Full Dark, No Stars

“When I asked if she could have laid her hands on any money, you mentioned 200 dol ars. Isn’t that right?”

Ah yes. The fictional money Arlette had supposedly taken from my dresser. “That’s right.”

He was nodding. “Wel , there you go, there you go. Some jewelry and some money. That explains everything, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t see—”

“Because you’re not looking at it from a lawman’s point of view. She was robbed on the road, that’s al . Some bad egg spied a woman hitch-hiking between Hemingford and Lyme Biska, picked her

up, kil ed her, robbed her of her money and her jewelry, then carried her body far enough into the nearest field so it couldn’t be seen from the road.” From his long face I could see he was thinking she had probably been raped as wel as robbed, and that it was probably a good thing that there wasn’t enough of her left to tel for sure.

“That’s probably it, then,” I said, and somehow I was able to keep a straight face until he was gone. Then I turned over, and although I thumped my stump in doing so, I began to laugh. I buried my face in my pil ow, but not even that would stifle the sound. When the nurse—an ugly old battle-axe—came in and saw the tears streaking my face, she assumed (which makes an ass out of you and me) that I had been crying. She softened, a thing I would have thought impossible, and gave me an extra morphine pil . I was, after al , the grieving husband and bereft father. I deserved comfort.

And do you know why I was laughing? Was it Jones’s wel -meaning stupidity? The fortuitous appearance of a dead female hobo who might have been kil ed by her male traveling companion while

they were drunk? It was both of those things, but mostly it was the shoe. The farmer had only stopped to investigate what the coydogs were fighting over because he’d seen a ladies’ patent leather shoe in the ditch. But when Sheriff Jones had asked about footwear that day at the house the previous summer, I’d told him Arlette’s canvas shoes were the ones that were gone. The idiot had forgotten.

And he never remembered.

When I got back to the farm, almost al my livestock was dead. The only survivor was Achelois, who looked at me with reproachful, starveling eyes and lowed plaintively. I fed her as lovingly as you

might feed a pet, and real y, that was al she was. What else would you cal an animal that can no longer contribute to a family’s livelihood?

There was a time when Harlan, assisted by his wife, would have taken care of my place while I was in the hospital; it’s how we neighbored out in the middle. But even after the mournful blat of my dying cows started drifting across the fields to him while he sat down to his supper, he stayed away. If I’d been in his place, I might have done the same. In Harl Cotterie’s view (and the world’s), my son hadn’t been content just to ruin his daughter; he’d fol owed her to what should have been a place of refuge, stolen her away, and forced her into a life of crime. How that “Sweetheart Bandits” stuff must have eaten into her father! Like acid! Ha!

The fol owing week—around the time the Christmas decorations were going up in farmhouses and along Main Street in Hemingford Home—Sheriff Jones came out to the farm again. One look at his

face told me what his news was, and I began to shake my head. “No. No more. I won’t have it. I can’t have it. Go away.”

I went back in the house and tried to bar the door against him, but I was both weak and one-handed, and he forced his way in easily enough. “Take hold, Wilf,” he said. “You’l get through this.” As if he knew what he was talking about.

He looked in the cabinet with the decorative ceramic beer stein on top of it, found my sadly depleted bottle of whiskey, poured the last finger into the stein, and handed it to me. “Doctor wouldn’t

approve,” he said, “but he’s not here and you’re going to need it.”

The Sweetheart Bandits had been discovered in their final hideout, Shannon dead of the counterman’s bul et, Henry of one he had put into his own brain. The bodies had been taken to the Elko

mortuary, pending instructions. Harlan Cotterie would see to his daughter, but would have nothing to do with my son. Of course not. I did that myself. Henry arrived in Hemingford by train on the eighteenth of December, and I was at the depot, along with a black funeral hack from Castings Brothers. My picture was taken repeatedly. I was asked questions which I didn’t even try to answer. The headlines in

both the World-Herald and the much humbler Hemingford Weekly featured the phrase GRIEVING FATHER.

If the reporters had seen me at the funeral home, however, when the cheap pine box was opened, they would have seen real grief; they could have featured the phrase SCREAMING FATHER. The