Chapter 8 #2
The far bank was Mexico, close enough to throw a stone across at the narrow stretches, and the brush on that side looked the same as the brush on this side. The border was a line on a map and a name people gave the river. The river didn’t seem to know about it.
She walked east along the near bank with her hands in the pockets of her coat, the coat unnecessary by eight in the morning but she’d put it on in the dark before dawn and hadn’t bothered taking it off.
She was thinking about what she had.
It was a short accounting and she’d been over it enough times that the items came up in the same order every time, like a rosary, the same beads in the same sequence, and the prayer that was supposed to follow never came.
Her father had left the house on a Wednesday evening in September two years ago, dressed in his good jacket, walking to dinner at Mayor Nash’s house on the north end of town. That was the last anyone had seen of him who was willing to say so plainly.
There were two accounts she couldn’t verify: a man who said he’d seen someone fitting Emmett’s description walking north on the main street around eight o’clock, and a boy of twelve who said he’d seen a tall gray-haired man arguing with someone at the edge of the Aldecoa property, which was a quarter mile short of Nash’s house, sometime around the same hour.
The boy had said the other man was shorter and wore a black hat. She’d spoken to that boy four separate times in two years and he hadn’t changed his story, and she believed him, which was more than she could say for most of what she’d been told.
Nash had told her he never arrived.
She’d heard it first from Charlotte Nash on the morning after, standing at her doorstep with her hand on the frame, meeting Marielle’s eyes and keeping them.
Then from Nash himself, twice, in his office with his father’s portrait above the desk and his hands folded and his face arranged in the practiced sympathy of a man who had prepared for exactly this conversation and found it a minor inconvenience beneath the preparation.
Three times in total she’d heard the same account, and she had watched each face carefully while it was delivered. And she had believed none of it.
The boy at the Aldecoa property had seen her father a quarter mile short of Nash’s gate, arguing with a man in a black hat, at eight o’clock.
Nash said he never arrived. Those two things could not both be true, and she had known it since the first morning, and it was the engine of everything that had followed.
She thought about Hollis telling her Nash had been cooperative, and what cooperative meant when the man doing the cooperating had already decided what he was going to say and said it the same way every time.
She walked farther along the bank and thought about the others.
George Mavado ran a sheep operation twelve miles southeast of town, the same land his family had worked for three generations.
He was sixty-three years old and looked older and moved with the particular carefulness of a man whose joints had been asking him to slow down for some years.
His son Calvin had been twenty-one when he and two other men walked into the bank in Bandera on a Tuesday morning and told the teller to fill a bag.
Her father had been in Bandera. He’d ridden out the day before on a separate matter and was set to come home that afternoon, and he’d stopped by the bank on a piece of personal business when Calvin Mavado came through the door.
She’d heard the account from two people who’d been in the bank and one who’d been outside and heard the shots and gone to the window.
Her father had told Calvin to put the gun down.
Calvin had been scared in the way that young inexperienced men got scared, and scared men made bad decisions quickly.
He’d pointed the gun at her father and her father had shot him once and that had been the end of Calvin Mavado at twenty-one years old.
The two other men had run. Her father had let them run rather than risk shooting in a room full of people. He’d told Marielle about it two days later at the kitchen table, not because she’d asked but because he seemed to need to say it to someone he trusted.
He’d said the boy had a look in his eyes that said he knew it had gone wrong the moment he walked in. He’d said he’d tried three times to talk him down. He’d said there was a moment where he thought Calvin was going to put the gun on the floor and instead he’d lifted it higher.
George Mavado had come to the house two weeks after the burial. Her father had been home. Marielle had been in the sitting room reading when Mavado knocked and she’d stayed quiet and listened to what came through the closed door.
Mavado’s voice had been controlled, but the control was the kind that required constant maintenance. He’d said her father had murdered his son. Her father had said Calvin made a choice in that bank and that he was sorry it had ended the way it did and that it had not been his preference.
Mavado had said that her father had a daughter and that he might think about what it would feel like if she were the one in the ground. Her father had said if his daughter walked into a bank with a gun he’d hope someone talked her down, and if they couldn’t he’d understand why they didn’t.
Mavado had left. He hadn’t come back, not to the house, but she’d seen him in town three times in the following year and each time he’d looked at her father the way a man looked at something he intended to settle at some point.
Then her father had disappeared and she’d gone to Mavado’s place and asked him directly and he’d stood in his front yard and looked at her with old, dry eyes and said he didn’t know where Emmett Vaughn was and wouldn’t lose sleep if he never found out.
She didn’t know if he’d done anything. She didn’t know if grief had turned into something actionable in George Mavado. Men carried those kinds of weights differently. Some put them down. Some carried them until the weight changed them into something they hadn’t started as.
Simon Kerry was a different kind of problem.
Kerry had come to Colinas Rojas about four years ago from somewhere in Louisiana, or said he was from Louisiana, and had established himself at a table in the back of the Territorial Saloon where he played cards five nights a week and cheated at them with a skill that had taken people a while to identify.
Her father had identified it in roughly two evenings of observation and had gone to the saloon on a Thursday night and sat down across from Kerry and explained that he was going to stop cheating at cards or find another town.
Kerry had stopped, visibly, for about six weeks. Then he’d started again with more subtlety, and her father had gone back to the saloon, and this time he hadn’t sat across the table.
She’d seen Kerry’s face the morning after that conversation. He’d come out of his rooming house with a split lip and a careful way of moving and had gone to the doctor and she’d heard about it from three separate people before noon.
Two days before her father’s disappearance, Kerry had been in the hardware store buying something when her father walked in. She’d heard this from old Prentiss Landry’s son, who had been behind the counter.
Kerry had turned from the shelf and seen her father and said, loud enough to be heard clearly, that Emmett Vaughn would want to sleep with both eyes open from here out. Her father had looked at him and told him to enjoy the rest of his afternoon.
She’d looked for Simon Kerry after her father disappeared. She’d found his rooming house cleared out and his usual card table at the Territorial occupied by someone else.
Kerry had been gone within a week of her father’s disappearance, which could have meant something—or could have meant that Simon Kerry, who was a practical man in his way, simply recognized that a Ranger’s disappearance was going to bring scrutiny to everyone the Ranger had recently crossed and had decided to be elsewhere for the scrutiny.
She stopped walking and stood at the water’s edge and looked at the far bank.
That was the accounting. Nash and what she couldn’t prove. Mavado and what she couldn’t prove. Kerry and what she couldn’t prove.
The man in the black serape asking for Samson, who she’d never been able to find. Samson himself, gone. The twelve-year-old boy and the argument he’d seen at the edge of the Aldecoa property, a quarter mile short of a house her father never reached.