Until the day Louis died, he never underestimated Kathy Mallory again. Or so he said.
When Tom Jessop came home to visit his bed for the first time in thirty-six hours, he walked in the back door and found a package was sitting on his kitchen table.
How did it get there? The cleaning woman was not due back for days, and the evidence of her absence was the load of dishes in the sink, the hamper filled to overflowing and dirty socks trailing out the door of the bathroom.
Distrustfully, carefully, he untied the string and opened the brown paper wrapper. Now he looked down at the gun he had lost to his erstwhile prisoner. A sheet of paper was rolled around the barrel. He spread the curling paper flat on the table. He was so tired, his eyes were closing to slits as he read her letter:
You wanted to know what my mother said to me when she was dying. She wrote a lot of numbers on the back of my hand and told me to run to the public telephone on the highway and dial that number. She said a woman would come for me. Most of the phone number was smudged, so I never did get through to anyone. I just kept running. I wanted to run to you, but she said, ‘No, don’t go near the sheriff’s office, you’ll get hurt.’ So I always figured you were part of it. Until tonight, I didn’t know the deputy was in the mob that stoned her. That must have been why she wanted me to stay clear of your office. She was afraid Travis would hurt me before I could get to you. If I could get to you now, I would – because I want my pocket watch back.
He slipped the gold watch from his shirt pocket, opened the case and speculated on the name engraved above hers. Was this the man who had raised her? She must have loved him, she prized his watch so much. So it was Louis Markowitz who had been there for her when she needed help. It might have been himself, if only he had stayed in town that day. But Cass had known that he wouldn’t be back before dark – not in time to save her daughter.
A cascade of images overwhelmed him: the blood on the floor of Kathy’s bedroom, the small red handprints inside the closet, Cass’s flesh on the rocks in the yard. And now he saw Kathy as a badly frightened child, all alone on the road and grieving for her mother.
He walked around the house in the slow shuffle of a much older man, closing all the curtains. It wouldn’t do for any passerby to glance in a window and see the sheriff crying.
CHAPTER 17
Few creatures began life in November; it was largely a killing season. But in the hour before dawn, owls and bats were folding up their wings. Insects and small animals enjoyed a respite from the carnage before the balance of power shifted and the daylight predators opened their eyes.
The cemetery was at peace, but one of its angels was missing.
The chilly air of a sudden cold front had mixed up a low-lying fog, and the sheriff’s feet disappeared in the mist as he stood before the bare stone pedestal and read the dates of Cass Shelley’s life and death. Seventeen years ago, he had meant to add a line to this engraving, a bit of poetry perhaps, but the right words had always eluded him. All these years later, he was still thinking about this unfinished business.
He turned to his deputy, who blended so well with the dark. Lilith’s ghost-white father had been the most superstitious man Tom Jessop had ever known. If old Guy Beaudare had been here yesterday and seen that angel weep, he would have been down on one knee in a heartbeat, rattling rosary beads and chanting prayers like a madman. Apparently, Guy’s daughter was more at home in the solid world and not a big believer in miracles.
“So you figure they’re coming right back?”
“It’ll be a while,” she said. “They have to lay boards in front of the pallet to move the statue over the ground. It’s slow work.”
“But real quiet and no tracks or ruts. So Mr. Butler never left town. Good job, Lilith. I guess you earned your pay this week.”
“You’re not going to fire me?”
“Never occurred to me. I knew I could depend on Guy to raise his daughter right.”
“You knew all along, didn’t you?”
“From the first day. But it’s good you told me.” Though he had only set eyes on Lilith three times in her life, it would have been awkward to fire the girl. He had so many years invested in drinking with her father, and an ocean of beer was a damn strong bond.
“I’m gonna tell the FBI to go to hell.”
“I like the sentiment, Lilith, but you might want to rethink that. Twenty years ago, they came to me with the same deal.”
“My father said you told them where to get off.”
“But after that, there were times I could’ve used their help. You can learn a lot from my mistakes.”
“So why did you turn them down?”
“They made my skin crawl with their little dossiers on the New Church crowd. Granted, Malcolm’s pulled off some shady deals, but the feds didn’t know anything about that. They just wanted to collect information on another church. They’re a lot like insects, collecting things without a brain to tell them why, collecting for its own sake. I wasn’t about to help them. So they asked my deputy if he’d like to make a little extra cash.”
“Travis worked for the feds?
“Not Travis – that worthless idiot. No, they used the real deputy, Eliot Dobbs. He’s long gone now. Got a better job up north. What with the other towns going broke and folding left and right, I didn’t really need another deputy, so I never replaced him. But I did miss the connection to the feds.”
He walked down the gravel path, inspecting tombs and looking for a likely place to hide. At his back, Lilith was asking, “How did you find out Eliot was working for them?”
“He asked if I would mind having a spy on the payroll. Said he had a baby on the way and needed the extra money. Hell, I used to help him spin lies for his reports. And then when I needed help, the feds came through for Eliot. A boy from Dayborn had run off. Jimmy was just a little kid then – way too young to be on the road. The feds helped us trace him to New York City, and I brought him back home.”
And New York was where Kathy had run to. He was sure of that now. Did every damn road in the world lead to that hellhole? The cop at the Missing Persons Bureau had told him there wasn’t a state in the union that had not contributed a child to the streets of New York. When Jimmy Simms came home again, he had probably flooded the whole school with tales of the city, hiding out and foraging for food. But Jimmy was a good five years older than Kathy when he made his run.
“I guess Eliot was gone when Kathy disappeared,” said Lilith.
“That he was. But it didn’t matter. The FBI wouldn’t have spent any time looking for her. We all figured she was dead. There was so much blood.”
He picked out a monument decked with cherubs. It offered good cover and a view of the empty pedestal. “This is as good a spot as any.”
The deputy put one finger to her lips and pointed east.
The angel was coming.
And she was magnificent, wings spread for flight and carrying a sword. The ground-hugging clouds obscured the hem of her robes and the pallet. She appeared to float along the path between the tombs.
Lilith crossed herself, and the sheriff decided his deputy did have a bit of Guy in her after all.
The sheriff pulled back to join her behind the monument just as Henry Roth appeared in front of the angel to set down two boards in her path. The planks immediately disappeared into the white soup of low fog. The angel veered left down another alley of tombs, heading toward the pedestal, and now the sheriff could see Charles Butler behind the wings, his shoulder bent to the stone, slowly moving her along.