Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  On camera, a sheriff’s detective said the pink uniform she had probably worn to work the previous night had been washed in a sink and put on a coat hanger in the bathroom. Anyone with knowledge about her whereabouts was asked to call the Mineral County Sheriff’s Department.

  WYATT DIXON WAS sitting in the living room of Bertha Phelps’s apartment, ten floors above the old vaudeville theater called the Wilma, with a magnificent view of the bandstand and the merry-go-round in the park and the river that flowed high and roiling through the city. The light was fading in the sky, and he could see stars high above the pink and lavender afterglow on the rim of the mountains far to the west. Wyatt’s mind was not on the view. When he looked up at Bertha’s silhouette as she watered her window plants, he felt the same conflict of emotions that had always beset him whenever he placed his trust in others.

  For most of Wyatt’s life, survival had meant war, and the rules of engagement had remained the same: If you wanted women, you had to fly the flag; if you wanted the respect of men, you never showed fear, and when provoked, you rattled only once.

  Bertha Phelps was an ongoing riddle he couldn’t figure out. She was an educated and intelligent countrywoman who seemed to genuinely like him and accept him, and smelled like a floral delivery truck on a hot day. She also had sand. After the attack, she called a women’s crisis hotline and made an appointment with a psychotherapist, as though contracting a pest exterminator to rid her house of termites. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she insisted that she and Wyatt immediately go to bed to prove she wasn’t snakebit. He had the feeling Bertha Phelps had an aggressive side that she herself wasn’t aware of; the kind of woman who’d slap the hat off your head if you didn’t remove it in the house on your own. Any man who said he wasn’t attracted to the Calamity Janes of the world was a damn liar.

  Bertha was staring at the television screen. “Listen to this, Wyatt,” she said.

  A sheriff’s detective was being interviewed in front of a frame house sheathed with asbestos shingles up by Lookout Pass. The tenant, a woman named Rhonda Fayhee, had gone missing, not unlike a Hutterite woman who had gone for a walk outside St. Regis two months ago and hadn’t been seen since.

  In the background, Wyatt could see a parked Mazda and a side yard with wash hanging on a line. A uniformed deputy was crossing the grass with a pet cage in his hand. The local anchorwoman came back on the screen and said that investigators could not account for the fact that the windows were locked and the doors bolted from inside.

  “This ain’t the first time he’s done this,” Wyatt said. “He’s what’s called a house creep.”

  “Who is?” Bertha said.

  “The guy who snatched her. It’s like the ship in the bottle, except the house is the bottle.”

  “I’m sure that makes sense to you, but it doesn’t to me.”

  “The guy dead-bolted the door, then went out a window and used a rig to slip the latch from the outside. The newslady said the animals was watered and fed. The guy who done this is a stage director. He gives the cops plenty to study on. It makes him feel powerful. In the meantime, the woman is probably going through hell, if she ain’t already dead.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I knew men in Huntsville pen the devil wouldn’t let wash his socks.”

  “Do you think it’s him?”

  “The guy who killed Angel Deer Heart? Yeah, I do.”

  She sat down next to him, the couch sinking under her. “I have to tell you something. Both the city police and the sheriff’s department interviewed me. They wanted to know if you owned any cap-and-ball weapons.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “I don’t even know what cap-and-ball means.”

  “Black-powder firearms. Somebody put three lead balls in a man who worked for Love Younger. The cops want to put it on me. Except I don’t own no cap-and-ball guns.”

  “The man who was killed is one of the men who attacked us, isn’t he?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “He was kidnapped and tortured in a motel. That’s what the paper said.”

  “I wouldn’t call it torture.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I don’t want you doing things like that, Wyatt.”

  “He was a son of a bitch and deserved a whole lot worse than what he got.”

  “You can’t do those kinds of things in my name.”

  “I done it in my own name.”

  She placed her hand on his forehead and smoothed back his hair. His eyes never changed expression. “I have to confess something to you,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I think you’ll be very disappointed in me.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You don’t know what I’m about to say.”

  “I got my suspicions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Those trashy ballpoint pens you was using, you didn’t get them from Walmart, did you?”

  He saw her swallow. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You knew that no-good detective Bill Pepper.”

  “I did. I knew him very well.”

  “Out in Los Angeles, when he was with the LAPD?”

  “Before that,” she said.

  “You’re saying you were sexually involved with him?”

  “He was my brother.”

  Wyatt’s colorless eyes showed no reaction, but the blood in his head seemed to go somewhere else and leave helium in its place.

  “So you thought it was me who done him in, carved him up with a knife and such? Thought you’d get next to me and maybe do some payback? Is that what you thought, Bertha?”

  “I didn’t know you. Then I learned you’re incapable of doing something like that.”

  “You don’t know what I’m capable of doing. You didn’t get to know me before the state turned my head into a pinball machine and made me drink all them chemical cocktails. Maybe the man I used to be is hiding in the weeds. Ever give that some thought?”

  “Remember when I saw the corn on your lawn?”

  “What about it?”

  “You were putting out feed for the injured doe and her fawn. I knew then I was wrong about you and that you were a kind man.”

  “Maybe I knew that was exactly what you’d think. Maybe I did that for show. I got two sets of cops trying to put me back inside. I don’t need a Jezebel in my life.”

  “I know I’ve hurt you deeply.”

  “For somebody to hurt me, they got to mean something to me in the first place,” he said, rising from the couch.

  “Please don’t say that, Wyatt.”

  “I already did,” he replied.

  Three seconds later, he was out the door, the window at the end of the corridor lit by dry lightning, a sound like a windstorm roaring in his ears.

  FRIDAY MORNING HE woke early at his place up the Blackfoot River and put on a western-cut suit and buffed his boots and took a new Stetson from a hatbox in the back of his closet. He sorted through a drawer full of Indian and western jewelry and broken watches and rabbit-foot key rings and found an honorary sheriff’s badge that a barmaid in Prescott, Arizona, had given him years ago. He found an empty wallet and fitted the badge onto one side and slipped a photo ID he had gotten at the Houston livestock show into the celluloid compartment on the other side. An hour later, he pulled into the parking lot of the café on I-90 where Rhonda Fayhee had been employed.

  “Howdy-doody. The name is Wyatt Dixon,” he said to the owner, opening his improvised badge holder. “I’d like to talk to you about the Fayhee lady.”

  The owner was squirting a hose on the roof of the café to rinse off the ash drifting down from a fire that was burning out of control on the mountainside. He tried to study the badge, but Wyatt put it back in his coat pocket. “I’ve already told the sheriff’s department everything I know,” the owner replied.

  “I’m running at it from a di
fferent angle,” Wyatt said. “I think the man who grabbed her was a little different from your normal motel guests and the regular customers at your café.”

  “What do you mean, ‘different’? What makes you think one of my guests or customers abducted her?”

  “I don’t think I said that. Maybe you weren’t listening. Maybe somebody followed her from work to her house.”

  The owner’s eyes wandered over Wyatt’s face. “Let me turn off my hose.”

  “What I’m really asking you is whether Ms. Fayhee would talk in a personal way with just anybody. Would she tell a trucker or a low-rider or a husband on the make where she lived or what time she got off work?”

  “No, she’s not that kind of girl.”

  “That’s my point. Do you remember her talking to an older man, maybe well dressed, with a comb-over, or a man who might own a big ranch, or maybe a family-type man?”

  “Somebody she’d trust?” the owner said.

  “Good, we’re on the right track.”

  “That could be lots of people. Where’d you say you’re from?”

  “Missoula. I told you.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  “I ain’t the issue. Did you have a guest here who might impress a young gal that’s tired of guys who are always trying to get in her bread?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “What do you care? I’m assisting the state. Try to imagine what that girl might be going through while we’re out here talking and squirting a garden hose on the rooftop.”

  “There was a minister here. He was a nice fellow. I saw him helping a lady unload her vehicle and carry her things inside.”

  “Where’s his church at?”

  “He didn’t say. I remember Rhonda asking him. He said his church was the big one that didn’t have a name.”

  “Which means he probably got his ordination off the Internet. What’d he look like?”

  “His hair was kind of blond, like he’d been out in the sun a lot. He was clean-looking. He said he’d lost his daughter.”

  “You got his name and tag number inside?”

  “He paid cash, so I didn’t bother with the tag. I remember his name, though. I’d never heard it before. Reverend Geta Noonen. I said that was quite a name. He said, ‘You can’t ever tell who’s going to wander in from the storm.’ ”

  “Remember what he was driving?”

  “A gray SUV. Maybe a Blazer. It had some rust on one side. Who is he?”

  Wyatt looked at the fire burning on the mountainside and the ash that floated like black thread out of the sky. “Maybe he’s just another rounder scamming a dollar or two out of ignorant people,” he replied. “Or maybe he’s just a guy that likes to get into a young girl’s panties.”

  “I don’t like the way you talk.”

  “Did you smell a peculiar odor in the room he slept in?” Wyatt asked.

  The owner bit down on his lower lip.

  “You think that fire up on the hillside is hot?” Wyatt said. “If you see that guy again, ask him what ‘hot’ is.”

  THE CHANGING OF the seasons in Louisiana—the changes taking place in the earth, if you wish—were predictable and followed the rules of cause and effect, regardless if the results were good or bad. Hurricanes brought floods; tornadoes destroyed towns; and tidal waves destroyed seawalls. The footprint of the Industrial Age was there in the form of canals that channeled millions of gallons of saline into freshwater marsh and poisoned the root system that bound the wetlands together.

  Montana was different. Friday evening at sunset, I sat on the deck with Albert and Molly and Alafair and watched dry lightning strike in three places on a distant ridge. In under fifteen minutes, I saw three narrow columns of black smoke rising from the woods, straight up into a windless pink-tinted sky. The spring had been long and cold, with more than average rainfall, and snow was packed deep inside the trees on the peaks of the Bitterroots. How could a green forest, one damp with snowmelt, be set ablaze so easily?

  “Because we’ve been in a drought since 1990,” Albert said. He was drinking Scotch and soda, more of it than he should. “Because insects kill more trees than wildfires do. The drought arrives first, then the pine beetles. Dry lightning provides the ignition. There’re places over in Idaho that look like they were sprayed with Agent Orange.”

  “I think I’ll take a walk. How about you?” I said to Molly and Alafair.

  “Maybe Albert might like to go,” Molly said.

  “Dave thinks I rain on parades,” Albert said.

  “He does not,” Molly said.

  “Go on. I’m going to fix another drink,” he said.

  We walked down the long drive and under the arch onto the road. The temperature was dropping, the sun’s afterglow fading beyond the mountains.

  “Why didn’t you invite Albert to come along?” Molly asked.

  “He’s in one of his moods. I didn’t want to get into an argument with him.”

  “This is the third anniversary of his wife’s death.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He told me this afternoon.”

  “I’ll go back.”

  “No, he’ll be all right. Don’t let him think we feel sorry for him.”

  “No, I was wrong. I’m not going to drop it,” I said.

  I walked back up the driveway. The valley was almost completely dark. I could hear the chain tinkling on the gate and the horses nickering and bolting in the north pasture. The wind had come up and was blowing in the cottonwoods by the creek bed, but I couldn’t smell smoke or detect any other cause that might agitate the horses.

  When I reached the top of the driveway, I saw the flashlight beam bouncing along the ground behind Albert’s office. “What are you doing?” I said.

  Albert pointed the flashlight beam below the windows that ran along the back of the house. “I thought I saw a man out here,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Two minutes ago.” He walked closer to me, shining his light up into the trees on the hillside. I could smell the Scotch on his breath and the heat trapped in his flannel shirt.

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  “When I came outside, there was nobody here.”

  “Sometimes the wind makes shadows on the grass,” I said.

  “I never saw a shadow run. Take a look at this.”

  He pointed the light down at an area between the lilac bushes and a bathroom window. I could see two funnel-shaped tracks stenciled deeply into the compost.

  “Those look like they belong to a dog or a coyote,” I said.

  “No, they’re too big.”

  “A wolf?” I said.

  “Yeah, I think that’s Brother Wolf’s prints, all right.” He moved his light around the base of the lilacs and out onto the belt of lawn between the house and the hillside. “Here’s the problem. There’re only two of them.”

  “Say again?”

  “Two paw prints. They’re three inches deep in the soil. You can see the points of the nails. There was a heavy animal here. But it left only two impressions. How is that possible, unless it was standing up? Besides, I didn’t see an animal out here. I saw a man.”

  “Maybe it’s time to cork the jug for the evening,” I said.

  “Don’t you be talking down to me like that, Dave.” He swept the flashlight beam across the tree trunks, illuminating boulders that were half buried in the soil. “I always said this was bloody ground. Why is it we think we can destroy a whole race of people and not pay a price for it?”

  “We didn’t do it.”

  “Like hell.” He clicked off the light. “I’m going inside. It’s cold out here.”

  I DIDN’T BELIEVE IN wolves that stood on their hind legs to look through bathroom windows, any more than I believed in Wyatt Dixon’s claim that a goat-footed creature out of a medieval book on demonology had taken up residence in the cave behind Albert’s house. At least that’s what I told my
self. Regardless, I couldn’t sleep that night. In this case, the source of my insomnia was simple: I feared for Alafair’s life.

  On the late-night news, there had been a follow-up story on the waitress who had gone missing. A silver bracelet with her name inscribed inside it had been found by a fisherman on a flat rock in the middle of the St. Regis River. There was no explanation as to how it had gotten there.

  In my opinion, the abduction was the work of Asa Surrette. He had placed one of his trophies on the rock to confound his pursuers. He was one of those serial predators who controlled both his victims and his adversaries by stoking their imaginations, leading them up a cul-de-sac, making them resent themselves for their powerlessness and the suffering he brought into their lives. Surrette wanted to instill as much pain as possible in the friends and family of the victim. Until her body was discovered, they would get no rest, find no peace, and be tormented by every dark possibility imaginable each time they closed their eyes.

  While Asa Surrette was doing this kind of damage to other people, Love Younger and his family lived in wealth and splendor and dealt with problems like the temperature of their bathwater and the noise the gardener was making with the Weed Eater. I’m aware that all of us reach the same denouement, that we return to dust and our teeth are sown in the field by the farmer’s plow, but that is poor solace when you look into your daughter’s face and try to guess at the fate a man like Asa Surrette might be planning for her.

  I fell asleep around four-thirty in the morning and woke at seven. Molly was still asleep. I got dressed and went down to Clete’s cabin and woke him up. “What’s going on?” he said.