Long Upon the Land

by Margaret Maron

  She wore a sleeveless red tank top and knee-length beige shorts and her legs were surprisingly shapely. Her face was flushed from the heat, tendrils of graying brown hair had pulled loose from her ponytail and the humidity made them curl around her forehead, giving her a younger look.

  “You’re moving?”

  She nodded. “I don’t want to stay here any longer and Marisa’s invited me to come live with her for now. See if we can stand each other. We’re going to hold a yard sale this weekend.”

  “Rosy?” Miss Young came to the door. “What do you want to do with— Oh, hello, Major Bryant. Any news about Vick?”

  She was perspiring even more than her cousin and wiped her hot face on the wristband of her long-sleeved tan T-shirt, before holding out a box of saucepans and colanders. “Yard sale or keep? You know I’ve got a ton of pots and pans.”

  “Yard sale, then,” Mrs. Earp said. “But I do want to keep that iron skillet.”

  Miss Young handed her the skillet, then carried the box out to the tool shed.

  “Come on in, Major,” said Mrs. Earp. She set the skillet on the kitchen counter. “Everything’s a mess, but we haven’t dismantled the living room yet. Sorry about the heat, but with all this in and out, I’ve turned off the air-conditioning. No point trying to cool off the yard.”

  Despite the open doors and windows and some portable fans to stir the air, the house was hot and stuffy. She had spread white cotton sheets over the dark velour couch and chairs, which made them marginally cooler to sit on.

  Dwight took a seat in front of a fan while Mrs. Earp perched on the end of the couch where her cousin soon joined her.

  “Don’t need any living room furniture, do you?” Miss Young asked. “We could probably get Tyler to help you get it in your truck.”

  Dwight smiled. “Sorry. So, you’re going to share a house?”

  Miss Young smiled back. “I’m going to teach her how to be a slob.”

  “Oh, Marisa,” Mrs. Earp protested. “You’re not a slob.”

  “Not what Vick used to say.”

  “Oh well, you know Vick.” She turned back to Dwight. “Is there any news? Have you found out who killed him?”

  “Not yet, ma’am, but we did find his truck. Somebody tried to hide it down by the railroad tracks where it passes under Old Forty-eight.”

  “It wasn’t wrecked, was it?” she asked.

  “A little scratched up on the tailgate, but that’s all.”

  “Good. The windshield Vick ordered has come in and they said I’d lose the deposit if I didn’t take it. When can I get it back?”

  “We’ll bring it out to you when we’re finished with it. Probably by tomorrow. I have to tell you, though—we found your husband’s blood in the back.”

  Mrs. Earp’s eyes widened.

  “We think that’s how his body got out to the country. He was probably attacked out there in your yard and then carried away in the truck to where he was left for dead.”

  When she didn’t speak, Dwight said, “Have you remembered anything more that might help us? Any enemies he had, people who might’ve had a grudge?”

  She shook her head. “I told you, Major Bryant. Vick wasn’t very social. He kept to himself, and didn’t have any real friends. Didn’t seem to need them. We never had anyone over except family. Marisa and Tyler and once in a long while his uncle. Joby and Earla. He said he got enough of people during the week and just wanted to work around the house or in the yard on the weekends.”

  “What about you, Mr. Earp?” Dwight said as Tyler Earp slowed in his walk down the hall.

  The man scowled. “What about me?”

  “Have any suggestions as to who might have killed your brother?”

  He shrugged. “We didn’t hang out together much. He thought he was better than me.”

  “That’s not true, Tyler,” Mrs. Earp said in a placating tone. “He just wanted you to make more of yourself.”

  “Whatever. Say, aren’t you the deputy they talked about in the paper? Married to Kezzie Knott’s daughter?”

  “You know her?”

  “Naw. Know who she is, though. We used to live out there when she was just a baby.”

  “I guess you feel he stole your land, too,” Dwight said.

  Tyler Earp shook his head with a sour laugh. “Me? No. That was Vick and Joby. They were the farmers in the family. Not me. I hated working in tobacco. Best day of my life up to then was when we moved off and I didn’t have to do it no more.” He grinned at the two women. “Remember that time we went back out there for a picnic? How he almost cried talking about how great it was to work your own land?”

  Miss Young nodded. “He sang that song every time anybody mentioned it. Got mad when you said that the only good thing about the place was swimming in the creek.”

  “He always wanted to farm,” Mrs. Earp said softly.

  “Won’t much of a farmer,” said Earp. “Him or Joby neither. Didn’t break even some years.”

  “Yet to hear him tell it, they could have paid off the mortgage if Kezzie Knott had just given them another year,” said Miss Young.

  “And if you believe that, I got some oceanfront property in Arizona I’ll sell you,” he said scornfully. “Both of ’em sure hated Kezzie Knott, though. Blamed him for everything that went wrong out there. Blamed him for Joby going to jail this last time. Reckon you’d know better’n me how he felt about them, Major. Way I remember it, Kezzie Knott used to be real handy with his fists. With his gun, too. And that reminds me. When do I get my shotgun back?”

  “Soon as we see if it fired the slug we recovered from your brother’s truck. If it matches, you might owe Mrs. Earp for that windshield.”

  “Excuse me, Major,” Mrs. Earp said timidly, “but can Tyler be charged with anything if nobody ever called the police? Vick never did and it was his truck.”

  “If you want your insurance to cover it, you’ll need to file a police report,” Dwight told her.

  “I’ll pay for it, Rosy,” said Tyler. “It’s not that much.”

  “We’ll work something out ourselves, Major. Tyler’s helping me move and he’s going to help spruce up this house so it’ll sell quickly.”

  “Yeah?”

  Earp put his hand over his heart. “God’s honest truth.”

  Dwight threw up his own hands in surrender. “All right. We’ll let it drop if you’re sure that’s what you want?”

  “It is,” said Mrs. Earp.

  “So when can I get it back?” asked Earp.

  “I’ll have someone drop it off,” Dwight said.

  As he reached the porch, the bloodstain on the step reminded him. “About your cat, ma’am…”

  “Diesel?” Hope blossomed in her thin face. “You found him? Where is he? Is he hurt? Rusty said you told her he was dead.”

  “I’m afraid he is, ma’am.” He pointed to the bloodstain. “He lost a lot of blood there, and we found more traces of it in the truck bed.”

  Mrs. Earp stared at the step, appalled. “In the truck? I don’t understand. Someone killed Diesel and then carried him off in the truck, too? Why?” Her eyes filled with tears. “That poor sweetie. Everybody loved him.”

  “Not everybody, Rosy,” said her cousin, handing her a tissue.

  “Vick got impatient with him, yes, but he’d never do something like that. Never!”

  She looked at them beseechingly. “Besides, even if he didn’t like Diesel, he wouldn’t let someone else hurt him. You know how he was.”

  Surprisingly, Tyler Earp agreed with her. “What was his, was his and he’d never let anybody else mess with his things without a fight. Even things he didn’t want. I remember out at the farm once, playing baseball. We were using a bat he’d whittled out of a tree limb and it split when he hit the ball. He threw it off in the bushes, but next day, one of the Knott twins—I think it was Haywood—had taped it up so it could still be used and I thought they were going to beat each other to death because Vick said it was
his and Haywood kept saying ‘Finders, keepers.’ Robert had to pull ’em apart and make him give it back to Vick. Soon as we got home, though, Vick put it in the woodstove. He just didn’t want somebody else to have what was his.”

  A classic dog in the manger, thought Dwight. But over a cat? A cat he didn’t even like?

  “I’ll be in touch about the truck,” he said and headed back to his own truck.

  By the time Dwight got out to the farm lane where they’d found Vick Earp’s body, Sam Dalton and Ray McLamb had already searched the area where the body had lain.

  “No sign of the cat, Major, and I didn’t see any buzzards or crows fly off when I drove up,” Ray said. “You, Sam?”

  The other deputy shook his head. “No, but the way coyotes are moving into the state, it could have been carried off deeper into the woods.”

  Nevertheless, a careful search up and down the edge of the branch did not give them any black cat fur.

  “Weird,” said Dalton. “Why dump it somewhere else?”

  “For that matter, why kill it at all?” asked Ray.

  Dwight told them what he’d learned from talking with Earp’s wife and brother. “Maybe it really was a spur-of-the-moment burst of anger. Somebody hurts the cat and he goes off on them and winds up getting the worst of it.”

  They searched for another half hour before giving up and calling it a day.

  CHAPTER

  15

  He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings for the rain.

  — Psalms 135:7

  I stepped out of the cool courthouse that afternoon into such brutal August heat, I could feel myself melting inside my sleeveless blue linen dress. The turquoise and green beads of my chunky necklace lay on my neck like a hot mule collar. Worse, the air was so heavy with humidity that I wondered if those dark clouds building on the western horizon meant we were in for something more than a summer thunderstorm. Our local NPR hadn’t mentioned hurricanes in the morning report, but it sure felt like hurricane weather; and when Luther Parker stopped me on the sidewalk, all I wanted to do was keep walking to my car so I could crank up the AC and dry out.

  Luther came to the bench a few months before me, our district’s first black judge. We faced each other in a runoff the first time we ran for judge and he won. Not surprising, considering that I had just shot and nearly killed one of Colleton County’s more prominent citizens, so I didn’t hold it against him. But we have adjoining offices upstairs.

  Air-conditioned offices.

  Why did we need to conference on a sidewalk hot enough to scramble eggs when we could have talked in comfort?

  But then he said, “What can you tell me about Marcus Williams, Deborah?” and I stopped in dismay.

  Marcus Williams is one of those kids who touch my heart. He’s seventeen and lives here in Dobbs with his grandmother and two younger sisters. He’s light-fingered and can’t resist stealing things for the girls, things that his grandmother can’t afford despite working two jobs, yet there’s an inner core of sweetness that reminds me of my favorite nephews and keeps me from throwing the book at him. I hadn’t seen him since he helped Aunt Zell and me break into an empty house back in May and I had hoped he was staying out of trouble.

  “Please don’t tell me he was up before you today?”

  “No, no,” said Luther, “but that has to be the luck of the draw considering how many times you’ve had him.”

  “You looked up his record?”

  “And asked your bailiff.”

  “Why?”

  He handed me a cheaply printed business card. Williams is willing… was printed at the top followed by Marcus’s full name and a telephone number. Across the bottom were small pictographs of basic maintenance equipment: stepladder, paintbrush, lawn mower, rake, clippers, and a bucket.

  “He’s started a handyman service?”

  “And my sister wants to hire him. Her husband has a heart condition and her son’s interning in Washington—did I tell you? Cyl DeGraffenreid had an opening in her firm up there.”

  Cyl used to be an assistant DA here before she joined a prestigious black lobbyist firm in D.C. We keep up with each other through Facebook, but I hadn’t talked to her in a couple of months. Much as I’d have loved to hear more, it was too hot to linger out there in the sun.

  “Marcus Williams,” I reminded Luther, returning the boy’s business card.

  “Right. Anyhow, my sister needs someone dependable to do their yard work, which is why she asked me to check out his reference. Is he honest, hardworking, and worth fifteen dollars an hour?”

  “I’m his reference?”

  “Told my sister you knew he could be trusted to do the right thing.”

  I had to laugh at that. But yes, he could have burned through the credit card he used after I’d tried (and failed) to jimmy that lock with it. I forgot to ask for it back and he could have gone on a shopping spree. Instead, he returned it the next day, along with Uncle Ash’s crowbar that Aunt Zell had brought with her as a backup to my credit card.

  “He’s basically a good kid that’s been handed the short end of a stick,” I said. “If he can finish school and get a couple of breaks, he’s bright enough to do anything he sets his mind to. Your sister needs to be real specific about what she wants him to do, but if he says he’ll do it, I think he will.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Luther said and headed for his own car.

  Dwight’s truck was parked by the back door when I got home, but there was no sign of him nor of Cal. A slight breeze stirred the tiny graceful limbs of a young willow near the garage. Not enough to cool, yet enough to bring me the smell of coming rain, along with the faint rumble of distant thunder.

  Inside, I changed into cutoffs and a tank top, kicked off my blue slingback heels for slip-on straw sandals, then went looking for my menfolks.

  They were nowhere in the house, but by the time I stepped outside, the wind had strengthened and I heard voices coming from the pond. I walked down the slope to see Cal out in the rowboat with Haywood and Robert, a few hundred feet from the pier where Dwight stood. Robert was bareheaded as usual, but Haywood had his porkpie hat pushed down on his forehead as he rowed for the pier.

  “Hurry!” Dwight called and pointed to the thunderheads, which were picking up speed. I watched as they blotted out the sun, making everything suddenly darker.

  As lightning flashed across the sky, Haywood picked up his own pace with the oars.

  The wind was gusting strongly now and there was less and less time between seeing the flash and hearing the thunder. I ran down to the pier, ready to help them out of the boat. As soon as they got close enough, Robert threw the rope to Dwight, who tied it around a post.

  Robert handed me the fishing poles and climbed up the ladder while Dwight reached down for Cal’s hands and swung him onto the pier just as the rain reached us. This was no soft, gentle rain. The drops were fat and heavy and hit my face and arms as if I were being pelted with small water balloons. With Haywood lumbering along behind, we ran for the house, but all five of us were drenched before we made it through the open garage door.

  Safely under shelter now, we looked out and watched thick sheets of rain sweep across the yard. Thunder crashed all around us as lightning forked from the black sky and we all jumped when it struck a tall pine at the edge of the field on the far side of the pond. Cal immediately tucked himself under Dwight’s arm in mingled fear and excitement. A moment later, hail began to bounce on the concrete apron outside the garage. Haywood would later swear the marble-sized hailstones were big as golf balls.

  The worst of the storm passed as quickly as it had come. The hail stopped, but rain continued to pour down, sluicing off the eaves. We’ve never bothered with gutters because water seldom stands long in our sandy soil, so curtains of rainwater fell from the roof and the wind blew some of it in on us until Dwight lowered the doors. We went through the kitchen to chairs on the back porch, aw
ay from the wind, and I fetched towels to dry our hair. Thin clouds of steam rose in the fields beyond our yard as cool rain met with hot dirt and the temperature had dropped several degrees. I was even thinking about a sweater when Cal said, “My fish! Did anybody bring the bucket up?”

  “Don’t worry about ’em, son,” Robert said. “They’ll just keep swimming around in the bucket, although with this much rain, the bucket might overflow and they’re liable to jump back in the pond.”

  “But we were going to have them for supper.”

  “Supper?” said Haywood, looking hopeful.

  He and Robert had parked at the far end of the pond and I could hardly throw them out in such heavy rain.

  “Call Isabel and Doris and tell them that you’ll eat with us,” I said.

  I rummaged in the pantry and in less than thirty minutes, we sat down to tuna salad and sliced tomatoes with hot crispy rounds of cornbread on the side. Dwight drew four glasses of his homemade ale for us and poured milk for Cal.

  The rain began to slack off as we finished eating, but it was still heavy enough that no one was anxious to retrieve a truck.

  “A million-dollar rain,” my brothers said, referring to all the crops that had been close to drying up in the field.

  “Saved our garden,” Dwight agreed, “although I hate to think what that wind may’ve done to the corn.”

  As we drifted back out to the porch rockers for coffee, Robert said, “Guess y’all still don’t know who killed Vick Earp, do you?”

  Haywood scowled at him. “We don’t need to be talking about that.”

  Cal looked from one to the other, then said, “You gonna ask ’em about their alibis, Dad?”

  “Huh?” said Haywood, easing his bulk into one of the rocking chairs.

  From the next chair, Robert said, “Alibi for what?”

  Dwight frowned at Cal. “Do you remember what I said about not repeating things to do with my work?”

  Abashed, Cal dropped his head. “Sorry, Dad.”

  “I think you should go clean up the kitchen,” he said mildly.