Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (30 page)

“Why would I kill that old scarecrow?”

“I am just asking…”

“Do you think I killed him?”

“Raven…”

“Do you? Do you think I got drunk and wrestled the Reverend into my rig and drove him off somewhere and wrestled him out of the cab because you know I wouldn’t get blood all over my interior for love or money, and he held still while I kicked him to death with my new boots, mind you, I had these
made
for me, Memphis, these are
good
boots, and I put him back in the cab and drove back to the Park and dumped his body and then parked my rig and cleaned my boots and radioed you and went back and puked on that truck and baby-sat the body of the man I just murdered until you got there? Is that what you think?”

“You worked it all out beautifully.”

“Except for one thing. It’s pure crap. I have no reason to kill that old son-of-a-bitch. Arrest me or take me back to my rig.”

She flew out the door before he came to a full stop, climbing up the side of her truck, flinging the door open and climbing in. He parked, got out, waited by the driver’s door. It seemed to take her only seconds to come back with her old boots. She held them out. They were light brown and dusty, polish-thirsty, and unspotted. She hadn’t done a thing but drive in these boots. He could tell it with a glance. “You can keep those. I need the new ones, Raven. I need your new boots.”

Her face was that same pale yellow.

“You can let me have them voluntarily, and I’ll get them back to you in a day, or I can seize them as possible evidence and do everything by the book. That can take weeks, or you might never get them back. I’ll take your rig, too. I can tell you, if I do it that way, you’ll have a heck of a time getting anything back. Ever.”

“You son of a bastard.”

He braced for when she threw them. Her father, he reminded himself, thinking of Tender pitching at the school’s ballgames, watching her wind up. Her pitch was ferocious and true. The boots landed in his hand and stretched his arm back so far that Memphis was left with a distinct sensation of something having been snapped.

A TRIP TO
the emergency room confirmed his suspicions.

While catching Raven’s boots, he’d retroflexed his arm and thrown his shoulder all out of whack. It all meant painkillers and two days off. “I have a murder to solve,” he said to no one and nothing. But what good was a sheriff who couldn’t draw his gun? He felt useless. Also, he was hungry. Once, just once, he thought, I’d like to wake up to the smell of a woman cooking something for me.

He closed his eyes and thought of his mother’s fry bread. He could smell it, after all these years he could still smell it. Memphis thought about her funeral, old-style, when he was twenty. His mother had refused Christ. Her funeral made no mention of any white man’s god.

The phone rang and he reached, winced, reached again, and answered. “Memphis here.”

“Memphis, this is Rhondalee. Have you seen your brother today?” She spoke in a voice that sounded oddly subdued. “I don’t know where he is.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“Thank you, Memphis.” And she hung up. No screaming, no accusations. Just a quiet humility and an undertone of worry. It was most unlike Rhondalee to make a phone call like that.

He didn’t spend a huge amount of time feeling sorry for himself. But it would be nice, Memphis thought, to have a family of your own, people who worried about where you were, what you were up to. Or at least to have a niece less likely to heave things at you hard enough to cause damage, now, wouldn’t it. It would be nice to have someone miss you when you were gone.

He put his hand to his chest, thought of just surrendering to the exhaustion of it, of giving up. He would never give up. He did need to call the office, to get the report on his niece’s boots. And he needed to water the rock farm.

He struggled to his feet. “John Lee?” he said aloud, waiting for the thump of the tail in answer. “John Lee?”

He heard nothing.

MELVEENA STRANGE SAT
at the abandoned quarry in her car with the top down and her head back, letting the sun soak into her skin. Angus MacIver, that dangerously handsome Bone Pile manchild, sat beside her, his body coiled in the sun like a warming snake ready to strike.

She’d arrived at school on time, waited once more for a bus empty of any girls, headed over to the store where Angus always seemed to be working, and then for reasons she didn’t want to investigate, let alone articulate, she’d driven them here to this quarry rather than up to the hills again. She was too tired to face the hills and the mothers and the suspicion. She wasn’t sleeping, and she wasn’t eating, and even if she’d had her girls that day, she probably wouldn’t have done right by them due to her overwhelming preoccupation with matters important. “I don’t understand why I don’t just drive the bus, too, Angus. Then at least I could pick them all up on time.”

“Everybody has to settle on down.”

“Well, I just don’t know how many times I’m going to drive up there and get them. If the mothers don’t trust me by now…”

“It ain’t you they don’t trust.”

She decided explaining double negatives could wait just this once. “How is she?”

He shook his head, spat over the side of the car. “Big as a melon. She wonders do you still have that lipstick.”

Melveena sighed. “Tell her I still have it.”

“Good. I’ll tell her.”

Angus shifted, unable to settle. And she felt herself shifting in return. There were three feet between them, but the air in the car sang a sweet, dark, dangerous song she dared not listen to. She knew what he was. He was a hundred and sixty pounds of sinew and bone and oily black hair. He was keen eyes and angry desire. He was trouble, and he was so horribly beautiful.

She felt his hand hovering over hers. She opened her green eyes. “Young man, let’s get you back to work. And on the way, let’s talk about finishing high school.”

He groaned, and kept his hands to himself.

HE ACHED TOO
much to handle a shovel. But he was trying, he was out in his backyard near the biggest of the boulders, hoping the shade it cast would let the ground be just a little softer for the digging.

She pulled up in her mauve Caddy, Angus MacPherson by her side. “Well hello, Memphis. What are you doing out here?” Memphis didn’t know how it came to pass, what luck sent her to his farm. But there she was, and there was the boy, hale and ready to work, and he had never been so happy to see anyone in his life.

The boy dug the hole. Melveena wound the old dog in a sheet that Memphis located for the purpose. Business-like and deft, she politely ignored the gassy wind that escaped the old Shepherd’s corpse. Angus carried John Lee to the grave and lowered him in with an amount of respect that it pleased Memphis to see. He knew they skinned dead dogs in Bone Pile.

They stood there, silent, unsure of what to say in times like these.

If Memphis had cried, it would have been in relief that he had some help to give the old dog what he deserved. After all, the dog was a police veteran. He had given eight years of faithful service to the force. And Lord knows, he had sniffed a few of the more unsavory characters that Memphis had the displeasure to encounter.

Poor old John Lee, thought Memphis. Will anyone really miss you?

He looked at the grave, the rocks, the stony landscape around him.

“Lord Bless him.”

It was all he had left to say.

MEMPHIS WATCHED HER
move around his kitchen, her heels clicking on the old rose-patterned linoleum. “I can’t believe you just showed up like that. Talk about Providence. I was getting set to call Garth.”

“Angus stopped by to talk, and I said we should take a drive because, well, to be honest I am not sure I trust that boy in a closed room. We ended up here.”

The Lord works in mysterious ways, thought Memphis. Much like Melveena Strange.

He removed the cloth from the cage, waking the birds. The finches fluttered and preened and warned. “Oh!” Melveena cooed, “they remind me of my Bone Pile Girls.”

Memphis knew that the finches weren’t manly pets. But he liked their buff-colored bodies, their conversational murmurs to one another. He liked the way they both fussed over the tiny eggs that hid in the round nest. Those eggs were the center of the universe. “They’re a nesting pair, and they’ll be a tad nervous with you in here, Melveena. Don’t take it personal, all right?”

“Your birds won’t hurt my feelings.” Melveena smiled.

He felt a little embarrassed at having a woman in his kitchen. It was a nice kitchen, he thought, plain, clean, sun-lit, especially in the corner where John Lee would sleep no more. But he wondered if, as a bachelor, it showed when he wasn’t doing something quite right. For instance, he used folded kitchen towels instead of oven mitts. He thought that maybe women could tell these things.

Since she was limited to the ingredients on hand, she made him a grilled-cheese sandwich. He sipped a cup of coffee, trying not to wince. He thought, a man could get used to this. He ate very little at home. He generally ate at the diner or drove through the window at the Burger Bonanza. How many years had it been since a woman had made him a meal? Melveena set the sandwich on a plate before him, and let her hand gently touch his shoulder. She stood there for a moment, as if comprehending him. “You shouldn’t wait forever for it, Memphis. You’ll enjoy it.”

“I just wanted to say thank-you before I dug in.” He took a bite, chewed, swallowed. My goodness, but women could cook. “I should have given that boy a ride into town.”

She sat across the table from him and smiled. “Angus is just fine hitching. A cousin drives down the road every five minutes or so. He’ll get a ride.”

Memphis nodded. “I suppose that’s right. I heard something about his sister being pregnant. Any truth to that?” He regretted the question almost immediately. Police work was a hard habit to break.

Melveena’s face stayed composed. “How did you hear about that?”

“Well, the funniest thing. Garth stopped her and Angus out on a country road, last night. Turns out she was driving. Angus was teaching her how to drive his cousin’s truck.”

“Bone Pile women don’t drive.”