Rough Country

doesn’t make any sense.”
     
     
     
    ZOE ASKED WENDY, “If it was your father, if he killed all those people, why’d he do it? To keep you close?”
    Wendy nodded. “The only people my dad ever loved was my mom and me. And the Deuce, I guess. He’s told me that a hundred times. When she left, it almost killed him. He says I act just like her.”
    “Your father never . . . ?” Virgil let the sentence fragment hang out there, instead of asking, “sexually molested you?”
    Wendy took just a second to catch on, and then said, “Oh, no. No, no. Nothing like that.”
    “Never?”
    “No. There was a time when I was thirteen, or twelve, I got kind of a bad feeling about him, like he was watching me, so I was kind of careful around him for a while. But nothing ever happened. Ever.”
    “What about with the Deuce?”
    She smiled ruefully. “He liked to spy on me. You know, when I was coming out of the bathroom, peeking in my window and stuff. I didn’t mind so much—he never did anything, either. He’s really shy.”
    “What’s your dad’s relationship to the Deuce? He’s seems to be pointing us at him.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. He used to spank us both, because he believed in discipline. But Mom would jump in. . . . After she was gone, he beat up the Deuce pretty bad, a couple of times. That stopped a few years ago, when the Deuce started fighting back. It looked like maybe . . . like maybe Dad was taking on more than he could handle.”
     
     
     
    THEY SAT around for a minute, then Virgil asked, “Has your father ever talked to you about not leaving?”
    She nodded. “Oh, yeah. He came from this really poor family—I mean, really poor. He had this brother who died young, supposedly of a heart problem, but Dad told me once that he thought it was because he didn’t have enough to eat when he was a boy. There were times when they went hungry. They had a welfare program back then, where the government would give people peanut butter and lard and that kind of stuff. Leftover stuff, when the farmers grew too much. He said there were months when they ate peanut butter for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He can’t even stand the smell of it anymore.”
    She trailed off, and Virgil, trying to keep her rolling, said, “I can understand that.”
    She nodded. “Anyway, after high school he was a shovel man for another septic tank construction company, then he went in the army and learned heavy equipment. He was in for six years, saved every dime he could, and when he got out, he put a down payment on a Bobcat and then . . . he worked and worked, and he met Mom and got married, and Mom worked and worked, all the time, and they finally got the business going. He doesn’t think the Deuce can handle it; he wants me to. He thinks if I go running off to Nashville or somewhere, the business will . . .”
    She shrugged.
    “Go down the toilet,” Zoe said.
    “Not funny,” Wendy snapped. To Virgil: “But I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to spend my life pushing some goddamned Bobcat around, or doing the office work for a bunch of rednecks.”
     
     
     
    “SO, why’re you telling me this?” Virgil asked.
    “ ’ Cause if Dad did it, they should stop him,” Wendy said. “And the Deuce . . . the Deuce can’t help the way he is. Dad made him that way. After Mom ran off with Hector, it was like I was the mom, and I had to take care of the Deuce. Stand between him and Dad, as much as I could.”
    “The Deuce is what? Four or five years younger than you?”
    “Seven,” Wendy said. “You know, I think they’d kill him in prison. I think being in prison, in a cage, might kill him, all by itself. But he seems to attract attention . . . from people who like to make fun of him. If he went to prison, he’d die there, or get killed there. And it’s not right, if he didn’t do it.”
    “No, it isn’t,” Virgil said.
    He leaned back and closed his eyes. If Slibe did it, and the Deuce was innocent, they had major problems. Once the police arrested somebody for a crime, it became almost impossible to convict somebody else, without a perfect, watertight case. Given the standard for a conviction—guilty beyond a reasonable doubt—a defense attorney would beat them to death with a prior arrest: “If you’re so sure X is guilty, why’d you arrest Y two days before?”
    They might be able to slide around that, since the two people involved were closely related, so the same evidence