Part 13 (1/2)
About halfway up the pa.s.s road I came out into sunlight. The fog below was like a sea of white water surging into the inlets of the mountains. From the summit of the pa.s.s, where I paused for a moment, further mountains were visible on the inland horizon.
The wide valley between was full of light. Cattle grazed among the live oaks on the hillsides. A covey of quail marched across the road in front of my car like small plumed tipsy soldiers. I could smell newrnown hay, and had the feeling that I had dropped down into a pastoral scene where nothing much had changed in a hundred years.
The town of Indian Springs didn't entirely dispel the feeling, though it had its service stations and its drive-ins offering hamburgers and tacos. It had a bit of old-time Western atmosphere, and more than a bit of the old-time sun-baked poverty of the West. Prematurely aging women watched over their brown children in the dooryards of crumbling adobes. Most of the loiterers in the main street had Indian faces under their broadbrimmed hats. Banners advertising Old Rodeo Days hung limply over their heads.
Alice Jenks lived in one of the best houses on what appeared to be the best street. It was a two-storied white frame house, with deep porches upstairs and down, standing far back from the street behind a smooth green lawn. I stepped onto the gra.s.s and leaned on a pepper tree, fanning myself with my hat. I was five minutes early.
A rather imposing woman in a blue dress came out on the veranda. She looked me over as if I might possibly be a burglar cleverly creeping up on her house at eleven o'clock in the morning. She came down the steps and along the walk toward me. The sun flashed on her gla.s.ses and lent her searchlight eyes.
Close up, she wasn't so alarming. The brown eyes behind the gla.s.ses were strained and anxious. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her mouth was unexpectedly generous and even soft, but it was tweezered like a live thing between the harsh lines that thrust down from the base of her nose. The stiff blue dress that curved like armor plate over her monolithic bosom was old-fas.h.i.+oned in cut, and gave her a dowdy look. The valley sun had parched and roughened her skin.
”Are you Mr. Archer?”
”Yes. How are you, Miss Jenks?”
”I'll survive.” Her handshake was like a man's. ”Come up on the porch, we can talk there.”
Her movements, like her speech, were so abrupt that they suggested the jitters. The jitters under firm, perhaps lifelong, control. She motioned me into a canvas glider and sat on a reed chair facing me, her back to the street. Three Mexican boys on one battered bicycle rode by precariously like high-wire artists.
”I don't know just what you want from me, Mr. Archer. My niece appears to be in very serious trouble. I talked to a friend in the courthouse this morning--”
”The Sheriff?”
”Yes. He seems to think that Dolly is hiding from him.”
”Did you tell Sheriff Crane where she was?”
”Yes. Shouldn't I have?”
”He trotted right over to the nursing home to question her. Dr. G.o.dwin wouldn't let him.”
”Dr. G.o.dwin is a great one for taking matters into his own hands. I don't believe myself that people in trouble should be coddled and swaddled in cotton wool, and what I believe for the rest of the world holds true for my own family. We've always been a law-abiding family, and if Dolly is holding something back, she ought to come out with it. I say let the truth be told, and the chips fall where they may.”
It was quite a speech. She seemed to be renewing her old disagreement with G.o.dwin about Dolly's testimony at the trial.
”Those chips can fall pretty hard, sometimes, when they fall on people you love.”
She watched me, her sensitive mouth held tight, as if I had accused her of a weakness. ”People I love?”
I had only an hour, and no sure intuition of how to reach her. ”I'm a.s.suming you love Dolly.”
”I haven't seen her lately--she seems to have turned against me--but I'll always be fond of her. That doesn't mean”--and the deep lines rea.s.serted themselves at the corners of her mouth--”that I'll condone any wrongdoing on her part. I have a public position--”
”Just what is your position?”
”I'm senior county welfare worker for this area,” she announced. Then she looked anxiously behind her at the empty street, as if a posse might be on its way to relieve her of her post.
”Welfare begins at home.”
”Are you instructing me in the conduct of my private life?” She didn't wait for an answer. ”Let me tell you, you don't have to. Who do you think took the child in when my sister's marriage broke up? I did, of course. I gave them both a home, and after my sister was killed I brought my niece up as if she was my own daughter. I gave her the best of food and clothes, the best of education. When she wanted her own independence, I gave her that, too. I gave her the money to go and study in Los Angeles. What more could I do for her?”
”You can give her the benefit of the doubt right now. I don't know what the Sheriff said to you, but I'm pretty sure he was talking through his little pointed hat.”
Her face hardened. ”Sheriff Crane does not make mistakes.”
I had the sense of doubleness again, of talking on two levels. On the surface we were talking about Dolly's connection with the Haggerty killing but underneath this, though McGee had not been mentioned, we were arguing the question of McGee's guilt.
”All policemen make mistakes,” I said. ”All human beings make mistakes. It's even possible that you and Sheriff Crane and the judge and the twelve jurors and everybody else were mistaken about Thomas McGee, and convicted an innocent man.”
She laughed in my face, not riotously. ”That's ridiculous, you didn't know Tom McGee. He was capable of anything. Ask anybody in this town. He used to get drunk and come home and beat her. More than once I had to stand him off with a gun, with the child holding onto my legs. More than once, after Constance left him, he came to this house and battered on the door and said he would drag her out of here by the hair. But I wouldn't let him.” She shook her head vehemently, and a strand of iron-gray hair fell like twisted wire across her cheek.
”What did he want from her?”
”He wanted domination. He wanted her under his thumb. But he had no right to her. We Jenks are the oldest family in town. The McGees across the river are the sc.u.m of the earth, most of them are on welfare to this day. He was one of the worst of them but my sister couldn't see it when he came courting her in his white sailor suit. He married her against Father's bitter objections. He gave her a dozen years of h.e.l.l on earth and then he finally killed her. Don't tell me he was innocent. You don't know him.”
A scrub jay in the pepper tree heard her harsh obsessive voice and raised his own voice in counter-complaint. I said under his noise: ”Why did he kill your sister?”
”Out of sheer diabolical devilment What he couldn't have he chose to destroy. It was as simple as that. It wasn't true that there was another man. She was faithful to him to the day she died. Even though they were living in separate houses, my sister kept herself pure.”
”Who said there was another man?”
She looked at me. The hot blood left her face. She seemed to lose the confidence that her righteous anger had given her.
”There were rumors,” she said weakly. ”Foul, dirty rumors. There always are when there's bad blood between a husband and wife. Tom McGee may have started them himself. I know his lawyer kept hammering away at the idea of another man. It was all I could do to sit there and listen to him, trying to destroy my sister's reputation after that murdering client of his had already destroyed her life. But Judge Gahagan made it clear in his instructions to the jury that it was just a story he invented, with no basis in fact.”
”Who was McGee's lawyer?”
”An old fox named Gil Stevens. People don't go to him unless they're guilty, and he takes everything they have to get them off.”
”But he didn't get McGee off.”
”He practically did. Ten years is a small price to pay for first-degree murder. It should have been first-degree. He should have been executed.”
The woman was implacable. With a firm hand she pressed her stray lock of hair back into place. Her graying head was marcelled in neat little waves, all alike, like the sea in old steel engravings. Such implacability as hers, I thought, could rise from either one of two sources: righteous certainty, or a guilty dubious fear that she was wrong. I hesitated to tell her what Dolly had said, that she had lied her father into prison. But I intended to tell her before I left.
”I'm interested in the details of the murder. Would it be too painful for you to go into them?”
”I can stand a lot of pain. What do you want to know?”
”Just how it happened.”
”I wasn't here myself. I was at a meeting of the Native Daughters. I was president of the local group that year.” The memory of this helped to restore her composure.
”Still I'm sure you know as much about it as anyone.”
”No doubt I do. Except Tom McGee,” she reminded me.
”And Dolly.”