arkansastraveler (23 page)

“You know, your tongue spends more time outside of your mouth than in,” he said, turning out onto the highway.

“Friday, I’m not touching that remark with
any
length of pole.”

“And with a reply like that, you’re lucky you’re in public in broad daylight, or I’d have your clothes off in two minutes.”

On the drive out to the lake, I told Gabe about Elvia’s decision to fly back with us on Monday morning. “That’s a good sign, don’t you think? They could still make up. A lot can happen in four days.”

He grunted as we turned left at the sign for Mayhaw Lake. “Don’t you ever get tired of minding everyone else’s business? Have you ever considered getting a hobby?”

I settled back in my seat and said, “You should talk. Let’s forget all this for a while and find us a good fishing spot even if ten-thirty is a little late to be fishing.”

“Catching fish is a mere ten percent of why one fishes,” Gabe said. “It’s a meditative thing.”

“You have been reading way too much philosophy and not enough
Sports Afield
,” I commented. “But whatever floats your boat.”

We drove around Mayhaw Lake looking for a dirt road I remembered led to a secluded spot at the far end of the
lake. While searching, we passed a road that was cordoned off with black-and-yellow crime-scene tape. I turned to stare as we passed it. “I bet that’s where they found Toby’s body.”

“Probably,” Gabe said.

“Do they really think that tape’s going to keep anyone out?”

“They most likely don’t care at this point. They’ve probably done all that can be done with the crime scene.”

“Which was probably a whole lotta nothing.”

Gabe didn’t answer.

“Right here,” I said, about a half-mile later. We drove slowly down the familiar dirt road and found my old fishing spot. In fifteen minutes we’d set up lawn chairs, our red Coleman cooler, stuck our fishing poles in the soft dirt, and settled down for a contemplative and calm afternoon. The shade from the hickory and oak trees was cool and soothing, causing both of us to mentally and physically slow down. With our sometimes too busy lives, moments like this were rare, and we both knew it. For the first two hours, we talked about everything except what had happened since we’d arrived in Arkansas.

“I think I’ll take a walk,” I said, stuffing my Moon Pie wrappers down into the Piggly Wiggly bag we were using for trash.

“You’ll need to walk five miles to burn off those two Moon Pies,” Gabe commented, his voice lazy. He’d moved from his chair to lying down on the old blanket I’d spread on the grassy bank. His eyes were starting to droop. “And stay away from that crime scene.”

“Take a nap, grumpy,” I said, nudging him with my foot as I walked by. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

He murmured his answer, already halfway asleep.

I headed up to the main road and walked along it for a while, looking at the expensive vacation homes going up and the ones already finished. Though the builders and
architects were doing their best to keep the “country” feel to the area, I couldn’t help but lament the number of hickory and pine trees that were felled to build these homes.

When I passed the crime-scene tape, I gave in to temptation and strode down to the lake. More crime-scene tape marked off a spot that, if it hadn’t been cordoned off, would have looked like just a small clearing next to the lake similar to the one where Gabe and I were parked. If there had been any clues here, they were long gone.

Disappointed, I went back up to the main road and continued walking, finally turning off the paved road onto a well-maintained dirt road named Sugar Oak Way and walked deeper into the forest. The people who bought property out here were obviously more interested in privacy than in having a personal lakeside dock. The cabins, when I could see them through the dense, green foliage, were more like lodges than cabins. I picked up a handful of large white-oak acorns and tossed them one by one as I walked. The road narrowed, and soon glimpses of cabins became impossible. The only thing that told me that any humans inhabited this forest was the occasional mailbox.

After about a mile or so, the still-sultry October afternoon air caused me to take off my sweatshirt and tie it around my waist. The quiet green buzz of the woods set me slightly on edge. As a child, the thick, leafy Arkansas forests, so different from the oak-dotted, rolling hills of California’s Central Coast, often frightened me. When I was allowed to tag along on camping trips with Emory, Uncle WW, and Uncle Boone, I was always a bit apprehensive when we veered off established pathways and forged through the woods using only walking sticks to clear our path through the veiny-leafed carpet of kudzu vine. Fearful of getting swallowed up in the primeval-feeling greenery, I’d focus my eyes on Uncle WW’s plaid-flannel back. As I tripped after him, I occasionally grabbed a reddish purple kudzu flower, inhaling its strong grape odor and
wishing I was back at Aunt Garnet’s eating a pimento cheese sandwich.

I wiped the beads of sweat off my upper lip and chided myself for not bringing water with me. Moist air seemed to envelop me like a damp blanket, yet my mouth was dry as a day-old biscuit.

At the end of the dirt path stood a green metal mailbox and a gravel driveway going deep into the woods. I turned to go back and had only walked a few feet when a male voice called to me.

“Mrs. Harper, what brings you out to my neighborhood?”

I turned to face a smiling Grady Hunter. He was wearing a pale pink golf shirt, khakis, and burnished leather boots. He opened the mailbox and stuck his hand deep inside.

“Just taking a walk,” I said, pulling my knotted sweatshirt tighter around my waist. I gestured back toward the lake. “Gabe’s fishing. Or rather he’s got a fishing pole stuck in the sand. When I left him, the only thing he was likely to catch was forty winks.”

He gave a practiced, politician’s laugh at my lame joke. “I was never much of a fisherman myself. It tends to do to me exactly what it’s doing to your husband—puts me right to sleep. That’s why I didn’t bother buying one of the lakeside lots.” He flipped through the handful of envelopes and magazines. “So, you decided while he slept to reacquaint yourself with the unsurpassed beauty of our natural woodlands.”

I nodded, not voicing my opinion that if this area kept developing, the only thing natural left would be the wood cut to make the log cabins. Instead I said, “You get mail delivered all the way out here?”

He chuckled, his tanned face genial. “Our postal service is very accommodating.”

Would it be as accommodating if the houses weren’t worth half a million dollars? I wanted to ask.

“You look thirsty,” he said. “Would you like to come up for a glass of iced tea, or is your husband expecting you back at a certain time?”

I glanced at my watch. There was something about this man that made me nervous, an instinct that said to watch my back. On the other hand, my curious nature wanted to see what the house of my friend’s political rival looked like. “Some tea would be nice. I’m not on any certain schedule.”

“Great, come on back, then.”

I followed him down the long gravel drive, and we talked idly about the unseasonably hot day, the trouble he’d been having with ticks on his hunting dogs, the activities the church had planned for the weekend, and Arkansas forests compared to the rolling hills of the central California coast.

“You like to hike at home?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Sure, though I prefer riding. You can see where you’re going and where you’ve been. Your forests are harder for me. They’re denser. I’m always afraid I’ll get lost.”

“I’m a walker myself. Especially since I’ve gotten older. Insomnia, the middle-aged person’s disease. I know what you mean about the forests here. They
are
dense. But I know them like the back of my hand, even at night. Love to walk at night. Relaxes me.”

Our conversation moved on to the weekend’s various activities. “What’s this about a Ping-Pong ball drop?” I asked, figuring if anyone knew, he would.

He tucked his mail under his arm and said, “Actually it’s my idea. It’s part a fun thing for the visitors and part advertising gimmick for the downtown merchants. I’ve hired a Cessna to fly over the town around noon on Saturday and drop ten thousand Ping-Pong balls over the town square. They’ll have Bible verses printed on them, invitations to come to the services on Sunday, discounts for different downtown businesses, and even some free prizes.
There’s five Ping-Pong balls that are printed with free weekends at a bed-and-breakfast in Eureka Springs, ten with fifty-dollar savings bonds, and one for a free bass boat.”

“Don’t the balls hurt when they fall?”

He laughed. “Not at all. We did it last year to start our Christmas shopping season, and it was a hit. You will not believe the lengths people will go to get those balls.”

“I’ll make sure and be there to see it.”

“Bring your catcher’s mitt,” he said.

We came around the corner, and I almost gasped at the gorgeous two-story lodge that lay before me. If I’d ever had a dream mountain cabin, I was looking at it now. Sitting in front of the cabin was a white Range Rover being carefully washed by Mr. Lovelis.

“Hello, Mr. Lovelis,” I said.

He nodded. “Miss.” He didn’t look at Grady Hunter, but continued to wash the car with small, deliberate circles.

“He works for me when he isn’t tending to church maintenance,” Grady said, opening the stained oak front door for me. “There’s a lot of upkeep on a place like this.”

“I imagine so,” I murmured.

Inside, the cabin was decorated like something out of an Adriondack lifestyle magazine. I lost count of how many Pendleton blankets were scattered about the huge living room. Leather, dark-stained oak furniture, and stuffed game dominated the decor. Grady Hunter obviously lived up to his name. The walls held two stuffed ten-point buck heads, a couger’s head, a bobcat’s head, a display cabinet with what looked like antique rifles, and a buffalo head over the huge stone fireplace. It was a house void of any feminine influence.

“I’ll just go out to the kitchen and ask Melba to make us some tea. Are you up for a little snack, too?” He looked at me expectantly.

“Sure,” I said, even though I wasn’t a bit hungry.

When he was gone, I wandered around the room looking at the expensive, decorator-coordinated western and Ozark knickknacks and the framed black-and-white photographs on the wall. Most of them were of Arkansas in the early 1900s. I wandered through an open door into what looked like a library or study. A large leather-topped executive desk sat in the corner of the book-lined room, and across from it were two deep-brown leather high-backed chairs. A pipe stand sat on the sturdy magazine table between them. Out of habit and because I knew you could often tell a lot about a person by what they held in their bookshelves, I ran my fingers across the shelves at my eye level. Predictably he was fond of Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison, and James Ellroy, all macho-men writers, though he also liked biographies. He appeared to own the biography of every United States president.

I perused another shelf that held a bunch of leather photo albums. I pulled one out and flipped through a few pages. In many of the photographs, a freckle-faced, laughing boy and a delicate, sweet-faced woman mugged for the unseen photographer. It took me a second to realize the innocent-looking, Huck Finn–like boy was a young Toby Hunter. Did Grady Hunter see this boy in his dreams or the ugly, hate-filled person his son had become? And how much of that latter person had Grady been responsible for? Though I was not someone who automatically blamed the parents for a child’s behavior, he’d picked up that hate somewhere.

Thinking about John Luther, I had to concede that Mr. Grady Hunter wouldn’t be the first person whose public appearance and opinions didn’t match his private ones. I slipped the album back into its place and pulled out another one. On the second-to-last page, as I was looking at pictures obviously taken at a cabin in some Ozark piney woods somewhere, I saw the edge of a photograph peeking out from behind one of Grady holding a large fish. Curious, I pulled it out. After staring at it for a long, shocked minute,
I shoved it back behind the fish trophy picture, slammed the album shut, and shoved it back onto the shelf.

By the time Grady came back, I was sitting on the living room sofa, flipping through a
Southern Living
magazine.

He set a tray on the square coffee table in front of me and poured a glass of iced tea into a heavy topaz-colored glass. I stared at the small crustless triangle sandwiches in front of me, my stomach churning.

“I hope you like egg salad,” he said, handing me a glass.

“Love it,” I replied, taking a quick gulp of tea.

He filled a matching topaz-colored plate with three sandwiches. I took it and murmured my thanks, thinking all the while about how I could get out of this house, away from this man, before I gave away with my transparent face the fact that I’d seen a picture I was sure he didn’t want me to see.

“So, tell me about your job,” he said, settling back on the sofa facing me. “I hear from the prayer requests from Garnet that you have quite the little sideline of solving murders.”

I bit off half a sandwich and took another gulp of tea, taking my time answering. “You know how she likes to exaggerate.”