Where You Once Belonged(31)

“Don’t I?”

“No. Because we were waiting for it to amount to two hundred thousand. That’s why. And I kept telling him we ought to leave now. I told him we have to take it and get out now. Before the auditors find out, I said. They were getting suspicious. I could tell that. I knew they were. I tried to tell him. But my god, that man kept saying: ‘Just another fifty. Just another fifty.’ Like it was play money or something. Oh, he didn’t understand the risks. He didn’t understand anything. And it was his idea from the beginning. I let him talk me into it. But I was the one that had to do the books, wasn’t I? Not him. And he kept promising me: ‘Wait until it’s two hundred thousand, then we’ll leave together.’ That’s what he said. We agreed on that. He promised me. But then he—”

“Yeah,” Sealy said. “Well. You poor dumb old son of bitch. So he didn’t tell you he was leaving either.”

“I thought I could trust him.”

“Of course. Except you weren’t the only one in town that thought that, now were you?”

“I trusted him, though. And what was I going to do now? Where was I going to go? He had the money. He took everything. He withdrew it all out of the bank over in Sterling. And—”

“Sterling? You mean you kept the money over in Sterling?”

“That’s where we had our account. I thought it would be safer. But I still thought I could trust him. I still believed he was trustworthy.”

“That’s right,” Sealy said. “Because he promised you. Because you agreed on it.”

Soames stopped talking for a moment. He looked at the sheriff.

“But wouldn’t you have said he could be trusted? Didn’t you think Jack Burdette was a trustworthy man?”

“I don’t know,” Sealy said, “Probably. But I might of said the same thing about you too, Charlie. And now look at you. Jesus Christ, look how you turned out.”

*

By evening everyone in Holt County knew about the arrest of Charlie Soames. They had heard about the embezzlement of Co-op funds and about his three-year involvement in it. So the panic and outrage had already begun. The Co-op Elevator was owned in shares by half the people in the area and they all wanted blood.

They would have preferred Jack Burdette’s and Charlie Soames’s blood, both, but Burdette had disappeared. Burdette was already in California, lost somewhere in the streets of Los Angeles. The police had finally managed to trace him that far, but then they had lost track of him. Consequently people in Holt began to understand that they were going to have to content themselves with the arrest of his accomplice, with the indictment and conviction of old Charlie Soames, and then with his rightful punishment. They expected to get something satisfying out of him at least.

And that was awful, really. Charlie Soames was already seventy years old by that time. Like Jack Burdette, he had grown up here. And everyone knew him just as they thought they had known Jack Burdette, except that Soames hadn’t any of Burdette’s flair for sudden and outlandish acts. He was merely an old man who had always lived here. He had spent his entire life being steady and normal and unremarkable. For almost half a century he had been a bookkeeper and accountant for various businessmen in town, and at forty he had married a woman who was only a year or two younger than he was, a woman who dominated him completely, and together they hadn’t been able to have any children. Or perhaps they hadn’t even tried to have children. No one knew about that. His wife liked to talk, but that didn’t happen to be one of the topics she liked to talk about. No, the truth was, Charlie Soames’s entire life had been about as gray as a man’s life can be. Now suddenly he had done this.

So he was arrested. And in very short time he was indicted. Then he posted bail and he was released to await the trial. He made the bail payment out of his own meager life’s savings, out of money which he had accumulated over years of frugality; it had nothing to do with the embezzlement; he had earned this particular money by doing bookwork for others—the police had checked. So he was released and then he went home again to his wife. But that must have been worse than sitting in a cell in the basement of the Holt County Courthouse on Albany Street. He would have been left alone for a few hours in jail. There would have been silence there. But now, once he was home again, Mrs. Soames must have made it hot for him. She was capable of that. She must have ground him like hamburger.

Perhaps that was why, about a week after he was released, he showed up on Main Street once more. It was in the middle of a weekday morning. He walked into Bradbury’s Bakery to have coffee. I don’t know, perhaps he had in mind to test the water, to take a kind of reading of Holt County feelings about things. The bakery was crowded as usual at that time of day. Businessmen and housewives and store clerks and one or two farmers were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, sitting about the room at the various tables. They were all talking.

Then Soames walked into the bakery and everyone got quiet. They watched this small tidy familiar old man fill his coffee cup at the urn at the front counter, watched him pay for it and then turn to find a seat. Across the room there was a vacant chair at a table near the wall. Ralph Bird and a couple of other men happened to be sitting at the table. Soames approached them.

“Wait just a goddamn minute,” Ralph Bird said. “Where do you think you’re going with that?”