Blue Lonesome

by Bill Pronzini

  “Even if she went crazy … what possible reason could she’ve had for putting the girl’s body into the well afterward? The husband’s body wasn’t moved, was it?”

  “No.” Again Hoxie sighed and shook his head. “There’s something else too, even more bizarre. Tess was struck down near the barn; bloodstains were found at the spot. But before she was carried to the well her clothes were apparently changed.”

  “Her clothes?”

  “Anna swore that when she last saw Tess, the child had on jeans and a T-shirt. When the body was taken from the well it was clothed in her best Sunday dress.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Very little of what happened does, Mr. Messenger.”

  He was silent. In his mind’s eye he could see the tattered old panda bear; it must have belonged to the little girl. And Tess must have been the child in the photo Del Carlo had found in the bloody bathtub. The pocket watch … To Davey from Pop. Dave Roebuck’s watch. Would a woman who’d murdered her husband and daughter in cold blood have kept mementos like that? Would she have kept a book on how to cope with pain and grief? He couldn’t imagine it. Most of what he’d heard the past few minutes was beyond his powers of imagination.

  Questions occurred to him, one after another, crowding into the forefront of his thoughts. He had a logical, orderly mind, if not an inventive one, and he was used to devising and asking questions and evaluating the answers he was given. That was a part of his job at Sitwell & Cobb, some of whose clients were anything but logical and orderly, while others skated dangerously on the thin edge of deception and fraud.

  “If Anna was a devoted mother,” he said at length, “how could people here be so quick to condemn her?”

  “No one else could’ve committed the crimes,” Hoxie said. “At least, so it seemed then and still seems now.”

  “Why not one of Roebuck’s women? You said he was a womanizer. A lover’s quarrel that turned violent, and the little girl killed because she was a witness?”

  “A possibility, yes, but there was no evidence to support it. The only clear adult fingerprints found anywhere belonged to Dave and Anna.”

  “The operative word being clear,” Messenger said. “There’s also the possibility of gloves.”

  “Perhaps. But the county investigators and Sheriff Espinosa questioned dozens of people, including the women Dave Roebuck was intimate with. And Joe Hanratty, a ranch hand who had a fistfight with him a week before the murders. They found nothing to incriminate anyone.”

  “This man Hanratty couldn’t have done it?”

  “No. He works for Dave Roebuck’s brother, John T., and the other hands swore he never left John T.’s ranch that day.”

  “What about a stranger, a drifter?”

  “Highly unlikely,” Hoxie said. “Dave and Anna’s ranch is far off any main road. When his body was found his wallet was untouched; it contained fifty-seven dollars in cash. And nothing was disturbed or missing from inside the house.”

  “Well, there couldn’t have been any evidence to incriminate Anna, either. Otherwise she’d have been arrested and charged.”

  “Circumstantial evidence, but not enough to satisfy the district attorney.”

  “Where did she say she was at the time of the killings?”

  “At the old Bootstrap Mine.”

  “What was she doing at a mine?”

  “Looking for gold.”

  “… She was a miner as well as a rancher?”

  “It was a hobby with her,” Hoxie said. “The Bootstrap has been shut down for thirty years, but there are traces of gold left in it. The mine and most of her ranch are on BLM land, less than a dozen miles apart.”

  “BLM?”

  “Public land. Owned by the Bureau of Land Management. Most sagebrush ranchers around here lease grazing land and grazing rights from the BLM. It’s a common practice in Nevada.”

  “So she went alone to the mine that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no one saw her there?”

  “No one.”

  “How long was she away from the ranch?”

  “Three hours or so, she claimed.”

  “And when she returned she found the bodies?”

  “Her husband’s body. Sheriff Espinosa and one of his deputies found Tess. Anna showed little emotion when she called them, and hardly any more when Tess was found. In public opinion that was another strike against her.”

  “Shock,” Messenger said. “Or she was the kind of person who internalizes pain and grief.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why was everyone so willing to believe the worst of her? Was she disliked for some reason?”

  “Misunderstood, rather than disliked. Anna was a difficult person to know or understand. Except for her family she preferred her own company.”

  “Lonely. A lonely person.”

  “Private, in any case. Much more so after the tragedy. She refused to see or talk to anyone, even her sister.”

  “Sister?”

  “Younger sibling. Dacy Burgess.”

  “Does Dacy Burgess live here?”

  “On a ranch not far from Anna’s.”

  “Where would that be, exactly?”

  “Salt Pan Valley, west of town. Dacy and her son are alone out there now. Too large a place for the two of them to manage by themselves, really, but they can’t afford a full-time hired hand anymore. Times are hard here. As everywhere these days.”

  “Is she Anna’s only living relative?”

  “Yes,” Hoxie said, “she and the boy. But if you’re planning to see her, I’d advise you to go carefully. Dacy’s cut from the same cloth as Anna was. She keeps to herself, doesn’t trust strangers, and doesn’t like to talk about what happened.”

  “But she does believe in her sister’s innocence?”

  “At first she did. But when Anna disappeared … no, I doubt even she does any longer.”

  “Does anyone around here believe in it?”

  “Jaime Orozco.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A retired ranch hand who worked for the Burgesses for several years. He also did odd jobs for Dave and Anna.”

  “And he’s the only one?”

  “Who believes Anna was innocent? I’m afraid so.”

  “Which puts you in the majority, too.”

  Hoxie sighed. “I’d like to say otherwise, but I can’t find it in my heart to credit any other explanation. Not now.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Anna’s suicide, of course. Wouldn’t you say that was an admission of guilt, Mr. Messenger?”

  “No,” he said, “I wouldn’t. It’s just as possible she killed herself because she was innocent.”

  THE ROAD LEADING from Beulah to Salt Pan Valley was one of the two graveled ones he’d taken earlier. He drove past the crumbling hillside diggings, out into the desert another mile and a half until he came to a Y fork. Hoxie had told him to take the left branch. He did that, jounced up onto higher ground over a series of low ridges spotted with yucca trees. Dust boiled up behind him, so that he was able to see little else when he glanced into the rearview mirror—as if he were towing a parachute on invisible wires. Sand and gravel thrown up by the Subaru’s tires peppered the undercarriage.

  Two miles of this, and the road dipped again into a wide bowl-shaped valley bounded by tawny hills that seemed taller and had sharper edges. The valley floor was flat, thickly covered with sagebrush and greasewood and scattered clumps of cactus, scored here and there by shallow washes. In the distance, where the land dipped low, a patch of white shimmered and glinted under the harsh sun: a sink full of salt deposits that had given the valley its name. Barbed-wire fences were strung along here, and power lines angled in from the south. Lean black and brown range cattle grazed in the washes and around the sage and greasewood scrub.

  Off to his left he could make out a jumble of ranch buildings set within a grove of cottonwoods. A graveled access road veered off
that way. When he reached the intersection he saw a closed gate inside a square wooden head frame, a burnt-wood sign on the head frame’s cross-piece that said ROEBUCK in the same style lettering as on the cemetery marker. Old Bud Roebuck’s ranch, according to Hoxie. Dave and John T.’s father. It had been willed to John T. alone, evidently because of some falling-out between the old man and his youngest son. Hoxie hadn’t been inclined to elaborate.

  Messenger drove on. A few hundred yards beyond the turnoff to John T. Roebuck’s ranch, the road surface worsened. Instead of gravel there was sand-coated hardpan, washboarded and spotted with chuck holes. He reduced his speed to less than thirty for fear of damaging something along the Subaru’s underbelly.

  After another mile an unmarked track cut away to the right, past a weathered wooden storage shed. He went on past by fifty yards, then on impulse braked and reversed through hanging plumes of dust to where he could turn onto the track. He sat for a few seconds, making up his mind. The side road led to Anna Roebuck’s ranch. Dacy Burgess lived another mile and a half along the main road, at the far end of the valley where the tawny hills rose bare and rough-edged against the hazy sky.

  “Nothing to see at Ms. Lonesome’s except ghosts,” he said aloud. “What’s the point?” But he made the turn anyway. Admit it, Messenger: It was in your mind to do this all along.

  The track led him over bumpy ground, around a hillock, then for three-quarters of a mile through a shallow canyon. When it climbed out of the canyon there was rusty barbed-wire fencing on his right. Past another turn, more fencing stretched away on the opposite side; and at the top of a short rise the roadway ended at a closed wood-and-wire gate. He parked and stepped out into a windless hush. Motionless hush, too: It was like being confronted with a desert hologram, everything three-dimensional yet not quite real. Still Life with Ghost Ranch. The stillness was so complete the click of the car door as he shut it had a loud, brittle quality.

  The gate was secured with a length of heavy chain and a padlock, both relatively new. A hand-lettered sign on the gate post read: NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT OR ELSE! A hundred yards beyond, in a hollow that ran out into a sage flat, were the ranch buildings: small, squatty house shaded by tamarisk trees, a low-roofed structure with a wire enclosure at one end, a shed not much larger than an outhouse (maybe it was an outhouse), and at the edge of the flat, a barn and the remains of a corral, a windmill, and a huge galvanized water tank. The windmill lay broken on its side, collapsed or blown over or pulled down. He couldn’t see the well from up here; it must be behind the house.

  The heated air was thick with sage spice and the creosote odor of greasewood; it ignited a burning sensation in his lungs. Breathing shallowly, he climbed over the gate and made his way down the track, his shoes creating little scraping sounds on the hard earth. Halfway down something startled him by jumping out from behind a yucca tree and darting away through the desert scrub. Jackrabbit. He saw it stop, its great ears lifting and falling like semaphores, then run again and vanish.

  The ranch yard was littered with tumbleweeds and wind-gathered debris; he crossed it slowly toward the house. Board and batten, with a roof of weathered shingles, a narrow porch across the front, a tangled growth of prickly pear at one end. If it had ever been painted, the last vestiges of the paint had long ago eroded away. All of the glass in the front windows had been broken out. The front door hung lopsidedly inward on one hinge; one of its panels was splintered, as though it had been rammed or kicked in. The entire facing wall was riddled with holes, but it wasn’t until he was within a few yards of the porch that he recognized them as bullet holes. Somebody—more than one somebody—had fired dozens of rounds at the house, handgun or rifle or both. As if trying to kill it.

  The bullet holes, the eerie stillness, the lifelessness of the place opened an odd hollow feeling inside him. Sweat ran down into his left eye, smearing his vision; he wiped it away. The sun was like a weight on the top of his bare head, the back of his neck. He wished he’d had the sense to stop at one of the stores in town and buy a hat of some kind. He wasn’t dressed at all right for this country. Stranger in a strange land.

  The boards creaked when he stepped onto the porch; the rusted hinges creaked when he pushed the door farther inward so he could pass through. The living room was empty of furniture, the bare-wood floor littered with dust and drifted sand, broken glass, rodent droppings, and dead insects. A quick look into each of the other four rooms told him the house had been completely stripped. All that was left were a few shelves, a broken chemical toilet, and an ancient claw-foot tub in the bathroom. Vandals? John T. Roebuck? Dacy Burgess?

  Outside again, he heard the faint, faraway throb of a car engine on the valley road. Except for his footfalls as he walked around to the rear, it was the only sound. White noise that enhanced rather than disturbed the stillness.

  The well was a circle of native stone set between two of the trees. A hand-operated pump had been used in place of a windlass; but the pump had been torn loose and battered with something like a sledgehammer until it was a mangled lump of metal. Scattered around it were bits of stone and mortar that had been beaten off the well itself. He moved a few steps closer. A fitted wooden cover still sat in place over the well opening.

  His stomach began a faint kicking. The cause was not what had been done to the well but what he’d been told about the murder of Tess Roebuck and its aftermath. Heinous, Hoxie had called it. God, yes. Heinous and inexplicable.

  He turned away, went across the rear yard. The low-roofed structure had been a chicken house; dried droppings and feathers lay strewn over the hardpan inside the wire enclosure. He passed the privylike shed. Its door had been pulled off and tossed aside; inside he could see a raised platform, a jut of bolts and tangle of wires. Generator, probably. They’d had electricity, and the power lines that serviced John T. Roebuck’s ranch didn’t extend out this far into the wilderness. The generator had been taken away along with everything else.

  He tried to visualize what it had been like living here, in conditions that were only a step or two removed from the primitive. Tried to fit Ms. Lonesome into these surroundings; to envision her happy, laughing, mothering and playing games with a faceless child of eight. He couldn’t manage that either. She was a stranger, dammit. All you knew was the shell of a woman, a walking piece of clay. She could have been a monster and you know it. Good people don’t have a monopoly on loneliness.

  He approached the barn. It and what was left of the corral fence were aged-silvered, tumbledown. The barn’s wide double doors sagged open; bullet holes studded them too, just a few, like afterthoughts. Beyond he could see more holes pocking the galvanized surface of the water tank. And the windmill … it looked to have been dragged down with ropes attached to the back of a car or truck; an end-frayed length of hemp trailed from a section of the windmill’s frame. Outrage at the killings. Mindless attacks on inanimate objects that had had nothing to do with the taking of two human lives. Teenagers, maybe. It was somehow worse to think that adults had been responsible.

  Messenger paused at the barn’s entrance. Dark inside, a thick gloom that stank of dried manure and rotting leather and Christ knew what else. Better not go in. Snakes … the desert was full of rattlers, and this was just the kind of place where they nested. Nothing to see anyway. Coming here had been a mistake, an exercise in morbid curiosity—

  Something smacked into the barn wall, head high, a couple of feet to the right of where he stood.

  He swung around that way as sound broke suddenly through the hush, a flat cracking like a distant roll of thunder. But the sky was clear—

  Singing buzz, and dust spurted from a spot on the ground near his right shoe. The cracking noise came again, echo-rolling this time. He stiffened, bewildered, just starting to comprehend what was happening.

  Another buzz, another spurt of dust even closer, another flat crack. It burst in on him then, full understanding that carried with it an adrenaline surge of fear and astonis
hment.

  Rifle shots.

  Somebody’s shooting at me!

  8

  THE ONLY PLACE for him to go was into the barn.

  He twisted around, got his feet tangled together, stumbled, and went down on all fours, jamming his left knee. His shoulders hunched; he could feel the skin bristling along his back. But there were no more shots as he scrambled inside, to safety around one of the sagging doors.

  He flattened himself on bare, lumpy earth near the front wall. He was slick with sweat; he smelled himself along with the sour stink of the barn’s interior. His breathing had a labored, stuttering quality. He opened his mouth wide, made himself take in air in shallow inhalations so he wouldn’t begin to hyperventilate.

  His mind was a clutter of disconnected thoughts. One of them: Seventeen years he’d lived in San Francisco, with all its urban threats and terrors, and he’d never once been attacked, mugged, burglarized, or bothered by anyone more dangerous than an aggressive panhandler. Now, all the way out in the Nevada desert, abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere … somebody with a rifle, for God’s sake, shooting so close to him he’d heard and felt the bullets’ passage. It was as if it were happening to somebody else. As if part of him were standing off and watching some other poor schmuck hugging the floor of a barn. Stage set, scene in a John Wayne or Randolph Scott Western …

  An awareness crowded in: Outside, it was quiet again.

  With an effort, he forced his thoughts into a semblance of order. He couldn’t just lie there and wait for whoever it was to come in after him. Move—that was the first thing. He put his hands under his chest and pushed up, then over on to one hip. The shadows were thick, clotted in corners and among the rafters, but enough smoky-looking light penetrated through gaps in the walls and roof to let him see how the barn was laid out. Stalls along the far wall, an enclosed feed bin. Hayloft above, with an opening into it but no ladder for access. No windows, no other doors. Trapped here. And nothing he could see to use as a weapon; the barn had been stripped of machinery and tools and anything else it might have once held.