27

The next afternoon, Bobo retraced Fiji’s route to Buffalo Plain. He’d talked to Fiji that morning in her yard: she’d finally made a start at getting out all her Halloween decorations. She’d climbed down from a ladder to tell him about the funeral.

She’d looked preoccupied, and cold, wrapped up in the battered zip-up jacket she wore for yard work. He himself was wearing his old brown corduroy coat with the toggle fastenings, a relic from his college days. Fall had declared itself overnight. The sky was a brilliant blue with a cloud scattered here and there to emphasize how radiant the day was, but the chilling wind blew steadily from the west. It tossed the leaves through the air, forcing them to somersault before drifting to the ground.

Bobo stopped to fill up his tank and get a cup of coffee in Marthasville, and the grackles in the trees around the gas station were full of noisy conversation. One strutted on the ground by his truck and cast a bright eye up at him, as if wondering if he were a source of food.

“Not today, bird,” he said, and the grackle flew away to tell its comrades. Most people hated grackles, but Bobo had enjoyed them since he’d moved to Texas. They seemed to tell each other everything.

Bobo’s old Garmin got him to the cemetery with only a moment of uncertainty. He spotted the fresh grave right away; it was covered with withering flowers. To his dismay, he was not alone. There was another mourner. Since the cemetery was a dead end (Yeah, pretty ironic, huh?), there was no way for him to leave unobtrusively. He decided to accept whatever was going to happen. He got out of his truck. The small form beside the grave turned to face him, and he saw it was a woman. After a second, Bobo recognized her as Aubrey’s mother. Aubrey had kept a picture of her parents on her side of the bed.

Though Bobo dreaded this encounter, it was impossible to back down. He walked toward her, doing his best to look as nonthreatening as a big strange man in an isolated spot possibly could appear to a lone woman.

The breeze picked up Aubrey’s mother’s short hair and ruffled it, and made the flowers rustle on their forms.

“I don’t know you,” she said after a moment. “I’m Lucyfay Hamilton.”

“Mrs. Hamilton, I’m Bobo Winthrop. I didn’t kill your daughter.”

She stared at him wordlessly. She had Aubrey’s eyes, he thought, but she was smaller all over than her daughter. She was only ten or twelve years older than Bobo, and if she had not been so sunk in grief, she might have appealed to him on a personal level, a realization he found shocking and confusing.

“That’s what the sheriff in your county tells us,” she said. From her tone and demeanor, he had no idea if she believed in his innocence or not.

“I heard you all didn’t want me to come to the funeral, so I thought I’d come today to pay my respects,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone else would be here.”

“After that man ruined the funeral yesterday, I wanted a quiet time to spend with my daughter,” Lucyfay Hamilton said, turning back to the grave. “Did you hear about that?”

“Yes, a friend of mine was here. I heard. And I’ll leave you to your private time.” He turned to go back to his truck.

“You can stay,” she said. “I’ve said everything to her I had to say.”

Bobo had no idea how to respond to that. He shifted from foot to foot. “I really loved her,” he offered.

“That’s what she told me. ‘Mama, he loves me, and he treats me better than anybody ever has,’ she said.”

“You were in contact with her?” Bobo said. “I’m sorry . . . somehow I thought that she was out of touch with you all.”

“She was out of touch with her father and Macon,” Lucyfay Hamilton said. There was a ghost of a smile on her lips. “Never with me.”

“She didn’t talk to her father because of her first husband?”

“And his really, really stupid death as a bank robber? And his scumbag buddies? Yes, that might have had something to do with it,” Lucyfay said dryly. “We raised her the best way we knew how. She had to work on the ranch. She went to church. She wore nice clothes. Did she tell you my husband runs his family ranch, sits on the board of the bank?”

“No, ma’am.” His bit his lip before he could say, She told me you were dead.

“And then she let his stupid friends talk her into ‘avenging his death’—yes, that’s the way they put it—by contacting you.” Clearly, she was not able to say “seducing you.” She turned away from him, to her car. “Well, she paid for her gullibility and her careless way with men. At least she had some happiness with you before she was murdered.”

“Who do you think killed her?” Bobo blurted.

“Price says you did. I’d assumed it was Price’s little militia, or Price himself. But I don’t believe that any longer. Price is an underhanded young man. He’s long on charisma and short on foresight. But I don’t think he’s capable of killing her and then putting on the show he did yesterday. Do you understand?”

Bobo nodded.

Lucyfay took a deep breath. “I think she insisted to the MOL that you were innocent of whatever they think you’ve done. I think she said she wouldn’t inform on you anymore. And I think one of Price’s goons killed her, though I don’t think Price knows that. Then he ruined her funeral, with his damn stupid flag ritual.”

Apparently she had had her say, because Lucyfay Hamilton got into her Lexus and drove off, leaving a dazed Bobo standing by the fresh grave. He felt so wobbly that he almost sank to his knees, before he was shamed by the melodrama of the gesture. He stiffened his backbone. What’s worse? he asked himself. To be accused of murdering the girl you loved or to be the cause of her getting murdered? His misery swept him away and swirled him around like the leaves in the wind.

Weirdly, strangely—wonderfully—he knew this was the moment he was touching the bottom, and he understood that from now on, however gradually, he would begin to heal.

When Bobo looked down at the flower-strewn mound, he no longer saw through it to the decayed body of the woman he’d loved. He saw the opaque layer of dirt, the sealed coffin. He saw good-bye.

Bobo shifted uneasily, as if a long-carried burden had shifted on his shoulders. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was not any less sad, but he felt free.

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