Hell With the Lid Blown Off (22 page)

Trenton Calder

I missed Scott, of course. Kurt Lukenbach told me that he had already headed back to Boynton by the time I got there. I should have rushed right back to let Scott know what I found out, but I had told Ruth that I'd ride back into town with her after her visit, so I stayed at the Luckenbachs' for a spell and helped Gee Dub and Kurt finish working on the corral. After we finished, we went inside to say howdy to Phoebe and John Lee. I was dismayed to see how beat up John Lee was, even though Phoebe told me he looked way better than he had when they pulled him out from under his barn.

His head was all wrapped up, his eyes were so bloodshot that they didn't look human, and his jaws were clinched shut. His right leg was splinted with two boards and stuck straight out in front of him. He could hardly move around but to hobble with a crutch somebody had carved for him out of a crooked branch. Considering that they had lost near to everything they owned in the storm, John Lee was in a pretty good mood, though. Cheating death will do that to you.

The little cousin of theirs that Miz Tucker had brought back with her from Arizona, Chase Kemp, was babysitting Phoebe's girl Zeltha, which consisted of him hauling her around like a sack of potatoes. She didn't seem to mind.

Mary Lukenbach fed us pie, and while we visited I got to bounce the little orphan baby on my knee. The baby was a pretty, white-blond, big eyed girl, surprised to find herself where she was, I reckon, and wondering how on earth she got there.

It was the middle of summer so daylight lasted long, but by the time I got back to the Tuckers', the shadows had stretched out. Miz Tucker sat me down at her table and plied me with more pie. Not that I complained any. I told them about what I had discovered at the Rusty Horseshoe.

“Are you suspecting Hosea, now?” Ruth asked me.

“I don't know,” I told her, “but I figure Scott will want to press him further. I'll tell y'all, I got to thinking about it on the ride back to town, and it could very well be that Jubal died somewhere close to the Rusty Horseshoe.” I pushed my empty plate away and took a pencil stub out of my breast pocket. “Miz Tucker, may I trouble you for a piece of paper?”

She looked at me like I'd lost my mind, but she brought me one of the young'uns' composition books. I tore out one of the blank pages and began to sketch out a map. “Now, here's Boynton, and if I remember right, here is how the roads go out of town and here is where everybody's farm is situated.” I drew a bunch of X's next to my lines then sat back and studied my handiwork. It wasn't pretty but it would do.

“Y'all get the idea, I hope. Anyway, here's the path the twister carved out.” I drew a broken line. “It ain't due northwest but mighty close. The twister set down close enough to the roadhouse to knock it down, then traveled right along this way, across the Morris road, right past y'all's place here, and through the Day place and on toward the northwest. I don't know where Gee Dub found Jubal's body, but it had to be on the storm track between your place and Boynton. Around here, most likely. So if Jubal was heading home from the Rusty Horseshoe that night and met somebody on the footpath between the two, he could have fell off his horse dead and lain there unseen in the tall grass all day. This is close enough to where the tornado set down that it ain't impossible for him to have got caught up by the wind and carried clear to here.” I tapped the paper with an index finger.

“That's nearly three miles, Trent,” Ruth said.

I shrugged. “That's nothing. That little baby your sister found is like to have been blown at least that far.”

999

Ruth decided she'd better get on back to Miz MacKenzie's for the night. Her mama wanted her to stay, but she said she'd rather go back than have to find some corner to curl up in at her folks' battered house. I fetched Teacup for her and we headed out back to Boynton.

We carried on chattering like a couple of happy jaybirds almost all the way back, and I was feeling like I could take off and fly then and there. Until she asked me a question that I never in my life expected to hear from a gently brought up girl. In fact, I couldn't believe my ears. So she repeated herself.

“I said, what exactly is a sodomite, Trent?”

I don't need to tell you that I near to fell off my horse. It took me a minute to recover. “Why do you ask?”

She looked puzzled by my reaction, which meant that I had probably turned red as a beet. The realization made me turn even redder. “Something my ma said. It occurred to me to wonder,” she said. “I always heard of it in the Bible, but I never rightly knew what that meant.”

“Well, Ruth, you don't want to know. You oughtn't be inquiring about such a thing.”

“I wouldn't ask if I didn't want to know.” She sounded annoyed. “And I don't appreciate being told what I think.”

That put me in my place. I swallowed and did my best. “Well, I believe a sodomite is a person who indulges in filthy and perverted behavior.”

“What does that mean? You mean like torture and murder? Mama said it had to do with improper love, whatever that is.”

I blinked at her, then turned my head to stare at the road while I considered how to answer without getting my face slapped. “Not so much improper love as unnatural behavior, Ruth. Think of the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Like when Lot offered his daughters to the crowd so they wouldn't beat up the angels? Oh, now that is bad. I always thought that was a particularly horrible thing for Lot to do to those innocent girls.”

Oh, Lordy, this wasn't going to be easy.
“Not exactly. It's more like when a man uses another man like…” I was desperate to come up with a comparison that didn't make her faint dead away. My voice went up about an octave. “…like a bull uses a cow.”

Ruth had grown up on a farm. She didn't look a bit scandalized at my explanation. I was the one who was like to faint. “You mean a man who loves another man like a wife?” she asked.

I was relieved that she saw it like that. “That's a good way to put it.”

She pondered the implications of this for some time before she said, “That's not possible, is it?”

I wasn't about to educate her on the matter. “I don't see how they manage it, myself, but I hear some do.”

After another moment of puzzling over the problem, she shrugged. “Well, if a fellow never finds the right girl to marry, it's nice to have somebody to care about, ain't it?” Her tone was chipper.

Now that made me laugh. “That's a good Christian attitude, Ruth.”

It didn't occur to me to ask why she was thinking about such a thing. Not right then.

Alafair Tucker

After Trent and Ruth left for town Alafair began making cornbread for supper. Blanche and Sophronia decided they would rather be elsewhere and had disappeared long before their mother could put them to work peeling something.

Alafair was left with her ever-present shadow, Grace, who was sitting at the kitchen table with Trent's pencil and a fresh scrap of paper from the notebook, industriously drawing a picture.

“That's pretty good, cookie,” Alafair said, as she passed by on her way to the oven. “What is it?”

“It's Bacon, Mama.” Grace sounded a bit put out that her mother didn't recognize the dog. “He's going under the house to get away from the twister.”

Alafair grimaced. It was going to take the children a long time to get over the trauma of the storm. “He's a smart pup, sweetie pie. No twister will get him.” She stood behind Grace's chair for a moment, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and watching the girl draw, when Trent's hand-drawn map caught her eye, still lying on the table where he had left it.

Where did Jubal Beldon die? Alafair sat down and pulled the sketch over toward her.

“Are you going to draw, too?” Grace asked.

“Mmm-hm,” Alafair murmured absently.

How far could a twister carry a body? She ran her finger along the broken line that represented the storm track. The tornado had traveled past the Rusty Horseshoe and blown it down. It passed the Beldon farm, but far enough to the east of it not to do much damage. It came near her own house, but not near enough to destroy it. Instead it rolled like a juggernaut directly over John Lee and Phoebe's little house, then headed northeast, out of her ken.

Jubal's body had been…where? Like Trent she had not seen the place where he came to rest, somewhere between Boynton and this farm on the path of the tornado. She was trying to triangulate the location on the map with her fingers when Grace cried, “Gee! Ma and me are drawing.”

Alafair looked up, startled, to see Gee Dub standing in the kitchen door. Was it that late? “Why, there you are, son. My, I've lost track of time! Are your daddy and Charlie coming in?”

Gee Dub's eyes crinkled with amusement. “They'll be right along, but I'd rather supper was late than stop y'all from finishing your works of art.”

Alafair leaped to her feet and hollered out the back door for the girls to put away their playthings and come set the table, while Gee Dub admired Grace's masterpiece. When she came back inside, Grace was on her brother's lap and Gee Dub was studying Trent's map. “What is this?”

Alafair told him. “Trent was thinking that Jubal Beldon could have died anywhere along this storm track and then got picked up by the wind and deposited where you found him. But Jubal had to have lain dead somewhere all day Monday, somewhere off the beaten path or somebody would have found him.”

Gee Dub nodded and looked back at the drawing. “Not exactly to scale, is it?”

“You were the one who found Jubal's body, son. Where exactly was it?”

“Well, I can't say for sure, Mama. It was dark as sin and I was lost. But I did run into Mr. Eichelberger right beforehand. And when us boys were clearing the road the next day, I did notice that there is a fallow field not too far back of his house. So upon reflection, if I had to guess I'd say right about…here.”

“Out in this field here, halfway between our house and town as the crow flies? Behind the Eichelberger place?”

“That's right.” Something about her tone gave him pause. He shifted Grace on his knee. “What are you thinking, Ma?”

Her countenance was the picture of innocence when she looked up at him. “Nothing. What do you mean?”

“Mama, you know what Dad would say.” He put on a stern expression and came out with a fair approximation of his father's voice. “Alafair, I do wish that just one time you'd leave the work of the law to the lawmen.”

Alafair laughed at that. “Oh, honey, I'm just ruminating out loud. Jubal Beldon's death, whether it was murder or just an accident, has nothing to do with me or mine. So I don't intend to involve myself.”

Gee Dub smiled. He had heard that declaration before. “Just in case, I won't mention your rumination to Dad.” He and Grace went out onto the back porch to wash up for dinner and Alafair turned to clear the table, but her eye returned to Trent's map and she found her finger moving over Jubal Beldon's known route on Sunday.

Late Sunday afternoon he had left the Masonic Hall in Boynton and chauffeured his mother and sister home. Then a couple of hours later he appeared at the Rusty Horseshoe with a wad of cash. He left an hour or so later and was not seen again that night. Then twenty-four hours later, his storm-violated body was found in the middle of a field three miles from his last known location.

Where did he get that money? It only made sense to Alafair that he had extorted hush money from one of the many people whose secrets he had threatened to expose. Someone with a very, very bad secret. Not like what he had threatened to say about Ruth—that was schoolyard bully stuff that no one who knew Ruth would believe. Ruth had told her mother that one of Marva Welsh's relatives had been a victim of Jubal's evil tongue. That was a frightening idea, for rumor and innuendo could do a colored family real harm. But as far as she knew, the Welshes didn't have that kind of money. No, it had to involve someone who could pay. A really horrendous piece of information, something that would ruin a person's life. Maybe even send him to prison.

Her conversation with Ruth about the love between Wallace and his friend popped into her mind. Could Jubal have gotten the money from Wallace in exchange for silence about an illicit relationship between the two young men? After all, Randal and Wallace and Miz Beckie had all left town without warning that very night.

But Jubal was seen alive at the Rusty Horseshoe after he got the money. And Randal and Wallace had come back to town after the storm. Not the action of killers on the run.

Suppose that Jubal had shaken down Wallace and in the process discovered that blackmail was a lot more satisfying—and lucrative—than simple bullying. It was so easy to make them pay and run them out of town to boot. Why not capitalize on the rest of his cache of secrets?

She conjured the scene in her mind. Jubal sitting in the dark at the Rusty Horseshoe, counting his immoral gains, making a plan to squeeze someone else. Someone who, as it turned out, was not so easily intimidated.

Her finger moved on the map. From the roadhouse back to town, east. Or from the roadhouse northeast, to the crossroads. To Eichelberger's, right in path of the storm.

She heard Shaw and Charlie clattering and laughing as they came up the back porch steps and she swept the papers off the table with a mutter of self-reproach. Supper was going to be a makeshift meal tonight.

Trenton Calder

I went over to Scott's as soon as I got back to town and told him what I had found out from Mr. Dills. He was real interested in Dan's story about Jubal waving around a wad of money at the roadhouse that night, because his trouser pockets were empty when Gee Dub brought his body in on Monday night. Scott wondered where he had got hold of so much money, and what had happened to it. I pointed out that except for the pants, the wind had carried away every stitch of Jubal's clothes, so folks around the area might be digging dollar bills out of the bushes for a long while to come.