Josh without a grin before, cheering up the other kids. He wasn’t smiling now, looking a sad figure in dusty jeans, a cartooned T-shirt, and neon-lined tennis shoes. “Hey, buddy, you doing okay?” I squatted down next to him. He shrugged. “I guess so.” “You sad about something?” Josh nodded. “I miss Miz Harcher. I loved her.” My throat tightened. Someone did actually care about the old battle-ax. I chastened myself for thinking that. Beta’s parents must have loved her, surely. Perhaps some young man once considered her pretty and smart and fascinating. But that was all long ago. Maybe Josh’s love was the only love Beta knew. My jaw felt tight as I looked into Josh’s dark, unhappy eyes. “I know you did, buddy. She loved you, too.” I said it with no knowledge of its truth, but it sounded fair. If she could have loved anyone, maybe it was this little boy who was so unsullied by the sin she saw in everyone else. “Then why’d she have to die, Jordy?” Josh asked, his face frowning into tears he was repressing. God, how do you explain death to a five-year-old? I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have a clue. I took one of Josh’s hands in mine. “Someone took her away, Josh.” I fumbled for an explanation to help, but Josh didn’t need my words. He had his own. “One of the bad people did it,” he said, folding thin arms over his stomach. The little Martian man from the Looney Tunes cartoons peered at me from Josh’s T-shirt, his head peeking above Josh’s crossed arms and daring me to contradict the boy. I didn’t know what defined a bad person, but Josh was correct to a degree. “Yes, a bad person killed her.” “She said they were here,” Josh added mournfully, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Bad people were here?” I asked, trying not to sound too stupid in front of this bright little boy. This was no news to me, though. I was stupid much of the time, it seemed, and Beta thought just about everyone was pretty bad. “Yeah, she said they were.” Josh blinked at me, then glanced around, as though bad people might creep up right behind us. I tented my cheek with my tongue, thinking. “What did she say about the bad people, Josh? Who were they?
You can tell me.” I just hoped I wasn’t on the dishonor roll. Josh shrugged with the same I-don’t-know attitude I’d experienced far too much lately. He must be learning it from all the adults around him.
“She just said all the bad people were going to pay.” “Pay? For what?”
“They were going to pay her. So she could build this place to talk to God,” he said, glancing toward his house. My eyes followed his, relieved to see his front yard empty. The church. They were going to pay her for the church. I took Josh’s shoulders and made him look into my eyes. “Josh, listen to me. What you just said to me is very important. Could you tell someone else about it? Would you tell Chief Moncrief?” Josh considered his civic duty. “Would he give me a ride in the patrol car and lemme run the siren?” he asked seriously. “Yes, he will. And I’ll call you every time we get a new children’s book at the library,” I offered. This literary bribe didn’t have the glamour of the patrol car, but it was enough. Josh took my hand and followed me into the house. A glass of milk, two slightly stale cookies, and a phone conversation with Junebug later, I dispatched Josh home. Junebug was still on the line when I came back in. “So now do you believe my blackmail theory?” I demanded. “It gives us something to work on, which is only a shade better than nothing. We need some solid proof, Jordy,” Junebug opined. “So let’s go over to Beta’s and get it,” I insisted. “Look, it’s coming up on three. I told Shannon we’d meet her there around then and she’d help us look around.” “Shannon, eh?”
Junebug asked. “She’s still Miz Harcher to me. I must not have your charm.” “We all have our small burdens to bear. You going to be there or not?” “I’ll be there,” he huffed. “See you shortly.” I replaced the phone in the hook. The bad people indeed, Josh, I thought. From the mouths of babes.
11
I knew something was wrong the moment I saw the door of Beta’s house. It stood ajar. Shannon might be visiting a small town but she was a big-city girl and didn’t strike me as the type to leave front doors open. I jogged up the path to the porch. It creaked when I stepped on it. “Shannon?” I called. No answer. The second step creaked louder than the first and I paused again. “Shannon? It’s Jordy Poteet.” The wind answered me, brushing across my face and bringing me the scent of honeysuckle from a neighbor’s bush. I pushed the door open, calling Shannon’s name again into the dimness of the entry hall.
I walked into the living room. The curtains were still drawn as Beta probably left them, but in the light of the doorway I could see the whole room had been trashed. Chairs were knocked over, books spilled down from the high-standing bookshelf, drawers from a desk lay yanked free of their snug home. I had taken four steps into the room when I heard and saw Shannon. She lay crumpled by the sofa, and the cushions were stained with the blood from her face. Her arms were flung outward, as though ready to give a hug, but not a kiss. Her lovely face was a wet mass, stained with blood and hair and what looked like bone. Her citified black T-shirt was ripped at the collar and I could see her bra strap and a white expanse of shoulder. The acrid smell of bullet fire pervaded the air, in contrast to the sweet honeysuckle on the porch. I crouched by her, hearing her wet intake of breath before I tried to find a pulse. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her neck; I found a pulse in her wrist. The beat had almost faded, but it was still there, like a last echo on a stage. I stumbled through the mess to the phone, hearing the porch boards creak under weight. Junebug’s shadow fell into the hallway. “Call an ambulance!” I hollered. “She’s been shot!” The next few minutes were a daze. Junebug bolted back to his car and radioed for help. I held Shannon’s cooling hand, telling her that help was on its way, for her to hold on. I don’t know if she heard me; there was no replying grasp on my fingers, and the only noise she made was her breathing. I held each breath of mine until she drew another one. The ambulance came, along with two of Junebug’s officers. Someone pulled Shannon’s fingers from mine and I watched them take her off in the ambulance. Wordlessly I turned back and walked into the house that still smelled of gunfire. I stood by the gore-stained couch and suddenly needed to sit down, but not there. I sagged and a strong arm, one that felt familiar, caught me. “Here, Jordy,” Junebug said gently. “Sit here.” He steered me to an easy chair in the corner under a lamp. I trod right over the books and smashed bric-a-brac that littered the floor. I sank into the chair.
Junebug squatted by me, and over his shoulder I saw a wall of crosses.
They were of every size and shape, some of metal and some of wood, and right away I saw they formed a larger cross that stood well over seven feet tall. Home decor a la Harcher, I thought crazily. It made the scene even more unreal. I sunk my face into my hands. “Listen, Jordy,”
Junebug said. “Tell me what happened.” I told him, remembering that it was only two mornings ago I’d had to relate a somewhat similar story.
If I kept finding bodies, I wasn’t going to get invited anywhere.
Shannon wasn’t a body, I reminded myself. She was alive. For now. I felt cold, despite the spring warmth outside. Junebug squeezed my shoulder when I was done. “You okay?” For the first time in all this he sounded like my old friend and rival. I looked up at him with gratitude (not a common occurrence with me) and he smiled grimly. “I just can’t believe this, Junebug. What the hell is going on here?” One of Junebug’s officers, the nervous one with the cropped hair that’d been at the library, stuck his head around the corner. “Busted window in the back bedroom, Chief,” he reported crisply. “Looks like the pane was smashed and the window forced up from outside.” “Thanks. Keep checking around; let me know what you find.” Junebug shook his head, surveying the wrecked room. He walked through the mess, and I followed him. The destruction wasn’t quite complete. One shelf of cheap glass over a secretary-style bureau glittered intact, and another row of Bibles stood on the top-most shelf, probably out of the attacker’s reach. Pictures on one wall, of a younger Beta, a far primmer-looking Shannon in her Baylor graduation gown, and of a nearsighted-looking couple from the Forties peered back at us, still hanging straight from the wall. Shards from a china collection that had seen far better days crunched under my feet. Junebug glanced back at me. “Maybe you were right, Jordy. Beta must’ve been hidin’ somethin’ in here. This ain’t from any struggle Shannon had with her attacker. Somebody was either looking for something or being a vandal.” “If someone broke in, Shannon must’ve walked in on them,” I guessed. “She told me she had an appointment with Reverend Hufnagel before she was meeting us back here. She must’ve surprised the intruder.” “Is that the story you’re peddling now, Poteet?” a nasal voice behind me demanded. Billy Ray Bummel sauntered in like he owned the place. He sniffed the air, like a wine connoisseur inhaling tenderly over a glass of vintage red.
“There’s been a crime here, I do believe.” I was ready to tell him the only crime was his continued employment by Bonaparte County, but Junebug had his own ax to grind. “Lay off Jordy, Billy Ray. He didn’t have anything to do with this.” Billy Ray whirled on the law like it was a misbehaving dog. “And how are you so sure about that, Chief? Let me remind you that Mr. Poteet here has found both members of the Harcher family dead in the past two days.” “Shannon’s not dead,” I argued. He waved off that technicality and tried to get as close to my
