The sheriff was giving him an amused look when he finally had the percolator set up and bubbling. Stafford was once again struck by the sheriff’s appearance: the tall, rangy body of a lumberjack, with that young-old face, the grayish white hair contrasting with the heavy black eyebrows, and that Wyatt Earp mustache. He wondered how old the sheriff really was.
“We were married when she came back from the university,” the sheriff said, easing his tall frame into a kitchen chair. “I think that was one of the things that screwed it all up in the end. She got out of Graniteville, got an education. I never did.”
“But she came back.”
“Hill country does that to young folk,” the sheriff said. “Either they fly out of the mountains and never come back or they can’t leave for very long. We’d been dating hi high school. I was something of a football star, and Gwen, well … even now she’ll turn your damn head straight around, you just walkin’by.”
Stafford nodded but was careful to say nothing, realizing that the sheriff had decided to get something into the open.
“I went to work for the county force soon’s I graduated and Gwen left for college. By the time she came home to teach, I was senior deputy. A year later, old man Slater— he was the sheriff then — he up and died at his desk, and I took over. Ran for the election the next year, never looked back.”
The percolator stopped making its noises. Stafford found two mugs in the pantry and filled them. He gave one to the sheriff and sat back down to listen.
“We got married the year I was elected. She was living here at the time, but it was a mite awkward, with the docs new wife and all.”
“That was Hope?”
The sheriff eyed him across his coffee mug. “She tell you about all that?”
“Yes.”
“She tell you her momma died? That the old doc remarried a couple years later?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The sheriff nodded and blew on his coffee. “Not quite how it happened,” he said. “Her momma went crazy. It took while, but by the time she took bad, everyone knew it. Especially old Doc Hand. He had to take her down to Milledgeville in 1974. She died there from some stupid little infection that they never caught. Some flu that got away from ‘em.”
“And then Hope ends up the same way?”
“Yup. After blowing away two of her kids with Doc’s twelve-gauge, and then tearing off her own arm trying to kill herself. Which lovely scene I got to investigate.”
Stafford shook his head hi wonder. “Come visit the nice peaceful north Georgia mountains,” he said. “Relax, take your pack off, listen to the gunfire.”
The sheriff nodded absently but did not reply.
“You lived here?”
“No, sir,” the sheriff said with a touch of pride.
“Don’t much hold with the idea of a man not providing a house and home for his own family. No, we lived across town, near the quarry. She came out here every day, and I usually came here for lunch. Other than what family did to family, it’s not like we had or have a big crime problem up here.”
Stafford nodded. So what led to the affair? he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to do that. The sheriff was staring down into his coffee cup as if looking for the answer to the riddle of the universe.
“See, like I said, I never left Graniteville,” he said again. “I was a local success story.
Everybody knew me from high school days. My classmates in high school, the ones who stayed, were now the citizens. I was the youngest sheriff in the state. Big man on campus, ‘cept’n this wasn’t no campus.” He looked up at Stafford and there was a blaze of pain in his eyes.
“You had an affair,” Stafford said.
The sheriff nodded slowly, the expression on his face a mask of regret “Yes, I did. It didn’t start out to be one, mind you. But Gwen and I were having some problems— over whether or not to have our own kids — and I began to spend time with another woman, a woman I had dated back while Gwen was away at college. For six months or so, it was just that: spending time, getting sympathy. Then one afternoon it became something else, and I became the biggest damn fool on the face of the planet.”
“She found out.” “She found out. Like I said, we’d been having a touch of trouble anyway: I wanted kids. She, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, said she wanted to wait. It wasn’t what I’d call serious trouble, mind you, but sufficient for me to justify seeking a sympathetic shoulder, or so I thought, anyways. But, yes, she found out.”
“Someone tell her? Small-town grapevine?”
“I don’t think so. Gwen just had a habit of knowing things. Still does.”
Stafford nodded. He didn’t know what to say, so he asked a question about Owen’s reluctance to have kids.
“We’d been married seven years when the trouble with Hope came to a head. Hope didn’t just rise up and do that: For the two, three years before that, Gwen had kinda become mother to Hope’s kids, especially when Hope wandered off the planet. It was real tough on the Doc, tough on everybody. And after that night, Jess, who was the baby, came to live with us.”
“So suddenly, you did have a child.”
“That’s it Course, I didn’t see it that way. Being’ not too damn bright, it took me many years to figure out the real reason.”
“Which was?”
“Old Doc Hand marrying up his new, young, and, eventually, insane wife, Hope.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Hope was related to Carrie, Owen’s mother.”
At first Stafford didn’t see it. And then he did. “Ah,” he said.
“Yeah. Owen’s own mother, then Hope. And, of course, before that, Hope’s older sister, Charity, the one who went flying with her unseen companions at the flooded quarry.”
Stafford sipped his coffee for a few minutes. “And now there’s Jess.”
“That’s right. Now there’s Jess. Who we hope like hell really is a psychic, and not—”
Stafford nodded again. There was no future in it, Owen had said. Because of the madness. Her own mother, her mother’s relatives, and now possibly her half sister. Gwinette Hand Warren had decided never, ever to have children, and when she had decided that a long time ago, her husband had sought the comfort of another woman. No future in that, either. Damn.
“That explains a lot,” Stafford said. “I guess what I find curious is your relationship now. You’re obviously friends; you obviously still care very much for her. See, my wife divorced me this past year. Ran off with some Air Force guy. I could never see myself in the same room with her ever again.” The sheriff nodded. “Owen told me something about that.” He looked up at Stafford, who was surprised to hear this. “Oh, yes, she did. I think-I’m more like her big brother now than her ex-husband. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and then almost eight years as man and wife, and for ten years since.” He sighed. “The plain fact is that I was the one who screwed that one up. She could forgive me for it, but she couldn’t be my wife any more. So what we’ve got now is the best I can make of a poor-ass situation. That I created.
I take what I can get.”
“You never remarried.”
“Nope. After Gwen found out, she went to see the other woman. Told her she was going to leave me. That if we wanted to get married after that, it would be all right with her. Was as nice and sweet as she could be.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, buddy. When I went to see her after that little session, she told me she couldn’t marry me, because if I couldn’t be faithful to such a good woman as Gwen, I’d never be faithful to her. Always some truth to that notion, I reckon. So that was that. I figured life didn’t have to go hittin’ me between the eyes with an ax handle more’n once to teach me a lesson.”