“When did you eat last?”
“I don’t remember. What were you doing up on the hill?”
“Trying to figure out how Surrette came and went with such ease on Albert’s property.”
“If Felicity dies, I’m going to smoke Love Younger. I’m going to smoke his son, too.”
“What else did Younger say?”
“Nothing. He’s an ice cube. Here’s what’s crazy: On the way up to his house, I thought I passed Wyatt Dixon.”
“Why would Dixon be at Younger’s place?”
“Maybe he knows something we don’t. I went to the sheriff’s home and asked why Felicity’s abduction wasn’t on the news. He says he and the feds want to force Surrette to make contact with the media.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“I think it sucks. You know why Love Younger is so relaxed? Surrette is getting rid of a big problem for him. Felicity knows Caspian was behind Angel Deer Heart’s homicide. Surrette is going to wipe the slate clean. I need a drink.”
Before I could answer, I saw a compact car coming up the road. The female driver looked too large for the vehicle. She turned under the arch and came up the driveway, braking at the last moment, almost running over Clete’s foot. She got out of the car, looking around as though not sure where she was. The density of her perfume made me think of magnolia blossoms opening on a hot night in the confines of a courtyard.
“You’re the fat one who gave Wyatt trouble,” she said to Clete.
“How you doin’, Miss Bertha?” I said. “Can I help you?”
“You can. He can’t,” she replied, pointing to Clete.
“Is something going on with Wyatt?” I asked.
“Yes, and I’m very frightened about it. I need to talk with you, Mr. Robicheaux. Does this man have to be here?”
“Yes, he does,” I said.
“I’ll be at the cabin,” Clete said.
“No, stay here,” I said. “Miss Bertha, Clete is on our side. The good guys need to stick together. Did Wyatt go see Love Younger today?”
“How did you know?”
“Clete was out there, too.”
“Wyatt reads lips. Love Younger was telling an ugly story to an ex — county detective, a man who worked with my brother. It was about Wyatt’s mother. Mr. Younger was bragging on seducing a cleaning girl in a motel years ago. Earlier he had asked Wyatt for the name of his mother. Wyatt told her it was Irma Jean. Mr. Younger told the detective that wasn’t the same woman he seduced.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying, Miss Bertha,” I said.
“Mr. Younger said the cleaning girl’s name was Josie, so that meant she wasn’t Wyatt’s mother, and Wyatt couldn’t possibly be his son. What Mr. Younger didn’t know was that Wyatt’s mother was Josie Irma Jean Holliday. She used the name Josie at work, but to her family, she was always Irma Jean.”
“Love Younger is Wyatt’s father?” I said incredulously.
“His mother was working in the motel when Younger’s company was drilling not far from Wyatt’s home.”
“You’re saying Wyatt feels betrayed or rejected?”
“Have you seen his back? That’s what his stepfather did to him. He was punished every day of his life for his mother’s infidelity. Rejected? Where did you get such a stupid word?”
“Can I talk with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know where he’s gone. I thought he might be here.”
“Why here?” I said.
“He respects you.”
“What for?”
“He says you two are alike, that you see things that aren’t there. He also says you have blood on your hands that no one knows about. That isn’t true, is it?”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
Clete leaned against his Caddy and lit a cigarette with his Zippo, the smoke breaking apart in the wind, his green eyes dulled over, locked on mine. He removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and flicked it off his fingertip. I could see his shoulder holster and snub-nosed .38 under his seersucker coat. How many times had he and I operated under a black flag?
“Wyatt left the house with his bowie knife,” she said. “He has that old rifle in his truck, too. I have to find him.”
“If you see him, tell him to keep his mouth shut about the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said.
“I don’t like your tone,” Bertha said.
“Few people do,” Clete replied.
She turned back to me. “You have to help him, Mr. Robicheaux. He’s tortured by what Love Younger has done to his life. He also has uninformed religious attitudes that were taught to him as a child. Wyatt has both too little and too much knowledge about certain things. And he’s confused by the name this killer may have been using.”
“You mean Asa Surrette?” I said.
“Who else would I be talking about? Wyatt did his own investigation into the disappearance of the waitress. He said the killer was using the name of a Roman emperor.”
“As an alias?” I said.
“He was calling himself Reverend Geta Noonen.”
I had heard the name Geta in a historical context, but I couldn’t place it offhand.
“He was the brother of Caracalla,” she said. “He was a cruel man, just like his brother. The two of them gave the Christians a terrible time.”
Clete was staring at me, the connections coming together in his eyes. “This has to be bullshit, Dave. Right? It’s bullshit, and she knows it. I’m not buying into this. These people need to pack their heads in dry ice and ship them somewhere.”
“Mr. Purcel, how would you like a punch in the face?” Bertha Phelps said. “You just take your big rear end down to the cabin and stay there, because you are starting to make me angry.”
“Do you know who Saint Felicity was, Miss Bertha?” I said.
“No,” she replied. “Who was she?”
“She died at the hands of the emperor Geta in a Carthaginian arena.”
“I’m not up to this,” Clete said. He got into his Caddy and backed down the driveway and onto the dirt road, then continued to back up until he was at the vehicle gate on the north pasture, as though eating the road and the entire world’s irrationality with the rear bumper of his car.
A moment later, an electric-blue SUV with smoked windows and dealer’s tags passed by the arch over Albert’s driveway, headed toward the end of the hollow, the sun’s reflection wobbling like a pool of yellow fire on the rear window.
“If something happens to my man, you two are to blame,” Bertha Phelps said. “I may have to take care of this situation myself. Then I’ll be back.”
Asa Surrette parked his newly purchased SUV in front of the house at the end of the hollow, then went inside, his overnight bag on his shoulder. The nostalgia he’d experienced at moving into a home reminiscent of rural Kansas had been replaced by a growing irritability that he couldn’t compartmentalize. Maybe it was the dusty baseboards and the bare lightbulbs and the dirt ingrained in the floors and thread-worn carpets; they were not only realistic reminders of his natal home, they conjured up other images for him as welclass="underline" treeless horizons, winds that blew at forty knots in twenty-below weather, Titan missiles sleeping in their silos under the wheat, the nightly mold-spore report on the local news.
His landlady didn’t help matters. She was Dutch or Swedish and had a loud voice and a North Dakota accent that hurt his ears. Her chirping evangelical rhetoric caused him to flutter his eyelids uncontrollably, not unlike a survivor of an artillery barrage.
He entered the house by way of the back steps, hoping to avoid her. Before he could make it to his bedroom, he heard a toilet flush and her feet pounding up the stairs. “Oh, there you are!” she said.
He stopped in the hallway. “Yes, here is where I am,” he replied.