The appearance of the kitchen startled her.
A chair lay on its back. There was a battered straw cowboy hat on the floor as well. A yellow rain slicker lay crumpled on the floor, too. At the kitchen sink, water was dripping from the spigot. When she went over to turn it off, she saw what looked like blood on the sharp metal rim of the sink.
Suddenly, she felt anxious. Things were not as they should be.
This time she yelled it: “Laurie Jo! Laurie!”
She rushed out of the kitchen and into the front hallway, calling, “Laurie! Hugh-Jay! Is anybody here?” Quickly, Annabelle looked into the dining room and the living room, and then she ran upstairs, her heart hammering and her body trembling when she saw and smelled strange stains on the stairway carpet. It smelled like bleach, and the carpeting had pale blotches in it.
Too frightened to speak now, she raced from room to room on the second floor.
They weren’t in the master bedroom. Or its bathroom. Or Jody’s room. Or the other bathroom on this floor. Or the guest room across from Jody’s room. That left only the small guest room at the far end of the hall. Annabelle raced toward it, pushing its door wide open as she rushed inside.
“Hugh-Jay! Oh, God! Oh, no! My child!”
His body lay on the bloody carpet.
Annabelle screamed his name again and again as her heart broke.
OUTSIDE, a neighbor who came over to check on the Linders after the storm heard muffled screams through the closed, thick-paned windows and was alarmed. The neighbor, Sam Carpenter, finally located the same unlocked door that Annabelle had and hurried up the basement stairs, slipping on her slimy footprints several times in his rush, while overhead the screams-clearer to his ears now, and more terrible because of it-punctured the air. They terrified him. They were the worst thing Sam had ever heard in his life. They sounded as if a woman was being stabbed repeatedly. He only escaped falling back down the steps by hanging onto the painted railing for dear life. During one slip, he barked his shins through his trousers, but barely felt the pain. At the top, he flung open the door and immediately spotted ominous signs of struggle in the kitchen: the chair, the rain slicker, the ruined straw hat. Without stopping to think about any of it, he followed the harrowing wails to their source in the small guest bedroom at the end of the hall on the second floor of the old stone house.
When Sam saw there was nothing he could do to help there, he hurried in search of his beautiful young neighbor, but Laurie Linder wasn’t there.
He returned to the terrible room.
Gasping for breath, he told Annabelle, “I can’t find her!”
“Get my family, Sam,” Annabelle begged him through her tears.
She told him where they were, and he tried the telephone, but it wasn’t working. “I’ll get them!” Sam Carpenter yelled back at her. He was so upset he forgot to drive, forgot to tell his wife Louanne that he was going, forgot everything except his mission for Annabelle Linder. His heart pounding, sobs forcing their way up his chest and out his mouth, he ran the half mile to the truck stop, stopping for nobody, hearing no voices that called to him.
He burst in the door of the restaurant shouting, “Hugh Linder! Where’s Hugh Linder?”
Waitresses and customers turned to stare.
The smiles that came automatically to some faces faded upon seeing the state he was in.
People pointed: In there. The Linders are in there.
“What’s the matter, baby?” asked a waitress who was known for calling all of her regulars by endearments rather than their names.
“Oh, God!” he exclaimed as he ran past her. In a flash it came to him who owned that beat-up hat he had seen in the kitchen of the young Linders. Like everybody else in town, Sam knew about the incidents at the ranch the day before, and he’d even already heard about the fight at Bailey’s the night before. His mind jumped to a logical conclusion: “Billy Crosby has gone and murdered Hugh-Jay Linder!”
She screamed. Dishes full of eggs and toast slid off her tray.
All around the restaurant people who heard those words stood up, some of them knocking their chairs back. Others demanded frantically to know what Sam Carpenter had said, and then they, too, gasped, cried out “Oh, no!” and stood up, or rocked back in their chairs, or grabbed each other.
After the initial uproar, silence fell over the entire room as they waited.
It was broken only by the beginning of sobs from some of the women.
“That son of a bitch!” someone cried in an anguished voice.
And then they all heard it-a roar of “No!” from the other room, where the Linders sat together. When the family came running out into the main room, they were greeted by a restaurant full of people standing, waiting to hear that it wasn’t true, that they’d misunderstood, that nobody had actually killed that nice boy. Instead, they saw Chase Linder carrying his scared-looking little niece, and Belle hanging onto her father, who suddenly looked a hundred years old. All eyes followed them as they rushed out the front door.
Bobby Linder still had a napkin tucked in his shirt collar.
Sam, following them, was too exhausted to walk back. He limped slowly into the main room as people gathered around to hear him tell his terrible story.
“Hugh-Jay’s dead, shot to death, and his mother’s there with his body-”
“Oh, my God!” A woman put her hands to her face in horror. “Annabelle! Poor Annabelle!”
“And I couldn’t find Laurie-”
“Did he kill her, too?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Sam sank down onto a restaurant chair beside half-eaten breakfasts now going cold. His shoulders slumped and he wept while one or two people patted his back as they fought to hold back their own emotions.
“How could he do that? How could anybody do such a thing?”
Nobody had an answer at first, because nothing like this had ever happened in Rose before. Then somebody said decisively, “It’s Billy. He’s just that way. I hope they catch him and kill the son of a bitch.”
17
COUNTY SHERIFF DON PHELPS made it to Rose in half an hour from where he was, fifty miles east. He drove with his siren blaring, all the while thinking about the things he didn’t know.
He was forty-three years old and had been first a deputy and then sheriff for a total of nine years. Not once in that time, or in any of the years that he knew of preceding it, had there been a murder in Henderson County. Maybe back in the homesteading days some sheepherder had killed a cattleman, or vice versa, but he wasn’t much on history and didn’t actually know if there’d been any murders back then, either. These days, he handled traffic violations and a bit of larceny and petty thievery, domestic disputes and drunken fights at bars, farm foreclosures and rental evictions. He had never faced a single attempted homicide, much less an actual one. His deputies didn’t know squat about handling such cases, and the only things he knew came from one weekend seminar the county had managed to afford to send him to, and the law enforcement journals he read at home. When he got together with cop friends from more populated places, he had to take a lot of ribbing about having nothing to do but put his feet up on his desk. He always shot back with his standard retort: “I don’t think that coming from a county where there aren’t any murders is anything to be ashamed of.”
When he entered the big stone house and climbed the stairs and saw the scene of the crime, he knew the wisest thing he could do was to close the door until the KBI got there.
Since he didn’t dare risk gathering evidence, he did the next best thing.
He went after the man he knew to his bones had done it.
It also allowed him to escape from that house where an entire family-a good and decent family, in his judgment-was falling to pieces like a plate thrown against a wall. The sheriff wasn’t a homicide detective, and he
