“And anyhow,” Bill went on, “it couldn’t have been premeditated. The doc didn’t know he was going to get called away from the house that night.”

“It would help to know the length of time between the emergency call from the roadhouse and his arrival there.”

“No more than half an hour, Lefty said.”

“What’s it usually take to drive it?”

“Roughly that. Gabe would have had to plan a perfect murder and implement it in a matter of minutes before racing out to treat the young prostitute who got beat up.”

Thatcher looked at him intuitively. “You already asked this Lefty about the timing of the doc’s arrival?”

Bill nodded.

“So this isn’t a sudden notion of yours. It had crossed your mind that the doc had a hand in Mrs. Driscoll’s vanishing.”

Bill’s sigh was as good as an admission. “He’s the one link between Mrs. Driscoll’s disappearance and Wally Johnson’s homicide. The more I thought about it, the less coincidental it seemed.”

“I thought so all along,” Thatcher said.

“So did I.”

“I just didn’t want to say so.”

“Me either.” Glumly, Bill added, “I wish you’d scoffed at the idea. Doesn’t make me feel any better to learn that it had occurred to you, too.”

“Are you going to arrest Driscoll?”

“Without any evidence? No. It’s still all speculation.”

“That didn’t stop you from arresting me.”

The sheriff put his hat back on and slapped his thighs as he stood up. “I had that coming.”

“You sure as hell did.” Thatcher also came to his feet.

“Cut me some slack. Hauling in a drifter for questioning is one thing. Hauling in a highly respected pillar of the community is another.” The sheriff started up the embankment. “But I could make it up to you. That is if you’re willing.”

“Willing?”

When the ground leveled off, the sheriff took advantage of the shade cast by the steel grillwork of the suspension bridge. “I’ve thought of a way to relieve you of suspicion.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ll deputize you.”

Thatcher laughed. “Come again?”

“You heard me. It would be a show of the faith I have in your innocence. If you wore a badge, folks would start looking at you in a different light.”

Still amused, Thatcher shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, and the show of faith, but I don’t want to be a lawman.”

“You’ve got a natural aptitude for it. You’re cool-headed. You listen more than you talk, and you yourself boasted of having a knack for reading people.”

“In a game of poker.”

“Bluffing at cards is a form of lying. Detecting it is a talent. You’d sense when a witness or suspect was giving me the runaround.”

When he saw that Thatcher was about to argue, he held up a hand. “Besides all that, Mrs. Driscoll’s fate is eating at you. You want to know what happened to her.”

“So does everybody.”

“But not everybody has a personal stake in solving the mystery. You’ve dwelled on it.”

“In my idle time.”

Bill grinned. “That speaks volumes. I’m headed out to talk again with that woman who had the breech birth. Maybe she’ll provide some insight into the doc’s frame of mind that night. Why don’t you come with me, listen in? Give it a trial run.”

Thatcher shook his head. “It won’t do any good to go on about it. I appreciate your trying to improve people’s opinion of me, but I don’t want to be a deputy. All I know is ranching and horses.”

“You could still do your horse training. You wouldn’t be on staff. Just, you know, every once in a while, I could use an extra set of eyes and ears and—”

“And?”

“I’ve seen you shoot.” After the blunt statement, he waited a beat. “I count on needing extra firepower soon, because I fear all hell’s about to break loose. The Johnsons have sworn vengeance for Wally. I’ve heard rumblings that they’re going to start sniffing out their competitors, and they’re going to keep at it until they find and execute Wally’s murderer.”

“How will they know when they’ve got the right man?”

“When they’ve killed all of them.”

He couldn’t have hammered his point home any harder, and Thatcher felt the impact of it. Nevertheless, he had no aspiration to wear a badge. “I hope it doesn’t turn into a bloodbath, Bill. But a war between moonshiners isn’t my fight, and I’m staying out of it.”

The sheriff held his gaze for several seconds. “We’ll see.”

They walked back to the stable together but said nothing more until they parted there with exchanged goodbyes.

As Thatcher watched the sheriff walk away, the words we’ll see echoed in his head. He wasn’t struck by the words themselves so much as by the way Bill had said them. Not with disappointment over being unable to change Thatcher’s mind. But with the shrewd confidence that he would.

Twenty-Three

The morning following her discovery of the still, Laurel plunged headfirst into her study of the centuries-old art of making sour mash whiskey. The more product they had to sell, the more money they could make, and the sooner she could settle their outstanding accounts.

In addition to the pressing financial necessity propelling her was a personal goal: As long as she was embarking on an illicit business, she wanted to excel at it.

Under pain of death, Ernie confided in her his family’s recipe for the mash: unsprouted corn kernels, malted barley, water, sugar, yeast, and pot-tail.

“But,” he warned, “you gotta know how much of each ingredient to add. You gotta know what stage to add it, and it has to be the right temperature. You gotta know when the mash has reached the perfect stage of fermentation. If your mash ain’t good, your whiskey ain’t gonna be.”

“How do you know when it’s fermented long enough?”

“When it gets foamy on top. But I dip my finger in and taste it just to be sure.”

Many of his instructions went that way. “What’s pot-tail?”