Jesus. Thatcher hoped Mrs. Plummer hadn’t been the one who found him. “That was an awful thing to do to his family. He leave a note?”

“No.” The sheriff lowered his head and stared at a spot on the floor between him and the cell. “When I questioned Mrs. Plummer about it, she told me her husband had come back from the war a different man, that he never recovered from his service over there, and that’s what drove him to kill himself.”

“It can happen.”

The sheriff kept his head down but lifted his gaze to Thatcher, looking at him from under a pair of eyebrows that matched his salt-and-pepper mustache. “Did it happen to you? See, Mr. Hutton, I recognize the buttons on your coat. My boy wore the same uniform.”

He lowered his gaze to the floor again. “I know the name of the town in France where he’s buried. Can’t pronounce it, but I can’t see it matters much. I doubt I’ll ever get there.

“And, anyway, if I were to, there’s a bunch of Company B boys all buried together. They couldn’t really tell one from the other, they said. Made separate graves… Well, impractical, I guess.”

He coughed behind his fist. Thatcher heard him swallow. Then he raised his head and looked Thatcher in the eye. “Were you witness to atrocities like that?”

“Damn near every day. Even after the armistice, I was left over there to clean up messes that folks who haven’t seen can’t imagine.”

“You didn’t feel the effects of seeing things like mass graves stuffed with unidentified body parts?”

“Yes, Mr. Amos, I felt the effects, all right. But they didn’t make me lose my mind, or tempt me to blow my brains out, or drive me to abduct women.” His hands closed around two of the bars. “Seeing all that death only made me determined to get back home and go on living out the rest of my life as best I can.”

Their gazes stayed locked for a time. The sheriff was the first to break away. He turned and started down the corridor. “Try to get some shut-eye.”

“How long can you hold me without charging me?”

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about it.”

“With all due respect, I do worry about it.”

Bill Amos stopped and turned. He subjected Thatcher to a long, assessing stare. “There’s a lot about you I’m trying to figure out. But it’s occurred to me to wonder why you would spend ten minutes or more with a young woman who you thought was all alone way out yonder, and leave politely without laying a hand on her, then walk five more miles, on a hot day that topped eighty, meet another woman who’s seven months pregnant, and decide to sneak back in the dead of night and carry her off. On foot.”

Thirteen

Laurel spent an anxious hour pacing the waiting area of the doctor’s office, trying to comfort Pearl. Her coughing spasms were relieved only when she could draw enough breath to wail.

When they finally were called into the examination room, the elderly physician peered at them through his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and asked, “What seems to be the problem?”

Laurel wanted to smack him.

With a maddening lack of urgency, he went about examining the screaming baby while asking Laurel pertinent questions. In the hope of moving things along, she kept her answers brief and precise.

He listened to Pearl’s chest and, when he removed the earpieces of the stethoscope, asked if she’d been born early.

“By three weeks.”

He ruminated on that, then used a medicine dropper to dose Pearl with powdered aspirin dissolved in water. “This will bring down her fever. And this,” he said as he similarly administered a dose of sweet smelling syrup, “will help with her cough.” He gave Laurel a small bottle of the cough remedy and a packet of the aspirin to take with her.

Irv had waited in the car. When he saw her coming from the building, he got out to help her and Pearl into the passenger seat. “Is it the Spanish flu?” he asked. “Pneumonia?”

“He didn’t say.”

He tilted his head and looked at Pearl, who was lying in Laurel’s arms. “She seems better already.”

“He gave her paregoric.”

He frowned. “That’s dope, ya know. You’d’ve been just as well off funneling some whiskey down her throat.”

Laurel agreed. Her mother had given her paregoric whenever she’d suffered a stomachache or diarrhea. However, rather than easing her symptoms, the opiate had always nauseated her, making her throw up.

She didn’t like the idea of the stuff, and would be very stingy with the doses she gave Pearl for her cough. Now, however, she was grateful that the baby was no longer struggling for every breath. Pearl’s eyes were blinking sleepily, and sleep would be as good a remedy as anything.

Laurel kissed her daughter’s forehead, then whispered to her, “Things are going to get better, Pearl. I’m going to make them better. I promise.” After Irv had started the car and gotten behind the wheel, she said, “I want to see that house for rent.”

* * *

As they drove through town, Irv reopened the subject of the scene in the sheriff’s office. “That fella Hutton. What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything.”

“I mean in connection with the doc’s wife gone missing.”

Rather than answer his question, she asked, “How was the mayor involved? Is he a close friend of the Driscolls?”

“Naw, he just sticks his big nose into everybody’s business.”

“Well, this is his business. He’s a public official, and a woman in his city went missing overnight.”

“You think that Hutton took her?”

“I don’t know, Irv.” Her tone reflected how tired she was of his seeming obsession with Mr. Hutton. Since he’d ventured into their yard yesterday, no matter what topic they were talking about, Irv always circled back to him. Every time she’d asked what had made him so suspicious of the man, his answer was usually the same. “Just don’t trust a tall, dark stranger who drops out of nowhere.”

As now, he muttered, “Don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”

He would trust Mr. Hutton even less if he knew that he’d placed his hands on Laurel’s arms and held her against him. She’d taken his hand!