The Langs would never have come to Calvary. In truth, Carson Riggs had known that all along. In the end it was face his Maker or face his brother, and he had chosen the former.
Somehow that had seemed the easier option after all the wrongs that had been done.
She did not look how Henry had expected her to look. There was so little of Evan in her. Perhaps she simply took after the mother she’d never known.
It was early on the morning of Thursday, July twentieth, and behind a small house off the highway between Sanderson and Langley, just a stone’s throw from the Pecos River, a woman of twenty-two called Sarah Forrester hung washing on a line. Nearby there was a basket, within it a baby, and she sang to the baby, and the song was something simple and sweet, and Sarah’s voice was soothing, and the baby gurgled and cooed as if joining in with the song.
Henry stood there at the edge of the road, Evie beside him, the letter from Evan in his hand, and he looked at Evie and the question was in his eyes, same question he’d been asking himself ever since Roy Sperling had told him where Sarah now lived and the name she had married into. Sarah Forrester. Twenty-two years old, alive and well and now a mother, living with her husband in a small house off the highway between Sanderson and Langley.
It was that complex, and then—all of a sudden—it was that simple.
Henry looked down at the letter in his hand, a letter secreted beneath the lining of his guitar case ever since he’d arrived in Calvary, and he wondered how this had all happened. It was the twentieth of July. He had arrived in Calvary on the thirteenth. One week. Seven days. Three men were dead. He felt like he had known Evie his whole life. He felt as if he had never been anywhere but here, never done anything but chase the ghost that was Evan Riggs’s daughter.
And now here she was.
He could see her.
And she did not look at all as he had imagined.
“Go,” Evie urged, and Henry left the side of the road and walked across the dried and rutted track to the fence that bordered the backyard.
Evie hung back a step or two.
This was Henry’s job now, and most of him knew he needed to do it alone, despite what he thought or felt.
“Mrs. Forrester,” he called out.
The young woman stopped singing. The baby stopped singing, too.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I am Henry Quinn,” Henry said. “You don’t know me. I have been looking for you. I came to deliver a message.”
“A message?” Sarah asked. “About what?”
Henry held up the creased and grubby envelope. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what the message is.”
Sarah Forrester smiled and shook her head, puzzled, wondering what this was all about.
“Who is this message from?”
Henry held out the letter. “I think you need to read this and find out for yourself.”
The young woman came forward and took the envelope from Henry’s hand.
She studied him closely for a second, glanced at Evie, a fleeting frown across her brow like the shadow of a cloud across a field.
Had Evan been there to see her, he would have recognized that expression. She looked like her mother. So much like her mother. Snake hunting. The rats’ nest. The bundle of clothes on the veranda. The way she looked as they hid in the barn and waited for Gabe Ellsworth. The expression on her face when he glanced back at her on the night of the party, the guilt of what they had done somehow extinguished by the passion of having done it.
Sarah Forrester read the letter.
She looked at the enclosed document; she looked at Henry, at Evie, back at Henry once more.
She read her father’s letter one more time, and then she started to cry.
Roy Sperling was buried in Calvary on Friday, July twenty-eighth. Alvin Lang was already gone, his family plot somewhere near Fredericksburg. Clarence Ames, George Eakins, the Honeycutts, even Ralph Chandler went out there for the service. They’d known Alvin, many of them since he was a child, and they wanted to pay their respects.
“It’s done now,” was the only comment her father made when Evie asked him why he wanted to attend. “When they’re dead, they gotta deal with a far higher power, I reckon. Who are we to judge?”
The Lang family did not order an independent inquiry into the suicide of Calvary’s deputy sheriff. Seemed they wanted the whole thing laid to rest and forgotten along with Alvin. Likewise, the killing of Roy Sperling seemed to be now the only motivation for Carson Riggs’s actions. Why had he killed Sperling? What was it that took place between those two men in that kitchen that resulted in Carson killing the town doctor and then walking headlong into a hail of gunfire, the only outcome of which would be his own death? Folks like Clarence Ames and George Eakins perhaps knew, but they kept their mouths shut and looked no one in the eye. There were theories, of course, but theories would always remain theories without the evidence to back them up. And no one was looking for evidence. Seemed no one was interested in finding it.
For the people of Calvary, the Sperling funeral was somehow significant, perhaps even cathartic. All that was left of the Riggs family was a crazy old woman in Odessa and a killer in Reeves. Aside from the girl. Rebecca’s girl. She showed up alongside Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler the day before Roy Sperling was buried. They told her what they knew of her parents, her grandparents, of the events that pulled her family apart so violently. They took her out to the old Riggs place, now nothing more than a footprint of the original farmhouse and tracts of land, all of it marked and bordered and punctuated with sinkholes where drills had punched deep into the ground in search of oil pockets and reservoirs. Whatever fortune came from that land was either gone, or buried so deep in legal paperwork that it would probably never surface. Carson Riggs had been spending that money for more than twenty years, and when the lawyers and the tax collectors and the court officers were done with it, it would very likely turn out that he owed the state.
Whatever the details, Sarah Forrester wanted none of it.
“This is not my life,” she told Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler, and then she asked if Henry would be so kind as to drive her home. Her husband had the baby, and he needed to get to work.
“What about your father?” Evie asked her.
Sarah looked away once more toward the horizon, across land that had seen the tracks of unknown predecessors, people whose names had only come to mean something within the last few days, people for whom she perhaps should have felt something, but somehow felt nothing at all. These people, like the land before her, were as distant and unfamiliar as the far side of the world.
Sarah turned to look at Evie. “What about him?”
Henry thought to speak, to say something, anything in Evan’s defense, and yet there were no words to find. A drunk, a traitor, false-hearted and irresponsible; an absentee father, a man who deserted his family and friends for the promise of some other life never attained; a killer. Henry had known him for three years. In truth, Henry hadn’t known him at all. The message had been delivered; he had kept his word. Upon reflection, it would seem that getting that letter into the hands of Evan’s daughter was less about keeping a promise to Evan, even less about Sarah, and more about Henry Quinn proving to himself that he was not the kind of man that he’d perhaps believed himself to be. For all their apparent similarities, he and Evan Riggs were altogether different.
And so, the day before Roy Sperling was buried, Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler drove Sarah Forrester back to the house off the highway between Sanderson and Langley, just a stone’s throw from the Pecos River, and her husband was there to greet her, standing inside the doorway with the baby in his arms.
Sarah got out of the car, and she looked back at Henry. “I don’t really have anything for him, you know? I mean, even if I met him, I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“I understand,” Henry replied, thinking in that moment of what he would do were he suddenly presented with Jack Alford, a father he himself had never known, a father who—more than likely—knew nothing of him.
“Do you want me to go and see him?” Sarah asked. “In Reeves?”
Henry shook his head. “I think it would kill him,” he said. “I think he would realize what he had missed all these years, and it would break his heart.”
“But you? You came all this way, and there’s been all this trouble?”
“The trouble wasn’t mine, Sarah, and it wasn’t yours, either. The trouble was here long before us. I walked into this with my eyes closed, just like you.” Henry looked away for a moment, his expression pensive and uncertain. “Now I am wondering whether I shouldn’t have promised your father that I would find you.”
“I am glad you found me,” Sarah replied. “Of course, I knew I was adopted. I never had a problem with that. My adoptive parents never hid that. They didn’t know who my real parents were, and after a while it didn’t seem to matter.” She smiled to herself, as if now understanding some small mystery. “When you don’t know who your parents are, there will always be things about yourself that you can’t explain … things that come from some unknown place, you know? I know his name now. I know who he was and what he did. That’s enough.”
“But the money that should have been yours?” Evie asked. “You were supposed to inherit that farm, all that land …”
“You can’t miss something you never had,” Sarah said. “Do I want to fight battles with lawyers and the courts and all that? No, I don’t, Miss Chandler. I want to raise my daughter and be the best wife and mother I can be, and that’s all I need right now.”
“Sweetheart?” Sarah’s husband called from the doorway of the house.
Sarah turned and waved and then looked back at Henry and Evie.
“I have to go,” she said. “I would say thank you, but I think this was more for my father than for me.”
She started toward the house.
“If I see him,” Henry said, “is there anything you want me to tell him?”
Sarah shook her head and then hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “Tell him that I will find a copy of his record and listen to it.”
“I can send you a copy—” Henry started.
“It’s okay, Mr. Quinn,” Sarah said, and smiled so artlessly that there was nothing else to be said.
Henry watched Sarah Forrester disappear into the shadowed hallway, knowing then that the sound of Evan Riggs’s voice would never reach her ears.
The following day, the funeral done, there was a small gathering at the saloon where Henry had first met Roy Sperling, George Eakins, Harold Mills, and Clarence Ames. Ralph Chandler came, too, and Henry and Evie sat with them, and they all looked at one another as if each expected an explanation they knew would never arrive.
“You heading out now?” Clarence asked Evie.
“I am,” she said. “Henry an’ me are gonna go on up to San Angelo and see Henry’s ma.”
“And then?”
Evie looked at Henry and shrugged.
“Take it as it comes,” Henry said.
“You gonna make a record?” George Eakins asked.
“Maybe,” Henry said. “We’ll see what happens.”
“I seen the girl,” Harold Mills said. “Evan’s daughter. Yesterday.”
“We took her out and showed her the old Riggs place,” Evie said.
“Hell, if she don’t look just like her ma,” Mills added. “And she just let it all go … everything to do with her family here.”
“What family?” Clarence Ames asked. “Only family she got left is a crazy woman and a homicidal country singer.”
For some reason Henry started laughing. The laughter traveled the table, but it died within a few seconds. It was symbolic, if nothing else, of the surreal nature of what they were discussing.
“Hell of a thing,” Evie’s father said, and that seemed to be the punctuation mark that ended the conversation.
Outside, Evie shared words with her father, trying to refuse the money he was offering her. Clarence Ames approached Henry Quinn. Henry stepped away from the back of the pickup and walked with him a few yards.
“I knew there was bad history here,” Clarence said. “I knew there was Lang trouble. I knew Roy was in something up to his neck. I had some ideas, but they were only ever ideas, and now that he’s dead, I don’t want to know. I even wondered if Carson had Evan fixed up and thrown in jail. Ain’t nothin’ those folks couldn’a done had they wanted. Anyways, it’s all bad water under burned bridges now, eh?”
“It is, yes,” Henry said. “Leave it where it is. No one wants to dig up the dead.”
“You gonna go see Evan, tell him you got the letter delivered?”
“I am, yes,” Henry said. “A week or two. I’ll go tell him what happened.”
“You think it’s gonna break his heart … that his girl don’t wanna see him?”
Henry looked away toward the horizon. “I don’t know, Clarence. Maybe it was never about fixing anything for himself. Maybe it wasn’t about her either …”
“It was just about revenge, right? Getting Carson back any which way he could for what he done to Rebecca.”
“Maybe. Only Evan knows.”
“Crazy goddamned brothers, the pair of them.”
“We’re all crazy, Clarence,” Henry said. “It’s just that we all think that our own kind of crazy is the good kind, right?”
Clarence Ames reached out and gripped Henry’s shoulder. “You do good, okay, son? Take care of that girl. She’s a sweetheart.”
“I will do just that, Mr. Ames.”
“Can’t say I am pleased we ever met, Henry Quinn. Done lost another good friend because of what you brought here, but Carson Riggs is gone, and I think that’s gonna be good for Calvary.”
“I hope so.”
“Travel well, boy,” Clarence said. He started to walk away, and then he paused. “You know … When I seen you the first time, there was something about you that reminded me of Evan. Ask me what, I couldn’t tell you. Same with Evie, how she had something of the Wyatt girl in her. Seemed ironic, I guess. That record Evan made.
The Whiskey Poet
. Song on there called “Mockingbird.” You know it, right?”
“I do, yes.”
“A mockingbird mimics the song of all other birds, you know? Beautiful though it may be, it pays by sacrificing its own individual voice.”
“You still think I’m anything like Evan?” Henry asked.
“No, son, I don’t,” Clarence said. “I don’t reckon you’re anything like him at all,” and with that he turned and walked back to the saloon.
They drove away then, the sun high and bold, the sky clear, the highway just running the straightest of lines toward an unknown horizon.
Evie took off her shoes and socks, put her bare feet up against the dash. She rolled a cigarette and lit it, passed it to Henry, then rolled one for herself.
“I never did hear you sing,” she said. “Never did heard you play no guitar, neither.”
“Time enough now.”
“How bad are you?”
“The worst,” Henry said.
“Like a pet store burnin’ down, right?”
“Worse than that.”
“And there lies our fortune?”
“Sure does.”
“Oh hell.”
Evie started to laugh.
Henry tried to laugh with her, but his face just hurt too much.