A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  “Maybe so, but not from you. I checked you out too, old man. I know you paid half a million dollars for a horse you couldn’t sell for a hundred thousand. You’re bleeding money.”

  “If you know that, then you know I can afford it. I could buy and sell you a hundred times over.”

  “You could, if I were for sale.”

  He showed his perfect teeth, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Everyone’s for sale.”

  Ignoring the pain in my side, I stretched up to scratch the sorrel’s throat. “Tom Cole wasn’t. Or if he was, you never found his price.”

  “Tom Cole. It’s been a long time since I heard that name.”

  “I’m surprised. His grandson’s been pretty vocal about looking into his case. And you were with Trehorne and the others the night Cole died. You saying they didn’t tell you Zane remembered Owen Bodeen telling him Tom Cole was murdered?”

  Lister rocked back on his heels. “If you’re going to revisit the past, Mr. McKean, you’d best be sure you’re prepared for what you might find.”

  “I’m prepared,” I said. “Are you?”

  He gave me a cold sneer. “You do whatever you need to do with my wife. A day from now, you’ll be nothing but a pleasant memory, like a pair of shoes she bought on sale and will never wear again. But don’t take me on, my friend. Not about Tom Cole or the horses or my livelihood. You do, and you’ll be very, very sorry.”

  “Funny, your friend Sam Trehorne told me pretty much the same thing.”

  “Funny, I’m betting you didn’t listen to him either.”

  39.

  By the time I got back, Khanh had wrangled the grill into place over the fire pit. A pair of foil packets and two cobs of corn sizzled on top, and in the ashes I could see the shapes of two potatoes baking. On the platter beside her knee was a rib eye soaked in a marinade of garlic, butter, and Worcestershire sauce. When I stepped into the firelight, Khanh waved a twopronged meat fork at me, skewered the steak, and plopped it onto the grill. The marinade dripped and sizzled, and the air filled with the aromas of garlic and seared meat.

  Suddenly I was ravenous.

  She said, “That skip trace lead to deadbeat dad. He living in Vegas.”

  “That was good work. If you liked it, I can give you more.”

  “You give me raise?”

  “Getting greedy?” I said. “We’ll split the fee. Got another job for you, if you want it. Billy will have to drive you.” I told her about Lori Mae Tillman’s daughter.

  Her face lit up. “This PI work, right? I doing real PI work?”

  “You’ve been doing real PI work all day. I think you’re ready, don’t you?”

  “Yes. No. Wait. Something I not understanding. What happen to you work alone?”

  There were a lot of things I might have said, sappy sentimental things that would have made her suspicious and me uncomfortable. I shrugged and said, “It’s lost some of its appeal. What do you say? Partners?”

  She nodded. “Partners.”

  We shook on it. Then she said, “You think we find something tomorrow?”

  “I hope so, because otherwise all these guys have to do is stick to their story, and they’ll keep right on getting away with it. It won’t be anything as obvious as a canceled check—these guys are too smart for that—but maybe something she wrote, like a letter or diary.”

  “You think Owen Bodeen telling the truth?”

  “He had no reason to lie. Not then, not to Zane.”

  “These man. They kill Owen Bodeen, put bones in fire?”

  That was the million-dollar question. Owen had died a year ago. Had his bones been in the Underwood barn all along, or had the arsonist put them there? And if the latter, why?

  “It’s tied to Tom Cole somehow,” I said. “Owen disappeared the night he told Zane about seeing Tommy murdered. That’s too big to be a coincidence. Plus, Jim Lister warned me off about it.”

  She shook her head. “Lot of people at that party. All guilty, none guilty, some guilty others cover. Too many possibility. Make my head hurt. I going clean kitchen. You feed horse, figure out.”

  After I’d fed and watered the horses, I went inside and pulled up the Sextant’s site on my computer. Eli had said he wrote for the print-only edition, but Maggie’s death and the attack on Zane had made the online issue. I checked the byline and saw a name I didn’t recognize.

  On impulse, I dialed the paper’s number. A woman’s voice answered. “Nashville Sextant.” she said.

  “You keep late hours.”

  “Newspaper hours. Just putting tomorrow’s edition to bed. What can I do for you?”

  I told her who I was and what I wanted, and there was a long pause. “Eli Barringer? He’s a stringer, not a regular contributor.”

  “Is that his choice, or yours?”

  “I don’t know if I should answer that,” she said. “These are litigious days.”

  “I’m not out to make trouble for you. Or for him. Just trying to understand. The article that ran today about the horse show, shouldn’t that have been Eli’s?”

  There was another pause. Then she said. “A news piece has to be unbiased.”

  “And Eli’s wasn’t.”

  “Let’s just say he definitely has a dog in the hunt.”

  “He thinks his grandfather was murdered,” I said, “and he’s probably right.”

  “He may be right. But he’s obsessed with it, which doesn’t lend itself to fair and objective reportage. The truth is, I’m worried about him. He’s there at the show?”

  “He is.”

  “If half of what he says is true, he’s dealing with some very dangerous people. And for the last few weeks, ever since his grandmother died, he’s been fixated on exposing them.”

  “Like a mission.”

  “She’s the one who raised him, and I think he feels he owes it to her memory.”

  I shifted the phone to the other ear. “When you say he’s obsessed . . .”

  “I think he’d let them kill him if he thought it would bring everything to light. I think he might consider that a noble death.”

  “Like his grandfather’s.”

  “Exactly. He’s a sweet boy, but I get the feeling he grew up in a very big shadow.”

  40.

  The moon was high and Khanh was long in bed when Rhonda Lister came out of the shadows. The campground was quiet, illuminated by moon and firelight and the dim spill of light from the streetlamps near the arena. I was sitting on the air mattress half watching the flames, and when she stepped out of the darkness and I felt my heartbeat quicken, I knew I’d been waiting for her all along.

  She stopped just inside the flickering circle of firelight, shook back her hair, and said. “I came to tuck you in.”

  “Rhonda—”

  She held up a hand. “Don’t. Don’t be so damn noble. No one’s sneaking around on anybody here.”

  “What happened to ‘a reasonable amount of discretion?’ ”

  “Who decides what’s reasonable?” She came around the fire pit and knelt to kiss me lightly on the lips.

  I slid my hand beneath her hair and cupped the back of her neck. Her mouth opened just a little, and we kissed again, her tongue tasting of peppermint.

  “I’m not exactly at my best,” I said. “The doctor said not to do anything too strenuous.”

  “Don’t worry.” She slid her palms across my chest, then gently pushed me down onto my back and tugged my shirt out of my waistband. “I’ll do all the work. But first, I need to show you something.”

  She rocked back on her heels, unzipped her jeans, and slid her thumbs beneath the waistband of her panties. Peach, a hint of lace at the waist. Beneath them, just above the crease of her inner thigh, was a thick gauze rectangle held in place by surgical tape.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  She peeled back the edge of the gauze to show a cluster of weeping burns. In the silence that stretched between us, she said, “Do you hate me?”
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  “I think the real question is, do you?”

  “I don’t know.” She pressed the tape back into place, not meeting my gaze. “My therapist says I’m punishing myself. Because it was my fault.”

  I didn’t have to ask what was her fault. I’d known her for three days, and the defining event in her life was already clear. She said, “He wasn’t supposed to race that day, but it was my birthday, and I’d been begging for this necklace I’d seen in a catalog. A dragonfly. Real gold, with diamonds. He was racing so he could buy me that necklace.”

  I found my voice. “That doesn’t make what happened to him your fault.”

  “I wish I could believe that.” She smoothed the edges flat against her skin. “Sometimes I don’t know if I want to scream or cry or burn the world. This helps.” She dug a fingernail into the gauze over the wound and gasped.

  I pulled her hand away, kissed the palm. “Don’t. You know he wouldn’t want you to.”

  “How do you know what he’d want? I burned him alive.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “As good as. If I hadn’t been so selfish—”

  “If he hadn’t raced, if somebody hadn’t bumped him, if he hadn’t lost control. You can kill yourself with ifs.”

  She unbuttoned her shirt and shrugged out of it, then reached behind and unhooked her bra. Her breasts were full and firm, and I pulled her down and tasted her, felt the nipple harden beneath my tongue.

  She used one hand to shuck out of her jeans and panties. Unbuckled my belt with the other. I lifted my hips and she tugged down my jeans, raising her eyebrows at the extra weight of the Glock at the waistband. Then she lowered herself onto me, and I lost myself in her warmth. The pain in my side merged with the pleasure in my groin, and I closed my eyes and thrust upward until we cried out together and she shuddered against my chest.

  I lay gasping beneath her for a moment, the pain in my ribs writhing like a live thing. When it finally subsided, I opened my eyes and saw a figure in the shadow of the trailer. He was tall and thin, his shoulders hunched forward in the same crabbed posture he’d used in the saddle.

  “He’s watching, isn’t he?” she said, lifting her head. “He likes to watch.”

  There were tears on her cheeks, and I brushed them away with my thumbs, pulled her down for another kiss. “There’s no one there,” I said. “There’s no one here but you and me.”

  We slept. Sometime later, I felt her stir, and woke to find her looking at me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t usually cry when I make love. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “I could make something up,” I said. “About how women cry when they’re overcome with sexual euphoria.”

  She smiled. “There might be something to that.” She trailed her fingers down my stomach. “Are you up for another round?”

  I took her hand, moved it lower. “What do you think?”

  “I want it to be just for you this time. Just for us.”

  I scanned the shadows, found them empty. Jim Lister was gone. I’d taken more from him than he’d given, but it was nothing he valued or appreciated, and while I should probably have felt guilty, I didn’t.

  Afterward she kissed me on the chin and said, “I have to get back.”

  “I’ll walk you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sure Maggie would have said the same thing. I’m going with you.”

  She stopped me before we reached her trailer. Kissed me once more, long and lingering. I watched from the shadows as she made her way up the aluminum steps, blew me a kiss, and closed the door behind her. Through the warmth of the afterglow, the serpent in the garden whispered in my ear: How far would this woman go to protect this life?

  41.

  A line of gold edged the horizon when I left the Listers’ trailer. The campground was still, and the morning smelled of grass and sawdust. I wondered if Maggie’s killer was awake and if our paths might cross, if she had met him at a moment much like this and smiled her open smile before realizing the danger. I wondered if this gilt-edged sky was the last good thing she’d seen before she died.

  I wound my way back through the campground and into the vendor area, passed the booth where Maggie had been killed, and paused to look behind the counter. Nothing seemed disturbed, but there were faint traces of graffiti from the day before. Go home, horse fu— . . .

  The streetlights gave off a faint hum.

  As I trudged up the concrete walkway to the arena, the sky lightened and the campground came to life. I heard a dog bark in the distance, and the cry of a baby, and then, as I pushed open the arena doors, a tinny recording of “Amazing Grace.”

  I slipped into a seat beside Sue Blankenship, who clutched a frayed tissue in one fist. Scattered around the bleachers were thirty or so faces I didn’t recognize and almost a dozen I did. Carlin and Zane sat near the front, Gerardo shifting uncomfortably in the row behind them. On the opposite side of the arena, a few rows behind the Trehornes, Mace and Trudy murmured to each other, hands clasped and heads close together. Mace looked bleary-eyed, and I wondered if he’d gone through another bottle of Jack the night before.

  From the center of the arena, in the judges’ pavilion, a microphone squealed. A man in a black suit rose from a folding chair, one finger marking his place in the Bible he held in one hand. Hap stood off to one side, looking tired and rumpled in his tan sheriff’s uniform.

  The man in the suit positioned himself in front of the mic and said, “Please stand and join me for a moment of silence for our sister, Maggie James, whose life was so cruelly cut short.”

  A tear rolled from the corner of Sue’s eye and came to rest, quivering, at the tip of her nose. I watched it through the moment of silence, most of a lengthy prayer, and a speech by Hap about Maggie’s role in the community. Then Sue dabbed at it with her tissue and walked down to the mic.

  Hap sank into a folding chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

  Sue said, “If Maggie were here, she’d have brought a big platter of fried chicken and a couple of buttermilk pies.” Her voice, wavering at first, steadied as she spoke. “I asked her a million times for those recipes, and she’d always say, Now Sue, if I told you that, I’d have to kill you. I’ll leave them to you in my will. I figured, being ten years older, I’d never see those recipes. I’d give anything to have been right.”

  A stream of Maggie’s friends shared memories, and by the time they’d finished and the preacher gave the benediction, I felt like I’d known her myself—the pint-sized chatterbox who’d crocheted afghans for our boys in the service, covered one living room wall with a mosaic of colored glass, and raised a litter of orphaned ’possums.

  As the small audience filed out, Hap came over and handed me a manila envelope.

  “What’s this?” I asked, sliding the flap open with my thumb. When I tipped the envelope, a sheaf of photos slid into my hand.

  “Sylvia Whitehead,” he said. “Just putting your mind at ease.”

  The woman who had drowned in her bathtub was stocky and plain. She lay on her back in the tub, her head and shoulders out of the water. Flipping through the stack of photos, I saw that Hap was right. There were no bruises on her shoulders.

  I said, “Why are you showing me these?”

  “Just poking a hole in Eli Barringer’s crazy conspiracy theory,” he said. “There’s no smoking gun here, just an angry woman who drank too much and slipped under the water.”

  I slid the photos back into the envelope and said, “His theory doesn’t sound that crazy to me.”

  “Then maybe the two of you can share a padded cell.” He held up his hands and heaved an exasperated sigh. “This fairy tale of his is just plain wishful thinking.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. Maggie’s death and the attack on Zane say something’s going on, and the timing says it’s tied to Tom Cole’s murder.”

  His eyes flashed with sudden anger.
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  I pressed on. “Add Junior’s history of starting fires, and you start to get a pretty ugly pattern.”

  “Go on,” he said, too quietly.

  A new scenario unfolded in my mind. What if I’d gotten it backward? Hap’s role was to protect his family using—and sometimes misusing—the tools of the law. But what if it was Hap who’d killed Owen Bodeen? What if the thing that was eating him alive was not guilt at looking the other way, but the weight of a man’s murder?

  I pressed on. “You’ve misdirected this investigation from the start, when your people ‘missed’ the fact that there were human bones in that barn in the first place. They missed Owen’s belt buckle and failed to investigate a half a dozen barn fires in the past year alone. You have to really work at it to be this incompetent. And since I don’t think you’re incompetent, that means you’re fucking up on purpose.”

  He reared back as if he’d been hit, then spun away, digging his nails into his palms.

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” I said.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his balding pate with his hands. “I wish I could,” he said finally. “But I can’t. I don’t know what to do. It’s all falling apart.”

  “Confession is good for the soul,” I said.

  It must have been pressing on him ever since he’d seen the bones in the ashes of the Underwoods’ barn, because after a moment, he drew in a hitching breath and said, “Follow me.”

  We pushed out the arena doors, where the vendors were beginning to pack their wares. A glance toward the campground showed that more than half the competitors had gone. With only a few classes left, none of them Big Lick, there was little incentive for most of them to stay.

  “This way,” Hap said, and I followed him into the barn area, past Mace Ewing’s stable and to Samuel Trehorne’s. He stopped in front of Rogue’s stall and stepped aside with a sweeping gesture.

  I unlatched the stall gate and pushed it open. Rogue swung his head toward me and stamped a foot, worry lines above his eyes. “Easy, boy.”

  The stallion nickered, stretched his neck, and nudged me gently with his nose.