A Killing at Cotton Hill (2 page)

Time was, Dora Lee was a good-looking woman with a fine figure. She's put on a little weight and her dark hair has gone to gray, but she still has those deep brown eyes that made her such a popular girl when we were in school together. I had a crush on her and went out with her a time or two. A torrent of water has gone under the bridge since those days.

Even after Dora Lee was a widow, I never saw her when she wasn't dressed nice. She needed glasses, but she refused to wear them, out of vanity, except for reading and quilting. There are those who think she put on airs for a country girl, but my wife, Jeanne, always said she admired women who didn't let themselves get dowdy.

I tear my eyes away from looking at Dora Lee's face and concentrate on the mess that's been made of the front of her clothes. She was killed before she had time to get comfortable for the night. She's wearing blue slacks and a white blouse. Or, at least, it was white. Blood has spilled down the front and puddled in her lap. The knife, a vicious-looking Bowie knife with a hefty handle and wide blade, is still there, sticking out of her chest. And there is more than one stab wound. Whoever did this wanted to be sure they made a thorough job of it. I don't think Dora Lee would have such a knife in her possession, so whoever killed her must have brought it with him. The blood has darkened, so the wounds are many hours old. A fly has made its way into the house and is buzzing around her. My stomach gives a little lurch and I look away.

For the first time, I wonder where Skeeter is, and if he set up a fuss when whoever killed Dora Lee came in. Skeeter is the latest in a long string of temperamental collies. Dora Lee never would have any other kind of dog. Skeeter should have escorted me around the outside of the house when I arrived. They must have put the dog somewhere so it wouldn't get in the way, but I don't hear any commotion like I should if he's penned up.

I take in the details of the kitchen, the dishes washed and in the drainer—two of everything, so Greg must have eaten dinner with her. Come to think of it, I never knew Dora Lee to leave the dishes to drain. She would have dried them and put them away. So she must have been killed between the washing and the drying. That could be a problem for young Greg, especially given what Ida Ruth said about the two of them having a fight last week.

I hear voices coming around to the back, so I take one more quick look around the kitchen, stopping when I get to Dora Lee. “Goddamn,” I say softly, “I'm sorry as hell.” Then I hustle on into the front part of the house. I turn left and go into her bedroom. Neat as a pin, it's plain but pretty. She made the handsome quilt on the bed herself, and her son-in-law painted the stodgy picture of her house that hangs over the bed. On the bureau there are framed photos of Dora Lee's husband, Teague, and several of her daughter Julie and her husband, the ones who died in the car accident. There's only one of her other daughter, Caroline, as a little girl.

I pick up a faded photo of the Grand Canyon with an old Ford in the foreground. Dora Lee was so proud of that picture. She and Teague took their honeymoon there. She always talked about going back but never made it. Seems like that no-good rascal Teague could have at least done that much for her.

I poke my head into the bathroom, but as far as I can tell everything is where it ought to be. Not that I'd know if something in particular was out of place, but it looks tidy anyway. Then I move on up to the front bedroom. I can hear Loretta in the kitchen giving orders about how things ought to be done. I'll bet that's going over big with Doc Taggart. He's a prissy SOB who thinks because he has an MD he's right up there next to God almighty and everybody ought to treat him that way.

Opening the door to the second bedroom, I'm hit by the heat. With the door closed, the air-conditioning hasn't reached in here. The room presents a challenge. Dora Lee spent most of her time quilting, and the room is packed with bags of fabric, rolls of bunting, and partly-pieced sections of quilts. I wouldn't be able to tell whether somebody came in and rummaged around looking for something, because it has always been a mess. “Samuel,” Dora Lee told me, “everybody's got to have a room they can just let go. I can shut the door to the room and sort things out when I please.” From the looks of it, she hasn't pleased in quite a while.

I take a good look around. One thing catches my eye right away. There's a place on the wall where a picture used to be. You can see the paint has faded around where it hung. I wipe my finger over the area that was covered by the picture. My finger comes away clean, so it hasn't been gone long. I close my eyes and try to remember what the picture looked like. I think it was some kind of landscape, but I can't come up with anything more than that.

Somebody is walking as quiet as they can, sneaking up behind me. Probably thinks because I'm old I can't hear. “Sir, what are you doing in here?”

I don't turn around. I know it's going to be that highway patrolman with the bad manners. “I knew Dora Lee for a long time, and I'm paying my respects.”

“I have to ask you to leave the house,” he says. “This is a crime scene. I'm sure you'll have time when we're done to come back.” He isn't unkind, just stiff.

“I'll be on my way,” I say. To avoid the crowd in the kitchen, I leave by the front door. In all the voices I heard talking in the kitchen, I didn't hear the boy, Greg. He lives in a shed behind the house. That wasn't Dora Lee's doing. Dora Lee wanted him to live in the house, but the boy insisted on taking over the shed. It took him several months to convert it into a living space. I've never seen the inside of it, but Dora Lee said he made a right nice place out of it.

I walk back around the house and make my way to the shed. When I'm close to it, I see that it's been converted into a compact little cabin. I wonder if the boy did all the work himself.

I tap on the door and hear him moving around inside, and after a minute he opens the door. His eyes are red and his look is hopeless, a far cry from the arrogant face he usually presents. “Yes sir?” A pungent smell of turpentine wafts out through the open door, reminding me that Dora Lee said the boy wanted to be an artist, a claim I never took seriously.

“I hate to bother you,” I say, “I just want to make sure you're all right. Can I come in?”

Greg looks over his shoulder, then back at me, and shrugs. He looks younger than his years, having yet to fill into his body. His jeans hang on his hips and skinny arms stick out of a ratty old T-shirt covered with colored smudges. With an unruly mop of hair, and his face long and bony, he's not an attractive boy. He steps back to let me inside, and I enter another world.

My wife, Jeanne, was crazy about modern art. She grew up in Fort Worth, where some of the best museums in Texas are located, and she was hooked on it. She dragged me to galleries with her, and it turned out I liked looking at art almost as much as she did. Before I met her, I liked pictures of bluebonnets and cactus, but she got me fired up about abstract painters.

So I have some knowledge of art, and I know the minute I walk into the room that I should have paid more attention to Dora Lee's talk of the boy's dreams. What is it that makes people think great artists have to come from somewhere else?

The walls are covered with his paintings, and they are stacked against the floorboards. The room is so crowded with tables containing all the paraphernalia that an artist works with—jars of brushes, tubes of oils, sketchbooks, tape, and piles of paint-smeared rags—that there is barely room for the single bed. As Greg sits down on the bed and gestures for me to take a straight-backed chair nearby, I notice that his hands are covered with pastel dust.

My pulse has speeded up at the sight of all this artwork that has been going on right under my nose, and me not paying a bit of mind to it.

“Sorry it's a little messy in here,” he says. He darts a look at me and then away, to see how I'm responding to what I see there.

“All right with you if I take a look?” I say.

He shrugs. “I'm just learning.”

Just learning. The way Kandinsky and de Kooning and Diebenkorn “just learned.” Taking raw talent, and from the look of it, working all hours to mine that talent. He paints with the colors of what he sees right here in his world; earth and dark loam and rust-colored iron deposits; the endless varieties of greens of grass and leaves; and the whole palette of sky colors we get around here from stark blue to stormy grays and greens to sunset blazes. All the things I love about this part of the country. What he does with those colors is a miracle. Most of the work is small scale, and I think he could benefit from spreading it out a little on a larger canvas. On a homemade easel he's begun work on a pastel of storm grays with a faint undercurrent of rose.

“You're doing some good work,” I say, tearing my eyes away, my heart beating hard. Greg is looking at me with kind of barely tolerant amusement, as if he can't imagine I'd know anything about what he's up to. I think of the tacky little painting over Dora Lee's bed done by Greg's daddy, and wonder how such a gift came of that. I despair that Dora Lee hadn't a clue that the boy was doing anything more than dabbling. “I'm sorry about your grandmother,” I say. “You have any idea what happened?”

He hunches forward, elbows on his knees and shakes his head.

“Were you the one who found her?”

He looks up at me, suddenly wary, and I suspect that Rodell has already scared him into thinking he's a suspect. “No sir, Mrs. Underwood from the next farm down came over this morning. I heard her screaming.” His voice wobbles suddenly.

I wait while he composes himself. “Your grandmother was proud of you,” I say. “You know she was glad to have you here.”

“I know.”

I hesitate, wondering if I should tell him Dora Lee called me last night. Maybe that's not the best idea. “You didn't hear anything last night to make you think something was wrong?”

“Of course I didn't!” He gets up abruptly, and his fists clench. “You think I would have just stayed out here and let her get killed?”

“Son, settle down. I just mean that sometimes we hear things and we don't even know we're hearing something important. Like a car driving up into the driveway, or somebody laughing, or the dog barking. By the way, where is Skeeter?”

He shoves his hands into his pockets. “We had to put Skeeter down last week.”

“What happened?” He wasn't old, so I know it must be something else.

“He got into something that made him sick and they couldn't do anything for him at the vet's.”

“That's a damn shame.” I'm trying to figure out how to give the boy a little comfort when there's a loud knock on the door. Before he can get to it, the door is flung open. Rodell strides in flanked by the two highway patrolmen. “Boy, you need to come with us,” he says.

Greg's eyes widen and he steps back. “Why?”

“We need to take you down to the station and ask you some questions.”

The boy looks around at his safe nest. “Can't you ask me here?”

“No, we can't. Now come on with us.”

Greg backs up another step. The two patrolmen are poised to grab him, so I step up near him. “Look at me, son.”

He looks, and I see a terrified calf.

“It's going to be okay. You don't have anything to be afraid of.” I'm hoping I'm right, but I know that the reason Rodell barged in here to take this boy away was to get Dora Lee's murder wrapped up quick. He's not going to attend to the finer points of whether or not the boy is guilty. Greg is convenient, that's the important thing.

One of the patrolmen snickers, but I hold the boy's eyes with mine. I'm promising him, and I see the promise take hold.

Loretta is in a state of indignation, and for the first five minutes of our drive back to Jarrett Creek she keeps her mouth firmly closed. That's fine with me, because I'm trying to sort out the steps I need to take to get the boy released. But the silence can't last, and pretty soon words start to tumble out, like what did I think I was doing sneaking around back there, just how well did I know Dora Lee? “I always thought it was crazy for her to live out on that farm by herself. And now look what's happened!”

“She wasn't by herself,” I say. “She had her grandson there.”

“A lot of good it did her! And it looks like he's probably the one who killed her anyway. Like Ida Ruth said, he's probably looking for her inheritance.”

“You told me Ida Ruth said they had an argument. Did she say what it was about?”

“The boy wanted to get a job, and Dora Lee told him there was plenty to do around her place.”

Dora Lee had told me Greg was thinking he might have to move to Houston if he couldn't find a job around here, but that was several weeks ago. “Well, it seems to me that if he was willing to work, he's not somebody who'd kill his grandmother for money. Besides, the two of them got along well with each other.”