Winding Stair (9781101559239) by Douglas C. Jones Page B

pennies’ profit a jailer of those times could make on the allowance paid for feeding overnight prisoners.
    Johnny Boins was a well-known figure in the town. He had been variously involved with misdemeanors since old enough to walk. Once, his parents had sent him to a private school in Missouri where be vandalized the headmaster’s library and assaulted another student twice his size and age with a paring knife from the academy kitchen. Lila’s story of the playmate doused with kerosene and set fire was confirmed. The deputy said we might see that victim at any time on the streets of Eureka Springs, a twenty-year-old man now but still with the burn scars across his face. Johnny Boins, the deputy said, had always been a high-spirited boy. A genuine hell-raiser. During his tenure as town terror, he had knocked out the plate-glass windows in most of the stores along Main and Spring streets at different times. As he grew older, his tastes changed. He had been threatened a number of times with shotguns by irate fathers whose daughters he had dishonored and one he had allegedly impregnated.
    â€œI don’t reckon Johnny ever felt the sting of a willow switch,” the deputy said. “He was the Boinses only child, and they never could bring theirselves to whup him. He’d get in trouble and they’d pay his way out of it or, later, get theirselves a good lawyer.”
    It was an exceptional situation in this deep mountain country, where the young were expected generally to toe the line or suffer the physically painful consequences. But because the Boinses were held in high regard in the community, and because they had the money to spend on him, Johnny was never in serious trouble with the law.
    â€œHis punishments run to strawberry shortcake and cream in his mother’s kitchen,” the deputy said. “Far as I know, he ain’t ever been whupped or convicted of a crime.”
    We were closemouthed about the real reason for wanting Johnny Boins. The deputy was cooperative and promised to keep our presence in town to himself. It would be an easy matter to lose ourselves amongst all the flood of tourists when we needed to get out on the streets.
    Our first day was given over to an examination of the town so a decision could be made on where Johnny Boins might be arrested. The deputy told us that in winter, when the tourists were not there, Johnny was usually away. But in summer he always returned. He worked part-time in his father’s hardware store. Mornings he spent along hotel row, playing croquet with the girls who were in the Ozarks with their parents to enjoy the scenery and take the waters. In the evenings, he played poker with some of the young men tourists and sometimes caroused along the streets with them singing songs unfit for decent ears. And each day, too, after a morning session on the croquet courts and before taking his place among the nails and screwdrivers, he had a bath at the Olympia Bath House, located up the mountainside between the courthouse and hotel row.
    Oscar Schiller gave no hint of what he was thinking as we strolled along the streets, but I knew he was figuring where best to arrest Johnny Boins. Too many of his colleagues had been shot to death trying to take a fugitive without planning ahead.
    Moving along the steep sidewalks, we paused frequently at one of the benches and sat watching the people pass. The Boinses’ hardware store was not difficult to find and we stationed ourselves across from it at about the time the deputy said Johnny Boins would come in to work. I had no way of knowing whether I would recognize him, having seen him only that one time. For some time, I had been trying to recall the features of both men, but as so often happens, the more I tried to picture them in my mind, the muddier became my memory of their faces.
    It was half past one when Oscar Schiller and I began our vigil across the street from the Boinses’ store. We waited