The German (16 page)

He ate his breakfast slowly and drank only half of his normal cup of coffee. The aching knot in his gut hadn’t let up. Most days it chose to be no more noticeable than a dull throb, but today it burned in his belly like a coal, and Tom felt his breakfast hitting that coal like kerosene.

The waiting ate at him. Sure as the sun rose, another boy was going to turn up. If Harold Ashton had been the only victim, Tom could have taken minor consolation in the idea that a drifter had murdered the boy, but after David Williams, Tom felt certain their killer was here to stay, and if Tom didn’t do his job, the killer would find himself another young man to add to his list. Exactly how long this list was Tom didn’t know. They had found two victims but the murderer’s notes put the number at four. Doc Randolph had suggested these additional victims might not have come from Barnard, but could be remnants of an earlier spree carried out in another city or another country. Tom preferred that idea, though was hesitant to believe it.

He pushed a wedge of bread around on his plate, but instead of eating it he dropped the soggy bit on the remains of his eggs and pushed the plate away. Estella patted his shoulder and he turned to find her worried expression.

“Thank you,” Tom said. “It was very good. S’pose I’m not hungry.”

Estella smiled and retrieved the plate. She carried it to the sink and placed it in the basin. Then she turned to Tom and said, “Sheriff Rabbit?”

“Yes,” he replied, not looking up from the table.

“I am going to my mother’s today after church. May I stay there tonight?”

“Of course, Estella,” he said. Only then did he realize that she was speaking, and the fact that her pronunciation was so good took another moment for Tom to process. When it did, he smiled broadly. “You said that very well.”

“Thank you, Sheriff Rabbit,” Estella said. “My aunt teaches me.”

“It’s nice to hear a woman’s voice around here again,” Tom said.

The phone on the wall above his right shoulder rang. The sound of phone bells had become repugnant to Tom since lately the device had brought him nothing but bad news. He closed his eyes at the second ring and took a deep breath, stomach churning like a volcanic pit.

The call came from Big Lenny Elliot, who lived a few blocks off Kramer Lake on San Jose Street. His eldest boy, Little Lenny, sixteen years old and nearly a twin for his daddy, was nowhere to be found.

~ ~ ~

The Elliot household was in an uproar when Tom arrived. Big Lenny threw the door open and ushered Tom inside the untidy home. Clothes, papers, dishes, toys, and kids were everywhere. Big Lenny had married his wife, Kathy, young, and they hadn’t wasted a moment before starting to bring babies into the world. Thirty-three-years old and the man already had eleven children to feed, and Kathy was good and plump with another one. Little Lenny had been the first, and worry boiled beneath his parents’ skin.

Tom stood in the living room, feeling like he had been dropped in the middle of a particularly unkempt schoolhouse. Small faces surrounded him, looking up at him expectantly. Some smiled. Others looked at him like he was a two-headed calf.

“He went to bed at ten, like always,” Big Lenny said. “Always at ten. I don’t care what’s on the radio.”

“Is there any chance he left the house early for some reason?”

“Naw, sir,” Big Lenny said. “I get up before anyone else. The one thing my boy and me don’t share is rising with the sun. He’ll sleep all day if we let him, but he’s young yet.”

“What about last night?” Tom asked. “Could he have slipped out of the house after you folks went to bed?”

“Why on earth would he have done that? And if he did, where is he now?”

A little girl waddled up to Tom and slapped his knee before the toddler giggled and scurried off to her mother’s skirt. Two boys stopped playing with a toy wooden truck on the sofa and started jabbering questions at Tom nonstop, asking about trains and horses and bank robbers and radio programs. Big Lenny looked at Kathy and said, “Would you settle these children down?”

She gave her husband a wounded look and placed her hands on her belly as if protecting the child within from his voice.

“Why don’t you show me the boy’s room,” Tom said. “Maybe we can have a private talk.”

“You’re the sheriff,” Big Lenny said, turning on his heels and leading Tom to the back of the house. They passed through the kitchen and Big Lenny stopped at the threshold of the mudroom. Tom peered inside and saw a simple cot laid out with a pillow and rough woolen blanket. “Little Lenny couldn’t sleep, sharing a room with his four brothers so he took this space here. Been just fine for him the last year.”

“Did you make the bed this morning?”

“Naw, sir,” Big Lenny said. “Everything’s just the way we found it.”

The pillow looked fluffed and the blanket lay neatly over the cot’s shallow mattress. Things appeared neat, orderly. It didn’t look like Little Lenny had been dragged from his bed. Maybe someone he’d known had come to the door and asked him outside, or the Cowboy might have coerced him at gunpoint, but would the killer have waited for Lenny to make his bed?

“Naw, sir, and I know what you’re trying to do, Sheriff, and I already thought about this every which way. He’s gone and I know someone took him, and I know you have to get out there and find him before he ends up like that Ashton boy or Deke’s son. You got to find him, because it will kill Kathy if anything happens to that boy.”

Tom noted the hitch in Big Lenny’s voice and saw the moisture at the man’s eyes. He nodded his head and crossed the mudroom. A row of dirty children’s boots stood by the door, arranged smallest to largest.

“Are Lenny’s boots gone?”

“I didn’t think to check,” Big Lenny said, leaning into the room. He eyed the row of boots and nodded his head. “They aren’t there.”

“I’m not a complete fool, Sheriff. Of course I called around, but no one seen him, and you know why no one seen him, and you have to find him. I don’t care if you and your men have to search every German house in the city. You best find my boy before he ends up like Harold Ashton and David Williams.”

“Settle down, Lenny,” Tom said. “It looks like his bed was made and he had time to put on his boots. Looks like he left of his own mind, and that’s a good sign. I’ll bet he comes home before the morning is done, but me and my men are going to follow up on this right away, so’s you and Kathy can get back your piece of mind. Now, I want you to write down the names of Lenny’s closest friends and whatever phone numbers you might have for them. He might have said something to them about where he was going.”

“I already told you….”

“Yes, but folks are going to know this is serious business if they’re talking to the sheriff and not the boy’s daddy. Kids’ll cover each other up, but only so much. You get me those names. And I’d appreciate it if you could keep your children out of the backyard until my men have had a chance to look it over.”

Big Lenny nodded distractedly and then backed into the kitchen. There was a sheet of paper by the phone and a pencil lay across it. The man called for his wife and then set to writing. When Kathy appeared with a toddler in her arms, the little girl riding the hump of her mama’s belly, Big Lenny told her to keep the kids corralled until the sheriff said otherwise.

“Please,” Tom added.

“Yes, Sheriff,” Kathy replied sibilantly. She covered her mouth after speaking and dropped her eyes, and then hurried from the kitchen.

“She’ll keep them out of your way,” Big Lenny said, scribbling on the pad. “If she’s good at anything, she’s good at herding this barnyard we got here.”

“I’m sure she’s a fine mother,” Tom said. “My men should be along shortly. I’m going into the backyard. You send them on back when they get here.”

“Yes, sir,” Big Lenny said.

Tom reached for the doorknob, and then stopped himself, fearing his prints might smear those of the killer: if the Cowboy had left any. For all of his rationalization to Big Lenny, Tom didn’t believe a single consoling word of it, though he was glad it sounded sensible in his ears. Another boy was gone. He’d not been able to stop it. Tom walked through the kitchen and back into the messy living room with all of the curious faces and by the time he reached the front door he all but ran, and when he hit the porch he veered left and hurried to the rail. He jumped it smoothly and ran between the houses. The first sob bucked in his chest as he reached the gate to the backyard. By the time he opened the gate and got it closed behind him, his jaws were clenched and his eyes squeezed tight as he fought to keep from bawling like a child.

Ma’s favorite record that summer, at least the one she played the most, was “I’ll Walk Alone.” Whenever she sat down to write a letter to my daddy Dinah Shore’s voice filled the house with bittersweet emotion, crooning to some nameless beau who was presumably stationed overseas. The song always needled at me. Ma looked miserable whenever she played it.

She hadn’t received a letter from Daddy in weeks, so she wrote him twice as many. Rita Marshall showed up just before noon to tell us that Little Lenny Elliot was missing, and my mother collapsed under the news, and I could tell she was considering calling her mother to come watch me again or maybe taking another night off of work, but she didn’t. Instead, she sat me down and asked me to stay in the house and to promise I wouldn’t break curfew, which I did. She looked so tired and scared I had to promise. When she left the house that evening, she carried a letter to my daddy against her purse, stamped and ready for the mailbox.

Bum and I went to the lake to cool off after supper, and we kept the water up to our chins. Late in the afternoon, I noticed a tall man walking up to Mr. Lang’s door. He didn’t look familiar, certainly no one from the neighborhood, and the sight of him reminded me of the other men who had visited my neighbor in the previous months – their arrival after sunset, their visits so brief.

In the twenty-four hours since I’d sat in his living room, with iodine drying in my wounds and Mr. Lang bouncing on his sofa to emphasize his point about Taters, I’d found myself inordinately interested in the man. I thought about him constantly, so bobbing in the lake and keeping up my end of the conversation with Bum, I watched his house, wondering about the stranger he’d just welcomed over his threshold.

When it got dark, Bum and I climbed out of the water and dried off. We dressed, but instead of heading back to the house and keeping my promise to Ma, I dropped down on the grass and just looked at the lake, which had deepened to the shade of a plum’s skin.

“We should get inside,” Bum said.

I knew he was worried about the Cowboy, and I had more than a little fear about the killer myself, but we were close to the house and our neighbors’ houses and they’d hear us if we kicked up a fuss. Plus, we were in the middle of the grassy patch between the road and the lake. It wasn’t like the Cowboy could sneak up on us, and we both knew better than to let a stranger get too close. I explained all of this to Bum, who reacted as I’d expected him to, with a shaking of his head and a soft-spoken line of reasoning, attempting to disassemble my argument point by point.

And then he added, “Plus, we’re breaking curfew and that’s against the law, and if we get caught our folks are going to beat us ’til next Wednesday.”

He had a point, though Ma had only whipped me once since my father had gone to war. Still I wasn’t ready to go back into the stifling, motionless air of the house just yet. A gentle breeze blew from the lake to take the edge off the heat, and the stars twinkled above our heads like an upended city hanging from the heavens. Bum threatened to go inside without me, but he didn’t. After the night I’d called his bluff and gone wandering on my own, he knew better than to test my resolve.

Except for a dim rectangle of light on the lake-facing side Mr. Lang’s house was dark. A shadow played against the curtains – oddly rhythmic in its motion. Curiosity fell over me in a wave, as I stood transfixed by the window.

I hated taking my eyes away from Mr. Lang’s window, but the fear in Bum’s voice sounded authentic. I scanned the shrubs to our left and saw nothing but tufts of black against a blacker background. The shrubs on our right looked little different. Listening intently, I heard the common noises of crickets and somewhere across the lake an owl hooted in the night.

“You’re nuts,” I told him.

“Someone’s here,” he insisted. “Let’s go back inside. Please, Tim.”

My friend could have been pulling my leg and telling a tale to get his way. I knew full well no one could move around brush that thick without making a good amount of noise, and I hadn’t heard a thing, which wasn’t to say the prospect hadn’t shaken me. A low blaze of fear began to burn in my stomach. The fates of Harold, David and most recently Little Lenny Elliot hadn’t faded from my memory, so I had to agree that distancing ourselves from the field was a good idea.