The sun slunk low on the horizon, as if—like a child—it, too, did not wish to sleep.
Dinner was done; William, Grace and Carson were someplace in the house doing whatever they were doing. Evan sat cross-legged on the veranda with his guitar, trying to figure out the closing phrase of “You’re the Only Star (In My Blue Heaven)” by Roy Acuff when he saw Rebecca Wyatt standing at the end of the drive that led down to the house.
She was just standing there in a cotton print dress and cowboy boots, her hair tied back, one hand by her side, the other on her hip, and she was looking toward the Riggs house with her head angled slightly to the right. Almost as if she was weighing up the pros and cons of making a visit.
Evan stood up. He set down his guitar and stepped forward to the railing. He raised one hand to acknowledge the fact that he saw her, but she seemed to pay no attention.
Rebecca stayed there for no more than ten seconds, and then she turned back the way she’d come and disappeared into the trees.
Evan opened his mouth, perhaps to say her name. He knew she’d never have heard it, but it was an instinctive response.
Not a sound left his lips, and he stepped back once more and lifted his guitar from where he’d rested it against the wall.
Rebecca appeared again, and this time she was carrying something. A canvas bag, Evan guessed, though he couldn’t be sure at such a distance.
Twice she glanced over her shoulder as she made her way down the drive, and Evan sensed that not only was there a degree of urgency, but also some anxiety in the way she was behaving.
Puzzled, he walked down to meet her, but she shook her head and waved him back.
Evan did as she indicated and was there on the veranda once more when she met him.
She handed him what was now evidently something wrapped in a shirt, the sleeves tied to form a handle of sorts.
“Some clothes,” she said. “My clothes. I want you to put them somewhere safe, and don’t tell anyone.”
“But—”
“I am just asking you, Evan. You can do this for me, right?”
“Yes, sure I can,” Evan replied.
“Thank you,” Rebecca replied, and she reached out and touched his hand. She started to turn, and he grabbed her sleeve.
“Are you in trouble?” he asked.
She looked back at him, that flicker of anxiety so obvious in her eyes. “Not yet,” she said. “But I might be.”
And with that she hurried away once more.
Evan was left standing on the front steps of the house, a bundle of clothes in his hands, waiting to see if Rebecca Wyatt glanced back over her shoulder at him.
She did not, as if she didn’t dare.
As if she didn’t want to acknowledge how she’d just drawn Evan Riggs into whatever trouble was on its way.
The trouble went by the name of Gabriel Ellsworth, and—notwithstanding his name—he was certainly no angel.
Cousin Gabe, as he was known by Ralph Wyatt, for he was, in fact, a cousin on his deceased wife’s mother’s side, was a handful of years younger than Ralph, weighing in at thirty-nine. He was one of the Tecumseh Ellsworths, more a dynasty than a family, for the patriarch—a onetime evangelical minister who lost his faith in the bottom of a bottle and then spent many years vainly looking for it in the same place—somehow managed to sire a total of eighteen children with seven different women. Gabriel was of the same direct line as Ralph’s wife, however, and thus Ralph felt a certain obligation to help the man out, to support whatever efforts he made toward a better and more productive life.
Gabe Ellsworth had worked the previous farm back in the summer of 1936. The summer of ’37 had been a time of change and upheaval, for that was when Ralph lost his wife and Rebecca her mother. Moving away from Oklahoma had been an effort to escape the past, but—as in most cases—memory was the scenery you found no matter where you were. Things were getting better, a little easier, and Ralph Wyatt had to say that his daughter had shown the most extraordinary resilience and fortitude. Couldn’t put it any other way, but had it not been for Rebecca, he might have lost his mind to grief completely.
The untimely death of Madeline Wyatt was still an open wound, and yet the new farm was prospering. He needed an extra pair of hands, and Gabe Ellsworth, sometime drinker though he was, had proven a good worker, accepting a nominal wage alongside room and board. So Ralph made the call, and Gabe set out for West Texas, coming in on the bus to Ozona on Friday, May 13. Portentous the day and date might have been, for it took just one weekend for Rebecca to realize she was in real trouble.
Gabe Ellsworth was a man of appetites, no doubt about it. To anyone with a weather eye for such things, he was a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and a pretty sixteen-year-old girl was just about the wrong kind of temptation. Such a morsel was well suited for sharpening teeth as well as wit.
Unbeknownst to most, when Gabe Ellsworth was twenty-two, he did something that meant he could never go home. Not ever. From that point and forever onward, his temper had been volatile, his fuse short, his mouth full of smart one-liners. As if to keep everyone at arm’s length, he appeared either unpredictable or infantile, that kind of mischievous bluff and bravado that spoke of a man with unwholesome secrets.
“Hey, girlie,” he would say to Rebecca. “You want to come over here and polish Cousin Gabe’s trailer hitch,” both of them knowing full well that Cousin Gabe possessed neither trailer hitch nor any vehicle upon which such a thing could feature.
The tone was suggestive, the glint in the eye too obvious by half, and the intent of every word slanted toward something devious and unsavory.
On the Sunday just forty-eight hours after Gabe’s arrival, Rebecca spoke to her father.
“I don’t like him, Pa,” she said.
“You don’t have to like him, sweetheart. He’s here to help me. He don’t cost a great deal, and he won’t make any trouble.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Why’d you say that?”
“The way he looks at me, the things he says … not what he says, but what he means.”
Ralph Wyatt paused, a flicker of concern crossing his brow like a cloud shadow crosses a field. “He do something to you?”
“No, Pa. He didn’t do anything to me.”
“Then what’s the worry for, Rebecca?”
“What he’s thinkin’ about doing, I guess.”
“Well, I can’t really afford not to have him, and until he does something that justifies my lettin’ him go—”
The sentence remained unfinished.
Sunday evening Rebecca went straight to her room after dinner. She didn’t much care for the furtive glances and sly smiles that now seemed almost without pause.
She heard him in the hallway, and with her door inched open, he said, “You hidin’ from me, sugar?”
“No, sir,” she replied. “If I was hidin’, you wouldn’t have found me.”
“I do so appreciate the sharpness of your tongue, Miss Wyatt,” he crooned, and she could hear the whiskey in his throat, the way it relaxed muscles and morals and good intent.
“Prefer it if you wouldn’t behave such a way, Cousin Gabe,” she said.
His elbow touched the door, and the gap between door and frame widened somewhat.
Gabe could see a girl alone, pretty as a picture, ringlets like feathered question marks, her teenage breasts so proud and pert, that delicate throat, those honey-tasting lips.
Rebecca could see the shadowed face in the doorway, the way he leaned against the jamb, that dip in his shoulder that made his whole body a question mark. He had his thumbs tucked in his belt, his fingers fanned toward his crotch as if to frame whatever hideous thing lay behind the buttons.
“Why you so mean to me, Rebecca Wyatt?” he purred.
“I’m not mean to you, Cousin Gabe. I just see what’s on your mind an’ it ain’t right an’ proper.”
“What do you mean? I’m just bein’ friendly.”
“You know what I mean, Gabe, and what you’re thinkin’ right now ain’t friendly, and you know it.”
“So what am I thinkin’ right now, sweet pea?”
Rebecca took a deep breath. Beyond the distaste and discomfort, there was now a sense of real anxiety. Gabe Ellsworth’s thoughts were so strong, she could feel them pushing right up against her, much the same as what he would do if given half a chance.
“Gabriel Ellsworth,” she said. “You are close to my daddy’s age. You are also related to my mother. If for no other reason than decency and good manners, I am asking you to leave me alone. I know what you want, an’ you ain’t gettin’ it. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby—” he started, but was cut short when Rebecca moved suddenly and closed the door.
Gabe Ellsworth pawed the door and whined like a puppy dog. Then he laughed coarsely. “G’night, sugar pie,” he whispered, loud enough for her to hear him.
She slept little that night, ever aware for the slightest unfamiliar creak that would forewarn her of Gabe’s approach. Visions of him creeping into her room, dressed in nothing but his undershorts, his manhood erect and angry and filled with malintent, haunted her terribly.
Gabe Ellsworth didn’t visit with her that night. He sat in his room and drank himself to sleep, and the following morning he looked at her across the kitchen table and smiled his greasy smile.
That was the afternoon Rebecca took her bundle to the Riggses’ place and asked Evan to hide it. If she was to make a run for it, then she at least wanted a change of clothes.
Evan didn’t see Rebecca again until late on Wednesday. There was no hiding her upset.
“My mama’s cousin is here,” she told Evan. They were away from the house some distance, Rebecca having found Evan on the stoop playing guitar, asking him to just take a short walk with her so they could speak without being overheard.
“He doesn’t mean well,” she explained. “He has bad things on his mind, and I think he’s set to do them. I don’t know how long he can withhold himself.”
“Bad things?” Evan asked.
“You know,” she said. “He’s gonna put the hurt on me. Rape me, I guess.”
Evan’s eyes widened. Though he’d done nothing more than think about Rebecca Wyatt buck naked and all that this entailed, he also knew that for a man of any age to impress himself on a woman uninvited was a sin against God and nature. It would not be the first time that the color rose in his cheeks when he thought of such a thing, how it angered him, how it stirred some violent shadow in his being. There was rightness, and then there was everything else. This was most definitely part of the everything else.
“What do you think we should do?” Evan said.
The fact that he didn’t play it down, question her certainty, the fact that he immediately included himself in the solution to this problem, reminded Rebecca of the fundamental difference between Evan and Carson. She could have taken the problem to Carson, but Carson would have done one of two things: laughed and told her she was foolish for imagining such a thing, or walked over to the Wyatt place, hauled Gabe Ellsworth out from wherever he was skulking, and had a damned good go at walloping some sense into him. That was not what she needed and would certainly cause more trouble than it was worth.
“My pa needs to send him away,” Rebecca said.
“Does your pa know what he says to you?”
“I tell him, but I think he wants to read it a different way. He has a problem. He needs help with the farm, but he can’t afford anyone but Gabe. Gabe comes cheap.”
“Acts it, too,” Evan said. “Then we need to prove to your pa that Cousin Gabe ain’t no good, right?”
“Right.”
“Then we set him a trap.”
“That’s what I was thinkin’.”
“Catch him good when your pa can see it.”
“Scares me, Evan.”
Evan reached out his hand and took Rebecca’s. He squeezed it reassuringly. “I’ll be there. If he gets crazy, I’ll jump on him.”
“He’s a big man, Evan. He’d kick a hole in you ’fore you had a chance to take your hat off.”
“We shall see,” was all Evan said, and there was flint in his expression that reminded her of Carson.
The trap was set for the following Friday. Ralph had business in Sonora, fifty crow-miles east. He’d be gone four hours or more, and Rebecca had known this by Thursday lunchtime. There was time to undertake this thing before Ralph Wyatt departed. At least that was the intent.
Evan told his ma and pa and Carson that he was visiting with Rebecca, that her daddy had some chores as far as he knew, that there was a buck or two in it and he needed new strings for the guitar.
“The way you fuss with that thing, anyone’d think you were gonna marry it and have ukuleles!” Carson quipped.
“Would serve you well to find something to get so interested in,” William Riggs told his eldest, a comment that provoked a sulky silence until Grace broached the subject of William’s birthday, two months hence, and whether they should all take a trip out to San Angelo for a restaurant dinner.
“We’ll discuss it some other time,” was William’s edict, “when we know better our financial position.”
Evan was gone to the Wyatt place right after dishes were washed and put away. He thought to take a weapon of some variety, a baseball bat, at least a sturdy branch, but ultimately decided against it. He hoped that there would not be any violence, for he felt sure that Gabe Ellsworth was not the kind of man to take a step back when tempers flared and fists were drawn.
Evan had never had a fight in his life. Playground scuffles, perhaps, but nothing beyond squinted eyes and flailing hands connecting rarely and with the force of a frightened bird. Cousin Gabe was a traveled man, full-grown, engineer’s boots, a good head of steam in him. Evan had recognized his kind from a distance, and recognized trouble.
The plan, if that was its name, was for Rebecca to lure Gabe to the barn nearest the Wyatt house, and here she knew he would set upon her with his seductive lines and molasses charm. Evan would be within earshot and would happen upon a moment of inappropriateness before it became truly threatening, and he would cause sufficient alarm to bring Rebecca’s father from the house. Men in their thirties with a mind for seducing teenage girls could only be cowards, and neither Rebecca nor Evan saw him maneuvering his way out of a confrontation with Ralph Wyatt when both his daughter and a witness challenged Gabe with the truth of what had happened.