James Burke - Light of the World

“On her legs.”

“There was no penetration?” I said.

“None.”

“Did you get a hit on the DNA?”

“We’re working on it,” he said.

That one didn’t sound right. “You ever hear of a guy named Asa Surrette?” I asked.

“I talked to your daughter about him,” the sheriff said.

“I didn’t know she called you.”

“I got the sense you don’t agree with your daughter’s perceptions about him. You think he’s dead?”

“The state of Kansas says he’s dead.”

“What do you say?” the sheriff asked.

“Maybe he’s out there. Maybe he was the guy who left the message in the cave. Or maybe somebody is using his MO.”

“Why did you mention the cave?”

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“It’s the biblical reference, isn’t it?”

“No, evil is evil. There’s enough of it in the human breast without having to ascribe it to the devil.”

“I hope you’re right,” the sheriff said, gathering up the photos and replacing them in the envelope. “Where’s your daughter, Mr. Purcel?”

“In town.”

“That’s convenient.”

“If she has time, maybe she can give you a ring,” Clete said.

“Repeat that, please?”

“Gretchen isn’t the problem,” Clete replied. “It’s not our job to follow you guys around with a dustpan and a broom.”

“Come back here, Mr. Purcel,” the sheriff said. “Did you hear me? Sir, don’t walk away from me.”

That was exactly what Clete did, gazing up at the strips of pink cloud in the sky and at the trees bending in the wind on the hillside. I knew we were in for it.

At first light Tuesday morning, Wyatt Dixon woke from a nightmare, one that left his armpits damp and turned his heart into gelatin. For Wyatt, the dream was not about the past or the present; nor did it have a beginning or an end. Instead, the dream was omnipresent in Wyatt’s life, and it waited for him whenever he closed his eyes, whether day or night. In the dream, the man he grew up calling “Pap” was walking toward him bare-chested in his strap overalls, his skin as shriveled and bloodless as a mummy’s, his bony hand knotted into a fist. “You touch your sister again, boy? Your mother seen you,” Pap was saying. “Don’t lie. It’ll go twice as hard if you lie. You worthless little pisspot. The best part of you run down your mother’s leg.”

Wyatt got up and put on his jeans and went outside barefoot and shirtless into the cold morning and the mist that was a ghostly blue in the cottonwoods and as bright as silver dollars on the steel swing bridge over the river. The current was dark green and swirling in giant eddies around the boulders and beaver dams on the edges of the main channel, and wild roses were blooming along the banks. The dawn was so soft and cool and tangible, Wyatt believed he could taste it in the back of his mouth and breathe it into his lungs. He pulled a tarp off a woodpile and threw it on the grass and lay on his back with his arm over his eyes, his chest rising and falling slowly, the world once again a place of leafy trees and a breeze blowing down a canyon and German brown trout undulating in the riffle. Just that fast, Pap had gone away and become the bag of bones that someone finally dropped in a hole in a potter’s field.

When Wyatt awoke, the sun had just broken above the canyon, and he could hear footsteps clanging on the steel grid of the swing bridge and the cables creaking with the tension created by weight. He sat up and saw a heavyset woman in a suit and heels trying to work her way down the slope without falling, a notebook in her hand.

Where had he seen her? At the revival on the rez?

“Could I have a word with you, Mr. Dixon?” she asked.

The breeze was at her back. He closed and opened his eyes. “What the hell is that smell?” he said, looking around.

“I guess that’s my perfume.”

“Who are you?”

“Bertha Phelps. I’m doing an article on charismatic religions among Native Americans.”

“I was about to fix breakfast.”

“I don’t mind,” she replied.

You don’t mind what? he thought. He took her inventory. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Could I ask you some questions?”

He broke off a blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “Whatever blows your skirt up,” he replied.

She followed him into the house. He put on a long-sleeved shirt without buttoning it and started a fire in the woodstove. There was so much clutter in his kitchen that there was hardly a spot to sit down. He went into the living room and returned with a straight-back chair and set it beside her. “Take a load off,” he said.

“I heard you speaking in tongues Sunday afternoon,” she said.

“You were the woman talking to Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s right. Were you raised Pentecostal?”

“I didn’t have no raising, unless that’s what you call breaking corn and picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see.”

“Would you say you found your religion through the Indians?”

“I never give it much thought.”

“You had a hard life, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Other people say you did.”

He cracked four eggs and plopped the yolks in a skillet and set the skillet on one of the stove lids. “Maybe other people ought to mind their own goddamn business.”

She leaned over her notebook to write in it. She rubbed her pen back and forth on the paper, trying to make ink come out of it. “Drat,” she said.

“That’s them kind Walmart sells. They’re about as good for writing as tent pegs.”

“I have another one in my purse,” she said.

He looked at her with increasing curiosity. “You’re not here to ask me about the revival, are you?”

“I’m also doing an article on the local Indians.”

“You know where I saw that kind of ballpoint before?”

“You just told me. At Walmart.”

“There was a cop here’bouts named Bill Pepper. He carried ballpoints just like that one in your hand. He was the kind of man who did things on the cheap. Did you happen to know Detective Pepper?”

“The name is familiar.”

“While I was in his custody, I heard him talking on his phone to Love Younger. I think the good detective was on a pad for Mr. Younger.”

“A what?”

“Detective Pepper was taking money on the side. That’s what cops call being on a pad.”

“You’re saying this police officer was corrupt?”

He looked through the back window at a doe and a fawn crossing through the shadows, their hooves stenciling the damp grass. They looked back at him, flipping their tails, theirs noses twitching. “I’m saying you got something on your mind, lady, and it ain’t religion.”

“I wondered if you knew the murdered Indian girl.”

“The Youngers sent you here?”

“No, sir, I’m here on my own.”

“You from down south?” he said.

“I’ve lived there.”

Wyatt opened the window and picked up a magazine from the drainboard and fanned his face with it.

“Does my perfume bother you?”

“I guess I’ve smelled worse.”

She seemed to concentrate on a reply but couldn’t think of one.

“If you see the Youngers, I want you to tell them something for me.”

“I’ve already told you I don’t work for them. I’m a freelance journalist.”

“Right. Tell Mr. Younger I know what he can do to me if he takes a mind. But I’ll leave my mark on him before we get done. He’ll know when it’s my ring, too.”

“If you want to make threats, Mr. Dixon, you’ll have to do that on your own.”

“It ain’t no threat.”

“I think maybe I should leave.”