Relentless (7 page)

    He looked again at Trent, then back at me.

    “How do you think all this would sound if the county attorney presented it to a grand jury, Marshal? You think it just might get your wife indicated for murder?”

    

    

    KEN ADAMS HAD homesteaded land just to the east of town. He was one of those completely independent men who ask no help from anyone else but his wife. He and Sylvia built their own log cabin, dug their own well, and planted their own crops. I don’t think he had a sinister past, but he lived as though he did. You saw him at church sometimes, and at the occasional social evening, but generally the Adamses and their children stayed to themselves. Sylvia was a dark-haired beauty whose hard work hadn’t cost her a whit in femininity.

    The only thing I knew about them was that she’d left him briefly on two or three occasions. I’d heard a lot of explanations for this-everything from her taking up with another man to her heading back to North Platte, Nebraska, her home, to tend to an ailing father-but gossip is rarely reliable, so I didn’t have any real sense of their relationship. One time they came to town and Ken had a black eye. If Sylvia had had the black eye, that would have set the gossips to speculating overtime, ominously. But with Ken’s eye being discolored, all that was made of it were a few stupid jokes.

    As I drew my horse into the glade that opened on their small farm, I saw lights in the windows and heard a lonesome fiddle being played. The outbuildings were traced in the gold of moonlight. I ground-tied my horse and approached the house.

    I was a hundred feet away when the door opened abruptly and a figure stood there silhouetted, moonlight glinting off the barrel of a rifle.

    “You go back to town, Marshal. I did a very foolish thing tonight. And I’m sorry I did it, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

    Even in silhouette, Sylvia’s figure was pleasing to see.

    “Is Ken in there?”

    “He is but he doesn’t want to talk to you either. Now, you scat.” She waggled the rifle in my direction.

    Full moon. Wind soughing through the bright, autumn-baked leaves. The scent of forest loam and clear stream water.

    “I’ll just come back with my deputies, Sylvia. You don’t want it to get out of hand, do you?”

    “It’s already out of hand. I broke my marriage vow.” She hesitated. “Again. And now people’ll blame poor Ken.”

    I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Blame poor Ken for what? Killing David Stanton?

    “I’m going to come inside, Sylvia. Shoot me if you want to. But I’m not taking my gun out, and I’m not going back to town.”

    “The mood I’m in, Marshal, I just might do it.”

    “I don’t think you will. You’re too good a woman.”

    “Oh, I’m some good woman, all right. The things I’ve done to that poor husband of mine.” She sounded about to cry; she also sounded frenzied, even a little crazy. Whatever she’d done, she’d paid a price for it in guilt.

    I started walking.

    She aimed the gun at my chest. “You heard me, Marshal.”

    I kept walking.

    “Right now, I could do just about anything.”

    I was just about to the front stoop of the cabin before I realized that I hadn’t heard any other voices from inside. Neither Ken nor the kids. They were awful quiet.

    She didn’t shoot me. What she did, when I was a few feet away, was retreat into the cabin. And lock it.

    I hadn’t worried about being shot. But I was worried about getting inside. Something was very wrong here.

    I knocked on the door. “You need to let me in.”

    “I already told you, Marshal. Go away.”

    “Where are Ken and the kids?”

    “He took them to the Chandlers. He’s going to stay there tonight.”

    “He shouldn’t have left you alone.”

    “I told him to.”

    “We all make mistakes, Sylvia. You and Ken need to sit down and talk about this.”

    “I warned him. Before we were married, I mean, I warned him how I was. How I sometimes-I just went off with other men. How I just can’t seem to help myself. The other two times-at least it was out of town where I didn’t embarrass him. But this time-right in Skylar. Right where everybody can find out. Just think of what my little ones are going to hear at school. All the things they’ll have to hear about their mother.”

    “Why don’t you let me in?”

    “I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see anybody. Not ever again.”

    “Sylvia, listen, please-”

    

    

    There was just the one shot and it was oddly muffled, and it was followed by a tiny squeaky sound, almost like the mewling of a newborn kitten, and then there was just that awful silence that follows death. My horse whinnied for no good reason-that was the first sound to break the silence. And then the night birds in the forest began to sing in a way that was almost like crying.

    I didn’t bang on the door, I didn’t call out, I didn’t run to my horse and head back to town for help. There was no sense to any of that.

    I was narrow enough to shinny myself sidewise through a northern-pointing window. She was slumped over in a rocking chair. The six-shooter hung from two of her fingers, angled down across her bosom. She’d put the barrel to her temple. Not even death could destroy the small, perfect, almost doll-like features of her face. The eyes looked stunned and sad at the same time.

    I went and unbolted the door, and went out and got on my horse and rode over to the Chandler farm. I was thinking about everything and nothing. It was one of those moments when your mind keeps flitting around, unable to light on any one subject for long. There were so many things to think about. If Sylvia had killed Stanton, then Callie was not in any trouble. But I couldn’t be sure of that. She’d certainly been remorseful. But that could have just been about sleeping with Stanton.

    The Chandler farm was pretty much like the Adams farm. They were homesteaders, too, though not anywhere as self-reliant. Verne Chandler, who wasn’t yet thirty, had had a bad stroke his first year here in Skylar, and people still had to pitch in from time to time to help him support himself. Fortunately for him, Am Chandler is a purposeful, smart, and resourceful woman who can do damned near any job a man can, and likely do it better. She’s not much for charity, and always looks uncomfortable and a little embarrassed when neighboring farmers and ranchers stop by at certain points in the year. Verne is still paralyzed on the right side of his body. Things aren’t likely to get better for him. They had but the one boy-I never knew why they didn’t have more children-but he passed the last time smallpox made a sweep of our part of the state. Six, he’d been. Am Chandler had not had an easy life.

    Verne came to the door, a fortyish man crabbed and bent before his time. He always wore a heavy sweater, even in the summertime. The stroke had somehow affected his thyroid and left him constantly cold. His bald head shone in the moonlight as he stuck his head outside. “Don’t talk loud,” he said. “Ma, she’s just put the two kids down for the night.” He spoke in a way that made some people think he was slow or tetched. He was neither. He’d just suffered a stroke.

    “I need to talk to Ken.”

    “You want to come in?”

    “Need to talk to him out here, Verne.”

    He nodded and dragged himself back inside. He’d been one hell of a Sunday afternoon baseball player. It was hard to watch him in his present state.

    Ken Adams came out and said, “Something wrong, Marshal?”

    “Let’s walk down to the creek.”

    He shrugged and closed the door quietly behind him, and followed me out to where the grass was long and silver-tipped from the moon.

    The one thing the seminars don’t prepare you for is telling somebody that his wife is dead. Long as I’d been at this, I’d never figured out how to do it with any skill. Later on, I’d always think of ways I could have been gentler, kinder.

    The creek smelled fresh in the night. An occasional fish slapped to the surface. Been a long time since I’d been on a camping trip, eating freshly caught fish from a pan set on a campfire. It sounded good now. Almost everything sounded good now-except saying what I had to say.

    “Something wrong, Marshal?” he said again. Ken Adams was a slender, towheaded man with wiry strength and a somber, insular personality ideal for the frontier. The frontier demanded a certain stoicism from its survivors, and Ken Adams was stoic enough for any six men. Except-and understandably-when he caught his wife in another man’s hotel room.

    I rolled a cigarette as we walked. I said, thinking of no other way to do it, “I went to your place to see you and Sylvia. She killed herself, Ken.”

    And damned if he didn’t haul out his Bull Durham and build himself a smoke and get it lighted before he said a word. The only sign that he’d heard me was in his dark eyes. They glistened with quick tears.

    “How’d she do it?”

    “A Colt.”

    “She leave a note?”

    “Not that I could see.”

    “You were the one who found her?”

    “I talked to her first. She bolted herself in the cabin. She wouldn’t let me in.”

    He took a deep drag from his smoke and exhaled in a stream. The smoke was blue in the moon rays. “She say anything before she did it?”

    “How sorry she was.”

    “Anything else?”

    “That she was ashamed. And that she worried how the other kids would treat yours at school.”

    He said, and without any rancor, “She wasn’t no whore.”

    “I don’t think she was.”

    “And nobody better say she was. Not to my face anyway.”

    “I’m sorry, Ken.”

    “She warned me how she was. Sometimes she just- strayed. This was the only time she ever done it here, in town.”

    “She said that, too.”

    “That Stanton, he was workin’ on her the first time he was here. And then the second time they got together.” Something about that wasn’t right, what he’d just said. “You said ‘the first time.’ He was here more than once?”

    “He was here about a month ago. He met her in the library. He was askin’ her all kinds of questions about Paul.” A very different story from the one Webley had told me about hiring the Pinkertons.

    “And she wasn’t the only one Stanton shined up to either.”

    “Another woman, you mean?”

    “He must’ve liked ’em married. I knew a fella down in Tulsa like that. He liked ’em married. Said they was more fun ’cause it was kinda dangerous and all. You know, the husband out there somewhere with a gun.”

    “You know who this other woman was?”

    He shook his head. “They had a fight about her, I guess. Him and Sylvia. She went up to his room and heard some other woman there. They was arguin’ about that when I got there.”

    I hesitated. “Did you kill him?”

    “I sure wanted to.”

    “That’s not an answer.”

    “I wanted to but I didn’t.”

    “Did Sylvia kill him?”

    He sobbed. He’d fought so hard against showing me anything-some misdirected sense of manliness, I guess-that it burst out and he couldn’t stop it. A sob of the kind a woman would make. “She always said she never cared about them no other way except the thrill of it. I guess she was a little like that fella down in Tulsa I mentioned. But this Stanton -I guess she felt somethin’ for him ’cause she got jealous when she found out about this other woman.”

    I said again, “Did she kill him, Ken?”

    “I don’t think so.”

    “You’re not sure.”

    “She went down there again tonight.”

    “Did you?”

    “Yeah. I followed her into town, if that’s what you mean.”

    “You go to his room?”

    He nodded.

    “What happened?”

    “He was dead,” he said. “Maybe I would’ve killed him if somebody hadn’t beat me to it.”

    

    

    TOOMEY AND GRICE were in my office when I got back to town.

    “Well?” Toomey said.

    “Well, what, Walter?”

    “Well, did you arrest him?”

    “And who would ‘him’ be?”

    “Who would ‘him’ be?” Phil Grice said. “Ken Adams, of course.”

    I shook my head. I pitched my hat on top of the bookcase, sat down with my cup of coffee, and rolled myself a cigarette as I went through Sylvia’s suicide and Ken’s denial.

    “And you believed him?” Grice said.

    “Not necessarily. But I didn’t-and don’t-disbelieve him either.”

    “He had a damn good motive,” Grice said.

    “And people saw him in the room,” Toomey said.

    I smiled. “You want to get saddled up and all three of us’ll ride out and lynch him?” They were the two most prominent businessmen on the town council. They were

    sleek and well-fed and as full of their own self-promoting bullshit as anybody in Skylar County. Toomey owned two stage lines and a short-haul railroad, and Grice oversaw his daddy’s varied business interests, sort of the way Paul did, but less successfully. They both had eyes on seats in the state legislature.

    “You’re forgetting, Marshal, what happens the day after tomorrow.” Grice gave Toomey a smug s
mil
e.

    I was confused. Tomorrow was the trial. But what about the day after?

    Toomey said, “The lieutenant governor is coming here. Phil and I convinced him to spend a day with us. And we certainly don’t want some sordid murder hanging over our heads.”

    I’d forgotten about the lieutenant governor, whose name I couldn’t remember anyway. “So you want me to just arrest somebody, is that it?”