The truck was a GMC product, fifteen years old. Lonnie was a good enough mechanic to get it running again whenever it quit (which was too damn often lately, Dacy said), but not quite good enough to keep the engine from idling high and rough and funneling hot-oil fumes into the cab. The suspension was shot too; every time a tire thudded through a chuckhole, the pickup jolted and shuddered and threatened to come apart like one of those comic cars in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. By the time he reached town he felt as shaken as a marble in a box.
The clerk at the building supply knew who he was. He wasn’t refused service, but he was subjected to obvious and sullen slow down tactics that kept him there nearly an hour. He endured it without comment. A pointless confrontation with one of Beulah’s citizens was the last thing he needed right now.
A thought occurred to him while he waited — something he should have done by now but hadn’t. When the pickup was finally loaded he drove over to the library. Thin and juiceless Ada Kendall was alone inside the stifling trailer. She drew back in her chair when he entered, as if she fancied he might leap over the desk and attack her. Then she sat spine-locked and fixed him with a sour look of disapproval.
“You’re not welcome here, you know,” she said.
“I know. But it’s a public place and you’re not going to ask me to leave, are you, Miss Kendall?”
“It’s Mrs. Kendall. I’m a widow.” She spoke the last sentence proudly, as if it were a badge of honor. “What is it you want?”
“Your file of the Tonopah newspaper, if you have one.”
“The past twelve months only.”
“That’s all I’m interested in.”
“Going to read about the murders, I suppose.”
“No. The real estate ads.”
“Real estate?”
“Didn’t you know? I’m thinking of settling in this area.”
Her mouth opened and she blinked at him behind her glasses.
“In your neighborhood, maybe. One of the places next door to you wouldn’t be up for sale or rent, would it?”
“Why, you... you...”
“Easy, Mrs. Kendall. This is a library — no obscenities permitted.”
He found the newspaper file on his own, in an airless alcove at the far end. Sweat ran freely on his face, dripped from his nose and chin, as he culled the issues containing stories about the killings. There were several, despite the fact that the Tonopah paper was a weekly: a bizarre, double homicide was big news in a small county like this one.
The initial account was prominent on the front page, and was accompanied by photographs of both Anna and Dave Roebuck. The one of Anna was a smiley wedding photo a dozen years old; the likeness between the woman and the one Messenger had observed in San Francisco was so slender they might have been two separate people. The photo of her husband was more recent but the reproduction was grainily poor; it conveyed no clear impression of the man.
He didn’t expect to learn much from the lead story and follow-ups that he didn’t already know. But he did find out one detail that neither Dacy nor Reverend Hoxie had mentioned — a detail that made Tess Roebuck’s death even more of a puzzle.
The child had been found not only wearing a white Sunday dress, but with a sprig of something called desert verbena tightly clenched in one hand. The fact appeared in two of the news stories, each time without either explanation or speculation.
Messenger left Ada Kendall glowering behind her desk and drove the rattling pickup back out to the ranch. Lonnie helped him unload the supplies, and when they were put away he went to talk to Dacy.
“Verbena?” she said in response to his question. “It’s a flowering desert plant. Common enough around here.”
“Why would Tess have had a sprig of it clutched in her hand?”
“Don’t go trying to make anything out of that, Jim. It’s not important.”
“The white dress is important — it has to be. Why not the verbena too?”
“Anna had bushes growing in the yard, along with some other plants. County cops found where the branch’d been broken off one of the bushes near where she was hit with the rock, and they figured when she fell she clutched at the bush and the branch snapped off in her hand.”
“Makes sense, I guess,” Messenger admitted. “Still, what if they were wrong? What if the murderer broke it off and put it in her hand, for the same reason he changed her clothes and put her in the well?”
“Jim, nobody could figure an explanation for the dress or the well. Maybe there isn’t any that makes much sense. You’ll only make yourself crazy trying to come up with one that includes the verbena, too.”
“Crazier than I already am, you mean.”
“You said it, I didn’t. Why don’t you go on back to work and let me do the same?”
He went back to work. But he couldn’t get the Sunday dress, the well, the verbena out of his mind. Or the feeling, groundless or not, that the three were connected somehow, and that if he knew their purpose he would know who was guilty and why.
18
Once the usual morning chores were done, Sunday was a day of rest on the Burgess ranch. This suited Messenger. He’d had a good eight hours of sleep, but he was still tired — and sunburnt and saddle sore — from Saturday’s truck-and-horseback ride across their grazing land.
He and Lonnie had set out early, with a loaded two-horse trailer hooked onto the back of the GMC pickup and the pickup’s bed stacked with fresh salt blocks. With water at a premium out here, salt blocks were essential to the survival of sagebrush cattle. They’d spent all morning jouncing over rough, arid terrain along the eastern foothills where the Bootstrap Mine was located. Most of the small herd were loosely scattered there, on land that belonged to the BLM. In another six weeks or so, Lonnie told him, the beeves would be bunched and driven back onto Burgess ground. That was when however many head they needed to sell would be culled and put into the holding pens, and any necessary doctoring taken care of; it was also when a BLM agent would come down from the regional office in Tonopah and take an inventory, one of the steps in setting next year’s quota. All the late calves would be on the ground then, too, and would have to be branded, earmarked, and inoculated. It was too much work for two people, so they’d scrape together enough money to hire a seasonal hand for a few weeks. A part-time buckaroo (yes, that was a word they still used out here) would also be short-hired for the spring roundup.
Cattle and the land were the only subjects Lonnie would discuss. Messenger tried twice to turn their desultory conversation to the murders; each time Lonnie withdrew into a moody silence. He had a feeling that whatever the boy was concealing, it was like a wad of bitter phlegm caught far back in his throat: He needed to spit it out, but he couldn’t do it even though it was choking him.
In the afternoon they’d saddled the horses and ridden along the southwest boundary line, over even rougher terrain, to check fences and look for far-straying cattle. It had been after three, Messenger feeling butt-sprung and as if he were cooking in his own juices, when they found the injured and dying steer. The animal had wandered too close to the edge of a shallow wash, and the powdery earth had given way and pitched it down into the cut. One of its hind legs had been broken in the fall. The accident must have happened within the past twelve hours, Lonnie said grimly; otherwise the steer, weak and bleating with pain, would already be dead. He’d wasted no more time with words, just gone and gotten his carbine and put the animal out of his misery, while Messenger waited with the horses. Afterward the boy grew moodily silent again. When Messenger asked him if he was upset over losing a steer from an already thin herd, Lonnie shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said. “I just don’t like to see anything suffer.”