EQMM, July 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Helen, a librarian from Newcastle, NSW, Australia, is the keeper of It's Criminal(its-criminal.blogspot.com), which is devoted mostly to reviews. The reviews aren't exclusively of Australian crime novels, so there's plenty of variety.

  Like the other blogs I've mentioned, Helen's has links, one of which will take you to Books and Musings from Downunder(sally906.blogspot.com), presided over by Sally906 from Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. Sally's an admitted bookaholic, and she has lots of reviews. Again, not all the reviews are of Australian books, but many are. Sally gives you the genre of each book, her rating, and the opening sentence.

  Now it's back to the U.S.A. for a site that's a bit different. Its name tells the story: Classic Mysteries(www.classicmysteries.net). It's devoted to “podcasts andconversations about fine mysteries worth reading and re-reading.” As I write this, the site has reviews of The Eye of Osiris by R. Austin Freeman, The Asey Mayo Trio: Three Cape Cod Mysteries by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, and one of my favorites by Ellery Queen, Cat of Many Tails. There are many podcast reviews to listen to. Rex Stout, Elizabeth Daly, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh Josephine Tey, and Michael Innes are among those whose books are represented. All available for free at the click of a mouse. What a deal!

  Copyright © 2009 by Bill Crider

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: THURSTON by R. T. Smith

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  Art by Mark Evans

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  R. T. Smith is making his first appearance in EQMM here, but his work has previously been included in Best American MysteryStories, Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, New Stories from the South, and many highly regarded liter-ary journals. In 2006, his story “Ina Grove” was one of three from the Virginia Quarterly Review to receive the National Magazine Award in Fiction. His most recent story collection is Uke Rivers Delivers.

  * * * *

  Shreds of ground fog are still flossed onto the cobwebs in the meadow, but the air is already fierce with heat when the squawking sound summons Thurston Sherburne to the kitchen's north window. He is halfway through the day's first cup of black Maxwell House and stands in what Donyell called his “Joseph coat,” a bathrobe from Sears Roebuck with stripes of a dozen colors. Barefooted, untouched by a razor for two weeks, he works a crust of sleep from the edge of an eye. Beyond the parching lawn and the stand of wild plums he can see the remnants of the horse, which went down five weeks ago. Mostly bone now with a few patches of desiccated hide, it has hosted and sustained flying things, crawling things, and creatures that come only by night. The noise from it at this moment does not issue from the skull bleaching in the July light but from the ribcage, which Sherburne now sees as some undersized boatwright's unfinished project. The empty eye sockets are large enough for billiard balls—eight ball, he thinks, and cue. That night he shot cut-throat with Boyd Cole and Jim Feeney at the Rack & Mug starts to run back at him, but it's too much to handle, and he waves it away.

  The noise is coming from an immature turkey buzzard, which seems, despite the legendary canniness of its tribe, unable to reckon how one escapes such a cage after his efforts have knocked the bones a-kilter. It has worked its way in for the last scraps and has tried to tear at the softening bones, but now the bird flails its wings and, stretching its neck heronlike, la-ments its plight.

  He remembers seeing the quarter horse, Ree's old mare Hopi, founder and fall one afternoon and even recalls deciding to let her lie there, not eighty feet from the house, and send her death message to a rose of circling black things in the sky, then various other scavengers in their turn. Perhaps something that feasted on the ruins of the animal would know the reason for its demise, but he does not, and he does not care in this new, cruel phase. Rattlesnake, a hunter's stray bullet, old age and the strangles—it hardly matters. The meat shall inherit, he thinks, then, meek, but then, not likely. He has chosen to endure, as penance, the smell and daily depredations wrought by hungry creatures who dragged the entrails out and squabbled over strips and shreds, and he has nearly grown accustomed to the raucous skirmishes, the diminishing carcass, and, when the wind is lively, the stench, which is now nearly gone.

  The horse had once been a stunning russet color, fully astonishing when she ran and lathered up under the sun, sixteen hands with a strong gait, fast, the hue of her hide so vibrant its form seemed a door to heaven. Ages back, it seems. Ree's horse from before her marriage to Boyd, though she had long ago stopped riding her regularly and sent her out here for, she said, “P and P,” peace and pasture. Thurston has seen Hopi feed on sweet grass in a driving rainstorm with lightning cracking the sky and thunder rumbling. He has watched her standing steadfast under the thin blue moon while her last spindly-legged colt suckled, seen her lope behind his own small herd and nicker if they came close. Other than Ree, the aging mare had been the only real beauty in his life since he left the force, and when Ree began to wither in his back room under the medicine and depression, his scrupulous practice of horse-care began to unwind. If he couldn't have both beauties, he didn't want either.

  From this window he cannot see the plinth stone he has raised over his daughter. The family plot—Donyell, his parents, his sister Rue among the dead from two earlier farm families—crowns the rise just beyond the cow pond, under a stand of catalpas which blossomed only meagerly this year, the popcorn flowers fading and shrinking before fully opening. Likely it was the lack of rainfall, lack of snow, as well. Back in the spring, he and McCall spent a hellish day with mattock, pry bar, and spade digging the grave and the stirrup hole for the plinth in stubborn soil. He dragged it from the sloping shale barrens beyond the bull pasture, his own Morgan cross, Levi, pulling the sled without complaint, despite being unused to such drudge work. The rest of the markers up there are rounded stones, the earliest ones chipped greywacke or limestone, more recent ones granite, but he cannot see them from the house.

  The plinth is dark, six of its eight feet showing above the dirt like a rugged finger jutting out of the ground. Green foliage, fall colors, brown, or none—he will always be able to see it from the west window over the sink and from his bedroom on the second story. She has been in the ground since early March, and recently the sun ball is setting right behind the dark stone. When the sky is not too cloudy to preclude it, he perches in his reading chair at the upstairs window and watches the colors unfold behind the figure. “Let ruin have it,” he says of everything else, and neither McCall nor Betty Lou can stir him from the conviction that the world is over, and that he has destroyed it. They think it is from simple, heart-riving loss, but more than they need to know is tearing at his insides—questions of vengeance, of justice and duty. The graven letters on the marble footstone read:

  REE SHERBURNE

  1928-1962

  Beloved Daughter, Citizen, Lover of Horses

  NEVER FORGOTTEN

  Her deputy star is epoxied onto the stone under the profiled horse head chiseled beneath the words, and he has shellacked it over as protection against the weather, but he does not go up there now, nor does he return to the bend of the Buffalo River where no one, not even with dogs, would be likely to discover his secret under the wet stones that he was able to move in the dark only with the help of Levi.

  It was not, he knew, the cancer in her lungs that killed her. Not even the blistering poisons pumped through her veins in the last-ditch effort to save her wasted body. It was Boyd. He had hurt her and weakened her and broken her spirit, and there was no reckoning coming to him from the law, because Ree had kept silent about the damage, partly out of pride and stubbornness, but more, most likely, to protect her father from what he might do.

  The first time she came home to recuperate, Thurston bought the same story the others did: It's a rough job. You end up in scuffles with prisoners, chasing fugitives through laurel thickets, over ridges and down treacherous creek beds. Even the force's routine P.T. could be rough on a woman—hand-to-hand, pugil sticks, obstacles more rigorous th
an Outward Bound just over the county line. And getting tossed by a new horse now and then doesn't help. Bruises and scrapes, an occasional break. He'd been in law enforcement. He knew the drill.

  Most of the damage she kept private, and it just didn't occur to Thurston that Ree would let a man slap her around, twist her arms and snatch her by the hair, choke her, God knows what else. She was supposed to be armed and dangerous herself, disciplined and cool under fire. “Self-possessed,” he'd told people, “able.” And she'd gone running to the assistance of too many battered wives and girlfriends up on the ridge farms or down in the Shadows to let a husband abuse her with impunity. That had been his conviction, but it was the bruising about the neck that finally made him sceptical, that unmistakable thumb mark, though standing in the window now, listening to the wing flap and screech of the caged scavenger, he admits that in his gut he had already started to suspect she was lying to him. She didn't practice enough to be good at it, but he didn't want to know, and now that gnaws at him day and night. He is also coming to the conviction that she lost the baby the same way. She was a strong woman, and miscarriage wasn't common to the clan.

  Sipping from the cup of coffee, he is suddenly aware again of the day's heat. He can see the air beyond the glass shimmer and feel gravity pulling on his bones the way it does in skillet summer. He can hear the unbalanced vanes of the fan humming in the other room, and for a moment, he can feel Ree standing behind him. The smell of burning tobacco, a hint of Chanel. If he turned around, she would be there, leaning in the doorway, her hair tied back and a cigarette between her fingers. Just a hint of a smile showing the front tooth chipped on a missed jump when she was sixteen. Or she wouldn't be there, just heat and the familiar light filtered through dingy windows, the air smoky with motes and its own strange life. He doesn't turn to see.

  Sherburne is still gathering wool, trying to keep his mind off the night down by the river, the night he stepped willfully over the line, further than ever before. He's listening to a vireo in the tree line when McCall's truck rounds the barn and throws up a billow of dust as it slides to a stop. His son is trying to smile as he steps out of the door, and Thurston shakes his head. I taught them so hard to be true, they can hardly fake a thing, he thinks. McCall, though, I don't know. The quartermaster corps changed him just enough to prime him for commerce—tractors, mowers, and balers. He'll never make a killing at it, though, not like the naturals.

  "Hey, Daddy. I figured to mosey on out and check on you, see if you're ready for me to crank up the Allis and drag that damn dead horse off. Mostly bones by now, I suppose."

  "It's fixing to foal, McCall. Hard birth, though. Might need Doc Lawrence. Look there.” It's McCall's kind of joke, he thinks.

  "What the hell are you talking about?” He is striding toward the fence, his fresh dungarees and bison buckle bright in the sun, the oxblood boots a compromise between genuine farming gear and showroom costumery. Despite his reddish shock of thinning hair and the complexion that goes with it, neither Thurston nor Betty Lou can convince him to wear a hat, no matter how many they give him. He is smoking a Camel, Ree's brand, and probably not giving it a thought. Not the sight of her with the IV tubes, not the grim nurses nor the borrowed Methodist preacher's last “amen.” Though Thurston had been doubtful back when his wife said, “Let's adopt a boy” after her surgery, he'd been swayed by the old irresistible light in her eyes, and he's quick to admit McCall has turned out decent. Sherburne has never really regretted it, and he wishes Donyell had lived to see the boy keep afloat in the world. He thinks, Good to see your name pass on, even without your blood. Then he thinks of Ree's baby again, though it never saw daylight.

  "Make scientific history if that buzzard biddy lives,” Thurston calls after him, pushing the whim.

  "Godamighty, Daddy.” After six years of running the dealership, Boyd can slip with ease from slick merchant talk of interest rates and depreciation into his back-slapping feedlot ways, but it's all tainted by performance now. As soon as he crosses the old cattle grate, day or night, he starts to sound a little like Pa Kettle. “By ding, you done invented what everybody wants, Daddy, a way to catch up the bastards without breaking not a law."

  "I try to work within the statutes."

  "People with buzzards roosting in their oaks and apple trees and fouling their yards with all that shit and vomit, going after their lap dogs and generally making the place hell, they'll pay high dollar for this idea. You could get a patent, no kidding. Your crews just drag up a bunch of dead horses, and when the birds after the last scraps get befuddled and snared, you go in with gloves and jerk them out. Midwifing, sort of. You got a plan to haul them off, maybe rocket them up to the moon?"

  Thurston has never understood where his son picked up his fondness for such banter. Not at home, he thinks, hopes, or the one short year at VPI. Probably the army. He could remember the kind of mouthy soldiers who found ranking on each other in mock hostility a brand of relief from the foolish military regimen, bad coffee, and endless mud. And he'd never really held out much hope of mental excellence from McCall, who was good-hearted but liked his comforts and had a little of his mother's showiness to him. One year with the ranger service was all he could stomach of what Donyell, always smiling, had called “the family business,” and at that point Thurston placed all his bets on Ree to rise to the top rung.

  When she dropped out after a year of law school—flustered, she said, by the snideness and greed—it nearly broke his heart. She dragged it through the dust even worse with every postcard from Santa Fe, Pueblo, or Lewiston during the seven months she drifted, so when she came home, rode hard and put up wet, as they say, he was only too glad to grant his unnecessary permission. When he pinned the star on her jacket at the swearing-in, she beamed like the girl he had seen accepting her first ribbon in the hunter-jumper. As Donyell's flashbulbs popped, the tears he felt welling up were from pride in her choice and shame that he hadn't been able to protect her from making it. They wore the same uniform, but they were not steering by the same compass.

  "Show's about over, sure enough. We might's well just drag them bones into a hole. Whenever you're ready ... wait up, though—Betty Lou sent you some stew. Pen-raised rabbit, mighty fine eating. Plenty of homegrowed vegetables, lots of pepper, like you order it. Onions to cut the gamey flavor.” He crushed out his smoke and field-stripped the butt.

  "I read in the paper that Jim Feeny has sold his acres and decided to relocate down past Roanoke.” Sherburne's voice was flat, disinterested.

  "Plans to work for the railroad, I've heard tell. Maybe some draper mill. He's a fair hand with machines. Could be, but who knows? The truth is surely in that old hoss, ‘cause nobody's ever been able to get it out of him.” One of McCall's favorite lines.

  "I didn't expect his people to ever give up that little scab of land above the river.” He scrapes at his shadow with a boot toe. “When he stayed put after that Joelle divorced him, I figured we'd have to look at his ugly face till Judgment."

  They are moving back to the house now, McCall carrying the handled tureen, Thurston pitching the last of his coffee onto the dry dirt, the liquid arching like a cat's back. He's waiting to hear what McCall will say.

  "Myself, I don't disbelieve it's about Boyd Cole."

  "Talk English, son—you're among friends."

  "Well, the whole police clan—state troopers down to the magistrates—seems like they've got some investment in proving he's the hillbilly behind Boyd's disappearing act. They were tailing him hither and yon, stopping him on the street, questioning ... but hell, you know all that. You're in the club. They probably trotted out all their wild theories to you and asked advice."

  "Lately, they seem to know my interest in such matters has dwindled considerably. Let those ridge runners and stump jumpers from over there do to one another what they please. I've got no dog in the fight."

  "But you've got your suspicions.” At the door McCall turns, his eyes squinting from the sun. “Yo
u've always been the one, you know, to swear that hunter taint gets in the blood and won't drain out. ‘Once an officer, always one,’ you say, ‘jump to the belling of the pack.’”

  "Not this time, McCall. I've chased my last felon and riddled my last riddle. Ree, she was ... well, that's where it stopped. That Feeny, though, he'd bear watching."

  "I knew it."

  In the kitchen, Sherburne lets his cup slip into the sink, where it strikes a pan under the gray water and cracks.

  "Shit, that too."

  He reaches up to touch the tip of his tongue, where he's been thinking he might have bitten it in his sleep. The dreams were worse than ever, and now he often wakes to find himself sitting on the side of the bed, sweating and breathing hard. For years he's had the one of finding himself naked, facing a felon who is armed or climbing out a window, jumping into the back of a moving truck, but it came most often right before court dates. He'd always preferred the sleuthing, the routine patrols, and even the paperwork to testifying on the stand, nervous, wary not to let a slick lawyer work him. Ree, now she could have been better than slick, if she'd just ridden it out.

  Don't, he thinks. Don't.

  But now he remembers this tingling feeling on his tongue from yesterday morning, like a cold sore, but not visible in the mirror, zinging like a shot at the dentist. It isn't likely a bite. Something deeper in the nerves.

  Last night's dream was a typical chapter from the recent book. He's in a cell himself, though the office is not one he recognizes. Cold, not much light, no colors in the whole thing. A big schoolhouse clock almost fills one wall, but it has no hands and its ticking is fast, like a downy having a go high on a hollow trunk. Then Boyd and Ree come through a door, spatting, her twisting away from him. At first it seems harmless, husband-wife stuff, but as it escalates, Boyd swells to the size of a wrestler down at the armory, or maybe Ree just shrinks. He is in the cell yelling, but nobody seems to notice him, and then Boyd is smacking Ree with some dark, large object. He can't tell what it is. Then Ree is yelling his name, which she never called him, the short version Donyell had used when they were courting—"Thurst, Thurst!” His hands grip the bars like he's seen a thousand prisoners do, and he tries to shake them, concentrating all his force into his fingers, wrists, and arms. And then, when something gives way, like an arm pulling out of its socket, the whole section of bars breaks loose, but Ree is already on the floor, Boyd, or somebody who looks a lot like him, staring Sherburne eye-to-eye, everything, even the clock, gone silent, and he's yelling, but there's no sound, and when he moves toward Boyd with the bars lifted over his head, everything goes dark and light and then grayish, and he is awake on his hands and knees at the foot of the bed, the low gibbous moon out the window a lantern saying, “This way, here."