by Terry Shames
“Wanted to see how you were getting along. No more fires at your place?”
His neck flushes red. “No. No more fires.”
“I talked to George earlier today. Everything all right between the two of you?” The relaxed air between the two of them seems odd, given what Owen and Judy told me.
“Yeah, it’s fine. I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret from you. George made a generous offer, and I’ve decided to pack it in. Now all I have to do is think of some other way to make a living.” He scratches his neck and gazes off into the distance. “Don’t know what exactly.”
George walks down the steps to join us. “I finally talked some sense into this mule.”
“What does your wife have to say about this turn of events?” I ask Montclair.
His flush deepens. “She’s happy about it.”
At that moment, the screen door opens and Judy Montclair pokes her head out. Her eyes are red-rimmed and swollen. If she’s happy to leave the farm, I wonder why she has been crying. “You all come on in.” Her voice is subdued. “Supper is ready. Mr. Craddock, you’re welcome to join us.”
“I appreciate the offer, but my wife expects me for supper. Owen, could I have a quick word with you before I go?”
He tells his brother and wife to go ahead and he’ll be there soon.
“I want to check out something with you,” I say when we’re alone. “Is there any need for me to think you all are in any danger from any more fires?”
Montclair crosses his arms over his chest and lowers his head. “I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
“You think George was responsible? That he did it to drive you out?”
He shakes his head. “I know he didn’t. Let’s leave it at that.”
For a second I think he means that he set the fire himself, but it doesn’t make sense. Suddenly I think I know what accounts for Owen Montclair’s change of heart and his wife’s tears. It was clear the first time I set foot on this farm that Judy Montclair was bitterly unhappy, and that her husband either didn’t understand how deeply unhappy she was or didn’t care. I suspect Judy set the fire to force the issue. Maybe the fire down the hill gave her the idea.
“People may say you’re stubborn,” I say. “But you gave it a good shot. You’ve got nothing to regret here.”
“That may be,” he says. His voice is low, and he gazes out over the property “But I lost track of why I was doing it to begin with. I wanted a nice life for my family.”
“You’re young. You’ll have another chance,” I say.
He turns toward the house, and I say, “One more thing.”
I pull the pictures from the burned house out of my pocket. “You ever see this man before?”
“No, who is he?”
“Someone I’m looking for. Would you ask your brother to step out here?”
When George Cato comes back out, I show him the picture.
If I hadn’t been watching him, I wouldn’t have seen the little jerk of recognition before he said, “No, he doesn’t look familiar.”
“Are you sure?”
He makes a show of looking closely at the picture, but then he shakes his head and hands it back. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m going to find out.”
It’s getting dark, and Jeanne probably has supper ready, but I stop back at the station with the idea of making a copy of the photo and sending it to Luke Schoppe. When I arrive, I see Eldridge’s car in the lot, which is a surprise since he was supposed to be off duty now.
Inside, he’s talking to a woman. She turns around when she hears me come in, and I see that her face is battered the way Donna’s was last week. I don’t recognize her. Eldridge says, “This is Molly Gundersand.”
“What happened to you?”
She sniffs, and a tear leaks down her check. Eldridge says, “Somebody gave her a ride and beat up on her.”
“Where are you from?”
“Bobtail.” Although she’s got to be over thirty, her voice is like a little girl’s.
“Do you know the man who did this to you?”
She shakes her head.
I pull up a chair near her. “You say he gave you a ride. Where were you going?”
She shakes her head again and stays quiet. I glance at Eldridge, and he raises his eyebrows. That’s when I take a mental step back and notice what she looks like. Without the bruises, she would probably be attractive. She has a swirl of long brown hair and a fine figure. She’s wearing a short white skirt and, despite the heat, white knee-high boots. Her blouse is sheer and low-cut, showing off an ample bust. There’s a big bruise above her right breast. She sees me notice it and covers it with her hand.
“Did he do that?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Gundersand, why were you getting a ride?”
“I needed to get to town.”
“You mean to Bobtail? But he brought you here instead?”
She nods.
“Did he bring you straight here after he picked you up?”
She swallows. “No, we . . . uh . . . drove around a little bit.”
“Did you go somewhere to have sex?”
Her eyes spark fire. “What if we did? We’re both adults.”
“I expect he drove off without paying you.”
She crosses her arms and clamps her mouth closed.
“And he beat you up. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you. How did you get away from him?”
“He dumped me here in Jarrett Creek. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked somebody where the police station was, and I walked over here.”
I ask her for a description of the man and the vehicle, but her answers are as vague as Donna’s were. I don’t know if they’re protecting him or themselves.
“You live in Bobtail?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take you back there, and we’re going to stop by the police department.”
I tell Eldridge he can go home, and before I leave I call Jeanne and tell her I’ve got to run up to Bobtail.
“It’s suppertime.”
“You and Tom go ahead and eat. I’ve got some police business.”
“Is it more about Truly?”
“No, it has nothing to do with him.”
She’s quiet for a second. “Can’t somebody else do it?”
“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”
When we get to the city limits of Bobtail, Molly says, “If you don’t mind, I don’t feel so good and I’d like to go on home.”
“This won’t take long. You need to report this man. Somebody else might get a worse beating than you did.”
“I really don’t want to,” she says in her little-girl voice. She scoots toward me and runs her hand over the bruised area on her chest, sliding her blouse down a few inches until it barely covers her breast. “I need to go put something on this bruise. Maybe you could help me.” She takes my hand and lays it on the swell of her breast. There’s not a man alive who wouldn’t be tempted, but I snatch my hand away.
When I pull into the police parking lot, she whines, “No, don’t stop here. Take me home? We could have a little fun.” She sticks out her lower lip.
“Come on in. You need to file a report.”
I practically have to pull her out of the car, and as we walk up to the station, she starts to walk away. I grab her by the arm. “You’re coming with me.”
“I don’t like you,” she says. “You won’t cut a girl some slack.”
Inside, the man at the desk barely glances up and then does a double-take. “Molly, what the hell happened to you?”
“You know this woman?”
He snickers. “In a manner of speaking. Molly is one of our working girls.”
“You get a lot of that here in Bobtail?”
“Not a lot. But out there on the edge of town where the roadhouse is you get a few.”
“As you can see, somebody beat her up. Same thing happened
to a woman in Jarrett Creek last week.”
“Uh oh. We got a bad man on the loose.” He asks the same things I asked, and he gets the same vague answers.
“What did this woman say who got hurt last week?”
I don’t tell him she was my sister-in-law. “She said some man was passing through, and she was hitching a ride to the grocery store because her husband was gone.”
“Ha! Sounds like BS to me,” Molly says. Her little-girl voice is gone. “Who the hell hitches a ride to the grocery store?”
I leave Molly in the care of the Bobtail PD and head home, but all the way her words echo in my head. She’s right. Who hitches a ride to the grocery store in the middle of the night? I don’t like where my thoughts are going. Not that I didn’t have a suspicion before, but I didn’t want to believe that Donna was soliciting. Does Horace know what she’s up to? Do they need money that badly? And most important, how will it affect Tom if kids find out?
I pass the football stadium on the way home, and I slow down. After what happened to the Blackman girl, I’m determined to put a stop to the drug sales. Charlie Ostrand said he got his supply by putting cash and a note with his order under a specific stone. I could try a trap, putting my own note there, but I don’t have the manpower to stake out the place. I’m still tempted, but I don’t even know what a note should say, or how much money to leave. It’s another one of those ways in which I feel over my head in this job. I should have asked the boy for more information.
Chapter 32
I usually fall right to sleep, but I lie awake for some time, questions circling like wolves. How am I going to find evidence of who killed those five people when it was apparently a revenge killing that had its roots far from here? Without evidence, Truly Bennett is stuck in jail. Is the photograph I found really of any importance? The only thing that makes me cling to the possibility that it is came from George Cato’s startled reaction this afternoon. But if he knows who the man is, why didn’t he say so? How is he connected? And what does Beaumont Penny have to do with any of it? My impulse is to go tearing off to Houston to investigate. But investigate what? I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
Closer to home, how am I going to get to the bottom of the drug problem here in town? I don’t know how the girl who was taken to the hospital is doing. I should have called to check on her progress. I’ll call first thing in the morning. If she’s well enough, I’ll find out if it really was Charlie Ostrand who provided the drugs that felled her.
Finally, why am I uneasy that my sister-in-law was lying when she told me the circumstances under which she was attacked? And where are she and Horace? Why haven’t they called to check on Tom? It’s been a few days since they brought him. You’d think they’d check on him every day. At least Jeanne and I would.
I circle back to the people who were murdered. Why did they move here? People don’t pick a place to move out of thin air, but I haven’t discovered their connection with Jarrett Creek. Freddie Carmichael and Blue Dudley acted like they were familiar with this town, and George Cato claimed he knew them. Is that the connection I’m looking for?
I resolve that first thing tomorrow I’m going to Darktown to rattle a few cages. Somebody has to know something about those people. But it does nothing to solve my sleep problem. Finally, I roll out of bed. There is one thing I can do. The football field is a few short blocks from here. I can try putting a note in the place Charlie told me about. If the drugs get dropped off, then at least I know we won’t be wasting our time if I put together a surveillance team. The deputies may complain, but they will have to put up with doing some real police work for a change.
At the kitchen table I make out a request for one hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana and sign it with an unintelligible signature. I have no idea if a hundred is a reasonable amount. I slip the note and the money into an envelope and seal it with tape.
It’s cool outside, or at least cooler than it is during the day. A breeze has sprung up, and the trees shiver as I walk. I’m almost never out alone at night. Jeanne and I sometimes go dancing on weekends if there’s a good band in Bryan or Bobtail, and we don’t get back until late. But I like the feel of the night air, or at least I think I would if I weren’t on such a dodgy mission.
The gate to the football field is closed with a lock on it, but the lock is hanging open. There’s a half-moon out, and the stadium’s stone grandstands glow in the light. It’s hotter inside the stadium. The stone absorbs the heat during the day and hasn’t had time to cool down. I’m sweating. The drug drop-off area is in shadow. I pause, look around, and square my shoulders. I’m not a fearful man, but the play of shadow and light makes me feel edgy.
In the shadowed area, I shine my flashlight from one stone to the next until I find the one Charlie mentioned that has a crack in the mortar. I crouch down next to the loose stone and tug it out. I take the envelope out of my pocket, but when I go to slip it into the hollow space, I find that there is already something there.
The envelope I pull out is sealed. I rip it open, and by the light from the flashlight I see that what I had written is a joke. This envelope contains three hundred dollars in cash and asks for both pills (ten reds and ten yellows) and two hundred dollars in marijuana.
Whoever put this here must be expecting to have it picked up tonight. I decide to put the stone back and wait to see who gets it. Before I have a chance to replace the stone, though, I hear a noise close behind me. I start to jump to my feet, but a blow to the back of my head sends me sprawling. I struggle to get to my knees. Someone says, “No, don’t.” I almost recognize the voice, but another blow makes everything go dark.
When I wake, I’m confused. It’s dark and I should be in my bed, but something feels wrong. My face is pressed against something rough and hard. The back of my head aches, and my jaw feels like it has been scraped with sandpaper. I smell something earthy. I grope around to feel the surface near my face, and I realize I’m facedown on rock. I move gingerly, gradually remembering where I am. I don’t hear any sound, so it seems like I’ve been left alone. When I try to lift my head, pain shoots through my eyeballs.
I take a deep breath and force myself up to my hands and knees. The knife of pain sends nausea through me, and I hunch over, waiting for it to pass. I take a few deep breaths, and then ease back so I’m sitting upright with my ass on my heels. After a few seconds like that, I look around me. I’m in dark shadows, but the moon has the field bathed in light.
After the pain in my head and the nausea eases, I struggle to my feet, fighting dizziness. I take a couple of steps toward the light, and my foot hits something hard, sending it skittering away. It slides to a stop, and in the moonlight I see that it’s my flashlight. I lean over and pick it up, gritting my teeth against the nausea that seizes me.
I shine the light around and see that the loose stone has been replaced. I dig it back out, and the indentation is empty. The note I had planned to use for bait is gone, as well as the money I found before I was attacked.
All I want to do now is get home and lie down. On my walk back, I think about what happened and wonder if someone followed me. But that means they had to be watching my house, and that seems unlikely. I come to the conclusion that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the bathroom mirror I see that my face is scraped where I hit the stone deck of the stadium seats, and my cheekbone is puffed up. I’m going to have a nice bruise. I feel the back of my head. It’s sticky, and my hand comes away with blood on it. That brings on another wave of nausea that I dispel by sticking my head under the faucet and letting the cold water wash over it. The water stings, but I keep it flowing over the wound until the pain subsides. I feel around and find it’s nothing but a small gash. More blood than the damage would warrant.
After that, I go into the kitchen and turn on the light over the sink, pull out a glass, and throw back two fingers of bourbon.
I’m opening my bedroom door when Tom comes out of his room,
headed for the bathroom. The sight of him makes me freeze momentarily, but he doesn’t look at me. He mumbles something and goes into the bathroom. I stare after him. The sight of him stirred up a memory of the last thing I heard before I lost consciousness. Someone said, “No, don’t.” A familiar voice, I believe, but my head is throbbing, and the memory is too fleeting to catch hold of.
I file the thought for tomorrow and slip into the room, where Jeanne hasn’t stirred. When I ease into bed, it isn’t long before weariness takes over.
I wake to find Jeanne lying on her side, her head propped on her arm, gazing at me. “What in the world did you do to yourself?”
I reach to my chin and cheekbone, which feel bruised and sore. “Fell down.”
“Fell down where? I heard you leave, but I didn’t hear you come in. Where did you go?”
I reach out and pull her to me. She lies down with her head on my chest and her arm around me. “I had something I meant to do, and I couldn’t sleep so I went off to do it.”
“What time was it?”
“I don’t exactly know.” I turn onto my side so I can lean down and kiss her. Her lips are soft and open to me in invitation. The movement stirs up my headache, but there’s something more stirred up, more important than the headache. I kiss her harder, and she falls onto her back, her hand against my chest. Maybe because of the danger I confronted last night, I feel a sense of urgency that transmits to Jeanne. She grabs me around the waist and pulls me to her, breathing hard. We are usually more languid in our lovemaking, but this time we go at it hard and fast.
Afterward, she giggles softly. “I hope we didn’t wake Tom.” Which reminds me of Tom and of the voice I heard.
I ease off the bed. “I’m going to get a shower. Long day ahead.”
In the shower, I try to remember my plan for the day, but after last night’s fiasco everything is a jumble. First I’ll see to the cows and try to shake the headache, and then maybe I’ll get my plan straight.
Chapter 33
The hospital tells me that the girl, Eileen Blackman, will be released to her parents this morning. I find her in a private hospital room in the company of her mother, Julia, who is calmer than she was yesterday. Eileen is sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed, dressed in a hospital gown and with a pink, fluffy robe around her shoulders. She’s slouched in the chair, her long hair falling to the sides of her face so it’s impossible to see her expression.