The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [203]
A flutter of dread went through me: we weren’t in the kind of place where you wanted to go accusing men of being cowards. But oddly, the bartender didn’t leap straight down Miss Howard’s throat, nor did anybody else who’d heard the question. They just kept staring steadily, and finally the bartender, in a hushed voice, answered, “Fear’s nothing but common sense sometimes. So’s keeping your mouth shut. And after what happened to the Muhlenbergs—”
“The Muhlenbergs?” Miss Howard repeated; but the bartender caught himself, realizing he’d said too much.
“Just finish up your drinks and get out of here,” he said, walking down to the other end of the bar.
“Can’t you at least tell us where these people live?” Miss Howard asked, pushing our luck. “I don’t think you understand, we’re conducting an investigation that may result in the woman’s being brought up on serious criminal charges.”
Everybody in the room just stayed silent. Then one mug in a corner whose face we couldn’t see said, “They live in the old yellow house at the south end of town.”
“You shut the hell up, Joe!” the bartender growled.
“What for?” the man in the corner said. “If they’re gonna go after the bitch—”
“Yeah?” said the man we’d spoken to on the street. “And what if they don’t get her, and she finds out you were part of their trying?”
“Oh …” It wasn’t much more than a scared whisper; but it was the last we heard from the fellow in the shadows.
“I ain’t gonna tell you again,” the bartender said. “Finish your drinks and leave.”
The smart move seemed to be to follow the order, being as the atmosphere in the place was becoming very uncomfortable. Fear was having its usual effect on ignorant people, making them antsy and prone to violence; and I figured that we’d best be getting back outside, and maybe back out of town altogether. Miss Howard, unfortunately, saw things differently. When I tapped her shoulder and then started toward the door, she did follow; but as we reached the end of the bar, she paused one more time to look at the collection of faces in the room.
“Is every man in this town afraid of her?” she asked.
Knowing that she was now definitely going beyond what those boys would accept quietly, I fairly pushed Miss Howard out the door and then on toward the buck-board, though she wasn’t very happy about it: she wasn’t a woman to back down in the face of male bullying or threats, and the behavior of the men in the bar had only made her more determined to stick around Stillwater and find something out. Because of that, we didn’t end up moving north and out of town again when we got back on our rig, but kept going south, until we rolled up to an old, run-down house. The place might have been yellow at some point in time, but now it was just a mass of dead climbing plants and peeling paint. The faint light of a lantern could be seen through one window, and once or twice the silhouette of a person passed in front of it.
“We going in?” I asked, hoping that maybe there was still some way Miss Howard would change her mind.
“Of course we’re going in,” she answered quietly. “I want to know what the hell happened here.”
Nodding in what you might call resignation, I got down off the buckboard, then followed Miss Howard past the broken-down little fence what ran around the overgrown front yard. We got to the front door, and Miss Howard was about to knock; then I made out something in the darkness away to the side of the house.
“Miss,” I said, nudging her with my elbow and then pointing. “Maybe you want to look over there …”
Turning, Miss Howard followed my finger to take in the sight of some black ruins in the lot next door. They were obviously the remains of another house, being as two crumbling chimneys stood at either end; and even by the faint light of the moon we could see a couple of cast-iron stoves and some bathroom fixtures—a tub and a sink—lying in the rubble. There were young trees and shrubs growing in the midst of it all, indicating that the fire what had destroyed the place hadn’t occurred any time recently.
All in