Light of the World

Chapter 34

It was 4:48 P.M. when Clete and I starting knocking on doors at the end of the hollow, up the road from Albert’s ranch. The first place we stopped was a remodeled barn that a young couple from California had rented for the summer. They said they taught at Berkeley and knew Albert and his work and sometimes hiked along the ridge above his house but hadn’t seen any other hikers there. They were nice people and invited us in for coffee. I did not want to tell them that Surrette was somewhere in the neighborhood. “Do you all have children?” I asked.

“No, we don’t,” the husband replied, trying not to show offense at the personal nature of the question. “Can you tell me what you guys are looking for?”

“A man named Asa Surrette has been around here. He’s a serial killer who escaped from a prison van in Kansas,” I said. “He may be long gone, or he may be close by. Have you seen any vehicles that don’t belong here? Or somebody up in the rocks above your house?”

The wife looked at the husband, then they both shook their heads. “This is a little disturbing,” the husband said. “Nobody else has told us about a serial killer.”

“He’s the guy who abducted the waitress up by Lookout Pass,” Clete said.

“There’s a minister who lives in that two-story house with the cedar trees in front,” the wife said. “He has his congregation there on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. His name is Ralph, I think.”

“Did you see anybody unusual over there?” I asked.

They shook their heads again. “Sometimes after their services, they throw a football back and forth in the yard,” the wife said. “I saw Ralph chopping wood earlier. I think his church friends come and go. This serial killer is probably gone by now, isn’t he?”

“Probably,” I replied.

“By the way, I saw the girls’ car pull into the driveway earlier. I’m pretty sure somebody’s home,” she said.

I wrote my cell number on the back of my departmental business card and left it with the couple.

Clete and I knocked on the doors of two more houses in the hollow with the same results. The four houses in the natural cul-de-sac were spaced a considerable distance apart, all of them set in the shadows of the mountains, and the people in the houses apparently had amiable but not close relationships. In effect, it was a community where insularity came with the property deed.

Our last stop was at the minister’s house. An old Toyota Corolla was parked in the driveway and a Bronco in the garage. The window shades were down, the front door shut. The glider on the porch rotated slightly on its chains in a mild breeze blowing down the canyon.

“It doesn’t look like anybody is home,” Clete said.

I looked at my watch. “Maybe they’re eating dinner,” I said.

I tapped on the door. I could hear no sound inside. I tried again. Nothing. I tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked. “Let’s walk around back,” I said.

We went through the side yard. The shades on the dining room windows were pulled halfway down. There were no place settings on the table or any sign of movement in the house. In the backyard, there was a pole shed attached to the side of an old barn where firewood had been stacked neatly against the barn wall. The grass was scattered with freshly split chunks of pinewood; the woodcutter’s ax had been left embedded on the rim of the chopping stump, the handle at a stiff forty-five-degree angle. Clete looked up at the sky. A bank of thunderheads had moved across the sun. “You’d think a guy this neat would want to get his wood under the shed before it rained,” he said.

He went up the back steps and banged on the door. No response. He held up one hand to keep the reflection off the glass and attempted to see inside. Then he went up the rear stairs to the second floor and tried the door and pressed his ear against the glass. “I can’t hear a thing,” he said. He went around the side of the house and came back. “Maybe they went off somewhere.”

I wished I had asked one of the neighbors how many vehicles the minister’s family owned. “Could be. But the Bronco is in the garage. This doesn’t look like a three-car family.”

“What do you want to do?” Clete said.

I glanced at my cell phone. No service. A cat walked around the corner of the house and watched us. Its water and food bowls were empty. I stared at the house. Its quiet and dark interior was of such intensity that I could hear a ringing sound in my head. “There’s something wrong in that house,” I said. “Break the glass.”

Clete knocked out a pane in the kitchen door with a brick and reached inside and opened the door, his shoes crunching on top of the shattered glass. I followed him through the mudroom into the kitchen. The oven had been left on, and the heat was enough to peel the wallpaper. Clete turned off the propane and took his .38 snub from his shoulder holster, letting it hang from his right hand, the muzzle pointed at the floor. The only sound in the house was the scraping of a tree limb on the eave.

“This is Clete Purcel and Dave Robicheaux,” he called into the dining room. “I’m a private investigator, and Dave is a sheriff’s detective from Louisiana. We’re visiting at Albert Hollister’s place down the road. We think there might be a problem in this house.”

His words echoed through the downstairs. We started moving through the house, Clete in front, his .38 held up at a right angle. We opened the closet doors and the door to a bedroom and the door to a pantry and a laundry room. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Clete started up the stairs one step at a time, his gaze fastened on the landing, his left hand on the banister. His back looked as wide as a whale’s, the fabric of his coat stretching across his spine.

On the left side of the landing was another bedroom, its door open, the bed made, raindrops clicking on the windowpane. I went inside the bedroom and looked in the closet. It was full of clothes that probably belonged to a teenage girl. I came back out on the landing. Neither Clete nor I spoke. He opened the bathroom door and winced. I could smell the fecal odor without going inside. If I hadn’t known better, I would have concluded someone had just used the toilet.

There were no towels on the racks, no toilet paper on the spindle. An incense bowl rested on top of a dirty-clothes hamper. Clete felt the bathroom walls and rubbed his fingertips with his thumb. It was obvious someone had used adhesive tape of some kind to hang up pictures or pieces of paper all over the walls. I tried the door on the right side of the landing. It swung back from the jamb, revealing a small room furnished with a chest of drawers and a narrow bed without sheets or a mattress cover. On the floor was a dust-free rectangle where a footlocker might have rested. Clete turned in a circle and lifted his arms to show his puzzlement.

We left the bedroom and closed the door behind us. Clete flicked on the light above the landing. The oak floor had been wiped clean in the center, but there were tiny hairlike traces of a dark substance between two boards. I squatted down and rubbed my handkerchief along the grain, then held up the handkerchief for Clete to see. I returned to the bathroom, holding my breath against the odor, removed the incense bowl, and opened the hamper. I had found the towels that were pulled off the racks. I tilted the hamper so Clete could see inside. He silently mouthed, The basement.

We went back downstairs and through the hallway. When I opened the door to the basement, I smelled an odor that was like night damp and mildew and perhaps a leak from a sewage line, but nothing you wouldn’t expect in a basement that seldom saw sunlight. We waited at the open door for at least ten seconds, listening. Then I felt for the wall switch and clicked it on, flooding the basement with the harsh illumination of three bare lightbulbs. This time I went first. We had to lower our heads when we passed under some water and heating pipes; we found ourselves standing in the midst of what seemed a conventional setting beneath an early-twentieth-century farmhouse. There was a propane-fed furnace that had rusted out along the floor, a keg of nails and a wheelbarrow full of broken bricks shoved in a corner, two cardboard boxes filled with Christmas-tree ornaments and strings of colored lights under a window whose wood frame had rotted. Clete turned around and peered through the shadows at something no human being ever wants to see, an image that no amount of experience can prepare you for. “Mother of God,” he said.

The two figures had been put in transparent garment bags, and the bags hung with baling wire from a rafter. The weight had stretched the bags into the shape and wispy texture of cocoons. One of the figures was a woman. Her hair was pressed in a bloody tangle against the plastic. She was probably dead when she went into the bag. The other figure was a man. His wrists were crisscrossed behind him with duct tape. One eye was half-lidded, the other popping from the socket. His mouth was attached to the plastic like a suction cup.

Clete walked to the corner of the basement and retched, his big arms propped against the wall, hiding his face from me, the smell of whiskey rising from the concrete.

The rain shower had already stopped when the first sheriff’s cruiser arrived, followed by the paramedics, the crime scene techs, the coroner, the sheriff, and the FBI special agent I’d had words with earlier, James Martini. He went down in the basement for five minutes. When he came back, his tie was pulled loose and his face had a winded look, although he was a trim, muscular man in his late thirties who probably worked out regularly. He seemed unsure of what he wanted to say. “Who got sick down there?” he asked.

“My friend Clete Purcel.”

He nodded, looking around, his gaze focused on nothing. “You ever work one like this before? Down in Louisiana?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why is Surrette prowling this ridge?” he asked.

“Part of it has to do with Albert Hollister.”

“The writer?”

“He owns a ranch just down the road. He was Asa Surrette’s creative writing professor at Wichita State University in 1979. Surrette has a grievance against him, something about an objectionable short story he turned in.”

“That’s a new one.”

“A guy like this doesn’t need much of an excuse.”

“Your daughter interviewed Surrette in prison and got him stoked up?”

“That’s close enough. Right now I’d like to keep her alive.”

“You don’t think we’re doing our job?”

“He means to kill her if he can. Surrette should have been gutted, salted, and tacked to a fence post years ago. That didn’t happen.”

“The Bureau is at fault?” he said.

“One time I pulled over a drunk driver, then let him go because he had no priors and was two blocks from his house. Three hours later, he killed his wife.”

“The Bureau had limited reach on Surrette’s crimes in Kansas,” he replied.

He was a company man and he wasn’t going to concede a point. I didn’t blame him for it. I had a feeling he wasn’t dealing well with the scene in the basement. No normal person would. The day you are not bothered by certain things you witness as a police officer is the day you need to turn in your shield. Martini removed a notebook from his coat pocket and opened it. He was a nice-looking man, with high cheekbones and a flush to his cheeks and a crew cut that had started to recede. He seemed to study the notebook, then gave up the pretense.

“I don’t blame you for your feelings,” he said. “I have a teenage daughter. I don’t think I could handle it if she were abducted by a predator. I don’t know how any parent does.”

“You’re sure the two girls are with him?” I said.

“The older one, Kate, was scheduled to be at work at Dairy Queen at six. She didn’t show up. Lavern was supposed to go to a birthday party this evening. There’re some messages for her on the phone. Truth is, we don’t have a clue about this guy’s whereabouts. Why do you think he didn’t kill the girls inside, when he had the chance?”

“A friend of mine thinks he’s going into meltdown and planning to take it out on the girls.”

“Why’s he going into meltdown?”

“Felicity Louviere is stronger than he is, and he knows it.”

Clete Purcel was talking to a sheriff’s detective by a cruiser. The agent watched him curiously. “I think you guys are operating as vigilantes, Detective Robicheaux,” he said. “I think you plan to cool out Surrette.”

“That’s news to me.”

“A guy with the AG’s office in New Orleans says Clete Purcel may have poured liquid Drano down a Nazi war criminal’s throat.”

“I wouldn’t believe everything I hear down there,” I replied.

“The guy says you were probably there when it happened.”

“Some days I think I have Alzheimer’s.”

“Maybe you ought to see a doc. Take Purcel with you.”

“What for?”

“There’s blood in his barf,” he said. “Maybe he drank some of that Drano himself.”

At eight-fifteen that evening, Gretchen Horowitz went up to Alafair’s bedroom. Alafair was working at her desk, wearing jeans and loafers without socks and a man’s long-sleeved khaki shirt. Shadows had already started to fall on the pasture and the barn, and the crests of the hills had taken on a golden glow in the sunset. “I was wondering where you were,” Alafair said.

Gretchen sat down on the edge of the bed. “I had a visit with Caspian Younger.”

“Did Dave tell you what happened at the house up the road?”

“Clete told me. I need to talk to you about something.”

“You know about the abduction of the two girls? They used to feed carrots to Albert’s horses.”

“Yeah, I heard all about it, Alafair. Did you hear what I said? I’ve got to talk with you.”

Alafair set down the sheet she had been working on and took off her glasses. “You need to rein it in, Gretchen.”

“I did a beat-down on Caspian Younger and that ex-detective Jack Boyd.”

“Clete already tore them up.”

“I thought a second helping wouldn’t hurt. My head is bursting. Will you please listen to me?”

“Yes, please tell me, whatever it is.”

“You don’t have to get bent out of shape. Rhonda Fayhee told me she was kept in a basement of some kind. She could hear water lapping against a boat or a dock or a beach. She also heard an airplane taking off and landing, but it was below the level of the window. She heard wind through a lot of trees close by. Here’s the last part: Not far away, people were singing a hymn of some kind. Rhonda remembered the words ‘Life is like a mountain railroad, with an engineer that’s brave.’ ”

“Those details don’t go together very well,” Alafair said. “The plane was beneath the level of the window?”

“She could hear water chucking at the same time.”

“She was on a hillside by a lake, one big enough for an amphibian?”

“That’s what I would think,” Gretchen said. “A lake that has a lot of trees on the shore.”

“There are lakes all over this area. Over in Idaho, too.”

“She said the wind made a rushing sound in the trees, like they grew everywhere and were thick with leaves.”

“An orchard?” Alafair said.

“Yeah, an orchard,” Gretchen said. “It’s cherry-picking season. Where would that put us?”

“Flathead Lake?” Alafair said.

“I’m glad you said that.”

“Why?”

“Because Caspian was bragging about his contacts in Vegas. He said he could have Clete shredded into fish chum. He said there would be nothing left of Clete except a bloody skim floating on Flathead Lake. What does Flathead Lake have to do with Vegas?”

“He had the lake associated with Surrette’s previous involvement with the casinos?”

“It’s a possibility,” Gretchen said.

“It’s more than that,” Alafair said.

“There’s something else. Caspian Younger told Bertha Phelps where his father was.”

“You lost me,” Alafair said.

“Wyatt Dixon is Love Younger’s illegitimate son. His stepfather treated him terribly. Who do you think Dixon blames?”

“Dixon is going to do something about it?” Alafair said.

“Maybe.”

“You’re wondering if you should warn Love Younger?”

“Yeah, I am. What would you do if you were me?” Gretchen asked.

“It’s their grief.”

“That simple?”

“Wyatt Dixon can take care of himself. Love Younger is a professional son of a bitch and would be the first to tell you that.”

Gretchen stood up. “Want to take a ride up to the lake?”

“Let me tell Dave,” Alafair replied.

Wyatt Dixon was standing shirtless and barefoot in his kitchen up on the Blackfoot, a ring of fire glowing around one of the lids on his woodstove, where he had set his coffeepot to boil. Through the side window, he could see the boughs of the cottonwoods swelling in the wind down by the riverbank, the trout starting to rise and dimple the riffle under the steel swing bridge. Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn’t know why.

“You went up to Younger’s place, didn’t you?” Wyatt said.

“I was looking for you. I didn’t know where you were,” Bertha said.

“Was the old man there?”

“No, he was not.”

“That twat of a son was, though, wasn’t he?”

She looked away, her eyes full of injury.

“He did something to you?”

“I won’t lie about it.”

“He put his hand on you?”

“I said I wouldn’t lie about it, but that doesn’t mean we should fall into his trap,” she replied. “I hate the Youngers. I hate what they’ve done to you.”

“Tell me what he did, Bertha.”

“I was going out the door. He kicked me. He laughed when he did it, too.”

The coffee had started to boil. Wyatt removed the top from the pot and fitted his palm through the handle. He lifted the pot to his mouth and drank, his face as expressionless as a leather mask, his pupils like dead flies trapped in glass. “Where did he kick you?”

“In the behind.”

He looked into space and drank again from the pot, his lips gray from the heat. “He told you where the old man was at?”

“Don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to.”

“I just want to know where Love Younger is at.”

“So you can do exactly what Caspian Younger wants you to?”

He set the coffeepot back on the stove. There was a red stripe across his palm. “Hear it?” he said.

“Hear what?”

“A train. Up on the railroad bed.”

“Those tracks were torn up decades ago. There’s nothing there except the cliff and an empty rail bed.”

“I heard it a-blowing down the line, whistling through a canyon.”

“That’s the wind.”

“No, ma’am, it ain’t. I been hearing that whistle all my life. He’s at Sweathouse Creek, ain’t he?”

“How’d you know?”

“I followed him there once. Love Younger ain’t that smart. He sired the likes of me, ain’t he?”

He slipped on his boots and stuck his sheathed bowie knife in the back pocket of his Wranglers, then pulled on a long-sleeved snap-button shirt and walked through the clutter of his living room and out the front door.

“I’m coming,” she said. “You’re not going without me.”

He turned and looked at her. Her expression was disjointed, her anatomical construction seeming to disintegrate as she approached, like a digital figure collapsing into a pile of dots. He pushed at his temple with his thumb until his vision seemed to correct itself.

“We’re in this together,” she said. She took hold of his right arm with both hands and clutched it tighter than anyone had ever held him in his life. “We’ll never be apart again. If I have to go with you to the grave, Wyatt Dixon, you hear what I’m saying to you? Don’t you ever try to leave me.”

Love Younger stood behind his cabin on Sweathouse Creek and stared up at the canyon walls. There were boulders in the canyon the size of a two-story house, even bigger, all of them surrounded by towering trees that grew cheek by jowl against the stone. He could see bighorn sheep up on a ledge, one that was no more than two feet wide. They were working their way toward the summit of the mountain while tiny rocks rilled down from their hooves, over the lip of the trail, falling at least four hundred feet onto the canopy of cottonwoods that grew along the banks of the creek. A slip, a miscalculation, a weak spot in the stone that split under their weight, and they would plummet to their deaths. Yet they never hesitated or showed fear, as though knowledge of the topography had been wired into them. Love Younger wondered why humankind did not feel the same kind of security. The sun was west of the Bitterroots now, and the air in the canyon had turned cold, and the magenta coloration above the top of the canyon was fading to a dark shade of blue that made him think of a curtain being closed on a stage.

He had taken a black-powder revolver to shoot at targets he picked out randomly along the creek — a wet rock dancing with spray, a wild rose hanging on a green stem over the current, a cedar stump that had decayed into pulp the color of rust. He aimed at all three of these targets but could not bring himself to pull the trigger. There was a stillness inside the entrance of the canyon that felt almost holy. He raised his eyes to the ledge and realized the bighorn sheep had disappeared inside a low-hanging cloud, as though the mountain had provided sanctuary from either his gaze or his firearm. Was that his role in the world? The harbinger of destruction? The twentieth century’s representative of a petrochemical empire staining the ground with the greasy imprint of his shoes?

Maybe this was not a good time to be alone, he told himself. But what merit was there in a man’s life if he had to fear solitude? Love Younger had created jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers all over the globe. His pipelines and drilling platforms delivered the oil and natural gas on which the entirety of the industrial world depended. Did any rational person believe he wanted to pollute the earth and incur environmental lawsuits that could cost his companies billions of dollars? Love Younger was a fair man. No one could say he wasn’t. The enemy was poverty, not refineries. How many environmentalists had worn clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks when they were children?

For Love Younger, depression was another term for self-pity. He had only one problem: He could not reason himself out of the black box he found himself inside. What was the truth about his life? The truth was, he woke every morning with a bête noire that he crowded out of his mind with sums and debits and concerns about the Saudi bench price on the barrel of oil in the same way a drunkard fills himself with whiskey to avoid acknowledging the catastrophe he has made of his life. The story of Love Younger was simple. He had committed the worst crime of which an ordinary human being was capable: He had destroyed his family.

He set down the heavy Navy Colt .44 on a spool table and waded into the creek. The coldness ran over the tops of his shoes and into his socks with a brittleness that reminded him of drawing water with a bucket from the stream that ran through Snakey Hollow, Kentucky, the place of his birth. As he stared at the long silvery ribbon winding through the canyon, he realized the gleam on the surface he had taken for granted was dying, as though the light were being drawn up through the trees and the canyon walls by the heavens, a shutting down of the day that was more an act of theft than a natural phenomenon.

He wondered what would happen if he began wading up the creek into the crack in the mountains that gave onto the great Idaho wilderness, disappearing inside its gathering shadows, crunching on the soft bed of sand and coppery pebbles that had been polished as bright as pennies. Could he keep going all the way to the top of the Bitterroots, where the snowmelt formed chains of lakes surrounded with miles of velvet greenery on which deer and elk and moose grazed in the sunrise?

Like the deerslayers of pre-Revolutionary America, could he walk all the way to the Missouri Breaks and follow the tributaries and the riparian paths of Indians to the inception point of the Mississippi, then find his way to Louisville and west through the bluegrass to the edge of the Cumberlands? Would his birthplace be changed significantly? Would there be a ragged child there who resembled another impoverished Kentucky child, one born during the first administration of Herbert Hoover? Was there some way to go back in time and undo his mistakes and set a straight path that would make his legacy acceptable in the eyes of others?

He knew these were foolish and vain thoughts, but if a man were contrite of heart, would not a merciful Creator make an exception and return, if only in token fashion, the children who had chosen either physical or spiritual death rather than live under the dominion of their father?

He walked farther up the creek, into a pool up to his knees, where the current was so cold that his shinbones felt as though they had been beaten with wood mallets. Holding on to a tree branch, he kept going deeper into the canyon, pulling himself along the edges of the current until he was up to his thighs and had no feeling at all beneath the dark wet line across his fly. He wondered if this would not be a bad way to go. He would simply keep walking up the creek into deeper and deeper pools until his entire body was numb and he was subsumed by the woods and the wild roses on the banks and the mist boiling at the bottom of a waterfall. Be my rod and staff, he thought.

The words angered him. Am I becoming one of the herd, the nitwits who roll in sawdust at camp meetings and dip their hands in boxes of copperheads? Get ahold of yourself.

He stepped out of the creek, water draining from his trouser cuffs onto the bank, the wind blowing as cold as an icicle through his thin shirt. He had thought his way through his problems and done what he could. The only concern that nagged at the edge of his conscience was his daughter-in-law, Felicity Louviere. But she was not a Younger. She was the offspring of a professional do-gooder and, from what he’d heard, a profligate working-class girl who had decided to enrich herself by marrying his pitiful son. Her fate had nothing to do with him.

He began walking back down the bank toward the cabin. He could hear bats flying by his head, their leathery wings throbbing, and he remembered how they had frightened him when he was a little boy, at dusk, when the hollow turned into a winter set, no matter what the season. Now he gave them no thought whatsoever, although he was sure some of them were rabid, just as they had been in Snakey Hollow. Why didn’t he fear them? The answer to the question was not complex. A king did not die from the bite of a rodent.

He went back inside with his .44 cap-and-ball revolver and hung it in a holster on the back of a wicker chair. Then he went outside again and gathered an armful of wood he had split and stacked under a pole shed. He thought he saw a pickup truck, one with a camper mounted on the bed, wending its way out of the dusk toward him, its headlights jiggling with a strange blue-stained white radiance that Love Younger associated with fairy tales more than he did with motorized vehicles.

Fornicators have to go somewhere, he thought. In the barn or the woods or on top of a corn-shuck pallet. Nothing will ever stop them from mating and pumping out legions of the same mentally defective creatures the world never seems to tire of. Well, have at it. I hope you have better luck with the product of your misspent seed than I did.

He started a fire in the stone fireplace. As he stood in its heat, steam rose from his wet khakis, and he felt a sense of tranquillity he hadn’t experienced in years. From down below, he heard a vehicle clank across the cattle guard. Was it the fornicators? Or perhaps Caspian’s ex-convict security people coming to tell him that Felicity Louviere had been released by the predator from Kansas? He didn’t care one way or another.

Love Younger walked to the door, a bourbon and branch water in his hand. He started to turn the doorknob, then paused and glanced over his shoulder at the blue-black walnut-handled thumb-buster hanging from the back of the chair. What a fine weapon, he thought. Kicks like a jackhammer and, in the dark, throws out a six-inch muzzle flash that would make the devil jump. One hundred and fifty-two years old and deadly as the day of its manufacture. He clicked on the porch light without unlocking the door and pulled aside the window curtain. An orange pickup with a chrome grille was just turning off the dirt road onto Younger’s property. A man wearing a starch-white cowboy hat was behind the wheel, his left arm propped on the window, a purple garter snugged around his upper arm. The man in the white hat drove to within fifty feet of the cabin and cut the engine.

Dixon again, Younger thought. So it’s about money after all. They claim they don’t want it. They love Jesus and country and their mothers. But it’s always about money and then more money, and if they could, they’d all get naked and wallow in it in the middle of a Walmart. Okay, Mr. Dixon, maybe it’s time you heard a wrathful voice, since you seem to understand no other kind.

Love Younger set down his tumbler and pulled open the door, his irritability overriding caution. He was staring straight into the high beams of the truck, his eyes tearing and blind to what might be taking place in the truck’s cab.

“Begone, Wyatt Dixon,” he said. “Disappear into the primeval soup that bred you, and never let the name of my family issue from your lips.”

The wind had dropped, and he thought he could hear the heat of the engine ticking under the hood.