Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

“Can you not think of Jarry and Paloma, though?”

“Paloma may do as she pleases.”

“And Jarry? What of him? Put yourself in his position, Harlan—what if it were you?”

“But it was me, Addie,” he replies with a pathetic note. “It is. It has been all my life. This is where it stops. There comes a time when you must cease to put your faith in others’ help and act to help yourself.” The paper now is ash. He smears it underneath his boot and grinds it down into the blackened brick. “This will never leave this room.”

She maintains a grim silence.

“I must have your promise.”

“I don’t know if I can give you that.”

“You will, though, Addie,” he informs her, with a cold assurance she finds threatening. “You certainly will if Jarry’s feelings are of concern to you. This is better for him, too.”

“How?” she answers. “Better how?”

“If it were you,” he says, “which would be the bitterer—to stay and work in accordance with your father’s wish to keep you safe, or to feel compelled to it by a brother whom you hate?”

She frowns and makes no answer.

“Come now, Addie,” he says, gaining confidence, “we may disagree, but it’s beneath you, when you know I’m right, to withhold an answer out of pique.”

“Perhaps,” she says, “but you’re wrong upon the larger point.”

“That is your opinion. Think what you will. I can’t help what you think. But keep your thinking to yourself. I won’t have this raised with Jarry or Paloma—do you understand me? This is my family, Addie, mine—my father, my property, my slaves. These matters go back forty years and more, and you’ve not yet been here three whole days. I am master now, and your husband, too. A week ago today, in church, you made a vow not just to love and honor me, but also to obey. If you intend to keep it, I must have your word.”

“All right, Harlan,” she says, mortified by the whole conversation and capitulating to escape. “All right, then, all right.”

“I have it?”

“Did you not just hear me say you do?”

“Very well, then. Good,” he says, and now he risks a smile. “Come, Addie, we’ve had rough sailing for a day or two, but we’ve come through. Let’s not mar our last few hours. You get dressed and speak to Paloma about your notion while I see if they’re ready for us at the cemetery.” He bends to kiss her mouth, but Addie gives a cheek instead.

After he leaves, she dresses briskly and sits down at the dressing table. She looks for the black hair in Harlan’s mother’s brush, but it’s gone, and Addie, angry at Harlan, but still angrier at her own concession, wonders if it was ever there at all. Falling into contemplation of her frowning face, she becomes aware she’s waiting for something. Since opening her eyes, she has been waiting half consciously, half in fear, for the voice to speak. It hasn’t, though; nor does it now. This is a blessing, though. Maybe now, she thinks, life, real life, suspended for these last two days, can recommence. Yes, decides Addie, as she sets in brushing vigorously—brushing quite furiously, in fact—the silence of the voice is a relief.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Well, correct me if I’m wrong, gentlemen,” said Ransom, pacing, pacing furiously before the partners desk, “but you don’t need a degree in forensic pathology to tell that Yorrick out there with the BB in his brain has been in the ground a hell of a long time.”

He nodded to the window and the excavation site beyond, where the remains were being photographed and bagged.

“Well, you are wrong,” said Sneeden, the ME, “so I will correct you. Once a body’s been in the ground a certain time, Mr. Hill, the bones oxidize, they turn this sort of dingy ivory-yellow, and it’s virtually impossible to tell with the naked eye—at least, for me, and I’ve been doing this twenty-five years—whether they’ve been there one year or a hundred.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

Ransom, now, came to a stop. “So what are you implying?”

Floating his question, he looked from Sneeden to Sergeant Thomason, who stood holding his doffed cap, watching Ran with soulful, put-upon, clinically dispassionate, unblinkingly observant eyes, like a poor boy on his first trip to the circus, studying the pacing tiger in its cage.

“I mean, based on your years of experience,” Ran continued, getting a fresh wind, “tracking criminal masterminds and so forth, do I strike you—and please be honest, don’t hold back for fear of hurting my feelings—as the sort of guy who goes around murdering people for kicks, depositing their remains in shallow graves around his property like a hound dog burying bones? Is that the kind of face I have?”

“Hard to tell what’s in a person’s heart by looking in their face, Mr. Hill. Awful hard,” said Thomason. “Take that fella Ted Bundy, now…. Personally, you strike me as a nice-enough sort—a bit excitable, maybe, a little sarcastic on occasion….”

“And from sarcasm it’s a short, slippery downhill slope to mass murder, right?” said Ran. “I’m sure that’s on page one of the police procedural handbook.”

Giving the marked-up page of “Nemo’s Submarine” a quarter turn, Sneeden scanned it briefly, sending Ran to Defcon 6, then walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and appeared to begin triangulating their position relative to the site. “Why are you so touchy, Mr. Hill?” he said, turning back. “That would be my question.”

“That would be your question,” said Ran, “why I’m so touchy? Why I’m touchy, Mr. Sneeden—”

“Dr. Sneeden.”

“Dr. Sneeden, is because two dead bodies just turned up on our property, and I seem to be under interrogation, and I’m asking if you think I have anything to do with those bodies being here, and you aren’t saying no. I’m a sensitive guy, Dr. Sneeden, an artist, and I find that implication very hurtful, very wounding—see me tearing up? It also