Tillis’ whole left side ached and his head throbbed, as he climbed out of his truck where it was angle-parked in front of the newspaper building, a single-story sprawling affair made of orange and red brick. He was younger than a lot of the Rangers; feeling he might be getting too old for the job didn’t do him much good. He glanced at his watch—not quite ten thirty a.m., though the sun made it feel like noon. It was a good time to visit a newspaper office, he figured; they’d be as busy as they ever get. Sometimes people talk better when they’re trying to get rid of you.
The building was located in the center of town on the main street passing through Hoel’s Dam. Traffic was picking up, and Tillis had been lucky to find a parking spot so close to the building. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the door glass as he reached for the handle. His reflection had a white patch at one temple and a spreading purple bruise along the side of his face. He didn’t look or feel lucky.
The inside of the building opened into a wide room, with most of the desks on the divided part of the room marked Advertising. Four people were busy in the advertising section, bending over chest-high, tilted art tables with X-Acto knives, reaching for strips of paper coming through waxing machines. It gave Tillis a better feel for the newspaper’s state-of-the-art than he expected. One of the advertising women at a desk looked up at him, but the hope eased from her face when he pointed back to the news area. Only three desks were on the other side of the low wooden barrier, and at one of them sat Thirsty Mills, pecking away at a keyboard while staring at a computer screen. Either the light coming off the screen or the fluorescent panels above gave a macabre tinge of green to the silver sheen of the gray hairs that were tied back in a ponytail and sprinkled through Thirsty’s scruffy beard. His face had a nearly-matching greenish-gray pallor to it. A phone on a nearby desk was ringing, which he ignored. He looked up, saw Tillis heading his way, glanced at the wall clock, then looked back at his screen to finish a sentence. He did, frowned at it, then moved the mouse and hit the Enter key before hopping to his feet to face the Ranger.
“I’d been hoping to track you down,” he said. “Looks like you saved me the bother. I’ve got folks calling from all over for more details, and a chance to string for a wire service here.” He glanced toward the corner office, knowing that anything he sent out on the wire would have to go by Herb Hoel first to be approved.
“That’s the Texas Rangers, nothing but eager public service,” Tillis said.
Some of Thirsty’s native sarcasm nearly showed in the response on his face, but went away as he looked more closely at Tillis’ head. “What happened to you?”
“Had some problems with plumbing.” Tillis looked for a place to sit. He reached for the swivel chair behind an empty desk and dragged it over beside Thirsty Mills’ desk. He lowered himself into the chair, inwardly groaning a bit until his aching left side was settled.
Thirsty stood looking at him, reaching into a pocket for a pack of cigarettes. An ashtray like a wide crystal candy dish was piled high with butts on his desktop. That’s the thing about small towns, Tillis figured. They haven’t pushed a lot of the rules about the work environment that have city office workers huddled outside the doors of buildings in all kinds of weather to grab their nicotine.
While Thirsty lit up with a plastic disposable lighter, Tillis looked around at the office. The building looked sturdy, like it had been built for something else, maybe some kind of mill or factory, maybe even built for the newspaper itself back during its hot-lead days, before computers replaced the heavy, cumbersome Linotype machines. In converting it to its current use, the ceilings had been lowered and the brick walls painted. But instead of making it cheery, it gave even the wide, open space of the newsroom a claustrophobic feel. It would be a tough place to show up every day and work, especially for someone of Thirsty’s height. That could be why his upper body had taken on a bit of the lean and shape of a question mark. It looked, from Tillis’ sitting position, as if Thirsty was ducking beneath the hanging ceiling, though that could be just the head tilt Thirsty was giving him. The cigarette in the corner of the reporter’s mouth stuck up an a jaunty angle as he sucked hard at it. Then, spears of smoke shot from both nostrils as he eased back down into his chair and looked at Tillis from beneath eyebrows that could use a bit of trimming.
“Have you wrapped up these little whodunits, both old and new?” Perhaps without realizing he did it, Thirsty pulled over an open, ringed pad and placed a pen across it, in case the Ranger said anything the inquiring minds of the public might need to know, providing it clicked with what Herb Hoel thought they should know.
“It’s the older case that kind of intrigues me,” Tillis admitted. “I’ve never worked on one quite this stale before. I dropped down here because I thought you might be able to help me.”
Tillis waited to see how Thirsty would react. A less sophisticated reporter might be flattered. As it was, Mills sucked on his cigarette and stared through the smoke at the Ranger. Then he took what was left, and snuffed it out in the crammed ash tray. He managed to be looking with a sideways glance at Tillis when he said, “You’ve got to know that anything that long ago happened way before I was here. It’d be no more than of historical interest to me, even with the skeleton thrown in. Now, the death of the mayor, that did happen while I was here, right here at the newspaper office.”
“So you’ve got an alibi?”
“‘Murder most foul, as in the best it is.’”
“You’re not Hamlet. How about that alibi?”
Tillis knowing the source of Thirsty’s quote seemed to irritate him more than any question asked so far. Here was someone with a lot of suppressed rage. Small-town life wasn’t clicking with this one.
“Yeah, boss Hoel was here working late himself, so I’ve even got a witness.”
“But you got there pretty quick.”
“I heard the squeal on the scanner. Sure, I was one of the first ones on the scene, if that helps.” Thirsty didn’t look like someone who wished to be helpful. He slid the pad over closer and picked up his pen. He glanced at the clock on the wall, then at his computer screen. “You’ve locked up both Tony and his hired hand James from the pawn shop. What’s going on there? Are they suspects in the mayor’s murder?”
“You’re the one as much as fingered their place, with information for which you still haven’t shared your source. You shouldn’t be asking me about them. I should be putting the vise grips to you about that.”
The wry smile half-buried beneath Thirsty’s face fur showed more disdain than fear. “I’m not one of your locals who just rolled off the back end of the turnip truck, so don’t try that strong-arm stuff with me. Did you arrest them, or what?”
“They’re not locked up. They were taken in for questioning. The place’ll be open again by now. You’ll still be able to pawn more stuff. As for suspects for Denny’s murder, we’re still shopping. Any suggestions?”
Thirsty shrugged off the question. He looked like he was going to reach for another cigarette, then didn’t. “Since I’m pushing a deadline, I hope you don’t mind if I make the most of my asking you a few questions about these murders.”
“You’d better go with what you have. I don’t have any answers just yet. I only have questions myself. What I’m here for is to find out more about Hugh Spurlock.”
“I told you, that’s way before my time.”
“You’re an enterprising reporter, Mills. If you were me, and you were in a newspaper office, where would you go to find out about what was going on forty years ago?” Tillis glanced around, but didn’t see any old newspapers piled around.
Thirsty didn’t quite manage to suppress all of a smirk. He nodded toward the corner office door. “I think you’d better see the boss. I’m sure he’d kind of like to field that sort of question himself.”
Having learned he’d get no help with his story, and having made it clear that any information exchange was on a quid pro quo basis, Thirsty turned away from Tillis and squinted at his screen again. He got his bearings and started tapping away at the keys again, as if the Ranger was no longer there.
Tillis eased his aching frame up out of the chair and went back to the open corner door. He peered inside, saw a thin man in a gray suit sitting behind a desk smoking a pipe. That explained some of the relaxed rules about smoking. Tillis tapped on the open door and Herb Hoel looked up from what looked like a copy of The New York Times. The story Tillis could make out once more featured Senator Martinez, this time hammering home another of his platform issues. This time the pitch was that America needed to clean up its own lingering civil rights issues before taking on those of the world.
“Yes?” Herb Hoel lowered the paper and politely folded it without losing eye contact.
“I’m the Texas Ranger working on the two Spurlock cases. Do you mind if I come in and ask a few questions?”
“That’s politely put, young man. Come on in and settle. What’s on your mind?”
The room was big, and had tinted windows that looked out onto both of the major streets of Hoel’s Dam. The desk was teak, or some equally dark wood, and was as big as all the reporters’ desks together. Both walls without windows were lined with bookshelves. The carpet outside had been a dull gray. Inside the office, the carpet was a thick burgundy that gave beneath his steps and went well with the off-white textured wallpaper on the wall space not covered by shelves. The room set a tone that said there was a difference in people, as did the air-conditioning, set ten degrees cooler than the newsroom so boss Hoel, who looked to be in his early sixties, could wear a suit jacket that looked tailored.
“This is my first forty-year-old murder,” Tillis said as he crossed the room. “I was hoping to do some research here. Maybe you can even tell me what went on back then.”
“Oh, I’d have been too young to know much of what was going on, and people don’t talk about the past as much around here as you’d think, at least not to me.”
On the surface, it was one of the most absurd things Tillis had ever heard. He had yet to meet a newspaper man who didn’t have an itch to know every little thing, all the way down to the smallest corpuscle of someone’s blood. And Herb wasn’t too young, though he might have been on an extended toot at the time, given some of the rumors he had heard about the man. He was being stonewalled, and he knew it.
“Do you have some of the old papers that go back that far?”
Herb Hoel took the straight-stemmed briar pipe with a medium round bowl out of his mouth and carefully set it in the marble ashtray with its own pipe rest. He sighed, or tried to. He seemed the kind of person who found it hard to show emotion, even mock regret.
The publisher was lean, upright, and had a careful way of doing every little thing, even to picking up a pipe tamper and starting to clean out the bowl of another pipe he took from a drawer, this one a stained meerschaum. Tillis would have guessed military, if he hadn’t heard somewhere that Old Bill Hoel had paid good money to see that Herb hadn’t gone that route. The rigid mannerisms could come from an Ivy League background, though that contrasted with Thirsty Mills’ ways, and Tillis knew Mills’d gathered up a sheepskin back in one of those dusty Ivory Tower schools. No, it had to be old money. The Hoels owned this town, and that was the belabored care of movement he was seeing in Herb, the easy-going but controlled way he folded his hands on the desk when he was done fiddling with the pipe.
“Let me show you something.” Herb rose slowly and went over to one of the bookshelves. Tillis creaked to his feet and followed. He could hear computer keyboard keys clicking away out in the newsroom. Outside, the world went on with its frantic urgency, but here in the calm of Herb Hoel’s office, it was as if time had stopped.
Tillis was surprised to find he was an inch or two taller than Herb, once he came up and stood beside him. The publisher’s posture had fooled him into thinking he was a much taller man.
Herb reached up and, from a row of large folders bound in light blue cloth, pulled out the first one in the row and carried it over to a stand beside the window that looked like a pulpit. He put the book on the stand, that Tillis could now see was for standing and reading. Maybe Herb had something wrong with his back that made him such a rigid pole. Tillis could understand standing to read, though, since his own banged-up side hurt every time he sat.
Herb was flipping through the pages, and Tillis leaned closer.
“There.” Herb stepped back and pointed. He’d turned all the way back to the first newspaper in the folder, and it was only half there. Big chunks were missing, and black rings and edges left where part of that paper had been. The date on the paper was only twenty years ago.
“A fire? You’re saying you had a fire here and there’s no record of the papers before that?”
Herb was nodding slowly at him, wearing a sad smile that had just a touch of contentment to it.
* * * * *
Donnie walked across the wide, open center of the Hoel’s Dam library and approached the desk, where a woman was breaking the rule of the “Shush!” sign above her head by talking loudly on the phone, something about a casserole. She was one of those young women who already looked and dressed as an older woman—maybe thirty, but acting twice that old. Donnie looked over at Karyn and she gave him a reassuring smile.
The woman glanced at them and frowned. She said into the receiver, “I’ll have to get back to you, Grace.” She hung up, reached for a clip-on gold earring, and put it back on her right earlobe before turning to Donnie and Karyn. “Now, what can I do you for?” She tried for a cheery, helpful tone, but didn’t quite hit it.
The librarian had her hair pulled back in a tight bun and had a way of pursing her lips in disapproval of almost everything. It was a real stretch for her to try to act civil and interested.
“We were trying to look up some old newspaper stuff on the microfiche machine,” Donnie told her, “and they only go back so far. Are there more of them someplace?”
The woman frowned at him, and it was an intensely personal frown, as if she’d caught him masturbating in the stacks, or something. “The back issues were stolen some time ago, even before I worked here. People ask about it all the time, but there’s nothing I can do about it. A lot of stuff moves out of here like it had wheels. You wouldn’t believe the stuff people steal from a public library that’s just trying to do a good thing.”
She looked them over and fixed on Karyn’s small purse, as if it might be full of library property.
“You mean there’s no other place we can look back that far?”
“That’s what I’m saying. We try to do what we can here, but people just don’t understand what . . .”
Donnie had already spun and started with brisk steps toward the door out of the library. He felt Karyn’s hand grab at his elbow. His first instinct was to shake it loose, but he wasn’t irritated with her. He glanced at her and saw her long red hair lifting out as she hurried to keep up with him. He slowed down. “Sorry,” he said.
“Over there.” Karyn nodded toward a back table, where a roundish woman with white hair sat with a litter of books, open atlases, and folders in front her. She was waving for them to come over. Karyn tugged on Donnie’s arm, though he was in the mood to just get out of there. But he let her lead him over to the table.
The woman didn’t get up. The composition book she’d been jotting in was open in front of her. The page was half-filled with the kind of handwriting Donnie had only seen in some old Palmer-style handwriting books, though his Dad had written kind of like that. The atlases showed the area around Hoel’s Dam, as well as Lake Kiowa.
She looked up at them with an intensity Donnie was surprised to see in an older person. Her face had concern and interest on it, expressed in a candor that again reminded Donnie of his father.
“Sit down,” she said in a library-soft voice. “Maybe I can help.”
Donnie glanced at Karyn, who was already easing into a chair. What the heck? They didn’t have anything else on their dance card, and they were only getting nowhere so far. He sat down too.
“You’re Donnie Spurlock and you must be Karyn Rainey. I’m Esbeth Walters. I work at the sheriff’s department when I don’t have a day off, like I do today.”
“Are you working on a case?” Karyn leaned closer to see what Esbeth had been writing in her notebook.
“No. I’m just one of the dispatchers. But I’m not from around here, so I was trying to catch up on some of the background here. The whole mess is confusing to me, and I’m the type of person who has to get her head straight about things, if I’m to be able to sleep nights.”
“We’ve been a bit confused ourselves,” Karyn said. She looked at Donnie, who gave a short nod, like he ought to say something. But he was too cautious, and a little uptight. Women will pour out their souls to some stranger on a bus. He never even seen this woman before, and he’d lived here all his life.
“I take it you hit a dead-end over there with Florence.” Esbeth nodded toward the counter where the librarian once again had the phone to her ear and was talking loudly into the receiver.
“People say they want to help,” Karyn said. “But . . .”
“I understand. What are you looking for?”
Karyn looked over at Donnie. She was going to force him to speak.
“We . . .” He glanced to Karyn for reassurance. “We’ve been trying to find out some things that happened a long time ago.”
“To your family.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Wasn’t there a family Bible, any kind of journal? Your father was a pretty literate man, I hear. He even wrote some things before he got busy being mayor.”
Donnie looked down at the table, let his eyes follow the line of the lakeshore on the map to where it led to the town of Hoel’s Dam.
“Some things were missing, weren’t they?” Esbeth said.
His head snapped up to the woman, to see if she was giving him that mind-reading look the fake fortune-tellers use. But she was looking at him as if going over some things in her mind, sorting them out.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “There were a few things missing, maybe a journal that’d been in the family for as long as I can remember. But there were a lot of people coming in and out of the house. I thought . . . well, I thought the sheriff might’ve taken it. I didn’t want to say anything.”
“I understand. But I think you can rest easy there. He’s not the kind of person who’d do that without asking. He may seem a little slow to you, but he’s not. He just works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, though you didn’t hear that from me. He kind of plods his slow way to Bethlehem.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just an old person’s way of talking, one who’s read too many books. Besides, there’s no way of knowing that the person who killed your father didn’t take some things. Oh, I’m sorry to talk about your father that way.”
“That’s okay. I’m more used to the idea of him being gone forever now, than I was at first.”
“Do you think something like a journal might’ve been what the person was after?” Esbeth’s round, sincere face was full enough of genuine concern to keep him talking.
“I hadn’t thought about it. But maybe that’s so. Nothing else makes sense. People liked or disliked Dad, but not enough to kill him. At least I didn’t think so.”
“What else could there be that might’ve been that valuable to someone, valuable enough to maybe kill for it?”
“That’s what we don’t know.” He looked at Karyn, but she didn’t quite know how to respond to this lady.
“Someone took all the old microfiche copies of the newspaper too, we think,” Karyn said. “Fearing didn’t have a newspaper then, and the library there didn’t store the Hoel’s Dam in either paper or microfiche.”
“Is that what Florence said?”
Donnie nodded.
“She’s kind of new here, relatively, that is. Maybe she doesn’t know everything.”
“Or care enough to help,” Karyn said.
“Some people ignore their fellow man without knowing they’re doing it. I know I’ve been guilty a few times myself,” Esbeth said. She pushed at the arms of her chair and stood up. Donnie kept expecting her to rise some more, but she was done getting up when her head was still even with his shoulder. Esbeth closed the books and atlases and picked up her notebook; then she tilted her head and took off in a slow deliberate walk toward the back of the library. She paused at a drinking fountain where she bent and took a short sip while they caught up to her. She stepped a bit closer and said, “A lot of people don’t come back this way much. There’s an annex built on to store stuff they just didn’t feel like pitching. Up north, they’d have stuff like this in a cellar. But you know there aren’t many cellars in all of Texas. I doubt if Florence comes back here much, and I know she doesn’t to dust.”
Donnie followed her, as surprised at himself as Karyn must be. But there was something about Esbeth that made him relax and open up. He doubted if he could explain it, or even if she could herself. It was a manner that told him instinctively that she was there to support and instruct. But she was one of those people who nudged other people to discover things themselves. He bet himself she’d been a teacher once, and a heck of a good one.
Esbeth led them down a long, narrow hallway to a room that was crammed with older books and magazines. This was where they kept the thousands of yellow-spined National Geographics, now that there were computers out in the big lobby that could read the CD-ROM versions. Books were squeezed into all the available shelf space, and boxes of magazines, and black buckram-bound copies of McClure’s Magazine and Harper’s Magazine. Esbeth seemed to know right where to head. She eased around a row of shelves and went to the far back corner, reached low, and drew out a wide and tall cloth binder. She carried it to a low shelf, where Donnie noticed there was no dust. She’d been back here looking before. He watched her flip through the pages back to an issue that was all about the dam being built.
He read the headline and the first few paragraphs before he asked, “What’s this have to do with anything?”
“That’s when the trouble started,” Esbeth said.
Donnie looked over at Karyn, but she was still reading. When she looked up at Esbeth, she said, “It tells about how the River Authority had to compensate people for the bottomland in the valley it was taking from them, when it filled the valley with what’s now the lake. But that wouldn’t affect the Spurlocks. They’ve always lived up here in the hills.”
“Exactly.” Esbeth said it as if a star pupil had just performed well.
“Yeah, our house’s sat right where it is, long before the town of Hoel’s Dam ever formed. I always understood the town was just a place for the workers on the dam to live, while the construction was going on. There’s all kind of talk about how lawless it got for a while, with hookers and everything else. There’s even a plaque over by the dam that kind of brags that only thirteen men died in the building of the dam.”
“And that includes Edgar Hoel, who’s now part of the concrete mix,” Esbeth said.
“But what about . . .” Donnie stopped himself.
“The diamonds?” Esbeth said.
“How could you possibly know about that?” Karyn looked at her the way Donnie had, when she’d known about the missing journal.
“That’s what seems to have everyone standing on their ears.” Esbeth pointed down at the pages again. “But finish the story. It’s all part of what shapes up later.”
She stood back a couple of steps and let them read through the story. Donnie glanced up and caught her smiling when they hesitated and reread the table of land ownership of the big spreads that were going to be relocated in the highlands.
When he and Karyn looked up at last, he said, “A lot of this is common knowledge. Everyone knows that the Hoels were the biggest spread. The Granites had a big place too, but nowhere nearly as large as what Bill Hoel had.”
“I’m not saying there are any pat answers here,” Esbeth said. “You have to follow the story along for a ways, before any of it forms a bigger picture.”
She bent low again and pulled out two more folders. These, Donnie noticed, covered ten years later. She opened them and spread them out.
Donnie and Karyn started reading again. Karyn, who read more quickly than Donnie, looked up after a while and said, “It’s kind of hard to tell what was really going on. But it seems like Bill Hoel was doing a lot of complaining that the land they’d given him wasn’t nearly as good as what they’d covered up with water. He wanted compensation, but it doesn’t sound like he got any.”
“You’re ready for the final one of these,” Esbeth said.
They had to skim through about a month’s worth of the papers, though it looked like three weeks of it had been a pretty hot time. Donnie was the first to look up this time. “Sure seems like a lot of people ended up dead.”
“Fourteen, by my count,” Esbeth said.
“One or two of the Granites, even more of the Hoels. Then some other people who just got involved on one side or the other. What the heck was going on, some kind of feud?” Karyn said.
Donnie looked over at Esbeth. “It doesn’t say what started it all, or share anything, really. Except that Bill Hoel isn’t complaining anymore. But where’s the talk about any diamonds? These stories make it sound like some temporary madness passed over the town, one that went away again after a while and a few people were killed.”
“That’s the thing about reading this kind of thing. It’s only one source, one perspective. You have to read what’s not on the page as much as what is.” The look on Esbeth’s face was as enigmatic as some stone Buddha.
“At least you didn’t call either of us ‘Grasshopper’ when you said that,” Karyn said.
“But it’s a riddle, all the same,” Esbeth admitted. “I haven’t put it all together myself. But you have to remember who’s running the newspaper by this time.”
“I caught that,” Donnie said.
“And that’s all you have?” Karyn looked at the yellowed pages of the newsprint.
Donnie was watching Esbeth more closely. She showed genuine excitement, a thrill of the hunt in digging through this old stuff. She’d been pouring over atlases and finding all this stuff everyone else thought no longer existed. But, why? In a way, it seemed useless and fruitless digging. But he knew he was just as excited, but only because he was pulling at threads that led all the way back to his own grandfather, Hank Spurlock. What made someone like Esbeth work at it so diligently on her time off? He couldn’t understand it, but he had to admit that it attracted him, that it was the kind of thing he wished he was better at. For the first time in a long time, he thought about going to college, learning to do real research.
Esbeth was putting away the folders. When she straightened, she gave a short huff and shared the kind of look a teacher does when class is over for the day. They started out of the room and were going up the hallway, when Karyn turned and spoke softly to Esbeth.
“Is it that unusual for it to be so hard to find out what happened a few years back?”
“You must know that no one loves their history like Texans—just love it. About every town has some small museum—all, that is, except this one. No county history that’s survived has been written in detail, except a small blurb in the Texas Handbook that Herb Hoel may well have written. Almost all records for Hoel’s Dam, even at Fearing, have clean skedaddled. No, that’s not normal, dear.”
“Do you think someone stole the microfiche copies of the paper, thinking they’d destroyed some of the city’s history?”
Esbeth smiled. “It’s possible. Think of it this way. A city without a history has an opportunity of rewriting it the way they’d like it to be.”
“Who do you mean when you say ‘they’?” Donnie asked.
Esbeth’s eyes lit in an amused sparkle. “There, my young friend, you’ve touched the needle on the nub of the issue.”