Unless they’d run off together to join the circus, Timmy and his mother had been abducted, or worse, before the kid could tell him something. So the question before the house was not what Timmy might have known, but what he could have known.
Someone said the sunflower windmill out ahead was the Diamond B. Longarm wasn’t sure he cared if Remington Ramsay didn’t. He went on cutting patterns as they all rode on. He told himself to forget whether Bubblehead had gotten it into that poor murdered gal or not. Timmy couldn’t have been an authority on such matters. He’d never said he saw his oversized playmate doing shit. It didn’t matter whether that poor Mongoloid had meant to kill their Sunday school teacher or, hell, even if the dirty deed had been done by somebody else! Timmy Sears had pointed Bubblehead out. Bubblehead had been arrested for the crime and then lynched. Neither of those cowhands riding in the other way had seen anybody. But what if Bubblehead had been innocent and the real murderer had been afraid Timmy might say something to give him away?
“That would make more than one village idiot,” Longarm muttered to himself. For a killer who got away clean and had them hang another in his place would have to be dumb as all get-out to risk yet another crime.
On the other hand, the prisons were filled to overflowing with old boys who just hadn’t been able to resist going back for yet another raid on that same fool bank, stage line, or whatever. A man who thought your average Sunday school teacher might welcome his advances was doubtless capable of thinking a little kid was on to him.
They swung west across a cattle guard as what sounded like all those bloodhounds after Uncle Tom’s daughter bayed at them for a short spell, then fell silent when somebody shrilled at them in a female voice. Longarm was still considering other patterns as he spied Fox Bancroft and some of her hands lined up on the veranda of her long sprawling sod mansion. It wasn’t too clear how a murderer more cunning than most with a lot to hide fit the few solid facts they had to go on.
To begin with, abducting a small boy and a grown woman off the main shopping street in broad daylight was pushing clever to impossible, and why might a killer that desperate wait so long?
Longarm recalled with some chagrin how he’d given any killer at the crowded coroner’s inquest plenty of advance notice he was aiming to interview the kid. So the killer or killers had had all night to simply knock on the front door of the Sears house and do the whole family in, under cover of darkness, with nobody able to hazard a tight guess as to the time they did it or which way anyone might have come or gone.
He reined in, distracted, as Remington Ramsay was telling Fox Bancroft and her own riders what they were doing out her way.
Fox said, “It pains me to say it. But I can’t blame it on Deacon Knox or his two sidekicks and one play-pretty. I was gracious enough to give them time to pack, and the four of them left this morning on that northbound combination. I asked.”
As Longarm dismounted to tether his bay to the rail out front, he casually asked just when she and her own riders might have left town that morning.
The redhead answered just as casually, “Never left town this morning. Rode home right after you and me parted friendly after our little game of cards. It costs money to stay overnight in town, and my poor daddy never raised no fools to leave this spread to. Spent the night in my own free bed. Had Curly bed down at the livery and make sure those rascals caught that train the way I’d told ‘em to. You remember Curly, don’t you?”
Longarm gravely replied, “I do. You say Curly was in town this morning?”
She nodded and said, “Got home around ten. He’s over to the corrals, doing Porky Shaw’s old chores. Do you want to talk to him? I mean Curly, not Porky, of course.”
Longarm met her mocking gaze and said, “I thought we’d agreed on Porky Shaw. I’ve no call to pester your new boss wrangler if he left town long before my other witness and his mother disappeared. I mean to work north of your spread and the Rocking Seven across the way to circle far and wide, scouting for sign. You know your own range, Miss Fox. I’m open to suggestions as to our best route through the trackless wilderness clear of the township.”
She said, “You’ll find such tracks as anyone left where they had to cross such sandy draws as there are in these parts. Let me rustle up fresh mounts for everybody and we just might catch the sons of bitches!”
But they didn’t. They rode high and they rode low in a wide weary circle of close to twenty miles before they all wound up back in the Red Rooster in Pawnee Junction, convinced that nobody but a really good Pawnee war party could have carried young Timmy and his mother across all that rolling grass, dissected by ribbons of uncrossed sand. It seemed just as obvious no Indian war party had passed through Pawnee Junction in recent memory.
Once Tim Sears Senior had heard about those mysterious strangers arriving in town that morning, he demanded a house-to-house search of the whole town, insisting, “If they never rid out with my woman and my boy, they have to be holding them somewhere here in town!”
Pronto Cross, who’d naturally joined the bunch in the Red Rooster as soon as they rode in, said soothingly, “That ain’t hardly practical, Tim. To begin with, we don’t know those strangers in dark duds have done anything to anybody. I have my own boys out canvassing. They’d been out asking questions since early this morning. Doc Forbes says he can’t issue any search warrants as the county coroner, and old Kiowa Jack says we need the circuit judge, not him or the J.P., if we want to go poking in anywhere we ain’t invited.”
Fox Bancroft sipped some suds sort of daintily and suggested, “What if we were to just spread out and ask polite, from door to door? Wouldn’t we be able to narrow things down a heap betwixt the ones who invite us in for a look around and the ones acting as if they have something to hide?”
There came a murmur of agreement. Longarm could have pointed out that lots of folks had lots of things to hide, from dirty pictures to a just plain messy house. But he never did. For there was some merit to the redhead’s casual approach to law and order. He knew half the innocent smiles around him were masking the secret thoughts of many a Minute Man. It might be interesting to let them all have some slack and see just who might find out what, doing what, and to whom. So he said he had to visit the Western Union and go home for a bite of supper, agreeing to meet up with everybody there at the Red Rooster after sundown.
He was holding out, of course. He did ride over to the Western Union, where he picked up a few answers to his earlier wires, though none told him to arrest anybody.
Then he rode back to the boardinghouse, stabled the pony he’d borrowed from the Diamond B next door, and let little Ellen Brent and the Widow MacUlric fix him up with cold meat and warmed-over soup as they asked him more questions than he had time to answer.
He told them, “I’ve no idea where Mrs. Sears and her boy wound up. Whilst everyone else hunts under the rugs and compost heaps for them, I mean to search for anyone with a good reason to grab them before I could talk to the boy. Could you by any chance let me into your library after hours, Miss Ellen?”
They both knew he had a spare key on him, but the brunette smiled innocently and allowed she’d be proud to go over yonder and open up for him if he needed to read something.
He said, “I do, ma’am. I need to look over your library copy of the county directory. You do have one, don’t you?”
When she allowed they had copies of most everything ever printed in those parts he said, “I was hoping you might. I didn’t ask about the directories others might have around Courthouse Square because I hate to have folks reading over my shoulder when I ain’t sure which side they might be on.”