Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (23 page)

“He still has my daughter.” The sheriff managed to make his voice sound almost normal. “I think you know where he’ll go next.”

“Yes,” she said, “but you and your people don’t make a very efficient posse. I told you about this place.”

“I’m a little short-handed right now and, when he’s got my Heather slung over his back, I can’t shoot on sight. You didn’t tell me he was a skilled climber. That might have made a difference. You haven’t told me some other things. They might make a difference too.”

She shifted a little and he thought she was maybe going to get physical again. The moment passed and the conversation went on.

“What things?”

“Who you really are. Why your brothers and father are dead—mutilated—and why you don’t seem to care. And how you knew it and why you’re out here looking for your former husband. Did you kill them? Is he next?”

She backed off a couple of paces and seemed to relax her stance a little. “Brothers? Did he get Tommy too?”

“He?”

“My loving former husband. He blames them, but he turned out to be just as sick as they are. Or were, I suppose.”

“Why would he kill them? What would he blame them for? What do you mean sick?”

“It’s all too complicated, Sheriff. I don’t have time to explain. I thought you wanted your daughter. I thought her whereabouts would be the most important question on your mind.”

“Then you do know where she is?”

“Yes,” she said, looking back over her shoulder toward the approaching storm. “Yes, I know. You see, Sheriff, I used to have to run and hide often. Ben knows that. Back when I thought we were allies, I told him about all my special places. This was one. That silo on our farm was another, but it’s too far if he’s on foot now. There was one more. That’s where he’ll be, right over there. You see, Sheriff, I’ve always been fond of high places.”

That’s when Englishman understood. It wasn’t the storm she was looking at. It was the grain elevator at the end of the street, towering like a reef on which the advancing wave of clouds must break before striking Buffalo Springs. His daughter was somewhere in that great white row of columns. He turned back to ask for clarification only to discover he’d been careless yet again. This was getting old.

Her kick must have knocked him out for a moment. He was lying on the roof and she was standing over him, pointing his .38 police special at him in a way that indicated she knew how to use it. “I see some handcuffs on your belt, Sheriff. I’d be obliged if you’d fasten one around a wrist and the other around your ankle. Then I’ll relieve you of your key and your radio and maybe go rescue your daughter for you.”

***

“I remember you, Dr. Jones,” Mary Ellen Chandler said. “We met when you came to check on Annie at her home near the end of her illness. She thought highly of you, appreciated your honesty and your compassion. Not like Elmer who probably still blames you for not just waving your magic stethoscope and fixing everything so that he could get back to life as he expected it.”

Doc had a faint recollection of sisters, pale, worried little women, hanging in the background. They had been too timid to ask him anything directly and Old Man Simms had been in a hurry to get him away from his patient, as if Doc somehow brought the disease instead of the treatment. He couldn’t come up with a face.

“Yes,” Doc said. “I believe I recall you as well, Ms. Chandler. I’m glad you remember me and that your sister, Mrs. Simms, thought well of me. She was a strong woman and she had great dignity.”

“No, Doctor,” Mary Ellen interrupted. “She was neither strong nor dignified, except on those brief occasions when the presence of outsiders made her put on that front. She was just another terrified victim.”

“Ah, yes.” Doc didn’t want to get into a discussion about the nature of death and dying. He’d just hoped to smooth the way for the very personal and intrusive questions he needed to ask. “Listen, Ms. Chandler, I’m calling from Buffalo Springs. There’ve been some extremely serious developments here today. There’s an ongoing situation that could prove life threatening. I’m afraid it would be inappropriate for me to disclose what those things are, but it’s imperative that we have some information about your sister’s family, the history behind some particularly unpleasant events.”

“Oh dear,” Mary Ellen said. “There’ve been so very many. I suppose it must be the Todd business though. The rest was so very long ago. I’m not sure whether I know enough to help you, Doctor, but ask away.”

“Why yes, precisely. The Todd incident is what I need to inquire about. What can you tell me?”

“Oh my. That was all so sad and tragic. I suppose it was probably Annie’s fault as much as any, because she never could accept what had happened to her and so she wasn’t prepared to believe that it happened to poor Sarah either.”

“Uh,” Doc muttered. He wasn’t quite sure how to break in and ask her to cut to the chase. Perhaps direct questions, but he knew so little he was afraid he might miss something important.

“I’m terribly sorry, Doctor. I suppose I’m rambling and whatever situation you have there requires that you get the information as quickly as possible. Since you can’t tell me what’s happened, I can’t be sure what’s relevant and what isn’t, but I’ll try to make this as simple as I can.”

“Thank you,” Doc said.

“I’m sorry, what was that? You sound so terribly distant, like you’re talking down some immense pipe.”

“I have you on a speaker phone, Ms. Chandler. There’s a representative of the Sheriff’s Office with me taking notes.” Technically, Judy English had not a thing to do with the Sheriff’s Office other than sharing in the parenthood of a girl who might be in terrible danger just now. That excused the exaggeration, as far as Doc was concerned. It also allowed him to keep Judy busy enough not to go running off to join the search and get in the way or endanger herself or distract the sheriff at a crucial moment. “I was just thanking you. Simple and straight forward would be great.”

“Yes, then I should get on with it, shouldn’t I.”

This time Doc didn’t risk an interruption.

“Our father molested us, Dr. Jones, all three of us. Annie Beth was the youngest and so by the time she came along my sister Linda Lois and I were able to protect her from the worst of it. And then Linda got pregnant and Mother and a few others came to realize what had been going on. After that, it stopped. Our father died three months later, while Annie was still quite young. As an adult, Annie denied it. She accused Linda and me—Linda is the oldest—of exaggerating it all, of making things up. If Linda had an illegitimate baby, she was sure it had to be someone else’s. Annie blamed herself for what she could remember, and she blamed us for reminding her of it. It got so bad that the only way we could maintain a relationship was by avoiding the topic.

“Then the situation with Sarah began. Elmer always refused to see anything he didn’t want to. Just like with Annie’s cancer, he treated it as if it didn’t exist and then expected that it wouldn’t. That’s how he was with Sarah. His sons could do no wrong, so long as he believed that. Therefore, his boys couldn’t be sexually molesting their little sister. It was overstated, typical children’s high jinks, nothing more than normal curiosity.

“Well, that may be how it started out, just normal curiosity, but there was a cruel streak in the eldest boy, Tommy, and the younger one, Peter, was such a self-centered little brat, and warped in his own way. If only Annie had handled it from the beginning, it might have been nipped in the bud, but she was in denial about her own history. She thought if these things were happening to Sarah, the girl was the one who was at fault. For boys, such things were natural, beyond their ability to control. It was up to girls to stop them. I don’t know how she thought little Sarah, who was five years younger than the oldest and four years younger than the second, was supposed to take control of the situation, or even understand it since Annie refused to explain the facts of life to her.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Jones. It probably seems that I’m giving you too much detail again, but there’s simply no way to understand what happened without some background.

“The Todds came to live on the farm about the time it all started. Elmer had quite a spread, but he didn’t take much pleasure in sitting behind the wheel of a tractor or a combine. That’s why he decided to put somebody in the tenant house on the property just across the road from the home place. That way, part of his hired hand’s pay could be his rent. The Todds were a young couple with a small child of their own. Mr. Todd came from a farming family, but he was a younger son and there wasn’t enough land to go around and I think maybe he’d experienced some prejudice, too. His wife, she was Hispanic you see.”.

She paused and sighed. Doc wondered if she was about to decide it was all too painful to talk about to a near stranger, but she’d just been composing her thoughts.

“Poor Sarah! I don’t know what really happened, of course, but she must have approached Mr. Todd, made some sort of sexual advances to him. By then, she didn’t know how else to react to a man. Her father was different, of course, but unapproachable. So far as she understood, she could have a male’s protection and favor only by winning it with her body. This would have been when she had just turned eleven. She was becoming an adolescent. That’s when it all happened, when things came undone.

“I can only guess how Mr. Todd reacted. She was a pretty little thing and I suppose some men would have taken advantage of the situation. In fact, I have reason to believe some already had. Mr. Todd, though, was made of stronger stuff.

“I think, after being properly shocked, Mr. Todd went to Annie. I don’t know what Sarah told him, she’d become quite an inventive story teller by then. I think he may have suspected her father, Elmer, and that’s why he went to talk to Annie instead. Annie, of course, denied everything. It was Sarah’s fault, and Mr. Todd shouldn’t trouble himself, Annie would see to it that the child was punished and didn’t accost him again. Well, Sarah had apparently exposed herself to Mr. Todd and there were marks and bruises and the last thing he had wanted was to cause the girl further trouble.

“What he did next should have been the right thing, but you know what Buffalo Springs is like, what a closed-in, sanctimonious, self-righteous place it can be, and it was worse then. Mr. Todd told the girl’s doctor. This was before you came to Buffalo Springs. The town was bigger then, more successful, but declining. There were a number of doctors there. The others might have been all right, but this one wasn’t. He was a society type. It was more important to him that he continue to be included in Elmer’s and Annie’s social circle than that an abused child be rescued. That meant none of the Simmses could be at fault, but he’d seen the bruises and abrasions himself. That made the molestation real, too real for Annie to deny away anymore. It also made Mr. Todd, as the accuser, the logical person to blame.

“The situation became quite messy then. Such things were never discussed in polite society. Sarah’s reputation and future would be destroyed if there was even a whisper of what had happened to her in the community, though, of course, because of her behavior, there had been whispers for years. Mr. Todd was offered substantial compensation to take his family and leave, and threatened with being charged with statutory rape if he didn’t. It was terribly unfair and, by all accounts, Mr. Todd was adamant in his refusal and angrier still because he’d just discovered that Sarah’s brothers had begun molesting his own son, who was only just six or seven at the time. His boy had a prized stuffed toy that he carried everywhere, much like some sort of security blanket, and then one day he didn’t carry it with him anymore and Mr. Todd discovered it hidden away, all encrusted with bodily fluids and what not. I gather the boys found it amusing to make the Todd child do all sorts of disgusting things with that toy.

“There was apparently a scene between Elmer and Mr. Todd in which Elmer was backed by his attorney and the doctor, and Mr. Todd was backed not at all. Young Todd stormed out, promising to fight them and saying that the children, Sarah and his boy, would testify and put things right, show where the blame truly lay. He must have gone looking for them then.

“Sarah had a number of secret places where she went to hide from her brothers, and from a world that made demands of her she couldn’t understand. She only had one friend then, or perhaps ally. He was Todd’s son, and as victims of the same abuse and abusers, they’d fallen into each other’s company despite their age difference. They were in one of Sarah’s secret hiding places that afternoon, atop the ensilage in the silo at the back of Elmer’s barn.

“Doctor, I don’t know what happened up there. Sarah has told all sorts of contradictory stories over the years, but judging by the way it affected her, I think she may have, in some way, caused his fall. He was a grown man, and a strong one, though, and she was just a slip of a girl. I’m confident she didn’t somehow purposefully murder him.

“In any case, he fell and died. His son’s sad, abused, Mickey Mouse doll was clutched in his hands. Afterwards, Sarah went into a state of perpetual hysterics and Todd’s son became nearly catatonic. The powers that be decided to rule that it was suicide. Sarah was institutionalized, and when it became clear the community knew she’d been sexually abused, it was convenient to assign the cause of the suicide to Todd’s fear of what would become of him when his molestation of the child was made known and charges were brought against him.