All The Ugly and Wonderful Things 14

  

 

4

 

WAVY

 

Of course Kellen said, “It’s gonna be okay.” He didn’t want me to be scared, but Mama was dead. Not Sad Mama or Good Mama or Scary Mama ever again. Just Dead Mama. And Donal was missing. And Kellen was in handcuffs.

 

The cops took us to the hospital, where I saw Mr. Cutcheon in the parking lot. He waved at me, but Aunt Brenda wouldn’t let me go to him. The hospital smelled like disinfectant and sadness, like when Mama and Donal had their wreck. In a white room with a maze of blue curtains, a nurse said, “How’s she doing? We’re going to have a private exam room for her in a few minutes. Are you her mother?”

 

“I’m her aunt. Her mother—” Aunt Brenda couldn’t say it. Dead Mama. Always. That was how death worked. Dead Grandma. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the smell of Grandma’s house. I wanted to smell something nice that wasn’t sadness. I pulled my shirt up over my nose. It smelled like Kellen’s sweat. Safe.

 

Aunt Brenda dragged me into a room with a black table covered in paper.

 

“Why don’t I take the other girls down to the visitor’s lobby? The candy stripers have magazines and stuff,” another nurse said.

 

Leslie and Amy looked scared, and their eyes were red from crying. Dead Aunt Val for always, too.

 

Then Aunt Brenda and the nurse and I were alone in the little room.

 

“Sweetie, why don’t you let your aunt help you change into this gown, okay?”

 

It was one of those blue hospital things with strings and no back. Aunt Brenda pulled on my T-shirt, trying to take it off, but I twisted her wrist until she let go.

 

“Ma’am, does she understand? Have you told her anything?” the nurse said.

 

“I didn’t know what to tell her. Is it like a pelvic exam?”

 

“Yeah, like when you have your pap smear. Has she had one before?”

 

“I don’t think so. She’s only thirteen.”

 

“Oh, sweetie. Oh, I’m so sorry,” the nurse said.

 

I hated hearing them talk about me like I was broken. Mama was dead, but I was fine. I knew what “rape” meant and that wasn’t what Kellen had done.

 

“You know, ma’am, we might give her a sedative. To calm her down.”

 

“That’s a good idea. She’s pretty nervous about people touching her,” Aunt Brenda said.

 

I wasn’t going to take any sedative. No pills. No needles. They weren’t going to put anything into me.

 

“I’ll go get that and maybe while I’m gone you can help her change into the gown.”

 

The nurse opened the door, and that was all I needed. I dodged around Aunt Brenda, ducked past the nurse, and into the hallway. I was free.

 

Where to go was the hard part. Not to the shop or Kellen’s house, where the cops might catch me. At the Lutheran Church, a carnival had been set up in the parking lot, which was crowded with people. The air smelled like funnel cakes, heavy and greasy.

 

No one even noticed me when I sat down in one of the tents, where people were playing bingo. I stayed there all afternoon and into the evening, going from tent to tent. When it started to get dark, a woman came up to me and said, “Are your parents here? Do you need a ride home?”

 

I shook my head and forced myself to smile and wave as I walked away. The police were still at the shop, but at Kellen’s house, they had gone. The front door and the back door were closed with yellow tape, but the window to the laundry room was open. Balancing on a trash can, I popped out the screen, and crawled inside. The cops had made a mess, dumping things out of drawers.

 

After I put everything away, I took a shower. All day in the heat had made me sweaty, and I felt sticky between my legs. Wrapping up in a towel, I took my dirty clothes into the laundry room and put them in the hamper. In the dryer were clean clothes, mine and Kellen’s mixed together. I put on a pair of my panties and one of his T-shirts that I liked to sleep in.

 

When I opened the freezer, I was hoping for ice cream sandwiches, but I found something better. Thirty-one little foam cups of ice cream. On top of each plastic lid, Kellen had written a letter in black marker. Setting them out on the table, I moved them around until I solved the puzzle: HAPPY BIRTHDAY WAVY! I LOVE YOU!

 

He’d drawn lopsided hearts on the other four cups.

 

I opened the first one and took a bite. Chocolate with cherries in it.

 5

AMY

After Wavy ran away from the hospital, we walked to the police station. Mom asked one of the deputies about our car, but he shook his head.

“I don’t know anything about that, but I expect the DEA will impound everything on the property.”

“The DEA?” Mom said.

“It’s crazy up there. I went out to help with roadblocks and it’s knee-deep in feds.”

“Because of the murders?”

“What? No. Mrs. Newling—there’s—your brother-in-law has a meth lab up there about the size of a—it’s big.”

Mom made all the right noises of shock, but I don’t think it surprised her. After all, she knew what he’d done in the past. Did she really think he was ranching?

Whatever she thought, she was too tired to argue. Leslie was too tired to even whine. The three of us sat in the police station, our backsides going numb on hard plastic chairs, until the sheriff’s wife took us to a motel.

She was a tiny, wiry woman, what I imagined Wavy growing into. Physically, anyway, because the sheriff’s wife filled up dead air with talking. Probably she had to. Mom, Leslie, and I were like zombies, trudging into the motel room.

“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Newling. We’ll find your niece and nephew.”

The sheriff’s wife put her hand on Mom’s shoulder, and that’s when she fell apart. The night we found out about Grandma’s cancer was the first time I saw Mom cry, but the night of Wavy’s fourteenth birthday was worse. Mom let the sheriff’s wife hold her, and she cried so hard it shook the bed they were sitting on. Leslie and I just watched. We were cried out. More than anything, I wanted to go home, so I was relieved when the sheriff’s wife said, “Now, have you had a chance to call your husband?”

When Dad answered the phone, Mom went stiff and she didn’t even say hello. She said, “Bill, I need you to come pick up the girls. Something happened with Val.”

He must have said a lot more than hello, because she listened for several minutes. She got up and dragged the phone around to the other bed to sit down facing away from Leslie and me.

“Bill, I need you to drive up to Powell in the morning and pick up the girls. We’re staying at the Blue Moon Motel that’s on the highway into town. Room One-Oh-Seven. Bill, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. They’re fine.”

She was quiet again, listening, her shoulders tight.

“I don’t care about your stupid meeting! Come get your daughters and take them home!” When she glanced over her shoulder at us, I could see she was getting ready to cry again. “They’re safe, but they want to come home.”

Mom came around the bed and held out the phone. “Tell your father that you’re okay.”

Leslie took the phone and said, “Hi, Daddy.”

“Leslie, are you okay? Your sister’s okay?” I heard my father say.

“We’re okay.”

“What happened? What’s going on?”

“Aunt Val’s dead. And Unc—”

Mom jerked the phone away from Leslie.

“Ow!” Leslie clamped her hand over her ear, and when she pulled it away there was blood on it. Mom had yanked her earring out. Not hard enough to tear the lobe, but hard enough to make it bleed.

“No. You don’t need to come tonight. It’d be after midnight by the time you got here,” Mom said to Dad.

It wasn’t, which meant he’d sped to get there. He didn’t wake us up, because we weren’t sleeping. We had changed into nightgowns donated by church ladies, and crowded together in a bed that smelled of bleach and cigarette smoke. Lying in the dark, we were staring at the ceiling when he pounded on the door.

He’d come straight from work, wrinkled and tired. Pulling all three of us into his arms, he hugged us hard. Usually I hated his stale coffee breath, but that night it was familiar and comforting.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he kept saying. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with Leslie under one arm and me under the other, he listened to Mom tell what had happened. When she was done, he said, “Let’s go home.”

Leslie and I didn’t have to be told twice. We were ready to leave that dark paneled room with the sticky carpet. We picked up the plastic bags that held our clothes and Leslie’s puked-on shoes, ready to go out to Dad’s car in our borrowed nightgowns. I thought of Wavy, going from one place to another, never knowing what stranger’s clothes she’d have to wear.

Mom stayed sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Come on, Brenda. We’ve all had a long day. You don’t want to hear it, but I have to be at work in the morning. Let’s go.”

“I can’t go.”

“Yes, you can, Brenda. There’s nothing you can do here. We can make the funeral arrangements from home.”

“Wavy and Donal are missing. I can’t go. They need me.”

“I’m so sorry about Val, but your daughters need you, too.” Dad jingled his car keys. “The police will find Wavy and Donal and take care of them.”

“What am I supposed to do? I can’t just walk away,” Mom said.

“That’s exactly what you can do. There’s a system in place to take care of kids like Wavy and Donal. There’s a reason I pay through the nose on my taxes, so that when things like this happen, we don’t have to disrupt our lives. So we don’t have to live in the chaos people like Val create. We keep stepping in, but let’s let the system work this time.”

“Are you serious? If something happened to us, is that what you’d want to happen to Leslie and Amy?” Mom stood up, not to come with us, but to fight.

I stood in my socks, on the sidewalk between the room and the car, waiting to see what Dad would do. He stepped out of the motel room and closed the door behind him, leaving Mom alone.

“Get in the car, girls.”

I slept on the drive home, curled up in the front seat. I dreamed in blood that night, speeding through darkness, with Dad’s hand on my back. Aunt Val’s skull ruptured on the kitchen floor in a sea of creeping red. Footprints running away. A trail of blood drops across a concrete floor. A calendar blotter on a desk, with a heart drawn around the nineteenth, and a smear of blood beside it.

 6

KELLEN

I knew exactly how Wavy’s birthday would go. I would make her wait at the table with her eyes closed, while I set out the ice cream to spell the message I’d written on the lids. Then I would sit down across from her and say, “Okay, you can look now.”

She would uncover her eyes and stare. The same way the girl at the ice cream place stared at me when I ordered. After she got over the surprise, Wavy would laugh. Stuff like that cracked her up. Then we’d eat ice cream together, even if I had to close my eyes.

After that, I was gonna take her over to the shop to see her real birthday present, the Triumph Terrier. It wasn’t finished yet, but that way she could tell me how she wanted it painted. The guy who sold it to me planned to return it to mint condition, but I had my eye more on the size, only 150 cc. Now that she was fourteen, she could get her learner’s permit, and the bike would let her go where she wanted, when she needed.

Then there would probably be some fooling around. Okay, there was definitely gonna be some fooling around after two weeks apart. Not too fast, but maybe not that slow. I could not stop thinking about the magazine she left on my pillow.

Eventually, I imagined we’d end up lying on the quilt in the meadow and she would name all the stars for me. Last of all, I was gonna say, “Do you really wanna marry me?”

If she said yes, I’d tell her about the conversation I had with Liam.

We were driving back from a deal, and I waited until he was all talked out about business.

“So, what do you want to do about Wavy?” I picked that question because if somebody asked me that, I had an answer.

“Do about her? Is there a problem?” Liam said.

“No, but I was thinking maybe we could make things more official.”

“Didn’t you buy her a ring?”

“Yeah, but I talked to Lyle Broadus. You know, my lawyer on that assault charge over in Garringer. That fight I got into at the drags?”

“Yeah, I remember. Can’t believe he got you probation for turning that guy into hamburger.”

“Well, it was justified. Anyway, Lyle says, once Wavy turns fourteen, we can get married, if you give us permission. It’s just a piece of paper you’d have to sign with a notary, that’s all.”

Liam laughed and shook his head. My stomach went south and I eased up on the accelerator.

“Kellen, as a married man, let me tell you, you don’t want to rush into anything. How old are you? Twenty-five or something? Why are you in such a hurry to tie yourself down? Think about that girl we met at Myrtle Beach last year. The redhead. The one with the tiny, tiny waist and the black leather dress?”

I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. I had room in my head for about five women: my ma, Wavy, Val, and maybe two of Liam’s girlfriends. Beyond that, I couldn’t keep them straight. I wished Liam would lay off the coke or the meth, whichever one made him talk so fast.

“So, would that be okay? If we got married? You wouldn’t have to do anything except sign that form. It’d be easier for school, too. If Wavy lived with me, she’d be closer to the new high school in Belton County.”

“Does she still go to school? You didn’t finish school, did you?”

“No, but Wavy’s a lot smarter than me.”

“No offense, but that’s not saying much. She’s a little slow.” Liam laughed. “I tried to teach her to read and never got anywhere.”

“You know I’d treat her good. You wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

Liam fumbled around in his shirt pocket for the coke. “Can’t talk you out of it, can I? You’re like a—you know in those Budweiser commercials—you’re like a big fucking horse with blinders on. I’m trying to expand your horizons, introduce you to girls, and you got your eye on that weird little runt. Does she even talk to you? Seriously, don’t lie, now, you sad sack of shit, does she talk to you?”

“Yeah, she talks to me.”

“That’s something.” Liam took a snort and, after he put the coke away, laid his hand on my shoulder. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. Get me whatever paper I gotta sign and we’ll get you a ball and chain. How would you feel about a honeymoon in Colorado? I need you to make a run for me next week.”

I wasn’t gonna tell Wavy what Liam said about her being weird or slow. I’d just say, “I talked to Liam and he signed off on the form. If you really wanna marry me, we can apply for the license tomorrow.”

Honestly, I figured on her saying yes.

Didn’t figure on spending her birthday in the county jail. When I was younger, me and the sheriff had some run-ins, but not in a while. If we saw each other on the street, I’d say, “Sheriff Grant,” and the sheriff’d say, “Junior.” Which was what we said to each other when he walked into the interview room. He looked about as confused as I felt, but I played by Wavy’s rule: wait.

The sheriff sat down and lit a cigarette, held the pack out to me. I shook my head.

“Junior, we got ourselves a real situation. I don’t guess I have to tell you that, but I need to know what in Hell happened today.”

“Not much ’til this afternoon. Roger was sharpening a lawnmower blade and managed to cut the tip of his finger off. Mr. Cutcheon took him up to county hospital, and I stayed at the shop. After they left, Wavy showed up.”

“That’s the Quinn girl?”

“Yep. Her aunt dropped her off, and a couple hours later her aunt came back. That’s when I found out something had happened up at Quinn’s place.”

“Junior, it seems to me you’re leaving out a whole bunch of stuff there in the middle. The aunt told my deputy that girl was bare-ass naked on your desk.”

I wanted not to blush so bad, but it came creeping up outta my collar. “Yeah, we were fooling around. But she’s my fiancée. I bought her a ring, and her daddy gave me permission to marry her. Got the letter from the judge, notarized and everything.”

“Don’t lie to me, Junior. You don’t want to go down that road. Even if I could make heads or tails of what’s left of that letter, the fact is, the girl’s not your wife. Age of consent’s sixteen, and her aunt is real goddamn upset, talking about pressing charges. So you need to tell me exactly what you were doing.”

“It went a little further than it should have. I know that. But it didn’t go all the way. I wouldn’t do that. We’re gonna get married and all.” I felt bad enough how far it did go, because I was sincere about wanting to marry her first.

“Okay. I’m glad to hear that, but the situation with the Quinn girl is the least of your worries. I’ve also got a gun that my deputy found in your shop. Now, we don’t know for sure yet, but my suspicion is that’s the gun used to kill Liam and Valerie Quinn. So you tell me, how’d the gun end up there?”

“I don’t know.” I knew that gun was gonna end up in front of me to explain. “After Roger and Cutcheon left, the phone in the office rang. I went in to answer it, ’cause we’d left a message for Roger’s wife, thought it was her. While I was on the phone, Wavy came in. She closed the office door and the window blinds, but the garage doors stayed open. Anybody coulda walked in there.”

“That puts us at nearly three hours between when her aunt says she dropped the girl off and when she made the call to dispatch from your office. You didn’t leave the garage any time in those three hours?”

“No, Sheriff. I didn’t even leave the office.”

“Three hours is an awful lot of fooling around, even for a young man like you.”

My face got hotter and hotter, and even though it was air-conditioned in there, I started sweating. The sheriff waited, looking at me.

“Well, we talked quite a bit, too,” I said.

“So, that’s your story? You and the girl talked. And you fooled around some, but you didn’t have sex with her. And you didn’t leave the office any time in there. And that’s what the Quinn girl will say?”

I nodded, but it made my guts tight, thinking about the police questioning Wavy.

“Anything else you want to tell me?” the sheriff said.

“That swab they took?”

“For the gunshot residue?”

“That might come back positive.”

“Damn it, Junior. What’s the story?” The sheriff put out his cigarette and leaned a little closer, frowning.

“There was a possum messing in my trash this morning and I took a shot at him.”

“Don’t suppose you killed him?”

“I missed.”

“That figures,” the sheriff said. “Is that it? I’m not gonna find your prints on that gun? That Quinn girl’s exam ain’t gonna show there was more than a little fooling around?”

“No, sir, but what kind of exam?”

“I believe they’ll do a swab for semen and look at, you know, whether she’s got any injury. Like that.”

“Are they going to touch her?”

“Yes, I suppose they will.”

“I wish they wouldn’t. She can’t stand for people to touch her.”

It made me sick. That I hadn’t had the self-control to say, “No, Wavy.” Or the goddamn good sense to close up the shop and take her to my house. I’d had this great plan and I screwed it up with plain old carelessness.

“She’ll be okay,” the sheriff said. “And so will you, if you’re telling me the truth.”

 7

SHERIFF GRANT

The federal agents crawling all over the Quinn place were part of some drug task force, and apparently that meant they couldn’t help look for two missing kids. We lost daylight before we found Wavy and Donal. I’ve had some sleepless nights as sheriff, but that was one of the worst.

By four o’clock I gave up on sleep and went back to the station. The feds had made about a dozen arrests, left me to figure out where to keep them overnight. I sent the women over to Belton County, and put Junior Barfoot in the old drunk tank in the basement. It hadn’t been used in twenty years and still smelled like piss. Down there in the dark, he was this big mountain on the narrow bunk.

“You asleep, Junior?”

“Not likely.” He sat up and gave a long sigh.

“I thought you might have some idea where those Quinn kids are.”

“Isn’t Wavy with her aunt?”

“No, your girl ran off from the hospital yesterday afternoon.”

“You just now decided to tell me that?”

He was a soft-spoken man, but when he took hold of the bars in front of me, I stepped back. I’d never been afraid of him, but right then, I was glad for those bars between us. I’d seen a few men who needed a doctor when he was done with them.

“Did you look up in the meadow? Those cottonwoods? By the windmill? What about my house?” he said.

“We can check again. And your house is locked up.”

“She’s got a key.”

“Alright, we’ll start there.”

“Let me know, will you, Sheriff? When you find them.”

I promised I would, and went up to the desk, where Haskins was on duty.

“Have Delbert check Junior’s house for the girl. I’m going up to the Quinn place,” I said.

“The Rotary’s coming out to volunteer come dawn,” Haskins said.

“Did Barfoot tell you something?” Agent Cardoza said. I hadn’t noticed him sitting at one of the desks in the squad room, and I wished he hadn’t noticed me. A fireplug of a man with a bristly black mustache, he looked as rough as I felt. But he was a federal agent, so even at four in the morning, he wore a suit and tie.

“He’s got an idea about where the Quinn kids might be,” I said.

“You mind if I tag along?”

I did mind, but I shrugged. Cardoza seemed decent enough, but he wasn’t losing any sleep over those missing kids. What was keeping him awake was the fact that his big career-making drug bust had farted and failed. With Liam Quinn dead, Cardoza and the rest of the feds were looking around to see what they could salvage.

Driving out to the ranch, he said, “I like Barfoot for the murders. Looks to me like he tried to make it look like a murder-suicide.”

“If you’re looking for somebody who’d plan a thing like that, he’s not your man.”

“In a big drug operation like this, murder is sometimes the best way to move up the ladder.”

Cardoza could like Junior for the murders all he wanted, but I’d believe it when I saw the evidence.

I’d known Junior Barfoot his whole life, although I don’t suppose I knew him by name until the night I drove him to the emergency room in Garringer. He was maybe ten years old and his old man broke the boy’s jaw. Junior didn’t even cry when they wired his mouth shut and took out a tooth to put a straw through. Coming from that, I figured he’d end up on the same path as the rest of his family. Both his folks drunk all the time, an older brother in prison for armed robbery, older sister in and out of jail, and the oldest brother shot dead in a bar fight before he was even old enough to drink.

Wasn’t but four years after that trip to the emergency room, when Junior was about fourteen, we got our usual domestic disturbance call out to their house. Mrs. Barfoot was standing on the front lawn, her housedress torn and her nose bloodied. Inside, I expected to find the old man going at Junior, but for the first time it was the other way around. Junior was pounding on him and screaming, “I’ll fucking kill you!” It took me, two deputies, and a volunteer fireman to pry Junior off his father. He was a big boy.

After Barfoot Senior was in the hospital, their youngest girl, who was retarded, was put in a state home, and Junior went to stay with Mrs. Barfoot’s family down in Oklahoma. That’s when he started going by Kellen, her maiden name. He came back two years later, and almost immediately got into trouble. I never saw anybody could tear up a bar the way he could. Furniture broken and grown men bleeding and crying, looking like they’d been hit by a train.

So I could imagine Junior killing somebody if he got angry enough, but he wouldn’t waste any energy trying to plan it or cover it up.

“The rape charge is a problem for us, since the girl isn’t cooperating,” Cardoza said. “We’d rather get Barfoot on the murders or the meth production. Your county prosecutor isn’t going to give us any trouble, is he?”

“My county prosecutor is likely to do whatever he wants. He usually does.”

At the farmhouse, I headed for the windmill, with Cardoza trailing.

I panned my flashlight around the stock tank, and there sat a little boy. He was awake, huddled up in his undershorts with a pile of bloody clothes next to him, probably been there all night.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you Donal?”

He looked scared, but he nodded and said, “Is Wavy okay?”

“Why are you worried about her?” Cardoza said, trying to make that one question mean something.

“She’s fine, son.” I hoped it wasn’t a lie. “You want me to take you to her?”

“Will you piggyback me like Kellen does?”

The kid was worn out, so I wrapped him in my windbreaker and carried him up the hill to the car. Left Cardoza to gather up the bloody clothes for evidence.

Driving back to Powell, I radioed the station.

“I was just set to call you,” Haskins said. “Delbert picked up the Quinn girl at Junior Barfoot’s house. Looks like she spent the night there.”

“Well, take her up to the motel to her aunt. I’m bringing her brother.”

“I’d rather we didn’t put them together just yet,” Cardoza said. “He’s our only eyewitness.”

“Your eyewitness is seven years old. He’s been up all night, and I bet he’d like to make sure his sister’s okay.”

“Look, I have a little boy about Donal’s age. I just—”

“Bet you wouldn’t think much of me interrogating your son at a time like this.”

The sun was coming up when we got to the motel. Mrs. Newling was already dressed, didn’t look like she’d slept either. I carried Donal into the room and put him to bed. As I was leaving, Delbert pulled up with Wavy Quinn. She stepped out of the patrol car, wearing a man’s T-shirt like a dress, and a pair of motorcycle boots. She brushed past me and went straight to her brother.

Driving back to the station, Cardoza said, “I wonder what he saw yesterday that he was so worried about her. Do you think he saw Barfoot kill his parents?”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree there.”

“But you have to wonder if Donal brought the gun to the garage to point a finger at Barfoot,” Cardoza said.

“Or maybe the garage was someplace familiar. And he knew his sister was there.”

“Why bring the gun, though? And why’d he leave if he went there for his sister?”

“Your little boy, does everything he do make sense?”

I’d had enough of Cardoza, but I wasn’t anywhere near getting shut of him. The feds were like a plague of cockroaches, except they didn’t scatter when you turned on the lights. They were convinced somebody would roll over on Junior, but everybody they interviewed said the same thing: Junior wasn’t Quinn’s second-in-command. This Butch character was, and he’d lit out in Brenda Newling’s car. Junior was just Quinn’s mechanic, and that held some water, seeing as he had half-ownership in Cutcheon’s garage. The feds took that place apart, pored over the books, and got nothing. Not a trace of meth, not a misplaced decimal point, which I could’ve predicted. Dan Cutcheon wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.

As for the murders, the gun being on his property was the only thing to connect Junior to them. That made Cutcheon a suspect, too.

In the end it all came down to the kids’ statements. The girl wouldn’t talk and they had to hold her down to get fingerprints and a blood sample. That left us with her brother.

Against my better judgment, I went along with Cardoza’s idea to take the boy on a walk-through of that day. Kids are tough, but Donal sure didn’t want to go back to that house. I held his hand going up the drive, with half-a-dozen agents behind us, including Cardoza. Never mind that he had a boy that same age, he was looking out for his career.

“What were you doing before you went inside the house?” Cardoza said.

“I was outside,” Donal said.

“Where did you come from?”

“Outside. On the porch.”

I knew what Cardoza was trying for, but the kid’s story started with him standing on the porch.

“I was going to see Mama. Because Sandy and me heard the car coming back.”

I opened the door and, brave as can be, Donal went in. The place was mostly cleaned up, but there was a brown spot on the kitchen floor, where blood had stained the linoleum. Same in the hallway.

Donal walked us around the crime scene. Here was Daddy. Here was Mama. He pointed to where the gun had been in Mrs. Quinn’s hand, before he took it.

“Kellen says you can’t leave a gun lying around.”

“Kellen told you that on the day you found Mommy and Daddy?” Cardoza said.

“No. Before, when he let me and Wavy try his gun. He said, ‘You have to be careful. You can’t leave a gun lying around.’”

“He let you shoot his gun?”

“If we were careful and only pointed at the beer cans.”

“Was Kellen here to tell you to take the gun?” I don’t know how Cardoza figured to get the truth if he was going to keep feeding Donal lines.

“No, I was all by myself,” Donal said, the same way he said, “I was outside.” Like he’d practiced it.

“But you took the gun?”

“Because it wasn’t safe to leave it lying around.”

You couldn’t fault the kid on his logic. Or his gun habits. When my deputy found the pistol, the safety was on.

After the house, Donal showed us the route he took that day, more than five miles of hayfields and woods, to Cutcheon’s garage.

On the walk, Cardoza said to me, “He’s lying about what happened up at the house.” Like he was the only one could see that. “You think Barfoot threatened him?”

“Don’t seem to me he’s scared of Junior.”

“It just kills me. I keep seeing my son, walking all this way.” Cardoza seemed sincere, but he kept looking at his watch. The feds were set on proving Junior had time to go from the garage to the farmhouse and back. They didn’t have any eyewitnesses for that, aside from a neighbor who might have heard a motorcycle, but wasn’t sure what time.

It was hot and humid, like the day the Quinns were killed, and by the time we got to the garage, Cardoza and I were dripping with sweat. Junior would have been in worse shape, as much weight as he was carrying.

Donal showed us how he walked in through the open garage door and laid the gun on Junior’s workbench. Instead of knocking at the office door, he looked through a gap at the bottom of the blinds. Up on his toes, resting a hand on the windowsill.

“Wavy says it’s okay to watch. That’s how you learn things.”

“Who was in the office?” Cardoza said.

“Wavy and Kellen.”

“What were they doing when you looked in?”

“Fucking. Like Daddy does to Sandy on the kitchen table. When is Sandy coming back? I miss her.”

“I don’t know, son.” I doubted she was coming back. The feds had charged her with possession and intent to distribute.

“I’m thirsty. Can we get a pop out of Kellen’s fridge?”

“Did you do that on that day?” Cardoza said.

“No. I didn’t want Wavy to catch me spying.”

We were all thirsty from hiking, so we went into the office and got some drinks. Cardoza sat Donal down in the chair, perched himself on the corner of the desk, and said, “What do you mean by fucking? What was Kellen doing to Wavy?”

“You know. On the table. Like cooking. Wavy says that’s how babies are made.”

“Maybe you could just tell me what you think it means.”

Donal took a drink of his pop and gave Cardoza a suspicious look. Apparently the rape charge wasn’t a problem for the feds anymore.

“Putting his thing in her. Making a baby. Except Daddy fucks Sandy all the time and they never make a baby. But maybe Wavy and Kellen could make one.”

It would’ve been funny, if it wasn’t so messed up. Made me think a little harder about him asking, “Is Wavy okay?” Because of what he’d seen at the garage? I planned to ask Junior about that.

“So what did you do then?” Cardoza said.

“I left the gun here. Kellen would know what to do with it. I needed to tell somebody about Mama, so I went back to the house to see if he—” The boy went pale as ashes and snapped his mouth shut. He started to shivering so hard I reached out to take the pop bottle before he dropped it.

“To see if who what?” I said. I’d been letting Cardoza take the lead, but something had just happened.

Donal brushed his hand against his shirt.

“There was dirt on me. I wanted to go swimming. To wash the dirt off,” he said. Blood, he meant, but I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to think about that. He went back to the farmhouse, but when he got there, my deputies were there.

“Daddy says, stay away from the pigs, so I hid.”

That was the end of the boy’s story.

After we returned Donal to his aunt, Cardoza and I went for coffee.

“Goddamn it,” Cardoza said. “He almost slipped and told us what he’s trying to keep a secret.”

“He won’t make that mistake again. Now he’s had a chance to practice it.”

“That poor kid. He walked ten miles. One way carrying the gun that killed his parents, and back the other way knowing that lowlife was banging his sister. You still think Barfoot is innocent?”

*   *   *

On the one side, I had the feds trying to ram murder charges down Junior’s throat and on the other side, I had Brenda Newling, who was just as eager to see him in jail. I’m not a squeamish man. I’d been sheriff for twenty-two years, and dealt with more than a few rapes, but I didn’t relish having a woman sit in my office and say the word “rape” twenty times in ten minutes.

I made the mistake of suggesting that the girl was willing.

“She is barely fourteen years old and he raped her,” Mrs. Newling said.

“The problem is we don’t have much in the way of evidence for a rape charge. Indecent exposure might stick, since we’ve got you as a witness.”

“The prosecutor says that the evidence from the office and Wavy’s clothes is enough.”

Make that the feds, Mrs. Newling, and the county prosecutor breathing down my neck, plus a mess of evidence from the two scenes.

At the farmhouse: Liam Quinn’s blood in the hallway and bathroom. Four bullets, two through his chest while he stood in the hallway, and two through his back while he crawled away. Valerie Quinn’s blood in the kitchen. One bullet above her right ear. Entry wound with contact powder burns around it. Exit wound the whole left side of her head. What looked like a suicide note on the kitchen table.

 

Liam, I’m done letting you make me miserable. I hope you’re happy with your whores, but you’re never going to fuck me again. Val.

 

At the garage: blood on the floor and the workbench belonged to Roger Betsworth, from his accident. The smudge of blood on the windowsill of the office belonged to Valerie Quinn. Her son transferred it from his hand, left his fingerprints behind. Left them all over the gun, too, which was covered in Valerie Quinn’s blood.

Inside the office: Wavy Quinn’s blood on the desk blotter and some under Junior’s fingernails on his left hand. Also on the desk blotter: semen. Junior’s. More of the same in Wavy Quinn’s underpants, retrieved from a hamper at Junior’s house.

On Junior’s right hand: gunshot residue.

Valerie Quinn had GSR on her elbow and shoulder, but none on her hands. Her fingerprints were on the gun, but so were Liam Quinn’s. His were also on the five shell casings ejected from the gun and nine of the bullets left in the magazine.

On the other round in the magazine: Junior’s thumbprint.

Valerie Quinn didn’t shoot herself in the head holding the gun with her elbow, so some unknown party staged it to look like a murder/suicide.

Who was the unknown party? Junior? His print on that one bullet and GSR on his hand. He had an answer for both. He and Quinn went target shooting together and they both had nine millimeters. Assuming the gun at the garage was Quinn’s, Junior’s was in his kitchen drawer. Recently fired, he claimed, at a possum. Two of the bullets in that gun had Liam Quinn’s fingerprints on them. The gun also had Wavy and Donal Quinn’s fingerprints on it.

Toward the end of summer, when we hadn’t had rain in weeks, a farmer over in Belton County found Liam Quinn’s Harley Davidson submerged in an irrigation pond. It’d likely been there since the day of the murders, but it wasn’t until the water level dropped that the bike was visible. If that was the motorcycle the neighbor heard, who was riding it?

Not Junior, who was fooling around with the Quinn girl in his office when the motorcycle was ditched. I put it to him that he could have killed the Quinns and had time to get back to the garage.

“That don’t even make sense,” Junior said. “It’s not like Wavy’s aunt is gonna let us get married.”

“All I have is your word that Valerie Quinn was okay with you marrying the girl. And I got these two gals, Ricki and Dee, say Mrs. Quinn didn’t like you at all. The feds figure their testimony establishes motive for you killing her. And those gals are real eager to cut a deal.”

“First of all, Lyle Broadus says I only needed Liam’s signature. I didn’t need Val to sign nothin’. And second, Val didn’t like me, but she didn’t give a shit about Wavy, neither. She woulda let me do anything I wanted.”

“So, you were having sex with her while the Quinns were murdered?”

“No, sir. I wasn’t lying. We didn’t have sex.” That was what Junior said, but he covered his face with his hands when he did.

“I’m looking at the report, son. I got blood. I got semen. On the desk. In the girl’s underpants. Prosecutor says that’s enough to prove vaginal penetration and ejaculation. Sounds like you had sex to me. And the girl won’t talk to us.”

“Will you let me write her a letter? Let her know it’s okay to tell you what happened?”

I figured that couldn’t hurt, so I got him pen and paper.

Dear Wavy,

I’m really sorry about your mama. I know you must be pretty sad, but I was glad to hear they found Donal alright. I hope you’re taking care of each other. I’m sorry your birthday didn’t turn out better.

You know I love you, right? I love you all the way, so I don’t want you to be scared, whatever you hear. Probably I’ll be in jail for a while, but you don’t need to worry. I can take care of myself.

It’s okay for you to tell the cops what happened on your birthday. I know it won’t be easy for you to talk to them, but maybe you could write it down. You can trust Sheriff Grant, he’s a good guy. Go ahead and tell him what happened, answer his questions.

I love you and I miss you a lot.

 

Kellen

It was a nice letter. You could tell he was concerned about her, and he wasn’t coaching her on what to say.

When Mrs. Newling came in the next day, I let her read it.

“I’m not going to pass her love letters from that pedophile,” she said.

“I don’t see how it’s a love letter, just because the man tells her he loves her.”

“He raped her. I’m not giving her a letter from him that says, ‘I love you all the way.’”

“You may not like it, but this situation is different than if he was a stranger. I need the girl to tell me what happened and, if this letter will help me get that, I want her to read it.”

“No. I will not let the man who murdered my sister send her daughter letters.”

“You can’t have it both ways, ma’am. He can’t be up at the house with a gun at the same time he’s fooling around with your niece at the garage.” I took the note back from her, before she could tear it up.

“The FBI says he had more than enough time to get back to the garage, with time to spare to assault my niece.”

“That’s why I need her to tell me how long they were at the garage fooling around.”

“Stop saying that! They were not fooling around. He raped her.”

Mrs. Newling was like a terrier. In my office every day until I asked her who in Hell was taking care of her kids. It was like putting a match to gasoline. She pounded her fist on my desk and screamed at me.

“How dare you accuse me of neglecting my children? I am trying to make sure that my niece gets justice—that my sister gets justice!”

“Then make that girl talk. And then get her out of this dog and pony show. The longer you keep her here, the more likely it is some reporter’ll put her all over the front page. Is that what you want?”

Finally, I’d found something to make her listen to me. By the end of the week, she brought the girl into the station to give a deposition. In all my years as sheriff, I had a few occasions when I skirted around official police procedure. One of those occasions was the minute I spent in my office with the Quinn girl before she gave her deposition. For all I knew, she’d get in there and not say a word, and I didn’t want that, so I got her away from her aunt and laid it out for her.

“Miss Quinn, is that your engagement ring? Junior Barfoot gave that to you?”

She nodded, all serious and distrustful. My wife said how cute she was, but I thought she was downright spooky. She had old eyes. Knowing eyes. Wasn’t hard to see how Junior had got himself in that situation. She looked fragile as a doll, but she wasn’t.

“Now, the county prosecutor, the red-haired guy in the suit? He’d like to send Junior to prison for a long time. I don’t think you want that. The thing is, you’re his alibi. Do you know what that means?”

She nodded, but she wasn’t any closer to trusting me.

“You’re the only one who knows whether Junior left the garage that afternoon. If he was with you all afternoon, you need to tell the prosecutor that.”

I’d run out of time; her aunt was coming toward my office. Years on, I don’t know how to feel about what I told her. I don’t believe Junior had a thing to do with the murders, but I’m not sure what effect my advice had on the girl’s statement.