“It fits too good,” she said tearfully.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
She walked slowly back toward us and sat down. “Four years ago we had a rain here you wouldn’t believe. A hurricane came in off the Gulf and must have dropped sixteen inches here on Webb County. There’s a creek over there you can’t see it from here-it runs down into the Nueces and it’s sometimes a trickle and sometimes dry. It was a river all by itself when that rain came, and it carved out new banks, and afterward one of my eldest sister’s kids, she came running to the house talking about bones sticking out of the gravel bank. I went and looked and called the authorities. The experts dug it out. It had been buried near the creek about two or three feet down. They estimated it had been there ten to twenty years. The leg bones and one arm was gone, and so they couldn’t tell how tall it had been. The experts from the state said it was a female from twelve to twenty years old. They found a couple of scraps of fabric. The trouble was that Izzy had never had any cavities that had to be filled, and she’d broken just one bone in her life, and that was a bone in her leg, and nobody ever found the leg bones. They had washed on down into the Nueces and washed away. The skull was stove in the back kind of like she’d been hit with the flat of a shovel. We sisters all got together and talked it over. Nobody could prove that the remains were Isobelle, and nobody could prove they weren’t. And there was, of course, the note she left Papa. Something like, Please forgive us, we’re in love, we’re running off to get married, wish us happiness. We could understand running off, because every one of the rest of us couldn’t hardly wait to get out of this house and away from him. We talked it over, and it just didn’t seem natural he’d kill her before they even got started. Three of us out of six had met and talked to Larry Joe, and we all liked him. What we decided, there’s a track where you can drive down and park in a grove by the creek, and couples sneak in there. So probably it was somebody else, we said. But we hadn’t heard from her, not once in eighteen years, and we all loved her and she loved us all. And from what you tell me about him…”
She buried her face in her hands. She cried silently, shoulders shaking. Meyer hitched his rocker closer and patted her shoulder. He is a good patter. He isn’t awkward about it. And, like the veterinarian who can quiet jumpy animals with his touch, Meyer has good hands for patting and comforting.
She turned a streaming face toward him. “I think I knew it all along. I think I knew it even before the time it rained so hard.” She hopped up and ran into the house, saying in a smothered voice, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
It was closer to ten. The geese went by again, looking us over with beady suspicion. A kitten crawled over the side of the basket and sprawled mewling on the porch floor. Meyer put it back where it belonged, and the mother cat seemed to smile at him.
The children came racing by all yelling, the dogs in tongue-lolling pursuit. After the sound died, I could hear a meadowlark in the distance, an improbable sweetness.
She came out smiling and embarrassed. “It was a long time ago. I didn’t expect it to break me up like that.”
“We understand,” Meyer said. “Can you tell us anything at all about the man which would help us look for him?”
“Like what kind of thing?”
“His likes, dislikes, skills, habits.”
“Let me think. I saw him like three times, altogether it wouldn’t be an hour. Papa said he was a real good shot with a rifle. I don’t know how Papa found that out. Oh, and he spoke good Mexican. All of us down here in south Texas have some, but he had a lot more than most. I get along, but he went too fast for me. There’s another thing, but I don’t know as it means anything. We’ve always had dogs, and Izzy told me the dogs didn’t like Larry Joe at all. The hair on their backs would stand right up. Izzy said it made him mad the dogs didn’t like him. She said he liked to have everybody like him, everybody and everything.”
She decided to show us the lanterns, and she walked out back to the sheds. We followed. She opened the third one and peered in and beckoned to us. When my eyes were used to the dim light inside the shed, I could see the dozen or so lanterns clumped close together in the corner, standing there like little stone dwarfs in conical hats. They were a murky green-brown, and the vines had grown in through the breaks and splits in the old boards and wound around them, in and out of the oval holes where the light would shine out of them at night.
“That’s all there is left. He certainly sold one hell of a lot of stone lanterns. I didn’t think anybody could sell that many. I thought it was another one of Papa’s crazy ideas. You want a lantern?”
“No thanks,” Meyer said hastily. “Nice of you to offer.”
As she walked us to the car, she said, “If you should find him, could you let us know, me and my sisters? You write me and I’ll tell them. My oldest sister named her youngest Isobelle. She’s thirteen now, and she looks so much like Izzy used to, it breaks my heart to look at her.”
As we went down the long drive I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her back there, hands on her hips, a small plump figure in a wide rural land, encircled by kids and dogs.
“Eagle Pass?” I asked, glancing over at Meyer. He nodded agreement and sat there, arms folded, behind a wall of silence. When I came to a suitable place, I pulled over and looked at the map. Big Wells, Brundage, Crystal City. Maybe a hundred miles. A hundred miles of silence. A hundred years of solitude.
But it was only about thirty miles of silence. “Could you have believed this about him the night the four of us had dinner?”
“It would have taken some convincing.” I replied.
“Yet now you believe he killed Izzy?”
“Of course. And Doris Eagle and Norma and maybe a few we haven’t come across. Or more than a few.”
“Motive?”
“I think my guess would be that he is a hunter. Women are the game he specializes in. He is a loner. A rare kind of loner, a man who seems affable, agreeable, gregarious, fun to have around. That is his act. That is his camouflage suit. That’s the way he comes up on the blind side, downwind, every move calculated. Not every stalk has to end in death, Meyer. Betsy Ann was a practice stalk, no shell in the chamber. He got close enough to reach out and touch the game. The money is important to him only because it gives him the freedom to keep hunting. I have heard the same crap a couple of times from some of my delayed-development macho friends who go out and shoot things they have no intention of eating. ‘My God, Travis, I was in love with that elk. The most beautiful damn thing you ever saw in your life. Stood there in the morning light, never knowing there was a soul within a mile of him. Raised his head and I put the slug just behind the shoulder, blew his brave heart to shreds. I tell you truly, I went up to him and squatted beside him, and I stroked his hide and I had tears in my eyes, he was so noble!’
“I think our buddy Larry Joe/Evan/Jerry must have some of the same bullshit running in his bloodstream. I think that when he mounts one of his victims-to-be, the idea that he is going to one day kill her dead gives him a bigger and better orgasm. In fact, he might be unable to make it unless he knows that’s going to happen to her, at his hand. Murmurings of love on his lips, and murder in his damn black heart.”
“Blackbeard,” he said. “And other men down through history.”
“Jack the Ripper?”
“No. That’s quite a different motivation, I think. He wanted the world to know that murder had been done, that the evil women who sold their bodies had been punished by an agent of the Lord. We know of three possible victims of Larry Joe/Evan/ Jerry spread over eighteen years. In no case was it labeled murder.”