The Old Buzzard Had It Coming (12 page)

“Well, I’ve got to, darlin’, can’t you see?”

“Please don’t, Mama,” Phoebe pleaded with a vehemence that startled Alafair. “Not yet, anyway. Not until we find some way to prove that John Lee couldn’t possibly have done this awful thing.”

“Honey, you know your daddy and I don’t keep things from one another.” Not things of such monumental importance, anyway, she added to herself.

“I’m just asking you to hold off telling him for a little while. If Daddy finds out now, before we can clear John Lee, he’ll turn him in. And once Cousin Scott has him, it’ll just be too tempting to say that he’s surely the one who did it, and leave off looking for the truth.”

Alafair had not missed Phoebe’s assertion that
we
could clear John Lee, and she smiled. The girl might have a grown-up life of her own, now, but she still depended on her mother with unconscious ease. I should encourage her to talk the boy into giving himself up right now, she thought. Then he’d be safe and warm and well fed while
they
went about the business of clearing him. If, in fact, he could be cleared. Alafair wasn’t as sure of John Lee’s innocence as Phoebe seemed to be. The way things now stood, Phoebe was implicated, perhaps as an accessory to murder. Right and proper behavior and legalities now all stood a distant second to Alafair’s need to protect her daughter. There was no way in the world she was going to turn that boy in until she had unshakable proof that Phoebe was not involved in any way with the murder.

“All right,” she said briskly. “But I think we need to find someplace to hide John Lee other than in that soddie. Your daddy goes out that way too often, and you can never tell when one of the other kids might get a notion to play there. Besides, Scott and Trent will get to searching the vicinity pretty quick now, and that hay store is just too obvious. Let me ponder on it tonight.”

Phoebe nearly swooned with relief. “Oh, Mama, thank you,” she sighed.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Alafair warned her. “If I find out that John Lee did it, I have no intention of helping him escape punishment.”

“No, no,” Phoebe gushed. “You won’t have to worry about that, Ma. Oh, thank you, thank you.”

Phoebe’s total belief in John Lee’s innocence made Alafair feel a little better. “Get a hold of yourself, now. Tell you what. You make up a sandwich with that leftover roast pork and you and me can take it out there to him in a bit, while everybody’s getting ready for bed.” Phoebe’s head was nodding wildly. “Right now we’ve got to get back in there before they come looking for us,” Alafair continued. “But before we’re done with this, you have to promise me that you will not go out there to see that boy without me along. Otherwise, I’m telling your daddy this minute.”

Phoebe promised on her life.

***

Alafair had a side word with Shaw as the children were readying for bed. What she told him was the truth, though not the whole truth. She implied to the bewildered father that she was offering counsel and comfort to a girl teetering on the edge of heartbreak, and that mother and daughter intended to step outside for a little walk and a heart to heart before sleeping. Shaw had no reason to find this suspicious, having lived through several girlish traumas in the twenty years he had had daughters. He did offer the opinion that it was too dang cold to go traipsing around outside in the dark, but after Alafair pointed out to him with some asperity that there was not a corner of the house that was beyond eight sets of prying ears, he admitted that she was correct. She comforted him by promising that they would go to the barn for a bit.

When Alafair and Phoebe finally left the house, bundled to the eyes and clutching food and drink under their coats, it was pitch dark and bitingly cold. They made their way to the soddie with a detour through the barn, because Alafair had said they were going to the barn, and she did what she said. When they reached the soddie, Alafair paused by the door and drew Phoebe over to her.

“I don’t want you telling him anything about what Doctor Addison found, Phoebe,” she warned the girl. “In fact, don’t be talking to him about his father’s murder at all, or about what’s going to happen. You leave that to me.”

“But I can talk to him?” Phoebe asked anxiously.

“Sure you can. I’ll even let you two alone for a few minutes before we go back to the house, if you promise to do as I ask.”

“You know I’ll do whatever you say, Mama,” Phoebe assured her.

John Lee was sitting on a bale of hay in his little cubicle, obviously waiting for them. He stood when Alafair squeezed herself through the opening in the bales. “Hello, son,” she greeted. She reached back through to relieve Phoebe of the lantern, and was holding the light high when Phoebe popped into view, so she had a clear and unobstructed view of John Lee’s face.

The greeting he was about to give Alafair died on his lips when Phoebe appeared, and the look of absolute adoration that came into his eyes when he saw her daughter startled Alafair. Oh, she had known beforehand that she had a problem on her hands with Phoebe’s affection for John Lee. But in one moment of insight, she realized that these two children loved one another with the kind of love that would wither them if it were thwarted. She swallowed.

“Phoebe, I’m glad to see you,” John Lee managed.

“Oh, John Lee, me too,” Phoebe breathed.

Alafair cleared her throat ostentatiously, and both youngsters looked at her, abashed. “Well, John Lee, I’m glad to see you’re still here,” she said.

His eyes widened in mild surprise. “Well, I said I’d stay here ’til I heard from you, Miz Tucker,” he noted.

She smiled. “So you did. And you’ve managed to keep from freezing, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. He was trying to look at Alafair, but his eyes kept straying to Phoebe against his will. “I sleep mostly during the day. Got plenty of quilts and the hay is a good insulator. I jump around a lot at night. It ain’t so bad. Worst thing is the boredom, that and not knowing what’s going on with my ma and the kids. I’d have asked for some books, you know, to practice my reading, but it’s too dim in here for that. I just been weaving things out of straw.” He reached down behind his sleeping nest and proffered a couple of little straw dolls, deftly woven.

Alafair took one and examined it. “Pretty good,” she admitted. “Best not to be idle.”

“Do you have some news for me, Miz Tucker?” John Lee asked, managing with some effort to control the anxiety in his voice.

Alafair glanced at Phoebe, who had as yet made no attempt to say anything. “Well, first of all,” Alafair began, “your ma and the kids are fine, though worried about you, of course. We heard that your daddy was definitely shot in the head with a small caliber bullet out of a small pistol, but they aren’t sure whether that was what killed him or the cold.”

John Lee’s eyebrows rose. “The head,” he repeated. A large puff of steamy breath escaped him, and he sat back down heavily on his bale of hay. “So I didn’t kill my daddy after all,” he murmured.

“It is not at all clear,” Alafair pointed out firmly. But he looked back up at her with a face suffused with relief.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t mean I’m proved innocent. But now I know I’m innocent.”

“You could be, son. But we’ve got to have proof. Now listen carefully, and tell me the truth. What did you do with that pistol after you shot at your father?”

The big black eyes, now suffused with the light of hope, widened at her question. “I threw it down, Miz Tucker, right there in the woods, by the hillock where we was sitting. It’s lying there still, I imagine.”

“You’d better hope so, boy, because if it is, and if it still has one bullet in it, then that means you didn’t shoot your daddy while he lay beside the house. If it isn’t there, then somebody came along and picked it up and probably used it to kill Harley, and that somebody could easily have been you.”

“Or me,” Phoebe interjected. “We’re the only two who knew it was there.”

“No,” Alafair and John Lee said at once, and Phoebe almost laughed.

“I’m glad y’all have such faith in me,” she admitted, “but the law could see it that way.”

“Miz Tucker,” John Lee said firmly, “I think we’re agreed that we got to keep Phoebe out of this.”

Phoebe started to protest, but Alafair cut her off. “Oh, we’re agreed, John Lee. Question is, can we? We haven’t got much time, is the problem. One more day, maybe two. I think me and Phoebe better go over to your place tomorrow and hunt for that pistol.”

“I can show you right where,” John Lee told her.

Alafair shook her head. “No, you don’t stir a foot out of here ’til I tell you. It’s too dangerous for you to go hotfooting it all over the county, and you being hunted. Phoebe can show me where you all were.”

“What about school?” Phoebe wondered.

Alafair sighed. “I guess you’ll be sick again tomorrow,” she said.

***

That night, Alafair dreamed she was running toward town with the baby in her arms. She could feel the life going out of him, and she could hear a voice screaming in fear and desperation. She knew it was herself screaming, but she didn’t have time to consider the fact because she had to run….

***

It was close to seven o’clock the next morning when Alafair and Phoebe finally were left alone and began their trek on foot through the fields and stands of pin oak to come up to the Day farm. Phoebe was a competent guide, having long ago figured the best way to get onto the neighboring homestead unseen. They crawled under the barbed wire fence, holding the bottom strand up for each other, and crossed over onto the Day place into a good sized grove of trees, their dried brown leaves like butcher paper shussing in the winter breeze, black boles standing out against a gray sky, and half melted streaks of white snow outlining the ground. They automatically fell silent when they entered the Day property, and picked their way warily through the trees. Alafair could see the back of the barn through the trees when Phoebe took her hand and halted her on top of a small mound just at the edge of the woods.

“This is where we were,” Phoebe said in a voice just above a whisper. She bent down and picked up something off the ground. “See, here’s the book I brought him, laying right here where I dropped it when Mr. Day surprised us.” She handed the wet and ruined book to her mother, who looked down at it thoughtfully for a moment before eyeing her surroundings. It was a good place for a tryst. They could see out, but it would be difficult to see two lovers hunkered down in the trees with their heads together. She shook her head. How could a falling-down drunk have surprised two healthy young people? They had been reading, they said, engrossed in the book, or more likely, in each other. Oh, Alafair remembered how it was. An elephant could have charged them, ears all aflap, and they wouldn’t have noticed it ’til they were trampled. Day had grabbed Phoebe by the arm, jerked her up. That’s what they had said. Alafair could envision it. Phoebe would have screamed, the boy would have leaped up and shoved his father away. Then what? A blindly inebriated man, insane with drink, mad with rage, numb to pain, flails out at his son like he had a hundred times before. Beats him, blackens his eye. At first, the boy is inclined to take it, like he had a hundred times before, simply out of habit. But something new is added. Phoebe. Besides being shamed before his love, he knows that if he doesn’t stop the man once and for all, his love may be in danger, too. His fair Phoebe, who has never known violence. She is a dream to him. Beauty and love and sanity to a boy who has known none of those things, when all the ugliness of his world suddenly bursts in and threatens it all.

He strikes back. Alafair could understand it. Faced with the loss of all that is dear to him, the boy pulls the derringer that Phoebe has given him for protection and fires.

She looked down at Phoebe, who was standing just below her on the hillock, looking up at her mother patiently. “Show me what happened,” Alafair instructed.

Phoebe nodded. “Me and John Lee were sitting right here like this.” She demonstrated by sitting down. Alafair moved down off the hillock and stood off to the side where she could take in all of Phoebe’s reenactment.

And Phoebe was quite a little actor, Alafair noted to her amazement. She watched, skeptically, to be sure, as Phoebe hopped around the clearing, playing the parts of innocent maid, evil accoster, and heroic rescuer with desperate verve. Alafair interrupted the performance periodically with questions.

“Now, did Mr. Day fall down like that right on top of you?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, he did,” Phoebe assured her. “Knocked the wind right out of me.”

“And that was right about here?”

“Yes, near as I can remember, it was right here.”

“When you and John Lee came to the house afterwards, you didn’t look much like you had been rolling around in this leaf litter, here,” Alafair noted.

Phoebe reddened. “John Lee and I hid out for a bit, like I told you, to get our breath back. Brushed each other off as best we could. John Lee picked a mess of twigs out of my hair.”

“Couldn’t disguise that black eye John Lee had, though,” Alafair observed.

“No,” Phoebe agreed with some heat. “It wasn’t the first one his daddy had given him, either.”

“Well, go on, then,” Alafair urged. “John Lee fell down right over there when Mr. Day clobbered him, and then you two struggled and fell down here. Why didn’t you run away when you had the chance?”