The Outrage - Edge Series 3 (13 page)

‘In here is where it all happened, I guess?’

Edge made cold-blooded use of the man’s unease. ‘The blanket to the left of where you’re standing is covering the bloodstains where Mrs Quinn was butchered. Her daughter was raped and strangled on the sofa there, where you see the other blanket.’

Kellner shuddered and looked morosely around the room allowing his gaze to dwell only briefly on the areas Edge indicated. Then he gazed for a long time at the sideboard with the broken glass scattered on the floor around it and one opened bottle on top. Edge, still shouldering the shotgun, crossed to the fireplace and turned to find Kellner peering at him with a misty eyed expression as he removed his battered cap and screwed it up in both hands.

‘It’s real terrible what happened to them two nice ladies.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And then for poor Mr Quinn to go and blow his head off that way . . . That was real bad, too.’

‘They were buried in the Springdale cemetery this morning.’

‘Sure, I knew that was going to be so, mister.’ He inferred a slur and was momentarily indignant then shrugged off the mood. ‘I’ll go visit the grave and pay my respects later. Me, I wouldn’t have been welcomed at the funeral. By all them folks dressed up in all their finery. Mr and Mrs Quinn and the girl - them and a couple of other people . . . They’re the only ones hereabouts had any time for me.’

‘I’m hereabouts, feller. And, like I said, I’m hired on to find the killers. So I’ve got time for you.’ A clock began to chime the noon hour. ‘Some, anyway.’

Kellner blurted in a strangled tone: ‘I was robbed, mister! Yesterday morning it was!’

‘I heard you live in a shack near a creek in the Avery Valley Woods, that right?’

He scowled. ‘You sure seem to know a whole lot about me, mister.’

Edge started to reiterate: ‘I’m being paid to find out who killed – ‘

‘But that don’t have nothing to do with me!’ He looked about to turn around and dart back along the hallway toward the still open front door. But he stood his ground. ‘How come you know so much about me, tell me that?’

‘People have talked to me. And now it’s your turn to do that. What were you doing hanging around near this place when you knew the man of the house was away, old timer?

There were no chores for you to do. And the women were here alone. You didn’t usually come here unless you had paid work to do is how I heard it.’

‘What? Have people been saying that I . . . Hell, the reason I came by here a few times was because Mr Quinn was away. There have been a whole bunch of house robberies going on around town lately. And I swung by this place whenever I could to make sure them two nice ladies were all right. I wouldn’t never have harmed either one of them. They treated me real good.’

Edge tossed the shotgun on the nearest armchair. ‘You want a drink?’

Kellner shook his head, looked at the bottle on the sideboard and quickly away again, licked his lips and snapped: ‘No! I drink, sometimes I do. I ain’t denying that. And when I do I sometimes say real stupid things.’

‘So maybe it’s best you wait until later. In case you say something you shouldn’t, uh?’

‘You said you’re getting paid good money for what you’re gonna do?’

‘I ain’t complaining about the wages, feller.’

‘Enough so you can pay folks a reward for what they tell you?’

Edge said evenly: ‘You got two choices. You can take a drink now, or when we’re through. That’s one choice. Or I can start breaking your bones.’

He grimaced. ‘Aw shit, I don’t know if it means anything or not. The sheriff didn’t think nothing to it.’

‘What didn’t Meeker think anything to?’

‘Like you already know, I got a shack by the creek in the timber out in Avery Valley. And yesterday morning I was robbed.’

‘You’ve got stuff in your place somebody would want to steal?’

Kellner looked insulted for a stretched second, then glanced down at himself, shook his head morosely and shrugged. ‘That’s kinda like what the sheriff and that mean mouthed deputy of his reckoned. Guess you wouldn’t think so, would you? An old guy like me? And truth to tell there ain’t nothing that’s worth anything at my place. But a couple of shirts and a pair of pants was sure took from the shack while I wasn’t around.’

‘So you didn’t see anything of whoever it was stole your stuff?’

‘No, not hair nor hide. All I know is what was stole and it was took sometime between nine and eleven by this watch.’ He dug into a pocket of his dungarees and pulled out a tarnished silver watch on a broken chain. ‘That’s when I left my place to go check my traps upstream. And when I come back. Way I heard it, Mrs Quinn and the girl . . . What was done to them, it was done between them times, ain’t that right?’

Edge nodded.

‘Well, I got on real well with the Quinn family, mister. Liked them a lot. They gave me work and paid me on the nail. Sometimes Mr Quinn did that even when he didn’t really need no chores done but him and Mrs Quinn knew I was in sore need.’ He sighed deeply and grimaced. ‘Ain’t nothing I can do for them poor souls now. Except tell what I just told. To someone who’ll listen to me? Honest, mister, I don’t know if my shack getting robbed had anything to do with it . . . What was done to the folks I liked so well, I mean?’

He half turned, like he was about to leave and Edge asked:

‘Something wrong, feller?’

He remained where he was, grunted and said in a rush: ‘You forget what I said about a reward, mister. And I don’t want no drink. I liked the Quinn family. And I want to do what little I can without getting no payment. Just want to help catch them bastards that did it if I can.’

‘Okay.’

‘So you come out to the woods if you want and take a good look around. You go along the Old Town Road almost as far as where it crosses the Austin Trail. And you’ll see a track off to the right. Follow that down into the valley. I’m there a lot of the time. So you come to my shack and maybe you’ll find some sign?’

‘How about now?’

Kellner shook his head. ‘I got things to do now.’ He began to speak in a rush again.

‘And don’t you go believing a lot of what folks tell you about me. They think I’m crazy, lots of them. And that I don’t know nothing. Well, I know lots of stuff. I know a hell of lot more than anyone thinks I do. You come and look where I told you, mister. I’ll have my weapon back now, if that’s okay with you?’ He kept balling up and unscrewing his cap with both hands as he shuffled diffidently into the room, seeming more unsettled than ever. Edge gestured toward the armchair on which the shotgun rested. ‘No sweat. Help yourself. Just be sure never to point it at me again. Far as you know, Meeker and Lacy didn’t go to your place to take a look around?’

The old man almost spat but remembered in time where he was: frowned in disapproval of the local lawmen and noisily swallowed the saliva he had sucked up into his mouth. ‘The sheriff, he didn’t pay no attention to what I told him. And that Vic Lacy, he laughed at me. Reckoned that if anyone took anything out of my shack then they had to be crazier than me. Said not to waste his and Mr Meeker’s time when they had murderers to bring to justice.’

He switched his anxious gaze between the armchair and Edge, got a confirming nod and retrieved his shotgun. Then turned and hurried from the room, scuttled along the hallway with surprising agility for a man of his years. He had not closed the front door when he followed Edge into the house and left it open again now.

Edge moved to the door more slowly and looked out across the terrace, watching the bad smelling, nervous old timer until he had gone from sight down the driveway. Then back in the parlour he briefly eyed the sideboard and decided against taking a drink from the bottle of bourbon. Rolled a cigarette and lit it as he surveyed the broken glass then the blankets on the sofa and the carpet.

Smoked the cigarette while he reflected dispassionately on the seemingly perfect family that had lived in this perfect home. Yet were almost universally disliked by their neighbours: but not by the gamy old man who respected them enough to suppress his normal panhandling nature to provide for free whatever he could to right the ghastly wrong that had been done to them. But a half-hour or so later he had still not arrived at any conclusion concerning why he was here – outside of the two thousand dollars he was in line to collect. Which would have been reason enough in the bad old days. But with a new leaf turned over as the years advanced, he felt that now he was older he ought to be a better man as well as a wiser one. Yet the malodorous Joe Kellner had more goodness in terms of the milk of unselfish human kindness flowing through his little finger than . . . Edge left the house, mounted up and followed the directions Kellner had given him, found the spur that cut off to the right a hundred yards short of the Austin Trail and turned on to it. Rode down a gentle slope that had clearly been well used over a long time. And some half a mile from the start of the track, where it ran through a stand of timber, the way was partially blocked by a toppled, long dead tree. The ancient elm had been felled by a storm, the ragged break near its base showing no bite of an axe. But somebody had chosen it as a convenient marker point on which to nail a weather warped board with a crudely painted warning:
PRIVATE PROPERTY – KEEP OUT – DANGEROUS.

He rode around the rotting obstacle and started to drop lower as the timber on either side of him gave way to high brush among sparsely scattered broad leaf trees. Soon, though, the gelding was moving almost soundlessly over a carpet of pine needles shed by close growing conifers. Then the ground levelled out and the trees were more widely spaced. But there were sufficient towering pines to cast patches of dank shade across the forest floor featured with decaying, moss covered stumps of trees that had been felled by the axe some years ago. The dominant smell down here was of sodden timber so it could be that the damp ground would retain easy to read sign made by the men who came this way close to the time the Quinn mother and daughter were murdered.

The track came to the kind of abrupt end that justified the danger warning on the sign fixed to the fallen tree: finished at the side of a fifty feet deep, steep sided ravine along the bottom of which flowed a gently running water course. It was rocky down there in the creek below clumps of thorny brush growing among boulders lodged into the steep sides. If somebody stumbled over the lip of the drop or rode a horse into the ravine in the darkness, the rock strewn creek bed would be sure to inflict serious injury on them. Or worse: as another steep drop in the Springdale area had done two nights ago to Bob Jordan, the Cassidys’ ranch hand who was buried this morning.

Edge turned his horse away from the dank ravine and heeled him toward a well-trodden gap in some high brush to the left. Beyond here the ground fell away sharply but it was not so steep that he needed to dismount. And at the bottom of the incline the shallow, fifteen feet wide creek trickled slowly enough for him to see through the clear water so he was able to ride across without the gelding stumbling on submerged rocks. On the other side the trees grew more densely or, here and there, had been felled only by the natural selection of old age, disease or lighting strike. There was a clearly defined path through the timber where those who chose to ignore the danger sign had trampled the ground: probably Joe Kellner for the most part? Who had probably put the sign in place on the fallen tree. Edge had always possessed a good sense of direction that he had seldom needed to call upon since what had seemed to be the watershed of his life. But the innate talent was readily re-awakened whenever he needed to find his way across rugged country: and this early afternoon he was able to take a bearing on the south west, glaringly marked by steeply angled shafts of bright sunlight piercing the tree canopy. And he was confident that if he turned to face northward and followed a diagonal line, with the sun’s rays always to his left he should emerge at a point on the Old Town Road not too far away from the Quinn house. He cursed softly! Just what the hell did he hope to find out here in this Godforsaken valley? Why had he clutched at the straw handed him by the malodours, raggedly dressed old man some people said was crazy? While Meeker and Lacy were in Austin questioning two young punks who most probably had killed Martha and Nancy Quinn? A pair of local no account kids who would eventually confess to the crime: admit or deny they had fled across open meadows and through the thick timber to get away unseen from the Quinn house. Stole clothes from Kellner’s shack because their own were stained by blood and vomit?

Then he saw the crudely built timber shack that surely had to be where Kellner lived, spat to the side and told himself silently that he was doing it solely for the money: which was motive enough, damnit! Said aloud: ‘If you’re not careful, feller, you’ll end up as crazy as the old timer!’

A woman said frostily: ‘It’s said that talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity. And Joe Kellner doesn’t do that, so perhaps he is completely sane, would you think?’ Sarah Farmer moderated her tone as she appeared in the open doorway of the dilapidated building. ‘What are you doing out here, Mr Edge?’

He rode closer, reined in his mount and tipped his hat. ‘I guess this is where the old man lives?’

‘You should reserve judgement on Joe until you have met him, I think.’

‘I already did that.’

‘Oh?’

‘At the Quinn house an hour or so ago.’