The Search For Rodney
After Wade had spent a quiet hour with Sally Jo and William, he rode back to Tara with Young Doc and Jeb. Wade did not look forward to the confrontation that he knew lay ahead, but he still hoped that overt violence could be avoided. Rodney had to be found, he could not compromise on that issue, but afterward, perhaps he could come to an agreement with the people who lived here, huddled in the leaky, drafty cottages on the banks of the river. Jeb was right; some of the men chose not to work, but others had been given very little say in how they ended up living in the shanty-town.
His preoccupation had not gone unnoticed. Young Doc gave him a concerned look as he dismounted. "Are you all right?" his friend whispered. "Because you look like someone carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, instead of a man who just got his kidnapped son back."
Wade avoided the other man's gaze. "I'm fine, Joe. Just hoping this search this afternoon goes well. We need to find Rodney."
Young Doc nodded. "I suppose we do," he answered. "Maybe Jeb can help keep the risk of violence to a minimum. I'm like you; I don't want to burn the settlement out if there's any other way to do it. It means making sure enemies of those people, and like Ella always reminds us, there are children living there."
Wade nodded, his mouth set in a tight line. "You're right. I just don't much look forward to it." He didn't tell Young Doc that it was the question of what to do with Rodney afterward that disturbed him the most. Just putting him on a ship back to England no longer seemed like enough, but killing him outright went against all of Wade's instincts. He sighed, and followed the other men to the back yard, where the builders who had searched for William had just finished their meal.
They fell silent when they saw him. Finally one man, braver than the rest, called out, "Hey, boss! It true, you got your boy back?"
Wade forced himself to smile and nod. "It's true, Charlie," he said. "Turns out the man who kidnapped him was pretty incompetent; couldn't even keep a six-year-old tied up. William escaped and hid until he could get word back to us where he was."
A cheer went up, and it lightened Wade's heart to see that these men really did seem glad that William was safe. The last few days had shown him a glimpse of himself as an unkind, hard-hearted landowner, and he did not much care for the image. He found it reassuring to realize that these men, most of whom were little better off than the shanty-town dwellers, did not seem to hate or fear him, even though he was their boss.
He went to Rhett. "I don't think we should take all the men with us," he said.
Rhett looked surprised. "The more searchers we have, the quicker we can find them," he pointed out mildly.
"Yes, but it occurs to me that if a man came to my house with an army at his back and demanded that I do something, I'd be likely to get my dander up and refuse, even if what he wanted was reasonable."
Rhett looked surprised. "I hadn't thought of it that way," he admitted. "But you're right. Maybe we look at them as extra searchers, but the people who live there would probably see a lot of men as trying to intimidate them. We should get Alex and Beau to pick a few of the men to go with us – they'll know which ones are most likely to be able to keep their tempers and not let trouble get started if someone lets out an insult."
Wade nodded, relieved that Rhett agreed with him. "We can put the others back to work. Alex can stay here to supervise -"
"Now that's an excellent idea. Alex is a good man, but he's always had a hot temper. Better to leave him here, where he can be useful." Rhett clapped Wade on the back. "You know, you'd have made a good soldier, son. You have the instinct for organizing your men – and you understand what so many military men never realize – that you can't solve everything with a direct fight. Sometimes, if you use your head a little, you don't have to fight at all."
Wade smiled at his stepfather; for a moment, he allowed himself to bask in the older man's approval. He felt the way William looked, when Wade took the time to show interest in what the boy was doing. Wade vowed, as he turned away, that he would do more of that in the future.
It took very little time to arrange matters to Wade' satisfaction. Jeb agreed that fewer men meant less chance of trouble, but to their surprise, he balked at leaving Alex behind. "It's true he has a quick temper, and that might cause problems," Jeb told them. "But several of the men who live there served with him in the army. I've heard them tell the stories. They remember him as the kind of commander who went without food and blankets if there weren't enough for everyone. They remember him wearing boots with holes in them and leaving bloody footprints behind in the snow. He has a reputation for being even-handed and fair. Those men respect him."
Wade thought about it, then agreed, hoping that the good would outweigh the bad.
They approached the settlement cautiously, stopping a hundred or so yards away and dismounting, securing the horses so they could approach on foot. Though no one was visible when they caught sight of the first tiny cabin, they must have been expected, for by the time they were all gathered beside that cabin, a group of men stood blocking the muddy road that led to the rest of the community. Several women stood watching from doorways, but there was neither sight nor sound of children.
"What you doin' here?" one of the men asked, his bleary voice fitting in well with his unwashed appearance. "This ain't your place, Mr Wade."
"Some of you may know that my son was kidnapped a few days ago -" Wade began.
"That don't have nothin' to do with us," the man said, spitting a stream of tobacco-juice on the ground. "Besides, I heard he's back home. So why ain't you there with your wife and young'un, 'stead of out here botherin' honest folks?"
A murmur of agreement rose from the crowd.
Wade spoke quickly, knowing that it would be easy to lose control of the situation if he hesitated. "It does have something to do with you," he said, his voice firm. "When my son awoke, he was in a cabin here. He escaped, but we need to search for the man he has identified as the one who took him."
"Yer sayin' it were one of us?" An aggressive-looking man with a long, tobacco-stained beard stepped forward. Wade recognized him.
"No, Wayne Furley, I'm not. I don't think anyone from here is stupid enough to try something like this, even on the spur of the moment." Wade saw smiles, even heard a chuckle or two. More relieved than he wanted to admit, he went on, "But he was using the cabin of one of the people who do live here, and even though I know that Emmielou Wilkerson had no hand in the kidnapping, and wanted no part of it when she found out what he had done, I still need to talk to her. I need to know if she knows where he might be, and I need to search the town just in case he might have hidden himself here."
"You're sayin' it was Emmilou's fancy man who did it?" Wayne asked. He glanced around at the other men in his group. "Well, ain't none of our business to pertect an outsider from trouble he caused his own self. I say we let 'em search, boys, even though I don't think he's here. Don't think either of them are here, come to that."
A few voices rose in dissent, but the overwhelming majority of the men seemed pretty much indifferent, now that it was clear that Wade wasn't after one of them. Wade thought they had managed pretty well, until a voice from the back of the crowd rose in protest.
"So that's it?" Emmielou screeched. "Just because the man he's looking for isn't one of you, you're going to roll over like a pack of yellow-bellied dogs? He's still one of the men who run this place, one of the men who make sure that your children can't get no schoolin' so's they'll be stuck here ferever. One of the men who won't come when there's illness, or a woman in childbed, but only when there's a girl he wants to stroll in the moonlight with -"
Wade glanced at Young Doc, who shook his head ever-so-slightly. He didn't know what she was talking about, either.
"Oh, come on, Emmielou," Jeb said, laughing. "It's been at least five years since I asked you to walk in the moonlight with me -"
Apparently, that was a joke; Wade didn't have a clue what she was talking about, but several of the men laughed, and the ones who had begun to remember the grudge they held against the landowners relaxed subtly, turning away to spit their tobacco juice to the side. Jeb had defused the situation, though Wade didn't have the slightest idea what the joke had been.
Emmielou knew, though. She backed away quickly, her eyes scanning the crowd, fruitlessly looking for allies. She turned and glared at them, and the unreasoning hatred in her face gave Wade cold shivers down his spine. "Just you wait, Jeb Hatcher," she yelled as she disappeared into the woods. "There'll come a day when I can do you as badly as you've done me today, and when it happens, I'll take my chance. See if I don't."
"What was that about?" Wade asked Jeb.
Jeb shrugged. "I'll tell you later," he said.
Wade nodded. Jeb had a point; this wasn't really the time or place.
"Do you want us to go after her?" Rhett asked, tilting his head in the direction Emmielou had taken.
"No," Wade said after a minute of consideration. "We wouldn't gain anything. She knows these woods well enough to lose anyone we sent after her, and even if we did find her, she wouldn't answer any questions we asked. Not honestly, anyway."
Wade set the men into a search pattern; they had already been told to ignore any contraband they found unless they were certain that it was involved in the kidnapping. Wade himself stayed in the middle of the little settlement, scanning the woods around them for signs that Rodney was trying to escape. He saw nothing, and the men gradually filtered back to cluster around him, their expressions grim. The stark poverty of this place was a reminder, to many of them, of places they had lived – and might again, if they weren't careful, and lucky.
"That's all of them," Alex said, shaking his head. Wade found it impossible to hide his relief.
"What, you didn't want to find him?" the older man asked, looking quizzically at him.
Wade sighed. "If we found him, I'd have to decide what to do with him," he said. Alex nodded, but Wade wasn't sure he really understood. Alex had been a soldier; killing didn't mean the same thing to him that it did to Wade.
"Okay, we're done here, I think," Alex said. Wade nodded, and walked back with the other men to where they left the horses. Wade would not have been too surprised to find them gone, and a long walk ahead of them, but the beasts stood in a long row, stolidly munching on the grain that someone – probably Jeb – had provided for them.
"Wait a minute," Wade said. He glanced up at his stepfather, then away, uneasily aware that he hadn't really talked to Rhett about what he wanted to do. Something seemed to tell him that the time to do this was now, before he lost the real desire to fix things. "I need to go back and talk to some of the men in the shanty-town," he told Rhett.
"What about?" Rhett asked, frowning. Wanting to spend time in the shabby little community near the river seemed unlike Wade.
"I just need to talk to them," Wade said, shifting from one foot to the other. Rhett's eyes narrowed as the two men looked at each other, and Wade could tell that Rhett was suspicious of why he wanted to go back. This wasn't the time to try to explain to Rhett everything he was thinking, though he would have to get with Rhett about it if the project he had in mind was going to work. Alex and Beau, too. But not today.
Rhett opened his mouth to speak, but Wade never found out what he intended to say. Jeb interrupted him, and at the moment, Wade was grateful. "Wade, I just remembered. There are two or three little shacks, even more rundown than the rest of them, in a clearing around the bend of the river. I forgot about them, 'cause no lives there anymore; the clearing is on lower ground, and it floods almost every time it rains."
Wade nodded. "It sounds like the kind of place where Emmielou might have stashed Rodney," he commented. "I guess we'd better search them."
"We'll come along," Rhett said firmly.
Wade sighed, knowing there was no way to dissuade his stepfather from coming along. He just hoped that he could have his conversation with the locals without any direct interference from the older man.
Jeb sent the workers back to the construction site with Beau, and the other five men rode towards the river.
It took very little time to find the cottages. They were very close to the river, and the reason they no one used them became clear as soon as Wade saw them. The river had undercut the bank here, probably in the bad flooding that occurred five summers ago, and two of the three cottages leaned precariously while the third showed every sign of having been under water several times.
"Shouldn't take long to search," Alex said, dismounting and handing the reins to Rhett. There's only one room per cottage, and I doubt there's even any furniture to search around."
He checked the first cottage; other than the door that came off in his hand when he tugged on it, he found nothing of interest. The same, minus the door malfunction, happened with the second cottage. But when he entered the third cottage, the one so close to the river that he actually had to step into the water to get to the front door, he was gone for longer than any of the watchers expected. "Probably found some furniture to look under," Rhett said.
"Probably," Wade agreed, but a cold feeling began to fill him, and he was not surprised when Alex emerged and waved them over.
The men dismounted, tied the horses, and walked over to where Alex stood on the stoop of the derelict cottage.
"Rodney is inside," Alex said. "He's dead. Someone hit him over the head and killed him."
Sorry it's taken me so long to update. Family problems and my own health issues have either kept me away from the computer or from having any desire to write when I do have time. I have got the next several chapters blocked out, however, so I do know where I'm trying to go.
So... who do you think killed Rodney?
Review if you'd like to. I haven't had time to answer reviews, but they all brightened my life through some recent dark times. Thanks for reading (I hope someone still is!).