THREE
At better than fifty-nine years of age, Sheriff Ezra Stone Holmes of Sandhill County was still very much a man to be reckoned with. He had a long-standing reputation for courage and strength, and he had been reelected sheriff every year for as long as most could remember. No one ever stood against him, and he was as widely known and respected as any small-town sheriff ever could hope to be.
As a younger man his reputation had grown steadily as he practically built a wall around the county and stopped the flow of bootleg liquor from Oklahoma. Like most small towns in the rural Southwest, Agatite sat in the middle of a vast emptiness, pockmarked by the odd agricultural center—a store, gas station, and maybe a barbershop—but Ezra had made them all his personal headquarters. He seemed to be everywhere during the dusty Depression summers, and even in the bone-cold winters his car was a familiar and comforting sight as he prowled the county’s back roads, keeping a lawman’s eye out for mischief or genuine crime. He was a serious man, soft-spoken and steady in his manner, but few men had ever found it worthwhile to rouse anger in him, and while almost no one in Agatite had ever heard him yell at anyone, those who had never forgot it sufficiently to want to hear it again.
Arthritis had settled into his knee some years before, and while the medication he took for it, along with the occasional hot-water bottle, kept the pain down to a bearable level, he had already recognized that retirement was soon coming. And he truly didn’t mind. But there was one more election coming up for him, and the absence of an heir apparent to his office and badge, someone he felt was worthy of the trust and respect he had earned for the sheriff’s office, caused him to stand again for the spring primary—a formality, really—and to postpone retirement for another term.
He discovered that his abilities and energies were only somewhat limited by his advancing age and aching knee, but he still cut a good figure of a lawman in his butternut khakis, brightly shined black boots, and felt Stetson, all complimented by the heavy .44 Colt that comfortably graced his hip almost all the time. He was a familiar and reassuring sight to the citizens of Agatite.
He was sitting at his desk under a cloud of pipe tobacco smoke when Imogene knocked firmly on the open door jamb and interrupted his report on an assault that had taken place in the colored section of town the day before. It had been a minor skirmish, a gambling debt quarrel, from what he could learn, and the victim was only slightly less injured than the accused after the victim’s wife got into the act with a pair of knitting needles and, of all things, an old croquet mallet. Ezra had almost chuckled at the look of terror and relief in the suspect’s eyes when he spied the sheriff approaching. The small black woman had already taken a couple of chunks out of his arm with the needles, and if Ezra had not shown up when he did, she would have for sure pulped his skull with the wooden mallet.
He glanced up and assessed the well-dressed woman standing in his doorway. “Can I help you?” The question came from Dooley, Ezra’s part-time deputy and most-time go-fer who was in his semi-permanent home, the office’s holding cell, washing out the coffeepot in the cell’s sink.
“I’m looking for Sheriff . . . uh, Sheriff . . .” She put her hand to her forehead and trailed off. She looked to be in great pain, and Ezra was about to rise when she recovered herself and stared at him with the most piercing gray eyes he could ever remember seeing. “I’m looking for the sheriff,” she said.
“I’m Sheriff Holmes,” Ezra said, standing and gesturing toward a creaky chair adjacent to the desk. “Sit down. Can I help you?”
She blurted out her story, and Ezra refired his pipe as he listened. He had been aware of her all day. Little happens in this town I don’t know about, he contentedly thought. He didn’t know about Cora or Pete, and he raised his eyebrows in wonder as she described the odd details of Cora’s disappearance, noting with a bit of shock that the woman was barely restraining herself from accusing old Pete of kidnapping, or worse. As she spoke, he noticed that her voice gained control. Most women would be losing their composure, he thought, but not this one. She was cool, careful, and gave off no visible signs of the frustration and near hysteria he sensed were boiling just beneath her calm surface. He watched her hands. They lay neatly folded around her purse. There was no clenching of fists, no digging of nails into the purse’s leather. She was totally in control.
As she finished, Ezra’s pipe went out and he reached for a knife to clean out the bowl. “Well”—he tried to sound serious but really unconcerned—“I expect she’ll turn up directly. Kids do this sort—”
“Damn it, Sheriff!” she burst out, and Ezra immediately caught sight of her hands going into a white-knuckled clench of the purse, and the panic he had sensed burst forth with a volume he had not anticipated. “I don’t need any more lectures on how kids behave. I’ve gotten it from everyone I’ve talked to all day long, and I didn’t come in here to hear it again!” Her gray eyes flashed, and Ezra saw the glimmer of something he truly didn’t like behind them. He couldn’t put a name to it, but it made things in the back of his mind stir, and he felt suddenly uncomfortable.
“I don’t mean to sound like I don’t care,” he said, “but really, ma’am, this isn’t hardly a—”
“I want you to go over to that drugstore and find my daughter!” she ordered, standing up suddenly and pointing a finger right at the sheriff’s badge on his shirt. The hysteria and loss of control were gone, he noticed, but in their place was something terrible and strident, something awesome.
“I ain’t likely to do anything unless you calm down.” Ezra felt a mixture of resentment and fear growing inside him. He didn’t like people to talk to him that way, and he didn’t intend to put up with it. “Suppose you sit down and tell me what happened again.”
“I’ve already told you—” she said, then she paused, caught her breath, and looked deeply into his eyes. “Would you please go over there and find out where my daughter is?”
“You’ve already told me she isn’t there.” Ezra calmly refilled his pipe from a canister of tobacco he kept on his desk.
“Well . . .” She finally sat down and regained the cool composure and control over her voice and manner she had brought into the office with her. “She was there. And that . . . that Pete there, he knows about it. He knows about her! He was the only one in the store when she went inside!”
“Start from the beginning,” Ezra said as he applied a match to his pipe and blew out billows of smoke over the bowl. “I want to hear it one more time.”
She went through the story again, this time adding small details and minor recollections that added nothing of substance. What became disturbing to Ezra was the utter simplicity of it all. He had dealt with runaway kids before, many times, but the fundamental conviction this woman had that something odd had happened to her daughter in the drugstore overrode any hysterical conclusions or wild imaginings runaways’ parents usually came up with. Something in Ezra told him that there was considerably more going on here than he, or possibly than she, knew. But he had no idea what it might be.
Agatite was what is often called a quiet town. It was a small, out-of-the-way place where crime was not much of a problem. Ezra knew that the image of a crime-free Norman Rockwell picture of pastoral America was not exactly the truth, however. He made an average of four arrests a week, and while most of them were for minor infractions of the law, he was enough of a realist to know that people, even “good” people, often broke the law, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not, and unless the small crimes were controlled, the bigger ones usually followed. There was the odd burglary, confidence game, or marital quarrel that escalated into assault. Livestock thefts weren’t uncommon, and vandalism often cropped up, especially toward the end of school or around Halloween. Every now and then there would even be a murder or a rape, but the former were usually passionate affairs, more accidents than actual homicides, and the latter were hushed up pretty much unless they were brutal and violent enough to make the local news. For the most part his job during the past ten years or so had centered on traffic problems, many of which came as the result of the new highway bypass, car wrecks and the like, and on keeping bootleggers from bringing beer and whiskey into the dry county and peddling it to kids who were too timid to go over to Oklahoma on their own. In fact, there had been quite a bit of teenage drinking and other nonsense of late, and his mind groped for a connection.
“You say you’re from Atlanta?” he asked as she concluded the second account of Cora’s disappearance.
“That’s right,” she shot back, and he sensed the panic rising again, along with that indefinable something that made him so wary and uncomfortable. “And my husband, Mr. Harvey McBride, is a very influential man there. And all across the South.”
Resentment flooded Ezra’s mind. He didn’t like people with money much in the first place, and he especially didn’t like people who tried to use it to throw their weight around. He fought down the bitterness the remark brought up in him, and asked, “And you know no one in town here?”
“No one at all,” she answered quickly, “except people I’ve met today. Luke Short, for example.”
Ezra tamped down the burned tobacco. “Is there anything else, anything at all, you think you ought to tell me?”
She pulled herself up even more erect in the creaky old chair. She took a breath and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Only that I truly think your duty calls you to go over there and talk to that druggist, uh . . . Pete.”
Ezra fished out a pocket watch. “Well, ol’ Pete’s about to close in fifteen minutes. I don’t guess it’d hurt to go over and have a chat with him.” She looked relieved, and he could see a mocking satisfaction in her eyes. “But I don’t mind telling you I’ve known Pete most all my life, and if he’s mixed up in anything crooked, I’d be more than a little surprised.”
“Stranger things have happened,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded, and he mentally acknowledged that she was right. But not this time, he silently added. “Dooley,” he said without taking his eyes off her gray stare, “watch the phone and the radio. I’ll be across the street.” He continued to sit, not moving but simply studying the woman across his desk.
“Well?” she asked at last. “Are we going or not?”
“I think you ought to wait here.”
“I will not!” she announced, rising and clutching her purse to her stomach. “Cora’s my daughter, and if something’s happened to her, I want to know about it!”
Ezra sighed and jammed the pipe between his teeth. “All right,” he said as he rose and moved around his desk. “Let’s go.”