The Lost Keats by Terence Faherty

Author:Terence Faherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: owen keane
Publisher: The Mystery Company

Chapter Seventeen

Yeager sat confidently behind his desk, rocking slightly in his noisy chair and enjoying the view of me sinking under the weight of his logic. Actually, his reasoning was mostly hot air, but two of the points he’d made had genuinely frightened me. One was the idea that Crosley might have lost his mind. It was just possible, given the pressure that Crosley was under at school and the double blow of his father’s death and his uncle’s revelations, that Michael had suffered a breakdown of some kind. That possibility undercut the only defense I had, my gut feeling that Crosley didn’t have it in him to take a life.

The other part of Yeager’s story that disturbed me was related to this possibility of madness. It was the picture Yeager had painted of Crosley coming to kill Sarah at the height of a storm. The night before, while watching the lightning outside my dorm, I’d thought of Crosley leaving St. Aelred’s in just such a storm. It made the idea of his running away worse for me somehow, making the act seem unnatural, or more precisely, uncivilized. A primeval act, like taking the life of another. Those two thunderstorms might have been symbolic of some cataclysm inside Crosley, the madness Yeager had postulated, that made all my reasoning worthless.

“Well, what do you think, son?”

Yeager was smiling happily at me, and his smile made me mad. Perhaps it was all the coffee I’d had with no breakfast to soak it up. Or it might have been Yeager’s crazy ideas about the religious life. It was probably just that I had no rational counterargument at hand. Whatever the reason, I went on the offensive, with no better goal than removing the smug smile from Sheriff Yeager’s face.

“I think you’re way off base, Sheriff. If anyone’s crazy around here, it isn’t Michael Crosley. You haven’t a scrap of physical evidence. All you have to go on is some muddy footprints and a prejudice against religion. I’d hate to think there’s a jury that nonsense would impress.”

“Well, thank you all to hell, Mr. Keane,” Yeager said. My primary objective had been achieved. The smile was gone from his heavy lips. He leaned toward me, steadying himself with his hands spread wide on his desktop. “Next time I want some city kid who’s greener than the corn in June telling me how to do my job, I’ll be sure to give you a call.”

I’d only just begun to make trouble for myself. “If this case were about corn, I’m sure you’d be on top of it,” I said. “But it’s not. It’s about human beings. We know a little about those in the city, and I’m telling you that Michael Crosley couldn’t kill anyone.”

Yeager’s smile returned. “You could make pope someday, son, you really could. You’ve got the infallibility part down already.” He consulted the notes the old deputy had given him. “Let’s see. You were trying to find Crosley, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Who told you to do that?”

It would have been a good moment to withhold a little more information.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.