Hell With the Lid Blown Off Read online

  “Well, you know Scott. He’ll want to make sure if he can,” I said. “He don’t countenance murder under any circumstance.”

  She guided Teacup over toward me till she was close enough to put her hand on my arm. It was soft and warm and nearly burned a hole in my skin. “Trent, maybe someone did kill Jubal, and that’s a bad thing. It’s a sin. But I wish y’all could just leave it to God, and not go to digging up the sad secrets of all them that Jubal tormented.”

  Now, I knew Ruth Tucker for one of the kindest girls on earth, and it didn’t surprise me one bit that she wouldn’t want innocent folks’ family secrets exposed to public ridicule. But, dang me, I suddenly got it in my head that she was keeping something from me. “Miss Tucker, do you know something about the death of Jubal Beldon that you’re not telling me?”

  If my tone disturbed her, she didn’t show it. “Certainly not. I’m just thinking aloud, Trent. If he tried to get something from me by making up stories, I’m sure he must have done the same to others.”

  “If you know who might have had cause to kill him, Ruth, you need to tell me. We can’t be making judgments about whether he deserved it or not. The law has to judge without prejudice. That’s why they say that justice is blind. If you know who all Beldon threatened, whether for a good reason or not, you’ve got to trust the law to do the right thing. We won’t be spreading tales.”

  She may have been younger than me, but she recognized a pompous ass when she saw one. Fortunately, she forgave me for it. “Oh, I trust you and Scott. I’m just asking you to be careful, and to consider the consequences.”

  I opened my mouth to spout more arrogant claptrap, but she glanced up at me with her turquoise eyes, full of perfect confidence in my honesty and good will, and I suddenly realized that I was going to do whatever she wanted.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure Scott aims to do a little poking around on the quiet before bringing the county sheriff in on it,” I said. “Maybe we can discover who Beldon had dirt on without making a fuss. Nobody needs to know right yet.”

  She didn’t take notice of my collapse. She never doubted that I’d see the rightness of her position. “Well, I can only guess, but I’m sure there’s quite a list.” She pondered what she had just said. “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that there actually is a list written down somewhere.”

  I snorted at the idea. “I doubt if Jubal ever held a pencil in his fist more than to write his name. And even if there was, it’s been blown clean to the Atlantic Ocean by now.”

  “Who might he have taken into his confidence?”

  “Those knucklehead brothers of his, if anybody.”

  She shook her head. “They’re not likely to tell us anything. More likely they’d use any information Jubal gave them to their own advantage. What about their mother?”

  “Heavens! Him and his ma barely spoke two words to one another. Jubal wouldn’t have told Miz Beldon if he was up to no good.”

  “She might know more than you think. In my experience, your mother knows a lot more about you than you wish she did.”

  We both laughed at that, an uncomfortable laugh, since it was so true.

  “Yes, well, in my experience, Ruth, your ma may know all your dark and evil thoughts but she’s the one person you can count on not to betray you with them.”

  Alafair Tucker

  Mr. Eichelberger was in his usual place on the porch, but he had undergone an amazing transformation since Trent had seen him last. No longer catatonic with shock and grief, he greeted the young people and solemnly accepted their condolences before directing them into the house. Ruth found her mother in the parlor with her sewing basket and a pile of children’s clothing that the youngsters had retrieved from the woods. Alafair had washed the clothes by hand in a tub on the back porch and was now mending rips and patching tears in the pieces that weren’t so badly damaged that they couldn’t be salvaged. Grace was at her feet, playing with the puppy, which had also been washed in a tub before being allowed into the scrubbed and disinfected house.

  Alafair and Grace both hugged Ruth until she feared she’d pass out from lack of air, even though it wasn’t as though they hadn’t seen one another for days. Alafair had already been to town several times to monitor the well being of all her town-dwelling children. After hearing that Scott had gone on to the Lukenbach farm, Trent took his leave and continued on his errand. Ruth was directed to the settee and given several ripped shirts to match with patch-sized scraps from the rag basket.

  Alafair told Ruth that Chase Kemp had gone back to Mary’s, intrigued by all the action there. Mary was glad to have him, believe it or not. Mary had her hands full with the injured John Lee, very expectant Phoebe, and the foundling baby, so Chase had become Zeltha’s enthusiastic and surprisingly competent babysitter. Grace, though, was still traumatized enough that she was unwilling to leave her mother’s side unless she was forced.

  “The bedrooms are still too tore up to use,” Alafair said, “so the boys have been sleeping in the old farmhand’s room off the toolshed and the rest of us have been finding whatever spots we can. We’re all still spooked after the twister. Every time the wind picks up, the young’uns all get distrait. It’s been hot, so the girls have been bunking on the porch along with Mr. Eichelberger. All but Grace. She’s been sleeping with me and Daddy.” She nodded toward the big double bed that Ruth had last seen in her parents’ room, now dominating the parlor. “I had your daddy move the bed under the front window so that if the wind shifts, I’ll know it right quick.” She smiled. “I’m a mite distrait myself.”

  Ruth caught her mother up on news from town, including the fact that Wallace had come back to help repair his grandmother’s house. And that, wonder of wonders, he and his friend had joined the Army.

  “I’m glad Wallace is able to say good-bye to his grandmother before he has to go off to Fort Riley,” Alafair said.

  “I’d have thought that Miz Beckie would be so glad to see him one more time, Ma. But she’s hardly spoken two words to him since he came back. She doesn’t want to tell me what is wrong, but Wallace believes that she’s taken a dislike to Mr. Wakefield.”

  “Did he tell you why he thinks so?”

  Ruth shrugged. “He told me that she doesn’t like Randal’s politics, but I wonder if that’s not a stretch. It’s true that Miz Beckie is mighty conservative. Randal may have said he admires Mr. Wilson or some such. But she’s such a lady that I can’t imagine her being so ungracious about it.”

  “Unless it’s Mr. Wakefield who is being ungracious,” Alafair offered.

  Ruth looked skeptical. “You’ve met Mr. Wakefield. He’s the furthest thing from ungracious. More than likely it’s Wallace who is at fault somehow. Whatever it is, I know it hurts her deeply. I hope they make up soon, because she’s going to be heartbroken when he finally has to go for good. I wonder if it might not have been better if he hadn’t come.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt she’ll forgive him. She dotes on that boy even if he is an imp. Is his friend Mr. Wakefield helping fix the house?”

  “No, he’s lying low at the American Hotel until him and Wallace have to leave. They aim to travel together on the train up to Kansas and report for duty at Fort Riley in a couple of weeks. I haven’t seen him at all. I imagine he doesn’t want to inflict himself on Wallace’s grandma and make things worse between them.”

  Alafair rocked in silence for a time, intent on her sewing. She bit off her stitch, reached for a spool of thread, and held it next to the material, critically comparing the colors. Satisfied, she threaded her needle and resumed sewing. “I wonder if Wallace has taken his friend’s side in a manner that his grandmother thought was insolent and disrespectful?”

  Ruth didn’t take her eyes off the rag basket. “Now, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. Wallace loves his friend.”

  The memory of Wallace and Randal sitting together in qui
et harmony on the stump behind the Masonic Hall leaped into Alafair’s mind. She looked up from her stitching. “What did you say, sugar?”

  “I said that Wallace loves his friend Mr. Wakefield.”

  Alafair lowered the frock into her lap. “Loves him? What do you mean, ‘loves him’?”

  “I can feel it in the air between them, Mama, the way they look at each other, like one knows what the other is thinking. Wallace is different with Randal than he is with anybody else. I know love when I see it.”

  “Are you saying you think that they are sodomites, honey?” Alafair blurted out the sentence before she had quite thought about it.

  “What’s that?”

  Alafair felt the heat of her furious embarrassment spread right up to the roots of her hair. She could hardly believe that she had actually uttered the word aloud, and to her daughter, of all people. “Well…well, people who love each other improperly.”

  Ruth lifted her eyebrows and smiled. Alafair realized that Ruth had no idea what she was talking about. “How can two people love each other improperly? There are all kinds of love. I love my friends and family very much. Don’t you have friends you love, Ma?”

  Now it was Alafair’s turn to smile, desperately relieved that her daughter had lived such a sheltered life. “Yes, puddin’, I do. I guess Wallace is lucky to have such a good friend.”

  “Yes, it’ll be much easier on him to go into the Army with a friend to support him.”

  Ruth fell silent again, engrossed in matching patches to holes, but Alafair didn’t lift the sewing from her lap. Ruth’s innocent remark had given her too much to think about.

  Trenton Calder

  I missed Scott, of course. Kurt Lukenbach told me that he had already headed back to Boynton by the time I got there. I should have rushed right back to let Scott know what I found out, but I had told Ruth that I’d ride back into town with her after her visit, so I stayed at the Luckenbachs’ for a spell and helped Gee Dub and Kurt finish working on the corral. After we finished, we went inside to say howdy to Phoebe and John Lee. I was dismayed to see how beat up John Lee was, even though Phoebe told me he looked way better than he had when they pulled him out from under his barn.

  His head was all wrapped up, his eyes were so bloodshot that they didn’t look human, and his jaws were clinched shut. His right leg was splinted with two boards and stuck straight out in front of him. He could hardly move around but to hobble with a crutch somebody had carved for him out of a crooked branch. Considering that they had lost near to everything they owned in the storm, John Lee was in a pretty good mood, though. Cheating death will do that to you.

  The little cousin of theirs that Miz Tucker had brought back with her from Arizona, Chase Kemp, was babysitting Phoebe’s girl Zeltha, which consisted of him hauling her around like a sack of potatoes. She didn’t seem to mind.

  Mary Lukenbach fed us pie, and while we visited I got to bounce the little orphan baby on my knee. The baby was a pretty, white-blond, big eyed girl, surprised to find herself where she was, I reckon, and wondering how on earth she got there.

  It was the middle of summer so daylight lasted long, but by the time I got back to the Tuckers’, the shadows had stretched out. Miz Tucker sat me down at her table and plied me with more pie. Not that I complained any. I told them about what I had discovered at the Rusty Horseshoe.

  “Are you suspecting Hosea, now?” Ruth asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I told her, “but I figure Scott will want to press him further. I’ll tell y’all, I got to thinking about it on the ride back to town, and it could very well be that Jubal died somewhere close to the Rusty Horseshoe.” I pushed my empty plate away and took a pencil stub out of my breast pocket. “Miz Tucker, may I trouble you for a piece of paper?”

  She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, but she brought me one of the young’uns’ composition books. I tore out one of the blank pages and began to sketch out a map. “Now, here’s Boynton, and if I remember right, here is how the roads go out of town and here is where everybody’s farm is situated.” I drew a bunch of X’s next to my lines then sat back and studied my handiwork. It wasn’t pretty but it would do.

  “Y’all get the idea, I hope. Anyway, here’s the path the twister carved out.” I drew a broken line. “It ain’t due northwest but mighty close. The twister set down close enough to the roadhouse to knock it down, then traveled right along this way, across the Morris road, right past y’all’s place here, and through the Day place and on toward the northwest. I don’t know where Gee Dub found Jubal’s body, but it had to be on the storm track between your place and Boynton. Around here, most likely. So if Jubal was heading home from the Rusty Horseshoe that night and met somebody on the footpath between the two, he could have fell off his horse dead and lain there unseen in the tall grass all day. This is close enough to where the tornado set down that it ain’t impossible for him to have got caught up by the wind and carried clear to here.” I tapped the paper with an index finger.

  “That’s nearly three miles, Trent,” Ruth said.

  I shrugged. “That’s nothing. That little baby your sister found is like to have been blown at least that far.”

  999

  Ruth decided she’d better get on back to Miz MacKenzie’s for the night. Her mama wanted her to stay, but she said she’d rather go back than have to find some corner to curl up in at her folks’ battered house. I fetched Teacup for her and we headed out back to Boynton.

  We carried on chattering like a couple of happy jaybirds almost all the way back, and I was feeling like I could take off and fly then and there. Until she asked me a question that I never in my life expected to hear from a gently brought up girl. In fact, I couldn’t believe my ears. So she repeated herself.

  “I said, what exactly is a sodomite, Trent?”

  I don’t need to tell you that I near to fell off my horse. It took me a minute to recover. “Why do you ask?”

  She looked puzzled by my reaction, which meant that I had probably turned red as a beet. The realization made me turn even redder. “Something my ma said. It occurred to me to wonder,” she said. “I always heard of it in the Bible, but I never rightly knew what that meant.”

  “Well, Ruth, you don’t want to know. You oughtn’t be inquiring about such a thing.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know.” She sounded annoyed. “And I don’t appreciate being told what I think.”

  That put me in my place. I swallowed and did my best. “Well, I believe a sodomite is a person who indulges in filthy and perverted behavior.”

  “What does that mean? You mean like torture and murder? Mama said it had to do with improper love, whatever that is.”

  I blinked at her, then turned my head to stare at the road while I considered how to answer without getting my face slapped. “Not so much improper love as unnatural behavior, Ruth. Think of the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “Like when Lot offered his daughters to the crowd so they wouldn’t beat up the angels? Oh, now that is bad. I always thought that was a particularly horrible thing for Lot to do to those innocent girls.”

  Oh, Lordy, this wasn’t going to be easy. “Not exactly. It’s more like when a man uses another man like…” I was desperate to come up with a comparison that didn’t make her faint dead away. My voice went up about an octave. “…like a bull uses a cow.”

  Ruth had grown up on a farm. She didn’t look a bit scandalized at my explanation. I was the one who was like to faint. “You mean a man who loves another man like a wife?” she asked.

  I was relieved that she saw it like that. “That’s a good way to put it.”

  She pondered the implications of this for some time before she said, “That’s not possible, is it?”

  I wasn’t about to educate her on the matter. “I don’t see how they manage it, myself, but I hear some
do.”

  After another moment of puzzling over the problem, she shrugged. “Well, if a fellow never finds the right girl to marry, it’s nice to have somebody to care about, ain’t it?” Her tone was chipper.

  Now that made me laugh. “That’s a good Christian attitude, Ruth.”

  It didn’t occur to me to ask why she was thinking about such a thing. Not right then.

  Alafair Tucker

  After Trent and Ruth left for town Alafair began making cornbread for supper. Blanche and Sophronia decided they would rather be elsewhere and had disappeared long before their mother could put them to work peeling something.

  Alafair was left with her ever-present shadow, Grace, who was sitting at the kitchen table with Trent’s pencil and a fresh scrap of paper from the notebook, industriously drawing a picture.

  “That’s pretty good, cookie,” Alafair said, as she passed by on her way to the oven. “What is it?”

  “It’s Bacon, Mama.” Grace sounded a bit put out that her mother didn’t recognize the dog. “He’s going under the house to get away from the twister.”

  Alafair grimaced. It was going to take the children a long time to get over the trauma of the storm. “He’s a smart pup, sweetie pie. No twister will get him.” She stood behind Grace’s chair for a moment, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and watching the girl draw, when Trent’s hand-drawn map caught her eye, still lying on the table where he had left it.

  Where did Jubal Beldon die? Alafair sat down and pulled the sketch over toward her.

  “Are you going to draw, too?” Grace asked.

  “Mmm-hm,” Alafair murmured absently.

  How far could a twister carry a body? She ran her finger along the broken line that represented the storm track. The tornado had traveled past the Rusty Horseshoe and blown it down. It passed the Beldon farm, but far enough to the east of it not to do much damage. It came near her own house, but not near enough to destroy it. Instead it rolled like a juggernaut directly over John Lee and Phoebe’s little house, then headed northeast, out of her ken.