Light of the World (53 page)

The note at the bottom read,
I’m not jerking you around—You mustn’t say that about me again—Go see the mine—You’ll like what you find—Our cast is growing, even though our cast members don’t know it yet.

The slash-mark calligraphy was the same as in the letter Surrette had written to Alafair after she interviewed him in prison. Surrette was either getting careless or starting to accept Gretchen as a kindred spirit. His allusion to their conversation indicated he had written
the note that morning. She was convinced he was somewhere up on a hillside, wetting his lips, enjoying the fact that his words were reaching inside her, stirring her imagination, while he watched from afar. She forced herself not to look up and got back in the pickup and drove up the road toward a mountain furrowed with slag and carpeted with miles of trees that had been denuded by a forest fire.

She turned off her engine in front of the mine and got out of the truck and stuck her Airweight .38 in her back pocket. The wind was colder and drier and smelled like ash or charred wood or smoke from an incinerator on a winter day. In her left hand, she carried a flashlight that used a six-volt battery. Down below, she could see Rhonda Fayhee’s house and the tiny lot on which it had been built and the dirt road winding away into the distance. She could see the vast emptiness in which one young, thin-boned poor woman had lived and struggled and eked out an existence until the day she met Asa Surrette. Gretchen walked up to the mine’s entrance and shone the light inside.

It didn’t go deep into the mountain. It probably was dug during the Depression, when the West was filled with unemployed men who saw a vein of quartz in an outcropping of metamorphic rock and knew that gold and silver were often wedged inside the same seam. She moved the flashlight beam along the floor and against the walls. At least half a dozen photographs were taped to the walls, all of them eight-by-ten, all of them showing a bound woman with a drawstring cloth bag over her head. In two photos, the woman was in an embryonic position on a rock floor, a blanket pulled over her. In another photo, she was sitting upright, the bag on her head, wrists tied behind her, knees drawn up, bare ankles showing above tennis shoes.

On a flat rock at the back of the mine was a bubble-wrapped thumb drive. The note on it read,
She was here the first night—No one thought to look—It’s like the other places where I’ve hunted on the game reserve—What do you think of the images—I think a before-and-after presentation of our subjects will give the film more shock value—I can’t wait to work with you, Gretchen.

When Gretchen got back to the cabin on Albert’s ranch, she inserted
the thumb drive into her laptop. The scene taking place on the screen was no longer than a minute. The lens had been pointed through a leafy, sun-dappled bower on the bank of a creek. A man and woman were broiling frankfurters on a grill, backs to the lens. A girl was turning somersaults in the background. Another girl was watching her. They were both blond. The lens never focused on their faces.

Just before the clip ended, a hand placed a note in front of the lens. The note read,
If they only knew.

“You’d better come in here and look at this, Clete,” Gretchen said. She replayed the video while he looked over her shoulder.

“Where’d you get this?” he said.

“From Asa Surrette.”

“Are you kidding?”

“He left it for me in a mine by the Idaho border. Do you recognize anybody on the screen?”

“No. Who are they?”

“His next victims. I called the FBI and the sheriff’s department in Mineral County. I suspect the feds will be out here soon. Give them the thumb drive and tell them to go fuck themselves.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find Wyatt Dixon,” she replied.

“What for?”

“I think Surrette is after him.”

“Why is Surrette interested in Dixon?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody in his right mind would want Wyatt Dixon as an enemy.”

“Last night I bruised up Caspian Younger and Jack Boyd a little bit. I think Younger was setting me up.”

“This was over his wife?”

Clete ignored the question. “Boyd was carrying a drop,” he said. “There’s something else I should mention.”

“What?” she asked.

“Felicity and I might get married. One thing bothers me, though: Her husband says she got it on with the old man.”

“With Love Younger?”

“That’s what he said.”

“What did
she
say?”

“What she always says: Her husband is a liar. I believe her. I think.”

“Nobody can get in this much trouble,” she said.

“I was trying to be straight with you. I wanted to bust up Jack Boyd worse than I did. It wasn’t because he was out to clip me, either. He called you ‘butch’ up by the cave, and his friend Bill Pepper kidnapped and assaulted you. So I made sure he’ll be taking his nutrients through a straw for a while. If I see him again, I may finish the job.”

She opened a tin of Altoids and placed one on her tongue. “What am I going to do with you?” she said.

“Nothing. I’m your father. It’s the other way around. You need to understand that, Gretchen.”

“You’re an absolute mess,” she said. She stood up on her toes and kissed him on the forehead. “Don’t let the feds throw you a slider. They’d like to jam both of us.”

T
HE RODEO AND
county fairgrounds were midway down in the Bitterroot Valley. All week an army of carnival people had been erecting the Ferris wheel, the Kamikaze, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Zipper, the pirate ship, the fun house, the merry-go-round, planes that swung on cables, and a miniature train that ran on a looping track never over five feet from the ground. The sun was still high in the western sky when Wyatt returned from a concession trailer and sat down at a table under a cottonwood beside Bertha Phelps, a paper plate loaded with chili dogs in each hand. Indians wearing beaded costumes strung with feathers and tinkling with bells walked past them to a huge open-sided tent where the snake dance was about to begin. Wyatt popped open two cans of Pepsi and set them on the table.

“You know what rodeo people call Christmastime?” he asked.

“No, I don’t. But I know you’ll tell me,” she replied.

“Christmastime is the two weeks before and after the Fourth of July,” he said. “That’s when all the prize money gets won.”

“You’re not going to put on greasepaint, are you?”

“I might.”

“The years take their toll on all of us, Wyatt. You should think about that.”

“I say ride it to the buzzer. I say don’t give an inch.”

She put her hand on his.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” she replied. “You’re just a special kind of man, that’s all.”

The breeze came up, and the leaves in the cottonwood tree seemed to take on a life of their own and flicker faster than the eye could record their movement. Their sound reminded Wyatt of a matchbook cover in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. He started in on his chili dogs, then stopped and stared at the mountains in the west. In minutes the sun had become a reddish-purple melt above a canyon already dark with shadow. He stared at the sun until his eyes watered and he saw a woman separate herself from its radiance and walk toward him in silhouette, her chestnut hair blowing on her cheeks, her legs longer than was natural, her posture like that of a man.

“Is something wrong?” Bertha asked.

“I get these lapses in my head. Time goes by, and I don’t have no memory of where it went or what I done. My head gets like it was before I drank all them chemical cocktails. It’s been happening to me of late, and it gives me feelings of anxiety I don’t have no name for.”

“You’ve been right here,” she said. “With me. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“You see yonder?”

“See what?”

“The woman walking out of the sun. She’s coming straight to our table. I already know what she’s gonna say and why she’s here. How come her words are already in my head?”

“The sun is too bright. I can’t see her. Wyatt, you’re not making sense.”

“She’s been sent.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“Her name is Gretchen Horowitz. She’s come to tell me about
him
. I knew it was gonna happen.”

“I can’t follow what you’re saying. Let’s eat our food. Don’t pay attention to that woman or these crazy thoughts. Pick up your fork and eat.”

“People don’t want to believe he’s here. That Lou’sana detective, Robicheaux, he knows it, too. So does the woman. He did your brother in. Stop pretending, Bertha.”

“You were raised among primitive and violent people. The superstition and fear they taught you is not your fault. But you cannot let their poison continue to cause injury in your life. Are you listening to me, Wyatt Dixon?”

He stood up from his folding chair. He was wearing garters on his sleeves, his gold-and-silver national championship buckle, a spur with a tiny rowel on one boot, and an oversize cowboy shirt that wouldn’t bind when he rode a horse. He was wearing all the things that told him who he was and who he was not. Except now these things seemed to mean nothing at all.

Gretchen Horowitz stepped out of the sun’s brilliance so Bertha Phelps and Wyatt could see her clearly. Behind her, the Kamikaze rose into the air, teetering against the sky as the teenagers inside the wire cage screamed in delight, then rushed toward the earth. “Hello, cowboy,” she said. “I won’t take but a minute.”

“I know why you’re here,” he replied. “This here is Miss Bertha. I ain’t sure I want to get involved.”

“Asa Surrette says someone wants to see you hurt. I think he means to do it himself,” she said. “You know who Surrette is, don’t you?”

“It don’t matter what he calls hisself. His real name is in the Book of Revelation.”

“No, it isn’t. He’s a serial killer from Kansas. He’s not a mythological figure. He’s a sack of garbage. He killed Angel Deer Heart, and he may try to kill you.”

“Don’t you be telling him these things,” Bertha said. “Who are you to come here and do this? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Gretchen looked at the heavyset woman, then back at Wyatt Dixon. “Do you know any reason the Younger family might hold a grudge against you? Caspian Younger in particular?”

“I could say their kind don’t like working people, and I got in their face. But that ain’t it.”

“Miss, please leave,” Bertha said.

“It’s all right,” Wyatt said. “Miss Gretchen is just doing what she thinks is right. He was using the name Geta Noonen when he grabbed the waitress.”

“How do you know this?” Gretchen asked.

“I did some investigating on my own.”

“Have you told anyone?”

“The state of Montana shot my head full of electricity. You think they’re gonna ask me for advice in catching serial killers? Besides, that ain’t what he is.”

“He’s the beast in the Bible?”

“No, he’s probably an acolyte, a lesser angel in the bunch that got thrown down to hell.”

“I’ve had all this that I can listen to,” Bertha said, getting up from the table. “You get out of here and leave us alone.”

“I’m sorry for upsetting you,” Gretchen said.

“Love Younger come out to my place and fished off my bank,” Wyatt said. “He asked about my folks. He asked if I was part Indian. What the hell would he care about my folks?”

“Watch your back, Wyatt. Good-bye, Ms. Phelps,” Gretchen said.

Wyatt watched Gretchen walk through a field of parked cars, her red shirt and chestnut hair seeming to blur and merge with the molten intensity of the sun. He pushed aside his food and removed a whetstone and a large sheathed bowie knife from a rucksack by his foot. The knife had a white handle and a nickel-plated guard. He began sliding the blade up and down the length of the whetstone, his eyes fixed on a spot three inches in front of his face.

“Why are you doing that?” Bertha asked.

“I’m gonna wear it in the snake dance.”

“Why are you sharpening it?”

“I used to do this when I was a little boy. I’d take my bicycle way out in the woods, along with my pocketknife and a piece of soap rock I dug from a riverbed. That’s when I learned not everybody has the same clock. I’d disappear and go somewhere I wouldn’t have no
memory of later, then come back and still be sharpening my pocketknife.”

“You mustn’t talk about these things anymore,” she said. “We need to go on a trip, maybe to Denver. We could stay at the Brown Palace. The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy stayed there. Did you know that?”

“I think some things are starting to catch up with me, Bertha. In my dreams, there’s something I ain’t supposed to see. I got a feeling what it is.”

“Don’t talk about it. Let go of the past.”

“Something happened when I was about fifteen. I can almost see it, like it’s hiding right around a corner. You know what all this is about?”

“No, and I don’t want to hear it,” she said, her voice starting to break.

“I picked the wrong goddamn parents,” he said. “Either that or they picked the wrong kid to use a horse quirt on.”

T
HE ROOM REVEREND
Geta Noonen had rented was located on the second floor of an old frame house at the far end of the hollow, below a slit in the mountains through which he could see the evening star from his window. Geta, as his host family called him, had a backstairs entrance and his own bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub. There was a nostalgic element about his new home, a hint of the agrarian Midwest and the immigrant farm families who plowed the prairies and planted the land with Russian wheat. Everything about the house reminded him of the world in which he had grown up: the glider on the front porch, the linoleum floor in the bathroom, the freeze cracks in the paint around the window, the stamped tin ceiling, a stovepipe hole in the wall patched with an aluminum pie plate. The upstairs echoed with the sounds of the teenage girls running through the hallways, slamming doors, giggling about the boys who called them on the phone, not unlike the way his sisters had carried on during adolescence. Geta thought of all these things with great fondness until he began to remember other things that had occurred in the foster home west of Omaha, a house in which one room always stayed locked and no one ever asked what was beyond the door.