CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Back in the early part of the summer, Sheila had gotten in the habit of coming by my house for coffee on Saturday mornings after she dropped Mindy off for an eight o’clock swimming class at the municipal pool. Until it got too hot in mid-July, we would pick her up at the pool when her lesson ended, and the three of us would go riding out at my dad’s old farm where I kept my horses. Sheila was a skilled horsewoman, and I would saddle up my big dun quarter horse for her while I rode a gentle gray with Mindy perched in front of me, holding on to the saddle horn.

After the swimming program ended in August, the two of us continued to get together for coffee most Saturday mornings. A couple of days before I’d stopped at the new boutique bakery that opened a month earlier on the square and bought a pecan coffee cake. We were just finishing a simple but rich breakfast when the front doorbell rang. I went up the hall and opened the door to find Willa Kimball standing on the porch.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Of course, Willa. Come on back to the kitchen. Sheila’s here. We were just having breakfast. Are you hungry?”

She shook her head and I ushered her to the back of the house and held a chair at the table for her. “Coffee?” I asked.

“I’d rather have a little whiskey, if you’ve got some.”

I took the bottle of V.O. out of the cabinet and poured a couple of inches into a coffee mug. “Do you want ice?” I asked.

“No,” she said and took the cup and downed a healthy swig. “One of the girls I work with at the Caravan called me last night. Two city cops were in for supper, and they claimed you’d arrested Jesse for shooting Scott. Is that true?”

I nodded solemnly.

“He didn’t do it.”

“You sound pretty certain.”

“That’s because I’m the one that did it,” she said. Then she reached in her purse and pulled out a small paper sack and laid it on the table. “That’s Scott’s gun. I took it from him after I shot him out at the cemetery yesterday morning.”

“Willa—”

“I’m going to tell you the whole story, and then I want you to turn Jesse loose. He didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Please don’t say anything more,” I said. “I need to get Walter Durbin or Dud Malone to come down here and represent you before you tell me anything else.”

“I don’t want a damned lawyer. I just want to tell you what happened.”

“Then at least let me read you your Miranda warn—”

“Bo Handel, shut up! I want you to stop being a lawman for once in your life and just be my friend. Can you do that?”

Defeated, I shrugged and nodded. “You know I can, Willa,”

Sheila reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I’ll leave if you want me to,” she said.

“I’d rather you stayed, if you don’t mind,” Willa said. “I think maybe it will seem easier with another woman here.” She raised her mug to her lips and finished off the drink. I poured more into the cup and set the bottle where she could reach it.

“You just take all the time you want,” I said. “When you get finished, we’ll see what we have to work with.”

She took a deep breath and began, “Scott was at the house when I came home from work a little after midnight the night of that big shootout that was in the papers. He’d broken in. He had to because I’d changed the locks when he left for Houston. He told me he came through the back way on a motorcycle and left it up in the woods at the edge of the pasture. I guess he walked right by Jesse’s cabin, and Jesse must have seen him and known something was wrong.

“He was too wound up to sleep, and so was I. We argued all night long. I think maybe he was taking something because his eyes were funny, and he went in the bathroom every so often as the night wore on. Every time he came back his eyes would seem even brighter. He was mean too. He wasn’t trying to wheedle or manipulate me any longer. The time for that was past. He just laid it all out on the table and showed me what he really was. When I told him you were looking for him, he said of course you were because he’d killed Amanda Twiller and that Raynes kid. I asked him how he could do such a thing, and he said Amanda was nothing but a slut and a dopehead and the Raynes boy was a worthless little faggot, and that neither of them had any reason to live.

“Then I started crying because I knew for certain that my son was a murderer. He laughed at me, Bo. He laughed and he told me he’d killed two more people that same night. He said he was going to make me take him to Houston. He said we’d just stay at the house for a couple of days to let things cool down, and then he’d get on the back floorboard of my car and I’d just whisk him right on out of town after midnight. I’d never seen anybody so arrogant and cocksure in my life. He seemed to think he could get away with anything.

“He asked me how much money I had. I told him about fifteen hundred dollars in my checking account. He said when we got to Houston I was going to go to an ATM and take it all out and give it to him. I pointed out that I’d need a little money to get home on. Do you know what he did then? He slapped me. My own child. He reached over and slapped me hard. ‘You’ve got credit cards, you lying old bitch.’

“That’s when I started to hate him. Or maybe I’d hated him for a long time and that’s when I just began to admit it to myself. But right at that moment I hated him worse than I ever thought I could hate anybody. And I hated myself too, and I hated the world where this thing sitting there smirking at me had come out of my body. So I decided to kill him. I told myself that he was only twenty-two years old, and he’d already murdered four people. What would the count be in a few more years? How many lives would I save? But I think that may have just been an excuse. I may have killed him because he was a monster who’d ruined my life.”

“How did you wind up at the cemetery?” I asked.

She sipped a little more whiskey and dabbed her handkerchief at the corners of her eyes. “The one decent thing he would always do was go with me to put flowers on his grandfather’s grave. Why, I don’t know. I think maybe he came as close to loving Dad as he ever did to loving anybody. About sunup I showed him two bunches of fall-colored silk flowers I’d bought, one for Bob’s grave and one for Dad’s. I asked him if he wanted to go to the cemetery. He said sure, why not.

“When I went upstairs to change clothes I slipped his father’s pistol into my purse. He rode on the back floorboard, just like he’d said, and he had me pull way up to one end of the cemetery where the car was out of sight from the road. When we got to the grave I smiled at him and handed him the flowers and asked him to put them in the vase. He did, and when he bent over I pulled the gun out of my purse. As soon as he stood up, I shot him twice right through the center of the chest. It wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be. Bob had taught me how to shoot years ago, and I knew what to do. After he stopped breathing, I stood there looking at him, and for a few seconds I could see him the way he was when he was a little boy about five.”

She looked across the table at me with eyes that were full of tears. I glanced at Sheila, who was crying silently.

Willa sighed a deep, heaving sigh. “I brought him into the world and I took him out of it.”

“How did Jesse come to have the pistol?” I asked.

“When I got back to the car, I had the gun I shot him with in my left hand, and I had his gun in my right hand. I must have taken it from his body, but I don’t remember that. I don’t even remember walking to the car. I just laid them both on the seat beside me and drove home. For some reason, when I got home and got out of the car, I picked up his daddy’s gun and left the other one where it was. Jesse was waiting for me there in the yard. He took the pistol out of my hand and said for me to go inside. I told him what I’d done, and he said that he’d been watching when we left the house and he heard the shots.

“First I just sat down in the den and stared at the wall for a long time. Then I went up to my room and lay down and dozed a little until you knocked on the door to tell me the body had been found.”

I got up and took the coffeepot and poured Sheila a refill, then topped off my own cup. I asked Willa if she wanted more whiskey, but she shook her head. “Are you going to turn Jesse loose, Bo?” she asked.

“Of course. I hated to have to arrest him in the first place.”

She nodded and then lay her head down on the table, cradling it in her arms like a little girl taking a nap on her school desk. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m just so tired of everything.”

*   *   *

Sheila and I drove her home. I knew she wasn’t going to run, and I wasn’t sure what she was guilty of, if anything, since Scott, who was himself a confessed killer, had forced his way into her home.

“I’ll talk to the DA and see what he says,” I said. “After all, Scott broke in and was going to rob you. Even if Tom decides to charge you with something, I’ll take you in Monday morning and run you through the process. You know as well as I do that Judge MacGregor is going to release you on your own recognizance, so there’s no need for you to spend two days in jail when I know you’re not going anywhere.”

“Can you get in any trouble doing this?” she asked.

“It’s my call. If the voters don’t like it, they can always elect somebody else. We’ll just leave your car here and I’ll drive it out this afternoon and have someone follow me in my pickup.”

When we got to her place, Sheila got out with her. Willa reached out and took her in her arms and hugged her. They spoke quietly for a moment, and then she turned and went up the steps and vanished in the sprawling old house that had sheltered her family for generations.