bird, dead as it was, would be a deterrent.
Afterward I walked across the street to the diner for coffee and a slice of What-the-hell pie. Most places would just call it Pie of the Day, something like that, but Jay and wife Margie took notice of how many people said 'Just a cup of coffee' only to add 'What the hell-a piece of pie, too.' Not surprisingly, since everyone had been watching out the front windows, most of the conversation was about Leland and his buzzard.
Margie came out from behind the counter to take my order and ask if I'd heard about Milly Bates. Everybody'd noticed how shaky she looked at Billy's funeral. Not just in pain or overwhelmed, Margie said; it was like you could see through her. Then this morning her folks'd gone over to check on her and she was gone. House wide open, no note, nothing.
'What about the car?' I asked.
'In the driveway. But it hadn't been running for weeks, someone said. The sheriff-' She stopped, realizing her blunder, embarrassed by it, but for me, not herself. 'Lonnie, I mean-is checking on it. Coffee?'
'Coffee.'
'And…?'
'Just coffee. To go.'
I drove out that way with the coffee in the cup holder on my dash. At some point the lid slipped and coffee sloshed over the dash and floorboard, and I barely noticed. I was busily trying to put things together in my head, things that in all likelihood didn't even belong together, a confused young man's death, an old woman who'd lost everything, now Milly.
Lonnie's car stood by the house with the driver's door open and its owner nowhere to be seen. It was his wife's car really, but after giving up the job and Jeep he'd 'taken to borrowing it,' and after close to a year of that, Shirley had gone out without saying a word to him and bought a new one just like it. The door to the house was open, too. Inside, flies shot back and forth like tiny buzz bombs, and I followed them to the kitchen where a table full of food brought around by neighbors and friends-a roasted chicken, casseroles, slices of ham, dinner rolls, cakes-sat mostly untouched. The coffeemaker was still on, with a few inches of coffee that looked like an oil spill; I turned it off. On the refrigerator alongside were a shopping list, discount coupons, a magnetic doll surrounded by clothing and accessories, also magnetic, and an old Valentine's Day card.
Lonnie spoke from behind me. 'Milly and me, we never saw much of each other.'
One thing about living in a town this size is, you pretty much know what goes on between people without it's ever being said. One thing about living these fifty-plus years and having a friend like Lonnie is that when it does get said, you know to keep quiet.
'Boy had a hard life,' Lonnie went on. 'Not making apologies, and I know he brought a lot of it on himself. But there wasn't much that was easy for him, such that you had to wonder what kept him going.'
I had been wondering that, ever since I could remember, about all of us.
'Milly married him, she took that trouble, Billy's trouble, to herself. And now…' He stared at flies buzzing into covers and containers, bouncing off, hitting again. 'Now, what?'
'You sure you want to be out here, Lonnie? Shouldn't you be home with Shirley?'
'Too much silence in that house, Turner. Too much…' He shook his head. 'Just too much.'
In my life I've known hundreds paralyzed, some by high expectations, others by grief or grievous wounds; finally there's little difference. That's where Lonnie was headed. But he wasn't quite there.
'Footprints out back,' he said. 'Two, three men. Cigarette stubs mashed into the mud.'
'Like they were there for a while.'
'Could just be friends… Whatever tracks there were out front are mostly gone, from the rain. Took a look around back, though. Old soybean fields out that way. And someone's been in there recently, with what looks to have been a van, maybe a pickup.'
'No signs of a search, I guess.'
'Hard to say. Milly wasn't much of a housekeeper. Picking up Cheetos bags and wiping off counters with a damp rag being about the extent of it. Drawers and closet doors open, clothes left where they fell-all business as usual.'
'Speaking of which-'
'Clothes? No way to know. And no one close enough to be able to tell us.'
'So except for some tire tracks and a few cigarette butts that for all we know could have been a friend's, we have no indication that anything's amiss here. She could just have packed up and left.'
'Without warning, and with her entire family here.'
'People in stress don't plan ahead, Lonnie. They panic, they bottom out. They run.'
'Like Billy did.'
'As we all have, at some point.'
'True enough.' Stepping up to the kitchen table, he removed the clear plastic cover of a cake with white frosting. Flies began buzzing toward it-from the entire house, it seemed. 'In the bathroom. There's a bottle of antidepressants, recently refilled, and a diaphragm on the counter in there. How likely is it that she'd leave those behind?'
We went through the house room by room. No sign of purse or wallet. There were two suitcases, bought as a set and unused, smaller one still nestled inside the larger, in a closet. In the bedside table we found the checkbook, never balanced, and beside it, nestled among a Bible, old ballpoints and chewed-up pencils, Q-tips and hairpins, we found a cardboard box in which, until recently, a handgun had made its home.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I never saw Eldon again.
So many people come into our lives, become important, then are gone.
Back in college, back before the government jacked me out of my shoes to drop me in jungle boots that started rotting from day one, I had an astronomy professor who compared human relationships to binary stars endlessly circling one another, ever apart yet exchanging matter. Dr. Rob Penny was given to fanciful explanations of the sort, amusing and embarrassing a classroom filled with freshmen there only because astronomy was the easy science credit. Planetary orbits, fractals and star systems, eclipses-all met with his signature version of the pathetic fallacy. Incipient meddler in others' lives that I was even then, I often wondered about Dr. Penny's own relationships.
Lonnie was at State headquarters co-opting their resources to do what he could about finding Milly, June was up at the colony with a handful of townspeople (including, to everyone's astonishment, Brother Davis) helping them rebuild, and I was answering the phone.
Jed Baxter had been in earlier, spitting and chewing scenery and saying over and over that I just didn't get it, did I, telling me how he had come all this way expressly to give Eldon a chance, then telling me he was heading back to Fort Worth. For a moment-something in his eyes-I actually thought he was about to say 'back to God's country.'
So I was answering the phone, and everybody in town or nearby was on the other end. Wanting to know what was going on with the sheriff's daughter-in-law, if someone could come out and talk to the senior class about careers in law enforcement, why people were up there in the hills helping those weirdos when their own town could use a good cleanup, what we were going to do about daughter Sherri Anne who kept going off with that no 'count Strump boy, what the old military base out by the county line was being used for, because they'd been seein' strange blue lights over that way late some nights, whether there was an ordinance against someone keeping pet snakes, and again, off and on the whole day, what was going on with Milly, had we found her yet, they heard there was blood at the scene, we should check with her cousin in Hot Springs, did we know she'd been seen in the company of that Joseph Miller person who'd recently up and moved here from Ill-uh-noise.
Between calls I did some of the things I most dislike doing: checked invoices and bills, marking the ones June should pay; organized the papers on my desk into four piles every bit as confusing as the single pile had been; and read through our voluminous backlog of arrest records (there were two). When I looked up, Burl Stanton was about a yard away from my desk, standing quietly. I hadn't heard him come in. But then, I
