looking at. He took in the velvet tapestries, the oak chiffonier, the red tapers melted down now. Everything was red and warm and selected to induce passion, he supposed. But what was on the bed induced anything but.
Like the whore in Pinoche…Mizzy Modine had been eviscerated.
But it was worse this time. All her internals had been cut out, arranged next to the body in some unguessable sequence. Her bowels had been draped over the headboard and coiled around her head in a halo. Her eyes had been plucked out and replaced with coins. Her breasts hacked off and set on the nightstand along with her eyeballs and privates.
“ Yeah…it’s him,” Cabe breathed. “I got a firsthand tour in Pinoche. It looked like this. Only this time it’s even worse.”
Dirker just nodded. “All right, then.”
Together they went outside, stood together, let the wind blast them clean. A light mist hung in the air…but even if it had been pouring, it couldn’t have hoped to wash the stink off of them. A stink that was mostly in their head by that point.
“ You can go, Cabe,” Dirker said. “Get some rest. There’s no more you can do here.”
Cabe looked at him, started to say something…then just shook his head and started down Piney Hill through the muddy, damp streets.
17
At the St. James Hostelry, Janice Dirker said, “My, my, Mister Tyler Cabe, but you smell like the Devil’s own brewery. For a man who didn’t come to Whisper Lake to ‘hell around’, you certainly managed to dip in the waters of our taverns quite thoroughly.”
Cabe just stood there. “Yeah…it was a hard night.”
“ You look like hell, Mr. Cabe. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“ I don’t, ma’am.”
He wanted very badly to get into bed, to sleep away the day, but she insisted he join her for breakfast. He didn’t figure it would be polite to resist. So he followed her into the dining room, thinking it was going to give old Crazy Jack a heart attack if he came in and none other than Tyler Cabe was breaking bread with his woman. Maybe yesterday that would have given Cabe pleasure…but after what he’d been through this day or night or whatever in hell it was, he just didn’t have the strength to feel any animosity for Dirker.
It just wasn’t there.
The cook brought out eggs and hotcakes, maple syrup and coffee.
Cabe stared at the food, his belly growling, but he kept seeing Mizzy Modine laying in that slaughterhouse. He picked up his fork and set it down again.
“ Please, Mr. Cabe, eat,” Janice Dirker said. “The other guests are not up yet. I usually dine alone, but I’m grateful for company. I can remember the days when my husband would share breakfast with me. But he’s simply too busy these days.”
“ I think I need sleep, ma’am,” Cabe said.
“ Of course you do. But sit with me for a moment or two.”
She cut a small bite of cakes and chewed it quite delicately. Cabe could see she had fine breeding. Womenfolk he knew back in Yell County shoveled it in before somebody snatched it off their plates.
“ So where do you hail from, Mr. Cabe?” she asked.
“ Arkansas. Yell County. Yourself?”
“ Georgia. Daddy owned a plantation there. He owned lots of things.” Her eyes misted for a moment, but something wouldn’t let the pain come, maybe breeding. “Daddy’s gone now…everything’s gone.”
She went on to tell him of her life in Georgia, the sort of life she’d had that he could only dream of. The privileges. The fine schools. The genteel upbringing. It was all in great contrast to the South Cabe had known… which had always been hard and unforgiving. She was a lady and the Yankees had destroyed her family’s holdings and yet she had gone and married one of them. She was an enigma to say the least. But the war, he knew, had created a great many of those.
“ Were you in the war, Mr. Cabe?”
“ Yes, ma’am.”
“ But you don’t like to talk about it?”
“ No, ma’am.”
She seemed to understand. “My husband was in the war, also. He, too, does not like to discuss it.”
“ It was a bad time, ma’am. A real bad time for all concerned.”
She smiled conspiratorially. “But, perhaps, worse for us Southerners…wouldn’t you agree?”
He nodded. “I would. The Yankees what stayed behind, stayed home…they probably had it all right. But the ones that did the fighting? No, I can’t say they had a good time of it. No one who went through that hell could possibly have fond memories. The Yankees were better equipped than us without a doubt. But they bled and died all the same.”
Janice admitted that her husband was a Yankee. “I remember him…this was a few years after the war. How tall and proud he was on his horse, how handsome. He wooed me and won me. I am not ashamed of the fact.”
“ No reason you should be. North and South, men are men and women are women.”
Janice told him she appreciated his understanding for there were many Southerners who did not feel that way. Regardless, many girls married Yankee soldiers. She wasn’t sure what it was…maybe there was a certain attraction in that they were the victors. Maybe it was a matter of power. Powerful men were…enticing. And maybe it had something to do with wanting badly to get out of the South, the ruin it had become. To escape memories and demons and melancholy things that were buried along with the antebellum South and wouldn’t rest quietly in their graves.
“ I knew many dashing men that went off to war, Mister Cabe. Those that returned, well, they were broken, beaten men. Their eyes were vacant and they were bitter, angry. At the Yankees, maybe at themselves, their commanders, the politicians that had put them in such a situation to begin with,” Janice explained. “Many of them did nothing but drink and fight amongst themselves. Some were touched in the head, didn’t believe the war was over. It was all very sad. Maybe I had to escape all that.”
Cabe understood. He knew nothing of the life she had led. Privilege and money were alien things to him. When he left for war he had nothing. When he came back, he still had nothing. He got out of Arkansas soon as possible, wanting desperately to be anything but what his father was-just a rich man’s belonging. He would not be a tenant farmer, a sharecropper. So he rode west with all the others, looking, looking for something he still had not found.
Cabe cleared his throat. “Your husband…he is a good man?”
“ Yes, I think so,” Janice said. “He always tries his best, always tries to do right by people…sometimes he fails as we all do, but he never stops trying. In his job, well, let’s just say he is unappreciated when things go smoothly and vilified if they do not.”
Cabe listened and heard, but was not sure if any of it registered. His thought processes were garbled and he wasn’t sure what day it was. He kept seeing the hacked prostitute, Virgil Clay, the old Indian at the jail, Henry Freeman, Jackson Dirker…a parade of faces and incidents that flowed together and lost solidity.
Sipping his coffee, but not tasting it, he thought: Everyone but me seems to think Dirker is a good man… maybe I’m wrong and maybe they don’t know him and maybe he’s changed and I have, too.
“ Do you know my husband?” Janice asked of him.
“ The sheriff,” Cabe said, nodding. “I’ve met him.”
“ Do you know him well?”
Cabe swallowed. “No, ma’am, I guess I don’t know him well at all.”
