FIVE
Sheriff Ezra Stone Holmes was home eating a tasteless meal he had cooked for himself. His wife, Hilda, had died six years before, and he was thinking how much he hated eating alone, a thought he now had every night without really thinking of Hilda at all. He was also thinking about his retirement, about taking a permanent fishing vacation. He certainly couldn’t survive too many more years of his own cooking, that was for sure, and a county sheriff couldn’t afford to plan extensive retirement vacations while he was eating expensive restaurant food.
He was having trouble getting the woman—what was her name? McBride, Mrs. Harvey McBride, Imogene—out of his mind. She had seemed more than a little desperate, and he figured that there was more to this than a simple missing child case. He had been a law officer for more than thirty years, and he could spot a case of a woman running away from her husband a mile off. He had looked over the Hudson carefully as she fished out a copy of the girl’s high school yearbook. Those suitcases had been packed for more than a vacation. He knew a foul ball when he saw one.
As he washed the dishes, he flipped on the radio and tried to relax, but his mind just wouldn’t let it go. After a bit he pulled on his boots and took a drive downtown, just to check and see if she was still there.
She was, perched on the park bench the same way she had been when he first noticed her that morning. He parked the car and walked over to her, feeling his arthritic knee complaining with every step.
“Not back yet?” he asked as he got closer. She looked weak and a little pale.
She turned her head slightly toward him. “Don’t tell me you’re concerned.”
“Look, Mrs. . . . uh . . . McBride,” he said as he took his pipe from his shirt pocket and began to work the partly burned tobacco down, “it’s my job to be concerned. I, uh, I had to come back over here tonight anyhow, so I thought I would ask you about your daughter. There’s no reason to get snooty with me.”
She looked him up and down. He was an old man, she realized, and she was reminded of her father suddenly, a man who had had the sense to hate Harvey McBride from the day he met him. The sheriff was being polite, he had been polite all the while she was ranting at him and old Pete. He had a point, too. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. But it’s so—so damned exasperating!” Suddenly, in spite of herself, the tears came, welling up inside her and making her choke and shake all over.
“Hey! Now!” he said, and he came and laid a horny, knobby hand on her shoulder, which was heaving with the convulsions of the sobbing. “I’ll do what I can, Mrs. McBride, but I got to have something more to go on.”
She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and began wiping her eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry, Sheriff. It’s just that I love my daughter so much, and I’m so worried about her. She’s a good girl, really she is. We’ve never had a cross word between us. I know this looks just awful. Like we had a fight or something. But it was nothing like that. She’s just gone, and I really do suspect, uh . . . I suspect mischief.”
Ezra sat down beside her on the bench. He didn’t think there was any foul play at all, but he sensed an opening in her, so he asked his next question gently. “You say you’re on a vacation trip to Oregon? That right?”
She nodded, wiping her eyes with the handkerchief. “To visit my sister, Mildred, in Portland.”
“And your husband, Mr. McBride, he knows about this trip? That right, too?”
“Of course, he does,” she said too quickly. She could see his face illuminated in the white streetlamp’s light and knew he sensed the lie. Suddenly she decided to be truthful with him. What the hell, she thought, I’m expecting him to be truthful with me. “Sheriff,” she began, “I’ve . . . I’ve left my husband. He’s an adulterer—worse, a drunk. He knows we were on our way to Oregon, but he has no idea of how we would go, what our route would be, so if you’re thinking he showed up to take her away from me—well, that’s just impossible!”
Ezra nodded and let go a silent sigh. So, he thought, there it was, out in the open. It’d been like pulling teeth. But he knew that he actually had less information than before.
“How could he possibly know that our car would break down here, in Agate, Texas?” she asked, looking with a searching stare into Ezra’s eyes.
“Agatite,” Ezra corrected, pulling on his pipe and realizing that it wasn’t lit.
“Agatite,” she repeated, choking back another bout of sobs. “No, I’m not sure she—Cora—even knew where we were. She slept all the way from Fort Worth.” The crying took over again.
“Listen,” Ezra said, rising, “I’m going to make some calls, neighboring sheriffs and the like, and I’ll be back in a little bit. Or do you want to come inside? It can still get chilly here at night.”
She shook her head. He leaned down and patted her shoulder, feeling strange and out of character in making the gesture. He caught the faint smell of body odor staining the spring air. Was it him? No. It was her. A thought came to him. “Say, you had anything to eat today?”
“Not since breakfast, early this morning,” she said, pulling the tears and sobs back inside her.
“Well, why not go down to the Agatite Hotel and check in. They got a nice little café there, too. It’s open till ten.”
“No!” She sat straight up, and he noticed the now familiar strangeness come into her eyes. He was startled. “I’ll stay right here until she shows up!”
“Okay,” he said softly, drawing back from her. He turned and started across the lawn to the steps of the courthouse.
“Sheriff?” she called to him after he took a few steps. “Have you any cigarettes?”
He held up his pipe. “No, I’m afraid not,” he replied. She was silent, and he went on inside.