Hard Row dk-13
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of all clouds. Even the sunlight seemed extra bright,
and they rode out of Dobbs in companionable silence,
enjoying the novelty of a clear windshield and no wipers
swishing back and forth.
“Everything’s going good then?” Bo asked.
“Would be better if somebody’d come forward and
tell us who’s missing.”
“No, I meant at home. You and Deborah and your
boy.”
“He’s handling it better than I would. Bedtimes can
be a little rough. That seems to be when he misses Jonna
the most.”
“How’s Deborah handling it?”
“Cal and me, we’re real lucky, Bo.”
“She got any long-range plans for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Some women, they think they want a lawman and
then when they get him, they don’t want the law
part.”
“That happen with you and Marnie?”
“Naw, but Marnie was special.”
“So’s Deborah.”
“All I’m saying is let me know if I need to start look-
ing me another chief deputy.”
“And all I’m saying is don’t plan on writing a want ad
anytime soon.”
When they pulled onto the shoulder of Jernigan
Road near the little bridge that crossed Apple Creek
and stepped out of the truck, a bitter wind whipped
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through the trees and dead vines that overhung the
water. It stung their eyes and cut at their bare faces.
Richards walked up from the creekbank to meet them, a
wad of tissues in her gloved hand. She had been fighting
a drippy cold all week and the tip of her nose was raw
from blowing. Tendrils of cinnamon brown hair worked
their way loose from her cap and blew across her freck-
led face until she tucked them back in.
“Nothing yet, sir,” she reported. “It’s up this way.”
Thin crusts of ice edged the creek, which was only
about eight feet wide and slow-moving. At this point it
was less than eighteen inches deep.
The two men followed as Richards led the way down
a narrow rough footpath that paralleled the south bank.
Nearly impassable here at the end of winter, one would
almost need a bushaxe to get through it in summer.
Dried briars tore at their pantlegs and tangled vines
caught at their feet. All three of them carried slender
metal rods and they used them as staffs to keep their
balance and brush back limbs.
Dwight was pleased to see that Mayleen was a savvy
enough woodsman to hold back the small tree branches
she pushed aside till Bo could grab them in turn and
hold them for Dwight, rather like holding open a set of
swinging doors to keep them from hitting the person
behind in the face. It was a reminder that Mayleen grew
up in this area and that Bo knew her people, which is
how she talked him into giving her a job.
“Who’d you say found it?” asked Bo, who kept hav-
ing to duck low-hanging branches to keep from losing
his trademark porkpie hat—a dapper black felt in win-
ter, black straw in the summer.
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MARGARET MARON
“Three girls from the local high school.” Richards
paused to blow her nose. “They were looking for early
fiddleheads for a science project. One of them’s my
niece. Shirlee’s oldest daughter?”
Bo grunted to acknowledge he knew her sister
Shirlee.
“Soon as they realized what it was, she called me on
her cell phone and sent me a picture of it. I’m afraid
they trampled the ground around it too much for us to
see any animal tracks.”
Bo shook his head and Dwight knew it was not over
the messed up tracks, but that teenagers came equipped
these days with cell phones that could transmit pictures
instantaneously.
“Getting too high tech for me,” he said. “Any day
now I expect to hear they’ve put a chip in somebody’s
brain so they can tap right into the Internet without
having to mess with a keyboard or screen.”
A few hundred feet or so in from the road, they
reached the scene, a popular local fishing spot, ac-
cording to Richards. A ring of stones encircled an old
campfire and a few drink cans and scraps of paper were
scattered around.
“There’s actually a way to drive here closer, but it
means going around through someone’s fields. That’s
how the girls got here,” she said.
Detective Denning was already there taking pictures
and documenting the find. The hand lay at the edge of
the water among some ice-glazed leaves.
“My niece said it had ice on it, too, when they first
found it,” said Richards. “But when they poked it, the
ice broke off.”
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It had been in the open so long that the skin was dark
and desiccated around the white finger bones.
“Not gonna be easy getting fingerprints,” said
Denning as they joined them. “I haven’t moved it yet,
but just eyeballing it?” He gave a pessimistic shrug in-
side his thick jacket. “Doesn’t look hopeful.”
“Were the bones hacked or sawed?” Dwight asked.
“The cartilage is pretty much gone, so it’s hard to say.
Should I go ahead and bag it?”
Bo Poole deferred to Dwight, who nodded.
Abruptly, the sheriff said, “Tell you what, Dwight.
Let’s you and me take a little drive. I need to see
something.”
“Call me if they find anything else,” Dwight said,
then followed Bo back out to the road and his truck.
“Which way, Bo?” he asked, putting the truck in
gear.
“Let’s head over to Black Creek.”
They drove north along Jernigan Road until they
neared a crossroads, at which point, Bo told him to
turn left toward the setting sun. As they approached
the backside of the unincorporated little town of Black
Creek, population around 600 give or take a handful,
the empty land gave way to houses.
“Slow down a hair,” said Bo and his porkpie hat
swung back and forth as he studied both sides.
Dwight knew Bo was enjoying himself so he did not
spoil that enjoyment by asking questions.
“There!” Bo said suddenly, pointing to a narrow dirt
road that led south. “Let’s see how far down you can
get your truck.”
The houses here were not much more than shacks and
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the dark-skinned children who played outside stopped
to stare as the two white men passed.
The dirt road ended in a cable stretched between up-
rights that looked like sawed-off light poles. Beyond the
cable, the land dropped off sharply in a tangle of black-
berry bushes and trash trees strangled in kudzu and
honeysuckle vines. A well-worn footpath began beside
the left upright and disappeared in the undergrowth.
&
nbsp; Bo looked back down the dirt road to the low build-
ings clustered in the distance, then nodded to himself
and struck off down the path.
Dwight followed.
In a few minutes, they reached the creek that gave
the little town its name and the path split to run in both
directions along the bank. Without hesitation, Bo fol-
lowed the flow of water that ran deep and swift after so
much rain.
They came upon the charred remains of a campfire
built in a scooped-out hollow edged with creek stones
next to a fallen tree that had probably toppled during
the last big hurricane and that now probably served as
a bench for the kids who had cleared the site. A dirt
bike with a twisted frame lay on the far side of the log.
Scattered around were several beer cans, an empty wine
bottle, cigarette butts and some fast-food wrappers.
There were also a couple of roach clips and an empty
plastic prescription bottle that had held a relatively mild
painkiller, which Dwight picked up. The owner’s name
was no longer legible, but the name of the pharmacy
was there and so was most of the prescription number.
If this was all the kids were into though, things weren’t
too bad in this neighborhood.
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He pocketed the bottle for later attention and hur-
ried after Bo, who had not paused at the campfire, but
kept walking as if he were late for his own wedding,
ducking beneath the tree branches, his small trim body
barely disturbing the bushes on either side of the path
that pulled at Dwight’s bulk as he tried to pass.
The creek deepened and narrowed and the path made
by casual fishermen and adventurous kids petered out in
even rougher underbrush, yet Bo pushed on.
When Dwight finally caught up, his boss was stand-
ing by the water’s edge. At his feet was what at first ap-
peared to be a half-submerged log.
“Over yonder’s where Apple Creek wanders off,” he
told Dwight, pointing downstream to the other side of
the creek just as one of their people broke through the
underbrush and stopped in surprise in seeing them on
that side of the fork. Then he looked down at the re-
mains that lay in the shallows. “And here’s where poor
ol’ Fred Mitchiner wandered off to.”
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C H A P T E R
9
The world seeks no stronger evidence of a man’s goodness of
heart than kindness.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Thursday Evening, March 2
% I did not repeat what Dwight had told me, but at
adjournment, I asked my clerk if she’d heard any-
thing more about that first set of body parts, figuring
that if fresh rumors were circulating through the court-
house about another hand, she would mention it.
Instead, she shook her head.
“And Faye’s off today, so I wouldn’t anyhow. Lavon’s
on duty and he never talks.”
As I left the parking lot behind the courthouse, I
didn’t spot Dwight’s truck, but there seemed to be no
more activity than the usual coming and going of patrol
cars. A second hand though? Where were the bodies?
I thought of that crematorium down in Georgia that
stashed bodies all over its grounds rather than commit-
ting them to the fire, and a gruesome image filled my
head of a pickup truck bumping around the county,
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strewing body parts as it went. Careless drivers are for-
ever hauling unsecured loads of trash that blow off and
litter our roadsides. Was this another example?
I switched my car radio to a local news station, but
heard nothing on this latest development.
After picking up Bandit’s heartworm pills at the vet’s,
I swung by Kate and Rob’s to collect Cal. The new baby
was fussing and Kate had dark circles under her eyes.
“He got me up four times last night,” she said, jig-
gling little R.W. on her shoulder with soothing pats as
Cal went upstairs with Mary Pat to retrieve his back-
pack. Through the archway to the den, I saw young
Jake watch them go, then he settled back on the couch
and turned his eyes to the video playing on the TV.
“I thought he was sleeping six hours at a stretch
now.”
“So did I,” she said wearily. “I was wrong.”
A middle-aged Hispanic woman came down the hall.
Kate’s cleaning woman, María, whose last name I can
never remember. She wore a heavy winter coat and drew
on a pair of thick knitted gloves. She gave me a shy smile
of greeting and said to Kate, “I go now, señora.”
“Thanks, María. See you on Monday?”
“Monday, sí.”
She let herself out the kitchen door and Kate said, “I
don’t know how I’d manage without her.”
She transferred the fretful baby to her other shoulder.
“Before this one, I only needed her every other week
and still put in a twenty-five-hour week in my studio.”
Kate was a freelance fabric designer and had remodeled
the farm’s old packhouse into a modern studio. “Now
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MARGARET MARON
she’s here twice a week and I still haven’t done a lick of
drawing since R.W. was born.”
“Slacker,” I said.
She gave me a wan smile.
“Kate, he’s not even two months old. Give yourself a
break. Are you sure it’s not too much to have Cal here
every afternoon?”
“He’s no real extra trouble.”
“But?” I asked, hearing something in her voice.
“It’s only the usual bickering,” she sighed. “The
four-year age difference. And it’s probably Mary Pat’s
fault more than Cal’s. She’s just not as patient with Jake
now that she has Cal to play with. He’s so happy when
they get home from school and it really hurts his feel-
ings when they exclude him. I had to give her a time-
out this afternoon and we’re going to have a serious
sit-down tonight after Jake goes to bed, so maybe you
could speak to Cal?”
“I’ll tell Dwight,” I said.
Kate shook her head in disapproval. “Come on,
Deborah. I’m not asking you to beat him with a stick or
send him to bed without supper. I’m just asking you to
reinforce the scolding I gave him and Mary Pat.”
“But Dwight’s the one to speak to him. He’s his fa-
ther,” I protested weakly.
“And you’re his stepmother. In loco maternis or what-
ever the Latin phrase would be. Sooner or later, you’re
going to have to help with discipline and you might as
well get started now. Besides, if you think Cal’s going to
resent your talking to him about something this minor,
imagine how he’s going to feel if you tattle to Dwight
and it gets blown out of proportion.”
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&nb
sp; I knew she was right. Nevertheless, I was so appre-
hensive about this aspect of parenting, that we were al-
most to the turn-in at the long drive that leads from the
road to the house before I got up enough nerve to say,
“Aunt Kate tells me that you and Mary Pat are having a
problem with Jake.”
Cal gave me a wary glance. “Not really.”
“That’s not what she says.”
“I’ll get the mail,” he said, reaching for the door han-
dle as I slowed to a stop by the mailbox. I waited till he
was back in the car with our magazines and first of the
month bills, then drove on down the lane, easing over
the low dikes that keep the lane from washing away.
“She says that you and Mary Pat aren’t treating
him very nicely. That you don’t want him to play with
you.”
“He can play, but he doesn’t know how. He’s a baby.”
“He’s four years old,” I said gently. “If he doesn’t
know how, then you should take the time to teach
him.”
“But he can’t even read yet.”
“I know it’s hard to be patient when he can’t keep
up, Cal, but think how you’d feel if you went over there
and he and Mary Pat wouldn’t play with you. Think
how it makes Aunt Kate feel. This is a stressful time for
her with a fussy new baby. If you won’t do it for Jake,
do it for Aunt Kate.”
He was quiet as he flicked the remote to open the
garage door for us.
“Are you going to tell Dad?”
“Not if you and Mary Pat start cutting Jake some
slack, okay?”
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“Okay,” he said, visibly relieved.
Inside the house, he hurried down to the utility room
to let Bandit out for a short run in the early evening
twilight and I let out the breath I’d been metaphorically
holding.
“See? That wasn’t bad,” said my internal preacher.
“Piece of cake,” crowed the pragmatist.
By the time Dwight got home, smothered pork chops
and sweet potatoes were baking in the oven, string beans
awaited a quick steaming in a saucepan, the rolls were
ready to brown and I was checking over Cal’s math
homework while he finished studying for tomorrow’s
spelling test.
I was dying to hear about the latest developments,
but I kept my curiosity in hand until after supper when
Cal went to take his shower and get into his pajamas
before the Hurricanes game came on. Tonight was an
away game and Cal didn’t want to miss a single minute