by Gayle Wilson
“What else we talking about, girl?”
My lack of resources. And my pride.
“You know I trust you,” she said aloud. “I always have.”
“Yeah, well, I thought maybe you’d gone big city on me.”
“No.”
“Then my gut says this ain’t broken. Could be some kind of hairline fracture, but even if it is, it’ll heal. I can wrap it for you. Give it some support. You come back next week and let me look at it. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” She wasn’t sure where those corny words had come from. Maybe from her sudden relief-generated euphoria. Despite everything else that had happened, Doc’s agreement not to send her to the hospital felt like a victory of sorts. There hadn’t been many of those lately.
“It’ll be better to stay off it, even taped, but I expect you ain’t gonna do that.”
“I don’t think I can. Not with everything I need to take care of.”
“You staying?”
“I’m sorry?” She felt like an idiot. Almost every question he’d asked, she had stammered and stuttered around it.
“Here. In Crenshaw.”
He meant for good, she realized. A question she hadn’t yet answered for herself.
It would take time to see to things. And money to replace what they’d lost. She couldn’t replace everything, but both she and Maddie would need more clothing than the outfits and jackets she had bought for each of them this morning. Shoes. Toiletries. The stuff of daily life.
“For a while. I expect there’ll be a lot of things I’ll have to tend to about the fire. Forms. Insurance. Sheriff Jackson said he was going to call the state fire marshal to check it out.”
“Fire marshal. Cade think this was arson?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he just wants to be safe.”
“I expect he does. You think it was arson?”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would do something like that,” she said carefully.
“Not here,” Doc said. “Not in Crenshaw. ’Course, I guess like everywhere else we got our share of dunces. Still, it would take someone downright evil to endanger a child, don’t you think? Though our history proves we got some of those here, too, doesn’t it? Heard you were interested in that.”
“You’ve been talking to Ada Pringle.”
“You want something spread around, you tell Ada. Is that what you did?”
“Hardly. I went to look up information on my house.”
“On your house? You have a reason for that?”
“Just…some things that didn’t feel right about it.”
His palm again around her heel, the old man lowered her foot. “Don’t sound like you’re talking about bad plumbing?”
“Bad dreams. Nightmares actually. Not me,” she added quickly, seeing the question in his eyes. “My daughter. Maddie. She started having night terrors. And I heard things. Things I couldn’t explain. I just thought that there might be some explanation for them.”
“An explanation in the history of the house?”
“Maybe it was a stupid idea—”
“I didn’t say that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business, it’s that not everything can be explained by science. And I consider myself a man of science. I’ve also learned never to discount a mother’s instinct. Not where her child’s concerned.”
“You’ve lived here a long time,” she began, wondering if Doc would be someone she could confide in to an even greater extent than she already had. He seemed open to hearing her out.
Besides, like her grandmother, the old man knew everyone in this town. And most of their secrets.
“All my life.”
“Did you know Eula Wright?”
“Most of her life. And I don’t know anything about her that would explain your daughter’s bad dreams or any noises you heard out there. What kind of noises, by the way?”
She hesitated, but in the end she told him because she desperately needed to tell someone. “Tapping sounds. On one of the windows, but…There wasn’t anything there to cause it.”
The brown eyes again considered her face. After a moment, Doc’s mouth pursed, but he didn’t ask any more questions. “Eula Wright died peacefully at Snow’s Nursing Home. I was there at the time. Her husband passed away years before of a heart attack. They’d taken him to UAB for some kind of treatment they’d hoped would make a difference. There was nothing violent or unfinished about either of those deaths. And neither occurred in that house.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“So neither of them should be haunting you. Or it. If that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I honestly don’t know what I’m suggesting. Just put this entire conversation down to stress,” she said, smiling at him.
“Of course, you already know that not everyone Eula loved died so peacefully.”
The unspoken name lay between them for a few seconds like a closed door. One she wasn’t sure she wanted to open.
“Sarah Comstock,” she said finally.
“Prettiest, sweetest little girl I ever saw. Kind of shy, but she just blossomed if you showed her any kind of attention. I suspect she didn’t get much. Nobody out there had time to see to her or any of them young’uns.”
“You treated her?”
“What treatment any of ’em ever got. Her mama brought her in a few times. Once with a broken arm, I remember. I made sure their inoculations were up to date. Did what I could, but…I guess nobody did do enough.”
“The broken arm. Could it have been…?”
“Abuse? I wondered, of course, but then kids fall and break bones. It wasn’t the kind of injury I could have said definitively was caused by anything other than that. She still had that same shy little smile. Trying so hard not to let on she was hurting. So damned anxious to please.”
The old man’s voice had softened. Blythe knew the memories were powerful, and that this wasn’t the first time he’d remembered that day.
“I was county coroner when she died. Did you know that?”
She hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she would have broached this subject if she had. Doc knew more about Sarah’s murder than Blythe wanted to hear. Maybe more than she could bear.
“That office was elected. Just like it is now,” Etheridge went on. “That was the only qualification. Some counties use morticians. In some it’s preachers or the occasional furniture salesman. I ran for that office because my daddy had done it before me and not ’cause I wanted to. We figured it was better for a medical doctor to serve in the position. That was the only murder I had during the ten years or so I served.”
“Doc—”
“There are things nobody should have to see and know. Not even a doctor. Not even a ‘man of science.’ You know what everybody around here believed about the murder, don’t you?”
“That her father had done it.”
The old man laughed, the sound hard. Unamused. “Yeah, some thought that. I never subscribed to the theory myself. I don’t believe a man could do those things to his own flesh and blood. That ain’t what I’m talking about.”
“Then…I don’t know. I don’t remember any other suspects mentioned in the Herald—”
“This wasn’t the kind of thing anybody’s gonna put in the newspaper. Still, there was plenty of talk. I heard it. I know Hoyt heard it, too.”
Despite the fact that she had started this, Blythe didn’t want to know what he was talking about. She already knew more than would let her sleep at night.
“’Course everybody was thinking that kind of thing back then. It was all over the TV. In the papers. They put folks in jail on account of rumors like the ones that were running rampant around here. Whole day cares supposedly filled with Satan worshippers. They’d bring in psychologists to talk to the kids. Ask ’em questions that would implant memories so that they’d really come to believe those awful things had been done to them.”
None of this had been in the materials she’d
read. It, too, was the kind of thing that might have been whispered about out of the hearing of children. Even if it had been, however, surely Doc Etheridge couldn’t believe there was anything to it.
“The only difference was, in this case those things had been done to that baby.”
The paper had mentioned mutilations, but they hadn’t been more specific than that. She wasn’t sure if the old man was suggesting Sarah had been the victim of some kind of satanic ritual or that the murder had been done in such a way as to suggest that.
“Are you saying that you think there was some kind of…devil worship involved?”
“I’m saying some in this town thought so. And none of that made-up garbage I read about in those other cases was worse than what that little girl had suffered. That’s another reason I don’t believe Abel had anything to do it.”
“The paper quoted Hoyt as saying that the violence of her injuries seemed to indicate it was personal.” The sheriff’s statement appeared to contradict what Etheridge was suggesting. But then both came to this from their own very different areas of expertise. “He said that random victims of violence are usually killed for gain—money or goods. And that the killing is as fast and as efficient as the killer can manage.”
“I’ll go along with Hoyt on part of that. ’Cause I sure as hell don’t believe Sarah was chosen at random. I don’t think someone passing by the Comstock place just looked in and saw two little girls sleeping in the moonlight and decided to drag one of them out and butcher her. And I damn well know that whoever killed Sarah had no interest in being fast. But as far as I could tell—and since I’m the one who did that autopsy, I don’t think I’m wrong—Sarah Comstock’s murderer was certainly efficient. Too goddamned efficient, if you ask me.”
10
“D oesn’t tell us much, does it?”
His deputy was right, Cade thought, his eyes examining the ground under the trees at the back of the property where the Wyndhams had been living. He had hoped for tracks. At least one clear impression of a footprint. Something that could be measured and analyzed. Some kind of proof that the story Blythe had told him wasn’t a figment of an overactive imagination.
“You sure none of the firemen were out here?”
“Not unless it was before we arrived,” Doug Stuart said. “And I can’t imagine why any of them would have ventured back this far. Maybe to take a leak or something, but…” The deputy shrugged. “There’s just not much to go on.”
A layer of pine straw and rotting leaves covered the ground under the trees. In a few places the debris looked as if it had been disturbed, but it would be hard to argue that those constituted proof someone had been walking around out here last night. Even at the edge of the woods there was exposed loam, which would have taken prints.
One hand on the ground for balance, Cade swiveled, looking back toward what he’d grown up calling the Wright house. Wisps of smoke rising from the pile of rubble it had been reduced to blended with the morning mist.
He had expected Blythe to be back out here as soon as it was light. It was almost impossible for people who were victims of a fire not to come and survey the damage or try to find any of their personal mementos that hadn’t been destroyed.
Given the speed with which the wooden structure had been consumed, he doubted there would be much left. And no news that he could give her concerning the figure she claimed to have seen out here in the woods. That would be another blow added to those she’d already suffered.
“Why don’t you take some casts?”
“Of what?”
Doug’s surprise was understandable. Under any other circumstances Cade would probably have let this go. If this was a crime scene, it wasn’t going to be a fruitful one.
“How about the areas that appear to be disturbed.”
“You think somebody was covering up their tracks?”
“Maybe.”
“Out here in the dark.” Doug’s tone was skeptical.
“It’s possible,” Cade said evenly. “By the time I arrived, the fire was lighting things up pretty good.”
“You see anybody out here?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone. Ms. Wyndham is convinced she saw a man standing among these trees.”
“A man who didn’t leave footprints.”
“The leaves and pine straw would prevent that. The areas that aren’t entirely covered are the ones that appear to have been disturbed. Doesn’t that make you wonder?”
“Birds digging for worms. Squirrels rooting for acorns. Or the neighbor’s cat using it for a litter box. Just ’cause there’s some dirt turned over, that don’t mean somebody’s been out here hiding their trail.”
“Just do the casts. See what we get.”
Cade got to his feet, deliberately not looking at his deputy. He knew Doug thought he was being asked to do a job that wasn’t going to be productive. He might be right.
Since there was nothing else going on in Crenshaw this early in the morning, Cade felt he could afford to waste a deputy, who was already on the clock, and a little plaster of Paris to verify—or disprove—Blythe’s story. What he didn’t understand was why he cared so much that it was the former.
“You’re the boss.” Still Doug didn’t move, maybe hoping that Cade would rescind the order. “Can’t say that I blame you either. She’s a looker.”
“What?”
“The Wyndham woman. Got that kind of city polish about her. You can spot it a mile away.”
She did, but that was something Cade hadn’t wanted to think about. Jean had had that same unmistakable air of sophistication.
“She grew up here.” Cade glanced over at the younger man.
The deputy was pretending to look at the smoldering ruin. “Yeah, well, she must have spent a few years somewhere else. You can always tell.”
Apparently Cade wasn’t the only one aware of the aura that surrounded Blythe. Maybe it was the way she dressed. Or the way she carried herself. Not as if she were better than anyone else, but slightly aloof. Untouchable.
The word echoed in his head before he dismissed it as a thought that was inappropriate in their situation.
“Check under the windows, too,” Cade added, his eyes following the deputy’s back to the house. “Around the doors. Just stay out of the house itself.”
“The firemen will have left prints all over those areas.”
“Cast whatever you find. We can sort them out later.”
“Could take a while.”
“You got until whoever they send out from the fire marshal’s office shows up.”
“They’re gonna get somebody out here today?”
That was what Cade had been promised. Of course, knowing how things worked in Montgomery, he wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting for that to happen.
“That’s what they say.”
“We got company,” Doug warned.
Cade’s gaze tracked to the end of the driveway. He watched as Ruth Mitchell’s big old Oldsmobile turned in, pulling up even with what would have been the house’s front porch.
Blythe climbed out of the car, her eyes locked on the remains of the structure. She didn’t seem to be aware they were back here, despite the two cruisers parked beside the detached garage where her car had been sheltered from the fire.
Cade realized that Doug was looking at him. He turned, raising his brows at his deputy, who shook his head.
“Nothing. I’ll go get the plaster and get started. You better tell her not to walk around.”
“Can you get out?”
“Plenty of room to make a U-turn back here. Unless you want me to cast for tire marks, too.”
Despite the sarcasm, the comment triggered something he should have thought of earlier. Cade turned, looking back through the trees.
“Not here,” he said. “Look for tread marks on the other side of these woods. All along Salter Road.”
“You think whoever was out here came through the woods?”
There was a note of interest in the deputy’s voice.
“I think it’s possible. Actually, why don’t you do that first. Stop there on your way back from the department.”
It was probably their best shot. Even if Doug found a place where someone had pulled off the road, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the driver of that car had been the person Blythe claimed to have seen.
That would have been the easiest access to the house, other than the road that led directly to it. And the fact that the guy had been waiting back here while he’d been watching the house burn argued that might have been his planned escape route.
Doug nodded, apparently following the logic that had led Cade to that conclusion. At least he wasn’t arguing about what he’d been asked to do.
“And don’t hurry over it,” Cade added.
If someone had parked on the road that paralleled the back of these woods, then there were probably a dozen places where he could pull off and hide his car from passing traffic. Finding that location would be more important than doing casts of what would almost certainly turn out to be the prints of the volunteer fire department.
“Want me to disappear for a while, huh?” Doug’s smirk made it clear what he was thinking.
For some reason the implication that Cade wanted to be alone with Blythe sent a flood of anger through his body, so strong it was almost a physical reaction.
“What I want is for you to do the job the citizens of this county are paying you for. You got that?”
The grin was quickly wiped off the deputy’s face. It wasn’t often that Doug felt the brunt of Cade’s displeasure. It wasn’t often he deserved it. At the look in the kid’s eyes, Cade knew he’d gotten his point across.
“Okay if I get Phillip to help me? That’s a long stretch of woods.”
“As long as he’s got nothing else going on.”
“Thanks, Cade. If it’s back there, we’ll find it.”
“I know you will.” By now he was ashamed of his overreaction. And calm enough to want to analyze why Doug’s suggestion that he was interested in Blythe would set him off.
Because there’s more truth in it than you want to admit?
“I think she’s spotted us. I’ll go on and get started. You can give her the bad news.”