6

“Dad?” Kelly demanded.

“Afraid so,” Sanborn confirmed. “You know, under all the gruffness, he’s really a sucker for good causes. Just hates hypocrisy and pretension. So he started a campaign to raise a few hundred dollars, went to the movers and shakers. Threatened to publish a few names if people didn’t cough up.” He chuckled again. “They coughed up and the Indian Creek Church agreed to provide a plot. In the end, I think everybody felt good about it, no matter how much they may have had to have their arms twisted at first.”

Brady finished his lemonade and put down his empty glass.

“Thanks a lot, Doctor. You’ve been a big help.”

Sanborn got to his feet. “Glad to help. Terrible thing about Frieda, wasn’t it? I understand you were there, Mr. Brady.”

“I was.”

The doctor shook his head. “Poor Frieda. She wasn’t the best liked person in town, but I always felt sorry for her. She was lonely and unhappy all her life and Annabelle’s going to end up the same way.” He sighed.

They were back onto the highway before Kelly spoke. “Well, where does that leave us? Our unknown friend seems to be a dead end.”

Brady nodded. “It looks that way. I guess that just leaves the librarian, Rowena Forbes.” He told Kelly about the woman’s strange behavior just before the crime. “She seemed bothered by something, but I don’t know what it was.” He looked over at Kelly. “I don’t guess you happen to be as friendly with her as you are with Doc?”

“Not quite. But I used to do a lot of reading in the library and she was always helpful. She lives with her mother.” She checked her watch. “We could run by, see if she’s home from church. I’ll tell her you’re interested in the archives and wanted to meet her. She’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

The house was on Elm, about two blocks from the courthouse. It was a twenties vintage wooden structure with a front porch and red brick pillars. A swing moved idly in the faint breeze and a rose trellis shaded a concrete birdbath. It was a comfortable-looking house that reminded Brady of the summer evenings of his youth.

The woman who came to the door was not the librarian. She was over seventy, with clear, blue eyes and translucent skin that looked as fragile as parchment. She unlatched the screen door, opened it slightly, and peered out at them, as if they had brought her a problem she was not sure she would know how to solve. “Yes?”

“Miss Addie,” said Kelly. “I’m Kelly Larson. You remember me?”

The old woman hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, of course. The little Larson girl. But I haven’t seen you for a while. You moved.”

“Yes, ma’am. This is Mr. Brady, the new publisher of the Express. He was interested in the Cantrell Archive and we wondered if Miss Rowena was home. If you’re eating …”

The old woman smiled faintly. “Land no, Wena’s still at church. I just put a chicken on to bake. She ought to be home by now. Come in.” She held the door open for them to enter. “I haven’t been very well lately. I hope the Lord’ll understand, even if the preacher doesn’t.” She showed them into a tastefully furnished living room whose furniture was largely antique. But no one had collected the antiques, Brady realized. They were the original furnishings. He took a seat beside Kelly on the ancient sofa.

“Wena hasn’t been doing too well lately, either,” Miss Addie said, as much to herself as to her guests. “She worries about me. Sometimes I think it would be merciful if the Lord …” She turned around quickly. “But I guess we have to leave things to Him. That’s what Dr. Goynes used to say, before …”

They heard a car stop outside and a door slammed. Brady rose as footsteps sounded on the front porch and the rotund little librarian appeared in the doorway.

“Oh,” she said, a hand moving to her throat, and he had the sense that she felt caught at something. She looked from one to the other of them. “I …”

“Wena,” Miss Addie said, “these folks came by to talk to you about the archive. You remember Kelly, Emmett’s daughter, and this gentleman is …”

“Peter Brady,” said the publisher. “We met yesterday.”

Rowena’s head jerked down in a little nod. “Yes. Of course.” She put her gloves on the hall table and began to unpin her hat. “I … You’ll have to pardon me. After what happened yesterday and all … Mother, you shouldn’t be up, it’s too much excitement. I can take care of this. You should be in bed.”

“Yes,” the old woman said in a hopeless tone of voice. “I guess I should.” She padded out of the room and Brady felt a surge of sympathy for her.

Rowena took a seat in the stuffed chair, her hat in her hands. “I’m so addled lately. Can I get you some refreshments?”

They shook their heads in unison. “No. We don’t want to be any trouble,” Kelly said. “If this is a bad time to visit …”

“It’s no worse than any other,” Rowena said. “That sounds so ungracious. I just mean that poor Mother’s been going downhill lately. I was so worried, I almost didn’t go to the working yesterday, and once I was there, I couldn’t do anything but think about her, at home, by herself. So I left before lunch even and came home to check on her. Which was just as well. She was having another spell. Doc was already with her, but I had to go get her medicine.”

“So you weren’t there when the incident took place,” Brady said.

She looked up quickly. “Oh, no. I was here.”

“Maybe Mr. Brady had better talk to you about the archives tomorrow,” Kelly said. “You’ll be at the library?”

“I certainly hope to.”

Brady and the girl left. For a long moment she sat behind the wheel, staring blankly out through the windshield. “Well,” she said at last, “we don’t seem to have gotten very far. Any more ideas?”

“Yep,” he acknowledged. “Let’s eat.”

“That,” she declared with a grin, “is the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

Ten minutes later they were back on the highway, the odor of fried chicken filling the car. “It’s sinful, positively sinful. At least two thousand calories,” Kelly said, looking greedily down at the bags of food between them. “But now that we have it, it would be even worse to waste it. Have any thoughts as to where we ought to have the feast?”

Brady leaned back, still trying to disentangle his mind from the problem of Frieda’s death and the gravestone without a name. “Yankee Bend. Is it within driving distance?” he asked.

She gave him a mischievous smile. “Not more than ten minutes. But seriously, Brady, what can you expect to find thirty some-odd years later?”

“Nothing,” he declared, pursing his lips. “And then maybe everything.”

“Make sense. Or is that some secret wisdom from the famous crime reporter?”

He shook his head. “No, just from an old sergeant on the New Orleans Police Force, named O’Connell. He used to go to a crime scene and sit for two hours sometimes, waiting for inspiration. He said you had to soak up the sights and sounds of a place, get the essential feeling, the ambience, to understand what had happened there. He spent a lot of time on bar stools, in saloons where killings had gone down, and sometimes in bordellos.”

“And did he solve a lot of cases?”

“I never figured that out.”

“Sounds like a hard job.”

“It was hard on him. He died of cirrhosis.”

“Well, if I’d thought about it, I would have brought a bottle of wine from home,” she said. “So you could get a head start. I think some fruit wine would be perfect with the chicken.”

He said nothing, just looked out the window at the passing scenery. Once he would have agreed with her.

In a matter of two minutes they left the red hills behind, emerging onto a flat, alluvial plain. The land was given to fenced pastures where cows grazed, and the vegetation had changed from pines to hardwoods. The road went into a long curve, and as they came out on the straightaway, he saw the girders of a bridge. But the car was already slowing, and a tenth of a mile before the bridge ramp, they turned right, onto a narrow blacktop that ran alongside a high grass-covered levee on their left. “We used to be able to go up on the levee,” she said, “but now everything’s fenced.”

He looked out and saw that she was right. The fence seemed to stretch forever, with Posted signs every hundred feet or so.

There was a bend ahead, with the blacktop vanishing behind a bulge of levee ahead of them. There was a gate with a single iron bar across it and Kelly stomped the brake, bringing them to a quick stop. “Now, when I was little, this was never locked. Why don’t you see if anything’s changed?”

He got out, went over to the iron barrier, and looked down. She was right. There was no lock. He lifted the bar away and pulled it back for her to pass, then returned it to its place and went back to the car.

“Who owns this, anyway?” he asked.

“Corps of Engineers,” she said. “They own all the levee system. They just lease it to people for grazing.”

“Okay. So we get busted by the feds instead of some farmer with a shotgun. Or do you know the folks along this stretch?”

They were headed up the levee now, at a twenty-degree angle, on what had clearly once been a continuation of the blacktop below. They reached the top and Brady saw the concrete remains of an old bridge ahead of them, stretching toward the river. Kelly let the car roll down the slope, until it came to rest out of sight of the road on the other side. She jerked the emergency brake and opened the car door. Brady got out and stood beside her. Below them, going to the river bank, was an apron of low scrub, and beyond that the muddy water itself.

“See out there?” Kelly pointed and Brady saw something white on an island in the center of the river. “It’s one of the pilings from the old bridge. The bridge fell in during the high water when I was a little girl. They put it in a curve of the river, where the bank kept getting eaten away. This has been a weak spot as long as I can remember. They finally wised up and ran the highway west of here, over a straight stretch of water.”

They took out the bags of food and Kelly found an old sheet in the car trunk. They walked up the slope and out onto the bridge remnant, where they could look out over the river.

Brady’s eyes wandered over to the levee, and he tried to imagine what it must have been like that night, nearly forty years ago. For surely it would have been at night and not during the daytime …

“One man with a shovel,” Kelly said, breaking into his thoughts and he looked over at her in surprise. She smiled, handing him a napkin and opening the chicken box. “I followed your eyes. It’s hard to be here and not think about it.”

“I wish we could see the actual spot,” the newsman said, taking a drumstick. “I have a feeling there are a lot of questions people might have forgotten to ask.”

She nodded. “Well, I’m sure the spot’s long gone, with the bulldozing and erosion.”

He looked from the levee over to the waters and had a sudden image of Ozzie’s body, floating face up.

“Brady, you’re shaking. What’s wrong?”

He came to himself and blushed. “What? Oh, nothing. I …”

She reached over to touch his arm. “What is it that happened in New Orleans? If you want to tell me, I’ll listen.”

He shrugged. Maybe it would be best to tell it after all. “There was a man,” he began tonelessly. “A little Yat from the Irish Channel who trusted me.” And, suddenly, it all tumbled out. She listened, frowning, her green eyes now reflecting the bluer tint of the sky. When he had finished, she started at him for a long second, and then moved over to sit beside him, their bodies touching.

“I keep thinking about that night near Pass Machnac. I keep wondering about Ozzie’s final hours: whether they killed him outright or took him out there and did it, letting him sweat the whole way. I guess this reminds me of that. Forty years ago. Did they take that other man out here and kill him? Or did they kill him someplace else and bring him out here, because they figured nobody would ever find him?”

“I know.” She let her body rest against his. “It’s sad. And scary. The person that did it may still be alive. In Troy.”

“Yes.” He watched her get up and go to stand at the concrete barrier, looking out over the brown waters. He sensed her mood had changed and he thought he knew what she was thinking. He got up and went to her. She turned to face him, her eyes wide with fear.

“Brady, whoever did it has to be dead, don’t they? I mean, this long after, the odds against …”

He reached out and took her in his arms, holding her to him. He wanted to bend his head, kiss her on the lips, but he knew that the mood had died, strangled by a terrible dread.

Her father had been here in 1950. Her father had been a young man, back from the war in Europe, struggling to earn a living as a newspaper publisher. In reality, however, Brady realized he knew next to nothing about Emmett Larson.

And as they folded the sheet and started back for the car, Brady knew he and Kelly were thinking the same thing. Was it kindness that had motivated Emmett’s gesture in finding a burial place for the unknown? Or was it guilt?