An Absence of Principal (19 page)

Angela tried to determine what her next move in life would be. The revelation of her husband’s ill-thought choices showed a tendency toward self-destruction, though. He had shown no signs of temptation prior to his sudden bad turn. His departure from socially acceptable behavior, Angela felt sure, was sufficient explanation for why she herself had done virtually nothing except sit on the couch and waste the days away in front of mindless television. She would have to go out and get a job before long, she knew, but how she would fund her children’s futures was a mystery, even with a job. That she had let the weeks pile up with no income herself only made her life that much bleaker and her future even more difficult.

She had loved her husband with a passion. And sometimes even now it felt like she still did, despite everything that had happened. She had a sudden and fond memory of the day they met on the campus of Texas Tech, she on her way to an English class that was giving her fits, he on his way across University Blvd. for a burger, his worst vice in those days. He had turned and looked away from what was ahead as he walked at a brisk pace. Angela had come out of nowhere and there was no way he had seen her move into his field of vision. When they collided it was a coming together that would last clearly a lot longer than most accidental mishaps. Ben looked at her as she lay sprawled on the commons grass near a statue of Will Rogers astride a black horse. She was about to lay into him with a zinger that would make him think twice about such carelessness, when he reached down and picked her up off the ground.

“I, um, I, um …” Ben stammered, taken aback by her beauty as much as by being startled at the collision the two had.

“Spit it out,” she said to him.

“I am so sorry, I wasn’t …”

“Watching where you were going? Well it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out,” Angela barked back, her self-confidence never in short supply from the moment they met.

“I’m Ben Doggett. And I’m so sorry.”

“I’m Angela, and you need to be more careful, Mr. Ben Doggett,” she responded.

Ben apologized three more times, picked up her freshman composition spiral and her
Dante’s Inferno
book before stumbling again toward the Burger Shack.

Three days later, following a series of successful inquiries done so well he felt he could be a detective if the education gig didn’t work, Ben stepped onto Angela Worthington’s doorstep at a student housing complex across campus. He came with a lump in his throat, sweat on his palms and dozen yellow roses, items that could not have been more perfect when attempting to make up for laying someone flat on their back in front of ten-thousand other students. Or so it seemed.

It might have been the flowers, or it could have also been the candies, but Angela Worthington fell head over heels in love with Ben Doggett from that day on, a state in which she remained until the unraveling began.

Angela called the kids on her way to Fredericksburg to check in with them. The next morning she rose from a restless night in a cheap hotel bed, halfway to the town that had held such good memories for her. She texted the twins back home and headed for Central Texas. Part of her wanted to find him and get him home. She wanted to tear up the divorce papers and start over. However the other Angela that left that morning wanted to find him and hurt him for what he had done to what they’d had.

In the days since his disappearance, only a handful of people seemed to care where he was. She was one of those few, although she would never admit as much. The anger felt by the twins had not subsided, and they were far from ready to welcome their father home yet. He had been fired from his job as principal for too many reasons to count. His ex-lover Shanna had moved on and found someone else to curl up to. The U.S. attorney’s office had never seriously considered Ben Doggett to be a suspect in the murder of Junior Walker, and as a result, Doggett was not on their radar. The only ones who cared about Ben’s whereabouts were Angela and Velma. And Garrison Trask, of course.

One thing, though, was for sure: If anyone ever really needed to find Ben, there was only one person who felt completely confident as to his whereabouts. Angela Doggett knew precisely where he was.

It was well after midnight when Angela pulled into Fredericksburg, a town that despite its popularity with tourists, boarded itself up every night at nine, except for Ruby’s Café and the local package store, both of which managed to stay open until 10. The slow pace was part of the town’s charm and most people who visited came from the hustle and bustle of the larger cities in Texas.

On the edge of the quaint little town was a bed and breakfast named the Stein Way, a cozy three-bedroom home that specialized in serving a unique German beer, and provided music played on a grand piano by Bill Stein, the proprietor and a Julliard-trained classical pianist.

The bells atop the door sang when Angela walked in. Bill Stein, owner and pianist extraordinaire, up late reading, looked up to find Angela. He remembered her as if he had just seen her yesterday.

“My lands, if it’s not Angela Doggett. What brings you here? Where’s Ben? He come with you?” Stein asked.

The story she would relate to him would put an end to his reading for the night, and Bill Stein listened closely to her every word.

Thirty minutes later, he showed Angela to the only room he had left. She wept quietly as her old friend led her down the hallway to the same room that she and Ben had shared on their first anniversary.

“Tomorrow will be a better day, Angela,” Stein said. “Marge and I, we’ll help you find Ben.”

Angela gave the man a hug which seemed to rejuvenate her as she retired for the evening. It was after two in the morning.

Bill Stein walked back to his room where he found his wife propped up in bed, her bedside light on.

“Was that Angela’s Doggett’s voice?” Marge asked.

He nodded.

“You remember I told you last week I thought I saw a man that looked like Ben in town, only with a beard?”

Marge did.

“I think it was him,” Stein said. “Angela filed for divorce on Ben two months ago. He’s been having an affair with his secretary and apparently had become addicted to online gambling. He’s started drinking and she thinks he may even be involved in drugs.”

“Ben? Our Ben Doggett?”

Stein nodded and looked out the window at the garden in back of the bed and breakfast.

“There’s more,” Stein said. “Ben may be somehow involved in the murder of a drug dealer in Odessa. No one seems to know how yet, but a defense attorney investigator tracked Angela down at Ben’s mother’s house in Tulsa yesterday.”

“Oh my,” Marge said.

“I told Angela we’d help her look for Ben tomorrow,” Stein said.

“Bill, honey, I don’t know if we should get mixed up in this. It concerns me.”

“It concerns me, too, honey, but we have to help. They’re our friends. They need us.”

On the other side of Fredericksburg, Ben Doggett was hunkered down in his hotel where he slept at night between shifts at the gas plant that had given him work as a shift foreman. He’d spent the night throwing back a six-pack of his favorite beer. On the table in front of him was a line of cocaine. He stared at it. Despite his involvement in the drug world to try to recoup some of his gambling losses, he had never actually tried the drug. He was in so deep now he thought one simple high off the coke wouldn’t hurt. How could it after all he’d done? It was the same type of mind game he often played with himself when gambling online.

Ben leaned down and put his nose up to the line of coke.

Five-hundred miles to the west, in the dark desert stretches of West Texas, the black SUV sped down the interstate, its driver pushing 90. Out here, 80 is legal, so an extra 10 mph is hardly enough to wake up a radar. In this part of Texas, there was nothing to run into or catch up with. Even 90 can seem too slow. The man barreled into the dusty, creaky outpost of Van Horn, famous only for being the town nearest to where interstate 10 and 20 split, or come together, depending on which way you are driving.

The man pulled into an all-purpose truck stop. He ran the pump on his SUV. It would take awhile to fill. He walked inside for a taquito and a bottle of water, grabbing some chocolate on his way to the register. While he was gone, his passenger in the back end of the vehicle stirred. She lifted her head to see where she was but saw only the occasional 18-wheeler that pulled out of a bay and back out on to the highway. She had no idea where she was and was too groggy to care. She dropped her head back down, moaning.

The man put the pump handle back and secured the gas cap before he climbed into the front seat, ready to pull away. As he unwrapped his dinner — if a greasy taquito that had been sitting on a hot burner for eight hours could somehow pass for dinner — he heard the woman stir in the back of the SUV and even thought he saw her raise her head. The man grabbed the handkerchief, soaked it in another few drops of liquid and made his way to the back of the car.

“Beautiful night, don’t you think?”

The voice, rich with a West Texas accent, came from somewhere nearby, but the man in the SUV wasn’t sure where. He continued walking to the back of the vehicle, ignoring the stranger’s attempts at pleasantries.

The woman lying in the back was too drugged to move or care what was about to happen next. The man opened the back end, covered her mouth and nose with the handkerchief and kept it there until she was again motionless.

“That ought to keep you for awhile,” he said.

The man closed the door and turned to walk back to the driver’s side door. Standing between him and his driver’s door was a tall man wearing a cowboy hat. And a cleanly pressed and pleated tan uniform.

“Everything all right back there, sir?” the man in the hat said.

“Yes, officer, just adjusting some cargo in the back end. A few things fell over back up the road a ways.”

“That’ll happen if things aren’t tied down tight out here. These long stretches, if you have anything stacked up, they’ll just shift over and fall sooner or later.”

“I should have thought of that,” the man returned the meaningless chit chat to the officer.

“Where you comin’ from?” the DPS officer asked.

“Been driving all night from Tulsa. Have some family up there, but have to get back to work first thing in the morning,” the man said, his nerves on edge.

“Tulsa’s a beautiful place,” the trooper said. “I was born there. Couple of years ago it was named the cleanest town in America, you know that?”

“No, officer, I didn’t,” the man continued, wishing this night was over. Sweat began to appear through the arms of his shirt. The officer looked at his face and noticed a bead of sweat rolling down his face.

“You OK?”

“Excuse me?” the man said.

“You feeling all right? I noticed you look like you might be feeling a little warm. Pretty chilly out here at night. Unusual for someone to sweat like that, all of a sudden like. Thought you might be feeling poorly.”

“Had a stomach bug a couple of days ago,” the man said. “Still feeling a little puny, I guess. Thought I’d shook it, but maybe it’s trying to come back.”

The man was doing a horrible job of lying, it was obvious to anyone who’d been in law enforcement for even half a day. He swallowed hard, hoping to somehow suppress the nervousness he was feeling. As many times as he had been on the opposite side of law abiding, it always made him a little nervous when he had to lie his way through a situation on the spur of the moment. He was a trained killer, a seasoned killer, and had probably gunned down eight or nine people in his narco-terrorist career. Killing didn’t bother him quite so much, but he was a lousy liar. It must have had everything to do with his upbringing; his devoutly religious mother instilling in him the evils of breaking the commandments, of which, by now, he had broken all ten. The man, oddly enough, didn’t consider murder one of the commandments. Not if it was work related. Not that his mother ever had occasion to preach on the evils of murder. Why should she? Such a good boy she raised.

“Mind if I take a look?” the trooper said.