house on Steiner Street there was loud music again from inside. When I rang, the same small, running feet answered like an echo.
‘Hello, it’s you,’ Sally Anne said. ‘My Mommy’s dead.’
Behind her, the smaller girl, Aggy, wailed in fury because her sister had answered the door first.
‘Be quiet, baby,’ Sally Anne commanded. ‘You want my Daddy? He’s home.’
What I wanted was to walk away, leave it alone. At least I think I did. I hope I did. What happened to Ricardo Vega, and justice, didn’t matter, no. Let him go to jail on a frame, or go free on a bombing. Let these little girls have what they could get. I hope I wanted to walk away, even if I couldn’t.
‘Can I come in, then, Sally Anne?’ I said.
‘Aunt Sarah’s here,’ little Aggy said, needing to have her share of me. ‘Aunt Sarah’s nice like Mommy.’
The barren living room was still grim, but it no longer had the look of children playing house. A woman’s hand was obvious, and Sarah Wiggen sat on a sagging couch. She watched me as I came in. Boone Terrell was beside her, still wearing work clothes. I suppose he was comfortable in them. They were together, yet somehow apart, as if they had been waiting for me-waiting for someone, or something. Terrell spoke gently to the two little girls.’
‘You go hear your music now.’
Aggy ran out. I saw her fall onto a pillow in front of the record player in the middle room. Sally Anne perched on chair, determined to stay with the grownups. Maybe she was afraid inside that if she lost sight of her father, and her new-found aunt, they, too, would go to sleep and not wake up.
‘Go on now, honey,’ Terrell said.
Reluctant, the little girl backed from the room. Visitors had not been happy events in her life of late. Boone Terrell watched her for some seconds after she had gone. Then he looked at me. His gaunt face had that faint smile I had seen before on the faces of big, slow men in rural towns. Calm and alert behind quiet, flat eyes.
‘You come out to talk with me, Mr Fortune?’
‘Perhaps he wants me, Boone,’ Sarah Wiggen said ‘Did you find Emory Foster, Mr Fortune?’
‘In a way,’ I said. ‘Someone tried to murder him. You didn’t hear about it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I hardly knew him, and Boone didn’t know him. Your head! Were you-?’
‘I got too close,’ I said, and said, ‘You didn’t want me to talk to him, did you Sarah?’
‘You think I tried to-!?’
Boone Terrell said, ‘Sarah’s been with us most all the time since Wednesday. The funeral was Thursday.’
‘Here?’ I said. ‘Since Wednesday? All day?’
‘I took my vacation to stay with Boone and the children for a time,’ Sarah said. ‘Boone has to find work now.’
‘I didn’t know he could,’ I said.
‘I expect it won’t be easy,’ Terrell said.
‘It takes money to raise children,’ I said.
‘I expect how it does,’ he said.
Sarah said, ‘I intend to help out for a time.’
‘That should be fine, then,’ I said, ‘with what Emory Foxx paid Boone for that story.’
Almost anyone can tell a lie, talk a whole concocted story, and lie to a series of questions if ready. It takes more skill, practice, to lie with silence, with your face, to a direct statement. It’s even harder for most of us if we have been waiting for the accusation, knowing it would come, but not sure just when. Sarah Wiggen couldn’t do it. She looked down at her hands, her fingers twisting like worms. Boone Terrell was better.
‘I guess I don’t rightly understand you, Mr Fortune,’ he said. ‘Who would that Emory Foxx be now?’
Nothing changed in his gaunt face. The same small smile and flat eyes. All he needed was a stick to whittle. ‘Emory Foxx is Emory Foster,’ I said, ‘and the man who “helped” Sarah, and paid you to tell what Anne said about Vega.’
‘You got the advantage of me,’ Terrell said.
I had been standing. Now I sat on one of his halfhearted homemade chairs. ‘Boone, right now you’ve only signed a false statement. That’s bad enough. If you tell it in court, that’s perjury. You want your kids to lose you, too?’
‘I told what Annie said. Maybe it’s true, maybe not.’
‘She didn’t tell you Vega arranged it,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t any note. Foxx planted it. Foxx did more to frame Vega. You want Vega to be charged for what he didn’t do, and when it comes out, go to prison with Emory Foxx?’
‘He got Annie pregnant,’ Terrell said. ‘She died.’
‘Did he kill her, Boone?’
‘That depends how you see it, don’t it?’
The small smile was gone from his rocky face now. His jaw muscles stood out like crags. He looked only at me.
‘Maybe it does,’ I said. ‘Maybe Vega is guilty in a way, but what about Emory Foxx? A man out to murder Vega by using you, me, the law. That’s what he’s doing, Boone. Three more people are dead because of his actions. Nobodies like you, and me and Sarah, caught between Vega and Emory Foxx. Vega started it by being what he is, but Emory Foxx carried it on, and you helped by lying for money.’
Terrell said nothing. Rural people are less complex than the abstract city men, and more complex. They respect principle and truth, will fight for it, but they live in a world that respects values even more. They are rarely abstract. Tradition before universal principle and justice; family before truth; county before right; honour before fact. Truth is good, the clan comes first. Morality, yes, but defend the family.
I said, leaned, my coat still on and the big cannon heavy in the pocket where I hoped it would stay, ‘Boone, you don’t have a choice. I know enough now to make your story smell even to Lieutenant Denniken. Sarah told Foxx how to find me Monday night, and he followed me out here. He found Anne dead. Somehow he found The Pyramid, and your friend Matt Boyle, and then he found you. Maybe he made you believe Ricardo Vega had gotten Anne killed, I don’t know, but he paid you to tell that story of what she said about Vega. He was only muddying then, sniping at Vega, but then he found where the abortion had been done, and it got serious. He planted the note out here, planted evidence against Vega in that abortion room, and now it was bad. Foxx was lucky, the timing worked right, and Vega helped him a lot by sending Sean McBride around to snoop and watch-Vega looked like a worried man. The police have swallowed it, they have to the way it stands, but it won’t hold. You’re in trouble now, Boone, but if you go in on your own, expose Foxx, I think it’ll go a lot easier for you.’
Terrell hadn’t moved a hair while I talked. Sarah Wiggen was watching him. His small smile didn’t return to his gaunt face. He sat there like a rebel in the dock braced for torture, monolithic in his stubbornness. His eyes looked toward the inner room where the little girls lay wrapped in ragged blankets and listened to their music, coloured cartoon books.
‘Boone?’ Sarah Wiggen said.
Terrell was impassive. ‘Easy on me, but I ain’t got much chance workin’. The kids is young, they forget me. I don’t say you got any part right, but say it’s so and I tell it, I got to give up any money, right? Now, if’n I hold to what I told, maybe they say I’m lyin’ and I go to jail, but I says there wasn’t no money. Foxx he got no proof there was.’
‘They’ll find the money, Boone,’ I said.
‘Money looks kind of the same. I figure I could work out something for the kids.’
Sarah said, ‘Boone, no. Not both of you. Children need what they know, someone they love, a parent.’
‘How much could it be, Terrell?’ I said. ‘Foxx isn’t rich. How long would it last for them? And later?’
He considered us both. Without expression. He could have been deciding what meat to have for dinner. A farmer thinking about whether or not to take his wife to town on Saturday night. He folded his hands in his lap.
‘Since you got most already,’ he said. ‘What you say I should do?’
Sarah Wiggen held his arm in both hands. He didn’t look at her, he looked steadily at me.
‘First tell me what did happen with Foxx,’ I said.
‘Foster, he called himself,’ Terrell said. ‘Like you had it, he follered you, found Annie. He watched you and the cops. When you all left here, he called Sarah.’
Sarah said, ‘The police called me, and told me what had happened, that it had been an abortion. They
