A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge

by Terry Shames

  I think back to the photo I saw of Jenny’s daddy and the cheerful look on his face when he was with his family. “You never had any idea why he left?”

  “I know just why he left.” Another shot of whiskey. She’s starting to have trouble focusing on me. “It was exactly what I was afraid of. He couldn’t face me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Couldn’t face me after she told him what happened. I was damaged goods. He wouldn’t have been able to stand being in the same room with me, so he left. At first Mamma told me that they had a fight and that’s why he walked out. A couple of years later, after I kept asking her if she’d heard from him, she finally told me the truth. She said she told him what happened to me, and he didn’t want to talk about it. A couple of days later he up and left. She didn’t think it was about me—she thought he was so disappointed in Eddie that he couldn’t stand it. But I knew it was me. He was proud of Eddie, but I was the one he adored. Sometimes that was the only thing that kept me going, knowing how much he loved me. When he left, I decided I wasn’t going to ever trust a man again.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “You think so? Why should I trust a man?”

  “No. You misunderstand me. I don’t mean your decision was harsh, I mean you’re not giving your daddy the benefit of the doubt. You felt so bad about yourself with what happened with those boys that you thought your daddy would have the same reaction.”

  “Maybe so. But I guess I’ll never know, because we never saw him again. Now you’ve heard my story. You know why I don’t have much interest in men, and why I was so close to my mamma.”

  “You ever think about seeing a therapist? It was a terrible thing your brother did to you.”

  “Where am I going to find a therapist around here? Mamma wanted me to talk to the preacher. I can just hear what he’d have to say. Forgiveness and all that.”

  We talk a bit more until Jenny seems calm. I stand up and tell her I’m going. “You going to be okay?”

  She shoots an anxious look at me. “Lot of stuff got stirred up.”

  “Listen,” I say. “Sometimes when somebody tells somebody a deep secret, they regret it and a tension comes between them. Don’t let that happen. You know I won’t ever let this information get past my lips, don’t you?”

  “Never had the slightest question about that.”

  When I get home, it takes me a while to settle down enough to go to bed. I’m not only mad at Eddie, but at Vera, too. Why did she let those boys off the hook? Maybe she had her reasons. Maybe she didn’t know whether Jenny could face the public airing of her ordeal.

  Some mothers might have wanted the boys punished enough to drag it into the open and have them arrested, regardless of the price their daughter would pay. Which would have been better for Jenny’s psychological state? Hard to say. Jenny has carried the weight of the incident for a long time. Would she have been able to let go of it easier if she’d known the boys were punished? I just don’t know. Maybe Vera knew that her daughter didn’t have the confidence to bear up under such an ordeal. Either way, what’s done is done, and I’m hoping that getting it out in the open will help Jenny put it behind her.

  I keep coming back to Jenny’s daddy. Is Jenny right? Did he leave because he couldn’t face Jenny’s shame? Upstanding man, honest, hardworking, loved his family. I don’t see it. From all I’ve heard of Howard Sandstone, he was a man who would have maybe been angry on Jenny’s behalf, may have confronted the boys who violated her, would surely have had a talk with his son to get to the truth of what happened. But leave? No.

  CHAPTER 32

  I’m at headquarters early the next morning after a poor night’s sleep. The phone is ringing as I walk in the door. “Samuel, it’s Jim Krueger.”

  “Jim, what can I do for you? The kids getting a case of short-timer’s attitude?” With the prom over, it’s finals week at the high school, and you usually get a few incidents of hijinks the last week before school is out.

  “I wish that’s what I was calling about. You know Rodell had a heart attack?”

  “Yes, I went over to the hospital to see him.” I hear a car outside and see that Zeke has driven up.

  “I got a call from Patty and she asked me if I’d let people know that Rodell went into a coma last night. She especially wanted me to call you. Said she thought you’d want to know.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “She said the doctor thought he might have had a stroke. His system is worn out.” The door opens, and Zeke comes in whistling. When he sees my face, he stops abruptly and stands there with the door half open.

  “How is Patty doing?”

  “She sounded okay. She said her kids got there when Rodell was still conscious.”

  I thank him for calling and ask if he’ll let me know if he hears anything else. When I hang up, I feel like everything around me is suddenly unrecognizable. I’ve known Rodell a long time, most of that time fraught with problems. But I’ve come to respect his determination to go out sober—not easy for a man so wedded to alcohol. I’ve seen a side of him I never knew, and I regret that it was for such a short time.

  I tell Zeke Dibble what happened. “That’s a shame,” he says. “But not a surprise. You going to be here for a while?”

  “No, I’ve got something I have to do,” I say.

  “About that,” Zeke says. He sits down in the chair next to my desk. “You’ve been gone a lot and. . . .”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I say.

  “No, no. It’s no problem. Odum and I don’t mind the work. It’s not like we’ve got a rash of serious crimes to deal with. No, I was just going to ask if there was anything I could help you with.” He gestures to the rest of the room. “Sometimes it gets boring just hanging out waiting for something exciting to happen. I thought maybe you could make use of my time.”

  I think about it for a minute. “Yesterday turned out to be pretty messy.” I tell him about the meth lab fire. “The problem is, we lost Scott Borland. That’s his picture that’s posted up there.” I point to the bulletin board. “I’m worried he might come after Jenny. It would be good if you’d keep an eye out at Jenny’s place to be sure there’s nobody hanging around that ought not be there.”

  It takes a while, but eventually I find the information I’m looking for at the courthouse in Bobtail. Eddie Sandstone married Estelle Cruz at the courthouse with two witnesses—a girl named Graciella Cruz and a man named Charles Cole.

  Back at Bobtail High School, the archive queen, Mollie Cleaver, doesn’t seem particularly surprised to see me. “I had a feeling you’d be back once you got the lay of the land.”

  I tell her I’d like to see some yearbooks spanning two years before and after Eddie Sandstone’s senior year. I find pictures of Estelle Cruz in the yearbook two years after Eddie’s senior year and of both Graciella Cruz and Charlie Cole the same year as Eddie. Neither of the Cruz girls show up in any clubs or athletic activities. Charlie Cole, on the other hand, is in many of the same activities as Eddie. In candid shots, they are often together. I wonder if he’s one of the boys Jenny says raped her. I show Mollie the photos of the girls. “Can you tell me anything about these two?”

  “I didn’t know Estelle, but Graciella had a part-time job in the front office. Good, hard worker.”

  “Neither of them seemed to have been involved in school activities.”

  “No. Back then a lot of the Hispanic children didn’t participate much. We finally got a Hispanic principal, Hector Salizar. He pushed to get the students of color more involved in the life of the school. We have a Dia de los Muertos celebration every year now and I think it’s good for everybody.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know what became of Graciella, would you?”

  “I don’t have any idea. Let me look up her records.” She goes to the computer, and her fingers fly over the keys. “Here it is.” She hits print, and after a minute a page oozes out of the printer on the table next
to her. “This is where she lived and her phone number. Maybe she has family that still lives there.”

  “And how about Charles Cole?”

  “That was a shame. Charlie was a popular boy. Went to the University of Houston, stayed there in Houston, married, and had a family. He had his pilot’s license and was killed in a small plane crash somewhere out west with his whole family. A real tragedy. Everybody was talking about it for days.”

  I start to leave and she stops me. “I’ll be interested to know what this is all about once you get it sorted,” she says.

  I tell her I’ll let her know, although it’s unlikely that I actually will.

  I drive over to where the Cruz family lived at the time that Graciella and Estelle were in school. The street is in a marginal part of Bobtail, with the majority of houses being rundown and in need of a good paint job. One of the exceptions is the Cruz house. Like the others, it’s small, probably no more than three bedrooms, but the cream color with brown trim has been applied in the last few years, and the yard is neat and trim. There aren’t a lot of flowers, but the beds are free of weeds. The one lone tree in the yard looks healthy.

  A woman in her forties answers the door. She tells me the Cruz family moved out a few years ago. “Mr. Cruz passed away and I believe the mother moved in with her daughter. I don’t know where they live, but the daughter is a pharmacist downtown. Either with the Walgreens or the CVS, I can’t remember which.”

  It’s the Walgreens. Graciella Cruz’s name is on the placard announcing the name of the pharmacist. I ask the young woman behind the counter if I can speak to Graciella.

  “You need a consultation?” she says in an officious voice. “I can help you. What do you need to know?”

  “It’s personal. I’m chief of police in Jarrett Creek and I’m following up on some questions about an incident a while back.”

  “I’ll see if she has time to talk to you.”

  Graciella Cruz eventually steps up to the counter, pushing her glasses up on the top of her head. She has put on a good thirty pounds since her school days, but she’s still a pretty woman, with dark, thick hair streaked with gray, and big eyes so dark they’re almost black. Her face is round and cheerful, but at the moment she’s frowning. “I’m sorry I don’t have much time. What can I do for you?”

  “Could I speak with you in private? It won’t take long.”

  “May I see some identification?”

  I bring out my badge, and she opens a side door to let me in so we can talk in her office. It’s a cramped space, with barely enough room for her desk and a small armchair. She gestures toward the armchair and sits behind her desk with a sigh. “Oof. Nice to get off my feet.”

  “Thank you for seeing me.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s about your sister.”

  “Lupe?”

  “No. Estelle.”

  She leans forward and frowns. “What about her?”

  “I understand she walked out on her husband a long time ago.”

  She sighs. “Got to be nearly thirty years.”

  “Have you heard from her?”

  She looks startled. “No. Did somebody tell you I had?”

  “No, I’m looking into another matter and her situation came up. Can you tell me the circumstances of her leaving her husband as you remember them?”

  “I haven’t thought about this in a while.” She knits her brow. “I was in graduate school at the time. Mamma telephoned me all upset. She said Estelle’s husband called and told her that Estelle had run out on him and gone to west Texas, to Lubbock. He asked Mamma if we had any friends in Lubbock. He wanted to see if he could go out there and get her to come back. Mamma told him she didn’t know anybody there.”

  “Did you talk to Estelle’s friends to see if she had confided in anybody?”

  “Oh yes. Absolutely. Mamma was so upset that I came home from school for a few days to be with her. We called all Estelle’s friends, but nobody knew where she went.”

  “Did anybody consider foul play?”

  “Of course. We considered everything. I went to the police, but they said there wasn’t anything they could do since it looked like she left of her own accord.”

  “Did they ever question Eddie?”

  She’s fiddling with a paperclip on her desk and seems to be avoiding looking at me. She lays the paperclip aside and shoots a challenging look at me. “You think the police would question Eddie Sandstone about the disappearance of his little Mexican wife? That’s not likely.”

  “I don’t know if you’re aware, but Eddie was arrested for assault the summer after he got out of high school.”

  She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no way anybody would have questioned Eddie without evidence that something had happened to Estelle.”

  “Did your sister seem happy with Eddie?”

  She smiles sadly. “My sister thought she had died and gone to heaven when she married him. He was popular, handsome, charming.”

  “So it didn’t strike you as odd that she would run away if she was happy?”

  Graciella shrugs. “People have arguments. Like I said, we worried, but there was always that chance that she really did take off and leave.”

  “What would make you think so?”

  “Estelle was a daredevil. That’s probably what attracted Eddie to her. She had a sassy way about her.” She smiles at her memories. “I didn’t really think she had gone off to Lubbock, but I couldn’t entirely put it past her, either. It was just . . .” She sighs.

  “What?”

  “Even if she did run away from Eddie, I figured when she cooled down she would get in touch with our family. We weren’t especially close to each other, but we were all close to our mamma. I figured if nothing else she’d eventually call Mamma.”

  “But she never did get in touch?”

  She shakes her head. “A few years after she disappeared, I tried to find her. I looked in the Lubbock phone book and called the police there. But I couldn’t locate her. And by then so much time had gone by, I didn’t know where to look. Why are you looking for her now?”

  “Some things have come up. It got me interested.”

  Her eyes search my face. “You think he might have killed her.”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “That thought crossed my mind, of course, but I didn’t know how to pursue it. Like the police said, there was no evidence.”

  “Did Estelle and Eddie get along?”

  “I don’t really know. They weren’t married that long, and I wasn’t around. I was off at school. I asked Mamma and she said she thought Estelle was happy . . . but she thought Estelle was a little afraid of him.” She holds a hand up to stop my response. “You have to understand this was my mother talking. She thought all women were afraid of their husbands.”

  “You said you had another sister?”

  “Lupe. She and Estelle were actually closer than Estelle and I were.”

  “I’d like to talk to her. Do you have a number for her?”

  She gets a funny look on her face. “I do, but I don’t know if you want to go to the trouble. She’s been in a federal prison for several years. She got caught up in a mortgage fraud scheme.” She shakes her head. “All those bankers making millions off of their shady business and getting their hands slapped for it, and my poor little sister goes to jail for eight years for some two-bit scam that her boyfriend got her into.”

  “Did you ever ask Eddie if he heard from Estelle?”

  “I didn’t really talk to him after I found out he had the marriage annulled. I mean, I guess he did what he had to do so he could remarry, but I didn’t want any more to do with him.” She gets up. “I’m sorry I can’t be more help, but I’ve got to get back to work or I’ll have to stay late. I don’t like to leave my kids at home by themselves too long. They’re good kids, but you know how it is these days.”

  “One last question. Do you recall wh
ere Estelle and Eddie lived when she disappeared?”

  “Yes, it’s easy to remember because it was a block away from my parents’ house. They rented part of a house from a widow. A while after Eddie moved out the place burned down. It’s never been rebuilt.”

  I find the address Graciela gave me easily enough. Although the lot is overgrown with weeds, the slab of the original house is still there. The house next door looks relatively new, and I wonder if the fire that destroyed this house took that one with it. I expect whoever lives in the newish house doesn’t know anything about Eddie and his young wife. On the other side, though, the house is old. Its weathered porch has a rocking chair and about thirty potted plants on it. A tiny old woman sits in the rocking chair watching my every move. If it weren’t for her stroking the cat on her lap, you’d think she was a mummy.

  I walk over and stand at the bottom of the porch, hat in hand. “I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute?”

  “What’s that? You’re going to have to come up here close. I can’t hear worth a damn.”

  I walk onto the porch, and the cat flies off the woman’s lap like it has seen a monster. “Sorry,” I say, nodding in the direction the cat disappeared to.

  “Doesn’t like strangers,” she says. She has a deep country accent.

  “How long have you lived here?” I say, raising my voice and speaking clearly.

  “You don’t have to shout,” she says. “I’ve been here forty years.”

  “Do you remember the woman who lived next door?”

  “Mrs. Kolajecko?”

  “She rented out part of the house to a young couple?”

  “Mm-hmm. She sure did.”

  “Did you know Eddie Sandstone who lived there?”

  Her eyes narrow. “Married a wetback.”

  “He married a young woman by the name of Estelle Cruz. Did you meet them?”