Strehlke did have a garden behind his house, but it was small and apparently not worth protecting from the depredations of the deer with a motion light. There was nothing left in it anyway except for a few pumpkins, most now rotting on the vine. She stepped over the rows, rounded the far corner of the house, and there was the cab-over. The moon had come out again and turned its chrome to the liquid silver of sword blades in fantasy novels.
Tess came up behind it, walked along the left side, and knelt by the chin-high (to her, at least) front wheel. She took the Lemon Squeezer out of her pocket. He couldn’t drive into his garage because the cab-over was in the way. Even if it hadn’t been, the garage was probably full of bachelor rickrack: tools, fishing gear, camping gear, truck parts, cases of discount soda.
That’s just guessing. It’s dangerous to guess. Doreen would scold you for it.
Of course she would, no one knew the Knitting Society ladies better than Tess did, but those dessert-loving babies rarely took chances. When you did take them, you were forced to make a certain number of guesses.
Tess looked at her watch and was astounded to see it was only twenty-five to ten. It seemed that she had fed Fritzy double rations and left the house four years ago. Maybe five. She thought she heard an approaching engine, then decided she didn’t. She wished the wind wasn’t blowing so hard, but wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first. It was a saying no Knitting Society lady had ever voiced—Doreen Marquis and her friends were more into things like soonest begun, soonest done—but it was a true saying, just the same.
Maybe he really was going on a trip, Sunday night or not. Maybe she was still going to be here when the sun came up, chilled to her already aching bones by the constant wind combing this lonely hilltop where she was crazy to be.
No, he’s the crazy one. Remember how he danced? His shadow dancing on the wall behind him? Remember how he sang? His squalling voice? You wait for him, Tessa Jean. You wait until hell freezes over. You’ve come too far to turn back.
She was afraid of that, actually.
It can’t be a decorous drawing-room murder. You understand that, don’t you?
She did. This particular killing—if she was able to bring it off—would be more Death Wish than The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes Backstage. He would pull in, hopefully right up to the cab-over she was hiding behind. He would douse the lights of the pickup, and before his eyes could adjust It wasn’t the wind this time. She recognized the badly tuned thump of the engine even before the headlights splashed up the curve of the drive. Tess got on one knee and yanked the brim of her cap down so the wind wouldn’t blow it off. She would have to approach, and that meant her timing would have to be exquisite. If she tried to shoot him from ambush, she would quite likely miss, even at close range; the gun instructor had told her she could only count on the Lemon Squeezer at ten feet or less. He had recommended she buy a more reliable handgun, but she never had. And getting close enough to make sure of killing him wasn’t all. She had to make sure it was Strehlke in the truck, and not the brother or some friend.
I have no plan.
But it was too late to plan, because it was the truck and when the pole light came on, she saw the brown cap with the bleach-splatters on it. She also saw him wince against the glare, as she had, and knew he was momentarily blinded. It was now or not at all.
I am the Courageous Woman.
With no plan, without even thinking, she walked around the back of the cab-over, not running but taking big, calm strides. The wind gusted around her, flapping her cargo pants. She opened the passenger door and saw the ring with the red stone on his hand. He was grabbing a paper bag with the shape of a square box inside it. Beer, probably a twelve-pack. He turned toward her and something terrible happened: she divided in two. The Courageous Woman saw the animal that had raped her, choked her, and put her in a pipe with two other rotting bodies. Tess saw the slightly broader face and lines around the mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there on Friday afternoon. But even as she was registering these things, the Lemon Squeezer barked twice in her hand. The first bullet punctured Strehlke’s throat, just below the chin. The second opened a black hole above his bushy right eyebrow and shattered the driver’s side window. He fell backward against the door, the hand that had been grasping the top of the paper bag dropping away. He gave a monstrous whole-body twitch, and the hand with the ring on it thudded against the middle of the steering wheel, honking the horn. Inside the house, the dog began to bark again.
“No, it’s him!” She stood at the open door with the gun in her hand, staring in. “It’s got to be him!”
She rushed around the front of the pickup, lost her balance, went to one knee, got up, and yanked open the driver’s side door. Strehlke fell out and hit his dead head on the smooth asphalt of his driveway. His hat fell off. His right eye, pulled out of true by the bullet that had entered his head just above it, stared up at the moon. The left one stared at Tess. And it wasn’t the face that finally convinced her—the face with lines on it she was seeing for the very first time, the face pitted with old acne scars that hadn’t been there on Friday afternoon.
Was he big or real big? Betsy Neal had asked.
Real big, Tess had replied, and he had been… but not as big as this man. Her rapist had been six-six, she had thought when he got out of the truck (this truck, she was in no doubt about that). Deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. But this man had to be at least six-nine. She had come hunting a giant and killed a leviathan.
“Oh my God,” Tess said, and the wind whipped her words away. “Oh my dear God, what have I done?”
“You killed me, Tess,” the man on the ground said… and that certainly made sense, given the hole in his head and the one in his throat. “You went and killed Big Driver, just like you meant to.”
The strength left her muscles. She went to her knees beside him. Overhead, the moon beamed down from the roaring sky.
“The ring,” she whispered. “The hat. The truck.”
“He wears the ring and the hat when he goes hunting,” Big Driver said. “And he drives the pickup. When he goes hunting, I’m on the road in a Red Hawk cab-over and if anyone sees him—especially if he’s sitting down—they think they’re seeing me.”
“Why would he do that?” Tess asked the dead man. “You’re his brother.”
“Because he’s crazy,” Big Driver said patiently.
“And because it worked before,” Doreen Marquis said. “When they were younger and Lester got in trouble with the police. The question is whether Roscoe Strehlke committed suicide because of that first trouble, or because Ramona made big brother Al take the blame for it. Or maybe Roscoe was going to tell and Ramona killed him. Made it look like suicide. Which way was it, Al?”
But on this subject Al was quiet. Dead quiet, in fact.
“I’ll tell you how I think it was,” Doreen said in the moonlight. “I think Ramona knew that if your little brother wound up in an interrogation room with an even half-smart policeman, he might confess to something a lot worse than touching a girl on the schoolbus or peeking into cars on the local lovers’ lane or whatever ten-cent crime it was he’d been accused of. I think she talked you into taking the blame, and she talked her husband into dummying up. Or browbeat him into it, that’s more like it. And either because the police never asked the girl to make a positive identification or because she wouldn’t press charges, they got away with it.”
Al said nothing.
Tess thought, I’m kneeling here talking in imaginary voices. I’ve lost my mind.
Yet part of her knew she was trying to keep her mind. The only way to do it was to understand, and she thought the story she was telling in Doreen’s voice was either true or close to true. It was based on guesswork and slopped—on deduction, but it made sense. It fit in with what Ramona had said in her last moments.