Fidelity Read online

  “Would you let me know as soon as you have anything more to report?”

  “Be glad to.”

  Henry gave him his phone numbers at home and at the office, thanked him, and hung up. He turned the light off then, felt his way to his easy chair, and sat down in the dark to think.

  He knew several things. For one, he knew that Danny Branch, though by no means a small man, would not be described by most people as “huge.” So far as he could see at present, all they had to worry about was the blue shirt, and that might be plenty.

  He sat thinking until the shapes of the trees outside the window emerged into the first daylight, and then he went back to the phone and called Lyda.

  Lyda called Nathan after she had talked to Henry the second time. Nathan, as was his way, said “Hello” and then simply listened. When she had told him of Burley’s disappearance and of Danny’s, Nathan said, “All right. Do you need anything?”

  “No. We’ll be fine,” she said. “But listen. Henry called back while ago. He said the police didn’t find any fingerprints at the hospital. The only witness they found was somebody who saw a man in a blue shirt. Henry wants you and Hannah and me to come to his office as soon as we get our chores done and all. When the police find us, he said, he’d just as soon they’d find us there. He said to tell you, and he’d call Jack and Andy and Flora and the Rowanberrys. He wants everybody who’s closest to Burley to be there.”

  “All right,” Nathan said. “It’ll be a little while.”

  He hung up, and having told Lyda’s message to Hannah, he put one of his shirts into a paper sack and went out. He had his chores to do, but he would do them later. He got into his pickup and drove out to the Coulter Lane and turned, and turned again into the farm that had been his father’s and was now his, divided by a steep, wooded hollow from Burley’s place, where Danny and Lyda and their children had lived with Burley since Danny’s mother’s death. Beyond the two houses in the dawn light, he could see the morning cloud of fog shining in the river valley.

  He pulled the truck in behind the house, got out, and started down the hill. Soon he was out of sight among the trees, and he went level along the slope around the point beyond Burley’s house, turning gradually out of the river valley into the smaller valley of the creek. He went straight down the hill then to the creek road, turned into the lower end of the Coulter Lane, and soon came to Danny’s truck. He saw that Danny’s axe and the digging tools were gone.

  For several minutes he stood beside the truck, looking up the hollow toward the old barn. And then he took the switch key from where Danny always hid it under a loose flap of floor mat, started the truck and eased it backward along its incoming tracks until it stood on the gravel of the county road. There were a few bald patches of fresh mud that he had had to drive over, and he walked back to these and tramped out the tire tracks, taking care to leave no shoe track of his own.

  When he returned to the truck, he drove back down the creek road toward the river and before long turned right under a huge sycamore into another lane. He forded the branch, went up by a stone chimney standing solitary on a little bench where a house had burned, and then down again to the disused barn of that place, and drove in. As before, he erased the few tire tracks that he had left in the lane. He stepped across the Katy’s Branch Road and again disappeared into the woods.

  While he did all this he had never ceased to whistle a barely audible whisper of a song, passing his breath in and out over the tip of his tongue.

  The detective came walking out to the barn as if he were not sure where to put his feet. He was wearing shiny shoes with perforated toes, a tallish man, softening in the middle. He looked a little like somebody Lyda might have seen before. His dark hair was combed straight over his forehead in bangs. He walked with his left hand in his pocket, the jacket of his blue suit held back on that side.

  Lyda herself was wearing a pair of rubber boots, but in expectation of company she had put on her best everyday dress. She was carrying two five-gallon buckets of corn that, as the detective approached, she emptied over the fence to the sows.

  “Good morning. Mrs. Branch?” the detective said.

  “Yes. Good morning.”

  The children were in the barn, doing the milking and the other chores, and Lyda, as she greeted the detective, started walking back toward the house.

  He was showing her a badge. “Detective Kyle Bode of the state police, Mrs. Branch. I hope you’ll be willing to answer a few questions.”

  Lyda laughed, looking out over the white cloud of fog that lay in the river valley. “I reckon I’ll have to know what questions,” she said.

  “Well, you’re Mrs. Danny Branch? And Danny Branch is Mr. Burley Coulter’s next of kin?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re aware that Mr. Coulter has disappeared from his hospital room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Mr. Branch at home?’’

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me where he went?”

  “Well, he said something about Indiana.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “Well, he sometimes goes up there to the Amish. You know, we farm with horses, and Danny has to depend on the Amish for harness and other things.”

  “Hmmm. Horses. Well,” the detective said. “When did Mr. Branch leave?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “You don’t know, or you don’t remember?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  Lyda had not ceased to walk, nor he to walk with her, and now, as they were approaching the yard gate, the detective stopped. “Mrs. Branch, I have the distinct feeling that you are playing a little game with me. I think your husband has Mr. Coulter with him in Indiana—or wherever he is—and I think you know he does, and you’re protecting him. Your husband, I would like to remind you, may be in very serious trouble with the law, and unless you cooperate you may be, too.”

  Lyda looked straight at him. Her eyes were an intense, surprising blue, and sometimes when she looked suddenly at you they seemed to leave little flashes of blue light dancing in the air. The detective saw her then: a big woman, good-looking for her age, which was maybe forty or forty-five, and possessed of great practical strength (he remembered her tossing the contents of those heavy buckets over the fence), but her eyes, now that he looked at her, were what impressed him most. They were eyes not at all in the habit of concealment, but they certainly were in the habit of withstanding. They withstood him. They made him feel like explaining that he was only doing his duty.

  “Mister,” she said without any trace of fear that he could detect, “it scares me to be talking to the police. I never talked to the police before in my life. If you want to know any more, you’ll have to talk to Henry Catlett down at Hargrave.”

  “Is Henry Catlett your lawyer?”

  “Henry’s our friend,” she said.

  “Yes,” the detective said. “I’ll go see him. Thank you very much for your time.”

  When Detective Bode walked away from Lyda, he already felt the mire of failure pulling at his feet. He had felt it before. Long ago, it seemed, he had studied to be a policeman because he wanted to become the kind of man who solved things. He had imagined himself becoming a man who—insightful, alert, and knowing—stepped into the midst of confusion and made clarity and order that people would be grateful for. So far, it had not turned out that way. He was twenty-nine years old already, and he had been confused as much as most people. In spite of the law and the government and the police, it seemed, people went right on and did whatever they were going to do. They had motives that were confusing, and they left evidence that was confusing. Sometimes they left no evidence. The science of crime solving was a clumsy business. Many criminals and many noncriminals were smarter than Kyle Bode—or, anyhow, smarter than Kyle Bode had been able to prove himself to be so far. He had begun to believe that he might end up as some kind of paper s
huffler, had even begun to think that it might be a relief.

  He had understood all too well, anyhow, the rather cynical grin with which his friend, Rich Ferris, had handed him this case. “Here’s one that’ll make you famous.”

  And what a case it was! Here was an old guy resting easy in the best medical facility money could buy. And what happened? This damned redneck, Danny Branch, who was his nephew or something, came and kidnapped him out of his hospital bed in the middle of the night. And took him off where? To Indiana? Not likely, Detective Bode thought. He would bet that Mr. Burley Coulter, alive or dead, and his kidnapper, Mr. Danny Branch, were somewhere just out of sight in some of these godforsaken hills and hollows.

  Kyle Bode objected to hills and hollows. He objected to them especially if they were all overgrown with trees. They offended his sense of the way things ought to be. That the government of the streets and highways persisted in having business in hills and hollows and woods and briar patches in every kind of weather was no small part of his disillusionment.

  And that big woman with her boots and her so-unimpressed blue eyes—it pleased him to believe that she was looking him straight in the eye and lying. In fact, he had wished a little that she would admire him, and he knew that she had not.

  Traveling at a contemplative speed down the river road toward Hargrave, he glanced up at his image in the rearview mirror and patted down his hair.

  Kyle Bode’s father had originated in the broad bottomlands of a community called Nowhere, three counties west of Louisville. Under pressure from birth to “get out of here and make something out of yourself,” Kyle’s father had come to Louisville and worked his way into a farm equipment dealership. Kyle was the dealer’s third child and second son. He might have succeeded to the dealership—“You boys can be partners,” their father had said—but the older brother possessed an invincible practicality and a head start, and besides Kyle did not want to spend his life dealing with farmers. He had higher aims that made him dangerous to those he considered to be below him. Unlike his brother, Kyle was an idealist, with a little bit of an ambition to be a hero. Perhaps by the same token, he was also a man given to lethargy and to sudden onsets of violence by which he attempted to drive back whatever circumstances his lethargy had allowed to close in on him. Sagged and silent in his chair at a party or beer joint, he would suddenly thrust himself, with fists flying, at some spontaneously elected opponent. This did not happen often enough to damage him much, and it remained surprising to his friends.

  Soon after graduation, he married his high school sweetheart. And then while he was beginning his career as a policeman, they, and especially he, began to dabble in some of the recreational sidelines of the countercultural revolution. He became sexually liberated. He suspected that his wife had experienced this liberation as well, but he did not catch her, and perhaps this was an ill omen for his police career. On the contrary, as it happened, she caught him in the very inflorescence of ecstasy on the floor of the carport of a house where they were attending a party. He was afraid for a while that she would divorce him, but when it became clear to him that she would not, he began to feel that she was limiting his development, and he divorced her in order to be free to be himself.

  He cut quite a figure at parties after that. One festive night a young lady said, “Kyle, do you know who you really look like?” And he said, “No.” And she said, “Ringo Starr.” That was when he began to comb down his bangs. Girls and young women were always saying to him after that, “Do you know who you look like?” And he would say, “No. Who?” as if he had no notion what they were talking about.

  His second wife, whom he married because he had made her pregnant—for he really was a conscientious young man who wanted to do the right thing—was proud of that resemblance, at first seriously and then jokingly, for a while. And then he ceased to remind her of anyone but himself, whereupon she divorced him.

  He knew that she had not left him because she was dissatisfied with him but because she was not able to be satisfied for very long with anything. He disliked and feared this in her at the same time that he recognized it in himself. He, too, was dissatisfied; he could not see what he had because he was always looking around for something else. And so perhaps it was out of mutual dissatisfaction that their divorce had come, and now they were free. Perhaps even their little daughter was free, who was tied down no more than her parents were, for they sent her flying back and forth between them like a shuttlecock, and spoiled her in vying for her allegiance, and gave her more freedom of choice than she could have used well at twice her age. They were all free, he supposed. But finally he had had to ask if they were, any of them, better off than they had been and if they could hope to be better off than they were. For they were not satisfied. And by now he had to suppose, and to fear, that they were not going to be satisfied. He had become almost resigned to revolving for the rest of his life, somewhere beyond gravity, in the modern vortex of infatuation and divorce.

  Surely there must be someplace to stop. In lieu of a more final place, though it was too early in the day to be thinking about it, he would take the lounge of the Outside Inn, the comers and goers shadowy between him and the neon, a filled and frosted glass in front of him, a slow brokenhearted song on the jukebox.

  And maybe the mood would hit him to ask one of the women to dance. Angela, maybe, who admitted to being lonesome and liked to dance close. They would dance, they would move as one, and after a while he would let his right hand slide down, as if by accident, onto her hip. And he would say, “Oh, Angela, you make me feel like I might realize my full potential as an individual.”

  But his car, as though mindful of his duty when he was not, had taken him into Hargrave. He stopped for the first light and then turned to drive around the courthouse square; he was looking for a place to eat breakfast. The futility of this day insinuated itself into his thoughts, as unignorable as if it crawled palpably on his skin. Here he was, looking for a comatose old geezer who had (if Detective Bode mistook not) been abducted by his next of kin, who, if the old geezer died, would be guilty of a crime that probably had not even been named yet. Maybe he was about to turn up something totally new in the annals of crime, though he would just as soon turn it up someplace else. In fact, he would just as soon somebody else turned it up. It ought, he told himself, to be easy enough to turn up, for it was clearly the work of an amateur. And yet this amateur, who had had the gall or stupidity or foolishness or whatever it took to kidnap his victim right out of the middle of a busy hospital, had managed to be seen, and not clearly seen at that, by only one witness and had left no evidence. So Detective Bode was working from a coincidence, a good guess, and no evidence. His success, he supposed, depended on the improbable occurrence of a lucky moment in which he would be able to outsmart the self-styled “country lawyer of sorts,” Henry Catlett.

  “Later for that,” Kyle Bode thought.

  Among the dilapidating storefronts he found the place he thought he remembered, the Front Street Grill, and he parked and went in.

  When Lyda had called, Nathan and Hannah were just waking up. Before Nathan turned the light on by the bed, they could see the gray early daylight out the window. After Nathan went to the phone, Hannah lay still and listened, but from Nathan’s brief responses she could not make out who had called.

  She heard Nathan hang up the phone. He came back into the bedroom and told her carefully everything that Lyda had told him.

  “But wait,” she said. “What’s happening? Where is Danny?”

  “We’d better not help each other answer those questions, Hannah—not for a while, anyhow.”

  He opened a drawer of the bureau and took out one of his shirts, a green one.

  “Where are you going?”

  He smiled at her. “I’ll be back before long.”

  Though Nathan was a quiet man, he was not usually a secretive one. But she asked no more.

  He went out. She heard him go throu
gh the kitchen and out the back door. She heard the pickup start and go out the driveway. And then the sound of it was gone.

  Usually, after Nathan got up, there would be a few minutes when she could stay in bed, sometimes rolling over into the warmth where he had slept, before she got up to start breakfast. She loved that time. She would lie still, listening, as the night ended and the day began. She heard the first bird songs of the morning. She heard Nathan leave the house, the milk bucket ringing a little as he took it down from its nail on the back porch. She heard the barn door slide open, and then Nathan’s voice calling the cows, and then the cowbells coming up through the pale light. If she got up when the cows reached the barn, she could have breakfast ready by the time Nathan came back to the house.

  But this morning, as soon as the truck was out of earshot, she got up. For there was much to think about, much to do and to be prepared for. Now that she was fully awake, she had, like the others, caught the drift of what was happening.

  She took the milk bucket and went to the barn and milked and did the chores, the things that Nathan usually did, and then she went to open the henhouse and put out feed and water for the hens—her work. At the house, she strained the milk, set the table for breakfast and got out the food. But Nathan was not back. She sat down by the kitchen window where she could see him when he came in. She kept her sewing basket there and the clothes that needed mending. But now, though she took a piece of sewing onto her lap, she did not work. She sat with her hands at rest, looking out the window as the mists of the hollows turned whiter under the growing light. She wanted to be thinking of Burley, but amongst all the knowing and unknowing of this strangely begun day she could not think of him. Who was most on her mind now was Nathan, and she wished him home.

  It was home to her, this house, though once it had not been, nor had this neighborhood been. She had come to Port William thirty-six years ago. She had married Virgil Feltner as war spread across the world, and had lived with him for a little while in the household of his parents, before he was called into the service. When he left, because her mother was dead and replaced long ago by an unkind stepmother, Mat and Margaret Feltner had made her welcome. She stayed on with them, and they were mother and father to her. In the summer of 1944, Virgil came home on leave; he and Hannah were together a little while again, and when he went back to his unit she was with child.