Up Jumps the Devil
( Deborah Knott - 4 )
Margaret Maron
Up Jumps the Devil Deborah Knott Mystery [4] Margaret Maron Grand Central Publishing (1997) Tags: Cozy Mystery, Contemporary
Cozy Mysteryttt Contemporaryttt
Colleton County, North Carolina judge Deobrah Knott embarks on a Thanksgiving Day investigation into the murder of a man from her father's moonshine-making past.
Up Jumps the Devil
Margaret Maron
Deborah Knott 04
A 3S digital back-up edition v1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
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|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|24|25|26|27|28|29|30|
GREAT PRAISE FOR UP JUMPS THE DEVIL, THE LATEST DEBORAH KNOTT MYSTERY FROM MARGARET MARON, WINNER OF THE EDGAR, AGATHA, ANTHONY, AND MACAVITY AWARDS “With vivid detail and engaging, credible characters, Maron’s series featuring North Carolina district court judge Deborah Knott brings to life fictional Colleton County and chronicles a charming but rapidly changing South… The old-fashioned warmth of the extended Knott family and Maron’s well-constructed plot make this series a standout.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The draw here… is Maron’s evocative sense of place, her smooth writing, and her flawed, intelligent heroine. Another fine entry in a solid series.”—Booklist “Deborah is a pithy and knowledgeable narrator… capturing the nuance and flavor of the region.”—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle “The three best things about Maron’s series of mysteries starring Judge Deborah Knott are the setting, the plots (lots of big and little stories), and Knott herself—a realistic blend of toughness and compassion.”—Chicago Tribune “As has been said before about the three previous novels, it is true that Deborah shares top billing with her locale, which is part of the attraction. Once again she evokes in vivid and interesting fashion her rural region of North Carolina and updates the reader on the status of the large Knott clan and its neighbors.”—Mystery News “Ms. Maron develops the case smoothly and expertly… She’s been away too long.”—Wilmington Sunday Star-News (NC) “As pungent and satisfying as the barbeque dinners its characters so readily consume—Maron has a knack for creating full-blooded characters and for outlining the tensions between New and Old Southerners.”—Seattle Times “Wonderful… great reading… Reads like a highspeed drive in a souped-up car carrying a load of moonshine down a mountain road. The trip’s exciting from start to finish with enough thrills (and laughs) for even the most speed-addicted of us. Don’t miss UP JUMPS THE DEVIL.”—Mostly Murder “The Edgar-winning Maron continues to give a superior portrait of North Carolina and its people… injecting regional humor and courtroom wit.”—Arizona Republic “Thankfully, Deborah’s back… Maron convincingly evokes a down-home atmosphere replete with barbeque and catfish… The collision of rural past and urban future gives the tale depth and poignancy.”—Orlando Sentinel “Delightful… enthralling… a lot of fun. Anyone who likes a good mystery will enjoy this book as will anyone who has ever cherished a love for a particular place and its people”—Austin American Statesman (TX) “Ibid with the obvious love for the land, and with a caustic wit that is both penetrating and amusing.” —Southbridge Evening News (MA) “Judge Knott is, as ever, the quintessential steel magnolia.”—Philadelphia Inquirer “Unravels just right… Maron infuses this series with realism and unromanticized local color.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution “A work as rich, textured, and uniquely southern as pecan pie.”—Greensboro News & Record (NC) “The world of deer racks, rabbit dogs, and jaunty picnics provides a framework for Deborah’s glimpse into the dark and greedy side of man’s nature… a fine novel.”—Roanoke Times (VA)
Books by Margaret MaronSIGRID HARALD NOVELSFugitive ColorsPast ImperfectCorpus ChristmasBaby Doll GamesThe Right JackBloody KinDeath in Blue FoldersDeath of a ButterflyOne Coffee With THE DEBORAH KNOTT MYSTERIESUp Jumps the DevilShooting at LoonsSouthern DiscomfortBootlegger’s Daughter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”WARNER BOOKS EDITIONCopyright © 1996 by Margaret MaronAll rights reserved.Cover design by Rachel McClainCover illustration by Dan CraigWarner Books, Inc.1271 Avenue of the AmericasNew York, NY 10020Visit our Web site atwww.warnerbooks.comA Time Warner CompanyPrinted in the United States of AmericaOriginally published in hardcover by The Mysterious Press.First Printed in Paperback: July, 1997
For Sara Ann Freed,
now my nurturing editor,
but years ago the friend who first said,
“Why don’t you write another book about North Carolina?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSAs always, I am indebted to many for their technical advice or help, in particular District Court Judges Shelly S. Holt, John W. Smith, and Rebecca W. Blackmore of the 5th Judicial District (New Hanover County, NC and former Special Agent Henry Lee Poole of the State Bureau of Investigation. David Brown shared the memory of his one moonshine run, Linda Bryan Murphy gave me her father’s deer story, Ann R. Stephenson tries to keep me accurate, and Susan Dunlap and Joan Hess let me bounce ideas. Thanks, guys!All chapter captions have been taken from a pamphlet published anonymously in 1773 by “Scotus Americanus”: Informations Concerning the Province of North Carolina, Addressed to Emigrants from the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, by an Impartial Hand, courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, Wilson library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
1
^ » Surely if these people, artless and undesigning as they are, could mean to deceive, it must be reckoned a very uncommon and most unnatural deception...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Most of my brothers—
Most of my respectable brothers, that is—
(Which also includes the ones that’ve sowed all their wild oats and are now settling into gray-haired middle age and trying to pretend they’ve been respectable all along.)
(When you have eleven older brothers, it’s sometimes hard to keep straight which ones have walked the line their whole lives and which ones are newly whitened sepulchers.)
Anyhow, most of my brothers say I don’t think long enough before I go rushing off half-cocked.
Usually I’ll argue their definition of what’s half-cocked, but every once in a while I have to admit that they may have a point.
If I hadn’t rushed out to do the right thing when Dallas Stancil got himself shot and killed in his own backyard, I wouldn’t have been left looking like a fool.
(“Don’t bet on it,” says Dwight Bryant. He’s the deputy sheriff here in Colleton County and might as well be another brother the way he feels free to smart mouth everything I do, even though I’m a district court judge and higher up in the judicial pecking order, technically speaking, than he is.)
What happened was I’d been holding court in the mountains near Asheville for a colleague who got called out suddenly for a family emergency. His elderly mother had wandered off from her nursing home and stayed missing two nights before they found her in a homeless shelter more than a hundred miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, alive and well and not a single clue as to how she got there.
It was early October and there’d been enough cool nights up in the mountains to color all their leaves; but down here in Dobbs, our flatland trees were just beginning to get t
he message that summer really was over.
I stopped by the courthouse that Wednesday evening to see if I was still scheduled to hold a commitment hearing the next morning out at Mental Health. A couple of white bailiffs were standing by my car when I came down the sun-warmed marble steps and one of them who knew I’d been away asked if I’d heard about the shooting.
“Past Cotton Grove on Old Forty-Eight,” said the bailiff who also knew that some of my daddy’s land borders that hard road south of Cotton Grove.
“Two niggers out from Raleigh killed a man as wouldn’t let ’em hunt on his land,” his fat-faced colleague interjected with relish.
I put my briefcase in the car, then turned and read the name tag pinned to the man’s brown uniform shirt.
“Niggers, Mr. Parrish?” I asked pleasantly. I was born and raised here in Colleton County and will no doubt die here, too, but I swear to God I’m never going to get used to the casual slurs of some people.
The other bailiff, Stanley Overby, gave me a sheepish smile as I said, “Use that word again, Mr. Parrish, and I’ll have your job.”
A dull brick red crept up from his tight collar, but I’m a judge and he’s not and the hot ugly words he really wanted to say came out in a huffy “Y’all excuse me. I got to get on home.”
As we watched him cross the street to the parking lot, Overby hitched up his pants around his own ample girth and said, “Don’t pay him any mind, Judge. He really don’t mean anything by it.”
I liked Overby and I knew he could be right. Parrish was probably nothing more than an equal opportunity bigot. Most of our bailiffs are like Overby—good decent men, augmenting a retirement pension that’s sometimes nothing but a Social Security check. Every once in a while though, we’ll get a Parrish, who, after a lifetime of taking orders himself, will put on that brown uniform and act like he’s just been put in charge of the world.
Black or white, at least half the people who get summoned to court through speeding tickets, misdemeanor subpoenas, or show-cause orders are there for the first time. They come in worried and unsure of themselves, they alternate between nervousness and embarrassment, and they certainly don’t know the procedures. It doesn’t help when the first person they approach with their timid questions is a surly-tongued white bailiff who either won’t give them the time of day or else treats them like chicken droppings.
Happily, someone overly officious doesn’t last too long. Not if Sheriff Bo Poole catches them at it.
“So who was it got himself shot?” I asked, not really concerned. If it’d been blood kin or a close friend, somebody in the family would’ve called me long before now.
“A Stancil man. Drove one of them big tractor-trailer trucks and—”
“Dallas Stancil?”
“You know him?”
“What happened?” I asked, too surprised to answer his question.
“Way I heard it, he went out to get in his truck yesterday morning and a couple of black fellows come up in a red pickup—Ford or Chevy. She couldn’t say which.”
“She?”
“His wife. She said it was the same two as he’d chased off his land Monday evening. She said they was talking and she commenced to make a fresh pot of coffee and then she heard gunshots and that pickup went screeching out of the yard. When she run out, he was laying dead next to his rig. Sheriff’s got a call out on the pickup but she couldn’t tell him a license plate or nothing.”
Again he looked at me curiously. “Did you know him, Judge?”
“A long, long time ago,” I said.
I should’ve either let it go, or phoned around my family for more solid information; but it was October and even if our trees hadn’t yet flamed red and gold, fall was in the air, and could be stirring up the ashes of things I’d just as soon my family didn’t remember.
Leaving Overby in the parking lot, I walked down the back stairs of the courthouse to the Sheriff’s Department, but Dwight wasn’t there. Nor was Sheriff Bo Poole.
I did ask a deputy if there’d been any development in the Stancil shooting, but he shrugged. “Last I heard, the body’s still over in Chapel Hill. Don’t know why it’s taking ’em so long. Two barrels at close range, what the heck they think killed him?”
What indeed?
Aunt Zell’s big white brick house sits on a quiet residential street six blocks from the courthouse. It was silent and empty when I let myself in a few minutes later because blues were running down at the coast and she and Uncle Ash had gone down to Harkers Island for a week of fishing. They’d taken Hambone with them, so I didn’t even have a dog to greet me.
Didn’t matter. I dumped my garment bag and briefcase on the deacon’s bench inside the door and headed straight down the hall for the deep freezer on the side porch. Like most women around here, Aunt Zell keeps two or three casseroles on hand at all times for emergencies, and the top one was baked chicken, garden peas, sliced hard-boiled eggs and mushroom soup with a drop-biscuit topping. She had thoughtfully printed the heating instructions on the outer layer of tinfoil in case the bereaved had too much perishable food on hand and wanted to wait till the next day to serve it.
I stuck it in an ice chest, which I carried back out to the car. On my way out of town, I stopped off at a 7-Eleven for a bag of ice and a couple of liters of chilled Pepsis and ginger ale. So many people always gather at the home of the deceased that they usually run out of drinks and ice halfway through the evening.
The preacher that lurks on the outer fringes of my mind nodded approvingly as I added my purchases to the ice chest, but the cynical pragmatist who shares headspace with him whispered, “Don’t you reckon Dallas’s wife might appreciate a pint of your daddy’s peach brandy more than a liter of Pepsi?”
“Unkind and unworthy,” murmured the preacher.
I only knew Dallas’s third wife, his widow now, by that sort of snide hearsay.
Hearsay said she’d been waiting tables at a truck stop in north Florida when Dallas pulled off I-95 for a late night hamburger about six or seven years ago.
“Hamburger?” one of my cattier sisters-in-law had snorted at the time. “That’s a new name for it. Big hair, big boobs, skinniest bee-hind I ever saw.”
“It’s them leopard print stirrup pants,” another sister-in-law said.
They were giggling about leopard pants when I came into the room.
“Who y’all trashing now?” I asked curiously.
They glanced at each other, then, careless-like, one said, “You remember that Dallas Stancil? He went and got himself a new wife with two half-grown young’uns. Third time lucky, maybe.”
I suppose they told me all the gossip they’d heard, but it barely registered.
Did I remember Dallas?
Oh, yes.
And as I drove through the gathering dusk of early October, I remembered him again.
Twelve or fifteen years older. A hard-drinking, hard-driving roughneck. Not the kind of man any of my brothers would want me associating with.
And maybe he did drive me to the devil, but hey, I was raring to go, wasn’t I? Begged him to take me, in fact.
And to do him justice, he went in and picked me up and drove me out again before I got more than just a little singed around the edges.
Did I remember Dallas Stancil?
Enough that I owed him at least the ritual of paying my respects by taking his widow a casserole.
The moon was rising fat and orange in the east, nearly full when I passed through Cotton Grove and headed south on Old Forty-Eight. The road gets rural real quick once you pass the last streetlight—big empty fields and thick woodlands with only a few house lights shining from yards back off the road. So far, most of the growth has been on the other side of Possum Creek where New Forty-Eight cuts a nearly straight line between Cotton Grove and Makely. The original highway meanders along the west bank and follows every bend and crook of the creek. I could almost drive it blindfolded.
Or without headlights, which i
s the next thing up from a blindfold on a moonlit night like this.
I don’t know what it is about those lazy S-curves where the road dips down into the bottom between stands of oaks and poplars and sweet gums, but I can never drive through them without automatically speeding up. I haven’t had a speeding ticket in four years, but there are two places in Colleton County where I’m bound to hit 80 even if I know there’s a trooper with a radar gun behind every tree. One of them’s that deserted stretch that crosses Possum Creek.
I cut off my lights and started down the long curving slope, my foot easing down on the accelerator as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight. By the time I hit the bottom where the air flows sweet and cool even on the hottest summer nights, the needle was on 78 and still climbing.
At the far end of the sharpest curve, on the right-hand side just before the bridge, an anonymous dilapidated mailbox—no name, no box number—stands beside a dirt lane that winds up through the underbrush, over a low ridge and then down to the homeplace. When I go home, and if nobody’s coming from the other direction, I bank off the left side of the blacktop, accelerate again as the turn tightens, then, at the last possible moment, I take my foot off the gas and let momentum carry me halfway up the lane. Even my little Firebird will kick up a wide arc of dirt if I’ve cut it sharp enough, but it takes a longbed pickup to sling a really good nasty.
Daddy used to growl about the ruts the boys made fish-tailing their trucks in and out of the lane, but all his life he’d slung too many nasties of his own not to let them get away with it most of the time.
Tonight I had the road to myself, and I wasn’t going home. Instead I banked on the curve, gave it enough gas to corner sweetly, and raced across the bridge doing close to 85.
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