Tillis Macrory drove his truck through metropolitan Hoel’s Dam—population 7,566 and dropping—and on toward the only slightly larger town of Fearing. A glance in the mirror told him his bruises were almost completely faded away by now, but he didn’t much care for the rest of the expression he saw there. He focused on the road, and on the rough country covered with scrub that whizzed past. It was a day full of portent. The sky was the off-chartreuse that can signal the near presence of tornadoes, or, at the least, a coming storm of the kind able to register on the Richter scale.
His white hat hung at home on a peg, and the badge made of a Mexican silver coin was tucked in the drawer where he kept his loose change. The badge had the smooth heft that came from having a bit of lead mixed in with the silver. It was the first time in eleven years he’d gone anywhere on an errand related to work without wearing it. He should’ve felt lousy. But he didn’t, nor did he know exactly why.
* * * * *
It was Lieutenant Tim Comber wearing the white hat and silver badge this time in the sheriff’s office, when Eldon and one of his other deputies led Morgan Lane out of the hallway that went back to the holding cells.
The gambler was loading items into his pockets from a manila envelope, while Comber took in the clean, starched white shirt and lean, hard build. He’d heard Lane’s shirt was spattered with blood when he’d been brought in, but Tim gave only a brief, passing thought to where Lane might’ve gotten his laundry done while in jail.
“I’ve heard that those Granite boys were as tough as could be found around here,” Tim said. He sat on the corner of one of the desks, watching Lane’s smooth, fluid movements, in contrast to the sheriff’s banging-around over at his desk.
Lane looked up, his eyes half-closed and sleepy, but even more dangerous when like that. “Reputation’s a funny thing that way, isn’t it?”
Tim shrugged. He looked over at Eldon, but he spoke to Morgan Lane. “Come this Thursday night, do you know where I’m going to be?”
Morgan didn’t answer, so Tim answered for him.
“I’m going to be outside your place, and if there’s a game going on in there, it’d better be tiddly-winks, or something even tamer, else I’ll be coming through that door with half-a-dozen crazed Rangers who make Tillis look like the sane one of the bunch.”
“That Macrory’s going as wild on you as a peach orchard boar, is he?” Eldon said.
“He’s in the right environment for it.” Tim stared at the sheriff. “And I’d be careful yourself, or your own re-election chances won’t be worth a bucket under a bull.”
* * * * *
Esbeth had her hands in the dishwater past her wrists, while keeping a weather eye on the sky out the window above the sink, when the doorbell rang. Something nasty was coming in from the northeast. The wispy ends of clouds were jerked up at the ends like so many cracks of a whip. The flat pan of the sky was shifting to an odd off-pea color that couldn’t mean anything good.
She swung the front door open and said, “Well, what’s got you out raising more hell than a catfish in a dry lake?”
Tillis Macrory stood there; he wore no hat, so he didn’t have to hold that in his hands. She took in the way he was dressed—no badge, and a short-sleeved denim shirt with the tail hanging outside his jeans. She bet herself he’d have to be careful sitting, since he almost certainly had a gun tucked in his belt at the small of his back.
“I believe you’ve been around Eldon too long. You’re starting to sound a bit like him,” he said.
“Oh, don’t wish that on a little old lady whose pear shape has gone pumpkin. Don’t just stand there. Come on in.”
“You know, that kind of humor with someone like Eldon is a bit of a misdirection signal. It usually means a person’s got something to hide.”
“Maybe I’m just trying to cheer myself up, after having my car smashed.” She looked for a response, but he just nodded slowly. He was as serious as she’d seen him.
He settled into the couch and let her have her chair.
“Coffee?”
He shook his head.
“Not in the mood for small talk, eh? I heard about . . . well, at least Eldon was saying that . . .”
“I’m not here officially, if that’s where you’re going with that.”
“I gathered that much. You didn’t come here to explain why you’ve been acting weird lately, have you?”
“Weird’s such an overworked and relative word.”
Esbeth, for a roundish woman, knew she had an almost-delicate shrug, which she shared now. “How’s wacky, daffy, unpredictable? What happened?”
“I may be off-duty, but I’m still interested, very interested.” He rubbed one restless, wide hand across a jean-clad thigh.
“I don’t know why that’d bring you here.”
“Why do you think Eldon hired you, Esbeth?”
“You don’t think it’s because I ended up helping solve more cases than he did?”
Tillis’ head shook slowly.
“No? Okay, I know better. It was to keep an eye on me, probably.”
“You’ve got superior instincts to him. He may resent that too. You ever sense that?”
“You mean like the time I overheard him say about me that, ‘Any blind hog can find an acorn once in a while.’” She tried to say it without any little painful hitch in her throat, and almost made it.
“You think he ever says anything original?”
“Don’t matter out here. No one would know if he did. People latch onto things, like a good luck piece. They use the same patches of words every day, makes them feel comfy.”
“The way the late Thirsty Mills was always spouting Shakespeare?”
“Education’s supposed to be a steppingstone to greater things. But when it’s the peak of everything you ever did or accomplished, it’s worse than pitiful. But you didn’t come here to talk about the flotsam and jetsam that’s washed up here, did you?”
He leaned forward on the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. “I want to get back to that part about your instincts, Esbeth. I want you to tell me what you really think is going on.”
“Now, why would I do that?”
“Because there’s a sense of urgency building that someone like you just has to feel.”
“What makes you think . . .”
“I’m not here to think, Esbeth. Sorry to be harsh, but it’s nut-cuttin’ time. Now, what do you really think is going on? And don’t give me the watered-down crap you shoveled back there in the sheriff’s office.”
Her head started to snap back half an inch until she realized she was coming close to faking. This wasn’t Eldon, after all. “I don’t owe that to you, or even any on-duty lawman, no matter what you think.”
“If something happens to Donnie or Karyn out of this, I’m going to lay that guilt trip on you all the remainder of your life.”
“That’s low. I don’t think you could stoop to that.”
“Look, I envy those kids their youth, their childish intensity, even that they’re the kind of people and at the age where patriotism, commitment, loyalty come out of their mouths with a purity of raw innocence I can only imagine. But I’ll damn sure use the threat of something hurting them in order to protect them, if that’s what’s necessary.”
“That’s still low.”
“I can go lower if I have to, so quit stalling.”
“You could’ve dug up some of it yourself, you or Eldon.”
“I may have the time. I just don’t have the connections, now. Besides, if I know you, you’ve already done enough groundwork to have a better big picture of this than anyone. And don’t say I won’t learn anything if you just tell it to me. I’m here to listen and learn, and that’s all the discovery I have time for now.”
She sighed, looked down at the slightly worn throw rug in front of the chair, wishing she’d made that coffee after all. Then she straightened and leaned back in her chair. “What do you know about the stock market?”
“I thought we were going to talk about diamonds.”
“We’ll get there, but we’ll cover gold first, too.”
His forehead showed a concentration wrinkle, but he was a good listener, and could give an interested and encouraging look.
“The way it is with stocks is that people hear about one that’s hot, or get wind of a merger or a new product, and the stock can soar. Sometimes it gets caught in a groundswell of buying and goes higher than the stock is worth. Then a few of those people holding shares sell out and make money, while the others get stung. These days, with a lot of amateur day traders out there, more people get stung than don’t.”
The concentration wrinkle on Tillis’ forehead deepened, but he said nothing.
“The point is that a lot of investment is speculation, and a lot of that happens because of rumor or innuendo. What you have to think about here is a little backwards history lesson. Back in the days of the early gold and silver strikes in the West, a rumor almost always got out, and a little pocket of America would go crazy. And that’s just with the rumor. If the strike was real, things got crazier.”
“I’ve read a bit of history, Esbeth.”
“Then this pill should be a bit sugarcoated for you. You probably know that the people who make money on a gold or silver strike aren’t always the ones who made the discovery.”
Tillis nodded, though a touch of impatience flashed in a glimmer across his face before he suppressed it.
“There were nabobs back in the gold and silver strike days—guys who got rich and spent fast. Most of them were broke a year or two later, some of them in less time than that. There were guys who sold out their whole claim for a bottle or two of cheap whiskey. But the guys that really interest me are the ones on the fringes, those who bought and sold futures, got little, tiny pieces of the mines and speculated with them, kind of like today’s stock market. First the miner would get an assay, taking the best possible sample, and then he might sell out shares on the mine, to hedge his bet. He might hit a ledge, or the whole pocket could dry up and he’d have nothing more than what he made from selling the shares.”
To his credit, Tillis didn’t glance at his watch, but his lips did press together a hair more tightly.
“In addition to the chiselers, dealers, hookers, and all kinds of suppliers that crowded around any strike town, there were those hanging on the fringes making money. A strike lights up a whole area, and people’re pulled in from all over.”
“Could you localize that?”
“I’m getting there. The so-called gold strike down in the valley, under what’s now Lake Kiowa, never was a strike. It was a way for the Granite clan to seem to come onto their wealth. They were simple highwaymen at best—looters, burglars, whatever you want to call them. It’s nothing to be too shocked at. I’m sure a lot of family trees have a pirate or a congressman farther down on an earlier limb.”
“The Granites?”
“I wouldn’t worry about them too much at the moment. Their cannon’s spiked for now. But they were part of all this falling into place.”
“We going to get to the diamonds?”
“Rein in your horse, there. I’m building to it. I bet you’d build a house without a foundation. Anyway, you know all about everyone moving up to the top of the valley when it was flooded in and the lake was formed. That left the Granites with slightly better land, the Spurlocks with new neighbors, and Old Bill Hoel with land he wasn’t all that happy about, even though there was twenty-two thousand acres of it.”
“You think Hank Spurlock found those diamonds on Bill Hoel’s land?”
She ignored the question. “Now, I’m going to have to go a whole different direction on you, so don’t get your shorts in a wad.”
Tillis eased himself back upright on the sofa.
“Most big strikes¾the gold around San Francisco, silver around Virginia City, gold in Colorado¾all happened in the mid-nineteenth century, except the gold rush in Alaska, which wasn’t until eighteen ninety-two. I hope that wasn’t a yawn you just stifled. Bear with me if I’m belaboring anything for you here. Anyway, most of the strike areas had the kind of paper-trading frenzy I’m talking about that we associate with the stock market today. People even bought up land at inflated prices. It was a seller’s market.”
“By eighteen seventy-one, there were some successful mineral rights men in San Francisco who had experience in buying and selling paper like that, trafficking it as far away as London. To name a key handful, there was George D. Roberts, W. C. Ralston, William W. Lent, and Asbury Harpening.”
Esbeth was looking up into the corner of the room as she recalled the names, then looked back at Tillis and caught him staring.
“You’ve got a remarkable memory.”
“People think I’m the teacher type. But I’m really a student, have been all my life. It’s what keeps me going. Now, are you going to let me finish?”
His mouth tightened shut again.
“These men had all had success with land and mineral speculation before and had become bankers, which set them up just fine for what followed. A couple of dusty prospectors named Philip Arnold and John Slack showed up with a bag full of what seemed to be diamonds, even a few rubies and sapphires. They needed backing to mine the strike they’d located. They were sufficiently coy about seeking the backing, enough to lure the men into a frenzy of eagerness. The potential backers even had the stones found so far verified by Mr. Tiffany himself in New York. The backers were a bit more surprised when they got a glowing report from him. When word of that got out, a lot of others wanted to invest too, but first the backers lined up a mining expert, Henry Janin, and they headed out into the California wilderness to confirm the diamond fields. Arnold and Slack led them in zigzags all over the place until they were someplace up about seven thousand feet above sea level. Then they started through the fields. The dirt was hard and packed, but when the backers and the mining expert scraped, they came up with rough gems of their own. They left one of the prospectors and the rest returned, while backers went to New York to organize a ten-million-dollar company, and one of the investors was Baron Rothschild. It took a full year before another geologist,” Esbeth tilted her head and looked up at a cobweb along the edge of the ceiling, “Clarence King, tracked his way to the Sierras and found traces of the diggings. One of the gems he uncovered was even partially faceted. That brought the whole business crashing down in what’s been referred to as the Great Diamond Hoax.”
Tillis let his head rest back on the back of the couch and looked up at the ceiling where Esbeth had been looking. “Is this yarn actually going anywhere?”
“Patience, dearheart. That’s just some of the set-up for our story. All the backers, it turned out, were innocent. But a fellow named Cooper eventually confessed to orchestrating the whole thing: buying rough, industrial diamonds in London by bulk, and helping the so-called miners salt the field by drilling holes and dropping a stone into each hole. Weather packed the soil back into place by the time the backers ever got to the field.”
“And you think Hank Spurlock . . .”
“If you’re going to finish the story for me, I needn’t bother.”
Tillis had leaned forward again. He caught himself and sat back.
“You’ve got to remember the climate around here when our little version got started. A lot of time had gone by since the California diamond hoax, not that a lot of people were informed anyway. There had also been a so-called gold fever ripple down in the valley before it was flooded. And, as recently as nineteen oh-six, diamonds were discovered as near to here as Arkansas, at Murfreesboro. By international standards, the Arkansas find was small, but it did open minds to the possibilities. Any questions so far?”
“Yeah, does this class have a recess?”
“If you need a bathroom break, just hold up fingers.”
“You don’t want to know what finger I’m thinking of.”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Go ahead.”
“If this sort of attitude continues, you’re going to forfeit any right to call me cranky.” She glared at him, but he was done talking for a while.
“What I’m going to say now enters the realm of hypotheses, based on a few known facts and a few givens.”
Tillis’ mouth opened, then shut.
“About fifty years ago the valley folks were moved up into the highlands and resettled. The Spurlocks were dominant up here, and their sway was usurped somewhat by the Hoels and Granites. Ten years later, Bill Hoel is complaining about his land not being near as good as what he had below. The soil wasn’t as good for grazing, he said, and the labor to maintain it was too high. He was ready to sell some of the twenty-two thousand acres he’d been given. About that same time, Hank Spurlock located diamonds, or so the story goes, on land in the area. I have it on reasonably good authority that his find was on the Hoel property.”
“Who?”
“Don’t even press that button. But now we get to the tricky part. Hank Spurlock disappears, but leaves a legacy story about the diamonds, and all the Spurlocks—Hugh, Denny, even Donnie now—have been charged with saying nothing and striving to get back Hank’s diamonds.”
“If there were any.”
“Oh, I think there were.”
“Salted ones?”
“I think that too.”
“How’re we going to ever prove any of this?”
“I don’t think you can.”
“You think Bill killed Hank and took over the mine? Is that why the property went off the market?”
“If I was a full-fledged officer of the law, I’d maybe look into the diamond markets. Most of them are in Amsterdam or Antwerp. You could see if anyone bought rough diamonds forty or more years ago.”
Tillis let out a slow puff of breath.
“Or you could see if someone sold the diamonds back, or if there’s diamond production, if someone’s selling diamonds at all that come from there.”
“You know that’d be a needle in a haystack, even if I was still in a position to do anything like that.”
“Yeah, I thought of that. Most of the diamonds sold at that time came through DeBeers. But who’s to say you could locate whoever sold or bought diamonds to someone like Bill. And if he’d been halfway clever enough to do that, he might’ve gotten his diamonds elsewhere. India and Russia had thriving businesses going by then, and were as likely to have the rough, industrial diamonds as DeBeers, since they were focusing on D Flawless stones by then.”
“You’ve done some homework. But it doesn’t help much, does it? That’s all you have, nothing more concrete than that?”
“I do have one little tidbit, not worth a lot, but it’s a scrap.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you remember when books in libraries used to have cards in the back?”
He nodded.
“The library here shifted their card catalog over to a computer at least five years ago.”
“But you found a book?”
“No. But there was a book, one written by Asbury Harpening, one of the backers of the Diamond Hoax, who sought to clear his name. The library had a copy, but it’s missing.”
“Like most of the history here.”
“But when the books were converted to the computer system, all the cards were kept. This library’s small enough it rarely throws away anything.”
“And?”
Esbeth reached down into her purse and brought out a small card with names written down in a list on one side. “Once I’d sweet-talked her a bit, Florence helped me find this. The last person to check out the book was Old Bill Hoel himself.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have?”
“I guess the library could zing him for the price of a new copy, if they wanted to. It took a few days to get a similar copy here on interlibrary loan for me to see just what was in the missing book. But it’s the tiny bit of glue that tells me Bill might be behind more of this than you’ve unearthed.”
“Okay, then. If what you say is true, and the whole diamond mine thing was a hoax to inflate the value of his land so he could sell it high, then he certainly didn’t take it off the market because he found a real mine. Why then did he suddenly not want to sell it?”
“Yeah, I pondered that a bit too. But think about this. What if he located a whole new source of labor?”
Tillis gave a small jerk, as if he’d been stung by the idea. But he didn’t seem quite as surprised by the idea as Esbeth expected. His eyes widened for just a moment, and he looked at Esbeth. “That could explain a lot of things.”
“Seemed so to me.”
“But we can’t prove a thing. Can you imagine, given his clout, what’d happen if I stormed in there and tried to do anything based on what you just said?”
“It is kind of thin for that, isn’t it? That’s been my dilemma. Now it’s yours too, if it hasn’t already been on your mind.”
“Still, it’s something, if just a scrap, like you said. Is there anything else?”
Esbeth shook her head, tired from the storytelling and wishing more than ever she’d whipped up that pot of coffee.
Tillis said, “You realize that all this may make you the first historical detective?”
“At my age, that’s no surprise. But if you’d read your history, you’d know it’s no first. All historians are detectives of one sort or another.”
Tillis stood slowly, as if he’d become part of the sofa. But with each step he took toward the door he seemed to energize again, until he had the bounce of a dog in the back of a truck about to be put on the scent. Maybe he was getting a sliver of hope out of all that.
He stepped outside and Esbeth looked past his shoulder at the sky. They were both surprised that the threat of storm that had been there had skipped around the town, and that the sky was now a partially overcast and pensive pale blue. The edge of the sky, where the sun was nearing the horizon, was taking on a coppery hue.
“You mind hearing one more thing from someone as old and as crusty as me?”
He turned and looked at her, and took an extra step down the porch steps until their eyes were close to level. “Go ahead and say it,” he said.
“I think there’s something about this one that you needed, something that rattles you to your deeps. And it comes at a time when that’s just the wake-up call in life you craved.”
“Are you talking about . . .”
“No, not her. Though she’ll be part of it before it all settles. You wait and see.”
“You know what?”
“No.” The sun poked past a cloud and she had to squint.
“If you’d lived back in Salem, Massachusetts you’d have probably had a pretty toasty time of it.” He reached up to tip his hat to her, then realized he wasn’t wearing one, so he touched three fingers above his right eye, gave a short wave, and turned to walk down toward his parked truck.
Under her breath, Esbeth muttered, “I’d have probably given those old witch hunters back then all they wanted of it, too.”
* * * * *
Tillis’ truck pulled away, and Esbeth was ready to rush out to the borrowed car and take off. But first, she made herself go inside and heat up some water to make a cup of instant coffee. While the water was heating, she changed into jeans, a worn but respectable white linen blouse, and comfortable shoes. She watered all the plants and checked the windows and doors. The preparations only heightened her own growing anxiety. She made herself sit still at the dinette and drink her coffee, and she even rinsed out the mug. Then she took the keys out of the drawer where she’d kept them out of sight of the Ranger, and she went out the walk to the car as if walking her last mile.
The car was a 1960 white Thunderbird that had seen better days. Well, Esbeth thought, so have I. When you borrow, you don’t get much ground for grousing. Her own car had been a twisted knot that was hard to look at as she’d visited it at the wrecking yard to get the last of her possessions and the odd map out of the glove box. The only good thing about it was that she hadn’t been in it at the time. Someone would have to do some real talking to convince her that her car being smashed hadn’t been a message to her to lay off, that her nosing had ruffled at least one set of feathers.
The paint on the old T-Bird had been worn thin, either by the Texas sun or too many washings. Inside, the upholstery had been sewed up enough times to look like the loser in a knife fight. She got in and opened the window. No air-conditioning—that figured. She started the car, and the engine rumbled with the rattling, loose roar of being six months past the need for a tune-up, on top of a partial muffler. She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. It had been a while since she had driven, and even with an automatic transmission her first few stops and starts kept her head bobbing. But then she settled down to a steady five miles under the speed limit.
“Go around,” she yelled out the window. “Indianapolis and Daytona are to hell and gone from here.”
Her face was flushed from either the wind or the state she was usually in while driving, full passive-aggressive attack. Driving was a painful and stressful ordeal for her. Only something pressing could get her out on the road with so many over-eager drivers. It’d be all right if she had the roads to herself. Was that a lot to ask?
“Get over in your own lane, or get a smaller car, and hang up that cell phone.”
The chief reason Esbeth had been so willing to leave the world of cars and driving behind not so long ago was her fear that it brought out her real personality, and at its full crankiness. And it wasn’t just her. Others were affected too, like the guy buzzing by now, who she was pretty sure wasn’t waving to her that she was number one.
She was almost exhausted by the time she got to the edge of Fearing and cut out onto the highway, heading over to the town of Hoel’s Dam.
With an open road in front of her, she, for a moment, pressed on the gas and the old car gave a clumsy but eager lurch, like a hound grabbing at a scent. She eased off on the gas and the roar reduced to a loud, steady burble as the wind swept in the window and tugged at her white hair. It was a conflict for her. One part hying to the sense of urgency, the other governed by the wish to get there in one piece, and with the car intact at that. As it was, even at the more regular speed, the steering wheel rattled all hard and jittery in her hands, like a skeleton trying to pull itself free from a body.
She pulled into the edge of Hoel’s Dam at last, and was physically exhausted after driving just the short distance. A long trip would have been the end of her, she figured. She did battle with the little dribs and drabs of traffic in town until she pulled up in front of the Victorian home that had served the Spurlocks all these years. A small cloud slid in front of the sun, and for a moment the house was vaguely sinister, but that could have been her thinking about Thirsty Mills being killed right beside the porch.
Esbeth banged on the front and back doors, and walked all the way around the house. She didn’t see Denny’s classic Dodge anywhere.
She had just gotten back to the front of the house after passing the spot where they’d found Thirsty when a noise made her look up.
A green truck screeched to a stop behind the car she’d borrowed. Logan Rainey hopped out of the door, slammed it shut, and came hurrying toward the house.
“Is he in there?” he shouted.
“No. And I guess this means he’s not over at your house either.”
Logan’s jaw tightened and he spun without answering and ran back to his truck. He was in it and peeling away before Esbeth realized it.
For a second, she stood in the sun and felt a bit dazed; then she plodded back toward the car. She knew where she had to go now, and was saying to herself, “I wish just once I could be a step ahead, instead of half a step behind.”
* * * * *
There was a line waiting all the way out to the parking lot at the Bluebonnet Cafe. But Tillis figured as long as he was in town he ought to give it a try, and he was able to squeeze past the line and get one of the open spots at the counter. Between meals like Donnie’s breakfast and the lunch he ordered, he was going to have to start thinking in terms of exercise and diet, though the thought of exercise made him grin and think of Gala.
He was cutting his first bite from a chicken-fried steak, and sweeping it through the edge of the mashed potatoes and gravy, when someone tapped on his shoulder. He looked up, and Logan’s face was bent down close, and it was nothing pretty to see. Any attempt Logan was making to mask his emotions was an utter failure. Tillis could read combined bits of panic, anger, fear, hurt, and a revolving door of other flickering insights into Logan’s mood he didn’t want right now.
“What?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Outside. Now.”
“Can I . . .”
“No. Come on.”
Tillis let out a long, slow breath and lowered his loaded fork back onto the plate. He rose and took out a bill big enough to more than cover lunch and tip, and then he followed Logan out the door, past the line of people still waiting, and through the sunny parking lot, until they stood in the shade of a live oak tree along the far end of the lot.
Logan waited until what looked like a young cattle ranch hand had helped his pregnant wife down from the high side of his diesel pickup truck cab and got her moving toward the line. When they were out of hearing, Logan’s head snapped to Tillis. “Karyn’s missing.”
“Oh, come on. She’s around somewhere.”
“No. I mean it. She’s gone.”
“She’ll come back.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you say that? What’d you do?”
“I . . . well, I’m not very proud . . .”
“What?”
“I locked her in her room.”
“Logan, you can’t do that, even if she wasn’t eighteen.”
Logan’s face flushed the brightest red Tillis had ever seen it. “Don’t you tell me what . . . oh, hell. It doesn’t matter. Just help me get her back, so I can talk to her.”
“You know, the reason they wrap dynamite so tight is that being repressed is what gives it the kick.”
“Can you spare me any retread farm wisdom you might’ve picked up from Eldon? Can’t you see I need your help here?”
Tillis started to speak and stopped himself. He examined the faintly hysterical look on the face of his friend, who normally shared very little of his inner feelings. “How’d you find me?”
“That deputy. She knew where you were.”
“Well, I didn’t tell her.”
“She knew just the same. I thought she might.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You really think you’re the only puppeteer around here pulling strings?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Look, I know I was out of line earlier the way I talked about her. I didn’t mean or intend any ethnic slurs.”
“But you made them, just the same.”
“And I’ll take the rap for that. But don’t you think your perspective might be compromised a bit, Tillis?”
“What am I missing?”
“Well, how she knows where everyone is all the time, especially you, and how Eldon jumps when she talks.”
“That’s . . .”
“Very unlike Eldon,” Logan said.
Tillis looked away and said nothing. He’d had some mixed thoughts about Gala himself.
“And Tillis . . .”
“What?”
“I’ve got to . . . got to tell you something else.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m the one who called Tim Comber to tell him about your fooling around with the deputy and the gambling. I hope I didn’t screw things up too much for you.” He was staring at the spot on Tillis’ shirt where he would normally be wearing a star.
Tillis stared off into the top of an old and stately live oak tree across the street for a few seconds, before he looked back at Logan and said, “If it makes you feel any better, you weren’t the only one.”