Chapter 4
Sheriff Tench walked the length of Fox Hollow's main street with his thumbs in his belt and his face arranged in the noncommittal shape twenty years of the office had taught him to wear in public.
He did not feel noncommittal. He felt tired.
The morning at the Barclay ranch had not gone the way he had pictured it on the ride out, and the ride back into town had not improved his picture.
Rufus Barclay, once he had set his shoulders, was not going to move them without a court order or a bullet, and Tench had not issued either.
He had asked the question, got an answer he didn't believe, and got a refusal from a man whose word, on any other Tuesday in his life, he would have taken at the bank.
The wind smelled of the spring runoff in the creek and a little of the burned hair that floated up from the smithy when the apprentice was learning a hoof.
A boy on a porch struck a bell three times to call his father to the dinner table.
People nodded as Tench passed and did not catch his eye, which was what they had been doing all morning.
He turned into the general store at the corner.
Sippy was not there. Shea Wardell was. The boy was at the back counter with the lock-box turned upside down on the wood in front of him, running a thumb along the splintered place where the lid had been pried up. The store smelled of lamp oil and dry flour.
"Sheriff."
"Shea."
The boy straightened. He had his father's gentle eyes and none of his father's stillness. Even standing in one place, he kept moving.
"My father's at the Drews'. He went over to tell them about the money."
"I figured he might be."
"Did you find anything out there?"
It came out a half-step too eager. Tench let it lie.
"I found Rufus Barclay's word that the boy won't run."
Shea's face changed. It was a change, one leaf rocking in still air, but Tench caught it.
"His word." Shea's mouth pinched on the word.
"His word, yes. Just said that, didn't I?"
"You let the boy stay there?" Shea asked, waspish.
He shrugged. "I'll go back for him if and when I have cause to."
"And the money?"
There it was. The money, ahead of the boy.
"The money is what I'm here about. Walk me through your night again, son. From the start. Tell it slow."
Shea drew a stool over from the corner and sat down on the wrong side of it, his knees apart and his hands loose between them. He took a breath.
"I couldn't sleep. I get like that sometimes. I don't know why. So I got up and I put my coat on and I went walking. I went down past the saddlery and turned at the church and was coming back along the creek when I heard the shots."
"Two shots."
"Two. Close together. The first one hadn't even finished and the second one was on top of it."
Tench nodded along, slow. The detail was right. Everyone in town had the detail right by noon.
"Where were you, exactly, when you heard them?"
"Just behind the church. By the side door."
Tench wrote nothing down. His eyes stayed on the boy's hands.
"Then what?"
"Then I ran toward the front of the store, because that's where the shots had come from, and I came around the corner and I saw a boy running away west, and I knew the boy. I knew his hat. Boone Keaton. He works out at Mr. Barclay's. I've known him since he first came out."
"You saw the hat."
"I saw the hat and I knew his stride. I've watched Boone walk past this window a hundred times. I know that walk."
Tench had known that walk fourteen months himself. He didn't say so. Instead he said, "He was carrying a bag."
"A bag, yes. Across his shoulder. He had a hand up to it as if he were keeping it from bouncing."
Tench did not say anything for a moment. He turned and looked out the front window, at the boardwalk and the place by the post where, by Shea's account, a boy he himself had spoken to that morning had stood with stolen money on his back.
"Pete Inglis didn't mention a bag," he said.
"Pete Inglis was looking out a window in his nightshirt. Pete Inglis wouldn't mention his own hat if he were wearing it."
"Mrs. Lacey didn't mention a bag."
"Mrs. Lacey was leaning out a door watching a boy run past at full speed. I'm not surprised."
The answers were coming smooth now, one right behind the other.
"Annie Boyd didn't mention a bag."
"Annie Boyd is twelve."
Tench considered him.
"You're saying you saw what they didn't see?”
"I'm saying I was closer. I'm saying I had a steadier light. I know that boy by sight, and they know him as a notion."
It was a reasonable answer. Tench had been a sheriff long enough to recognize a reasonable answer. Also long enough to know that such answers came in two kinds, and that you couldn't always tell which kind you were getting.
"All right, son."
"Sheriff—"
"All right. Sit on it. Don't go telling the bag part around town until I say so. There's a difference between an empty robbery and a robbery with a bag walking out of it, and I'd rather not have the difference shouted from one end of Main to the other."
"Yes, sir."
The yes came quick again. Quick was just the boy's way, Tench told himself. He half believed it.
Tench tipped his hat and went back out into the noon.
The boy in his story matched the boys in everybody else's story.
The shots matched. The direction of the running matched.
The only thing that didn't entirely match was the bag, and the bag could be something four people missed and one closer person saw, and that was, on the face of it, not strange in a town at midnight.
The one thing that troubled him more than anything was Shea Wardell’s quick explanation for how nobody else saw the bag but him.
A man with nothing to hide typically shrugged, and claimed only responsibility for what he saw.
Swiftly justifying the memories or actions of others that didn’t align with his own was the sort of thing a man who still had something under his hat might do.