Up Jumps the Devil

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^ » 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 the 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 is 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.

A few hundred feet past the bridge, I saw headlights in the distance and reluctantly took my foot off the gas pedal and switched my own lights back on. As I flicked them back to high after the other car roared past, I caught a glimpse of fluorescent orange ribbons tied to a stake on the opposite ditch bank and I almost stood on the brakes.

Surveyor’s ribbons.

Oh, shit. Not out here, too.

I tried to remember whose land this was. I could hope it was merely someone selling off his timber, but I’ve seen too many of those orange ribbons across Colleton County these last few years not to realize that they could signal yet another new subdivision.

Ever since I-40 came through, linking Wilmington, North Carolina with Barstow, California, not to mention putting much of Colleton County within forty minutes of the Research Triangle, more and more of our fields and woodlands have been bulldozed under for cheap housing.

No, I don’t want us to go back to 1910 or to mules and wagons that took six hours to haul a load of watermelons to Raleigh, but damn I hate how cars and highways are destroying the places where I grew up.

I’d have to worry about it another time though because I was coming up on Dallas Stancil’s house. Since I hadn’t given it much thought in the last few years, I had to look sharp or miss the turn-in—especially since my headlights didn’t seem to be as bright as they should be even though I’d had a new battery installed less than a month ago.

First comes Mr. Jap’s trashy, unlovely place—a boarded-up cinderblock garage set back from the road in a grove of oaks. Moonlight glinted dully on the old tin roof. In summer, shoulder-high hogweeds disguise the rusted hulks of junker cars out back, and curtains of kudzu and Virginia creeper swing over the tumbledown sheds where more derelicts sit on concrete blocks. In winter, when all the weeds die and the vines wither, the place is a true eyesore; but there aren’t any zoning laws out here nor many neighbors to complain about Jap Stancil’s mess.

I saw lights at the rear of the old man’s house and several cars and pickups were parked by his back door.

That surprised me a little. I’d have thought he’d be on down at his son’s house, grieving with his daughter-in-law.

Whose name, I suddenly realized, had fled from my mind.

A couple of hundred feet further along, past a thicket of sassafras, wild cherries and scrub pines, was the mailbox with Dallas’s name painted on it and I turned in.

And there I got another surprise.

A house of bereavement is normally lit up like a Christmas tree. Cars come and go, men stand around in the yard talking, and women stream in and out of the house bearing enough food to get Moses halfway to the Promised Land.

Not here.

The front part of the brick house Dallas had built for his second wife—one of the Otlee sisters from Makely—was dark and unwelcoming. As I drove around to the back (out in the country, some front doors haven’t been opened in ten years), only the kitchen and porch lights were on. Dallas’s rig was parked off to the side underneath one of those tall security lights, and yellow crime scene ribbons marked the place where he must have died.

Further up the lane, another security light guarded a black Nissan pickup and a single-wide mobile home. I’d heard that Dallas had let his stepdaughter move her trailer in when her husband lost his job at the lumber yard in Makely. A blue Toyota truck and a white Ford sedan were parked in the carport and a black-and-silver Jeep Cherokee stood near the back steps.

For a moment, I was tempted to turn around and drive right out again, wondering if those bailiffs were mistaken about who’d been shot.

But then I remembered the sheriff’s deputy. They couldn’t all be wrong.

I got out of the car with more confidence than I felt and carried Aunt Zell’s casserole before me like a shield against awkwardness. I figured whoever walked me back to the car later could carry in the ice and soft drinks.

The inner door was open on this warm evening and as I came up onto the porch, a plump young woman with lots of curly brown hair got up from the table and met me at the screen door. Dallas’s stepdaughter?

I didn’t know her name either.

This was getting to seem more and more of a bad idea, but I took a deep breath and gave her my best politician’s funeral smile, half friendly, half mournful.

“I’m Deborah Knott,” I said. “I used to be a neighbor of Dallas’s.”

She wore green biker pants that were two sizes too small for those hefty thighs and a ruffled pink-and-green striped top that was so loose I couldn’t tell if she was pregnant or merely overweight. Her eyes were swollen and her round pink face was blotched from crying as she held open the screen. “Ma’s over there.”

The large L-shaped kitchen was as much dining room and den as a place to cook and every surface gleamed with vinyl wax and lemon polish. I could have eaten off that white tile floor it was scrubbed so clean.

At the long end of the L, a plum-colored sectional set of couches and recliners wrapped around the corner and faced a color television that could be viewed from the dining table as well.

Football players grappled each other on the screen. The sound was turned off but it still held the attention of a hulking young man who sat at the table and munched on a drumstick from the biggest bucket of the Colonel’s takeout chicken. From his looks, he and the young woman had been fished up out of the same gene pool. Both had fair skin and thick heads of lustrous brown hair, both had eyes that shifted away as soon as they met mine, and both could have stood to lose a fourth of their body weight.

Their mother, on the other hand, was so thin as to be almost gaunt. She still had big hair—thicker, browner and curlier than her daughter’s—but the big breasts that had impressed my sisters-in-law were no more. Her many rings—diamonds? zircons? crystal “ice”?—slid loosely on thin workworn fingers as she poked at her hair. Beneath those towering curls, her face looked haggard despite a generous layer of pink blusher, bright red lipstick and dark blue eyeshadow.

She perched on the edge of one plum-colored couch at a right angle to a black couple who sat just as stiffly on an adjacent section of the couch. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed as if all three looked at me in relief as I approached, still bearing Aunt Zell’s frozen casserole.

Either my name hadn’t registered on the daughter or she simply lacked the social skills needed to introduce me, so I said, “Deborah Knott, Mrs. Stancil. I grew up down the road from here and used to know Dallas when I was a girl. I was so sorry to hear about him.”

“Mr. Kezzie Knott’s daughter?” she asked in a voice husky with cigarettes.

I nodded and looked at the black couple inquiringly.

The man came to his feet and put out his hand. “I’m Fred Greene, Miss—Knott, was it? And this is my wife Wilma.”

They looked to be about my age, mid-thirties, and both were as formally dressed as if they’d just come from church.

I balanced the casserole in my left hand and shook with each of them, apologizing for my cold fingers.

“You want Ashley to take that for you?” asked Mrs. Stancil as she straightened the rings on her fingers and pulled a cigarette from a gold leather case. “Ashley, honey, put that in the refrigerator, would you?”

From the pile of red-tipped butts heaped in the cut-glass ashtray on the couch beside her, she was working on her second pack since the tray was last emptied.

I handed Aunt Zell’s casserole to Ashley and explained how it could go in the freezer if they didn’t need it right away.

“That’ll be nice,” said Dallas’s widow. “We’re much obliged.” She inclined her head toward the Greenes. “They brought us some chicken and we surely do appreciate that, too. There’s no way I feel like cooking since everything happened.”

“It was nothing,” Mrs. Greene murmured. “We just hate it so bad about your husband.”

Fred Greene continued to stand and I looked at him closely. There was something awfully familiar about his face, but I couldn’t think in what context.

“You wouldn’t happen to be kin to Maidie Greene that married Cletus Holt, would you?” I asked.

“No, ma’am,” he answered politely. “My family’s from Pitt County.”

My brain made a template of his face and slid it across a wide variety of places and events. A desk? Law?

“Were you ever a guardian ad litem down in Lee County or maybe a parole officer?”

“Sorry. I install mufflers over near Garner.”

“I’m sure I’ve seen you before,” I insisted.

“A lot of white folks tell me that,” he said, and something about his stony manner made me wonder if he’d ever stood up before me in court.

I would’ve dropped it at that point, but his wife came to her feet anyhow. “Since Miss Knott is here to visit with you, Mrs. Stancil, we’ll go on now. We just wanted you to know that all your African-American neighbors in the Cotton Grove community really hate what’s happened. If we can do anything to help you identify those two cowards who shot Mr. Stancil in the back—”

The widow exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I appreciate you saying that, but you tell your people not to worry. We know it’s not anything to do with anybody ’round here. Dallas got along real good with everybody, I don’t care if they were green or purple. He always said, ‘I treat everybody decent, Cherry Lou, and long as they treat me decent back, we won’t never have any trouble.’ That’s what he always said and that’s how he always did. But if I think of anything else, I’ll let y’all know.”

After putting the casserole in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, Dallas’s stepdaughter had joined her brother and that cardboard bucket of fried chicken at the table; and since their mother remained seated as well, the Greenes nodded good-bye to me and saw themselves out.

As soon as she heard their car engine turn over, Cherry Lou Stancil stubbed out her cigarette with angry, jerky motions.

“Can you believe the nerve of them?” She turned her head closer to mine and I caught the rich burnt sugar smell of bourbon mingled with her cigarette.

“Dallas not even in his coffin yet and they come in here bold as brass, telling me that the African-American community, if you please, wants to help bring his killers to justice. What were they driving? What were they wearing? What did they look like? Like you can tell one nigger from another when they’re both black as the ace of spades like them two were that shot him.”

“Mrs. Stancil—”

“Call me Cherry Lou, honey. If you knew Dallas, you don’t need to be a stranger.”

“Your sisters-in-law sure had her number,” muttered the pragmatist inside my head.

“Now, now,” said the preacher. “She’s a poor soul who just lost her husband. You can’t be hard on her for reverting to stereotype.”

I swallowed my distaste and said, “Were the Greenes friends of Dallas’s?”

She shrugged. “Never saw them before. He says he’s a deacon in the Tabernacle down the road, but Dallas knew lots of people I didn’t, what with him gone so much. Left me stuck out here with nobody but the kids to talk to half the time. Now that he’s gone, I guess I’ll sell this place and move back to Florida.”

“Sell? But I thought this was Mr. Jap’s farm.”

“Nope. He messes with a little corn and vegetables, but no, he signed everything over to Dallas years ago, before we was even married. The government was about to take it for taxes or something. I reckon it’ll be mine, now that Dallas is gone.”

When she said that, I remembered hearing my daddy talk about the hole Jap Stancil got himself in with the 1RS over some used cars he’d sold without paying taxes on his profits.

Mr. Jap was a self-taught mechanic who liked to tinker with anything that had a carburetor. Some of my brothers got their first cars from him and he showed them how to keep those old engines running with cuss words and socket wrenches. He could do anything with a motor, but he probably never finished sixth grade and he wasn’t much for keeping books, much less for reporting all his income. It was a cash-and-carry business and according to my daddy, “He couldn’t come up with the cash he owed ’em, so the government carried him off to jail for six months.”

Before they’d actually arrested him though, he gave the farm to Dallas and declared personal bankruptcy. After he got out of prison, he only worked on cars in somebody else’s backyard so far as the tax people knew.

“What’ll happen to Mr. Jap?” I asked.

“He can always have a home with me, if he wants it. Don’t you know he’d just love Disney World?”

That was something I’d almost pay to see. Jasper Stancil’s nearly as old as my daddy. I hadn’t seen him in two or three years, but even though I knew he and Daddy still fished together, I couldn’t picture either one of those octogenarians at Disney World.

“I’ve been out in Asheville all week,” I said. “Didn’t get back to Dobbs till this afternoon, so I’m not clear about what all happened. Did you see it?”

“Not really. It was yesterday morning a little before eight o’clock, about thirty minutes after the school bus run. Dallas told me ’bye and said he was on his way. I was fixing Bradley his breakfast and Ashley and Tig didn’t eat yet either—”

“Tig?” I murmured.

“Ashley’s husband. They usually bring Michelle down to catch the school bus—she’s in kindergarten this year— and then they stay and eat breakfast with Bradley and me most school mornings. Anyhow, I was over there at the sink and could see the truck out the window and Dallas just had the door open good and was about to climb in when up drives this red pickup and these two niggers get out.

“I says to Tig and Bradley, ‘Y’all better go out there and see if Dallas needs any help because I believe them’s the same ones he chased out of his woods yesterday.’”

“That was odd, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Most hunters respect those posted signs.”

(The signs say “No Hunting—Possum Creek Hunt Club.” Every year, hunters out from town with their shotguns and rifles will knock on the door at Daddy’s or Mr. Jap’s or over at Leo Pleasant’s and meekly ask if they can join. The three old men solemnly take down the applicants’ names and promise to put them on the waiting list. Of course, there is no waiting list. No hunt club either, for that matter. Daddy long ago noticed that most men, the same men who won’t think twice about trespassing onto posted land, do seem to respect a hunt club’s lease.)

“Them people don’t respect nothing,” said Cherry Lou.

Her son had stopped eating and now lit up a cigarette as he half-turned in his chair to follow his mother’s words.

“I didn’t have my shoes on,” he told me, “so Tig stepped out on the porch by himself.”

“But it was like they never knew he was there,” said Cherry Lou. “Or didn’t care. ’Cause the next thing I knew, I heard both barrels of a shotgun go off and when I ran back to the window, that green Chevrolet was halfway down the driveway.”

“Ford,” said her son.

“I thought you said it was a Chevy.”

“No, I told you it was a Ford. Bright red.”

“I was never one for knowing the makes of anything,” Cherry Lou told me.

“It was a full-size red Ford pickup,” said Bradley, “and they were flying out the yard on two wheels by the time I got out there. Dallas was laying half in and half out of his truck with a big hole in his back. Blood all over the yard, all over the truck.”

“On you, too, I reckon when y’all ran to help him.”

An embarrassed look crossed his chubby round face. “Well, naw, I could see he was beyond help. It was awful. I just ran back in and told Ma to call the sheriff.”

“So you actually never saw the men that shot him?”

He shook his head as if he’d flunked a test of personal bravery.

“Then it’s a good thing your brother-in-law got a good look at what happened.”

“Yeah. They took him over to Dobbs so he could help some artist draw one of them—” He hesitated, not quite sure of the term. “Like when they don’t have a real picture?”

“A composite drawing?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“But he’s been gone ever since eleven-thirty this morning,” Ashley burst out. “What you reckon’s taking so long?”

“Ashley, honey,” said her mother, “I believe I could eat a little piece of white meat if there’s any left. And a glass of tea? How about you, Deb’rah? Tea? Something to eat?”

“Tea would be great,” I said. And in truth, I needed cool liquid to my throat because all three of them had lit up again and the air around us was turning blue.

As Ashley reached into the cupboard to get me a glass, her hand slipped and the glass crashed to the floor in a zillion shards.

Her brother started yelling because he was barefooted. She yelled back that he hadn’t got up off his fat butt all evening so he could just sit there a little longer till she got the broom. Cherry Lou yelled at both of them to hush up before they woke the baby.

Too late.

Above the din came a child’s fretful wail and a sleepy-eyed little girl in Mickey Mouse pajamas stumbled down the hallway, squinting against the light.

“Now see what you did!” said Ashley.

“Me?” protested her brother. “You’re the one broke the damn thing.”

While they bickered, Cherry Lou darted across the room and snatched up the child before she could get near the glass and cut her feet.

“I’ll get her back to sleep,” she told us and carried her granddaughter down the hall, crooning soothing noises to the child as they went

I held the dustpan while Ashley swept up the glass. She kept glancing anxiously at the clock above the kitchen sink.

“I just don’t know why they don’t let Tig come home,” she said again. “I called over to Dobbs about an hour ago and they wouldn’t even let him talk to me. Said they still had things to ask him about. That don’t mean they think he shot Daddy Dallas, does it?”

“Of course not,” I assured her. “They always question the family first. Doesn’t mean a thing. They’ve probably got him looking at mug shots.”

Uneasily, I remembered that I’d been in the sheriff’s office an hour or so ago and neither the sheriff nor Dwight Bryant had been there.

“You sure they took him to Dobbs and not just up the road to Cotton Grove?”

She was positive.

“Well, you did say your husband was the only one to see the actual shooting, right?”

Brother and sister nodded vigorously and both seemed anxious to go over the whole incident again, explaining why neither had happened to be looking out the window at the time. Curious, I asked them every question about those hunters I could think of, yet they couldn’t seem to come up with a single new detail. They were just two big black men in a red pickup. A full-size Ford.

“Ma keeps getting it mixed up, but it was a Ford alright. About three years old.”

Cherry Lou returned to report that she’d finally gotten her granddaughter back to sleep. “Poor little thing. Keeps asking me where’s her Paw-Daddy. That’s what she calls Dallas. And he was just as foolish about her. Brought her a stuffed animal every time he come home from one of his long hauls. You can’t hardly get into her room over yonder at their trailer for all the rabbits and teddy bears. Some of them’s bigger’n she is, aren’t they, Ashley?”

She suddenly noticed my empty hands. “Didn’t you get you any tea yet? Ashley, where on earth’s your manners, girl?”

Dry as my throat was, I declined politely, expressed my condolences, promised to attend the funeral, and got out of there as quickly as I could because I’d suddenly remembered where I’d seen Fred Greene before.

When I pulled up at Jasper Stancil’s back door, that black-and-silver Jeep Cherokee was parked alongside the other vehicles.

Surprise, surprise.

I slammed my car door and stomped into the kitchen without knocking and there were the “Greenes” with Sheriff Bo Poole, Dwight Bryant, and SBI Agent Terry Wilson, all with big gotcha grins on their faces. The only person not there was Jap Stancil and I later heard that Daddy’d taken him over to his niece’s house.

In the middle of Mr. Jap’s eating table was a radio receiver and a tape recorder and I could hear Ashley’s voice wailing, “They know Tig did it, they must know or why else won’t they let him come home?”

“They don’t know shit,” her brother said. “You keep your mouth shut and Tig stays cool, we’ll all be back in Florida before Christmas.”

“No thanks to you two,” came Cherry Lou’s voice. “Won’t for me getting the gun and Tig pulling the trigger, we’d all be out on our tails without a dime.”

“Bingo!” said “Wilma.”

“Fred and Wilma Greene?” I rolled my eyes at the two black SBI agents, who tried to look innocent. “Why didn’t you use Flintstone and be done with it?”

“Sh-sh!” said Dwight as he concentrated on the bickering voices their bug was beaming over from Dallas’s house.

Terry Wilson tried to give me a hug. “Sure do ’preciate you going in there and asking all those questions for us. We didn’t get doodly with ol’ Fred and Wilma here.”

“Go to hell!” I flared. “What’s my Aunt Zell going to say when I tell her one of her best chicken casseroles is sitting down there in a murderer’s refrigerator?”