All the Old Lions (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book One) Read online

  “No,” I cried, backing away from this final blow. “No, Max, no.” I sank down to the ground. My legs refused to hold me any longer.

  Max raised his face to me, a grim frightening mask, as if he’d forgotten my existence. He let the limp form fall carelessly to the ground. He rose and came to me, wiping the sweat and blood from his face with the back of his hands. His lungs reaching for air filled the sudden stillness with a ragged aftermath to violence.

  Fatigue etched his face and slowed his movements. I watched helplessly and wondered if the ferocity I’d just witnessed was the same kind of monstrous cancer that had lurked so close to the surface of Jim’s charm.

  Wordlessly, he took a jackknife from his pocket and kneeled, turning me to reach my hands. He pried loose the rock I still gripped in my paralyzed fingers and threw it across the lot with a vicious snap. His hands trembled as he sawed through the rope.

  There was no way I could suppress the groan when my hands were freed and my shoulders rolled back into place. Max swore under his breath and massaged my abused muscles, pushing the pain around with strong fingers, spreading it out until the stinging, razor darts diminished to a manageable ache.

  Then he sank down beside me, drew me into his arms and buried his face in my neck, seeking a release of his own. I recognized his reaction and took comfort from it.

  After a brief moment, he held me away and smoothed the hair from my face. “Are you all right?” he asked, much too solemn.

  “All right!” I countered, in my own hoarse voice. “Battered, bruised, tied, thrown in a pit, and you calmly ask if I’m all right? Well, I’m not; I hurt like hell.” He managed a small smile, the tiniest turning of one corner. “But, I would have hurt a lot more if you hadn’t come along when you did and, frankly, I’m rather enjoying this bit.” I snuggled more closely against his heavy chest.

  He wasn’t deterred. “What’s this?” His fingers pulled at the rag that hung around my neck. I looked at it blankly. I’d actually forgotten the ghastly thing.

  “He gagged me, but you ought to know I’m not easy to shut up. I got rid of the thing on my way out of the pit.” My attempt at lightness didn’t work very well. His mouth hardened and a pulse jumped to life in the stiff line of his jaw.

  “That bastard.”

  “No, Max.” I put my fingers on the pulse, tried to smooth it away. “There’s been enough of that already. It’s over.”

  He glanced over his shoulder to where Jim was lying, but I had no desire to look at him again.

  “I didn’t think you’d ever come back, Max.”

  “You knew I was here?”

  “Yes, and I tried to make enough noise to attract your attention, but couldn’t.”

  “You can thank that damfool dog for bringing me back. I actually believed Jim when he said he didn’t know where you were. So I went back to Minnie’s. I thought I’d missed you somewhere. Then I saw the dog cut through the fields. I knew what a fool he was for you. I decided I’d better check where he was going, and followed him here. Heard you scream…I thought Jim was mixed up in this somehow; still, I didn’t think he’d hurt you.” He stared at his hands, slowly balling them into fists. “I honestly didn’t think he’d hurt you.”

  “Forget it, Max. I handed myself to him on a platter. I was so sure Potts was the villain.”

  He kissed me then, with a thoroughness that I definitely was not too tired to appreciate; in fact, I didn’t even care that I hadn’t been able to coax a smile from him. There would be plenty of time for that.

  Something jumped on me. I yelped, and pulled away from Max. The wiggling mass of dog trod all over us, even daring to lollop Max’s rough cheek in his happiness.

  “Whoa,” Max said, trying to escape the wet tongue and beating tail. “Call your hound off.” Then added, “I guess I owe you one, Sport.”

  “Jim beat him, Max. And at the house, I thought the dog was running away from Potts, but it was Jim.”

  When I spoke Jim’s name, Max turned to check on him, then jumped to his feet with a sharp expletive. Jim was gone. “I should have known the dog wouldn’t show while Jim was here,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.” But we were too late. The sound of a vehicle roaring out of the drive hit our ears.

  Max set off at a trot.

  “Wait,” I called, and limped off to where I’d seen the picture of Minnie and Lil land. I retrieved it, but the soles of my bare feet could stand no more. I felt like I was walking on a bed of hot coals, and was not one of the chosen.

  Max glared at my feet. “Where are your shoes?” For the first time he seemed to take in my appearance, disgusting filth, grime, torn clothes and all. “You know, woman,” he said. “I’m having one hell of a time keeping you clean.”

  He offered me his back. “Hop on. Let’s get out of here.” He carried me piggyback up through the rocks, weeds and cactus, past the barn and to the house. We entered cautiously, but it was empty.

  While Max grabbed the phone and put the sheriff on the lookout for Jim, I tied my broken bra strap with a knot and tucked the shredded ends of shirt underneath it. I couldn’t find anything that would stay on my feet, so Max again rode me on his back out to the truck, which he’d left on the road while he followed the dog.

  “You could use some rapid transit around here,” I said, trying not to choke him with my death’s grip around his neck.

  “Ooof,” was all he said. I wasn’t that much of a featherweight.

  While we drove—or rather flew—to town, I filled him in on everything that had happened, starting with my reasons for borrowing his pickup, and leaving town without him.

  “And I’m no better off now than I was then, Max. I left Minnie’s manuscript in Jim’s truck. We’ll probably never see it, or the pictures, again.”

  “What pictures?”

  “The ones we were going to use in the book. We had a snapshot that identified the members of the vigilante gang who hung your grandfather. Both Parson Potts and Helby Enright were in it And some relative of Sheriff Beesom.”

  I thought about the companion picture that had become so much more personal now, more than just an exploitable relic of the wild west. A depiction of the grandfather Max had never known, the father that his mother had never known. Not something you’d want to keep in the family album.

  I guess I wanted, needed, him to know that I had intended to publish the picture without consulting him. “There was a photo of the hanging, too, Max, that we were going to use. It showed the body.” I felt small, but relieved.

  Bit by bit, I had gained a better perspective of the manuscript’s importance to my life. There were other things in the world more significant than the advancement of my career, such as Minnie’s health and safety, and yes, my own as well.

  Max lit a cigarette, one of the few I’d seen him smoke, and gave me another one of those long considering glances, before he returned his attention to the road. All he said was, “I was worried when I couldn’t find you, or the truck.”

  “I looked for you,” I said, as glad as he to change the subject. “Why weren’t you at the sheriff’s office?”

  “I caught him on his way to the courthouse, and told him what we thought had happened to Minnie. He put an official watch on her, but we wasted time trying to find Potts. He must have already gone to the country.”

  “Yes, I know only too well. I caught him searching Halfway Halt for Minnie’s manuscript. He said as much when he grabbed me.” I clutched my side, which was beginning to ache unbearably.

  “It wasn’t hard to convince Hank to put a guard on Minnie. He was worried about a lot of things. He’d just been told that Cora had more than a casual stumble against that truck mirror. Her skull was fractured at the temple. She died from a brain hemorrhage.”

  “Jim did it, Max. He told me. They had an argument and he said he just pushed her; but he must have really slammed her against it.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. It has something to do with
that picture of Lil and Minnie. He was afraid she was going to tell people about it. But I don’t understand. It was Jim who broke into the house the other night, too. Cora had seen the picture first and told Jim about it.”

  I had stuck the portrait under the belt of my jeans, the only place I had to carry anything. It was in pretty disgusting shape by now.

  Max glanced at it. “Yeah, I saw that in her scrapbook.”

  “But this belonged to Helby. Obviously, Lil gave it to him, but he didn’t keep it with his other old pictures.”

  “I don’t suppose he would. It’s not the kind of thing you’d keep along with keepsakes of your wife and family.”

  “Mmmm,” I agreed. “His other pictures of Hallway Halt were in the box, too. But what’s wrong with it?” The inked inscription, “Me and Minnie,” was smeared a bit from the sweat on my belly. I tried to smooth the cardboard frame back into shape. The studio’s name was embossed on a lower corner: Wick’s Photographs, Clearfield, Iowa, 1932.

  “Max,” I said, peering more closely at the raised print. “The little girl in this picture can’t be Minnie!”

  Sixteen

  “What do you mean, it can’t be Minnie?” Max said. “It’s got ‘Me and Minnie’ written all over it.”

  “This picture was taken in Iowa in nineteen thirty-two. Minnie was already two years old. This child is much younger.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “About her exact age? No. But I am sure that the little Minnie in all those pictures taken in Halfway Halt is older than this little girl.”

  Max slowed as we entered Hijax, and turned the truck towards the hospital.

  “Do you think he told her, Max? Do you think Jim told her that she wasn’t really Minnie? And the shock brought on the stroke?”

  “Or maybe Minnie’s really Minnie, and this other kid is somebody else?” Max pulled in to the small hospital’s emergency entrance. He took the picture from me and inspected it closely.

  I said, “It’s one of Minnie’s favorite pictures. I’m sure Lil told Minnie it was a picture of her. I’ll bet that’s why the frame was removed. Lil cleaned up everything else in the scrapbook. She arranged the past the way she wanted Minnie to see it.” But who was the other child?

  “Well, hang on to this, Thea, but for now we’ve got other things to see to.”

  The long ride had stiffened every muscle I owned. I could no longer tell which part of me hurt more than the other. Max danced with impatience, but insisted I be admitted to emergency. Any protest I was forming dissolved at the look of shocked concern on the nurse’s face when she saw me. Max didn’t look so great, either, but a quick trip to the rest room did wonders for him. He returned with a clean face and hands that looked relatively normal, except for darkening bruises on cheek and jaw, and knuckles that appeared to have fought with a buzz saw.

  “Don’t let her out of your sight,” Max ordered the nurse. Then he took me by the shoulders. “Look, we don’t know where Jim is, or what he has in mind, or even how desperate he is. Please be careful, and stay in your room. I’ll be back as soon as I can and tell you what’s going on. Okay?”

  I nodded, and dropped thankfully into the wheelchair the nurse held for me. I would have agreed to anything at that point. Max turned down the corridor and spoke briefly to a uniformed man who sat in a chair outside of Minnie’s room. The nurse wheeled me in the opposite direction. Potts stood by the nurse’s station. His mouth dropped at sight of me, and I couldn’t tell if he was horrified or delighted by my condition.

  The nurse answered my agitated questions with quick assurance. Minnie was being carefully watched, and doing as well as could be expected. And then I remembered that Potts wasn’t the person I had to worry about any more; it was Jim.

  The doctor taped my cracked ribs, and I was clucked over, cleaned and painted to a fare-thee-well, then put in a room across the hall from Minnie. The nurse was a real sweetheart and even helped me wash my hair. I began to feel like a passable human being, and wondered what Roger would think when he got the bill for this little escapade.

  I was too restless to stay in bed. If there was such a thing as a hospital gown that didn’t open to the wind, this place didn’t have one. I found a second gown in the stand beside my bed and put it on in the opposite direction so I was covered both north and south, or was it east and west? I wanted to see Minnie.

  The guard had my name as an allowed visitor, and let me in without an argument. She looked much as she had earlier. Had it really been just this morning when I last saw her? It seemed as if days had passed since then, so much had happened. Not only to me, but to Minnie as well. The search for her roots had turned into a tragic loss of identity. Who was she really? And due to my carelessness, or stupidity, or whatever you wanted to call it, all the hard work she had done on her book was as good as down the drain. What would happen to her now?

  She opened her eyes briefly and looked at me, but I couldn’t tell if there was recognition there, and I might well have imagined the slight pressure from her fingers. I patted her hand and left her to sleep.

  Potts still stood vigil at the end of the corridor by the nurse’s station. He looked unnaturally timid and self-conscious. I don’t know what impulse sent me down the hall, but I didn’t think I’d be breaking Max’s edict as long as I kept the guard in sight.

  Potts cringed when I approached, and I found it hard to imagine that I’d once found him frightening. He held his hat in front of him and twisted it around and around in his swollen fingers.

  “How…how’s Minnie?” he asked in a low rumble. “They won’t let me see her.”

  I repeated what the doctor and nurse had told me. He’d probably heard it himself, but I had nothing more to offer.

  He looked so abject, so broken; an old lion whose claws had been pulled. I couldn’t stand it. “I think I owe you an apology, Parson. I accused you of a lot of things you didn’t do, and called you a murderer.” That, surely, had been the final blow to his ego. “I should have known there was nothing to fear from a…a man of the cloth.”

  “I wouldn’t have hurt you!”

  “True, but you certainly frightened me.” I said dryly. “And when I met you at the dance, you acted so guilty I thought…” But I was too tired to go into all the details. He would hear it all soon enough.

  Dark color flooded his face. “I’d just found out you weren’t a…a…Folks around town been saying Minnie was going to start up the old business, and I thought you…”

  I waited patiently, struggling not to smile, but if I could apologize, so could this old duck.

  “Well, I found out you weren’t. And…and I’m sorry I thought so,” was the best he could manage.

  It was good enough for me, but I couldn’t resist grinding a bit. “You can’t blame me for being frightened when I found you in my room.”

  “Don’t know what happened.” He shook his head, and the words rumbled out of his great barrel chest. “Somehow the Devil got to me, but I wasn’t going to steal Minnie’s book,” he insisted. “I just needed to know what she’d written about me, so’s I could prepare. And pray,” he said, regaining some of his accustomed force.

  I had a few qualms about putting his steps back on the paths of righteousness; still, it was nice to see some of the starch return.

  “There’s people around here what depend on me,” he said. “I can’t let them down.”

  Strangely enough, I believed him. “I don’t think anything in Minnie’s book will destroy people’s belief in you. They’ve known you for a long time.”

  However, there were limits to my altruism. I wasn’t about to tell him I feared Minnie’s book would never see the light of day. Everything depended now upon how much of a recovery Minnie made, and what she chose to do with the information she had. And, of course, if I ever got the manuscript back.

  I had turned to go back to my room when, with another great rumbling, Potts cleared his throat. “About that camera, Miss.”

 
; So that had been his piece of work.

  “I didn’t know what you was planning. I didn’t want no pictures of me in a book without knowing what was going to be said. Have a bit of trouble with my temper, now and then.” He shrugged, as if that explained everything. “Be glad to buy you another.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said, and walked away.

  “You look much better,” Max said when he returned.

  “Good, but you’re going to have to rustle me up some clothes, as they say in the vernacular. I’m not staying here all night.”

  “The stores are closed.”

  “If there’s a Laundromat, you can wash my jeans, and surely one of the gas stations sells T-shirts. Anything will do. Now, tell me, what did you find out?”

  “Not much. Deputies have gone out into the country, looking for Jim, but they’re not real hopeful about finding him. He could be anywhere.”

  The nurse came in and said, “Helby Enright’s in the lobby. He wants to see both of you.” She handed me a striped cotton robe.

  “Oh, Max, does he know about Jim?” I asked, as we hurried out to meet him. “I feel so sorry for him.”

  Parson Potts was gone. Helby was the only person in the waiting room. Once more, he wore the fawn trousers, a blond shirt with a black silk scarf tied loosely around his neck, a rich leather vest, and high-heeled cowboy boots. He held the high-crowned hat at his side. I smiled and extended my hand. He took it, and looked me over much as Max had, to see if I were suitably in a piece. I was glad he hadn’t seen me earlier.

  “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

  “And I’m…”

  “I assure you, my son will be caught and charged with assault and battery. Both on your account, and Minnie’s.” He squeezed my fingers lightly, offering me the comfort I wanted to give him. He didn’t know about Cora yet. He held himself with a great deal of reserve but still managed to convey that he had lived his life, knew what it contained, and what he had wrought. He didn’t need sympathy.

  He turned to Max. “I owe you a debt, young man, you and yours. Your grandfather was hung for a deed I committed, and wasn’t man enough to own up to. I watched him swing, and told myself it didn’t matter because he was sheepherding trash.” He stood ramrod straight and spoke unflinchingly. “I was a snot-nosed kid then, fourteen years old, full of myself and the man I was going to become. But I always knew I did wrong. It never left me.”