Dark Places

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  “We know that, but they don’t.”

  “What do you think they were doing?”

  “I think it has something to with Leland Hale getting run over.”

  “Grandpa would have said something about that if he thought it was John T. or Marty. Him and Uncle Cody went over to Marty’s house that day and I know good and well they would have checked Marty’s truck. They’ve been watching every car and truck that’s gone through Center Springs.”

  “You don’t know for sure, though. Maybe that Impala hit Mr. Leland.” Cale thought for a moment, wondering if the timing was right. He finally decided it was. “Let’s go to California. I don’t want John T. after me for any reason, and if we’re gone, we won’t have anything to worry about. You wanted to go. Now’s the time to do it.”

  In a teenage moment of absurd rationality, she decided that running away was the best option. Butterflies filled her stomach when It was said, the thing she’d been talking about and leading up to for months. She couldn’t run away alone, but Cale made it possible.

  “Yep. That’s how you do it. You don’t announce it to anyone, you just split.” She shivered. “San Francisco, here we come.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anna started the engine, put the patrol car in gear, and pulled out of the courthouse parking lot. One of the other deputies pulled in at the same time and waved a finger when he saw the car. Then he shook his head and laughed, and Anna wondered if he was laughing at her.

  It didn’t bother her that much. She’d been in law enforcement for ten years, and dealt with her share of sexist comments and arrogant men. In Houston, it had taken three years before most of them gave up and treated her like one of their own.

  There were a couple, though, who had to learn the hard way. One wouldn’t keep his hands to himself one night after work in the parking lot, when he cupped her breast and squeezed like he was checking a cantaloupe for ripeness. After the cast came off his little finger, he absently rubbed it every time they passed each other in the station.

  The other one was her partner, an old-school deputy who believed women belonged in the bedroom and kitchen. They rode together for two years and she endured a daily ration of ill treatment until the day she solved the murder of a ten-year-old child whose abused body was dumped beside a Houston bayou. When they arrested a local preacher for the crime, and he confessed to the murder, her partner never said another word again.

  The ten-year-old had been his granddaughter.

  Anna took the back way to the Ramada Inn because she wanted to start fresh in her thinking. Her idea of retracing the businessmen’s routes came from those first couple of weeks in town when she knew no one and needed something to do in the evenings.

  The rain increased still again as she parked near the motel’s swimming pool in the middle of a large L. She watched rain dimple the surface of the heavily chlorinated water that was usually full of kids and parents. Then she pulled away.

  The Motorola squawked with cop talk, most of it about car accidents and rising water. She drove down Highway 271, and under the loop’s overpass. She passed the bowling alley, not knowing that one of Ned’s cousins had come close to dying in the parking lot a year earlier, when his wife’s boyfriend knocked him in the head with a crowbar. It was one of the hundreds of stories folks in Chisum and Center Springs knew about, but didn’t discuss.

  On an impulse, she stopped at the bowling alley for the second time since moving to Chisum. That first week, she bowled one game, but then realizing it was more fun with others, picked up a greasy cheeseburger in the coffee shop and left to eat it in her rented house. Anna occupied the next few nights by unpacking her few possessions, finding the right position for the rabbit ears antenna on her portable television, shopping at the Woolworth, Duke & Ayres, and Bealls, and going to the movies at the Plaza and Grand Theaters, both downtown, within two hundred yards of each other.

  Inside, the noisy Bowl-a-Rama assaulted her senses with the familiar smells of popcorn, sweaty socks, the rumble of rolling balls on hard maple lanes, the solid crack of scattering pins, and the clunk of the new machinery resetting them for the next roll.

  Harold Hollis was spraying disinfectant into shoes when Anna stepped up to the counter. “Is it Halloween?”

  She frowned. “Excuse me?”

  He gave her a long inspection, from the uniform cap bobby-pinned to her hair, to her blouse, and the skirt ending above her knees. “You’re dressed up for something and I wondered if it was Halloween.”

  Her ears flushed with rising heat. “It’s time for you to drop that crap and talk to me, that’s what time it is.” She pointed at the badge over her left breast, wishing she could wear it somewhere else. “I’m Deputy Anna Sloan, and I’m here to investigate a murder.”

  Harold put the shoes down and patted the air between them. “Keep your voice down. There ain’t been no murders in here, and my customers don’t want to hear anything like that.”

  Anna had to force the smile off her face. It didn’t take much to back some fools down. She spoke softly, forcing Harold to mirror her actions over the counter. She was far enough back that it was uncomfortable for him, and that made her feel even better. “I didn’t say it happened here. I’m working on a case involving two businessmen from Dallas.”

  The manager waited. “Okay?”

  She held out a black and white photo that had been delivered from Dallas, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. “Were these men in here?”

  He studied the likeness. “Nope.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I might not know shit from Shinola, but I’d recognize the noses on those two if they came in.” His eyes slipped from Anna’s face to her chest. “Ain’t seen ’em.”

  “Hey, up here.” When Harold’s eyes rose, she continued. “Maybe you weren’t working if they did and there’s somebody else I could talk to.”

  “I open and I close. There ain’t nobody works this counter but me. Bowling alleys run on a tight margin. Hell, I had to shell out a butt-load of money for them new pin setters so I didn’t have to hire and feed a bunch of kids that wouldn’t show up for work. Now it’s me, Mary on the snack counter, and Slim back there on the grill, but I ain’t never seen these two.”

  Deflated, Anna gave up. “All right, but if you hear anything, you call the sheriff’s department.”

  “All right, missy.”

  She paused. “Answer me this, if a male deputy came in here, would you call him buddy, or feller, or bub?”

  Harold raised an eyebrow in surprise, wondering at the question. “Nope.”

  “All right. That’s good to know. Now, the next time I’m in here and you call me missy, I’m going to stick one of those size thirteen bowling shoes up your ass, got that, bub?”

  Shocked that a woman would speak to him in such a way, Harold gaped like a fish out of water as she spun on her heel and stomped back into the rain. Anna had to sit in the car for a few minutes to cool off before pulling back into the light flow of traffic.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ned pulled into the bottle-cap lot in front of Neal Box’s store in Center Springs. The Spit and Whittle Club was on the porch and out of the incessant rain. A few trucks were parked in front of Oak Peterson’s store, less than fifty yards away. Ned figured some were there to pick up staples such as bread or salt, and the others were folks getting their mail from the post office in the back. Oak was smart enough to know that most people preferred Neal’s store, but he stayed in business because of the post office. He’d located it at the rear, though, so they would have to pass all his wares on their way in and out.

  Between the two small businesses, the door to the domino hall was open and a soft light made the one-room building inviting.

  Ned joined the loafers on the porch. Ty Cobb and Jimmy Foxx leaned against the wall in straight-back chairs on two legs, their
muddy feet stretched out. “I swear, it’s a risin’ like nobody’s business.”

  Rain dripped off the roof well away from the two-by-six porch railings they used as seats. Ned settled on one with his back to the highway. “What is?”

  “The lake.” Jimmy Foxx motioned toward the south. “We was down on the south end, huntin’ coons on the creek when Ty Cobb damn near drowned.”

  “Aw, I didn’t come close to drowning, but we was running a branch down there that we’ve hunted for years. When I went lopin’ over a little rise in the dark, I wound up swimming.”

  The men laughed. Isaac Reader, Neal Box, Wayne Simpson, Dub Hinkley, and Mike Parsons all loved a good hunting story, and none of them ever let the facts get in the way of telling it.

  “Shoot, I know that trail like I know the back of my hand, and I’m a tellin’ you, the water is comin’ up so fast in them sloughs that you can watch it eat up the ground. I had to dog paddle back to the rise and Jimmy Foxx hauled me in like a big old gar. It won’t be long before the creek gets out of the banks.”

  Mike Parsons leaned forward to speak. He always leaned into a conversation. “It’s fillin’ up faster than they want. There’s a steady stream of heavy equipment coming up out of the bottoms. They ain’t even finished with burning up all the trees, but if they don’t get their rigs out pretty soon, they’ll be underwater the way it’s comin’ down.”

  “I came over a while ago,” Ned said. With the completion of the dam, there were now two ways to get to Center Springs off the highway running between Chisum and Hugo, in Oklahoma. The original two-lane road came from Arthur City, and now the cutoff across the dam originated in Powderly, about two miles south of the Texas/Oklahoma border. “All the fires are out and there ain’t but a couple of draglines left. They’re having to pull one out with a bulldozer.”

  “Yep, they’ve beat the ground up so much that’s it’s boggy from all this rain.” Dub rubbed his three-day old whiskers. “The creek’s up seven or eight feet, which ain’t much down there in that big hole, but it’ll be a sight deeper if it don’t clear off soon.”

  “Listen. Listen. They say it’s gonna rain for another week, at least.” Isaac Reader cleaned under his fingernails with a pocket knife. It always made Ned nervous to watch him do that, because Ike’s knives were sharp enough to shave with, and the jerky little farmer seemed to work way too deep under his nails.

  Mike Parsons crossed his arms. “Hell, Ike, they don’t know for sure. I can guess as good as the weatherman can.”

  “So what do you think, then?”

  Mike scratched his head. “I think it’s gonna rain for another week.”

  More laughter. A dented Pontiac Catalina came down the road from the dam and slowed at the stop sign, then accelerated across the highway and into Oak Peterson’s drive. Ned hadn’t yet become accustomed to so many strange cars coming through Center Springs. “Y’all know who that is?”

  Jimmy Fox squinted past Ike. “That’s John T. West.” He resumed his position. “Most folks don’t have any use for him.”

  “I don’t neither.” Ned said. “He runs with a couple of other no’counts.”

  Ty Cobb bit his bottom lip, thinking. “Yeah, I’ve always thought it was him and Marty Smallwood who was settin’ fire to hay barns a few years back.”

  Marty’s name caught Ned’s attention. “That’s right.” He stood. “You know, I need to go. See y’all later.”

  He dropped heavily into the front seat of his car, slamming the door against the rain and rubbing his tingling scar for a minute. He slowly drove through the puddles in front of the domino hall and across the oil road between it and Oak’s store.

  He parked alongside John T.’s car and studied the undented front end for a moment before going inside. Unlike Neal Box’s store, Oak’s business seemed like a dungeon even on sunny days. Where Neal had three large double-hung windows on both sides of the frame building, Oak only had two thin, horizontal windows on the east side, up near the ceiling hanging thick with farm implements. The worn wooden floor sagged in places, and many of the dry goods on the shelves had been there so long they were dusty.

  John T. was in the rear, talking to Oak through the iron bars of the post office counter. “Have you seen James Parker’s little gal, Pepper?”

  Oak shook his head. “Naw, not today. Why’n’t you ask James, or Ned?”

  “I will when I see ’em. I wanted to warn her away from that Westlake kid.”

  “Somebody needs to.” Ned joined him at the post office window. “I ain’t seen her today. Why?”

  John T.’s face reddened. He moved to face Ned. “Well, uh, I don’t think much of that Westlake kid and I think she needs to be careful.”

  “I’m all right with that, but I don’t know much about you. Where do you live?”

  “Down toward Cooper right now.”

  Ned’s blue eyes took stock of the man in front of him and he didn’t like what he saw. “I’d sooner you didn’t have anything to do with my grandkids.”

  “That’s fine, then.”

  “Where’s your other runnin’ buddy you were up here with earlier? What’s his name…”

  “Freddy.” His eyes narrowed in frustration when he realized he’d done exactly what Ned wanted.

  “Yeah, ol’ Freddy. Where’s he?”

  John T. scowled. “Home, I guess. He tried snuff the other day, but it didn’t set well with him.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?”

  Oak watched the exchange with one wandering eye through his coke-bottle-thick glasses. His sight was so bad he had to hold objects almost against his nose to read them. Tiring of the subject, he peered at an envelope through the thick lens. “Ned, you want your mail?”

  “Probably just duns.”

  “Most likely. You need anything else, John T.?”

  He started to say something else, but changed his mind. “Nope. I’m gone.” John T. spun on one boot heel.

  When he opened the door, James Parker rushed in, shouldering him aside. “Ned!”

  The old constable’s head snapped around at his son’s frightened voice. “What?”

  “Pepper’s done run off from home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She left in the night.”

  Holding his belly, Ned rushed out the door, followed by James. Ned had no idea what to do first, other than get ahold of Top. He’d know what was going on.

  John T. watched them go. With luck, Pepper and Cale would disappear forever, like a lot of kids who ran away from home.

  At least he wouldn’t have to deal with them.

  Unless they returned.

  Chapter Twenty

  Once again on Main Street, Anna shook off her mad and passed a small, empty building that still harbored a mystery. A decade earlier, the owner of what then was a small fix-it shop was tied up, beaten, and left alone. By the time Ned and John Washington broke down the door, the owner was dead. They never knew if it was from the beating, asphyxiation, or the rats. The case was still unsolved.

  She thought about turning into SkateWorld, but didn’t figure grown men in suits would have any interest in roller skating. Her next stop was the Dairy Kreem drive-in. She parked under metal cover and ordered a burger, fries, and a Dr Pepper. The carhop hung the tray on Anna’s partially opened window.

  Anna held up the photo. “You ever serve these guys?”

  The little brunette stood hip-cocked beside the car. “Yep. They’ve been in here a few times.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw them?”

  “It’s been several days.”

  The hand-cut fries were still too hot to eat, so Anna separated the largest and balanced them on the side of the plastic basket, like cigarettes in an ashtray. “Did you talk to them?”

  “No ma’am. Not more than taking
their order.”

  Anna bit into the burger and chewed for a moment. “Do you always work this shift?”

  “No ma’am. I work around my kids, and when Earl says he needs me, and that’s pretty regular the way some of these gals are, not coming in and all.”

  “Did those guys ever stop here at night?”

  The carhop thought for a minute. Another car pulled in out of the rain on the other side of Anna’s patrol car. “Only once, last Friday. They came through about an hour or so before dark. Gotta go. Bye.”

  While she held the sweating Dr Pepper bottle and took a pull on the paper straw, Anna filed that little bit of information away. She made a note to come back and talk to the others later.

  She finished her burger and the carhop picked up the tray. Anna backed into the rain and continued down the street to the Owl Drugstore. Neither the pharmacist or his employees recalled the brothers. That one was definitely a dead end.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I was in the living room, scared and out of place. Pepper was gone and Miss Becky was cryin’ to beat the band. Norma Faye, Uncle Cody’s redheaded firecracker of a wife, at least that’s what Grandpa called her when none of the family was around, was sitting beside Miss Becky on the couch and rubbing her back.

  Pepper didn’t need to be with me all the time, but by being close by, she made me feel better if I was down in the dumps, like now. Right then I was feeling so out of sorts I didn’t know what to do. I was wishing Uncle Cody was there.

  Miss Becky dabbed at one eye with a cup towel. “Pepper’s gone, Top, and we need to go to church.”

  Of all the places Pepper might run off and hide, I knew it wouldn’t be the Assembly of God church across the pasture. “She ain’t there, Miss Becky.”

  It was like I said I’d hated her all my life. Her eyes widened and welled even more. She buried her face and bawled long and loud.