The Night Visitor Read Online Free Page A

woman.
    â€œWell, not real hard. If Mr. Zig-Zag bothered her, she’d kinda push at him with her foot.”
    â€œWhen we get there,” Moon said, “I’ll go in and have a talkwith her. You’d best stay in the pickup with your cat for a while.” This would be a delicate operation.
    Daisy Perika had finished her breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs—the last two eggs in the small refrigerator. She washed the dishes hurriedly and twisted a papered wire around the top of a plastic refuse bag. Grocery day was also take-the-garbage-to-the-landfill day. Though it would be a mild autumn day, the elderly woman pulled on the heavy wool coat her last husband had worn every winter for fifteen years. She wrapped her gray head in a blue cotton scarf.
    Impatiently, she sat in her kitchen, leather purse slung over her shoulder, grocery list in her coat pocket. She scowled in the general direction from whence he would come, and tapped the door key on the table. By her reckoning, Charlie Moon was almost an hour late. At intervals, she would get up and putter around the kitchen. Wiping spots of grease off the porcelain surface of the propane stove. Cleaning her hornrimmed spectacles with a tissue. Setting her wristwatch against the electric clock on the wall over the refrigerator.
    Presently, though the windows were closed to the chill October morning, she heard the characteristic grumble of the big V-8 engine. Charlie Moon’s old pickup was still far over the ridge, maybe a half mile away. Soon, she could hear the chassis groaning and creaking as her nephew negotiated the deep ruts in the unpaved road.
    Well, it’s about time.
    She checked to make sure the burner valves on the gas stove were firmly shut off, that water from the faucets wasn’t dripping in the sink.
    Daisy watched through the window as Charlie Moon parked the pickup in the lane that led up to her trailer-home. Funny. He usually pulled right up to the porch, so she wouldn’t have to walk so far. And what was that… a second head in the cab? Somebody was in the truck with him. Daisy groaned. She hoped he hadn’t brought that Myra Cornstone along. Myra’s little boy—the one she called “Chigger Bug”—was almost three years old now, and the baby’s father was a no-account
matukach
cowboy who’d run off to Nevada orsomeplace after the child was born. After she’d decided her white man wasn’t coming back, Myra had started looking around for someone else to share her bed. For some time now, she’d been making the big-eyes at Charlie Moon. Though the Cornstone girl was a Ute—and no close relation to Charlie—Daisy didn’t think this particular young woman would make a good wife for her favorite nephew.
    But that wasn’t Myra in the truck with Charlie. It was someone much smaller. A child …?
    Moon climbed the steps on the unpainted pine porch; the planks groaned under his weight. The tall man rapped his knuckles on the trailer wall.
    Daisy Perika pushed the door open and peered suspiciously at her nephew. There was no one on the porch with him; she leaned to look past him at the pickup. Yes. He’d left the engine running, most likely to keep the cab warm for his passenger. And there was that little head bobbing around like a cork when a trout nibbled at the worm on the hook. She grunted and stepped aside. This passed for an invitation for her nephew to come inside.
    Charlie Moon removed his black Stetson, ducked his head to pass under the six-foot door frame, and made his way into the old woman’s warm kitchen. He patted his aunt on the shoulder. “I guess you’re about ready to go into town for some groceries.”
    â€œI been ready for more’n an hour,” she said peevishly. Daisy went to a window and stared at the pickup. “Who’s that?”
    â€œWho’s what?” he said. As if he’d forgotten about his small passenger.