Lone Creek

52

I hadn't used my journalism training to speak of in almost a decade, and Hannah had to spend a couple of minutes showing me around her computer. But things came back fast, and the task wasn't complicated.

A quick search for Laurie Balcomb gave me her maiden name, Lennox, and the location of her family's estate in Virginia. There were plenty of news archives available-it looked like genealogies were a big thing in that part of the country. I went to the nearest newspaper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress. It mentioned her a few times as a debutante and equestrienne.

And then as an arsonist.

The few brief items on the stable fire she'd told me about matched her account pretty well-except that by all indications, she had, in fact, set it. There was no suggestion of a delayed attempt at blackmail. She'd been caught red-handed, with the eyewitness reporting her to firefighters as soon as they arrived on the scene.

The story disappeared from the news, as such stories usually did. I doubted that she'd gone to jail or even to trial. An influential family in a place like that would most likely be able to settle the matter quietly. Or maybe Wesley Balcomb really had played a role somewhat like she'd claimed-scared the eyewitness into backing off, or even silenced her for good. I couldn't find any more mention of her in the Daily Progress. If she had, in fact, been killed, it was possible that her body had been discovered in a different area, and the two events were never connected.

The one thing I was sure of was that the scars on Laurie's breasts were real. She might have lied about how they'd been caused, although I was quite sure that her terror of John Doe was real, too.

As to what would happen to her now-whether her husband really would have her murdered-that was out of my hands.

It was time for me to finally decide what was going to happen with me.

I sat in Hannah's office a few minutes longer, weighing the factors once more. As near as I could tell, I had three options. The first, keeping on running, didn't look any better than it did to start with. The second, turning myself in, looked more disastrous than ever. Things had gotten so much more complicated that I'd trip all over myself if I tried to spin a tailored story. My only course would be to stonewall completely, but that was practically an admission of guilt, and would leave me helpless to defend myself against a case built against me.

Both choices carried the added problem that Laurie might decide that the best way to save herself would be to cooperate with authorities. If they leaned on her hard enough, she might let it slip that I'd set out to kill Balcomb, adding another major felony to my list. She might also drag Madbird in, and now we weren't talking just about abetting a fugitive. Conning Balcomb out of that money and working outside the law would have both those parties furious. No doubt Madbird would be charged with felonies there, too. Especially with him being an Indian, he'd land in Deer Lodge along with me for sure.

My third option was a final hike in the woods with my old man's pistol-with a stop at Balcomb's first to carry out last night's aborted mission. I could leave a written confession-admitting that I'd killed him and Kirk and giving the location of Kirk's body-but leaving out everything else. The cops would run a routine investigation, but there'd be no point in pushing it, and nobody involved had anything to gain by talking, including Laurie-with her husband dead, she'd have gotten what she wanted. I'd have the satisfaction of protecting my friend, avenging myself, and ridding the world of a scumbag.

My rational mind still rejected the idea, but some deeper part was starting to think about choosing a place to draw my last breath.

When I went back out to the kitchen, Hannah was sitting at the table with Kirk's book open in front of her again.

"I'm just thinking," she said, ignoring the dogs trying to wrestle their way into her lap. "Whenever I see Josie in the bars, she's always flashing that ring around?" She twisted her right fingertips around her left third finger to indicate where a woman wore an engagement ring.

I couldn't see how Kirk's girlfriend might figure into this, but I said, "What about it?"

"My friend Carol, she makes jewelry? She says the big diamond's, like, two carats, and it might cost ten thousand dollars or even more. The smaller ones, maybe they're like a half carat each."

"She's lucky somebody ain't cut off her finger for it," Madbird muttered.

"Jewels aren't like drugs," Hannah said patiently. "The bigger they are, the more they're worth, on a sliding scale."

Madbird's hand stopped. He strode to the table and crouched over to stare at the page with the scrawled numbers. I stepped beside him.

Hannah's forefinger pointed at the top entry.

Her finger moved down to the next entry.

"Now look at this," she said, and pointed to the page the book was opened to. It was a chart of diamond values, correlating several factors like shape, weight, color, and clarity. One of the low-end values listed for a two-carat stone was $6,612. The figure 10,716 appeared toward the higher end. All the variable factors made the figuring very complex, but it seemed that enhanced qualities like better clarity or cut could raise the value by several hundred dollars or more.

Madbird slowly straightened up and raised his face toward heaven.

"Fuck, oh dear," he said. He swung around toward me. "You got any idea how much we're gonna owe her for this?"

Hannah smiled shyly.

I stood there bewildered. He took hold of my shirt like he had last night, but this time the grip was a good one.

"I'm sorry I called you white boy," he said. "You sure ain't as white as you used to be. I watched you when we first started working. Heard you were going to college and knew all kinds of smart shit, kept expecting you to deal down to the rest of us. But you never did."

He let me go and opened the refrigerator door, came out with three cans of Pabst, shoved one at me, and took another over to Hannah.

"Then I started seeing you got something fucked up in you. But the same kind of fucked up as her and me-" his hand moved to caress her hair, rough and gentle at the same time-"and the other fucked-up people we hang with, 'cause they're our fucked-up people."

I still couldn't grasp what was happening. Madbird exhaled in exasperation.

"Look, I respect you for all that schooling, but you got a way of not seeing what's right in front of you. Hannah just told you it ain't dope them horses were carrying. It was diamonds."