Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I think we have to let go of Linda Gail. Her choices are always about herself. She won’t change. She seems incapable of understanding how much injury she’s done.”

I couldn’t argue with that logic.“I’m going to destroy this photograph,” I said.

“They have others.”

“Good,” I said. “One day I’ll catch up with the people who took them. When I do, I won’t feel any qualms. They’ll get the reward they’ve earned.”

“I don’t want you to talk about killing again.”

“What do you think I did in the war?”

“The war is over.”

“It’s never over. You enlist and you fight it for the rest of your life. I’m going to make these people pay for what they’ve done. There’s a difference between justice and vengeance.”

She walked toward me and placed her hand on my forehead, as though checking to see if I had a fever. “Don’t you ever start thinking like that,” she said. “Don’t compromise yourself because of scum like these people. Do you hear me, Weldon?”

That was Rosita Lowenstein in full-frontal attack mode. It was a state of mind I had learned not to challenge. I put my arms around her, crossing them behind her back. I could smell the fragrance in her hair and the heat in her skin. I looked her in the eye. “Straight shooters always win,” I said.

She buried her face in my neck, her fingers kneading my arms, her bare feet standing on the tops of my shoes. I swore I would get every one of them, one at a time or all at once; it didn’t matter.

I KNEW I COULD not get close to Dalton Wiseheart on my own. But maybe there was another way into his inner circle, I told myself. He might have an enemy who would be only too glad to help undermine the outer wall of the fortress. Wiseheart had made a remark about his daughter-in-law, Clara. What was it? She was a different kettle of fish? I wondered in what way.

While Rosita took a nap, I drove to the far end of River Oaks, where Roy and Clara Wiseheart lived amid a level of Greco-Roman glory that Nero would have envied. Her name had been Harrington before she married. Her family had made its money in rice and cotton in the early part of the century, then doubled its wealth during the Great War by growing beans for the government and investing the profits in the demand for explosives. Unlike many of their peers, the Harringtons were reclusive and generated no mystique about their personal lives. They were rich and gold-plated against the minuscule concerns of ordinary people, and that was all that mattered. What else did anyone need to know?

I pulled into the driveway and walked across the lawn toward the porch and the massive three-story columns at the front of the house. I had no idea if anyone was home. Nor did I have a plan. During the drive from my house to the Wisehearts’, I had decided to approach whoever was home in the most honest fashion I could. If I was rebuffed, at least I wouldn’t have to resent myself.

I saw her in the side yard, weeding the garden on her knees. She was wearing cloth gloves and denim pants and a straw hat and a gray work jacket with big pockets for garden tools. “How are you, Miss Clara?” I said, lifting my hat.

“Roy is in Los Angeles, Mr. Holland,” she said.

The sunlight was not kind to Clara Wiseheart. The foundation on her skin was cracked, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes showing through like cat’s whiskers. I realized she was at least a decade older than her husband.

“May I talk to you?” I asked.

She inserted her weeding trowel in the dirt. “About what?”

“My wife was arrested on false charges. She was molested by the arresting officer.”

One of her eyes was smaller than the other, an intense blue, triangular in shape. “Why would you want to tell me about something like this?”

“Because I think Dalton Wiseheart is trying to injure us. Because I want to make him accountable for the evil deeds I think he’s done.”

She got to her feet and brushed off her knees. “Follow me.”

I walked behind her into the backyard. The swimming pool had been drained, and pine needles and oak leaves were stuck to the bottom and the sides like crustaceans. The air was cold in the shade and smelled of gas and herbicide and a moldy tarp carelessly piled against the pool house. The yard seemed marked by neglect and the onslaught of winter or, better said, the ephemeral nature of life and our inability to deal with it.

An old hand-crank record player had been set on a low brick wall that bordered an elevated flowerbed. It had a fluted horn on it and a record mounted on the turntable.

“Sit down,” she said.

The chair was hard and cold to the touch, the glass tabletop the same. She sat across from me, her triangular-shaped eye watery. She took a drink from a coffee cup that smelled of liqueur, her gaze never leaving my face. “Why would I be your confidante regarding the character deficiencies of Dalton Wiseheart?”

“I’m not asking that of you. I’m telling you of the harm I believe he’s done to an innocent woman. I want to talk to him. I want him to look me in the face and tell me he’s not responsible for hiring an evil man to commit sexual battery on my wife and put her in jail.”

“Dalton plays the role of an avuncular wheat farmer for journalists stupid enough to write about him. He has squandered millions buying professional baseball and football teams. He also spends huge sums trying to control an electorate that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Dalton is a bumbling idiot and should be treated as such.”

“Do you think he’s capable of paying a Houston police officer to hurt my wife?”