Whatever the details, Sarah Forrester wanted none of it.
“This is not my life,” she told Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler, and then she asked if Henry would be so kind as to drive her home. Her husband had the baby, and he needed to get to work.
“What about your father?” Evie asked her.
Sarah looked away once more toward the horizon, across land that had seen the tracks of unknown predecessors, people whose names had only come to mean something within the last few days, people for whom she perhaps should have felt something, but somehow felt nothing at all. These people, like the land before her, were as distant and unfamiliar as the far side of the world.
Sarah turned to look at Evie. “What about him?”
Henry thought to speak, to say something, anything in Evan’s defense, and yet there were no words to find. A drunk, a traitor, false-hearted and irresponsible; an absentee father, a man who deserted his family and friends for the promise of some other life never attained; a killer. Henry had known him for three years. In truth, Henry hadn’t known him at all. The message had been delivered; he had kept his word. Upon reflection, it would seem that getting that letter into the hands of Evan’s daughter was less about keeping a promise to Evan, even less about Sarah, and more about Henry Quinn proving to himself that he was not the kind of man that he’d perhaps believed himself to be. For all their apparent similarities, he and Evan Riggs were altogether different.
And so, the day before Roy Sperling was buried, Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler drove Sarah Forrester back to the house off the highway between Sanderson and Langley, just a stone’s throw from the Pecos River, and her husband was there to greet her, standing inside the doorway with the baby in his arms.
Sarah got out of the car, and she looked back at Henry. “I don’t really have anything for him, you know? I mean, even if I met him, I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“I understand,” Henry replied, thinking in that moment of what he would do were he suddenly presented with Jack Alford, a father he himself had never known, a father who—more than likely—knew nothing of him.
“Do you want me to go and see him?” Sarah asked. “In Reeves?”
Henry shook his head. “I think it would kill him,” he said. “I think he would realize what he had missed all these years, and it would break his heart.”
“But you? You came all this way, and there’s been all this trouble?”
“The trouble wasn’t mine, Sarah, and it wasn’t yours, either. The trouble was here long before us. I walked into this with my eyes closed, just like you.” Henry looked away for a moment, his expression pensive and uncertain. “Now I am wondering whether I shouldn’t have promised your father that I would find you.”
“I am glad you found me,” Sarah replied. “Of course, I knew I was adopted. I never had a problem with that. My adoptive parents never hid that. They didn’t know who my real parents were, and after a while it didn’t seem to matter.” She smiled to herself, as if now understanding some small mystery. “When you don’t know who your parents are, there will always be things about yourself that you can’t explain … things that come from some unknown place, you know? I know his name now. I know who he was and what he did. That’s enough.”
“But the money that should have been yours?” Evie asked. “You were supposed to inherit that farm, all that land …”
“You can’t miss something you never had,” Sarah said. “Do I want to fight battles with lawyers and the courts and all that? No, I don’t, Miss Chandler. I want to raise my daughter and be the best wife and mother I can be, and that’s all I need right now.”
“Sweetheart?” Sarah’s husband called from the doorway of the house.
Sarah turned and waved and then looked back at Henry and Evie.
“I have to go,” she said. “I would say thank you, but I think this was more for my father than for me.”
She started toward the house.
“If I see him,” Henry said, “is there anything you want me to tell him?”
Sarah shook her head and then hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “Tell him that I will find a copy of his record and listen to it.”
“I can send you a copy—” Henry started.
“It’s okay, Mr. Quinn,” Sarah said, and smiled so artlessly that there was nothing else to be said.
Henry watched Sarah Forrester disappear into the shadowed hallway, knowing then that the sound of Evan Riggs’s voice would never reach her ears.
The following day, the funeral done, there was a small gathering at the saloon where Henry had first met Roy Sperling, George Eakins, Harold Mills, and Clarence Ames. Ralph Chandler came, too, and Henry and Evie sat with them, and they all looked at one another as if each expected an explanation they knew would never arrive.
“You heading out now?” Clarence asked Evie.
“I am,” she said. “Henry an’ me are gonna go on up to San Angelo and see Henry’s ma.”
“And then?”
Evie looked at Henry and shrugged.
“Take it as it comes,” Henry said.
“You gonna make a record?” George Eakins asked.
“Maybe,” Henry said. “We’ll see what happens.”
“I seen the girl,” Harold Mills said. “Evan’s daughter. Yesterday.”
“We took her out and showed her the old Riggs place,” Evie said.
“Hell, if she don’t look just like her ma,” Mills added. “And she just let it all go … everything to do with her family here.”
“What family?” Clarence Ames asked. “Only family she got left is a crazy woman and a homicidal country singer.”
For some reason Henry started laughing. The laughter traveled the table, but it died within a few seconds. It was symbolic, if nothing else, of the surreal nature of what they were discussing.
“Hell of a thing,” Evie’s father said, and that seemed to be the punctuation mark that ended the conversation.
Outside, Evie shared words with her father, trying to refuse the money he was offering her. Clarence Ames approached Henry Quinn. Henry stepped away from the back of the pickup and walked with him a few yards.
“I knew there was bad history here,” Clarence said. “I knew there was Lang trouble. I knew Roy was in something up to his neck. I had some ideas, but they were only ever ideas, and now that he’s dead, I don’t want to know. I even wondered if Carson had Evan fixed up and thrown in jail. Ain’t nothin’ those folks couldn’a done had they wanted. Anyways, it’s all bad water under burned bridges now, eh?”
“It is, yes,” Henry said. “Leave it where it is. No one wants to dig up the dead.”
“You gonna go see Evan, tell him you got the letter delivered?”
“I am, yes,” Henry said. “A week or two. I’ll go tell him what happened.”
“You think it’s gonna break his heart … that his girl don’t wanna see him?”
Henry looked away toward the horizon. “I don’t know, Clarence. Maybe it was never about fixing anything for himself. Maybe it wasn’t about her either …”
“It was just about revenge, right? Getting Carson back any which way he could for what he done to Rebecca.”
“Maybe. Only Evan knows.”
“Crazy goddamned brothers, the pair of them.”
“We’re all crazy, Clarence,” Henry said. “It’s just that we all think that our own kind of crazy is the good kind, right?”
Clarence Ames reached out and gripped Henry’s shoulder. “You do good, okay, son? Take care of that girl. She’s a sweetheart.”
“I will do just that, Mr. Ames.”
“Can’t say I am pleased we ever met, Henry Quinn. Done lost another good friend because of what you brought here, but Carson Riggs is gone, and I think that’s gonna be good for Calvary.”
“I hope so.”
“Travel well, boy,” Clarence said. He started to walk away, and then he paused. “You know … When I seen you the first time, there was something about
you that reminded me of Evan. Ask me what, I couldn’t tell you. Same with Evie, how she had something of the Wyatt girl in her. Seemed ironic, I guess. That record Evan made. The Whiskey Poet. Song on there called “Mockingbird.” You know it, right?”
“I do, yes.”
“A mockingbird mimics the song of all other birds, you know? Beautiful though it may be, it pays by sacrificing its own individual voice.”
“You still think I’m anything like Evan?” Henry asked.
“No, son, I don’t,” Clarence said. “I don’t reckon you’re anything like him at all,” and with that he turned and walked back to the saloon.
They drove away then, the sun high and bold, the sky clear, the highway just running the straightest of lines toward an unknown horizon.
Evie took off her shoes and socks, put her bare feet up against the dash. She rolled a cigarette and lit it, passed it to Henry, then rolled one for herself.
“I never did hear you sing,” she said. “Never did heard you play no guitar, neither.”
“Time enough now.”
“How bad are you?”
“The worst,” Henry said.
“Like a pet store burnin’ down, right?”
“Worse than that.”
“And there lies our fortune?”
“Sure does.”
“Oh hell.”
Evie started to laugh.
Henry tried to laugh with her, but his face just hurt too much.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
R.J. Ellory is the critically acclaimed author of eleven previous novels including the bestselling A Quiet Belief in Angels, which was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection and won the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize.
Ellory’s novels have been translated into twenty-six languages, and he has won the USA Excellence Award for Best Mystery, the Strand Magazine Best Thriller 2009, the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for A Simple Act of Violence and the Quebec Laureat. He has been shortlisted for a further thirteen awards in numerous countries, including four Daggers from the UK Crime Writers’ Association.
Despite the American setting of his novels, Ellory is British and currently lives in England with his wife and son.
To find out more visit www.rjellory.com
Also by R.J. Ellory
Candlemoth
Ghostheart
A Quiet Vendetta
City Of Lies
A Quiet Belief in Angels
A Simple Act of Violence
The Anniversary Man
Saints of New York
Bad Signs
A Dark and Broken Heart
The Devil and the River
Carnival of Shadows
Novellas
Three Days in Chicagoland:
1. The Sister
2. The Cop
3. The Killer
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books.
This ebook first published in 2015 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Roger Jon Ellory 2015
The right of Roger Jon Ellory to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book, with the exception of those already in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 2425 2
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R.J. Ellory, Mockingbird Songs
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