a tooled gunbelt and holstered on it was a Colt New Service revolver with pearl grips. “Nice gun.”
He sat down again. “Me and all the deputies switched to forty-fives last year. Our old thirty-eights wouldn’t shoot through car doors. Times are changing.”
Sam looked at Tabors’ eyes, wondering if he could trust him. Ultimately, he had no other choice, and had to take a leap of faith. “Well, that ought to solve that problem for you. Let’s see if you can do something about mine.”
“Let’s have it.” Then the sheriff did something that convinced Sam that he’d made the right decision. He pulled a pad in front of him and held a sharpened pencil at the ready.
It took ten minutes to explain the history between the Skadlocks and Acy White, the death of Ted Weller, and why he believed the child would be exchanged in Woodgulch.
The sheriff took notes all along, and after Sam finished, he sat back. “Son, you probably realize this already, but one crime was committed in Louisiana and the other in Kentucky. My jurisdiction is only this poor little Mississipppi county. Do you think they’ll trade money for the child at the station?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they did, I’d have reason to arrest everybody and wire for warrants from the other places. That is, if the child recognizes you.”
“She’ll know her brother.”
The sheriff put down his pencil. “She better. I can’t turn her over otherwise.”
“You’re telling me a four-year-old has to convince you of who she belongs to?”
The sheriff pulled the box of pistol shells toward him and placed it in a desk drawer. “Seems like she’s the one with the most to lose.”
Sam smiled. “Well, I guess that’s fair.”
The sheriff leaned back and pulled a folder from a different drawer, his body movement suggesting that the meeting was over. “What do you do on the excursion boat?”
“I play piano and bang around the rowdies when I’m not.”
“I like piano music and have a player piano at home. I took music appreciation, two courses worth, in college.”
“College? Where at?”
“Rutgers. On weekends I went into New York for the revues and plays. There’s a lot of music in that town.”
“Why’d you come back? Family?”
“Not really. I just came back because it’s so bad around here.” He gave Sam a smile and motioned to the door. “Come Friday we’ll help you out.”
HE FOUND THE BOY at the station and together they walked to a two-dollar-a-night hotel on Batson Street, a mildew-smelling place with tall windows covered with storm-belled screens, bathroom down the hall, and an old man somewhere on the third floor coughing deep and long. They cleaned up and walked downtown to a cafe, counted their money, and ordered ham sandwiches and tap water. The train would next rattle into town on Friday afternoon, and it was Wednesday.
The hotel room held two small iron beds and that night they lay in the hot, breathless room and tried to sleep.
August turned repeatedly, went down the hall to the bathroom, came back and began tossing again. “Lucky, you awake?” His voice was young again in the dark room.
“Yeah, I’m one hot dog.”
“I’m glad you made me put down that gun.”
He rolled on his back and tried to see the ceiling, which he knew was cracked like a map of desert rivers where the electric wire had been nailed to the plaster. His sore shoulder throbbed with his heartbeat. “Count sheep, and maybe you’ll drop off.”
“I’ve got to say it.”
“Go on, then.”
“If I hadn’t backed off, I’d have killed her.”
“All right.”
“No, I need you to know how I feel right now. I mean, I want to get her, but I’m mostly glad she’s alive. It’s like it’s okay if we don’t even find her, just so she’s, you know, still somewhere.”
Sam thought about that last phrase, “still somewhere.” “Aw, we’ll get her back when that old train rumbles in day after tomorrow. The sheriff said he’d sit in the waiting room with three of his deputies and hash it out with all concerned.”
“You sure they’ll bring her here?”
“I can’t imagine where else. I’d bet a month of piano playing that Billsy was coming back from setting up the meeting somehow. It makes sense they bring her in Friday, since the train won’t run again till Monday.”
August was quiet for a long time. “What if those people talk the sheriff out of it? Didn’t you say this Mr. White was a banker and his wife a proper lady? You think the sheriff will believe us over them?”
“Oh, maybe she was bred in old Kentucky, but she’s only a crumb down here.”
August laughed aloud, and it was the first time he’d laughed since before his father died. “I wish you could play piano as good as you tell jokes.”
“I’m getting better.”
He talked to the boy a long time, easing him off to sleep. And then the image came to him of armed men waiting in the small depot for the likes of Ralph and Billsy Skadlock, and he thought of the possibility that something could go wrong, a gunfight and pursuit, slugs the size of bumblebees slamming through the flimsy pine walls, with a little girl in the middle of the fracas. Bullets didn’t seek out guilt or innocence; they were flying accidents of fate. He eventually fell asleep and began to dream of Lily in Ralph Skadlock’s arms, both of them turning to face a boy pointing a monstrous shotgun at them, and when that vision faded, he was in a hospital in France, and his wife was working on a needlepoint chair bottom, at one point holding it up to him and showing an image of a bombed-out house, a girl standing before the smoke and fire raising both hands, each finger made of khaki thread, nine in all, and a stitch of red for the bloody socket.
WHEN RALPH SKADLOCK got out of bed, Billsy was standing in the doorway scratching and yawning into the new day.
“You smell that?” Billsy asked.
Ralph had begun sleeping upstairs again now that the ceiling no longer leaked and Vessy had dried and turned the mattress. He pulled on his pants with a grunt, and they went down and out into the kitchen.
Vessy had fired the big stove, robbed eggs from the hens that were left, and cut up onions and cheese, making the men an omelette and floating it on a pad of grits and butter. The little girl was at the table penciling mustaches on photographs in an old newspaper. The men sat down and began to eat, their heads low over the plates, staring at the food as it disappeared. The girl dropped her pencil and bent under the table to reach for it, but banged her head when she came up and started crying. The men glowered at her and Billsy said, “Hey, shut that stuff up.”
Vessy picked up the pencil, gave it to the child, and brushed back her hair, kissing her forehead. She rubbed her back and found her a fresh page on which to draw. The child stopped wailing and began marking dark eyebrows on the image of a Baton Rouge debutante.
The men stopped eating and watched all of it, as if the notion of calming a child with anything other than a peppery slap or a whack with a piece of kindling had never occurred to them. Billsy put an elbow in his brother’s ribs and asked, “You remember the time I sassed the old woman while she was ironin’ and she threw that flat-iron down on my foot?”
Ralph made a face and took another bite. “What made you think of something like that?”
