Dark River Road (82 page)

“He’s had to hide a lot, I guess.” That was true. Maybe he should have given him more credit. It had to be hard to walk such a fine line and not have anyone to talk to about it. At least he’d had Mikey. And Tansy a long time ago. Now he had Cinda. He looked at her. She’d rolled onto her back and was looking up at him.

“You never even hinted how he felt about Tansy. Why?”

“It wasn’t my secret to tell.”

“And you didn’t trust me. Because I’m a Quinton.”

“It was never that. None of us can help who we were born. All we can do is try to be somebody to be proud of. Mama used to tell me that I could be anything I wanted. I believed her for a long time.”

“And now you don’t?”

He thought about that a minute. “She was right in a lot of ways, but she just didn’t tell me that I’d have to be careful what I wanted.”

“Ah, the ‘be careful what you wish for because you might get it’ thing.”

He smiled. “Basically.”

Cinda sat up. “Well, I can hardly wait to see what the rest of the week is going to bring. If I had any sense, I’d do like Mother and fly off to Italy.”

“You’re not the kind to run away.”

“No,” she said with a faint smile, “I’m not that smart.”

Maybe he wasn’t either, but later he thought he should have been. It’d have been safer for everybody.

Somebody tried to burn down the Cane Creek Animal Hospital that Sunday night. They’d have succeeded, too, if Doc hadn’t been there tending to a really sick cat. He smelled the smoke while he was in the back, and by the time he got to the front of the clinic, the waiting room was blazing so high the extinguishers he kept on hand hardly cut it. Fortunately, the alarm system was wired for fire too, and fire trucks showed up at the door quick enough that the only thing considered a loss was the waiting room. And the fish tank. None of the animals suffered any harm except for a little throat and eye irritation, and Doc had some smoke inhalation and a few burns on his hands from trying to put out the fire, but other than that, it turned out a lot better than it could have if he hadn’t been there late.

“Who’d do such a thing?” Mindy asked, staring at the ruined room. Water still dripped from blackened rafters and walls.

“I have a pretty good idea,” Chantry said grimly. And he did. Chris had warned him. Mrs. Sheridan had warned him. And he hadn’t listened.

He left the clinic and got in his car and drove out to Six Oaks, madder than hell and ready to take on Bert Quinton or whoever got in his way. Sukey, the housekeeper, said that Mr. Quinton was gone for the morning but would be back that afternoon.

Spoiling for a fight and disappointed, Chantry said he’d be back and turned to go to his car. He had in mind driving up to the Silver Dollar Casino to see if the old man was there. Then he stopped.

Laura Quinton stood on the top step leading up to the wide front porch. She had on a broad-brimmed hat and long, flowing dress, and looked like she’d just stepped out of some gothic southern novel. A flawed Faulknerian character.

“You never came back to see me,” she said, and he nodded.

“I did. They said you couldn’t have visitors.”

“Ah. I wondered.” She took a step closer, smiling. “The secret is out now. They’ll come for him.”

“They—?”

“The police. They’ll take him away.”

“That’s not likely, Mrs. Quinton.” He said it gently because she seemed so pleased and he didn’t want to disappoint her. “There’s no proof. The police can’t just arrest a man like Bert Quinton without something called probable cause.”

Her smile faded. “But they must.”

His supply of patience waned. All he wanted was to find Quinton. He shrugged and started to go around her, but she grabbed his arm. Her fingers dug into his skin with surprising ferocity.

“You make them take him. He’s a wicked man. I heard him that day, you know. With Carrie. He made her cry. Like he used to make me cry. And Chris. Even Colin. He says terrible things.”

He tensed, watched her closely. “What’d he say to Carrie to make her cry?”

Laura got a crafty look on her face. “You make them arrest him and I’ll tell you.”

He should have figured it wouldn’t be that easy. He shook his head. “I would if I could, but as much as I’d like to see him go to jail, I can’t make the police do anything.”

“Then you’ll be sorry.” She stepped up onto the porch, then turned to look at him. “He won’t rest until he ruins you.”

That may well be true. But he was getting used to disappointment.

Chantry drove up to the Silver Dollar but Quinton wasn’t there. Or if he was, he didn’t intend to be found. So he drove over to the Grand Isle. The desk clerk at the hotel called up to Tansy’s room before she’d give him the room number, then said he could go on up.

“Miss Rivers will send someone to meet you on the concierge floor.”

He half-expected Chris, but Dempsey came down to meet him. There was a nice kitchen on the concierge floor, stocked with just about everything anybody could want, and he followed Dempsey to a table in the far corner. The only other person was an employee who kept the place supplied with fresh food and coffee.

“You need to talk some sense into Tansy,” Dempsey said when they were seated at the window that overlooked the river. “Quinton’s fit to be tied. He’s liable to go and do somethin’ mean.”

“I know. He tried to burn down the clinic last night.”

“So I heard. He’s dangerous, Chantry, just like a rabid dog. I told Tansy to hire a few more bodyguards but she just laughed, said he couldn’t get to her here.”

“Look, he’s angry and dangerous, but he’s not stupid. He’s not going to murder her, certainly not after Chris got up in front of the church congregation and told everyone he intends to marry her. It’s probably the main thing keeping them both safe right now. Quinton has to know how it’d look if one of them ended up dead. Especially Tansy.”

“But he could arrange an accident. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Chantry looked at him. “Yeah. Jesus.” Possibilities popped up like icebergs in a dark ocean. “I’ll find him. I’ll stop him.”

Dempsey shook his head. “Ain’t smart to corner somethin’ meaner than you, boy. And Quinton is a damn sight meaner than anyone I know.”

“How the hell did he get that way? Not that it makes any difference, but at least Rainey had a reason for turning so mean. Quinton just enjoys it.”

“Meanness don’t happen overnight. Took Bert Quinton a long time to get like he is. He didn’ start out that way. Not that I recollect. His daddy expected a lot of him, but that ain’t always a bad thing. Some folks just don’t grow straight, like a tree bent all out of shape.”

Chantry stood up. “Maybe somebody needs to chop down that tree.”

“Maybe. Just don’t let it be you.”

“Dammit, I can’t let him get away with trying to burn down the clinic. If Doc hadn’t been there—I’m not risking it again. I’m going to find that bastard.”

“Chantry, wait until you ain’t so mad. It won’t help my baby girl if you go out there half-cocked and say or do stuff that won’t make any difference or help anything. We need cool heads. We need Tansy to listen. To go someplace safe.”

He was right, and Chantry knew it, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He looked away, and saw the casino employee staring at him from beside the fruit basket she’d been rearranging. This wasn’t the place to be talking, either.

Dempsey went up with him to see Tansy. She looked a little shell-shocked herself, not knowing whether to be glad or scared.

“Chris told me what he did at church. I don’t know what to say.”

“How long are you going to be here?” Chantry asked her, and she made a gesture with her hands like she wasn’t sure. “If I was you, then, I’d make it a short trip. Go up to Memphis if you have to, or somewhere a lot farther away. Out of Quinton’s reach for a while. And take Chris with you.”

“I have a contract here for several shows. I have to honor that. But I do have to be in New York soon to lay down some new tracks on my next CD. Do you really think he’d be so stupid as to try something?”

“This ain’t New York. Quinton owns the sheriff’s office. And the sheriff.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’s not like we’re living in the fifties. There are laws.”

“Uh huh.” Chantry just looked at her, and Tansy bit her lower lip. She had to remember the cross that’d been burned in her yard. He wondered if Chris had told her about her real daddy yet. Or if Dempsey intended to do that. It’d better be soon, because at the rate things were happening, she’d find out anyway. He looked over at Dempsey, and it was like the old man knew what he was thinking, because he put out a hand to Tansy.

“Baby, there’s things you don’t know but you need to hear. I shoulda told you a long time ago, but I didn’t. It didn’t seem right somehow. Like I’d be saying things about your mama.”

Tansy frowned. “What about Mama?”

It was time he left them alone, and Chantry left the penthouse suite and went out to his car. It was almost October and the sunshine was still warm so that the inside of his car was hot when he opened the door. A funny smell washed over him, like the stuff crop dusters used on cotton fields. DDT. Hell, they’d outlawed that years ago, but he still remembered the smell from his childhood, and remembered watching the crop dusters swoop low over the fields every year with billowing clouds of white fog like vapor trails streaming behind. And he remembered hearing about a pilot that flew his plane into some electric wires and ended up with his brains spilled all over the ground, too. So why was he remembering that all of a sudden?

He stood there a minute, thinking. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he backed away from his car slowly, looking at it. Maybe it wasn’t DDT. Maybe it was fertilizer. And mixed with something else. He got down on his hands and knees and looked up under his car, and saw something that shouldn’t be there, a metal cylinder tucked up in the chassis between the front wheels.

A bomb.

A couple of hours later, some of the excitement had died down. The Bomb Squad had come and gone, taken off the crude homemade bomb to explode in an empty field somewhere, and Chantry stood in the parking lot looking at his car and knowing he was a marked man.

Fortunately, the Tunica police weren’t as reticent about investigating the attempt on his life as the Quinton county cops would have been. They were swift, efficient, and thorough. Bert Quinton had some explaining to do, since he’d been seen on TV hitting Chantry in the eye. Not that Quinton didn’t have a solid alibi. Of course he did. He’d been in a high-powered meeting with Tunica executives all that day. A regrettable incident, and while Chantry Callahan certainly wasn’t one of his favorite people, he’d never stoop to murder.

Right.

Chantry watched that farce on the evening news, sitting in his den and drinking a cold beer with Cinda right beside him. She huddled in a miserable little knot. Her day hadn’t been much better. Reporters and media had followed her when she tried to focus on her work, so that she’d ended up going back home and shutting herself in her house.

“Who do you think did it, Chantry?”

He didn’t reply for a minute. He knew who was behind it, but not who did the actual planting of the bomb. Finally he said, “I don’t know. Maybe Billy Mac.”

“Or Beau and Rafe?”

“Yeah. Possible.”

“What’s happened? Why has everything gone so crazy suddenly? My grandfather, my parents
 . . .
now this.”

He looked over at her. There wasn’t much he could say that’d make her feel better so he just hooked an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him. They sat that way for a long time.