Blue Lonesome (8 page)

“Nothing to see at Ms. Lonesome’s except ghosts,” he said aloud. “What’s the point?” But he made the turn anyway.
Admit it, Messenger: It was in your mind to do this all along.

The track led him over bumpy ground, around a hillock, then for three-quarters of a mile through a shallow canyon. When it climbed out of the canyon there was rusty barbed-wire fencing on his right. Past another turn, more fencing stretched away on the opposite side; and at the top of a short rise the roadway ended at a closed wood-and-wire gate. He parked and stepped out into a windless hush. Motionless hush, too: It was like being confronted with a desert hologram, everything three-dimensional yet not quite real. Still Life with Ghost Ranch. The stillness was so complete the click of the car door as he shut it had a loud, brittle quality.

The gate was secured with a length of heavy chain and a padlock, both relatively new. A hand-lettered sign on the gate post read: NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT OR ELSE! A hundred yards beyond, in a hollow that ran out into a sage flat, were the ranch buildings: small, squatty house shaded by tamarisk trees, a low-roofed structure with a wire enclosure at one end, a shed not much larger than an outhouse (maybe it
was
an outhouse), and at the edge of the flat, a barn and the remains of a corral, a windmill, and a huge galvanized water tank. The windmill lay broken on its side, collapsed or blown over or pulled down. He couldn’t see the well from up here; it must be behind the house.

The heated air was thick with sage spice and the creosote odor of greasewood; it ignited a burning sensation in his lungs. Breathing shallowly, he climbed over the gate and made his way down the track, his shoes creating little scraping sounds on the hard earth. Halfway down something startled him by jumping out from behind a yucca tree and darting away through the desert scrub. Jackrabbit. He saw it stop, its great ears lifting and falling like semaphores, then run again and vanish.

The ranch yard was littered with tumbleweeds and wind-gathered debris; he crossed it slowly toward the house. Board and batten, with a roof of weathered shingles, a narrow porch across the front, a tangled growth of prickly pear at one end. If it had ever been painted, the last vestiges of the paint had long ago eroded away. All of the glass in the front windows had been broken out. The front door hung lopsidedly inward on one hinge; one of its panels was splintered, as though it had been rammed or kicked in. The entire facing wall was riddled with holes, but it wasn’t until he was within a few yards of the porch that he recognized them as bullet holes. Somebody—more than one somebody—had fired dozens of rounds at the house, handgun or rifle or both. As if trying to kill it.

The bullet holes, the eerie stillness, the lifelessness of the place opened an odd hollow feeling inside him. Sweat ran down into his left eye, smearing his vision; he wiped it away. The sun was like a weight on the top of his bare head, the back of his neck. He wished he’d had the sense to stop at one of the stores in town and buy a hat of some kind. He wasn’t dressed at all right for this country. Stranger in a strange land.

The boards creaked when he stepped onto the porch; the rusted hinges creaked when he pushed the door farther inward so he could pass through. The living room was empty of furniture, the bare-wood floor littered with dust and drifted sand, broken glass, rodent droppings, and dead insects. A quick look into each of the other four rooms told him the house had been completely stripped. All that was left were a few shelves, a broken chemical toilet, and an ancient claw-foot tub in the bathroom. Vandals? John T. Roebuck? Dacy Burgess?

Outside again, he heard the faint, faraway throb of a car engine on the valley road. Except for his footfalls as he walked around to the rear, it was the only sound. White noise that enhanced rather than disturbed the stillness.

The well was a circle of native stone set between two of the trees. A hand-operated pump had been used in place of a windlass; but the pump had been torn loose and battered with something like a sledgehammer until it was a mangled lump of metal. Scattered around it were bits of stone and mortar that had been beaten off the well itself. He moved a few steps closer. A fitted wooden cover still sat in place over the well opening.

His stomach began a faint kicking. The cause was not what had been done to the well but what he’d been told about the murder of Tess Roebuck and its aftermath. Heinous, Hoxie had called it. God, yes. Heinous and inexplicable.

He turned away, went across the rear yard. The low-roofed structure had been a chicken house; dried droppings and feathers lay strewn over the hardpan inside the wire enclosure. He passed the privylike shed. Its door had been pulled off and tossed aside; inside he could see a raised platform, a jut of bolts and tangle of wires. Generator, probably. They’d had electricity, and the power lines that serviced John T. Roebuck’s ranch didn’t extend out this far into the wilderness. The generator had been taken away along with everything else.

He tried to visualize what it had been like living here, in conditions that were only a step or two removed from the primitive. Tried to fit Ms. Lonesome into these surroundings; to envision her happy, laughing, mothering and playing games with a faceless child of eight. He couldn’t manage that either.
She was a stranger, dammit. All you knew was the shell of a woman, a walking piece of clay. She
could
have been a monster and you know it. Good people don’t have a monopoly on loneliness.

He approached the barn. It and what was left of the corral fence were aged-silvered, tumbledown. The barn’s wide double doors sagged open; bullet holes studded them too, just a few, like afterthoughts. Beyond he could see more holes pocking the galvanized surface of the water tank. And the windmill … it looked to have been dragged down with ropes attached to the back of a car or truck; an end-frayed length of hemp trailed from a section of the windmill’s frame. Outrage at the killings. Mindless attacks on inanimate objects that had had nothing to do with the taking of two human lives. Teenagers, maybe. It was somehow worse to think that adults had been responsible.

Messenger paused at the barn’s entrance. Dark inside, a thick gloom that stank of dried manure and rotting leather and Christ knew what else. Better not go in. Snakes … the desert was full of rattlers, and this was just the kind of place where they nested. Nothing to see anyway. Coming here had been a mistake, an exercise in morbid curiosity—

Something smacked into the barn wall, head high, a couple of feet to the right of where he stood.

He swung around that way as sound broke suddenly through the hush, a flat cracking like a distant roll of thunder. But the sky was clear—

Singing buzz, and dust spurted from a spot on the ground near his right shoe. The cracking noise came again, echo-rolling this time. He stiffened, bewildered, just starting to comprehend what was happening.

Another buzz, another spurt of dust even closer, another flat crack. It burst in on him then, full understanding that carried with it an adrenaline surge of fear and astonishment.

Rifle shots.

Somebody’s shooting at me!

T
HE ONLY PLACE
for him to go was into the barn.

He twisted around, got his feet tangled together, stumbled, and went down on all fours, jamming his left knee. His shoulders hunched; he could feel the skin bristling along his back. But there were no more shots as he scrambled inside, to safety around one of the sagging doors.

He flattened himself on bare, lumpy earth near the front wall. He was slick with sweat; he smelled himself along with the sour stink of the barn’s interior. His breathing had a labored, stuttering quality. He opened his mouth wide, made himself take in air in shallow inhalations so he wouldn’t begin to hyperventilate.

His mind was a clutter of disconnected thoughts. One of them: Seventeen years he’d lived in San Francisco, with all its urban threats and terrors, and he’d never once been attacked, mugged, burglarized, or bothered by anyone more dangerous than an aggressive panhandler. Now, all the way out in the Nevada desert, abandoned ranch in the middle of nowhere … somebody with a rifle, for God’s sake, shooting so close to him he’d heard and felt the bullets’ passage. It was as if it were happening to somebody else. As if part of him were standing off and watching some other poor schmuck hugging the floor of a barn. Stage set, scene in a John Wayne or Randolph Scott Western …

An awareness crowded in: Outside, it was quiet again.

With an effort, he forced his thoughts into a semblance of order. He couldn’t just lie there and wait for whoever it was to come in after him. Move—that was the first thing. He put his hands under his chest and pushed up, then over on to one hip. The shadows were thick, clotted in corners and among the rafters, but enough smoky-looking light penetrated through gaps in the walls and roof to let him see how the barn was laid out. Stalls along the far wall, an enclosed feed bin. Hayloft above, with an opening into it but no ladder for access. No windows, no other doors. Trapped here. And nothing he could see to use as a weapon; the barn had been stripped of machinery and tools and anything else it might have once held.

The postshooting stillness remained unbroken.

Several more deep breaths and then he crawled over against the wall, to where a missing piece of board provided an eyehole. His thin imagination, heightened and wild-running, led him to expect more than one armed man. What he saw made him suck in another ragged breath, as much in confusion as in relief. A woman, alone, walking alongside the house toward the barn. Short, wiry, youngish, wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, khaki clothing, scuffed boots. Carrying a rifle waist high, at the ready, with the ease and competence of long familiarity. Nothing else moved anywhere except for watery sun-shimmers.

He remembered the car engine he’d heard. It hadn’t been over on the valley road; the car must have been on the access track by then—her coming here. He watched her walk slowly to within thirty yards of the barn. When she stopped she shifted the rifle slightly and stood in an attitude of listening. Then—

“Hey! You in there! Come on out where I can see you.”

Hard, angry voice. A woman used to giving orders and having them obeyed. He stayed where he was, watching her.

“I’m not gonna shoot you. If I’d wanted that, I’d’ve put the first round into your hide instead of the wall.”

He didn’t move.

“Better get your ass out here if you don’t want any more trouble. It’s too damn hot for a Mexican standoff.”

Still he didn’t move.

“I’ll give you two more minutes. Then I’ll disable your car and go for the sheriff, and by God I’ll press charges against you for sure.”

Now he was convinced. He got shakily to his feet. His respiration and pulse beat had returned to normal; the fear-grip had left him and his mind was clear again. He stood for a moment to compose himself. Then he limped around the door and out into the yard.

“About time,” the woman said.

He shaded his eyes with one hand so he could see her better. “Why’d you shoot at me like that? You scared the hell out of me.”

“That was the idea. Can’t you read, mister?”

“Read?”

“Sign on the gate, big as life. No Trespassing. Keep Out.”

“I saw the sign.”

“But you came down anyway. Where’s your camera?”

“My … what?”

“Camera. Tourist, right? Looking for something real quaint to take pictures of?”

“No.” He reached down to rub his sore knee. “I’m not a tourist.”

“Then what in the hell’re you doing here?”

“I came … I wanted to see this place. Anna Roebuck’s place.”

The woman scowled and advanced a few paces. The muzzle of her rifle remained centered on his chest. She appeared to be in her early thirties, cured by sun and wind to a creased-leather brown; too thin, all bone and sinew. But not unattractive and not dried out. Juices flowed hot in her—that was plain enough. A woman of mood and temper and passion.

“What do you know about Anna Roebuck?”

“Not very much. I didn’t have the chance to know her well.”

“Where’d you meet her? You’re not from around here.”

“San Francisco.”

“When?”

“Not long ago. A few months.”

She stood stiff-backed and flat-footed now. A film of moisture like a pale mustache had grown on her wide upper lip. “What’s your name? Who are you?”

“Jim Messenger. I’m not anybody, just a man who’s interested in Anna and her past.”

“Everybody’s somebody.”

“And you? Who’re you?”

“That any of your business?”

“Are you Dacy Burgess?”

“She sent you here, is that it?”

“Please,” Messenger said. “Are you Anna’s sister?”

“All right, I’m Dacy Burgess. Anna send you or didn’t she?”

“No, no one sent me. She’s … I’m sorry, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but Anna’s dead.”

“… Say that again.”

“Your sister’s dead, Mrs. Burgess. She committed suicide three weeks ago in San Francisco.”

She stared at him without moving. There was no expression on her brown face; no hint of what she was thinking or feeling. All she did was stand there, still and straight, her mouth parted slightly and the film of sweat beginning to break and slide down around its corners from her upper lip.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Burgess, truly sorry. I—”

She turned on her heel, in a kind of jerky about-face, and hurried away from him.

He was startled enough to stand rooted, with more words caught tight in his throat. She didn’t look back; walked faster, until she was almost running as she passed the patch of prickly pear. His motor responses finally sent him in pursuit. He tried to run himself, but his sore knee twinged and threatened to buckle the leg on him; all he could manage was an awkward hobble. By the time he came around to the front of the house she was all the way uphill at the gate.

“Mrs. Burgess, wait. …”

If she heard him, she gave no indication of it. She climbed quickly over the gate, disappeared from his view until he’d hobbled to the top of the rise. Parked fifty yards downhill was an open-sided, canvas-topped Jeep; she was just sliding in under the wheel. The engine roared, hammering echoes across the desert wastes. She reversed into a skidding half-turn that boiled up dust like pallid smoke. He heard the gears grind as she shifted into low, then the Jeep bucked ahead and was gone into an expanding funnel of dust.