A Killing at Cotton Hill (15 page)

“You're a sweet man, Samuel. I hope Greg is worth your trouble.”

I tell her that I hope so too, and that I think he's a boy with talent.

“I noticed your paintings. I've never been much for art myself. But I remember your wife liked it. This stuff you have is real?”

I'm not sure why I hedge my answer. “It's things Jeanne and I both liked that we bought.”

She gestures to a print on the wall above the dresser. “You think Greg could make a living doing paintings like that?”

It's the continual bane of the serious artist, this question. Can you make a living at it?

“Yes, I do. I could be wrong. Plenty of good artists never manage to make a name for themselves, or they go wrong somewhere. But he should at least have the chance.”

She sighs. “I'll go out to the farm and see what Wayne is up to. I think that whole swarm of relatives had planned to stop by before they go home.” She turns liquid eyes to me. “I don't suppose you can come with me?”

I get up. “I've got one or two things I ought to see about. It's best if you face the lions by yourself.”

I don't say so, but I can't help thinking that it will do her good to face off the family with a winning hand behind her. After all, the land belongs to her. And something tells me that when it comes to Wayne Jackson and Leslie Parjeter, she's going to need a backbone made of steel. I tell her I'll run her over to the church to pick up her car, but she says she'll walk over there. “It's just a few blocks.”

“You still remember the way out to the farm?”

Her face goes hard. “How could I forget?”

It's late afternoon and I'm suddenly restless. It has been a harrowing day. I'm happy to walk down to where the cows are. They low their greetings, and that soothes me. I walk among them, automatically checking them for anything unusual. Before long I'll have to think about which ones to give up to auction, which ones to breed next spring. But for now I'm content just to be with them.

When I get back to the house, Loretta has been there. She has left a note on the table along with a few slices of cake. Then I remember that I told Jenny Sandstone I'd see her this evening.

I start to call and tell her I can't make it, but then it occurs to me that Jenny may be able to find out something about Dora Lee's land. That perks me up enough to call her, and she tells me to come on over.

“If you can't guess, I'm not much of a cook,” Jenny says.

She stands flustered at a pristine counter in her gleaming kitchen, trying to arrange a few pieces of cheese on a plate so that they don't look like mangled chunks of plastic.

“Jenny, I appreciate your going to the trouble, but I didn't come over here to eat. The Baptist ladies took care of my appetite this afternoon. Here, let me do that.”

It's strange to me to see a perfectly competent woman be all paws when it comes to food. I move her aside, pile the cheese on one side of the plate and some crackers out of the box she has sitting on the counter on the other.

We sit at the kitchen table where she has already opened a bottle of red wine and put out two glasses. With some women I might be thinking,
Uh, oh
, but I get none of the hints I usually get from a woman who is looking to rope me in. It's more like she was going to have some cheese and crackers herself, and I happened to come by.

I have never been in Jenny's house. I like the way she has done it up. It's comfortable without being fussy the way some single women get. No little glass figurines to catch dust, no smell of potpourri to smother you. The living room she led me through on the way to the kitchen is furnished with a big comfortable sofa and chairs, a handsome rug over polished floors, and a long bookcase full of books. The workings of someone with quiet taste who knows when to stop. On her walls she has a couple of nicely framed art gallery posters and a woven rug. Nothing to get excited about either way, but a welcome change in a town where a picture of Aunt Nelly looking stern or Jesus minding the flock tend to be the wall decoration of choice.

She pours the wine and I sip it. I'm not much of a drinker, a little beer here and there, but the wine is good and I tell her so.

“I like good wine,” she says, holding her glass up to the light. “I buy it off the internet. They ship it right here so I don't have to run around finding it and hauling it home.”

“Jenny, growing up in Bobtail, how come you moved to a small place like Jarrett Creek?”

She twirls the stem of her glass, smiling a little. “I always liked Jarrett Creek. My daddy used to come over to Granger's Feed Store when he was still farming, and he'd bring me with him. I know it sounds funny, but people always seemed to be a little more modern here than in Bobtail. Even though Bobtail is bigger, it's stuck in the last century. My mamma always said folks here in Jarrett Creek thought they were up to something. Above themselves, if you know what I mean.”

“You could have gone to Houston or Austin. A lawyer can make a fine living there.”

She laughs, a big cheerful sound. “That's what people say, but the truth is those places are overrun with lawyers. You can make a good bit of money, but expenses are high and I'm just not a big city kind of girl. In case you haven't noticed, I don't exactly have the build for fashion, and I knew early on that I probably wasn't going to be one for marrying.”

“Jarrett Creek is lucky to have you,” I say.

She pours herself a little more wine and says, “Help yourself when you want more. Now, tell me if you've found out anything about that poor woman's death.”

“I wish I could tell you I had, but there's not much to go on. ” I admit to my failure in not taking seriously Dora Lee's fear about the car she saw parked out in front of her place the night she died. And about poor old Skeeter being poisoned. “Whoever did it wanted Skeeter out of the way.”

“Pure meanness,” Jenny says.

I tell her about walking the land to see if there's any sign of oil or gas. We have a laugh over Leslie Parjeter's interest in the possibility, and about him and Jackson circling the wagons to be sure I don't run off with any goods. I wind up talking about Clyde Underwood's low-ball offer for Dora Lee's land. “I wonder if you might be able to find out if there's anything special about that land,” I say. “You know people over in Bobtail at the courthouse. They may have some news.”

Jenny is looking off into the distance. “I'm trying to think what I heard recently. It seemed crazy to me, so I didn't hold it in my mind.”

I sip the good red wine and eat a piece of cheese while she ponders.

She slaps her hands together and then points at me. “A race track.”

“Horse racing?”

“Oh, good heavens, no. That, I'd have remembered. I mean like a Nascar track. You know, car racing. Some Houston outfit is thinking it might appeal to people around here.”

I picture the dust rising from cars tearing around a track out there in the pastureland, a big parking lot with hotdog and beer stands and bleachers—and money pouring into the county. I don't know a thing about car racing, but it doesn't seem crazy to imagine that land being useful for such a venture. “I guess they figure if people come here for the lake, they'll come here for car racing, too. I wonder what kind of money car race tracks bring in?”

“I'm trying to think who I heard it from. It'll come to me and I'll call and see what they know.”

“With what you're telling me, I think it's probably time for me to have a talk with Clyde Underwood.”

“Lord, I hate to think somebody would kill that old woman for her land.”

“Greed makes people do terrible things,” I say. “But I'm thinking Underwood wouldn't have had to kill her to get that land. He could have offered her a little more to get her to go along with selling the place.”

“People get funny about land,” she says. “Maybe he'd had a conversation with Dora Lee, and she had turned him down flat.”

“Could be. I know nothing about Underwood. Maybe he's all kinds of crooked. Might be a good thing for me to go to San Antonio and nose around, find out what he was up to.”

Jenny smirks at me. “See, I knew you'd be the man to do this investigating.”

“Well, I haven't gotten anywhere yet.”

Then I go into telling her a little bit about Caroline's past. She watches me, her eyes calculating.

“She's a good-looking woman,” Jenny says. “Maybe got used to a better life, and now she's down and out. What's the chances she asked her mamma for help and when Dora Lee turned her down, she got mad and used a knife on her?”

I squirm a little. I don't like the idea that Caroline might have done that to her own mamma, but I can't rule it out. Something runs deep in Caroline that I haven't begun to work out. But all I say is, “I'll have to think about that.”

Jenny has been on social time with me, and all of a sudden she's got the eagle-eyed lawyer look about her. “She's the kind of woman that can blind a man to her shenanigans.”

I rear back. “I'm a pretty good judge of character.”

“I'm just saying what I know from a woman's standpoint. A certain kind of woman says things and does things that another woman sees right off are tricky. But if you tell a man what you sense, the man wants to protect her. That's what Caroline's like.”

I remember Maddie Hicks saying how wild Caroline was back in the day, and I recognize how quick I've been to protect Caroline from the women of Jarrett Creek and even from her own relatives. And although I don't really want to admit it, I also think about Caroline's seductive ways. “I'll take that under advisement. Could be you're right. That doesn't mean she killed her mamma.”

Jenny cocks an eyebrow at me and shakes her head, in that way women have of saying, “Men! What can you do with them?”

We have a laugh over it. We gossip a little about the Baptist ladies, who are always generous with their funeral spread, but who expect to make a little money for the church for their trouble.

I walk back over to my house and am surprised to see that Caroline's car is not back. It's ten o'clock and I can't imagine what she's got to talk to the Parjeters about so late. For a second I imagine her lying dead out there, the Parjeters having swarmed on her like
Lord of the Flies
.

Inside, I start to get undressed, and then in a stroke of insight, I know exactly where to find Caroline. I sit on the side of the bed with my boots off. I rub my feet. They don't want to go back into the boots, and I want to get into bed. But neither of us is going to get our way.

 

At night the Two Dog looks better than it does in the daytime, because the shine from the blue neon lights hides the shabby parts. But it still doesn't look good. The building sags on one side, making it look like a heavy wind could tip it over.

I park my truck next to Caroline's beat-up car and heave myself out. My boots crunch on the gravel that's scattered over the hard-packed ground. Two other cars are here, one of them Rodell's. I pause at the door, thinking about what Jenny said about men protecting a certain kind of woman, and wonder if I should just leave Caroline here.

Inside, a stranger is sitting on one of the stools watching Caroline, who is in a clench doing a slow dance with Rodell. His hand is gripping Caroline's butt, pulling her close in. The song on the jukebox is a country-and-western number I never heard before.

The stranger is most likely on the road between Houston and Austin. There's no good direct route between the two cities, and the highway that runs through Jarrett Creek is as good as any other for getting back and forth. Oscar keeps the Two Dog solvent on money from men who stop here to fortify themselves for the final run to one of the two cities. This traveler is enjoying the show Caroline and Rodell are putting on, looking like a hound with a bitch close by. His eyes are little and his mouth slack. I go over and park myself on the stool next to him and ask Oscar for a beer.