by Terry Shames
“What do you want to tell me?” She’s trembling. Happily, a car wheels into the parking lot and a man gets out and goes inside. I hope he wants a room and that the transaction takes a few minutes.
“Alva, you need to be strong. Your brother has been arrested.”
She squeaks in fear. “For what?”
“They think he had something to do with the people who were killed.”
“No! No! He didn’t do that. He couldn’t . . .”
“Hush now. I know he didn’t do it. I’m working to figure out who did. But for now, you need to be strong for him and for your daddy.”
“And my daddy? Did they arrest him, too?”
“No, but he’s upset about Truly, and you need to help him stay calm.”
“Calm! You crazy! How can we be calm? You know how they do us. They just want to arrest somebody, and the best somebody they can come up with is a nigger. They don’t care who really did it.”
“I do.”
“Who are you? What do you have to do with anything?”
“I’m chief of police, and I know Truly. I don’t want to see him falsely accused. I know this is a bad situation, and the more you can help me, the better chance I have of getting your brother released.”
“I told you I don’t know nothing.”
The man comes out of the office and gives us a curious look. He gets in his car and moves it a few spaces away.
I lower my voice. “Listen to me. The Texas Highway Patrol officer who arrested Truly questioned him about you. How would he know that Truly had a sister?”
She stares at me. “How do I know? I don’t know any highway patrolman.” She begins to weep, her chest heaving and tears running down her cheeks. “They’re going to beat him like that black man they killed in Georgetown. He’s going to die. I know he will.”
“No. The sheriff here is a good man. He doesn’t want anything like that to happen. But the faster I can help get Truly out, the better. I need help from anybody who can tell me something about those people.”
“Oh . . .” she squeals. “I swear I don’t know them.” She chews on her fist and then brings her chin up in defiance. “Why do you care what happens to Truly?”
That’s the question a lot of people are going to ask. “I just do, that’s all.” At first it was personal, but now something is stirred up in me and I need to know what really happened out there. “Are you going to help me or not?”
The motel owner takes that unfortunate moment to stick her head out the door and send a fierce look in our direction.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Alva says, avoiding my eyes. She starts backing away.
“Wait.” I open my wallet, fish one of my cards out, and hand it to her. “A name. That’s all I need.” Then louder I say, “Thank you very much for your help. I’ll let you get back to work.”
Back at the motel office, I stick my head inside. The woman is standing there absolutely still. “Thank you. Sorry I disturbed your girl. Everything’s fine. I won’t need to come out here again.”
“I guess that’s all right then.”
Chapter 19
Before I leave Bobtail, I stop at a phone booth and call home. I don’t expect Jeanne until this evening, but if she has come back early, I want her to know where I am. The phone rings and rings, and I’m oddly relieved that I don’t have to explain to her why I’m stopping off to see the Montclairs.
It’s not hard to see where the fire was. A whole section of crop is charred, and you can still see wisps of smoke here and there from some of the remaining seared plants. I spy Owen Montclair out on the edge of the field with a hoe. Is he going to turn the soil under by hand? It’s a wrenching thought. A tractor could do the work in no time.
He raises his head and watches me as I drive up the long, rutted road, but he doesn’t acknowledge me and quickly returns to his work.
At the house, I walk up onto the porch and rap on the door. There’s movement inside and the door opens to a boy Tom’s age. He’s nothing like Tom, though. Despite my brother’s unhappiness, Tom has an irrepressible good nature. The Montclair family’s struggle to make ends meet is reflected in the disappointment on this boy’s face.
The boy stares at me silently. I ask if his mamma is in.
“She’s out back seeing to the chickens,” he says.
“Would you tell her Mr. Craddock is here and that I’d like to talk to her when she has a minute?” Before the boy can close the door, a young girl a couple of years older than him hurries into the front room, wiping her hands on an apron that’s too big for her. “Who is it, Cal? Oh, can I help you?”
I repeat my request.
“You can come inside if you want,” she says.
“That’s all right, I’ll stay out here.”
The girl glances past me and freezes. I look behind me to see Montclair striding toward the porch. “Get on into the kitchen, Cal,” she says in a tense voice.
I go down the steps to meet Montclair. “Sorry to bother you,” I say.
“What is it you want?”
There’s no need to ease into the subject of why I’m here. I have no doubt it would aggravate the man further. “I heard you had a fire, and I couldn’t help thinking it was something of a coincidence to have two fires on the Cato property in one week. I wondered if you know how it started.”
The anger in his eyes lowers a notch. “Fire chief seemed to think it was carelessness.”
I look past him toward the scorched land, and then meet his eyes. “I only met you once, but from what I saw, it seems unlikely you’d be careless. How do you think it happened?”
“I think somebody set it.”
“How? Gas? Kindling of some kind?”
He swallows and his expression sags with naked defeat. “If you’re interested, come with me.”
I follow him down to the field where he was hoeing. He crouches down next to one of the plants. “It’s close to harvest, so the plants are dry. All it takes is for a few of them to be kindled.” He pulls one of the ravaged plants from the ground, sniffs it, and hands it over. “Gasoline.”
“Did you show this to the fire chief?”
“I only just now found it. I knew there had to be a starter somewhere, so I began clearing around the perimeter to see if I could find something.” He stands up and wipes his hands on his pants. “Not that it matters.” He says it so low, he could be talking to himself.
I don’t need to ask what he means. He was counting on every one of these cotton plants to give him the slim margin he needed to keep going. The loss of even one field tips him off the edge. It might be for the best. His stubbornness has not done his family any good. I don’t know what drives a man to dig in his heels the way he has, and I don’t see how I can make it my business. But one part of it is my business. Somebody set this fire. You can’t go around torching someone’s livelihood just because you have other plans.
“When is George Cato set to come out here?” I ask.
He blinks at me. “George? He comes the first of every month, so it’ll be another couple of weeks. You’re not thinking he’s responsible for this, are you?”
“It occurred to me, since you said he wanted you off the property.”
His mouth turns down in a sneer. “This isn’t Cato’s work.”
“Why do you say that?”
He takes a while to answer. “It was like the two of us were in a standoff. He didn’t believe I could make a go of this farm, and I was determined to show him I could. I think he was too anxious to prove me wrong to do anything underhanded. He wanted to make me understand fair and square that I was a fool.”
“Sounds personal,” I say.
“Oh, yes, it’s personal all right. Him and me are half brothers. We have the same mamma but different daddies. He always thought he was the smart one.”
He seems convinced that George Cato didn’t have a hand in the fire, but I’m not. I remember the implied smirk in the voice of George Cato’s fath
er. “George’s daddy had money and yours didn’t.”
“My daddy was a high school teacher, and George’s daddy is a real-estate tycoon in Dallas. Which one do you think is rich?”
“You said your daddy ‘was.’ Is he deceased?”
“Long time ago. I was a young boy. My mamma went to work as Ronald Cato’s secretary, and he married her.”
“You’ve got a different name. He didn’t adopt you?”
“No.” He sighs and looks off in the distance. “But he treated me okay. I was stubborn and he put up with it.”
“Owen, supper!” Judy Montclair sticks her head out the door and calls sharply.
“I know one person who’s going to thank whoever set that fire,” he says.
“Maybe things will turn out better than you think,” I say, and then instantly feel foolish for presuming to spout empty phrases to Owen Montclair.
But he takes it as intended and says, “Could be.”
“I’ll be on my way, but if you hear from George, will you let me know? I’d like to talk to him about the place that burned in the woods.”
“Why don’t you call him?”
“I did, and I only got his daddy. He told me he’d pass on the message, but I didn’t get the impression it was high on his list.”
Chapter 20
It’s still daylight when I get home, and I can’t wait for Jeanne to arrive. I stand in the kitchen weighing whether she’d rather cook or go out, but before I make up my mind, I hear her car pull into the driveway. For a second I freeze. I feel different than I did a couple of days ago. Will I seem strange to her? Is it the autopsy that made me feel different, or was it Truly being arrested? Or deciding to take my job seriously?
It doesn’t matter. I rush out the door, grinning. She’s getting out of the car, and I’m as stunned as I always am when I see her after we’ve been away from each other. How did I ever get so lucky? She stretches her arms over her head, and her pretty swish of hair falls across her shoulders. She wriggles all over, and her impish smile takes over her face. We move toward each other as if it has been weeks and not just two days since she left.
We both start talking at once, saying, “I have so much to tell you.” Then we laugh and I pull her into my arms and kiss her. I suddenly want all I can get of her, right now. We pull back, breathless. “Let me help you get your things out of the car.”
She gets on tiptoes and throws her arms around my neck, pulling my head down to meet hers. “We can do that later,” she says. I swoop my arm down and pick her up, with her still clinging to my neck, and carry her inside. She’s laughing. “What are the neighbors going to think?” she whispers.
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” I don’t care about much of anything. Let the house catch on fire, the telephone ring, somebody come banging on the front door. It will all have to wait. There’s only one thing on my mind, and Jeanne is right with me. As we clamor onto the bed like a couple of newlyweds, I breathe in her scent and can hardly stop looking at her, losing myself in her dark eyes.
The last thing I hear her say is, “I’m so glad to be home with you.”
Later, we lie in bed, and as the dusk closes in she chatters about her trip and I savor the sound of her voice. Suddenly she sits bolt upright. “I almost forgot. I have a surprise. Okay, I mean not really a surprise. Not for you anyway. It’s for me, and you, too, of course. I hope you’ll like it.”
I know by the way she’s talking, begging me to understand, that she has brought home another painting. Jeanne and her mother collect art the way some people collect knick-knacks. I try to act like I like the art, but it’s all a mess to me. Give me a good picture of bluebonnets and cactus, and I’m satisfied. I did make her happy when we went to a museum and I really enjoyed looking at Frederick Remington. She was nice enough to admit that his art is important. But what she loves is modern art—things that look like a jumble of shapes and colors.
We go out to the car, and she opens the trunk. “This is the surprise,” she says. “Mamma thinks you’ll love it. I hope she’s right.” She’s practically dancing with anticipation. I pull the well-wrapped painting out of the trunk and carry it into the house, with her tripping along beside me.
“Let’s open it,” she says when I lay it on the kitchen table.
“Let me bring in the rest of your stuff while there’s still daylight.”
She fetches her small cosmetics case while I carry the big suitcase. “I hope you had enough clothes for two days,” I grumble.
“I had to have a lot of outfits. You know how Mamma is. We went out to dinner twice and I had to go to lunch with some of Mamma’s friends. They’re my friends, too, I guess. Anyway I’ve known most of them my whole life. I’m not like you and wear the same old thing every day.”
If I didn’t know her, I’d think she enjoyed all the social outings that her mamma drags her to. But in reality she goes to please her mamma, who is as friendly a person as you’d ever meet. The problem is, where her mamma is outgoing and can’t get enough of social life, Jeanne likes a quieter life. When we first got out of school, we tried living in Fort Worth, but after a year Jeanne couldn’t wait to get away from the city. I wasn’t altogether excited when she suggested that we move back here, but she seems happy, and I’m learning to appreciate it.
“What are we going to do about dinner?” I ask. “I could eat a sixteen-ounce steak.” I grin at her, knowing she’s about to bust to show me the picture.
“Oh, you! Open it.”
I tear off the brown paper, then the foam around the edges, and finally the cardboard covering the picture.
What I see surprises me. The background is a strong red, and in the foreground, boxes and stick-like shapes in bright colors seem to be tumbling from the top of the painting. I’m happy that I really do like it. I like the movement and the vibrant colors. I even like the size of it, which seems like an odd thing to notice. The proportion is perfect. “I don’t know what to say. This is . . . I don’t know how to describe it. I like it.”
She raises her hands to the ceiling. “He likes it. Oh. He likes it. It’s a Kandinsky!”
“In that case, I like it even better.” I laugh. She knows I couldn’t tell a Kandinsky from a coconut.
“I’m going to call Mamma right now and tell her she was right. She’ll be so glad.”
“No, we’re going to dinner right now.”
We go to a barbecue place out on the road to Bryan–College Station for brisket and potato salad. We order at the counter and bring our drinks to the table with us.
When we sit down, she says, “We’ve only been talking about me. What happened while I was gone?”
It’s hard to pick the right details. I don’t want to upset her with talk of the autopsy, and I’m reluctant to tell her that Truly was arrested, although she’ll hear it soon enough from the grapevine. “There’s a lot going on,” I say.
She looks at me as if seeing me for the first time since she got home. “You look different.”
“Different how?”
“Older or something.”
“Well, you were gone for two whole days.”
She smiles and speaks softly. “How was that autopsy? Was it awful?”
“Unpleasant. Informative.” I take a swallow of beer.
“You know the Dallas newspapers made a big deal out of it. They said those people were murdered. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Did you know right away?”
“I did.”
She squeezes lemon into her iced tea, and when she looks up at me her face is serious. “I know I said I didn’t want you to be chief of police, but that doesn’t mean I want you to keep secrets from me.”
I put my hand out onto the table, palm up, and she lays her hand on top of it. “I didn’t intend for it to be a secret. It was a shock, and I needed to get it straight in my mind. Here I was thinking being chief of police was easy, and then something like that
happens.”
“Just don’t shut me out, that’s all. Anyway, you told me the highway patrol or the Rangers would be in charge, so there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
I want to tell her the struggle I’m having with John Sutherland, but it’s hard to put it into words. I squeeze her hand. “Did you happen to bring a Dallas paper with you?”
“No, why would I?”
“You said the papers made a big deal out of the murders, and I thought maybe you would have brought it.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think of it. Have they found out who did it yet?”
The moment I’ve been dreading. Even if I don’t tell her, it will be all over town tomorrow and she’ll wonder why I kept it from her. “They arrested somebody, but I don’t think he’s guilty.”
She sits up taller and her eyes widen. “What do you mean you don’t think he did it? Who is it?”
“They arrested Truly Bennett.”
She claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh, that’s terrible. Who would have suspected?”
“You know he couldn’t have done it.”
The waiter chooses that second to plop our barbecue platters down in front of us. “More iced tea?” he asks Jeanne.
“Yes, please.” He pours it from the big pitcher, and she squeezes more lemon into it, not meeting my eyes. But I see the pink spots high on her cheeks. She takes a sip and says, “What do you mean I know he couldn’t have done it? I don’t know anything of the kind.”
“Jeanne, I’ve known Truly my whole life. He’s a good man. He’s been at our house. He’s worked for us.”
“He’s been at our house? He’s done work outside, that’s all. Other than that, we don’t know a thing about him.” She sounds frightened.
“He has never been in any trouble.”
“Never got caught, you mean.”
“He’s a good, church-going man.”
“Since when did you care whether somebody goes to church?” She doesn’t like that she has to go to church without me.
“I think they’re jumping the gun by arresting him, that’s all,” I say. “I’m pretty sure the highway patrolman investigating just wanted to make a quick arrest.”