Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills

by Ardath Mayhar

  Irene thought of the woman at the river. She thought of his pistol, its muzzle staring into her face on the road. She waited just inside the door until he came back into the hall.

  He was looking the other way, so she waited for him to turn to face her before pulling the trigger. A twelve-gauge pattern blossomed high on his chest as Ben Roswell sailed backward and fetched up against the hall tree.

  Irene flicked the switch for the hall lights and stared down at him. His eyelids fluttered open and he stared up at her, his bloody jaw dropping. He tried to speak, but his throat and chest, lungs and heart were riddled with shot.

  “Damn fool,” Irene said. “A woman brought you into the world, and one can take you out of it. And good riddance.”

  Then she went to call the sheriff. He’d just have to come back all the long way to Bobcat Ridge and take away the carrion from her hallway.

  THE TROTLINE

  Here’s another story featuring Irene. You don’t want to cross strange little old ladies!

  Although Irene Follett would rather sit and paint than do almost anything else, sometimes she found herself hankering to sit on the riverbank and fish for sun-perch. Today was one of those days, and she was having the dickens of a time making her inner vision of a terrapin, chewing on a leaf beside a creek, half hidden beneath fern, appear on the watercolor paper before her.

  It was midsummer, and the heat was intense outside, although in her high-ceiled study the ceiling fan was doing a good job of keeping her cool. But the rich scent of pond water and fish and weed and snakes kept making her lose her concentration. Today was a fishing day, and that was all there was to it.

  Being mid-week, there shouldn’t be too many people on the river, she felt. Her favorite fishing spot, beneath a huge black gum tree, should be vacant. It was a long walk in such heat, and she decided to take her bicycle down the dusty sand and red clay road instead. Wolf, her half-red wolf dog, would love that too.

  In fifteen minutes she had cleaned her brushes, washed her paint pans, and set the watercolor on the rack to dry. Fishing was in her blood and bones, and when that instinct called, she simply had to follow the urge. When she set out on her bike, she had her folding cane pole, a box of hooks and line, and a folding shovel in the basket behind her.

  Wolf cocked his sharp ears, gave a gruff woof of approval, and ran ahead of her, flushing road-runners and other birds out of the ditches as he zigzagged forward. It was still early, and mockingbirds were giving enthusiastic concerts overhead, as she rode through the shady tunnel of arching branches.

  She had been right—the river bank was empty of fishermen. Only an occasional plop, as big fish struck at the hovering damsel-flies in the middle of the river, interrupted the quiet. Irene unfolded her shovel, located a damp patch of dirt, and dug up squirming clots of fat red-gray worms. She kept only a half dozen; she had been raised never to waste anything, even earthworms.

  Pinching one in half, she strung it onto her perch hook and leaned against the trunk of the tree. The bait dropped softly into the coffee-colored water, and the pine twig she used for a bobber began to dance regularly along the continual ripples. Eyes half closed, she watched the inverted shapes of the willows beyond the river make surreal patterns on the brown stream. Make a nice painting, she was thinking, when she glanced at her bobber, which was heading silently and swiftly downward at an angle. She pulled smoothly and a glittering perch swung high as she raised her pole.

  Drat! Fishing for her was anticipating, not catching. She carefully freed the fish and returned it to the stream. Nice regular bites were what she liked, when she fished. Catching something interrupted her peaceful mood.

  Overhead a long narrow bird the color of toast called, “Chip-twee! Stick it in your earrr!” and she smiled. Never heard that one before, that was for sure. Watching the birds was one of her primary reasons for coming.

  There was a sudden wump, ending with a gigantic splash. Gator, she thought. In a moment another echoed the first.

  Irene was beginning to get stiff by then, feeling all of her fifty-odd years in her joints. She rose, stuck the end of her pole deep into the mud, and wandered downstream, pausing to gather stiff bunches of purple ironwort as she went. Her hands filled with blossoms, she rounded the dog-leg bend and stopped, staring at two willows, one on either side of the river, that bent toward each other as if bowing.

  “Sam Williams’s trotline,” she said aloud. “And I’ll bet he’s got a gator on it, the way those trees look.” She whistled for Wolf, who came lolloping up, tongue dripping, his grin wide. Together they moved toward the nearer tree. Heavy cord strained downward from the loops securing it. She knelt, her experienced fingers freeing the knot, while holding the line fast. Then she walked along the bank, dragging the burdened line toward the shallows just upstream, though it was quite a struggle. There was something BIG on that line.

  From the shelter of the willows, there came the boom of a gator’s bellow. All this commotion should have scared any alligators away from the area by now. What held them here, when they should be moving away?

  Then the weighted line dragged on the shelf of rock for which she had been heading, and she saw, tangled in the cord and looped with individual short lines and hooks, the body of a man. Through the mud and water weed she could see the unmistakable shade of a game warden’s uniform.

  “Thomas Lingard!” she gasped. There was a thorn bush near the edge of the water, and she secured her end of the line to it and stepped back to consider what to do. It would require at least half an hour to bicycle to her house. If she stopped at Mrs. Goren’s cabin, a mile up the road, she’d take forever making the old woman understand. By the time she got back with help, alligators might well have taken off chunks of the poor fellow. It was best for her to wade out there and cut him loose, drag him ashore, and try to put him where gators would have a hard time dragging him into the river again. Once he was tucked under a root or a rock at the bottom, it would be a real job to find him.

  Sighing with distaste, Irene pushed off her walking shoes, skinned off her socks, and put both on a stump. Then she moved slowly into the brown water, the mud squishing between her toes. The sharp edge of a mussel shell made her wince, and she felt her way cautiously around a bed of them, keeping always on a shallow shelf of rock. Below it the water became quite deep.

  The blue-white face of the game warden turned upward as she cut the line beyond the body. Retching, Irene turned and towed the lax bundle ashore. The wet clay at the edge allowed her to skid him upward toward the stump where her shoes waited. When she examined the game warden carefully; gashes in both clothing and skin told her Lingard had been in the water only a short time. Otherwise the turtles and fish, as well as the gators, would have taken chunks of his flesh.

  Irene glanced around, trying to find some safe spot to secure the remains. As she moved, a glint told her some vehicle was parked around the outthrust point of woods that ran down to the water. The old hunter’s road that cut across the point would take a four-wheel drive vehicle like the warden’s. That had to be his truck. Wrinkling her nose, she felt the right-hand pocket of the sodden uniform. Keys. Digging them out was no fun, but if she could get the truck over here, he’d be safe in its bed until she got back with a deputy.

  The truck hadn’t been there long, it was plain. When she backed it out of the nook where it was parked, the grass on which it had stood rose again before she had turned completely. Getting its owner into the vehicle, with her dog whining anxiously around her legs, was not something she recalled with any pleasure. She got the job done at last and sat on the stump to replace her socks and shoes.

  Wolf knew something terrible had happened. The dog kept shivering and half whining, half barking, but when she whistled for him to follow her, he came after the bike.

  Mrs. Goren wasn’t at home. Two miles farther up the road the Stocktons were getting ready to drive to town when she panted into their front yard and stopped her bike beneath their huge umb
rella chinaberry. “Got to make...a call!” Irene wheezed. “Body down there. At river. All right?”

  Joyce Stockton was not a friend. The woman felt that any female who was not under the thumb of a man was somehow lacking in decency, particularly one who made for herself sums unheard of in East Texas, even for men. Now she looked at Irene as if she smelled as bad as the corpse would in a few hours. Still, nobody down here in the river bottom country would dream of turning down a neighbor in distress. She did look relieved when Irene asked her to make the call, not wanting her bedraggled clothing to drip mud and river water (if not worse things) in Joyce’s tidy entry hall.

  “Tell Sheriff Cole that I’ll be down there just below the sharp bend. Where the rock shelf sticks out into the main current. He’ll know,” she told the woman. Then Irene sat on the brick edging of Joyce’s front flowerbed and wiped her sweaty forehead on one sleeve.

  “You’re never going back down there alone!” Clark Stockton objected. “With a dead body?”

  “He’s not going to bother me,” Irene said. “And if anybody else tries to, Wolf will scare him out of his socks.”

  “We’ll go with you,” the skinny man said, but even as he spoke he began to cough.

  “This is your day to see Dr. Larkin,” Irene told him. “I know that, and the doctor maybe can help you. He sure as hell can’t help poor Lingard.”

  It took a lot of persuasion to get the Stocktons on their way to town. Then Irene rested for a while before tackling the ride back to the river. She was getting too old for this kind of shenanigans. Things kept happening down there at the river that never used to be heard about. Could be, she needed to get even farther away from civilization, if there was any such place. But she knew this was as far as you could get.

  As she pedaled back along her trail, she thought of the last time she’d seen Tom Lingard alive. His job took him down the road often, and from time to time he’d stop at her house, drink a cup of coffee, and reminisce with her about the days when her father and his fished and hunted together in the big woods along the river. She sighed and stopped to rest again, propping her bicycle against a tree and leaning against it herself. She could see his big red face, alive with laugh wrinkles, as he told some particularly funny tale from the past. She was going to miss him, Irene thought, and no mistake.

  She wondered which of the many illegal netters or poachers of deer might have killed him. Only last spring he had caught a bunch using illegal gill nets, and they’d burned his vacation cabin down on Lake Naconi. It must have been something a lot bigger and more dangerous that he’d found this morning. Or had the poachers found him?

  With that in mind, she returned to the truck and drove it along the main trail into the woods until she reached the logging road that went back toward the giant magnolia tree at the edge of state land. If he wasn’t where he was expected to be and anyone came checking on him, they might be puzzled enough to do something stupid.

  He’d been moved already anyway, and when the sheriff’s people came she could bring him back. Until then, she decided to take Wolf and hide in the shadows of the bluff overlooking the road and the river. She would have felt safer, of course, if she’d had a gun. There hadn’t been a sidearm with the body, she had made sure. There wasn’t a weapon inside the truck either. Well, she’d just have to do the best she could.

  There was nobody there when she looked down on the shallows. The remnant of the trotline still bobbled from the tree on the far bank, trailing downstream. She found a spot layered with dead leaves and went flat. Wolf sat beside her, panting happily, as they waited. Ants crawled up her pants legs, mosquitoes zinged about her neck and face, but Irene was an old hand at watching in the woods. She never moved, and when there came the soft pad of feet on the sandy track below, she heard it.

  It wasn’t the law, that was certain. Nobody came down here afoot, in these days when folks didn’t know what feet were made for. Irene focused her eyes and ears, blessing her good hearing, and waited for what might come next. She could feel her heart galloping in her chest, but that was excitement. Wolf’s was too. She could hear it over his panting.

  Three men and a woman came into view, slipping along through the brush, rather than walking the road. The woman stopped and pointed out over the river toward the tree where the rope still strained at its knot. “He might of hung up there,” she said, and so intent was Irene that she made out the words.

  “But it’s broke,” the tallest man said, his skinny neck craned to see. “S’pose a gator might of got him?”

  “Could be.” That was the old man, grizzled and grimy, who was staring too.

  “Can’t let him be found. If we could of kept him from fallin’ in, we might of took him off to the other side of the county. If they find him here, somebody’s goin’ to remember how he got Pa sent up for gill-nettin’ and moonshinin’. They’re goin’ to look spang at us, you wait and see.” That was the third man, a wiry youngster who began wading out toward the trailing rope.

  “You nitwit!” That was the woman. “Come back here! That water is twenty feet deep out there. You want to drown and keep Lingard comp’ny?” Even as she spoke, he slipped on something beneath the water, and the current took him out into the main stream. He evidently didn’t swim well, for he began floundering and yelling, and his companions forgot their caution and yelled too.

  Irene didn’t wait. While they were distracted, she slid back through the trees to the truck, cranked it, and drove the long way around through the edge of a farm to come up on the spot again from the direction of town. She set the siren wailing, the lights flashing. (Tom had given her a ride once, and showed off all his bells and whistles.)

  The group at the river’s edge turned in dismay, saw the official truck heading toward them, and jumped like bullfrogs into the swift water of the Naconi River. Before any of them could reach the other side, there came another sound of a siren, and the sheriff’s car pulled up with a screech.

  “You, Irene,” he yelled as she got out and moved toward him. “What you found now?”

  “Better get those creatures first,” she said. “Tom Lingard’s body is in the back of his truck here. Those folks came to find the body. Said they’d lost it upstream, but they wanted to take it away someplace where nobody knew about their family’s problems with the game warden.”

  Two deputies were already covering the dripping quartet as they found footing below the deep spot and splashed ashore. Irene sat on the stump where she’d put her shoes and watched the roundup.

  “Sue Lee Grant,” she said. “No ’count and never were. Moonshined with your daddy until he went to jail. Thurman Grant, timber thief. Arthur Grant, gill-netter and poacher. Caswell Grant, who ought to know better than to kill a law officer. You blasted idiots!”

  She was so furious she didn’t see, for a moment, Sheriff Cole’s amusement. When she did, she stalked away to her bicycle and climbed aboard.

  “Come on, Wolf,” she snapped. “It’s not enough that I do their job for them; they have to make fun of me too.”

  The dog cocked his head and stared up into her eyes. Then he turned and dashed after the Sheriff, setting his teeth firmly in his right pants leg and hanging there like a furry anchor while Cole dragged him forward two steps. “Irene, you get this animal off me,” he commanded. “I swear, I’ll have him picked up and put to sleep if you don’t.”

  “Not unless you want a visit from me, you won’t,” Irene replied. “I’d have your Nettie on top of you like a duck onto a June bug. You don’t take her only protection away from a helpless little old lady, now do you?”

  Cole snorted, and Wolf loosed his grip and returned to her side, his furry tail wagging. As Irene pedaled away, she could hear the Sheriff’s language, which was more than colorful.

  When he cooled off, he’d come to the house to get her statement. Until then, she had her own business to attend to. She knew just how to finish that terrapin painting. She was going to add a trotline across the stream
behind him.

  YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

  Families are a big deal in this neck of the woods. When you can’t find enemies, sometimes family members will do...better!

  A swirl of oak leaves danced out of the wood across the road, and slapped pettishly at the windshield. For an instant, the cool October moon stared through their mottling shadows into my face. Then they blew on, and the road shone dimly in the glare of the headlights.

  It was familiar, yet there was a difference. The sharp curve that my hands were braced for had turned into a gentle arc, banked to hold a car on the road. The uphill grade was cut down. I no longer would have had to shift into second to keep the engine from clattering, though my powerful Lincoln took any grade without a problem.

  The cut that had lowered the road had left banks rising as high as the top of the car on either side. There it was dark, for the moon was still low, and it was early evening. At the darkest point, something pale and small flashed through the cone of light and was gone. A cat? Perhaps the umpteenth great-grandchild of the Angora that my mother had doted on and tormented?

  Then I was at the top of the hill, looking out across clear space that had been thick stands of oak and ash and pine when I left home. The house shone in the moonlight, tall and commanding. Mama always resented the forest that hid her imposing home—she must have had it cut at last. I wished it back with all my heart, but the shorn meadow glimmered mockingly as the moon rose higher and the stars stared down. The house stared, too, from bleak, malicious windows.

  I eased off on the gas, slid the lever into neutral. The car eased to a stop. How many years was it since I left that house behind? Almost thirty.... I had left my girlhood behind me, since last standing here. It was no rebellious nineteen-year-old who now returned to claim the heritage she never wanted and would never have possessed except for the deaths of two well-loved brothers.