She paused again, and I heard her gulping liquid at the other end of the line. "Water," she said, "case you're wondering."
"I wasn't."
"Well, whatever. Anyway, I don't know about sexual abuse. It came up at the trial, but it came up at the Menendez brothers' trial as well, and look where it got them. Like I said, Mr. Parker, Caleb was smart. Even at sixteen, seventeen, he was smarter than most of the people in this town."
"You think he made it up?"
She didn't answer for a time. "I don't know. But if there was abuse, then he was smart enough to try to use it as mitigation. You have to remember, Mr. Parker, that people didn't talk about it so much in those days. The fact of someone bringing it up was unusual. In the end, I guess we'll never know for certain what happened in that house.
"But there was more to Caleb Brewster than intelligence. People around here recall that he was mean, or worse than mean. He tortured animals, Mr. Parker, and hung their remains from trees: squirrels, rabbits, even cats and dogs. There was no evidence to tie him to it, you understand, but folks knew it was him. Maybe he got tired of killing animals, and decided to move up a step. There was other stuff too."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, let's take this in the order it happened. Two or three days after that incident on the road, Caleb Brewster killed his mother and fed her remains to the hogs. Sheriff Garrett and another deputy came up to check on the boy and found him sitting on the porch, drinking sour milk from a jug. There was blood in the kitchen, on the walls and on the floor. Boy still had the knife beside him. Bonnie Kyle's clothing was in the hog pen, along with some bones, which was pretty much all that the hogs had left of her, apart from a small silver ring. One of the hogs had passed it out in its stool. I think they got it in the Frontier Museum over in Banderas now, alongside two-headed lambs and Indian arrowheads."
"What happened to Caleb?"
"He was tried as an adult, then sent down."
"For life?"
"Twenty years. He got out in sixty-three or sixty-four, I think."
"Was he rehabilitated?"
"Rehabilitated? Fuck, no. I reckon he was off the scale before he ever killed her, and he never got back on it again. But someone saw fit to release him, taking into account the extenuating circumstances. He'd served his time and they couldn't keep him locked up forever, no matter how good an idea that might have been. And, like I said, he was smart. He kept his nose clean in prison. They thought he was getting better. Myself, I think he was waiting."
"He came back to the Hill Country?" I asked, although I already sensed the answer to the question.
Again, there came that pause. This time, it remained unbroken for what seemed like a long time.
"The house was still standing," began Tannen. "I remember him coming back into town on the Greyhound-I was maybe ten or eleven-and Caleb walking out toward the old house, and folks stepping onto the other side of the street and then watching him as he passed. I don't know how long he spent there. Couldn't have been more than a couple of nights, but…"
"But?"
She sighed. "A girl died. Lillian Boyce. They reckon she was the prettiest girl in the county, and they were probably right. They found her down by the Hondo Creek, near Tarpley. She'd been cut up pretty bad. That wasn't the worst of it, though."
I waited, and it seemed to me that I knew what was coming, even before she said it.
"She was hung from a tree," she said. "Like someone wanted her to be found. Like she was a warning to us all."
The line seemed to hum, and the cell phone was hot in my hand, as Sheriff Tannen concluded her story. "When we found her, Caleb Brewster had gone again. There's still a warrant outstanding, far as I know, but I didn't think anyone would ever get to serve it.
"At least, I didn't until now."
After I hung up, I sat on my bed for a time. There was a deck of playing cards on a bookshelf in the room and I found myself shuffling it, the edges of the cards blurring before my eyes. I saw the queen of hearts and drew her from the deck. Hanky-poo, that was what Saul Mann used to call "Find the Queen." He would stand at his felt-covered trestle-table, seemingly talking to himself as he arranged the cards before him, flipping one card over with the rim of another. "Five gets you ten, ten gets you twenty. "He didn't even seem to notice the punters slowly gathering, attracted by the sure movement of his hands and the promise of easy money, but he was always watching. He watched and he waited, and slowly, surely, they came to him. The old man was like a hunter who knows that, at some point, the deer must surely cross his path.
And I thought too of Caleb Kyle, staring at the remains of the girls he had torn apart and hung from trees. A memory came to me, a recollection of a legend told of the Emperor Nero. It was said that after Nero killed his own mother, Agrippina the Younger, he ordered that her body be opened, so that he could see the place from which he had come. What motivated this action is unclear: morbid obsession, perhaps, or even the incestuous feelings that the ancient chroniclers ascribed to him. It may even have been the case that he hoped to understand something of himself, of his own nature, by gazing upon the site of his own origin.
He must have loved her once, I thought, before it all turned to fury and rage and hate, before he found it in himself to take her life and rend her to pieces.
And, for a brief moment, I felt a kind of pity for Caleb, a sorrow for the boy he once was and a hatred for the man that he became.
I saw shadows falling from trees, and a figure moving north, ever north, like the needle on a compass. Of course he would have headed north. North was as far away from Texas as he could get after avenging himself on the community that had seen fit to jail him for what he had done to his mother.
But there was more to it than that, it seemed. When my grandfather was a boy, the priest would read the gospels at the north side of the church because north had always been perceived as an area that had not yet seen God's light. It was the same reason why they buried the unbaptized, the suicides and the murderers on northern ground, outside the boundaries of the church walls.
Because north was unknown territory.
North lay the darklands.
The next morning, the bookstore was crowded with students and tourists. I ordered coffee and read a copy of Rolling Stone that someone had left on a chair until Rachel arrived, late as usual. She still wore her black coat, this time with blue denims and a sky-blue V-neck sweater. Beneath it, her blue-and-white striped Oxford shirt was buttoned to the neck. Her hair hung loose on her shoulders.
"Are you ever early?" I asked, as I ordered her a coffee and a muffin.
"I was up until 5 A.M. working on your damned file," she replied. "If I was charging you for my time, you couldn't afford me."
"Sorry," I said. "I can barely afford the coffee and muffin."
"You're breaking my heart," she said, but it seemed that her attitude had softened a little since the day before, although it could have been wishful thinking on my part.
"You ready for this?" she asked.
I nodded, but before she went on I told her what I had learned from the sheriff in Medina and how Caleb had taken his mother's name to escape his past.
She nodded to herself. "It fits," she said. "It all fits."
The coffee arrived and she added sugar, then unwrapped the muffin, tore it into bite-sized pieces and began to talk.
"Most of this is guesswork and supposition. Any decent law enforcement officer would laugh me out of his building, but since you're neither decent nor a law enforcement officer, you'll take what you can get. Plus, everything you've given me is also based on guesswork and supposition, with a little superstition and paranoia thrown in." She shook her head in bemusement, then grew serious as she opened her wire-bound notebook. Line upon line of closely written text lay before her, dotted here and there with yellow Post-its. "Most of what I'm going to tell you, I think you know already. All I can do is to clarify it for you, maybe put it into some kind of context.