Do Unto Others

by Jeff Abbott

  “Matt? I don’t understand,” I lied. “What does he have to do with this?”

  “You were there when he was smoking some dope, and you didn’t blab on him to your buddy the chief of police. Why?”

  “Matt talks to you, obviously.” I smiled and made myself ruffle her hair. “I figured what Matt does is his own business. Not mine. Anyway, drugs aren’t such a big deal. I knew plenty of folks who did coke and such up in Boston. Pot was a little too pedestrian for them.”

  “It’s not too pedestrian for the simple, hearty folks of Bonaparte County.” She laughed. “It’s a booming business.” She watched my face, and I inched up one corner of my mouth in a half-smile.

  “I’m glad to hear business is good. The local economy needs a boost. And so does my own pocketbook.”

  “Good,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I run the operation. You take orders from me. I hope being something of a good ol’ boy, you don’t have a problem with that.”

  “No, ma’am,” I drawled.

  “Matt Blalock provides the land and two of the vets from his support group farm it and distribute it. Actually, you’re already somewhat involved—they’ve been using their support group meetings for a distribution time for several months now.”

  Blood rushed to my face and she saw it. Using my library for this? “I—I’m surprised,” I heard myself say.

  She shrugged. “We’re careful. I’ve got plots scattered all over Bonaparte and Bastrop counties. We mostly sell into Austin, but we’re selling more here, too. I thought you might help us, since so many young folks use the library for school papers and such. You’d be a good contact for them.”

  I made myself smile. “Get a joint with their Joyce?”

  “That’s the idea. You catch on fast, Jordy. I knew you’d be a natural at this.”

  I tried not to bristle at the compliment. “Just how secure is this operation? Aren’t you worried about getting caught?”

  “We move the planting sites around. We protect them with booby traps …”

  “So if someone stumbles across your crop and gets killed, you don’t get the cops coming in,” I said dryly.

  “We can move quickly, if we have to. I’ve done this for quite a while, Jordy.” She sat on the couch. “And we’ve got a friend in a high place.”

  I thought, and the answer came to me in inspiration. “Let me guess. Reverend Hufnagel.”

  It was her turn to be surprised. I shrugged, as though my deduction was no big deal. “I saw him and Matt talking. Brother Adam claimed Matt wanted the church for a vets’ meeting. I just didn’t quite buy it.” I didn’t mention my trick phone call to Matt where he’d said there was no vets’ meeting for the week.

  “Well, cancer and chemotherapy’s one of our best business references.” Ruth laughed. God, she was cruel. I wanted to wipe her kiss from my mouth. “Poor Reverend Hufnagel’s chemo last year was real hard on his body. I was his nurse. His pain got so bad I kidded him about trying pot to relieve it and he took me up on it. You could have knocked me over with a straw, but he was dead serious. He’s a real weakling about pain.” I couldn’t imagine the agony of chemotherapy and didn’t particularly want to try. “He developed a quick liking for it. Of course, he couldn’t let anyone know; he’d lose his church. So now, he just hooks up with Matt every few nights and smokes a joint before bed. I don’t think that priss-assed little wife of his knows.”

  I sat down next to her, quietly. “Beta put you on her list of sinners. ‘There is death in the pot.’ I thought her quote for you was about when she thought you tried to poison her. I see now the operative word there was pot.”

  “Just a coincidence,” Ruth said easily.

  “I don’t think so, Ruth. She was all in black when she was killed, and there was a lot of mud on her shoes. I’m thinking she was out traipsing around in the dark somewhere, maybe checking out one of your little secret plantations. Maybe she got some proof on you and Matt.” I paused. “Maybe you killed her, and then shot Shannon when you were trying to find that evidence.”

  Ruth frowned. “I offer you a business proposition and you accuse me of murder. And here I thought you were a gentleman.” She stood, went into the kitchen, and poured herself some water. “I didn’t have anything to do with Beta’s death or Shannon’s shooting. Beta didn’t know anything about my sideline. When she was in the hospital, I just pretended I was going to poison her to scare her. I knew no one’d believe her, and I wasn’t going to hurt her. I just wanted to put the fear of God in the old girl.”

  “Your professional ethics are charming.” I smiled.

  She took it as humor, not as an insult. “So are you in?”

  “You’ve told me a lot; do I even have a choice?”

  “Sure you do. If you don’t want in, just keep your mouth shut. I mean, you wouldn’t want anything to happen to that sweet mama of yours, would you? Or maybe your sister, or her boy?”

  “I’m in,” I lied easily enough. “As long as you had nothing to do with Beta’s murder. I want no part of that.”

  “I didn’t kill her. Matt and Reverend Hufnagel, them I don’t know about.” She put down her water glass and came to me, wrapping her windbreakered arms around me. “How about we seal the contract the right way?” She kissed me, hard and demanding.

  “Is this how you conduct all your negotiations?” I asked a moment later.

  “Yes,” she smiled. “Even with our friend Matt. Of course he had certain limitations, but I do admire initiative and enthusiasm.”

  “I can tell.” I pulled away from her. “We’ll seal our deal later—when we’ve agreed on my percentage. Shall I call you tomorrow?”

  “I don’t like being turned down twice, Jordy,” she snapped. An unpleasant gleam showed in her eyes.

  “Not turned down—just delayed. I have to get back home, or they’ll think something’s wrong. You don’t want me attracting undue attention, do you?”

  Sense made her relent. “All right. I’m working the day shift, but I’ll be off at three.”

  I told her I’d call her then. I stumbled out into the night to my car. I felt dirtier than after I’d run through the brambles. I took a long, hard drink of air and started the engine. I was about halfway down the long street she lived on when a Mirabeau police car shot past me. I saw it slow in front of her house.

  I had the strongest feeling that Junebug’d paid a visit to Matt Blalock and he’d turned in his boss. I wondered if Ruth would look as good in Bonaparte County Jail orange as she did in hospital white.

  BETA HARCHER’S HOUSE STOOD DARK AND foreboding in the faint moonlight. I tried not to think of it as the scene of bitter blackmail, attempted murder, or even as the lair of the woman who should have been voted Most Likely to Cause Suffering. I just tried to think of it as a house I needed to break into.

  I’d thought that if Junebug had indeed descended on Matt Blalock’s farm (and not to do so immediately wouldn’t be politically advantageous—most citizenry didn’t view drug crimes favorably), he’d gone in with force. Quite possibly there was no longer a guard at Beta’s home. There wasn’t.

  I parked several houses down and checked the flash-light Candace had left in my car. I tried to walk nonchalantly down the street at this late hour, but no one really ambles in Mirabeau past eleven at night if they’re not staggering home drunk. I gave it up and jogged over to the back of Beta’s house. Like I said before, most yards in town don’t have fences, and Beta’s backyard tumbled down to the shores of the Colorado. I snuck around to the back, keeping an eye on the neighboring homes. They stayed dark in slumber.

  The back door was still locked, and so were all the windows I tried. The window that Shannon’s attacker broke in through was efficiently boarded shut. I weighed the choices in my mind. I needed those letters Mama had written Bob Don. After an evening of having a near stranger claim paternity of me, getting shot at, and being offered gainful employment by our local drug czarina, a little breaking and entering seemed mil
d. If I got in trouble, I got in trouble, and I’d explain it to Junebug later.

  I wrapped my dark windbreaker around my hand. Popping out a pane of glass in Beta’s back door sounded deafening, but there was no neighborhood call to arms. Maybe the constant murmur of the river inured the folks to sound. I slipped inside.

  I kept the flashlight off and eased to the front windows. The drapes had been closed. Good. I didn’t want anyone to see my light. I made a quick pass upstairs, just in case there was a room labeled HERE’S WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR. No such luck. There was a small bedroom, a dusty guest bedroom that smelled stalely of disuse, and another smaller bedroom with Shannon’s luggage still sitting in it. The poor girl hadn’t even had a chance to unpack.

  I went back downstairs to the den. The police hadn’t tidied up after Shannon’s attacker. Books and broken bric-a-brac covered the floor. My light played along the carpet and found a stain of gore. Shannon’s blood. I reminded myself I was dealing with someone who had few compunctions about killing.

  I played the light along the room and it caught the Bible that Junebug had pulled Patty Quiff’s yellowing letter from. I remembered he’d opened the Bible to the letter, then set the Good Book on the side table. I examined the Bible; it was open at the Book of Job, who could have only suffered more if he’d lived in Mirabeau and gotten on Beta’s bad side. Eula Mae’s quote, about your enemy writing a book, came from Job. I straightened up and cast the beam across the other shelves and the floor. Lots and lots of Bibles, some still on the uppermost shelf.

  I dragged a chair over to the big built-in bookshelf and climbed on it. I opened one, and let the pages flip past my thumb until I got to a piece of paper that wasn’t covered with holy scripture. The book of Isaiah, where my quote had come from. I turned the light on the page.

  A picture of me stared back at me. It was a photo that’d been on the front page of the local newspaper, The Mirabeau Mirror, when I’d gotten the librarian job. That’d been the biggest civic news in town that week. In the picture I looked a little startled, as though getting the library job was an honor I hadn’t expected. Across the picture of my face, written in heavy red ink, were the words: FIRE PURIFIES. My throat felt thick and I swallowed. I wondered for one moment if the library had been her only intended target for arson; maybe she’d have burned my house down, with me and my family inside, and hummed a little hymn for our sinning souls. I dropped the Bible and the newspaper clipping on the floor.

  The next two Bibles apparently weren’t being used in Beta’s odd filing system. The third one I checked fell open at the beginning, in the book of Genesis. Mama’s quote about bearing children in sorrow came from there. I let the Bible fall noisily to the floor and pulled three letters, yellowed and crackling with age, out of a small manila envelope.

  Mama had loved the man she wrote them to, and she’d written them to Bob Don Goertz. I tried to remember to breathe as I read through them. Mama had always been sentimental to a point, but I’d never heard her speak to Daddy with such tender emotion. For her privacy I won’t record them here. But the last one was the hardest to read, because she asked Bob Don to stay out of her life and her unborn baby’s. She begged him, if she loved her and their child, to follow her wishes. She could not hurt Lloyd—she loved him, too—and there was little Arlene to consider. I read the last one through three times.

  I switched off the flashlight and leaned against the dusty bookshelf. “Oh, Mama,” I finally said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? I should have heard this from you.” I put the letters in my jacket pocket, feeling cold anger that Beta Harcher had touched them, read them, kept them here to hurt me and my mother. I tried to think about Bob Don but he just appeared in my mind as sort of a shapeless blob that I couldn’t picture as my father.

  I was putting back the Bible that contained Mama’s letters when some paper slipped out the back. A photo, and another letter. I stared at that photo a long while, feeling cold in my veins. A much younger Uncle Bid and Beta Harcher smiled at me from the picture, looking merry under a Ferris wheel. The letter was to Beta from a woman whose name I didn’t recognize and mentioned Uncle Bid’s name. The postmark was from Norway. I put the letter and the photo with Mama’s letters.

  Some Bibles remained and I flipped through the rest of them. They were empty except for one notable exception. I guess Beta felt she had holy words to spare, because she’d scooped out most of them from this particular volume. The pages had been cut away, so you could hide something in the closed Bible. The something there was a videotape. According to Gaston, Hally Schneider had a camcorder stolen on a trip Beta chaperoned. She’d checked out a book on how to operate a camcorder. If my guess was right, the proof Beta had gotten on Matt and Ruth’s drug operation was on this tape. I tapped the tape against my forehead, thinking, and let the scarred Bible tumble to the floor. I tucked the cassette into my jacket, deciding I needed to get to the nearest VCR possible and see this tape.

  I snuck back out of the house into the cool spring night. Clouds hid the stars now and the breeze was brisk, strong with the woody scent of river. I eased around the corner of Beta’s house, glad that the moonlight seemed to be gone. I was about halfway across her yard when a twig snapped and I froze. I glanced around, didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. Probably a raccoon, I told myself. I ran on to the car and headed home.

  The den lights blazed when I opened the front door, even though it was near midnight. Mark and Mama sat watching a talk show. I found it real hard to look at Mama, but I made myself. She stared at the TV screen, not laughing at the jokes. Somewhere in that muddled mass of neurons that was her brain, there were memories of Bob Don and the truth she’d never bothered to tell me. I felt incredibly angry with her, but I knew chewing her out would do only me good. Not the time or the place. I swallowed the fury I felt and let it start to burn an ulcer in my gut.

  Mark bolted up from the couch. Now he didn’t look like a wisecracking thirteen-year-old, but more like a worried little boy. “Have you heard anything about Shannon?”

  My news on her was hours old. I hoped it was still current. I told him what Ruth had told me when I’d seen her at the hospital. His face pinched with concern.

  “Mark, why isn’t Mama in bed?” I asked, pulling the videotape out of my jacket. Alzheimer’s patients can be notoriously active at night, much to the annoyance of caregivers. We’d tried to control Mama’s nocturnal activities as much as possible, but Mark was a lax Mamasitter.

  “She wanted to watch TV.” Mark shrugged.

  “I’ll bet.” I looked at the television. The VCR had taken flight. “Where the hell is the VCR?”

  “Oh, it’s hooked up in your room. Sorry, I forgot. I’ll go get it—”

  “Never mind. You and Mama watch TV down here.” I ran up the stairs.

  “Junebug called, he wants you to call him as soon as you get home,” Mark yelled after me. I made a noise of acknowledgment, shut my door, and slid the tape into the VCR.

  I’d half expected the tape to show an unsteady walk through the Blalock property, like a press escort of a drug raid with narration: “And here we have some actual cannabis, grown by the alleged perpetrators….” This wasn’t it. The scene that unfolded was a nature hike of sorts, but more along the paths of biology than botany.

  It started slow, an empty bedroom, spartan and unadorned, like you might find in a cabin. I pressed the fast forward button, with great haste Tamma Hufnagel and Hally Schneider walked into view. It looked like the camcorder was somewhere above them, possibly on a tall bureau or bookshelf. I let go of the fast-forward. Tamma and Hally hugged, kissed, and disrobed with still a fair amount of speed, even without help from the VCR.

  “Oh, shit!” I said, half laughing with shock. They were not much into foreplay; it wasn’t long before they were sweatily making love. It appeared that they were not strangers; they handled each other with graceful familiarity. Tamma cooed his name a lot; Hally didn’t say much. Her mousiness had faded;
she barked out sexual orders to him with the ease of command.

  I heard the doorbell ring and thought: Junebug is going to find this fascinating. I pushed the fast-forward button, to see if there was anything else on the tape. I hadn’t gotten too much further when there was a crash and a scream from downstairs.

  I flung the door open and ran down the stairs, nearly tumbling down them in my haste. My eyes took the scene in one glance: Mark lying on the floor, not moving, with blood welling from the side of his head; Mama cowering on the couch, crying; and Tamma Hufnagel, standing in the middle of the room, steadily holding a gun aimed at my mother. That gun swung around and the black eye of its barrel stared into my face.

  “Hands on your head, Jordy,” Tamma said with that same wavery voice of innocence she’d used with me when I talked to her at the church announcement board. I obeyed.

  “What’s this all about, Tamma?” I said. I was halfway down the stairs, and wondered if she wanted me to come the rest of the way down. I decided to wait for an invitation. I kept looking at Mark and his bloodied head. I saw his back heave the shallow motion of breath. Thank God.

  “You have something I want, Jordy,” Tamma insisted. Mousy brown eyes glared into mine. She didn’t exactly look a threatening figure in a dark sweatshirt with painted bluebonnets on it, jeans, sneakers, and a long denim jacket.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I answered. “But that gun isn’t going to solve any problems. Put it down and let’s talk.”

  “No, thank you. Just give me the videotape that you took from Beta’s house.”

  “I told you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Look, you don’t have a lot of time for this,” she said, which I thought didn’t bode well for me. “You beat me into Beta’s house tonight. I peeked in the windows and saw you searching. After you left, I went into her house and found that carved-up Bible. It’s not hard to figure out what she hid there. I’d like it, please.” I opened my mouth and she saw the protest coming.