"Come to turn in your wife?" McDowell asked.
"I've come to make an offer for your cooperation," Pemberton said, "a final one."
"You know my answer. You've known it for three years."
Pemberton eased back into the chair he suspected the sheriff deliberately wanted uncomfortable, spreading his legs to better balance his two-hundred pounds.
"It's not just money this time. It's whether you want to continue being sheriff."
"Oh, I'm going to continue," McDowell replied. "I found me a fisherman who saw Galloway's Ford crossing the bridge near Colt Ridge last night. Since Galloway doesn't have a left hand, I'd say that kind of narrows who did the actual killing."
"I just got off the phone to a state senator who can have you fired within a week," Pemberton said. "You want to keep your job or not?"
McDowell looked intently at Pemberton.
"What's interesting to me is how you were surprised this morning. I guess I can take that a couple of ways, can't I?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Pemberton answered.
"No, maybe you don't," McDowell said after a few moments. "Maybe you're such a worthless son-of-a-bitch that you wanted it done same as she did, but you were too gutless to go with her."
McDowell stood up, his chair scraping against the wood floor as he shoved it backward. He was not nearly as big a man as Pemberton, no more than five-ten. Yet there was a visible strength in McDowell's body, wiry but muscled in the biceps and forearms, wrists thicker than expected for his frame. No gun and holster clinched around the sheriff's waist. Pemberton stood up as well. It would be a good fight, Pemberton told himself, because the highlanders considered it a matter of honor never to cut and run, or quit once a brawl had begun. He'd be able to pummel McDowell for ten or fifteen minutes. Adrenaline surged through his veins, and with it Pemberton felt a revived sense of his own strength that had been dormant too long. The world suddenly became simpler than it had been in a long while.
But before they could start, there was a knock on the door, another soon after, still light but more insistent. McDowell looked toward the door. Pemberton thought the lawman would walk over and lock it, and perhaps he would have, but at that moment the brass doorknob turned and the door opened. An older woman, her gray hair tied in a taut bun, entered the office, behind her Rachel Harmon, the child in her arms.
Pemberton looked at Jacob and saw the sheriff was right about his features, even more obvious now than in January. He thought about the photograph of himself and wondered if Serena had found it last night as she searched for the hunting knife. She might have opened the desk drawer and found the album, turned the pages until she came to the last two. It suddenly occurred to Pemberton then that Serena might have taken not only the knife but also a photograph with her.
Sheer lunacy to imagine such a thing, Pemberton told himself, but his mind continued to assemble its own fevered logic. Pemberton remembered the glint of the knife blade when Serena stepped onto the porch last night. He tried to recall if something had been in her right hand as well. It could have easily been there, a photograph taken to confirm a child that, as far as Pemberton knew, Serena had never seen. Taken to make sure-except it wouldn't be the photograph of Jacob as an infant, Pemberton suddenly realized. Because even if Serena knew it was a picture of Jacob, she'd need a picture of the child the way he looked now, at two years of age. Serena would have taken the photograph of Pemberton.
Pemberton continued to stare at Jacob. It was impossible not to. The dark-brown eyes solemnly stared back at him. The Harmon girl noticed and turned the boy away. For a few moments no one moved, as if all awaited someone else to enter the office and set something yet unknown into motion. The only sound was the tick of the brass chain against the ceiling fan's motor.
McDowell opened the desk drawer and pulled out his revolver. The sheriff clicked off the safety and pointed it at Pemberton.
"Get out of here."
Pemberton was about to speak, but McDowell thumbed back the hammer and aimed directly at Pemberton's forehead. The sheriff's raised arm and hand did not tremble as the index finger settled against the trigger.
"If you say a word, one single word, I swear to God I'll kill you," McDowell said.
Pemberton believed him. He stepped away from the desk and walked across the room, the Harmon girl clutching the child tighter in her arms as if Pemberton might try to snatch away the boy. Pemberton opened the door and stepped blinking into the midday light.
The town was still there, the streetlamps and shops and the not quite obsolete hitching post, the clock face on the courthouse steeple. Pemberton watched as the ponderous minute hand lurched forward and nudged away another bit of time. He recalled one of the few occasions he'd attended his physics class at Harvard, the professor lecturing on an idea espoused by an Austrian scientist about the relativity of time. It seemed that way to him now, as if time was no longer brisk measured increments but something more fluid, with its own currents and eddies. Something that could easily sweep him away.
A Model T blared its horn and pulled around him. Only then did Pemberton realize he stood in the middle of the street. Pemberton walked to his car and got in, but he did not turn the key and press the starter button.
In a few minutes the office door opened. The older woman went up the street, but the girl and child got in the sheriff's car. Pemberton let them get far enough away and then pulled out and followed the sheriff's car west. After a while the blacktop became dirt, and gray roostertails of dust rose in the police car's wake. Pemberton dropped farther behind, no longer following the car but the haze of dust. The dust trail soon left the main road, turned down the washout that led to Deep Creek. Pemberton knew where they were headed.
Pemberton did not follow but drove fifty yards past. He turned the Packard around and parked it on the road's weedy shoulder. The day was warm, but he didn't roll down the passenger window. He wanted to blame the heat for the sweat matting his shirt. Twenty minutes later the sheriff's car came back up the secondary road and turned toward Waynesville.
There was a two-foot-long Stillson wrench in the trunk, and for a few minutes he imagined the ten pounds of iron in his grasp. It would be enough. Or he could simply make a phone call to Meeks, a few words passed on to Galloway. He turned the key and his foot pressed the starter button. Pemberton let his hand settle over the black gear shift knob. He squeezed and felt the ball of hard rubber in his grip. He pressed the clutch and paused a moment longer, then shifted the Packard into gear. When he came to the Deep Creek turnoff, Pemberton did not slow but kept on going. He drove into Waynesville, on past the hospital and elementary school and the train depot, then on toward Cove Creek Valley.
As Pemberton passed the saw mill, he remembered his father's funeral, though "remembered" didn't seem as apt a word to him as "recovered." He could not recall the last time he'd thought of the funeral since his return from Boston. Or when he'd last thought of his mother or two sisters. The letters they'd written him those first months had been thrown away unopened. Partly it had been his freeing himself of the past, as Serena advocated, but it had also been a self-willed amnesia, a spell willingly succumbed to.