A Darker Justice

by Sallie Bissell

  He stepped out from the stall, the old diary pressed to his side. The other boys stood silent, huddled and watching. Galloway tried to smile; McCall stood with hands clasped in front of him, trying to protect himself any way he could. Only fat, dumb Darrell kept his head lowered, his gaze fixed on the floor. Darrell knew what was coming. He’d been wienied before, a time or two.

  “Wh-what do you know about Willett?” Cabe forced himself to look up into Tallent’s pink, piggy face.

  “He sends you all his love,” Grice said in a high falsetto.

  “Yeah,” Tallent snarled. “All the way from hell, which is where Willett is. Too bad he won’t be around to protect you no more.”

  Before Tommy could spit out a word of protest, Tallent slapped him, snapping his head back against the bathroom stall, sending his glasses flying. Tommy heard them land, somewhere under the sinks, then someone snatched the diary from his hands. He heard Tallent and Grice laughing.

  “Look at poor little C-C-Cabe. Got his thick old glasses broke again. He really needs his Wilma, now.”

  “What’s this old shit you’re reading, Cabe?” Tallent mocked, opening the diary. “Looks like Abe Lincoln wrote it.”

  Cabe tried to grab the book back, but Grice snatched it away and threw it back into his stall. He felt a fist pummel into his gut. He doubled over, a dark red curtain shimmering down over his eyes.

  “What do you mean reading in the john, C-C-Cabe?” Tallent demanded. “Don’t you know that’s bad manners? Or didn’t your mom, the whore, teach you no better?”

  “You go to hell!” Cabe cried, trying to stand upright long enough to take a swing at Tallent’s face, wishing he could kill both of them.

  They dodged easily away from his blows, laughing and sniggering. Pretending to be afraid, they danced around him, cuffing at his face. Ruthlessly they grabbed him and spun him around. Grice jerked his pajama pants to his knees, then held him down, bent over at the waist. He squirmed hard to get away, but Grice was too strong. When his pajamas fell to his ankles, Tallent began swatting his bare buttocks. They beat him with their open hands, slapping him as they would a woman. The other boys laughed nervously as he slipped and fell to the floor, but Tallent and Grice just pulled him up and started all over again.

  “No more Wilma now, C-C-Cabe,” Tallent sneered. “Nobody left standing between you and me.” He unbuckled his belt and pulled it from around his waist. “But don’t worry, Cabe. We’re doing you a big favor. We’re teaching you to be more of a man than little Wilma ever could be. You’ll thank us someday.”

  That’s absolutely right, Tommy Cabe thought, squeezing his eyes shut against all his pain and humiliation. Someday I will thank the living shit out of you, he vowed.

  CHAPTER 22

  The moon had risen above the mountains by the time the horses finished eating. One by one they crunched the last of their oats, took long slurps of water from their buckets, and settled down to sleep. Mary leaned against the foaling stall, watching Lady Jane turn in a circle like a dog, finally finding a position that suited her. As the little mare with the huge belly arranged herself in the straw, Mary heard a noise behind her. Instinctively she whirled around, then she recognized Safer’s silhouette in the doorway. He held what looked like a camera bag in his right hand.

  “Hey,” he called softly. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay,” she lied, her shoulders relaxing. “I just finished feeding the horses.”

  “I still need to get a copy of your prints.” He held out the bag. “And a statement.”

  “Sure.” Her heart gave a little thump of disappointment. She was hoping he’d say something different—what, she didn’t know. Maybe that they’d found Irene, or that she wasn’t such a fuckup as a bodyguard. But no words of comfort left Safer’s mouth. Why should they? He was here to track a killer, not ease her guilt.

  He glanced at the dimly lit rafters of the hayloft. “Maybe we’d better go back up to the house, where we can see better.”

  “Let’s try the tack room. Irene’s got a little office in there.”

  She opened a door and turned on an overhead light. Safer followed her into a small room where, along with an extensive array of saddles and bridles, Irene kept a battered couch, a desk, and a dorm-sized refrigerator that held medicine for her horses.

  Safer sat down on the couch. “Smells like a shoe store in here.”

  “All the leather,” Mary explained, watching as he pulled out a small tape recorder and something that vaguely resembled a kid’s set of watercolors.

  “What do you want to do first?” He looked at her almost shyly. “Statement or prints?”

  “You choose.” She sat beside him on the couch. He turned on the tape recorder and handed it to her. Holding the microphone close to her mouth, she recounted everything, from finding the black feather in the bathroom to calling Safer on the cell phone.

  When she finished, he rewound the tape and switched the recorder off.

  “Thanks,” he said softly. “I know that wasn’t easy.”

  “Statements never are.” Blurry-eyed, she stared at the mahogany-colored saddles. “I’ve made enough to know.”

  Safer put the recorder back in his bag and opened his set of watercolors, which turned out to be a fingerprint kit. Ten little pots of smooth black ink next to ten little squares of fingertip-sized white paper. Balancing the kit across his knees, he reached over and took her right hand. “Sheriff Logan thinks I ought to put you in charge of the investigation and go back home to D.C.”

  Mary felt her face grow hot. She despised being the subject of cop gossip. “Let me guess. He told you I tracked a crazy man for three days through the forest, then smashed another man’s head in before I pushed him into a nest of rattlesnakes?”

  Safer’s hand on hers felt like warm silk. “I believe it went something like that,” he said quietly, keeping his eyes on his work as he printed her left ring finger.

  “Did he tell you that the man deserved it?”

  “No.” Safer stroked her finger before he pressed it into the ink. “I figured that out on my own.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Safer handed her a tissue and reached for her right hand.

  “You know what else he told me?” Safer asked. “He warned me that you were trouble. Said you had the perfect name—that death was your bread and butter. Just like a crow.”

  For the first time, Mary could see the true color of his eyes—not black, but dark, dark brown, like feldspar flecked with quartz.

  His surprisingly gentle fingers guided hers across the ink and onto the paper. In the silence that sprang between them, his movements became almost languid, as if he wanted to prolong the process as long as he could. When he finished he looked at her hand, cupping it in his as if it were made of glass.

  “What do you think?” she asked impulsively. “Is this the hand of a reveler in death?”

  He looked at her with a fierceness that took her by surprise. “I think you and I might be cut from the same cloth,” he whispered, his voice like sand.

  She stared at him, astonished. He started to say something else, but the cell phone in his pocket beeped. He sat back on the couch and closed up the print kit, offering her another tissue as he answered the phone.

  “Safer here,” he said, his voice once again crisp and perfunctory.

  He listened for a moment, then switched off with a brisk, “I’ll be right there.” Quickly he repacked his bag and stood.

  “I’ve got to get back to the house.” He spoke awkwardly, as if embarrassed by the words he’d said moments before. “Why don’t you come, too? Logan’s gone. And it’s warmer up there.”

  “Thanks,” she replied. “But I want to stay out here awhile. Make sure the horses are okay.”

  “Sure.” He dipped his head and shouldered the fingerprint bag. “I’ll see you later, then.”

  She watched him stride back to Irene’s empty house, then she checked the horses one final time. Four
stood dozing on their feet, while Lady Jane and Stella lay curled up in their straw. Mary stopped to see if the mare exhibited any signs of imminent labor, but Lady Jane seemed like just another tired horse, sleeping with her front legs tucked neatly beneath her like a deer.

  All at once she, too, felt weary beyond belief—tired as if she’d crawled all the way from Atlanta on her hands and knees. Yawning, she returned to the tack room, where she found a large blanket along with several smaller, thicker ones that Irene used as saddle pads. Hoisting the lot over her shoulder, she climbed up to the hay loft, her legs feeling like lead. She kicked all the loose hay in front of the loft window and spread it out on the floor. Over that she placed the saddle pads and spread the larger blanket. With a brilliant winter sky overhead, she lay down and burrowed into the fragrant hay. All the lights in Irene’s house still blazed. The two green vans still sat in the driveway. Safer and his Feds were working this case, busy as bees in a hive.

  She supposed she should go back up there, but cops got irritated when someone wandered into the middle of an investigation. What could she do, anyway? If it hadn’t been for her, Irene would be there right now, playing her piano.

  Her eyelids grew heavy and she began to drift in and out of a dream about Irene and Jonathan and his new love, Ruth Moon. She was floating, following them all down a long hall, only they were running and she was helplessly floating, insignificant to them as a dust mote in the air.

  * * *

  The next thing she knew she was sitting up, chilled and itchy. The prickly hay had lost its warmth and the Beretta had rubbed a sore place under her arm. The horses slept below her, Spindletop snoring as loud as any human sleeper. Tilting her head, Mary realized something else. Music was floating through the night air. Notes from a piano, bright and clear as stars.

  “She’s back!” Mary cried, flinging the horse blanket off. “They found her!”

  Without stopping to think, she raced headlong down the hayloft stairs, tearing through the stable and up the hill to the house. The lights in the kitchen had been turned off, but she could see a glow from the living room. Irene had sent the Feds home and was playing the piano! She flew through the grape arbor, across the patio, up to the back door. She tugged on it, but it did not budge. She ran around to the front of the house, where golden light poured out onto the porch as golden notes poured into the air—fast, bright, Bach-like melodies. Mary’s heart soared as she leaped up the front steps. Irene was home and playing music!

  The front door, too, was locked. As the music accelerated, she raced to the window. Grinning, she pressed her nose against the cold glass, waiting to catch a glimpse of that familiar silver head bobbing over the music. Then her heart fell. Though it was Irene’s house and Irene’s piano, it was not Irene playing. Safer sat at the old Steinway, pounding the keyboard as if the secret to Irene’s disappearance lay hidden in the ivory beneath his fingers.

  “Oh,” Mary whispered, her joy seeping away like air leaking from a balloon. “It’s you.” When Safer came to the end of the piece, she tapped on the window.

  He looked up, startled, then rose from the piano bench and unlocked the door. “I thought you were asleep in the hayloft.”

  “I heard you playing. I thought you were Irene.”

  “I’m sorry,” he replied, his voice instantly full of regret. “I didn’t mean for you . . .”

  “It’s okay.” She walked past him into the living room. “Forget it.”

  He closed the door and returned to the piano while she slumped into an armchair. He began to play again. This time the tune was softer but sad, in a bittersweet way. As she closed her eyes and listened, she had to admit that whatever Safer had or hadn’t accomplished as an FBI agent, he could certainly play the piano. He finished the first song, then began another. This one she knew—she’d heard a girl sing it one night when she and Jonathan went to a piano bar. She smiled, the lyrics echoing in her head. “When Sunny gets blue, her eyes get gray and cloudy, then the rain begins to fall . . .”

  She drifted away, immersed in the music until the last notes faded into silence. When she sat up and opened her eyes, Safer was staring at her, his dark gaze again inscrutable.

  “You play well,” she said, embarrassed that he had caught her in such an unguarded moment. “That’s a nice tune.”

  “It seemed to fit the moment,” he replied.

  “Do you always play the piano in the middle of an investigation?”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Safer almost laughed. His cheeks rounded and she caught a flash of straight, white teeth through his thick beard. All her lovers had either been clean-shaven or, like Jonathan, grew little facial hair at all. What would it be like, she wondered, to have Safer’s beard curling around my fingers?

  “When I’m trying to figure something out,” he said, tinkling out the melody to “Stardust.”

  “What are you trying to figure out now?”

  He nodded. “The pattern. Irene Hannah’s the twelfth judge in twelve months, but none have had exactly the same MO. Klinefelter was beheaded, Hannah was abducted.”

  “But there were black feathers at the last two crime scenes. They must be some kind of signature.”

  Safer started a Bach minuet. “But why didn’t they just stick the feather in her mouth and kill her, right there in the bathroom? They could have poisoned her easily. Hell, they probably had enough time to chop off her head.”

  Mary’s stomach tightened so at the thought of Irene being decapitated that she had to cover her mouth with her hand.

  “I’m sorry.” Safer quit playing. “I keep forgetting how much she means to you. It was pretty cool what you guys did yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” The day before seemed to Mary like a distant memory.

  “You know, Christmas afternoon. That horse-rearing thing.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Mary. “That was pretty cool.” She stared at the Christmas tree for a moment, then she turned back to him. “Have you increased the protection on the other judges?”

  He nodded. “The entire federal judiciary is on full alert. Everybody’s got some kind of guard on them.” He frowned at the keyboard and played a single note. The sound echoed in the silence. “I just can’t figure out how the hell they knew Judge Hannah was going to be at the dentist’s this afternoon.”

  Mary thought of smug Rebecca Taylor. “I assume Dr. Moreland checked out.”

  “Everybody who works in and around that building checks out, although the dentist’s receptionist did accuse you of trying to intimidate her.”

  “Then somebody who blends in very well in Hartsville must have staked us out,” said Mary.

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Damn.” She pressed her fingertips against her forehead. “Why didn’t I just get out of the truck and go in with her?”

  “Look.” Safer leaned forward. “Don’t go to the land of coulda-woulda-shoulda. You’re a female civilian. You did the best you could. Considering what happened, you did a great job.”

  Mary swallowed hard, trying to loosen the guilt that felt coiled around her throat. “Don’t baby me, Safer. You know as well as I do that if I’d stayed with her, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Maybe. But maybe it would have, anyway. Maybe it would have been worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Maybe they would have eliminated you and taken her just the same.”

  She sighed. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  He played a complex jazz chord, mournful and full of longing. As he let it fade into silence, she felt as if everyone she’d ever loved had gotten into a boat and sailed away, leaving her alone, to inhabit an island that ships rarely visited. She heard the piano bench squeak as he stood up. He walked toward her, his footsteps muted on the worn carpet.

  “They’ve cleared your room. Why don’t you go back upstairs and get some rest?” He touched her shoulder. “It’s almost three A.M. There’s nothing more either of us can do now.”


  “What about later?” she raised her head and looked at him.

  “Later we’ll find out what the lab comes up with,” he said impassively. “Then we’ll go from there.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Far beyond the reach of Safer’s piano, the bare limbs of maple trees sang in the darkness, played by a winter wind that whipped and eddied across the Little Tennessee River. Ruth Moon stood naked in the bedroom she shared with Jonathan Walkingstick, staring out into the inky darkness, shivering as a frigid whisper of air seeped in beneath the drafty window. For hours she’d lain awake, gazing at the North Star, trying to pinpoint the vague sense of unease that had crimped her sleep ever since she’d first shaken hands with Mary Crow.

  At first she thought it was simple jealousy—Mary was pretty; Mary was smart. Mary walked through Little Jump Off with a grace she, Ruth, would never possess. But there was also a darkness about Mary Crow. She had a sadness that sucked people up. Jonathan had only now begun to heal from the wounds she had inflicted upon him. Only now did his mouth begin to turn up in a real smile. Only now did he love Ruth with ardor of their own making, instead of passion remembered for the woman he’d left behind. How could she let that woman come back into his life—into their life—to gnaw at his gut once again?

  She turned from the window and studied him, lying on the bed behind her, sleeping on his back, his face and body open to the night around him. How she loved him. How she longed for him to look up and say to her You have become my love. I want you to become my wife.

  “Udolanushdi.” She whispered his name in Cherokee, speaking in the Atali dialect she’d grown up with. “I’m going to protect you.”

  She closed her eyes as wind rattled the window, then she tiptoed to the bed. In her hand she held three seeds, all from the same red apple. Moving without a sound, she pulled the blankets from him, exposing his nakedness to the cool air. Soon he would awaken. She must hurry. She placed the largest seed between his feet, then the next largest over his head. The smallest, a mere dot of a seed, she put ever so gently on his heart, so perfectly that she could see the tiny brown drop throbbing with his heartbeat.