No Tomorrow

by Jake Hinkson

The Haringtons came in and Lucy saw me and smiled. She pulled at Eustace’s arm and he followed her over to my table.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Morning.”

  “Care if we join you?”

  “That’d be lovely.”

  They sat down. Eustace smiled at me.

  “Good to see you, Eustace.”

  Lucy leaned back from the table and crossed her legs.

  “He’s glad to see you, too. He likes you, you know.”

  “Well, I like him.”

  “I suppose I should congratulate you.”

  “On what?”

  “You’ve had a busy week. Getting saved, getting cleared at the inquest. Heard you got forgiven by Sister Henshaw and the ladies from the church. All in all, that’s a lot to contend with. To say nothing of running over poor Obadiah Henshaw.”

  Helen came to the table and took the breakfast order for Eustace and Lucy. They both got bacon, eggs, and oatmeal.

  I said, “We don’t know each other very well, Lucy, but you sound almost sarcastic.”

  Lucy Harington lifted her eyebrows. “My mother said that a person’s tone of voice was the sound of their hidden thoughts.”

  “Your mother sounds like quite a woman.”

  “She was quite a woman.”

  Eustace stood up and walked out of the diner.

  Lucy watched him go.

  I asked, “Where’s he going?”

  “He doesn’t like it when I talk about Mother. He’ll collect himself and come back.”

  Helen brought over a cup of coffee for Lucy. “I forget, Lucy, you take any short sweetening?”

  “No, thank you. Just black.”

  Helen left and Lucy turned her attention back to me.

  “At any rate, you made it through the inquest,” she said.

  “Yes. Thank you for your testimony.”

  She tapped her coffee cup with her fingernail. “I only told them what I saw, what I thought.”

  “Yes.” I sipped my coffee. “Well, thank you, anyway.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still unsettled, I suppose.”

  “That’s only natural.”

  I said, “You know it was an accident, don’t you, Lucy?”

  “If I knew of evidence to the contrary, I would have presented it to the court.”

  “That’s a rather cold answer to my question.”

  “It’s a cold job that I’ve been tasked with, Billie. I’m neither Sherlock Holmes nor Dolly of the Dailies. I’m just someone trying to do her job. I attempt to do it with a certain degree of precision.”

  “You told the court that you found…how did you put it? You found my explanation for why I was on the road to be ‘implausible.’ I have to tell you, that seems almost insulting. And given that the weight of that hearing, I was very worried when you said it.”

  Lucy sipped some of her coffee. Then she placed the cup back in her saucer and smiled politely in a way that declined the invitation to comment further.

  I said, “Well, I’m just glad it’s over.”

  “And now you’re born again.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes.”

  She grinned back.

  I said, “You know what? At the time, it seemed like the thing to do. I figured it couldn’t hurt to square my account with the Lord of the recently deceased.”

  She nodded. “And now what? Back to Hollywood?”

  “Yes. I’ll try to look up Cary Grant for you.”

  “Thank you. Your company must be concerned to hear that you were in an accident.”

  “Yes…they were. But I’ve let them know that I’m alright.”

  “What about the damage to the car and the films?”

  “What about it?”

  “The company isn’t upset about that?”

  “Oh, well, yes. But these things happen sometimes. I’m not the first person to get in a wreck.”

  “No,” she said, staring at my eyes like she was trying to read something illegible.

  I shook my head. “You know,” I said, “I don’t know what it is, but for some reason I can’t shake the feeling that you don’t quite believe me. And the mystery is, I don’t know why I care. I know what happened. The court knows what happened. But I can tell that you have some kind of lingering doubt and it bothers me.”

  She leaned over the table and said, “When Eustace and I saw Amberly and Mrs. Hermann together at the store, I offered to give her a ride home because old Mrs. Hermann wanted to get back home before the rain. But I also gave Amberly a ride home because I was curious about the old bruises I saw on her neck.”

  “I wasn’t aware of any bruises on her. I didn’t see any, but, of course, I was pretty shaken up when I saw her that afternoon.”

  “She had them. It looked as if she’d been choked.”

  “Did you ask her about them?”

  “No. Of course not. One doesn’t pry into someone else’s marriage.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  Lucy sat back in her chair. “Nothing. Not a thing. It’s a simple sequence of events. You arrived in town and met the Henshaws. Then you left town. Then you came back. Then I saw Amberly with bruises. And then you killed her husband with a car.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Lucy.”

  “I’m not getting at anything. Except maybe this: some part of the story is missing. Something has been left out of the sequence events. I know that.”

  “Well, if you figure it out, let me know. For now, it sounds like you’re putting a bunch of coincidences together and trying make them make sense. I don’t know why the preacher might have beat up his wife. Maybe he liked it. Maybe she hit him with a frying pan. I don’t know. All I know is I went out to see him to make sure he wasn’t going to give Claude any more trouble about the pictures, and I turned the corner and hit the poor guy.”

  Eustace walked back in the diner and sat down with us.

  Helen came over with our food. “Just in time, Eustace.”

  The big man smiled.

  As we ate, I steered the conversation toward safer subjects like the weather and my job. I didn’t reveal that I’d been fired. I told stories – some true, some made up – about the places I’d gone and the people I’d met. I talked and talked, talked to fill the space between us, but the whole time I knew that Lucy Harington was across the table, thinking.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As soon as breakfast was over, I excused myself and hurried over to the garage where my car had been towed.

  The mechanic was a wiry little fellow without his front teeth. Grease spotted his work clothes and caked his hands and the creases webbing his neck. He leaned against the big doorway of the car bay and masticated a bulge of tobacco in his left cheek.

  I asked, “How’s my car?”

  His lips peeled back so he could spit brown juice through the gap in his teeth.

  “Goter done.”

  “You do?”

  He lifted his eyebrows in affirmation.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  He reached in his pocket and pulled out a greasy piece of paper.

  I felt my spirits lift. Then I read the bill. $248. My spirits lowered.

  “That’s more than I thought it would be. I could have bought another car for that.”

  He spit.

  I had just a little over three hundred dollars. And I no longer had a job.

  “I just…I didn’t think it would be that much.”

  He didn’t respond to that, so I just stared at him pleadingly, beseechingly, pathetically.

  After a while, he turned and spat into the snow.

  ~ ~ ~

  I drove back to the motor lodge and collected my things. After paying my bill at the front office, I only had $57.17 left in my pocket. That wasn’t much, but with a car that ran I could get the hell away from Stock’s Settlement. I did not intend to delay my departure.

&
nbsp; I carried my stuff out to the car and started it up. For a moment, I thought about dropping by to see Claude. In an odd way, I thought of him as the only friend I had in town.

  I decided against it, though. Claude would do fine without seeing me, and I didn’t want to risk running into Lucy Harington again.

  I backed out of the lodge and drove through town. Through the window of the diner I saw Helen laughing with Sam. I saw the light through the window of the sheriff’s office.

  I was out on Appleton Avenue before I remembered Amberly.

  Should I go get her? Did she really want to leave with me? What would people say? How long would it take anyone to figure out that we’d left town together? Once they knew, what would Lucy say? What would she do?

  Being in the car, feeling the ground pass beneath the wheels, I knew I could just keep going. Amberly would be crushed. That hurt to think about, but she wouldn’t be the first woman I’d hurt. People hurt each other. She’d get over it. She was beautiful and smart. She didn’t have to stay in this town if she didn’t want to, and if she couldn’t figure that out on her own then she was a fool. Either way it wasn’t my fault.

  But as I approached the turn for Church Hill Road something pulled me toward her. If I’m honest myself, the pull didn’t have all that much to do with Amberly herself.

  I was scared. I was alone and broke and without prospects. All I had to do was turn and get her and she’d be with me. I wouldn’t be alone.

  I turned.

  ~ ~ ~

  As I pulled up, Amberly walked through the snow around the side of the church.

  She wore a brown coat over a white blouse and a black skirt. Her hair was pinned up, and she wore a pair of heavy black boots.

  I got out of the car and said, “We have to go.”

  “Go? Now?”

  “If you want to leave with me, now is the time. I need to get out of this town.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “I had a talk with Lucy Harington this morning.”

  “What’d you say? What’d she say?”

  “She’s suspicious.”

  “Of us? If she’s suspicious, why didn’t she say anything yesterday?”

  “Look we don’t have time for this – ”

  She stepped back. A large snowflake fell against her pink cheek and she wiped it away. “Please take a breath and slow down, Billie. You just drove up, jumped out of the car and told me that we have to beat a hasty retreat. That doesn’t make me want to get into a car with you.”

  “I thought you wanted to leave with me.”

  “I do. But I didn’t think it would be this morning, on a moment’s notice, with some vague warnings about the sheriff’s suspicions.”

  I took the deep breath she’d recommended. I said, “No one is after us. I’m sorry if I seemed panicked. Everything is fine. For now.”

  “What about Lucy?”

  “She and I talked at Dub’s this morning. She doesn’t like me. But it’s not… What you said before was right, if she had any serious suspicions she would have made them known to the court. She as much as told me that herself. She feels like there’s some part of the preacher’s death that is unaccounted for – and obviously there is – but that’s it. The court cleared me, and I’m free to go. Which is what I want to do. I want to get out of town and out of the state as quickly as I can. The longer I stay here the worse it all gets for me. That much I know. I need to leave, and I want you to come with me. Right now.”

  She put her hands on her hips and looked up the frozen road. It occurred to me that she was looking up there near the spot where I’d killed her husband, but I’m not sure that it occurred to her. I think she was just staring off, considering her options.

  She looked at the house.

  She looked at me.

  She nodded.

  ~ ~ ~

  It took her ten minutes to pack. She had two suitcases that she filled with dresses and blouses and skirts and shoes. She had an overnight bag she filled with toiletries and a long nightshirt.

  She left her Bible. She took her movie magazine.

  We should have left at night. There would be fewer people to see us together, fewer people to get suspicious.

  But all we knew is that we wanted to leave as soon as possible. She navigated me down the icy back roads she judged least likely to be occupied, and we bumped along in single minded purpose. Neither of us felt any excitement or thrill as we made our escape that day. It was not a lark we were on. Without discussing it, we both knew that if we were caught, the truth, or something like it, would come out – and one of us would go to jail for it.

  We twisted and slipped along the back roads until we hit the highway. We’d managed to circumnavigate the town without seeing anyone, and Amberly had guided us to a point outside the city limits.

  We hit the highway and headed north. Neither of us spoke. I certainly didn’t feel any relief yet. We could still be seen. These hills were peppered with people, and in an area with such a small population, we’d have to drive miles before we found someone who didn’t know Amberly.

  Yet the wind was at our backs. As we climbed those torturous, snowy mountain paths, the car moved fine and I handled it with the precision of a Hollywood stunt driver. Next to me, Amberly stayed quiet except to give the occasional direction or warn me about an upcoming curve or dip in the road.

  I was so focused on the drive that I couldn’t afford the presence of mind to really regard our situation. We hardly knew each other. In fact, I knew practically nothing about her. Her age. Her maiden name. Where she was from. Where she wanted to go. Despite having had sex with her and covered up a murder with her, I had only the vaguest notion of who she was. Looking back on it now, that seems incredible. At the time, though, all I knew is that she and I were together and that we had the same goal: to get out of Arkansas.

  An hour north of town, we saw some people. A man and a woman and a couple of children were walking down the road. The man, in front, wore a beard and overalls. The woman wore a coat over a garment made of scraps. The child behind the woman was wearing a coat and scraps as well. The child at the end – a girl of perhaps four or five – wore a short coat under which she appeared to be completely naked.

  We passed them and all of them glared at us.

  After we’d rounded the bend, I asked, “Did you know them?”

  “No.”

  We drove a little further. I asked, “Was that child naked?”

  “I think so.”

  “Christ.”

  We passed through a town called Baxter a little further up the highway.

  “I might stop here.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I have to use the ladies room.”

  “I know people here. Brother Walker’s church is here. Don’t stop. We’ll pull over to the road outside of town.”

  We zipped through Baxter, past a large red church on a hill, past a few houses with smoking chimneys, past an assortment of old cars and horses and mules surrounding an auction house.

  Outside of Baxter, I pulled over and we took turns urinating in the woods while the other one stayed with the car.

  Then we were back on the road. Neither of us had thought to bring any food, and I started to get hungry around two o’clock, but we didn’t stop.

  We didn’t talk. We just sat there, side by side, staring at the road in front of us, willing it to be behind us.

  Finally I saw the sign for the state line.

  Next to me, Amberly cleared her throat. I looked over and she was crying.

  As we crossed over, I said, “You’re free.”

  “We’re free,” she said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  That night we stopped for dinner somewhere in Oklahoma at a roadside joint called The OK Café. Either the place had once been an Indian trading post or the owners had built it to look that way. A hitching post ran along the front of the building, and to get inside we had to push through some swing
ing doors flanked by wooden barrels.

  A pretty girl in a getup that made her look like Dale Evans greeted us as we came in. She tipped her hat at us. “Howdy, ladies. How are y’all today?”

  We were both too exhausted to give much back to the girl, but Amberly smiled and said, “We’re fine.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She grabbed a couple of menus and showed us past some rowdy families and moon-eyed couples to a booth in the back.

  We slid in and the waitress left us to the menus.

  Amberly looked it over. “I’m not sure I can eat.”

  “I can.”

  She gave me a weary grin.

  I put the menu down on the tabletop and ran my hands through my hair. “We should stop in the next town we see that has a motor lodge. No idea when that will be.”

  “We could use the rest. You could use it. You look tired.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. You’re saying I look rough?”

  “No. Not at all. Just tired.”

  “Well, I am tired. I’ve never had to beat it out of town before.”

  Looking over her menu she said, “Mm. You did last time.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  She glanced up at me. “Last time you left Stock’s Settlement, you left in a hurry.” She turned her attention back to her menu. “I was pretty hurt, I must say.” I stared at her while she turned the menu over. She said, “I think I’ll have The Westerner sandwich with a side of cowboy beans. I wonder what cowboy beans are.”

  The waitress walked over. “What can I do you ladies for?”

  “What are cowboy beans?” Amberly asked.

  The waitress glanced over her shoulder to see that she was out of earshot of the boss. “Baked beans,” she admitted. “Got a bit of bacon fat in there to liven it up. But basically you’re looking at baked beans.”

  “Fine then. I’ll take the Westerner and some cowboy beans.”

  “To drink?”

  “A Coca-Cola.”

  The waitress said, “And for you, ma’am?”

  “Black coffee and a ham sandwich.”

  The waitress thanked us and took our menus. Amberly said, “I need to use the powder room.”

  She slid out of the booth and I watched her walk to the soda counter and ask a boy in buckskins where the shithouse was. He pointed her down a hallway.