Tillis carried two more mugs out from the kitchen to the living area that was still lit only by the dim lights from the foyer and kitchen as well as a soft flicker of flames from the fire. He’d kept the lights low, hoping for an atmosphere that was cozy, even confessional. Donnie and Karyn both huddled in blankets in chairs they’d pulled close to the fire. They held the cups of hot chocolate he’d made for them first.
He reached to hand one of the coffee mugs to Logan, and Logan nodded him in closer. Tillis’ head bent close enough so just he could hear.
“You think you ought to clear this chat with the sheriff first? He may want to be part of this.”
Tillis gave a curt head shake, straightened up again, and carried his own mug over to the small table by the big leather chair. In deference to it being his place, the others had all made other seating arrangements. The kids had two captains’ chairs from the breakfast nook, and Logan had the other leather guest chair.
Karyn and Donnie were staring into the fire. Logan had shifted to staring at the back of Karyn’s head, a mixture of concern and suppressed anger wrestling on his face. Tillis blew across the lip of his mug and took a sip of coffee. He didn’t know what to make of the look on Logan’s face. Tillis had been involved in enough cases where parents had been the powder keg and their kids the fuse. Logan had a temper too. But he was either doing a good job of controlling it, or had something else on his mind. Of all the dark mysteries Tillis had uncovered as a Texas Ranger, the thoughts and emotions of others were the hardest for him to comprehend, even with someone like Logan, whom he’d once thought he knew like a brother.
He looked down at Donnie’s bowed head. “You intend to say anything?”
Donnie slowly shook his head. Tillis glanced at Logan, who didn’t seem surprised.
Tillis put his mug down and turned to the girl. “You said there was a body down there, Karyn. Tell me about it.”
Her head swung toward him, made a hitch as she panned past Donnie’s face. She held her blanket close to her neck, her long red hair hanging straight down along the back of the blanket where it could dry.
“I couldn’t tell if it was male or female,” she said.
“Male.” The voice was Donnie’s. “I saw it too.” He realized he’d spoken in spite of himself. He looked right at Tillis and then his mouth clamped shut and he turned to look back into the fire.
Donnie had the same trait as his father—an inability to speak to anyone without looking directly and intently at the person. It had been an endearing trait in the father, one that led to his becoming mayor. In the boy, it signaled some of the same sincerity, and that he was struggling with knowing more than he was going to let himself say.
“Go ahead, Karyn,” Tillis encouraged.
She turned back from Donnie and looked at Tillis. “It was in a black scuba wetsuit, with tanks, everything. But it must’ve been down there a while. There was no face, just a skull.” She gave a delicate shudder that even the blanket and fire didn’t prevent.
“What about you, Donnie? Anything to add?”
Tillis watched the boy shake his head again. He could be a stubborn one. His father had been. But Denny had been a good man too. It was too soon to know how Donnie would turn out. His appearance was clean-cut, to the point of seeming chiseled out of marble—his dad, too, had looked far too young for his years. Donnie hadn’t said more than a dozen words since they’d gotten the boats off the lake and the kids inside, though sometimes expressions flitted quickly across his face before they were suppressed.
“You’re going to have to talk sometime, Donnie. Does any of this have to do with what happened to your dad?”
That had been some crime scene only a week ago. Tillis got there when the Medical Examiner and crew were zipping up Denny and hauling him out to the meatwagon. Blood and the throwdown gun were the only signs on the scarred hardwood floor that there had been a human in Denny’s living room moments before. Now, in the dim interior of Tillis’ living room, the boy’s head lowered, settled into a fix on the flames. But the girl’s head flicked toward Donnie, then turned away.
Tillis looked at the girl. Karyn was a lot like her mother, enough to make whatever was causing Logan to twitch in his chair affect him all the harder. Heidi Rainey had been very smart, way too smart to live out here in such a small town, so far from all the things she’d grown up with in Houston. But living in the country, wife of a game warden, must have sounded good once. Twenty-seven years of it had been too much, at least for a woman who discovered she craved something that wasn’t out here. Raising Karyn had helped. As soon as the child was old enough not to need her as much, the depression bouts started. Then they got worse. The sheriff’s deputies found Heidi in her car, which was still running in the garage, and rags had been stuffed in the cracks along the door to seal it. They’d gotten there in time and had saved her, only for her to die a slower and more painful death weeks later from the cancer. Logan had been a while getting over her death. Karyn might not be over it yet.
Tillis had seen Karyn grow up, the way you do, looking up each time surprised at another spurt of growth or awareness. She had slowly matured into a young lady, and even when she started dating Donnie, Tillis had seen none of the visual transformation that had been so obvious with Selma Granite’s girl Sandy, when, at sixteen, she’d started sneaking in to town to spend nights with that gambler Morgan Lane, a man in his forties. Tillis had watched Sandy’s tiny face shift from the blossom of youthful innocence to take on a harder, more knowledgeable look within weeks. Everyone knew what was going on over there at Lane’s place. But Selma wasn’t one to go to the law. The two oldest and biggest of her boys, Rocky and Stone, had gone over to pay Lane a visit. The two boys were locally-feared bullies, each hard-muscled and over six feet. But they both ended up in the hospital, Rocky with a broken collarbone in addition to abrasions, Stone in a near-coma.
“What made you two go out there on a night like this, Karyn? No lights on the boat, diving at night. I know you didn’t want to be seen. But in a thunderstorm like that, why, you could’ve both been killed.” Tillis watched the girl.
She glanced toward Donnie, who still forced himself to stare into the fire.
“Go ahead, tell Tillis, honey.” There was a burr of emotion in Logan’s voice.
She looked from her father to Tillis, who said, “If this has anything to do with Denny Spurlock’s death, you’ve got to help us. That’s a murder investigation.”
Tillis watched her face, sensed she was getting ready to speak. She kept sneaking glances to Donnie for direction, but got none from him.
“I’m not supposed to . . .”
“You tell him, and quit stalling around here. This is more serious than you think.” Logan’s face was flushed pink again, and he leaned forward, while struggling to hold himself back.
Donnie jumped upright to his feet, abrupt and flushed, the blanket falling back onto his chair, and what was left of his hot chocolate splashing out onto the flagstones in front of the fire. His face was pink, and his voice full of emotion. “We don’t have to say anything. Don’t you let them get to you, Kare. It’s . . . it’s . . . they can throw us in the slammer if they like. Remember what we agreed.”
She was looking up at him, and Tillis watched her mouth tighten shut. Normally, Tillis might push. But he’d done enough of these interviews to know when he’d hit the wall. He glanced at Logan, who looked as exasperated as Tillis felt. Tillis shrugged and stood. Well, that was probably that, for now.
Karyn was making a conscious effort not to look at him, and that stung a bit.
Logan got to his feet and came over to stand close to Tillis, so he could speak low enough that neither of the kids could hear him. “What’s with you? You’re not leaning very hard on that boy at all. Either you think this relates to Denny Spurlock’s death or you don’t.”
For the barest part of a second, Tillis thought he might be kidding. But there was the slow clenching and unclenching of Logan’s jaw, as if softly chewing something that was very tough.
“I’m not sure that it does,” he said.
“Then why all the questions?”
“It’s what I do.”
“You sure you’re not being soft on him because he’s prone to pull the jacked-up kind of stunts you might have done as a kid? Hell, that you’d still do?”
“It did take some brass to dive down there on a night like this.”
“Don’t forget, he did it with my daughter along. He risked her life too.”
Tillis studied Logan’s face, watched the set he hadn’t seen since some pretty dicey times in Korea. “She’s got some brass too, or she wouldn’t have gone along—must’ve inherited it.”
“Don’t try to butter your way around it. That’s my daughter, my only . . .” The scratch in Logan’s throat slowed him until he stopped and glared, his eyes glittering with just a touch extra moisture.
“They got out of there all right. Doesn’t that count for anything?” Tillis said.
Logan spun away from him, waved for Karyn to follow. Tillis knew he had been near the place where anyone who wasn’t a parent dared not go.
* * * * *
The headlights of a pickup that passed Logan heading the other way caught the red-bronze highlights of his daughter’s hair. Karyn’s face was turned away from him, looking out the truck’s passenger window. She’d been silent since they had gotten the Spurlock boat into its winch at the marina and his game warden’s boat back onto the trailer. Most of the irritated rage Logan had felt at her not coming home on time had slipped away, and he felt more spent now than anything. The lights of the other truck faded in the rearview mirror.
Off to the right of the road, in the splash of light his headlights made, stood three deer. Logan eased off the gas, and the truck slowed. The two does stayed bent and feeding, the spike buck looked up at the truck. Their hides showed sandy tan to pale brown in the light. “Don’t you dart in front of me,” Logan said softly. When he was past them, he accelerated back to speed. Their place was seven miles out from town. It had been one of the issues with Heidi, one he wished he’d been more sensitive to earlier. He glanced at his daughter.
“Whatever you’re up to, you should tell Tillis. He’s investigating a murder, one the two of you should care about more than whatever’s going on in your own petty world.”
She turned to him, and gave her long red hair a brush back so it was away from her face. “Don’t you think, Daddy, that Donnie has a right to care about what happened to his father in his own way?”
“There’re other things I care about a lot more.”
“Daddy, there’s a lot you don’t understand about Donnie.”
“There’s a lot I don’t want to understand.” He glanced her way.
The look on her face was more patient than her years should have let her possess. The expression, accepting of his faults, but firmly trying to defend her own perspective, made him think of Heidi. Karyn was enough like her mother, especially when calm in the face of his own inner rage, to make him feel as if his insides were piled all the way to his throat with broken glass. It was a pain he’d felt before, and about which he would say nothing.
He looked back at the road, at the steady blips of white lines coming at him down the center. There was nothing else he felt capable of saying for the rest of the way home.
* * * * *
It was dark in the cab of Tillis’ truck, lit only by the eerie green of the dash lights, as he rounded the top of the hill and started down into the sleeping town of Hoel’s Dam. The boy, Donnie, sat still as a stone beside him.
The street lights and a gas station or two were all that lit the town of seven or eight thousand. Would it have mattered more, Tillis wondered, if Denny had been the murdered mayor of a bigger town?
Hoel’s Dam got its name not from Old Bill Hoel, the richest man in this part of Texas, but from Bill’s son Edgar, brother of newspaper publisher Herb Hoel. Edgar had been the engineer assigned to build the dam. He had given it his all—literally.
When the dam was built, fifty-one years ago, Bill had pulled strings to get his young engineer son his first big job. Old Bill had those kind of strings, then and now, as one of the bigger soft-money backers of LBJ in those heady days for Texas politics. It was Edgar’s first big commission, and he had run into troubles almost at once. There was a labor flare-up—something about bringing in an all-white mostly German and Irish crew from outside—and when that was settled, the tons and tons of concrete being poured in a muggy series of days in April did not seem to want to take a set. Young Edgar was up nights watching the men work, trying everything he’d ever heard of to start the slow process of drying. Something seemed to be wrong with the chemical mix, and some people even hinted of sabotage. Leaning far out over the scaffolding one night, Edgar fell into the pouring cement and became part of the dam. But the cement had, oddly enough, suddenly shown a willingness to take a set. The completed dam had become something of a monument to Edgar. He was in there somewhere yet.
The town was a cozy and small one, the kind where some folks from the First Baptist Church had erected an unauthorized sign at the city limits that read, “THIS IS GOD’S COUNTRY, SO DON’T SPEED LIKE HELL THROUGH HERE!”
Tillis wove his truck through the dim streets, past the feed store and down a cul-de-sac to the older Victorian home where he’d been only a week ago on the murder investigation of Denny Spurlock.
He let the engine idle, and turned to Donnie. The boy, because he was who he was, had to look directly back at him. It was the only way any Spurlock could be.
“Did your being out there doing that hare-brained dive have anything to do with Logan being the one doing the patrolling of the lake more than usual lately?”
Donnie gave Tillis a start by responding, “He’s an awfully intense man, isn’t he? Karyn keeps telling me he has a warm side, but I sure haven’t seen it.”
“I’ve seen it. You just have to remember he lost his wife not too long ago.”
There was a noticeable pause in the truck until Tillis said, “I’m sorry. You lost your own father just a week ago. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Donnie looked down, but didn’t get out of the truck. There seemed to be more he wanted to share, and Tillis waited, hoping the kid would open up a bit more.
“You’re friends with him, aren’t you?”
“We were best man at each other’s wedding.”
Tillis didn’t go into the part about their drifting apart, or his moving out to Hoel’s Dam with one thought being to try and spend more time with Logan. But he’d come at a bad time. Heidi was dying. When he’d later tried to comfort Logan, his friend had said the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to Tillis. He’d snapped, “You think moving out here’s what made your Claire leave, don’t you?”
“Mr. Macrory?”
“Yeah?” Tillis realized his mind had drifted a bit.
“You were married once, weren’t you?” The boy’s wide blue eyes were candid, and fixed on Tillis.
There was a short, stunned silence while Tillis organized his thoughts.
The boy went on, “I mean, what was it like?”
“Being married?”
“Yeah.”
“Fine. For a while.”
“I . . . I probably shouldn’t be asking you all this, should I?”
Tillis felt himself shrug. But the gesture was probably lost in the dim light of the truck’s cab. Who else was the boy going to ask?
“What happened? If you don’t mind my asking,” Donnie said.
“Won’t tell me a thing all night about something that matters,” Tillis said, “and now you’re a regular chatterbox.”
“Sorry.”
“It was change.”
“What?”
“People change. When you’re your age, you don’t think you ever will. But we all do.”
“That’s why she left?”
“She left,” Tillis sighed, “because the new her liked someone else more than the new me.”
“That’ll never happen with Karyn and me.”
“I hope you’re right, son. I really do.” Tillis’ head shook in slow doubt as he said it.
“Do . . . do you miss her?”
Tillis thought about it. He did. But it was odd stuff. He missed the way she kissed. Claire had been a terrific kisser. He recalled the way her eyes fluttered beneath her closed lids as she kissed. He missed that more than the bed, though that came up sometimes in his thoughts too, mostly about waking up to find her there. But he missed talking to her, over dinner or riding together on their trips, though he doubted if he’d ever mentioned it to her.
“A bit,” he said.
“You think you’ll ever get back together?”
“No.” There was a hard ring of finality to the word. “Some things are truly over.” But Tillis wasn’t thinking about himself. He was thinking about the boy’s father, Denny Spurlock, who was as dead as anyone ever gets.
The dark house was a solid, old building, one Denny had spent a lot of time keeping fixed up. He’d gotten a quiet joy from tinkering, even mowing the lawn.
Thinking about Denny, alive like that, made Tillis ponder the resiliency of youth, or whatever it was he was witnessing. If he’d been Donnie’s age, he wondered how he would act after his father was killed. Would he be thinking about his love for some girl? Maybe. Who knew what kids think these days?
Donnie looked over him with that unflinching sincerity that was his own, as well as his father’s, trademark. “Don’t think from this talk about Karyn that I don’t care about what happened to my dad.”
Tillis looked at the boy’s sincere, wide eyes.
“I do care,” Donnie said. “More than you can know. A lot of people, yourself among them for all I know, think he must’ve been up to something, something no good if it ended in him being killed over it. My way of making sure everything Dad did wasn’t a total waste is to carry on for him, maybe even have children that bear his name, the kind of kids he would have wanted as a grandfather.” The boy’s voice was getting louder, more shrill. “I intend to do that, right after I’ve done what I need to do. You’ll see.”
He spun and walked up the dark walkway in the rain that had now settled into a drizzle. His shoulders seemed hunched into a proud and determined set that would have worried Tillis a whole lot more if a bigger worry wasn’t getting home without falling asleep at the wheel.