Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I won’t answer that question.”

“I know she’s not. But what if you knew she was a turncoat? How would you feel, Loot? How would you like to be deceived by the woman you love?”

I didn’t have an answer for him.

“See what I mean?” he said. “I was a virgin when I married Linda Gail. I’ve never wanted another woman. You ask why I’m carrying my forty-five? I think I might shoot myself for being so damn dumb.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s on your mind.”

“It’s my upbringing. If a badger digs under your back fence, you deal with it.”

I didn’t want to hear any more. Hershel had said he planned to visit his father on their farm. I had never met his family, but I knew their frame of reference well. Whether Hershel knew it or not, he was rejoining his family and the culture they represented without ever stepping out of the motor court. I clicked off the light switch for him on my way out.

ROSITA AND I returned to Houston two days later. Historically, in the long and weary traditions of warfare, snipers were treated as ignominious individuals who seldom became prisoners of war. The degree of enmity directed at them was for a reason. A successful sniper destroyed morale, robbed exhausted soldiers of the few hours of sleep they were allowed, and inculcated feelings of nakedness and vulnerability in a foot solider that can only be compared to having your skin stripped off with a pair of pliers.

A single sniper could influence the behavior of hundreds or even thousands of troops, whether he was close by or not. We didn’t salute in combat zones or silhouette on a hill or wear good-luck pieces or watches or rings that reflected light. We believed in the three-on-a-match warning passed down from the Great War. (The first and second man who lit his cigarette off the same match would probably be all right; by the time the third man lit up, the crosshairs of a scoped rifle would be on his face.) An effective sniper did not simply command territory; he lived in your mind like a parasite, sapping your energies, eating away at your nerve endings.

The people trying to hurt us operated in the same fashion. We did not know who or where they were, but they could reach out and touch us any time they wished. We were blindfolded, groping about in the darkness, waiting for them to strike, while they stood faceless in the sunlight and enjoyed our plight.

We had been home three hours when I saw a police cruiser pull into our driveway, a uniformed officer behind the wheel and a middle-aged woman in the passenger seat. The woman got out and walked across the grass to the front porch, her plain black bag hanging from her shoulder, her dark suit too tight for her body.

As adherents of a Judeo-Christian ethos that teaches us not to judge, we have a tendency to shut down our instincts and avoid first impressions that are cautionary in nature. But as I review my own experience, I have to conclude that my choice not to pet a junkyard dog was probably a good one, and I should not have been surprised at the irritability of a black-garbed, wimple-encased two-hundred-pound Catholic nun on a one-hundred-degree sidewalk when I asked for directions to the San Jacinto Battleground. Of course, those are facetious examples. There was nothing humorous about the encounter I was about to have.

The woman who knocked on my door wore no expression, unless you counted the flat stare in her eyes and the bitterness around her mouth. She seemed to radiate the kind of repressed animus that has no origins, the kind that is probably pathological and characterizes functionaries who serve perverse abstractions created for them by others. When we meet people of this kind, we assume their source of discontent has nothing to do with us, and hence we’re often incautious in dealing with them. I was not the exception. She said her name was Lemunyon and that she was a probation officer assigned by the court to make a recommendation regarding the charges against Rosita.

“Recommendation about what?” I said through the screen.

“I’ve called three times to make an appointment. No one answered,” she said. “So I came out. May I come in?”

I pushed open the door. “Sit down,” I said.

“Is Mrs. Holland here?”

“She went to the store.”

“I also sent a letter and asked that you call me.”

“We were out of town. We haven’t had time to open the mail.”

“Out of town?” she said, sitting down in a stuffed chair but touching it first, as though it might have dust on it.

“Yes, my company has several pipeline contracts in Louisiana. I’m over there two weeks out of four.”

She looked at a spot midway between her chair and me. “You’re telling me you and your wife were in the state of Louisiana?”

“That’s what I said. Excuse me, but I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

“Obviously,” she said, looking around the room, as though its old furniture and bookcases and dark drapes and big globe mounted on a stand were an extension of an attitude she couldn’t piece together. “I’m doing a background report on your wife. She can be tried for misdemeanor battery or for felonious assault. Do you know the difference between the two?”

“Yes, I believe I do.”

“You believe?”

This time I didn’t speak.

“Do you know the penalty for felony assault on a police officer?” she said.

“My wife did not assault anybody,” I said.