Bitter Creek (17 page)

Chapter 33

A HUGE BOLT OF LIGHTNING
washed the porch with light.

Du Pré glanced at the parking lot.

Rain spackled the puddles; they danced and it got dark again. The mercury-vapor lamp on the pole dimmed and went out. So did the lights. Rain thrummed.

Du Pré hunkered down and he dashed for the SUV. He opened the door and he got a flashlight. He grabbed the briefcase that La Salle had brought on the plane and he carried both back to the porch. He flicked the flashlight on.

Patchen lay on his back.

His face was wet; the cheap plastic poncho he had shrugged on was rumpled and stretched.

La Salle tugged the flashlight away. He knelt and he played the light over Patchen's head. He took a pocketknife and slit the cheap plastic poncho. Patchen's blue chambray shirt was wet.

… damn things never work, keep off the rain but you sweat yourself soaking …

La Salle opened Patchen's shirt. “Help me turn him over,” he said.

Du Pré bent to help. They rolled Patchen over.

“There,” said La Salle. He pointed to a thin trickle of blood at the base of Patchen's skull.

Headlights shone out on the road, and a pickup turned in, going fast. It pulled up, its lights on the porch. The door opened.

Bonner Macatee got out. He left the engine running and the lights on.

“Goddamnit, Rudy,” yelled Macatee, “where is Ellie?”

“I'm here, Bonner,” said Eleanor, coming into the doorway.

“He don't go, I will arrest his ass,” said Rudabaugh, “though I do have other things on my mind at the moment. …”

“It's all right,” said Eleanor.

Jack La Salle stood up. He went inside and he pulled a checked tablecloth from a table and he came back and he covered Patchen.

Bonner Macatee stepped up on the porch out of the rain. He looked at Du Pré and then he looked at Jack La Salle. “What is goin' on?” he said. “Jackson Pardoe is dead. Now this feller is dead. What is goin' on?”

La Salle looked at Rudabaugh.

The huge sheriff shook his head.

“You come on home, Ellie,” said Macatee, “it's dangerous here.”

“It's dangerous there, Bonner,” said Eleanor. “I can't do it anymore. I don't want anything from you. Go on home. …”

Du Pré sighed.

Macatee got back in the truck, backed up, drove off, the truck lurching when he got up on the road.

“He said he was going to go and rest in the car,” said Chappie. “So I didn't worry when he didn't come back right away.”

“Where was he?” said Rudabaugh.

“On the ground,” said Chappie, “on the other side of the car we drove here in.”

“Point it out to me,” said Rudabaugh.

Chappie walked to the end of the porch and pointed back along the building's side.

His SUV was parked at the back.

Du Pré's was out in the lot, a hundred feet away.

Rudabaugh nodded.

The lights flickered and then they rose to full power.

The air was thick with the smell of ozone and rain.

Rudabaugh went inside, stood at the bar, the toothpick rolling around his mouth.

Jack La Salle joined him, and so did Du Pré.

Eleanor Pardoe Macatee sat on a stool, her head in her hands.

Lily came out of the kitchen, smiling.

She went to Eleanor and patted her hand.

Eleanor looked up. She drew in her breath. Her face went white.

“You don't think I … ?” she said, looking at Rudabaugh.

Rudabaugh looked at her.

“It was rainin' when you come?” he said.

“Yes,” said Eleanor. “Lily called me and said she needed some help. It's usually slow on Tuesday evenings. I knew the rain was coming so I put the riding coat and the hat in the truck cab, and by the time I got here, it was pouring. I don't park near the front door, of course; we leave those spaces for customers. There isn't any parking right in the back, just room for the dumpsters. I parked way back where I usually park. …”

“Then you run to the back door,” said Rudabaugh.

“Walked,” said Eleanor, “slowly, with my collar up and my head down. I could see the light over the back door but nothing else. …”

Rudabaugh nodded.

Lily went on patting Eleanor's hand.

Du Pré rolled a smoke.

Jack La Salle was sitting at a table with Chappie, talking softly. The ranchers were all gone.

Rudabaugh sighed. “Doo Pray,” he said, “could you do me a favor?”

Du Pré put out the cigarette.

Rudabaugh went round the bar. Lily smiled at him.

Eleanor looked stunned and frightened.

Rudabaugh stopped. He glanced through the cutaway to the kitchen. “Back there on the stove there is a stockpot,” Rudabaugh said to Du Pré. “I wonder you could see if there is a gun in the bottom of it.”

Lily shrieked and she clawed at Rudabaugh's eyes. The huge man grabbed her wrists. She kicked at him, but he lifted her up so she had no purchase.

Du Pré sighed.

He went in, got a long-handled strainer.

He shoved it down in the boiling liquid, scraped the gun to the side of the pot, pushed the strainer under it and lifted it out. He carried it to the sink, dumped it in, turned on the hot water, and washed the grease and bits of meat away. He turned the water to cold, chilling the gun down, and lifted it out.

Du Pré found a white paper sack. He put the gun in it, folded the top, walked back out with it into the dining room.

Rudabaugh had turned Lily around and put handcuffs on her. “Yew got a right to ree-main silent,” he said, “and the rest of that crap. Knowin' you as I do, you will keep quiet anyways, till you get you a lawyer.”

“You fat prick,” spat Lily.

“Language,” said Rudabaugh. “You gonna walk on your own? And be nice. I kin always lock ya in the trunk.”

“Fuck you,” said Lily.

“Yer chariot awaits,” said Rudabaugh. He picked her up under one arm and walked out.

“Lily?” said Eleanor.

Du Pré nodded.

“Mother of God,” said Eleanor. “Lily.”

“Yes,” said Du Pré.

Eleanor Pardoe Macatee put her face in her hands and she cried softly. “Is this ever going to be over?” she said. She grabbed a handful of bar napkins and she wiped her eyes and nose. She got up and went to the ladies' room. Water ran.

Rudabaugh returned from the parking lot.

“County ambulance is on the way,” he said, “pick up poor Patchen there. Nice young feller, gets hell blown out of him to Iraq, gets killed here in the matter of something danged near a century old. …”

Du Pré nodded.

Rudabaugh looked at him.

“I knowed both them girls since they was sprouts,” he said. “Had to be one or the other. …”

Du Pré looked at him.

“Eleanor was a sweet kid,” said Rudabaugh. “And Lily had this nice smile. Lily got to be fourteen, maybe, she started losin' animals. Cats. A dog. …”

Du Pré nodded.

“Went away for a while,” said Rudabaugh. “Dunno where. Anyway, on this particular evening, I went with the cats and dogs. Lily's smart. So if she done it, she'd get rid of the gun, hide it in plain sight but someplace you was not likely to stick yer hand in. …”

Eleanor Pardoe Macatee came back from the washroom, her face composed, her eyes a little puffy.

Rudabaugh put his hand on her shoulder.

She looked up at his face.

“Ellie,” he said, “over there at that table is General Jack La Salle who I would bet a nice shiny quarter wants to tell you he is your long-lost cousin. …”

“What?” said Eleanor.

“Like I said,” said Rudabaugh, “a shiny quarter.” One arced through the air and the sheriff put out his huge hand and it disappeared.

“Cousin Eleanor,” said La Salle.

He motioned to the table.

Chapter 34

DU PRÉ WATCHED THE AMBULANCE
go, no lights, no siren. The rain was beginning to lessen, though it was still strong.

He put the
CLOSED
sign in the window and he flipped the lock.

Chappie was sitting alone, a bottle of whiskey in front of him. But it was still full. His glass was empty.

Eleanor Pardoe Macatee sat at the table with Jack La Salle.

She was looking into some far country.

La Salle got up and he walked over to Chappie.

“Soldier,” he said, his voice steely, “there is a good deal left to do. …”

Chappie scrambled up to attention.

“Come on,” said La Salle, “Du Pré has figured it out but you probably have not. …”

He pointed to a chair at the table with Eleanor. Du Pré went to the bar, poured some brandy in a glass, brought it to the table, set it in front of Eleanor.

“You might drink that,” said La Salle. “You're shivering.”

She nodded, lifted the glass, drank.

“Ellis Pardoe was killed a week before the Armistice,” said La Salle, “and afterward his commander, Brigadier General Albert, came here to offer condolences to the widow. It was a strange fate that sent him back to the very place he had seen worse than anything he'd encountered on the Western Front, and to the widow of the very man who had taken that massacre's sole survivor to safety. But he came and he and Elizabeth had much to talk of. …”

Eleanor nodded.

“And ultimately there was a child. Albert was married, of course, loved his wife, too. They had four children. So Elizabeth left Montana and she stayed in Seattle until the baby was born and gave the child up for adoption. To the La Salles. They never mentioned it to my grandfather. When Albert's wife died, he wanted Elizabeth to marry him. He wanted to recover their son. But she wouldn't do it. She wrote him, he wrote her. She said they shared too much sorrow, too much ill fate, she had other children, it might hurt them. So Albert finally came back here again and shot himself. Selfish bastard. She was right not to marry him,” said LaSalle.

Du Pré fetched more brandy for Eleanor.

“It was Elizabeth who found him. He probably had her letters and the journal he kept when he was in Montana in 1910. She took them, hid them with her letters from him. …”

“Jesus,” said Eleanor.

“Time went on, the old families did their best to bury what their founders had done that January day in 1910. And then Du Pré shows up. Jackson Pardoe was a good man. He was pulled several ways. …”

Eleanor laughed, just a little. “Mama always said Papa could find four answers to a yes or no question. …” she said.

“In the journal,” said La Salle, “Albert tells the story of what happened, how he and his six black troopers took off after the Mètis, how they were housed and fed along the way, how the Mètis killed one or two steers missed in the roundup, and finally how they got the attention of Hoeft, who wanted them dead, who gathered the posse, who offered money, and who was really the one man—and there is always one—without whose stupidity and viciousness not one thing would have happened. But he was powerful, and so when the troopers got near his posse, he had the soldiers disarmed. His mob killed the Mètis, all but the girl, and the soldier's rifles were used. …”

Eleanor nodded.

“Hoeft heard rumors that Ellis Pardoe and Elizabeth had got a girl to safety, but they denied it. He knew the bodies would be found, so he paid to have them hauled to an old mine. That would have been not long after the killing. It is easier to travel in winter in this country than spring. …” said La Salle.

“So my grandfather …” said Eleanor.

“Never knew what really happened, I suspect,” said La Salle.

“And my father … ?” said Eleanor.

“Hard to tell,” said La Salle. “Elizabeth Rhodes Pardoe died in 1969; she and her son Jackson were close. Not all the letters were to or from Albert. …”

“What could she have wanted?” said Eleanor. “My God. …”

“She wanted the truth to come out,” said La Salle, “but after all the people were dead, so there would be history rather than shame. …”

Eleanor shook her head. She looked at La Salle. “So this old woman, who turns out to be a fraud anyway, tells Du Pré that these people were killed down on little Bitter Creek,” said Eleanor, “and he comes here and finds nothing. The old fraud dies. …”

La Salle nodded.

Du Pré rolled a cigarette.

“I never met my grandmother,” said Eleanor. “She died a dozen years before I was born. But I look so much like her, people who come here and look at the photograph in the museum tell me I must have posed for it dressed up in antique clothing. I wonder whether they'll be certain now that the photograph's a fraud, as well. …”

“It is a stunning resemblance,” said La Salle.

“But I don't think it was just modest propriety that kept Elizabeth silent,” said Eleanor. La Salle looked at her.

“I think she was just plain afraid,” said Eleanor. “Hoeft lived to be a very old man. Died in '49 or '50. I know something about being afraid. And maybe one of the good things to come from this is that I can finally divorce Bonner Macatee.”

La Salle leaned forward.

“Do you know who killed your father?” he said.

“Could he have done it himself?” said Eleanor.

La Salle leaned back.

“He had dreams, sometimes,” she said. “He took things deeply to heart. It would come and it would go. But if he knew about all this for so long, and it was finally going to come to light … ?”

“Thallium is an awfully hard death,” said La Salle.

She shook her head.

“It makes no sense.
None
of this makes sense,” she said.

La Salle waited.

“And Lily?” said Eleanor. “I've known Lily all my life. I'm twenty-eight, she's thirty-two. She could be moody sometimes, bitchy even. But since she got this place she seemed to settle down. …”

“Didn't marry?” said La Salle.

“No. She was the prettiest girl around, no shortage of men who wanted her. But she never did.” Eleanor paused. “I want to read the letters and see the journal.”

“Of course,” said La Salle.

Eleanor shook her head as though she was clearing it and looked at La Salle.

“What does thallium do, exactly, and in what dose?” she said.

He leaned forward again. “I don't really know,” he said.

She nodded, then looked around the roadhouse.

“I wonder who will end up with this?” she said.

Du Pré smoked.

He went back to the kitchen, found some good roast beef, made himself a sandwich with lots of mustard.

The voices in the dining room went on murmuring.

He stepped out the back door.

The rain had stopped, thin veils of cloud sat high. A half-moon hung in the sky.

A pickup truck pulled in, drove slowly past the front of the building, drove away.

Du Pré went back inside.

The voices went on murmuring.

He went to the bar, made himself a ditch, drank it and made another.

Chappie had leaned over the table, his face in his hands.

Eleanor was nodding.

“… I think the next thing to do is get the bones out of the mine. …” said La Salle.

“This isn't going to be over until we do that,” said Eleanor.

“That's right,” said La Salle.

Eleanor shook her head again. “Have you ever had one of those thoughts you can't quite get hold of?” she said.

“Most of mine are like that,” said La Salle.

Eleanor smiled a little. She sipped some more brandy.

La Salle yawned. It was late.

“My grandmother was afraid,” said Eleanor. “I know she was afraid. And one other thing …”

La Salle looked at her.

“Do we know how Ellis Pardoe died, exactly?” she said.