Chapter 4
Two years was long enough to know when you were getting the same answer dressed in different clothes.
Captain Hollis had a trimmed gray mustache and the careful courtesy of a man who’d delivered difficult news often enough to have worn grooves in the approach. He’d offered her coffee when she sat down. She’d said no.
He’d straightened the papers on his desk in a way that wasn’t about the papers and then looked up at her with the expression of a man who understood he was about to disappoint someone and had accepted it.
“Miss Vaughn,” he said. “I want to be clear that your father’s case has not been closed. We continue to treat it as—”
“Active,” Marielle said.
He paused. “Yes.”
“You said that in March. You said it the September before and the January before that.” She had her hands in her lap and she kept them still.
“Captain, I’ve been here five times. Each time you tell me the case is active and each time I ask you what that means specifically and each time you give me a different arrangement of the same words. ”
“I understand your frustration.”
“Then help me with it. Specifically.”
He looked at her steadily. “We have inquiries outstanding in four counties. We have communicated with the Mexican federal authorities regarding movements along the border in the period surrounding his disappearance. We have spoken with the mayor of Colinas Rojas—”
“Nash,” she said.
“Mayor Nash, yes. He was cooperative.”
“Nash was cooperative.”
“He was, yes.”
She looked at him. “Nash wanted my father out of his position for three years before he disappeared. Nash went out of his way to make my father’s life difficult in ways that were hard to prove and harder to confront.
And you found him cooperative.” She let that sit for a moment.
“I knew the morning after my father didn’t come home that Nash’s account was that he never arrived.
His wife told me at her door. I’ve since heard Nash say it himself, twice, in formal interviews.
And now you’re telling me you found him cooperative. ”
Hollis moved one of the papers on his desk. “We have no evidence connecting Mayor Nash to your father’s disappearance.”
“I’m not saying you do. I’m saying his cooperation means less than you might think, because a man who knew exactly what happened and wanted to stay clear of the consequences would cooperate completely.
That’s the easiest thing in the world to do when you’ve already decided what you’re going to say.
” She let that sit. “What about Samson Jennings?”
A small pause. “What about him?”
“My father came home the morning before he disappeared and told my mother he’d encountered a man on the road asking for Samson. A Mexican man. That was the last morning anyone saw my father. Did you follow that?”
“We spoke with Deputy Jennings shortly after—”
“Ex-deputy,” she said. “He’d left the Rangers by then.”
“We spoke with Mr. Jennings. He had no information about the man your father described.”
“And that was that.”
“That was that.”
She watched his face. He held it steady. Whatever else Hollis had to give her on the subject of Samson Jennings, he wasn’t going to give it across this desk on this afternoon.
“Miss Vaughn,” he said. He put both hands flat on the desk.
“I am telling you what we have. I’m not in a position to make the evidence we don’t have appear because the case warrants it.
Your father was a Ranger for twenty-eight years.
He was well-known and well-respected in this organization.
Every man in this building would like to find him.
” He looked at her without flinching. “We don’t know where he is. ”
She stood up. The chair scraped back on the wood floor.
“Thank you for your time,” she said.
“Miss Vaughn—”
She picked up her hat and walked out.
The Austin street hit her with full afternoon sun and the smell of hot tar and horse and something frying somewhere close that should have been appetizing and wasn’t.
They were repaving the block in front of the capital building and the crew had the street torn open and the wagons backed up in both directions and two men on opposite sides of the obstruction yelling at each other about whose fault it was.
A boy with a stack of newspapers was working the blocked traffic, holding up the front page and shouting something about a railway bill.
She’d watched this city change across five visits and she didn’t like what it was becoming.
The old buildings were still here but were getting crowded out, the limestone hemmed in by newer brick, the streets that used to be wide enough to turn a wagon being squeezed by buildings that kept adding floors as if height was the same thing as importance.
Everything moved faster and louder and with less purpose than she remembered from her first time here at seventeen, riding in with her father to see the capital and eating at a restaurant with tablecloths, which had seemed impossibly elegant at the time.
She turned off Congress and found a saloon that didn’t have a painted sign or a man outside it and went in.
It was dim, and that was the point. She took a stool at the bar and ordered whiskey and the bartender set it in front of her without any commentary, which was all she asked of him.
She drank it looking at the bottles on the back shelf.
Some of them hadn’t moved since her last visit, the dust line around their bases telling the story.
The second whiskey went down the same way as the first and she was most of the way through the third when the two men sat down on either side of her.
She felt them before she saw them, the air changing in that specific way it changed when men decided she was an opportunity.
The big one on her left smelled like he’d been drinking since mid-morning.
The one on her right was younger and had the bright, glassy eyes of someone whose judgment had punched out early.
“You’re too pretty to be drinking alone,” the big one said.
Marielle set her glass down. “I’m doing fine.”
“No, see, that’s the thing.” He leaned in, comfortable like he thought he’d already won. “Pretty woman drinking alone in a place like this, that’s a problem that needs solving.”
“The problem is on your side of this conversation,” she said. “Not mine.”
The younger one on her right laughed like she’d said something charming. “There’s a place on Pecan Street,” he said. “Livelier than this. Better whiskey.”
“I didn’t come here for better whiskey.”
“What did you come for?” the big one asked.
“To be left alone.” She picked up her glass again. “I’ve said it plainly twice. This is the third time and the last time.”
“She counts,” the younger one said, still with the laugh in his voice.
“We’re just being friendly,” the big one said.
“You’re being something,” Marielle said. “Friendly isn’t it.”
The big one’s hand came down on her arm above the elbow, thick fingers closing like he’d done it before and it had worked before.
“Come on,” he said. “Don’t make this difficult.”
She set her glass down and twisted out of his grip the way her father had shown her when she was fifteen, turning into him rather than away, breaking the hold at the weakest point of his thumb.
His hand came free and he looked at it. She slipped off the stool in the same motion and when he reached again she caught his wrist with both hands and drove it hard down against the bar’s edge.
The sound was not a good sound. His knees buckled and he made a noise she’d rather not have heard.
The younger one had better reflexes than she’d given him credit for. He was off his stool and swinging before the big man had finished folding, and she got her forearm up but not quite in time and took part of the punch on the side of her head above the ear.
It rang through her and she stepped back into a table and caught herself on it.
She hit him in the nose with the heel of her hand before he could wind up again, driving up and through with her shoulder behind it.
His head went back and he sat down on the floor and held his face and said something she didn’t need to understand to get the meaning of.
The big man had his good arm on the bar and was pulling himself up, breathing through his teeth, his face the deep red of a man who’d moved past embarrassment to something more committed.
He came at her and she didn’t have room to fully clear him and took a shot across the cheekbone that turned her vision white for a moment and filled her mouth with the taste of copper.
She went sideways into a stool and shoved him by the front of his jacket and used his own forward movement to run him into the bar face-first. He made contact with the hardwood edge and slid down it and came to rest against the foot rail in a posture that suggested he was done discussing the matter.
The bartender had stopped whatever he’d been doing and was staring at her with his hands on the bar. The other drinkers had moved back against the far wall and watched with careful stillness.
The younger one was still on the floor. The blood coming from his nose had got onto his shirt.
Marielle picked up her hat from where it had landed. The cheekbone was going to be a problem. She could feel it swelling already, a hot pulse keeping time with her heartbeat. She put two coins on the bar for her drinks and one more for the stool she’d knocked over and walked to the door.
“Sorry for the trouble,” she said to the bartender.
He nodded slowly. She went out.
The evening air was warm and still. She walked the four blocks to the inn with her hat loose in her hand and her eyes forward, not looking at the people she passed. A woman with a market basket stopped and stared at her openly and Marielle looked back at her until she moved on.
Her forearm ached from the blocked punch and the inside of her cheek had a cut she kept finding with her tongue against her better judgment.
She’d have a bruise the size of a fist on her face by morning.
She’d explain it the way she always explained things that required no explanation, which was to say nothing and let people reach their own wrong conclusions.
The inn was a two-story frame building on a side street, clean enough and quiet enough for her purposes. The woman behind the front desk was in her fifties, had seen things, and looked at Marielle’s face when she came in and took a measured breath but said nothing about what she saw.
“There’s a letter came for you,” she said. “Arrived this afternoon.”
She held it out. Marielle recognized her aunt’s handwriting on the envelope, the tall careful letters of a woman who’d had proper schooling and never lost the habit.
“Thank you,” Marielle said.
She climbed the stairs and closed the door of her room behind her and sat on the edge of the bed. She turned the envelope in her hands for a moment. Her aunt wrote every few weeks. Sometimes practical, sometimes not. Always the same undertow of concern pulling through the sentences.
She opened it.
My dear Marielle, the letter read. Your mother tells me you have been to Austin again. I know you will not stop going until you have answers, and knowing you I would not waste ink asking you to. But when you are ready—and I leave it to you to know when that is—I want you to come to me.
There is nothing more to be done there that cannot wait. You should not be doing this alone. I have the room and the time and the patience, all of which are yours if you want them. Come east, my girl. The ocean is good for grief, and the oranges are remarkable.
Her aunt. Practical and warm in the same sentence and a little funny at the end because she knew Marielle well enough to know the oranges might do more than the sentiment.
She folded the letter and set it on the nightstand and lay back on the bed with her boots on.
The ceiling had a water stain above the window in the rough shape of a running dog. She’d noticed it on the first visit and checked for it on each one since, like confirming that at least one thing stayed the same.
She’d gone five times. She had the same nothing she’d started with, dressed up in Hollis’s careful language and filed in a cabinet somewhere in the capital building, right next to all the other things this organization had decided it couldn’t solve.
Her father had given twenty-eight years to these people. He’d killed for them and bled for them and ridden more miles than most men traveled in a lifetime, and they’d handed her a cup of coffee she didn’t want and a phrase about active inquiries.
She thought about Nash saying he never arrived, the first time and the second, the same practiced words in the same order, his hands folded on the desk below his father’s portrait.
She thought about Charlotte Nash at her doorstep on the first morning, meeting her eyes throughout, and whether that steadiness was honesty or something that had been prepared for.
She thought about the boy at the Aldecoa property and the argument he’d seen and the man in the black hat, and how that detail and Nash’s account couldn’t both be true.
She thought about the man on the road her father had mentioned at the table that last morning. Looking for Samson. Her father had told her mother it was probably nothing. He’d said probably. That was the word she kept coming back to.
The cheekbone throbbed. She closed her eyes.
She was asleep before she’d made any decisions, which was, she’d found, the only reliable way to make them.