The Night Visitor, page 37
And so Moon dismissed this peculiar feeling of unease.
But when unperturbed by interference from logic and analysis, such deep currents gain in strength. A vortex eventually began to whirl. And bubble. And without the least warning—like an unwatched pot on a low flame—it boiled over.
In an instant, Moon understood what had actually happened on the night Nathan McFain had died. She’d reminded him of what he already knew from her sleepwalking experience years ago. Simple things. Like the fact that her father was a sound sleeper. And she wasn’t. So it would have been Vanessa—not Nathan—who would have been awakened by Horace Flye’s bungled burglary attempt.
And then all the pieces fell neatly into place.
The rancher had not come outside that night to dig up Horace Flye’s corpse. Sometime long after midnight, Nathan had awakened. And realized his daughter was out of the house. Might have figured Vanessa was sleepwalking again. He’d hurried outside to find her. And called her name. But Nathan had not called for Vanessa. Like her Aunt Celeste, her father had called for Vannie. That’s when Danny Bignight had thought the banshee called his name. The Taos Pueblo man had made an understandable error. But my mistakes can’t be excused quite so easily.
“Vanessa… I need to ask you something.”
“About what?”
“About the night Horace Flye disappeared. You told me you woke up. Heard your father arguing with someone downstairs.”
She gave him a wary look.
“Everything you told me—it was a pack of lies.”
She tried to look away, but his gaze was magnetic. She swallowed hard. “That’s not true.”
His voice was a low growl. “You know better.”
“When you questioned me after Daddy’s funeral, I told you the complete truth.” But she wilted under his disarming gaze. “Well… except for one teensy-weensy little thing.”
“Which was …?”
Now she looked at his boots. My, he has big feet. “Well, there was an argument downstairs that night. I only changed one little detail. See, it wasn’t my father who argued with Mr. Flye. Daddy was asleep and snoring like thunder when that awful man broke into our home. And tried to steal the artifact off the mantelpiece. I went downstairs …”
As she proceeded to tell her tale, the lurid scene played slow-motion in Moon’s mind, like a series of old black-and-white film clips running at one-quarter speed. Horace Flye creeps into the McFain home. Vanessa is startled from her half-sleep by an unusual sound. She pulls on a robe and slips downstairs. Surprises Horace Flye in the parlor. The Arkansas man, who has the artifact in his hand, protests that he is not a thief—because the flint blade don’t belong to Mr. McFain. And he ain’t leaving without it. She’d best get out of his way.
Vanessa orders him to put it down.
Flye blusters. He is a man who has fought bears and wildcats and whipped ’em all. He is for damn sure not afeared of no beanpole-skinny woman. With the flint blade gripped in his mitt, he turns his back on Vanessa and heads for the door. In his frantic life, Horace Flye has made many errors. Sometimes a dozen or more in a single day. But showing the back of his head to this particular young woman is his final blunder.
Vanessa, cool as a Quaker farmer at an October hog-killing, lays the man’s skull open with a heavy iron poker. She is gratified when he falls like a sack of ripe turnips. But the troublesome varmint is bleeding on the floor she waxed just hours ago. More than a little vexed and somewhat in a hurry, she wraps him in a rug—it is a nice little piece of yarn from Costa Rica—and drags his limp body outside onto the porch. Thinking it will be inconvenient if another insomniac should pass by and ask what she is doing with this warm corpse wrapped up like a burrito, she decides it would be prudent to stash the body someplace until she can think of something better to do. She drags Flye’s corpse to the pond dam and starts to cover him in the loose clay. The work gives her some time to think. People will wonder what happened to Flye. It’ll have to look like her daddy’s ranch hand got tired of working and left in the middle of the night. Vanessa has him half-buried when she remembers his pickup. And the little camp-trailer. A man with wheels wouldn’t just walk away. It will take no great brain to realize he must still be nearby. Vanessa finds the truck keys in his pocket. After she completes the burial, she hikes up to the RV park and has a look. It’d be too hard to connect the truck to the camper in the pitch darkness and this wouldn’t be a good time to use a flashlight. So Vanessa leaves the trailer behind when she drives Flye’s pickup over to Lake Capote. When the man turns up missing, it’ll look like he drove off and got himself lost or something. But not on the McFain ranch. Being in good shape and having long legs, she walks back to the ranch well before first light. And spends an hour cleaning up the coagulated blood off the parlor floor. It is the very dickens of a job, but she gets it done before Daddy is awake and hollering for his breakfast.
And that was that, except that she has regrets about two things.
First, if she had to do it over, she’d make a better job of it.
Secondly, she didn’t know Flye had a little girl in the trailer. She feels just terrible to have made an orphan of Butter Flye. She weeps bitterly for several minutes.
While she drips saltwater into her handkerchief, Moon is dealing with his own thoughts. Like how maybe he isn’t quite so smart a policeman as he thought he was. Or ought to be.
Vanessa, who had put away her hankie, tugged at his jacket sleeve. “I didn’t mean to kill him, Charlie—you’ve got to believe that.”
“Hmmmf,” he said. Being short of things to say.
“Anyway, no jury would convict me. He was a burglar who broke into our home in the middle of the night. And I’m only a… a defenseless woman.”
In spite of his inner fury—primarily directed at himself— Moon smiled bitterly. Poor old Horace Flye hadn’t had a prayer when he met up with all six feet of this poor defenseless woman. But she was right about one thing. No Colorado jury would put a woman behind the Walls for braining a burglar in her own house. Sure, she’d buried the body. Then had the presence of mind to drive Flye’s truck to Capote Lake. But a C-average defense attorney freshly graduated from Podunk University Mail-Order Law School would need about a minute to convince a jury that she’d done all this in a state of understandable and forgivable panic.
Vanessa took a deep breath. “Charlie, I hope you’re not upset …”
“Why should I be? All you did was tell me a pack of lies.”
She pouted. “That’s an exaggeration… It was only one little fib, Charlie. Whether me or Daddy did it doesn’t matter all that much. Either way,” she added brightly, “it’s really all in the family.”
“On the night your father died, he must’ve come out here looking for you.”
She nodded sadly. “I was terrified that those body-sniffing dogs you’d mentioned would find Mr. Flye’s body. So I slipped out of the house late that night. I had already uncovered one arm… in another five minutes I’d have had the body in my van. I was going to dump it somewhere on Indian land …”
“On behalf of the Southern Ute Nation, I thank you for thinking of us …”
“… when my father came outside to look for me. I ran inside the barn. Daddy stood right here and called for me. Vaaannneee… Vaaannneee …”
Sure. Nathan was the “banshee” Danny Bignight heard calling his name.
She went on, breathless. “I was just terrified that he’d see Mr. Flye’s arm sticking out of the dirt. It was so awful… I just couldn’t bear it. I ran back to the house and… and waited to see what would happen. Daddy was out here awfully long. I thought he must’ve found the body. The suspense was just unbearable. I’d made up my mind to go out to see what he was doing—when you showed up with that woman… Delia Silver. And told me Daddy was dead. I thought he must’ve found Mr. Flye’s body and had a heart attack. And I thought you must surely know about the body. But when I came outside the next morning… the arm was buried again. I realized Daddy must’ve found it and covered it up.”
Moon shook his head glumly. “It was me. I thought your father had dug up the corpse. Which meant he’d put it here. But Nathan was dead by then. So I pushed the dirt over Flye’s arm. To keep you from finding out …” The Ute policeman was beginning to feel outrageously stupid.
Such a sweet man. “Imagine that… You believed my father had killed one of his employees—and you covered up the evidence. All to protect me from a scandal.” Vanessa stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.
It was like rubbing salt in the wound. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.
Her lips made a pretty, though teasing smile. “But it does sort of make you my accomplice.”
It wasn’t funny. He kicked at a heavy stone—scuffing the shiny toe of his brand-new bull-hide boot.
His feelings are hurt, poor dear. Best leave him he for a while. She did.
Finally… “A penny for your thoughts, Charlie.”
“A penny don’t buy much these days.”
“An apple pie, then. Hot from the oven.”
He growled. Like an old bear, she thought.
“You’re very upset with me, aren’t you?”
“One thing I still can’t figure out.”
“What’s that?”
“You must’ve been the one who worked out the deal with Ralph Briggs to sell the flint blade. So why’d you tell me what he was up to?”
“I told you the honest truth about that. After that awful woman brought Daddy the legal papers, he knew he’d have to turn the artifact over to the Silvers. It would have hurt his pride to do that. And he could’ve lost it for good if the Utes won the boundary dispute. So I think Daddy decided to pretend it’d been stolen—and arrange the sale through Mr. Briggs.” She gave Moon an accusing glance. “If the Utes hadn’t started that nasty fight about the land boundaries, Daddy wouldn’t have been put in such a terrible spot.”
The Ute policeman sighed. “What can I say? Us Indians are always causing trouble.”
She pouted. “And shame on you for not trusting me, Charlie Moon!”
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said with exaggerated politeness. “I can’t imagine what I was thinking. It’s not like you’d ever tell me a lie.”
Well. He was still in a snit. She gave him a moment to cool off, then changed the subject. “Why do you think Mr. Flye said the artifact didn’t belong to Daddy?”
He shrugged. It was best she didn’t know that Flye had made the thing. The more people who knew the flint blade was a phony, the harder it would be to keep the secret.
She was giving him a searching look. “You must’ve talked to Ralph Briggs—did you manage to prevent the sale?”
Charlie Moon was suddenly on the defensive. There’d be sure-enough hell to pay if Vanessa McFain ever found out that “Daddy’s artifact” had been sold to a wealthy foreign collector for a bushel of greenbacks—and she didn’t get a red cent of the take. What he needed was a deceptive answer that was not a bald-faced lie. “I talked to Briggs. But he claimed he had no idea where the artifact was. He said he’d never got it from your father.” That had been the antiquarian’s first story—before Scott Parris threatened to get a search warrant and have a bunch of ham-fisted cops turn his antique store upside down. Then he’d prudently decided to make a deal.
Vanessa looked doubtful. “Do you believe him?”
The policeman nodded. “I’m satisfied he doesn’t have it.” Quite true.
She gave him an odd look. “So where is it?”
It was Moon’s turn to swallow hard. “Well… gone for good, I guess.” I hope.
Then maybe it really had been stolen. “I’m sure you did your best.” Poor Charlie. What he needed was an ego boost. “You’re a very clever policeman.”
Sure. Clever enough to get everything upside down and backward.
There was a long silence between them. And much soul-searching.
She touched his hand. “Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ll get over being upset with me… won’t you?”
Knowing that he would—but not caring to admit it—he grunted.
Knowing her man, Vanessa understood this to be “yes.” And felt much better. She looked up at him with enormous, come-hither eyes. It gets terribly lonesome out here when the snows come. The winter nights are awfully long. And cold. “Maybe you could… drop by for a visit. From time to time.”
He was silent as a stone.
She squeezed his arm. “Charlie …?”
“I’ll think about it.”
He thought about it. It was about time he found a woman to settle down with. Vanessa was easy on the eyes. Smart. Resourceful. He’d always liked her. Now that she’d inherited a fine ranch, he liked her a little more. A man could run a hundred head of Hereford stock here. And raise some fine quarterhorses. Not that it was all about the ranch. This young woman needed someone to keep an eye on her. See that she stayed out of trouble.
But there was a but.
Deep down, he’d known for weeks that something was wrong. For weeks, there had been small, sinister indications that he’d chosen to ignore. But during the course of this morning he’d come eyeball-to-eyeball with the dark side of Vanessa’s nature.
THE SUGAR BOWL RESTAURANT, GRANITE CREEK
Charlie Moon—who was to be best man at the wedding—had driven his pickup to Granite Creek to confer with the hopeful groom. Anne was doing all the really important planning, so there was little for them to do but talk about this and that. Like how Moon would keep the ring in his pocket until just the right moment. And how peculiar it would be for Parris to be married again. Jokes about how Anne would make him walk the line. Parris silently wondered whether there was a rental tux in Colorado big enough for the Ute. And… whether it would be needed… whether this marriage is to be.
For the last three nights, he’s awakened in a cold, clammy sweat. After dreaming the same bizarre dream:
The church is filled to overflowing with strangers. There are heaps and mounds of flowers everywhere—all white lilies. He stands before the altar, practicing his lines. I will… Forever. I do. I do. Charlie Moon is at his side, with the gold wedding band in his pocket. And a heavy revolver strapped to his side. The Ute is outfitted in an absurd lime-green tux… and he wears something on his arm.
“Charlie,” he whispers, “you shouldn’t pack a gun in church.”
“It is necessary,” the Ute policeman replies in an ominous monotone.
“But why the black armband?”
Moon crosses himself. “It is customary.”
The priest looks up from his prayer book, toward the rear of the chruch. The organist immediately begins to grind out “Here Comes the Bride.” All dressed in …
Parris turns. Anne is coming up the aisle, on the arm of a solemn-faced, cadaverous man. She is all dressed in… black.
Parris tells himself that his troubled sleep is a symptom of pre-wedding jitters. Yes. Only that and nothing more …
It was mid-afternoon, and quiet in the Sugar Bowl Restaurant. Aside from the two lawmen, there was only an elderly waitress who’d already taken their orders. She was out of earshot, reading a Glamour magazine article entitled “Ten Ways to Drive Men Mad.” Sad to say, she would have to settle for being a mild annoyance.
“Well,” Moon said, “I guess I ought to bring you up to date on the Horace Flye business.” His pardner was up to his armpits in this mess already, and deserved to know the truth.
Scott Parris listened without comment as the Ute summarized the essential facts. How Vanessa McFain had confronted Flye during the late-night break-in of her home, how he wouldn’t give up the flint blade he’d pinched off the mantelpiece. Moon described how she’d cracked the Arkansas man’s skull with the poker, buried his body in the pond dam, then drove his truck over to Capote Lake. And, when Moon had hinted that body-sniffing dogs might be brought to sniff around the McFain ranch, she’d slipped out that night and proceeded to dig up Flye’s body for reburial in a less conspicuous location. Only Vanessa was interrupted by her father, who’d come outside looking for her. Poor old Nathan, he must’ve thought she was sleepwalking again. Vanessa had hightailed it back to the house. What happened to the old man after that was a little fuzzy. But something must’ve spooked Nathan… maybe he saw Flye’s hand sticking out of the dirt. Whatever the cause, he’d taken off in a dead run. And ended up in the excavation tent. Too bad the old man had fallen on the mammoth’s tusk, but accidents do happen.
Parris thought about it. “She can’t risk leaving Flye’s body buried on her property. She’s bound to move the corpse someplace where it won’t be found.”
“I’m sure she already has,” Moon said. And that was best for everyone involved. Like him and his pardner. If Flye’s body turned up, you couldn’t tell what might happen. If push came to shove, folks might start talking. Delia Silver, who already felt terribly guilty about Flye’s disappearance, might reveal the secret about how he planted a fake artifact in the mammoth excavation. If the rich Arab heard about this, he’d want his money back. Probably send someone to collect it from the antiquarian. And Ralph Briggs might decide to tell his tale. About how a couple of sworn officers of the law had helped him sell a fake artifact for a tub of money. And spent ninety percent of the untaxed income on Flye’s orphan. It could get awfully complicated. Yes, it was best for everyone that Vanessa hauled Flye’s remains away. Far away.
“Miss McFain,” Parris said, “is a rather enterprising young woman.” His eyes twinkled. “I kind of thought you and her might… well …”
“I kinda like Vanessa,” the Ute admitted glumly, “but after what I’ve learned about her, I don’t think it’d work out.”
“See what you mean,” Parris said soberly. “Lying and killing aren’t the best traits in a woman.”
