The River Widow(38)
“Just sit and listen for a spell.”
Adah sucked in a deep breath.
“Thing is, supposedly it happened on the very farm you’re now living on. Story is, she and Les went for a ride. Betsy was on their pretty chestnut mare with the white socks, and that horse went wild and tore through the woods, knocking Betsy around and then throwing her and killing her.”
“Yes? That’s what I was told, too.”
“Trouble is, I saw Lester go by in the truck that day. He was heading for his folks’ house alright, but there weren’t anyone in the truck with him. He was driving crazy, kicking up a cloud of dust—that’s why I looked up. He was alone, or maybe he had the baby with him in his lap. But if Betsy had been in the truck that day, she was lying down . . . or already dead.”
Adah gazed back at a pastoral view suddenly turned dismal and full of confusing green dips and swells. “What are you saying?” she urged out.
She became aware that he’d lit a cigarette, and then he said, through the smoke he exhaled, “That wife of his was all banged up. Talk is, she looked like she’d been beaten to death, but with three eye witnesses—your husband, Buck, and Mabel—telling the same story, that made for no investigation. But I know that horse. That’s the one I sold to the Branches and never got fully paid for. That horse wouldn’t hurt an ant on the ground.”
“I-I’m not following . . .”
“What I think and what lots of folks think is that Lester Branch killed his wife on his farm, and then in a panic brought her body down yonder to his folks’ place, where the three of them concocted a story to tell the police.”
Adah’s vision went hazy. The world slowed to a crawl, and her heart clenched in her chest like a fist. “Are you saying . . . ?”
“Yes,” he said just above a whisper, gently, as if he knew what the information he was imparting could mean to her, how it could scare her out of her mind. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the way I see it, your husband was a cold-blooded murderer. And the people you’re living with made up a story with him to cover up the crime.”
Chapter Thirteen
The air froze around her, and the ground vaporized beneath her feet. For a moment, she felt like she was floating. But she could not escape this, and she breathed in the cool air in silent gulps and worked her way back to what was real.
Of course. It made perfect sense. Lester had killed his first wife, and his family had helped him hide the truth. Now she knew the nefarious secret that Lester had held on to the entire time they were married, and now she knew the Branches’, too. And these were secrets blacker and bleaker than she could have ever conjured up, even during her most imaginative moments.
The silence was deafening, screaming in her ears, and yet she forced herself to take in the impact of what she’d just realized. She could not turn away from the truth. And then she thought of Daisy. How had such a sweet little girl been born into such a family? How could she have come from such wretched people, and now they had her in their grasp? Everything about it seemed at such odds with her innocence and purity. Adah almost couldn’t believe it.
Adah said, “My stepdaughter,” and then her voice failed her again. She gazed away and wiped her nose with the dusty bandanna she retrieved from her pocket. “Maybe I was better off not knowing.”
Jack waited for a moment. “I’m sorry, but I disagree. You’re much better off knowing.”
She laughed pitifully. “So . . . what else is there?”
He leaned back. “They never did put down that horse they say killed Betsy. Do you know of her?”
Jack Darby was a rather attractive man, but she hated the sight of his face just then, and this was beginning to feel like foreign soil, some kind of weird dreamscape.
Adah’s voice cracked as she answered, “Yes, she’s Mabel’s prized possession, although she rarely rides her. A beautiful chestnut with white socks. Mabel calls her Miss Socks.”
“Now . . . just think about it for a minute.” Sympathy evident in his expression, Jack went on, “Don’t you think if that horse had killed Betsy, they’d have put her down or at the least gotten rid of her?”
Adah glanced about furtively. She said, “Okay, I agree you have a good point. So what did you do about it? Did you go to the police with your suspicions?”
“Sure I did. But they had questioned the three Branches who told of the accident, talked to them separately, and they all had a story and they stuck to it. They were so slick they gave the police nothing. Seems to me some of the police suspect what might have happened, but it would’ve been near impossible to prove in a court of law. There was no evidence. The police who arrived first on the scene found that Lester had already carried his dead wife back to the house after he supposedly found her, and they never did go look in the woods for where she had, according to the Branches, gotten all beat up by trees, and they never checked the horse’s hooves for mud or anything like that. Guess it just didn’t occur to them. Police around here aren’t used to investigating murders. They botched the case real bad.”
“And the Branches have at least one good friend in the sheriff’s department.”
“No doubt.”
“So they got away with it.”
“Seems to me.”