Vengeance Road (12 page)

G
annon gazed at the suds sliding to the bottom of his glass.

Sorrow hung in the stale air, rippling up to the bar from the blues singer on the lower stage. Gannon tapped the rim.

“You really think you need another one, sir?” the bartender asked.

Gannon let the question slosh around in a head numbed by the wreckage of recent catastrophes.

“Yes, I do.”

“I'll give you one more, but it'll be your last.”

Gannon tried to remember how long he'd been here. His new home. Moved in, what, eight beers ago? It's starting to look good. Not as empty as the old place. He liked the diamond pattern of the scuffed linoleum floor, the worn wood paneling, the old jukebox and the black-and-white photos of Buffalo's history.

That's Mark Twain. He used to own a newspaper here.

Jack London did a bit of jail time here
.

And that's some president waving from a train
.

Goodbye.

So long to the great Jack Gannon, who almost got a Pulitzer.

Hello to the loser people blamed for driving Styebeck's wife to overdose.

He didn't mean to hurt anyone.

Goodbye, Jack. The writing was on the wall and in the letter he reread from his pal in Ethiopia and the application form. Maybe he
would
chuck journalism and teach English in Africa.

“Last one,” the bartender said.

Gannon gripped the sweating glass and thought, here's to loss. Loss of a career, loss of ten years, loss of his parents, loss of his sister, loss of a dream.

Loss of himself.

He took a long gulp.

Local news flickered on the muted TV above the bar. Gannon saw a still of Styebeck's hero-cop face, then footage of Bernice Hogan's crime scene, a still shot of her college-ID photo, then footage of himself in front of the
Sentinel
building after being fired.

Gannon turned away and swallowed more beer.

What went wrong?

In the far reaches of his mind the remotest grains of self-doubt began to squirm. Was it possible that maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about Styebeck?

He downed the remainder of his glass. His stomach roiled; his head lolled. His vision blurred but he saw it all clearly.

He was not wrong.

Styebeck was involved in this. He's living some sort of double life. Gannon had to stop feeling sorry for himself and break this story.

Gannon started ringing.

He tried to find his cell phone. It rang and rang. He shoved both hands in his pants pockets. No phone. Where was it? The bartender retrieved it from Gannon's shirt pocket, answered, then handed it to Gannon.

“Hullo. Jack Gannon, formerly of the
Buffalo Sentinel
.”

“Jack, it's Adell. I'm calling from a pay phone. There's been a break.”

Gannon said something before his phone, then his head, hit the counter.

 

He could not remember falling asleep.

He woke with a short-lived memory loss of where he'd been, what he'd done. He was on a strange sofa, under a quilt, in a small pleasant living room with the shades drawn. He was in his clothes, his shoes on the floor beside him. His mouth was dry. His head was nestled in a soft pillow that was hurting him.

Coffee. He could smell coffee.

He saw Adell Clark in the adjoining room.

Bar.

That's it. He'd gone to a bar to mourn his termination. He'd gotten drunk. Adell had called.

“Morning, Jack.”

“How did I get here?”

“The bartender picked up your phone and told me about your troubles. You were blathering to him all night. I drove down. We loaded you in my car and with some effort I got you here to sleep it off.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure. Eggs?”

“God, no.”

“Coffee?”

“I need your bathroom first.”

Gannon washed up and returned to the kitchen where he saw his wallet, and its contents, stacked beside it, on the counter.

“It fell from your pocket on my driveway last night. Thought you'd want to organize your stuff.” Adell set a cup of black coffee before him. “I wasn't snooping, but I saw
the pictures of your parents and Cora. Are you still looking for your sister?”

Gannon stared at the age-worn snapshots before sliding them back into place.

“No, not really.” He drank some coffee. “You said something about a break on the case?”

“Out-of-state calls on Jolene Peller's phone have been made after her disappearance. And you won't believe who they were made to?”

Gannon looked at her, waiting for the answer.

“Karl Styebeck,” she said.

“That means Jolene Peller could be alive,” he said.

“It means Styebeck has to be tied to her disappearance.”

A
lice was going to make it. She had to make it.

The room where Karl Styebeck waited was oppressive with antiseptic smells. He stared at the cheerless walls, the drab vinyl couches, the outdated copies of
Reader's Digest
and
People
, as the clock above the nurses' station swept time forward.

How long had it been since this morning when Alice wouldn't wake up?

She just wouldn't wake up
.

Sirens screamed when the ambulance came.

It appeared to be a bad reaction to an accidental but dangerous mix of pills, alcohol and anxiety, the doctor had said.

“Will she recover?” Styebeck asked him now.

“She's stable, but it'll be touch-and-go for the next few hours.”

Styebeck sat down, ran his hands over his whiskered face and inventoried the calamities mounting against him. The murder, Gannon's accusation, his brother's recording of Bernice Hogan's dying words implicating him.

Now, outside his wife's hospital room, he accepted that for all these years he'd been wrong to think he was free of his father's curse.

He had to end it himself.

To prepare for that moment, he had to confront the greatest pain of his life. He had to take his mind back through time and exhume a long-buried ancestral secret. He had to return to the root of the evil in his blood.

He had to imagine 1937, Brooks, Alberta, Canada….

 

Majestic dust clouds ascended from the parched earth as a lone farm truck cut across the desolate prairie.

Norris Selkirk drove while his mother, Vida, sat next to him; the sky and worry were reflected in her eyes as she searched the endless horizon.

Not a sign of life for miles in this quarter of dry grassland where the Blackfeet Nation once hunted the great buffalo herds before treaties were signed and the white homesteaders arrived.

This morning Vida had told her husband that she needed their son to take her out to the Rudd place.

“What for? I need Norris here, to help me with the tractor.”

“
Clydell and Eva weren't at church. The younger ones weren't at school. And remember, that killer escaped from Stony Mountain prison in Manitoba and was supposed to be headed west.
”

“
Vida, we got our own business to mind.
”

“You mind it. I'm going out to see if Eva needs help. Maybe they're sick.”

Vida's husband grunted the way most men did whenever they considered Clydell Rudd and anything related to him.

The Rudd place was at the edge of Newell County where Clydell kept his wife, Eva, their five daughters and young boy, Deke, isolated from the community.

Except for church and school, they rarely left their property.

Clydell never permitted his girls, including the two who were full-grown and unmarried, to go into town.

Clydell didn't care for other people, which suited other people just fine.

Earlier on, there was talk that one of the Rudd girls had become pregnant, then came rumors that Clydell had a criminal past, or owed money to the Chicago mob. Somebody claimed that some nights people had seen Clydell drunk on his own brew, running naked on his land raging at the moon.

No one knew the truth about Clydell Rudd.

Vida didn't care. She put no stock in childish folklore. She wanted to be sure Eva and her kids were all right. That's what you did out here, where living could be hard with men who couldn't understand a woman's heart.

Vida took stock as the Rudds' ranch house with its peeling paint came into view. Their battered green Dodge was there all right, but no clothes were pinned to the line.

Odd.

With five children, you could count on Eva and the girls doing a wash every day.

Norris halted the truck, shut it off, got out and released a whistle that normally summoned the dogs.

Nothing
.

The chickens seemed agitated, clucking up a storm in the coop. As Vida approached the house, the air felt wrong, like something had been taken. The front door was open, swaying and creaking, as if beckoning Vida to continue
.

Or warning her to turn right around and go home
.

“Eva?” Vida called. “Clydell?”

No one responded
.

Three fat mice darted out of the house, over the threshold.

“Anybody home?”

Nothing.

Passing through the door, Vida and Norris met a wave of foul air.

“Whoa,” Norris said.

As their eyes adjusted to the light, they moved through the small living room. Vida's calls filled the quiet. Nothing seemed out of place but for the stillness. It was too quiet, as if all life in the house had stopped.

Then they heard the humming.

Vida and Norris exchanged a glance.

As they approached the first bedroom, the humming grew louder. Norris pushed the door open wider and they saw the source of the sound.

Vida's scalp tingled.

Norris felt the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Flies encased the two figures on the bed.

Vida's first thought was how they looked like macabre scarecrows hastily assembled by a lunatic.

Reddish-brown matter laced their wide-eyed faces and upper bodies so that Vida could barely identify them as belonging to Clydell and Eva. Splatters and ribbons of blood cascaded down the wall above the headboard and streamed down the painting of the Rockies that Eva had treasured.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Norris said the same way his father cursed.

Vida covered her mouth with both hands in time to stifle a sob.

Moving to the next bedroom, they found the three youngest girls in the same manner lying in their small beds. A little rag doll stared back wide-eyed from under the arm of one.

Vida gasped as they moved down the hall to the little
loft with the bed where the thirteen-year-old boy, Deke, slept.

It was empty.

No bloodstains. Norris touched the sheets. They were cool and dry.

“Deke!” he called, moving quickly to seize an iron poker
.

There was no response as they moved on to the last bedroom, the one used by the two older girls. The smell and the scene were the same. It was as if pails of red paint had been hurled in anger at the two young women and the walls surrounding their beds
.

“Look!” Norris pointed
.

One of them seemed higher in her bed, seemed to rise and fall as her body trembled. Norris spotted an extra arm, hand, another pair of eyes staring back
.

Someone was under her—alive!

“It's Deke!”

The Rudds' only son had survived by hiding under the corpse of his murdered sister.

 

In the aftermath, it seemed that the world had descended on the Rudd place north of Brooks.

First came members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arriving out of nearly every detachment from Calgary, some eighty miles west, and Medicine Hat, about the same distance east. A team from the Calgary Medical Examiner's Office arrived, then forensic experts. Then came reporters from the big newspapers and radio stations in Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, even the United States. And the wire-service syndicates sent correspondents. Their first reports brought the public, who drove in from Edmonton, Red Deer, Swift Current, Winnipeg, Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota.

They had to see.

7 Family Members Slaughtered

Boy, 13, Survives by Hiding Under the Dead

 

The press left within days of the funerals, which were even more heartwrenching because not a single relative of the Rudds, on Clydell or Eva's side, attended.

They had no other family.

Vida Selkirk wanted to take Deke into her home but they couldn't afford to raise him. The law made him a ward of Alberta's social services, which set out to find him a home. In the time after the tragedy, caseworkers got Deke counseling and helped him to help the Mounties investigating the case.

“All I remember was noises and shadows. Then it got all quiet. I got up and went to each bed. I shook everybody, tried to wake them before I knew they were all dead. My mother, my sisters. I got scared. The dogs run off. I was alone. I was the only one left. I thought whoever done it was coming for me. So I hid under my sister and played dead until somebody come to help.”

The investigators held the theory that the killer overlooked Deke because the boy slept in the loft, which could be easily missed in the dark.

They showed him pictures of the escaped killer from Stony Mountain, who was still at large. Deke could not identify him.

“It was dark.”

The first reports on the death toll were wrong.

While Deke was the only survivor, not every member of his family died that night. Tilley Rudd, his oldest sister, thought dead, was found to be alive when help came. She was taken to the hospital in Calgary where she slipped in and out of a coma before she died of her injuries.

Given the circumstances and publicity of the case
,
many people wanted to give Deke a home. Ultimately, quickly and with no publicity, he was adopted by an American pastor and his wife living in Brooks at the time.

“Hello, Deke, my name is Gabriel Styebeck,” the pastor said.

He was a tall man with a beard like Abraham Lincoln's and a face so stern he looked to be hurting when he smiled.

“This is my wife, Adolpha. We'll be your new mother and father.”

Adolpha nodded and cupped Deke's face in her hands.

They were ice cold, like those of his dead sisters.

A few months after the Styebecks adopted Deke, they moved to Texas, near Lufkin. They sent Deke to a special bible school, where male instructors would hit him with a yardstick when he failed to learn Scripture. He wanted to drop out and fight in the war, like some of the older boys in town, but it never happened.

After he graduated from high school, Deke moved out on his own and got a job with the state of Texas as a corrections officer in Huntsville. It was the perfect job for him, for he would secretly scrutinize the case of every inmate he encountered, vigilant for any chance, however remote, that he might find the one who'd murdered his family.

Like his father, Deke kept to himself and was a bachelor for several years until he couldn't live with the loneliness anymore. So one night he got up the nerve to go to a summer social near Trinity. There he saw a young lady standing against the wall. He smiled at her, told her she was pretty and asked her to dance.

Her name was Belva Denker
.

They began dating
.

Belva was a schoolteacher. Her father, a farmer, had been killed when his tractor rolled on top of him. And her
mother had passed away two years later. Belva taught elementary school and lived alone in a room downtown where she dreamed of having a family
.

Deke wanted a family, too. Like Belva, he felt alone and they made each other happy. He was the only man who'd asked her to dance, the only man who'd ever smiled at her and told her she was pretty
.