As Good As Gone (9781616206000) by Larry Watson Page A

black-­clad women looking like bobbing magpies as they came up the front walk. They had been living together in a small apartment above the Gladstone Memorial Clinic, but when they entered the Sidey house, it was to stay. And their arrival coincided with Calvin’s departure—for good. Jeanette must have been fifteen or sixteen, and her brother Bill two or three years younger. If their father ever returned for his children’s birthdays, for their high school graduations, or for holidays, Beverly never knew about it. She wondered if he even knew, at the time, that his son enlisted in the army and that his daughter ran off with a Louisiana oilman.
    When Calvin left Gladstone, the word around town was that he had returned to the cowboy life, hiring himself out to any rancher who’d have him. Then Beverly heard that he was living like a hermit on land that a family member had homesteaded in the previous century.
    By then, Beverly knew a thing or two about grief herself. She knew its agony didn’t grow worse over time. Day by day, week by week, its pain lessened, although sometimes so imperceptibly that it seemed a wound that couldn’t heal. And grief didn’t drive you away from your family and civilization. Beverly had clung so tightly to her son after Burt’s death that she sometimes wondered if Adam’s problems had their origin in that period when he lost his father, when his mother asked of him something he could not give.
    As if she were among the last to catch a flu that had been making the rounds, Beverly heard a rumor that offered up another reason for Calvin Sidey’s departure. The story had obviously been in circulation for a while because when it was brought up in Beverly’s presence, it was with the assumption that she would know it as well as anyone in town.
    Del Murdock, a rancher, was found dead in his own driveway. The cause of death was clear—his skull was fractured—but the cause behind the cause was not. He was lying by his truck’s open door, so it was possible that he got out, slipped, fell backward, and split his head open on the running board. That was certainly a plausible explanation; on many nights he staggered out of one or another of Gladstone’s bars, climbed into his truck, and negotiated the long drive back to the house where he lived alone most of the year. His wife spent more and more of her time down in Casper, Wyoming, where, or so Mrs. Murdock said, she had a sick mother who needed looking after. Most of Gladstone figured she grabbed onto any excuse she could find to put distance between herself and the foul-­mouthed drunk she was married to.
    But many people claimed that Del’s skull had fractured from something other than a fall and a truck’s running board. A pipe or a gun barrel or a two-­by-­four could also have done the damage, and that version had someone waiting for Del when he drove up that night, someone who clubbed Del in the back of the head. That someone was rumored to be Calvin Sidey, and in that narrative he left Gladstone to avoid arrest and prosecution.
    The story had never made sense to Beverly. What did Calvin Sidey have against Del Murdock? And why would Sidey believe that living far from town put him out of the reach of the law?
    She finally asked her husband, though reluctantly. Burt, whether through the fault of his lawyer’s training or his own contrary nature, did not like to respond to any question put directly to him, and on that occasion he behaved as he so often did. He worked his tongue inside his cheek and lip, tsked softly, and then said, cryptically, “The French, they are a funny race . . .”
    â€œWhat on earth does that mean?” Beverly had demanded, thereby guaranteeing that she would get no more from Burt than a nod of the head and a raised eyebrow.
    Beverly sat on her curiosity for a long time before she had the nerve to inquire again into the death of Del Murdock