The Old Buzzard Had It Coming (21 page)

Josie put the steeping teapot on the table and sat herself down opposite Alafair. “You’ve got a dandy bruise on your jaw, but it looks like your head is none the worse for wear,” she observed.

Alafair sliced off a chunk of the pale winter butter and was pouring sorghum over it in her plate. “Oh, I got over that in a day,” she admitted. “I just enjoy letting the girls take care of me, though I’m getting a case of cabin fever.”

“Scott says you found the gun that killed Harley Day.”

Alafair looked up from dicing the cold butter into the sorghum with a table knife. “That I did.” She spooned the chunky butter and sorghum onto the hot bread and watched it melt into a glorious golden amalgam. “I had told Jim Leonard that I was looking for the gun by the creek, and he said something about a ‘little pop gun.’ I didn’t think anybody had told him that the gun was a derringer, and it made me suspicious.”

Josie nodded. “Seems it made Scott pretty suspicious, too, because Hattie just told me this morning that he’s asked to press charges against Jim for killing Harley.”

Alafair nearly choked on her bite of bread, which was too bad, because it was delicious. “You don’t say!” she managed, at length.

“I do say,” Josie informed her. “Seems that Scott got Jim to admit that he had found the little gun in the woods back of Harley’s place and picked it up and hid it. Scott found it right where you said it would be. He told Hattie that it was a nice, expensive little gun, and it had one bullet of the type that killed Harley still in it. So, Jim had motive and opportunity enough, Scott thinks. Hattie told me that the charges against Miz Day have been dropped, anyway. I think John Lee is picking her up from the jailhouse in Muskogee right this minute.”

Alafair put her elbow on the table and shook her head. “Well, I’ll be.”

Josie patted the table conspiratorially. “What’s this I hear about John Lee Day and Phoebe?” she asked.

Alafair opened her mouth to answer before a thought struck her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Did you say that the derringer still had one bullet in it?”

Josie nodded, perplexed. “Yes, one empty chamber and one chamber loaded with a .22 caliber bullet. Why?”

Alafair’s heart suddenly plummeted to her boots. One bullet in Harley’s head, and one bullet in the blackjack tree, and one bullet in the gun. Three bullets in a two-shot derringer. She had twisted herself in knots to keep Phoebe’s involvement in all this a secret. She should have known that the truth always comes out. Where did that third bullet come from? Did somebody reload? Or was there a second gun? She leaned back in her chair and covered her eyes with her hands.

“What is it, child?” Josie asked, alarmed.

Alafair dropped her hands into her lap and prepared to tell Josie all.

***

“I’ll be switched from here to Dallas!” Josie exclaimed, after Alafair had finished her tale. “No wonder you’ve been so interested in finding out who killed Harley Day! Well, I’m glad you finally told me, Alafair. This is quite a burden to bear all by yourself.”

“So you can see the dilemma, now, Josie,” Alafair said. “Phoebe and I found one bullet in a blackjack, which lines up with John Lee’s story about shooting at Harley and missing. There was one .22 slug in Harley’s head. Then Jim Leonard says there was still a bullet in the gun when he found it.”

“You didn’t notice if the gun was loaded when you found it at the still?”

“I didn’t think to look. I just expected it was empty.”

“Scott has the gun, and it has one bullet in it, now,” Josie pointed out. “He has to be thinking the same thing we are. Three bullets, two-shot derringer. Somebody reloaded. It’s the most likely thing.”

“Or that derringer isn’t the one that killed Harley,” Alafair speculated.

“Another gun?”

“Maybe.”

Josie crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. “Well, then, we’re back where we started. Anybody could have done it.”

Alafair’s forehead crinkled, and she sat back in her chair, trying to quiet the frantic noise in her brain. In the few moments of dead silence that followed, a thought floated up from the depths of her mind, ephemeral as a butterfly. She leaned forward, trying to grasp it. “I stopped by Zorah Millar’s just before Mary dropped me off here,” she said.

Josie blinked at this incongruous comment. “Yes?” she urged.

“She told me that before Maggie Ellen Day ran away from home, she gave the girl the means to protect herself.”

“You reckon that means she gave her a gun?”

Alafair clicked her tongue, exasperated. “That comment went right by me. I could kick myself!”

Josie waved away this superfluous comment with a flick of her fingers in the air, and got back to the point. “You’re thinking that Maggie Ellen Day might have done it. But how? She ran away a long time ago.”

“So everybody says. But did she come back? Both John Lee and Naomi told me that she planned to come back eventually to get the kids away from Harley. Maybe she did just that.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Well, it makes sense. If she was afraid of Harley, she might want to do it on the sly.”

Josie nodded. “All right, then. She sneaks back onto the farm in the middle of a snowy night, intending to spirit away some or all of the kids, and maybe her mother, too. She has her gun that her aunt gave her for protection. Then, as she gets near the house, she sees the object of her hatred lying by the house in a filthy, reeking heap, freezing to death. It’s dark, it’s cold, there’s nobody around….”

“It’s the first time she’s clapped eyes on him in a year,” Alafair continued. “All of a sudden it all comes back to her like a thunderburst, all the misery, all the humiliation. And she does it.”

“Maybe she feels real good at first,” Josie finished the tale, “but then it dawns on her what she’s done, and she runs like a turkey.”

“It makes sense,” Alafair said, excited. “It makes sense!”

“Now, don’t go getting all het up,” Josie cautioned. “I admit it fits with what we know, but we’re just guessing, here. Maybe Maggie Ellen did it, and maybe she didn’t. Where has she been keeping herself all this time, and where is she now?”

Alafair immediately thought of the lean-to shelter in the woods, and the little bundle of quartz and a feather.

“She can’t have been hiding in the woods for a year, especially not right up next to her father’s moonshining setup,” Josie protested, when Alafair told her about it.

“Well, no, but maybe just for a night or two, while she got ready to carry out her plans.”

“How did she plan to get away in the middle of the night with a bunch of kids? She’d have had to have help.”

“I don’t expect that would have been a problem,” Alafair assured her. “I can think of lots of folks who would have been happy to help her, maybe to be waiting up the road with a wagon.”

“Like her aunt?”

“Or Dan Lang. Or Dan’s daddy! He was known to be about with a buggy that evening.”

“Could be that some of the Days were in on the plan, as well,” Josie said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if John Lee or his ma were expecting to smuggle the kids out to her.”

“Or Naomi,” Alafair surmised. “Naomi told me herself that Maggie Ellen had promised to come back for them. And I know that little gal hoarded food. I saw it with my own eyes. I thought at the time she was just hungry, but now I wonder if she was smuggling vittles to her sister.”

“We’ve got to tell Scott about this, Alafair,” Josie said.

“We will, we will,” Alafair promised. “But let’s be sure we know what we’re talking about, first. Will you take me out to the Day place right now? Let’s talk to John Lee.”

***

After instructing a reluctant Mary to stay in town to pick up the kids, Josie and Alafair hitched up Josie’s shay and headed out to the Day farm. As the two women drove out of town, they discussed how much they could disclose to Scott about the incident between John Lee and Harley in the woods without involving Phoebe any more than they had to. Alafair was afraid that she would have to come clean about Phoebe having given the gun to John Lee in the first place. Unless directly confronted, they didn’t see why they should tell the sheriff that Phoebe was physically present when John Lee shot at his father.

As they neared the Day farm, they planned their strategy. They thought they would ask John Lee how he had gotten bullets for the derringer. Alafair knew that there were two bullets in a fancy little case that she kept in the gun box, but any other bullets would have to have been acquired elsewhere. When Josie asked her whether the bullet case was there when she saw that the gun was gone, Alafair had to admit that she hadn’t noticed. Mrs. Day had told Scott that there were no twenty-two caliber firearms on their farm, but twenty-two caliber bullets were easy enough to get. Even if the bullet case was still in the box, it wouldn’t mean much.

Their main interest, though, was to find Maggie Ellen Day. It never occurred to Alafair, before now, that Maggie Ellen could be involved, and Alafair had never heard Scott evince an interest in her, either. Until this moment, the girl’s flight had been just one more sorry incident in the pitiful existence of the Day family, and, as far as Alafair knew, no one had ever made a concerted effort to discover where she had gone. Her family seemed to take for granted that she was better off wherever she was, and didn’t really expect her to make good on her promise to return. Or, they knew more about the absent Maggie Ellen than they were telling. Josie and Alafair would press John Lee on the matter, they decided, and if that plan bore no fruit, they would approach some of the other children.

Josie reined the horse in front of the house, but before the women could disembark, Frances Day came running from the chicken coop and launched herself up the running board and into Alafair’s lap.

“Well, howdy, there,” Alafair greeted her, surprised. The once-shy Frances was apparently becoming more sociable since her father died.

“Howdy, Miz Tucker, Miz Cecil,” Frances responded. “Are Fronie and Blanche to home?”

“No, they’re in school,” Alafair told her. “How come you’re not in school today?”

“I’m helping out around here,” Francis told them. “I been feeding chickens.”

“You’re a big girl,” Josie acknowledged. “I’ll bet you’re a big help.”

“I am,” Frances informed her, with a grin.

“Well, we’re here to see John Lee, if he’s back from Muskogee,” Alafair said. “Is he here?”

“No, he ain’t back yet,” the girl said. “He’s gone to get Mama from the jail and bring her home, but John Lee told us he probably wouldn’t be home ’til almost dark.”

“Well, then, I expect Naomi is around here somewhere, isn’t she, sugar?” Alafair pressed on.

“She was,” Francis told them cheerfully, “but she walked back toward the creek a while ago, looking for the goat. That old goat runs away regular.”

“Has she been gone for a long time?” Josie asked.

“I don’t know. Sometimes she’s gone for hours and hours. But it’s all right. Jeb Stuart is in the barn, and he’s watching me.”

Alafair and Josie looked at one another, disappointed. “What now, Josie?” Alafair asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” Josie confessed. “If we go back into town, and tell Scott about the bullet in the tree, maybe he can start looking for another little gun.”

“Will he be willing to think about our idea that there was a second gun and not just that somebody reloaded the first one?”

Josie shrugged. “I expect he’ll decide it was a reload. That’s the most likely thing. But he might decide to humor us and look to see if there could have been a second gun.”

“Maybe it was a regular twenty-two rifle that did the deed,” Alafair posed.

“Not likely. Scott said there were powder burns….” Josie hesitated, mindful of the little girl. It wouldn’t do to say that a rifle, even a .22 caliber, fired at such close range would have made a bigger mess of Harley’s head. “I’m thinking it would have had to be another small pistol like the first one.”

“Are you looking for a little bitty gun?” Frances interjected.

A stunned silence as heavy as a boulder fell on the two women. “We are,” Alafair admitted, at length. “What do you know about a little bitty gun, Frances?”

“Maggie Ellen had a little bitty gun,” Frances said. “Aunt Zorah give it to her a long time ago. I never seen such a little gun before.”

“Whatever happened to this little gun of Maggie Ellen’s?” Alafair urged. Her heart was pounding. Josie gripped Alafair’s arm.

“I know where it is,” Frances informed her blithely. She jumped down from the buggy, and the two women followed her as she headed around the side of the house.

Frances knelt down on the ground near the back corner of the clapboard house and pulled a loose brick from the foundation. The masonry brick was almost too big for the little girl to handle, and she had to ease it out and let it drop into the moist earth that girdled the house. Frances peered into the dark hole for half a second, then reached her arm in up to her shoulder. When she withdrew, she was holding a burlap-wrapped bundle about the size of a loaf of bread. She bounced to her feet and eagerly unwrapped the package for Alafair and Josie’s inspection. The two women bent over to see that lying on the dirty burlap were a variety of small odds and ends that a girl might hide as treasures. A length of ribbon, a rose stone, a pretty pine cone, a piece of quartz, like the ones Alafair had found in the lean-to, and a nickel-plated two-shot derringer that had seen better days.