A few minutes later they were again sitting in the living room. Ann was still next to Steve on the couch, but even closer than before; he had an arm around her, and despite what she had said he suspected this was going to be a stressful time for her.

“Steve,” Uncle Homer said. “I know this is going to be difficult, and it probably will be difficult for all of us. If it gets too stressful, let’s just drop it and come back to it later. That goes especially for you, Ann. If you call a halt, we’ll just stop.”

“I realize you’re being protective of me, sir, but I have an interest in this, too.”

“Thank you, Ann. I’ll still try to gloss over a few things, but you know what I’ll be talking about, and Steve won’t. Steve, you might have guessed that we’re going to be talking about the monster who treated Ann so badly when she was a little girl.”

“I don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out.”

“Obviously not. Steve, this is an old subject around this house, and usually it has been a very tentative one told in short bits and pieces. I think the best thing to do is for me to just start at the beginning. Up until the time that Ann and Agnes joined me here, I often spent time on the road, investigating various opportunities and dealing with problems, much like you’ve done the past few weeks for me. I was usually careful to make the point that I wasn’t the investor involved, but a representative, just like you’ve done, and frankly I hope you will continue to do.”

Uncle Homer went on to explain that in the weeks just before Agnes was released from the nursing home, he’d been very antsy, and realized that he was breathing too hard down too many people’s necks. He needed to get away for a while to let those people do their jobs, and the best he could come up with was to hit the road to look into a few things. One of those was in a small town named Milton, not terribly far from Pendersburg, where he’d picked up a couple of leads at the time he was helping to set up what became Hansen-Baldwynn Buick-Cadillac.

“Frankly it wasn’t all that damn great a deal,” he explained. “I was at the home of a guy by the name of Jim Baldwynn, who was some kind of shirttail relation of Forrest, who you know. In fact, Forrest tipped me off on the deal, but even he warned me it probably wasn’t a good one. However, before we get any further, I should probably say that I never told Forrest anything about this, and as far as I know he doesn’t have any idea of my involvement. In fact, I’ve stayed the hell out of that neck of the woods ever since, which is probably part of the reason Forrest didn’t know how to get hold of me when Hansen Senior had his stroke.”

Jim and Uncle Homer were strolling around the back of Baldwynn’s property, mostly just talking; even Jim didn’t think it was that great a deal, but he’d been pressured to look into developing an idea, and it seemed as if he would be just as happy if it didn’t work out. There was a place where they could look into the fenced back yard of a neighbor, and both of them saw a little girl chained by the neck to a stake in the middle of the yard. Even at a good distance they could see that her naked body was red from sunburn, and she was crying helplessly, clearly in a good deal of pain.

“Well, I asked him what the hell that was all about, and he said, ‘Oh, shit, that bastard Seth Greer is at it again. He’s really hell on that little girl from what I hear. He’ll leave her out there until she’s one big fucking blister, and then take her inside and beat the hell out of her. Why he hasn’t killed her I’ll never know.’”

Steve could feel Ann take his hand and almost crush it in hers as Uncle Homer went on. “Well, I asked him why he didn’t call the sheriff or children’s services in on someone like that, and he told me he didn’t dare. ‘The bastard is a Holy Roller preacher,’ he explained. ‘There’s bunch of rollers around here, some weird goddamn cult, and they just about run the damn town. What’s worse, his brother is the sheriff, and nobody fucks with him. I mean, nobody; he’s a mean bastard, and he pretty much does what his brother wants him to. What’s more, this is a small, poor county. There ain’t no protective services or anything like that, so there ain’t nothing to stop that fucking Greer from treating that kid however he wants to.’ Well, I thought that was pretty bad and told him so, and he said it was pretty bad but he didn’t see any way anyone could do something about it.”

The whole thing got Homer pretty upset. “I mean, I was just about ready to shoot the son of a bitch right then and there,” he related. “But in that town, with that sheriff, it wouldn’t have helped the kid very much, so I decided the best thing to do was to just get the hell out of town and try to forget it.”

But he couldn’t forget about it. The sight of the poor kid being sunburned to a crisp and crying her eyes out haunted him with every turn of the wheels of the Lincoln away from Milton. “I finally decided that if no one else was going to help that kid then I’d better damn well do it. Now, this couldn’t have come at a worse possible time for me, since I knew Agnes was going to be coming to live with me in a few days. Knowing the kind of care she would need, I didn’t figure I was going to be getting away very often. Like I said, I was winding down my affairs so I could deal with that, and I even had a woman who was going to come in and help out now and then so I could get away when I absolutely had to. But that meant that if I was going to do something about the kid, I couldn’t put it off very long.”

Uncle Homer found a town with a place he could rent another car – the Lincoln was pretty distinctive, after all – and went back to do a little more investigating, this time without letting Jim Baldwynn know he was there. “Mostly it was detail stuff,” he related to Ann and Steve, “but I got a few key pieces of information without having to be too damn nosy and getting anyone’s suspicions involved. The really important piece of information was that this Greer character drove a dark blue Plymouth minivan, but there were a few other bits and pieces that mostly confirmed what Jim had told me.

“Now, I never was an action-adventure hero,” Uncle Homer went on, “and I was seventy-six at the time so that didn’t help a damn bit, either, so I figured I had to be sneaky. I got the hell out of town, returned the rental car, and went looking for another place where I could rent a minivan that looked something like Greer’s, and found one at a rent-a-wreck place. I figured I had one shot at this, so I’d better make it a good one.”

Uncle Homer went on to explain that with the liberal use of bribe money he also got a syringe filled with a drug that would knock out a kid he estimated would weigh about eighty pounds; if this was going to come off, he didn’t need her making a fuss. “The one thing I had going for me was that I knew that most churches like that aren’t an in-and-out-in-forty-five-minutes thing like most straight-line churches,” he said. “Usually they’re good for two or three hours and I knew I needed the time.”

Steve shook his head. “Don’t tell me you pulled this deal off on the middle of a Sunday morning.”

“No, I didn’t,” he smiled. “I may not be any kind of an expert on those kinds of deals, but I’m not that stupid, either. They had a Wednesday evening service along with the Sunday service, and from what I found out those went on even longer than the Sunday service. I figured that Greer bastard would lock up his house, but it was a small town, so I was betting he wouldn’t lock his minivan when he was at church. And sure enough, he didn’t, although I had a coat hanger and was set to pop the lock if I had to. I stole his garage door opener, and drove my minivan right into his garage and closed the door. From there on it was duck soup.”

That was only the first step, though. Uncle Homer explained how he’d spent nearly an hour hunting through the house with a small flashlight before finding the little girl in the closet, naked and shivering in fear, still showing the effects of the sunburn she’d received a couple of days before. “I was afraid he’d have her on that damn chain, but I had a pair of bolt cutters with me if I needed them. As it turned out I didn’t. I told her I had come to rescue her.”

“I was very scared,” Ann spoke up, the first time she’d said anything since Uncle Homer had started his story. “I had no idea what was happening.”

“That’s an understatement, if anything,” Uncle Homer smiled. “Fortunately I’d thought ahead to bring that syringe with me, and it knocked her out in only a few seconds. I picked her up, and it was about all I could do to carry her out to the minivan. She was heavier than she looked, and let’s face it, I was seventy-six. But I got her in the minivan, which was what counted. I even put the garage door opener back in that bastard Greer’s minivan and blew the hell out of that town. I put Ann under the back seat of the Lincoln, left her there while I took the rental to the lot, then walked back to the Lincoln. I got the hell out of that town too, and out of that state. I haven’t been back to either one since. That’s the story of how I rescued Ann.”

“Steve, I told you a lot of the rest of it,” Ann said, her eyes filled with tears. “It was a long time before I realized that Mr. Taylor had saved my life.”

Steve shook his head. “Uncle Homer,” he smiled. “For being seventy-six, no action-adventure hero, and an amateur at that kind of thing, I think you did pretty damn well.”

“Glad you think so,” Uncle Homer smiled, “except that it wasn’t the first time I’d pulled something sort of like that, but the other times didn’t have anything like as much riding on them. But that’s a story or two for another time, so there’s no point in telling them now. Anyway, I told you Ann was pretty frightened, but I at least got out of her that her name was Jasmine. It was a long time before I found out her last name, and it may have been that she didn’t even know it.”

“I can’t remember it even now,” Ann said. “Oh, I know the name but I learned it either from Mr. Taylor or Mrs. Cooper. I can’t remember it being used, or using it as a child.”

“I knew I couldn’t let her be known by that name, for obvious reasons. Besides, it’d be much too distinctive for her if she was living around here. I started calling her ‘Ann’ because it sounded a little like part of her real name, and she learned to answer to it. The ‘Rutledge’ part of it came as I was driving and thinking about how I’d just freed a slave and was smuggling her into free country, and that got me to thinking about Lincoln, so the last name just popped out. It was a couple years before I got it made legal, and it happened after a friend of mine turned up a county clerk in a small town in South Dakota who needed some fast cash under the table. According to the paperwork Ann is my illegitimate daughter, which happens to be true but not in the way the term is usually used. The documentation is still a little weak, and I still don’t think it should be examined too carefully. It might be in a legal battle over my will, so the three of us are the only ones living, besides maybe that clerk if he’s still alive, who know about that angle of the deal.”

“That’s quite a story,” Steve replied. “I agree, you took a hell of a risk, but the payoff was obviously worth it.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s been worth it in so many ways I can’t tell you all of them. Unfortunately, there’s more to the story,” Uncle Homer went on. “There were parts that Ann didn’t experience, but I told her about them when she was a lot older. Anyway, about a month later I got a little curious about whether anyone was hot on my tail or what. By then both Ann and Agnes were pretty much awake at night and asleep during the day, so I decided to take a little risk and leave them alone here for a couple of hours. I got in the car, drove over to Bradford, found a phone booth at the truck stop, and called Jim Baldwynn to tell him that the guy I was working for had decided against making the investment. He wasn’t very surprised about that since he’d figured it was a dead issue from the beginning. Anyway, we got to shooting the shit a little, and he told me that the little girl next door, Jasmine Johnson, had disappeared. The sheriff had been asking around about her, thinking she’d been kidnapped, but hadn’t found a thing. He also said that some of the people in the town thought that Greer had killed her and had the sheriff nosing around to sort of lay a false trail. It turned out that her mother had been dead long before I found her. So I figured I was in the clear. I never talked to Jim again.”

“Probably a wise move.”

“It wasn’t by my lack of effort,” Uncle Homer sighed. “Oh, three or four months later I decided to check in with Jim again, just on general principles. I got his wife instead, and found out Jim was dead, a car accident. I found out sometime afterwards that while the sheriff had ruled it an accident, the insurance company found it ‘suspicious,’ but didn’t go any further than that. I know Jim wasn’t exactly the most popular guy around town, so I’ve often thought the sheriff must have had something to do with it, mostly because the sheriff was a sleazy, crooked bastard in the first place. But maybe that’s making six or seven out of two and two. It doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot since the sheriff got his about a year after that.”

“How’s that?” Steve replied, a little dismayed at the hellhole of a town Ann had come from.

“I found out about it on the Internet. It seems the sheriff’s house burned down with him in it. It looked as if he’d been trapped inside and assumed that he’d put a bullet in his head to keep from being burned alive.”

“That’s understandable. In that situation I think I’d probably do the same thing if I had a gun with me.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have shot yourself in the back of the head, which was what the autopsy said.”

“He must have made some enemies, then.”

“From what I can figure, he must have made a lot of them. Anyway, that came off the ’net, and I haven’t looked into it since other than on the ’net and I haven’t done much of that. I haven’t wanted to since it’s pretty clear the whole damn town is about as rotten as you can get.”

“So that Greer bastard is still running around down there?”

“As far as I can tell. Again, I haven’t checked in a while. Steve, I would have liked to have done something about him, but it was just too damn dangerous, especially since I had Ann and Agnes here and caring for them had to come first. I’m not saying let bygones be bygones, by any means. It was just that for years I didn’t dare do anything because of them. By the time that became less of a factor, I was too damn old. But the third thing on my list of things I want to accomplish before I die is to do something about that bastard. It won’t bother me that it’s fifteen years later than it should have been, since vengeance is a dish best served cold.”

“Easily done,” Steve said flatly. “I can go to a state that’s pretty lax about gun registration, especially about rifles. I can go to a gun show and buy a varmint rifle chambered for a 5.56 NATO round and a scope, then brush up on my shooting. I wasn’t a sniper, but I shot high expert more than once in the Army. One shot at two or three hundred yards and he’s history. Lose the rifle, done deal.”

“I wish it were that easy, Steve. It’s not, especially for you.”

“Why not?”

“I doubt that place is any less rotten now than it was fifteen years ago, for one thing. From my memory, it would be tough to find a place for a clear shot at that distance and you could be noticed while you’re hanging around waiting for an opportunity. For another, you have responsibilities, and shouldn’t take the risk yourself. I’m talking about Ann, Steve. Hell, I had contacts we’d better not talk about who could have handled it, although most of them are dead now.”

“Stinky Antonelli kind of people?”

“The same general kind. I’m sure I could have arranged it, but when you arrange an assassination, you can’t be sure who the guy you’re talking to is really working for, like maybe the cops. But the big reason is that I don’t want that Greer bastard dead.”

“Don’t want him dead? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Oh, I have no problem with him being dead eventually. I’d just like him to be hurting for a while before he kicks off. A good long while, maybe something like fifteen years.”

“Yeaaaaahhh,” Steve replied slowly and thoughtfully. “That might be a little harder to arrange.”

“Do you have some ideas?”

“Not right at the moment,” he said. “At least not any that don’t involve a really well-placed shot with that rifle I just mentioned. I mean, a shot that severs the spinal cord and misses the jugular vein. That’d leave him a quadriplegic, but it would be very, very chancy.”

“It might leave him dead, too.”

“That’s the risk we’d have to take,” Steve replied, “but maybe this is farting down a dry hole, too. You haven’t had any contact with this Greer bastard in fifteen years, right?”

“I never had any contact with him. I haven’t checked recently, but the last time I looked he hadn’t shown up on the Internet in a while. That might not mean anything.”

“It might mean he’s already dead,” Steve shrugged. “In fact, if that town is the snake pit you say it is, there might even be a good chance of it. Uncle Homer, I’ve been impressed at how you keep your finger on pretty much everything that affects you, so I can’t imagine why you didn’t this time.”

“To protect Ann, again. I didn’t want to give them any clue that could lead them back to me for her sake, so I figured that what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. I wanted to be sure she was taken care of before I did much of anything. Besides, I figured the fewer people who knew of my interest, the better.”

“I don’t want to be critical, but you could have been a little more curious without revealing anything. But that’s all spilled milk now, and in the past. As I see it, there’s only one thing to do, and that’s to get some current information.”

“Steve, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go poking your nose around Milton,” Ann said. “I don’t know much about it either, but it sounds like they play for keeps there.”

“Yeah, it does, but Uncle Homer also pointed out when I first met him that the turtle doesn’t get anywhere without sticking his neck out. Besides, I already know who I want to talk to first, and he isn’t in Milton.”

“Who’s that?”

“Forrest Baldwynn, and I think he’d talk pretty straight to me. He might not know anything much, but he might be able to point me at someone who knows what we need to know.”

“Steve, if you do that, you could be letting it lead right back to you and Ann and me if you have to do something.”

“Maybe, and maybe not. I don’t know at this point, but I don’t know of any better way to find out.”

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