I drove onto the state road that led to the ranch, directly into the face of the storm, then struggled on westward the three miles it took to reach the beginning of the fence line. The rain flattened itself against the glass as if God were tossing buckets of water directly onto my windshield. I turned on the headlights but still could see only the yellow line directly ahead of me on the left and a drainage ditch on the right. I didn’t know I’d missed the padlocked front gate until I passed it, but that was all right, since Lilly couldn’t get in that way anyway. I looked for her car along the road that bordered the fence.
Two miles farther on, I came upon a white Volkswagen convertible parked down in a wide gulley between the road and the fence. The water rushing down the gulley was already up to the middle of the VW’s wheel covers.
I couldn’t see anybody in the car.
I parked off the highway on the grass for a moment, taking a chance on getting stuck in the mud, but more afraid of the chance of getting rear-ended by a car or truck that wouldn’t see me if I stopped on the road. I let the windshield wipers run and stared through the rain.
“Where’d you go, Lilly?”
I had to find her, storm or no, tornado, hurricane, cyclone, or blizzard. None of Cat Benet’s ex-wives had killed him, of that I was sure, and the only family member with whom he’d had a real feud was his sister, Judy, and she was also dead. I didn’t believe that Clyde Railing had killed Cat—he wouldn’t even have known the rancher was sick or where to find him, and besides, he’d been attacked himself. But this I did know, or at least feel deeply—between gunshots, ghost spurs, rattlesnakes, and a near-miss in an airplane, Slight Harlan and Carl Everett had done their damnedest to scare me off the ranch. Both men were pilots, either could have flown that little plane to Kansas City, killed their boss, then flown back before morning. For that matter, either one of them could have flown to Texas, rented a car, killed Judy Benet, then flown back. If they wanted the Benets either dead or ousted, if they so desperately wanted this place to themselves, I had to consider that Lilly Ann was a Benet and she was here, and I’d better find her before either of them did.
I drove back onto the road, past her car, then I saw the gate that led into the pasture beyond it. I pulled up to the gate. “Damn!” The fucking thing was closed. I forced my car door open against the wind, which caught it and slammed it the minute I let go. By the time I’d managed to lift the barbed-wire noose that attached the gate to the fence, push the gate back, then run back and get into my car, I was drenched clear through and shaking with cold. I flipped the heater on to high.
I drove down the dirt road, longing for a truck instead of a rear-wheel-drive, automatic-transmission city car. I decided I’d go as far as I could until there was too much risk of getting stuck in the mud, a risk that increased with every minute as the rain fell harder. It was really dark now, though lightning strikes illuminated the landscape like spotlights, terrifying me with their crackling noise and naked brightness.
I drove on, spinning my wheels, wondering if this was a futile effort, because maybe she’d gone in a completely different direction.
Then a lightning strike illuminated the hills in front of me. Against the bottom of one of them, plain as daylight, stood a small tent, one corner of it rising and falling, flapping violently in the wind. As I watched, the wind pulled another stake out so that now a full half of the tent was flapping and it wouldn’t be but a few minutes until the whole thing blew away. I could see the girl, frantically reaching for the flapping corners, trying to catch them, to peg them down again. I risked stepping on the gas harder and barreled on toward her.
With a crack and a roll of thunder, another lightning strike, closer this time, revealed another vehicle heading toward the tent from the opposite direction: a big, long car. Carl Everett’s Caddy? It was weaving, its wheels spinning in the mud of the pasture, but it was definitely headed toward Lilly Ann’s tent.
The Caddy and my own car got stuck at almost the same time. While I was spinning my wheels in the mud, alternately throwing the car into reverse and then into first, Carl got out of his car. I stopped long enough to watch him stand in the rain beside his car, then reach inside for what looked at this distance like a rifle. He turned toward the tent, his head down, the wind blowing his rain slicker back. He was weaving, not because of the force of the wind, I felt sure, but because he was drunk.
Did he know who she was, or was he going after her because he was drunk and thought she was a trespasser, even a poacher?
I laid on my horn to warn her, to distract him.
The wind and rain and a crack of thunder muffled the noise. I was terrified of confronting a drunken, rifle-toting Carl, but I couldn’t let him hurt the girl. I threw open the car door and pushed out into the rain.
This time, a lightning strike illuminated Carl and me to each other. He looked up, must have seen a figure standing beside a car in his pasture, raised the rifle, and fired. Unharmed, I threw myself back into the car.
Carl fired again.
I started the car, rammed it into reverse, and spun wildly back up the road, managing to make it almost back to the gate before the car plunged backward off the road into the grass and got so stuck I couldn’t move it in any direction. I left the car where it was, then ran through the open gate and down the highway, running, running through rain and terrifying lightning and thunder, running, running until I came to the open gate hidden by cottonwood trees.
I jumped the cattle guard, not wanting to take a chance of slipping on it and twisting an ankle. Then I plunged down the road, racing on toward the house, running over grass, mud, rocks, and piles of cow dung. Cattle were bunched together at the far fences, tails into the storm, and I felt as if they were watching me, the crazy woman, hurtling through their fields. I’d never seen such a storm as this, I’d never been in such a storm as this. The elements poured themselves down on me like vengeance out of a god’s mouth. Anger. Spite. Jealousy. Drunkenness. I am a jealous god, thou shalt have no other gods before me. My feet pounded in time to commandments I didn’t know I remembered so well: Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife or his oxen, Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father, Thou shalt not commit adultery …
“Slight!”
I screamed his name as I neared the house. I yelled it again as I wrenched open the front door, and again as I stood dripping in the doorway. I registered the presence of two men in the living room: Slight Harlan and the boy, Laddy Benet.
“Slight!” I was still screaming. I couldn’t lower my voice, I couldn’t stop it. “Lilly’s in the pasture west of the fence and Carl’s out there with a rifle, he took some shots at me, Slight, you’ve got to help me, Carl could kill her, she’s just a girl! Help me, help me, come on, come on!”
Both men ran after me, not even stopping to put on rain slickers or jackets, and we raced back out into the storm in Slight’s green pickup.
The gate on the west side of the road was still open, as I’d left it, and Slight plunged the truck on through. We half-slid down the slope of the hill toward the tent and the Cadillac.
In a flash of lightning, we saw them both, only now the girl was sitting inside Carl’s car, even from a distance we could see her terror. Carl stood straddle-legged in front of his car, holding his rifle nose-high, aiming it straight at us. Slight accelerated toward them. For the second time in a week I found myself roaring toward someone holding a gun in our direction.
“He won’t shoot,” Slight yelled at us.
Carl shot one of the headlights out.
“Down” Slight yelled at us. “Get down, kids!”
Laddy and I obeyed, practically laying our heads on each other’s lap to do it.
Slight skidded to a stop. He threw open the truck door and got out, hiding himself partially behind it, admitting the rain and the wind into the cab. He rolled down the window in front of him.
“You goddamned lunatic!” he shouted through it.
“Get back!” Carl’s voice was so deep, so huge with drunken fury that we heard him plainly through the storm’s racket. “I’m takin’ her! You goddamn sonsabitches took mine away from me, now I’m takin’ her!”
“Put the goddamned gun down, you goddamned moron!”
“Get back, you lying son of a bitch!”
While the two men yelled epithets at each other in the rain, the wind screamed around us, and Laddy whispered to me, “Can you get your hand under the seat? Feel if he keeps a gun under there.”
I moved my left hand down to the gritty floor, which was getting soaked, and brushed it over whatever surface I could reach, and it did come in contact with hard metal. Carefully, I tugged it out by the barrel.
“Yes,” I whispered to Laddy.
“Pass it to me.”
I slid it across the floor until he grabbed it with his right hand. When I realized what he wanted to do, I cooperated by lifting my legs up on the seat so that he could slide himself along. He nudged Slight in the side with the gun.
Slight looked down.
“No,” Slight said.
“What d’ya mean no?!” Laddy cried.
“I won’t shoot him.”
“You got to,” Laddy said. “Do it.”
“Christ, he’s your father,” I exclaimed.
“No, he ain’t,” Laddy whispered.
“Carl, no!” Slight suddenly yelled, and I pushed myself far enough above the dashboard to see that Lilly, or something, had distracted Carl, who now had his rifle pointed inside of his own car. Now he swung back toward us. I ducked. He was wild, drunk, out of control. Slight bellowed, “If you got to shoot somebody, shoot me, you crazy, drunk son of a bitch! Don’t hurt the girl!”
From where Laddy and I were crouched, we couldn’t see out, but we both stiffened when we heard the single shot.
“Carl, you bastard!”
“Oh, my God,” I cried. “No, no, not Lilly! Slight, did he shoot her? Slight, did he shoot her? Oh, no, please, please, no …”
Slight turned slowly toward us and reached out for the gun with an expression of infinite pain, weariness, and sadness. “Give it to me, son.”
Laddy handed him the weapon.
Slight braced it on the bottom of the truck window frame. He braced himself in the mud and fired. I screamed. He fired again. Beside me, on top of me, Laddy Benet made a sound like a stifled sob and said a single word that sounded like, “Dad.”
Slight Harlan crumpled to the mud.
Laddy kicked and crawled over and under me to reach the fallen man. I turned myself around and slid toward them. Laddy was kneeling in the rain, cradling Slight, whose eyes were closed.
“Lilly!”
The girl came running up, and she, too, fell to her knees beside man and boy. She looked up at me with the eyes of a mortally wounded fawn and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Carl had not shot the girl, he’d shot his old friend, who had then killed him in self-defense. Crying, I reached out a trembling hand to caress Slight’s pale, cold cheek, then I bent down to softly kiss him. I am embarrassed to admit I said, “Oh, Slight.”
Right under my lips, the bastard smiled.
41
He’s my father,” Laddy told Lilly and me on our wild drive to deliver Slight to a hospital in Emporia. We had left Carl’s body in the pasture, where the rain would surely wash away his blood, if not his guilt. “Slight’s my real father.”
It was from the hospital in Emporia that we called Sheriff Pat Taylor in Rock Creek. And it was the sheriff who decided, on the strength of our united testimony, that Slight had shot Carl out of self-defense and out of a need to protect Lilly Ann, and so there wasn’t any reason to place a police guard on him that night. That was a big mistake, though we wouldn’t know it until the next morning.
“When mother died,” Laddy told us during that wild and extraordinary drive, “she told me to get Slight to tell me the truth, so I came up here and confronted him, and he admitted it. He said he and mother had an affair while she was married to Carl, and Mom got pregnant with me. They were all afraid of what Carl would do if he found out, so nobody told him. Not my real father, not my Uncle Cat, not mother, they all just agreed to pretend that Carl was my dad. Uncle Cat made Slight agree to stay away from Mom and me, and he was so mad at Mom that he never saw her again.”
“But Carl found out, didn’t he?” I asked.
Laddy nodded. “Yeah, in the hospital, Uncle Cat told Carl the truth. I guess he wanted to get it off his chest or something. It made Carl crazy to think he’d been cheated on to begin with, and that they’d all been lying to him ever since.”
That might have been true, but I thought of the photographs of Laddy that I’d glimpsed on Carl’s bedside table, and I thought: He loved you, Laddy, or at least he loved the idea of you. He thought he had a son, then found out he’d been loving some other man’s son all along.
But I didn’t say it out loud.
“So,” Laddy continued, “Carl got drunk and decided to get even with everybody. First, Uncle Cat, then Mom …” The boy choked over that, but managed to go on. “He tried to kill Dad a couple of times, once when he missed and shot a heifer, or some damn thing instead, and another time when he sabotaged Dad’s airplane.”
“I was there both times,” I said. But Laddy wasn’t interested in that, he was only interested in saving the life of the bleeding man who lay with his eyes closed in the backseat of the truck, holding the hand I had draped over the back of the front seat. It was his right hand, on which the knuckles looked raw and swollen.
That was from beating up Mr. Railing, I suspected, from pummeling the man into a vow to tell Mark and Suanna the truth and to divorce Anna. I had never believed that story about a thief in the night in Winnetka; it was too pat, and far too coincidental. You did it for your late boss, I thought, gazing at Slight, and to satisfy your own idea of justice. I tried to condemn him for it, but couldn’t; it was too damn satisfying.
Every time I tried to slip my hand away, his grasp tightened. By the time we reached the emergency room, my whole arm was asleep.
The irony was that by killing Laddy’s mother, Carl Everett had given the boy back his father. Now the son rushed down the highway, driving as if he were saving his father’s life, although the wound didn’t look like a mortal one to me. In fact, I wondered why Slight didn’t say so, to ease Lilly’s sense of guilt, and to keep us all from being killed by his son’s fervor. But then, maybe Slight was dealing with enough guilt and grief of his own to drown an elephant, I thought at the time; maybe that’s what kept him so uncharacteristically silent on that long ride.
Laddy hovered around the attendants who placed Slight on a gurney. He tried to give orders to the doctors and nurses, who mostly ignored him. He pushed Lilly and me out of the way more than once in order to remain within touching distance of the uncharacteristically quiet man who never even spoke when the doctor probed his wound. It was only with the greatest effort that Lilly and I managed to drag Laddy away from Slight’s private room in the hospital in Emporia after the anesthetic had knocked him out.
All of which made it seem so much worse when we trouped back to the hospital the next day, only to be told:
“He’s gone.”
They didn’t mean he was dead. Sometime during the night, Slight Harlan had slipped into his bloody clothes and disappeared from the hospital, from Emporia, from his son’s life, from everybody’s life, including mine.
42
Even Detective Luis Canales was satisfied with the answers Laddy gave him, which were the same ones that Slight had given to Laddy, and that Laddy had repeated to us in the car.
Of course, it helped that once they had Carl Everett pinned as the murderer, they were able to pick up circumstantial evidence to support the charge: someone who’d seen him fly the little plane into Kansas City the same night I arrived; the motel where he’d stayed that night while he got drunk and worked himself up to killing Cat; the
motel where he’d stayed near La Segunda Ranch; and even some physical evidence that suggested he had set the fire there. It all pointed to Carl, and Carl was dead, and everybody was as satisfied as you can be in such circumstances.
Except me.
Oh, I believed he killed Cat and Judy, all right.
But I still didn’t have the answers to those mysteries I’d gone to Kansas City to solve in the first place: Why did Cat Benet leave his ranch to the Port Frederick, Massachusetts, Civic Foundation, and why did he bar his relatives from the property?
I thought about it. For six months I worried it until it became such an obsession that Geof didn’t want to hear about it anymore. He especially got tired of listening to me talk about Slight Harlan, and I couldn’t blame him for that. But he also got tired of hearing me say, “Everyone talked about Cat Benet as if he was a wild and impulsive man, and yet Dwight Brady portrayed him as very deliberate, never making a snap decision, always thinking about matters before signing anything.”
And, “They had this phone machine, Geof, and Slight never picked it up until he knew who was calling, but Carl, he’d pick it up on the first ring.”
And, “First, he moves to Kansas where nobody knows him. Then he gets sick, but none of them tells anybody who might want to visit him in the hospital. Then he dies, but neither Slight nor Carl call Marvalene, or anybody else that I know of. And there wasn’t to be a funeral. And the front gate was padlocked, and the relatives were barred. And yet he lets us in, perfect strangers, we get in.”
“So maybe the cancer had spread to his brain, causing him to do irrational things,” Geof said. “It’s over, Jenny, let it go.”
Bum Steer Page 21
