When Beulah saw Ellard’s car coming at last, a red light revolving on its roof, she got to her feet. As he pulled up to the steps and switched the motor off she noticed through the blurred windshield someone sitting beside him in the front seat. Ellard got out and went around the car to open a rear door. At the same time the man on the passenger side almost tripped onto the sidewalk. It was James Dodson. She knew her fears had been founded. Something had gone wrong, but she couldn’t understand exactly what. Then she saw that Ellard was pulling her boy out of the backseat by the arm and her fingers went to her pouch of bones. She stood there clutching the pouch as Ellard led Amos up the courthouse steps with his hands cuffed behind him. When they reached the top Amos lifted his chin, hatless with his hair wetted sleek. Beulah sucked in a breath. His face was beaten misshapen. His lips mashed against his teeth, his nose bent, his eyebrow gashed, blood caked at his hairline. And yet he seemed unruffled as ever. Ellard was the one who looked shaken. James Dodson shambled up the steps behind them with his skinned fists hanging at his sides like he had taken the beating. When Beulah found the voice to ask Ellard what happened he turned to her and said, “He’s lucky I didn’t blow his head off.”
She didn’t follow them right away into the courthouse. She watched them disappear behind the double doors, afraid to find out what damage she had caused. It took a moment to collect herself and walk in through the entrance hall, past the mahogany staircase and the bulletin boards tacked with old notices, her shoes squeaking on the checkerboard tiles. She stopped and stood in the middle of the confusion with nobody paying attention to her. The constable that had questioned Beulah last night shuffled Amos to a desk in the corner scattered with papers beneath a map of the county. James Dodson sat on a bench against the wall holding his head in his hands, the curve of his back rouged by the stained-glass fanlights above the windows. Ellard walked over to a high counter where uniformed men from other police departments were operating a shortwave radio. Beulah tried to make sense of what he was telling these lawmen about bones in a cave, saying they needed to get somebody down to the Hankins woods to collect the remains. She thought at first he was talking about Gracie, but then one of the others mentioned contacting someone from the college in Knoxville to determine the age of the bones. She stood there for some unknown amount of time. Her eyes found the wall clock but it had run down. The calendar above the file cabinets hadn’t been changed since April either, as if the town had ceased to exist when the dam gates closed. Unable to stay on her blistered feet any longer, Beulah went to the bench and sat beside James. She touched his back through his coat but he didn’t lift his head.
Then she noticed the constable rising from behind the desk in the corner, steering Amos still handcuffed toward the stairwell leading down to the basement. She got up as quick as she could and hurried after them, too old to keep up. They went down two flights of stairs and a hall lined with shelves of moldering volumes labeled CRIMINAL MINUTES, their aged bindings unraveling and strings trailing from their broken spines, on past the door to a vault that held county records she supposed would be thrown away for all they mattered to the power company. At the end of the hall they came to the only cell. It looked hardly wide enough to turn around in, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls, a bunk with a thin woolen blanket folded on top. The constable glared at Beulah as he opened the door. She knew he wasn’t fond of her since she’d refused to talk to him about Amos. After it clanged shut Amos backed up to the bars to have the handcuffs removed. When they were left alone he took a seat on the bunk and turned his beaten face to Beulah. She couldn’t keep from crying. “How come them to hurt you this way?”
“They didn’t give me a reason,” he said.
Beulah fished a handkerchief from her pocket. “What are they so wrought up over?”
Amos blinked at her between the bars. “They found some bones.”
“A child’s bones?”
“Yes.”
“A skeleton?”
He nodded.
“Where at?”
“Same place you found me.”
“How did they know where to look?”
“I showed them.”
Beulah mopped at her eyes. “How did you know where to look, then?”
Amos winced as he leaned against the cinder-block wall. “It’s been in there ten years or longer. Every time I get back a few more bones are carried off. But I’ve left it alone.”
“How do you reckon it got in there?”
“I would say the floods washed it in. Or the child crawled in, like I did.”
After a silence it struck her. “The little Deering boy. He’s the only one never found.”
“I guess he’s found now.”
Beulah stared down at the handkerchief crumpled in her hand, unable to look anymore at Amos’s swelling face, his bloody eye socket. “That still don’t tell me why James hurt you.”
There was a drawn-out pause. Beulah could hear rumbling voices and a flurry of movement upstairs. “He might have thought it was his daughter,” Amos said.
Beulah looked up. “Why would he think that?”
Amos touched his split eyebrow and studied his fingers without answering.
“You told him you found Gracie in that cave?”
“No,” he said. “That’s what he believed.”
Beulah felt light-headed. “Why would you do him that way?”
“I was just giving him what he wanted.”
“What in the devil does that mean?”
“He wanted to see a dead child and I showed him one.”
“That’s crazy talk. He didn’t want no such thing.”
“He wanted it over one way or another. If it was me, I wouldn’t have given up.”
“Lord, Amos. What have you done this time?”
He tried to smile. “Ellard was going to arrest me anyway.”
Beulah sighed. “You’re fixing to get yourself killed, son. You’ve nearly done it already.”
“Leave it alone,” he said, and she heard the pain in his voice.
She moved to the bars of the cell, wrapped her knotty fingers around them with the handkerchief balled in her palm. “They ought to let me clean you up. Where’s that constable?”
Amos closed his eye. “He won’t let you in here.”
“He will, too,” she said.
Amos rested against the wall and she loitered a moment more watching him. It felt like she was seeing his true face for the first time under that veil of bruises. It was something she’d needed to see before she died. She turned away from the cell with purpose, replacing the handkerchief in her pocket. She went down the hall the same way they’d come. She had started up the stairs when an echoing bang resounded down the stairwell. She paused. It sounded like the courthouse doors thrown open. Her first incoherent thought was that the wind had blown them in. Then she heard raised voices, one of them a woman’s. There was a pounding of feet overhead. Something toppled and crashed. As Beulah stood with her eyes fixed on the carpet rising out of sight around the bend leading to another flight of stairs, there was a second blast that could only have come from a gun. Annie Clyde had finally done it. Somebody was lying dead up there. Beulah should have rushed upstairs to see if she could help, but she didn’t want to know who it was. Ellard or James or some out-of-county lawman. Listening harder, she heard frantic scuffling. She looked over her shoulder toward Amos’s cell. “Don’t go up there,” he called down the hall.