Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(35)

Snale had briefed me on Jed Chatt while she stood over the dining room table, marking out the tiny speck that was his house on his vast property in the empty space west of Last Chance. There had been a dispute between Jed’s people and Dez’s nearly two hundred years earlier, apparently over land within the valley that both parties seemed to want. Snale didn’t know much more about it than that, but she told me that the resentment ran deep. Jed hardly came into the town at all, but when he did people shied away from him. He would be dependent on Dez for his mail services, and on the town for his food and supplies, the occasional visits of fly-in, fly-out doctors and dentists. Jed seemed like a hovering black eagle, the townspeople in the valley uneasy mice.

The house sat perched on the side of a low hill facing back towards the valley, only the gentle slope of Last Chance Valley’s crumbly ridge visible in the distance. I got out at the bottom of the hill and looked up towards the property, saw no one. The place was very bare, functional. Shutters closed against the raging sun. A porch that hadn’t been painted in years. There was a small awning where a person might host barbecues, but there were no chairs suggesting anyone ever did. Instead the thing stood rusted, propped up on sandstone blocks. There was a collection of rusty gas bottles under one table.

I walked up onto the porch. Jed was sitting so still that I must have stood in his presence for a good twenty seconds before I noticed him. The man lounged in an old mustard-coloured armchair in the shade of a floral sheet nailed to the rafters, a makeshift screen trying and failing to block the sun. I was wandering along when I noticed him, the gun in his hand trained on me.





Chapter 46


‘THAT’S FAR ENOUGH,’ the man said.

I’d expected someone older, more decrepit looking. But Jed Chatt wouldn’t have been sixty, or if he was, he carried it well. Even from the way he sat, I could see he was a tall, slender man with broad shoulders and strong arms. Black curly hair streaked with grey, dark brown skin. The sawn-off shotgun sitting along his leg was a well-oiled thing with a duct-taped handle.

I put my hands out slightly from my sides, froze with one foot out, the heel up, mid-step.

‘I’m a cop,’ I said.

‘I thought so.’ He nodded to a huge rifle sitting on a table to his left, pointed at my car. There was a long scope mounted on it. ‘I had you in my sights not long after you turned off the highway. Saw you talking while you drove.’

I glanced towards the road.

‘I figured you were either a crazy person talking to yourself, or a sane person talking on a phone. The only person out here

so stressed they’ve got to talk and drive at the same time would be a cop.’

‘Good guess,’ I said. ‘Now put the gun down.’

‘You put yours down first.’

I reached slowly behind me and took my pistol from the back of my jeans, set it on the ground at my feet. Jed responded by shifting the aim of his gun from my belly to my knee.

‘I assume you’re Jed Chatt, terror of Last Chance Valley.’

‘You’ve got the right guy.’

‘I’m Harriet Blue,’ I said. I felt a small measure of relief when he didn’t show any recognition of the name. ‘I just want to talk.’

‘Is this about the boy?’ he asked.

‘What boy?’ I said. He didn’t answer. We stared at each other, neither daring to be the one to show their cards first. It was only when a thin, pealing cry sounded from inside the little house that the expression on his face changed, softened for an instant, before hardening again.

I cocked my head. ‘Is that … Is that a baby?’

Jed put the shotgun down and emerged from his chair, even taller than I had imagined. He walked past me and disappeared into the house. I followed him and stood in the doorway. It was dark and cool inside. Pushed up against the back of the couch was a battered wooden baby’s crib. There was almost no other furniture in the room. The big man took an infant from the stark cotton sheet and lifted it against his chest.

I was shaken and confused by Jed’s transformation from menacing armchair spider to whatever he was now, holding the child. I stepped closer. The baby was brown-skinned as he was, gripping at the tired blue cotton of his old singlet.

‘ Nobody invited you in,’ he said.

‘Is this the boy you were talking about?’ I asked. Jed glanced sideways at me, said nothing. I watched as he tried to hold the baby and retrieve the child’s teething ring from the crib at the same time. I bent down and got it for him. Our fingers brushed. Jed’s skin was hard and warm.

‘No one in the town told me you had a kid out here.’

‘I’d be surprised if anyone knew,’ he said. ‘It’s none of their business.’

‘Whose …’ I struggled. ‘I mean, you’re a bit … mature … to have a newborn.’

‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘If you’re not here about the child, then it’s none of your business, either.’

The baby played with the teething ring. I sat on the arm of the sofa and watched the man taking a bottle of formula from the fridge, boiling the kettle, pouring the water into a bowl. He rested the milk bottle in the bowl, turned it slowly, the baby grizzling against his chest. The hand that held the baby’s bottom tapped it gently, a soft, steady beat. This man had raised children before. But as I looked around the walls, there were no pictures of them. The baby’s arrival seemed to have been an unplanned thing. There was a small bag of children’s clothes by the door and not a toy in sight. The infant and the man were alone out here. There was no sign of a woman’s touch about the place. I spied a handgun on the counter beside some old books full of handwritten notes.