Morgan James - Promise McNeal 02 - Quiet Killing (7 page)

Mrs. Allen walked me to the door. “Mercy me, that little thing would run these hills till she froze if I didn’t talk her inside. You take that letter on with you. I expect it belongs with you.”

As I backed my Subaru around and inched down the steep drive, I may have seen someone in my rear view mirror running from Mrs. Allen’s well house to the porch; or, it may have been only the slanted late afternoon sunlight. Turning right toward home, I realized I’d forgotten to ask Mrs. Allen about Lewis and Adeline Redmond. It seemed that I’d heard the Redmond name, though I couldn’t place where.

6

A tall person wearing a black leather jacket—an image of the Roadrunner stitched in yellow and white on the back—leaned against my pasture fence. I say
person
because, from the back, the thick, wavy blond hair cascading onto the shoulders could have belonged to either Marilyn Monroe or a member of the flashy world of prime-time wrestling. I could hear Alfie barking from the house as I pulled my Subaru next to the kitchen porch and got out.

“Can I help you?” I called, and unlocked the door to let Alfie out. The hound jumped up and planted large slobbery kisses on my cheek, before he ran for the person standing on “his” turf. I wasn’t sure if Alfie would greet the stranger with kisses or take a hunk out of his butt. My visitor turned toward me and braced himself against the fence for Alfie’s tackle. He was a guy, a skinny guy, whose narrow chest seemed lost inside his oversized bombardier’s jacket.

“Sorry, he’s just excited. He won’t bite. At least I don’t think so.” I covered the space between us and
grasped Alfie’s new red collar. “Down Alfie. Be nice and sit. Sit boy.” Wonder of wonders, the dog sat.

My visitor retreated a foot or so, and brushed Alfie’s paw prints from his clean jeans. His attempt at a smile was too tight to be friendly. “I’m Shane Long. Susan told me to come by about the burned barn,” he explained in a flat North Carolina twang. Both hands went up to push the blond waves behind his ears, exposing a long, tanned face, pocked with acne scars. The sparse goatee did nothing to fill out his almost nonexistent chin. I was struck by how unfair Mother Nature had been to this young man— to give him hair some women would kill for, and then pair it with a face more homely than handsome.

“Ah, yes. The contractor. Right? I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

“I was heading out this way already, so I took a chance you’d be home.”

“Well then. Glad I got back when I did.” I realized there was no truck in the drive. Surely he didn’t walk. “How did you get out here?”

He motioned with a hitchhiker’s thumb to the back of the house. “I rode my new Harley. Had to park it around back on the concrete apron to the rear porch, on account of the kickstand wasn’t holding here in the dirt and gravel. I could pour you a cement walk up to the kitchen steps on this side of the house while I’m here fixing the barn, if you want.”

I nodded my approval of his idea, and we walked around the house to the rear yard with Alfie trotting along side, drooling and smiling as he followed. Yes, there was, indeed, a large, incredibly shiny black
motorcycle parked close to my rear porch steps. The behemoth spoke power, arrogance, and a don’t- mess-with-me attitude. I would bet, as it traveled the twisting mountain roads, the dazzling silver exhaust pipes screamed like the baritone voices of hell. No wonder Alfie was barking his head off when I drove into the drive. The dog was probably scared half to death by the noise.

Shane looked at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for a compliment on the motorcycle. I don’t know a Harley from a hairnet, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Wow. Very impressive. You must be very proud.”

Now he really smiled—a large sincere grin, his eyes a luster of rhinestones—a pleasant face, after all. “I am proud. That’s fact.” He ambled over to give the Harley a loving rub with a clean white handkerchief from his hip pocket. “Been saving my whole life for this big beauty. She’s my dream come true. Everybody needs a dream. Don’t you reckon?”

A dream? How wonderful to be young and think of dreams as events happening down the road rather than episodes of sleep disruption. I’d gladly trade my own nighttime dreams, peopled with restless souls traveling eternity, for daytime wishes and wants.

We left the motorcycle and walked to the burned patch in the goat yard. I held the dummy end of the tape for Shane to measure and record the dimensions of the barn in his pocket-sized spiral notebook. We discussed siding the new structure with Hardi-Plank, a concrete based material he assured me was immune to curious goats with a habit of chewing anything within reach
of their cute little mouths, and settled on a new dark green metal roof. Within fifteen minutes, he promised to call me the next day with a price for the barn, and was riding away on his rumbling two-wheeled dream.

Alfie and I went inside to check on Cat and Junior. They were both asleep on top of the dryer, food bowl empty, and water bowl turned over onto the utility room floor. “All right, Mister,” I admonished Alfie, “if you want the luxury of sleeping in front of the kitchen fireplace while I’m out, no eating the cat food, and no dumping over the water bowl.” The hound tugged on one end of the towel as I wiped up the mess. “Come on, I forgot to buy dog food while I was in town. You can ride with me, instead of staying to watch the kitties.”

I made a quick survey of the fridge contents and snapped on Alfie’s red leash, a stylish match to his new collar. “Auntie Susan brought you this. She’s a thoughtful person.” I’m sure the hound agreed, and we locked up and headed for the Subaru.

Alfie is a natural traveler. He knows just where to stand in the back seat to balance his weight going around our tightly curved mountain roads. If only he didn’t insist on hanging his head over my right shoulder and drooling down my neck. I drove slowly, giving him time to get his sea legs, and about a mile from the house we saw Shane’s motorcycle parked off to the right on a wide turnout at the base of Fire Mountain. Alfie barked. I pulled over to make sure Shane hadn’t had engine trouble. I didn’t see him, but I did see a hiker’s trail leading from the turnout into the woods. I assumed an afternoon hike was the reason Shane had plans to come out my way, even before Susan’s call.

About an hour later, when Alfie and I came back from town, the motorcycle was still there. By then, dusk was smothering daylight and the temperature was dropping. It would be full dark by the time I reached home. Tiny crystalline flecks of snow peppered the windshield. Thunder groaned low in the valley. Cruel weather for the end of March. My buttery-yellow daffodils already nodded in a sunny patch of the back yard, yet Mrs. Allen was correct. Winter wasn’t done with us yet. If I hadn’t been so sleep deprived from my ordeal of the night before, I’d probably have questioned Shane’s Harley still parked on the grassy shoulder.

By eight o’clock I’d eaten a bowl of Susan’s delicious homemade butternut squash soup. Did I mention Susan finished a degree in culinary arts over in Asheville last year? The girl is amazing. Just as I was getting out of the shower, the phone rang. Running for it was out of the question, I was way too tired for that, but I did manage to pick it up on the fourth ring, just before it rolled over to voice mail.

“Promise, don’t hang up.”

“I wasn’t going to hang up, Daniel. I was going to say, hello.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Just extremely tired. How about you?”

“Me?” Daniel made the “me” sound like I’d asked him the most absurd question in the universe. “Jesus, Promise. How can you be so flip? I’m not the one whose property was vandalized in the dead of night by some crazy arsonist. Susan just called me. Why didn’t
you
call me? You’d have to know I’d be worried sick about you.”

I grabbed my terry robe from the back of the bathroom door and wrapped up. If I was forced to endure Daniel sending me on a major guilt trip for not calling him about the barn fire, I wanted to be warm for the ride. “I didn’t call you because you left angry with me, and I wasn’t sure you even wanted to talk to me. Besides, it was just the hay barn— hardly a seven o’clock news story. Of course, I really need the space for storing hay…” I heard myself rambling on like an old woman and stopped to reorganize my thoughts before I continued. Daniel let the silence alone. He’s good at that, sometimes.

“Everything’s under control. No one was hurt. Susan sent Shane Long over to give me a price on rebuilding the barn. She says you know Shane, that he’s an okay guy.” The sound of fizzy liquid over ice cubes came from Daniel’s end of the line. “You drinking a Coke? I’ve never known you to drink a Coke.”

“I’m a North Carolina Tar Heel. We drink Pepsi. You Georgia Crackers drink Coca-Cola. I’m drinking a soda because the ribs I ate for supper gave me indigestion. Probably because I was so worried about you.”

“How could you have been worried at supper? You told me Susan just now called you.”

“Well, she did…but that’s beside the point. I’m still worried.”

I was trying hard not to react to Daniel’s digs. “So, is Shane Long a good choice for rebuilding the barn?”

Daniel took a long noisy drink before he answered. “Yeah, he’s okay. The worst I can say for him is he
used to run with the Goddard twins in high school. But I think he’s put them behind and grown up. He’s had his own construction business for three or four years now. How come you didn’t call Mac and report someone torched your barn?”

“I don’t know that the barn was torched. Maybe it was some freaky natural thing.”

“Yeah, it was probably a freaky natural thing, all right. Some freak with two legs, a box of Diamond matches, and a half-gallon jug of gasoline.”

“The firemen didn’t see any evidence of gasoline. They couldn’t tell how it started.”

“Well, that’s why you should’ve called the sheriff. We have an arson unit in the county. They need to investigate. Who have you pissed off lately?”

“You mean besides you?”

He laughed. I wished he were beside me. Daniel’s laugh is warmer than my terry robe. “Let me rephrase that question. Are you working on a case for that attorney down in Atlanta? Maybe stirring up trouble? Anyone angry enough to want to hurt you?”

Why doesn’t anyone remember the consulting jobs I do for Garland Wang where nothing out of the ordinary happens? Where no one even remembers my name, much less wants to hurt me. I interview the folks; do my research, testify in court as an expert witness, collect my fee, and go home. No excess excitement. No snakes nailed to my door, no one shooting at me, no contraband cigarettes raining all over my Subaru.

“Fletcher Enloe asked the same question, and the answer is no; I’m not working on a case for Garland Wang.”

“Then it has to be a meth-head husband, or boyfriend, belonging to one of the domestic violence victims you’re counseling. Has to be one of them sons of bitches…they’re ruining Perry County with their shit drugs and violence. Used to be all we had to worry about was some local boy making a little shine on the side or growing a field of pot. Now look at what we got. I swear to God, I’d be happy to hang every one of them. Public hanging. Right on the square in downtown, make an example of them.”

“Daniel, Daniel, please, calm down. You’ll give yourself a heart attack.” Meth creeping into the Western North Carolina Mountains was a hot button for Daniel. In his mind, redemption or rehab didn’t apply to methamphetamine. It was catch’em and hang’em. Simple as that. I could understand his hard line opinion. As a counselor, I’d seen the violence and waste of human potential meth brings. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try to help victims caught in the tsunami of the drugs.