by J. A. Kerley
“It was dumb, but everyone got so busy with the dead guards and chasing a motorcycle with Crayline aboard that … well, it just happened.”
“I’ll see if I can’t get Babe Ellis and Sandhill in on this,” Harry said. “Could be fun. How’s the vacation?”
“Right now I’m helping look for a corpse that walked away from a funeral home.”
“Aren’t there more vacation-type things to do? Are there no pretty women in the area?”
“There’s one. I’m helping her look for—”
“—a corpse that escaped from a funeral home. Gotcha.”
Cherry was leaning against her vehicle when I walked up. “Anything?” she said, face hopeful.
“Thanks to the old letch, I might have figured out how a psychotic named Bobby Lee Crayline escaped while being transported to prison.”
“How does that help us here?”
“It doesn’t. And neither did anything else.”
We got back on the road and were on the Mountain Highway just east of Stanton when Cherry pulled out a notepad, studied it, exited down a ramp.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“Quick trip to tie up a loose end. I want to see if anyone’s home at the house on the lane leading to Tandee Powers’s death scene. The creek. No one was home the day we checked.”
I recalled the small house. It was probably too far from the road for an occupant to have heard anything.
“You said you knew the occupant?”
“An elderly lady. Hell, for all I know, she passed. Like I said, she was in her eighties. This’ll take a few minutes, then I’ll get you back to your packing.”
Looking over at Cherry I had a moment of doubt. But staying here would mean being sucked deeper into the black hole of my brother’s mind.
“I’ve got to get on that,” I affirmed. “I want to be Mobile-bound at daybreak.”
26
We wound down roads growing tighter and tighter. Turned on to the long slender band of crumbling asphalt that ended at the creek where Crayline had left Tandee Powers’s body floating in the water. We both knew nothing would come of the trip, but it was one of those investigative motions that had to be made, a box checked off.
“This is the only house on the road back,” Cherry said, slowing at a bend. “Let me see if the lady’s home.”
It was the small and rickety frame dwelling with a big silver propane tank at its side and the maples filled with birdhouses. A single rocking chair sat on the porch. As we pulled in the drive I thought I saw a motion at a window curtain, as though the occupant had heard us a mile back.
“Wait in the car,” Cherry said. “Some folks live deep in the woods because they fear, or don’t particularly care for, people. Strangers, especially.”
I did aghast. “Are you telling me I’m strange?”
“Sit, cowboy.”
I waited as Cherry knocked on the door. It occurred to me to put on a big yellow happy face so as not to threaten whoever, but I figured Cherry kept the happy face in the trunk with the bullhorn.
The front door opened. Cherry spoke for several minutes. I couldn’t hear her words, only her tone, like a traveler bringing news to an isolated settlement. I figured Cherry’s accent - which I was beginning to view as “richly textured” instead of “grating” - permanently marked her as a member of the mountain tribe, a powerful asset in a culture where outsiders had always been viewed with suspicion, generally for good reason.
Cherry walked back to the car, told me to come to the house. She stayed tight to my side as we approached, a hand over my shoulder. She’d never been so close or touched me, and I realized her nearness symbolized sanction. Cherry was giving me her approval so that Miz Bascomb could see that I was safe, a man who brought neither shadow nor harm.
Leona Bascomb was a tiny woman with bottle-thick glasses and few teeth remaining in a head that had seen at least eighty years of life. Her gray hair was full and fell past her waist. She wore a faded gingham dress under a starched white apron. Her brown and gnarled hands seemed constructed entirely of knuckles.
The room was Spartan in furnishing: a rocking chair, a small sofa, a pair of TV trays beside the furniture. It was the walls that drew my eyes. They were covered with sheets of cheap simple paper, the kind run through copiers. Each sheet displayed colors arranged in a variety of ways. Some colors were hard and disparate shapes, others merged and flowed. Many pages recalled works by Kandinsky, others Chagall.
There were at least a hundred such paintings taped to the walls. It took a moment to catch my breath, startled by the surprise.
“Your walls are covered with beauty, Miz Bascomb,” I said.
“They’re my birds,” she replied.
“Birds?”
She looked embarrassed. “I know they don’t look a bit like birds, an’ I cain’t he’p it. Whenever I tried to draw a bird like a pitchur, it didn’t look right. I couldn’t see birds real good anyway cuz my eyes was always on the low side. So I started drawin’ how they sound.”
I studied the walls again and began to see the music, the rhythmic bursts of color. The shading of notes gliding into others, or tapering off as a trill must have tapered into the air. One compelling picture displayed a three-color arc: blue, becoming a sideways, bottom-weighted crescent of purple, transmuting into a wavering series of lines, blue again. The background was coal black, providing a stillness behind the color, the sense of a night sky. I’d heard those colors recently.
“This one,” I said, pointing to the picture. “It’s a whip-poor-will, right?”
Cherry’s eyes turned to me with surprise. Miss Bascomb stared through the thick lenses, canting her head as if bringing me into focus. She walked to me, took my hand in hers. Her hand felt like driftwood.
“You’re the first person to ever see one right,” she said, leading me past the walls like at a gallery opening, pointing out towhees, starlings, robins, crows - a nervous jitter of black and yellow - martins, several varieties of thrushes and finches, bluebirds, cardinals, willets, grebes, plovers, and dozens more. When the tour was finished, a smiling Leona Bascomb went to fetch tea and cookies.
“How did you do that, Ryder?” Cherry whispered when the bird artist had retreated to her tiny kitchen, clattering dishes. “How did you know those splotches were a whip-poor-will?”
“I couldn’t imagine it being anything else.”
When Miz Bascomb returned, Cherry steered her into our questions. I sipped tea and nibbled a sugar cookie, happy to be out of the limelight.
“I wasn’t here that morning the poor woman’s body got found,” Miz Bascomb said to Cherry. “The health service came by real early and took me to the clinic for my six-month look-see. I’m good, praise God.”
“You mentioned hearing a car the night before?”
“It was almost midnight. I was up, puttering. Cain’t never sleep no more, just doze. I heard a car out on the road. Sounded big. I can tell by the sounds of the motors. I cain’t see hardly none any more, but God gave me ears as good as they git.”
“Is that common, Miz Bascomb, nighttime traffic on the road?” Cherry asked.
“Any traffic ain’t real common. Nothing back there but the ol’ logging camp. In the daytime, local kids sometimes go back there in summer to splash around. But most of ‘em goes to the divin’ rock over in the Red River. Water’s deeper and there’s other kids to show off for. I did the same myself, when I was a girl.”
“So the vehicle on the road caught your ear?” Cherry asked.
“I was waiting for it to come back out. It did, ’bout two hours later.”
“The same vehicle?”
“No way to tell that perzactky. Same kind of one, to tell by the sound.”
Cherry made some notes in her pad. “So a vehicle went in around midnight, came out around two. Possibly the same vehicle.”
The old woman nodded.
Cherry looked at me. It fit the timeline, given what we’d learned from
the lab about time of death. Tandee Powers was probably taken from her home around eleven, driven past Leona Bascomb’s house, then another desolate mile to the creek. She’d been dressed in a sexually suggestive manner, dragged into the water, tortured by being pulled under and then released back to the surface. This could have gone on for an hour and a half. Perhaps longer.
“No other vehicles went back down the road after that?” Cherry asked.
The birdsong artist frowned, trying to discern a memory. “I drowsed off around four in the morning. Something popped my eyes open just afore six. I’m purty sure it was a car, but I was sorta drifty. It seemed like it was going west toward east, like driving away.”
Cherry looked at me and shook her head. Not the car. It didn’t fit the timeline, the sun rising by six. It was the midnight ride that carried Tandee Powers to her death.
We stood and bid our farewells, Miz Bascomb seeming loathe to see me go, offering more tea and cookies, or dinner. I again complimented her work as we withdrew toward the door. I paused, turned, a sudden thought lighting my head.
“One more thing, Miz Bascomb,” I said. “The sound the earlier vehicle made. Do you think you could draw it for me?”
A smile crossed her face, as though the challenge was amusing.
“Why not? Lemme git my workings.”
Leona Bascomb walked to a cabinet, withdrew a sheet of paper and a box of bright pastel crayons.
“I got a daughter lives up in Louisville sends me my colors from an art store,” she said, sitting in the rocker and placing the sheet on the TV tray. She thought for a full minute and I saw her lips move as the sounds replayed in her head. Her ancient fingers whisked over the colors, selected.
The gnarled hands began drawing.
Two minutes later she handed me the paper. I saw a vibrating line that ran a few inches in yellow, turned green, jumped into blue and stayed the same until running off the edge of the page. I peeked out the window and confirmed the bridge that had slowed Cherry’s vehicle three hundred feet away. After crossing the bridge the vehicle would have accelerated to the speed the potholed road could bear, twenty-five or thirty miles per hour. The colors in Miz Bascomb’s drawing shifted abruptly, as the sounds must have changed.
“A standard transmission,” I said. “I see it shifting.”
Cherry stared at me.
27
Cherry dropped me at my cabin. We climbed out, stood on separate sides of the car. “Well, Ryder, it looks like this is it,” Cherry said over the hood, her smile strained. “I’m sorry your vacation turned into work. And for the record, I truly wasn’t the person who called you.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“Thanks for all your help. And your company. I just wish that we’d had the time to—”
I turned to the cabin. Something was missing. Mix-up was nowhere to be seen.
“You all right, Ryder?”
“Mix-up. Where is he? Mix-up!” I yelled into the trees. “Yo … Mr Mix-up. Come here, boy!”
Nothing. I turned to Cherry. “This is strange. He never goes far.”
She clapped her hands, yelled, “Here Mix-up!” I joined in and we walked up and down the drive, calling. I told Cherry I was heading into the woods and I’d let her know when he came back. I whistled, clapped, banged a wooden spoon on his metal food bowl, playing his favorite music. I hiked a mile up the creek, a mile down, yelling and banging until my hand hurt and my voice was a painful rasp.
No rustling in the underbrush. No happy bay as he raced to my side. Nothing.
I drove the nearby roads, stopping to speak to everyone I saw outside. Giving them my cell number in case they saw him.
“What’s your dog look like, mister?”
“Like nothing you’ve ever seen. And a lot of it.”
I saw a barrel-bodied guy wearing overalls and a ZZ Top beard sitting on his porch and cleaning a shotgun. I stopped, told him my story and passed him my number. “You know there are b’ars in the woods, don’t you?” he said, spitting tobacco juice over the porch rail.
I nodded. “But bears are few and far between, right?”
He thought for a moment. “E’yup. It almost ain’t never b’ars that get lost dogs …”
Thank God, my mind said.
“They usually get tore apart by coyotes,” the guy finished.
I added the aspect of heart-pounding frenzy to my search and continued another hour, passing out my number like a religious zealot jamming tracts into people’s hands. My breath stopped at a mound of fur at the side of the road, started again when I saw it was a deer carcass. Several times I wondered if passers-by thought me a crazy man, parked beside the road, yelling into the woods while beating a bowl with a wooden spoon. I didn’t care.
After two hours of nothing, I returned to the cabin, passing Jeremy’s home. Though I figured I’d said my goodbyes, I had to check.
“You’re still here?” he said when he answered the door, seeming to stifle a yawn.
“My dog’s gone. You haven’t seen him, have you?”
He wrinkled up his nose. “Not in two days. The smelly cur was on my porch. I was going to set out poison, but figured that would set you off.”
I stared at him.
“You’re still leaving, right?” he asked, looking like I was keeping him from a task.
“My dog’s here, Jeremy. He’s lost.”
“A dog’s going to keep you from leaving?”
“I have to find him.”
My brother looked perplexed, as if I was talking Gaelic. “But didn’t you say the thing cost you something like ten dollars?”
Mix-up had been a deal. The shelter folks were so happy to have him saved from Death Row they dropped the adoption fee. My sole cost was an annual license.
“Five,” I corrected.
He looked thoughtful. “Five bucks for a hundred-plus pounds of dog? Maybe I should start shopping at the pound. How do the things taste, Carson?”
I jammed my hands in my pocket to keep from punching out my brother’s teeth and walked away.
Mix-up hadn’t returned to the cabin. All I heard when listening into the woods were bands of rabid coyotes. Like most Americans under the age of forty, the prospect of traveling without connectivity was too daunting to consider, and I’d packed my laptop. In common with most pet owners, I had more shots of my dog than I could count - his first bath, his first swim in the Gulf, his first steak dinner. It took fifteen minutes to lash together a DOG MISSING poster complete with photos, basic description, and my phone number. I also added a reward, a hundred bucks at first, but the coyotes started howling in my head again and I upgraded to five hundred.
I climbed into the truck and rushed to the local library to print canine wanted posters, dropping them off at any venue with human traffic, gas stations, restaurants. I taped them to phone poles, bulletin boards at trailheads, the message boards used by rock climbers.
My travels took me past the Woslee County Police Department. I gritted my teeth and turned back, telling the person at the desk I wanted to speak with whoever was in charge, hoping for Caudill, but knew by the way my luck had been running it would be Beale.
“The Sherf’s on the phone,” the young woman at the desk said, pausing in the filing of her nails. “He says for you to hold your water ’til he gits done.”
I turned to the photo wall ubiquitous at cop shops, the parade of past leaders. There were five: a mustachioed fellow who had been sheriff until 1947, a hollow-eyed and cadaverous-looking fellow who had the position until 1967, and square-jawed man who’d started in 1967 and held the position until six years ago. The names beneath the last two photos were Earl Gaines Beale and Roy Stimple Beale, granddaddy and daddy, respectively, to the current holder of the title.
McCoy had described the earlier Beales as stubborn and humorless men from a time when rules were pliable, with enemies punished, friends rewarded, and the position paying so poorly it was almost expected that illegalities - moo
nshining and so forth - would be overlooked if an envelope of the correct thickness moved beneath a table.
Indeed, I saw nothing akin to humor in either pair of Bealean eyes, nor anything resembling stern-jawed integrity. They looked more like members of Ike Clanton’s gang than Eliot Ness’s crew.
The desk phone buzzed. I heard a burp and Beale Junior’s voice.
“Ryder still there, Louella?”
“Yup, Sherf.”
A pause. “Send him on back, I guess.”
I nodded thanks to Louella, pushed through the door to the rear, found Beale leaning back in his chair with his feet on a desk holding no visible sign of activity save for the lone Hustler half-tucked under a local newspaper. In one hand was a cigarette, in the other a bottle of Ale-8-One, a regional soft drink consumed like water by seemingly everyone in Eastern Kentucky. His eyes were bloodshot and I wondered if he’d spiked the drink.
“You’re not up in Augusta, Sheriff?” I said by way of greeting.
“Ain’t my party, Ryder. What am I gonna do that the FBI can’t?”
“You never knew William Taithering? You’re both about the same age, from the same county.”
“I used to see him around when I was in school. He was one a them geeky types, always looked like if you slapped your hands hard, he’d jump outta his shoes. You never know who’s gonna turn into a serial killer, right?”
“That’s what Agent Krenkler thinks? That Taithering’s the killer?”
“You don’t?”
I shrugged, not wanting to debate psychology with someone who would spell it with an S in front. Beale yawned, showing teeth that saw more repair than maintenance. “Guess it don’t really matter. Looks like the FBI nailed it where Cherry couldn’t. Be nice to have some peace an’ quiet around here again.”
It suddenly occurred to Beale that I wasn’t usually standing in front of him.
“Why you here, Ryder?”
I held up a sheaf of posters. “My dog’s lost. I hoped you could distribute posters to the guys on patrol, have them keep an eye out.”
