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“‘And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod.’
“This,” the leader is reputed to have said, “is the penalty for murderers.”
“Nod,” LeBeau is said to have retorted, “was east of Eden, espèce de con .”
The word nod in the original Hebrew refers to wandering, but LeBeau—perhaps out of age or exhaustion, but more likely due to the bullet wound in his leg he’d suffered when trying to escape—wandered not at all, settling instead in the reeking, rancid vale where the Americans had left him and his compatriots, in the land thenceforth known as LeBeau’s Nod.
Until years and ignorance corrupted it, as they corrupt all things.
One of the people in Lobo’s Nod who knew this truth was G. William Tanner. He’d learned it from his late wife, a Nod native and a schoolteacher. She’d told it to him one night early in their marriage, when the sex was nightly and the laughter had yet to deepen into the familiar tones of hard-fought love. It was a small story, but Tanner remembered it.
It wasn’t an important history, Tanner was well aware.
Still.
G. William Tanner—“G. William” to one and all, including his sainted wife—liked knowing the truth. Whatever it was.
That was one reason why—at the age of sixty-two and after burying his wife of thirty-seven years—he was once again running for election as the sheriff of the county that was home to Lobo’s Nod.
Chapter 1
A dead girl.
A.
Dead.
Girl.
When he thought the words over and over, they became meaningless to G. William Tanner. You could do that with any words, he knew, via thorough and unrelenting repetition, but somehow turning a dead girl into a hash of syllables seemed profane. Still, he couldn’t stop the words from repeating in his head over and over, and he couldn’t stop them from disintegrating into a mishmash.
The words became meaningless, but the idea and the fear never did.
There was no body, but there was an excellent chance Lobo’s Nod had had its first murder in recent memory.
In his office, G. William had a large corkboard mounted to one wall. Usually, its pushpin-pocked surface revealed nothing more exciting than the week’s duty roster, photos of the latest DUI stops, a court schedule, and the menu from whichever of the three decent-to-middling local take-out joints would get the sheriff’s business that day. But for a week now, the corkboard had held the meager evidence in the case of Cara Swinton, most likely A Dead Girl.
It wasn’t definite, but all the signs pointed in that direction. G. William couldn’t stop thinking of Cara Swinton, and he couldn’t stop thinking of old Étienne LeBeau, either. If this had been 1787 and not the twenty-first century, Monsieur LeBeau would have been the sheriff’s prime suspect. According to legend, Étienne liked them young and pretty, and G. William had a suspicion the old boy had a habit of discarding them, too, when he was done with them. He reached for the phone on his desk to call Joyce and get her thoughts on the matter; he was halfway to his face with the receiver when he remembered—again—that Joyce was dead. Was fifty-nine too old to be called a girl? Because she’d been G. William’s girl, that was for sure, and now she, too, was A Dead Girl.
Too. He had to stop that. Cara’s death wasn’t proven; it wasn’t a fact. Not yet. There was still a chance she’d run off or was being held somewhere. How perverse was life that he was hoping she was suffering somewhere in a dungeon?
The receiver hovered in the space between the desk and his ear.
“Sheriff?”
Clearing his throat, G. William replaced the receiver. He wasn’t sure how long Deputy Hanson had been standing in his doorway watching the old man vacillate between call and no call. He thought he could trust Hanson to keep it to himself, though. The last thing he needed was some story about him losing his mind getting out there during the
“‘And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod.’
“This,” the leader is reputed to have said, “is the penalty for murderers.”
“Nod,” LeBeau is said to have retorted, “was east of Eden, espèce de con .”
The word nod in the original Hebrew refers to wandering, but LeBeau—perhaps out of age or exhaustion, but more likely due to the bullet wound in his leg he’d suffered when trying to escape—wandered not at all, settling instead in the reeking, rancid vale where the Americans had left him and his compatriots, in the land thenceforth known as LeBeau’s Nod.
Until years and ignorance corrupted it, as they corrupt all things.
One of the people in Lobo’s Nod who knew this truth was G. William Tanner. He’d learned it from his late wife, a Nod native and a schoolteacher. She’d told it to him one night early in their marriage, when the sex was nightly and the laughter had yet to deepen into the familiar tones of hard-fought love. It was a small story, but Tanner remembered it.
It wasn’t an important history, Tanner was well aware.
Still.
G. William Tanner—“G. William” to one and all, including his sainted wife—liked knowing the truth. Whatever it was.
That was one reason why—at the age of sixty-two and after burying his wife of thirty-seven years—he was once again running for election as the sheriff of the county that was home to Lobo’s Nod.
Chapter 1
A dead girl.
A.
Dead.
Girl.
When he thought the words over and over, they became meaningless to G. William Tanner. You could do that with any words, he knew, via thorough and unrelenting repetition, but somehow turning a dead girl into a hash of syllables seemed profane. Still, he couldn’t stop the words from repeating in his head over and over, and he couldn’t stop them from disintegrating into a mishmash.
The words became meaningless, but the idea and the fear never did.
There was no body, but there was an excellent chance Lobo’s Nod had had its first murder in recent memory.
In his office, G. William had a large corkboard mounted to one wall. Usually, its pushpin-pocked surface revealed nothing more exciting than the week’s duty roster, photos of the latest DUI stops, a court schedule, and the menu from whichever of the three decent-to-middling local take-out joints would get the sheriff’s business that day. But for a week now, the corkboard had held the meager evidence in the case of Cara Swinton, most likely A Dead Girl.
It wasn’t definite, but all the signs pointed in that direction. G. William couldn’t stop thinking of Cara Swinton, and he couldn’t stop thinking of old Étienne LeBeau, either. If this had been 1787 and not the twenty-first century, Monsieur LeBeau would have been the sheriff’s prime suspect. According to legend, Étienne liked them young and pretty, and G. William had a suspicion the old boy had a habit of discarding them, too, when he was done with them. He reached for the phone on his desk to call Joyce and get her thoughts on the matter; he was halfway to his face with the receiver when he remembered—again—that Joyce was dead. Was fifty-nine too old to be called a girl? Because she’d been G. William’s girl, that was for sure, and now she, too, was A Dead Girl.
Too. He had to stop that. Cara’s death wasn’t proven; it wasn’t a fact. Not yet. There was still a chance she’d run off or was being held somewhere. How perverse was life that he was hoping she was suffering somewhere in a dungeon?
The receiver hovered in the space between the desk and his ear.
“Sheriff?”
Clearing his throat, G. William replaced the receiver. He wasn’t sure how long Deputy Hanson had been standing in his doorway watching the old man vacillate between call and no call. He thought he could trust Hanson to keep it to himself, though. The last thing he needed was some story about him losing his mind getting out there during the
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