Unspeakable

by Sandra Brown

  Jack looked through the truck’s rear window, and for the first time noticed the dark storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

  * * *

  “Dumb sons o’ bitches.”

  Lucy approached the counter with a carafe of fresh coffee. “Who is, Ezzy?”

  “Excuse my language, Lucy. I was just watching your TV there.”

  He was taking a coffee break from boredom. For working folks it was near quitting time—beyond the afternoon coffee break, verging on cocktail hour, too early for supper. Ezzy was the only customer in the diner.

  He and Lucy had been discussing the upcoming Blewer Bucks football season, but he had kept one eye on the small TV she kept on the work counter between the malt mixer and the microwave. He had noticed when Oprah signed off and the first edition of the local evening news came on.

  The lead story was about the manhunt mounted for the convicts, who were still being sought more than a week following their escape. But there was a new chapter to the story. In northwestern Louisiana the bodies of two elderly women had been discovered on their farm at the bottom of the water well. Carl Herbold and Myron Hutts were shoo-in suspects; their fingerprints were found all over the house. Now law enforcement agencies in three states were coordinating efforts to capture them, along with Cecil Herbold and Connie Skaggs.

  The TV station was broadcasting live shots of a roadblock, where uniformed officers were barricaded, armed to the teeth, behind their patrol cars. The camera caught one yawning. That was what had caused Ezzy to curse.

  After refilling his coffee cup, Lucy propped her fist on her hip and watched the broadcast with him until another story was introduced. “Who’re you calling dumb, Ezzy?”

  “Well not the Herbolds.”

  “You think the cops are going about this manhunt all wrong?”

  He looked at her wryly. “If you’d escaped from prison, killed four people, then robbed a bank and killed some more, would you be traveling down a major highway?”

  “Lord, Ezzy, I don’t know. You’re the crime expert.”

  He harrumphed. She was the only one who thought so. “Those roadblocks are a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.”

  “So what’s your opinion?”

  He sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “If I was them—the Herbolds—I’d hole up somewhere till things calmed down. Sooner or later those police forces aren’t going to pay men to sit on their thumbs and yawn on TV. They’ll cut back on the manpower. Something else will distract them. They’ll look the other way.” He tapped the counter with his blunt index finger. “That’s when I’d make my move and not before.”

  Even though he didn’t order it, she served him a slice of apple pie. “Want ice cream on that? Or whipped cream? Some cheddar?”

  “No, this is fine.” He didn’t want the pie, but to keep from hurting her feelings, he picked up a fork and dug in. It was delicious, though the crust wasn’t as flaky as Cora’s. “I knew those boys, Lucy. They weren’t book smart, but they were cagey little bastards. I’d bet my next retirement check that they’ve got the law figured out. Instead of setting up traps the Herbolds are too smart to walk into, those officers ought to be out beating the bushes for them.”

  “That’s lots of acreage to cover on foot, Ezzy.”

  “I know. It’s impractical. No, it’s impossible. I’m just saying that’s how they’ll be found. If ever.”

  “You think they could get away?”

  “Wouldn’t be all that surprised if they did. Especially if Carl’s running the show, and he usually did.”

  “Be a shame if they escaped. Can you imagine him killing those helpless old ladies in cold blood? And that teenage girl?” She shook her head in a manner that said the world was going to hell in a handbasket. “Maybe you ought to share your theory with somebody, Ezzy.”

  “They wouldn’t listen to me,” he grumbled.

  “Bet they would.”

  He knew better. He had offered his services to Sheriff Ron Foster and had been turned down flat. He wasn’t going to humiliate himself again. “Nobody wants my services, Lucy. They think my brain is kaput just ’cause I look old and decrepit.”

  “Now you’re fishing for compliments.” Reaching across the counter, she playfully slapped his arm. “You’re a far sight from old, Ezzy Hardge. And a long shot from decrepit, too.”

  “You haven’t seen me getting out of bed.”

  Only after speaking the words did he realize that she might read something into them. Sure enough, when he looked up at her, he was met with a soft and misty gaze.

  His hand was unsteady as he reached for his cup of coffee. “Take my word for it, it ain’t pretty. Cora teases me about being creaky.”

  He was no longer looking at Lucy, but he sensed her deflation. She said nothing for a while, then quietly said, “She’s sure staying away a long time.”

  “Um-huh.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “Any day now,” he lied.

  “Hmm.” There was another silence long enough to stretch out in. Then she cleared her throat. “Well, till she gets back, I’m happy to cook for you. Anytime.”

  Relieved that the boundaries had been reestablished, he looked at her across the blue Formica and smiled. “That’s right decent of you, Lucy. Thanks.” He forked up the last bite of pie, took a final sip of coffee, and stepped off the counter stool.

  Treating him more like a visitor than a customer, Lucy walked him to the door. Since he had come in, there had been a distinct change in the weather. The sky had grown dark. The wind was whipping at the canopy above the door, making it pop like a mainsail.

  “Looks like we might get some rain finally,” Lucy said.

  “Looks like.”

  “You be careful out there, Ezzy.”

  “Thanks again for the pie.”

  “Ezzy?” He paused, turned. Lucy was twisting a dish towel between her hands. “The other day, after you left, those old geezers…” She pointed toward the table where the spit-and-whittle group collected each morning. “They said that Carl Herbold had vowed to kill Delray Corbett.”

  “Not a threat any longer. Delray’s heart attack beat him to it.”

  “What happened to make him say such a thing?”

  “After his conviction for killing that bank guard in Arkadelphia, Carl filed for an appeal. It was granted, but he fired his lawyer and asked Delray to foot the bill for a new one. Delray told him he was on his own. Said he had done the crime so he could pay the consequences. Said Carl should be glad he wasn’t having to face murder charges here in Blewer County for Patsy McCorkle.

  “Carl swore up and down he had nothing to do with her death. Delray called him a liar and publicly denounced him. The boy went berserk and spouted all sorts of dire threats. He lost on appeal and blamed his stepdaddy for not coming through with a better lawyer. In fact, he blamed Delray for everything. Said if Delray had loved them, he and Cecil might have turned out different.”

  “Was their meanness Delray’s fault?”

  “Maybe. Some. But not altogether. Those boys were already bad when he married their mother.”

  She glanced toward the empty table before bringing her worried eyes back to him. “They also said that… that Carl had vowed to kill you.”

  “Just talk from a bunch of old men who’ve got nothing better to do than jabber about other people’s misfortunes.”

  “Did he?” she persisted.

  “Something to that effect,” he said reluctantly. “He said he was a repeat offender only because I jailed him so many times on pissant charges when he was a kid. On account of me, he said, he had a long record and that’s why the courts in Arkansas came down on him so hard.”

  “It still bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  “Naw. Con talk, Lucy, is all it was. Can’t take it seriously.”

  “No, I mean that McCorkle girl’s death. It still bothers you.”

  Her insight surprised him. Or was his preoccupation visible? Did
it show up like a tattoo? It bothered him to think it might be that obvious to folks, but he answered her honestly. “It comes to mind now and then.”

  Her overmascaraed lashes didn’t even blink. His pat answer hadn’t satisfied her. Why was it that the women in his life were the most intuitive females on the face of the earth? “Yeah, Lucy, it still bothers me. And, actually, I think about it a lot.”

  “Those boys never had to answer for it.” Her lined face formed a grimace of compassion for his torment. “And it haunts you ’cause you believe they did it.”

  “Not quite, Lucy. I’m coming to believe they didn’t.”

  * * *

  The wind was even stronger than it had looked through the window of the Busy Bee. Moving down the sidewalk toward his car, Ezzy squinted against the grit the gale churned up from the gutters. He held his hat on his head with one hand while using the other to fish his car keys from his pocket.

  Earlier in the day, middle-school band students had gone from car to car parked in the downtown area and put flyers under windshield wipers. Freed by the wind, the announcements of the fund-raising pancake supper were swirling around like a swarm of bright pink butterflies.

  Across the street from the café a kiddie pool featured in the sidewalk sale at the Perry Bros. store was tumbling along the sidewalk. It blew out into the street, forcing a van to swerve in order to miss it.

  Ezzy got into his car and turned on the headlights. Even though it was hours before sundown, low scuttling clouds had made the sky as dark as twilight. Motorists were driving recklessly and fast, trying to reach their destinations before the approaching storm broke. On his way home, he witnessed several near collisions.

  He drove with more caution than he wished. Eager to get home and ponder the words he’d unexpectedly heard himself say to Lucy, he regarded the storm as a gross inconvenience.

  But, inevitably, his adrenaline kicked in. He began thinking like an official faced with an emergency that jeopardized public safety. There would be a potential for flash flooding. Pylons should be rounded up and made ready to place at low crossings before some fool tried to drive through high, swift water and got his car swept into the river. The fire department should be on the alert to sound the civil defense alarm if a funnel cloud was sighted. Every deputy in the department should be mobilized.

  He caught himself speeding toward the sheriff’s office before he remembered that he didn’t belong there. He would be sitting out this storm, and all the storms to follow.

  Arriving at home, he heard the first rumblings of distant thunder, which underscored his dejection. The house was unnaturally dark. Switching on lights as he moved through the gloomy rooms, he went outside to the back deck and pulled the lawn furniture and Cora’s prized hibiscus plants beneath the overhang for protection.

  He thought about calling her to ask if they’d had any rough weather in West Texas, maybe make her feel a little guilty that she wasn’t here to share a lonely, stormy evening with him.

  But he didn’t want to expose himself to rejection again. Not yet. Eventually he would beg if he had to, make promises he probably wouldn’t keep, do anything to get her to come home. But he wasn’t up to it tonight.

  The last time he’d called, she had rebuffed his tentative approaches toward the topic of their reconciliation. Worse, she had ignored them, stopping him cold whenever he ventured in the direction of anything personal. Instead, she had squandered his time and long-distance budget by talking about Delray Corbett’s funeral and the food he should take out to Anna.

  He went back indoors but stared out the patio door, past his deck and beyond. Ugly storm clouds stretched across the horizon as far as he could see, bringing to mind Anna and her boy. He wondered if they would be okay out there all by themselves. Probably. Besides, if there was any trouble, her hired hand was nearby.

  He went into the living room and switched on the TV. Using the latest technology, the weatherman was standing slap-dab in the middle of the state map, moving his hands over the multicolored radar pattern of storms. They spread over the entire eastern third of Texas, stretching from the Red River all the way down the Sabine, nearly to the coast.

  Weatherwise, it was going to be an eventful night.

  Ezzy climbed aboard his Barcalounger, prepared to ride out the night in front of his television set. But for all the warnings and watches issued by the National Weather Service, the threatening storms seemed of minor importance. Free now to square off with the hypothesis he’d shared with Lucy, he focused on it, viewing it from every angle, like a gladiator sizing up his opponent. And that’s how he thought of it—as a silent, invisible enemy that had stalked him for years while he remained blissfully, stupidly unaware.

  Not until this afternoon when this reversed possibility pounced on him with the impetus of a mountain lion and sank its claws into him had he realized why this case had haunted him. Not because he was convinced that the Herbolds were involved. But because he wasn’t convinced.

  Maybe he’d been too close to it from the start. The discovery of the dead girl’s naked body in his county had caused him to leap to a quick but logical conclusion. Maybe he had wanted the Herbold brothers to be guilty because they were a tragedy waiting to happen. It was only a matter of time before somebody tangled with them and wound up dead. Ezzy had skipped ahead a few chapters, that’s all.

  They’d had a fairly good alibi in that they’d been driving to Arkadelphia. They’d been photographed robbing a convenience store there early the following morning. But, presuming them to be guilty, Ezzy had massaged the facts to make them fit. Not perfectly, but pretty good. Say as good as a size eight shoe fit a woman who really wore an eight and a half. He had made it work.

  But Carl’s avowal of innocence had always bothered him. His vehement denial was the real grain of sand in the oyster shell of Ezzy’s case. Why would Carl own up to every other wicked deed he’d ever done but adamantly deny that he had even left the Wagon Wheel with Patsy that night? Ezzy had figured he was just being ornery. But maybe not. For once in his miserable life, maybe Carl had been telling the truth.

  What was most troublesome was that if Carl and Cecil hadn’t left the tavern with that girl, someone else had. Someone else had taken her to the river, used her sexually, then left her dead in the weeds. Someone else held the answers to the questions that had plagued Ezzy for almost a quarter of a century.

  Had he spent his career, and a good part of his life, trying to prove that Carl and Cecil were there, when actually another man had heard Patsy McCorkle take her final breath? Had he allowed a guilty man to go scot free?

  Damn him for a fool if he had.

  Chapter Forty

  It’s really better this way. Right, Myron?”

  “Right, Carl.”

  “We did what we had to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  Myron was eating Vienna sausages from the can. The packing gelatin oozed between his fingers faster than he could lick it off.

  “Did I ever tell you about our stepdaddy, Myron?”

  “You said he was a bastard.”

  “To put it mildly, Myron. To put it mildly. Our mama came home one night wagging this loser with her and announcing that he was going to be our new daddy. Fat chance of that. Right off, me and Cecil hated him and made no secret of it. From the day they got married, it was them against us. All we needed was each other. My brother and me made a good team.”

  He sighed heavily. “But Delray ruined Cecil, is what I think. My brother must have taken some of his lectures to heart, because the older Cecil got, the more of a pussy he became. Wasn’t too long before he completely lost his sense of humor and spirit of adventure. It came to a head that morning in Arkadelphia. He got spooked and left it to me to kill that off-duty policeman. Now, how’s that for a brother?” he asked in disgust.

  “I just couldn’t trust him after that, Myron. Not even on this job. He argued with me about every single detail, didn’t he? You were here. You heard.” He
looked across at Myron, adding earnestly, “If I had done things Cecil’s way, we’d’ve been fucked.”

  “Yeah. Fucked.” Myron picked at a pimple on his chin and drank from a can of beer, seemingly indifferent to the conversation and to sharing the cabin with two corpses.

  In many ways Carl envied Myron. He wouldn’t mind temporarily slipping into Myron’s vacuous universe where nothing mattered except the appeasement of whatever appetite happened to be gnawing. Just for a little while. Just long enough to get over this hump. Myron didn’t seem to care, or even remember, that he had tortured Cecil into such a sad state that he was begging for death by the time Carl put the pistol to the back of his head.

  When you looked at it from that standpoint, he’d done his brother a huge favor. Killing him had been an act of mercy, not murder.

  Nevertheless, the incident had left a bad taste in his mouth. Sharing the cabin with the bodies wasn’t helping his nerves any, either. He wished he and Myron had carted them outside, or that they would rot faster than they were so he wouldn’t be forced to continue looking at them. They hadn’t started stinking yet, but when they did, what then?

  With no more concern than he would give two tow sacks of potatoes, Myron had dragged the bodies into a corner so they wouldn’t clutter up the center of the floor. They lay exactly as he had left them, in a jumble of bloody clothing and lifeless limbs.

  Apparently it didn’t bother Myron to look at Cecil’s death mask, or Connie’s blood-streaked legs, or the necklace of dark bruises around her throat. Myron was an ardent, if artless, lover. Connie hadn’t taken to his rowdy style of romance and had fought him to her last breath. But she was a whore. No great loss to anybody.

  Carl tried real hard to work up some sadness over his brother’s death, but all he could muster was regret that Cecil had died as he had lived—a gutless coward. If he had shown some spine, he might still be alive. Instead he had died blubbering like a baby, and that was cause for disdain, not grief.

  “He never could go the distance,” Carl said, speaking his private thoughts aloud. “I could give you a hundred examples of how he chickened out at the last minute. He always backed down when things got rough, and left me to do the dirty work for him. But he was my brother. I’m gonna miss him something terrible.”