فصل 09 - بخش 10

9

‘All right,’ Lovie Bolton said when Claude was down the road and out of sight. ‘What’s this all about? What is it you didn’t want my boy to hear?’

Yune ignored her for the moment, turning to the others. ‘The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office sent a couple of deputies out to look at the places Holly photographed. They found a pile of bloody clothes in that abandoned factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side. One of the items was an orderly’s jacket with a tag reading PROPERTY OF HMU sewn into it.’

‘Heisman Memory Unit,’ Howie said. ‘When they analyze the blood on the clothes, what do you want to bet it turns out to be from one or both of the Howard girls?’

‘Plus any fingerprints they find will belong to Heath Holmes,’ Alec added. ‘They may be blurry, if he’d started his change.’

‘Or not,’ Holly said. ‘We don’t know how long the change takes, or even if it’s the same every time.’

‘The sheriff up there has questions,’ Yune said. ‘I put him off. Considering what we might be dealing with, I hope I can put him off forever.’

‘You folks need to stop talking amongst yourselves and fill me in,’ Lovie said. ‘Please. I’m worried about my boy. He’s as innocent as those other two men, and they are both dead.’

‘I understand your concern,’ Ralph said. ‘One minute. Holly, when you were filling the Boltons in on the ride from the airport, did you tell them about the graveyards? You didn’t, did you?’

‘No. Just hit the high spots, you said. So that’s what I did.’

‘Oh, hold it,’ Lovie said. ‘Just hold the phone. There was a movie I saw when I was a girl in Laredo, one of those wrestling women movies—’

‘Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster,’ Howie said. ‘We saw it. Ms Gibney brought a copy. Not Academy Award material, but interesting, just the same.’

‘That was one of the ones Rosita Mu?oz was in,’ Lovie said. ‘The cholita luchadora. We all wanted to be her, me and my friends. I even dressed up like her one Halloween. My mother made my costume. That movie about the cuco was a scary one. There was a professor … or a scientist … I don’t remember which, but El Cuco took his face, and when the luchadoras finally tracked him down, he was living in a crypt or a vault in the local graveyard. Isn’t that how the story went?’

‘Yes,’ Holly said, ‘because that’s part of the legend, at least the Spanish version of it. The cuco sleeps with the dead. Like vampires are supposed to do.’

‘If this thing actually exists,’ Alec said, ‘it is a vampire, at least sort of. It needs blood to make the next link in the chain. To perpetuate itself.’

Once again Ralph thought, Do you people hear yourselves? He liked Holly Gibney a lot, but he also wished he’d never met her. Thanks to her there was a war going on in his head, and he wished mightily for a truce.

Holly turned to Lovie. ‘That empty factory where the Ohio police found the bloody clothes is close to the graveyard where Heath Holmes and his parents are buried. More clothes were found in a barn not far from an old graveyard where some of Terry Maitland’s ancestors are buried. So here’s the question: Is there a graveyard close to here?’

Lovie considered. They waited. At last she said, ‘There’s a boneyard in Plainville, but nothing in Marysville. Hell, we don’t even have a church. There used to be one, Our Lady of Forgiveness, but it burned down twenty years ago.’

‘Shit,’ Howie muttered.

‘How about a family plot?’ Holly asked. ‘Sometimes people bury on their property, don’t they?’

‘Well, I don’t know about other folks,’ the old lady said, ‘but we never had one. My momma and daddy are buried back in Laredo, and their momma and daddy, too. Way back it’d be Indiana, which is where my people migrated down from after the Civil War.’

‘What about your husband?’ Howie asked.

‘George? All his people were from Austin, and that’s where he’s buried, right next to his parents. I used to take the bus once in a while to visit him, usually on his birthday, took flowers and all, but since I got this goddam COPD, I haven’t been.’

‘Well, I guess that’s that,’ Yune said.

Lovie seemed not to hear. ‘I could sing, you know, back when I still had my wind. And I played guitar. I came to Austin from Laredo after high school, because of the music. Nashville South, they call it. I got a job in the paper factory on Brazos Street while I was waitin for my big break at the Carousel or the Broken Spoke or wherever. Makin envelopes. I never did get my big break, but I married the foreman. That was George. Never regretted it until he retired.’

‘I think we’re drifting off the subject,’ Howie said.

‘Let her talk,’ Ralph said. He had that little tingle, the feel of something coming. Still over the horizon, but yes, coming. ‘Go on, Mrs Bolton.’

She looked doubtfully at Howie, but when Holly nodded and smiled, Lovie smiled back, lit another cigarette, and went on.

‘Well, after he got his thirty in and had his pension, George moved us out here to the back of beyond. Claude was just twelve – we had him late, long after we decided God wasn’t going to give us no children. Claude never liked Marysville, missed the bright lights and his worthless friends – bad company was always my boy’s downfall – and I didn’t care for it much either at first, although I have come to enjoy the peace of it. When you get old, peace is about all you want. You folks might not believe that now, but you’ll find out. And that idea of a family plot ain’t such a bad one, now I think of it. I could do worse than going into the ground out back, but I s’pose Claude will end up dragging my meat and bones to Austin, so I can lay with my husband, like I did in life. Won’t be long now, neither.’

She coughed, looked at her cigarette with distaste, and buried it with the others in the overfilled ashtray, where it smoldered balefully.

‘You know why we happened to end up in Marysville? George had the idea he was going to raise alpacas. After they died, which didn’t take long, it was going to be goldendoodles. If you don’t know, goldendoodles are a cross between golden retrievers and poodles. You think eeva-lution ever approved of a mix like that? I goddam doubt it. His brother put the notion in his head. No greater fool than Roger Bolton ever walked the earth, but George thought their fortunes was made. Roger moved down here with his family and the two of em went partners. Anyway, the goldendoodle pups died, just like the alpacas. George and me were a little tight for money after that, but we had enough to get by. Roger, though, he poured his whole savings into that damn fool scheme. So he looked around for work and …’

She stopped, an expression of amazement dawning on her face.

‘What about Roger?’ Ralph asked.

‘Damn,’ Lovie Bolton said. ‘I’m old, but that’s no excuse. It was right in front of my face.’

Ralph leaned forward and took one of her hands. ‘What are you talking about, Lovie?’ Going to her first name, as he always eventually did in the interrogation room.

‘Roger Bolton and his two sons – Claude’s cousins – are buried not four miles from here, along with four other men. Or maybe ’twas five. And those children, of course, them twins.’ She shook her head slowly back and forth. ‘I was so mad when Claude got six months in Gatesville for stealing. And ashamed. That’s when he started using drugs, you know. But I saw later it was God’s mercy. Because if he’d been here, he would have been with them. Not his dad, by then George had already had two heart attacks and couldn’t go, but Claude … yes, he would have been with them.’

‘Where?’ Alec asked. He was leaning forward now, staring intently.

‘The Marysville Hole,’ she said. ‘That’s where those men died, and that’s where they remain.’