The Night Visitor (48 page)

“It's good for you,” Aunt Celeste said.

Well, that's a sure-enough tip-off.

Vanessa touched his arm in a consoling fashion. “It's made from bran, wheat, and molasses.”

“Caffeine-free,” the older woman added brutally.

He steeled himself. Took a sip. “Real tasty.”
Why me, Lord?

When the bland meal was finished, Aunt Celeste insisted on doing the dishes. Moon and Vanessa took a walk. Across the yard, soft from recently melted snow. Under the bare, outstretched arms of the great cotton woods. Past the horse corral, around the barn. She paused at the half-finished pond. The big yellow Caterpillar, its rusty blade pushed against the pillow of earthen dam, was dozing like a hibernating beast. Vanessa looked across the pasture, toward the excavation tent. Except for frequent checks by Jimson Beugmann, all was quiet now. The Silvers were at home for the holidays. The excavation trenches had been refilled and would not be disturbed until the father-daughter team returned with a crew of graduate students and a substantial National Science Foundation grant. Then there would be visiting professors from a dozen universities. The rental cabins were already reserved from April through the next autumn. Yes, for the foreseeable future, the McFain Dude Ranch would prosper. The ancient Caucasian hunter, already dubbed “McFain Man,” would make her father's name immortal. Daddy would have been so pleased. She brushed away a tear from her eye.

“You know, Charlie, I still wonder if my father's death was really an accident. Maybe somebody pushed him onto that elephant's tusk. Maybe he was …” She couldn't say the terrible word. But she thought it. Murdered.

“I'm sure it was an accident.” Moon put his arm around her thin shoulders.

“I guess you're right.” Vanessa put one boot on the earthen dam. Most of the clay surface was smooth.

But not all of it.

Charlie Moon held his breath. Under this innocent young
woman's boot heel was the remains of a small excavation. It had been made within a few hours after the murderer learned that body-sniffing dogs would be used to find Horace Flye's corpse. Moon had no doubt about what had happened on that night. Vanessa's father had come outside under cover of darkness for a single, guilty purpose. Nathan McFain had intended to remove the corpse he'd buried in the stock pond dam before the trained dogs could find it. But for some reason not to be known on this side of that deep river, the rancher had stopped digging before the task was completed. He had only exposed Horace Flye's left arm… and then he'd run away like a crazy man. Bignight, who'd been startled by all the commotion, had thought he heard the “bant-shee” calling his name. After Charlie Moon had found Nathan's impaled corpse in the tent, he had headed across the pasture… on his way to break the news to Vanessa. At the pond dam, Moon had been hailed to a halt by the exposed arm, an outstretched left hand that was missing a middle finger. The mutilated hand had seemed to be desperately grasping for something. Justice, maybe. But justice—if that's what Nathan's peculiar death really was—had come too late to do Horace Flye any good. The Ute policeman had stood there for several minutes, thinking hard about several weighty matters. Proper legal procedure. His duty as a sworn officer of the law. Right and wrong. But most of all, he had thoughts about the living. About what was good for them.

And what wasn't.

Moon had used a shovel he'd found in the barn to push Flye's outstretched arm back into the earthen grave. Then he'd tamped the soil down. Some dark secrets, like moldering corpses, best lie quietly. If the remains were found, Vanessa would eventually have to face the fact that her father had killed the man. Maybe it was cold-blooded murder. Or maybe Nathan had never meant for Horace Flye to die. With both men dead, it was a legal issue that hardly mattered.

Vanessa moved bits of the loose dirt with the toe of her boot. “I've been so tired lately.”

Moon stiffened. It would be better if this particular corpse
was buried a bit deeper. “What you need is rest. A good night's sleep'll do wonders.”

“Daddy could snore his way through a thunderstorm.” She leaned against Moon. “But I've always been a light sleeper. Lately, I've been laying awake at night. And thinking over everything that's happened the past few weeks. And wondering what I should do.”

Moon managed to tear his gaze away from the scarred earth at their feet. “Well,” he said slowly, “there's always plenty to do around a ranch. Before the ground freezes hard, you oughta get Jimson Beugmann to start up that old Cat's diesel. Tell him to push some more dirt onto this dam.”
Over Horace Flye's grave.
“I'd make it about a yard thicker, maybe two feet higher.” He looked toward a gathering of low clouds rolling in from the west. “We're gonna have lots of snow, once it gets started. And when the spring runoff starts, you'll want to catch all the water you can in your new pond.”

She squeezed his arm. “I could stock it with some rainbows. You might want to stop by and do some fishing.”

Grilled rainbow trout and scrambled eggs made a mighty good breakfast. But Charlie Moon didn't think he'd have any appetite for fish caught from this particular pond. He looked at her upturned face. It was, though strained with worry, a pretty face.

She looked back.

This silent communication was interrupted by a shrill bellow from Aunt Celeste, who was somewhere on the opposite side of the barn.

“Vaannneeee… Vaannneeee… you out here?”

“Excuse me. Charlie.” Vanessa went to meet her elderly aunt at the corner of the barn. They exchanged a few words. The older woman nodded, then headed back to the house. The young woman returned to Moon with an explanation for the interruption. “I have a phone call from one of my mother's relatives in Michigan. Sorry they couldn't get to the funeral, want to know if they can be of any help, and all that. Aunt Celeste will make excuses for me; I'll call them back tonight.”

Moon, who had little interest in her Michigan relatives, nodded absentmindedly. It was such a small matter—but Aunt
Celeste, like Nathan, called her niece “Vannie.” In the depths of the policeman's consciousness, a small disturbance began to trouble the waters. It was nothing more than a whispering eddy on the dark shores… and the succession of waves conveyed no useful intelligence. Such annoyances were best relegated to the deep.

And so Moon dismissed this peculiar feeling of unease.

But when unperturbed by interference from logic and analysis, such deep currents gain in strength. A vortex eventually began to whirl. And bubble. And without the least warning—like an unwatched pot on a low flame—it boiled over.

In an instant, Moon understood what had actually happened on the night Nathan McFain had died. She'd reminded him of what he already knew from her sleepwalking experience years ago. Simple things. Like the fact that her father was a sound sleeper. And she wasn't. So it would have been Vanessa—not Nathan—who would have been awakened by Horace Flye's bungled burglary attempt.

And then all the pieces fell neatly into place.

The rancher had
not
come outside that night to dig up Horace Flye's corpse. Sometime long after midnight, Nathan had awakened. And realized his daughter was out of the house. Might have figured Vanessa was sleepwalking again. He'd hurried outside to find her. And called her name. But Nathan had not called for Vanessa. Like her Aunt Celeste, her father had called for
Vannie.
That's when Danny Bignight had thought the banshee called his name. The Taos Pueblo man had made an understandable error.
But my mistakes can't be excused quite so easily.

“Vanessa… I need to ask you something.”

“About what?”

“About the night Horace Flye disappeared. You told me you woke up. Heard your father arguing with someone downstairs.”

She gave him a wary look.

“Everything you told me—it was a pack of lies.”

She tried to look away, but his gaze was magnetic. She swallowed hard. “That's not true.”

His voice was a low growl. “You know better.”

“When you questioned me after Daddy's funeral, I told you the complete truth.” But she wilted under his disarming gaze. “Well… except for one teensy-weensy little thing.”

“Which was …?”

Now she looked at his boots.
My, he has big feet.
“Well, there
was
an argument downstairs that night. I only changed one little detail. See, it wasn't my father who argued with Mr. Flye. Daddy was asleep and snoring like thunder when that awful man broke into our home. And tried to steal the artifact off the mantelpiece. I went downstairs …”

As she proceeded to tell her tale, the lurid scene played slow-motion in Moon's mind, like a series of old black-and-white film clips running at one-quarter speed. Horace Flye creeps into the McFain home. Vanessa is startled from her half-sleep by an unusual sound. She pulls on a robe and slips downstairs. Surprises Horace Flye in the parlor. The Arkansas man, who has the artifact in his hand, protests that he is not a thief—because the flint blade
don't belong to Mr. McFain.
And he ain't leaving without it. She'd best get out of his way.

Vanessa orders him to put it down.

Flye blusters. He is a man who has fought bears and wildcats and whipped 'em all. He is for damn sure not afeared of no beanpole-skinny woman. With the flint blade gripped in his mitt, he turns his back on Vanessa and heads for the door. In his frantic life, Horace Flye has made many errors. Sometimes a dozen or more in a single day. But showing the back of his head to this particular young woman is his final blunder.

Vanessa, cool as a Quaker farmer at an October hog-killing, lays the man's skull open with a heavy iron poker. She is gratified when he falls like a sack of ripe turnips. But the troublesome varmint is bleeding on the floor she waxed just hours ago. More than a little vexed and somewhat in a hurry, she wraps him in a rug—it is a nice little piece of yarn from Costa Rica—and drags his limp body outside onto the porch. Thinking it will be inconvenient if another insomniac should pass by and ask what she is doing with this warm corpse wrapped up like a burrito, she decides it would be prudent to stash the
body someplace until she can think of something better to do. She drags Flye's corpse to the pond dam and starts to cover him in the loose clay. The work gives her some time to think. People will wonder what happened to Flye. It'll have to look like her daddy's ranch hand got tired of working and left in the middle of the night. Vanessa has him half-buried when she remembers his pickup. And the little camp-trailer. A man with wheels wouldn't just walk away. It will take no great brain to realize he must still be nearby. Vanessa finds the truck keys in his pocket. After she completes the burial, she hikes up to the RV park and has a look. It'd be too hard to connect the truck to the camper in the pitch darkness and this wouldn't be a good time to use a flashlight. So Vanessa leaves the trailer behind when she drives Flye's pickup over to Lake Capote. When the man turns up missing, it'll look like he drove off and got himself lost or something. But not on the McFain ranch. Being in good shape and having long legs, she walks back to the ranch well before first light. And spends an hour cleaning up the coagulated blood off the parlor floor. It is the very dickens of a job, but she gets it done before Daddy is awake and hollering for his breakfast.

And that was that, except that she has regrets about two things.

First, if she had to do it over, she'd make a better job of it.

Secondly, she didn't know Flye had a little girl in the trailer. She feels just terrible to have made an orphan of Butter Flye. She weeps bitterly for several minutes.

While she drips saltwater into her handkerchief, Moon is dealing with his own thoughts. Like how maybe he isn't quite so smart a policeman as he thought he was. Or ought to be.

Vanessa, who had put away her hankie, tugged at his jacket sleeve. “I didn't mean to kill him, Charlie—you've got to believe that.”

“Hmmmf,” he said. Being short of things to say.

“Anyway, no jury would convict me. He was a burglar who broke into our home in the middle of the night. And I'm only a… a defenseless woman.”

In spite of his inner fury—primarily directed at himself—
Moon smiled bitterly. Poor old Horace Flye hadn't had a prayer when he met up with all six feet of this poor defenseless woman. But she was right about one thing. No Colorado jury would put a woman behind the Walls for braining a burglar in her own house. Sure, she'd buried the body. Then had the presence of mind to drive Flye's truck to Capote Lake. But a C-average defense attorney freshly graduated from Podunk University Mail-Order Law School would need about a minute to convince a jury that she'd done all this in a state of understandable and forgivable panic.

Vanessa took a deep breath. “Charlie,
I
hope you're not upset …”

“Why should I be? All you did was tell me a pack of lies.”

She pouted. “That's an exaggeration… It was only one little fib, Charlie. Whether me or Daddy did it doesn't matter all that much. Either way,” she added brightly, “it's really all in the family.”

“On the night your father died, he must've come out here looking for you.”

She nodded sadly. “I was terrified that those body-sniffing dogs you'd mentioned would find Mr. Flye's body. So I slipped out of the house late that night. I had already uncovered one arm… in another five minutes I'd have had the body in my van. I was going to dump it somewhere on Indian land …”

“On behalf of the Southern Ute Nation, I thank you for thinking of us …”

“… when my father came outside to look for me. I ran inside the barn. Daddy stood right here and called for me. Vaaannneee… Vaaannneee …”