by George Wier
She ignored the comment.
“He’s in trouble, isn’t he?” she asked.
I nodded. It was so dark I couldn’t see her face clearly. I fished for the keys in my pocket.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it,” she asked, more of a statement than a question. “And it’s something to do with who killed Ed.”
“You might be saying that, to both.”
“Alright. Now I’m in this with you,” Lydia said.
I got into the cruiser, opened the passenger side door and moved Buster’s twelve gauge shotgun between the seats so she wouldn’t have to sit on it.
As Lydia slid into the seat I got the feeling that it was an all-too-familiar move for her.
I sat there and regarded her in the dim dome light of the car.
She paused, looked at me as I hesitated with the key halfway to the ignition.
“What are we waiting for?” she asked.
I chuckled.
“Nothing,” I said. “Exactly nothing.”
*****
“You know, Reg ought to be around,” Lydia said as we moved slowly along the dark streets of the small town.
“Reg?”
“Reg Morrissey. Buster’s Chief Deputy. He’s all hot snot and Barney Fife. If you’ve got any thunder, he’ll steal it.”
“I don’t have much use for thunder,” I said.
At that moment the police radio squawked. “Boss?”
“That’s Reg,” Lydia says.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m not going to answer him. If he doesn’t know his boss has been arrested, then he’s either slow or... slow.”
“He’s neither,” she said. “You watch out for him, Bill. If I were you, I’d find alternate transportation and take this thing back to the Chalmers County Courthouse. These things are magnets for trouble.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Boss?” the voice repeated, some concern there.
I looked at the face of the police radio, found the right nob and switched it off.
“You may be right about ditching this car,” I said. “But first, let’s go find that house.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re also right about something else,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked and turned to face me.
“Dark is quiet, and quiet is nice.”
Lydia grinned.
*****
“Bill, we’re in the neighborhood,” Lydia said.
I slowed us down and she lowered her window and gazed out at the silent and dark homes overarched by trees as dark as the inky blackness between the stars.
The road abruptly dipped at an intersection with no stop sign either way, which is another one of those interesting little phenomenons only to be found in small towns.
“Next block, I think,” she said. “I remember the dip. I remember thinking you wouldn’t want to take it too fast in a car and you would want to be looking down when you were on foot, which I was at the time.”
“Fine,” I replied. I took the dip nice and slow and Buster’s cruiser purred along.
The neighborhood architecture—what I could see of it in my headlights—was a nod toward Southern antebellum. Stately homes spoke volumes about old money and quiet evenings on the screened porch watching bats dart about in search of mosquitos and listening to the musical drone of cicadas in the high trees. They were sentinel homes, resistant to change but amenable to sullen and subtle deterioration both physical and social. Wisteria tendrils encroached past the high curb on our right and spilled onto the roadway. Low stone and stucco walls lined with ivy and gateways trellised overhead with sparse, brittle-looking growth demarked formal entryways onto properties, as if their owners held the world at arms length from their homes.
“There, Bill. I think there.” Lydia pointed. I stopped.
A smaller, one-story brick at the corner of the next block had that empty, no-one-lives-here look about it, even though the shades were drawn and the lawn had been recently cut. The home beyond it, however, cast a bright glow upon the grounds and up into the trees.
“You feel like talking to the neighbors?” I asked her.
“Sure. Tell you what. I’ll go talk. You stay put. I probably know them from somewhere. You can’t not know everyone in a small town, but my chances are better than yours.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “You’re right about that. Okay, five minutes, please. No more. Find out anything you can about—”
“Who Molly’s lover was. I’ll give it a try.”
“Right. Afterwards I’ll drop you off at your house.”
“And then what?” Lydia asked me.
“Then, or at some later point, I’ve got to find a hotel room somewhere and rest these aged bones.”
“You’re not so old,” Lydia said. She leaned toward me, gave me a quick-as-lightning peck on the cheek, then climbed out into the wash of sodium arc lamps.
CHAPTER NINE
Of course it happened while she was gone. Reg Morrissey, whom I would come to see as a force of nature in the hours and days to come, paid me a visit.
The tap at my window startled me. I don’t startle easily. Anyone with young kids around the house won’t after awhile. But there in the night, idling in the Sheriff’s cruiser, a tap on the window was enough to make my heart skip a beat.
I looked up, saw the uniform and the Sam Browne belt, the sardonic and wicked grin on the clean-shaven face, and knew I would have to talk.
I rolled the window down half way.
“Yeah?”
“This is Sheriff LeRoy’s car. What are you doing in it?”
“He loaned it to me. I’m running errands for him.”
“Get out.”
“You must be Reg,” I said.
“So? Get out.”
“Shut up, Reg,” I said, and yawned widely. “I am under orders, and you’re now under mine. Step back unless you want to get very personal with this door.”
The look of uncertainty was what I was waiting for. I willed anger into my face. I gritted my teeth.
He stepped back a single step, reluctantly.
“Get out,” he said, his voice lower, a little more unsure this time.
I opened the door and climbed out slowly.
I stepped toward him. He was an inch shorter than me, well-muscled. Nervous. I was giving him a good scare.
“Officer Morrissey, if you have a problem you get back in your little car and you call the State Trooper barracks in Austin. Ask to speak to Texas Ranger Walter M. Cannon. Tell him Bill Travis is on the verge of yanking your TCLEOSE license.”
“Y-y-you’re a Ranger?” he stammered.
“Honorary. And under protest, and only on given days,” I said.
“Your kiddin’ me,” he said. “I, uh, found out the Sheriff has been arrested.”
“More like he’s been taken in for questioning.”
“Same thing as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, alright. He seems to think he’ll have to post bail in Austin. His wife and a friend of mine are headed that way to pick him up.”
Officer Reg Morrissey visibly relaxed.
“I thought I was going to have to be Sheriff.”
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked me.
“What’s so funny is you are acting Sheriff. At least until Buster LeRoy returns.”
“I-I-I don’t understand.”
“Right now,” I said, calming myself, “I’m looking for the person or persons who actually did kill Edgar Bristow. I may need your help if we’re going to clear your boss. If you will work with me, Reg, we’ll get who did this, but we can’t do it by the usual rules.”
He swallowed.
“What I mean is, if you will hold down the fort downtown—and I do mean hold it down, because the news media is going to turn your town square into a three-ring circus by tomorrow morning—then I will hold up my end. Is that okay with you?”
> “Yes, sir, Mr.— uh...”
“Travis. And don’t give my name out to anyone. I’ve got a wife and kids at home.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Travis.” He squared his jaw and his shoulders. “I won’t let them take over my courthouse.”
“See that you don’t. And don’t make any—and I mean ANY—public statements.”
He swallowed again.
At that moment I detected another presence. Lydia.
“What’s she doing here?”
“She’s helping,” I said. “And right now you’re interfering.”
“I think I might make that call,” he said.
“Which call?”
“To the Rangers. Just to make sure.”
“Please,” I said. “Do so. That will be all, Officer Morrissey.”
He turned and fled to his car.
Lydia came up beside me.
“I missed most of that, but still, what I heard was pretty awesome.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Any luck?”
“The neighbors there rent and they weren’t living here ten years ago, but they confirmed for me that Ed is... was the owner of the house. He comes out and mows the lawn himself every few months, especially after they complain to the City about it. Other than that, I’d guess you’d say this trail is at a dead end.”
“Not a dead end,” I said. “Just cold.”
I turned and regarded the house, the same house Lydia had followed Molly Bristow to ten years before.
Lydia came up beside me and peered into the darkness at the house.
“You’re not—” she began.
“I am,” I said.
I rifled around inside the cruiser and found a long black flashlight, the kind a night watchman might use. I clicked it on and it shed a bright beam of light upwards into the night sky.
“You want to stay here with the car?” I asked Lydia.
“Not on your life,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
“I know this is not your favorite subject, but where was Molly’s body found?” I asked her. The front door of Edgar Bristow’s rent house was of course locked up tight. We were around back moving down the narrow alley between the house and the foliage-laden wall behind it, checking each window in turn and shining the light inside to reveal rooms devoid of any content other than a layer of dust. I thought about a tornado shelter in North Texas, a place that once bore the skeleton of a missing United States Marshall for over eighty years, and shivered.
“Her father found her in her bungalow out back of the main house on the Bristow ranch. I’ve heard that she was unrecognizeable, except for her red hair.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to dredge it all up for you, but I’ve got to visit that Ranch. Probably tonight, before the news media descends on this town.”
“It’s okay. Enough time has gone by,” her voice faded to a whisper. She stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I feel like—”
She visibly shivered in the moonlight. I turned the light on her briefly and she winced, so I quickly flicked it away.
“What?”
“There is something here. I mean, in there,” she pointed to the window, the last window at the corner of the house.
“Yeah,” I said. “I had that feeling when we first drove by.” She was right about that feeling. My insides were stone cold.
I tested the window. It was stuck fast.
The window around the corner of the house held only half a pane of glass, likely having been busted out by the local hoodlums. I reached through and upward, felt for the latch and it turned easily under my fingers. I pushed upwards and the window rolled up smooth as silk.
“Me first,” Lydia said. “Boost me in and I’ll go around and open the front door.”
“Fine,” I said.
I made a step with my hands and she went up and in quickly. I handed her my flashlight and she turned away from the window.
“Go slow,” I said. “Be thorough.”
“I will.”
As I stepped away toward the front of the house I heard her distant voice reverberate back to me as she made her way slowly through the house. I caught only one word that made any sense: “weird.”
So many things went through my head during my brief trip around the house to the darkness-shrouded front door. I had to get to and onto the Bristow estate, somehow. Also, I felt a very strong need to return to the hangar where Bristow spent his last breath, to see the place, check it out thoroughly, the ‘Do Not Cross’ tape to hell and be damned. And also somewhere, somehow, a bit of food and a pillow. My stomach grumbled a complaint and I whispered to it to shut up. The port wine hadn’t done much for it and I was pretty sure that I was running the old body on little more than the admixture of the sugar content from Lydia’s bottle and nervous energy.
The door handle clicked as my fingers reached out for it and I jerked them back. Who says I never react?
“Get in here, Bill,” she said as the door swung wide, her voice quiet. “And tell me what you make of this.”
I followed her inside. She played the powerful beam about a deserted landscape. The dust was thick, and the pervasive odor of mouse droppings and old mildew filled my nostrils.
We moved toward the rear of the house, past the living room and down the hallway. She stopped before a half-open doorway, and turned to me.
“Give me your first impression, okay?”
“Alright,” I said. “Enough with the enigma. Let me see.”
She handed me the flashlight and I stepped into the narrow space.
*****
“Weird,” I said, and meant it. Also, I couldn’t for the life of me come up with a better word. Lydia stood behind me as I pushed the partially opened door back into the room. I expected a shrill creaking of the hinges, but that didn’t happen.
The room appeared empty. It was about the dimensions of a space a child or teenager might be relegated to if the other rooms were claimed by their elders, roughly six feet by about eleven. I’d seen larger jail cells, but it wasn’t the rooms size which caused the shiver that went through my body.
The space was clean. There wasn’t a spot of dust on the floor. There was no window. And the walls were of a purplish hue so dark that it approached blackness.
I shuddered and then jerked when I felt the fingers on my shoulder, but of course it was only Lydia.
“I’m scared, Bill,” she said. “I almost lost control of my bladder when I saw it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Spooky.”
Her fingers remained there for a moment. We were drawn together by the coldness of the place—I couldn’t blame her for touching me, and I couldn’t blame myself for beginning to feel somewhat comforted by it, but at that exact moment she removed her hand.
“Can we leave now?” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said, without hesitation, but then for some reason I stood rooted to that spot and panned the brilliant light about.
“Wait a minute,” I said. I stepped inside the room.
There was something out of place about it—as if the faintest of silvery mists hung about the ceiling. I reached upward with my free hand and raked my fingers through the air beneath the lower-than-normal ceiling and felt something fine on my fingertips. I reached further and felt it tickle my hand. I shined the flashlight upwards.
“Something odd,” I said.
I grasped at a few tendrils of what felt like spiders’ silk, and pulled.
I shined the flashlight at my open palm. The evidence of what my keen vision had dimly sensed lay in my open palm. I shined the light at it.
Two black threads were there.
“Thread,” I said. “Black thread.”
Lydia stepped into the room beside me and ran her splayed fingers through the space over her head.
“Hundreds of them,” Lydia said. She jerked them back quickly.
“Oh God,” she said, her voice breaking into a little whimper. �
�Let’s get out of here, Bill.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “I vote we get the hell out of Dodge.
*****
Back outside, the front door closed and locked behind us, we moved quickly across the yard and toward Buster’s cruiser. We were jumping the low ditch onto the narrow roadway before I realized I still held the black threads clutched in one aching fist. I relaxed my hand with some effort and tucked the threads into my shirt pocket.
There were no words between us as we drove on into a violet night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ten blocks later—which to my mind was a pretty sizeable chuck of the town—Lydia turned to me. “I can show you the path, if you want me to,” she said.
“The back way. The driver’s license-less way to the Bristow ranch?”
“Yep.”
“Show me,” I told her.
“Turn right,” she said.
*****
We left the cruiser parked at the end of a city road where the houses gave way to dry, stubby vegetation. Beyond was a large overgrown field bisected by a barbed-wire fence that ran off into the darkness. Probably it went straight on for miles away from the town.
“How far is it?” I asked her as I opened the trunk of Buster’s car. Overhead the stars were a spray of diamonds on black velvet.
“Almost a mile. It seems like farther, especially if you’re not used to a hike.”
“I’ll manage,” I said. “What have we here?” I said to myself. “Spare tire. No tire tool. So far my addition is correct.” My eyes lit on a gun butt sticking out a holster near the left rear wheel well. I pulled the rig out into the light.
“Three fifty-seven,” Lydia said. “Smith & Wesson. Buster’s pride and joy.”
