“Tell you the truth, Deputy, I was of a mind to give up anyway,” Henry said. “This is some harebrained scheme that ain’t gonna come to any good.”
Lang nodded. “Sheriff Riggs said you would see sense. Said you had your head set the right way.” He tossed the bag in through the window of the car and opened the door.
As a parting word, he added, “Sometimes a man gets bullheadedness confused with keeping his word and suchlike. They ain’t the same thing, I assure you. Smart man is the man who knows when to quit.”
Evie stepped forward, once again intent on making a speech.
Henry grabbed her hand and once again shook his head. “No, Evie.”
Lang smiled. “Listen to the man, Evie Chandler,” he said. “And listen good … Pushin’ on this thing ain’t gonna serve no one no good.”
Lang put on his sunglasses, got behind the wheel, and slammed the car door behind him. The engine kicked into life, and he cut out of the drive and started down the highway.
Evie stood silent for a moment, and then she turned to Henry with a look of disbelief on her face.
“You are not the man I thought you were,” she said.
“How so?”
“Quittin’ like this … givin’ up on this thing.”
“Who’s quittin’?” he replied. “He came here to find Evan’s letter. They can look for a month of Sundays. They ain’t never gonna find it. However, now they’ve made me angry.”
Evie smiled wryly. “Let’s go see what kind of mess Alvin Lang has made, eh?”
The truth—hard like a bullet—came out. Inevitable it may have been, but the way in which Carson became apprised of it could never have been predicted.
Doc Sperling and Warren Garfield, Calvary’s only lawyer, were thick as thieves. Drunk one night, Sperling let it slip. Ida Garfield, chairwoman of the church committee, overheard. Fact was that she didn’t so much overhear as eavesdrop. To say she was interested in the business of others was an understatement of significance, and being married to a lawyer gave her all manner of opportunity to inveigle her way into the unsuspecting confidences of those who would have preferred her to remain ignorant. She knew, for example, that misdemeanors were perpetrated by all and sundry, everything from Clarence Ames’s multiple parking and speeding violations to George Eakins’s impropriety with a young woman from Sanderson who’d been hired by Mrs. Eakins to assist with the school bake sale. Girl said that George Eakins was drunk and put his hands someplace where they really shouldn’t have been; Carson Riggs calmed the whole thing down, convinced the girl there was nothing to pursue in the way of legal action, sent her packing, never to be heard of again. Nevertheless, there was a conversation in the Garfield kitchen a day or two later. Present were Warren, Sheriff Riggs, and George Eakins. Ida did not catch the details of the discussion, but bade George farewell when he left. To say he looked sheepish would have been putting it mildly; the man looked positively crestfallen. Ida Garfield guessed that Sheriff Carson Riggs went on being Sheriff Carson Riggs for a very simple reason: He knew what he knew, and—most important—he kept records.
One time Ida asked her husband if he and Carson Riggs were in collusion, if they were in fact keeping the collective menfolk of Calvary in their sway with a litany of unexposed crimes, all of which could become public knowledge in the event of a betrayal.
“Where you get these ideas from, I do not know,” Warren told his wife. “Guess you’ve been reading those trashy
True Detective
magazines in the hair salon.”
Dismiss it he may have done, but Ida read her husband far more closely and with far greater interest than any
True Detective
magazine, and he was no gifted liar. He and Carson Riggs were up to no good. She knew it in her bones.
Thus, when she got wind of Rebecca Riggs’s pregnancy being something other than it was, she could not withhold herself from having a quiet word with Grace Riggs when next she saw her. Take three yards of bull-hide rein and lash Ida Garfield’s tongue to a hitching post and still she’d find a way to gossip.
Grace had known all along. Grace had known it from the moment she saw Evan return from the Wyatt farm that night of the party. Had Rebecca Wyatt wanted a parting gift from Evan Riggs, something personal with which to remember him, she could not have asked for something better or more permanent. Maybe it was female intuition, maybe simply because she was Evan’s mother, but a sense of quiet and certain anxiety had been present among her thoughts since that fateful February night.
Sunday, July twenty-fourth, the vast majority of Calvary’s womenfolk huddling for postchurch chatter while the men smoked cigarettes and discussed whatever men discussed, Ida steered Grace aside and cornered her.
“I got the notion there might be some awkwardness on the way,” Ida said.
Grace frowned. At that point she could not surmise what Ida was implying. Ida was always rooting for scents like some sort of tactful bloodhound.
“Word has it that the new Mrs. Riggs—”
Grace knew then. How she knew—more to the point, how Ida knew—was irrelevant. She cut the woman short. “Ida,” she said, doing all she could to maintain an implacable composure, “if you concerned yourself with your own affairs with the same diligence as you concern yourself with the affairs of others, then your stoop would be a great deal cleaner.”
“Well, I don’t know what on earth you mean by that, Grace Riggs,” Ida Garfield retorted. Her indignation was not feigned; as with all hypocrites, her hypocrisy was unknown to herself, the suggestion of any such thing met with nothing but dismay and disbelief.
“I mean nothing by it,” Grace said, “save that Proverbs tells us that whoever keeps their mouth and their tongue keeps themselves out of trouble.”
“You are quoting Scriptures at me, Grace?” Ida said, this time feigning hurt.
“Ephesians, chapter four, verse twenty-nine, Ida. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.”
Hindsight told Grace Riggs that she had perpetrated an act of aggression tantamount to declaration of war. Hindsight told her that she should have bitten her tongue. Her wish to reprimand Ida Garfield had been nothing more than defensive, a knee-jerk response to the threat of discovery. It has been said that emotional responses to criticism are merely efforts to obscure the fact that the criticism is justified. So it was the case here, for the sharpest spike of hindsight, the one that drew blood, was Grace’s knowledge that she could have dissuaded Evan from walking Rebecca home that night and she had not. In truth, perhaps she had made some subconscious wish for something such as this to happen. Secretly, Rebecca’s acceptance of Carson’s proposal had troubled her more than she had ever let on, even to William. Rebecca should have married Evan. Evan needed someone like Rebecca far more than Carson ever did or ever would. Unanchored, Evan was a ship adrift, the kind of ship that gravitated toward rocky outcrops and hull-shredding reefs as if a magnet for such things.
“Your response tells me all I need to know,” Ida Garfield said, and the impulse to knock the woman on her ass was almost overwhelming.
Grace withheld herself, not only because it was Sunday, the minister and Calvary’s entire congregation in hailing distance, but because she didn’t wish to give Ida Garfield the satisfaction of proving herself superior.
Grace let it go, at least for that moment, but when dinner was done, she took Rebecca aside and told her that she knew.
“Know what?” Rebecca asked, her cheeks already colored, her eyes deer-in-headlight wide.
“Let’s not play games, my dear,” Grace said. “What’s done is done. There’s no going backward. No one, least of all you and Evan, can undo what happened that night.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Rebecca Riggs, married little more than four months, broke down. She sobbed like a spring runoff, and Grace merely held her.
Carson appeared at one point to find out what in tarnation was going on out on the porch, but Grace waved him away with three words sufficient to communicate that not only was his presence unwanted, but he wouldn’t understand it anyway.
“Just woman things …” she whispered, and Carson vanished like a ghost.
Grace held her new daughter-in-law for a long time. She even cried herself, for she knew that whatever would unravel now would unravel their lives completely. They were in this together, neck-deep, no hope of rescue, and what transpired was dependent exclusively upon Carson’s reaction to the news. A fuse had been lit, but the power and consequences of the explosion were utterly unknown. This was no Globe Salute. What it actually was, they had no inkling, save that it would be bad. That much they knew for sure. It would be bad.
An hour or so later, Grace told William to drive Rebecca over to her father’s place. She told him not to ask questions of the girl.
“Just take her, William,” she said. “Just take her home and we’ll talk when you get back.”
Carson was in the kitchen.
“What the hell is going on, Ma?” he said.
“She’s pregnant, Carson. Get used to all manner of things you don’t understand.”
“But she’s my wife. She should stay here with me.”
“Well, what you think she should do and what she wants to do are not always going to be the same thing, son. It’s called marriage. Deal with it.”
“But—”
“The conversation is done, Carson. You go on to bed. Let me deal with all of this.”
Carson kissed his mother good night and went to his room, a room still decorated with Carson’s childhood and teenage years, a room he and Rebecca used when they were staying over at the Riggs farm. He could have headed back to the apartment in town, but he was not of a mind to. He was of a troubled mind, to be honest. Blessed with little more than his limited male intuition, he still knew something was awry.
It was past midnight when William Riggs returned home to find his wife still dressed and wide-awake in the kitchen. On the table in front of her was a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. William knew from experience that here was the clearest sign he could ever get that trouble was afoot.
“Sit down,” she said. “I already had a drink. You better have a couple.”
She told him then, straight as could be.
“Rebecca is going to have Evan’s baby. Night of the party before Evan left, that’s what happened and this is the result.”
William Riggs sat and looked at his wife without comment, without the slightest change of expression.
“Did your heart stop, William?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “But it’ll start again in a moment.”
“So we need to make some decisions.”
“Yes,” he replied. “Some decisions.”
“You just sit there awhile,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready to work on this.”
“Evan knows?”
Grace shook her head. “No. Only people who know are Rebecca, me, you, Doc Sperling and the Garfields.”
William’s eyes opened wide. “Ida Garfield knows?”
“She made it clear that there was something awry in the Riggs household. You know how she is, William.”
“So if she knows, then the whole of Calvary knows.”
Grace nodded. “And if they don’t, I give it a day before they do.”
“And how is Rebecca?”
“I don’t know, William, and neither does she. To have done that and then married Carson is as wrong as it gets, but there’s no use beating her to death about it. People make mistakes. Adults are no different from kids. No matter how bad the decisions they make, the reason is always the same. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“If we don’t tell Carson, he will find out from somewhere else. If we don’t tell Evan, then Carson will tell him. What will happen, I don’t know, but my fear is that one or both of them will wind up dead.” He paused for a moment, then added, “There is no way to hide this, is there?”
“If it were just us, if there were no one else involved … if it had been someone other than her husband’s brother, then maybe we could hide it. Premature births happen all the time. But it
is
her husband’s brother and there are other people who know. Doc Sperling, Warren Garfield, his wife …” Grace sighed, shook her head resignedly. “Lord knows who else by now.”
William Riggs closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. His insides felt hot and twisted. “Christ Jesus Almighty on a bicycle,” he said under his breath.
“This is what they call life,” Grace said. “There’s no accounting for it. No one ever told us it’d be easy.”
“No one told us it’d be this tough.”
“Are you mad with Evan?”
“He’s my son, Grace. Drives me crazy, want to knock his silly head off, but no, I can’t be mad with him.”
“So what do we do?”
“We find a time to tell Carson and we tell him.”
“There is not going to be a good time for that, William.”
“I know, my sweet, but there are going to be times that are worse than others.”
Neither of them spoke for a little while, and then William Riggs reached for the whiskey bottle and filled both glasses.
“Girls would have been less trouble,” William said.
Grace gave a wry smile. “Knowing us, we’d have had two girls just like Rebecca Wyatt.”
“Or worse.”
Grace laughed, William laughed with her, and thus they did not hear the retreating footsteps of Carson Riggs as he made his way back from the shadowed end of the hallway to his room.
It was Glenn Chandler they approached, and though unexpected, there was a certain inevitability to it. At least that’s how he felt.
Returning to the house, seeing the disaster zone that it had become—books pulled from shelves, clothes turned out of drawers, boxes of private papers spilled left and right, mattresses upended, cupboards emptied, their contents left strewn along the landing—Chandler knew that Riggs had sent a very clear message. Where the hell Evie was, he did not know. No doubt somewhere with Henry Quinn, and that was the man Chandler needed to talk to.
And then the visitors came—before he’d even begun to straighten up the mess—and the three of them sat and talked for a while, and then the visitors left and there was nothing but silence and disarray.
Glenn Chandler sat in his kitchen and wondered what the hell to do. Obligation played a part in it, of course, but it also walked around the edges of duty, even justice. He had been drawn into it by default, but he was pragmatic enough to understand that luck and coincidence were merely attempts to rationalize those things for which people were not prepared to take responsibility. He was responsible for his own daughter, and whether he liked it or not, she had gotten herself into a situation with this feller from Reeves.
Riggs was desperate to find his brother’s letter, and where else would they look aside from where Henry Quinn was staying?
Those thoughts were summarily interrupted by the sound of Henry Quinn’s pickup as it pulled to a halt outside the Chandler place.
Glenn didn’t move. He sat there waiting for them both to appear, and when Evie came into the kitchen, she and Henry were carrying paper sacks of groceries.
“Hell of a mess,” Chandler said.
“Alvin Lang,” Evie said. She walked to her father, leaned down, and put her arms around his shoulders. “I am so sorry, Pa. I don’t know what to say. We started getting it sorted out, and then we went to get some groceries. We will straighten everything out. I promise.”
“There’s a trail of photos across the landing,” Chandler said. “Most of them are of your mother.”
Evie hugged her father.
Henry stood there in silence.
“And while you were gone, I had a couple of visitors.”
Evie stood up, took a step back. “Lang?” she asked. “Did Sheriff Riggs come, too?”
“Not Riggs and Lang, no. But it was about them.”
“So who came?”
“Roy Sperling and George Eakins.”
“And what did they want?”
“Wanted to let me know how much trouble you were in.”
“We know how much trouble we’re in,” Henry said. “Riggs and Lang have cooked up a possession beef for me. Told us to back off or I go back to Reeves for a year.”
Chandler nodded, didn’t speak for a moment, and then he said, “And they did this to me, too. Trashed my home. Emptied boxes of my private papers, my photos, everything …”
“He searched Henry’s car as well,” Evie said.
“This isn’t about delivering a letter anymore, is it?”
Henry looked at Evie, back at her father. “I don’t think it was ever about delivering a letter, Mr. Chandler.”
“So what did Roy and George want?” Evie asked. She took a seat facing her father.
Chandler raised his eyebrows, exhaled slowly. “To be honest, I am not really sure. They talked a great deal and said little of any real sense. All I could gather was that there is some wealth of history between them and Carson Riggs, and they don’t want it coming out.”
“Seems everyone in Calvary has secrets,” Evie said. “Never been anywhere like it.”
“All comes back to Riggs,” Henry said. “And if you want my opinion—”
Chandler cleared his throat, interrupting Henry. “To be completely truthful, son,” he said, “I’m not sure what to think or feel about you at all. I don’t know what the hell you’ve gotten my daughter involved in. Now I’m involved, too, if only from the viewpoint that my home is being searched by the cops.”
“I got myself involved, Dad,” Evie said. “We’ve already talked about that. If Mom were here—”
“If Mom were here?” Chandler said. “Well, she’s not. She died, Evie. She died, okay? I lost her, and I sure as hell don’t have my heart set on losing you.”
Evie laughed nervously. “You’re not gonna lose me, Dad. Carson Riggs is not gonna kill us.”
“Maybe he will,” Chandler said. “Hear what Roy Sperling and George Eakins have to say about it, and maybe there wasn’t so much of the natural causes going on when Warren Garfield bought it.”
“They said that Riggs killed Garfield?” Henry asked. “He was Calvary’s lawyer, right?”
“He was, indeed,” Chandler said, “and no, they didn’t say that Riggs killed him. They said that people who start turning rocks over tend to find rattlers. Rattlers like the cool and the shade. They don’t like to be disturbed.”
“Then they told you that Garfield was turning over rocks?” Evie asked.
“In so many words, yes. That was definitely the message I got from … well, what I can only describe as a slightly surreal one-way conversation.”
“I am thinking we need to talk to one or both of them,” Henry said.
“How did I know that that was going to be your next plan of action?”
“Because he’s like me, Dad. That’s why. That’s exactly what I would do right now, and I am going to go with him.”
“My sweet, naive daughter … Everyone has more going on than they’re prepared to say. You’ve just gotten yourself wound up in the rightness of it all, and you think that backing off will say something about your integrity or your human decency or whatever.” Chandler looked at Henry Quinn. “Okay, so you shared a cell with the guy, and maybe he did help you out some, but if it came down to it, then would you risk your life to get this message delivered to his daughter?”
“I would, yes,” Henry replied, and he replied without hesitation.
Chandler seemed surprised at the speed and certainty of Henry’s response. “And why, might I ask, are you so indebted to the man?”
“Because he did the same for me, Mr. Chandler.”
“He risked his life for you?”
“Yes, sir, he did. Twice, if not three times.”
“And he did this because?”
“It may seem crazy to anyone outside of someplace like Reeves, but it’s a world all its own. There’s a way that things are done, and they’ve been done that way for a long, long time, and no one explains these things to you, and sometimes you cross a line that you didn’t even know was there. Before you know it, there’s word out that you probably ain’t gonna make it to the end of the week.”
“And you crossed some lines,” Chandler said.
“I did, yes.”
“And Evan Riggs took care of it so you made it to the end of the week.”
Henry nodded, walked from the door to the kitchen table and sat down facing Glenn Chandler.
“You are how old?”
“Twenty-one.”
Chandler sighed. “Jeez,” he said. “Twenty-one years old and you’re already in shit so deep most people’d have drowned by now.”
“What did you always say, Dad?” Evie asked. “No one should ever aspire to a normal life?”
“Not exactly what I meant, Evie. Gettin’ yourself killed at twenty-one wasn’t the kind of thing I had in mind.”
“I don’t really think Carson Riggs is gonna kill anyone,” she said.
“You don’t know what he’s gonna do,” Chandler replied. “And the reason you don’t know what he’s gonna do is because you don’t know what he’s hiding. Whatever the hell he has under his bed might be big enough to justify anything you can imagine. Say that whatever he’s done, or whatever he knows, is gonna put him in Reeves for the rest of his life, maybe even send him to the chair. You don’t think a man like that would be prepared to do whatever it took to protect himself from such an eventuality? The bottom line here is that you pair don’t even know how deep the hole is or what’s at the bottom, and you might go on falling forever before you find out.”
“Jeez, Dad, where the hell do you get this thing about people being killed from? What the hell is this? You honestly believe that Carson Riggs has murdered people? That he’s trying to hide something like that?”
“The point, my dear, is that we don’t know. This is West Texas. Normal-people rules don’t apply here. Even East Texas rules don’t apply here. Head out to the plateau and the Davis Mountains and there’s an awful lot of space to lose a couple of bodies.”
“Since when did you get so paranoid?” Evie asked.
Chandler shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know … Maybe since I came home and found out that the Sheriff’s Department has searched my house, looking for something I haven’t even seen.” He nodded at Henry. “Maybe since this joker came along and got me to thinkin’ about losing my daughter.”
“You’re not gonna lose me, Dad,” Evie said, “but I’m not going to let this lie. I’m just not. I can’t even explain why not, but that’s just the way it is.”
Chandler smiled, a moment of recognition, almost as if he’d heard that kind of line delivered just that kind of way many times before. “You want my advice?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Roy Sperling. Calvary’s doctor for however many centuries. If he doesn’t know stuff, then no one does.”
“We need to get him out of Calvary,” Henry said. “I go back there and I might as well drive myself straight to Reeves.”
“I can call him, see if he’s willing to meet someplace,” Evie said.
“I think he’ll come,” Chandler said. “Got the feeling that there was a man who wanted to get something off his chest. Eakins did all the talking. Sperling looked like he had a ghost inside him just desperate to get out.”
Evie got up, walked out to the hallway.
Henry Quinn and Glenn Chandler sat in silence, heard murmurings of whatever conversation Evie was having. She was back within a couple of minutes.
The expression on her face was telling.
“He’ll meet us,” she said. “A diner just off 10, about twenty miles east of here. An hour from now.”
“What did he say?” Henry asked.
Evie shook her head and frowned. “He said the weirdest thing … that we didn’t have the right to judge him. That no one but God had the right to judge him.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Means he wants to confess,” Glenn Chandler said. “Means he’s an old man, and he ain’t as strong as he used to be.”