Tar Heel Dead

by Sarah R. Shaber

  “That’s what you think, old Cap. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Ranse swung his shotgun up then, holding it at his waist, aiming it right at Grandpa’s chest.

  “No, Ranse!” Myrtle cried. “I back out now. That weren’t in the bargain.”

  “You’ll back out of nothing. Shut your damn mouth.”

  Grandpa didn’t flinch. He just got a little smile on his face.

  “No, Ranse,” Myrtle said. “I mean it.”

  Grandpa said, “You’ve not got to worry, Myrtle. Ranse here’s been talking about killin’ something ever since he came on this place. But I’ve got him pegged. He wouldn’t kill a tick unless he could set a trap and go off somewhere and hide while the dirty work was done.”

  “Is that so?” Ranse snarled, steadying his gun.

  That’s when I stood up in the barn loft. I aimed the rifle at the corn thief, and I didn’t tremble a bit. “Drop it, Ranse,” I said. “Drop that gun now.”

  Ranse swiveled his head around and up, his eyes almost as wide as Myrtle’s.

  “You’d better do what he says,” Grandpa advised. “I taught Joel how to handle that rifle, and he don’t miss.” He smiled up at me. “Come on down, son.”

  Ranse just let his shotgun fall out of his hands, his shoulders slumping.

  I scrambled down the ladder. When I got there Grandpa was holding the shotgun, not pointing it at anybody. Myrtle was whimpering, and Ranse looked like a suck-egg dog that had eaten an egg with red-devil lye in it. He even looked blue around the mouth. Wolf was sitting by the crib door looking at them with his one good eye, puzzled.

  “I’ll go call the sheriff, Mister Jim,” Myrtle said in a low voice.

  “I hope this teaches you a lesson, Myrtle,” Grandpa said.

  From the look on her face it had. I almost felt sorry for her myself.

  Ranse turned to walk toward the house with her. He didn’t say a word more to us.

  “Another thing,” Grandpa called after them. “Joel and me are goin’ fishing. When we get back, if that power saw has turned up, I won’t mention it to Sheriff Slade.”

  I guess that’s what’s meant by tempering justice with mercy. Anyway, when we got back from the Cape Fear River with a string of perch a yard long, there the power saw was on the back porch. And Myrtle and the corn thief had gone and turned themselves in to the law.

  GUY OWEN (1925–81) was a novelist, poet, editor, critic, and teacher who received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught at North Carolina State University for many years. Owen may be best known for his novel The Flim-Flam Man, which became a motion picture starring George C. Scott and Michael Sarrazin. Among his many honors were a Sir Walter Raleigh Award, a North Carolina Award for Literature, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

  Copyright 1976 by Guy Owen. First printed in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1976. Reprinted with permission of Dorothy Owen.

  The Choice

  Margaret Maron

  “Kate?”

  She whirled around, the blood draining from her face, then returning so rapidly that she flushed like a guilty schoolchild.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you heard me when I came in.”

  He peered over his wife’s slender shoulder through the tall narrow window slit that gave light to the stair landing and realized suddenly that this was not the first time he’d found her here.

  “What do you see out there?” he asked.

  He himself saw nothing except bright sunlight playing on an overgrown pasture that sloped down to a creek. He couldn’t even see the creek for it was hidden by the trees and underbrush that grew thickly along its sandy banks. They had talked about horses when they first moved here, when the children were little, and they’d had a few chickens and, briefly, some goats to eat the poison ivy and stinging nettles. The youngest child was in college now. Their only animals were a couple of dogs and some stray cats that nobody had the heart to take to the pound, and small pine trees were starting to spring up in the pasture.

  Although they’d both grown up on working farms—or maybe it was more accurate to say that because they’d both grown up working on farms right here in Colleton County, North Carolina—they had no romantic illusions about getting back to the earth. Tobacco was already loosening its stranglehold on the area, and even if it weren’t, neither Sam nor Kate had any desire to spend their lives doing such hot, sweaty, dirty work. No, when they came back to the country, it was on their terms: with college degrees that allowed them to work in Raleigh yet still raise their children in a loving community of aunts and uncles and grandparents on a ten-acre piece of land where there was space for the children to run and play freely, safely.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked again, his chin brushed by the softness of her hair, hair that was gently going gray, like the first random flakes of snow falling lightly on brown autumn leaves.

  “Nothing,” she said, leaning back against his chest in the circle of his arms. Yet she continued to gaze out the window, so he did, too.

  And then, of course, he saw it. How odd that he’d never noticed before. By some trick of architecture, this was the only window in the house that was high enough to overlook the trees along the creek bottom to where the land rose beyond. Near the top of the rise was a ruined chimney, two stories tall, a visible reminder of the house that once stood there.

  “Do you ever feel time fold back against itself?” she asked him. “Sometimes I stand here and I can almost see the house the way it used to look with Tim and me racing down the hill with our fishing poles, heading for the creek after a day in the fields. As if those two kids were the reality and I was a ghost out of their future.”

  “The future doesn’t have ghosts.”

  “Doesn’t it? Remember when we were building this house? I stood right here—it was the same day they put the roof trusses on—and you and the children were outside picking up nails where the doorway was going to go. I remember thinking to myself that I’d grow old in this house and I would stand at this very window and watch a grown-up child come up from the creek. It felt so real, I could almost see it. Last weekend, when Chris was out here …” Her voice trembled and broke off.

  He turned her in his arms then and looked down into her troubled face.

  “Kate, the kids are back and forth all the time. Of course they’re going to go down to the creek. They spent half their lives splashing around down there. There’s nothing odd about seeing Chris through this window.”

  “No? Then why did I have the exact same feeling I had twenty years ago? As if I ought to be able to look up and see the sky through the trusses.”

  “Deja vu all over again?” he teased. Then, as he felt her shoulders tighten, he added sympathetically, “You’ve been working too hard. And all this strain with your mother. You were out there this afternoon, weren’t you?”

  She nodded. “It’s not that though. She’s adjusting to the place very nicely. Likes the food, likes the staff, likes her room.”

  “What then?”

  A small shrug of her shoulders. “The aide was changing the sheets when I got there, and Mama was up in her wheelchair. The aide said something about her cold feet, and Mama said that was one of the things she missed the most after her husband died. Not having somebody there beside her that she could warm her cold feet on.”

  “And?” he asked in puzzlement.

  Even though his family had known the Cole family when they were children, they were in different school districts and hadn’t met until high school. Like the rest of the community, he’d heard of the tragedy though—how Mr. Cole had fallen asleep with a lighted cigarette after being up half the night with his wife when she miscarried their third child, how Kate and her older brother Tim blamed themselves because they might have noticed the fire in time to raise the alarm if they hadn’t skipped their chores and gone fishing. Not that Kate ever t
alked much about it or about their father either, for that matter. Even after they were married, it was years before she confided that her father had been drinking that day. In that time, in that churchly community, excessive drinking—drunkenness—had been a shameful secret that every affected family tried to keep hidden. She chattered freely of the poor but loving grandparents who took them in, the aunts and uncles who’d helped out. Only rarely did she speak of her father and never about his death. When Tim reminisced about the waterwheels Mr. Cole built for him on the creekbank or the times they went hunting together, Kate would somehow drift away to the kitchen to make coffee or fill a glass or check on the kids.

  It was years before Sam actually noticed, and when he did, he put it down to the pain and embarrassment she must have felt.

  Mrs. Cole was a different matter. A sickly woman who shied from any sort of confrontation, she had bravely borne her widowhood, devoting herself to the welfare of her two children. Her two fatherless children. She had a way of reminding you of how she had sacrificed her health to make up to them for their loss. And hers, too, of course. A hot-tempered man, folks said, but a good man and a hard worker. Made the children work hard, too, they said. Hard work never hurt anybody, and look how good those children turned out, both of them teachers, both of them upright pillars of the community.

  “After all these years, don’t you think it’s sort of sweet that she still misses him?”

  “Daddy’s been dead almost thirty-five years,” Kate said. “And she quit sleeping in his bed long before that.”

  That surprised him. “But I thought that was why she was in the hospital with a miscarriage.”

  “Even a poor marriage can still have sex,” Kate said dryly as she turned back to the window. But someone to warm her cold feet on? Kate wondered what Mama would say if suddenly reminded of the way she flinched whenever he grabbed her breast in front of them and pulled her up the rickety stairs to his bedroom and slammed the door, leaving Kate and Tim to pretend nothing unpleasant was happening up there? Not that she had really understood, but Tim was two years older and he certainly had. That must have been why he always tried to distract her during those bad times. Protecting her emotions. Unable to protect his own. She shuddered to think of the lasting damage to his emotional psyche if their father hadn’t died when he did. So why should it bother her if Tim had managed to bury the pain and angry humiliation of their childhood, if Mama pretended her marriage had been as warm and loving as Sam and Kate’s?

  Most of the time, she didn’t care, just let her mind go blank. But today, standing at this window, staring across to the ruined house of her childhood, Kate wondered if she were the only one who remembered how things really were.…

  They were tenant farmers. Sharecroppers. Unlanded gentry. Maybe that was the acid that ate at him and corroded his soul. Moving from farm to farm every few years. Living in tiny little shacks or huge dilapidated houses like this one, with no indoor plumbing as though it were the 1870s, not the 1970s. Knowing that the labor of his body and that of his wife and children would never earn enough to buy back the land that his own father had gambled away in the forties. Or maybe it was just the alcohol. Rotgut whiskey or a case of Bud when he had a few dollars. Fermented tomato juice or aftershave lotion when he didn’t.

  Not that he was drunk all the time. That’s what made it so horrible. The unpredictability of his rages. He could go months without a drop, months where, when the field work was done for the day, he’d help little Katie plant flower seeds or whittle slingshots and, yes, waterwheels for Timmy. Then, for no reason they could ever fathom, he’d go roaring off to town and come home in a black drunken rage that could last for days. Near the end, those rages seemed to come more often, with more violence. Like the day he’d carried Mama to the hospital because she was bleeding so badly. She and Timmy were scared and wanted to go with them, but he’d ordered them out to the field.

  “And I’d better see every one of them tobacco plants suckered by the time I get back,” he’d told them.

  All morning, they’d toiled up and down the rows of sticky green plants, snapping off the suckers that tried to grow up where the money leaves met the plant’s stem. At lunchtime, they stopped just long enough for sandwiches and glasses of cold milk before heading back into the broiling field with only their wide-brimmed straw hats for shade. Feet bare on the hot dirt, their bare arms and legs burned brown by the sun.

  An hour later, Timmy had gone back to the house for a jug of water, and that’s where he was when their father came home and accused him of slacking off while his sister was out there working as she’d been told.

  Katie heard his screams from the edge of the field, but experience had told her there was nothing she could do except blank her mind and keep on snapping the suckers. When Timmy took his place beside her in the next row, his legs were red and raw. The welts from the belt marched up and down her brother’s backside like rows of newly seeded corn.

  “Did Mama come home?” she whispered. Not that Mama had ever been able to step between Timmy and the belt. Timmy shook his head and kept moving.

  They finished the field a little before four. Timmy didn’t want to go back to the house, but Katie was bolder. Their father almost never hit her. Just Timmy and Mama.

  “Besides, I’ll bet he’s passed out on the bed by now.”

  Something else that experience had taught her.

  But Timmy couldn’t be persuaded. Instead he fetched a hoe and headed for the vegetable garden. “He said for us to start chopping grass if we got through early.”

  She crept into the old wooden house quieter than the mice usually were. Silence was all around. At the foot of the staircase, she hesitated until she heard deep snores from above. Relief flowed down like healing waters on her sore heart then, and she tiptoed up the stairs, the stairs he’d knocked Mama down this morning, though he said it was an accident when he saw all the blood.

  His bedroom was at the top of the stairs, and as her eyes got level with the landing, Katie could see him sprawled on his back, his head on the pillow, loud ragged snores issuing from his open mouth.

  She tiptoed closer. The sheet had come untucked and there was a cigarette-shaped scorch mark on the mattress ticking. At least this time, he’d put his cigarette in the ashtray on the night stand, she thought. It had burned right down to the filter, leaving an acrid smell in the room. There were more little scorch marks all around on the carpet where cigarettes had dropped from his fingers when he fell asleep. Last winter, he’d actually burned his chest and fingers when he passed out with a freshly lit one. Mama kept saying they’d all be burned in their beds one night.

  She thought of Timmy’s raw legs, of Mama’s bloody dress and the way she’d held her swollen belly and moaned as she hobbled to the car.

  Timmy’s legs.

  Mama’s blood.

  “It’s okay,” she told Timmy, whose eyes were almost as red as the welts on his legs from crying. “He’s drunk as a skunk and won’t remember how much chopping needed doing today. Let’s you and me go fishing, okay? Catch a few sun perch for supper.”

  She pulled a couple of cane poles from the shed and sidetracked Timmy when he headed for the compost pile with a small shovel to dig for worms. “Wait and dig ’em out of the creekbank,” she said. “It’ll be cooler there.”

  As they hurried along toward the path that led through the thick underbrush down to the creek, she paused and looked back. A tendril of gray smoke leaked from the upstairs bedroom window. Abruptly, like a startled doe who feels the hunter’s eye upon her, she whirled around and searched with her own eyes the pasture that rose on the other side of the creek, an empty pasture where no house was yet built.

  No one was there though. No one had watched her before and no one cried out in alarm now.

  No one.

  “So your mother sees her marriage through rose-colored glasses,” said Sam. “After thirty-five years, let the old woman rewrite her past if she wants to. Hav
en’t you ever wanted to?”

  Kate stood so long without answering that Sam tightened his arms around her. “Hey, it was just a rhetorical question. It’s not as if you really have a choice.”

  No choice? When out there, across the creek, she could almost see the ten-year-old child she’d once been looking straight at her? If she leaned forward, rapped on the window, would the child turn? Run back to the house? Raise the alarm?

  “No, of course not,” she told Sam. “And even if I could rewrite the past, I wouldn’t.”

  “C’mon, Katie!” Timmy called impatiently. “Whatcha looking at?”

  “Nothing,” Katie said. “Not a thing.” And ran down through the underbrush to join her brother.

  The debut novel in MARGARET MARON’S second mystery series, Bootlegger’s Daughter, was the first book to win all four major mystery awards, the Agatha, the Edgar, the Macavity, and the Anthony. Since then the series, which stars Judge Deborah Knott and the fictional Colleton County, North Carolina, has reaped more awards and become a best seller in the mystery field. Maron received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Last Lessons of Summer and was elected president of Mystery Writers of America for 2005. After spending some years in New York and Italy, Maron now lives on her family’s homeplace in Johnston County.

  Copyright 2001 by Margaret Maron. First printed in Malice Domestic, volume 10 (New York: Avon Books, 2001). Reprinted with permission of the author.

  The Soul of Deception

  Brynn Bonner

  Deborah’s sharp intake of breath came like the whoosh of a hydraulic brake as she entered her mother’s dining room and saw her father sitting at the head of the table. A cup of steaming coffee was on his saucer, and the morning paper was folded neatly beside his plate. It was a homey sight and wouldn’t have been at all out of the ordinary—except for the fact that her father had been dead for well over two years.