by R.J. Ellory
“I know, Pa. I know. Just a shame that he ain’t here, that he don’t know he’s gonna be an uncle.”
“Oh, I’ll guess we’ll get word to him soon enough, and I am sure he’s gonna be overjoyed. He was always good with the little ’uns. Kids always gravitated to him for some reason. Maybe ’cause he has some kinda artistic thing, you know?”
“Sure he’ll be overjoyed,” Carson echoed, and the conversation drifted away in some other direction and Evan was not mentioned again until later.
“You will tell Evan, won’t you?” was the next time his name was raised, and it was raised by Rebecca as she dried dishes with Grace in the Riggses’ kitchen. Dinner had been nothing but smiles and laughter, and had anyone missed Evan, they did not show it.
“Of course we’ll tell him,” Grace replied. And then with a knowing smile, she added, “Once we manage to track him down.”
“I’m still sad that he didn’t come to the wedding.”
“No need for that,” Grace said. “What’s done is done.”
“I guess I’d just like to know why.”
Grace turned and looked at her daughter-in-law. “If you are trying to draw me into a conversation about you and Evan, then it ain’t gonna work, girl,” she said. “And if you really don’t know why he didn’t come, then you’re a great deal dumber than you look, and I’ll be advising Carson to divorce you as soon as he possibly can.”
Rebecca colored up.
Grace handed her another dish from the sink.
There were words on Grace’s lips that she couldn’t bring herself to utter, and so she did not.
There was a fear in Rebecca’s mind—more than a fear, a terrifying certainty—and she would no more have voiced it than she would have told Grace Riggs what happened between herself and Evan that night of the party. The fact that the one might have led directly to the other was the issue, and she hoped against all odds that this was not the case. However, whatever she might have wished for, there was a line in one of Evan Riggs’s songs that was coming back to haunt her like a ghost. Even if no one else ever knows the truth, I still know I done you wrong.
Like someone would later comment, Take those pretty tunes away and you may as well have called it a confession. Not solely for the singer, but for the listener as well.
By the time the first trimester came up, Rebecca was already talking nursery colors and Carson was doing his damnedest to appear enthused. To be frank, he didn’t see a great deal of difference between sunshine yellow and French marigold, but he tried not to make his limited spectral differentiation skills become a topic for heated discussion. He was excited, yes; he was nervous, of course, but the color of a nursery wall seemed relatively insignificant in the face of the pregnancy itself. He wanted Doc Sperling to do all the checks he needed to do and tell them that there was a baby in there and that everything was A-OK.
Doc Sperling did the checkup. It was Thursday, July twenty-first, and Carson translated Rebecca’s nervousness as only natural considering what was going on. He was anxious, too, but for the right reason; he just wanted to know that everything was as it should be, that there were no complications. He had heard this word in such a context before, and to him they sounded less like complications and more like natural disasters.
Doc Sperling said nothing beyond the routine as the examination was undertaken, but Rebecca sensed there were questions unasked.
“What?” she eventually said.
Sperling tried to look surprised, but he was no natural-born liar.
“Seriously, Roy … You look like you got a fly in your ear. What’s bugging you?”
“I gotta ask, Rebecca … I just gotta ask, but I don’t want to.”
Rebecca’s color visibly paled. Had she said she didn’t know what was coming, she would have been lying.
“I need to ask whether you and Carson were … well, whether you were intimate before you got married.”
Rebecca closed her eyes. Her heart deflated like a slow-punctured balloon. That feeling in the pit of her stomach, a feeling that had sat there like a cold stone ever since that night with Evan, suddenly became burning hot, hot enough to sear right through her and kill her where she sat.
“W-w-why d-d’you ask, Doc?”
“You gonna answer the question, Rebecca?”
“Tell me why you’re asking, Roy …” she said, her voice faltering at the end, because she knew well enough why he was asking. She prayed that what she feared most and what he was about tell her were not one and the same thing.
“You’re into your second trimester, my dear … no question. I’d say you were not so far from the start of your third.”
Rebecca didn’t speak.
“So, my question stands,” Sperling said. “Do we got a problem here?”
It was a long time before she responded, and when she did, it was a barely noticeable nod of the head.
“Evan?” Sperling asked, to which Rebecca said nothing, and Sperling merely repeated Evan’s name, this time as a statement rather than a question.
“Night of the party,” Sperling said, almost to himself. “When was that? Start of February. That would put you at about twenty-three weeks. Makes sense, from what I can see.”
“Oh, God—” she said.
“Calm yourself,” Sperling said. “Let’s work this out now, my dear. There’s no need for Carson to know—”
“What do you mean, there’s no need for him to know?” Rebecca said, suddenly coming to life. “I’m going to have his brother’s baby. And to answer your question, no, we were never intimate before we were married. I am two months further along than I should be, Roy … How the hell do you hide something like that, and what kind of wife would I be to have such a secret? He has to know.” And with that she got up, almost as if marching out to the waiting room and announcing this revelation was her immediate plan.
“Sit,” Sperling said, and grabbed her arm.
Rebecca sat.
“Listen to me, Rebecca. You have more than yourself and your husband to think about now. You have to think about your father, Carson’s folks, the entirety of Calvary, if you want me to be brutally honest. Carson is the sheriff here. He has a certain position, a certain reputation. You have any idea of the damage that could be done if this comes out without some sort of strategy?”
A sense of numbness was overtaking Rebecca’s emotions. Not knowing what to feel beyond utter terror, she had perhaps decided that the safest option was to try to feel nothing. Maybe there was no conscious decision at all, her mind just shutting down on her like a worn-out engine.
“Of course he needs to know, Rebecca,” Sperling said. “But I don’t think you should be the one to tell him, and I don’t think he should know now.”
Rebecca just stared blankly at Dr. Sperling. Whatever life she thought she was going to have had just ended. The future was some wild unknown, and she was scared beyond belief.
“Let me give you something to calm your nerves,” Sperling said, and from a small cupboard against the wall, he produced a pill bottle, tipped out two, handed them to Rebecca with a glass of water.
She took them without thinking, without even asking what they were, and Sperling sat with her until a dazed and slightly disconnected sense of unreality overtook her thoughts.
She smiled at the doctor, and when she asked him what they were going to do, he simply said, “I don’t know, Mrs. Riggs … To be honest, I really don’t know.”
THIRTY-SIX
Henry and Evie had sat up late the night before. Glenn Chandler had sat with them, too, drank a couple of beers, talked of nothing significant, and the sense that Glenn was avoiding the issue at hand seemed as real as anyone present. It was the elephant in the room. Evan Riggs’s daughter. Carson Riggs’s change of heart. The reason for Henry’s presence in Calvary. Of course, Evie herself was now rapidly becoming just as good a reason to be there. Henry watched her laugh with her father, caught the odd moment as she turned and looked at Henry, h
er eyes flashing with humor. He felt a very tangible connection, a sense that she—above and beyond everyone else—truly understood what he was doing and why. He hoped that their partnership would last so much longer than the search for Sarah.
Later, lying beside her, those few minutes before he himself drifted into sleep, he questioned his own motivation. Had it now become a matter of stubbornness, the unwillingness to back off, the blunt fact being that he would not be swayed by Carson Riggs? Having spent more than three years doing exactly what he was told, had this now become his way of fighting back? Carson Riggs was a figure of authority. He was a man of the law. Fuck the law. Fuck Carson Riggs. I will find what I want, and I don’t give a damn what you do to stop me. Was that all it was now?
It didn’t matter. He had set himself on a course to do this thing, and regardless of any additional reasons he might find to do it, his promise to Evan was enough. It was with this certainty that he slept, and when he awoke the certainty remained.
They set out right after breakfast. The featureless road gave onto an all-too-familiar landscape. West Texas had no dearth of towns that looked much as the one left behind, identical to the next you’d happen upon, no matter the direction taken. The flat horizon was punctuated with grain towers, water towers, irrigation pivots and pumps, all evidence of folks trying to give the land what it did not have, or prevent the weather taking it away. Dusty caliche roads ran away left and right, took you out through fields of bluestem, buffalo grass, Indian stem, every once in a while a grove of cottonwood or willow to break up the monotony.
They spoke little. Henry drove while Evie smoked, careful to ensure each butt was thoroughly extinguished before flicking it from the pickup. Prairie fires had taken lives and livelihoods with less than a thoughtless cigarette.
It was a little after nine when they arrived, and when Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler pulled into the main drag on Monday morning, it felt more like a ghost town than the end of Henry’s quest.
They were looking for an orphanage, maybe some kind of fostering home, and, with a population exceeding little more than one and a half thousand, they figured it shouldn’t be too hard. A town like this everyone would know everyone, and if they didn’t, they’d know someone who did.
They asked first at the post office.
“Orphanage?” the woman asked. She shook her head. “Never been no orphanage here, son.”
“Maybe some kind of fostering place?” Evie asked.
The woman frowned. “How far back you talkin’?”
“Would be twenty years, maybe,” Henry said.
“Well, I don’t know whether it’s gonna be of any help, but there was a family called Garrett who used to look after some strays. That was years ago, though.”
“They still here?”
“He is, she isn’t, far as I know.”
“You know where he lives?”
“I do, yes,” the woman said, and gave them directions.
The house to which they were directed did not seem at all like the place Henry had expected.
Close to ramshackle, whoever lived here could not have possessed a shred of domestic pride. Little more than a wood-built lean-to crudely appended to an almost-derelict single-wide, the roof of both structures a patchwork of exhausted felt, corrugated sheeting, random boards, and a length of threadbare carpet upon which was growing some sort of bright-colored moss. The steps up to the front door were lengths of railway sleeper, as far as Henry could guess, and when he approached and knocked on the door, it felt as if the whole structure reverberated sufficiently to risk collapse.
“This is bullshit,” Evie said as they waited. She wore an expression like some bad smell had assaulted her nostrils.
Henry said nothing. What could he say? He knocked again and stepped back as he heard movement.
Predictably, the man who appeared from the side of the building was carrying a shotgun.
“Hell do you want?” he said.
“Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we were told to come looking for you by a woman at the post office,” Henry said. “Got word that you used to run some kind of orphanage or somethin’.”
The man shook his head. “Hell, that’s all history now, son. That was a good deal o’ years ago.”
“We just came to ask about someone that may have stayed with you,” Evie said. “That was all.”
“Lot of kids stayed with us,” Garrett said. “That’s what we did. Looked after kids no one wanted until they found a home. Thankless task, if you ask me, but that’s what we did.”
“There was a girl,” Henry said. “Born in late forty-nine. Mother was from over Calvary way; father was a singer called Evan Riggs.”
The man smiled a crooked smile. “You’d be speaking of Sarah.”
Henry felt an unexpected rush of emotion bloom in his chest. He felt light-headed for a moment. He looked at Evie. Evie opened her mouth to speak but said nothing.
“Sarah, yes,” Henry said. “That was her name. Sarah.”
“She be dead,” Garrett said. “Good while now.”
Henry’s eyes widened. His intake of breath was audible. He looked back at Evie once more. She looked stunned, her brow furrowed, her shoulders sagged, as if those three words meant everything and nothing at the same time.
“Dead?” Henry asked.
“Dead is what I said, boy.”
“But … but how? When? What happened?”
“She died. That’s what happened,” Garrett said. “Ain’t no point to dress it up fancy. She got the pneumonia when she was all of seven or eight years old. Killed her stone dead. Had a rash of them here, Calvary, too. Whole bunch o’ kids. Adults, too.”
“She’s dead?” Henry asked Garrett, as if repeating the question would somehow change the answer.
Garrett looked at Evie. “He a bit simple-minded or what?”
Evie shook her head. “He’s just shocked, Mr. Garrett. He’s been looking for her, and we never expected that she’d be dead.”
“Well, in my experience, what you expect and what you get is rarely the same thing, miss. Life is pretty much rough corners an’ sharp angles. That’s a fact right where it stands.”
“I can’t believe she’s dead,” Henry said.
Garrett took a step closer toward them. “Seems our business is done, eh?”
Henry was still in disbelief. He kept shaking his head and sighing. He thought about Evan, about what he would say, about the defeat such a thing would bring to the man. The weight of this was sufficient to crush him, Henry believed, considering then that the idea of one day seeing his own daughter had been the sole motivation for Evan’s staying alive in Reeves. Take this away, and what did he have?
“Are there any records, any documents, any pictures of her?” Evie asked.
Garrett shook his head. “You wanna know the history, look elsewhere, girlie. My wife done raised up that girl only to see her die. And she wasn’t the only one. Boys, too. Broke her heart. Broke her mind. She up and burned everything … clothes, shoes, toys, pictures, everything. Done killed herself a year later. Been livin’ alone with naught but conscience for company ever since.”
“Oh, Christ …” Evie exhaled, and even though it was not her loss, she looked close to tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“Gotta be sorry for? You didn’t kill her. Only thing you done is remind me of it.”
“Well, then, I am sorry for that, Mr. Garrett,” she said.
“No need for sorry, sweetheart. What’s done is done.”
Evie turned to Henry. “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s not trouble Mr. Garrett any further.”
Henry nodded but said nothing. She stepped back, took his arm, steered him toward the pickup, and opened the door for him.
“Start the engine, Henry,” she said, and he complied.
Pulling away, she waved back at Garrett, and he raised his hand in response.
“She’s dead,” Henry muttered to himself as they re
ached the main drag of Menard.
“Sad fucking business,” Evie replied, and yet she could not shake that ghost of doubt at the back of her mind. Something was awry. She knew it. Knew it in her bones.
They drove back to Ozona in near silence, Evie wanting to say something, anything, but there were no words. The atmosphere in the car was as if packed tight with thunderclouds. Henry started to say something a couple of times, but then his thoughts fell short of verbal realization.
Both of them spoke when they turned down the drive toward the Chandler place.
“Oh, hell,” Evie said.
“What the fu—” Henry started, but left it unfinished.
Alvin Lang stood beside his black-and-white outside her house, a smug grin on his face, and they knew then that whatever trouble they had started into had only just begun.
“Mr. Henry Quinn,” Lang said as Henry exited the pickup.
“What the hell you doin’ here, Alvin?” Evie asked, at once challenging and aggressive, though beneath the bravado there was a clear tone of anxiety.
“Attendin’ to some business that don’t much concern you, Evie Chandler,” he replied.
“You have business with me?” Henry asked.
“Reckon I do, son,” Lang said.
“Concerning what? This business with Evan’s daughter? If it’s that, then it’s finished. We went out to Menard, found out that Sarah is dead.”
“That so?” Lang asked, seemingly disinterested.
“You aren’t surprised, Alvin?” Evie asked. “Or did you already know she was dead before you sent us?”
“Didn’t know nothin’,” Lang replied. “And I don’t care to know much of anythin’ now. Not here to talk about that. Here to talk about something a good deal more serious.”
Henry knew that. He felt it in the pit of his gut.
“What are you doing here, Deputy?” he asked.
Lang reached into the car and took out a brown paper bag. From it he withdrew another bag, clear plastic, and within that was some kind of parcel, again wrapped in clear polythene.
