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“No,” Henry said, and tears overspilled his eyes. I blessed each one.
Sheriff Jones said, “There-there.” And after offering that perfunctory comfort, he bent down with his hands braced on his pudgy knees, and looked under the bed. “Appears to be a pair of woman’s shoes under there. Broke in, too. The kind that would be good for walking. Don’t suppose she ran away barefooty, do you?”
“She wore her canvas shoes,” I said. “Those are the ones that are gone.”
They were, too. The faded green ones she used to call her gardening shoes. I’d remembered them just before starting to fill in the well.
“Ah!” he said. “Another mystery solved.” He pulled a silver-plated watch from his vest pocket and consulted it. “Well, I’d better get on the roll. Tempus is fugiting right along.”
We went back through the house, Henry bringing up the rear, perhaps so he could swipe his eyes dry in privacy. We walked with the Sheriff toward his Maxwell sedan with the star on the door. I was about to ask him if he wanted to see the well-I even knew what I was going to call it-when he stopped and gave my son a look of frightening kindness.
“I stopped at the Cotteries’,” he said.
“Oh?” Henry said. “Did you?”
“Told you these days I have to water just about every bush, but I’ll use a privy anytime there’s one handy, always assuming folks keep it clean and I don’t have to worry about wasps while I’m waiting for my dingus to drip a little water. And the Cotteries are clean folks. Pretty daughter, too. Just about your age, isn’t she?”
“Yes, sir,” Henry said, lifting his voice just a tiny bit on the sir.
“Kind of sweet on her, I guess? And her on you, from what her mama says.”
“Did she say that?” Henry asked. He sounded surprised, but pleased, too.
“Yes. Mrs. Cotterie said you were troubled about your own mama, and that Sha
Henry looked at his feet. “I told her to keep it to herself.”
“You aren’t going to hold it against her, are you?” Sheriff Jones asked. “I mean, when a big man like me with a star on his chest asks a little thing like her what she knows, it’s kind of hard for the little thing to keep mum, isn’t it? She just about has to tell, doesn’t she?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said, still looking down. “Probably.” He wasn’t just acting unhappiness; he was unhappy. Even though it was going just the way we had hoped it would.
“Sha
“Yes,” Henry said colorlessly. “She’d had too much to drink.”
Sheriff Jones turned to me. “Was she drunk or just tiddly?”
“Somewhere in between,” I said. “If she’d been all the way to drunk, she would have slept all night instead of getting up and packing a grip and creeping away like a thief.”
“Thought she’d come back once she sobered up, did you?”
“I did. It’s over four miles out to the tarvy. I thought for sure she’d come back. Someone must have come along and given her a ride before her head cleared. A trucker on the Lincoln-Omaha run would be my guess.”
“Yep, yep, that’d be mine, too. You’ll hear from her when she contacts Mr. Lester, I’m sure. If she means to stay out on her own, if she’s got that in her head, she’ll need money to do it.”
So he knew that, too.
His eyes sharpened. “Did she have any money at all, Mr. James?”
“Well…”
“Don’t be shy. Confession’s good for the soul. The Catholics have got hold of something there, don’t they?”
“I kept a box in my dresser. There was 200 dollars put by in it, to help pay the pickers when they start next month.”
“And Mr. Cotterie,” Henry reminded. To Sheriff Jones, he said: “Mr. Cotterie has a corn harvester. A Harris Giant. Almost new. It’s a pip.”
“Yep, yep, saw it in his dooryard. Big bastid, isn’t it? Pardon my Polish. Money all gone out’n that box, was it?”
I smiled sourly-only it wasn’t really me making that smile; the Co
I tried to ruffle Henry’s hair. He ducked away, embarrassed.
“Well, I’ve got a good budget of news to tell Mr. Lester, don’t I? He won’t like any of it, but if he’s as smart as he thinks he is, I guess he’ll know enough to expect her in his office, and sooner rather than later. People have a way of turning up when they’re short on folding green, don’t they?”
“That’s been my experience,” I said. “If we’re done here, Sheriff, my boy and I better get back to work. That useless well should have been filled in three years ago. An old cow of mine-”
“Elphis.” Henry spoke like a boy in a dream. “Her name was Elphis.”
“Elphis,” I agreed. “She got out of the barn and decided to take a stroll on the cap, and it gave way. Didn’t have the good grace to die on her own, either. I had to shoot her. Come around the back of the barn I’ll show you the wages of laziness with its damn feet sticking up. We’re going to bury her right where she lies, and from now on I’m going to call that old well Wilfred’s Folly.”
“Well, I would, wouldn’t I? It’d be somethin’ to see. But I’ve got that bad-tempered old judge to contend with. Another time.” He hoisted himself into the car, grunting as he did so. “Thank you for the lemonade, and for bein’ so gracious. You could have been a lot less so, considering who sent me out here.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “We all have our jobs.”
“And our crosses to bear.” His sharp eyes fastened on Henry again. “Son, Mr. Lester told me you were hidin’ something. He was sure of it. And you were, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Henry said in his colorless and somehow awful voice. As if all his emotions had flown away, like those things in Pandora’s jar when she opened it. But there was no Elphis for Henry and me; our Elphis was dead in the well.
“If he asks me, I’ll tell him he was wrong,” Sheriff Jones said. “A company lawyer don’t need to know that a boy’s mother put her hand to him while she was in drink.” He groped under his seat, came up with a long S-shaped tool I knew well, and held it out to Henry. “Would you save an old man’s back and shoulder, son?”
“Yes, sir, happy to.” Henry took the crank and went around to the front of the Maxwell.
“Mind your wrist!” Jones hollered. “She kicks like a bull!” Then he turned to me. The inquisitive glitter had gone out of his eyes. So had the green. They looked dull and gray and hard, like lakewater on a cloudy day. It was the face of a man who could beat a railroad bum within an inch of his life and never lose a minute’s sleep over it. “Mr. James,” he said. “I need to ask you something. Man to man.”
“All right,” I said. I tried to brace myself for what I felt sure was coming next: Is there another cow in yonder well? One named Arlette? But I was wrong.
“I can put her name and description out on the telegraph wire, if you want. She won’t have gone no further than Omaha, will she? Not on just a hundred and eighty smackers. And a woman who’s spent most of her life keepin’ house has no idea of how to hide out. She’ll like as not be in a rooming house over on the east side, where they run cheap. I could have her brought back. Dragged back by the hair of the head, if you want.”
“That’s a generous offer, but-”
The dull gray eyes surveyed me. “Think it over before you say yea or nay. Sometimes a fee-male needs talking to by hand, if you take my meaning, and after that they’re all right. A good whacking has a way of sweetening some gals up. Think it over.”