P. Parrish - The Little Death

“The horse was wild?” Swann asked.

Aubry smiled. “No, son, just full of piss and vinegar. Wouldn’t have been the first time she throwed David, and we didn’t think it’d be the last.”

Aubry paused, the smile gone.

“Go on, please,” Louis said.

“Well, Jim and me and the rest of us set out after him, thinking we’d find him sitting in the shade, laid up with a sprained ankle or something and waiting for us to ride up and take him home to supper.”

Aubry stopped again and stared at his boots. Louis glanced at Swann. He had the look of a boy listening to a ghost story.

“Mr. Aubry?” Louis prodded.

“We found David in some heavy woods just north of the old pen,” Aubry said softly. “I knew the minute I touched him, he was gone.”

“What did you do then?” Louis asked.

Aubry cleared his throat. “Jim carried him on back to the house, and we called the doc. Not for David but for Mrs. Archer. I could tell she was going to need everything the doc, and maybe God, could offer just so she could make it through the night.”

“So, no one ever took a closer look at David’s head wound or the area where you found him?” Louis asked.

Aubry shook his head. “No reason to. Doc and the chief said it was an accident, and that’s what got wrote down.”

“The doctor and the police chief, they still around?” Louis asked.

“Both dead,” Aubry said.

Louis pulled his notebook from his pocket, intending to ask Aubry to draw him a map of where this patch of woods was. He wanted to see the exact spot where David had fallen, although he didn’t know why. The cattle pen had offered him no vibrations, so what could he expect from a plot of ground where a death had happened almost thirty years ago?

Swann leaned forward. “Mr. Aubry, what do you think happened to David that day?”

Louis looked to Swann, surprised not only that he’d spoken up but at the question itself. What had Swann heard that Louis hadn’t?

“You said ‘that’s what got wrote down,’” Swann said. “We all know that sometimes what gets written down isn’t always what happened.”

Aubry walked a few feet across the porch, then turned back to them. “That same night, when we were sitting around the house trying to make sense of stuff, Jim started wondering out loud why David had been in those woods when he was supposed to be working on the fence line about a mile north.”

Aubry’s walkie-talkie crackled with a spurt of male voices. He listened for a few seconds, then turned it off.

“I knew what David was doing there, but I didn’t tell Jim,” Aubry said. “David liked to wander off and draw pictures. I was sure that’s why he was there in those woods. It’s the prettiest place on the ranch.”

“Why couldn’t you tell his father this?” Louis asked.

“Well, when David was thirteen, Jim found him in the barn drawing pictures of the horses. He got a little upset, told him only sissies did stuff like that.”

“But David didn’t give it up,” Louis said.

“No,” Aubry said. “He just couldn’t seem to help himself. So, to keep peace, I told David he could stow his sketching stuff at my place. That’s why the night we found David, I went to the barn to check David’s kit and make sure there weren’t any sketchbooks there. Jim had enough heartache that night.”

Aubry pulled the bandanna from around his neck and wiped his face. The man was sweating, despite the cool breeze blowing in from the south.

“But I didn’t find any sketchbooks,” Aubry said. “I was thinking about that when I saw his whip was missing.”

“His whip?” Louis asked.

“Yup. The saddle kit was still intact, but the whip was gone.”

“Could it have fallen off when the horse bucked?” Louis asked.

Aubry shook his head. “But I took a trip out to those woods the next morning just to make sure. I didn’t find anything.”

“Could he have just lost the whip?” Swann asked.

“Cowmen don’t just lose things off their saddles,” Aubry said. “Our kit is as important to us as your police stuff is to you.”

“Could David have loaned the whip to someone?” Louis asked.

Aubry shook his head. “No. His granddad Tom gave it to him, and that boy loved that whip like nothing else in this world. Waxed it himself, braided it himself. His initials were carved in the handle.”

Louis thought back to the slashes on Mark Durand’s bare back and the tiny piece of leather Dr. Steffel had retrieved from deep inside one of the wounds.

He looked to Aubry’s horse, at the whip hanging on the saddle. It was a braided red and blue coil, not anything like the leather lash most people envisioned when they thought of a bullwhip.

“Did David’s whip look like that?” Louis asked, pointing toward the horse.

“No,” Aubry said. “We use nylon now. Holds up better in the wet weather. But David always used that old leather one.”

“Is there a chance one of your cowboys stole it?” Swann asked.

“Cow men , son,” Aubry said. “And no, like I told your friends when they were here before, no man of mine, then or now, would have stolen that boy’s whip. Not from that boy and not that whip.”

“Then someone had to have taken it from David that day in the woods,” Louis said.

Aubry’s eyes came slowly to Louis. There was a sad kind of reckoning in them, as if his twenty-eight-year-old struggle between what he hoped to be true and what he feared to be true was finally coming to an end.

“Is there a chance he could have encountered a stranger out there and been robbed or bullied into a fight?” Louis asked.

Aubry shook his head. “You have to understand. This place is like an island. We all know each other. We protect each other. Strangers just don’t wander onto the land. It’s not their world.”

“Then was it possible he was meeting someone?” Louis asked.

“I don’t know who,” Aubry said. “Everyone else was working. David should’ve been working. If he had a friend, he would have brought him to the house.”

Louis glanced at Swann. They had both heard Aubry’s use of the word sissy earlier and were probably thinking the same thing now: that David couldn’t bring his friend to the house because he was gay.

But they had abandoned the theory of the victims’ sexual orientation as motivation days ago. What the hell were they missing here?

Louis looked back at Aubry, knowing he needed to ask the question, but he just wasn’t sure how.

Aubry must have seen something in his face. “I remember how that Detective Barberry was talking about that man who was killed in the cow pen,” he said. “And now you’re wondering the same thing about David.”

“Mr. Aubry-”

“I ought to take offense at the idea that you think just because David liked drawing things, he was a molly-boy.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you thought it.”

Louis was quiet. Swann was staring at the porch, the squeaking of the rocker filling the stiff silence.

“But I won’t take offense, because I know that you’re just doing your job the only way you know how,” Aubry said. “So, I’ll tell you this. David looked at pretty girls as much as any man on this ranch and even picked out the land where he wanted to build his home after he got married. Six kids, he used to say. Three boys, three girls.”

He was quiet, staring Louis down.

“All that boy wanted was to have a family and live out his life here.”

The sound of Swann’s rocking chair stopped.

“Now, if you fellas don’t have any more questions, I’ve got work to do,” Aubry said.