“Found out—?”
“Dave was molesting Tess.”
“Oh Jesus!”
“It’s true. For a month or more before he died.”
“You mean he—”
“No, he didn’t rape her. Touched her, that was as far as it went.”
“Touched her.” Lynette slumped onto one of the chairs. Anger puckered her mouth, drew the skin tight over her cheekbones. “I should’ve known,” she said.
“He did the same with Karen, didn’t he.”
“Yeah.”
“How many times?”
“Just once. She told me right afterward; I taught her right.”
“What’d you do?”
“Went after him with a butcher knife. He took it away from me before I could cut him. Then he tried to laugh the whole thing off. Said I was making a mountain out of a molehill.” She took a long, nervous swallow from her beer. Foam dribbled from a corner of her mouth; she didn’t bother to wipe it away. “I’d been out at the store and Karen was in the tub. He walked in on her... just wanted to help her wash, he said... fuckin’ pervert. Bad enough with her, but his own little girl...”
“Why didn’t you report him to the sheriff?” Messenger asked.
“What good would it’ve done?” she said bitterly. “That kind of charge against a Roebuck in this town? Besides, I couldn’t put her through a thing like that, all the damn questions. If he’d actually raped her... but just messing around, her word against his... I couldn’t do it. Best thing for us was to get shut of that pig and just forget it ever happened.”
“You told Joe about it.”
“No. Karen told him. Blurted it out. If I hadn’t been there to calm him down, he’d have been the one to blow Dave’s head off. I should’ve let him get his gun, even if he is my brother. Then Tess might still be alive.”
“Maybe you only stopped him temporarily.”
“No. I told you before, it wasn’t Joe. He brooded about it, sure, who wouldn’t? And when he saw Dave at the Hardrock he lost it and started beating on him. But that’s all he did. He’d never hurt a kid, not in a million years.”
“Neither would Anna,” Dacy said. “She didn’t kill either of them. I’m as sure of that now as you are about Joe.”
Lynette blinked up at her. “Dave,” she said. “He would.”
“Would what?”
“Hurt a kid. Molesting his own flesh and blood is hurting her, isn’t it? Not much of a step from that to worse. What if he tried to... you know, with Tess, and she got free and ran off to tell on him? What if he busted her skull with that rock to keep her quiet? And Anna came home and saw it or saw him putting her in the well?”
“My God.”
“It could’ve happened that way, couldn’t it? He’s the one who killed Tess and that’s why Anna killed him?”
The Wild Horse Casino was closed. Parking lot empty, windows dark, the high bucking stallion frozen and lightless.
“Damn!” Messenger said. “They must’ve shut down because of John T. Now we’ll have to go out to the gypsum mine to talk to Draper and Teal.”
“Don’t jump the gun, Jim. Casino bar’s not the only place in town with a big-screen TV.”
“How many others?”
“Two. Murphy’s and the Hardrock Tavern.”
“Will either of them be open?”
“Both. They’re shitkicker bars; they wouldn’t have shut down the day after Christ died.”
“Which one’s closer?”
Dacy said, “Murphy’s,” and swung the Jeep into an illegal U-turn across the highway.
Except for sporadic traffic passing through, the town had an empty look and feel. No pedestrians, not many parked cars, most of the businesses along Main — even the ones that normally stayed open late — closed and dark. Town in mourning for its boss hog, he thought. That was part of it, anyway; the other part was fear. Three brutal murders in less than a year, including the last two surviving members of one of Beulah’s pioneer families. People had closed ranks, locked windows and doors, dusted off pistols and rifles and shotguns. Their fear made them angry and skittish, and the combination of all three made them dangerous. It was a bad time for him to be roaming around here with night coming on, even in Dacy’s company. They’d turned on Anna, one of their own, and hounded her out of Beulah and eventually into oblivion in a tubful of bloody water. It wouldn’t take much for them to turn on the man they blamed for John T.’s murder, an outsider, a pariah. And if that happened, they wouldn’t settle for just driving him away.
The wind was hot and abrasive against his face as they dipped downhill past the new high school. He tasted the dryness, felt the tension in his body. But he wasn’t afraid. Fear all around him, hidden and gathering, but none in him. It occurred to him that he was no longer in a state of crisis or flux; no longer the same person he’d been a week ago, and not even a shadow of the one he’d been before Ms. Lonesome came into his life. The internal forces had finished their work and the changeling process was complete. Thirty-seven years old, and he’d finally gone through the chrysalis stage — his own personal rite of passage.
Dacy’s voice dragged him out of himself. “... Lynette said before we left?”
“What?”
“Before we left her. What she said about Dave killing Tess and Anna shooting him because of it. You think it could’ve happened that way?”
“No,” he said. And yet ... “And you don’t either.”
“Tell me why I don’t. Ease my mind.”
“If it’d happened that way, why wouldn’t she have admitted it? The only reason to keep quiet would be to hide the abuse, and at that point it didn’t matter. She wasn’t that much of a martyr, was she?”
“Wasn’t a martyr at all,” Dacy said. “She’d have admitted it, all right. She never wanted pity, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with than hatred and suspicion.”
Not that way, no. But suppose ...
Draper and Teal weren’t at Murphy’s, a roadhouse on the flats below the shopping center: None of the half dozen pickups parked on its front lot was white. Both Messenger and Dacy were silent as she wheeled the Jeep back onto the highway heading north. The sky to the west, where the sun was sliding down toward the jagged crest of Montezuma Peak, was streaked with crimson and orange — fire colors, like the blaze that had consumed the skeletons of Anna’s ranch. Cloud puffs in that direction had dark red underbellies, as if they had been used like cotton swabs to mop up blood.
Back through the empty town, past the High Desert Lodge. A sheriff’s cruiser passed them there, but the driver wasn’t Ben Espinosa and he paid them no attention. Downhill and onto the northern plain. Pale flickering neon — the outlines of a blue miner with a red pick and a yellow gold pan — jutted from the roof of the Hardrock Tavern, marking its location when they were still some distance away. A cavvy of motorcycles and a dozen pickups and four-by-fours jammed front and side lots. He began scanning for the white pickup even before Dacy turned in.
Two white trucks. And the second of the two, near the end of the side lot, had a broken radio antenna.
Dacy parked across from it, in the only available space. When she shut off the Jeep’s engine, Messenger could hear the throb of country music and the muted jumble of voices from inside the low-slung building.
She caught hold of his arm, stopped him from getting out. “No, you wait here. I’ll bring them.”
“Bring them? Why not talk to them inside?”
“We’re doing this my way, remember?”
“I’m not arguing, just wondering.”
“It’s crowded in there,” she said. “The two of us walk in together and you’re recognized, we might not get a chance at Draper and Teal. You understand what I mean?”
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