The man had run north, pushing through the privet hedge and moving into the mixed hardwood and pine forest that formed the northern two acres of the Frost estate. He had reconnoitered the place well, Shipp figured, before the first break-in. Now he knew the best approach and the best retreat from this dark house.
It was becoming lighter in the east, the first pale streak lying along the horizon, where it could be seen between the big trees. There was dew thick on Shipp’s windshield, and he turned on the wipers for a moment before backing out of the driveway, avoiding the big tree at its entrance.
Then he stopped, staring at the face of the house, just becoming visible in the light of dawn. It looked enigmatic, smug, like a cat that had caught its prey in the night. He could almost see the tail of a mouse hanging out of the rounded lips of the upper and lower porches.
Wash shook his head sharply. That was nonsense. The problem had come from outside that gloomy structure, and no Victorian house, no matter how dark and overburdened with heavy antique furniture, could cow Washington Shipp.
He wasn’t entirely sure about Myron Duson.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Myron Duson
Duson pulled into a motel before daylight and parked behind the office, so his battered pickup was invisible from the highway. He didn’t think that lawman back there in Templeton had seen him or his vehicle either, but he refused to take chances on that. Driving by day was not smart, and he intended to sleep the daylight hours away and set off again at twilight.
The place where he stopped was so small it didn’t qualify as a town at all. There was a big truck stop with attached café and garage, a grocery across the state highway, and the motel a mile down the road where the state road crossed a U.S. Highway heading north and south.
Trees surrounded the double line of cottages, coming right up to the doors. That gave concealment as he came and went, which was always good. He registered with a sleepy clerk, who probably could hardly recall his own name even when he was wide awake, and got himself under cover before early risers began driving to work. Tomorrow he would steal another vehicle and head for northern Louisiana and that big farm where the old woman lived.
If his quarry wasn’t there...but he knew in his gut that she would be, along with the crippled gun dealer.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Washington Shipp
Shipp turned off toward Merryville and made the series of sharp angles that took him past the school and onto the farm road heading toward Ragley. The deputy who had met him near the river bridge was driving faster than seemed reasonable on the narrow road, and Wash stepped down on the gas to keep him in sight.
They turned sharply right and left, after going through a town even smaller than Merryville, and crossed the railroad. Beyond that the deputy slowed somewhat, and in a few more miles he braked to turn into a steep drive leading between overhanging bushes. It was still muddy, churned up by the passage of many vehicles.
His wheels spun a bit, but Wash gunned the Chevy up the slope and turned aside to park on the grass beside the deputy’s car. Once he stood in front of the neat little house, he felt a sudden pang of regret.
Proud people had lived here, making work substitute for money. The ship-lap siding was freshly whitewashed, the tin roof shining with aluminum paint. Everything was clean, neat, orderly.
Though the front porch sagged beneath the weight of years, it was obviously often swept, where muddy shoes hadn’t tracked their prints between steps and door. Pots of ferns sat along the sides and vines climbed from others that were hung from hooks screwed into the beams of the roof.
It was too like his own mother’s house for comfort, Wash decided. He could almost see the tidy old lady who had last swept the porch and watered the plants, as he climbed the steps and opened the screen door.
Inside it was dark, in contrast to the bright day, and he paused, letting his eyes adjust. Then the feeling of familiarity was back. The Greek Revival furniture told him that at some point these people had been better off. Books and magazines lay in straight-edged stacks on the floor beside the two rocking chairs, and more magazines were arranged on a library table along one wall.
“Nothing here to show what happened,” said the deputy. “The old folks was found out back, the woman killed with a rock, the man beaten and strangled. I think the killer must’ve come through the house, because there’s an empty pie pan on the kitchen table and an empty milk jug by the refrigerator, but I can’t see any sign he come in here. Sheriff Elkin couldn’, either.”
Shipp nodded, but that old instinct was alert, on the job, telling him that Duson had stood here, almost in this spot. He had looked around—several scattered magazines on the table should have been piled neatly like the books on the floor.
He moved to examine them. A copy of Sports Afield was lying on its crumpled back cover, and as he straightened it, almost hearing his mother’s admonitions to be neat, it fell open at a photograph. Alison Frost Vernier.
He jerked, gripping the magazine. The deputy looked at him questioningly, and he asked, “Do you mind if I take this? I’ve got an ongoing case that this might work into. Or does Sheriff Elkin want everything kept just as it is?”
“I’ll ask. You want to come out back with me? I think he’s out there again.”
They went down a narrow hall, whose walls were tacked full of photographs of grandchildren and family gatherings, through the kitchen, and down the back steps. A worn mop hung from a hook in the door facing, just as his mother’s always had.
Again he felt a surge of sadness. Why should decent people die at the hands of a mad dog like Duson?
Elkins was pacing off the distance from the edge of the yard, stalking toward a scuffed spot in the spring grass. He looked up and said, “You must be Sheriff Shipp from Templeton. Your dispatcher called to say you were comin’. You got something that ties into this?”
Shipp nodded. “We had a burglary and attempted murder over our way a couple of days ago. Got a description that matches up with the prints you found on the abandoned car up the road. I think Myron Duson is the man we both want.
“This magazine I found in the front room has an article about a woman that’s kin to the victim of our crime. You mind if I take it? That’s where the girl’s gone, and if Duson saw this while he was here, it means he might know where to find her.”
“Lord, man, take it! No magazine’s going to help us catch that bastard. If you get him first, we want him. Better to hang a Murder One charge on him than anything less that he might get off on.” Elkin wiped his pink forehead on his sleeve and stared back at the fence and its betraying loose strand of barbed wire.
“That’s how he come. Left the road up a ways, come through the pasture, kicked loose the wire, and come up on the old folks from the back. The old lady was lyin’ right there, and next to her was a rock with her blood and brains on it.”
“Deputy Fuller says the old man was strangled,” Wash said. “He must have heard something and come to see, you think?”
“You can see how his crutch is lyin’—I think he come at the killer tryin’ to get him with the only weapon he had, but it’s hard to say for sure. However it was, we want this bastard the worst way. Good luck with findin’ him, Sheriff.” Elkins turned as another deputy came around the house and signaled for his attention.
Wash glanced at the scuffed spot, whose upper end was stained with dried blood, and shivered. Sometimes he was almost glad his own folks were safely dead and out of this crazy world. They’d lived good lives, and a car accident wasn’t the worst way to go, by any means.
“Thanks,” he said. “I think I’ve got what I need.”
Then he hurried to his car and headed back toward Texas. He had no authority in Louisiana, but once he made some calls from his office in Templeton, he thought he might get some people in Bossier Parish on the ball.
He couldn’t afford to take the chance that Myron Duson hadn’t found that betraying name in the magazine left
so carelessly crumpled on the table in that pitiful house. It was all but certain, at least to him, that the folks who lived there would never in a million years have left one of their publications out of line, much less crumpled as it had been.
He sped along the blacktop road toward Merryville, his mind busy. What could he do to safeguard Stony and Lily and their very old great-aunt? That was the problem that plagued him as he headed for home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Martin Fewell
The ancient clunker rattled and left a trail of blue exhaust as it moved, but it did move, and that was all Martin had expected of it. More, in fact. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the pickup had died on him before he passed Jasper. But it coughed and wheezed its way into Templeton and let out its last gasp in front of a junkyard, which Fewell thought provided a nice, ironic touch.
The fellow in the junkyard didn’t ask for proof of ownership, though if Martin recalled his Texas law correctly he probably should have. He paid fifty bucks for the thing, and Martin felt himself lucky to get that much.
It might be a tad illegal, but that bastard who’d taken his own truck was still moving, and he had to have some traveling money. What was in his pocket was, as always, pretty skimpy.
Templeton hadn’t changed much in the years since he’d shaken the dust off his feet and taken Lily Frost away from her protesting family. Little towns like that one never had enough industry to bring in money to make changes, he knew. He avoided the side street leading past the combined police station and jail, crossed the intersecting highway that went north and south, and found the country road that went to the Frost place. His feet knew the way, though he had always driven it in his psychedelically painted van, back in the old days.
It was a damn long walk, and it was getting pretty dark before he found the big tree sticking out into the road that marked the Frost drive. He’d always wondered why they didn’t cut the thing down, and all Lily’s explanations never convinced him that any tree, however old and historical, was worth a minute of his time or an iota of inconvenience.
Now he was grateful for its nine-foot-thick trunk. The bushes had grown a lot, and he might have missed the drive altogether without it.
He checked the road before darting into the concealment of the crepe myrtles. The last sunset light did nothing to make his way easier as he crept along the front porch, heading for the rear of the house. He’d never been in the front door, a matter of some bitterness at the time, but he intended to go the way he knew.
If Lily and her crip brother were there, he wanted to make sure they were all right. He wasn’t certain if he intended for them to know he was checking on them.
He had a funny feeling about what he was doing, anyway. Never in his life had he done anything just to help someone, and it felt strange.
Once he got to the back of the house, he realized that it was too quiet. No light shone through any window, though there was a dim glow from the store room. The kitchen was dark behind the low overhang of the back porch. They were gone. That was good thinking. But somehow he felt that the danger wasn’t altogether averted. There was still a chill in his backbone that told him someone was about.
It was now very dark. The idea of walking back to town and spending some of his scanty cash on a room wasn’t inviting. Besides, he had a feeling something might well happen before the night was over.
Here was an empty house, and he had learned to pick locks while he was in prison. Before the last light left the sky he was inside. It smelled old, that house, but not the kind of old Martin Fewell understood. This was a rich, mellow sort of scent, compounded of leather and furniture polish, candles, and the acrid smell of cold fireplaces.
The kitchen was recognizable the instant he stuck his head in at the door. Generations of rich food seemed to linger in the air, along with the lemony smell of dish detergent.
He didn’t turn on a light—who knew what sorts of neighbors might be able to see it and call the cops?—but his skilled, silent fingers checked out a cupboard that held crackers and canned meat. A swift search found a can opener, and he ate standing at the sink. Uncharacteristically, he rinsed out the can and swilled out the sink before turning to go over the rest of the house. Martin had a sheepish feeling about Lily’s knowing he had been prying into her kitchen. He had treated her too badly to expect forgiveness; he didn’t think he could face her anger.
He crept through the still rooms, smelling the scent of wax and polish and old books. Something drew him to an upstairs window, at last, to look down on the dark lawn.
The blackness inside the house made the outside almost visible, the grass gray, the clumps of shrubbery dense shadows. As he looked down, one blot of darkness moved away from another much larger one. A man was creeping over the grass. He moved into the shadow of the crepe myrtles along the walk; before Martin could decide what to make of that, another figure moved away from the same shelter.
Two men had been watching the house. One had to be the man who’d tried to kill Lily, but who had the other one been? The law? Possibly, but Fewell had no intention of depending on that.
He watched until the second shadow was out of sight. He waited until the clock with the loud tick, which had been noting the half-hour with a light chime, cleared its throat and bonged once. Time to go. There would be no sleep for him tonight, for he knew he must search the house until he found some indication of Lily’s whereabouts. He had seen from the state of the kitchen that someone had been there before him, and he hoped nothing had been there to tell where the family had gone.
Whether she and her brother knew it or not, they needed someone to keep watch over them, and Martin Fewell knew that was his job. He’d earned it the hard way, just as he had earned his belated conscience.
Hurting Lily had been the thing he did best. Now he had to make certain that nobody else took up that task.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Washington Shipp
Shipp pulled into town in mid-afternoon and stopped by the office to see if anything had come in that needed his attention. It was the family’s night. He always took Jewel and the boy to visit Jewel’s parents or else to the art museum or the zoo. They both believed in exposing their small son to a wide range of experiences.
Amy had a pile of stuff on his desk, and he went through it carefully, signing letters, checking out reports, noting anything unusual. Before he was through, Amy tapped at his door.
“You’ve got a call from Ned Tubbs at the junk yard. He got in a dead pickup this afternoon, and the fellow seemed to be in a terrible hurry. Ned fudged on ownership papers, as the thing was good for nothing but scrap metal, but now he wants to talk to you about it.”
Wash could tell that she was afire with curiosity, for Ned avoided the law as if he were a hardened criminal. Yet in all the years he’d had his junkyard, Shipp had never caught him doing anything illegal. “I’ll take it,” he said. “Close the door, Amy.”
With a sniff, she went out, the door snapping shut behind her with an irritable click. Shipp lifted the phone and said, “Ned? What you got on your mind, man?”
There was a short silence. Then Ned coughed and snorted, as usual, before speaking. “I had the radio on but I wasn’t listenin’ close. Then I caught a story about a old couple over in Louisiana that got killed and their pickup was stole. Well, yesterday afternoon I taken in a junker with Louisiana tags. I went out and looked, and sure enough, they match up with the ones the feller on the radio said. At least I think they do. You better come out and look, Sheriff.” Better mark that on the calendar as a red letter day, Shipp thought. The day Ned Tubbs actually invited the sheriff out to his place.
“Be right out, Ned,” he said. “Don’t you touch the thing any more than you can help. If it’s the one, we may get prints off it. Don’t let Teebo mess with it, you hear? That boy just likes to get his hands on any kind of vehicle, whether it runs or not.”
Ned chuckled. “He’s a borned mechanic, I got to say. But I�
��ll warn him off. I don’t think he touched it yet—he’s been guttin’ a big Caddy that come in last week with its side bashed in.”
Wash cradled the phone and shrugged on his jacket again. It might be dark by the time he finished. Too late for the family outing, he was sure.
“Amy!” He stuck his head out into the hallway. “Can you call my wife and tell her that I won’t be home till late? Tell her I’ll take her and the boy someplace tomorrow, if I can. I’m going out to Ned’s.”
* * * * * * *
The junk yard was a treasury of rusty refrigerators, remnants of automobiles, wagon wheels, hoe-heads, and rakes without handles, not to mention every other sort of throwaway possible to imagine. Everything was sorted with painful neatness, each kind to itself, in rows or piles or whatever arrangement its anatomy dictated.
Shipp pulled up inside the chain link fence, whose utilitarian skeleton was veiled by yellow jasmine vines most of the year. Already there were fragrant golden bells among the dark green foliage.
He honked once. Ned waddled out, his round shape all but lost in overalls large enough to contain two of him. “Over here, Sheriff,” he called, pointing to the part of the yard devoted to the corpses of cars and trucks.
Wash approached the dilapidated truck with hope and doubt. It would be too much luck to have that pickup turn up here in his own front yard. Yet Duson had been at the Frost house last night—who else would have been hiding in the myrtles, checking out the place? He could easily have driven the distance by yesterday afternoon.
The plates were a match. Somehow he’d known they would be. The description was dead on.
“Good work, Ned. I can understand your not making a fuss about papers on this clunker, but I sure am glad you heard that newscast. This is the very truck Duson stole.”
Born Rebel and The Guns of Livingston Frost - Two Short Novels Page 14