The Devil Went Down to Austin

Page 36

Ramskit?"
"Ram shit!" Father Time interpreted, thoroughly delighted.
We read through the fistfight between Noah and wife, the kicking and screaming, the insults. Uxor, the wife, sat down to knit in the rain while the flood came up around her ankles. Once the pleading family finally herded the old matriarch on board, the class was almost sorry to see her lose the argument and live.
"She should've held out," one contended. "Noah's a bastard."
We got to the end. The wife sent out a raven to find land. Noah sent out two doves. The raven's hunger for carrion kept him from returning, but the dove's gentleness and true heart brought it back to the ship with the olive branch.
There was a moment of silence after we read the last line.
"So women send out ravens," the girl in back said. "Is that an insult?"
We could've talked for another hour just on that point, but we were out of time. I told them we'd continue to discuss Noah tomorrow, then asked them to read the next play, The Crucifixion, on their own.
Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in Texas French Bread on Guadalupe, the rain beating down outside. My Bevington Medieval Drama was open, a blank yellow pad and portable Middle English Dictionary on top. My cell phone, a cup of coffee, a ham and cheese croissant, and a bottle of extrastrength Tylenol filled up the rest of the tabletop. All the comforts of home.
I stared at the phone, then at the Bevington book.
Planning for tomorrow's class seemed a lot safer than the other things I needed to do today.
And then the phone chirped.
Maia Lee said, "Hey."
"We win the lottery?"
"Finding Garrett—no luck. And nothing on Ruby. The search divers aren't going back in until later in the day."
I wasn't sure whether to be relieved by no news, or not. "Where are you? "
Rain static hissed on the line. "Tres, I went back to Faye DoeblerIngram's house.
She's gone."
"Gone as in gone?"
Maia told me how she'd found the Hyde Park house locked up, dark, no car in the driveway. Maia had taken a discreet look around
inside and found empty clothes hangers, missing toiletries, everything else clean and tidy, nothing perishable in the refrigerator.
"She left under her own steam," I said.
"Or it's been made to look that way."
I ran down the mental list—Jimmy, Jimmy's exwife, Jimmy's aunt. Five years ago, Jimmy's mother. Except for my good friend W.B., every Doebler I knew had been taken out of service. And even W.B. had hired a bodyguard.
"Jimmy's family history," I said. "That tip he got about a lost sibling. What are the odds, Maia?"
Maia was quiet so long I thought I'd lost her.
"I know what you're thinking," she said at last. "There was one case like that in North Carolina. A woman went to court to open her adoption files. Gave medical reasons, but really, she'd harboured years of resentment, felt she'd been abandoned to abusive foster care. When she found her birth family, she tracked them down—murdered her mother and two sisters. But she was caught immediately, Tres. The paper trail was clear. The consent of the birth family had to be given for her to track them."
"That assumes the paper trail is legitimate," I argued. "We're talking about South Texas in the 1960s. An unmarried society woman getting in trouble with the wrong man, going off to a 'resort,' paying a little money for the baby to vanish. Better on the family's conscience than abortion. That was anything but rare, Maia."
The rain was letting up outside, coming down in random cupfuls on the sidewalk. A street person shuffled by in a green parka made of Hefty bags.
I took Maia's silence for disapproval.
"All right," I relented. "So it was a long shot. What made you want to check back with Faye?"
"Listen, Tres. I've had a lead for a couple of days now, but I wasn't sure what to do with it. I was afraid you'd say I was crazy, grasping at anything. I know Lopez would accuse me of that. After going to Faye's, I decided to do a little paperdigging. I spent the last hour at the Travis County Courthouse."
"Jimmy's search," I said. "The birth certificates."
"As near as I can tell, that's a big blank. No birth certificates with Clara Doebler as the mother for the years in question. At least, nothing on file. Nothing legal."
"But?"
"Dwight's story," she said. "About Pena's parents."
"The car accident."
"I made some calls. It wasn't easy, but I found out the parents lived in Burnet County. I talked to a deputy out there who knew them, remembered the accident. According to this guy, there was nothing suspicious. The parents were coming back from a Christmas party late at night. The road was icy. They'd been drinking. They swerved off a sharp turn in a hill. End of story. The police did a thorough check on the car, and no tampering was found. The deputy said the Heismans were good people, said he never thought much of the son, but Matthew had been away at college at the time.
Nobody seriously suspected him of any complicity."
"The Heismans?"
"That was their name. The search I did a couple of days ago, Tres, when I was trying to dig up dirt on Pena's past... I hit a brick wall—no records at all before he was eighteen.
My deputy friend says Matthew took back his birth name, even changed his Social Security number the day he turned eighteen—a kind of 'screw you' present to the Heismans. It'll be a hard job to confirm that his birth name really was Pena."
I stared at the lines of Middle English in my book. "Pena is about as old as me."
"It may mean nothing," Maia cautioned.
"Sure."
"Might be worth talking to Dwight Hayes, see if he knows any more."
"Sure."
"But given Matthew Pena's age, we know one thing."
"Sometime after 1967," I supplied, "Matthew Pena was adopted."
CHAPTER 32
Mrs. Hayes was exactly where I'd left her, on her couch under the portrait of Jesus.
Her dress was pistachio green today, and she had no child to fan her. Otherwise she looked no different than she had Sunday night.
"Dwight went out for a moment, Mr. Navarre," she said. "But please sit down."
Grimy sunlight streaked through the windows. Jesus gazed toward the dead moths in the light cover on the ceiling. I could hear the two older kids, Chris and Amanda, playing fulltackle freezetag in the front yard.
"Only two little lambs today?" I asked.
Mrs. Hayes' makeup suggested a scowl, but there was no life to it—just paint.
"Matthew called me yesterday," she said. "He told me Dwight lost his job because of you."
I tried to remind myself she was just a frustrated mother looking out for her son. She didn't know all the things I had to deal with. And Jesus was looking at me, too. Despite that, I had the overwhelming urge to crack her rosy image of Matthew Pena over her head like a cascaron.
"Don't worry," I told her. "Losing that job might be the best thing for Dwight. Cutting the apron strings."
It took her a moment, but the metaphor sunk in. She didn't seem to like it. "I don't appreciate your tone, young man. If you were one of my children ..."
She looked out the window at a flash of metal. A gray Honda was turning into the driveway.
"But never mind," she said. "Matthew Pena was good to my boy."
"You ever deal with foster children, Mrs. Hayes?"
Her eyes traced an imaginary box around me. "Occasionally I help a child from GardenerBettes."
"GardenerBettes, the juvenile home."
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"Just a case I was working on. A child I think was adopted. I think it might have been locally."
"How long ago?"
"Oh, years. Thirtyplus years."
There was an archipelago of tiny brown moles on her rounded shoulders. I imagined a laser burning them off, one by one, as I waited for her reply.
"I couldn't help you," she told me. "The life expectancy for adoption agencies is not good. The one you're looking for probably would not be around anymore."
"Probably not," I agreed. "A shame. This particular placement didn't work out too well.
The adoptee in question turned into quite the little coldblooded killer, Mrs. Hayes.
Someone I'm sure you wouldn't admire. No one you'd want your son to work with."
Her eyes became small, amber points.
Dwight came up the sidewalk, his backpack on his shoulder. He stopped to chew out Chris and Amanda, who were throwing rocks at each other, then came inside.
He looked from me to his mother, read the tension immediately. "Goddamnit, Mother.
Leave him alone."
He tossed a plastic drugstore bag onto the table.
Mrs. Hayes raised her eyebrows. "You will not speak in that way, Dwight. Not while you're in this house."
"I'll arrange for a hotel tonight, then. I'll give you a check for the month's utilities." He glared at me. "Come on, Tres. Don't sit with her. You'll never get up again."
He wheeled around and headed for the stairs.
I smiled apologetically at Mrs. Hayes. "Nice seeing you again, ma'am."
I could feel her eyes on my back as I left, like ice cubes pressing into my shirt.
Halfway up the stairs, one of the smaller children was blocking my path. It was Clem, Mrs. Hayes' fanwielder, watching me with feral brown eyes under a mess of brown hair. He had a shoebox pinched between his knees.
"She doesn't like you," he confided.
I looked in his box. Brown and green things moved, glistening in the bottom—things about the size of almonds. My skin crawled.
Not that I hadn't seen cicadas before, but Clem had tried a new experiment. He'd put them back into their former skins—liberally Scotchtaping their desiccated shells to their bodies. He'd left some of the legs free, so the suffocating cicadas could crawl in helpless paths, going nowhere, waiting to die.
"It's a race," he confided.
I hugged the wall as I stepped around him.
Dwight's bedroom was on the left. He sat in the dark on a trundle bed, his backpack between his knees, staring dejectedly at a dumpedover bucket of toy cars on the carpet.
A bookshelf dominated the south wall—comic books in protective plastic sleeves, science fiction paperbacks, hot rod magazines, computer programming manuals, Clive Cussler novels. There was a window on the right, light filtering through the upper branches of a redbud in the backyard. Posters were thumb tacked to the wall: Nolan Ryan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. If the room had been any more Average Texan Boyhood it would've cracked the meter.
I started to reach for the light switch.
"Don't," Dwight said. "She doesn't like the lights on. Wastes energy."
I wondered how Dwight had gotten so tan growing up in a dark house. The answer immediately presented itself: Dwight would've left as soon and as often as possible.
"You okay?" I asked.
"The kids. It's like having a Little League team invited to trample over your childhood."
I went to the window, looked out at the yard. "At least they limit a Little League team to nine."