“The key,” a voice rasped. He gave her hair a sharp jerk.
I felt a jolt of recognition. I knew that voice.
“It’s in the kitchen.”
The hand holding the knife lowered, and the figure shoved Carmen in the direction of the kitchen. She slipped, falling to her knees.
That was the moment. I stepped forward, clutching the butt of the pistol tightly in my fist, and brought it down smartly on the man’s head.
He dropped like a sack of potatoes, taking a telephone and its stand along with him.
I felt over the wall and found the light switch. “You all right?” I asked Carmen.
She nodded, her face pale. I could tell she wasn’t, but she hid it very well.
“What about Melinda?”
“She’s okay,” Carmen said. “She’s hiding upstairs in a closet.”
At that moment there came three heavy thumps, each more violent than the last, followed by a fourth that was accompanied by breaking glass and splintering wood.
I’d forgotten about Walts, whom I’d left padlocked in the basement. The results were a seriously bruised shoulder and about three hundred dollars in structural damage to Melinda Wilcox’s house.
Walts came bounding in through the front door, revolver drawn.
“You’re late,” I commented.
He holstered his gun and made a beeline to Carmen Willowby.
The crumpled figure in the corner was beginning to emit groans. I went over and picked up the knife, then pulled his arms around behind him and slipped on a pair of handcuffs.
“Hey!” Walts said. “That’s George Mackey!”
“Yep.” I rolled George over. His eyelids were beginning to flutter. “I should have figured it out before now.” I pulled a long face. “Luther Kroger’s never going to let me hear the end of this.”
“I don’t get it,” Walts said. “How did George know about the money?”
“Simple. Benjamin Simms told him. Mackey must have caught him and Salyers over at Oak Knoll Cemetery on their first night out. I imagine he promised to help them in return for a cut.”
“But why did he kill them?” Walts said.
“In Salyers’ case, it was plain and simple greed. With Simms, it was revenge.”
“Revenge? For what?”
“I think we’re going to find out that ol’ George here was the bank guard whom Scarlotti shot during the robbery, way back in ’36. That’s how George came by his bum leg. And that’s why George figured the money was rightfully his. He only called us over to Willow Creek the other night to cover himself. I’ll give odds that if we compare the casts of the tire tracks we found with the tires on George’s pickup, we’ll have a perfect match.”
By the following afternoon, George Mackey was cooling his heels in a cell in the county jail. Luther Kroger was preparing an indictment — or would be anyway, once he’d run out of people to call and tell how he’d solved the Willow Creek murder case. Walts, Carmen Willowby, and I were over at Melinda Wilcox’s place, sitting around her kitchen table and sharing a pot of tea while we tied up a few loose ends.
“But why was it that you never went to the police?” Carmen was asking.
“I suppose I should have,” Melinda said. “I knew what they’d done. But Mr. Kelly was different from the other two. He was such a kind man. Such a gentleman. And he was so badly hurt! At first we thought for sure he was going to die. He would have, too, if it hadn’t been for me.”
“You were in love with him,” Carmen said gently.
Melinda looked away from us, out through the kitchen window toward the distant fields. A moment passed, then she nodded. “I wasn’t so very young by then, Miss Willowby. When I should have been thinking about love — about getting married — I was taking care of an ailing mother.” She smiled sadly.
“Mr. Kelly was like a breath of spring air blowing into a sickroom. He made me feel a way I’d never felt before. When he promised he would come back, I never doubted him for a moment.”
She glanced down at the pocket watch she had given to Patrick Kelly almost half a century before, then placed it on the table. “And now I see that he did come back. But not for me.”
I got to my feet, and Walts followed suit. “If you don’t mind, we really do have to take a look.”
Melinda Wilcox nodded.
It didn’t take Walts and me long to find it. There was a loose stone in the basement wall. In the hollow behind it, there was a rusted metal cash box.
I set it on the basement floor and used my pocketknife to scrape away the scales. Walts and I exchanged glances. I pried open the lid.
What we found inside was a moldy mass of confetti. A home for mice and beetles.
“Put it back,” I said.
Walts returned the box to its hiding place and slid the stone back into the opening.
Melinda Wilcox watched us as we entered the kitchen.
I made a decision. An easy one.
I sat down at the table, shaking my head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Two men dead, all over an old convict’s fantasy.”
Melinda Wilcox blinked, then slowly placed a trembling hand over the pocket watch. Her fingers closed, and she held onto it tightly.
I glanced at her as we left the room. Her eyes were moist, but she was smiling.
Since the Sky Blew Off
by G. Wayne Miller
He was only a kid, seven, maybe eight years old. We never did get his name.
He arrived at dusk, and when no one answered his cries, he finally fell into a restless sleep in the dust and half-dead weeds along the front perimeter. Well before the sun was up, I shot him through the head. His body quivered a bit and then his mouth became a fountain of blood, but it didn’t last long. In less than three minutes, long enough for a smoke, his nerves stopped firing and he was still.
Under brilliant starlight, Tony and I buried his body. You might wonder why we bothered, but those were Mather’s orders. Mather was obsessed with germs, and he had every reason to be. We knew about other parts of the country, where whole camps had been wiped out by typhus, diphtheria, all the diseases that had gone completely out of control since the sky blew off. To be honest, we were scared shitless about germs, and we had every reason to be.
The kid was light and bony, more skeleton than meat. Underfed, I guess, like most roamers. Wearing gloves and masks, we carried him downhill, away from the hatchery, and put him ten feet under, as deep as we could dig in the two hours we had before the sun came up. Then we burned our clothes and bathed in rubbing alcohol and Lysol we’d come across on our last trip to the A&P warehouse. When we were done, we walked naked back inside the compound, pulling the razor wire tight behind us.
Right off, Mather had been uneasy about the kid. Not that we hadn’t seen our share of roamers since coming north to Vermont a year ago, after the Great Fire leveled Boston and half of eastern Massachusetts. We’d seen them, all right, and mostly we’d let them pass on by. The only ones we’d disposed of were the ones that got too close or started acting too weird or hung around too long, like stray dogs begging for handouts. Creepy behavior like that set off alarm bells inside Mather’s head.
I especially remember one old guy, batty as hell, his face covered with pus, his bald scalp peeling, his tongue swollen and hanging out of his mouth like a steer at an old-time Kansas City slaughterhouse. Howled at the gate like something out of a nightmare until we took care of him. I remember a teenage girl, too. She’d probably been pretty once, but the sun had left her skin runny and raw and made her hair fall out. She was delirious, talking nonsense about salvation, redemption, apocalypse, all that other Bible crap, like so many of the roamers we’d seen since New York.