Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1 Page 16

  Nick interrupted. “When Mrs. Guilford rejected your brother, I’m sure he was hurt. He was disappointed and angry—that’s not the same as depressed. Think carefully. When did he begin to sleep longer hours? When did small tasks begin to seem overwhelming to him? When did he begin to stay to himself and disappear for long periods of time?”

  “He always did some of that. But it got worse after the Gulf—lots worse. He went up to Walter Reed for a spell. Didn’t help much.”

  “Walter Reed Army Medical Center? In Washington?”

  She nodded.

  “Was that the Gulf War Syndrome treatment program?”

  “He went for a couple weeks at a time. Didn’t do no good.”

  “Did he have any other symptoms besides depression? Weakness? Fatigue? Memory loss, neurological disorders?”

  “None of that.” She shook her head. “He just got down on hisself.”

  “Did your brother see action in the Gulf? Did you ever talk to him about what happened there?”

  “I tried—but when I asked about it he just clammed up. Sometimes he brung it up. Sometimes he’d start to talk about what he done or what it was like in the desert or some tight spot him and Andy was in—but then he’d just as soon get quiet again, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t bring him out of it. That’s when he’d head off by hisself—sometimes for weeks.”

  “Where did he go during those periods? Do you know?”

  “Off in the woods, mostly. To hunt. Jimmy loved to hunt.”

  “Mostly around here?”

  “All over. You go where the game is, where the season is.”

  Nick paused. “Who did your brother hunt with?”

  “Most everybody in town.”

  “The three hunters who found him? Ronny, Denny, Wayne?”

  “Sure, lots o’ times.”

  “Did he ever mention a problem with any of them? One of them he didn’t seem to get along with?”

  “None in particular. Jimmy didn’t take to nobody too well.”

  “What about the sheriff? Did your brother hunt with the sheriff?”

  “Peter, sure. Most of all Peter. Peter got hisself an old hunting cabin just outside of Valdosta. Hunt turkey and hog there.”

  “Valdosta, Georgia?”

  She nodded.

  “Miss McAllister, I want you to think very carefully. Who was the last person to see your brother alive?”

  Her eyes took on a distant look. “Me, I guess.”

  “The last time you saw him, how did he act? Was there anything unusual about his behavior? Can you remember anything he said?”

  Amy squinted hard, as if staring into a deep darkness. “He was mad as mud—even more than usual. Said he was going to make things right.”

  “Make things right—what do you think he meant by that?”

  She shrugged. “Jimmy said a lot of things didn’t make no sense.”

  “And when he went to ‘make things right,’ where did he go? Any idea what he did, who he spoke with?”

  No answer.

  Nick sat quietly for a minute, his searching eyes darting rapidly behind their glass enclosures. Amy’s eyes sank to the floor, and Kathryn ventured her first glance up at Amy’s face. She looked so tired, so much older than her twenty-five years. Her entire childhood had been a walking death, and now death surrounded her, suffocated her—perhaps as it had Jimmy.

  “Miss McAllister,” Nick spoke again, “I’d like to ask you one last question—one that I asked you before: Do you really believe your brother killed himself?”

  Amy’s face began to twist and contort. Half a dozen times she seemed as if she would speak, only to shake her head or shrug and start again. At last she managed just a single word.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m still here,” she whispered. “And Jimmy wouldn’t leave without me.”

  Kathryn let a single sob escape.

  Amy slowly rose from her chair and silently left the room.

  It was all Kathryn could do to contain herself. The utter wretchedness of it all almost swallowed her alive.

  Nick slapped his hands on the sofa and stood up. “I think our interview is over,” he said, stretching. “She gave us a lot to think about.” He headed for the door, and Kathryn slowly followed. A part of her wanted to stay behind, to find Amy and hold her, to stay with her.

  At the door a quiet voice stopped her.

  “Wait.”

  Kathryn turned to see Amy holding a small Bible and a faded cigar box bound together with a cracked and brittle rubber band.

  “These are Jimmy’s things,” she said. “His personal things. They might as well go with you.” She held out the bundle, and Kathryn saw the briefest flicker of light in Amy’s eyes—then darkness again.

  “I can’t see you again,” Amy whispered. “I can’t.”

  “Amy—I want you to know—” Kathryn stopped midsentence.

  Over Amy’s shoulder Kathryn saw thick gray smoke rolling toward them down the hallway ceiling from the back of the house. She spun around. Nick was already halfway back to the car.

  “Nick! Fire!”

  By the time she turned back again, Amy was halfway down the hall. She ducked into the living room just long enough to grab her brother’s portrait, then raced toward the kitchen.

  “Ariel! Here, Ariel!”

  “Amy! Leave the cat! We’ve got to get out of here now!”

  Amy hesitated in the doorway, silhouetted against a rising amber glow, then disappeared into the roiling cloud.

  “Amy!”

  Kathryn started forward when she felt a powerful hand grab her by the arm and jerk back. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Nick shouted, dragging her back toward the open doorway. “We can’t find her this way, the smoke’s already too thick! We’ve got to head around back and find a shorter way in!”

  They raced across the porch and around the left side of the house. Flames were visible from three windows, and individual panes cracked and exploded outward from the expanding gases. The vinyl siding began to brown and curl like frying bacon.

  The end of the house was already engulfed in fire. Flame belched out from the kitchen window like a blowtorch. Less than a yard from the house, in the very center of the inferno, was a hulking silver capsule.

  A propane tank.

  They both saw it simultaneously.

  “Back the other way!” Nick shouted. “Go, go!”

  They raced back down the side of the house through blasts of flying glass and heat, around to the front of the house where the raging remains of the house might shelter them from shrapnel. Above the flames they could hear a shrill whistle that steadily rose to a deafening shriek.

  “The ditch!” Kathryn screamed. “Into the ditch!”

  They both dove headlong into the shallow water of the drainage ditch and threw their arms over their heads and necks.

  There was a thundering roar, and a great orange fireball rolled into the sky.

  Nick and Kathryn clutched coarse woolen blankets around their shoulders and watched the Holcum County Fire and Rescue team kick apart the remaining embers that an hour ago formed the house of Amy McAllister. Somewhere in the smoldering ashes lay the remains of Amy herself.

  Sheriff Peter St. Clair stood with his arm around Kathryn as the fire chief approached.

  “What can you tell us?” the sheriff called out. “How did it start?”

  “Are you kidding?” the fire chief said. “You tell me. All I can tell you is what you already know: It hit the propane tank. There isn’t enough left of the house to tell us anything else. Man, the heat inside that fireball must have been like a hog roast on the Fourth of July.”

  Nick felt the stubble on the back of his left arm, where the heat from the blast had singed it almost to the skin. “My guess is she started the fire herself. She went to make us some tea—probably left the gas on. The woman wasn’t dealing off the top of the deck.”

  “I ca
n tell you how the fire started,” Kathryn grumbled. “Somebody set it.”

  Both men looked at her.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “First somebody takes a shot at us in the woods; now they try to burn us alive.”

  The sheriff squeezed Kathryn a little tighter and shook his head to the fire chief, who turned and headed back toward the EMT truck.

  “Kath,” Peter said softly, “they were two separate things.”

  Kathryn twisted away from him. “Are you going to tell me that this was just a prank too?”

  “No. I’m going to tell you it was an accident. C’mon, you saw the condition of the place—the bare wood, the brush, the debris piled next to the house. You saw how many candles she had burning in there, like it was some kind of shrine. It’s a wonder the whole place didn’t go up a long time ago. Like the Doc said, she probably set the fire herself.”

  “But it didn’t go up a long time ago, Peter. It went up while we were in it.”

  “That is a bit coincidental,” Nick joined in. “The fire started in the back of the house, probably in the kitchen. But we were in the kitchen less than half an hour before we saw smoke, and the place went up in minutes. It’s hard to see how a spontaneous fire could spread that fast.”

  The sheriff glared at him. “So now you’re the Fire Man too?”

  “Okay, so I’m out of my league here. All I’m saying is it seems a little odd.”

  “You said it yourself, everything about the place was odd. Including Amy.”

  Kathryn turned to face Peter. “Someone wants us to stop this investigation, Peter. If Jimmy’s death was such an obvious suicide, why would anyone care if we take a closer look? It looks to me like someone has something to hide.”

  “Now wait a minute. Slow down—”

  “Maybe this was an accident. Maybe Amy burned her own house down. Maybe she decided to set fire to it herself when she first saw me at the front door! But Amy didn’t take a shot at us in the woods. And when you put the two together …”

  “Hold on,” the sheriff began—and then he stopped abruptly. He kicked at a piece of charred debris and smothered a curse. “I know who fired on you in the woods.”

  Nick poked his head around Kathryn and stared at the sheriff. “Excuse me?”

  “It was Ronny. Or maybe Denny or Wayne—one of those three.”

  “The three hunters? The ones who discovered the body in the meadow?”

  Peter nodded. “I had a hunch about it, so I stopped by the Buck Stop the other night—it’s a bar over in Elkhorn where some of the boys like to hang out.”

  “And?”

  “Look, put yourself in their place. Three good ol’ boys stumble across a body in the woods. They know the man’s problems, they see the gun in his hand, they put two and two together. So they do their civic duty and call the authorities. Next thing they know, some witch doctor comes to town saying he’s gonna find out what really happened. And the boys get worried that somebody’s gonna point the finger at them. So they fired a shot to try to scare you off. They weren’t trying to hurt anybody.”

  “That’s it?” Nick said.

  “That’s it,” the sheriff said. “Now you know. Don’t worry, I put the fear of God in all three of ‘em. There won’t be any more of that nonsense.”

  Kathryn looked at the charred remains of the house and wondered.

  Nick turned to the sheriff. “Do you believe their motive? That they were only trying to protect themselves from false accusation?”

  “They saw the O. J. trial, Doc. They know how screwed up the law can get.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that they might be covering up a deeper motive? They discovered the body, Sheriff; they certainly had the opportunity to manipulate it before you saw it. Any one of them could have played a role in Mr. McAllister’s death.”

  “Maybe. But you’re forgetting something, Doc—something you can’t understand because you’re not from around here. I know those boys—and I knew Jimmy. That plays a big part in knowing what did and didn’t happen.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” Nick responded. “Mrs. Guilford knew Jimmy too—but she holds a different opinion. You put a lot of faith in your knowledge of people, Sheriff.”

  “Jimmy was an accident waiting to happen,” the sheriff said.

  “You’re sure about that? Absolutely positive?”

  “You see a blind man walking toward a hole, you watch him walk right up to the edge, then you turn away for a split second—and when you look back, he’s lying at the bottom of the hole. Do you ask who pushed him?”

  “No,” Nick said. “I ask, ‘Who’s the blind man here?’”

  Kathryn could contain herself no longer. “Why didn’t you tell us this before, Peter? Yesterday or the night before? You said you were going to cooperate!”

  Peter pointed to the smoldering ruins of the house. “Because that’s you. You’re a fire out of control. First you thought somebody was tryin’ to kill you in the woods, and it was just a couple of boys tryin’ to cover their own backsides. Now you think somebody wants to burn you alive. Pretty soon you’ll be finding conspiracies under every rock! Jimmy killed himself, Kath—I’m sorry you can’t accept that. I just don’t want to see you wasting any more of your time and money. I don’t want to fuel the fire.”

  “If I’m wrong,” Kathryn seethed, “then I’m only wasting my own time and money. But if you’re wrong”—she pointed to the house—“then that was another murder!”

  Kathryn picked up the small pile of Jimmy’s personal belongings and began to brush off the dried mud and soot.

  “What’s that?”

  “Jimmy’s personal things—what’s left of them anyway. Amy thought I should have them.”

  “Mind if I have a look?”

  The sheriff slid the crumbling Macanudo cigar box out from under the rubber band and handed the Bible back to Kathryn. He flipped open the lid. Inside was a scattering of personal items: Jimmy’s Airborne insignia and campaign ribbon, a small Buck pocketknife, a pair of shiny onyx cuff links, and a banded deck of Aviator playing cards. There were also a half-dozen letters and papers of various shapes and sizes.

  “Mind if I hang on to this for awhile? I’ll go through the papers, see if I find anything that might help.” He leaned toward Kathryn. “I don’t expect to.”

  “If you don’t expect to find anything, then give them back,” Kathryn said.

  “We said we’d cooperate,” the sheriff said gently. “You got to let me do something.”

  Kathryn shrugged the blanket from her shoulders and dropped it at Peter’s feet. She spun around and stormed away toward the car.

  Nick let the embers cool for a few moments before saying, “It is her time, you know. Why don’t you just humor her?”

  The sheriff glared at him. “It’s time that could be better spent.”

  “Better spent … on you?”

  The sheriff leaned in close and spoke in a low, rumbling voice. “There are lines, Doc.” He turned and stomped off toward the waiting patrol car.

  “There are lines,” Nick whistled. “And I think I just found one.”

  Ten o’clock, hon. League play just ended; it’s open lanes now.”

  “Thanks.” Nick sat at the snack bar at the Strike ’N Spare Lanes, watching three men in matching gray Loungemaster shirts with the name Buck Stop chainstitched in red across the back.

  “Can you give me lane twelve? The one beside those three there.”

  “Sure thing. Friends of yours?”

  Nick shook his head. “What can you tell me about them?”

  The waitress eyed him suspiciously. “Why you asking?”

  “I’d like to do a little business with them.”

  “Ronny, Denny, and Wayne,” the waitress said, pointing. “Three peas in a pod, those boys.”

  “What do they do—for a living, I mean?”

  “Denny—he’s the little one—still works for his daddy at the
Feed & Supply. Don’t worry, he’ll tell you more’n you want to know. Never stops talkin’, that one. Wayne—the one that used to have hair—he drives a truck for Ferrellgas. Ronny’s the big, quiet fella. He’s got hisself an office over on Dalrymple. He’s the success of the three.”

  “What’s his business?”

  “Insurance, I think. Something like that. Always seems to have money anyway.” She glanced up just in time to see Denny chest-thump Wayne after picking an easy split. “If you ask me, none of ’em’s a bargain.”

  Nick picked up his plate of pork ribs and potato salad and headed for the alleys, stopping by a rack of multicolored spheres just long enough to fit his fingers into a coal black, sixteen-pound Ebonite.

  “You need shoes?” the waitress called after him.

  Nick shook his head. “Not for this game.”

  The three men recognized him even before he sat down. They had never seen Nick before, but they had no doubts about his identity; his massive spectacles were already legendary in the little town of Rayford. They watched as Nick silently added his ball to the return rack and set his plate down on the scoring table.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Can you bowl?” Wayne snickered. “I mean, can you see the pins?”

  Nick lifted his ball and turned to the alley. He held the ball chest high, paused, then took three quick steps forward. His backswing rose above his head, and the black shape floated weightless for an instant before arcing down again. The ball met the alley without a sound and rocketed forward along the right gutter, spinning like a gyroscope on its side. Two-thirds of the way to the target lateral rotation overcame forward momentum, and the ball broke, curling in perfectly just behind the headpin. Ten pins exploded and ricocheted inside their black frame.

  Nick turned to the three hunters. “Did I get any?”

  “You’re that Bug Man,” Denny said. “Settle a bet for us. What’s the deadliest insect in the world?”

  “Who are the nominees?” Nick asked.

  “I say it’s the female black widow spider.”

  “A naughty lady, but not even in the running.”

  “Your turn, Wayne. Tell the doc what you said.”

  “It’s a definite fact,” Wayne stated with all the authority he could summon, “that the daddy-longlegs, if eaten, is the deadliest spider in the world.”