The Right Kind of Fool

by Sarah Loudin Thomas

  Rebecca was on the team playing against her brother. She gave Loyal a hesitant smile and a small wave. He wondered if she really had seen him that day at the river. He wished he could ask her about that, along with the comb still hidden in his sock drawer. Today she wore her long hair in braids over each shoulder. No combs.

  Lost in thought, Loyal almost missed seeing the ball come flying his way. He caught it and tossed it back to Rebecca’s side. She smiled at him again, and he began to think about how he could ask her a question. If only he had paper and a pencil.

  Michael’s team started jumping up and down and slapping each other on the backs, so Loyal assumed they’d won. Reverend Harriman lifted a whistle to his lips and puffed his cheeks. He waved his arms around, and the teams broke up, then began reforming with different players. This time, Loyal got picked and Rebecca was left along the wall. Loyal took his place in the front row near the net. He liked being on the outside corner because it was easier to see what was happening. He hit a ball to a teammate, and they got a point.

  Then he shifted to the front center position. He hated this spot. Since he couldn’t hear what was happening behind him, he had to twist back and forth to try to see everything. The server hit the ball, and he craned his neck to watch it go over the net. A tall boy on the other side leapt into the air to spike the ball, and Loyal dove to keep it from hitting the floor. Instead, he crashed into one of his teammates who was trying to do the same thing. They ended up in a heap with the ball bouncing away.

  As he stood, Loyal could tell the boy he’d crashed into was mad and he chose not to read his lips. He swiped at his own lip and realized it was bloodied. Reverend Harriman was suddenly there handing him a handkerchief and waving him toward the door and the boys’ lavatory. Loyal shuffled after the pastor and obediently washed his mouth out and then pressed the folded handkerchief to his lip. The reverend looked worried. Loyal guessed he was already imagining what Mother would say. Which made Loyal smile. Which hurt.

  Reverend Harriman leaned down and looked into his face. “Do you want to go home?”

  Loyal shook his head no, not bothering to make the sign. The pastor looked relieved. “Okay, just sit down until the bleeding stops.” He made a little squatting motion as though to help Loyal understand what “sit down” meant. Loyal nodded and made his way to the wall where Rebecca sat cross-legged watching the game. He tilted his head as a sort of question. She smiled and patted the floor next to her. Loyal flopped down, letting his shoulders fall. His lip throbbed, but at least he wasn’t bored anymore.

  Now if he could just figure out how to talk to Rebecca.

  She touched his arm, and he turned toward her. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He pulled the handkerchief away and touched his lip with the tip of his tongue. The bleeding had stopped. He nodded and gave her a lopsided smile, trying not to stretch the injured spot.

  He could tell she laughed, and the strangest longing to hear that laugh hit him. He’d always wished he could hear his mother’s voice—thought he could almost remember it—and he was pretty sure it would be nice to hear music, but this feeling was different. He looked away.

  She touched his arm again.

  “You saw us at the river yesterday.” He could tell it was a statement. Not a question. He nodded. Tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them away. “That man is dead.” Another statement. He nodded again. “Will you tell on us?”

  Loyal widened his eyes. Then he wrinkled his brow and let his shoulders rise and fall once.

  “You know about what, but thank you for acting like you don’t.”

  Loyal was astonished. She’d understood exactly what he meant even without words or signs. He lifted his hand to make the sign for who when the ball bounced over and struck him in the leg. He tossed it back toward the game, and Michael caught it. The older boy paused, the ball propped on his hip. “Rebecca, about time we headed home.”

  She made a face and clambered to her feet. She gave Loyal a rueful look and said, “See you later. I’m glad we got to talk.”

  Loyal watched the pair leave the gymnasium. Glad we got to talk. She’d said it just like he was a regular person.

  As Creed and Virgil climbed out of the car, Hadden’s man Otto limped around the side of the massive brick house. Otto took care of Hadden’s prized hunting dogs. When he showed up in Beverly, folks had been suspicious of his German accent and his bum leg, but Hadden—not known for acts of generosity—took the boy in. Now he was devoted to his employer and treated the hounds like they were royalty.

  Virgil called out to him. “Otto! Is Mr. Westfall to home?”

  “Yes, sir. He is inside the house using the telephone. I will tell him you are here.” The boy’s accent was less pronounced than when he first arrived, but Creed supposed with all that was happening in Europe these days, even a hint of an accent would make folks suspicious. He felt sorry for the young man.

  “Naw, that’s alright. We’ll find the way.” Otto looked skeptical but didn’t appear to be willing to contradict the sheriff. He just continued on his way toward an outbuilding, glancing back at them as he limped along.

  Creed and Virgil peered in through the screen door on the wide front porch. The house sat on a hill overlooking a rolling valley and the Tygart River—one of the prettiest spots in the county. They could see Hadden standing in the hall, receiver in hand. He waved them in as he finished his conversation. He had long been high up with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and now he was involved in building an airport, of all things. Creed was a little bit in awe of this man, who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of Randolph County but tried not to let it show. Virgil just acted like he did around everybody, as if he were a country bumpkin playing sheriff. Creed—and most everybody else—knew it was an act.

  Hadden dropped the receiver into its cradle with a clatter. “I’m betting you’re here about the dead man you found down along the river.” He waved them into a fancy sitting room, and Creed dusted the seat of his pants before perching on a velvet settee.

  “You know anything about him?” asked Virgil.

  “Not a blasted thing beyond who his employer is. And it’s almighty inconvenient for him to get shot on my property. Shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  “So you knew he’d been poking around?” Virgil settled into a wing-back chair and crossed his legs like a dandy.

  “Two of them have been poking around. They already have terms for the adjoining land, and I’ve been working directly with the government office in Washington, D.C.” Hadden poured clear liquid from a crystal decanter and slugged it back. “If, and I stress the word if, there’s going to be an agreement, I won’t be making it with two ne’er-do-well flunkies parading around Randolph County.” He sat in a chair that matched the one Virgil selected. “There was no reason for either one of them to be out there.”

  “So, you do plan to sell land for this Roosevelt community.”

  “Not unless those idiots offer me what it’s worth. They think just because the country is in this ridiculous downturn, they can pay half the value.” He snorted. “They don’t realize who they’re dealing with.”

  Virgil nodded his head. “Guess Eddie didn’t realize either.”

  “You’ve got that . . . Hold on. What do you mean by that?”

  “You have a reputation for flying off the handle now and again. If you got fired up and tried to scare off a trespasser, I can see how a shot might go awry.”

  Creed braced himself for a burst of anger from Hadden. Instead, a slow smile spread across his face, and he relaxed back into his chair. He propped his elbows and steepled his fingers. “Virgil, I sometimes forget you’re not the fool you try to make people believe you are. No, I did not take a shot at one of those government flunkies and kill him by accident.” He smiled wider. “Nor did I kill him on purpose.”

  Virgil winked. “That’s good to hear. Don’t guess you’d have any notion who might have done it instead?”r />
  Hadden shook his head. “No, I do not. I haven’t seen the Hackers over this way since I ran them out of the hollow down there near the old home place. Although I hear the government is after their land, too. Only other person I see out here is Creed.” Creed tensed the muscles in his legs almost involuntarily. Like he might need to run. He forced himself to relax. “But since he’s tagging along with you, I assume you’ve eliminated him as a suspect.”

  “Not entirely,” Virgil drawled. Creed felt his eyes go wide. Virgil winked again. “He found the body, though, and if he has a motive, I can’t think what it’d be.”

  “I, on the other hand, have a plausible motive. If I am indeed wrangling to either keep my land or sell it for a higher price, those government men might have gotten in my way.”

  “I was thinking something like that,” Virgil said.

  “When was he shot?”

  “Yesterday—probably around noon.”

  Hadden stood and dusted his hands. “Well and good. I was in Elkins, meeting with the engineer about the new airport.” He raised his eyebrows. “Can I show you gentlemen the door?”

  Virgil let one side of his mouth tip up. “Sure. You mind if we poke around the crime scene one more time?”

  “Not at all, although I suppose since it’s a crime scene it wouldn’t matter if I did mind.”

  Virgil shook Hadden’s hand, and there seemed to be a moment when each man was trying to best the other. Virgil let go first and gave his hand a shake. “You’ve still got it, Hadden. Guess being a man of business hasn’t made you go soft.”

  “That it has not,” Hadden said as he opened the front door.

  six

  Virgil parked as close as he could to the spot along the river where Eddie Minks breathed his last. Creed got out of the car and followed the sheriff along a path near the water’s edge. Humidity hung heavy in the summer air, and he felt sweat prickle under his arms, even though it was an easy walk. The only sound was the rush of water to his left and their footsteps. No birds sang, and the air was as still as a tomb.

  As they approached the place where river grasses were mashed down, Creed saw that the earth had already absorbed the worst of the bloodstains. Nature was like that. Quick to reclaim anything man tried to change. He crouched down and examined the place where the body had lain.

  “Did you see footprints or anything like that when you first got here?” Virgil asked.

  “Sure. Deer tracks, turkey, grown men, kids, probably a raccoon or possum. This trail is used by all sorts of warm-blooded critters. Killer’s tracks could easily have been here, but I don’t know how you’d tell ’em apart.”

  Virgil grunted and circled the area looking high and low. He finally stopped near a small stand of river oaks. “Remind me which way the body was laying.” Creed closed his eyes to picture it and pointed.

  “So, the killer was probably standing opposite this spot if Eddie fell when he was hit.” The sheriff scratched under the edge of his hat where beads of sweat had formed. He let his gaze swing around. “Or Eddie might have staggered a few steps . . . Here we are!” He flipped open a pocketknife and jabbed the blade in a tree trunk. “Slug. Probably the one that winged Eddie in the arm.”

  Creed stepped closer to see what Virgil had found. “Could be. Or it might be an old slug from a hunter.”

  “This looks fresh. Not many folks hunting in July.”

  Creed nodded. It was too hot for deer hunting, and the game wasn’t good this time of year. “If it is the bullet, what good does that do you? Lots of folks around here have a gun that caliber.”

  Virgil worked the slug out and dropped it into his breast pocket. “There’s this new science called ‘ballistics.’ They say they can look at a slug under a microscope and match it to the gun that fired it. We already got the bullet that was lodged against Eddie’s spine, so we can test ’em both.” He shrugged. “If nothing else, I’d like to see how it’s done.”

  Loyal sat between his parents in church the next morning. It was boring, like always, but he didn’t mind as much when Mother and Father were with him. It made him feel like part of a regular family. He leaned against Mother as they stood to sing so he could feel her voice.

  After Reverend Harriman finally raised, then lowered his hands at the end, they all filtered out into the airless day. Men clustered under a tree, smoking cigarettes and tapping their toes. Loyal knew they wished their wives would stop talking and go home to get dinner on the table, and he sympathized with the women. If he could talk freely like that, he’d do plenty of it.

  Across the yard, he saw Rebecca standing near her father. He noticed that she had her hair pulled back with mismatched combs. They were both the mottled brown, but one was plain and the other carved like the comb in his drawer at home. So it really was Rebecca’s. He frowned, considering what that—along with her earlier comments—meant. She and Michael must have found the body before he did. But why had she asked if he would tell on them? His eyes widened. What if they had killed the man? Michael had brought one of his father’s pistols to the Fourth of July picnic. Loyal had seen him showing it to some older boys. Why would kids shoot a grown man they didn’t even know? It was the kind of notion Mother would tell him was the result of an overactive imagination.

  Loyal stared at his shoes, so deep in thought he didn’t sense someone approaching from behind. Suddenly he felt something cold and wet slither down the collar of his Sunday shirt. He arched his back and jerked the tail of his shirt out, shaking it and high-stepping until he was sure whatever it was had fallen out. He turned to see Father holding a crawdad that must have come from the creek below the church. Loyal realized everyone in the churchyard was staring at him—including Michael and his buddies, who were bent over laughing.

  He felt his face go hot as he tucked his shirt back in. Father walked over, and together they strode down to the creek where they put the crawdad back in the water. Father kept his hand on Loyal’s shoulder the whole time. When they got to the creek, backs to the crowd, Father looked earnestly into his eyes. “Any fool can play a trick. Courage is holding your head high when they do.” Loyal nodded, fighting a prickling of tears. “Show me how to shape courage.”

  Loyal looked to his father. Was he asking for the sign? He lifted his hands to his shoulders and made a motion as if he were plucking something from his shirt and holding it tight in his fists. Father imitated him. “That’s you,” he said, pointing at Loyal. “Courageous. Brave.” He made the sign again.

  Loyal still wanted to cry, only now it was a different kind of feeling.

  Delphy tried to slow the whirl of her mind as she ladled stewed chicken into a tureen. Even when it was just her and Loyal, she liked to serve a proper Sunday dinner. And this morning Creed had offered to wring the neck of the old rooster that had taken to crowing well before dawn. She’d been meaning to do it herself but was grateful to let someone else put an end to the old fellow. A secret smile quirked her lips. She’d save her neck wringing for Creed Raines. He’d spent a second night so they could go to church together, and her conflicting emotions were keeping her up at night. While she was grateful to see Creed taking more of an interest in Loyal, she was afraid he was setting the boy up for disappointment.

  She settled the stew on the table next to a pea salad and angel biscuits. Creed spoke even before she could sit. “I need to get back up the mountain.” She felt every muscle in her body tense and darted a look at Loyal. The boy was perched on the edge of his seat, watching them intently. Oh, but he could see so much more than people with two good ears.

  “I’m surprised you stayed this long.” She didn’t sign the words. Loyal would likely follow along, but at least he couldn’t hear the way her words twisted between them. She wished she could tell Creed that he broke her heart every time he came home and left again. If he’d left all at once and stayed gone, maybe it would be different. Instead, he’d drifted away from them in bits and pieces. Still was. Although each time he came home,
some foolish part of her dared to hope he would stay.

  Delphy suspected he blamed himself for taking Loyal on that fateful trip that ended in a fever, an ear infection, and . . . she looked at her son. A wave of fierce protectiveness washed over her, and she realized that maybe she blamed Creed, too. For the first time she considered that maybe she’d played a role in Creed’s slow abdication of his family.

  “Maybe . . .” Creed sat and spooned some peas onto his plate. Something took flight in Delphy’s heart. As if his maybe were echoing her own and they might finally talk about what stood between them. “Maybe I should take Loyal up on the mountain with me this time.”

  Her heart turned to stone. “Absolutely not,” she said as she pushed her plate away.

  Creed broke open a piece of bread and buttered it. “Might be good for both of us.” He ducked his head, then looked up again. “I didn’t realize we could . . . communicate. I’d like to try more of that.” He turned toward Loyal. “You want to come up on the mountain with me?”

  She didn’t mean to do it. Didn’t know she was going to until her plate of stew crashed to the floor, spattering bits of food and making Loyal jump. While he couldn’t hear the crash, she knew he could feel the reverberation.

  “Come with me,” she said to Creed and marched him out the back door into the yard. She could feel her cheeks heating and knew tears stood in her eyes. Loyal did not need to witness what she would say next.

  When Delphy returned to the kitchen, she saw that Loyal had cleaned up her mess. He was such a good boy. For a split second she wondered if she should let him go with his father. Boys needed their fathers, didn’t they? But no. The last time the two of them went somewhere alone, it changed all of their lives. And while she knew this was different, her mother’s heart couldn’t bear the notion that something even worse might happen up on the mountain where help was simply too far away.