The Rock Hole Read online

  The Rock Hole

  A Red River Mystery

  Reavis Z. Wortham

  www.ReavisZWortham.com

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright © 2011 by Reavis Z. Wortham

  First Edition 2011

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2011920305

  ISBN: 9781590588840 Hardcover

  ISBN: 9781590588864 Trade Paperback

  ISBN: 9781615953127 epub

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

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  Contents

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to the three women in my life.

  My daughters Chelsea and Megan,

  and the love of my life, Shana.

  They keep me grounded and in the real world.

  Author Note

  Lamar County; Paris, Texas; and Hugo, Oklahoma exist, but they are used fictitiously in this novel. The same is true for certain businesses and other places that have passed with time. Center Springs exists, also, but it is the original name of a small community called Chicota. Other geographical references are correct. The Rock Hole on Sanders Creek was still there the last time I visited, but that was thirty-five years ago. All the characters, with the exception of Cliff Vanderburg, are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All towns and communities have stories and are bonded together by the people who live there, who drop by and only stay for a spell, and who pass through on the way to some other place. All have an impact on those with whom they have contact. Those stories are collected in memory, and are spun around kitchen tables, in front of the fireplace, on porches, in deer camps, or up at the store. Kids flow through these venues without notice, but they are sponges, and they absorb the stories as they are told. Eventually, they grow up and tell stories of their own.

  With that said, step back with me in time to the good and bad of rural life at the end of an era. Welcome to 1964.

  December 22, 2010

  Reavis Z. Wortham

  Telluride, Colorado

  Chapter One

  I came to live with my grandparents up on the Red River in the summer of 1964. Their hardscrabble farm sat exactly one mile from the domino hall in Center Springs, a one-horse settlement named after the clear-water spring that feeds Sanders Creek, which then drains into the Red.

  When I climbed down the metal steps of that hot old bus outside the Greyhound station in the much larger town of Chisum, Grandpa and my grandmother Miss Becky were waiting on the sidewalk. I was so proud to see them I could have busted, Grandpa especially. There he stood in his sweat-stained old straw hat and overalls, with a tiny badge pinned to his blue work shirt.

  I knew a revolver was in one of those big pockets, because he was the Law in Lamar County, though you couldn’t rightly tell if you didn’t know.

  He hugged me against his big belly. Miss Becky was nearly dancing with excitement when he turned me loose to throw my suitcase into the truck bed among the bailing wire, empty feed sacks, and loose hay. He’d parked right at the curb, and the bus’ front bumper was right against the tailgate. When the bus driver stopped a few minutes before, I could tell he was aggravated because the truck was in his way, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Why Top, you’ve growed a foot since we last saw you!” When Miss Becky hugged my neck, she smelled like the bath powder she kept in a round tin on her dresser

  “C’mon, Mama, we have to go.” Grandpa opened the door for us. “Get in hoss, and let’s go look at a dead dog.” He was always in a hurry to get out of town and back to the country. I crawled onto the dusty seat full of holes and Miss Becky gathered her long skirts and climbed in behind me.

  “Ned,” Miss Becky softly scolded him when he pulled away from the curb.

  “Aw, Mama, it ain’t nothin’ but a dead dog and we’re liable to see two or three in the same condition on the side of the highway before we get back to the house. It won’t hurt him none.”

  “Well, y’all can drop me off at the house first, then.”

  “I intend to.”

  Ten-year-old boys are always up for an adventure, so twenty minutes later we let her out at the house and fifteen minutes after that I followed him through Mr. Isaac’s chest-high corn. Grandpa led us between the rows with a hoe thrown over his shoulder and a ’toe sack dangling from the back pocket of his overalls. I wasn’t sure how he knew where we were going until I looked down at his brogans and saw footprints leading through the rows in the sand.

  I cocked my Daisy air rifle he’d remembered to bring for me. The BB gun’s barrel was hot to the touch from the blazing summer sun. “Glad we have a gun.” He always enjoyed kidding me. “You never know if you’re gonna run across a booger-bear out here.”

  I rattled the air rifle to see how many BBs were left. “Is this your corn?”

  “Nope. It belongs to Isaac Reader. I usually don’t like being alone in another man’s field. It feels like trespassing, but since Ike called me, here we are.”

  Turkey buzzards drifted on the thermals high above the thick corn stalks surrounding us. Locusts sang in the trees at the edge of the field. He stopped and wrinkled his nose at the edge of a tramped-down area in the corn. “Sheew. That stinks.”

  I almost gagged. The sight of what lay at our feet nearly made me fall out. Someone had used a heated two-handed screwdriver to torture a poor bird dog lying beside the cold remains of a fire. Dark stains on the blade and the German shorthair’s wounds told us what had happened i
n the clearing. Burn marks made crisscross patterns in the animal’s hide. Deep puncture wounds from the once red-hot blade still oozed fluid.

  Despite the heat, a chill ran up my spine. I’d seen dead dogs on the side of the highway, but I’d never seen one intentionally mistreated. My stomach rose, but I choked it down again. The stink made my asthma act up, making me wheeze. I dug my puffer out of my jean pocket, stuck the atomizer end in my mouth, and gave the bulb a squeeze. My lungs tickled deep down inside and I began to breathe better.

  “Bastard.” Grandpa had a habit of talking quietly to himself. He hooked the sharp blade of his hoe under the stiff corpse and lifted it off the ground. Flies rose and buzzed all around us. “This one makes five now.”

  “Five what, Grandpa?”

  “Just you never mind.”

  I waved flies out of my face as he knelt onto one knee and pulled a damp scrap of paper free from the sand. He unfolded the raggedly torn advertisement from The Chisum News. I got a peek at the drawing of a boy and girl playing catch.

  He stood with a grunt and backed off a step.

  I’d never seen anything so horrible in my life, and I wished Grandpa hadn’t brought me. Center Springs was always my safe place, where I didn’t have to worry about anything except running outside, hunting, and fishing. That’s why I came.

  Another truck rattled down the dirt road and pulled into the shade beside ours. Grandpa slipped the folded clipping into the deep pocket of his overalls, removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his bald head with a blue bandanna. “That’s your Uncle Cody’s bird dog someone stole out of his pen last week. But you don’t say anything to him about it. I’ll tell him.”

  “Why?”

  He stared down at me with those pale blue eyes of his. “Because I said not to.”

  Behind him, I saw the tops of several corn stalks twitch, but there was no wind. I started to say something about it, but a man got out of the truck and hollered across the field. Had I known someone was creeping through the field with us that morning, I could have told Grandpa and we might have ended what was coming for us right then and there.

  He also might not have had to do what he did.

  But at the time I didn’t know I’d been slapped square in the path of a maniac who had it in for our family.

  Chapter Two

  A cold feeling of dread grew in Ned’s stomach as he absently folded the piece of newspaper. Animal mutilations were stacking up in the river bottoms, but for the first time, the threat pointed toward children.

  Ned shivered at the future in his sun-browned hands. Crows called in the distance. Blinking sweat from his eyes, he wondered if he’d soon be staring down at a child’s body.

  He rose with a grunt and slipped the paper into his pocket as Isaac Reader slowed to a stop in the shade beside Ned’s own pickup. It was Isaac who found the dog the evening before and called Ned on the party line. Isaac slammed the door and hurried into the field.

  “Dammit. I hoped I’d get through here before Isaac showed up.” He rubbed a damp bandana over the back of his neck. Sweat plastered the faded blue shirt to his back. Top didn’t pay much attention, watching instead the corn stalks moving behind his Grandpa.

  His youthful imagination in overdrive, Top pointed the muzzle of his BB gun toward the booger-bear Ned had warned him about. It was a perfect way of avoiding the corpse at his feet. He shot at a corn stalk and cocked the gun again. Ned glanced down at his grandson, then back at Reader.

  A short, talkative man, Isaac Reader moved with quick jerky motions, as if he’d been weaned on too much caffeine. He matched Ned in a way that only comes from a lifetime of farming together. Dressed in faded overalls and soft blue shirts, both men wore straw Stetsons which fell under the “absolute necessity” category like a tractor, plow, and a good sharp hoe. With the first norther of autumn, they traded the breathable straws for a warmer felt.

  He talked as he bulled his way across the rows toward Ned, breaking and shoving through the cornstalks without consideration toward his own crop. “I told you on the phone last night it was something!”

  Waiting until Isaac was within conversational distance, Ned drew a long-suffering breath and stared at the distant tree line along the nearby Red River. He hated to be yelled at and any conversation with Isaac drained all of his energy.

  Isaac soon joined him in the rough clearing. “Gosh-a-mighty! That stinks, don’t it?”

  “He’s pretty ripe all right.”

  The little famer noticed the youngster holding his BB gun. “Hidy Top. What are you doing here?” Before the youngster could answer, Isaac pointed to the dog. “Listen, I couldn’t believe it when I found that thing laying here. It weren’t here three days ago, because my hands chopped this entire field. I believe if they’d seen anything I’d have heard about it.”

  “It probably happened night before last. He swelled pretty fast in this heat.”

  “I don’t give a fiddler’s fangdang when it happened. I don’t like what happened.”

  “Well.” Ned pondered the dog’s corpse.

  He thought about burying it right there in the cornfield, but he knew Isaac wanted the animal gone. “I’ll carry it off a ways down to the river, but don’t you tell Cody how we found him. You know how he is. He doesn’t need to know how his dog was killed. I’ll find the right time and tell him you found it already dead somewheres down here. I don’t want anyone to know about this.”

  “Listen, I ain’t telling nobody nothin’.”

  The trio stood in uncomfortable silence for several long moments.

  Isaac hated silence between men when, in his opinion, they should be talking. “It’s a crying shame. Who would do such a thing?”

  “I cain’t call anybody’s name right now, but I’m afraid we probably know him.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say. Strangers can’t come in here like this without being seen by someone who’d talk about it.”

  “I can’t believe anyone in Center Springs would do something like this. Who’d wire up a dog and burn it with a screwdriver like that? And why pull its toenails? It looks like he wanted to make a necklace out of it.”

  Ned agreed. “It ain’t nothing but puredee meanness.”

  “Listen, look at it. The poor thing’s been halfway skint. Why would anyone peel an animal’s hide back thataway? Do you think it was alive when he did it?”

  Ned cut his eyes toward Top, who didn’t seem to be paying attention to their conversation. He was busy shooting at corn stalks. “I can see it right there Isaac. You don’t have to tell me to look at it.”

  “Listen, you reckon it’s them circus people over there in Hugo?” Isaac never did like the Carson and Barnes Circus people who wintered across the river in Oklahoma.

  “They’re not there in the summer.” Ned knew Isaac had always been suspicious of circus people because he’d been afraid of clowns since they were kids running the bottoms in Lamar County.

  “I know it, but there’s always a few of those people still hanging around all year long. Maybe it’s one of them freaks they carry with them, like the feller that bites the heads off’n live chickens.”

  “Now you’re thinking about those little carnivals that come to town.” Any other time Ned would have laughed at the familiar conversation. “The circus just has elephants and clowns and such.”

  Isaac shivered despite the heat. “I hate clowns. People can hide under all that paint and colored hair and you don’t know what they’re up to. I bet there’s a lot goes on over there we don’t know about. Maybe one of ’em went crazier than usual and they left him behind.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Listen, don’t tell Joshua or any of my coloreds about this. I’m ’possa have thirty hands here in a week to gather my corn and this could scare ’em off. I have enough trouble getting good hands as it is. They’ll probably think its voodoo or something. You know how them niggers are. They’ll think this field is haunted.”

>   Ned nodded toward Top and frowned, hoping the man would get his intent. “Joshua is as Baptist as you are, Isaac. His mama got the name from the Book of Joshua in the same Bible you carry in your hand to the white Baptist church every Sunday. Besides, they’re just folks like you and me, only their skin is a different color.”

  “Well, listen, I don’t care. All I know is that none of his people need to hear about this. They’ll think the bogey-man lives out here and then I can’t get anyone to ever hoe this field again.”

  “You’re right. No one needs to know, black or white. I won’t tell anyone, and you don’t neither. Neither will Top, will you?”

  “Nossir.” Top pointed his air rifle toward the now still corn stalks and pulled the trigger. Satisfied with the snap, he cocked the rifle again. Neither farmer paid any attention to the youngster’s shot.

  Suddenly tired, Ned didn’t want to talk any longer while stewing in the disgusting odor. He drew a ’toe sack out of his back pocket and handed it to Isaac. “I’ll have to study on this some more. Here, hold this open.”

  Isaac knelt, making a face at the odor of decay. Ned took a long piece of bailing wire out of his pocket and looped it around the dog’s hind feet, then used both callused hands to lift the dog’s body into the sack. Isaac waved flies away from his head. One flew into a nostril and he jerked back in revulsion, shuddering and shaking his head. He gagged for a moment and then held the sack open.

  Top giggled at the sight.

  The loose weave of the burlap was no relief from the stench that settled deep into their sinuses. The shade called as they filed down the rows, Ned silently leading the way. Isaac followed, staring intently at the dry ground. Top brought up the rear, turning around now and then to be sure whatever had been moving in the corn wasn’t coming after them. It was fun to pretend Indians were stalking the trio of pioneers as they made their way though the wilderness.

  In the shade, Ned settled the sack gently beside the tree and exchanged the hoe for a shovel from his cluttered truck bed. Much to Isaac’s agitation, Ned dug a hole in the soft sand.