The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

May 28

Pouring down rain, pouring down rain. The Maury is at flood again and little chance to move about with dispatch. This wilderness business sits heavy on me. Today I have the chivaree of Bob Dove as accompaniment, as I was roused last night to attend his pranks at the Star Diner and subsequently had to take him into custody. He is most often an affable and harmless drunk, but something was stuck in his craw last night concerning the jibes of some cadets from the Institute, and he was busting glass and spreading threats like broadcasting so much wheat seed, though today his sole crime is that tuneless caterwauling.

I must plot this campaign anew, as the Irish Creek inmates seem little inclined to step forward for the reward, and Pink’s agent, whom I know of only as Cratis, has turned in a blank book where details of the fugitive’s habits and dens might be concerned. If you believe hearsay, the creature is at once everywhere and none, reeling at a party in Brownsburg and pistol-whipping a barber in Amherst ten minutes later. Pink further reports that Painter has posted in one tawing shop a notice of two dollars reward for the governor’s own noble pelt. If there is comedy in this, it is too rustic for my appetite.

I cannot strike from my mind today the first visit I made to the Pogue homestead last month. Granny Fell had already taken the assailed under her roof, and I expected to find the place empty but instead came up a draw on the morningside of the mountain, then over the ditch which resembles nothing so much as a siege moat, only to find myself facing a sallow girl sprite perched on the slanted porch of the shotgun house and plucking a white chicken in lazy and distracted fashion. The house was shabby with loose chinking, bullet scars, and scorch marks where somebody had done mischief. It was just touching twilight, and though the ash and dogwood, the judas and earliest blackberries were showing bloom, the big rose oaks were limb-empty and clutching at the sky with many claws. The first night noises were tuning up. The rain djinns were resting a spell.

I tied Vester to a shrub and approached the urchin when she leveled at me the most unnatural and lifeless pink eyes and commenced to sing softly in a nonsense jargon. She was clad in a coarse sacking, and her one hand began to snatch at the feathers with vim, tossing them aside almost in rhythm with her crude lullaby. It is Bob Dove’s infernal serenade that puts me in mind of the scene again, and when I made effort to speak to her as one would gentle a jumpy filly, she slung the corpse over her shoulder, sprang up, and dashed through the gap and into the north room, the hen’s red-combed head bouncing on her back as she ran, its dead eye squamous.

When I mounted the scaffold steps and entered, the room was near empty, most likely already plundered by those who knew the place uninhabited. Beside the cookstove a plank table was tossed aside and a rent patch quilt on the floor, the windows glassless but for the front one, the place a general shambles. A few bent speckleware cups and pans about, empty cans and windblown woods-debris, a chipped slop bucket. A whet strop hung nailed to the wall with pellets of scuttling creatures here and there, the whole affair shoddy. Seeing no sign of the child and aware I was soaked to the skin, I paused to surmise the unfolding of the drama — the two victims settling toward dinner, early moon hanging, the alleged felon charging in from the rain with a blade in his hand. Here the two men tangled and fell, there the girl sat shaking. Then the girl grabbed by her garment and thrown, mounted, and trod. I turned aside from it and walked through the open door.