Shivering, I keyed open the cabin door. Warm enough inside but I turned the space heater up anyway, as high as it would go. I locked the door and wedged the only chair under the knob and then went into the bathroom cubicle for a damage check.

  Not too bad. Scrape on my neck, a big gathering bruise on my shoulder, a swelling on one knuckle. I stripped and stood under a hot shower for a while to ease some of the shoulder soreness. When I came out I put on my robe and moved the chair over under the window and sat there looking out past the edge of the shade, the .38 on the table next to me.

  I sat there for a long time. They didn’t come back. Nobody drove into the lot, nobody came out of the office building-nothing at all happened. I did a lot of thinking, sitting there. The reason for the attack was clear enough: I was getting too close to the truth about what had happened to Allison Shay and Rob Compton. That giggling laugh from the slugger whose wrist I’d snapped-Gene Ballard, no mistake. Both Johnny and Mike Cermak had pretty much confirmed that Ballard was a Kinsmen recruit… and yet I couldn’t see it as a Kinsmen-ordered assault. Trying to beat up somebody in an effort to scare him off is a neophyte’s ploy, not a paramilitary one. If the Kinsmen had already murdered two people, they wouldn’t hesitate to murder a third to protect themselves; and they’d have sent trained soldiers to do it with guns, not amateurs armed with a piece of stove-wood.

  So had Ballard been acting on his own? Or as a favor to somebody other than the Kinsmen? The second slugger, for instance-Art Maxe?

  The more I thought, the more it seemed I had enough facts to work out the right answers; but my head hurt and I couldn’t seem to separate the significant few from the insignificant majority. At midnight, fatigue drove me out of the chair and into bed. I was asleep in thirty seconds.

  ***

  I slept hard and deep for four hours, and then woke up suddenly in a cold sweat. And with everything clear and sharp in my mind: What had happened to Allison and Rob. Who had made it happen and why. Even when and where.

  Not just the facts but the whole truth had been in my head for days now. Under and over my head, too. Monsters hiding in plain sight that I just hadn’t recognized for what they were.

  Jesus. Sweet Jesus.

  CHAPTER 19

  Sunday morning.

  Church bells began pealing, faint above the babble of the wind, a little before nine o’clock. I had been up for more than an hour by then, sitting stiff and sore at the front window, waiting. From this vantage point I had a full angled view of the back end of the office building.

  The bells had been making their musical summons for about three minutes when the Bartholomews came out through the rear door. Him in a dark blue suit, his tie drawn so tightly that his wattles hung down in folds alongside the knot; her in a black and white dress and a boxy hat with some kind of feather poking out of it. On their way to church, all right. Both of them together because with me as the only guest, they didn’t have any reason not to close the office for an hour or so this morning.

  One hand tight on her arm, Bartholomew helped his wife into their old Buick. She was a little unsteady on her feet-the muddy ground over there, maybe, but more likely it was a few belts of pre-sermon gin. I watched him get in, start the car, let it warm up for a minute or so, then maneuver it around the building and out onto Main Street. He was a good driver, not too fast, not too slow, with a sure touch on the wheel.

  I waited five minutes, in case they’d forgotten something. Then I went out into the chill, damp morning. The rain had quit sometime during the night but the smell and the feel of it were still in the air. Thick clouds swarmed overhead. I picked my way across the courtyard, dodging puddles like miniature lakes. The street out front was deserted now.

  Bartholomew had locked the rear door, but it was not much of a lock; even with my sore shoulder and swollen finger I had it picked inside of thirty seconds. I went in fast, shut the door behind me. Kitchen. Breakfast aromas clogged the air-toast, sausage, fried eggs. Strong in there too was the juniper-berry smell. Next to the sink, an empty carton of orange juice and an empty bottle of Beefeaters bore silent witness.

  Three other rooms-living room, bedroom, bathroom-completed the Bartholomews’ living space. All of the rooms were cramped and in need of tidying and cleaning. The bedroom drew me first, for no particular reason except a feeling that it was the right choice. And it was.

  On the nightstand between twin beds was a well-used Gideon bible; and on the wall above an oak dresser hung a picture of Christ not unlike the one over the bed in Cabin Eleven. Symbols of faith, symbols of love. Directly underneath the picture, in two of the dresser drawers, I found the symbols of hate.

  Computer-generated leaflets and pamphlets: desktop publishing of the worst kind. Newspapers: The California Klan News, the Posse Comitatus’s Posse Noose Report, the White Aryan Resistance’s Aryan Vigil, the Christian National Emancipation League’s Kinsmen Monthly. Cheaply printed paperback books, two of them with swastikas and death heads on the covers: Warrant for Genocide, The Turner Diaries, Hitler Was Right!, White Power, Dead Coons. Articles and printed slogans: “White People Built This Country-White People Are This Country.” “Niggers and Kikes Beware!” “Make a List of Your Enemies.” “Arm Yourselves Before It’s Too Late.” “The Only Way to Be Free of What Threatens You Is to Kill It-Learn to Kill Now!”

  Jesus above and death below. It made me feel cold, dirty, and sad and angry and a little awed. How do they reconcile it? I thought. Pictures of the Savior, bible on the nightstand, and shit like this tucked away in a drawer. Read a little from the Book of Genesis or the Book of Job and then read a little from White Power, Dead Coons. How in God’s name do they reconcile the two?

  Maybe they don’t, I thought then, maybe they can’t and so they no longer even try. And maybe that’s the key. To why she drinks, why he has the look of a reanimated corpse, why they live like this, why they did the things they did. Caught between two polar opposites, push-pull, for months and years until they were incapable of making any rational distinction; until they were self-indoctrinated to the point of paranoid schizophrenia. Now all they could do was respond to one set of stimuli or the other-love or hate, life or death, Christianity or anti-Christianity, but never one in relation to the other.

  I was sweating now and my stomach had begun to kick. I wanted out of this place, to return to the cold clean air outside. But I wasn’t done here yet. Not just yet.

  The bedroom had nothing more for me. Neither did the living room. In a closet off the kitchen I found a pump shotgun, a Winchester .30-30, and an old Savage with iron sights. All three were loaded, and in there with them were at least a hundred extra rounds of ammunition for each-as if the Bartholomews were expecting a siege. “Arm Yourselves Before It’s Too Late.” “The Only Way to Be Free of What Threatens You Is to Kill It-Learn to Kill Now!” That was exactly what they were expecting.

  I looked for a handgun. No handgun. But there had to be at least one somewhere on the premises. The right one. They wouldn’t have gotten rid of it, not people like them, not under any circumstances. Waste not, want not.

  I found it out front, in a drawer under the office counter: a .32 Iver Johnson revolver, clean and oiled and fully loaded. The evidence said that the murder gun had to be a .32 or a small-bore .38. Okay.

  Without touching the revolver, I shut the drawer and continued my search. The pocket of a fleece-lined jacket hanging from a hook on the kitchen wall yielded another piece of hard evidence-two pieces, actually. Greyhound bus ticket stubs, both stamped with last Sunday’s date, one from Eureka to Redding and the other from Redding to Susanville.

  When I finished looking at the stubs I returned them to the jacket pocket. If Bartholomew hadn’t gotten rid of them over the past week, he wouldn’t think to do it when he got home from church; it was likely he’d forgotten he still had them. They would be much more damning if the authorities found them just as I had.

  Done. I opened the back door, didn’t see anybody on the courtyard, reset the lock, and stepped outside. But I was wrong about the area being deserted-wrong twice, going in and now coming out. I hadn’t taken more than a few paces when a hard voice said, “Hold it right there,” and froze me in mid-stride.

  Art Maxe. Standing ten feet away, at the corner of the building, with a deer rifle pointed straight at my head.

  CHAPTER 20

  Second time in two days I’d been under a gun. This time I didn’t put my hands up; I couldn’t have gotten the left one up very high anyhow, as stiff as my shoulder was. I just stood there looking at him, waiting. If he wanted to shoot me there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

  He said, “What the hell you think you’re doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “I seen you bust in from down the road. Good thing I had my rifle in the truck. What’d you take in there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The hell. You took something, got it on you. Sheriff’s deputies’ll find it, by God.”

  So he wasn’t going to shoot me. Some of the tension began to loosen in my chest and back. “Go ahead and call them,” I said. “I was just about to do it myself.”

  “Sure you were.”

  “Plain truth. I found what I was looking for.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “More evidence.”

  “Evidence? Evidence of what?”

  “That the Bartholomews murdered Allison Shay and Rob Compton last Friday night.”

  The muzzle of Maxe’s rifle dipped a little; he stared at me as if I’d suddenly changed shape, become an alien being. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You’re crazy as a barn owl.”

  “Am I? I don’t think so.”

  “Ed Bartholomew? Ruth? I known them thirty years… they wouldn’t kill nobody.”

  “One of them did. Or maybe both of them.”

  “Why? For Chrissake, why?”

  “Because they’re hardline racists. Because Rob Compton was black and Allison Shay was white.”

  Maxe shook his head, more in confusion than negation. “Racists?”

  “Members of a bunch of hate groups, including the Kinsmen. Like you, huh, Maxe?”

  “Me? You think I’m a Kinsmen?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No. Hell, no. Sure, I went to one of their meetings with Gene Ballard, see what they were all about. But I didn’t like what I heard. Still don’t. I never went back.”

  “Then why did you and Ballard jump me last night?”

  “Jump you? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No? Two men attacked me around nine-thirty, over in front of Cabin Eleven. They were waiting in one of the other cabins-had to be because it was raining and their clothing smelled dry and felt dry. The Bartholomews set it up. How else would the attackers get a key to an empty cabin? One of the men was Ballard; I recognized that laugh of his. I thought the other one was you.”

  “Thought wrong,” Maxe said. “I was home last night. Ask my wife, if you don’t believe me.”

  “All right, you weren’t involved. But there’s still the cover-up with Allison’s car. You were part of that, no mistake.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t know nothing about no cover-up.”

  “You lied about Allison and Rob picking up her MG on Saturday morning. They didn’t pick it up; they couldn’t have because they were already dead by then.”

  Headshake. Maxe was no mental giant; confusion was plain on his craggy face, as if he couldn’t quite come to terms with all I was telling him.

  “You did lie,” I said, “we both know that. Why, if you had nothing to do with the murder or the cover-up?”

  “Ed… he come down to the station that morning. Asked if their car was ready, said if it was he’d take it back to the motel. Said them two kids was still in bed and he wanted to get rid of ‘em and if he brought their car right up to the door, maybe that would do it.”

  “Why did he say he wanted to get rid of them?”

  “Him and Ruth didn’t like the idea of a white woman and a… nigger sleeping together in one of their cabins. Said he wouldn’t have put ’em up if he’d known the boy was a nigger. Said he didn’t find it out until just that morning or he’d have got rid of ’em sooner…” Maxe wet his lips. “Jesus,” he said.

  “So you let him have the MG. What did he say then?”

  “Then?”

  “To get you to lie about who picked it up.”

  “Said he didn’t want anybody to know he was fetching their car for them, didn’t want anybody saying Ed Bartholomew fetched for a nigger and his white whore. Put it to me as a favor. I didn’t see no harm in it-why should I? So I said all right, if anybody asked I’d say they come and got the car themselves.”

  The rifle muzzle was all the way down now, pointed at the ground between us. The last of my tension was gone, too. Maxe was telling the truth down the line; I was sure of it.

  He said, “What’d Ed do with it-the MG?”

  “Drove it to Eureka and abandoned it, to make it look like the kids disappeared over there. Sometime that day, Saturday. On Sunday he took a bus from Eureka to Redding and another from Redding to Susanville; I found the ticket stubs. His wife probably picked him up in Susanville. She does drive, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Maxe said. “Not too far, the way she drinks, but Susanville… yeah.” He ran his free hand through the tangle of his hair. Shook his head again. “I still ain’t sure I believe it.”

  “You’d better believe it. It’s what happened.”

  “Where? Where’d it happen?”

  “The shooting? Cabin Eleven, the one the kids stayed in. The one I’ve been staying in.”

  “How you know that? How you know they was shot?”

  “Come over there with me and I’ll show you.”

  I took a couple of slow steps. The rifle muzzle stayed down. When I kept going Maxe moved too, jerkily, and fell into step beside me.

  Inside the cabin I said, “Everything’s old in here-bed frame, dresser, TV, pictures on the wall. Everything except the mattress. That’s new, brand new.”

  “So what?” Maxe said. “Mattresses wear out.”

  “That’s not the case here. Bartholomew replaced the old one because of bloodstains and bullet holes.”

  “Just guessing. Ain’t you?”

  “There’s something else that isn’t a guess,” I said. “That picture of Christ over the bed… why was it hung off-center like that, down so low?” I went over and took the picture down. It had been screwed to the wall but I’d removed the screws earlier. “That’s why.”

  Maxe stared at the hole in the wall-the little round hole that had been patched with wood putty but whose size and shape were still visible. The little round hole that had been made by a .32 caliber bullet. I stared at it too, as I had at four a.m. and with the same thought in my mind: I’d spent three nights in this damn room, on the same bed if on a different mattress. The thought started my skin crawling again; I shook it out of my mind. Dwell on a thing like that too long and it can make you a little crazy.

  I said, “He’d have dug the slug out before he patched it. But the hole itself is enough. Added to the other evidence, it’s enough.”

  Maxe’s face was creased up like a hound’s. “Just come over here in the night and blew them kids away?” he said with the same kind of awe I’d felt inside the Bartholomews’ bedroom. “Just like that?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Something must have triggered the shooting-I doubt if it was premeditated.”

  “And afterward? What’d Ed do with the bodies?”

  “Took them away somewhere. Buried or hid them. He’ll tell the authorities where eventually. Or she will.”

  There was the sound of a car in the courtyard, crunching through the wet gravel. Maxe turned into the open doorway. Past him I could see the old Buick splash over to the rear of the office building, come to a stop. When Ed Bartholomew got out and started around to the passenger side, Maxe moved again in his jerky way-normal stride for a few paces, then a fast walk until he was almost running. I called, “Maxe, wait,” but he didn’t listen and didn’t stop. All I could do then was to chase after him.

  Both Bartholomews were out of the car, standing on the passenger side, him with his hand on his wife’s arm, when Maxe reached them. They looked at him, at me coming up behind, at him again. There was nothing in Ed Bartholomew’s eyes, no emotion, just a flat stare. If he was a closed book, Ruth Bartholomew was a wide open one with a cracked binding: unsteady on her feet, cheeks so pale the rouge on them was like daubs of crimson paint, eyes ablaze when they rested on me. She’d left all her love at the church. Now that she was home again, with her need for gin clawing at her, she had redonned her hate like a grotesque mask.

  Bartholomew said, “What you doing here with that rifle, Art? And with him?” as I came up alongside Maxe. “What’s going on?”

  Maxe glanced at the rifle as if he’d forgotten he was carrying it. I thought he might blurt out the fact that I’d been inside their living quarters but he didn’t. Nodding at me, he said, “He thinks you done something to them two kids last week. Killed them, for Chrissake, over there in Cabin Eleven.”

  It came out slap-hard, but neither of the Bartholomews reacted to it. There was not even a flicker of change in Ed Bartholomew’s stoic expression. His wife’s eyes seemed to get hotter, brighter-that was all. Neither of them said anything. The silence among the four of us was chill and dead, like night hush in a crypt.

  “Well, Ed?” Maxe said at length. “You got anything to say?”