Narsissa, never bothering to put down the biscuit she was eating, motioned with her elbow toward the platter of bacon next to the pitcher of milk.
When he stood up and turned, Lanier looked out through the kitchen windows. He half stood over the table, his hand frozen above the plate of bacon.
Outside, in front of the azalea bushes, J.D. Troxler climbed out of the back of the old Ford Model T pickup that he had paid Mrs. Mercile, the inn manager, five dollars to borrow. He placed the black derby hat cock-ways on his head, and his brother Parker spat a stream of tobacco out of his mouth and onto the side of the truck’s passenger door. Jack-Ray stood up in the flat-board bed and never lost his hat from his head as he leaped to the ground.
Lanier moved so fast that he knocked over the kitchen chair. He whirled around the kitchen door and into the dining room, where he leaned against the wall closest to the windows.
“Lanier?” Ella said. She was the first to stand, followed by Samuel and Narsissa.
“They’re out there.”
“Who?” Ella asked, playing with the collar of her shirt.
“The Troxlers.”
Only Ella knew the significance of that name. Narsissa stared up at Ella, who bit her lip and shook her head.
The oxen mooed outside, and the sound of automobile doors slamming rolled inside the house.
“Who?” Samuel asked.
“Where’s the key?” Lanier said, pulling at the locked gun cabinet in the dining room with the panicked look of a trapped animal. “We got to get to the guns.”
“Now listen,” Ella said. She took a step forward. “First let me try to talk—”
Lanier turned and looked at her with a ferociousness she had not seen from him. “Get back!”
Samuel tore into the dining room. “Hey—nobody speaks to my mama like that.”
Lanier gripped the boy by the neck until his veins popped out and his face contorted in pain. Ella gasped, and Narsissa reached for the butcher knife that was still on the kitchen counter. Leading Samuel into the hallway like a captured bull, Lanier spat the words in Samuel’s ear. “Now you want me to kill you or do you want them to do it? Because one way or another you’re fixing to die unless I get the guns.”
“Keaton, go get the key,” Ella said, moving to block Samuel from Lanier. “It’s in the good teapot.”
Keaton ran into the dining room and used the turned-over kitchen chair to climb up to the top of the dining room cabinet. He fished a key from inside a fragile iris-blue teapot.
Ella looked at Narsissa. The pulse in the side of Ella’s neck was evident when she stroked her fingers across the fish-scale necklace. Keaton ran into the hallway and fumbled with the key before Lanier snatched it from him. He unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled wads of gun shells from the drawers. Lanier nodded at Keaton. “Start handing out the guns. Hurry it up!” Lanier tossed shells to each one, including Narsissa.
“Lanier . . . Lanier,” Ella kept saying. “You’re scaring me.”
He stopped to look at Ella before throwing the shells in her direction. She let go of the necklace, missed catching the first shell, and then scrambled on the floor to recover it. Lanier’s eyes were electric green, and the steadiness she had relied on was now replaced with fear. “Well, you should be scared.”
Ella pushed Macon toward the back bedroom. “Run, get under my bed. Don’t you move until I call for you. Do you hear me?” Macon stared up at her. His eyes were glazed and wide. Ella grabbed his shoulders, shook him. “Get.”
“Hello!” J.D. yelled twice before circling the truck and shading his eyes with his hand and staring off toward the barn. He called Lanier’s name the way he might call the name of a missing hound during a hunting trip. No one in the front part of the house moved. The only sounds were the footsteps of Macon as he ran down the hall.
“Lanier,” Troxler yelled. “Is there a Lanier Stillis on the place?”
Samuel pumped the shotgun. A breeze came in through the open living room windows, and the yellow curtains playfully danced about. Everyone stared at Lanier. And Ella could no longer ignore the way that his lower lip was quivering. Lanier motioned for them to line the wall in the foyer. From where Ella stood she could make out the truck that was parked sideways. The left front corner of the truck was pressed into the bushes in such a way that it looked like branches of the shrub were growing about the headlight.
Out in the yard, Parker Troxler leaned against the side of the car and pulled two pistols from his jacket. Jack-Ray reached down inside the back of the truck and rested his hand on the rifle that sat on the floor of the bed. J.D. made his way up the porch steps with his hands tucked inside his jacket, massaging the silver handles engraved with his father’s name.
“Hello, Wallace family,” J.D. said as he made his way onto the porch. He knocked on the door, and Ella caught her breath. “I can smell the bacon and ham a mile away,” he said and began a slow back and forth on the porch. J.D.’s bootsteps echoed inside the house. Ella watched the silver tips of them glisten in the sun. She heard the creak of the porch swing when he pushed it with his boot. She caught the restrained eagerness in his voice. “Lanier Stillis.” J.D. bent down and looked through the window at the end of the living room, closest to the fireplace mantel. The curtain fanned back and forth across his face.
Just when Ella thought he would crawl inside, she looked past him and saw Sheriff Bissell’s automobile pull up her driveway.
“Thank the Lord,” she said, moving toward the door.
Samuel tried to pull her away. “What are you doing?” he hissed in a whisper.
“Sheriff Bissell is here. It’ll be fine. The sheriff will take care of this.”
Samuel blocked her path and stood at the foyer entrance with his legs spread far apart. “You are not leaving this house.”
Lanier turned and pointed the shotgun right into Samuel’s chest.
“Watch yourself,” Narsissa said, holding a pistol aimed at the base of Lanier’s skull.
Lanier never moved the gun away from Samuel. “Ella, go on out there.”
Ella looked at Samuel. The Adam’s apple twitched in his neck, and his eyes darted back toward the hallway to where she could find safety.
“Don’t you do it, Ella,” Narsissa said. “You’re liable to get shot.” Her aim never left Lanier.
“If you’re ever going to trust me, now is the time,” Lanier said in a deep, monotone voice. “If you don’t go out there, we’ll all be shot.”
When Ella walked out onto the porch carrying the shotgun that shook in her grasp, the Troxler brothers and Jack-Ray looked at each other and grinned.
“No cause for that, ma’am,” J.D. said, pointing at Ella’s shotgun and taking off his hat all at the same time.
Ella stepped forward, and J.D. moved backward, one step at a time. The roar of Sheriff Bissell’s car coming up the drive caused him to turn and partly stumble down the last two steps.
“You’re trespassing. We have . . . we have a sign out front.” Ella gripped the gun tighter and motioned with the barrel toward the sheriff’s automobile.
J.D. nodded. “I’m J.D. Troxler. I believe my former brother-in-law, Lanier Stillis, is hiding on your—”
“Sheriff Bissell,” Ella shouted over and over as the sheriff and Clive climbed out of his car.
The sheriff never bothered to put his hat on. He pulled at the crotch of his pants and looked at the men with the same suspicion as Ella did. “What’s all this?”
“This man was poking his head in through my living room window. I keep telling him that he’s trespassing, but he won’t listen.”
Sheriff Bissell motioned toward Ella but never looked away from J.D. “Now put that gun down before you hurt somebody.”
J.D. extended his hand and smiled. “Sheriff, I’m J.D. Troxler from Bainbridge, Georgia. I’m afraid there’s a fugitive on the premises here. I came looking for the man who owns the place.”
“I figure she’s looking for him too,” Sheriff Bissell said, using his thumb to point at Ella. “This is the Wallace place. Who’s this fugitive you’re talking about?”
“Lanier Stillis,” J.D. said. He withdrew his empty hand from the inside of his jacket. “About six feet or six-one. Blond headed.”
“Hair as long as a woman’s,” Parker, the other brother, called out.
Sheriff Bissell looked up at Ella, and Clive Gillespie made his way behind the sheriff.
“Well, I do know,” Clive murmured.
“What you want with him?” Sheriff Bissell asked.
“Murder,” J.D. said.
“Well, now,” Clive said before turning toward Ella. “Murder. That’s a mighty big charge.”
“Ella, where’s the man? In the barn?” Sheriff Bissell asked.
All of the men were looking up at Ella, who still held the gun clutched to her chest. “There’s no need to know where he is.”
Parker spat a stream of tobacco at the tire of the truck. “Ole Lanier always could catch the eye of the ladies.” Jack-Ray moved toward the barn, but none of them seemed to notice.
“I can tell from the looks of it he found another one to swindle. Just like he did my sister,” J.D. said.
“There’s no swindling,” Ella said and held the gun higher. “He’s worked here.”
“Oh, so he
is
here,” J.D. said.
“Ella,” the sheriff said. “Either you put that gun down, or I’ll come up there and take it from you.”
She slowly lowered the shotgun and propped it, barrel up, against the side of the door.
“There you go,” the sheriff said. He looked back at J.D. and squinted. “Fella, I think you need to fill us in on exactly what brings you here with these big accusations.”
J.D. Troxler stepped forward and placed his hat in open palms like an offering. “First, I want to say to the lady that I completely understand her confusion right about now. I am sure she had no idea what she was getting into. Neither did my sister.”
Ella eased to the center of the faded circle that Macon had drawn with chalk.
“Now, Lanier Stillis, the man you’ve been keeping, he was once my brother-in-law, sad to say. . . . He killed my wife and my sister.”
Parker massaged the pistols in his coat pockets and chewed on a wad of tobacco. He seemed more concerned about running his finger inside his mouth to loosen stray bits of tobacco than he was with hearing J.D.’s story.
Ella forced herself to stand up straight. “I know about your wife and your sister. I know all that.”
“I bet you do,” J.D. said. “I bet he painted a vivid picture.” J.D. rotated the hat in his left palm and used his other hand to circle over it the same way he might if he’d been holding a crystal ball. When J.D. stepped forward closer to the porch rail, Parker and Jack-Ray spread out across the yard. “My wife . . .” J.D. looked up at the white clouds that hung so low they looked like they might touch the ground. “My wife, Camilla, had a gift. The gift of caregiving. When she saw my sister hurting the way she was, she took to her like any caregiver naturally would. But Lanier . . . well, Lanier tried to make something perverse out of it. By then he’d already found himself a sweet little thing, and he wanted to get rid of my sister.”
Ella ran the tips of her fingers up and down the side seam of her dress. Then she reached over and caressed the rusted tip of the gun barrel.
“An adulterer and a murderer, you say?” Clive asked with his head bowed in reverence.
“Lanier controlled my sister . . . built her up with his words and then tore her down after their boy died. I never could figure it. He took my sister, who was always a spirited young woman, and turned her into a limp washcloth who couldn’t get out of bed. Some who worked around the house claimed he doped her up with potions he made. Some claimed he was evil. Some claimed—”
“Some claimed your wife was in love with your sister,” Ella said.
The sheriff pulled at the seat of his britches. “Now, Ella. That’s not talk fitting a lady.”
J.D. raised the hat toward Sheriff Bissell. “No, no. That’s quite all right. That’s what you were told, I bet. He went around telling anyone who’d listen. He wanted it that way. It would make for a more convincing story when he killed them and took the money my sister had inherited. You take that plus the life insurance, and, well . . . that whittler from the mountains who could barely read and write when I first met him was sitting pretty.”
Clive clasped his hands like he might be praying and squinted up at Ella. “Open your eyes. The man is a con artist. A criminal, no doubt.”
J.D. Troxler pulled a set of yellowed, crisp documents from the inside of his coat. “And do you want to know where he learned how to whittle?”
“The mountains are full of those who do such,” Ella said, wondering if what she said with such authority was true.
“And so are insane asylums.” J.D. Troxler opened up the papers as if Ella could make out the letters from where she stood up on the porch. “All this talk about crazy . . . did it ever come to mind that he painted such a good picture of my wife being crazy because he learned it firsthand? In the sanatoriums they learn from each other. One crazy man becomes a case study for another. They even teach the crazies how to weave baskets. They call it therapy. Lanier didn’t take to the baskets. He learned how to whittle with a dull spoon that one of the nurses who took to his looks gave him.”
Parker Troxler snickered. “How come you think he got his ear cut off? He read about some artist doing it in one of his books and got it in his mind that he’d try it too.” Parker twisted his mouth until the plug of tobacco visibly pressed against the side of his cheek, and then he spat it out. “I’d hate for him to get in one of his spells and cut your ear off that way.”
Ella glanced at the front door and picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her dress.
J.D. put the papers back inside his coat and toyed with the gun that was protruding from underneath his jacket. “You take a mighty fine picture, by the way.”
“You see now why I had the sheriff come out here?” Clive said. “Now do you see, Ella? We’re concerned for your welfare.”
Ella could only see spots of color, like the kaleidoscope that her aunt used to let her look through on Sunday afternoons. She gripped the back of the porch chair, looked out toward the barn and then down at the shotgun that rested next to the front door.