The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  “That’s true. But maybe they know anyway.” She yawned and looked over at him again. His lids were closing. “One last thing, Grady.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said in a thick voice.

  “How do you feel about the death penalty? You’re the only person I know who’s never said anything about it.”

  He was silent and she thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. But finally he said, “I’ve come to hate it. It means we can’t make any mistakes and we make mistakes all the time.”

  When she looked over at him again, he was asleep. Even Grady Traynor had limits at this hour of the morning.

  Molly got up in the dark, wrapped a blanket around her, and padded downstairs. She couldn’t sleep, but at least she could keep watch at the window for a while.

  When Grady Traynor came down at dawn, dressed and ready to work his Sunday morning shift, he came into the darkened living room so silently she didn’t hear him until he spoke: “Still at your old post, Molly.”

  She gave a start, guilty, as if she’d been caught doing something forbidden and shameful. “Oh, I just got up,” she lied. “My ant bites were itching.”

  He walked to where she was sitting curled up in the wing chair in front of the window. He leaned down and pecked her on the cheek—a cold dawn parting after such a warm night, it seemed to Molly.

  He started to turn away, then seemed to have a second thought. He squatted down next to her chair, looked hard at the dark window that was just beginning to show a dirty graying near the horizon, and said softly, “The same tragic and wonderful things will happen out there, Molly, whether you’re watching or not.”

  “But if I’m watching, at least they won’t take me by surprise.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” he told her.

  As she heard the front door close, she felt suddenly exhausted. Maybe she was getting too old for vigils.

  chapter 20

  Here’s the best deal—

  Hands on the wheel

  Go where you feel

  Work for a day

  Collect the pay

  And drive away

  Open highway

  Going my way?

  You made my day.

  LOUIE BRONK

  Death Row, Ellis I Unit,

  Huntsville, Texas

  It was a Sunday tradition.

  Molly supposed she should have taken Jo Beth to church when she was little; everybody seemed to think it was a good idea to give children some religious training and Molly agreed in theory. But the few times she’d tried it, they had both hated it with such intensity that even now, many years later, a Sunday rarely passed when one of them didn’t mention that the thing she was most grateful for on a sweet lazy Sunday morning was not being in church.

  Instead, they had their own ritual: every Sunday morning, even in winter, they swam together in the clear, ice-cold waters of Barton Springs. Afterward, they went out for a leisurely lunch. They read the newspaper and each worked on her own copy of the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was Molly’s favorite time of the week.

  They had been doing this for twenty years, except for a four-year interruption when Jo Beth had been away at college.

  As they walked from the parking lot to the pool, they were uncharacteristically silent, the only sound the slap of their sandals on the pavement. In the truck Molly had pointed out the patrol car following them and had given Jo Beth a blow-by-blow description of the events in Fort Worth the day before. Neither of them had said a word about Grady Traynor. Molly knew she had to say something but she couldn’t seem to get started. She stole a sideways glance at her daughter’s face and felt a stab of foreboding at the expression she saw there. Jo Beth’s head was down and between her eyebrows a deep vertical furrow dented the usually smooth tight skin.

  They each paid the entry fee and walked down the steps to the pool in silence. For Molly, Barton Springs had been a case of love at first sight. When she was fourteen and they had just moved to Austin, her daddy brought her here to swim. It had come to personify for her all the wild, slightly seedy, funky, laid-back beauty of Austin, especially Austin as it had been before the growth boom of the eighties.

  The pool was mammoth, the length of three football fields laid end to end, and spring-fed. It was a hybrid, part of it constructed of cement like any pool and part of it enclosed by a natural limestone cliff—a municipal pool that felt more like a swimming hole or a spring-fed lake. Irregularly shaped and somehow soft-edged, it seemed to Molly like a long skinny rectangle drawn freehand by a two-year-old with a broken blue-green crayon.

  At ten on a Sunday morning, the pool had just opened. The only swimmers already in the water were two sinewy, sun-dried women who were doing laps, skimming across the water like marine mammals. A few people sat on towels in the grassy areas surrounding the pool. One sleepy-looking lifeguard slouched on one of the eight high platforms spaced along the length of the pool.

  Molly and Jo Beth took the long walk around the shallow end, where a few mothers and small children were inching into the water, and up onto the rock walk along the cliff that led to the grassy slope on the far side of the pool. There they dumped their big towels under a towering pecan tree—the same exact spot every Sunday.

  They both wore thong-type sandals and long T-shirts over their swimming suits. In silence, they shook off their sandals, and in silence they both pulled their shirts over their heads. As Jo Beth folded hers and laid it carefully on top of her towel, she said, “Aren’t you going to say anything about you and Dad? I didn’t even know you two were on speaking terms and all of a sudden there he is walking naked out of your bathroom, for heaven’s sake.” She turned to look at Molly, who had stopped with her shirt in her hands. “That sort of thing can be a real trauma for a child, you know.” Jo Beth managed a half smile.

  Molly balled her shirt up and leaned over to tuck it under her towel. “It must have been a real shock for you.”

  “It was.” Jo Beth’s grin faded.

  They stood facing the pool. The subject of Grady Traynor had been taboo between them for so long that Molly found herself mute now. If she got started, Jo Beth might again start asking about the real reasons for the divorce; in the past Molly had parried those questions with evasions, vague statements about her own immaturity back then and their mutual incompatibility. Molly’s behavior at the end of her marriage to Grady Traynor was one secret she hoped to take with her to her grave. She had always felt grateful to Grady that he had kept her secret; according to Jo Beth he had never, in all the twenty-two years they’d been divorced, said a negative word about Molly.

  “So what’s the story?” Jo Beth asked.

  Molly shrugged her shoulders. “Well, you know he’s on the McFarland murder, so I ran into him there and we had a drink afterward, and of course I had to make a statement about finding the body, and I’ve seen him a few times since then, you know, like the night they found David Serrano’s body over at the Burnet Road storage place and we had things to talk about concerning the case and then he met my flight yesterday when I came back from Fort Worth and …” Molly saw Jo Beth’s grimace of impatience; she’d been babbling. The two of them had never been secretive about sexual matters, but somehow this was different.

  “Easy, Mom, easy.” Jo Beth reached out and patted her on the arm.

  Molly took a deep breath. “Honey, I’m finding this real hard.”

  “Yeah, I can see.”

  Molly walked down the grassy slope to the pool and sat down on the edge, letting her legs dangle. Her toes just skimmed the surface of the water. Jo Beth sat down next to her, still waiting.

  Looking down toward the shallower water, Molly studied the familiar pattern the light made on the bottom of the pool, a bright pattern of big shimmering hexagons—one of the many things she had wondered about for years and intended to investigate, but had never gotten around to. How many things like that, she wondered, would be left unexplored when she died?

  Without looking
at her daughter, she said, “I guess I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know what’s going on myself.” She didn’t know she was going to say the next thing until it came out of her mouth: “Really all I can tell you is that I’ve always loved him. Always.” Molly glanced over at Jo Beth, who was staring straight down into the water, a glistening tear balanced on her cheekbone.

  Molly reached her arm around Jo Beth’s shoulders, which felt as smooth and sun-warmed as they had when she was a little girl. “Baby, what is it?”

  Jo Beth’s head sank toward her chest and more tears fell. “Oh, Mom. I’m in love with Ben and it’s so utterly hopeless.”

  Molly leaned her head against her daughter’s. Benson Williams, the senior partner in the firm and Jo Beth’s boss, was married and had four children. He’d once been a U.S. congressman and everybody knew he wanted to be governor; a divorce was not likely.

  Molly knew that Jo Beth had said all she was going to right now; asking questions wouldn’t help. It would all come out later, when she felt like telling it. They sat like that for several minutes—two women, Molly thought, who conducted their love lives like something out of a country and western song.

  Then Molly rose to her feet and said, “Come on. Let’s do it before we lose our nerve.”

  Jo Beth stood up next to her and curled her toes over the edge of the cement, getting ready to dive. “One,” she said, glancing over at Molly.

  “Two,” Molly said.

  “Three!” they both shouted. They hit the water simultaneously.

  It was always a shock, no matter how many times you’d done it. The first contact numbed Molly’s skin and made her eyes throb deep inside her head. As she burst to the surface, she felt, as she always did after the first dive, charged with vigor and new awareness, more intensely alive. It was tempting to think in terms of purification, because that’s exactly what it felt like.

  She lay on her back in the water and kicked, stretching her arms out wide, feeling like a seal at play in an arctic pool. She tilted her head so the bruised left cheek was under water. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these waters that bubbled so clear and cold from underground could magically heal wounds? And wouldn’t it be even more wonderful if they could wash away old transgressions and sleepless nights and regrets?

  She let herself sink under the surface and, with her eyes closed against the cold, swam down to the bottom where she reached out her hands to feel the inrushing water surge up from a fissure in the rock. It was even icier and clearer down here at the source and she liked to think she was the first person in the world to make contact with this water. She stayed down as long as she could, then burst back up to the surface, gulping in the hot air.

  Maybe it was because the Texas heat was so relentless, so scorching, so steamy, that Molly relished the iciness of this water. She had grown up in West Texas without air-conditioning, when the only relief from the summer heat had been water, and this water was the best she had ever known—better than the cattle tank in Lubbock, better than Lake Travis where she and her daddy had lived, better than the chlorinated pool at her condo. This was spring water fresh from the ground, sixty-eight degrees all year round; it bubbled up into the pool, uncorrupted by the Texas sun, had its first exposure to the air, and gushed out into the creek.

  Molly saw that Jo Beth was beginning her laps, so she fell in beside her. Strong swimmers, they each did six lengths of the pool before stopping to rest. They sat on a rock ledge that jutted out from the limestone wall, positioning themselves so the water gushing from a cleft in the limestone swirled around their hips.

  Jo Beth tossed her head to sling her long hair away from her face and turned her face up to the sun. The furrow between her eyebrows was gone; her skin glowed translucent and honey-colored. Like Molly, Jo Beth had been born in February under the sign of Pisces and considered water her element; for both, swimming was a dependable restorative, especially in difficult times.

  “So, Mother,” Jo Beth said, “before we got distracted by sex, you were telling me about Louie Bronk. You don’t really believe he’s innocent, do you?”

  “I’m afraid I do.” Molly squinted her eyes at the water and thought how much easier it was to confront all this now, in sunlight, than it had been last night in the darkness.

  “But there’s nothing to prove it,” Jo Beth said. “I mean the trip to Fort Worth was a bust, wasn’t it? Other than your coming out of it alive, of course. There’s nothing at all to prove he ever had that car painted.”

  “Not a bloody thing.”

  “It must have been damned frustrating for you to be—what’s the old saying? A day late and a dollar short?”

  Molly ran her hands through her hair. “A day late. Yeah. It was damned frustrating. And Nelda Fay Ferguson, the woman who owns the body shop, kept saying it: if only I’d come twelve hours earlier she could have put her hand right on the receipt in seconds, so perfect were their records, so meticulous their filing. What a shame I hadn’t come yesterday. I wanted to strangle her. I hate being too late. I hate missing things. The saddest words in the language are ‘Oops, you just missed it.’ ”

  Jo Beth’s long, dark lashes were spiked with water. “Hmmm. A business like that—auto painting and parts—my experience is that they rarely keep complete records. They usually have huge holes where the underground economy operates.”

  Molly felt a little tingling buzz in her arms and hands—that old feeling when she got close to some truth that had previously eluded her. “When people barter or pay in cash, you mean.”

  Jo Beth nodded. “And Louie Bronk strikes me as an underground economy sort of guy.”

  “When he paid at all,” Molly said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah. But this is a service you can’t steal. He’d have to pay to get his car back.”

  Molly felt like she was just emerging from a fog. “Jo Beth, when businesses like that don’t report a transaction, do you think they keep any records on it at all?”

  “Well, they certainly wouldn’t keep them with their legitimate records, where the IRS could stumble on them in an audit, but I’ve seen lots of businesses that keep private records. They might want to keep them for their own use, like sometimes when there’s a guarantee involved, that sort of thing. Or they just want a record of the amount of business they really did, in case they want to sell the business sometime.”

  Molly tried to recall the conversation with Nelda Fay Ferguson the previous day. She pictured the sharp, tense face with the scarlet lipstick. The mouth moving, talking and talking, and Molly barely listening, her head throbbing, her bites itching. Once she’d established that the records were all burned up and that the woman didn’t remember Louie, she’d paid hardly any attention to her, to that endless chatter about perfect records and what a clean business her husband had run and the IRS.

  She said, “I must be losing it. That woman did nothing but protest about what a clean business her husband ran; she was clearly worried about any inquiries into her records. I must have been comatose.…”

  “Getting hit on the head can do that.”

  Molly scrambled to her feet. “Jo Beth, I need to give her a call. Right now. On the outside chance she’s got something. I’ll be right back.”

  Jo Beth smiled. “Glad to see that love hasn’t turned you to total mush, Mom.”

  “You too, sweetheart,” Molly said, patting her on the head.

  Molly eased off the ledge and swam to the ladder nearest their clothes. She shoved her wet feet into her sandals, and as she hurried around the pool, she wrapped the towel around herself like a sarong. She stopped to get her hand stamped at the gate and pushed out the turnstile. The patrol car was still there, double-parked. She lifted a hand in greeting to the young cop who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Baby-sitting the daughter and ex-wife of a homicide lieutenant was clearly not his idea of a good way to spend a Sunday morning.

  When she got to the truck, she flipped through her notebook until
she found the page where she’d jotted down notes about Nelda Fay Ferguson and Sam’s Body Shop. Instead of using the little speaker clipped near the visor she picked up the receiver; that way there would be none of the echo effect you got from a speaker phone that tended to make people think a whole roomful of people was listening in to the call. This conversation would definitely require a delicate touch and a feeling of privacy. As she punched out the number, she felt thankful for her ingrained habit of always getting a phone number; there was always something she forgot to ask in an interview or some piece of information she discovered she needed later on when she was writing.

  Leaving the truck door open, Molly perched on the side of the seat and punched out the number.

  The phone rang eight times. She was about to hang up, consoling herself that it had been a long shot anyway. But on the ninth ring, a dispirited voice said, “Ferguson residence.”

  “Mrs. Ferguson, please.”

  “This is her.”

  “Mrs. Ferguson. I’m so glad I got you home. This is Molly Cates in Austin. I talked with you at police headquarters yesterday.”

  “Oh … yes.” The voice came flat and reluctant, the auditory equivalent of a dead fish handshake.

  “You remember we talked about the records from July 1982. I told you I was looking for a white Mustang that got painted blue?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mrs. Ferguson, lots of businesses do some cash transactions that don’t get reported, you know, for tax purposes.”

  There was dead silence on the other end.

  “Now no one’s interested in that here. If your husband might have done some of those cash transactions back then, it’s not anything anyone would get upset over. Not in the least.”

  “I wouldn’t know nothing about that. See I—”

  Molly cut her off in midwhine. A good way to get people to cooperate was to give them a sense of participating in a larger cause, something that had some heroism to it. “Please listen, Mrs. Ferguson. This is so important. Remember I told you yesterday about the man on death row who says this car business could prove he didn’t do it? What I didn’t think to tell you yesterday is that he was a drifter who never had a checking account in his life or a credit card. He would have paid in cash. If you could find any record of a cash transaction on a Mustang for that July third to eighth period, under any name, it could be very, very significant.”