Neely Tucker - Only the Hunted Run

“Harpers?”

“I do. They been gone for years and years. William, that was the husband? He had money in oil or cattle or something in Texas? He wasn’t here that much. They just used that place out there on the reservoir as a weekend sort of place. They’d be out there a lot in the summer. They’re all dead now. Far as I know.”

“So, okay, so what’s the name of that road they’re on, my turn off sixty-two?”

“If it’s got a name, I never heard it. On the maps, its county road thirty-four eighty, but nobody ever calls it that. It’s just the road that goes by the reservoir. Hardly nobody lives out that way.”

“Hunh. I didn’t see any Harpers listed in there, the land records.”

“I would imagine William had it under the company name he ran. Tex, Texa-something.”

“Tex-Oil?”

“That sounds right. Way yonder.” She fluttered a hand out toward the parking lot and beyond, south.

“Yes, ma’am. That was listed… wait.” He flipped the big plat book back open, going through the pages. “Jesus, I just had it.”

“Language,” she said, frowning.

“Sorry. I got home trainin’, I just forgot it. Here now. Tex-Oil. That sounds like an impressive company. This property right here, though, it’s small. Couple dozen acres.”

“It was just a weekend place. It wasn’t his oil operation or nothing.”

“Hunh. You remember the family?”

“I wasn’t but a tadpole. All I remember was the story that went around.”

“The story.”

“Yep.”

He waited. “Which one was that?”

The clerk leaned forward, dropped her whisper even more. “Mrs. Harper, she committed suicide. Slit her throat with a butcher knife one morning, right there in the bathroom just off the kitchen.”

“Good God.”

“Everybody talked about it for years .”

Sully blinked. “Slit her own throat?”

She nodded, chin bobbing. “I think she really didn’t want to be with us no more.”

“You don’t say.”

“I don’t know if the house is still out there or not. The family, they left right after the suicide, you know. The scandal and all?”

He nodded. The lady was gold. “Sure, sure.”

“I don’t remember ever seeing them again.”

Sully was looking at the pages open before him, the map, spelling out the plat as clear as day. The Harpers had frontage on the lake. He flipped the book shut.

“Ma’am, we got started to talking, I didn’t even get your name.”

“Jo-Ellen.” She looked at his scars, her eyes flicked just that quick, then back at him. She was trying to decide if she should bat her eyelashes, he could tell, wondering if his question had been personal or professional. But no, the issue was decided: too many scars. She eased back from him ever so slightly. Half an inch.

“Jo-Ellen,” he said, “thank you for the help. I might miss the driveway the first time, but I’ll find it. If I pull into the wrong one, somebody’ll just run me off with a round of buckshot.”

“Hon,” she said, “there ain’t no more than three driveways out there to pull up into, and I don’t think any of ’em got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, much less a shotgun.”

“Okay.”

“But there’s a crooked tree just before you get there. The lake, the tree, the driveway. When my daddy used to drive by there, he’d tell us that’s where the ghost of the crazy lady lived, that she’d come get us in the dark if we weren’t good.”

The house, by the time he found it, was an abandoned shell baking in the heat.

Open fields, pasture, the lake to the south. A narrow grove of oaks set along the long, unpaved drive. The prairie grass rustled against the front bumper as he eased ahead. The driveway was more of a memory than an actual thing.

The house lay in front of him like a ruination from Faulkner. It was a crumbling two-story brick farmhouse, two columns out front, the whole thing falling in on itself. Shutters had long since faded beside the windows and were now just dried out slats of brown wood. Half a dozen windows were broken out.

As he pulled up to the front, a squirrel squatted on a window ledge upstairs. It ducked back inside when he killed the engine. He got out. Nothing but the wind moved. It was nicer than the Russell Waters place, he guessed, but its sense of decay was heightened by the pretensions to grandeur. It didn’t even look back at him. It just sat there, hulking, stupid, dead.

“Too bad for you,” he said, to the house, as he was getting out of the car, “I don’t believe in haints.”

Sweat was already starting to roll down his forehead when he pushed open the front door. The architects had been going for the classic Southern mansion. A center hallway. What would have been the library to the left, the main dining room to the right. Kitchen to the rear right, through a narrow door from the dining room. He stood, listening. Nothing. He pulled his shirt out, untucking it to try to keep the sweat from soaking it, unbuttoning the top button. Trash and leaves in a corner, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. A broken ceramic cup.

Taking the circular stairway upstairs, he kept to the outside of the steps, avoiding the rotten spots in the middle. The steps, like the flooring, had saddled in, buckling from water damage. The walls, all bare, were ruined with water and seepage and mildew, the paint long since cracked and peeling. Rat pellets were everywhere, mixed with dust and dirt. Bird nestings. He didn’t spot the squirrel, but there was scratching in the attic. Looking out the back window of the master bedroom, he saw the cracked and faded pool in the backyard. It was now a stagnant pond of brown water.

That’s when he heard the sound of a car approaching from out front.

He walked to the front room, careful to stay out of the line of sight. A sheriff’s patrol car, white in the middle, black at the hood and trunk, pulled to a stop behind his car. The deputy-or sheriff, hell, he couldn’t see-waited in the air-conditioned car. Sully could make out only his outline, but guessed the man was calling in his plates.

Not moving, barely breathing, he waited, looking.

Then the driver’s side door swung open, the cop got out, surveyed the area, and plopped his hat on his head. The man was beefy, leaning toward fat, lumbering stiff-kneed toward the house. He was wearing a flak jacket underneath the uniform. Seriously? There was that much bang-bang in Lincoln County?

Sully cursed under his breath. Then he went to the window. He called out, “Helllooo, Officer? Hey? l’m just looking around. Here’s my hands.” He held them out. “Just me. Nobody else.”

The deputy looked up, brought his lumbering to a halt, and put his hands on his hips. He said, not putting much into it, “Don’t suppose you’re the absentee owner.”

The cop leaned over and spat a black line of tobacco juice. He seemed pained, as if walking from the car had taxed him and now he was pissed about it and going to make somebody grieve for it. “Come on down, then, and tell me the hell you doing. Jo-Ellen said I’d find you out here, like as not.”

The cop was coming up to the porch by the time Sully reached the front door. “Jo-Ellen, she said a reporter fella was interested in the place,” the deputy said, putting a hand on a rotting front porch rail. “That’d be you.”

“It would,” Sully said. “I didn’t know I was that much an item of concern.”

“You ain’t. I just saw her there at the Arby’s. Lunchtime. I asked after how her day was. She mentioned you. I drove out.”

“Sully Carter, Officer, good meeting you.” He stepped over a rotting board on the porch to shake the man’s hand, look him in the eye. This was a deputy, not the sheriff, but he walked up onto the porch, into the shade, like he owned the house himself.