No one could talk about anything else. Just Doc Spiver and how two outsiders had found him lying in his rocking chair, blood dripping off his fingertips, half his head blown off.
He'd killed himself-everyone agreed to that-but why?
Terminal cancer, Thelma Nettro said. Her own grandpa had had cancer, and he would have killed himself if he hadn't died first.
He was nearly blind, Ralph Keaton said. Everybody knew he was pleased because when they got the body back, Ralph would lay him out. Yeah, Ralph said, Doc couldn't stand it that he wasn't really an honest-to-goodness doctor anymore.
He was hurt because some woman rejected him, Purn Davies said. Everyone knew that Amabel had turned Purn down some years before and he was still burning with resentment.
He just got tired of life, Helen Keaton said, as she scooped out a triple-dip chocolate pecan cone for Sherry Vorhees. Lots of old people just got tired of living. He just did something about it and didn't sit around whining for ten years until the devil finally took him.
Just maybe, Hunker Dawson said, just maybe Doc Spiver had something to do with that poor woman's death. It made sense he'd kill himself then, wouldn't it? The guilt would drive a fine man like Doc Spiver to shoot himself.
There were no lawyers in town, but the sheriff found Doc Spiver's will soon enough. He had some $22,000 in a bank in South Bend. He left it all to what he called the Town Fund, headed by Reverend Hal Vorhees.
Sheriff David Mountebank was surprised when he was told about the Town Fund. He'd never heard about such a thing. What effect would this Town Fund have had on people's motives? Of course, he didn't know yet if someone had put the.38-caliber pistol in Doc's mouth and pulled the trigger, then pressed the butt into Doc's hand.
Premeditated murder, that was. Or Doc Spiver had put the gun in his own mouth. Ponser called David at eight o'clock that evening. He'd finished the autopsy and now he was equivocating, damn him. David pushed him, and he ended up saying it was suicide. No, Doc Spiver didn't have any terminal illness-at least Ponser hadn't seen anything.
Amabel said to Sally that same evening, 'I'm thinking you and I should go to Mexico and lie on a beach.'
Sally smiled. She was still wearing Amabel's bathrobe because she just couldn't seem to get warm. James hadn't wanted to leave her, but then it seemed he remembered something that had made him go back to Thelma's. She'd wanted to ask him what it was, but she hadn't. 'I can't go to Mexico, Amabel. I don't have my passport.'
'Alaska, then. We could lie around on the snowbanks. I could paint and you could do-what, Sally? What did you do before your daddy got killed?'
Sally got colder. She pulled the bathrobe tighter around her and moved closer to the heat register. 'I was Senator Bainbridge's senior aide.'
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
'Didn't he retire?'
'Yes, last year. I didn't do anything after that.'
'Why not?'
Vivid, frenzied pictures went careening through her mind, shrieking as loudly as the wind outside. She clutched the edge of the kitchen table.
'It's all right, baby, you don't have to tell me. It really doesn't matter. Goodness, what a day it's been. I'm going to miss Doc. He's been here forever. Everyone will miss him.'
'No, Amabel, not everyone.'
'So you don't think it was suicide, Sally?'
'No,' Sally said, drawing a deep breath. 'I think there's a madness in this town.'
'What a thing to say! I've lived here for nearly thirty years. I'm not mad. None of my friends is mad.
They're all down-to-earth folk who are friendly and care about each other and this town. Besides, if you were right, then the madness didn't begin until after you arrived. How do you explain that, Sally?'
'That's what the sheriff said. Amabel, do you really believe that Laura Strather, the woman James and I found, was brought into town by a stranger and held somewhere before he murdered her?'
'What I think, Sally, is that your brain is squirreling around, and it's just not healthy for you, not with everything else upside down in your life. Just don't think about it. Everything will be back to normal soon.
It's got to be.'
That night, at exactly three o'clock in the morning, a blustery night with high winds but no rain, something brought Sally awake. She lay there a moment. Then she heard a soft tap on the window. At least it wasn't a woman screaming.
A branch from a tree, she thought, turning over and pulling the blanket up to her nose. Just a tree branch.
Tap.
She gave up and slid out of bed.
Tap.
She didn't remember that there wasn't a tree high enough until she'd pulled back the curtain and stared into her father's ghastly white, grinning face.
Amabel found her on her knees in the middle of the floor, her arms wrapped around herself, the window open, the curtains billowing outward, pulled by the wind, screaming and screaming until her throat closed and no sound came from her mouth.
