East Texas abounds with odd people and strange little old ladies. Being one myself, I can vouch for that. And Irene is an example. Also, Wolf was my dog for many satisfactory years, and I still miss him.
The first long cool breath of evening moved the tops of the chinaberry trees shading the yard. Far in the woods beyond the creek an owl began to hoot. It was definitely cooler, Irene decided. Time to take a break from painting.
She moved through the hot, dim house and dropped to sit on the kitchen steps, taking a small sketch pad out of her pocket. That squirrel in the oak, with his tail just so, would work into her next painting. She was sketching busily when the scream brought her head up and sent her sharp gaze toward the creek beyond the fishpond. Was that actually a human scream? Or a screech owl? Or maybe something else?
Irene rose and reached inside the kitchen door for her .410 shotgun. So far out in the country, thirty minutes from the nearest town, she’d taken care of herself for fifty-one years, and she intended to keep right on doing it. No country-bred person could ignore a cry for help, and there was nobody to send to check. By the time she called the sheriff and somebody got there, whatever was going on would be over and done with.
Wolf, three-quarters red wolf, one-quarter German shepherd, came after her as she strode toward the creek. Then, head high, nose at the alert, he moved ahead into the shadows of the sweetgum trees along the stream. He’d scare away any snakes that might be dozing beside the water.
She paused again, listening. That was no screech owl. It sounded like a woman, down there in the thickets along the river. She followed the dog as he lolloped along the cow-path that followed the creek bank. As she drew near the river, Irene took shotgun shells from the string bag that was always tied to the trigger guard of her .410, dropping them into her pocket loose. She always kept one in the chamber.
Two years before, a woman had been killed at the campsite where the road ended at the river. She had no intention of being another. Her mind busy with speculation, she crept on, wondering if some drug deal might have gone wrong at the camp. That had been one of the theories the sheriff mentioned when they found that woman’s body.
But it might be a bad child getting his tail swatted too. “Let’s not get all melodramatic,” she muttered, keeping Wolf’s cocked ears in view as he moved through berry vines and button willows to the borrow pit that bordered the road. She cut around the end of that and darted across the rutted mud track into the woods beyond. The camp was not far now, and she didn’t want to run into something unexpected.
Again she crept like an Indian, taking care not to crush through deadfall or whip betraying branches. When she came, stooping to stay below the level of the bushes, to the bluff that overlooked the campsite, she lay flat on her belly and stared. A club-cab pickup, its body jacked high on outsized tires, was parked at an angle, almost at the edge of the water. Behind it, a woman lay flat on her face, while a man wielded a stick that came down on her back with cracks like pistol shots.
“Damn whore, hold out on me!”
The words were plain, though they came in grunts between his blows. The woman, evidently too weak now to scream, didn’t even flinch. Was she dead? If not, she soon might be.
Irene slid the shotgun forward, pulled back the hammer, and took careful aim. She couldn’t kill someone from ambush, she knew, but she could scare the teetotal hell out of him. The gun, small as it was, had a roar like a cannon.
The stick, raised high for another lick at the woman, suddenly became a stub with an end fringed like some giant toothbrush. Stray shot from the pattern evidently struck the man about the face and neck, for he dropped his weapon and began feeling his skin. Then he stopped and stared around him, trying to find the source of the attack.
Irene flattened her face on the ground behind a sugarbush shrub. Wolf lay flat beside her, even his breathing almost silent.
“Damn!” He turned and dived into the pickup. The engine started with a roar; the wheels spun as he backed recklessly to gain turning room. When he gunned it again, the right front wheel ran over the woman’s leg, but she gave no sign she had felt it.
Her heart sick with dread, Irene waited until the last sound of the engine died away, swallowed by the trees along the winding track. Then she dropped off the bluff, Wolf beside her, and ran to kneel beside the injured woman.
Tatters of shirt hid the marks of the blows, but when Irene lifted the tail of it she saw that every bone in the woman’s back must be shattered. Blood had smeared and spattered. A knob of vertebra showed between the shoulder-blades, and splinters of bone were visible in several places.
“Best she’s dead, boy,” Irene said to her dog. “She’d be a cripple or worse, if she’d lived. We’d better get help. Miz Goren, up the road, has a phone, I think. We’ll go that way—it’s a lot closer and faster.”
She dropped the bloody shirt over the wreckage that had been a fairly pretty girl, and turned, holding the shotgun cradled in her arm. She reloaded, for who knew where that murdering bastard might be? It wasn’t like the old days when the river was a place for family outings.
Then she set out up the red-mud track, keeping to one edge where pine-straw made for better footing. Wolf kept looking back toward the dead woman until they turned the first bend; then he shot ahead and out of sight, cutting across the woods. Irene felt a hundred and fifty by the time she caught up with him, but it wasn’t far by then. Another quarter-mile and she’d be there.
The man, afoot now, came around the bend ahead. For an instant they were face to face, both shocked into silence. Then the burly fellow raised a pistol and took aim, at point-blank range.
Wolf shot forward, a sandy-red streak, and caught him by the elbow. The impact knocked the killer onto his back in the muddy road. Irene kicked the pistol into the woods and bashed the stock of the .410 against the side of the man’s head. He didn’t quite go out, but his eyes seemed to cock in different directions as she stepped around him.
“I could kill you,” she said, “and nobody would question an old woman shooting a man she saw commit murder, but that would put me just about at your level. I’m not ready to go that low. So you stay put. I’m going to shoot out the tires of your truck, when I pass it, so don’t think you can drive away.” She turned her back, though she knew Wolf would growl a warning if he came after her, and trudged away. Behind her she could hear uninspired but fervent cursing.
It was no trick to spot his pickup, for it loomed above the young pines along the logging track where he’d tried to hide it. He must have intended to finish off the witness who’d shot at him. She shot out his front tires.
Before she tried to explain the situation to the Widow Goren, Irene made the call. She knew from long experience that the widow’s combined deafness and senility would require many repeats of the story. Even then the old woman would get just about everything wrong. Still, it was little enough to give her some excitement to liven up her lonely days.
Much sooner than she expected, Cal Schneider, the local deputy, came screeching up in the Goren drive. “You call in a murder?” he yelled.
Irene got into the county car. “Right down beside the river. I saw it done, and I could have shot the man, but somehow I just couldn’t. I did knock him in the head, which may have slowed him down some.”
“I left him just about here,” she said, as they came to the spot where a wallow in the mud marked the place where the man had fallen. “My dog kept him from shooting me, but it looks like he’s run off into the woods. I plugged his tires when I saw his pickup back there on the logging track. It’s still there, so he didn’t even try for it.”
Cal put the car in gear again and they crept down the ruts, coming to a halt when the limp figure came into view. “I won’t get close—might mess up clues,” he said.
“Clues be damned,” Irene said. “I saw him beating her. Heard her scream way up at my place and came down the creek to see what was going on. He’s a great big fellow, maybe six-two or so. Square beefy face with pale blue eyes—bloodshot, though that might be from drink or drugs, I guess. He had on dark blue jeans—looked new. Plaid shirt, blue and tan and gray, with a torn pocket on the left side. Oh, and he’s got a brand new bruise alongside his forehead, shaped like a .410 butt.
“You can see his boot tracks right there along the riverbank. There’s also a plain track on that poor girl’s back, just above the hips.” Irene figured that ought to do it, even for a slow thinker like the deputy.
Cal took a look at the girl’s back and turned pale. “The Sheriff ought to be along pretty soon,” he said. “I think I’ll cover her up. Keep these damn flies off her a bit.”
Irene nodded. Already bluebottles were buzzing and gnats were clustered in dark patches on the bloody spots. She wasn’t terribly squeamish about such things, but Cal was young and still a bit tender, she thought.
“I’ll sit on the stump here,” she said. “You go and check on the radio. See if anybody can spot him crossing the road farther along toward the highway.”
Gratefully, the boy took her advice, and she saw that his color improved. He was too young for this, she thought.
* * * * * * *
It was almost midnight by the time Cal dropped her off at her front steps. She had never seen so much activity—ambulance, paramedics, deputies, the sheriff stepping cautiously about in his snakeskin boots, though whether that was to avoid messing up evidence or to keep mud off those boots she was hard put to tell.
She’d gone into Talbot with the sheriff to give her statement, following the ambulance and the wrecker that was towing the murderer’s pickup. She had described the murder in graphic detail, despite being just about tired to death by then. Her main worry had been whether Wolf found his way home all right, but he was waiting on the porch when she dragged herself up the steps at last.
Sheriff Cole had kept the .410 to test-fire, in case they needed to prove that the pattern of shot on the man’s face matched it. Cal had secretly lent her the pump shotgun he kept in the back of his car, as it belonged to him. He also gave her a half-box of twelve-gauge shells, which rattled in her pocket as she clumped into the house and, for the first time in years, locked her door behind her.
Cal’s words still echoed in her ears. “Miz Follett, that fellow’s still around someplace close. You bein’ alone like you are, I can’t feel right if you don’t have some protection. You keep a sharp eye out. Listen if your dog barks in the night too. That killer seen you close and plain. Lots of folks know what you look like, because your picture gets in the paper every time one of your paintin’s sells for big money.”
It had never occurred to her that the work she loved so well, which allowed her to live as she liked and where she liked, might betray her. She never bought newspapers. Though she was used to having interviewers find their way to her door, she never thought about what was done with all those notes they took or the cassettes they recorded as they asked their questions.
But if Cal, who knew as much about art as her dog, had seen her picture, then others had too. The thought made her cringe. She had always been a private person, and the thought of every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the county looking at her face and reading her words made her feel a bit sick.
Tonight, despite the heat, she must close and lock both doors. Not the windows—just as well be murdered in her bed as to suffocate there—but the doors had to be secured. Late as it was, she hated to take a bath, closed into the bathroom and unable to hear anything outside. She left the water running while she stood guard in the dark kitchen, and then she bathed quickly.
Before she went to bed she whispered to Wolf, who slept on the porch under her window, “You take care of things, Dog, you hear?”
His tail thumped the floor reassuringly, and she climbed into her bed feeling somewhat better. The shotgun leaning against the wall was also a comfort, and she drifted off quickly, exhausted by the trying day.
* * * * * * *
Wolf’s growl brought her up from fathoms deep in sleep. Yet some part of Irene had stayed alert, even as she slept. She was up at once, the gun in her hands, her light cotton robe pocket bulging with ammunition belted around her pajamas.
She knelt beside the screened window. “Wolf?” she whispered. His tail thumped a reply, and his softest growl came again.
Something was out there, that was sure. If it had been a bobcat or an armadillo, he’d have been off that porch and after it like a streak. This was something he didn’t quite know how to deal with; they’d lived together for twelve years, and she knew every sound he made as well as a mother knows her baby’s cries.
Irene slid into her moccasins and moved down the hall toward the back of the house, avoiding creaky spots in the hardwood floor. The back door opened quietly—she hated squeaks and kept its hinges well oiled—and she slipped down the length of the back porch to step off behind the rose trellis. Wolf had worn his private trail all around the foundation of the house. She ducked low and used that as she moved toward the front. Before she reached her bedroom wall, she heard an incautious crunch as someone stepped too heavily onto the gravel of the drive.
Now Wolf was with her, though she hadn’t heard him coming. His shoulder pushed against her hip as she crouched amid the bridal wreath and watched a dark shape moving toward the porch. She could feel the dog’s heart beating—or was that her own?
It was very dark; only the fact that she had moved without turning on a light allowed her to see the black-on-black movement in her front yard. The steps squeaked; then he was on the porch. She could hear a chorus of warped and ancient boards moving under his weight.
The night cracked apart with noise as he kicked in the front door. “Old woman,” he yelled, “I’ve come to git you! You think I done Estelle bad? Wait’ll you see what I’ve got waitin’ for you!”
His heavy steps moved into the central hallway; she heard him push open the living room door. Light splayed onto the porch as he found the switch, and she used its help to make her way silently to the broken door.
“I watched you come back,” he shouted. “You’d as well come out as hide from me. No woman alive kin handle Ben Roswell, and you better not even try.”
Irene thought of the woman at the river. She thought of his pistol, its muzzle staring into her face on the road. She waited just inside the door until he came back into the hall.
He was looking the other way, so she waited for him to turn to face her before pulling the trigger. A twelve-gauge pattern blossomed high on his chest as Ben Roswell sailed backward and fetched up against the hall tree.
Irene flicked the switch for the hall lights and stared down at him. His eyelids fluttered open and he stared up at her, his bloody jaw dropping. He tried to speak, but his throat and chest, lungs and heart were riddled with shot.
“Damn fool,” Irene said. “A woman brought you into the world, and one can take you out of it. And good riddance.”
Then she went to call the sheriff. He’d just have to come back all the long way to Bobcat Ridge and take away the carrion from her hallway.