The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(105)

We knocked on the screen door, got no answer, called hello. Still no reply.

Maia kindly offered her key chain knife, which I used to unlatch the door.

The living room was bright with morning sun. Pothos and ivy crowded the windows. I put the newspaper down on the sideboard.

A suitcase lay open and empty on the sofa. On the coffee table was the large brown binder Faye had shown Maia and me the week before.

Maia went to the stereo, checked out the case on the CD player. She might've been waiting in a doctor's office, for all the anxiety she showed.

I sat next to the suitcase, opened the memory book. The picture of Ewin Lowry and Clara Doebler stared up at me—Clara smiling, her hand resting on the hood of the '65

Mustang as if it were a favourite horse. Ewin Lowry's smile was more devilish, his teeth perfectly white. Small build, dark skin—not really olive, as I'd speculated before, but the hue of cinnamon.

Something shattered.

I looked up. Faye Ingram was standing in her kitchen doorway, shards of a Jimmy Doebler coffee cup at her feet.

Her fingers were flaked with mud. She wiped them absently on her gardening apron, then touched her face as if to make sure her mascara and jewellery and pennyred hairdo were still in place.

"Mr. Navarre," she said. "Miss Lee. What are you doing in my house?"

"You haven't disappeared," Maia said. "I'm glad to see that."

Faye glanced behind her, into the kitchen. "I'm fine, thank you. I think you should leave."

"He's here," I said. "Isn't he?"

She knelt down, began picking up pieces of the cup, using her apron as a collection pouch. "I'm afraid— I'm not quite awake yet, Mr. Navarre. I haven't had my second cup of coffee, haven't had my thirty minutes in the garden. I'm afraid I'm not following you."

I slipped the picture of Ewin and Clara out of its plastic pocket. "The resemblance is there, isn't it, if you blend the two of them together? I just wasn't looking for the right connection."

"You shouldn't be here."

She stood, the pottery shards in her apron. Plucking up the ends of the fabric, she looked as if she were about to curtsy.

"Twentyfive years ago," I said. "You saved your sister's child."

"Please don't ask me this."

"Clara had her second son, but it was another battle she couldn't win against the family, wasn't it? They forced her to give the baby away. W.B.'s father made the arrangements—no paperwork, no embarrassment, just discreet payments to a family that would keep the secret and ask no questions as long as the money kept coming.

The Doeblers either didn't know or didn't care what kind of operation the Hayeses were running—what kind of hell they inflicted on their charges. But you found out. You'd watched Clara unravel—you knew that she was unfit to take care of herself, much less a child, but you also knew her misery. You resented the family for what they'd done to her."

Faye pressed her lips tight, turned her face toward the door jamb. "I never married, Tres, never had children. I saw how the family's expectations destroyed my sister—how she kept giving them more rope to strangle her with."

"But you found a way to save something of your sister. You found a way to have a family, too. By the time your nephew was six, it was clear to you what kind of monsters the Hayeses were. Their own son Dwight was being twisted, misshaped by an abusive father and a dangerously unstable mother. Your nephew was not faring much better.

In one incident, he almost died. That decided you. You rescued the child, kidnapped him. You placed him in a home of your choosing, supported by your money, and you made sure he was treated well. He became your son more than Clara's, and as he grew, you were not about to tell your sister—to see the one good deed of your life be tainted by the Doeblers. They would find a way to interfere again. Clara would insist on raising the child, and she would screw it up, the way she'd screwed up everything in her life. The child was yours now. That's why the payments to the Hayeses stopped.

Because the child was no longer there."

In the kitchen, a coffee machine gurgled and steamed as it let out the last of its water into the filter. Faye clutched her apron. One tear was making its way down her cheek.

Her mascara streaked like a smear of ashes.

"He warned me. He said the best we could hope for was a few more quiet days. I so hoped— Oh, Tres. You don't understand. Until Clara's death, we had so many good years. Even after, when he was worried for my safety, when he was so busy guarding our lives and our secret that he could barely enjoy my company—even then, every day was a gift. I would give anything to protect him. Everything else failed to matter long ago."

I could barely speak. The unequivocal love in her voice was humbling. "We need to see him, Ms. Ingram."

She hesitated, then nodded, resigned to the inevitable. She led us through the kitchen and into the yard.

The grass was dappled with light through the oak tree. A new jar of sun tea glowed on the sidewalk. Another Jimmy Doebler coffee cup and two plates of cinnamon toast sat on the patio table.

He was working near the tomato cages, cutting dead sunflower stalks with a machete.

Nearby on the grass, a flat of lantana waited, ready to be planted in the sunflowers'