Dark Places

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  “He’s right.” Crow nodded. “He’s done his part. It’s you and me again. The best thing to do is wait until they leave tomorrow. With the numbers down, we stand a better chance of getting her out, if she’s in there.”

  James put both hands on the wheel. He needed something to hold himself steady. “She is. I can feel it.”

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Cody went back to Leland Hale’s house. This time Melva was home and had the lights on inside. He killed the engine and got out. A cat shot off the porch and disappeared under the derelict truck.

  Once again being careful of the rotten steps, Cody stepped up on the porch and knocked on the door. “Miss Hale? Melva? It’s Sheriff Parker.”

  He saw someone moving past the window and waited, standing to the side. The wooden door opened and Melva peeked out. Dim light spilled out. “What is it sheriff? What’s wrong?”

  “Howdy, Melva. Is Marty home?”

  “You don’t see his truck out there, do you?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Then he ain’t here.”

  “I didn’t figure. Can I come in for a minute?”

  She thought about it for a second, then stepped back. Cody hooked a finger in the screen’s handle. It opened with a rusty squall that he didn’t remember being so loud. He pushed the wooden door open against the wall and gave the crack a quick glance to be sure nobody was hiding back there.

  The radio was on, playing music through a filter of static. Melva returned to the couch and picked up her crocheting. Romance magazines were still scattered around the coffee table and couch. Cody stayed by the door, shifting from one foot to the other.

  “Have you seen Marty lately?”

  “He comes and he goes. Now that he ain’t workin’ no more, he’s gone most of the time.”

  “Did he lose his job?”

  “The lake started to fill up, so they’re done.” She giggled. “I don’t know what he’s gonna do for money now. Might have to move. I don’t intend to, less I have to, but I’m ’bout tired of feedin’ ’im.”

  “You’ve lived here a while.”

  “Yep, since before Charlie run off.”

  “Marty was little.”

  “Yep, Charlie brought me here from New Boston, probably to get closer to the river and them beer joints. That place was a misery.”

  “The beer joints aren’t good places, that’s for sure.”

  “I was talking about New Boston.” Her annoying giggle burst from her chest and was gone. “Lost two daughters there. Food poisonin’, but them joints are trouble, too.”

  The small community was seventy miles east of Chisum. Cody glanced out the front window, watching for headlights in the dim light. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

  She kept crocheting. “After the girls was buried, my husband took the baby and run off, but he didn’t want Marty. I’m tired of raising him, but he won’t leave.”

  Cody frowned. “That was Charlie?”

  She giggled. “No, Harry Clay.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I’s married ’fore Charlie, to Harry Clay. He never could keep a job, then he run off and took my baby. Don’t know where he went. Charlie come along and we married.”

  Cody wondered if she’d officially divorced Harry Clay before she and Charlie wed.

  “Did you work there in New Boston, before Marty came along?”

  “Had to. Took a job in the tomato house packing ’maters. That’s where I met Charlie.”

  Cody shook a cigarette from the pack and lipped it out. “So Marty’s the only one of your kids you have left.”

  Melva pulled a long string of yard from the skein beside her. “No. I have an older girl, but she don’t have nothin’ to do with me. I never was married to her daddy.” A giggle. “Ain’t that a scandal?”

  Cody wondered how many husbands and kids Melva’d had through the years. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Waco. She went to Waco after I helped deliver her baby that was born dead. It was a blessing, ’cause when it was born she wasn’t married and there was no way she could have raised a baby. The Lord works in mysterious ways.” She giggled. Her strange behavior grated on Cody, and he could see why it was a chore for Miss Becky to gin up enough enthusiasm to visit. “Like Leland gettin’ killed the way he did. I reckon his time was long past when that truck hit him.”

  “I guess you figured everything should have worked out for y’all when you came here from New Boston. Starting fresh and all. I’m sorry it turned out this way. I hope you can keep up with the farm.”

  “Probably need to sell it. I doubt we’ll get what we paid for it.”

  Cody frowned. “I’d think you’d make enough money off the sale to pay it off with a little bit left over.”

  She giggled, but this time it was one he recognized. It was punctuation of fact. “We oughta make enough. It’s paid for. But it wasn’t Leland’s nohow. Me and Charlie bought it with some insurance money. He run off after we got settled in, and then I married Leland. I won’t be able to keep up with the taxes when they come due, though. We’ve been behind on them for six-seven years or so, and the gov’m’t won’t wait much longer. Letter in there on the table makes it so. I hope I can get the money out of Leland’s life insurance policy, then we won’t have to move.”

  “You paid cash for this place?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “Y’all must have done pretty good in New Boston.”

  “We wasn’t doing good, but Harry Clay had policies on both the girls.”

  Cody felt like his head was spinning from all the information and he paused for a moment as cogs clicked into place. He started to ask another question, but headlights turning off the highway made him pause. Instead of Marty’s truck, a sedan passed, driving slowly down the muddy road.

  Melva giggled again, then took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “I wish I could do without these spectacles, but they seemed to help my headaches.”

  “You farsighted?”

  She giggled. “Nor nearsighted neither. It’s hurting something fierce right now.”

  “You probably need more light. You should get a stronger bulb.”

  “It ain’t the light. I keep a headache all the time, but some days it gets so bad I have to go to bed. I hit my head when a horse throwed me into a fence post when I was fifteen and it’s hurt ever since.” She giggled and replaced the glasses. “Well sir, after I got up, I marched myself right in the house and got Daddy’s pistol and shot that damned horse right between the eyes.” She stretched out more yarn. “That’s the gun that went off and killed Daddy later almost a year to the day.”

  Cody needed an ashtray. Finding none, he flicked the long ash into the palm of his hand.

  “Use the floor. Ashes from a cigarette ain’t no wors’n ashes from the stove.”

  He figured she was right about that. The wood stove’s door was partially open and ashes littered the floor underneath. It was an odd dichotomy. The house was clean and tidy in a number of ways, but in others, it was downright dirty. The sink and counter was full of unwashed dishes, but the table was dusted. The living room was fairly tidy, but magazines littered all the furniture, and newspapers were stacked at the end of the couch. The rug under the coffee table didn’t have a spec of dirt on it, but ashes and bits of charcoal made the floor in that corner gritty.

  Instead of dropping the ash, Cody kept it in his palm and added another.

  She produced another giggle. “It don’t matter none.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I’ll find me another husband sooner or later. I know what men want.” This time Cody would have thought her giggle was self-conscious, but he decided it wasn’t. “I’m gonna put me an ad in the personals in one of these magazines and ’fore you know it, I’ll have me another man. That
helps my headaches.”

  “Being married?”

  “In a way.” She lowered her voice in a little girl whisper that sounded creepy coming from a woman nearly sixty years old. “It’s the relations that takes this headache away for a little while.”

  Giggle.

  Feeling uneasy at the turn of the conversation, Cody used his thumb and forefinger to grind out the cherry on the cigarette butt. “How many times you been married, Melva, to know that much about men?”

  “Five, no, six, if you count my first one when I wasn’t but sixteen, but he run off on me not a month after we took our sacred vows. There’s been some men in between, if you know what I mean.”

  Another set of headlights lit the dirt road. This time the vehicle stopped for a moment, then backed up and drove off.

  “All right.” Cody opened the door, forgetting the ashes in his hand. “Gotta go.” He was off the porch in a flash and running through the rain. Starting his car, Cody backed out of the yard, his headlights sweeping across the house, the broken-down truck, and the propane tank near the fence.

  He hit the highway, fishtailed slightly on the wet pavement, and shot away to catch the truck that turned out to be Ike Reader, who’d driven by to check Leland Hale’s fence.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  Following the hand-drawn map, Anna found the rented house with very little trouble and parked in the empty front yard surrounded by trees on three sides. In the late afternoon light there were no other buildings in sight except for a ramshackle barn in the distance. She didn’t know what kind of vehicle John T. drove, but he obviously wasn’t there. She drummed her fingernails on the cloth seat, thinking.

  “Dispatch, this is Deputy Sloan.”

  “Go ahead, Anna. Remember, you can call me Martha.”

  “I’m serving a warrant at…” she read the route number on the mailbox.

  “Ten-four.”

  She stepped out, her foot squishing in a sea of red mud. Eroded car tracks crisscrossed the yard. A light shower dimpled the puddles. She paused, listening to the sound of high water in the roaring creek not half a mile away. A darker line of clouds moved from the southwest, followed by the grumble of distant thunder.

  The house was a typical salt-box Texas farmhouse with a small inset porch in the left front corner. One peeling, shiplap-covered wall bowed outward and from the long perspective from the front, curved up and down like rolling hills. She’d already seen the other side when she pulled in. There were no ruts leading to the back.

  Grit on the concrete porch steps scraped under her shoes. Once there, she checked the window to her immediate right. The paper shade was drawn and still. Angling her body so as not to stand directly in front of the door, she banged on the screen with the heel of her hand.

  After a long, silent moment, she banged again. “John T. West! Sheriff’s department! Open up!”

  She banged again, harder. “Sheriff’s department, John T.! I have a warrant for your arrest! Come to the door!”

  She bent outward to check the length of the house. Nothing moved. No one sprinted out the back toward the woods, at least no one she could see from where she stood.

  She rapped her knuckles on the loose glass in what she expected to be the living room window. The paper blind blocked her view there as well. “Sheriff’s department!” Anna tugged at the screen door. It opened easily. Propping it open with her foot, she twisted the knob on the wooden door.

  “Search warrant!” For the first time she drew her pistol and pushed at the unlocked front door. Stiff, it only swung open for about ten inches. The part of the living area within her view was completely empty. She peeked inside and because she was small, slid sideways through the opening.

  The wooden door swung wider and the world exploded as a booby trap triggered both barrels of a sawed-off twelve-gauge pointed at the door.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  “Cody.”

  “Go ahead, Martha.”

  “I can’t raise Anna, and it’s been half an hour.”

  “Where did she last report?”

  She gave him the route number for the house. “She went there to serve that warrant on John T. West.”

  “I’m on the way. Did you call the constable in Cooper?” It was the nearest town to John T.’s house.

  She heard his engine roar as Cody pushed the accelerator to the floor. “Sure did. Jim Ed Hathaway. No answer at his house, and I can’t raise him on the radio, neither.”

  Cody flipped on his siren. “Did he go out there with Anna?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “All right. Let me know if you hear anything else. I oughta be there in twenty minutes or so.”

  He was about to hang up the microphone when his Motorola squawked again. “Cody.”

  “Go ahead, John.”

  “I’m hitched to your bumper.”

  Cody checked his mirror. “Hang on tight.”

  Five minutes later his radio squawked. “Cody, this is Jim Ed.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Pulling a car out of a low place not far from Cooper. The water’s rising so fast that it’s cut folks off all around me. Why?”

  “You know where John T. West lives?”

  “Yessir, that mean son of a bitch lives on a back road south of the river, but it’s getting’ out of its banks now and spreadin’ fast. It’s raining like hell here.”

  All the creeks in that part of the county drained into the Sulphur River, a deep, winding cut with steep banks sometimes twenty feet from top to bottom.

  “I’m gettin’ it pretty good myself.” Feeling the sedan’s front end slip, Cody backed off the gas. “I’m driving as quick as I can, but this highway’s slick as glass.”

  “I know it. I’m having to find a way around Springhill Slough. I’ll be coming up on the post office in about five or ten minutes.”

  “That’ll be about when I get there.”

  Cody dropped the microphone in his lap and concentrated on his driving. The water seemed higher on that side of Chisum and the fields were shallow lakes. It hadn’t rained this much since the night the kids were taken, nearly four years earlier.

  Minutes later, Cody rounded a curve to see flashing lights as Jim Ed pulled on the highway a quarter mile ahead. He flashed his headlights and Jim Ed’s voice came over the radio. “I see you. We’re gonna lose some time when we get off the highway up here. I sure hope these roads ain’t washed out.”

  “You get me to my deputy. I believe she’s at John T.’s.”

  “You figure she’s hurt?”

  “I hope not, but she still hasn’t checked in.” Cody prayed that her car was stuck somewhere between them and John T.’s house, but that wouldn’t explain why she hadn’t called.

  Jim Ed knew where he was going, so the only thing slowing them was the road conditions. He stopped at a submerged plank bridge not far from John T.’s house and got out, slamming his door in frustration. Rain hammered his hat and bounced up from the stream of roiling, glassy water.

  Cody braked and opened the door. “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s a bridge under here somewhere.”

  “How deep is it?”

  He studied the glass-slick surface. “Not quite deep enough to worry about, yet.”

  “Is there another way around?”

  “Not that’ll be any better than this. I’m gonna see if I can feel the edge with my feet. You get in my car and follow me. If we make it, you can wade back and get yours.” Jim Ed opened his trunk and took out a shovel. Like a man walking on ice, Jim Ed eased forward in the strong current, feeling for the solid oak boards underneath the ankle-deep water.

  He jabbed downward, feeling for the edge of the rough bridge. He felt the shovel miss, as the water caught the wide blade. “Here it is! Come on.”

  Leani
ng into the current, Jim Ed stood at the very edge of the bridge. The water pushed at his legs, and he knew it wouldn’t be much longer before it gained enough power to take him down.

  Barely touching the gas, Cody eased forward and passed so close to Jim Ed that he thought the side mirror would push the Delta County constable off into the current, but he missed by inches and continued several yards onto slightly higher ground.

  Leaving his car, Big John waded onto the bridge. The current pulled like a live thing against his legs. He took Jim Ed’s arm. “C’mon. I’ve watched this water climb your britches while you stood here. We’ll leave the cars here and ride in your’n.”

  When they were inside with Cody, Jim Ed pointed. “Turn up there past the graveyard.” The slough was out of its banks and headstones jutted from the water. “Hope it don’t wash Miss Millie Bills out of the ground. She ain’t been down there long enough to set.”

  By then, Cody saw Anna’s sedan parked in front of the house. He pushed the car as hard as he dared, and a minute later they stopped in the flooded yard. Three doors opened simultaneously as the men jumped out of Jim Ed’s sedan.

  “Anna!” Cody rounded the car and splashed through the ankle deep water. “Anna!” He saw her on the porch, lying on her back, her fingers dangling only inches from the rising water. “John! She’s shot.”

  The big deputy jumped the steps and landed on the boards. Drawing his pistol, he faced the destroyed door. “She alive?”

  Cody pressed his fingers under her jaw, feeling for a pulse. His voice choked. “I think she’s dead.”

  John growled and pushed through the ventilated door. A shotgun was tied to a step ladder. A limp line running from the trigger to the door showed how the contraption was rigged to fire. “No one did it by hand. They’s a booby trap here.”

  Cody moved his fingers on her neck, pressing harder. “C’mon kid.”

  John disappeared into the house and Jim Ed followed, a shotgun ready in his hands.

  Cody checked again. This time finding a pulse so weak that he barely felt it. “Thank God!” He grabbed her shirt and ripped it open, buttons rattling across the porch. Three small holes seeped blood. Another hole at the bottom of her bra bubbled through the material when she took a wet, shallow breath.