Workin my ass. Workin some kind of devil’s business with that Tyler girl’d be my guess.
Poor old Mrs. Hull died. I’m preparing her for burial.
That’s a damned shame, Sutter said. About old Mrs. Hull. Although if there’s a Mrs. Hull back there or ever was it’d come as a big surprise to me.
What are you doing here?
We had talked about money.
Oh. Yes, I’d forgotten. Well, I picked it up and it’s in myoffice. Just walk this way.
They crossed the room, Sutter behind and miming Breece’s ducklike waddle. Breece went behind a desk and opened a drawer. He took out a manilla envelope and laid it before Sutter. This is half, he said. Everything is just the way we discussed it.
Sutter withdrew from the envelope a thick sheaf of bills. He licked a thumb and began to count bills onto another stack. He licked his thumb once for each fresh bill and he moved his lips as he counted.
Impatience flickered across Breece’s face. The bank counted it and they were satisfied, he said. I counted it and I was satisfied. It’s seventyfive hundred dollars.
Sutter stopped counting. He looked up. You know, Breece, he said, one of the five or six thousand things I don’t like about you is that you think you’re smart. You think because you went to a college in Memphis and learned how to puncture folk’s insides with Pop-Cola bottles you can run a number on me. Forget that. Put that thought away and don’t look at it no more. Now the bank counted and they were satisfied. You counted and you were satisfied. That’s a load off my mind, that you all were satisfied. But since it’s my money, how about if I count it my damn self? I like to be satisfied as well as the next man.
Breece made a tiny gesture of dismissal. Count by all means, he said. If you don’t trust me.
There’s damn small question about that. I don’t trust you worth a shit. And I pity the fool who does.
He went back to counting the small bills. Breece watched him. Lick the thumb, stack the bill, move the lips. Lick the thumb. Breece looked away, out the window. An old grayhaired lady was coming slowly up the sidewalk. Hobbling laboriously along on a walker. Every now and then she’d halt and lean on the walker to rest, her mouth open and gasping for oxygen like a fish suddenly jerked from water to air. Then when she’d caught her breath she’d come on. Breece thought for a fey moment she’d had some premonition and come to sit on his doorstep and wait.
At length Sutter seemed satisfied. He folded the money once and shoved it into a jean pocket and rose to go. Well I’m burnin daylight, he said. I got places to be.
Have you made any progress?
It depends on what you mean by progress. You’ve seen the result of some of that progress and I expect I could smell her on your fingers if I was a mind to. That playpretty I sent you special delivered in a hearse. That wasn’t supposed to be. That dead girl. If anybody was goin to be dead it was supposed to be that mouthy houseburnin brother of hers. Anyway this was supposed to be all about the pictures. Just get a stack of pictures and bring em to you. It went south too quick for me to stop and that dead playpretty is fixin to cost you some more money.
What do you mean?
Maybe I couldn’t have her talking. Maybe she had a little breath in her and I had to suck it out. Maybe her neck wasn’t twisted just right and I had to retwist it. Maybe I didn’t have as much time as I needed to set that wreck up in a way the law would buy. Or go on buyin. Anyway it’ll all show up on the bill.
Sutter’s air of uncertainty emboldened Breece. Seventy-five hundred dollars seems to buy an awful lot of maybes, he said carefully. I’d like a little more certainty. I explained to you that it’s crucial that I get those pictures back. I’ll get your precious pictures. Maybe when I bring em I’ll bring that boy so you’ll have a matched set of playpretties. Like salt and pepper shakers. How’d that suit you?
Just get those pictures.
Sutter stood up. I’ll leave you and poor old Mrs. Hull to finish your business, he said.
When he’d gone Breece still sat in his office chair. Hands palm down on the desk before him. He could see no way to return to the previous scene of domesticity when he and Corrie had been listening to his stories. Winter light crept across the windowglass. He closed his eyes against the images that assailed them. Something that he’d set in motion shambled toward him. He’d been strenuously winding the spring of a device that would ultimately impale him. He didn’t know what to do. Sutter was going to become more expensive than he could afford and he was going to run his mouth. Perhaps there was someone he could hire to kill Sutter.
He leaned his face into his hands like one stricken by grief. He envisioned a long line of folks set in motion each one stalking the one set in motion previous but he was all out of exonerated murderers and he didn’t know if he could do it himself.
Tyler was wending up a deep hollow that was a funnel for the winds at his back. He moved in a waisthigh maelstrom of blowing leaves and miniature whirlwinds would dart up the hillside in little dervishes as if they had minds if their own. He went past the remains of a whiskey still whose copper had long been plundered and whose barrels showed the axemarks of old violence.
He was following an eerie keening he’d first heard miles back, and he seemed to be nearing its source. At first he’d thought it the wind but it was not the wind. It seemed the highpitched cry of a child or woman but it went on blowing the same mournful note without ceasing or altering, and when he climbed up the mouth of the hollow to higher ground he found it.
The earth here was stony shale and cleft out of the bluelooking limestone was an irregular opening six or eight feet wide. A crude fence had been constructed around it of split rails and old castoff boards wound with barbed wire, but the wood was rotten and insubstantial-looking. Beyond it a stone bluff rose almost vertically and perpendicular to it with a narrow rock doorway between another wall of stone, and studying this Tyler decided the hills must direct the winds and the hollow funnel them across the pit and play it like some mournful harp of the earth.
He approached the opening with caution, stepping across the juryrigged fence and peering down. There was nothing to see. He could hear the keening, but now it seemed to be issuing out of the earth itself, sad and murmurous voices of the damned pleabargaining for their souls. A cold updraft off subterranean waters came like breath from an ancient tomb, and he dreamed inkblack rivers coursing in the stone veins of the earth where chunks of ice black as obsidian clocked through the dark and where whatever arcane creatures lived there were unsighted and at the mercy of the current. He dropped a stone, and it rolled off the sides as it went, fainter and fainter, then nothing, and it went unremarked by the voices that went on and on in their haunting onenote timbre Somewhere he could hear the bells of animals and he studied the poor excuse for a fence then rearranged it as best he could and went toward the narrow arch of stone. He paused and then looked all about and knelt onto the earth. There was a flat circular stone at the floor of the arch, and he pried it free and scratched out a hole in the earth. He took out the tin of pictures and placed them in the cavity and covered them with the stone. He rose and passed through the arch and the hill began to descend and through the trees he could see tended land and a wooden farmhouse leached gray by the weathers.
The house had a shake roof darkening from melting frost and a tall brick chimney whose shadow was told palely in white hoarfrost on the gable opposing. As he watched the house an old man came out and went with a shuffling hobble toward the barn. He watched awhile and saw nothing further, and after a time he eased down through the shadowed morning trees to the house.
By good daylight Bookbinder had fed and watered the goats and turned them into the lot to graze. There were a nanny and her kids missing, and Bookbinder figured to slip down the hollow and find them. These years Bookbinder moved with care and caution. Arthritis had seized his eighty-year-old knees, and on the steeper hillsides he looked not unlike some gaunt puppet jerked along by an inept or careless puppeteer who’d lost interest in him.
There had been predawn cold and a rime of frost, but the sun when it smoked over the horizon burned it away and aftera while the day warmed. A golden haze like Indian summer hung in the air and the old man could feel sweat beginning under the chambray shirt he wore.
He went farther than he’d planned hunting the goats and after a while he crossed out on a roadbed so densely packed by traffic nothing would yet grow there. Idly he followed the road. The sun had ascended and warmed and sweat darkened the back of his shirt between his sharp shoulder blades. He stopped once and with a big Case pocketknife cut himself a walking stick and then he went hobbling on. After fifty yards or so more the
