“I tried to get in touch with him these past few days.”
“I know. He wasn’t here.”
“When did you talk to him last?”
She hesitated and wiped her flushed cheeks. Her eyes were dry but strangely enlarged, as if she were straining to see everything very clearly. “I talked to him yesterday, Mr. Selby, after breakfast, it was, Casper called from a gas station.”
“He wasn’t staying here?”
“Stayed where he pleased, you know that.”
“Lori, your husband and I were friends. Can you tell me what he was worried about?”
“That was his business. Didn’t do to ask. You know how Casper was, you better’n most maybe. Didn’t believe in explaining.”
One of Gideen’s sons came into the living room, Eli, who was sixteen, with wide shoulders and thick blond hair. “My ma is worn out now, Mr. Selby.” Selby remembered that Shana had once made Eli a woolen skating cap for Christmas. “We’d just as soon be with our own selves now.”
“I understand, I’ll be going, Eli. But your father didn’t trip over a shotgun like some goddamn fool out with a gun for the first time. Anybody who says he wouldn’t put his gun on safe before climbing a fence is a liar. His death wasn’t an accident, Eli.”
Lori’s hands were locked together now, the knuckles strained and white.
Eli Gideen said, “We’re obliged to you for coming by, Mr. Selby.”
“Mrs. Gideen,” Selby said, “if I can be of any help at all...”
“Thank you kindly for that.”
“I flooded my car,” Selby said, “so I’ll have to let the engine dry out for a while. I’m parked on Fairlee. If I can’t get it started, I’d appreciate it if I could come back and use the phone.”
“Phone is here,” Eli said.
The station wagon was cold, the windows steamed, and the sleeting rain making a metallic clatter on the roof and fenders. Selby started the car and turned on the heater and wipers. The blacktop materialized as the rubber blades swept the windshield clean. The road curved through ground mists toward Pyle’s Corners and Muhlenburg.
“Casper’s boys won’t talk to anyone.” Selby turned and looked at Dorcas Brett. She wore a brown wool coat with caped shoulders. Her face was white with the cold except for sharp points of color in her cheeks.
“Will Mrs. Gideen talk to us?”
“She knows I’m waiting. Maybe she’s angry enough and hurt enough to tell us whatever she knows.”
The hum of the motor mingled with the slap of the windshield wipers. The white scar on Selby’s cheek caught a reflected light as he glanced at the rear-view mirror.
They had made progress during the last ten days, finding links that raised further questions. General Taggart who owned Vinegar Hill also commanded Camp Saliaris, the chemical corps installation near Summitt City. Lieutenant General Adam Taggart, from an old Pennsylvania family, had once owned the hundreds of acres along the river which had been developed into the exclusive community known as Brandywine Lakes. The general had sold the land to a holding company a dozen years before.
Sergeant Burt Wilger had got hold of several curricula programs and relevant yearbooks from Rockland College. (He had persuaded a local librarian to request the material from the school as an “aid to the library’s educational reference program.”) Derek Taggart’s class photograph was on the same page as Earl Thomson’s. A handsome young man, nineteen or twenty then, young Taggart had a challenging, mocking smile. Derek was the general’s son. He had been an editor of the school paper, and nicknamed “Ace” during his years at Rockland.
They waited for ten or fifteen minutes in the station wagon. Occasionally, Selby glanced at the rear-view mirror.
“That wasn’t easy for you, was it?” Brett said.
“It wasn’t easy for Lori Gideen, either.”
“I understand that... I was thinking of you.”
Selby shrugged and rubbed the steam from the rear-view mirror. He remembered Gideen when they’d been together at the kennel run, Casper talking about this dying pear tree, its last extravagant death crop and then the swift, final decline...
Selby said, “If Casper trusted you and thought he owed you, he’d cut off his arm for you before you could ask. He wanted to help me.” He rubbed the mirror again. “Yes, it was hard, talking to Lori and Casper’s sons.”
She pulled off her glove and put a hand against his face, then traced the scar on his cheek. “That hurt badly when it happened, Harry. You told me it did...”
Selby moved her hand away from his face.
“Do you mind that?”
“No, but I think you’ve got a point to make.”
“It healed over, Harry, it doesn’t hurt anymore. That happens.”
“And has everything in your past healed over?” he asked her. “We all go through things, marriages, break-ups with friends, the ice cream cone falling in the gutter.”
“I’m all right, I think.”
“That scene at the college swimming pool, that must have stuck with you over the years. If I’m saying something you don’t want me to, I’ll shut up. But it was more than imagining piranha fish in the water that night. That’s what Davey thinks, by the way.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said carefully. “I was frightened, all right, but I’m over it. I’d just as soon leave it at that, Harry.”
“Okay. We’ll leave it at that.”
Lori Gideen appeared in the rear-view mirror then, hurrying toward them with one of Casper’s old hunting jackets pulled around her shoulders. She climbed into the rear of the station wagon and when Selby introduced her to Brett, nodded shyly.
“The boys is worse than Casper ever was...” Her voice was low, impersonal. “Casper was my husband, ma’am. He and Mr. Selby went hunting a lot. They was good friends. He used to say that Mr. Selby here had enough sense to listen.”
Looking steadily at Selby, the rain on her girlish face mingled with her tears. “The boys don’t want me to talk to anybody, they think any stranger could be the devil, just like Casper did. But I’m going to talk ’cause you’ll listen, Mr. Selby. Casper knew Goldie Boy and Barby Kane’s momma was together that night your little girl got hurt. That’s what started the talk. Others knew about it but wasn’t saying, him being a preacher.”
“Did Casper know where they were?”
“It was what he was trying to find out. But two nights ago, Barby Kane and her momma, Coralee, they up and left Little Tenn. A big car came for them in the middle of the night. Two in the morning, didn’t even take all their clothes, and Barby’s cat, it’s whining around everywhere for food.”
“Casper knew where they went?”
“The car took ’em to the airport in Philadelphia. He found out that much. The same night they left, Casper packed some food and his shotgun in the truck and drove off. Told me not to pay any mind if anybody came around asking for him. Just to say he’d gone hunting, even if it was the police. He wasn’t afraid, you know Casper, Mr. Selby, but he didn’t want anyone bothering me or his boys.”
She pushed open the door, letting in a spray of wind and rain. “He’s gone, but he set a store by you, and he’d want me to tell you all this, never mind the boys. I thank you again for coming around, Mr. Selby.”
Lori Gideen ran clumsily through the mud toward the entrance to Little Tenn, slipping occasionally in her heavy rubber boots. The trailers had their lights, the small windows gleaming with forlorn cheer through the gathering darkness.
Selby drove on through the rain into Muhlenburg. Turning at Pyle’s Corners, he parked a half block from Goldie Boy Jessup’s storefront church. The name was spelled out in gilt letters on the glass window — “Tabernacle of the Golden Flame.” A large room beyond the ornate sign was brightly illuminated, crowded with men and women huddled on benches facing Goldie Boy, who stood above them gesturing and shouting from a raised platform. Speakers carried his voice to an adjoining parking lot. Cars and trucks lined up there, dogs in the rear of pickups, howling at the pounding rain and Goldie’s amplified voice.