The Old Buzzard Had It Coming (17 page)

“Is Scott going to be at your ma’s for dinner?” she asked Shaw.

“I think his folks are going to Ma’s house, so I expect Scott will be there with Hattie and the boys. Why? Are you expecting to pick his brain again?”

“I’m planning to try,” she confessed.

Chapter Twelve

By late Monday morning, Shaw was long gone from the house, out in the fields with the livestock, hauling feed to them, making sure their ponds and water tanks weren’t frozen over, checking the herds for signs of illness, injury or stress. Alafair and her helper Georgie had left the wash flapping on the line, and Alafair was on her own until dinnertime. She took an empty flour sack and a scoop to the root cellar and scooped a couple of cups of pecans from the big bag in the corner next to the bottom of the steps. The nuts had been curing in the cellar at the side of the house since the family had gathered them from the ground under the trees in Shaw’s mother’s pecan grove the previous November. She took the nuts back into the house and sat by the window in her rocking chair. She sat rocking nervously, stopping occasionally to chafe her hands, as she stared down the drive toward the gate and cracked and picked out pecans into a bowl in her lap, while her mind was otherwise engaged.

While she was at her mother-in-law’s for Sunday dinner, she had tried to talk to Scott about her conversation with Mrs. Lang, but she had been unable to make any headway with him. She was never sure if he was taking her seriously or simply humoring her when she told him of her suspicions. He did tell her that he had investigated both the Langs and the Millars, but he didn’t tell her what he had found out. She had expected him to tell her to mind her own business, but he had seemed more amused at her questions than annoyed.

In spite of a banked fire burning in the kitchen stove, and a good coal fire going in the pot belly stove in the parlor, the house was chilly. It was February, now, and spring couldn’t come fast enough for Alafair. Winters in Oklahoma weren’t as relentless as the winters she had experienced growing up in the Arkansas mountains, but even so, the weather alternated almost day to day from false spring to arctic blast, and a body never had time to get used to one or the other. It was a wonder, she thought, that they all hadn’t died of pneumonia long ago.

She was worried that if John Lee showed up too late, they wouldn’t have time to search the creek bank for Harley’s still, and still get back home in time for her to fix dinner without alerting Shaw that she had been out. Therefore, she was most relieved to see John Lee trudging up the drive toward the house just before eleven o’clock. She carried the bowl of cracked pecans back into the kitchen and pulled on her winter wear in time to meet him by the front gate.

“Good morning, son,” she greeted. “You made it in good time. Have you already managed to get into town to see your mother?”

John Lee snatched the stocking cap off of his head before he spoke to her. “Good morning, Miz Tucker. Yes, ma’am, I’ve been and gone already. Her and the sheriff’s deputy are on their way to Muskogee right now. Ma is in fairly good spirits. As long as she thinks we’re all going to be taken care of, she don’t seem very concerned with what happens to her.” They began to walk around the house and into the woods at the back of the yard, toward Phoebe’s secret access to the Day property. “I have a pretty good idea where Daddy was set up before he died,” John Lee interjected. “It shouldn’t take us more than fifteen, twenty minutes to get there. Anyway,” he continued, “I told Mama that I didn’t think she really did the deed, and that she was just helping the real culprit get away. She told me that she did do it, too, and besides she’d just as soon that this all be over and us kids can start our new lives.”

“But you still think it wasn’t her,” Alafair said.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think it was. I think she just saw the opportunity to confess and make this all be over with, and she done it. I’ll tell you, ma’am, I think she’s got it in her head that this way she can make up for not standing up to him all these years and putting us kids through it.”

“Well, that’s just crazy,” Alafair opined.

John Lee shrugged. “That ain’t all, I’m thinkin’. I expect she really believes that I did it, and she thinks she’s protecting me, and making it up to me, as well.” He looked over at Alafair, his black eyes hard with determination. “That’s why we’ve got to find out who really done it, and quick, because I don’t want my own mother thinking I’m a killer, even if it’s of such a low critter as my father.”

Alafair stared at him, taken aback. John Lee moved ahead of her to lead her through the trees as they neared the creek bank. The crunch of their feet on the carpet of brittle leaves was magnified by the papery rustle of the wind through the pin oak leaves that still hung on the trees. “Do you have some notion of who the culprit is, John Lee?” she asked his back, at length.

“I have two or three notions, Miz Tucker,” he said, as he held a blackjack branch aside for her, “though they’re just guesses. Pa was such a nasty piece of work that I’m sure there are a dozen folks who would welcome the opportunity to do him in. When we got to talking about the still, it reminded me that Daddy had got in some kind of a scrape with Jim Leonard over the last batch of ’shine he sold him. Seems Mr. Leonard didn’t think highly of the quality of the batch and didn’t want to pay. I heard them going at it down here a couple of weeks ago, while I was at the pond, them a’yelling and all. They took a couple of swings at one another. Daddy had a scrape on his cheek that evening, anyway. Daddy always met his customers down here on the creek, at the place where that willow hangs over the water and the bank is undercut. Lots of roots there for stashing quart jars.”

“You said you thought your daddy was headed for the still on that last night you saw him alive,” Alafair remembered.

“Yes, ma’am, the still or the willow root stash, though I don’t know it for sure. It’s just that his stash in the barn was low, and that’s his usual way of doing things.”

They were walking along the creek bank, now, their feet squishing and sliding along the wet, half-decomposed brown leaves that lay thick next to the water. A coating of very black mud was clinging to the bottoms of Alafair’s shoes, which didn’t help her footing any. The creek was running, but a thin skin of ice had formed up next to the bank. Alafair reached out and grabbed the back of John Lee’s coat in her fist to steady herself as they picked their way along.

“So you’re considering old Jim Leonard,” Alafair observed. “Take a look at how black this mud is. You father’s body was covered in black mud just like this. Maybe him and Leonard met that night and got into it again, and maybe old Jim followed him back to the house, all stealthy, and saw him lay down drunk beside the house.”

“Then finished him where he lay with the gun he ran across in the woods. Yes, ma’am. It’s worth finding out.”

Alafair cocked her head as she thought about it. Stranger things had happened. Jim Leonard was a nondescript enough person when he was sober, but he was a pretty unpleasant drunk. “You said you had two or three prospects,” Alafair reminded John Lee.

She saw his head nod. “Yes, ma’am. I was also thinking about Mr. Lang, the grain merchant. He was supposed to come out to the farm Wednesday afternoon and give Daddy what for, but he never made it. I expect he got busy that day. It was a real sloppy, dreary day, I remember. Daddy didn’t have no love for Mr. Lang, I’ll tell you. He sort of had it in for anybody with money, anybody respectable, don’t you know. He always went out of his way to provoke Mr. Lang, and as nice as Mr. Lang has always been to me, I think he has something of a temper. Once or twice I thought he’d have a hissy fit while trying to deal with Daddy. There was that business with Dan, too. Mr. Lang was mighty put out with Daddy for the way he treated Dan.”

“You know, I considered Mr. Lang myself,” Alafair admitted. “Your mama mentioned that he was supposed to come by and never made it. I even went by the office and spoke to him. He says he started out to see you, but his buggy skidded into a ditch at the crossroads.”

“Really?” John Lee exclaimed, interested. “It could be he went ahead and walked on out here, since he was nearer here than to town. It would be right on his way to cut across the back there where I dropped that gun. He’d have been a lot later than he expected to be, and probably in a pretty bad mood. And then after all that to find the no-good crook passed out all stinking drunk and revolting….”

“That’s the story I concocted, more or less,” Alafair told him. “And it’s one story would be easy enough to check, when he left town to come out here on Wednesday, whether he came back late and disheveled. Somebody would have seen.”

“Mr. Turner would know the when and wherefores of the horse and buggy,” John Lee noted.

“I’ll ask him when next I have the chance.”

John Lee turned and took Alafair’s mittened hand in his own in order to help her over a slim fallen tree. “I’ll be in town this evening,” he said. “I’ll ask him.”

Alafair gathered her skirt in her free hand to keep it from snagging on stray branches and stepped over the log. “Perhaps that’s best,” she acknowledged. “I’d just as soon my husband didn’t know how deep I am involved in this.”

“Not to mention Phoebe,” John Lee agreed.

“Not to mention.”

John Lee turned to take the lead down the path, and Alafair fell into step behind him. “You know,” she said to his back, “speaking of Dan Lang, did you ever wonder whether Dan might have done Harley in?”

John Lee kept walking, but Alafair saw his spine stiffen before he answered. “No, I can’t imagine that he’d have shot Daddy. He’d never done anything to cause Maggie Ellen to think less of him.”

“Maybe he thought just the opposite,” she speculated, “that she’d get wind of what happened and admire him for it.”

John Lee shook his head. “No. I’d hate to think Dan was a killer.”

“Do you know where Dan was that night?” she persisted. She was going to tell him that Dan had been riding around in the dark, ostensibly looking for his father, but John Lee responded before she got the chance.

“Not anywhere around here,” he said, firmly dismissing this line of thinking.

They had reached the old willow, hanging precariously over the creek. The bank had been undercut by the current, washing the soil away from the tree’s roots, which dangled in the water. Some day in the not too distant future, the creek would completely undermine the willow, and it would fall. But until that day, the bare, washed-out roots created a perfect little complex of hidden storage compartments, practically invisible to the casual passerby. John Lee squatted down and ran his hand under the overhung bank. After a couple of minutes of feeling around, he sat back on his heels and stared thoughtfully across the water.

“Empty,” he pronounced. “Last time I was down here, just a day or two before he died, there was a couple of gallon jugs and maybe a dozen quart jars.”

“You think somebody cleaned him out?”

John Lee looked up at her. “I reckon. I’ve got Jim Leonard on my mind, but Daddy did business with several of the less respectable types around here, and I imagine there’s any number of folks would have thought of his cache when they heard that he was dead.”

“So where is this still?” Alafair wondered.

John Lee stood and brushed himself off absently. “He moved it around, like I said. But he usually used one of about three or four places here on the property that was suitable. I kind of liked to know where it was, so I’d come down here once a week or so to see if I could spot it. He was a pretty good hider, and you could practically trip over it when he had it hid. He’d cover it up with brush and such when he wasn’t cooking with it.”

Alafair grunted appreciatively. A good working still was a fair sized operation, and had to be run at night, if you didn’t want to be betrayed by the steam. Hiding one was not the easiest proposition.

John Lee pointed through the brush. “Last I saw the thing, it was over this way.” He started walking east along the bank with Alafair right behind him. He left the path that had been beaten down by many feet following along the creek, and ducked into the tangle of dormant limbs. Once again, Alafair had to grab the back of his coat, this time to keep from getting lost in the dense undergrowth. Alafair lost her sense of direction in about ten seconds flat, but John Lee seemed to know where he was going. He crashed through the woods purposefully while Alafair covered her face with her arm to protect her eyes from slashing branches and hung on for dear life. In less than five minutes they broke through into a small overhung clearing, where John Lee stopped abruptly and Alafair crashed into his back. He looked back at her over his shoulder. “This here is the place, Miz Tucker,” he told her.

Alafair blinked and looked around. She saw a small, roomlike clearing that had been created when a large pin oak had fallen. Dead branches and leaf litter were at least ankle deep, and the surrounding trees had filled in with their limbs overhead, effectively creating a leafy roof ten feet up. It was a neat little hidey-hole. But there was no still to be seen.

Before she could question him, John Lee had begun tossing aside man-sized dead limbs from one end of the clearing, exposing bricks, a cauldron, copper tubing….

“Well, I’ll be!” Alafair exclaimed. “I could have stood right on it and not found it! I can’t even figure out how you found it again yourself.”

John Lee, who was studying the still with his hands on his hips and his feet planted apart, shrugged. “Like I said, Daddy tended to use the same two or three spots. I’ve been here plenty of times.” He squatted down, eyed the apparatus for a minute, then dug his hand into the ash pile under the makeshift brick fireplace. “These ashes are warm,” he said.