A Violent End at Blake Ranch (6 page)

“He started kindergarten this year. And he loves it. I knew he would. He's a busy guy.”

“Did he and Nonie do okay together?”

She hesitates, a frown puckering her forehead. “Nonie did the best she could, but I could tell Trey got on her nerves. She wasn't used to kids.”

“Skeeter mentioned that he got the impression Nonie thought the family owed her something. He said you might know what that was about.”

She considers the question. “I know what he means. She kind of had an attitude, like she expected us to cater to her.”

“You know why?”

“I figured it was because she'd been institutionalized for so long that she thought we ought to make up for it.”

“Were there any blowups about her expectations?”

“Not really. She could be a little pushy, I guess you'd say, but I thought it would smooth out once she got familiar with us.”

“Did Nonie have any interaction with anybody outside the family since she got back?”

She hesitates. “I'm not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was an incident a couple of nights ago. It was odd. Nonie got agitated at times.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “The doctor may have thought she was all right to be on her own, but she still had some quirks. Anyway, that night she was pacing the floor in the kitchen. I heard her and went downstairs to find out what was going on.”

“What time was this?”

“Maybe nine o'clock. I had just put Trey to bed. Anyway, when I came down she said she had to go see somebody and wondered if she could take the car. I was surprised and told her I didn't know she had a driver's license. Would you believe it turned out she didn't?” She shakes her head and gives a bark of laughter.

“Did she say who she wanted to go see?”

Charlotte looks out over the yard. It's so hot you can almost see the sparse grass burning up right in front of your eyes. “No, she didn't say. I told her I would drive her wherever she needed to go. But she said it was private, that she needed to clear something up with somebody.”

“She didn't say whether it was a man or woman?”

“No. I remember Mamma used to fuss at Nonie for being too bold with men. It made me wonder if she had some relationship with a man before she left here. She was fourteen. It's possible that some older man was . . . well, you know.”

“Did she say anything that might have led you to believe that?”

“No. It was just from what Mamma said.”

Who could Nonie have wanted to talk to? Twenty years is a long time to hold a grudge, so it must have been something pretty significant that happened. Could have had to do with a classmate, a teacher, one of her parents' friends. “Did she ever end up going out?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I wonder if she called whoever it was on the telephone? Did she have a cell phone?”

“I never saw one. Where would she have gotten it anyway? I doubt that they hand them out to their patients at the hospital.”

“Do you know if she might have called on your house phone?”

She looks blank. “I suppose she could have. There are plenty of times she could have used our phone and nobody would have known.”

“And you don't know if she ever went out.”

“No, but it's possible she did. She could have gone out after I went to bed. Maybe somebody picked her up. Maybe that's what happened and she was killed. You could ask Mamma. She doesn't sleep all that soundly, and she could have heard Nonie if she went out.”

“Did anything unusual happen the day before she died? Anything that made you wonder if everything was all right?”

She sighs and pushes her hair back. “I've asked myself that over and over and I don't remember anything. The whole situation of her being here was unusual, so I'm not sure I would have noticed.”

“Do you have a job?”

“No, I have the good fortune not to have to go outside the home to work. Our family has some investments and we do pretty well with them.” Les Moffitt must have done all right by the family.

“And your brother Skeeter doesn't have a job either.”

“No, he flunked out of school last semester. I'm trying to persuade him to do some independent study. He isn't good at applying himself. Nothing I say seems to matter. And Mamma might as well be talking to a brick wall—he doesn't listen to anything she says either.”

“How about your older brother, Billy. Did you ever get a hold of him?”

For the first time, her face brightens. “Billy? I called him as soon as Nonie showed up here. He wasn't thrilled that she was home.”

“Wait. Hold on. You didn't say anything about this earlier when we were talking. You said you were trying to get in touch with him about her death.”

Her faces flushes. “That's right. The thing is, I didn't want Mamma to know I had called him to tell him Nonie was back.”

“Why not?”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but after what happened when we were kids he never had any use for Nonie. I was afraid he might come home unexpectedly and find her here.”

“So you did know where to reach him.”

“I have his cell phone number. Sometimes he doesn't answer right away. Anyway, I called him last night to tell him what happened. It took a while, but I finally located him in Denton. I'm so glad for cell phones. I never used to be able to find him, but now I can usually track him down. He'll be coming home right away. I'll be really glad for him to get here.”

“You two are close?”

“As close as two people can be when they never see each other. Billy is four years older than me, and he was always my hero. You know he's the one who saved me when Nonie . . .” She swallows and brings her hand to her throat. “What I mean is, if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't be here.”

I hear the screen door open. “Are you two almost done talking?” Adelaide says.

“Give us another few minutes,” I say.

The door closes, and Adelaide's footsteps recede.

“Something that I want to check out with you. Skeeter said none of the family ever visited Nonie. Is that true?”

I don't tell her that her mamma had verified it. I want to hear what she has to say. Her lips are pinched into a straight line. “Skeeter talks out of place sometimes. He doesn't know anything about it.”

“So the family did visit?”

“Mamma and Daddy went up there a couple of times early on, but the doctor assigned to Nonie said it agitated her when family came. So they stopped going. I suspect they planned to go back, but you know how things are. You think you're going to do something and suddenly a year has gone by.”

She's right in most instances, but it's hard for me to imagine a parent never going to visit a child in a mental institution. Despite Charlotte's supposed good intentions, if she really wanted her sister to be brought home, it seems like she would have taken it on herself to at least go visit her in the hospital.

“There is one more thing. What's the situation with your son's daddy? He around?”

“No. He's been gone a long time, since right after Trey was born. He headed off to Montana. He said he wanted me to go with him, but I had the feeling he didn't really want me to go. I don't think he really wanted to be a daddy.”

“Ever hear from him?”

She snorts. “If you're hinting around that he might have had something to do with Nonie's death, you're way off base. Last time I heard from him he was living in Bozeman, working on a ranch, and fixing to get married again. I can't in my wildest dreams imagine him coming back here and killing my sister.”

CHAPTER 5

I walk around back to take another look around. Adelaide told me that the ranch is bigger than most of the others and that it extends back several acres behind the house. As far as I can see it's mostly scrub­land dotted with post oak trees. I'm pretty sure they never kept cattle out here. A big area to the right of the barn has been fenced off. At one time it was a vegetable garden. There are still a few scraggly cornstalks, and I can barely make out where there were raised rows of plantings. It's mostly dirt now, so it hasn't been farmed in a long time. It makes me wonder why they bought this place—what they had in mind.

I walk back to the pond where Nonie's body was found. Most people around here call a pond a tank, from when all these small bodies of water used to be for watering cattle. Both Adelaide and John grew up in this area, so where did they get their fancy idea to call it a pond? The word
pond
conjures up an image from a storybook—a shallow pool of water with lily pads and nicely kept-up banks and cute little animals playing in the grass.

This small body of water is surrounded by weeds most of the way around. There's an old stump on the far shore next to a big sycamore tree whose branches hang out several feet over the water. Water moccasins like to lie in shady areas under trees like that one, or even in the low branches. There must not be any in this tank, or they would likely have latched onto Nonie's body. I shudder to think of Skeeter wading out in the muck to tow the body in. Young men can be impulsive.

Weeds have been trampled around the side where Skeeter dragged Nonie out and the ambulance drivers picked up her body. I walk gingerly around the rest of the bank, keeping an eye out for snakes but also for disturbed areas that might indicate a scuffle of some kind. I phoned Odum this morning, and he said he didn't see anything, but it never hurts to double-check.

The graveled driveway leading to the house from the road isn't that long, maybe 250 feet. Nonie could have walked down to the road and met someone. They might have driven off somewhere and gotten into an argument, and she ended up dead. Then whoever it was brought her back here to dump her. If that was the case, they would have needed to drive close up and either carry her or drag her here. There are no footprints to verify that—not surprising, given the drought-ravaged land around the tank. There's barely any indication of all the foot traffic that was here last night.

Still, the most likely scenario is that someone in the family killed her. I can make up a far-fetched idea of a stranger or someone from her past, but more likely she met someone from the family outside in the yard so they could have it out, and whoever it was became enraged and killed her. Does the whole family know who actually did it and they've closed ranks? Is that why I feel that they are hiding something?

And what of the murder weapon? What became of it? I'll have to have somebody look for it. I stare at the pond, thinking it's very likely it ended up in the water. I hate to think of having the pond drained, but it may come to that.

No sooner am I back at headquarters when the coroner's office calls me from Bobtail. There's no question that Nonie Blake's death was a homicide. The blow to her head was hard enough to kill her before she was dumped into the water. “Probably done by a man,” the coroner says. “Takes some strength to hit somebody that hard.”

“What's your time of death estimate?”

“That's a moving target. If she'd been on land, body changes would have occurred fast because it's hot outside, but being in the water slowed things down. From the condition of the body, I think she was put in the water pretty soon after she was killed. Best I can estimate is a couple of hours either side of midnight.”

“That'll do. Can you give me any idea of the size and type of weapon that was used?”

“I can't be exactly sure, but I'd say it was something not too big around—maybe the handle of a tool, like a spade or a hoe. Or maybe a tire iron.”

“Not a rock?”

“Definitely not a rock unless it was an especially smooth, skinny one.”

I ask him to send me a copy of the full report when he sends one out to Texas Ranger headquarters.

Zeke Dibble, Jarrett Creek's other part-time cop, is in the office with me, and when I get off the phone I tell him the coroner's findings. Dibble retired from the Houston Police Department and moved here so he could spend his time fishing. He hadn't been retired long when he realized he couldn't put up with retirement, partly because full-time fishing wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and partly because his wife kept finding household chores for him to do. So he joined our department. He may not have the fire of a young officer, but he makes up for it in experience. He listens to the coroner's assessment and says, “You and I both know, Craddock, that in the right circumstances a woman could hit somebody hard enough to kill them.”

“Yeah, but I was hoping to eliminate half the population,” I say dryly.

The bigger question is, why would anybody want to kill Nonie in the first place? What kind of threat did she represent? And if not to the family, then to whom? How in the world am I going to find out if she actually met someone the night she was killed? And if so, how did she arrange to meet them?