Parsons came into Tule River two or three times a month to trade for supplies, but you seldom saw the wife. Neither of them went to church on Sunday, nor to any of the social events at the Odd Fellows Hall. Parsons kept to himself mostly, didn’t seem to have any friends or any particular vices. Always civil, at least to me, but taciturn and kind of broody-looking. Not the sort of fellow you find yourself liking much.
But did the medal I’d found belong to him? And if it did, had he hung the drifter? And if he had, what was his motive?
I was still puzzling on that when Boze showed up. He was a half hour early, and he had Floyd Jones with him. Floyd looked some like Santa Claus — fat and jolly and white-haired — and he liked it when you told him so. He was the night bartender at the Elkhorn Bar and Grill.
Boze said, “Got some news, Carl. Floyd here saw the hanging man last night. Recognized the body over to Obe Spencer’s just now.”
Floyd bobbed his head up and down. “He came into the Elkhorn about eight o’clock, asking for work.”
I said, “How long did he stay?”
“Half hour, maybe. Told him we already had a swamper and he spent five minutes trying to convince me he’d do a better job of cleaning up. Then he gave it up when he come to see I wasn’t listening, and bought a beer and nursed it over by the stove. Seemed he didn’t much relish going back into the cold.”
“He say anything else to you?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Didn’t give his name, either,” Boze said. “But there’s something else. Tell him, Floyd.”
“Well, there was another fella came in just after the drifter,” Floyd said. “Ordered a beer and sat watching him. Never took his eyes off that drifter once. I wouldn’t have noticed except for that and because we were near empty. Cold kept most everybody home last night.”
“You know this second man?” I asked.
“Sure do. Local farmer. Newcomer to the area, only been around for—”
“Jubal Parsons?”
Floyd blinked at me. “Now how in thunder did you know that?”
“Lucky guess. Parsons leave right after the drifter?”
“He did. Not more than ten seconds afterward.”
“You see which direction they went?”
“Downstreet, I think. Toward Sam McCullough’s livery.”
I thanked Floyd for his help and shooed him on his way. When he was gone Boze asked me, “Just how did you know it was Jubal Parsons?”
“I finally remembered where I’d seen that Presidential Medal I found. Parsons showed it when he was here one day several months ago. Said it was his good-luck charm.”
Boze rubbed at his bald spot. “That and Floyd’s testimony make a pretty good case against him, don’t they?”
“They do. Reckon I’ll go out and have a talk with him.”
“We’ll both go,” Boze said. “Ellie can mind the store the rest of the day. This is more important. Besides, if Parsons is a killer, it’ll be safer if there are two of us.”
I didn’t argue; a hero is something I never was nor wanted to be. We left the mill and went and picked up Boze’s buckboard from behind the mercantile. On the way out of town we stopped by his house and mine long enough to fetch our rifles. Then we headed west on Willow Creek Road.
It was a long cool ride out to Jubal Parsons’ tenant farm, through a lot of rich farmland and stands of willows and evergreens. Neither of us said much. There wasn’t much to say. But I was tensed up and I could see that Boze was, too.
A rutted trail hooked up to the farm from Willow Creek Road, and Boze jounced the buckboard along there some past three o’clock. It was pretty modest acreage. Just a few fields of corn and alfalfa, with a cluster of ramshackle buildings set near where Willow Creek cut through the northwest corner. There was a one-room farmhouse, a chicken coop, a barn, a couple of lean-tos, and a pole corral. That was all except for a small windmill — a Fairbanks, Morse Eclipse — that the Siler brothers had put up because the creek was dry more than half the year.
When we came in sight of the buildings I could tell that Jubal Parsons had done work on the place. The farmhouse had a fresh coat of whitewash, as did the chicken coop, and the barn had a new roof
There was nobody in the farmyard, just half a dozen squawking leghorns, when we pulled in and Boze drew rein. But as soon as we stepped down, the front door of the house opened and Greta Parsons came out on the porch. She was wearing a calico dress and high-button shoes, but her head was bare; that butter-yellow hair of hers hung down to her hips, glistening like the bargeman’s gold nugget in the sun. She was some pretty woman, for a fact. It made your throat thicken up just to look at her, and funny ideas start to stir around in your head. If ever there was a woman to tempt a man to sin, I thought, it was this one.
Boze stayed near the buckboard, with his rifle held loose in one hand, while I went over to the porch steps and took off my hat. “I’m Carl Miller, Mrs. Parsons,” I said. “That’s Ed Bozeman back there. We’re from Tule River. Maybe you remember seeing us?”
“Yes, Mr. Miller. I remember you.”
“We’d like a few words with your husband. Would he be somewhere nearby?”
“He’s in the barn,” she said. There was something odd about her voice — a kind of dullness, as if she was fatigued. She moved that way, too, loose and jerky. She didn’t seem to notice Boze’s rifle, or to care if she did.
I said, “Do you want to call him out for us?”
“No, you go on in. It’s all right.”
I nodded to her and rejoined Boze, and we walked on over to the barn. Alongside it was a McCormick & Deering binder-harvester, and further down, under a lean-to, was an old buggy with its storm curtains buttoned up. A big gray horse stood in the corral, nuzzling a pile of hay. The smell of dust and earth and manure was ripe on the cool air.
The barn doors were shut. I opened one half, stood aside from the opening, and called out, “Mr. Parsons? You in there?”
No answer.
I looked at Boze. He said, “We’ll go in together,” and I nodded. Then we shouldered up and I pulled the other door half open. And we went inside.
It was shadowed in there, even with the doors open; those parts of the interior I could make out were empty. I eased away from Boze, toward where the corn crib was. There was sweat on me; I wished I’d taken my own rifle out of the buckboard.
“Mr. Parsons?”
Still no answer. I would have tried a third time, but right then Boze said, “Never mind, Carl,” in a way that made me turn around and face him.
He was a dozen paces away, staring down at something under the hayloft. I frowned and moved over to him. Then I saw too, and my mouth came open and there was a slithery feeling on my back.
Jubal Parsons was lying there dead on the sod floor, with blood all over his shirtfront and the side of his face. He’d been shot. There was a .45–70 Springfield rifle beside the body, and when Boze bent down and struck a match, you could see the black-powder marks mixed up with the blood.
“My God,” I said, soft.
“Shot twice,” Boze said. “Head and chest.”
“Twice rules out suicide.”
“Yeah,” he said.
We traded looks in the dim light. Then we turned and crossed back to the doors. When we came out Mrs. Parsons was sitting on the front steps of the house, looking past the windmill at the alfalfa fields. We went over and stopped in front of her. The sun was at our backs, and the way we stood put her in our shadow. That was what made her look up; she hadn’t seen us coming, or heard us crossing the yard.