CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The dawn did not break that morning, nor did it announce its arrival with any color at all; the day merely began.

The atmosphere was unusually quiet, my cowboys having raised more than a little ruckus once all the work had been done and after placing second in the team roping event that they had all but written off. As a result, I was more than a little surprised to see Tom Jenkins shamble out of the bunk-house at such an early hour.

“You look like you’re re-herding your own sheep, son,” I called out.

The first shafts of pale sunlight cut between the tall pine boughs and the chatter of goldfinches drifted out of the forest shrubs.

“Just getting a head start on the day, sir,” he said.

“Thought you might’ve earned a couple extra winks after your big win,” I said, and offered him my hand in congratulations.

He shook it and his face broke into an uncertain grin, then he looped his thumbs through his belt loops and looked into the overgrowth.

“I don’t like to air out my feelings too loudly,” he said. “I don’t want to jinx nothin’.”

“Winning never feels quite like you think it’s going to, does it?”

He dug a furrow in the loose pine needles with his boot heel and nodded.

“No, sir. It don’t.”

He shifted his weight and began to turn away.

“Beats the hell out of losing though,” I said.

Tom Jenkins’s face broke into a full smile that began with his eyes and slowly migrated across his entire face.

“Yes, sir. It certainly does do that.”

The clock tower down the street from the office was chiming nine when I phoned Chris Rose at CID in Salem.

“I’m telling you, it was damned odd,” I said. “Harper Emory seemed genuinely scared when he laid eyes on Spinell. He nearly threw a shoe trying to get away.”

“Carl Spinell is a criminal,” Rose said. “And a sack of shit.”

“There was more to it than that.”

“Nobody’s gonna blunt no nails hammerin’ into that man’s intellect.”

“Which man are you referring to?”

“Pick one,” he said, then laughed, and I heard him take a bite of something; my guess was a jelly doughnut. “But I was talking about Harper Emory.”

“Regardless,” I said. “It struck me as odd.”

“Maybe Emory ain’t afraid of Carl Spinell. Maybe he’s afraid of being seen talking to you.”

I waited while I heard him leaf through the pages of what sounded like a sizable report.

“We got ballistics on the .38 used in the Doc Brawley murder,” he said. “It matches one of the weapons you recovered off the dead shitweasels from your motel. We matched one of their knife blades to the postmortem stab wounds as well.”

He paused for effect. Through the open window in my office I could hear the steel wheels of the Southern Pacific echo between the canyon walls as it slowly climbed the grade.

“Cort Scheer, the dead hepcat—the guy you called Duck-tail?” Rose said. “He has a sheet that includes acts of arson.”

“And the fingerprints off the Polaroid?”

“Slow down, pard. Did you hear what I just told you?”

“Yes, I heard you,” I said. “I’ll take it to the DA.”

“Why don’t you sound pleased?”

“Because my suspects are already dead,” I said. “And they can’t tell us why they murdered Abel Brawley, torched the record store, or who it was that ended up smoking their worthless asses.”

“Two of those matters are now concluded, Ty. I usually celebrate when I can close a case. Don’t complicate your life.”

I pressed the handset to my ear and picked up the phone housing from my desk, the wall cord snaking behind me as I carried it to where I could talk while I looked out the window.

“It isn’t complicated,” I said. “When the facts change, I’ll change my mind.”

I heard him sigh and shut the file he’d been reading from.

“I’ll send this stuff over to you,” he said.

“What about the Polaroid?”

“When did we last talk about that?” he asked. “Friday afternoon? It’s only Monday morning, Ty. I told you these things take time.”

“Either you reach out to the lab or I will,” I said.

“I have cultivated a civilized and respectful relationship with them over the years. Don’t you go screwing that up for me.”

“I’m out of time, Chris. I can feel it.”

“I’ll call ’em and get back to you.”

I scanned the files on my desk and found the handwritten notes I’d made while at the high school library regarding Galanis United. I dialed the company’s Nevada number, let it ring a dozen times, but no answer. I broke the connection and stepped into the break room to refill my coffee, then dialed the number again and achieved the same result.

I tried to ignore the inchoate rage that I felt rising inside my chest, and rifled through my Rolodex until I landed on the card bearing the name and number for Ambervalia Corporation. I immediately recognized the west Texas accent of the man who answered when I’d called before.

“Who is Galanis United?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. A Greek soccer team?”

“Your firm does business with—”

“Am I speaking to the sheriff of that pissant town in Oregon?”

I chose not to answer, silently enduring several seconds of labored breathing from a man who had turned complacency and lethargy into a career path. Whatever the true nature of his relationship or responsibilities for Ambervalia was anybody’s guess.

“You’ve got to stop calling this number. I’m serious,” he said. “Why don’t you save yourself the long-distance charges and pester that lawyer who works for us up in your neck of the woods.”

“I don’t think I heard you correctly, bubba,” I said.

“Let me try and come at this a different way: If that asshole up there wants to answer your questions, I guess it’s up to him. Beyond that, you leave me out of it from now on, you hearing me correctly now?”

“Give me his name, and I’ll do my best.”

“And nobody calls me ‘bubba’.”

“Just give me the name.”

I could hear the man wheeze as he rifled through his desk drawers.

“It’s in here somewhere,” he said. “Yankee name. Niles? Nevin? Nelson …”

“Nolan?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Nolan Brody?”

“Bull’s-eye.”

I turned off the county two-lane, and sped across the long, narrow entry to Nolan Brody’s estate, my rear tires sliding sideways on the crushed rock. Brody’s MGB convertible was parked at an angle between the fountain and the front door of his house, and I skidded to a stop just short of his bumper. I leaped down from the cab and left my truck running, took the portico stairs two at a time.

I badged Brody’s manservant and pushed past him as he cracked open the front door, and left him staring after me as I stalked down the hallway in search of his boss. I finally located Brody in a large study I had not been invited into on my previous visit.

Like the rest of the house, the room was expensively furnished, but more masculine in that it was paneled in burnished mahogany from the floor all the way to the cathedral ceilings more than twenty feet overhead, where exposed beams were upheld by hand-carved corbels fashioned into the images of cherubim. An antique billiard table occupied the center of the floor, midway between a leather sofa and club chair setup and the mirror-backed bar that spanned the entire width of the room. In a dwelling whose sole purpose was to serve as a stage prop, this room reeked not only of cigar smoke, but of a flagrant masculinity so impudently out of character it seemed like some sort of mockery.

Nolan Brody was leaning on the bar, a pool cue in one hand and a smoldering Panatela in the other, watching Carl Spinell line up a shot.

“Hello, Sheriff,” Brody said. “I didn’t hear the doorbell. Did Manring show you in?”

Spinell glanced at me from beneath heavy brows, then returned his focus to the cue ball without a word.

“I let myself in,” I said.

Spinell tapped the cue ball and sunk the five off two cushions. He smirked as he slid around the side of the table to set up another shot.

“How very familiar of you,” Brody said.

“Who is Ambervalia Corporation?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How about Galanis United?”

“Never heard of them either.”

Spinell snapped off another shot and came out of his crouch. I could see that he wasn’t smirking anymore.

“That’s all I needed from you,” I said. “I’ll see myself out.”

“You won’t stay for a game?”

Brody was doing his best to feign impassivity, but something flickered behind his eyes.

“Thanks just the same,” I said. “But I only stopped by to see whether you’d lie straight to my face.”

“You know, sometimes you can be a very difficult man to understand. I have no idea what to make of that statement.”

“Try this one then, Nolan: You’d better hope the gallows burns down before I come back for you.”

I could hear the tractor mowing the ryegrass in the North Pasture when I returned home that afternoon. The air smelled sweet and ripe with summer and freshly cut grama, and the magnolia tree was dropping its spent blossoms on an unfamiliar car parked in the drive.

I heard footsteps on the gravel as I gathered my belongings off the bench seat of my truck.

“Dad?” Cricket said. “I thought I heard someone in the driveway and I was hoping it was you.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“It’s her volunteer day at the Thrift Shop.”

Cricket’s cheeks were flushed, and she kept glancing behind her, toward the back door to the mudroom that she’d left open.

“Whose car is that?” I asked. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s Dawn’s car.”

“Dawn from the commune?”

“I found her sleeping in it right outside of our gates,” she said. “She told me she pulled off the road by the dry wash and tried to hide it. She’s really scared of something, but she won’t tell me what it is.”

I followed Cricket inside the house and found Dawn where she had wedged herself into the corner of our living room sofa. She was rocking slowly back and forth, arms encircling her knees, her bare feet drawn up tight beneath her. Her hair was wet, dampening the collar of a blouse that I recognized as my daughter’s, and she smelled strongly of Cricket’s shampoo. The girl’s expression was a mask of complete desolation.

“I lied to you,” Dawn said when she saw me come in.

“About the photos I showed you?”

She nodded.

“I knew Peter Troy. I called him ‘Sweet Pete.’ I think I might have even loved him once.”

“We’re talking about the victim from the fire?”

“I gave him the Saint Christopher necklace that caused the scar.”

She turned her head toward the picture window that looked out over the office and corral.

“Those guys you showed me in those pictures,” she said. “They did that to him.”

“The bald one and the fifties greaser?”

She nodded.

“How do you know it was them?”

“I just do. They came around the shop a couple times and said things to me and the other girls.”

I followed Dawn’s empty gaze beyond the window. Caleb’s horse was saddled, reins wrapped around the fence post, his lever-action Winchester tucked into a scabbard strapped along its withers. Predators had been picking off newborn calves over the past few days. When she turned her eyes back on me, they held equal parts fear and despondency.

“It started so beautiful out there,” Dawn said. “When it all turned to shit, it happened so fast.”

Cricket sat down beside her and gently laid a hand on her shoulder.

“I mean, if the people around town thought hippies could do all this horrible stuff,” Dawn said, “what would the squares do to me? We all started thinking that way. Things were never the same again after the fire. It was like Deva just gave up.”

She paused and closed her eyes. When she opened them again a few moments later, no words would come, though she tried, and she buried her face in the palms of her hands and wept.

“I wish you had said something to me, Dawn,” I said.

Dawn dropped her hands from her face, watched the dust motes in the light from the window as she recovered her breath.

“Deva said he had it all in hand, but it was too late by then,” she said. “They’re going to come looking for me, you know.”

“Deva Ravi?”

Something dark passed over her and she shook her head.

“Mac,” she said. “Or Larry. Maybe even Aurora. I don’t know. But if they find me, they’re going to hurt me bad.”

“Let my dad help you.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then tell it to me,” I said. “All of it. Every detail. From the beginning. Can you do that?”

Dawn gauged me for several long seconds, then turned her eyes on Cricket. I saw her squeeze Dawn’s hand again when she nodded her head.

I borrowed my daughter’s cassette deck, and all three of us moved into the kitchen and seated ourselves at the breakfast table. Outside the window a scarlet hummingbird hovered beside the feeder and seemed to study our faces before darting away.

Cricket placed the tape deck at the center of the table and plugged in the mic. Dawn ran her tongue along her dry, cracked lips and stared at the machine.

“I’ll get you a glass of water, and leave you with my dad,” Cricket said, and stepped over to the sink.

“No, no,” Dawn said. “Please stay.”

I pressed the Record button and tested the sound.

“Can we begin with your legal name?” I asked.

“Mila Kinslow.”

“My name is Sheriff Tyler Dawson of Meriwether County,” I said. “The file reference for this interview is MC1803 stroke D. This is side one.”

Dawn reached across the table, laid her palm on my daughter’s wrist, and shut her eyes.

“Whenever you’re ready, Mila,” I said, using this unaccustomed name for the first time. I suspected that I would always think of her as Dawn. “Take your time.”

Dawn’s eyelids began to flutter, as though she was dreaming. She drew a deep breath and began to speak.

“I remember spending my sweet sixteenth birthday watching the lights flash on the Ferris wheel far below us, and the long line of cars idling outside those gates,” she began softly. Her tone glided into its native southern cadence and her posture and affect became almost childlike. “We was sitting on the porch of the old house, Momma and me …”