Brutal was laughing in spite of himself. “That sounds like Purdom County, all right,” he said. “Like as not.”
“It was three months later, give or take, that Wharton broke out and started the spree that ended with the holdup,” I said. “That and the murders that got him to us.”
“So he’d had something to do with an underage girl once,” Harry said. He took off his glasses, huffed on them, polished them. “Way underage. Once isn’t exactly a pattern, is it?”
“A man doesn’t do a thing like that just once,” my wife said, then pressed her lips together so tight they almost weren’t there.
Next I told them about my visit to Trapingus County. I’d been a lot more frank with Rob McGee – I’d had no choice, really. To this day I have no idea what sort of story he spun for Mr. Detterick, but the McGee who sat down next to me in the diner seemed to have aged seven years.
In mid-May, about a month before the holdup and the murders which finished Wharton’s short career as an outlaw, Klaus Detterick had painted his barn (and, incidentally, Bowser’s doghouse next to it). He hadn’t wanted his son crawling around up on a high scaffolding, and the boy had been in school, anyway, so he had hired a fellow. A nice enough fellow. Very quiet. Three days, work it had been. No, the fellow hadn’t slept at the house, Detterick wasn’t foolish enough to believe that nice and quiet always meant safe, especially in those days, when there was so much dust-bowl riffraff on the roads. A man with a family had to be careful. In any case, the man hadn’t needed lodging; he told Detterick he had taken a room in town, at Eva Price’s. There was a lady named Eva Price in Tefton, and she did rent rooms, but she hadn’t had a boarder that May who fit the description of Detterick’s hired man, just the usual fellows in checked suits and derby hats, hauling sample cases – drummers, in other words. McGee had been able to tell me that because he stopped at Mrs. Price’s and checked on his way back from the Detterick farm –
that’s how upset he was.
“Even so,” he added, “there’s no law against a man sleeping rough in the woods, Mr. Edgecombe. I’ve done it a time or two myself.”
The hired man didn’t sleep at the Dettericks, house, but he took dinner with them twice. He would have met Howie. He would have met the girls, Cora and Kathe. He would have listened to their chatter, some of which might have been about how much they looked forward to the coming summer, because if they were good and the weather was good, Mommy sometimes let them sleep out on the porch, where they could pretend they were pioneer wives crossing the Great Plains in Conestoga wagons.
I can see him sitting there at the table, eating roast chicken and Mrs. Detterick’s rye bread, listening, keeping his wolf’s eyes well veiled, nodding, smiling a little, storing it all up.
“This doesn’t sound like the wildman you told me about when he first came on the Mile, Paul,” Janice said doubtfully. “Not a bit.”
“You didn’t see him up at Indianola Hospital, ma’am,” Harry said. “Just standin there with his mouth open and his bare butt hangin out the back of his Johnny. Lettin us dress him. We thought he was either drugged or foolish. Didn’t we, Dean?”
Dean nodded.
“The day after he finished the barn and left, a man wearing a bandanna mask robbed Hampey’s Freight Office in Jarvis,” I told them. “Cot away with seventy dollars. He also took an 1892 silver dollar the freight agent carried as a lucky piece. That silver dollar was on Wharton when he was captured, and Jarvis is only thirty miles from Tefton.”
“So this robber this wildman you think he stopped for three days to help Klaus Detterick pain his barn,”
my wife said. “Ate dinner with them and said please pass the peas just like folks.”
“The scariest thing about men like him is how unpredictable they are”, Brutal said. “He might’ve been planning to kill the Dettericks and rifle their house, then changed his mind because a cloud came over the sun at the wrong time, or something like. Maybe he just wanted to cool off a little. But most likely he already had his eye on those two girls and was planning to come back. Do you think, Paul?”