Full Dark, No Stars(33)
“I know he talked a lot about his mother after she left, but then he stopped. And I know he hasn’t shown up at that home where Harlan and his wife stuck Shannon.” And on that score I was as surprised as Sheriff Jones… but awfully grateful. “Put the two things together, and what do you get?”
“I don’t know,” Jones said, frowning. “I truly don’t. I thought I had this figured out, but I’ve been wrong before, haven’t I? Yes, and will be again. ‘We are all bound in error,’ that’s what the Book says. But good God, kids make my life hard. If you hear from your son, Wilfred, I’d tell him to get his skinny ass home and stay away from Shannon Cotterie, if he knows where she is. She won’t want to see him, guarantee you that. Good news is no prairie fire, and we can’t arrest him for stealing his father’s truck.”
“No,” I said grimly, “you’d never get me to press charges on that one.”
“But. ” He raised his finger, which reminded me of Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. “Three days ago, in Lyme Biska—not so far from where the rider found your truck—someone held up that grocery and ethyl station on the edge of town. The one with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof ? Took 23 dollars. I got the report sitting on my desk. It was a young fella dressed in old cowboy clothes, with a bandanna pulled up over his mouth and a plainsman hat slouched down over his eyes. The owner’s mother was tending the counter, and the fella menaced her with some sort of tool. She thought it might have been a crowbar or a pry-rod, but who knows? She’s pushing 80 and half-blind.”
It was my time to be silent. I was flabbergasted. At last I said, “Henry left from school, Sheriff, and so far as I can remember he was wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers that day. He didn’t take any of his clothes, and in any case he doesn’t have any cowboy clothes, if you mean boots and all. Nor does he have a plainsman’s hat.”
“He could have stolen those things, too, couldn’t he?”
“If you don’t know anything more than what you just said, you ought to stop. I know you’re friends with Harlan—”
“Now, now, this has nothing to do with that.”
It did and we both knew it, but there was no reason to go any farther down that road. Maybe my 80 acres didn’t stack up very high against Harlan Cotterie’s 400, but I was still a landowner and a taxpayer, and I wasn’t going to be browbeaten. That was the point I was making, and Sheriff Jones had taken it.
“My son’s not a robber, and he doesn’t threaten women. That’s not how he acts and not the way he was raised.”
Not until just lately, anyway, a voice inside whispered.
“Probably just a drifter looking for a quick payday,” Jones said. “But I felt like I had to bring it up, and so I did. And we don’t know what people might say, do we? Talk gets around. Everybody talks, don’t they? Talk’s cheap. The subject’s closed as far as I’m concerned—let the Lyme County Sheriff worry about what goes on in Lyme Biska, that’s my motto—but you should know that the Omaha police are keeping an eye on the place where Shannon Cotterie’s at. Just in case your son gets in touch, you know.”
He brushed back his hair, then resettled his hat a final time.
“Maybe he’ll come back on his own, no harm done, and we can write this whole thing off as, I don’t know, a bad debt.”
“Fine. Just don’t call him a bad son, unless you’re willing to call Shannon Cotterie a bad daughter.”
The way his nostrils flared suggested he didn’t like that much, but he didn’t reply to it. What he said was, “If he comes back and says he’s seen his mother, let me know, would you? We’ve got her on the books as a missing person. Silly, I know, but the law is the law.”
“I’ll do that, of course.”
He nodded and went to his car. Lars had settled behind the wheel. Jones shooed him over—the sheriff was the kind of man who did his own driving. I thought about the young man who’d held up the store, and tried to tell myself that my Henry would never do such a thing, and even if he were driven to it, he wouldn’t be sly enough to put on clothes he’d stolen out of somebody’s barn or bunkhouse. But Henry was different now, and murderers learn slyness, don’t they? It’s a survival skill. I thought that maybe—
But no. I won’t say it that way. It’s too weak. This is my confession, my last word on everything, and if I can’t tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, what good is it? What good is anything?
It was him. It was Henry. I had seen by Sheriff Jones’s eyes that he only brought up that side-o’-the-road robbery because I wouldn’t kowtow to him the way he thought I should’ve, but I believed it. Because I knew more than Sheriff Jones. After helping your father to murder your mother, what was stealing some new clothes and waving a crowbar in an old granny’s face? No such much. And if he tried it once, he would try it again, once those 23 dollars were gone. Probably in Omaha. Where they would catch him. And then the whole thing might come out. Almost certainly would come out.
I climbed to the porch, sat down, and put my face in my hands.
Days went by. I don’t know how many, only that they were rainy. When the rain comes in the fall, outside chores have to wait, and I didn’t have enough livestock or outbuildings to fill the hours with inside chores. I tried to read, but the words wouldn’t seem to string together, although every now and then a single one would seem to leap off the page and scream. Murder. Guilt. Betrayal. Words like those.