Long Upon the Land (18 page)

Daddy said he’d wanted to kill Joby Earp.
Would
have killed him if people hadn’t pulled him off. But Joby Earp had almost killed the woman Daddy had fallen in love with. No one was suggesting anything similar for Vick Earp.

(“
But let us not forget that whoever killed him knew his fixation on the land his grandfather had lost and was familiar enough with the place to dump his body there
,” said my mental preacher, who has a way of remembering unpleasant truths.)

(“
Haywood? Don’t be silly
,” said the pragmatist from the other side of my brain. “
Haywood would have left him where it happened, not driven him all the way out to the farm.
”)

(“
And what if he was killed there, not driven there?
” said the preacher.)

Before I could panic over that thought, I remembered the cat. And the fact that blood from both of them had been found in the truck bed.

Everything seemed to indicate that the murder had taken place in Cotton Grove. The truck had been used to dump the body and then driven back.

Why?

Because the killer needed to get back to his own vehicle?

So we needed someone who knew him, someone who needed to move the body and who also knew about Black Gum Branch.

Joby Earp?

Dwight said there had been hostility between the two of them, mitigated by Joby’s wife, who was like a mother to Vick and his brother Tyler. He certainly knew the lanes that crisscrossed the farm. His wife was his alibi, but Dwight said she was so firmly under his thumb that she’d probably say anything he wanted.

And what about Tyler Earp?

He’d shot up Vick’s pickup and was angry because he was owed money for a paint job that was never going to be paid. He knew the farm and while I wasn’t sure exactly where he lived in relation to where the truck was found, Cotton Grove’s not that big. He might could have walked home from the murder site if his own truck wasn’t nearby. His roommate said that they’d been together all night and into midmorning, and that Tyler had passed out in front of the TV. But the roommate had been drinking, too. Would he have heard Tyler leave and return?

Which brought me to Vick’s wife, Rosalee. Dwight only had her word for when Vick hit her or that he was still alive when she left. She certainly knew about Black Gum Branch. Had parked there when they were courting and picnicked there over the years. Again, I didn’t know how far the Earp house was from the railroad track, but if she was on foot, surely someone would have seen her because it was still daylight when she got to her cousin’s house.

The cousin? Marisa Young? She told Dwight that she’d doctored Rosalee’s cuts and bruises and put her to bed. Would she have been angry enough on her cousin’s behalf to go looking for Vick, kill him, and then dispose of his truck? She and Tyler had picnicked out there at Black Gum Branch, so she knew the spot. But Rosalee could alibi her for the first part of Friday night and then again Saturday morning. On the other hand, if she’d given Rosalee a sleeping pill…?

So who did that leave?

What about the neighbor who shared a cat with Rosalee Earp? Rusty Somebody-or-other? What if she saw Vick trying to kill her cat and just grabbed up the first thing at hand to stop him? But was she familiar with the farm?

The main problem in all of this, so far as I could see, was that there was no knowing when or where the blow that killed him had been delivered. Dr. Singh said he’d been hit three times, but he hadn’t actually died until shortly before Daddy found him. All that blood in the truck bed certainly indicated that he hadn’t died immediately. He could have been hit hours before he was found or only minutes. By the time the truck was located, the blood had been baked dry by the August sun.

We were now entering Cotton Grove on Old Forty-eight. A few blocks in, Dwight put on his turn signal and soon he had pulled into the driveway of a small neat brick house. I followed him up the drive and around to the back.

M
arisa Young’s front yard was narrow but quite deep. Undeveloped woods were on the left of a long graveled driveway that led to a turnaround at the back between an unexpectedly spacious porch and a small one-car garage. Two vehicles were parked back there, a Toyota sedan and an SUV with a bicycle rack on the back. Both were packed with cardboard boxes. The garage door was rolled up and two middle-aged women were toiling there, stacking boxes on the floor. A bicycle hung on hooks at the back of the garage.

Dwight got out of Vick Earp’s truck and I joined him in the shade of the nearest tree. The humid heat of the late afternoon was like a sauna.

According to Mother and Aunt Zell, their mother had been impervious to heat. “Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow” was her mantra. Right now, I was glowing like one of my neon signs. That stalled cold front couldn’t get here fast enough for me.

I had never met the sturdily built woman who wore khaki slacks and a loose black blouse with three-quarter sleeves and black sneakers, but the smaller woman, dressed in blue denim shorts and a coral tank top, had a familiar face, and I knew she must be Rosalee Earp, the woman who had petitioned me for a restraining order against her husband last year after he left her bruised and battered. There was a scab on her chin from where he’d hit her Friday last week, but the bruises on her arm were almost gone and her black eye was fading, too.

She seemed to recognize me, and came forward with a smile that carried a tinge of sadness when Dwight introduced me.

“I’m so sorry about your husband,” I said. A platitude I know, but what else can you say in a situation like this?

“Thank you,” she said. “You warned me that he might hurt me really bad someday. We didn’t know that he’d be the one to get hurt.”

“My husband tells me that you and your cousin are going to live together now?”

“For the time being. We may wind up moving to the D.C. area. That’s where my daughters are. It would be nice to live closer to them and they’ll never come back to Cotton Grove.” She gestured to the boxes. “I won’t unpack my things until we decide.”

She called to the other woman. “Marisa. Come meet Judge Knott.”

We murmured pleasantries to each other and we both mopped perspiration from our faces as Dwight gave Earp’s keys back to Mrs. Earp. I was ready to get back in the truck—Dwight’s air-conditioned truck—but he wanted to go over a few details with the women again and Mrs. Earp suggested we go onto the porch where she had a pitcher of freshly made iced tea.

The porch was screened on three sides, shaded by oaks and made more bearable by a large paddle fan in the ceiling. The tea was icy cold and lightly sugared, just the way I like it. I drained the glass in a few greedy gulps and said, “Oh yes, please” when offered a refill.

“You’re a bird-watcher?” I asked Miss Young, sipping my second glass more slowly.

A rhetorical question. Suet cages hung from the eaves of the house and I saw nuthatches, tufted titmice, and a downy woodpecker perch to feed. Hummingbirds darted in and out and hovered over the little red plastic flowers on at least a half-dozen nectar tubes and no sooner had we come inside, than towhees, wrens, and brown thrashers lined up to splash in the two large concrete birdbaths set amid the flower beds that rimmed the porch. A decorative cardinal carved from stone perched on a low post by the porch steps.

“In this hot weather, I have to fill the birdbaths twice a day,” said Miss Young. “I thought the rain would cool us off but today feels even worse.”

“Did you find Vick’s wallet, Major Bryant?” asked Mrs. Earp. “He got paid every other Friday and he would have had a couple of hundred dollars in cash on him.”

“Sorry,” Dwight said. “There was nothing in his pockets except a few coins.”

“Don’t worry, Rosy,” her cousin said. “Rusty said she’d help you switch his bank account over to your name and I’ll lend you as much as you need.”

“There’s so much to think about and do,” Mrs. Earp said wanly and I nodded, thinking of the many legal hoops my cousin Sally has jumped through after Aunt Rachel died this spring.

“You mentioned Mrs. Reynolds,” said Dwight. “How did your husband get along with her?”

“Rusty? Fine, I guess. Not that she ever came over except to ask about Diesel. Vick and her husband didn’t take to each other the one time they met. If it hadn’t been for the cat, Rusty and I probably wouldn’t have become friends.” She sighed. “Poor Diesel. I guess we’ll never know what happened to him.”

“Did she ever picnic with you out at Black Gum Branch?” Dwight asked.

“No.”

“What about your other neighbors? He ever have any disagreements with them?”

She shook her head. “I told you. Vick was a loner and I quit trying to change that. It was easier just to keep to ourselves.”

It sounded like a bleak life to me, but maybe she had friends at work.

Our tea glasses were leaving small puddles on the table and she handed us some paper napkins, which the overhead fan promptly blew to the floor while I scrambled to catch them.

She looked up at the fan. “I can’t reach the chain, Marisa. Could you turn it down a notch?”

Dwight said, “Let me,” but Miss Young was already standing. When she reached up for it, the loose sleeve of her blouse slipped back and I saw a large bruise on her upper arm.

“You got quite a knock there,” I said.

She hastily pulled her sleeve into place. “Yeah, I banged it when we were moving the boxes yesterday.”

Mrs. Earp looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Marisa. Was it when we moved that chest?”

Now I can’t claim any great insight or
aha!
moment, but I’ve seen enough battered women to know about bruises and this one was not acquired yesterday. Why would she lie about it? Unless…?

“Are you sure it was only yesterday?” I asked. “To me, it looks as old as Mrs. Earp’s bruises. Like you got it about ten days ago.”

“I—I fell,” she said. “You’re right. That one’s from last week.”

“May I see?” Dwight asked politely.

She tried to bluff her way out of it, but with all three of us looking at her now, she pushed her sleeves up and there were fading bruises on both arms. “I took a tumble out there in the yard. No big deal.”

Dwight wasn’t buying it. “The thermometer’s been stuck near a hundred all week, yet every time I’ve seen you, you’ve had on long sleeves. Why’ve you been hiding those bruises, Miss Young?”

She looked stricken but didn’t answer.

“Marisa?” said her cousin. “Did Vick come over here that night?”

There was a long silence, then all the starch went out of her and she nodded.

“I thought he was going to kill me. I didn’t have a choice. Honest! It was self-defense.”

“Self-defense?” Dwight asked skeptically. “Then why didn’t you call the police?”

“Because I wasn’t sure!”

“Not sure?” Mrs. Earp moved her chair closer to her cousin and made her take a swallow of her tea. “What happened, Marisa?”

“He did come here,” Miss Young said. “About ten-thirty. You were sound asleep, Rosy, but I was still so riled up I couldn’t sleep. It had cooled off a little, so I put on the yard lights and went out to deadhead the flowers. I was about to come inside when he drove up. He was so drunk he could hardly walk and I told him to leave or I’d get my gun. I thought he was walking back around to get in his truck when all of a sudden, he reached into the bed and threw Diesel at me. I was shocked and didn’t know at first if he was dead or alive. When I bent down to pick him up, Vick kicked me. Hard. I thought he’d broken my arm, it hurt so bad.”

She touched the spot where the toe of his boot had landed.

“He came at me again and I grabbed up that stone cardinal and smashed the side of his head and he went down like a rock. Blood all over his face.”

“Oh, Marisa, honey!” Mrs. Earp said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I wasn’t thinking straight, Rosy, and my arm hurt so bad I almost cried. I went in the kitchen to make an ice pack for it and to try to think what to do. I was going to call 911,” she told Dwight. “Honest. But before I could get back to the yard, I heard the truck start up and he was gone. So I thought maybe I hadn’t hurt him as bad as it looked and by next morning, before you came, I thought he must be okay or we would have heard something.”

“You’re sure that’s what happened, Miss Young?” Dwight said. “You didn’t put him in the bed of the truck with your bicycle and take him out to where he was found, then hide the truck and pedal back here?”

“What?
No!
My bicycle’s had a broken chain since June. I was waiting for cooler weather to take it in to get fixed.”

“She’s telling the truth, Major,” Mrs. Earp said. “We haven’t ridden in ages.”

“You have a bicycle, too?”

She nodded. “Didn’t you see it in the tool shed? Behind the mower?”

Clearly he hadn’t and I could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to make sense of two bikes and come up with an alternate theory that might involve her.

“Diesel?” asked Mrs. Earp.

Miss Young pointed to the birdbath at the end of the porch. “He was dead, Rosy. I buried him in the flower bed there. Underneath the zinnias.” She straightened her shoulders and faced him squarely. “Am I under arrest, Major Bryant?”

“Not until we figure out who dumped his body and drove his truck back to Cotton Grove. But you’ll have to come in and sign a statement.”

“Do I need to bring a lawyer with me?”

“Up to you, ma’am,” he said. “You’ve already told us your story in front of witnesses, though.”

Okay, I’ll admit it. As we headed out of town, I was rather pleased with myself for having noticed Marisa Young’s bruise, which cleared up the mystery of the cat and maybe eliminated one suspect, but I’d barely begun to crow when Dwight’s phone rang. He had it on speaker mode, so I heard Cotton Grove’s no-nonsense police chief come straight to the point.

“You still looking for that red pickup, Major?”

“No, some kid found it down by the railroad tracks. Why?”

“I’ve got a couple here who say they saw it on their way out of town on the evening of the eighth. Wasn’t that the night of the murder?”

“Sometime between six-thirty that night and midmorning the next day.”

“Well, this was around eleven.”

“And they waited till now to speak up?”

“As I said, they were on their way out of town, heading up to Richmond to stay with their daughter for a few days after their first grandbaby got itself born. They just got back yesterday and started catching up on the
Clarion
—all the obituaries. You know how some old people are. Want to make sure they haven’t missed somebody’s funeral. Anyhow, they saw the appeal for any sightings of that truck, so they came in.”

“They’re still there? I’ll be right over. Any more details?”

“It was stopped near a Lincoln Town Car with a flat tire. He thinks it was black, she says it was dark green. And there were two men. One was waving a wrench at the other one. Tall and fat and wearing a porkpie hat. The other guy was shorter.”

My heart stopped. There are lots of tall fat men around, but how many of them would be driving a dark green Lincoln Town Car with a porkpie hat on his head?

Haywood?