“Do you think we’re utter fools down here?” McDowell said. “Or just so afraid we’ll let you do anything?”
Pemberton resisted the urge to answer.
“I went over to Asheville last week,” McDowell continued. “It’s not my jurisdiction but I talked to the coroner about Carlyle. He said once he got Carlyle’s clothes off he found five possible causes of death. Whoever killed Carlyle had it in for him. I can’t do anything about Abe Harmon or Buchanan or Carlyle, but I vow I’ll do something about the murder of a mother and her child.”
McDowell paused, his voice softer, more reflective.
“There’s something about it,” he said, “seeing a child laid out in a morgue. It takes root in the mind and nothing can get it out.”
McDowell splayed his fingers and ran them through his hair, revealing a few streaks of silver Pemberton had not noticed before. He had no idea how old the man was, though he would have guessed forty-five, maybe fifty.
“When was the last time you saw that child?” McDowell asked, looking at Pemberton now.
“Are you expecting me to say last night, Sheriff?”
McDowell waited.
“June. She brought him to one of Bolick’s services.”
“I seen him about that time as well. He’d grown a lot since then. His face had filled out more, become a lot more like yours.”
McDowell paused, then stared into Pemberton’s eyes as if trying to look through them deep into the brain that lay behind.
“The eye color too,” he said softly, “not blue like his mama’s but molasses brown, not a whit’s difference between that child’s eyes and the eyes I’m looking at right now.”
“I’ve got work to do, Sheriff,” Pemberton said. He peered at an invoice on the desk, raised it slightly as if to better read the numbers.
“I measured a boot print left on the sandbar,” McDowell said. “A distinctive type of boot from the narrow toe, nothing you’d buy around here. From the size and shape I’m betting it’s a woman’s. Now all I’ve got to do is find my Cinderella.”
Pemberton did not raise his eyes from the invoice but knew the sheriff watched for a reaction. After a few more moments McDowell turned and walked out the door. Pemberton watched from his window as the sheriff got in his car and drove back across the ridge toward Waynesville. He locked the office door and went to the gun rack, opened the drawer beneath the mounted rifles.
The hunting knife was in the same place as before, but when he pulled it from the sheath blood stained the blade. The blood was black and appeared to be clotted, but when Pemberton scratched a fleck free and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, he felt a residue of moisture.
The phone rang and Pemberton picked it up. Campbell was calling from the sawmill. Almost all the train cars had been loaded. Pemberton’s voice seemed hardly a part of him as he told Campbell he’d be there in a few minutes.
He hung up the phone. The knife lay on the desk, and Pemberton picked it up.
He considered taking the knife to the sawmill and throwing it in the splash pond. He realized that for the first time in memory he felt vulnerable, almost afraid. For a few moments he did nothing. Then Pemberton rubbed the blade clean with a handkerchief, slid the knife in the sheath, and returned it to the gun rack’s drawer.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
The story “Speckled Trout,” which won a 2005 O. Henry Award, was later altered and extended to become the 2006 novel The World Made Straight. What follows is the story in its original form.
Speckled Trout
Lanny came upon the marijuana plants while fishing Caney Creek. It was a Saturday, and after helping his father sucker tobacco all morning, he’d had the truck and the rest of the afternoon and evening for himself. He’d changed into his fishing clothes and driven the three miles of dirt road to the French Broad. He drove fast, the rod and reel clattering side to side in the truck bed and clouds of red dust rising in his wake. He had the windows down and if the radio worked he’d have had it blasting. The driver’s license in his billfold was six months old but only in the last month had his daddy let him drive the truck by himself.
He parked by the bridge and walked upriver toward where Caney Creek entered. Afternoon sunlight slanted over Brushy Mountain and tinged the water the deep gold of cured tobacco. A big fish leaped in the shallows, but Lanny’s spinning rod was broken down and even if it hadn’t been he would not have bothered to make a cast. There was nothing in the river he could sell, only stocked rainbows and browns, knottyheads, and catfish. The men who fished the river were mostly old men who stayed in one place for hours, motionless as the stumps and rocks they sat on. Lanny liked to keep moving, and he fished where even the younger fishermen wouldn’t go.
In forty minutes he was half a mile up Caney Creek, the spinning rod still broken down. The gorge narrowed to a thirty-foot wall of water and rock, below it the deepest pool on the creek. This was the place where everyone else turned back. Lanny waded through waist-high water to reach the left side of the waterfall. Then he began climbing, using juts and fissures in the rock for leverage and resting places. When he got to the top he put the rod together and tied a gold Panther Martin on the line.
The only fish this far up were what fishing magazines called brook trout, though Lanny had never heard Old Man Jenkins or anyone else call them anything other than speckled trout. Jenkins swore they tasted better than any brown or rainbow and paid Lanny fifty cents apiece no matter how small they were. Old Man Jenkins ate them head and all, like sardines.
Mountain laurel slapped Lanny’s face and arms, and he scraped his hands and elbows climbing straight up rocks there was no other way around. The only path was water now. He thought of his daddy back at the farmhouse and smiled to himself. The old man had told him never to fish a place like this alone, because a broken leg or a rattlesnake bite could get you stone dead before anyone found you. That was near about the only kind of talk he got anymore from the old man, Lanny thought to himself as he tested his knot, always being lectured about something — how fast he drove, who he hung out with — like he was eight years old instead of sixteen, like the old man himself hadn’t raised all sorts of hell when he was young.
The only places with enough water to hold fish were the pools, some no bigger than a wash bucket. Lanny flicked the spinner into these pools and in every third or fourth one a small, orange-finned trout came flopping out onto the bank, the spinner’s treble hook snagged in its mouth. Lanny would slap the speckled’s head against a rock and feel the fish shudder in his hand and die. If he missed a strike, he cast again into the same pool. Unlike browns and rainbows, the speckleds would hit twice, occasionally even three times. Old Man Jenkins had told Lanny when he was a boy most every stream in the county was thick with speckleds, but they’d been too easy caught and soon enough fished out, which was why now you had to go to the back of beyond to find them.
Lanny already had eight fish in his creel when he passed the No Trespassing sign nailed in an oak tree. The sign was scabbed with rust like the ten-year-old car tag on his granddaddy’s barn, and he paid no more attention to the sign than when he’d first seen it a month ago. He knew he was on Toomey land, and he knew the stories. How Linwood Toomey once used his thumb to gouge a man’s eye out in a bar fight and another time opened a man’s face from ear to mouth with a broken beer bottle. Stories about events Lanny’s daddy had witnessed before, as his daddy put it, he’d got straight with the Lord. But Lanny had heard other things. About how Linwood Toomey and his son were too lazy and hard drinking to hold steady jobs. Too lazy and drunk to walk the quarter-mile from their farmhouse to look for trespassers, Lanny figured.