Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (29 page)

Just as Mad Dog was sure they wouldn’t find the bodies, the sheriff was sure they’d never know which of them had been the killer, or if they’d conspired in the deeds or just accidently meshed in some improbable fashion. Just now, he was too tired to care. His daughter was curled up on the seat next to him, snuggled into his chest under the protective crook of his arm in a way that wasn’t likely to happen between them very often anymore. That, along with the presence of his rambling, but beloved, elder brother, was enough to make him feel like the winner, no matter how little he might have had to do with resolving the day’s events.

Frenchy brought them around the corner by Bertha’s in a controlled skid and targeted an empty slot directly before the front steps to the courthouse. They had hardly come to a stop before Doc was in the car with a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff and Judy was hauling Heather out of his arms. Mrs. Kraus greeted him with the kind of fond hug he wouldn’t have believed was in her. She offered him a cigarette and a light and he accepted before it occurred to him that he’d quit smoking more than twenty years ago.

“Jesus, Sheriff,” she was saying. “Are you all right? You look like you been rode hard and put away wet. There’s blood and scrapes all over you. Should I get Doc to come take a take a look at you when he’s done with Mad Dog?”

“Nah, I’m all right,” he lied, the tough guy in the John Wayne role, reassuring folks that his wounds weren’t mortal. This was how Kansas sheriffs were supposed to act wasn’t it? Sort of a “shucks, t’wern’t nothin, ma’am,” school of pain management. The place where the horn had grazed his back hurt like sin, almost as bad as his legs. Heather had checked it, though, and the wound wasn’t deep.

There he’d been, looking for cows to start blowing across the loading floor atop the elevator and he’d almost gotten his wish. It wasn’t a cow that crashed through the window behind him though, it was a buffalo with an arrow through it that had been part of a sign directing traffic on the highway to stop for a Buffalo Burger. It was peculiar, too, how it had come to rest with that arrow pointing straight down into the grain bin in which his brother was hanging. The sheriff had been out of it for a minute, in no shape to determine just where Mad Dog might have gone if that stupid sign hadn’t been sitting there, demanding that he examine it and then look where it was pointing. Maybe, he thought for just a second, there was something to this metaphysical stuff after all.

“The twister took ‘em? Lord!” Mrs. Kraus said. “Ain’t that something. Them storms do the craziest things. You know, after the tornado hopped the elevator it come right across town, headed straight for the courthouse. Wynn called me from a pay phone downtown when he heard Frenchy’s siren. Told me he saw the funnel and was sure it was going to take the courthouse right out.”

Wynn, the sheriff had forgotten all about him. “Where is Wynn?” he asked. “Is he OK?”

“Oh yeah. He’s fine. He’s walking in. Wanted to know if I thought it would be all right if he drove your truck over and I told him to leave it set right were it was. Wrecking one car a day is enough. Besides, the exercise’ll do him good.

“Anyway, we were all in your office, waiting by the phone and the radio and hoping to hear some good news out of one of them any minute and, instead, we all of a sudden heard it coming. Sounded like God had brought a big Hoover to suck up the sinners. We never had time to even think about heading for the basement before it came and went. I ran outside to see if there was any damage, and, you know, it was the damnedest thing….”

She paused, waiting for the sheriff to ask just what that damnedest thing could be. It took him a moment to recognize his cue. He’d encountered enough damnedest things that day for a lifetime.

“What was it, Mrs. Kraus?” he finally managed.

“The rose garden. That damn, forever expanding rose garden. It’s gone. Every single plant, roots and all, best I could see, and not a tad of damage to Mr. York’s house or the back of the courthouse either. It just set down right on those roses and it huffed and it puffed and it blowed ‘em all away. And those metal posts he filled with concrete and set back there, it took them too. And the pile of metal poles he was fixing to set, along with his bag of concrete and his pile of sand and even his damned wheel barrow and tools. He came wandering around his house about a minute after I got out there. Stood, shaking his head and saying ‘Enough’s enough. I give up. No more roses.’ I tell you Sheriff, it makes you think maybe the Lord’s on our side.”

The sheriff let her euphoria wash over him and pick him up and carry him along for a minute, until he saw Doc’s posterior come backing out of Frenchy’s car.

“How is he, Doc?”

“Frenchy and I are going to take him over to the office and I’m going to give him a few stitches and some fancier bandages and drip a pint of plasma into him. He’s telling me he wants to take you over to Bertha’s for a steak and fries and a long tall cold one. After I’m done, I think that’d be about the best thing in the world for him, but maybe you should go find him some regular clothes to get into first. Then somebody better call Bertha and let her know this is a prescription visit and that Frenchy and I’ll be coming along too, and maybe some of these other folks from the courthouse as well. You know Bertha. She’ll open up anytime if there’s enough business.

“We’ll be about an hour and a half,” Doc said. “That’ll give you time to handle what you’ve got to.” He nodded toward the front steps of the courthouse where another Heather stood beside the professor from Fort Hays and looked frightened.

The sheriff had managed to avoid thinking about her. His happy ending was someone else’s tragedy. He turned and started walking toward her. Like his daughter, she was almost as tall as her mother, filling out too, beginning to look almost like a woman. Except in her eyes. The eyes that watched him approach belonged to a scared little girl.

***

“Just a second,” Judy was keyed up and breathless when she caught the sheriff as he walked toward the courthouse steps. “We’ve got to talk.”

Her intensity frightened him. “No,” she said reading the incipient panic in his eyes. “Everybody’s still OK. There’s just something we need to discuss before you start making arrangements for Heather Lane.”

He was exhausted and the thought of taking on that chore was more than he wanted to bear. Anything that put it off was welcome. He let her guide him toward the seldom used concrete bench at the southeast corner of the building, out of everyone’s hearing.

“Oh Englishman, have you thought about what’s to become of her?”

Former spouses aren’t noted for recognizing each other’s best qualities. The sheriff knew Judy could be a remarkably empathetic woman, once you got past her me-and-mine-first approach to human relations, but this surprised him. He hadn’t expected her to be able to give more than a passing thought to anyone other than their daughter for days.

“Well, I’ll contact her family. From what Doc said, they’re elderly aunts, not healthy. I don’t know whether they’ll be up to taking on a teen. If not, since there are no other immediate relatives, she’ll be turned over to the state.”

“And end up in some foster home,” Judy made it sound the sort of cruel fate that Oliver Twist faced in a nineteenth century orphan asylum. “We can’t let that happen to her, Englishman. She should stay with us. I was thinking, maybe we could adopt her.”

“What?” The world tilted with the absurdity of her suggestion and the sheriff mentally stumbled and fought for his balance before answering with all the compassion that had become typical of their discussions. “Are you nuts. The state’s not going to let a divorced couple keep her just because she happens to share the same name, age, and looks as our daughter.”

“We could get married again,” Judy said, and this time he actually had to reach out and grab the back of the bench to keep from pitching over in astonishment. “And there’s another reason we should keep her. You know I’ve been doing genealogical research?”

The sheriff was having trouble following the conversation. Still, this seemed safer to respond to than her previous statement.

“Ah, sure. You told me Mad Dog and I are probably only one sixteenth Cheyenne, instead of the quarter Mom always thought.”

Judy seemed almost apologetic about that. “I thought, if it was true and I could prove it, our daughter might be eligible for some college scholarships, or that it might make it easier for her to get into a good university. But it didn’t work. That’s the way it is with genealogy. You don’t always find what you expect, though what you do find is usually interesting.”.

The wind whipped her auburn hair and blended the scent of wet earth with Judy’s perfume. The Kansas wind—it was back, blowing again the way it always did. Knowing that helped the sheriff steady his world a little.

It was absurd, but the idea of getting back together with Judy, of being a full-time father to his daughter and maybe helping a child in need, was intriguing. Though wisdom dictated he avoid the topics, the sheriff found he had to ask.

“Judy, didn’t you tell me once you never really loved me? Was that true, or did you say it just to hurt me?”

A familiar look of calculation flickered across her face until he reached out and took her hands in his. “You’ve got to be honest here, Judy. This is too serious for anything else.”

“Some of each,” she admitted. Her eyes dropped for a moment, then defiantly flashed back and locked on his. “But most of the time I still love you, Englishman. So listen. This is really important.

“After I ran out of records to follow for the generations back of Grandma Sadie, and hit a brick wall looking for your father, I started on my side of the family. Did you know my mother was adopted?”

“Sure. I remember Mom telling me that when you and I started getting serious.”

“She knew?” Judy’s astonishment could probably be heard clear to Bertha’s. “I didn’t know! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hey, I just assumed you knew. And I never thought it was important. I remember telling Mom I didn’t care, and didn’t really want to know about it unless there was some reason you and I shouldn’t get married and have children.”

She pulled away from him. “No one ever told me,” she said, quieter now, but beginning to pace back and forth, too upset and frustrated to stand still. “I had to find out for myself. I was going through some old family files and I discovered the adoption papers. Mom, my grandparents, they’re all gone. I asked Dad, but you know how his memory has failed. If he knew, he can’t recall, or won’t tell me. So I went hunting on my own and I finally did it. I came up with her birth certificate. My Mom was born in Albuquerque. Most of the spots where my real grandmother filled out information about who she was or where she and her family were from are blank. She put her name down as Lois Lane. A joke, I thought. And a dead end. I was sure I’d never trace her, but, Englishman…she was just thirteen and she wasn’t married. She wrote down the father’s name as Osuna de la Jolla. There was a girls’ school near Albuquerque in the ’30s, when my mother was born, a place that specialized in situations like this. It was the de la Jolla Academy for Young Women, and it used to be on Osuna Road.”.

Judy grabbed the sheriff’s arm and pulled him around to face the courthouse steps where Heather Lane huddled beside the professor from Fort Hays State. “That little girl over there, she has an aunt whose name is Linda Lois Chandler de la Jolla. Her Linda Chandler came from right outside Buffalo Springs. She was molested by her father, had a baby. Heather just told me Ellen Lane chose that surname because her aunt used the same alias when she was young and in trouble. Don’t you understand, Englishman. She and my mother were cousins. Heather, our Heather, and I are related to that Heather. By whatever Byzantine twists of fate, we’re her family.”

“Whoa, Judy, you lost me.”

“Englishman, the Chandlers were a prominent family here. They had three daughters, Linda Lois, Mary Ellen, and Annie Beth. All of them were sexually abused by their father. Linda had a child by him. My mother. Somehow, my grandparents adopted the baby and brought her back to Buffalo Springs. Linda probably never knew where her daughter went. She and Mary Ellen left the county as soon as they could, but Annie stayed and married Elmer Simms. They had three kids too, Tommy and Peter, who both got cut up and stuffed in toilets today, and the woman who picked her alias from the aunts who raised her, Ellen Lane, the other Heather’s mother.

The sheriff shook his head. “Can you prove all this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, with time.”

They didn’t have time. Even if Judy was right, knowing was different from proving. They could remarry. It was a curiously appealing idea, but, he feared the plight of this second Heather was a fragile cause on which to pin a cure for all the failures that had doomed their relationship. They could start the proceedings next morning, hire the best lawyers and pay whatever they asked, and it would still take years. More years, probably, than this Heather had left before she was old enough to choose her own family. She needed someone now.

***

“Hello.” It wasn’t a very good connection. Lots of snaps, crackles and pops, as if a breakfast food company had taken over the long distance service.

“Yes, hello. Is this Mary Ellen Chandler?” the sheriff asked.

“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d bothered answering. A habit of boredom, she supposed.