All this time and Bobby Clancy had been living just up the river road, not even a mile from Belle Vie’s gates, in a run-down fishing lodge that had its back to the water, set back from the river’s levee by a hundred yards or so of sand and weeds. There was a propane tank along the west side of the one-story, clapboard house, a few of its graying shingles rotting at the edges, and down in the dirt, an orange extension cord was snaking from the edge of the yard all the way to the front door of the house, where Caren was standing now. She thought she heard some movement inside, and so she went to knock on the door a second time. The shovel, the one Luis said Bobby had stolen from Belle Vie, was resting right there against the railing of the front porch.
A minute or so passed, and still no one came to the door.
Caren thought about a back door, one that faced the river, and wondered if Bobby was coming out that way. She felt the porch’s wooden planks creak beneath the weight of her boots, as she started down the steps. The house was a true river hut, with no foundation and all four corners hopped up on blocks of cement. She could see tiny blades of grass blowing beneath the house, as the wind picked up and a huge chunk of blue sky closed over.
She smelled rain coming.
The air had turned gray and dark, and Caren was careful to watch her step on the unpaved ground, stepping over tools strewn in the dirt, along with empty beer cans and miniature bottles of bourbon, the kind you could still buy at the T&H in town for a dollar or two a pop. She walked all the way around to the back of the house . . . before stopping dead in her tracks. For parked in the yard, at an angle which had made it invisible from the street, was a red pickup truck. It was rusted along the sides and had a familiar dent in the front grill. The headlights were square . . . just like the ones in Donovan’s video, shining from the cane fields on the night Inés Avalo was murdered.
Caren slapped a hand over her mouth, afraid she might actually scream out loud. Slowly, she backed away from the sight of the red truck and all that its presence here implied. There would be time to sort it out, but right now she felt an almost primal urge to get out of there as fast as she could.
She spun on her heels, turning toward her car.
And that’s how she bumped right into Bobby Clancy.
He smelled of pine and beer, and he was sweaty for some reason, the dampness of his cotton T-shirt showing off a ridge of muscles across his torso. He’d grown sloppy over the years, but he was still strong. Capable of God knows what, she thought.
Bobby looked at her and smiled.
“Well,” he said, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
Caren stammered that she was just leaving.
She tried to step around him, but Bobby blocked her, reaching for her hand, and then her shoulder, digging his fingers in, so that she could move neither left nor right.
“Stay,” he said. “Let me at least make you a cup of coffee.”
She saw a flash of lightning reflected in his blue eyes.
And then a crack of thunder, as loud as a gunshot.
The storm was creeping closer.
Caren looked across the yard at her car, seemingly beyond her reach, as she nearly withered beneath Bobby’s grasp. She looked toward the clapboard house.
A phone, she thought.
Inside, there might be a phone.
And so she let him lead the way.
The place was surprisingly roomy, mostly because Bobby didn’t hardly have furniture of any kind. As far as she could tell, he slept on a pallet of blankets in the center of the lodge’s main room. Bobby had by now led her into the kitchen, where he’d sat her at a chair against the wall, in such a way that put him between her and the front door. He was standing over a small two-range stove, fiddling with the knobs and a small book of matches. From Rainey’s, Caren noticed, the icehouse, where she’d gone the night she went looking for her cell phone. Bobby, getting a fire going on the stove, looked up at her and smiled. “Or I could make us some tea, if you like that better.” Caren shook her head. She felt a strange calmness come over her. This was Bobby, after all. She had known him her whole life. Sitting here in his warm kitchen, at a table topped with a sunny tablecloth and toast crumbs, a few loose insides of local newspapers, she felt a surge of hope that she was wrong about him, about all of this. “It was good seeing you last night,” he said. “It’s always good seeing you, Caren.”
She smiled stiffly.
“That’s a sweet girl you got, too,” he said, standing over running water at the sink, swishing it around an empty coffee mug. “She’s, what, in the fifth grade or something?” At the mention of her daughter, Caren felt something acid in her stomach. Bobby had his back to her, and she could see he was wearing blue Wranglers, just like the description of the man the school’s secretary said had been looking for Morgan.
“Good guess.”
Too good, she thought.
She swallowed hard, then said softly, “Do you think I could use your telephone?”
Bobby, who was setting a percolator on the stove, looked up at Caren and said nothing for a few seconds. But she did notice that his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. Outside, she heard another roll of thunder, this one more like a roar, a scream.
Bobby gave her a queer smile.
“Sure.”
From a chipped corner of his kitchen counter he grabbed a dirty cordless phone and handed it to her, meeting her eye for a half second before releasing it to her grasp. He never made his way back to the stovetop, instead hovering over the edge of the table as she dialed the ten digits that made up her cell phone number. Bobby was looking right at her as the line connected and she heard a ringing in her ear. Beyond the kitchen table, the whole of the house was dead silent, and Caren felt a moment of breathtaking relief. Maybe there was some other explanation for all of this. It was a small hope that she clung to . . . up until the moment she heard a faint buzzing in the front pocket of Bobby’s Wranglers. Their eyes met over the table. She hung up the line, and a second later, the buzzing in Bobby’s pants pocket stopped.
He was still hovering over her.
Caren could see that he had started to sweat again. There were shallow pools of moisture in the deep hollows beneath his tired, bloodshot eyes. She still had the cordless in her hand. She managed to dial a 9, and then the first 1, before Bobby said, “Don’t do anything stupid, Caren.” He reached down and grabbed the phone out of her hand.
Caren felt a whisper in her throat. “What did you do, Bobby?”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Caren,” he said, stepping back, as he tucked the cordless into the back pocket of his jeans. “I don’t ever want to hurt you.”
“Jesus, what did you do?”
Bobby wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“Did you kill that girl?”
“She was on my land, mine,” he said sharply. “Not Groveland’s.”
The pools of water beneath his eyes broke free, running in two lines down his face, and Caren realized that Bobby was actually crying. He was nearly shaking with rage. His life had come down to this fishing lodge, this one room by the river, where he lived alone. “That’s my family’s place,” he said. “And it ain’t right what Ray’s doing.”
“What did you do?”
He shrugged coldly, as if saying the words out loud didn’t matter much. His back was to her, kind of, and she couldn’t tell if he was hiding shame or the ugliness of his rage. “My brother told me to keep an eye on her. She had found something in the fields that worried him, something Abrams told him about, and he didn’t want it getting out. He told me to watch her.” Then, he added bitterly, “That’s Ray. Don’t want a goddamn thing to do with me till he wants something dirty done.”
“So you killed her?”
“I was just keeping an eye on her, just making sure she kept her mouth shut, that nobody said nothing else about bones in the fields, not before Ray’s big sale. But then she came at me with a knife . . . On my own goddamned property, she’s threatening me. So I reached out, and I don’t know, I grabbed the knife and I just swung. I guess I must have cut her good.”
“Oh, Bobby . . .”
The sound caught in the back of her throat, hiding there.
“She ain’t have no business out there no way,” he said acidly.
“Did Raymond tell you to keep an eye on me, too?”
By now, Caren’s voice was shaking.
“I did that for nothing,” he said.
He squatted down, so they were eye-to-eye.
She thought he was going to put his hands on her.
She leapt out of the chair, upending the kitchen table as she got to her feet. The whole thing fell against Bobby, knocking him back, and Caren ran for the front door. It was still standing open, and she shot straight through and down the porch steps, running to the driver’s-side door of her Volvo. She heard footsteps behind her, but she never looked back. She spun around in the dirt yard and drove onto the river road, heading south toward the highway, toward the sheriff’s station. She got about two miles up Highway 1 before she remembered she had left Morgan at Belle Vie with her father. Eric had no idea what Caren now knew, that everything connected to the Clancys was tainted, that he and Morgan were sitting ducks out on the plantation. And without her cell phone she had no way of telling him.
She swung the car around and headed back to Belle Vie.
The library was in the northeast corner of the property, and from the direction she was traveling, it came into view first, even before the main house. Caren dumped her car along the fence and ran to the front gate. As she started up the alley of live oaks, the first drops started to fall. Caren took off running, cutting through the grass.
The front door was unlocked.
The lights were all on, but there was no sign of Morgan or Eric. Caren circled through every room in the building, from the front parlor to the kitchen, where there was a pot of cold coffee sitting on the stove. Upstairs, there was an open, half-filled Samsonite suitcase in the hallway between the two bedrooms, as if they’d started packing and then stopped suddenly, the task interrupted. “Morgan?” Caren called out, over and over. She called Eric’s name, too, as she ran back down the stairs. There was only one room left to check: the Hall of Records, holding Belle Vie’s history, its heart and soul. Caren ran through the parlor to the narrow storage room. “Eric?” she said, pushing into the room. The door, swollen from the rain, took a moment to pop free. Inside, the lone lightbulb was swinging on a string. Caren squinted against the low light, and it took her a moment to notice what was wrong. The guns were missing. The shotgun and the pistol, the pearl-handled .32. They were both gone.
Caren ran to the phone on the kitchen wall.
She dialed Eric’s cell phone. Twice, no one answered.
She turned and ran out the front door.
There was a show still going in the old schoolhouse, but no Eric. He and Morgan were not in the gift shop, either. She tried Gerald, but he was not responding to any of her calls over the two-way. She checked every room on the first floor of the main house, then upstairs, checking the old bedrooms and lastly her office. Her desk phone was ringing off the hook. Caren reached for it, screaming Eric’s name as she answered. There was silence on the line . . . then the voice of Lee Owens.
“Caren, are you okay?”
“Bobby Clancy,” she said. She was panting, out of breath. “It was him.”
“What?”
Owens seemed momentarily confused, as if he’d walked into a play well past intermission and had missed some crucial turn in the plot line.
“It was Clancy.”
“What about Abrams?”
Abrams had never had a real motive, she finally saw.
It was Bobby Clancy who had taken out his rage on Inés Avalo. Just as it was Bobby who had been digging in the fields where she found human remains—which had worried Raymond terribly when he found out about it, enough that he put his brother to the task of keeping an eye on her, and setting in motion the events that took her life.
“It was him,” she said. “It was Clancy.”
“Caren, does this have anything to do with that message you left this morning? The stuff you asked me to look up?”
She had almost forgotten.
“What did you find?”
“The Homestead Act,” he said excitedly. On the other end of the line, she heard him shuffling papers across his desk. “I didn’t actually find anything in the newspaper’s archives about the Belle Vie Plantation and land sales. I mean, nothing that caught my eye. Like you said, the government owned it for a time after the war, and then a William P. Tynan took possession after that, in 1872.” The same year that Jason went missing, Caren remembered. “But it is true,” Owens continued, “that the federal government was using the Homestead Act of 1862, something Lincoln had signed into law, to procure land grants for former slaves. It had originally been written as a law to help settle the West, but during Reconstruction, the feds had other ideas. Any free man could be granted a piece of unclaimed property, including former plantations, as long as he lived on the land and grew crops or built on the place, a structure of at least twelve by fourteen. Long as he could prove he’d made some kind of improvements to the land, any man stood a chance,” Owens said over the phone. “That was the idea, at least.”
Caren glanced out the window, thinking of the quarters and the patch of land back behind the cabins where Jason had built a small hut, no bigger than a horse’s stable but big enough to suit the dimensions required by federal law. She had the map of the plantation out on her desk, stamped by the federal government in 1872. She now realized that her great-great-great-grandfather must have made a claim on this very land just before he died . . . and just before William Tynan took possession for himself. Caren remembered her mother’s last words to her: Leland Clancy knew he hadn’t come by this land honestly. And she guessed that Clancy’s two sons knew it, too. They knew what William Tynan, their ancestor, had done to get his hands on Belle Vie, that the sheriff’s accusations of murder back in 1872 weren’t that far-fetched. It made her think twice about the bone Inés had found, and the possible identity of the body buried in the fields. “What about state and federal records? Were you able to check there?” she said.
“I cross-checked what I could from here in the office, but my understanding is that some of those records have been lost over time. Before computers, things got moved around, papers disappeared.”
Then, mulling it over, he said, “Bobby Clancy . . . are you sure?”
Outside, lightning shot through the sky, brightening the southern end of the plantation. And in the flash of electric light, Caren caught a frightening sight. Eric’s rental car was in the parking lot . . . but so was Bobby’s red truck. “I have to go,” she said, slamming down the phone. Thunder followed the strike of lightning, as loud as a cannon shot. Caren ran out of the main house, searching for her family. On the other side of Lorraine’s kitchen, the vegetable garden came into view. The dirt was turned over, roots coming up out of the ground.
Caren saw tire tracks in the mud.
She grabbed the two-way from her jacket pocket, calling over to security again.
Gerald, when she reached him, sounded breathless and confused. The white golf cart was missing, he said. He’d driven to the gift shop to use the facilities and when he stepped out again the cart was gone.
“What’s going on, Miss C?”
“Call the cops,” she said. “Get somebody out here now.”
She clicked off the line and followed the twin tracks in the mud.
She passed the garden and the stone kitchen and the two guest cottages, searching every corner of the plantation, running all the way. She ran through the slave village, coming up to the white five-foot-high fence, and that’s where she saw them. On the other side sat the golf cart, idling near the cane fields. Eric was in the driver’s seat, the lenses of his glasses so dotted with rainwater that Caren could hardly see his eyes. Morgan was shivering, crouched in beside him. Eric had an arm around her, not letting go for a second. And behind them both, in the backseat, Bobby was holding the .32 to the back of Eric’s head.
When she saw her mother, Morgan tried to stand. “Morgan!” Eric shouted.
Caren told her not to move.
I’m coming, she thought.
Don’t move.
She ran for the fence. The bars were slippery and wet, and she had no idea how she made it over in one piece. She did manage to cut her palm in the process. And when she landed in the cane fields, her ankle bent at a sharp angle, a pain that shot up through the base of her skull. She limped toward them, but stopped short when Bobby slid from the backseat. He had the pistol in one hand and the shotgun in the other, the long nose of it carving a trail in the dirt. His gait was loping and unsteady, and he was tilting off to one side. “I told you not to do anything stupid.” He’s drunk, Caren thought. The .32, still pointed at Eric’s head, was wavering slightly in Bobby’s hand. All around them, the tall sweet grass was swaying this way and that in the wind. “I’m not going down for this. Not for nothing,” he said. He was shaking his head, back and forth, the motion achingly precise, as if he were gunning some internal engine, revving himself up . . . for what, Caren didn’t know. “I’m not going down for this alone.”
There was a faint movement behind him.
Eric had climbed from behind the wheel of the golf cart. To Morgan, he held up a single finger, indicating that she was to remain silent and perfectly still, no matter what was about to happen. Then he looked at Caren. He nodded his head toward the shotgun, sending her a silent message with that small gesture. He was going to grab the larger gun, catching Bobby unawares.
But when Eric reached for it, the shotgun didn’t easily come out of Bobby’s hand. Bobby turned and swatted hard with the smaller gun, landing a sharp blow across Eric’s brow. Eric reeled backward, and Morgan screamed. Bleeding from the hit, Eric then charged Bobby at the waist, knocking them both into the dirt and mud. Bobby fell on top of the shotgun, belching out a low moan when the nose of the gun dug into his back. Eric reached for the pistol, and a second later Caren heard a shot ring out. Morgan jumped out of the golf cart. Caren screamed for her to stay where she was. They both watched as Eric rolled over in silence, landing face down in the dirt. Within seconds Bobby was standing over Caren.
“I’m not going down for this one,” he said, pointing the pistol at her face, his finger on the trigger, the knuckle scraped raw. “You not gon’ breath a word of it, hear?”
Bobby.
She whispered his name.
“It’s me, Helen’s girl,” she said. “It’s Caren.” Bobby stumbled on unsteady feet, blinking back against the sound of her voice and whatever memories it invoked. In his hand, the gun wavered slightly.
Behind him, Eric sat up.
Bobby turned toward the sound, which is how he never saw where the final shot came from. Even Caren had no idea that Hunt Abrams had followed the sounds of their shouts in the fields. Without saying a word, Abrams aimed his shotgun, the very one he carried in his truck, and unleashed the force of it. Caren watched in disbelief as the blast shredded Bobby’s left shoulder. He dropped the pistol and fell backward, as stiff and straight as a stalk of cane. The sound he made, his voice box choked with shock and searing pain, cut through the air.
Abrams jogged across the field, kneeling at Bobby’s side. When he got a good look at his handiwork, saw up close what he’d done, he cursed himself. “Aw, goddamnit,” he muttered. He sank down into the wet earth and lowered his head, his shotgun still warm at his side.
Eric’s right arm was bleeding.
He was shaking everywhere, teeth chattering from the pain.
“Morgan opened the door,” he said to Caren, trying to explain, trying to understand himself what had just happened. “She let him in and . . .” His voice trailed to nothing, lost in the rain and wind. He winced and looked down at his arm. “How bad is it?” It was ugly, but manageable, she hoped. It looked like no more than a flesh wound.
A few feet away, Morgan, by a miracle, was unhurt.
“Get her out of here,” Caren said.
Eric made his way to their daughter, and Morgan threw her arms around her father.
“Go!” Caren said.
Eric hesitated, looking back at her.
He didn’t want to leave her out here.
“I’m okay,” she said, and she was.
She watched and waited as he ushered Morgan into the golf cart, then climbed behind the wheel. He put the cart into gear and spun it in the direction of the river road, kicking up a spray of mud as he sped away. Hunt Abrams was still seated beside Bobby’s injured body, his own one-man vigil. Caren limped toward him, her ankle still throbbing. She knelt beside him and rested a hand on Abrams’s shoulder. He looked up at her, but had nothing to say. She leaned her weight against him as she bent over Bobby Clancy, patting his damp body, until she found her cell phone in his jeans pocket. In the afternoon rain, she called 911, asking for an ambulance, and then she called the Sheriff’s Department.
Lang was already on his way, they told her.
They would need a second team, too, she said, investigators and crime-scene techs with shovels and whatever else was needed for an excavation, to get Jason out of these fields.