“And Dwight did say Sutterly was shot with a small-bore weapon,” I said reluctantly. “Maybe I’d better leave it here till we know better. There might be fingerprints.”
“I hear Billy Wall’s out on bail. Don’t you reckon he killed Dick Sutterly, too?”
I suppose I could have told him. It would be all over this end of the county by next day anyhow, but I just shook my head.
“Sure he did,” said Pete. “He killed Uncle Jap, stole his money, and then he probably shot Dick Sutterly because Dick saw him here.”
“I grant you that’s probably why Sutterly was shot, but not by Billy Wall. Sutterly was up and down all the lanes Saturday. He must’ve seen—”
My mouth was in gear but my brain was on idle. I hesitated, abruptly made uneasy by something feral in the way Pete had gone absolutely still and unblinking, like a cat that suspects a vole beneath the leaves. And just as abruptly, I remembered how he’d tried to prevent Merrilee from coming in here that morning. “Aw, now, honey,” he’d said. “You don’t want to go in there and remember him there like that.”
Like how?
Pete?
He saw it in my face, let out a roar of denial and lunged at me. He was twice my size and if he ever caught me in that bear hug, I’d be dog meat.
He grabbed my arm and swung me around. I raked his face with my car keys and tried to knee him in the groin. I must have missed the main target, but it did loosen his grip for an instant and I snatched up a hammer from the workbench. By then, he had a lug wrench in his beefy hand, and he swung so hard that both my keys and the hammer went flying. A second swing landed a glancing blow on my hip and I fell to the concrete floor.
As he moved in for the kill, I grabbed Allen’s creeper board and shoved it toward him. He stepped down heavily on it and both feet went out from under him.
I didn’t wait to see how he landed, just sprinted for the door as fast as I could, slammed it and rammed the padlock home.
Ob God, for a car key! There was a spare set in a magnetic case under the fender but Pete was already banging against the door and I knew the hasp wouldn’t hold long enough for me to find them and drive away. The way my hip throbbed from where he’d hit me, I also knew I couldn’t run far.
Thanking the Lord for the moonless night, I dashed down the lane straight for the barn shelter fifty feet away and dived under the wrecked Maverick just as Pete burst through the door. There wasn’t much room and I wiggled through the powdery dry sand till I was under the furthest hulk, a car that rode a lot higher than the Maverick.
From where I lay in pitch darkness, I could see Pete rush around his car and mine, looking for me. Car doors banged and I heard something crash against the shop wall, then he reached into his car and my heart sank as he pulled out a powerful flashlight and began searching more carefully. As he pointed the beam under the cars and all around the shop, I saw that he held the flash in his left hand.
His right hand held a pistol.
I wiggled right up against the cinder block supporting the left front wheel, oblivious to black widows, brown recluses or snakes of any color that might be hibernating in the cracks and crevices. All I wanted was a crack or crevice myself. Or better yet, a deep dark hole.
Instead, I realized that space had opened up above me. Of course! The motor on this old car had been pulled years ago, probably before I was even born. I pushed my hand up through cobwebs and waved it around. There was plenty of room up under the hood, although my hand encountered so many dangling wires and sharp ends of copper tubing, I wasn’t sure if I could get past the axle and the radiator without tearing my clothes—not to mention my skin—to shreds.
But then Pete’s flashlight turned toward the shed and shelters and damned if I didn’t find that terror makes a real good lubricant. I slipped up into the motor housing like a greased monkey and my foot left the ground just as the light swept a long low arc under all the cars.
Pete was so close I could hear his heavy grunts as he stooped to look under each car.
Panicked, I realized there was a gaping hole under the dash where the floorboards had rusted through into the motor housing, and I quickly turned my head so that my face wouldn’t shine back should the light hit it.
Fortunately, it was only a hasty inspection and the light didn’t linger. Through the broken window, I heard Pete move around to the vehicles on the other side of the shelter, then the vibration of running feet, as if it had suddenly dawned on him that I might have headed for my daddy’s house.
I pushed my way through the hole, up into the front seat, and found that I was inside the Hudson Hornet whose racing virtues Allen had sung when Kidd and I met him out here last month. The upholstery was filthy and probably riddled with mouse nests, but all I cared about was keeping tabs on Pete. Maybe if he went far enough down the lane, I could risk a run for my car, at least grab the cell phone and call for the cavalry.
I crawled over the high front seat and into the back. The seat here was hard as a rock, more like a thinly padded church pew than the cushiony springs of the front seat. I knelt on it though and peered through the tiny dirty rear windows.
I might never know why Pete killed Mr. Jap—momentary rage at hearing Merrilee slighted for Allen? Or merely the greedy assumption that Merrilee would split the estate with Allen if Mr. Jap died?—but I was pretty sure the same assumption was what sent Dick Sutterly over to Pete this afternoon with that promissory note. “Don’t tell the Grimeses or Allen Stancil,” he’d said Wednesday afternoon when he was so gleeful over securing Adam’s land. And I’d been too weary of the whole subject to try to educate anyone else about the laws of inheritance. In view of how quickly Pete had attacked me, I had to wonder if Dick Sutterly had really seen Pete last Saturday or if Pete’s guilty conscience led him to believe that Sutterly’s proposition was a prelude to blackmail?
Out in the field, the powerful beam of that flashlight swept across the fallow field, up and down both sides of the lane. If he would just go on over the rise and down toward the creek—
The light disappeared. I waited a few seconds, but saw nothing. Just as I reached for the door handle, there was a burst of light, then darkness. He was coming back, straight across the field to Mr. Jap’s house, trying to catch my silhouette between the lane and the dim porch light, hoping to flush me with his flashlight.
The old frame house sat up on low brick pilings with a lattice skirting that gapped in places. Pete circled the house, shining the light up under every corner.
Eventually he stood up and I rejoiced to see the slump of defeat in his shoulders as he trudged back over to his car. I was just starting to take big breaths of relief when his hand banged down on the hood and he straightened purposefully.
Oh, dear Lord, he was heading back toward the sheds! There was no way I could scrabble across the front seat and under the hood in time. As I ducked down below the windows, my weight shifted, the seat tilted and I was almost dumped to the floor.
I instantly remembered all the bottlegging lore I’d ever heard. Praying it would be empty, I tilted the padded board all the way over and a darker crevice appeared. In the old days, the hollowed-out backseat would have held at least four dozen half-gallon Mason jars of my daddy’s best white lightning. No reason it wouldn’t hold his daughter now.
I slid inside and pulled the padded board back over me like a coffin lid.
A moment later, I felt the car rock as Pete stepped on the running board and ran the light over every inch of the Hornet’s interior. His breathing was ragged from exertion.
I myself had quit breathing and had no intention of starting again any time soon.
There was a thin crack where I hadn’t quite pushed the board into the backrest as far as it was meant to go and so much light after such darkness terrified me. Any second now I would hear his triumphant cry and feel the explosion as he fired down through the board.
Then the car rocked violently as Pete jumped from the running board. I heard his f
eet pounding across the lane as a wash of headlights played across the shed and I came up out of my hidey-hole just in time to see Pete’s car roar across the yard and turn out onto Old Forty-Eight on two wheels. At the same moment, car doors opened and slammed over at the shop.
Two male figures circled my car and called my name through the open shop door.
The adrenaline high that had kept me at fever pitch for the last half-hour abruptly evaporated and I was almost too weak to wrest open the rusty hinges and totter down to the shop.
I must have looked like the devil’s playmate, torn, scratched, filthy dirty, but my appearance sent Adam and Allen into gales of raucous laughter.
Both of them clutched beer cans and both were drunk as skunks, but I couldn’t see what was so damn funny.
“Reckon we showed you, darlin’,” said Allen.
“Take the wind out of your sails,” Adam said. A sudden hiccup made him giggle.
I hadn’t seen my uptight, upright brother this wrecked since the night of his bachelor party.
“Where’ve you been?” I demanded. “You scared the hell out of us, disappearing like that.”
He gave me a foolish grin. I spotted my car keys on the floor, grabbed them and headed outside. I didn’t get three steps toward my car though when I saw my smashed cell phone. Damn that Pete Grimes!
Allen and Adam followed me, still strutting and bragging.
“Thought you’d sic the law on me ’cause of that phony blood test Diana did?” asked Allen. “Ha-ha on you, darlin’. She called me yesterday, told me all about what you done to her.”
He was slurring his S sounds and that struck Adam as even runnier than the look on my face.
“Me and Adam, we drove up to Greensboro last evening and Katie and me got married today in Fort Mill, South Carolina.”
Adam beamed at me. “Bes’ man,” he said happily. “Chauffeur, too.”
“I’m just here to get my truck, pick up my stuff and head on back to Greensboro tomorrow.”
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” I said as I loaded my sodden brother into my car and dumped my smashed phone in his lap.
Five minutes later, Seth was putting Adam to bed on the couch in the den and I was phoning Dwight.
30
« ^ Mean time they have abundance, nay affluence, and enjoy independence, which, we all know, is a great sweetener of life and every blessing, and makes up for many superfluous refinements in what is called polite society...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
The phone kept ringing Saturday morning as half my family called to exclaim or condole about my close brush with danger, Pete’s arrest, Adam’s safe return. If I’d planned to sleep in, I could just forget it.
I had a bruise the size of Rhode Island on my hip and it was tender, but I seemed to be able to walk okay.
By ten o’clock, I had stuck the blue paper plates and napkins and the ten pounds of roasted peanuts in the trunk of my car and was driving over to Andrew’s house. Dinner was to be at the homeplace at two o’clock, but Daddy had suggested that my brothers and I might want to come out early and watch some of his new puppies go through their paces in the training pen at Andrew’s.
The temperature had dropped thirty degrees during the night and was barely expected to hit forty. Despite the sun, there was a stiff wind out of the north. Not a good day to stand around outside, but something in Seth’s tone when he called to relay Daddy’s message made me think I ought to be there. So I put on wool socks, boots, and a white turtle-neck sweater under a sapphire blue warm-up suit that looked like crushed silk. My silver earrings were set with small blue topazes. I felt festive, yet I was still casual enough for the jeans and flannel shirts and sweaters my brothers would be wearing. For safe measure, I took along gloves and a blue-gray wool car coat that had a hood in case I got chilly.
Andrew’s land is next to Seth’s. The house is a comfortable old white clapboard built in the twenties by one of April’s uncles over in Makely. When a new supermarket bought the lot, her cousin said April and Andrew could have it as a wedding present if they wanted to move it. It’s been much remodeled since then—April rearranges walls the way some women rearrange furniture—and the kitchen is huge and modern now.
And smelled like Thanksgiving when I stuck my head in the back door. Isabel was bringing a ham and Nadine and Minnie were each roasting a turkey, but April always makes her succulent smoked oyster dressing and she was just putting the big pans in the oven, enough for fifty people.
April is Andrew’s second wife and considerably younger than he, closer to my age, in fact, than his. She got her BA. after A.K. was born and teaches sixth grade at Cotton Grove’s middle school.
“Need any help?” I asked.
“Oh, Deborah!” She rushed over to hug me. “You could have been killed. Pete Grimes.” She shook her head. “Have you heard how Merrilee’s taking it?”
“I think she’s retained Zack Young, but when Dwight called me last night, he said he’s pretty sure they’ll find that Dick Sutterly was killed with a bullet from Pete’s gun.”
“Thank goodness he didn’t shoot you.”
I looked around the kitchen. “You sure there’s nothing I can do?”
“No, everything’s done except I may mix up a little crabapple relish. And maybe make another gallon of tea. If you want coffee, here’s a mug. They’ve got the pot plugged in down at the dog pen.”
“Holler if you change your mind about needing help,” I told her and went on down the slope where at least six pickups were parked, half with dog cages in the back.
Bert, Robert’s four-year-old grandson, came running to meet me holding a beagle pup so young it didn’t yet have its eyes open.
“Better bring him on back, little man,” called Robert. “His mama’s getting worried.”
I swung Bert and the puppy both up in my arms. “I haven’t had any sugar all week,” I said, kissing him under his chin till he was giggling all over.
Haywood’s granddaughter Kim is three and she wanted me to pick her up, too, so she could tell me all about a new litter of piglets that Seth’s Jessica had taken her to see that morning.
Jess and A.K. and Adam’s twin, Zach, were inside the quarter-acre training pen distributing fresh branches over the logs and pipes so the rabbits would have enough bolt spaces, and they all had plenty to say about my close call. As did Daddy when I saw him. The younger children were racing up and down along the outside perimeter with Blue and Ladybelle and a couple of other pet dogs, squealing with excitement and waiting for the fun to begin.
Reese and Annie Sue drove up and the kidding started before he even got out of her car good.
“Hey, Reese,” Zach called. “Heard you got hold of a deer yesterday.”
“Naw,” said A.K. “I heard it was the other way ’round.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Reese. “Y’all have fun. Get it out of your system.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” I said, taking pity on his bruised and stitched face.
“Hell, from what I hear, I ought to be buying you one.” He looked me up and down. “Gotta say though, you’re looking pretty good this morning for an old lady that spent time scrunched up in a wrecked car.”
“Old lady?”
He ducked my punch and slipped through the door ahead of me.
The boys got together a few years ago and salvaged enough building scraps to put up a one-room shack right beside the training yard, complete with a big picture window, a small potbellied woodstove, and several cast-off chairs, including an old rump-sprung recliner that Isabel was going to make Haywood take to the dump. Now Daddy can sit out there with them and watch the training sessions even when it’s cold and rainy.
The fire was welcome today, and so was the coffee Haywood poured for Reese and me. Adam was sitting in there with a mug between his hands, looking like something the dogs had dragged around in the mud.
I grinned. “Best man, huh?”
“Don�
�t say it,” he groaned.
Reese laughed and went outside.
As I stood watching through the picture window, Haywood said in the lowest, most confidential tone he could muster, “Uh, say, Adam? Me’n Isabel, we was wondering if you could use this?”
There was a rustle of paper, then Adam said, “Huh? Ten thousand dollars? What’s this for?”
Haywood’s whisper was like everybody else’s normal level and I heard the awkwardness in his voice. “Well, I knowed you was worried about something and if it’s just money, well, shootfire! I got lucky Thursday. You can pay me back when it’s convenient.”
I didn’t wait to hear Adam’s reply. My eyes were stinging as I took my coffee out into the crisp morning air. We might be going to have a real winter after all.
“Cold weather feels good, don’t it, shug?” asked Daddy. He’d already asked me twice was I sure Pete hadn’t seriously hurt me? Once again, I promised him that I was just fine. He had on a fleece-lined brown jacket and the beige felt Stetson that he wears in winter, and he was watching Andrew buckle a training collar around the neck of a pup he’d paid twelve hundred for.
Some people think an electronic training collar is a cruel device and I suppose it is if wrongly used. On the other hand, if you’re out in the woods and your dogs won’t come when you call or whistle, they can follow a rabbit trail halfway across the county and wind up footsore and lost. It’s sad to see a couple of slab-sided hunting dogs wandering the back roads in winter. They give you such a hopeful look when your car passes, as if wondering if this car, this time, will finally hold their owner. Yet if you stop to try and read their tags, they skitter away and often can’t be caught.
Daddy and my brothers believe a few mild electric shocks are worth preventing that.
This little dog had already caught the whiff of rabbits and was wiggling with anticipation. Daddy led her inside, got her settled, then gave the command to seek. She found the scent immediately and started yipping and singing. The other dogs in the cages started barking, too. Rabbits were zinging every which way, and the grandbabies were tumbling all over each other, laughing and pointing as a rabbit sailed right over the young dog’s head.
Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Page 24
