“Don’t want to do that,” the woman warned. “They’re nasty fuckers. Bite your finger off.”
Eustace yanked his hand away. “Right.”
He stood and looked at the woman. Her name was Rena, Renee, something like that, as scraggly-looking a thing as he’d ever laid eyes on. It was entirely possible that her parents had given her to the Possum Man in exchange for food. Such bargains were common.
“You said you found the rifle.”
She retrieved it from the house. Eustace worked the bolt, kicking out an empty cartridge. He asked her where she’d found it. Her eyes didn’t look in quite the same direction; it made her a little hard to talk to.
“Just about where you’re standing.”
“And you didn’t hear anything else. Only the one shot.”
“Happened like I said.”
He was beginning to wonder if maybe she’d done it—shot the Possum Man, dragged his body to the river, busted up the hutches to cover her tracks. Well, if she had, she probably had a good enough reason, and Eustace sure as hell wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“I’ll put the word out. He turns up, you let us know.”
“You sure you don’t want to come inside, Sheriff?”
She was giving him a look. It took Eustace a second to figure out what it was. Her off-kilter gaze traveled the length of his body, then lingered pointedly. The gesture was supposed to be seductive but was more like livestock trying to sell itself.
“Folks say you ain’t got a woman.”
Eustace wasn’t perturbed. Well, maybe a little. But the woman had been treated like property all her life; she had no other way of doing things.
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“But what’ll I do he’s dead?”
“You’ve got two possums, don’t you? Make more.”
“Them there? Them’s both boys.”
Eustace handed back the rifle. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
He returned to the jail. Fry, at his desk with his boots up, was paging through a picture book.
“She try to poke you?” Fry asked, not looking up.
Eustace sat behind his desk. “How’d you know?”
“They say she does that.” He turned a page. “Think she killed him?”
“She mighta.” Eustace gestured at the book. “What you got there?”
Fry held it up to show him. Where the Wild Things Are.
“That’s a good one,” Eustace said.
The door swung open and a man entered, banging dust from his hat. Eustace recognized him; he and his wife farmed a patch of ground on the other side of the river.
“Sheriff. Deputy.” He nodded at each of them in turn.
“Help you, Bart?”
He cleared his throat nervously. “It’s my wife. I can’t find her anywhere.”
It was nine A.M. By noon, Eustace had heard the same story fourteen times.
* * *
39
It was midafternoon by the time Caleb reached town on the buckboard. The place seemed totally dead—no people anywhere. In two hours on the road, he hadn’t seen a single soul.
The door of the mercantile was locked. Caleb cupped his eyes to the glass. Nothing, no movement inside. He stilled his body, listening to the quiet. Where the hell was everybody? Why would George close up in the middle of the day? He walked around to the alley. The back door stood ajar. The frame was splintered; the door had been forced.
He returned to the buckboard for his rifle.
He nudged the door open with the tip of the barrel and moved inside. He was in the storeroom. The space was tightly packed—sacks of feed piled high, coils of fencing, spools of chain and rope—leaving only a narrow corridor through which to pass.
“George?” he called. “George, are you in here?”
He felt and heard crunching underfoot. One of the bags of feed had been torn open. As he knelt to look, he heard a high-pitched clicking above his head. He lurched back, swinging the barrel of the rifle upward.
It was a raccoon. The animal was sitting on top of the pile. It lifted onto its hind legs, rubbing its two front paws together, and gave him a look of absolute innocence. That mess on the floor? Nothing to do with me, pal.
“Go on, beat it.” Caleb poked the barrel of the rifle forward. “Get your ass out of here before I make you into a hat.”
The raccoon scampered down the pile and out the door. Caleb took a breath to calm his heart and passed through the beaded curtain into the store. The lockbox where George kept the day’s receipts sat beneath the counter in its usual spot. He moved through the aisles, finding nothing amiss. A flight of stairs behind the counter led to the second floor—presumably, George’s living quarters.