concert ended, and Charles found the silence unbearably sad, the loss of the music, the loss of heaven.
The two men watched as Ira folded his body inward and sank to the grass at the foot of the statue. He curled up like an exhausted kitten, pulling his broken hands into the protective circle of his body. After a time, they walked away and left him sleeping in the perfect peace of a winged shadow.
Roused from sleep, the dog opened his eyes to the bright light of day. One shaggy ear rose to attention. Was it an animal he sensed? It came toward him so stealthy, he could barely detect its movement – even with his muzzle pressed to the earth and sensitive to every vibration. Suspicious now, his weary head lifted, and he caught the scent.
Not an animal.
The elderly sentry rose to a stand, his fur coated with the dry smell of dirt. With some regret, he left his patch of shade and padded slowly across the yard and down to the narrow path leading away from the house, his paws kicking up small swirls of dust. His eyes were dry and sore, slow to focus on the figure in the road. He turned his head, the better to see with his good eye.
The stranger whistled to him, an old familiar ripple of music – one long high note and two short bursts – his secret name. It was not a stranger in the road, and neither was this the stuff of his dreams.
She had come home.
As she came closer, his heart beat faster. He moved a few steps into the road, his jaws hanging open in the dog’s way of a smile. Enormous waves of emotion pounded his heart, banging out blood to crash through the wreckage of ancient veins, and his mind was lost between shores of disbelief and joy. His steps were slow, but he believed he was running, bounding toward her.
At last, he stood before her, making low loving noises in his throat. He licked her hand, and then his legs betrayed him. He was falling, rolling into the dirt at her feet.
She knelt down to stroke his pelt, and then to hold him in her arms, pressing him close to her body. Her face was wet as she cradled him. One soft and gentle hand was probing that place where his heart was caged by ribs, and together they followed the weakening beats. His gaze was fixed on her face, backlit by the brilliant aureole of the midday sun.
He was shivering now, so very cold.
And then his eyes rolled back; his day was done; the darkness was absolute.
CHAPTER 11
Charles Butler walked on water. Or perhaps this was only the top of the natural water table. His shoes squished with each step across wet grass. The soaked earth was yet another piece of evidence in favor of Augusta’s invisible hill, for the land closer to the house had been dry.
“Augusta!” he shouted to the distant figure in the faded cotton dress. She stopped at the edge of the woods and turned to wave.
As he moved toward her, the water level was rising, his shoes were sinking and probably ruined. When he joined her by the trees, he noticed that she was barefoot – an elegant solution to the footwear problem.
She grinned. “Charles, you and I must have a talk about your wardrobe.”
He supposed it was ridiculous. The tailored suit and handmade shoe
s had been of no help blending in with the locals. Blue jeans abounded here. He had not owned a pair since the summer spent with Cousin Max. At home, his parents had always dressed him as a miniature adult on his way to a dress-code office job.
“I came to return the keys to the Shelley house.” He looked down at the small plastic bag in her hand. It was half filled with chicken wings. “Planning a picnic in the swamp?”
“No, but you take off your shoes, roll up those pantlegs, and I’ll show you a sight to remember.”
“You’re on.” When he was properly attired in naked feet and showing a bit of leg that had not seen the sun in years, he splashed after her into deeper water which now covered his toes.
“Stay close to me and don’t wander off the path.” She spoke to him over one shoulder, stern in her warning. “If you go into the bayou, you won’t find any purchase. Bottom’s real slippery.”
They had cleared the semisolid ground and passed into a watery, primeval forest of widely spaced cypress trees and small grassy islands. He could not immediately detect the path she mentioned. Then he saw the chunks of rock, more like man-made mortar, colored green with slime and moss. She was using them as stepping stones.
“These chunks came from the foundation of the original house.”
Augusta’s feet grasped the rocks like a second pair of hands. He fared less well, but with practice, his toes got the hang of it. Both his arms shot out as balancing beams until he stepped onto soggy but more solid ground, a small rise jutting over a sea of water hyacinth. A pondlike area had been cleared of the choking plant life covering the rest of the water. This must be the narrow tributary which ran alongside the road to Cass Shelley’s house.
“This is the tip of Finger Bayou.” Augusta’s lips curled inward as she sucked in air to make a sound like a child’s fingers rubbing the skin of a balloon. She pointed to a log floating toward them, though the dark glass surface of the bayou showed no trace of a current. Augusta made the strange sound again, and he realized that she was summoning the log.
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