Stephen King - A Good Marriage

I tried to wait quietly while Jones went through his Ritual of Arrival: belt-hitching, forehead-wiping (even though the day was chilly and overcast), hair-brushing. I couldn’t do it. “Is he all right? Did you find him?”

“No, nope, can’t say we did.” He mounted the porch steps. “Line-rider over east of Lyme Biska found the truck, but no sign of the kid. We might know better about the state of his health if you’d reported this when it happened. Wouldn’t we?”

“I was hoping he’d come back on his own,” I said dully. “He’s gone to Omaha. I don’t know how much I need to tell you, Sheriff—”

Lars Olsen had meandered into auditory range, ears all but flapping. “Go on back to my car, Olsen,” Jones said. “This is a private conversation.”

Lars, a meek soul, scurried off without demur. Jones turned back to me. He was far less cheerful than on his previous visit, and had dispensed with the bumbling persona, as well.

“I already know enough, don’t I? That your kid got Harl Cotterie’s daughter in the fam’ly way and has probably gone haring off to Omaha. He run the truck off the road into a field of high grass when he knew the tank was ’bout dry. That was smart. He get that kind of smart from you? Or from Arlette?”

I said nothing, but he’d given me an idea. Just a little one, but it might come in handy.

“I’ll tell you one thing he did that we’ll thank him for,” Jones said. “Might keep him out of jail, too. He yanked all the grass from under the truck before he went on his merry way. So the exhaust wouldn’t catch it afire, you know. Start a big prairie fire that burned a couple thousand acres, a jury might get a bit touchy, don’t you think? Even if the offender was only 15 or so?”

“Well, it didn’t happen, Sheriff—he did the right thing—so why are you going on about it?” I knew the answer, of course. Sheriff Jones might not give a hoot in a high wind for the likes of Andrew Lester, attorney-at-law, but he was good friends with Harl. They were both members of the newly formed Elks Lodge, and Harl had it in for my son.

“A little touchy, aren’t you?” He wiped his forehead again, then resettled his Stetson. “Well, I might be touchy, too, if it was my son. And you know what? If it was my son and Harl Cotterie was my neighbor—my good neighbor—I might’ve just taken a run down there and said, ‘Harl? You know what? I think my son might be going to try and see your daughter. You want to tell someone to be on the peep for him?’ But you didn’t do that, either, did you?”

The idea he’d given me was looking better and better, and it was almost time to spring it.

“He hasn’t shown up wherever she is, has he?”

“Not yet, no, he may still be looking for it.”

“I don’t think he ran away to see Shannon,” I said.

“Why, then? Do they have a better brand of ice cream there in Omaha? Because that’s the way he was headed, sure as your life.”

“I think he went looking for his mother. I think she may have gotten in touch with him.”

That stopped him for a good ten seconds, long enough for a wipe of the forehead and a brush of the hair. Then he said, “How would she do that?”

“A letter would be my best guess.” The Hemingford Home Grocery was also the post office, where all the general delivery went. “They would have given it to him when he went in for candy or a bag of peanuts, as he often does on his way back from school. I don’t know for sure, Sheriff, any more than I know why you came out here acting like I committed some kind of crime. I wasn’t the one who knocked her up.”

“You ought to hush that kind of talk about a nice girl!”

“Maybe yes and maybe no, but this was as much a surprise to me as it was to the Cotteries, and now my boy is gone. They at least know where their daughter is.”

Once again he was stumped. Then he took out a little notebook from his back pocket and jotted something in it. He put it back and asked, “You don’t know for sure that your wife got in touch with your kid, though—that’s what you’re telling me? It’s just a guess?”

“I know he talked a lot about his mother after she left, but then he stopped. And I know he hasn’t shown up at that home where Harlan and his wife stuck Shannon.” And on that score I was as surprised as Sheriff Jones… but awfully grateful. “Put the two things together, and what do you get?”

“I don’t know,” Jones said, frowning. “I truly don’t. I thought I had this figured out, but I’ve been wrong before, haven’t I? Yes, and will be again. ‘We are all bound in error,’ that’s what the Book says. But good God, kids make my life hard. If you hear from your son, Wilfred, I’d tell him to get his skinny ass home and stay away from Shannon Cotterie, if he knows where she is. She won’t want to see him, guarantee you that. Good news is no prairie fire, and we can’t arrest him for stealing his father’s truck.”

“No,” I said grimly, “you’d never get me to press charges on that one.”

“But.” He raised his finger, which reminded me of Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. “Three days ago, in Lyme Biska—not so far from where the rider found your truck—someone held up that grocery and ethyl station on the edge of town. The one with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof? Took 23 dollars. I got the report sitting on my desk. It was a young fella dressed in old cowboy clothes, with a bandanna pulled up over his mouth and a plainsman hat slouched down over his eyes. The owner’s mother was tending the counter, and the fella menaced her with some sort of tool. She thought it might have been a crowbar or a pry-rod, but who knows? She’s pushing 80 and half-blind.”

It was my time to be silent. I was flabbergasted. At last I said, “Henry left from school, Sheriff, and so far as I can remember he was wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers that day. He didn’t take any of his clothes, and in any case he doesn’t have any cowboy clothes, if you mean boots and all. Nor does he have a plainsman’s hat.”

“He could have stolen those things, too, couldn’t he?”

“If you don’t know anything more than what you just said, you ought to stop. I know you’re friends with Harlan—”

“Now, now, this has nothing to do with that.”

It did and we both knew it, but there was no reason to go any farther down that road. Maybe my 80 acres didn’t stack up very high against Harlan Cotterie’s 400, but I was still a landowner and a taxpayer, and I wasn’t going to be browbeaten. That was the point I was making, and Sheriff Jones had taken it.

“My son’s not a robber, and he doesn’t threaten women. That’s not how he acts and not the way he was raised.”

Not until just lately, anyway, a voice inside whispered.

“Probably just a drifter looking for a quick payday,” Jones said. “But I felt like I had to bring it up, and so I did. And we don’t know what people might say, do we? Talk gets around. Everybody talks, don’t they? Talk’s cheap. The subject’s closed as far as I’m concerned—let the Lyme County Sheriff worry about what goes on in Lyme Biska, that’s my motto—but you should know that the Omaha police are keeping an eye on the place where Shannon Cotterie’s at. Just in case your son gets in touch, you know.”

He brushed back his hair, then resettled his hat a final time.

“Maybe he’ll come back on his own, no harm done, and we can write this whole thing off as, I don’t know, a bad debt.”

“Fine. Just don’t call him a bad son, unless you’re willing to call Shannon Cotterie a bad daughter.”

The way his nostrils flared suggested he didn’t like that much, but he didn’t reply to it. What he said was, “If he comes back and says he’s seen his mother, let me know, would you? We’ve got her on the books as a missing person. Silly, I know, but the law is the law.”