Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“If you’d tried to kill him, he’d be dead. You’ll never make an assassin, Satch, so stop pretending you are. You need to stop fretting yourself over a waste of oxygen like Slakely. The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”

Grandfather should have been an exorcist.

“There’s another matter on my mind,” I said.

“The day hasn’t come when there wasn’t.”

“Did you ever see specters or illusions? I mean really see them?”

“Like pools of heat on the horizon?” he said.

“Remember the stolen car Bonnie and Clyde were driving, the one I shot into? It was a 1932 Confederate. I’ve seen it. Not once but twice.”

“There’re probably a lot of them around. I think you need to turn off your brain for a while and discontinue this line of thought.”

“I saw it in a gas station just before my former commanding officer gave me the key to his hunting camp. I saw it at the camp, too, before the vigilantes took away Rosita. Four people were in it. They looked like cardboard cutouts. They didn’t look alive.”

He never took his eyes off the yard. “I see spirits with regularity these days. They’re on the edge of the shade just yonder. If you turn real quick, you’ll see them, too. I don’t like to dwell too much upon this sort of thing.” He got up stiffly from the rocker and took off his Stetson and sailed it crown-down onto the bed, a lock of his white hair falling across his eye, like a little boy’s.

“You see them out there now?” I asked.

“Don’t pay me any mind or listen to anything I say. Let’s see what Snowball has fixed for lunch.”

LINDA GAIL HEARD something drop through the mail slot and hit hard on the floor. It was a cardboard mailer with no return address. Inside was a brown envelope that contained individual head shots of four women. All of the women were Caucasian and wearing smocks; their mouths were open, their hair in disarray, their eyes locked in a private vision of despair they could never share with others, their heads tilted as though there were no reason to hold them erect. A typed note in the envelope read: “Medical science is doing wonders for disturbed people these days. We hope your friend is better.”

She drove to Roy’s office and went inside. “Tell Mr. Wiseheart that Linda Gail is here, please,” she said to the receptionist.

“He’s on the phone right now. He might be a while,” the receptionist said.

“No, he won’t,” she replied.

Before the receptionist could reply, Linda Gail brushed past and shut Roy’s door behind her. She turned the envelope over and sprinkled the photos and the typed note on his desk. “Check this out,” she said.

He was holding the phone receiver to his ear. “I’ll call you back, Senator,” he said, and replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Where’d you get these?”

“From the mailman. Read the note.”

“Who are these women?”

“Would you read the note, please?”

He picked it up from the desk blotter, his eyebrows bronze-tinted in a ray of sunlight shining through the window. There was hardly a line in his skin.

“They were lobotomized,” she said. “They’re vegetables. I called the reference librarian and got some information about the procedure. A steel probe is shoved under the eyelid into the brain.”

“How do you know they were lobotomized?”

“I don’t. Maybe they went through electroshock. What difference does it make? This is something that belongs in the Middle Ages.”

“Does Weldon know about this?” he asked.

“I’m going to his house now. I’d like you to go with me.”

She waited. This was the moment, she thought. All he had to say was Let me get my coat.

“No, I don’t believe I should do that. Weldon was here earlier. He knows I’m doing everything I can to help Rosita. What neither of you understands is the political position she has put other people in. I was talking to a United States senator when you came in.”

She looked at him dumbly. “You won’t go with me to Weldon’s house? That’s going to disrupt your day?”