“It’s an interesting theory. I guess I’ve heard worse logic over the years.” She layered fresh gauze on the wound and set the bat back in the box.
“It’s your style, Augusta. You watched Cass Shelley grow up in that house – and then Kathy. And then when you saw what had been done to that woman, ordinary justice wasn’t good enough, was it? Not for an artist like yourself. What an original revenge.”
“And when did I have time to do all of this? Henry was the one who found the body.”
“He reported the murder on the following day. You had all night to dispose of her body.”
“I never heard that mob, and that’s the truth.”
He believed that much. “The mob never made any noise, but you can hear a dog howl in pain from quite a distance. You would have wondered about that howling. You would have seen the dog from this window and gone to help him. You’d do anything for a wounded animal.” The cat gave away her character. It was a natural enemy of her precious birds, yet she had saved the creature. And now she was working over a bat she had once characterized as owl food.
“You’re talking through your hat, Charles.”
“As Mallory said, all the evidence of the murder was lying around in plain sight. No one had attempted to hide the crime. But the sheriff told me the back stairs had been cleaned. I don’t believe Mallory knows about that. If she did, she would have put it together before I did. You took the body down those stairs, and then you erased your tracks – and the smaller tracks Kathy made when she ran from the house.”
“The sheriff was all over my land, poking and digging.” She gently prodded the bat with one finger until the animal was roused from his herbal sleep. “Tom even dragged Finger Bayou. It was a damn thorough job.”
“You put Cass’s body in a temporary hiding place. Later, you had all the time in the world to bury her in ground he’d already covered. She’s probably lying under something heavy enough to keep a corpse from rising – say; a pile of rocks. You were standing on a pile of rocks on the day you fed the alligator.”
“You have a flair for spinning stories, Charles.”
“I wonder if the sheriff could do anything with my guesswork. I think he might go to a lot of trouble to find out where Cass Shelley is.”
“If you start spreading that story of yours, you’ll cause Mallory more grief than you know.”
Oh, very good shot, Augusta. She knew the pressure points.
“That’s Cass Shelley’s grave at the tip of Finger Bayou, isn’t it?”
She was grinning gloriously, unintimidated, unafraid. Might she be laughine at him? And now it crossed his troubled mind that Riker was right, he’d been altered somehow – blinded. Here he was, virtually threatening Augusta, who had done him no wrong. Quite the opposite, she only had helped him, and then she had trusted him with the secret of the alligator.
Her smile was more subdued now, and he could see that she was already forgiving him.
“Charles, I know you wouldn’t do anything to hurt Mallory. So I know you’ll keep all this wild speculation to yourself – and without ever knowing why. It’ll drive you crazy at first, but everybody needs a little mystery in their lives.” She tilted her head to one side as she studied his face. “I’d say you need it more than most.”
It was dark when Mallory left the house. The birds were louder than usual, when they should have been settling down for the night. And it was well past time for Augusta to put the horse in his stall. But there he was, racing back and forth in the paddock, rearing up on his hind legs.
The long black duster whipped around her boots as she walked down the oak lane. What was spooking the animals? Her eyes scanned everything in view, hunting for the thing out of place. She used the mini cell phone to call the sheriff’s office again. No answer. She was on the path leading into the cemetery when she heard the woman.
Mallory was through the skirt of trees, following the sound of crying. Her gun was drawn as she slowly cleared the ground, stopping at each small side street of tombs, watching for movement, then moving on.
She found Darlene Wooley kneeling near the south rim, leaning over Ira’s body and cradling his bloody head in her arms. Ira allowed it. He was past his fear of the human touch, but not yet dead.
“So you’re the witness,” said Ira, as Mallory bent over him, scanning the blood, and wondering how much real damage had been done to him.
Darlene looked up at her. “He was late for dinner. I came to get him for – ”
“So you’re the witness,” Ira said again.
Mallory pulled her palm computer and its electronic bundle from the deep pocket of her duster. She detached the mini cell phone from the battery pack and dialed the emergency number. When the dispatcher answered, she handed the phone to Darlene. “Just tell them you need an ambulance.”
Darlene nodded, and Mallory set to work on Ira’s wounds. He had all the signs of a deadly beating; most of the damage would be internal. She wiped away the blood from his mouth. No broken teeth, but there was a bad head wound, and one arm was broken. “Everything will be all right, Ira.” She walked to the oldest tree and gripped a dry branch, cracking it straight down and pulling it from the tree. Now she tore a cable from her battery pack and wound it around his arm, binding it to the branch to keep him from moving it and causing more damage.
Ira stared at her quietly, his eyes large and full of trust.
She smiled down at her old playmate, humming the music she remembered from their brief childhood. He began to sing as Mallory ripped off a section of his torn red shirt and his mother cried into the telephone.
After a few minutes, Darlene put her hand over the miniphone and spoke to Mallory. “They’re out on a call – all of them, ambulances, fire trucks. One of the chemical plants went up in a ball of fire and torched a cane field. The dispatcher is patching me into the sheriff’s car.”
“Don’t mention my name.” Mallory wound a bloody strip of Ira’s shirt around the bloody head wound. She couldn’t smell any smoke. The fire must be miles down the road.
Now Darlene broke the connection and closed her hand over the tiny phone. “The sheriff is pulling off the highway. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Mallory checked Ira’s pupils. He was holding his own. Darlene was not doing so well by half.
In her own strange way of offering comfort, Mallory said, “I know who did this. I’ll kill him for you, okay?”
Darlene was shaking her head in confusion. “No, Kathy.” She was talking in the mother tone now. “Cass wouldn’t want that, and neither would I. It has to end, don’t you see?” Her hand wound around Mallory’s arm. “The damage can’t just go on and on. All these years, all this damage.”
Mallory gently pried loose Darlene’s restraining fingers and stood up. As she was moving through the cemetery with slow deliberation, Darlene called out after her, “Kathy, don’t kill anybody.”
Mallory recognized the same worried intonation her own mother had once used to caution her not to touch a dead bird she had found in the yard. As she walked, she checked the chambers of her revolver, and ceased to hear Darlene.
She was on her way to Owltown.
Augusta fixed one eye to her telescope. Studying the wildlife? Charles thought not. “You aren’t bird-watching, are you, Augusta?”
“Not at the moment, but I do find birds more interesting than people. Killer humans are definitely the more gentle species. Now you take the way Cass was killed – no passion. You should see the owls and hawks rip and tear the meat. But death is quick. If you blink, you miss it.”
“I’m sure you manage to keep abreast of all the killing around here.” What was she looking at?
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I spend some of my time watching the stars. But there’s a kind of violence out there too. This whole world is careening through space with a real wicked spin. I try to lay back and roll with it, and I recommend that to you.”
But her telescope was not trained o
n the stars tonight. “I think you’re a bit less passive than that. You don’t just watch, do you? You’re a player.”
“You’ve been listening to stories, Charles.” She smiled, but never took her eye from the telescope. “They’re all true. I’m a murderess. Killed my own father.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“Your friend Riker is in trouble. They’re closing in on him.”
Charles ripped the glass from her hand. Augusta patiently helped him refocus on the fairgrounds where the tent used to be. Now the most prominent thing on the field was a large truck with a long, flat bed strung with Christmas tree lights and the brighter spotlights perched on stalks of steel. At the center of the truck bed was a glass-domed coffin. It reminded him of a display case for a preserved insect.
Perhaps a hundred people milled and reeled around the truck waving bottles and paper cups. The women were laden with gaudy jewelry and they wore bright party dresses of shiny materials. Even some of the men wore sequins, and here and there was a costume more appropriate to a Mardi Gras parade than a funeral. A band of musicians stood off to one side and a stilt-walker moved among them with bright silver streamers in both hands.
In addition to the coffin, there was a chair on the truck bed. It was gold and elevated like a throne. Malcolm Laurie sat there, dressed in his suit of lights. He pointed toward the center of the crowd. The people stepped back to clear a wide circle, and there at its center, Riker stood alone, out of place in his drab gray suit.
CHAPTER 26
Charles’s shoes had only hit on every third step in his descent, and now he ran the length of the hallway to Augusta’s back room. He was lifting the antique telephone receiver when he saw the note lying on the table: “I’m going to the sheriff’s office to check on Riker. Stay where you are!”
Her last phrase was so heavily underscored, Mallory was virtually shouting off the page.
He was examining the broken telephone cord when Augusta hurried past him on her way to a chest of drawers in the far corner.
“There’s a pack of men coming over the bridge.” She was ripping through the top drawer, and articles of intimate apparel were flying. “We got to leave, and fast.” She pulled out a very small handgun and slammed the drawer. She held the weapon out to him. “It’s only a single-shot forty-five, but better than nothing.” She stuffed it into the pocket of her dress and ran from the room. The cat seemed to grasp the sense of it before Charles did, and now the creature was following its mistress.
Charles quit the room and ran down the hall, racing the yellow cat. He closed the outer door on the animal, and it began to growl, not frightened at all, but genuinely pissed off.
“Let the cat out,” commanded Augusta.
He opened the door and the cat sped past him. Charles looked up at Augusta, astride the white horse and without a saddle. She danced the stallion closer to the courting staircase. “They’ll be at the cemetery by now. Get on or you’re a dead man.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to – ”
“I know a lynch mob when I see one, Charles. Want to live? Get on!”
Charles stepped on the second stair and swung one long leg over the rear of the horse to mount behind Augusta.
“Hold on tight as you can!” she yelled. They galloped across the wide grassy lawn.
He had not been on horseback since he was a child, and then he had sat in a proper saddle. Now he felt that he would fall in every passing second. The horse’s massive muscles were elongating and contracting as they flew over the long grass, heading for the great earthen dike, pitch-black against the sky.
He held Augusta by the waist and leaned into her neck to yell, “We’re going along the base of the levee, right? Around the tip of Upland Bayou?”
“Can’t,” she called back to him, heading straight for the great looming barrier. “Too many bad patches and wet ones,” she yelled into the wind. “The horse would lose his legs in the dark before we even got to Henry’s place.”
“When will Henry be back?”
“Not till late. Wrap your legs tight and dig in with your heels. We’re going the way the horse knows best. He’s been this route a thousand times.”
And now they were moving up the embankment. Skillfully she led the horse into a slanted approach to the road atop the levee. Charles held on tight, knees and heels to the horse’s hide, arms wrapped around Augusta, and certain that he would slide off as the horse faltered on the steep slope of Bermuda grass. But the animal never lost its forward momentum, finding purchase in the worn areas of dirt scumbling out beneath his hooves in a brown spray as he climbed up to the stars. Now the horse was running full-out across the levee road, along the top of the earth where it met the sky.
Charles looked back to the mansion. A small army of ants with pale white heads and hands emerged from the oak alley and converged on Trebec House.
The stilt-walker’s baggy pants obscured the glass-domed coffin as he tottered back and forth alongside the truck’s flat bed. Every one of the hundred mourners was dressed for a blowout party of free booze. A few men in the crowd had disguised their eyes with bright costume masks. Some wore feathers and capes. Gaudy colors bobbed and weaved as the liquor flowed and spilled, and cheap jewelry flashed in the beams of spotlights on tall metal stands around the truck. But Malcolm’s suit of lights outglittered all of them. He had forsaken his throne to straddle the coffin, riding it like a nightmare, waving one hand in the air, hailing his subjects and laughing.
Only the Dixieland band was silent. The musicians stood by the float, exchanging glances, shifting on their feet and wanting to leave now. Clark Kinkaid, the trumpet player, put up his horn and nodded to the others. They began to back away from the truck. One of the Laurie brothers stepped in the path of the man with the sax. Old Ray was stern as any chain gang boss, and carrying a rifle.
The musicians thought better of leaving. A pretty woman danced by with a full bottle for the band to pass around. The drinking had been well under way for an hour, but the funeral had yet to begin.
Clark cradled his trumpet in one arm and looked toward the pile of gas-soaked rags wound on sticks. They should have been lit long ago to signal the start of the torchlight parade down the main street of Owltown. But the crematorium truck had arrived only to be sent away empty. Apparently, Malcolm had plans to expand the evening’s entertainment.
Well, this was not part of the deal.
Clark had arranged another gig for his band, figuring this would be a done thing before eight. So when was the show gonna get on the road, and who was that old guy in the center of the loose ring of drunks? Men and women closed ranks to tighten the circle and block his view. Clark stepped onto the truck’s bumper and hoisted himself up on the fender for a better look.
Every pair of eyes was trained on Malcolm Laurie as the man swung one sequined leg over the coffin, stood up and held out both his hands for silence. “This man, Riker.” Malcolm had real anger in his voice as he pointed to the man in the gray suit. “This staggering drunk, this subhuman garbage, was found in the cemetery, naked from his waist to his ankles – standing over the idiot’s dead body.”
Obscenities and moans rose up all around the truck. “Look at this man, so drunk he can hardly stand. His victim did not die easy. The boy was raped and beaten to death. Poor helpless idiot. It’s like the rape of a child.”
“You ought to know, Malcolm,” yelled Riker, not the least bit inebriated. “Your brother raped Ira Wooley when the kid was only six years old. Does it run in the family? Is that where your expertise comes from?”
“Shut him up!”
A man stepped forward to put a fist in Riker’s face and did just that. Riker fell to his knees. His lip was split open and blood ran into his mouth. Malcolm was livid. Something had gone wrong, and Clark wondered if it had anything to do with Riker’s sobriety.
Malcolm waved his fist to the sky. “Three witnesses found him – ”
“That’s why Cass Sh
elley had to die!” Riker stood up. “She had the hospital reports. Babe raped Jimmy Simms, too. That’s why he ran away when he was only twelve years old.”
“Shut his lying mouth!”
But no one stepped forward this time, except Jimmy’s father, Dan Simms, all rapt attention. Malcolm turned to his brother Ray, who nodded back his understanding and moved into the crowd to do the job right as Riker was saying, “She couldn’t figure out how a six-year-old could contract a junkie hepatitis. Then she ran the test for syphilis. Remember Babe’s syphilis party. He – ”
Ray Laurie had both his hands on Riker’s windpipe. Dan Simms was a larger man and had no trouble clearing Ray’s fat fingers from Riker’s neck. Simms looked down at the shorter Ray Laurie and backed him off with only a rising fist. Simms turned to Malcolm. “This ain’t the story you gave me, Mal. Now I want to hear this man out.”
Malcolm strutted to the edge of the truck bed, shaking his head in pity, and pity was in his voice. “Dan, how can you listen to a man who was caught with his pants around his ankles assaulting that poor idiot?”
“But you said he was drunk too, and he don’t seem all that tight to me,” said Dan Simms. He turned to Riker. “Go on, mister.”
“Cass had all the blood work,” said Riker. “She matched up the stages of syphilis. Babe’s was the oldest, then Jimmy’s, then Ira’s. That’s what she was trying to tell you when she crashed that meeting. But Malcolm drove her off and covered it up.”
“Lies, all lies!” said Malcolm.
“And what kind of lie did you tell Ira’s father?” Riker was louder now. “I know he threw the first rock. You put it in his hand, didn’t you?”
Ray Laurie was standing behind Jimmy Simms’s father, saying, “Now Dan, you know that’s a lie. Malcolm was gone before the first stone flew.”
Simms turned to look up at Malcolm. “Well, how did he know Ira’s father threw – ”
It was done quickly with the butt end of a rifle, and Simms fell. A second blow sent Riker to his knees again.
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