The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  24

  Actual Answers

  Or, We Get Set to Bury a Body and Find a Skeleton in the Closet Instead

  The body was half in, half out of the water, and the moon and stars mirrored on the smooth black surface took on a pinkish tint as blood billowed out into the lake and drifted southward into the San Marcos.

  Lottie was kneeling in the mud, face in her hands, Squirrel Tooth Annie by her side. It had been Squirrel Tooth who’d stopped all the frantic stabbing, wrapping her arms around Lottie and squeezing tight. Now, though, Squirrel Tooth just hung around her friend’s shoulders as limp and lifeless as a ratty old shawl.

  The shears lay in the shallows, streaked with dark stains even fresh spring water couldn’t wash away.

  “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this,” my brother muttered.

  “Well, how the hell did you see it turnin’ out?”

  Gustav gave me a droopy-shouldered shrug. “Different…better…”

  There was a rustling in the brush behind us, and Bob stepped out of the shadows.

  “Did I hear—?”

  He stopped, going stiff at the sight of Stonewall facedown in Spring Lake.

  “Shit,” he said, the word coming out in a long, slow, descending sigh. He looked over at his wife but made no move to join Squirrel Tooth at her side. “What happened?”

  “Don’t look to me to talk for you this time,” I said to my brother. “This mess ain’t mine to explain.”

  Old Red nodded. “Stonewall made a run for it,” he said to Bob, “and Lottie…stopped him.”

  “Why didn’t one of—?”

  Bob finally seemed to notice the position of my hands: pressed to my stomach over blood-speckled rips in my shirt.

  “You alright?”

  I brought up my hands and checked the palms. They were striped red up the middle but were mostly dry—the bleeding wasn’t any more than a trickle.

  “No, I ain’t alright,” I said, “but I ain’t dyin’, either.”

  “Stonewall had a blade hid on him?”

  I jerked my head at Gustav. “You’re supposed to be askin’ him the questions, remember?”

  “Come on,” my brother said, sloshing into the water beside Stonewall. “It’s gonna take every one of us to get this back in the wagon.”

  That much he was right about. Never has the term “dead weight” been more literal. Even drained of half his blood, Stonewall seemed to weigh a ton.

  Old Red led the way, his hands under Stonewall’s shoulders. The women grabbed hold by the wrists, Bob and I the ankles. Yet every few steps, someone would lose their grip, an arm or leg would go flopping loose, and the whole bloody thing would hit the ground. Eventually, Bob asked why we didn’t take the hint and just plant Stonewall where he’d plopped.

  “Think, Bob,” my brother growled. “People come out here for picnics, for chrissakes. Sooner or later, he’d be found, and that we can’t have—not if we like our necks unstretched. Just buryin’ him ain’t good enough. We gotta vanish him.”

  After that, no one lost their hold, and we finally made it all the way out to the road.

  “I know this won’t sit well with you,” Gustav said once we’d hoisted the corpse into the buckboard, “but Lottie, Annie—I think you two oughta ride under the tarp with Stonewall.”

  Lottie hadn’t said a word the last few minutes, simply doing what was asked of her in a hollow-eyed daze. My brother’s words roused her as hard and fast as a slap.

  “Are you serious? All the way back to the ranch”—she waved a crimson-smeared hand at Stonewall’s mangled remains—“lyin’ next to that?”

  “I can’t,” Squirrel Tooth mumbled. “I won’t.”

  “You got to,” Old Red snapped. “Anyone lookin’ for Stonewall’s gonna be lookin’ for you, too, and you know you ain’t got the nerve to lie us outta this. And would you just look at yourself? You, too, Lottie.”

  The women glanced down at their muck-and blood-covered dresses.

  “It’s gonna take a miracle to get that wagon down to the Lucky Two before dawn,” Gustav said. “You wanna pass someone on the road lookin’ like you just stepped out of a slaughter house?”

  “No. You can’t make me,” Squirrel Tooth said, shaking her head. “I won’t do it.”

  “Annie.”

  Lottie spoke the name sharply, like she was talking to a dog lifting its leg inside the house.

  “Gus is right,” she said. “We don’t have any choice.”

  “No…I’ll just go back to the Phoenix and…I can say someone jumped us and…and I got away, but Stonewall—”

  Lottie clapped her hands on Squirrel Tooth’s bony shoulders and shoved her against the back of the wagon.

  “Get up there, you dumb hoppie! Climb up or I’ll throw you up!”

  Bob took a hesitant half step toward his wife. “Ease up, Lottie.”

  “Ease up, hell!” she screeched. “I ain’t gonna hang for that bastard! He ain’t worth it!”

  “You shouldn’t have killed him, then,” Old Red said.

  Lottie spun on my brother with her hands up, the fingers curled like claws poised to swipe for his throat. Her beauty was a thing that seemed to come and go, and there was absolutely no trace of it now: She was all wide eyes and teeth and wild hair and blood.

  “What was I supposed to do? Just let him get away cuz you were squabblin’ with your idiot brother? Anyway, it’s not like what you were gonna do to him was any better!”

  “That was to get him to talk,” Gustav shot back, “and he sure ain’t talkin’ now, is he?”

  “How ’bout before things got outta hand?” Bob asked. “Did we get anything out of him at all?”

  He was obviously trying to get us on a different track, avoid a head-on collision. He didn’t put himself between his wife and his friend, though. He hung back a few paces. Out of range.

  “No,” Lottie snarled. “We didn’t learn a damn thing.”

  “Oh, I ain’t so sure about that,” Old Red said, and he whirled on Bob so fast the man actually took a step back. “When did you and Lottie move out to the Lucky Two?”

  Lottie’s eyes flashed with anger—or a signal.

  Bob saw it but couldn’t make sense of it.

  “About four and a half years ago,” he said helplessly, gaze swinging back and forth between Lottie and Gustav. “Why?”

  “Look, Gus—” Lottie began.

  “Is that your recollection?” my brother asked Squirrel Tooth. “Lottie left the Eagle six months after Adeline died?”

  The gaunt, ghostly woman peeped sheepishly at Lottie, then shrank back against the buckboard.

  “I don’t remember. I guess I’m just an addled old hophead, like everyone keeps sayin’.”

  “What’s this all about, Brother?” I asked.

  “Money.” Old Red turned to Bob again. “Stonewall said Lottie left the Eagle five years ago. Right after Adeline died and I left town. So I gotta wonder…if that’s true, how’d you come up with the cash for the Lucky Two so fast? When we was workin’ the Seven together, you never had the coin in your pocket to put up a jingle. Then all of a sudden you got enough to buy your own spread?”

  “I was savin’, too,” Lottie said. “Just like Adeline.”

  Gustav kept looking at Bob. “Funny you never mentioned it before.”

  “You can’t go by Stonewall’s say-so anyway,” Lottie went on. “Us gals was just cattle to him. He wouldn’t remember our comings and goings any more than you’d remember some heifer.”

  My brother was still staring at Bob, gaze pinning the man in place like a butterfly in a glass case.

  “But y’all said Adeline was special to Stonewall, in some sick way. Her bein’ murdered? The first of five? I think he’d remember that well enough.”

  “What the hell are you sayin’, Gus?” Lottie snapped. “Are you suggestin’ we’d—?”

  “Stop it, Lottie,” Bob said, voice calm and even. Resigned. “He knows.”

/>   I knew by then, too, though my brother had to lead me there on a leash.

  The money Adeline had been socking away so she and Gustav could run off together—it had done just what it had been saved for. Only for somebody else.

  Even the name of the goat ranch made sense to me now. It wasn’t just a goof on the Lucky Seven. The Lucky Two—that was Bob and Lottie.

  The unlucky ones were Adeline and my brother.

  “I should’ve seen it right off,” Old Red said, finally looking at Lottie again. “Who’d be most likely to know where Adeline kept her kitty hidden? Who could get at it easiest without anyone bein’ the wiser? Adeline’s best friend at the Eagle, that’s who.”

  “Alright…what if it’s true?” Lottie said. “I was Adeline’s best friend. Don’t you think she’d want that money to help me? For all we know, it saved my life.”

  A few feet away, her husband was wilting, practically melting with humiliation. Lottie was doing just the opposite: straightening her back, stiffening her neck, making herself into something stiff and unyielding and impervious to shame.

  “I don’t know what Adeline would’ve wanted,” my brother said to her. “I just know you never asked me about it.”

  “We almost told you, Gus. Right before you left San Marcos,” Bob said. “Except you were still so crazy with grief, we didn’t know what you’d do. You might’ve blown it all on liquor or paid some gunny to go after Ragsdale and Bock or who knows what, and do you think any of that would’ve made Adeline happy?”

  “How much was it?” I asked. “Adeline’s stash?”

  Lottie gaped at me angrily, as if one of the horses hitched to the wagon had just butted into the conversation. She obviously couldn’t see what business it was of mine.

  My brother knew, though.

  “Tell him,” he said.

  “She’d saved three hundred and nine dollars and some odd cents,” Bob told me. “In a cigar box under the floorboards.”

  I sighed.

  That nest egg was a good three hundred bucks more than Gustav and I had when we’d hit the trail together five years before. How many indignities, how much pain would that money have spared us?

  “Believe me—it’s torn us up all these years,” Bob said to Old Red. “We were truly happy you came back. We finally had a chance to make it up to you.”

  “Oh, I get it now,” I said. “That’s why you were so eager for us to come in with you as partners. You were gonna give us a slice of what you stole.”

  “Well, now,” Bob mumbled, “I wouldn’t say—”

  He stopped himself.

  I wouldn’t say “stole,” he’d been about to say—but what else would you call it?

  “Goin’ halvsies on the Lucky Two—that was Bob’s notion of makin’ amends,” Lottie said. “Showin’ up today. Helpin’ you find Adeline’s killer. That was mine.”

  Old Red jabbed a finger at Stonewall’s naked feet poking out from under the tarpaulin.

  “This is help?” he scoffed. “There we are, finally closin’ in on some actual answers, and Stonewall ends up dead? It makes me wonder if helpin’ is what you really had in mind.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Lottie spat, about as sorrowful as a hissing cat, “but like I said already, what was I supposed to…hold on.”

  She tilted her head to one side, taking in my brother from a new angle, looking for something she couldn’t quite see before.

  She saw it, too—and she sure as hell didn’t like it.

  “Why, you ungrateful little shit—”

  “For all I know, my gratitude’s exactly what you was countin’ on,” Old Red said.

  “What are you two talkin’ about?” Bob asked.

  “Don’t you see?” Lottie said. “He’s sayin’ I killed Stonewall cuz we had something to hide.”

  “Well, did you?” my brother asked her.

  “Oh, come on now,” Bob said. “We already come clean about the money.”

  “You thick-witted moron!” Lottie raged. “He ain’t talkin’ about the money no more!”

  Her meaning dawned on Bob so slowly I could actually see the precise moment the man’s heart broke in two.

  There were his thick brows beetled in confused concentration. There they were lifting higher as the truth took form in his mind’s eye. Then there they were sagging again, along with the rest of his face, as he saw it all.

  “Oh, Gus,” he moaned. “How could you think such a thing of us?”

  Old Red shrugged. “Lottie did a pretty good job on Stonewall with them shears, and y’all sure stabbed me in the back. Why not Adeline, too?”

  Lottie stepped toward my brother, her right hand whipping up high. It was plain what was coming, but Gustav didn’t jump back or turn aside or make a grab for the woman’s wrist. He just stood there, expressionless, and took the blow like there was no avoiding it—a slap from the Hand of Fate itself.

  And what a slap it was. It rang out through the still night air as sharp as a gunshot, and the rest of us flinched even if Old Red didn’t.

  “How dare you?” Lottie brought up her hand again. “How dare you!”

  The second smack never came. Lottie turned aside and pitched forward into Bob’s arms, sobbing hysterically.

  Bob steered his wife around to the front of the wagon, glancing back over his shoulder just once to shake his head at Gustav. He looked like an old dog that’s just been kicked for reasons it can’t understand.

  “You know, I was at the Eagle the night Adeline was killed,” Squirrel Tooth said, “and Lottie was busy workin’ the whole time Adeline was gone with Stonewall—that I remember plain as day. There ain’t no way she could’ve snuck out and done what you’re hintin’ at. I’d have told you that, too…if you’d bothered to ask.”

  She climbed up into the wagon bed then, disappearing under the tarp. The thought of crawling under there with Stonewall had her in hysterics just a few minutes before, but now, it seemed, she preferred a dead man’s company to ours.

  In case there was any question, her head popped out a moment later, and she added a final afterthought for my brother’s benefit.

  “Asshole.”

  She ducked back under the canvas.

  “I suppose you agree with her,” Old Red said to me.

  I shrugged. “I was taught never to contradict a lady.”

  “Yeah, well…I reckon I wouldn’t give her any arguments either,” Gustav mumbled.

  A moment later, Bob came shambling around to join us again, alone this time.

  “Alright, boys,” he said, “you can leave the rest of the tidyin’ to me.”

  “You’ll put out the fire?” Old Red asked.

  “Yup.”

  “And gather up Stonewall’s shoes and socks?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the shears?”

  Bob’s lips curled down at the corners, but he didn’t have the strength left to even hold onto a scowl. He shook his head, face going slack.

  “Dammit, Gus…I’m really not a moron,” he said. “I’ll gather up everything and get it down to my spread and bury it—and Stonewall—out where even the goats never go. No one’ll catch sight of the women on the way, either, don’t you worry about that. It’s all gonna be taken care of.”

  He drew in a deep, deep breath that swelled his big balloon-round gut and practically lifted him up off his feet.

  “Then that’s it. We’re done. I’m truly sorry…about everything…but you’re on your own now.”

  “Well, what the hell else is new?” Gustav said, and he turned and marched off down the trail toward town.

  Bob and I stood there together, watching him disappear into the gloom, waiting to see if he’d turn back to say more.

  He didn’t. He let his walking do the talking, the steady, fading trudge of footsteps in the dark the only indication that my brother was still there at all.

  25

  Room for Worse

  Or, I Awake from One Nightmare into Another


  “Well…good-bye,” I said to Bob before dashing off into the darkness after Gustav. I didn’t have time for more. Or the words for it.

  We’d practically accused him and his wife of murder, they’d both admitted to theft, and now the man had to drive all night by lantern light with a bloody body and a hophead chippie hidden in the back of his buckboard. “No hard feelings” just didn’t seem to cover it.

  After a quick sprint—and several toe-stubs on rocks and gnarled roots along the trail—I was shoulder to shoulder with my brother.

  “Thanks for waitin’ for me,” I panted.

  Of course, Old Red hadn’t slowed in the slightest, nor did he bother looking at me now. He just kept charging ahead at a quick-time march just shy of a gallop.

  “Ease up before you walk smack into the side of a tree,” I said.

  My brother ignored me.

  “I said slow down.”

  I was ignored again.

  “You’re pushin’ too hard, Brother. Every which way.”

  This time, Gustav sped up.

  I reached out and took hold of his left arm.

  He jerked free and kept going.

  “Slow down? Ease up? Feh!” he spat. “Don’t you remember what Squirrel Tooth said? Beginning of October, every year, some gal goes missin’.” He finally looked at me, his gaze holding mine so long I started worrying we were both going to walk into a tree. “He’s due, Otto. Any day now, he’s gonna do it again.”

  “And breakin’ your leg out here is gonna stop him how?”

  My brother looked over his shoulder, and I glanced back, too.

  Bob and Lottie’s lantern was just a smudgy circle of light now. The wagon—and the people around it—we couldn’t see at all.

  “That’s what you get for diggin’ your spurs in so deep,” I said. “We’ve lost the only friends we had around here.”

  “Good,” Old Red said, and he slowed down at last.

  “Good? How do you figure that? And don’t tell me it’s cuz they might’ve killed Adeline. You said yourself someone’s been doin’ away with a gal a year, and Bob and Lottie wouldn’t have no reason to—”