The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

Valerie’s greatest time commitment wasn’t to her clubs or school assignments; it was to reading in the public library. The great gift of the government to our generation was the WPA program known simply as the bookmobile. Those of us who loved books didn’t learn to love them at school; we learned a love of literature by reading the adventures of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Richard Halliburton. One day Valerie would probably become a librarian. For now she had formed an almost religious faith in the knowledge a person could discover on her own in the musty shelves of a small library in North Houston.

We went for a soda after the show, and I told her that Saber and Jimmy McDougal had vandalized Krauser’s home and that Saber had betrayed me.

“You can’t be sure of that, can you?” she said. “Jimmy what’s-his-name didn’t actually tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to. I always thought Saber was involved. When I asked him, he slipped the punch. The funny thing is that Krauser wanted to believe we did it.”

“Why?”

“Because he was afraid of Clint Harrelson and the kind of people who work for him. He probably thought he and Saber and I were being set up, and Cisco Napolitano dumped him because he wouldn’t use his influence to get kids into Harrelson’s indoctrination camps. A guy who went all the way to the Elbe River killed himself for no reason.”

Maybe my reasoning was self-serving and I was exonerating my mother at the expense of a suicide victim, but I didn’t care. She had paid enough dues in this world, and Krauser had not, no matter how many Nazis he had killed.

She pushed aside her black cow and took a pencil and pad from her purse. “What was the title of that book Clint Harrelson was reading when you and your father went to his house?”

“I saw the word ‘eugenical’ on the cover. It was written by a guy named Laughlin.”

She wrote it down. “I’ll get right on this.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t get too involved,” I said.

She gave me a look that made me blink. That was the downside of being in love with Valerie Epstein. You didn’t tell her what to do.

“I mean, Detective Jenks has evidently been after these guys for years. The only thing he’s gotten for it is indigestion.”

“Where is Saber now?”

“With a couple of Mexican drug dealers.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him.”

“What about?”

“He let you get arrested for a crime he committed. I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

“Let’s take a pass on that,” I said.

Under the table, she put both of her tennis shoes on top of my cowboy boots.

“If I see him, I’ll tell him,” I said.

She pounded her feet up and down.

“I’ll call him,” I said.

“You never know when I’m kidding you, do you,” she replied.

I never saw anyone who had so much light in her eyes.

SHE MADE CLINT Harrelson the subject of her private investigation at her neighborhood public library, then expanded her operation to the library at Rice University. The filling station where I worked was a short distance away. The campus was green through the summer and winter and filled with oak trees, the buildings deep in shadow at sunset. As I approached her in the reading room and saw her at one of the tables, writing in her notepad, books spread open around her, I was reminded of Nancy Drew waging war with her fountain pen against the sinister forces that threatened to destroy River Heights. Even though Valerie’s mother had been murdered b

y Nazis, she believed that people were basically good. I did not think she would find anything in either a public or university library that would tell us anything we didn’t know about Clint Harrelson or the people who ran the Galveston underworld. But I dared not tell her that.

“What’d you find?” I said, sitting down across from her, still wearing my green-and-white-striped gas station shirt.

“Clint Harrelson went to a military academy in Virginia,” she said. “He had a senatorial appointment to West Point, but he was expelled for hazing another cadet. Guess what? He did it again at Northwestern. Mr. Harrelson and his fraternity brothers hung a boy by his feet off a pier and ending up dropping him on the rocks. They not only killed him and hid the body, they did the same thing to another kid later on, although he survived.”

“Where’d you get all this?”