Pious Deception (24 page)

She yanked his arms together behind him and demanded, “What were you doing up there?” Her voice was harsh and raw from the dust.

He made a gurgling sound.

“Answer me!”

He coughed. “Nothing,” he squeaked out.

She pulled his arms tighter together. “This is your last chance.”

A whimper came from his throat. . Kiernan yanked again. “Tell me!”

“Uhm.” He spat. “Help him … haul stuff.”

She pulled his arms up, sending his face into the dirt. “Don’t lie to me. You were stealing, weren’t you?”

He gasped, spat, gasped again.

“Now!”

“Okay … okay … let up!” he muttered. She eased up just enough for him to notice. He breathed in deeply.

“You were after the tapes, weren’t you?” It was a fair guess.

“No!”

She pulled his arms tighter.

“No! Leggo! You’re going to break my shoulder.”

“The truth! You were after Zekk’s tapes, weren’t you?”

“His porn tapes? No. I don’t need that.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t!” He giggled. “I can see the real stuff.”

She eased his arms slightly. “Where?”

Now he made an odd sound. It took her a moment to realize it was the laugh of an awkward, embarrassed adolescent. “The titty-shaped love nest up there.” His face flushed. “You know, through the blue window.” He giggled. “Like a blue movie.”

“You’ve done that?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, his tone indicating less certainty than his words. “Me and my friend.”

“Not much to do out here, huh?” Kiernan offered, letting him loose.

By tacit agreement the two of them sat, panting. “Nothing like that, not in Rattlesnake. Only three girls in town, and none of them are like her.”

“Her? Who?”

“The one up there. She’s real tan, and she’s got a white X on her back—”

“From bathing-suit lines?”

“And she’s tan all the way down to … Then she’s got this great round white …” His face was even redder.

“Short hair?”

“Huh?” he demanded, redder yet.

Kiernan swallowed a laugh. “Her hair, was it sandy-colored and cut short?”

“Yeah. Hey, you don’t know her, do you?”

Ignoring that, she demanded, “Who was she with?”

“Some guy. He was on the bottom.” He turned away and gestured toward the house. “Zekk owes us. He cheats us all the time.”

“How? He sells your pottery, right?”

His breath was becoming calmer. “He takes twenty pots and platters, big ones, to town. And he comes back with a hundred dollars. None of us go to the city, he knows that. We don’t deal with strangers. He thinks we’re just dumb hicks. But my cousin worked construction a while back and a guy there told him what pots sell for. Zekk’s cheating us.”

They sat staring at each other. “So what were you going to do about it?”

“Wait for him, make him admit it.”

“And if he didn’t? He’s bigger than you, isn’t he?” It was a guess.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“He’s got guns, doesn’t he?” Another guess.

“Sure. But—”

“And you’re what, fifteen? Don’t tell me you’re the one who speaks for your whole village.”

“Somebody’s got to. He’s cheating us. Before Mac got sick he’d have taken care of it. He’s too sick now. He’s dying. Somebody’s got to.”

“Mac?”

“My granddad.”

“John McKinley?”

“Yeah,” he said, standing up. He started down the road, waiting till she fell in beside him. When the road switched back he kept on straight along a path toward the cemetery.

The cemetery was so steep the corpses might almost have been standing up; the thought made her laugh irrationally. The sun bounced off the dry hillside, the brittle tombstones; it burned her back. Sweat coated her body. It ran in dirty rivulets down the boy’s arms. His shirt stuck to his back.

As they walked along she noticed the shabby tombstone of Matthew Shelton, 1901-1938. She looked at the tombstones in the row above: Sabrina Shelton, 1906-1938; Benjamin Shelton, 1917-1938. She shifted to see the next one; Hazel Shelton, 1909-1938.

“What happened in nineteen thirty-eight?” she asked.

“Flu.”

She looked back at the weathered headstones and the bare dirt around them, “How come no one cares for these graves?”

“No relatives left.”

A center path divided the cemetery into two sections. This shabby section had three rows of eight graves each, a top row of two. The other half had three rows with six each. Headstones had been carved from the red rock of the hillside. But that was the sole similarity between the two sides. The far section had been watered down, and the dirt had been raked. This one looked like a potter’s field: nearly half the stones had been blown over; dirt clumped against them. All it needed was tumbleweed to complete the picture.

“Those graves over there, they’re McKinleys, right? How come they’re all cared for?”

The boy didn’t answer.

“And how come so many of them survived the flu?”

“George!” A man called from below. “Get her down here.”

She looked down. Whatever suspicions she had had about Rattlesnake being a ghost town disappeared. A crowd of roughly thirty people—women, children, men—stood on the path beneath the cemetery. Two men stood on porches of the wooden houses to the left. Many carried heavy-looking rifles. Every one of them stared at her, eyeing her masculine attire and her short hair. And every one of them looked angry.

K
IERNAN SAT ON A
rawhide chair in a cottage that could have been taken from a Wild West movie set. Two men with rifles propped beside them kept watch on her. One guarded the front door. The other—Frank, by name, and clearly the leader—stood stolidly across the dark, ill-ventilated room by the bedroom door. Everything about him was thick—his belly pushed at his belt, his jeans spanned his thighs, the short sleeves of his shirt clung to his biceps. He looked like the ancestor of Brad Tchernak’s perfect offensive lineman, the man no human could move. A man a not-quite-five-foot-one detective was not likely to push aside.

It was he who had hauled her down from the cemetery, leaving the boy in obvious disgrace. The villagers had watched silently, their faces pinched with anger, their eyes squinting in curiosity. They looked as if they had all been dropped from the same mold: tall, thick, long-haired people; men in jeans and flannel shirts, hefting heavy rifles like Patsy Luca’s varmint rifle; women in cotton dresses. They had followed her along the steaming treeless street to the first house and stood silent as Frank shoved her inside.

What kind of place was this? Were the villagers members of some cult? Renegade Mormon polygamists with armed men ready to fight off any threat to their harems? Fundamentalists equally eager to shoot? Generations of families, hiding some shameful secret? One thing she knew was that they were McKinleys and Sheltons, and Austin Vanderhooven had been planning to visit one McKinley today. He had had “McKinley” written on his calendar. A second thing she recalled was Patsy Luca’s description of the varmint rifle: an accurate high-velocity rifle, likely to blow its victim’s insides to mush.

A low moan came from the bedroom now. Was that John McKinley, the dying village elder?

Moving her head as little as possible, she surveyed the room. The hot damp air smelled of smoke, stale sweat, stale onions, camphor—an odd combination. An old leather trunk stood beside the soot-coated fireplace. On the mantel were two graceless pottery bowls with a quartet of black vertical lines for design. Two worn rawhide chairs stood next to a stained oak table. The bare floorboards had been worn down in the center, and decades of dirt-covered boots had ground the red-brown earth into them. Faded, frayed curtains hung limp beside dirt-encrusted windows.

“I came to see John McKinley,” Kiernan said.

Frank made no reply. His eyes were sunk back above leathery cheekbones; his thick shoulders sloped. He had the look of a tired, anxious man. His eyes wandered to the closed bedroom door just as another moan broke the silence.

“He’s dying, isn’t he?” she asked.

Frank’s only response was the tightening of his fingers on the rifle. Behind him the door remained shut. The stale muggy air in the room seemed to carry the heat of his tension.

Kiernan weighed her options. Neither man had spoken; neither had touched her after the big one shoved her in here. They seemed to have no curiosity about why she was here, but neither did they show any urge to let her go. She could wait. With a small, quiet woman they might relax their guard. Watching for her moment, she might escape. But patience was hardly one of her virtues. She needed to get to John McKinley before he died; she needed to learn why a copy of his fifty-year-old will was in Joe Zekk’s house. She stood and took a step toward the bedroom.

A moan broke the silence—louder this time. Frank shuddered.

Kiernan braced a foot on the arm of the chair. “How bad is he?” she said, eyeing the closed door.

Frank said nothing, but a flicker of fear was visible in his dull, brown eyes.

She guessed. “You’re not sure, are you? But he’s too sick to take chances with, right?” She couldn’t read Frank’s reaction, couldn’t tell if she was playing him right. “I’m a doctor. I can help him.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed in disbelief.

“Had a doctor,” the younger man said, disgust clear in his tone.

Frank scowled at him.

“What did the doctor say?”

Frank’s lips quivered but he didn’t speak.

“The doctor, did he leave any medicine? Penicillin, tetracycline, streptomycin?” From the younger man’s disdainful shrug she guessed that there was medicine, medicine that wasn’t doing much. “With medication, even the right medicines, sometimes the doses need to be changed. Sometimes the patient reacts badly, the prescription has to be different. Show me what he’s taking.”

The younger man looked at the door, then back at his companion. A tremulous moan pierced the door. Both men started. Kiernan shivered.

“For Christ’s sake,” she said, “you can hear how much pain he’s in. Don’t you care?”

Without appearing to move his mouth, Frank said, “Morphine.”

Kiernan sighed. That might mean something else, but chances were that a prescription of morphine left in this remote village with apparently no one trained to administer it was for a cancer patient, and one who didn’t have much time. If they gave him too much, if they created addiction, it wouldn’t be for long.

And that explained the somberness of those hostile villagers.

She said, “Morphine? Obviously, it’s not making him comfortable. You know the dose can vary. The amount he needed yesterday may not do it today.”

Not looking at Frank, the younger man said, “Not taking it.”

“Not taking it? Why not? He’s got cancer, right?”

For the first time Frank winced.

The younger man said, “Old Mac knows what morphine does. He was here when the town was booming. He saw the miners strung out on drink, a couple on stuff like morphine. Minds like mud, he said. He won’t take it till the priest comes back.”

“Father Vanderhooven.”

He nodded.

“You expected him today, right?”

The younger man’s eyes snapped open.

“Father Vanderhooven is dead.” Before they could even gasp, she said, “He was murdered. Murdered before he could get here.”

To the younger man she said, “Why was Father Vanderhooven coming?”

“Last rites.”

She shook her head. “It was more than that. Mr. McKinley’s name was on the priest’s calendar. He planned to come here today. You expected him today, right? So, there was no need for Mac to wait in pain all week. He could receive Extreme Unction in any state; his mind wouldn’t have to be clear. There must be more to it than that.”

Frank shook his head sharply.

Pacing toward the bedroom, Kiernan said, “Had the priest come here often?”

With his free hand, Frank grabbed her shoulder and shoved her back in the chair.

Her head banged against the hard chair back. Swallowing her urge to yelp, she took a breath and waited till she could be sure her voice would be steady. “He’s your father, right?”

Frank didn’t answer. Kiernan kept her gaze on him, ignoring the younger man.

“Your father’s in there dying. He’s been in pain how long—a week, a month? All that so he could deal with the priest today. And now someone has killed the priest to keep him from seeing your father. And you don’t have enough respect for your father to find out why?”

Beneath his leathery tan, Frank’s craggy face reddened. He stepped toward Kiernan, lifted an arm, and backhanded it across her face.

Her head snapped left, the pain clanged through her skull, setting off the throbbing anew. She jammed her teeth together and waited for the pain to ease up. “Are you going to find out what your father is desperate to know or not?”

He took another step toward her.

Involuntarily, she stiffened.

“We don’t deal with strangers. We don’t go to town. We don’t let strangers in here. We don’t let them snoop around our graveyard. And we don’t put up with this kind of shit.” Holding the rifle in his left hand, he leaned back, drew his right arm back.

From the bedroom came another shrill tremulous moan. Frank spun toward the door. The old man moaned again, louder, his pain obvious in every note.

Kiernan stepped back. “He’s really suffering. There’s nothing for him to wait for now. With the morphine he won’t care. It’ll be like the pain is in someone else’s body.”

Frank made no move toward either Kiernan or the bedroom. His father wailed, the sound of hopeless desperation. Frank took a step toward the bedroom door, then stopped, as if he couldn’t bring himself to go inside. His face was tense with fear and shame.

Kiernan had seen faces like that only a few times. And then she had seen only the dregs of shame as a husband or daughter confessed to her after the death. She had never been out to patients’ homes, never seen the relatives when they still had Frank’s decision to make. But she knew his reaction was not uncommon. She said, “You’ve never given him a shot, have you? Isn’t there someone else here who can do that? A woman?”

“He won’t have a strange woman. Wouldn’t have no one but Ma. She’s dead. Been dead ten years.”