A Fragment Too Far Page 6

  Mary Austin had been a willowy blond. So was Angie. Mary Austin liked to pull her long hair back in a ponytail. So did Angie. Mary Austin favored pinning it toward the back, higher than you might expect. Angie did that too. I don’t think these likenesses and some of the others had anything to do with my attraction to her. But who knew?

  I’d never mentioned it to her, and I didn’t plan to. It wouldn’t at all be in keeping with my resolve to let the past be the past.

  I was halfway up the front walk when she flung the front door open, took a few quick steps down the sidewalk, and stopped to eyeball the street in both directions.

  She blocked my advance. Scowled up at me. And reached for the Mexican food bag. But she was wearing her gun. “Explanation, please, Marshal Dillon.”

  I grasped her left bicep — it felt only a tad less firm than a baseball — and decided to forgo any levity. “I think I was followed home.”

  “By what?”

  “A new Ford F-350 pickup.”

  “So where’d they go?”

  “Disappeared. Somewhere here in the subdivision.”

  I could see her attitude building. “Six thousand pounds of steel and rubber? In this itty, bitty place. Like Poof the Magic Dragon?”

  “I believe it was Puff the Magic Dragon, not Poof.”

  “With the best law enforcement tracker since Cochise hot on its tail?”

  “Cochise was an Indigenous chief, not law enforcement.”

  She gave me an exaggerated pout. “Well, thank goodness, the great Wells Fargo delivery man didn’t lose the enchiladas.”

  “I need to give you the full story.”

  “Please do! Unless you think we need to turn the sofa over and get behind it with our rifles first.”

  After two years, I was getting much better at reading Angie’s moods and real intentions. She only fired both barrels of her sarcasm when she was uncertain, tired, or hungry. I sensed at the moment it was all three.

  “You had anything to eat since breakfast?”

  “Energy bar.”

  “When was that?”

  “Early afternoon, I think. The gangbangers in Brownwood were down for their naps.”

  I suspected that the energy-bar story was a fabrication or a half-truth.

  She might have never had an energy bar. Or she might have opened one, then had to toss it in the gutter because a raid was starting. Or she might have eaten part of it, grimaced at the blah taste and offered the rest of it to a stray dog.

  She was famished.

  She had set the table. Or rather, spread dinner utensils on my bar counter. I could see a pitcher of fresh tea on the cabinet. I reached for two mason jars and began filling them one at a time from my refrigerator ice maker.

  Angie moved the enchiladas to a baking dish and put it in the microwave. I was already wishing that I’d picked up sopapillas and flan too. I sensed a long evening of heart-searching introspection ahead, and yummy Mexican desserts would have gotten us off to a nice start.

  I had my hand on the oven door when the microwave timer went off. Cochise couldn’t have nocked an arrow any faster. I served up enchiladas. And counted two hmm-mms, several ahs, and any number of smacking sounds before either of us said another word.

  Then it was Angie who wanted the conn. Three green-chili chicken enchiladas had done wonders for her constitution, mental and physical. “I heard on NPR about your tenth body.”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “At least you know who to return the shoes to.”

  “Just wish I knew who to return the body to.”

  “Oh, that’s going to happen. What we have to hope is that we don’t keep finding them.”

  “You heard that the professor has gone missing?”

  Angie’s eyes got wide, and her mouth flew open. She hadn’t heard.

  I told her what I knew.

  She listened like I was supplying details on how we were going to kill Caesar. “Your town . . . isn’t . . .” She didn’t finish her thought, but then, she didn’t need to. I was sure she was about to point out that my town was starting to look like it was something other than what it had always pretended to be: an open, welcoming kind of place, especially to newcomers.

  But analyzing my community’s psyche could wait. I had ten suspicious deaths to solve and a demented missing nursing home occupant with a shady past to find. And a young FBI special agent’s crackerjack mind available, maybe for the entire evening.

  I tried to dab enchilada sauce off her chin. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist —”

  “You think, Sheriff Luke?”

  She dodged my hand so she could look me in the eye.

  “His house. Mystery number one. His dead house guests. Mystery number two. A bomb threat that empties his current place of residence. Mystery number three. The man himself goes missing. Mystery number four. Weird stories about the gentleman from your own father, a former sheriff. Mystery number five.” She shook her head so hard her ponytail flew over her shoulder. “No, sir-ee, Mister Sheriff. A very good time for you to be a conspiracy theorist is my guess. I think your sanctimonious little town is losing control of its secrets.”

  I had a thought about all that. “I keep wondering —”

  “Do you think your father knew what this is all about? Or even your grandfather?”

  It was a habit she had.

  At first, I’d been as annoyed as most people at her interruptions. Then I’d realized how much her mind thrived on possibilities. Watched for them, hunted them down, prioritized them, interpreted them, pieced them together. Her gifts had enabled her to write a prize-winning master’s thesis at the University of Iowa analyzing Mark Twain’s racist instincts.

  It was possible that my father and grandfather had known what it was about. Only McWhorters had worn the sheriff’s star in Abbot County in the past fifty-two years. But I sensed what she was asking was if my family could have been part of the ugliness that was surfacing. Maybe even one of the causes of it.

  I didn’t know and told her that. “Both my father and grandfather were true meat-and-potatoes Texans. Steady as rocks. If you needed it, they would give you the shirt off their backs. But they were also cowboys at heart. They didn’t talk about a lot of things. At least to me.”

  “And now they’re gone.”

  “A lot of people in Flagler are gone. Or will be going soon. I’m getting a hunch that this might be close to the heart of the matter. The truth is trying to get out —”

  She finished the sentence for me. “— while there’s still someone around who knows where the truth is buried.”

  * * *

  Angie decided to stay the night. That was happening more and more.

  Since Christmas, we’d both kept clothes and toiletries at the other’s place. Our nocturnal discussions were becoming more intimate and confessional. Sometimes, we’d talk deep into the night. And cuddle. Love-making was rarer than I think either of us would have liked. But we were often too exhausted for such exertions.

  I’d already begun to look at rings.

  Angie fell asleep before she could cover herself with the sheet. I did it for her. Then lay awake for long minutes thinking about the pickup that had followed me into my subdivision. About the ten slayings that had happened in my county this week. About the mysterious and now-missing Professor Huntgardner. About the past and the cruel hand of fate.

  It had robbed me of my future once. I’d go fighting into that dark night before I’d let it do so again.

  I got out of bed. Went to the kitchen. Turned on the light. And had a sudden thought. An urge, really.

  I walked outside to where our cars were parked. Got down on my hands and knees beside each of them. And did my best to see if I could spot anything amiss. I couldn’t.

  Back in the kitchen, I found Angie’s car keys whe
re she’d laid them on the counter.

  I hid them on the top shelf of my cabinet. Then I located the pad I usually compiled grocery lists on. And wrote Angie a note. It was unlikely she would wake up before me, but I didn’t want to take chances.

  “I have your car keys. Don’t leave the house without me. We may have a problem. Love, Luke.”

  I’d been thinking about the pickup. About its dual rear wheels. About my chief deputy’s comment about dually tracks at the crime scene. About why a killer would go to the trouble of shadowing me as I left the office and following me for miles, only to disappear a few blocks from my home.

  I intended to awaken early. The first thing I was going to do was call the sergeant in charge of our bomb squad and ask him to send someone to search both vehicles. I could have done it right then, but I wasn’t sure if my fears about a bomber were an overreaction. We didn’t need any more unwarranted excitement around the department. Especially in the middle of the night. We had enough as it was.

  But at the first crack of dawn, I made the call. I couldn’t think of anything that would plunge Abbot County even deeper into despair and confusion than a bomb planted on its sheriff’s car.

  Especially if it went off.

  Chapter 17

  My sergeant, Haskell Haines, responded himself, along with another member of the bomb squad. They pulled up to the curb in their menacing white-over-black truck. The vehicle looked big enough to be a local-haul moving van.

  My deputies’ lack of urgency reminded me of the mail carrier’s. They’d stayed in the cab long enough to have ordered a pizza and gotten it delivered. I didn’t think that’s what they were doing. They mostly just sat there talking and pointing at the two cars in my driveway again and again. And consulting their laptop like they’d forgotten instructions on how to breathe.

  Angie was up and dressed now, and we were both standing across the street from my house on a neighbor’s lawn. Watching. Waiting. Wondering. It was all we could do since neither of us had our mobile phones or radios. At least my deputies had waved at us. Once.

  By and by, Sergeant Haines stepped out the cab and walked over. He said good morning and informed us that a patrol car was coming to transport us to our offices. He didn’t want us to return to my house until there was an all-clear. My neighbors for two blocks around were going to be ordered to leave too.

  He saw the impatience on my face. “You never hurry a bomb, Sheriff. And unfortunately, our Labradors only sniff out drugs. Deputy Ainsworth and I are going to put on our bomb suits and see if Andy can spot anything.”

  Our bomb squad hadn’t been accredited very long, and it hadn’t been called out that often. I’d never been with them on an assignment and wasn’t all that familiar with their activities. Or their argot.

  “Andy?”

  “The most expensive gadget in your department, Sheriff. Andy is our robot.”

  “Why ‘Andy’?”

  “The manufacturer calls it the ANDROS F6A. It’s the gold standard creepy-crawly for finding bombs. Even has a periscope.”

  * * *

  I didn’t get to see Andy find the bomb because Angie, the neighbors, and I were long gone. But Sergeant Haines said it was in plain view, taped to my gas tank. From the office, I radioed him for details.

  “Nothing fancy. Four sticks of TNT and a tilt fuse. Didn’t even have a timer. They were counting on it going off the first time you hit a bump. Probably when you went over the street gutter backing out.”

  “And if it had?”

  “Well, we’d be needing a new sheriff, most likely. And other people could have been killed. Lots more injured too. If it had detonated, say, downtown.”

  “Can you find who made it?”

  “Maybe. It helps that it didn’t go off. We’re going to ask Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to get involved. And the FBI.”

  That reminded me that I needed to talk to the FBI myself. Angie answered on the first ring. “Special Agent Angie Steele of the HTBA bureau speaking.”

  I decided to play along. Serious talk at this point might be treacherous anyway, given the arrogant way I’d handled this situation from the first. “Excuse me, I think I have the wrong number.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Boyfriends who forecast car bombs can use this number at any time.”

  So she’d moved past her pique at awakening to learn that her car keys had been hidden behind my mother’s crystal dinnerware.

  “And HTBA?”

  “It stands for ‘Happy To Be Alive.’ And you are forgiven for spending all night thinking about car bombs instead of the beautiful creature sharing your bed.”

  We seemed to have abandoned the rule that the personal go unreferenced when someone else in the office might be listening.

  I asked her where she thought I should focus my attention. I thought she’d use the question to joke around a bit more. But the time for joking was over. “I’ve been reading about Professor Huntgardner on the web. Very interesting. You knew he was a physicist, right?”

  “Yes, I’ve never forgiven him. He gave me the only F I ever got in a class, college or otherwise.”

  “Then you know he started the physics department at Hills-U?”

  “Seems like I did. Or maybe I just assumed it. I remember he lived and breathed the stuff.”

  “Then you probably heard him talk about how his passion for exploring and mastering — what did he call it? — ‘the second Scripture.’ That was his name, you know, for the physical universe.”

  “I do remember that, now that you mention it.”

  “And how his inspiration was triggered by the first atomic bomb blast in New Mexico?”

  I paused for a minute, thinking. “The only time I can recall hearing the Trinity thing mentioned at Hills-U was by my history professor.”

  “Professor Huntgardner was just a teenager that morning. Said he saw the light from the blast just over the mountains. Said it profoundly changed his life.”

  I waited a few more seconds before I spoke again. My thoughts had gone elsewhere.

  But Angie didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she didn’t wait for me to speak. “I find it odd that July 16, 1945, keeps popping up. I think that’s where you should start.” She segued again from the serious to the breezy. “Maybe you’ll get a better grade in physics this time.”

  I could hear her smile over the phone line.

  Chapter 18

  It wasn’t the Wikipedia article about Thaddeus Huntgardner itself that I found compelling. It was one of the footnotes to the article. And not anything that the footnote said, but what I found on a website referenced by the footnote. Two more clicks and I was reading from a media release dated June 1972. The University of the Hills had issued the release to dramatize the announcement of its new physics department:

  31 miles north/northwest

  of Roswell, New Mexico,

  shortly before 5:30 a.m.

  July 16, 1945

  Thaddeus “Thad” Huntgardner took small steps in the darkness of his parents’ kitchen. Not quite tiptoes, but almost.

  Sometimes, he didn’t move at all. Not until he felt something familiar. A chair, a drawer handle.

  He could have flipped on a light switch, but that would have dispelled the mood.

  He unhooked the screen door and eased into the pitch-blackness of the backyard. He peered off to his left, to the east, but there was nothing on the horizon. Not yet.

  He loved the waning moments of the nighttime like no other. It was why most mornings he arose at his house before anyone else and pondered life and things as he waited for the first appearance of dawn.

  But at the very moment when history laid down one of its most eradicable markers, sixteen-year-old Thad Huntgardner was gazing to the west, not the east.

  That’s how he witnessed the light from the first sunrise that morning
— the one that came from a godforsaken valley in a remote corner of a desolate Army Air Forces bombing range called White Sands. From a desert patch along a route the conquistadors had called the Jornada del Muerto: “Journey of the Dead Man.”

  At 5:30:45 a.m., the predawn sky flashed a brilliant yellow. Witnesses in every state and nation bordering New Mexico saw it. It was hotter than ten thousand suns and brighter than a dozen of the Earth’s own warming star.

  Thad was more than a hundred miles away, so he was not endangered by the blast or the heat. But at that instant, he realized he had been jolted across a threshold.

  That’s how it felt: like a lightning bolt.

  In two years, he would leave for college, and until that moment he hadn’t given much thought to what might give focus to his studies.

  Now, he knew. He could feel it. He wanted to study what the universe was capable of. The kind of forces that had turned the predawn skies into a light brighter than day — he could surrender his curiosity and future to that.

  And he has.

  I had no idea what this had to do with ten suspicious deaths, a missing dementia patient, the Roswell note left in my living room, and the duct-taping of a bomb to the gas tank of my car.

  But I sensed that I needed to know a lot more about the professor.

  Chapter 19

  They told me at the county garage why they’d kept my car so long. They had to take some of it apart.

  Dismantle the inside of the door on the driver’s side. Pressure-wash everything that could survive a wetting. Scrub it all down with liquid industrial cleaner. Do another rinse. Blow it dry. Then reassemble it. Some components couldn’t survive being drenched. These had to be replaced. The motor for the power window, for example.

  As I drove away, I noticed that some thoughtful soul had placed an air freshener on the dashboard.

  Savoring the smell, I thought of Robert Herrick’s poem. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may . . .” I got straight A’s in English, Professor Huntgardner! The interior of my car smelled like rosebuds.