Blue Lonesome (6 page)

Just inside the door, a thin, colorless woman in her sixties sat at a desk separated from the rest of the library by an old-fashioned bank of card files. A name plate on the desk said she was Ada Kendall. Another woman, fat and raisin-eyed, browsed in a section marked Historical and Romance Fiction. They both looked at him when he came in, casually at first and then with the interest and vague suspicion of small-town inhabitants for strangers who show up in a place strangers aren’t expected to visit.

“May I help you?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” Messenger said. He’d brought the copy of
A Treasury of American Verse
with him; he laid it in front of Ada Kendall. “Is this one of your books? It has a Beulah Library stamp on the last page.”

She frowned at him, frowned at the book. When she picked it up, opened it to the last page, it was with the tips of her fingers, as if she were afraid it might be contaminated in some way. “Yes, that’s our stamp. Someone’s torn the card pocket out.” She said the last as if she thought he might have done it.

“So it’s not a discarded book?”

“There’s no discard stamp,” she said.

“Then I wonder if there’s any way you can tell me who checked it out last.”

“That would depend on
when
it was last checked out.”

“I don’t know when, exactly. More than six months ago.”

“Whoever it was doesn’t seem to care about books
or
other library users. This book is in very poor condition.”

“Yes. But I—”

“The person will have to pay a fine,” Ada Kendall said. “A
large
fine. Where did you find it?”

“In San Francisco.”

“In … where did you say?”

“San Francisco. A woman named Janet Mitchell had it. At least, Janet Mitchell was the name I knew her by.”

Ada Kendall opened her mouth, closed it again; the frown, fixed now, had narrowed her eyes into a myopic squint. The raisin-eyed woman was no longer browsing. She stood watching him, Messenger realized, with a peculiarly eager intensity.

He asked the librarian, “Do you know anyone—a former resident of Beulah—named Janet Mitchell?”

“No.”

“Janet, then. Or Mitchell.”

“No Mitchells around here,” the raisin-eyed woman said. She moved over closer to where Messenger stood, as if to get a better look at him. It allowed him a better look at her, too; the intense expression was gossipmonger’s hunger. “No Janets either. Never has been, that I know of.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Just a name she was using, one she made up.”

“Why would she use a name that wasn’t hers?”

“Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”

“You think she used to live here? On account of that book?”

“It’s possible. I thought so, anyway.”

“What’s she look like, this woman?”

“Tallish, thin, ash-blond hair, striking gray eyes—”

“My God,” the raisin-eyed woman said, “I knew it, I
knew
it!” Ada Kendall said nothing, but her thin mouth drew so tight the lips vanished into a crooked line, like a crack in an adobe wall.

Messenger felt a prickling of excitement. “Then you know her.”

“San Francisco. So that’s where she went. I never would’ve guessed a place like that, would you, Ada? A desert rat like her?”

“No. No, I surely wouldn’t.”

“What’s she doing there?” the gossipmonger asked him. “What’s she have to do with you?”

“She was a … she was somebody I knew.”

“Was? She leave Frisco, go somewhere else?”

“She’s dead,” he said.

“Dead? You say
dead
?”

“I’m afraid so. She—”

“How? How’d she die?”

“She committed suicide.”

“Ada, you hear that? She killed herself!”

“I heard,” Ada Kendall said. “Lord have mercy.”

“Lord had His vengeance, you mean. How’d she do it, mister? How’d she kill herself?”

“She cut her wrists with a razor blade.”

“Oh my! Wait till John T. hears that!” And the raisin-eyed woman burst out laughing, an eruption of sheer, unrestrained glee.

M
ESSENGER WAS SHOCKED
. He had never seen anyone react with such callous pleasure to the news of another person’s death.
They hated her, both of them. Sad, broken woman like Ms. Lonesome … what could she have done to incite that much hate?

The fat woman’s laughter continued unchecked, rising to an almost hysterical pitch. The sound of it echoed through the close, dusty spaces of the library. It put a coldness on his nape. And for a reason he couldn’t define, it caused apprehension to rise in him like bile.

“You stop that, Sally Adams,” the librarian said. Her tone was schoolmarmish, as if she were speaking to a naughty child. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have a shred of respect? This is a
library
, for heaven’s sake.”

Her words had the opposite effect: The gossipmonger’s laughter came even harder, in whooping spurts, like the shrieking of a madwoman. Sally Adams broke forward at the middle, gasping and whooping, arms clutched across jiggling fat as if to keep it from shaking loose inside her bright print dress. Tears rolled down cheeks flushed the color of fire-roasted peppers. Visible spasms began to rock her; her buttocks twitched and rolled. It was as though her ferocious mirth had turned sexual and she were in the beginning throes of orgasm.

The look of her, as much as the sounds she was making, drove him out of there.

He opened the Subaru’s sun-hot door. All his earlier good-to-be-alive feelings were gone; the undigested remains of his breakfast lay sour in his stomach. He felt confused, not a little incredulous. Ms. Lonesome’s suicide was a source of pleasure for Ada Kendall too, he thought. Both of them, two women in a town this size … delighted to hear that someone they’d known was dead. It made no sense to him. There was no correlation between their reaction and his knowledge and impressions of Ms. Lonesome. A mistake? Not the same woman after all, despite the description—?

“Mister! Wait, mister—wait!”

His head came up, eyes pinching against the sun glare. Sally Adams had appeared on the library porch. She waddled down the steps toward him, wiping away tear-wet with fingers like brown sausages.

“Don’t leave yet,” she called to him in a breathless voice. “The details … the rest of the details …”

Quickly he folded his body inside. He had the engine rumbling when she reached the car; she came around to the front, stood there blocking the way, her mouth moving with words he couldn’t—didn’t want to—hear. He put the gearshift lever into reverse. The Subaru’s tires churned up a blossom of white dust as the car skidded backward. He kept on powering in reverse until Sally Adams was an indistinctly hazed shape in the middle of the street.

THE CHURCH OF
the Holy Name sat by itself on a low bluff on the southwest edge of town. It resembled a rectangular box, unadorned and freshly whitewashed, with an ungraded parking area in front, a graveyard stretched out behind, and a smaller whitewashed building—probably a parsonage—off to one side. Cottonwoods had been planted around the buildings to provide shade. A few more dotted the burial ground, but most of it sat baking openly under the hard eye of the sun.

In place of a steeple was a huge white cross, thrust up above the church’s entrance so that from a distance, with sun rays glinting off its surface, it had the look of a brand burned into the smoky blue sky. It was the cross that had drawn him here. That, and the fact that he’d noticed the church on his earlier explorations: it was by far the most prominent of the three in Beulah. He had to have someone to question, and the last thing he wanted was a repeat of the emotional scene at the library. Who calmer than a clergyman? Who knew more about what went on in a small town?

He parked in front of the church. There was no one in sight, although he could see a small Jeep wagon parked in the carport adjacent to the parsonage; the only sounds were the distant ones of traffic and someone using an electric saw. The church’s double doors were unlocked. He hesitated before he entered. He was not a religious man, at least not in the sense of embracing formal religion, and the few times he’d been inside a place of worship he’d felt uncomfortable.

Single room, long and narrow, with a high cross-beamed ceiling and stained-glass windows shadowed by the branches of the cottonwoods. Two dozen rows of pews and a plain altar with a bronze crucifix mounted on the wall behind it. Hardwood floors worn smooth in places and scarred in others by the feet of two or three generations of worshipers. The hot, dry silence had an empty quality. In the wall to the right of the altar was a closed door that would lead to the sacristy. He walked down there and knocked on it. No answer.

Outside again, he started toward the parsonage. More of the graveyard grew visible as he went, and in the same moment he saw movement and heard a sound over that way. Somebody—a young woman wearing jeans and a straw hat—was kneeling on parched ground at the rear of the church, her back to him. He hesitated, then changed direction and approached her.

The cemetery had an austere look in keeping with the desert surroundings: not much in the way of grass or other ground cover, most of the markers of wood and, with one exception, all small and simple. The exception was a plot closer to the back wall, near where the woman knelt; it was presided over by a six-foot, white marble angel, wings spread, its surfaces dulled and pocked by windblown sand, poised atop a four-foot block of black granite. The monument was so out of place here it was almost a grotesquerie. Even from a distance Messenger could read the name etched on a bronze plate set into the granite: ROEBUCK.

The young woman was working at a much smaller grave site a few yards from the Roebuck plot, one marked only by a newish wooden cross. Spread out beside her were gardening tools, a nursery planter containing a white-flowered shrub. She was hacking at the dry earth with a trowel, making a hole for the shrub. She must have been there, quiet, when he drove up.

Intent on what she was doing, she didn’t hear him. When he stepped around in front of her and said, “Excuse me,” her reaction was sudden and defensive; she reared up jerkily and drew the trowel back as if to fend off an attack. Messenger backed up a step. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Messenger. I’m looking for the pastor here.”

“Messenger?”

“Yes. Jim Messenger.”

She was tense for another few seconds, staring up at him with her free hand shading her eyes. Then all at once she relaxed; she laid the trowel down and got loosely and jerkily to her feet. Skittish, he thought. High-strung. She was two or three years past her twentieth birthday, slim except for wide hips, very brown. Wisps of hair visible under the brim of her hat were a lustrous blue-black. Indian or Mexican blood. The high, broad cheekbones and dark eyes indicated it, too.

“My father,” she said.

“… I’m sorry?”

“The pastor. He’s my father. Reverend Walter Hoxie.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I’m Maria Hoxie.” She didn’t offer her hand. “He’s not here right now; he went to do some shopping. He should be back pretty soon.”

“I’ll wait, if that’s all right.”

“Better not wait in the sun without a hat.”

He nodded. “Hot out here even with a hat.”

“Yes, but I’m used to it.”

“Are you the caretaker here?”

“Caretaker? No. Well, sometimes. I can’t stand it looking so bare and colorless. It should have flowers, plants.”

“So you’ve started planting them.”

“When I don’t have anything else to do. You’re a stranger in town, a tourist. Right?”

“A stranger, yes. A tourist more or less.”

“Are you going to gamble at the Wild Horse Casino?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Good. I don’t like gambling, I think it’s sinful. John T. laughs at me but it’s what I think.”

“John T.?”

“John T. Roebuck. He manages the casino. Do you think gambling is sinful?”

“I don’t have much of an opinion either way.”

“My father preaches against it sometimes.” She paused. “Sunday services start at nine o’clock.”

“I doubt I’ll be here on Sunday.”

“You have some business with him? My father?”

“Well, a few questions I’d like answered.”

“What questions?”

“About someone who used to live in Beulah.”

“Who? Maybe I can tell you what you want to know.”

She probably could, but her youth and the way her mind seemed to jump from one subject to another made him reluctant to confide in her.

“Thanks, but I’d better wait and talk to your father.”

“All right.”

Messenger’s gaze strayed to the marble angel atop its four-foot block of granite. “The Roebucks must be important people in this community.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The size of the monument there.”

“The Roebucks aren’t important, even though John T. thinks they are. Nobody’s important except God. Excuse me, okay? I want to finish planting this before it gets too hot. The other one I put here died.”

“Too much sun and not enough water?”

“It just died,” she said.

Messenger said he would wait out front and left her on her knees again, scratching at the hole in the sandy soil with her trowel. He sat in the shadow of one of the cottonwoods, his back against the bole, looking out over the town and the desert beyond. It was a short wait. Inside of five minutes the whine of a car engine cut through the stillness; an old, sun-faded station wagon appeared on the access road, swung over into the carport next to the Jeep wagon.

Pint-sized stick figure; that was his first impression of the man who got out of the station wagon and came forward to meet him. Not much more than five feet tall, so thin his shadow was like a child’s line drawing. The cords and bones in his neck and arms protruded in sharp relief; his Adam’s apple was the size of a walnut. Thin, graying hair—he looked to be in his fifties—was combed crosshatch-fashion across a liver-spotted skull. Maria hadn’t gotten her Indian or Mexican blood from him, or her dark good looks. In fact, it seemed improbable that his genes could have helped create her at all. Stepfather or adoptive father was more likely.