Through the cloud of shock and terror that had dulled Mike's senses, he slowly recognized the driver. It was Mr. McBride, Duane's dad. The man was sobbing and leaning on the running board of his pickup.
Mike turned away from the murmuring crowd, walking back toward the house as he bit hard on the fleshy part of his hand below the thumb. He was afraid that if he let up on the pressure he would start to laugh or cry, and he was not sure if he would be able to stop.
THIRTY-FIVE
Saturday the sixteenth of July was as dark a day as there can be in Illinois in midsummer. In Oak Hill, where the streetlights were controlled by photoelectric sensors, the lights went off at five-thirty a.m. and flickered back on at seven-fifteen a.m. The dark clouds seemed to move in above the treetops and hang there. In Elm Haven, the few streetlights were switched on and off by an old electrical timer in the annex next to the bank, and no one thought to turn them back on when the day grew darker rather than lighter.
Mr. Meyers opened his dry goods store on Main Street at precisely nine a.m. and was surprised to find four boys-the Stewart kids, Ken Grumbacher's boy Kevin, and another boy in a sling-waiting to buy squirt guns. Three apiece. The boys deliberated for several minutes, taking care to choose the most reliable guns and the ones with the largest water reservoirs. Mr. Meyers thought it odd . . . but he thought most things in this brave new world of 1960 odd. Things made more sense when he had opened the store baek in the twenties, when trains came through every day and people knew how to behave like civilized human beings.
The boys were gone by nine-thirty, keeping their newly purchased squirt guns in sacks and riding off with not a word of good-bye. Mr. Meyers shouted at them not to park their bikes on the sidewalk, that it was a hazard to pedestrians and against the city ordinances to boot, but the boys were gone, out of sight up Broad Avenue.
Mr. Meyers went back to taking inventory of dusty things on the high old shelves, occasionally looking out across the street and above the park to frown at the dark clouds. When he took his coffee break at the Parkside an hour later, old-timers in the back booth were talking about tornadoes.
Mike was questioned several times on Saturday: by Barney, by the county sheriff, and even by the Highway Patrol, who sent two troopers in a long brown car.
The sixth grader tried to imagine the puzzle that the sheriff and Barney were trying to assemble-Duane McBride and his uncle dying under mysterious circumstances, Mrs. Moon dying of natural causes but her precious cats being slaughtered, the body of the justice of the peace being found charred almost-but not quite-beyond recognition in the grain elevator, his throat cut according to the county coroner, while the body of Congden's friend Karl Van Syke-charred beyond immediate recognition but identified by his front gold tooth-was pulled out of the cab of the scorched Rendering Truck owned by Van Syke and Congden. The body of an unidentified dog was also discovered in the truck.
Town gossips were already piecing together motives for the murder; Congden and Van Syke sharing ill-gained profits from the justice of the peace's various scams, a falling-out between partners in crime, a brutal murder, then an accident with the gasoline that Van Syke had obviously used to douse the elevator before torching it, the fleeing man too frightened to abandon his burning truck for fear of being caught at the scene, the exploding gas tank . . .
By noon on Saturday, the locals had explained everything but the dead dog . . . Van Syke hated dogs, and no one had ever seen him allow one near him, much less in his truck.
Then Mrs. Whittaker at Betty's Beauty Salon on Church Street came up with the obvious deduction-J. P. Congden's large watchdog had disappeared some weeks earlier. Obviously that no-good Karl Van Syke had stolen it, or dognapped it, and the ownership of the dog was part of the dispute that led to the grisly murder.
Elm Haven had not had a real murder for decades. The townsfolk were shocked and delighted-especially delighted now that the obvious culprit behind the slaughter of Mrs. Moon's cats had been found.
How Father Cavanaugh's accidental death figured into this was not quite as certain. Mrs. McCafferty told Mrs. Somerset who called Mrs. Sperling with the information that the priest always had been a bit unstable, making fun of his own vocation, even calling the diocese vehicle on loan from Oak Hill Lincoln-Mercury the "Popemobile," according to Mrs. Mee-han, who helped with all the church functions. Mrs. Maher at the Lutheran Ladies' Auxiliary told Mrs. Meehan at the Methodist Bazaar that Father Cavanaugh had a history of insanity in his family-he was Scotch-Irish and everyone knew what that meant, and it had been common knowledge that the young priest had been transferred from a large diocese in Chicago as punishment for some bizarre act there.
Now everyone knew what the bizarre acts included: being a Peeping Tom, trying to break into people's houses, and probably killing cats as some sort of dark Catholic ritual. Mrs. Whittaker told Mrs. Staffney, who confirmed it with Mrs. Taylor that Catholics used dead cats in certain secret rituals. Mrs. Taylor said that her husband had told her that the young priest's face had been "crushed and peeled," his words, by the sharp grille of Mr. McBride's pickup truck. Mr. Taylor had pronounced Father Cavanaugh as "perhaps the deadest on arrival dead-on-arrival" that he had had the solemn duty to prepare. The archdiocese bishop called early Saturday morning from St. Mary's in Peoria and told Mr. Taylor not to prepare the body for anything except shipment on Monday to Chicago, where the family would claim it. Mr. Taylor agreed, but added cosmetology to his bill at any rate, since "the family can't see him like this . . . it's as if something had exploded outward from his face." Again, Mr. Taylor's words, to quote Mrs. Taylor to Mrs. Whittaker.
One way or the other, however, the people were sure that the mystery had been solved. Mr. Van Syke, whom, it turned out, no one in town had trusted very much, murdering poor old Justice of the Peace Congden over money or a dog. Poor Father Cavanaugh, whom, it turned out, all of the Protestants and not a few of the older Catholics had never considered that stable, had gone out of his mind with a congenital fever and had tried to attack his altar boy Michael O'Rourke before running in front of a truck.
The townspeople clucked and the phone lines hummed-Jenny at the county switchboard hadn't counted so many calls coming out of Elm Haven since the flood in '49-and everyone had a good time solving things while they kept one eye on the dark clouds that continued to build over the cornfields to the south and west.
The sheriff wasn't so easily convinced that things were solved. After lunch he came back for the third interview with Mike since the night before.
"And Father Cavanaugh spoke to your sister?" "Yessir. She told me that Father C. wanted to talk to me . . . that it was important." Mike knew that the tall sheriff had spoken to Peg twice before also.
"Did he tell her what he wanted to speak to you about?" "No, sir. I don't think so. You'll have to ask her." "Mmmm," said the sheriff, looking at a small spiral notebook that made Mike think of Duane's notebooks. "Tell me again what he did talk to you about."
"Well, sir, as I said before, I couldn't really understand him. It was like when a person's talking in a fever. There were words and phrases that seemed to make sense, but it didn't all go together."
"Tell me some of the words, son." Mike chewed his lip. Duane McBride had once told him and Dale that most criminals screw up their lies and alibis because they talk too much, feel too much need to embroider facts. Innocent people, said Duane, are usually a lot less articulate. Mike had had to go home and look up the word "articulate" after that conversation.
"Well, sir," said Mike slowly, "I know he used the word sin several times. He said we'd all sinned and had to be punished. But I had the feeling he wasn't really talking about us ... just people in general."