Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 13

DWIGHT BRYANT

MONDAY MORNING

As Dwight Bryant headed his squad car toward the carnival grounds, he caught a glimpse of Deborah’s car in the parking lot across from the courthouse and in his rearview mirror, he saw her get out and lock the door. Any other day, he might have circled the courthouse and intercepted her with a teasing remark or the offer of a cup of coffee if she had time, but not today. Not after last night. He had loved her and wanted her for so damn long that the wanting had become a permanent ache in his heart, like a limp from a badly mended broken leg or a torn muscle that wouldn’t heal, something you learned to live with but that could still leave you gasping with pain at unexpected moments. And now that ache was finally, cautiously, lifting.

He still couldn’t believe that she’d actually said yes.

And hadn’t changed her mind even after he made love to her.

Twice.

So until they both got used to the idea, he told himself, better not risk messing it up or making a fool of himself in broad daylight. Stick to business.

Marriage to Jonna had taught him to compartmentalize his feelings, a useful trick these last few years as he watched Deborah with other men—the willpower it had taken to keep his mouth shut and his hands off when she confided in him while watching some old World War II Van Johnson movie, or that time she wept on his chest after Herman had been poisoned, or any other time when she would touch him with casual, sisterly affection. If she’d ever suspected the intensity of his feelings for her, he knew she’d shy away. Every instinct warned him to keep it light, act as if nothing had really changed between them, compartmentalize.

He was halfway across town before he realized that he was whistling. So much for compartmentalization.

“Boss is in a good mood today,” Raeford McLamb said to Jack Jamison as he pulled out of the Hardee’s drive-through and turned onto the highway for Raleigh.

“Was he? I didn’t notice,” said Jamison, yawning widely as he uncapped his coffee. It was scalding hot, but the caffeine was a welcome jolt to his tired nerves.

“Jack Junior still keeping you awake?” McLamb asked sympathetically.

“He’s seven weeks old,” Jamison moaned, turning a plaintive face to his fellow officer. “Shouldn’t he be sleeping through by now?”

As the voice of wisdom and experience, McLamb said, “Well, Rosy was, but it was almost three months before Jordo gave up that two A.M. feeding.”

“Three months?” Appalled, the tubby young detective recapped the coffee and stuck it in a cup holder clipped to the dashboard, then leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “Wake me when we get to Shaw,” he said. “I need all the sleep I can get.”

Deputy Mayleen Richards glanced again at the clipboard on the dash to confirm the address. One of the self-storage facilities on her list was right there in Dobbs, but it wouldn’t open till ten, so she’d decided to start with the one farthest away on the edge of Fuquay-Varina over in Wake County. The way the numbers seemed to be running, Six Pines Self-Storage should be—ah, yes, there it was, a gray cinderblock office with long rows of units out back, each looking like a single-car garage with a pull-down door. A high chain-link fence surrounded them all.

She pulled into a parking slot, adjusted the tilt of her hat, and made sure the blouse of her uniform was properly tucked in as she got out of the car.

A tall, sturdily built young woman with cinnamon brown hair and freckles across her prominent nose, Mayleen Richards had tried sitting at a desk after finishing a two-year computer course out at Colleton Community College, but she was farm bred, used to hard physical work outdoors. Another two years of trying to fit her awkward square personality into a comfortable round hole was all she could take before she quit her job in the Research Triangle and asked Sheriff Bo Poole for a job. He knew her parents, knew her, and was always glad to have another officer in the department who wasn’t afraid of computers. He’d been disappointed that she preferred patrol duty over an indoor job, but agreed to let her pull a normal rotation. Lately, Major Bryant had been giving her more detective chores, and with the county growing in population, she was hoping to get switched over permanently.

As she entered the office building, a gray-haired woman smiled at her from behind the counter.

“Good morning, Officer. How can I help you?”

Richards introduced herself and explained that she was there in connection with a Brazos Hartley, who had bought the contents of a storage locker from Six Pines. “A couple of racks of negligees.”

“How do you spell that name?”

As Richards spelled it out, the clerk swiveled around and began tapping computer keys to bring up the record. “Oh, yes. The Lee Hamden account. Negligees? Is that all it was?”

“Nightgowns and robes. And rather expensive looking. Didn’t you know?”

“Honey, all I know’s what’s on this contract. They don’t have to get specific about what they’re storing, and we can’t go through their things.”

“Even when you’re auctioning it off?” asked Richards.

“Nope. Even the buyers don’t know what they’re getting till they’ve paid over their money. Talk about a pig in a poke. All they can do is look. They can shine a flashlight in, but they can’t touch anything and they can’t go inside till they’ve made the winning bid and paid for it. Is Ms. Hamden suing him? Her brother said she’d be furious, but you know, we did everything by the book—certified letter, advertisement in the paper, everything the law requires.”

“You remember Hartley, then?”

“Hartley? The man who bought the locker?” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t know him from Adam’s house cat if he walked in behind you,” she said cheerfully. “Doubt if I ever saw him. My boss is the one who helps with the auctions. I stay in here and do the paperwork. I meant the owner’s brother. Him I remember. He was here last week trying to pay his sister’s back rent and her stuff already auctioned off nine days before. He was awful upset for her, but what could I do? She only left us an accommodation box number at one of those mailing stores here in town. We ask folks to leave us the name or telephone number of a friend or relative, somebody we can get in touch with. The way people move around these days, though...”

She shrugged helplessly. “We wind up auctioning off three or four of our lockers every month.”

“Did he say why his sister didn’t respond to the certified letter?”

“She never got it. It went to the mail store and bounced back here when it couldn’t be delivered. He said she’s been called out of state to nurse her husband’s mother and didn’t realize she’d be gone so long. Soon as she remembered, she called him and told him to come over and pay me the back rent, late fees. I had the hardest time making him understand we really didn’t have her clothes. Clothes. That’s what he said it was. Didn’t say nothing about fancy nightgowns. Mostly, he said, she was worried about some pictures—maybe an album?—stored in her locker, too.”

“Oh?” Deputy Richards encouraged.

“I had to tell her brother that most people, when they buy one of these lockers? They just keep the stuff they think they can sell at flea markets and dump all the personal stuff.”

“Dump it where? Here?”

“If they want to pay the fee. Soon as the auction’s over, they go through the stuff right out there in the driveway and bag up what they don’t want. We charge to let ‘em use our Dumpsters. Otherwise, they have to truck it to a landfill themselves. I had to tell him that nobody goes to flea markets to buy somebody else’s pictures, so stuff like that usually gets dumped right here.”

“I don’t suppose he went through the Dumpster?”

“Oh, honey, after nine days?”

“You didn’t happen to get his name, did you?”

“Wasn’t any reason to. Although, now that you mention it, I believe I did call him Mr. Hamden and he didn’t say that wasn’t his name.”

“But you told him who bought the contents of the locker?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a public sale. Brazos Hartley. Ames Amusement Corporation, Gibsonton, Florida. Don’t know how he found us from way down there. Anyhow, here’s his phone number and an e-mail address, and I gave Mr. Hamden the same information and wished him luck.”

“But all you have on Ms. Hamden herself is this mailing-service box number?”

“And this phone number. But she must have written it down wrong because I called it and the lady that answered said she’d had that number for sixteen years and nobody by that name had ever lived there.”

The gray-haired clerk looked at Mayleen Richards in sudden interest. “So how come you’re trying to find her? Was the stuff stolen?”

“All I can say right now is that it’s related to an investigation the sheriff’s department is conducting,” the deputy said. “Could you describe Ms. Hamden?”

“Sorry. That locker was rented six years ago, before I came. She was on our quarterly plan and payments always arrived by check every three months. Nothing on the checks except her name.”

“Do you remember what bank?”

The woman shook her head. “Her brother was real cute, though,” she added, trying to be helpful. “Curly black hair and gorgeous brown eyes.”

Richards thanked her for her time and checked her watch as she went back out to the car. Only a little past ten. Wouldn’t take but a few minutes to check out E-Z-Quik Mail.

The lone clerk there was cooperative but he’d only worked there a few months and could add nothing. “I’ve never seen her to know who I was looking at. Most people using the boxes out there in the vestibule don’t come on inside unless they’re mailing a package or buying stamps. According to our records, she pays cash for the box a year at the time and it’s due to expire the end of the month.”

“Is there anything in her box right now?”

“I’m not supposed to let anybody see a client’s mail without a court order,” the clerk said virtuously, but he went into the sorting room behind the bank of rental boxes and came back a minute later. “Nope. Empty as my girlfriend’s head.”

The phone number on the form was similar to the one on the Six Pines Self-Storage form. Same prefix, but she’d scrambled the same last four numbers. There was no North Carolina street address for Lee Hamden. The space had been left blank except for the notation “In transit—no permanent address.”

“‘Course now, there’s a lot of that going around,” said the clerk.

Shaw University on the south side of Raleigh had its beginning in an 1865 Bible-study class immediately after the Civil War. Despite integration during the civil rights movement, however, its student body has remained predominately black.

Even though Deputy Jack Jamison passed the school every time he drove into Raleigh, he’d never actually set foot on the campus, and in his sleep-deprived state, he was glad to tag along after McLamb, who seemed to know his way around. They found the dorm where Lamarr Wrenn and Eric Holt shared a room, but neither was in. The kid next door thought Holt might be at his job in the library and that Wrenn was probably in his modern art–appreciation class.

Since classes wouldn’t change for another thirty-eight minutes, they headed for the library, homed in on their prey, and were soon crowded together in one of the small soundproof study rooms deep in the stacks.

Of medium height and sturdy build, with light brown skin, closely trimmed hair, and a small gold stud in one ear, Eric Holt was the picture of earnest helpfulness. His eyes met theirs with innocent candor. Hide something? those eyes seemed to ask. Me? Collude with my friends? Cook up a story together? Certainly not.

“Okay, yeah, it was dumb of Steve and me not to leave our names,” he admitted forthrightly, “but hey, Lamarr’s our friend. We didn’t want to rat him out just because he lost his temper and hit that dude. Besides, the guy was fine when we pulled Lamarr away.”

“Fine’s not the way we heard it,” McLamb growled.

“Well, no,” Eric agreed. “He was bleeding pretty bad. I guess Lamarr might even’ve broken his nose. But he was definitely able to sit there on the top step of that game wagon and cuss us to hell and back. Nothing wrong with his lungs.”

“And your friend Lamarr didn’t go back later and finish him off?”

“You’ll have to ask him that,” Eric said earnestly. “He says he went home and I believe him, but the last time Steve Knott and I saw him that night, he was leaving the carnival, heading in the opposite direction from the Dozer.”

“Why’d he pop Hartley?” asked Jamison.

“Oh, they got into it about the game. Lamarr said it was rigged. Called the guy running it a thief. One thing led to another. You know how it goes,” he said, appealing to them man to man.

“Yeah,” said McLamb cynically. “We know how it goes.”

They came at him with questions from every angle, but nothing they asked made Eric Holt give up any more information. His whole attitude said that he wanted to help, wished he could help, would certainly help if there were any way in his power to do so, but everything had gone down just as he’d told them.

Lamarr Wrenn was just as helpfully unhelpful. They caught up with him as he was leaving one classroom and heading across campus for another. Dark-skinned with a small chin beard, he was built like a concrete post, tough and solid with big muscular hands that clenched convulsively around his books and looked capable of felling a mule with one blow. He walked with a slight limp that favored his right ankle (“Twisted it playing Hacky Sack yesterday”), but it didn’t seem to slow him down.

“Look, man, you make me late and it’ll go down as a cut. Steve and Eric already told you what happened, didn’t they?”

“You tell us,” said McLamb as they strode along with him.

The walks were crowded with students changing classes and they were forced to walk on the grass to keep up as Wrenn plowed his way through.

But it was clear the young men had their stories well in hand. Lamarr Wrenn had thought the Dozer was rigged, he said. He and Hartley got into it. Accusations were made by Wrenn; slurs were spoken by Hartley.

“So when he called me a dumb-ass jigaboo, I smashed his nose in for him. But that’s all. Anybody says different, he can talk to me.”

McLamb said, “Your friends say you were still steamed when you left them. You sure you didn’t go back and have another go at him?”

“Nope, I went home.”

“Home being?”

The address he gave was in the old Darkside section of Dobbs. The neighborhood was still mostly black, yet, despite some derelict shanties, it wasn’t what you’d call a real ghetto, McLamb thought as he wrote it down. Not when those shanties stood on quarter- to half-acre lots. Not when professional and middle-class African Americans were either remodeling the old clapboard houses of their parents and grandparents or else leveling them to make way for bigger and more modern homes.

“Any witnesses to the time you got there?”

Wrenn shook his head, moving more slowly up the stairs of the building they’d entered, as if it hurt to climb on that ankle.

Nobody lived in the house at the moment, he explained, because it had belonged to his grandfather who died early in the summer. His mother was the old man’s only relative and natural heir, but there was some technicality about the deed. Soon as that was straightened out, the house would be sold. In the meantime, Wrenn used it as a crash pad when he wanted to get away from school.

“Wait a minute, though,” he said as they pulled up at the doorway of his next class. “There’s a nosy old lady lives next door. I think she might’ve still been out on her porch when I got home.”

He gave them her name and address; then the bell rang again and he stepped inside the classroom just as the professor came over to close the door.

The pimply faced teenager minding the desk at the Colleton U-Stor didn’t remember Brazos Hartley even though he’d taken the bid on two lockers on the thirty first of August. He was pretty sure that no one had been around about a locker belonging to a Leonard Angelopolus but Caroline Sholten? He couldn’t swear he’d ever met her, but he certainly recalled Mrs. Sholten’s angry middle-aged daughter.

“You know how kids used to say ‘Your mama wears army boots’?” He giggled. “Well, this lady really did. I mean, she was huge. She had on these lace-up boots like a Marine or a paratrooper, and shorts that looked like bib overalls with the pant legs cut off, y’know? And her legs were like tree stumps. Man, she was one tough mama! And going on and on about how it was her furniture and her mother meant for her to have it. I told her if her mother wanted to keep the stuff, she shoulda paid the rent before it got auctioned off. I mean, we sent out the letter, advertised in the Ledger. Posted a notice at the courthouse. It was a legal sale.”

“Did you tell her who’d bought it?” asked Mayleen Richards.

“Yep. Gave her his phone number and e-mail and told her she’d have to find him before he sold it.”

“Did she leave her own name or address?”

The kid shook his head.

“What about the owner’s address?”

He looked at her as if her deck had a few missing cards. “Well, yeah, but she’s dead, remember?”

No point in reminding him that even old ladies have friends and neighbors. “Just give me the address.”

It was only a couple of miles away, a fifties-type brick ranch with empty windows and an air of expectant neglect. The foundation plantings had overgrown their allotted spaces and all the trimwork was in sore need of paint, but help was probably on the way if the real estate agent’s sign in the weedy front yard was any indication. It had a new red SOLD! sticker across it. She took down the agent’s number just in case no one else could help, then knocked on the door of the house across the road.

“Coming, coming, coming!” called a cheerful, if somewhat trembly, voice and the door was eventually opened by a very old, very frail white woman encumbered by an aluminum walker. She seemed delighted to find a female deputy in full uniform on her front porch. Smiling as Richards introduced herself, she invited the younger woman to come in. “I’m Liz. Liz Collins. Isn’t it just wonderful all that we can be and do these days? I’d give anything if I’d been born fifty years later. Not that I didn’t have an interesting time of it”—her gnarled hand gestured to a wall of framed photographs beside the door—“but these days I could have maybe made it into space.”

Mayleen Richards glanced perfunctorily at the photographs, did a double take, then looked more closely at the young woman in the cockpit of a plane, surrounded by other women in flying gear, getting a medal pinned to her jacket by a general, sitting on the wing of an airplane. “You were a pilot? Which war is this?”

“WW Two,” she said proudly. “I was one of the women that ferried planes from the assembly lines over to Europe. They wouldn’t let us join the Air Force or fly combat missions, but at least we got to do that much.”

From the next room came another cracked and trembly voice. “May I get you some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Richards said. She turned, expecting to see another elderly person in the doorway, but no one was there.

“That’s only Billy, my cockatiel.” The woman laughed and seated herself in a high rocking chair, the seat of which was made even higher by a thick cushion so that she didn’t have far to lower herself. “Please make yourself comfortable, Deputy Richards, and are you sure I can’t get you some tea?”

“Some tea?” the bird asked again.

Richards smiled. “No, ma’am, thank you.”

She explained the reason for her visit and Mrs. Collins nodded immediately.

“Carrie Sholten. Lovely woman. We were neighbors more than thirty years. Her husband died about eighteen months ago and her daughter wanted her to come live near her in Atlanta. Carrie wasn’t exactly sure about making it permanent, so she rented the house to his cousin and put her best pieces of furniture in storage while she looked for an apartment. But then, before she could find one, she fell and broke her hip and bless her heart, she never came home from the hospital.”

“What about her daughter?”

“Janice? Yes, she came up last month to put the house on the market and get Carrie’s things, but that shiftless cousin that was supposed to forward her mail never passed on the letter from the storage place that she was behind on her rent, so they sold everything at auction. Janice was mad as fire over that, but it was all legal. Nothing she could do about it. She did go find the high bidder and bought back some of the pieces.”

“Do you have an address or phone number for her?” Richards asked.

“Oh yes.” A telephone and a large businesslike Rolodex stood on the table beside her chair. Mrs. Collins spun the round knob until she found the card she wanted. “Janice Radakovich. She’s a civil engineer with the highway department down there in Georgia. Builds roads and bridges. Isn’t that wonderful? You young women today!”

About the time Deputy Richards was checking out the E-Z-Quik Mail and McLamb and Jamison were winding up their interview with Lamarr Wrenn, Dwight Bryant was ready to walk through the outbuildings at the old Hatcher place with Tally Ames. Not that he’d known the name given to the farm by local residents in this part of the county. All he knew was that Mrs. Ames had said it belonged to her grandparents and now to her.

“They were Hatchers? You any kin to Beth Hatcher over near Clayton?”

When she said no, he gave up trying to find a personal link.

Arnold Ames and their son Val were back in Dobbs, working on the innards of a motor that turned one of the kiddie rides and hoping to get it back in operation by opening time this evening, which is why it was Mrs. Ames who led him out from the carnival. He had offered to bring her in his car, but she had declined.

“Fish’s loading the truck with the rest of the stuff Braz bought so we can store it out there, and then I have to go over to the funeral home, okay? They released his body yesterday.”

“You’re burying him here?” For some reason, that surprised him. “I was thinking you’d want to take him back to Florida.”

“No, we decided to do it here,” she said, giving him an odd sidelong glance. She started to say something, then changed her mind.

She had parked the truck over by one of the sheds and the employee they called Fish was already undoing the tarp they’d tied over the load. There was a flash of bright colors inside their plastic covering as he let down the tailgate and rolled off the rack of lingerie Dwight had seen when the van was searched on Saturday. Mayleen Richards had interviewed the guy and reported that he’d spent Friday evening in front of the dunk tank, taking money from the customers who lined up to throw baseballs at the target that would trip a spring and dump their Bozo in the water. Dwight remembered the Bozo, who’d had such an insulting mouth on him that Colleton County youths were elbowing each other aside to pay for the privilege of drowning him, but he didn’t remember this Fish.

“Nice enough guy,” Mayleen had said. “Borderline retarded, though. Not bright enough to lie.”

Mrs. Ames got out of the truck clutching a handful of keys. She wore jeans and work shoes. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face today and tied at the nape with a red scarf.

Since getting the ME’s report, Dwight found himself conscious of footwear around the carnival. Not that he really thought Mrs. Ames had stomped her son. All the same, he gave her shoes a close look. These were buff colored with equally light gum soles. They were scuffed and dusty as if they hadn’t been cleaned in some time, but no apparent stains. When she walked over to the barn doors, he noticed that the shoes left a crisp ripple pattern on the dirt path.

Fish’s shoes were Nikes that had started out white but were now stained and dingy. The stains were either black, as from grease and oil, or were drips of crayon-bright enamels from helping to paint the rides. They, too, left distinct patterns on the dirt.

“Some woman from Georgia caught up with Braz a couple of weeks ago,” said Mrs. Ames, unlocking the first shelter. “I didn’t see her, but he said she was pretty mad about the locker place selling her mother’s furniture.”

“Was she mad at him?” asked Dwight.

“Well, she certainly wasn’t happy having to buy back the things she particularly wanted. He sold her a table, some chairs, and a framed mirror and he told me he got enough from those four pieces to put him in the black for that particular locker. Braz liked to drive hard bargains.”

She threw open the double doors, and Dwight saw a massive oak bedroom suite proportioned for a room with ten-foot ceilings.

“That came out of the same auction,” said Tally Ames, “but nobody’s called him about it. Over here’s the rest of that woman’s mother’s things.”

It looked like ordinary furniture to Dwight.

“Cheap veneers and beat-up postwar era,” Mrs. Ames agreed, “but migrant workers will snap it up down in Florida. Fish, you can slide that rack in behind the dresser here, okay?”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully. He was early thirties, about five-nine, and well muscled with a heavy lower jaw and a bullet-shaped head made even more noticeable for being shaved smooth. Around his neck was a gold chain with a cross on it, and the cross banged his chin whenever he stooped to pick up something he’d dropped. Some of the filmy robes kept slipping off their hangers and he bent to retrieve them with a surprising delicacy of touch.

“They’re real pretty, Tally. You ought to keep these for yourself.”

“I don’t think so,” she told him with a smile. “Too fancy for me.”

They left him to finish unloading the truck, and Mrs. Ames showed Dwight some of the things her husband had bought, including the tools that incited the Lincoln brothers to slash the Pot O‘Gold slide.

They were headed for the far side of the compound toward a small shed that stood up on low rock pilings. “Braz’s office,” Mrs. Ames was saying when she broke off and quickened her step.

“Well, damn!” she exclaimed. “Somebody’s pulled the lock off.”

She was right. The lock was still closed tightly on the hasp, but the whole thing had been prized right off the door and now lay on the grass near an abandoned hammer. Inside was a shambles. A box of used books had been overturned and more loose papers fluttered off the old battered teacher’s desk as a breeze from the open doorway blew in.

“What on earth were they looking for?” Tally Ames wondered aloud.

“Try not to touch anything,” Dwight said, “but can you tell me if anything’s missing?”

“God, how would I know?” she said tartly. “Braz called this his office, but mostly it was where he kept the books and papers and pictures he and Arnie unload from the lockers. Arnie used to toss them in the nearest Dumpster, okay? But Braz once found a fifty-dollar bill in one of the books. And he was watching a rerun of Antiques Roadshow the night they showed how sometimes old tintypes and letters could be worth a few hundred. After that, he got Arnie to give him any papers he was going to toss and he’d go through them. We used to tease him about him and his slow dollar. We thought the only thing he’d found was baby pictures and old income tax returns. Nothing worth even putting in a flea market, much less on eBay.”

Dwight heard the “But” in her voice and saw the troubled look on her face.

“There was more?”

She nodded. “He was doing better than any of us ever realized. You gave us his wallet back Friday night, remember? Val was looking through it this morning. There was a little bankbook in the secret compartment. He opened a new account just last winter with a seventy-thousand deposit. We had no idea he had more than two or three thousand, okay? He must have found something really great in the books or papers and he never said a word to us, just sold it and hid the money. Like he was becoming a miser or something.”

“You don’t know what he found?”

“Whatever it was, he must’ve got it from Arnie and thought if he told, Arnie would want a cut. Like Arn’s ever gone back on his word once he’s made a deal.”

By now, Fish had finished unloading the back of the truck and had wandered over with a manila envelope. “Here’s more pictures Braz had from the new place,” he said.

“Mind if I take a look?” Dwight asked as they stepped back outside.

“Keep them,” she said. “He’d already looked through them. It’s just pictures of the woman in her night things.”

Dwight glanced inside and saw what were clearly amateur photos. Most were blurry and taken from such odd angles that her face wasn’t clear in any of them. He closed the envelope and tucked it in his jacket pocket to look at later, then went back to his car for latex gloves and an instant camera.

“Why bother?” asked Mrs. Ames as he snapped pictures of the hasp, the hammer, and the condition of the shed. “There was nothing in here worth stealing.”

“This your hammer?” asked Dwight as he lifted it by two fingers, being careful not to touch the handle.

“Naw,” said Fish before she could answer. “Arnie’s got all ours with him in the other truck.”

While Dwight was bagging the hammer, Fish stuck his head in the doorway, looked around, and said, “Hey! What happened to all them pictures for the haunted house?”

“What?” said Tally Ames. She took another look. “Didn’t Arnie put them in the other barn?”

Fish shook his head. “I stacked ‘em right back there. All those skeletons and ghosts and people on fire.”

“Now, who would steal junk like that?” Tally wondered.

“You’re sure it was junk?” asked Dwight.

“Believe me, I’m sure,” she said. “We’re not talking old masters or even old primitives on oil and canvas, okay? This looked like some kids had been given a lot of leftover house paint and some old pieces of plywood to paint Halloween decorations on. That’s it. There were about thirty-five of them, and Arnie and the boys were going to use them to decorate the outside of our haunted house. Braz thought it was all scrap lumber and old half-empty cans of paint when they opened up the locker and he put his flashlight on it. I think he got it for like thirty dollars and Arn gave him thirty-five for the lot since they’d be useful.”

The main part of the compound had been neatly mowed, but weeds were high around the side and Dwight soon saw where two vehicles of some sort had recently driven in there and turned around. Ragweed and goldenrods had been snapped off or crushed down and were barely wilted.

“Any of your people park there?” he asked.

Both Mrs. Ames and Fish shook their heads.

“Who knows you have this place?”

“All our own people have been out here moving equipment in and out,” she answered. “And some of the independents know about it. Braz told Skee, the guy runs the duck pond? His wife was like a grandmother to Braz. And Skee probably told the world if it sat still long enough.”

Dwight laid a ruler across the tire tracks and took careful pictures, but he knew he was just going through the motions. The tracks appeared to be the width of standard tires, the weeds hadn’t held any tread marks, and if there had been shoe prints in the dirt immediately in front of the wooden steps, their own shoes had obliterated them.

Bostrom’s Bigfoot U-Store was out on the bypass at the edge of Dobbs, and Bob Bostrom himself was standing in the doorway when Deputy Mayleen Richards got out of her patrol car. He was about her height, of slender build, with brown hair and brown eyes that were wary at first.

“Your feet don’t look very big to me,” she said in greeting.

The wary look disappeared and he laughed. “That was my dad. Size thirteen triple E. I got my momma’s feet, thank goodness. What can I do for you, Officer?”

When she explained and showed him the receipt he’d given Braz Hartley a couple of weeks ago, he led her into his small office and pulled out a file drawer. No computers here.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Now I remember. Young black guy showed up here wanting his granddaddy’s stuff back.”

He described the man’s outrage in a vivid, almost word-for-word reenactment for her.

“He said, ‘Gibsonton, Florida? This white bastard trucked my granddaddy’s pictures to Florida? How you got the right to let him do that?’

“I told him, ‘The state of North Carolina gave me that right when your granddaddy let the rent run out on his locker and the certified letter I sent him came back.’

“ ‘But he died!’

“I told him even dead people got debts, debts him and his family ought to’ve paid, and you shoulda seen him puff up at that,” Bostrom told Richards. “He was a lot bigger’n me, but I just started cleaning my nails with my pocketknife here”—as if by magic, a wicked-looking switchblade appeared in his hands—“and he climbed back down. I told him to chill. He didn’t have to go all the way to Florida. The buyer was with a carnival right here in North Carolina. Ames Amusement.”

“So was his grandfather an artist or something?” asked Richards.

“You’d think he was Rembrandt to hear that guy run on about it, but the old man used to come over here and paint right out there in his locker. All the stuff I ever saw looked like the pictures my wife Jane puts on our refrigerator from our grandbabies.”

Bostrom showed her the deceased artist’s address. It was just over in Darkside, less than a quarter mile away.