The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “Why would he want that tape?” Skid actually scratched his head, the way a sheriff in a bad movie might.

  “No idea.” All I could do was survey the battlefield and worry about the losses.

  Andrews appeared beside me. “Well, obviously he said something on the tape that he didn’t want anyone to hear. Do I have to think of everything? And where the hell is my apple brandy?”

  Before I could even turn to Lucinda for help, she was on her way to my pantry. Andrews caught on a second later and followed her, mute and, for some reason, limping.

  “Can you remember—” Skid began.

  “I’m trying, but it was all a jumble: the Tango, an Argentine mother, World War I. It was more on the order of telling a story he could only half remember than recalling things that actually happened to him. Or maybe I’m reading that into his words because I know that the things he told me couldn’t, logically, have happened to him.”

  Skid cast his eye over the wreckage in my living room. “Well, he said something that was true enough to make him come back to your house, do this, and shoot a pistol at you two.”

  “The pistol.” I held my breath for a second. “You realize it’s probably the one that Hovis Daniels owned. This man obviously stole it from Hovis when he visited him.”

  “Along with the necklace,” Skidmore added, “that had the picture of Barbrie in it.”

  “Right. And the problem for Hovis now is—”

  “That a stolen picture of his dead wife and a pistol that belonged to him and everyone knew it,” Skid said tersely, “combine to make Hovis the clear suspect in our murder investigation, even though we both know he didn’t do it.”

  “So you do know that?” I asked him.

  “Yes.” He glanced over at Deputy Melissa Mathews, who was going through my tapes on the floor in a pair of latex hospital gloves. “I did that for Millroy. Turns out to be a problem.”

  “Because now Millroy will be convinced that the stranger’s death was murder,” I agreed, “but he’ll be convinced that the murderer is Hovis.”

  “Growing up,” Melissa said, not looking up from her work, “us kids used to hear stories about the Jacksons’ caretaker, and how he killed a lots of people, mostly kids who went onto the Jackson property. We never stopped to think that no one we knew had ever actually lost a playmate or gone to a funeral. It was a Halloween story. But it adds to Hovis’s troubles now.”

  Deputy Crawdad eased up behind me, standing next to Skidmore.

  “We used to have a dare,” he said softly, “me and my brothers. You had to wait till after dark, then you had to jump the Jacksons’ fence, run touch the front door on that old shack where Hovis stayed, and get back to the road without, you know, getting shot. We did it all the time at the first of every school year growing up. After Christmas, not as much. I always felt bad about that when I got, you know, growed-up enough to realize we probably had a hand in driving Hovis crazy.”

  “The chances are good,” Skidmore said to Crawdad without turning, “that he wasn’t there. By the time you were a kid, he was put away.”

  Andrews wafted in from the kitchen, a tumbler full of clear fire in his hand, and stood to make his own observation of the scene.

  “You have really let your housekeeping skills deteriorate.” He took a healthy swig. “I remember when you used to file those tapes on a shelf instead of on the floor.”

  “How’s the head?” I asked him.

  “What head?” He grinned and lifted his glass to me.

  “Perfect.” I returned to the matter at hand, kneeling on the living room floor. “The tape would have Monday’s date on it. It’s the only one with that date.”

  “Are all the dates like this?” Melissa held up one tape for me to see. “I mean, like 02/07/97?”

  “You have tapes from 1997 on the shelves in your living room?” Andrews marveled.

  “I have some that are dated 1962,” I told him proudly. “My Wollensak is the same model as Alan Lomax used to record his Library of Congress tapes. And I have copies of some of his tapes.”

  “Really?” Andrews moved further into the living room.

  “Could we focus on the point at hand?” Skidmore interrupted impatiently. “Tomorrow is Thursday. We have to figure all this out by sundown tomorrow or things get a whole lot more complicated.”

  “At least we know the real killer hasn’t escaped off the mountain,” I offered.

  “Hey!” Deputy Mathews held up a tape. “You don’t really have tapes as far back as 1917, do you?”

  “What?” I squinted in her direction.

  “This one says 11/08/17. Now, Monday was the seventeenth, I believe, so is it possible you got the day and the year reversed?”

  I stood and waded through the tapes on the floor. “Very possible. I was pretty tired—and, you know, the man had a gun.”

  I took the tape from Melissa.

  “Play it,” Skidmore insisted. “Where’s your machine?”

  “In my truck.”

  Less than three minutes later I’d retrieved the Wollensak from under the passenger’s seat, lugged it into the kitchen, and was ready to play the tape. Everyone had gathered silently around the kitchen table.

  “Here we go,” I whispered.

  The reel turned, and a voice cracked the silence.

  “The gun exploded, blood erupted, and Jacob lay dying on the brothel floor.”

  Twelve

  I awoke before sunrise on Thursday morning, got ready to leave as silently as I could manage, and headed downstairs. I intended to put up the rest of the tapes, a task I had not finished the night before, and be gone early from the house.

  To my great amazement, Andrews was already up, rummaging through the kitchen for something to eat. His hair looked like a frozen blond fountain. He had slept in his clothes, as he often did, and they made him a lively parody of absentminded professor.

  “Yes.” He barely acknowledged my entrance into the kitchen. “Apple brandy: good. Morning after: bad.”

  I was already dressed for the day: black jeans, rust-colored flannel shirt, comfortably worn-down black work boots.

  “You don’t have to go with me, you know.” I drifted toward the espresso machine.

  Skidmore would be busy most of the day with some sort of forensic voodoo. Melissa had offered to listen more carefully to the visitor’s tape enough times to find out why he had wanted so badly to steal it—we hadn’t heard anything like that the night before. Crawdad had gathered some of his old school chums, and they were combing through the woods between my house and the Jackson place in an attempt to ferret out the ferret. I had volunteered to visit Mrs. Jackson and speak with her concerning the strange presence of someone calling himself Truck Jackson—not to mention hinting at Jacob Jackson, the family’s black sheep—and the possibility that her in-law caretaker, Hovis Daniels, was a murderer.

  The morning dawned quickly, and hard as a stone. Golden light gave everything a layer of rich warmth, but it was fool’s gold—only the appearance of heat. The air was more honest, made from little thorns of ice. In autumn the eye is often so deceived, but the skin always knows the truth. The illusion of warmth is autumn’s seduction: Cranberry- and wine-colored leaves spiral through sunlight’s fortresses of gold. But the year is old, and the unwary traveler, distracted by these swirling visions, may sometimes be unaware of the bone-white hand just behind him, a sudden dying of the light, and the silence of the coming snow.

  “Why, exactly,” Andrews said at last, “did you want me to come up here? I mean, why the urgency?”

  He had found a box of Cheerios and was eating handfuls of the cereal, sans milk. Several of the tiny circles stuck to his face.

  I started to explain that we had such a short amount of time to find out a great many things. I had in mind to tell him about Hovis Daniels, and his plea for my help, something no one else would give him. I was even preparing a short speech about keeping Lucinda safe from the roving maniac. Instead, I t
old the truth.

  “I was afraid to do this by myself.”

  “Do what?” He stopped eating.

  “I don’t like what I’m thinking.” I avoided looking at him and pretended to busy myself with the espresso machine. “I’m thinking that this man, Truck Jackson, might actually be all the things he says he is. I’m afraid of the turning wheels of Time, the way he rides them. And I know that’s a little unbalanced; thinking that, I mean. So I’m worried that maybe I’m not completely stable. Given my upbringing and my life in general, it’s not so hard to imagine that my mind would capsize eventually. Not that I’m feeling anywhere close to that, but I’m … not steady. I just needed, I don’t know, someone to look at what I’m looking at and assure me that they see it, too.”

  He resumed his breakfast, digging his hand into the box with abandon.

  “And that someone,” he mumbled around a mouthful of cereal, “can’t be Lucinda because you don’t want to seem like a pansy to her; and it can’t be Skidmore because he’s getting more and more like a real sheriff and less tolerant of your—how shall we say?—eccentricities. So I’m your boy, because for one thing I always think of you as a little off-kilter—so no surprises there—and for another I razz you about everything so it makes you take your whole gestalt a bit less seriously. I get it. You’d do the same for me. Do you have any milk?”

  That was it. That was Andrews. He tossed the empty cereal box on the counter behind him and headed for the refrigerator.

  “Now you want milk?”

  “Didn’t think of it before.” He grabbed the handle of the fridge with a touch of desperation. “Not awake yet.”

  “Look—if I’d known you were going to get shot in the head—”

  “You wouldn’t have asked me to come. Clearly.” He stood with the refrigerator door open, grabbed a nearly full carton of milk, and drained it. “But—”

  “And I haven’t told you everything. An innocent man may be convicted of this murder, and the man who shot you might get away, if we don’t have some answers by this afternoon.”

  “But,” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard what I’d said, “if you had known that coming to my defense five years ago was going to piss off the wrong people at the university and lead to the demise of your department, would you have done that?”

  “Yes.” I said it instantly.

  “There you have it.” He flashed the merest moment of a smile in my direction.

  We never talked about the situation that nearly put Andrews in jail and had, in fact, started a series of events that shut down my folklore program at the university. It was old news.

  Andrews stood there a moment, holding the empty milk carton in his hand, staring at me.

  “It doesn’t even hurt,” he said at length.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Where the bullet skinned my skull. I can’t even feel it this morning.” He put the empty carton back in the refrigerator and closed the door. “I’m hoping the hair turns white along the scar. Think how cool that would look.”

  “Like the bride of Frankenstein.”

  “No,” he groused. “Like—a racing stripe.”

  “So you can look fast standing still.”

  “Are we going?” He looked around the kitchen. “Or should I eat something else?”

  “No, we’re leaving,” I assured him.

  The espresso machine was ready. I made us each a triple to go, and we headed for the door.

  The ride to the Jackson place took a bit longer than it needed to. I drove slowly under the pretense of not spilling my espresso, but, in fact, I used the extra minutes to fill Andrews in on all the details, all the things I was thinking about Truck Jackson, Millroy’s imposing deadline.

  By the time we pulled up to the Jacksons’ front yard, we’d nearly finished our espresso and were both armed with a battery of questions.

  The original Jackson home had been built in 1711, rebuilt from the ground up in 1906, and Edna had been born in it shortly after that—or so she always said. It had been whitewashed every spring since its completion, and glowed like a lantern in the morning sun. Set back from the road at the top of a rise, it offered a stunning view of the valley below where the town rested, if you were standing on the porch at the back of the house. Two stories were wrapped in that porch; it went entirely around the house. More than a dozen handmade rocking chairs were placed casually about. The roof was blazing silver tin, and that, too, was often refurbished or replaced. There were white lace curtains in every window, and a rich, buttery light always seemed to back them, as if a warm fire’s glow emanated from every room in the house. Smoke, afraid to be any other color than white, curled into the sky from two of the four brick chimneys. Whitewashed stones lined the walkway to the front steps, and behind them that morning there were blood-red mums and deep purple ageratum. At every corner of the home there was a giant tea olive shrub, nearly as tall as the house—probably planted soon after the house was built. The flowers of the shrub there were negligible to the eye, but their scent ravished the air, and every breath filled the lungs with the beauty of a dying year’s last memories.

  I turned off the engine.

  “Mrs. Jackson may be the oldest living resident of Blue Mountain.” I stared at the front door. “She’s set in her ways, militant concerning her religious beliefs, and meticulous about her home. If you spill anything, insult anyone, or let a curse word slip, we’ll be shuttled out before you even begin to apologize.”

  “Right.” Andrews tossed back his last swallow of espresso, eyes glued to the house. “Put me in, coach.”

  “Damn,” I whispered, climbing out of the truck.

  “Shh!” Andrews chided. “What did you just tell me?”

  “But I forgot to ask Skidmore if he’d had a chance to bring Mrs. Jackson over to the Deveroes’ to look at the body, see if she knew who it was.”

  “Can’t you just ask her now?” Andrews whispered back.

  “I guess.” I would have preferred foreknowledge.

  Before I could gather my thoughts any further, Edna Jackson appeared in the doorway.

  Framed there, she looked more an old photo-portrait of a woman from another time than a flesh-and-blood human being alive in that morning air. Even the light refused to impart more than a sepia tone to her area of the front porch. She was dressed in a long chocolate-colored dress under a huge white Irish lamb’s wool sweater. Her hair was perfectly coifed, the exact shade of the sweater. The hem of her garment covered her feet, but the toe of some sort of black slipper barely made itself known there.

  She stood in the doorway with her arms folded in front of her, face set in her usual stern glare. Her wire-rimmed glasses reflected the morning light and made her eyes round bright diamonds, impossible to read.

  I thought for a moment she was going to tell us to go away. Instead she raised her hand in the most commanding gesture I’d ever seen in real life; Andrews and I halted in our tracks.

  “I’d expect you’re here about that dead’un they found back of the house.” Her voice crackled like breaking ice. “If you think you can convince me to go look at the body, get right back in that rusty old truck. Sheriff already tried. I see the dead at church.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said slowly. “We’re here to talk to you about Truck Jackson.”

  Another of the techniques gleaned from years of field research in the mountains—and often with characters as solid as Mrs. Jackson—was the assumption of knowledge rule. Never ask a question first. If you do, people might get the idea you want to find out something. That makes them wonder what you’re after, and they spend all their time trying to outfox you instead of answering the questions you’re eventually going to ask. The rule worked about 80 percent of the time.

  In the case of Mrs. Jackson, asking her if she knew anything about Truck Jackson could have prompted a quick “no” and a hasty send-off. Assuming that she knew all about him and informing her that I did, too, was a much better opening gamb
it—but it could have gone either way.

  She aimed her gleaming glasses right at me and took a deep breath. After one more moment of frozen glaring, she turned abruptly and vanished into the shadows past the door of the house.

  Andrews shot a glance my way. I shook my head warning him not to move or speak. Another second clicked by.

  “Parlor.” That was all, but it was our invitation to cross the threshold.

  I started in; Andrews failed to stop a momentary grin.

  The foyer was a startling contrast to the exterior of the house. The moment we entered we were confronted by a stern staircase, with a banister that began and ended in a carved wooden lion’s head, and turned finials that looked as if they’d been made from the wheel of a sailing ship that brought the Jacksons from Scotland to America.

  It was dark, but we could see to our right a formal living room filled with centuries-old antiques and lace doilies. That room was not for the likes of us. If a minister or a politician were visiting, that room would be set for light refreshments and superficial conversation. Our room lay to the left, a less formal parlor where a fire blazed in the hearth and the curtains had been pulled aside to let in some of the day’s light.

  Mrs. Jackson was nowhere to be seen.

  I nodded my head in the direction of the parlor, and Andrews followed me in. The room was only slightly brighter than the sepulcher of the hallway, despite tall windows in two of the four walls. The brown and ginger Persian rug that completely covered the floor seemed to absorb most of the light in the room. The fire popped occasionally, but seemed a bit afraid to make too much noise or illumination. The mantel was a single carved piece of ivory and looked like a sculpture of ice. Even in previous centuries the furniture would have been called quaint.