Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) (25 page)

“What are you doing here, Ruth Ann?” Jasper said.

She was still looking at Charlie as though she were measuring her up before a fistfight.

“Came to pay my respects to you and my daughter,” she said.

Charlie had stopped in the middle of the kitchen. She met her mother’s gaze and held it steadily. There was no sense of familiarity, no instinctive twinge of recognition or maternal longing. It had been so long since Charlie had heard her mother’s voice. And now that she was hearing it, it was the voice of a stranger.

“Consider ‘em paid,” Jasper said.
 

“You grew up fine.” Ruth Ann’s eyes hadn’t left Charlie’s. “Pretty and fine.”

“You just get on outta here,” Jasper said. “Who do you think you are to come waltzing in here like you own the place? Go on back to West Virginia, back to your people.”

“Why did you abandon me?”
 

The question Charlie had asked in her mind a million times, a question to which she desperately needed an answer, had come out spontaneously, almost involuntarily. It was as though someone else’s voice had come out of her body, as though she’d exited herself and was hovering near the ceiling, watching the scene unfold beneath her.
 

Ruth Ann took a long drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly.
 

“I couldn’t take care of you,” she said. “Couldn’t take care of myself at the time, let alone a child. Your daddy was in jail, the government took everything we had. I started drinking a lot, taking pills. I wasn’t in my right mind.”

Charlie took a couple of steps toward the table, pulled out a chair, sat down.

“But all these years, not a word. Why?”

“I was ashamed. I’m still ashamed.”

“You ought to be.” Jasper’s voice was sharp with anger. “Run off and leave a little girl, your own flesh and blood, without so much as a fare thee well. Leave Momma and Daddy to raise her, both of them already sick about what happened to Luke. You can say what you want about liquor or pills or whatever, but the plain truth is that you just didn’t want to face up to it. You ain’t nothing but a coward, plain and simple. Ain’t no other word for it.”

Ruth Ann dropped her cigarette into a Styrofoam cup that was sitting in front of her and stood up.

“I guess you’ve been waiting a long time to say that to me,” she said.
 

She picked up the cup and started around the table. She paused and put her hand on Charlie’s shoulder.
 

“I’m sorry about your daddy, and I’m sorry for what I did to you. I live in Mount Hope, West Virginia, just north of the prison where they were keeping Luke. You’d be welcome there any time.”

Charlie sat motionless. She listened to Ruth Ann’s heels clicking on the back porch, listened to her car start up, listened to the gravel crackling as she drove away.
 

“Goodbye,” she whispered.

Chapter 46

IT
was two-thirty in the morning, and Johnny and Carlo were on the move again.

“Can you believe this place?” Carlo was in the passenger seat, as usual, as they rode through the darkness. “Freakin’ mountains and trees and cows and corn, that’s all there is. The food sucks. Could you believe that spaghetti we ate last night? The sauce was ketchup with a little hamburger, the pasta was so overcooked it was like glue. And these people, man. Not an Italian in sight. I ain’t seen a Jew or a black dude in a week, not that I miss them, but this is weird. No Catholic churches. Everybody’s named Smith or Jones.”

“Yeah, it’s white bread,” Johnny said. “Cracker white bread. The way they talk makes me want to puke. I never heard anybody make a two-syllable word out of yes. Yay-yus. And beer? Bee-yer. I swear to God I’d either die of boredom or shoot myself if I had to live here.”

“That club was the worst I’ve ever been to,” Carlo said. They’d driven to Johnson City on their way back from killing Luke Story. It’s a college town, home to East Tennessee State University, and they thought they’d find some action, but it was summer and most of the students had gone home. “Did you see the way they looked at us? Like we were aliens or something, from outer space.”

“I know. I wonder if they have tanning beds here. Everybody’s so
pale.
They look like ghosts.”

Johnny turned left onto Buck Mountain Road. The windows were down to let the smell of gasoline escape; the breeze flowed across his face and arms. The night was warm. Only a couple of miles to go.
 

“Ready?” Johnny asked. “We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

Carlo held up a lighter. “Am I breathing?”

“Wake up, girl! Something bad’s going on!”

Charlie came out of sleep to hear the roar of an engine passing by her bedroom window. She sprang out of bed and ran to the window, but all she could see was dust and taillights. She heard the tires screeching as they pulled out onto Buck Mountain Road and disappeared into the soupy blackness of the night.
 

“Come on!” Jasper was shouting. “We got fire!”

Charlie cleared the back door to see fingers of orange flame crawling up the walls of both the barn and Jasper’s shop. She sprinted toward the barn in her nightgown and bare feet. Gray smoke billowed toward the sky, the acrid smell of gasoline and burning wood attacked her. Light from the flames was flickering off the canopy behind the barn. She heard shrieking.

“Sadie! Oh my God, Sadie!”

Biscuit was running back and forth between the barn and the shop, barking ferociously. Jasper was about thirty feet ahead of Charlie. He’d hesitated at the barn door, but now he disappeared. Charlie barreled headlong through the door after him. The heat inside the barn was what Charlie imagined hell might feel like; the roar of the fire consuming oxygen and fuel sounded like a freight train.
 

Jasper was opening the door to Sadie’s stall, surrounded by flames. He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. Charlie veered into the tack room, grabbed a blanket, a halter and a lead line, and sprinted to Sadie’s stall. The door was now open and Jasper was pushing her, but the terrified animal wouldn’t move.
 

“Take this!” Charlie yelled as she slipped the halter over Sadie’s ears. She held out the blanket. “Cover her eyes!”

Jasper began covering the horse’s eyes with the blanket while Charlie snapped the lead line onto the halter. Her skin was hot and painful. She felt as though she was being baked alive. A cross beam fell from the hayloft and showered them in sparks.

 
“Gotta go!” Jasper shouted. “Gotta go gotta go gotta go!”

 
Charlie pulled on the lead line and the horse responded. They hurried through the stall door and across the seemingly endless barn floor. The air outside the barn was gloriously cool. Charlie led Sadie toward the house and tied the lead line to a tree branch near the back porch. She turned back toward the barn and the shop, both raging infernos now. Jasper was standing twenty feet away with his back to her, his hands on his hips. Charlie walked up and stood next to him, and together, they watched two symbols of their heritage go up in flames. There was nothing either of them could do. The area was serviced by a volunteer fire department that was slow to react, and even if they’d called the minute they spotted the fire, it wouldn’t have done any good. The old wood planks used to construct the buildings, the dry straw and hay, the chemicals in Jasper’s shop, were all accelerants. The buildings were doomed the moment the fire started.

Charlie put a hand on Jasper’s shoulder.
 

“Don’t worry, uncle. We’ll rebuild them.”

She looked at her uncle’s face, glowing in the light from the flames. His eyes were wet and angry. He dropped to his knees, spread his arms, and let out a feral wail that echoed off the nearby slopes.

“They’re gone!” Jasper cried. “Momma and Daddy and Rachel! They’re gone! Somebody’s gonna pay for this!”

Part III

Chapter 47

MORNING
finally arrived, the volunteer firemen had finished drinking their coffee and left. Charlie had called them to make sure the fire didn’t spread to the house and to document the scene for the insurance claim she planned to file. She wasn’t at all optimistic about the reaction she would receive from the insurance company. She would tell them it was arson and they would immediately suspect her of setting the fire. They might pay the claim, they might not.
 

The barn and the shop were nothing but black, smoldering piles of ash. A couple of support poles stuck up out of the remains of the barn like burned bones. An arson investigator from the sheriff’s department had showed up a little after seven. His name was Timmons, a short, thin, middle-aged rooster of a man who walked around the ruins at least a dozen times and kept running his hand across his shiny, hairless scalp. He seemed to be itching to dive into the ashes, but they were still too hot.
 

“So ye say ye saw ‘em?” Timmons asked Charlie. They were standing about halfway between the house and the barn. Jasper and Biscuit were standing a few feet away.
 

“I saw their tail lights,” Charlie said.
 

“So ye didn’t see ‘em.”

“No, I guess not.”

“But ye saw their lights?”

“Yes.”

“So ye did see ‘em, I reckon. Ye just can’t
identify
‘em.”

“Maybe you could get casts of their tire tracks,” Charlie said.
 

“I do fires. Don’t do tires. Hee-hee, that rhymes, don’t it? Maybe I’ll put it in a song. Timmons does fires but he don’t do tires, doo-dah, doo-dah, Timmons does fires but he don’t do tires, oh, doo-dah-day.”
 

“Is there someone else who might be able to come and get casts?”

“I’ll ask around when I get back,” Timmons said. “Barn fire’s all it is, though. Nobody hurt, livestock made it out. I don’t reckon they’ll be rollin’ out the big guns for this one.”

“That’s comforting.”

“So why you reckon they’d drive up like that?” Timmons asked.

“Probably because of the dog.”

“So it was somebody that knows ye?”

“I don’t know who it was.”

“Well, it was somebody that knows ye well enough to know ye got a big ol’ dog. Rolled in here near three in the mornin’, threw a couple of bottles full of gasoline at each building, then tore on outta here. The smell and the shards of glass near the edge of the ashes gimme a pretty good clue. One of the boys at the department said he thinks it was probably that Clyde Dalton feller that’s been stalking you.”

“I don’t think it was him.”

“That so? Why not?”

“I just don’t think it was him.”

“Who else, then? Who else you made mad lately?”

“I don’t know. I’m a lawyer. People get mad sometimes.”

“I know a bunch of lawyers. Not a one of them has had their barn burned. Tell you what, I’ll come back later and see if the ashes has cooled off enough for me to do a little sifting. Don’t think it’ll do much good, but maybe I’ll get lucky and find something I can use.”

“You ain’t sifting nothing,” Jasper said. He walked over and towered over Timmons, who looked at him curiously.

“What do ye mean? I can’t find no clues if I don’t sift.”

“You already said it was gasoline. I could’ve told you that as soon as you got here and saved myself having to listen to your foolishness.”

“But this is a crime scene. I got things I need to do.”

“This is private property and I’m telling you there ain’t going to be no sifting.”

“Insurance company’s gonna send an investigator if you file a claim.”
 

“And I’ll tell him the same as I’m telling you. This is my land, those are my ashes, and you or nobody else is going to touch them.”

“Well if you just don’t beat all.”

“I didn’t call you to come out here. One of them firemen must have done it. I don’t want no investigation and I don’t care about no insurance.”

Timmons seemed to shrink into himself like a turtle.
 

“I reckon I’m done then,” he said.

“I reckon so.”

“Joe Dillard is coming up,” Charlie said to Jasper as they watched Timmons drive away. “I called him because I feel like I need some advice. I’d like you to be there when I talk to him, but I hope you’ll be a little more hospitable than you were to that investigator.”

Joe arrived thirty minutes later. After she showed him the damage, Charlie served him coffee at the kitchen table. Jasper joined them. He’d barely said a word since the fire. Charlie could see that he was deeply wounded by the loss of his shop, and, she imagined, by the loss of his “special” mannequins. He was angry, too. She could see it in the set of his jaw, the curve in his brow, the harshness in his eyes.
 

“You know the old saying, ‘Bad things happen to good people?’” Joe said as he lifted his cup to his lips. “You’re a prime example.”

“It’s gotten out of hand,” Charlie said. “You were right about the gold. It’s been nothing but a curse. As soon as I found it, bad things started happening. First Clyde Dalton came along and then Jack got shot. Now my father had been murdered and someone has burned our barn and tried to kill my horse. Zane Barnes wanted it so badly, and look what’s happened to him.”

“With him being gone, the land is yours now,” Joe said. “So is the gold. But it looks like someone else wants it. Maybe Barnes hired somebody and they turned on him.”

“What am I going to do?” Charlie said. “I wish I could find whoever it is that wants it so badly. I’d give it to him or them or whoever it is. I swear I would.”

“Maybe Clyde Dalton burned the barn,” Joe said. “I don’t know how he would be connected to Zane Barnes or why he would have killed him, but I guess stranger things have happened.”

“It wasn’t Dalton.” Jasper spoke for the first time. “Dalton’s gone.”

Joe set the cup down and turned to Jasper.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s gone. He ain’t gonna be coming around again.”