by R.J. Ellory
And then the visitors came—before he’d even begun to straighten up the mess—and the three of them sat and talked for a while, and then the visitors left and there was nothing but silence and disarray.
Glenn Chandler sat in his kitchen and wondered what the hell to do. Obligation played a part in it, of course, but it also walked around the edges of duty, even justice. He had been drawn into it by default, but he was pragmatic enough to understand that luck and coincidence were merely attempts to rationalize those things for which people were not prepared to take responsibility. He was responsible for his own daughter, and whether he liked it or not, she had gotten herself into a situation with this feller from Reeves.
Riggs was desperate to find his brother’s letter, and where else would they look aside from where Henry Quinn was staying?
Those thoughts were summarily interrupted by the sound of Henry Quinn’s pickup as it pulled to a halt outside the Chandler place.
Glenn didn’t move. He sat there waiting for them both to appear, and when Evie came into the kitchen, she and Henry were carrying paper sacks of groceries.
“Hell of a mess,” Chandler said.
“Alvin Lang,” Evie said. She walked to her father, leaned down, and put her arms around his shoulders. “I am so sorry, Pa. I don’t know what to say. We started getting it sorted out, and then we went to get some groceries. We will straighten everything out. I promise.”
“There’s a trail of photos across the landing,” Chandler said. “Most of them are of your mother.”
Evie hugged her father.
Henry stood there in silence.
“And while you were gone, I had a couple of visitors.”
Evie stood up, took a step back. “Lang?” she asked. “Did Sheriff Riggs come, too?”
“Not Riggs and Lang, no. But it was about them.”
“So who came?”
“Roy Sperling and George Eakins.”
“And what did they want?”
“Wanted to let me know how much trouble you were in.”
“We know how much trouble we’re in,” Henry said. “Riggs and Lang have cooked up a possession beef for me. Told us to back off or I go back to Reeves for a year.”
Chandler nodded, didn’t speak for a moment, and then he said, “And they did this to me, too. Trashed my home. Emptied boxes of my private papers, my photos, everything …”
“He searched Henry’s car as well,” Evie said.
“This isn’t about delivering a letter anymore, is it?”
Henry looked at Evie, back at her father. “I don’t think it was ever about delivering a letter, Mr. Chandler.”
“So what did Roy and George want?” Evie asked. She took a seat facing her father.
Chandler raised his eyebrows, exhaled slowly. “To be honest, I am not really sure. They talked a great deal and said little of any real sense. All I could gather was that there is some wealth of history between them and Carson Riggs, and they don’t want it coming out.”
“Seems everyone in Calvary has secrets,” Evie said. “Never been anywhere like it.”
“All comes back to Riggs,” Henry said. “And if you want my opinion—”
Chandler cleared his throat, interrupting Henry. “To be completely truthful, son,” he said, “I’m not sure what to think or feel about you at all. I don’t know what the hell you’ve gotten my daughter involved in. Now I’m involved, too, if only from the viewpoint that my home is being searched by the cops.”
“I got myself involved, Dad,” Evie said. “We’ve already talked about that. If Mom were here—”
“If Mom were here?” Chandler said. “Well, she’s not. She died, Evie. She died, okay? I lost her, and I sure as hell don’t have my heart set on losing you.”
Evie laughed nervously. “You’re not gonna lose me, Dad. Carson Riggs is not gonna kill us.”
“Maybe he will,” Chandler said. “Hear what Roy Sperling and George Eakins have to say about it, and maybe there wasn’t so much of the natural causes going on when Warren Garfield bought it.”
“They said that Riggs killed Garfield?” Henry asked. “He was Calvary’s lawyer, right?”
“He was, indeed,” Chandler said, “and no, they didn’t say that Riggs killed him. They said that people who start turning rocks over tend to find rattlers. Rattlers like the cool and the shade. They don’t like to be disturbed.”
“Then they told you that Garfield was turning over rocks?” Evie asked.
“In so many words, yes. That was definitely the message I got from … well, what I can only describe as a slightly surreal one-way conversation.”
“I am thinking we need to talk to one or both of them,” Henry said.
“How did I know that that was going to be your next plan of action?”
“Because he’s like me, Dad. That’s why. That’s exactly what I would do right now, and I am going to go with him.”
“My sweet, naive daughter … Everyone has more going on than they’re prepared to say. You’ve just gotten yourself wound up in the rightness of it all, and you think that backing off will say something about your integrity or your human decency or whatever.” Chandler looked at Henry Quinn. “Okay, so you shared a cell with the guy, and maybe he did help you out some, but if it came down to it, then would you risk your life to get this message delivered to his daughter?”
“I would, yes,” Henry replied, and he replied without hesitation.
Chandler seemed surprised at the speed and certainty of Henry’s response. “And why, might I ask, are you so indebted to the man?”
“Because he did the same for me, Mr. Chandler.”
“He risked his life for you?”
“Yes, sir, he did. Twice, if not three times.”
“And he did this because?”
“It may seem crazy to anyone outside of someplace like Reeves, but it’s a world all its own. There’s a way that things are done, and they’ve been done that way for a long, long time, and no one explains these things to you, and sometimes you cross a line that you didn’t even know was there. Before you know it, there’s word out that you probably ain’t gonna make it to the end of the week.”
“And you crossed some lines,” Chandler said.
“I did, yes.”
“And Evan Riggs took care of it so you made it to the end of the week.”
Henry nodded, walked from the door to the kitchen table and sat down facing Glenn Chandler.
“You are how old?”
“Twenty-one.”
Chandler sighed. “Jeez,” he said. “Twenty-one years old and you’re already in shit so deep most people’d have drowned by now.”
“What did you always say, Dad?” Evie asked. “No one should ever aspire to a normal life?”
“Not exactly what I meant, Evie. Gettin’ yourself killed at twenty-one wasn’t the kind of thing I had in mind.”
“I don’t really think Carson Riggs is gonna kill anyone,” she said.
“You don’t know what he’s gonna do,” Chandler replied. “And the reason you don’t know what he’s gonna do is because you don’t know what he’s hiding. Whatever the hell he has under his bed might be big enough to justify anything you can imagine. Say that whatever he’s done, or whatever he knows, is gonna put him in Reeves for the rest of his life, maybe even send him to the chair. You don’t think a man like that would be prepared to do whatever it took to protect himself from such an eventuality? The bottom line here is that you pair don’t even know how deep the hole is or what’s at the bottom, and you might go on falling forever before you find out.”
“Jeez, Dad, where the hell do you get this thing about people being killed from? What the hell is this? You honestly believe that Carson Riggs has murdered people? That he’s trying to hide something like that?”
“The point, my dear, is that we don’t know. This is West Texas. Normal-people rules don’t apply here. Even East Texas rules don’t apply here. Head out to the plateau and the D
avis Mountains and there’s an awful lot of space to lose a couple of bodies.”
“Since when did you get so paranoid?” Evie asked.
Chandler shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know … Maybe since I came home and found out that the Sheriff’s Department has searched my house, looking for something I haven’t even seen.” He nodded at Henry. “Maybe since this joker came along and got me to thinkin’ about losing my daughter.”
“You’re not gonna lose me, Dad,” Evie said, “but I’m not going to let this lie. I’m just not. I can’t even explain why not, but that’s just the way it is.”
Chandler smiled, a moment of recognition, almost as if he’d heard that kind of line delivered just that kind of way many times before. “You want my advice?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Roy Sperling. Calvary’s doctor for however many centuries. If he doesn’t know stuff, then no one does.”
“We need to get him out of Calvary,” Henry said. “I go back there and I might as well drive myself straight to Reeves.”
“I can call him, see if he’s willing to meet someplace,” Evie said.
“I think he’ll come,” Chandler said. “Got the feeling that there was a man who wanted to get something off his chest. Eakins did all the talking. Sperling looked like he had a ghost inside him just desperate to get out.”
Evie got up, walked out to the hallway.
Henry Quinn and Glenn Chandler sat in silence, heard murmurings of whatever conversation Evie was having. She was back within a couple of minutes.
The expression on her face was telling.
“He’ll meet us,” she said. “A diner just off 10, about twenty miles east of here. An hour from now.”
“What did he say?” Henry asked.
Evie shook her head and frowned. “He said the weirdest thing … that we didn’t have the right to judge him. That no one but God had the right to judge him.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Means he wants to confess,” Glenn Chandler said. “Means he’s an old man, and he ain’t as strong as he used to be.”
THIRTY-NINE
The world fell quiet for a little while. Rebecca stayed at the Wyatt place. Carson went about his sheriff business, called on his wife a couple of times, and from all appearances she seemed to be all right. Subdued, a little quiet, but all right. Carson spent a night in town, another at the farm with his folks. The third night he drove out to see her, took her into Calgary, and they stayed together in the apartment.
In the morning Carson drove her to the Wyatt farm once more, knew from his wife that Ralph would be gone for the afternoon.
“I’ll come over for lunch, if that’s okay,” he told her as he left the house.
She stood on the veranda and watched him drive away.
If there was anything unusual in his manner, Rebecca didn’t notice it. She went about the business of cleaning up for her father, gathering up his laundry, taking care of those things she had always taken care of. She forced herself to think of anything and everything but what was set to consume her completely. In the odd moment that she caught her own reflection in a mirror, she saw a frightened and lost woman. For Carson, her face was brave and resolute, but the facade was wearing thin. Hiding the truth was exhausting beyond anything she could imagine.
Just after eleven she made a telephone call to Doc Sperling. She needed someone to talk to, someone who had some inkling of what she was going through. There was no answer, and Sperling’s receptionist said he was up at County Hospital, wouldn’t be back until late afternoon.
Rebecca thought of walking over to see Grace Riggs, but she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing so many reminders of Evan.
She was torn in two. Not until now had she ever really grasped the conflict that had always been present. Carson and Evan. Evan and Carson. When they were kids, it was no big deal. The snake hunts. The rats’ nest. The incident with Gabe Ellsworth. The foolhardy stunts they had worked up together. Three of them, always three of them, and it wasn’t until this moment that she understood the ultimate inevitability of choosing between them. It had always been inevitable. Life was not fair. Life was not just. However, it could not be lived backward, and things done could never be undone. At least not this.
For the hundredth time since her conversation with Doc Sperling, she found herself truly overwhelmed. Cleaning the tub on her hands and knees in the bathroom, she just leaned forward, rested her head against the cool edge, and sobbed. She made barely a sound, and the tears ran down her face and dampened the front of her apron. After a while she got to her feet and washed her face, sat there on the rim of the bathtub and took as many deep breaths as she could. A sense of dizziness filled her mind, but it passed soon enough.
She went back to cleaning the tub. It was another half an hour before she started crying again, this time on the back veranda as she hung her father’s work shirts up to dry.
This is madness, she told herself. This is getting me nowhere …
Nevertheless, she could not stop herself. The tears came, and there seemed to be an unlimited supply.
She needed to speak to Evan, but she knew she could not. They had not been able to find him for the wedding, and in some small way she had been glad of it. Knowing he was Carson’s best man, standing right there beside her husband-to-be as she made vows that she could so easily have made to Evan, would have been worse than … No, she corrected herself, nothing could be worse than what she was facing right now.
Evan did not know he was going to be a father. Carson believed he was the father, but soon enough he would understand otherwise, and then what?
She could not hide; she could not escape; she could not run away or desert Calvary and her husband. She could not leave her father behind; she could not vanish into thin air. She could do nothing but wait for that inevitable moment when Carson was informed of the truth. He was not going to be a father; he was going to be an uncle.
And had she known she was pregnant right away, would she have aborted the child? That was a question she could not answer. As of tomorrow, she would be six months pregnant. Abortion was now impossible, and thus it would serve no purpose to further cloud her mind with considerations of it.
Close to noon, Rebecca heard the sound of a car. She was cried out, at least for the moment, and thus there were no further tears to be hidden as she went to greet her husband. She’d made a chicken broth, sandwiches, too, and a pot of fresh coffee was even now brewing on the stove.
Seemed he was not alone, for following his was another car, behind that a white vehicle she did not recognize.
It was only when Carson drew to a halt in the yard that she realized that Doc Sperling had come, too.
Her heart stopped.
Had he told Carson? Was this the moment he’d chosen to tell Carson what was going on?
Carson got out of the car. He did not smile at his wife. He reached back into the vehicle and took out his hat. He put it on.
The white vehicle drew to a halt behind Sperling’s car. A man and a woman emerged, both of them dressed in hospital uniforms.
“Carson?” she said, her voice faltering. “What’s happening?”
Carson looked back at Sperling. Sperling looked crestfallen, as if even now he was bearing the very worst news a man could ever bear.
“I never said a thing—” he started, but Carson said, “Shut the hell up, Roy,” and then looked back at his wife as she came down the steps from the veranda and into the yard.
“What’s going on, Carson?” she said, even though she understood full well.
“You know what’s going on, Rebecca,” he said.
Her eyes wide, blood draining from her face, she looked and felt no more than a ghost.
“Carson, I beg of you—” Sperling said, and the expression on his face said that anywhere in the world would be a better place than where he was in that moment.
“Enough, Roy,” Carson said. “Don’t say another word.”
“Sweetheart,” Rebecca said. “Tell me what’s happening? Who are these people?”
“They are from Ector County Hospital,” Carson said. “They are here to take care of things.”
“Take care of things?” she asked. “What things, Carson? What are you talking about?”
Carson sneered at her. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he said. “You know why I’m here. You know what’s going on. You know exactly what’s happened … and no, Roy Sperling didn’t tell me about it. I heard it from my own mother’s lips. I heard what you did, and I know that the child you’re carrying isn’t mine, and there is no way in the world I am going to let you live under my roof with my brother’s child, Rebecca—”
“Carson … Carson, please … You can’t take away the baby. No, you can’t do that. Please, please, you must forgive me …”
“Forgive you? You want me to forgive you? And how would this work, Rebecca? I should just make believe that the child you’re carrying is mine?” Carson shook his head in disgust. He looked back toward the medical orderlies. “Take her,” he said.
Rebecca rushed toward Doc Sperling as if there were some chance that he might come to her aid.
Sperling stepped back. Simultaneously, he lowered his head and looked down at the ground. “It is out of my hands, Rebecca,” he said, and Rebecca understood all too clearly that Sperling would not help her.
The woman grabbed Rebecca’s arm. “You need to come with us, dear,” she said.
Rebecca pulled back, turned to run, but the woman was fast. The man joined her, and within a heartbeat Rebecca had her arms pinned on either side.
“Carson!” she cried. “Carson, stop them! Carson, you can’t do this!”
Carson Riggs looked back at his wife, his expression harder than flint. “You want me to be a better husband, do you?” he asked. “Perhaps you should have considered how to be a better wife.”
“Carson … no …” Rebecca pleaded, but there was nothing.
The orderlies marched her back to the white car and bundled her inside, the woman in the rear of the vehicle holding her down as the man stepped around to take the driver’s seat.
