Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I’ll go with you.”

“No. Finish your lunch.”

“Do they have a doctor here?”

“For God’s sake, sit down and give me a few minutes alone. Please do that, Hershel. Don’t argue. For once, don’t argue about things you don’t understand.”

She walked out the tent flap, avoiding the stares from the other tables, her magenta silk blouse rippling in the wind. She saw Roy Wiseheart’s open-cockpit biplane lifting off the dirt runway, his goggled face turning toward her. He was grinning. As he flew past her, he waved and pointed upward, as though telling her his destination lay somewhere beyond the heavens, and his plane made of wires and struts and fabric would take him there. Then he began climbing almost straight up, higher and higher, until his plane became a black speck and seemed to dissolve inside the sun. She continued toward her trailer, trying to remember what Roy had said about Jack Valentine. He needed to be taught a lesson? Was that it? Yes, those were Roy’s words.

She heard the plane’s engine sputtering, as though the fuel line had clogged. She shielded her eyes and stared up at the sound, then saw Roy coming out of the west, over brown hills that looked like clay sculptures of a woman’s breasts, his plane upside down. As he roared past her, low over her trailer, he let his arms hang loose from his body, his full weight hanging against the leather safety harness, his shadow and the shadow of his plane rippling like an effigy of a feathered serpent across a field of green corn.

Then she turned and saw Hershel behind her. He was watching the biplane disappear over the hills, a look of resignation on his face. “I didn’t come out here to cause you problems, Linda Gail,” he said. “I missed you, that’s all.”

Chapter

22

I CAN’T TELL you what evil is. I’ll leave that to the theologians. But I can tell you what it looks like in human form. In this instance its name was Hubert Timmons Slakely, the uniformed cop who arrested and molested my wife.

We had left Grandfather at home and driven to a miniature golf course a few blocks away. There was still light in the sky, and it was cool enough for a jacket. The stars were out, and families were putting golf balls down felt-lined corridors into imitation greens outfitted with toy windmills and tiny bridges over watercourses and tunnels that plunked the ball into a cup. I had no reason to worry about Grandfather. He enjoyed listening to the radio by himself and reading his encyclopedias and putting up preserves from our garden or the vegetable market, and we had told the next-door neighbor where we would be in case of an emergency.

Earlier I’d said I didn’t expect to see Officer Slakely again. I was dead wrong. Wicked men do not go away of their own accord.

Grandfather was sitting up in bed with his spectacles on, the King James Bible propped open on his stomach, when he heard the house creak and felt the air in his room decompress. Someone had just opened and closed the front door.

“Is that you, Weldon?” he said.

A tall man wearing a pearl-gray short-brim Stetson and a sharkskin suit and a black shirt with red flowers on it appeared in the bedroom doorway. His hands were big, the back of the right hand tattooed with a string of blue stars. He was smoking a cigarette. “Howdy,” he said.

Grandfather nodded.

“Where’s your ashtray?” the tall man asked.

“I don’t have one,” Grandfather replied.

“You must be the former Texas Ranger.”

Grandfather didn’t reply.

“I didn’t figure you for a student of Scripture,” the visitor said.

“I was looking for the loopholes.”

The visitor’s cigarette was almost down to his fingers. “I got to remember that one. Where’s your grandson at?”

“He comes and goes. Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing in our house?”

“I’m Detective Hubert Timmons Slakely of the Houston City Police Department.”

“You knocked and walked in? Or you didn’t bother to knock and just walked in?”

“I knocked and thought I heard someone say come in.”

“Are you the one who arrested Rosita in Hermann Park?”

“It’s my opinion she got herself arrested.”

“When did you become a plainclothes?”