“I don’t guess there’s anybody around here that’s talked to her,” he wound up, “except of course Mary Nunez.”
“Mary working for them?” the deputy asked.
“Yes. What’s the matter, Ben? Something the matter over there?”
“He fell off the cliff last night, and she’s gone away without saying anything to anybody.”
Debro whistled.
Rolly went into the house to use Debro’s phone, reporting to the sheriff. I stayed outside with Debro, trying to get more–if only his opinions–out of him. All I got were expressions of amazement.
“We’ll go over and see Mary,” the deputy said when he came from the phone; and then, when we had left Debro, had crossed the road, and were walking through a field towards a cluster of trees: “Funny she wasn’t there.”
“Who is she?”
“A Mex. Lives down in the hollow with the rest of them. Her man, Pedro Nunez, is doing a life-stretch in Folsom for killing a bootlegger named Dunne in a hijacking two-three years back.”
“Local killing?”
“Uh-huh. It happened down in the cove in front of the Tooker place.”
We went through the trees and down a slope to where half a dozen shacks–shaped, sized, and red-leaded to resemble box-cars–lined the side of a stream, with vegetable gardens spread out behind them. In front of one of the shacks a shapeless Mexican woman in a pink-checkered dress sat on an empty canned-soup box smoking a corncob pipe and nursing a brown baby. Ragged and dirty children played between the buildings, with ragged and dirty mongrels helping them make noise. In one of the gardens a brown man in overalls that had once been blue was barely moving a hoe.
The children stopped playing to watch Rolly and me cross the stream on conveniently placed stones. The dogs came yapping to meet us, snarling and snapping around us until one of the boys chased them. We stopped in front of the woman with the baby. The deputy grinned down at the baby and said:
“Well, well, ain’t he getting to be a husky son-of-a-gun!”
The woman took the pipe from her mouth long enough to complain stolidly:
“Colic all the time.”
“Tch, tch, tch. Where’s Mary Nunez?”
The pipe-stem pointed at the next shack.
“I thought she was working for them people at the Tooker place,” he said.
“Sometimes,” the woman replied indifferently.
We went to the next shack. An old woman in a gray wrapper had come to the door, watching us while stirring something in a yellow bowl.
“Where’s Mary?” the deputy asked.
She spoke over her shoulder into the shack’s interior, and moved aside to let another woman take her place in the doorway. This other woman was short and solidly built, somewhere in her early thirties, with intelligent dark eyes in a wide, flat face. She held a dark blanket together at her throat. The blanket hung to the floor all around her.
“Howdy, Mary,” Rolly greeted her. “Why ain’t you over to the Carters’?”
“I’m sick, Mr. Rolly.” She spoke without accent. “Chills–so I just stayed home today.”
“Tch, tch, tch. That’s too bad. Have you had the doc?”
She said she hadn’t. Rolly said she ought to. She said she didn’t need him: she had chills often. Rolly said that might be so, but that was all the more reason for having him: it was best to play safe and have things like that looked after. She said yes but doctors took so much money, and it was bad enough being sick without having to pay for it. He said in the long run it was likely to cost folks more not having a doctor than having him. I had begun to think they were going to keep it up all day when Rolly finally brought the talk around to the Carters again, asking the woman about her work there.
She told us she had been hired two weeks ago, when they took the house. She went there each morning at nine–they never got up before ten–cooked their meals, did the housework, and left after washing the dinner dishes in the evening–usually somewhere around seven-thirty. She seemed surprised at the news that Collinson–Carter to her–had been killed and his wife had gone away. She told us that Collinson had gone out by himself, for a walk, he said, right after dinner the previous night. That was at about half-past six, dinner having been, for no especial reason, a little early. When she left for home, at a few minutes past seven, Mrs. Carter had been reading a book in the front second-story room.