“Just stay the hell away from me,” I said, and walked back to my Avalon.
I saw Kippy Jo hanging wash on the clothesline. She stopped her work and lifted her head, her eyes focusing on the sky, as though the barometer had dropped dramatically and the environment around her was about to experience a change she had not foreseen.
Late that night the phone in my library rang.
“Jessie and me has got to get out of here, Mr. Holland,” the voice said.
“Mr. Doolittle?”
“I owe you mightily for what you’ve done. But I need money to get us down to the coast.”
“I can’t do that. You’re an innocent man, but Jessie Stump belongs in a cage.”
“Somebody up on the ridge seen us yesterday. He had field glasses.”
“Let me surrender you, sir. I’ll see that you’re protected. You have my word.”
“You don’t know what it’s like for a deformed man in the hands of hateful men. They ain’t gonna get me again. You cain’t hep me?”
“Not the way you want.”
I heard him take a breath through the receiver, as though resigning himself.
“Jessie ain’t all bad. I made him give up revenge against Earl Deitrich. That’s a start, ain’t it?” Skyler said.
“I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” I replied.
“Goodbye, Mr. Holland. I reckon this is the last time I’ll be telling you that, too.”
“Good luck, Mr. Doolittle,” I said.
He hung up.
The following afternoon, Saturday, Temple threw a pebble against my library window. I went to the back porch and opened the screen. But she didn’t come in.
“This is good right here,” she said, and sat down on the scrolled iron bench under the chinaberry tree.
“I’ve got some lemonade made.”
“Another time. I talked with Wilbur Pickett. You’re too hard on him,” she said.
“Oh?”
“It was there all the time, Billy Bob. You’ve said it yourself. People will do lots of things for money. Did it make sense that a man who would steal an antique watch would take nothing else with it?”
“He lied.”
r /> “He was scared.”
“Of what?”
“You, his wife, the kids that look up to him. Come on, stop stoking your own furnace.”
“Just dropping by to ladle out some moral insight?” I said.
“No. I did some checking into Earl Deitrich’s finances. His place in Montana is up for sale and he’s been borrowing on his house here. That’s why he grabbed on to this insurance scam after Wilbur stole his bonds. He stands to gain a quarter of a million and he might still end up a partner in Wilbur’s oil deal. He probably sent Bubba Grimes to kill Wilbur and Kippy Jo so he could file civil suit against the estate and seize their property up in Wyoming.”
“I’m still Kippy Jo’s defense attorney, and now I have to put Wilbur on the stand so he can tell the jury how he stole fifty thousand dollars in bonds and lied about it. Does that sound like a credible defense witness to you? You think that will make the jury a lot more sympathetic toward the Picketts? Or maybe I can suborn perjury.”