Blue Lonesome (7 page)

“Hello, there,” he said cheerfully, smiling. His voice was the only big thing about him: an oddly rich and resonant baritone. “Waiting for me?

“Yes, if you’re Reverend Hoxie.”

“In the flesh, what there is of it.” He chuckled at his little joke. “And you’re—?”

“Messenger. Jim Messenger.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Messenger?”

“Well, it’s a personal matter. Some things I’d like to know.”

“I’ll be glad to help, if I can. Come inside where it’s cool.”

The interior of the parsonage was overly cool; a noisy air conditioner had been turned up so high, and left on so long, that the large and spartan front parlor was almost chilly. “My daughter,” Reverend Hoxie said by way of apology. “You should see our electric bills in the summer. Did you meet her? My daughter, Maria?”

“Yes. She’s doing some landscaping in the cemetery.”

“Is she? Not even in the house and the air conditioner going full blast.” He shook his head again. “Do you have children, Mr. Messenger?”

“No. I’m not married.”

“A blessing, to be sure. Children, I mean. But they can also be trying at times. Not that Maria’s a child any longer, of course, although sometimes I daresay she acts like one. Well, I’ll just turn it down before we catch a chill. Would you like something to drink? A glass of lemonade? I made some fresh this morning. …”

“No, thanks. Nothing.”

“I’ll have one, if you don’t mind. Be right back.”

Messenger perched on a settee made of some woven material. The rest of the furniture was mismatched, without much color, and seemed to have been chosen at random and with little thought to comfort or esthetics. On one wall was a hammered bronze crucifix; on another, an oil painting of the Last Supper. There were three framed photographs of Maria at different ages, and one of a younger but no less scrawny Reverend Hoxie holding a seven- or eight-year-old Maria in the crook of one arm.

Hoxie returned with his lemonade, arranged himself in an old mohair chair, and leaned forward attentively. “Now, then,” he said. “What is it you’d like to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me about a woman I knew in San Francisco, briefly and not very well. She called herself Janet Mitchell but that wasn’t her real name.”

“Yes?”

“I think she came from Beulah. I’m curious about her true identity, and why she left here and went to San Francisco.”

“You say she was using an assumed name?”

“Yes. I have no idea why.”

“She told you nothing about herself?”

“No. I hardly knew her, as I said.”

“But I don’t understand. If you hardly knew her, why have you come all the way to Beulah? Are you trying to find her for some reason? Do you think she’s come back home?”

“She’s never coming home,” Messenger said. “She committed suicide three weeks ago.”

Hoxie’s smile turned upside down. “Dear Lord.”

“She didn’t leave a note, nothing to explain why. No one’s claimed her body yet. The police weren’t able to identify her or trace where she came from; it’s sheer luck that led me to Beulah. If she does have relatives here, they should know what happened to her.”

“Of course. She should have a proper burial.”

“There’s that, and also the fact that she left quite a bit of money in cash. Fourteen thousand dollars.”

A silence built between them. Messenger saw knowledge seep into the minister’s eyes; the man’s expression turned doleful. “Fourteen thousand dollars,” Hoxie repeated.

“It was sixteen when she came to San Francisco.”

“Yes, that’s about how much she received. How long ago was it she arrived there?”

“About six months.”

“Describe her to me.”

Messenger described her.

“Anna,” Hoxie said then, and sighed. “Poor Anna.”

“Anna?”

“Anna Roebuck. I should have realized it as soon as you mentioned suicide.”

Anna Roebuck. The name seemed strange to him; Janet Mitchell somehow fitted her better. No, that was a false illusion, created and colored by his impressions of who and what she’d been.
He hadn’t
known her—that was the thing.

“Tell me about Anna Roebuck, Reverend.”

“A tragic case,” Hoxie said. “She led a hard life, like so many sagebrush ranchers out here. Came from a poor family, and stayed poor even after she married Dave Roebuck. He was a black sheep and a womanizer; she couldn’t have made a worse choice. Still … such a terrible vengeance. Such terrible acts.”

“What acts?”

“She was never tried or convicted, mind you, except in people’s eyes. Never even arrested. And of course she maintained her innocence to the day she disappeared.”

“Reverend, what acts?”

“The worst of all sins against God’s law. The taking of human life.”

“
Murder
?”

“Double murder. Her husband, for one. Killed in their barn with a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“My God. Who else was killed? A woman he was with?”

Hoxie shook his head sorrowfully. “If that were the case, she wouldn’t have been reviled and driven away. No, the second murder was far more heinous.”

“I don’t … heinous?”

“Her daughter, eight years old. The child’s skull was crushed with a rock and the poor broken body put down the well.”

M
ESSENGER SAID
, “I don’t believe it.”

“Yes, I know. It’s difficult to believe anyone could do such a thing to an innocent child, especially a woman who seemed devoted to her daughter.”

“Even if she went crazy … what possible reason could she’ve had for putting the girl’s body into the well afterward? The husband’s body wasn’t moved, was it?”

“No.” Again Hoxie sighed and shook his head. “There’s something else too, even more bizarre. Tess was struck down near the barn; bloodstains were found at the spot. But before she was carried to the well her clothes were apparently changed.”

“Her clothes?”

“Anna swore that when she last saw Tess, the child had on jeans and a T-shirt. When the body was taken from the well it was clothed in her best Sunday dress.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Very little of what happened does, Mr. Messenger.”

He was silent. In his mind’s eye he could see the tattered old panda bear; it must have belonged to the little girl. And Tess must have been the child in the photo Del Carlo had found in the bloody bathtub. The pocket watch …
To Davey from Pop.
Dave Roebuck’s watch. Would a woman who’d murdered her husband and daughter in cold blood have kept mementos like that? Would she have kept a book on how to cope with pain and grief? He couldn’t imagine it. Most of what he’d heard the past few minutes was beyond his powers of imagination.

Questions occurred to him, one after another, crowding into the forefront of his thoughts. He had a logical, orderly mind, if not an inventive one, and he was used to devising and asking questions and evaluating the answers he was given. That was a part of his job at Sitwell & Cobb, some of whose clients were anything but logical and orderly, while others skated dangerously on the thin edge of deception and fraud.

“If Anna was a devoted mother,” he said at length, “how could people here be so quick to condemn her?”

“No one else could’ve committed the crimes,” Hoxie said. “At least, so it seemed then and still seems now.”

“Why not one of Roebuck’s women? You said he was a womanizer. A lover’s quarrel that turned violent, and the little girl killed because she was a witness?”

“A possibility, yes, but there was no evidence to support it. The only clear adult fingerprints found anywhere belonged to Dave and Anna.”

“The operative word being
clear
,” Messenger said. “There’s also the possibility of gloves.”

“Perhaps. But the county investigators and Sheriff Espinosa questioned dozens of people, including the women Dave Roebuck was intimate with. And Joe Hanratty, a ranch hand who had a fistfight with him a week before the murders. They found nothing to incriminate anyone.”

“This man Hanratty couldn’t have done it?”

“No. He works for Dave Roebuck’s brother, John T., and the other hands swore he never left John T.’s ranch that day.”

“What about a stranger, a drifter?”

“Highly unlikely,” Hoxie said. “Dave and Anna’s ranch is far off any main road. When his body was found his wallet was untouched; it contained fifty-seven dollars in cash. And nothing was disturbed or missing from inside the house.”

“Well, there couldn’t have been any evidence to incriminate Anna, either. Otherwise she’d have been arrested and charged.”

“Circumstantial evidence, but not enough to satisfy the district attorney.”

“Where did she say she was at the time of the killings?”

“At the old Bootstrap Mine.”

“What was she doing at a mine?”

“Looking for gold.”

“… She was a miner as well as a rancher?”

“It was a hobby with her,” Hoxie said. “The Bootstrap has been shut down for thirty years, but there are traces of gold left in it. The mine and most of her ranch are on BLM land, less than a dozen miles apart.”

“BLM?”

“Public land. Owned by the Bureau of Land Management. Most sagebrush ranchers around here lease grazing land and grazing rights from the BLM. It’s a common practice in Nevada.”

“So she went alone to the mine that day?”

“Yes.”

“And no one saw her there?”

“No one.”

“How long was she away from the ranch?”

“Three hours or so, she claimed.”

“And when she returned she found the bodies?”

“Her husband’s body. Sheriff Espinosa and one of his deputies found Tess. Anna showed little emotion when she called them, and hardly any more when Tess was found. In public opinion that was another strike against her.”

“Shock,” Messenger said. “Or she was the kind of person who internalizes pain and grief.”

“Perhaps.”

“Why was everyone so willing to believe the worst of her? Was she disliked for some reason?”

“Misunderstood, rather than disliked. Anna was a difficult person to know or understand. Except for her family she preferred her own company.”

“Lonely. A lonely person.”

“Private, in any case. Much more so after the tragedy. She refused to see or talk to anyone, even her sister.”

“Sister?”

“Younger sibling. Dacy Burgess.”

“Does Dacy Burgess live here?”

“On a ranch not far from Anna’s.”

“Where would that be, exactly?”

“Salt Pan Valley, west of town. Dacy and her son are alone out there now. Too large a place for the two of them to manage by themselves, really, but they can’t afford a full-time hired hand anymore. Times are hard here. As everywhere these days.”

“Is she Anna’s only living relative?”

“Yes,” Hoxie said, “she and the boy. But if you’re planning to see her, I’d advise you to go carefully. Dacy’s cut from the same cloth as Anna was. She keeps to herself, doesn’t trust strangers, and doesn’t like to talk about what happened.”

“But she does believe in her sister’s innocence?”

“At first she did. But when Anna disappeared … no, I doubt even she does any longer.”

“Does anyone around here believe in it?”

“Jaime Orozco.”

“Who’s he?”

“A retired ranch hand who worked for the Burgesses for several years. He also did odd jobs for Dave and Anna.”

“And he’s the only one?”

“Who believes Anna was innocent? I’m afraid so.”

“Which puts you in the majority, too.”

Hoxie sighed. “I’d like to say otherwise, but I can’t find it in my heart to credit any other explanation. Not now.”

“Why not now?”

“Anna’s suicide, of course. Wouldn’t you say that was an admission of guilt, Mr. Messenger?”

“No,” he said, “I wouldn’t. It’s just as possible she killed herself because she was innocent.”

THE ROAD LEADING
from Beulah to Salt Pan Valley was one of the two graveled ones he’d taken earlier. He drove past the crumbling hillside diggings, out into the desert another mile and a half until he came to a Y fork. Hoxie had told him to take the left branch. He did that, jounced up onto higher ground over a series of low ridges spotted with yucca trees. Dust boiled up behind him, so that he was able to see little else when he glanced into the rearview mirror—as if he were towing a parachute on invisible wires. Sand and gravel thrown up by the Subaru’s tires peppered the undercarriage.

Two miles of this, and the road dipped again into a wide bowl-shaped valley bounded by tawny hills that seemed taller and had sharper edges. The valley floor was flat, thickly covered with sagebrush and greasewood and scattered clumps of cactus, scored here and there by shallow washes. In the distance, where the land dipped low, a patch of white shimmered and glinted under the harsh sun: a sink full of salt deposits that had given the valley its name. Barbed-wire fences were strung along here, and power lines angled in from the south. Lean black and brown range cattle grazed in the washes and around the sage and greasewood scrub.

Off to his left he could make out a jumble of ranch buildings set within a grove of cottonwoods. A graveled access road veered off that way. When he reached the intersection he saw a closed gate inside a square wooden head frame, a burnt-wood sign on the head frame’s cross-piece that said ROEBUCK in the same style lettering as on the cemetery marker. Old Bud Roebuck’s ranch, according to Hoxie. Dave and John T.’s father. It had been willed to John T. alone, evidently because of some falling-out between the old man and his youngest son. Hoxie hadn’t been inclined to elaborate.

Messenger drove on. A few hundred yards beyond the turnoff to John T. Roebuck’s ranch, the road surface worsened. Instead of gravel there was sand-coated hardpan, washboarded and spotted with chuck holes. He reduced his speed to less than thirty for fear of damaging something along the Subaru’s underbelly.

After another mile an unmarked track cut away to the right, past a weathered wooden storage shed. He went on past by fifty yards, then on impulse braked and reversed through hanging plumes of dust to where he could turn onto the track. He sat for a few seconds, making up his mind. The side road led to Anna Roebuck’s ranch. Dacy Burgess lived another mile and a half along the main road, at the far end of the valley where the tawny hills rose bare and rough-edged against the hazy sky.