by Donis Casey
“You said you thought your daddy was headed for the still on that last night you saw him alive,” Alafair remembered.
“Yes, ma’am, the still or the willow root stash, though I don’t know it for sure. It’s just that his stash in the barn was low, and that’s his usual way of doing things.”
They were walking along the creek bank, now, their feet squishing and sliding along the wet, half-decomposed brown leaves that lay thick next to the water. A coating of very black mud was clinging to the bottoms of Alafair’s shoes, which didn’t help her footing any. The creek was running, but a thin skin of ice had formed up next to the bank. Alafair reached out and grabbed the back of John Lee’s coat in her fist to steady herself as they picked their way along.
“So you’re considering old Jim Leonard,” Alafair observed. “Take a look at how black this mud is. You father’s body was covered in black mud just like this. Maybe him and Leonard met that night and got into it again, and maybe old Jim followed him back to the house, all stealthy, and saw him lay down drunk beside the house.”
“Then finished him where he lay with the gun he ran across in the woods. Yes, ma’am. It’s worth finding out.”
Alafair cocked her head as she thought about it. Stranger things had happened. Jim Leonard was a nondescript enough person when he was sober, but he was a pretty unpleasant drunk. “You said you had two or three prospects,” Alafair reminded John Lee.
She saw his head nod. “Yes, ma’am. I was also thinking about Mr. Lang, the grain merchant. He was supposed to come out to the farm Wednesday afternoon and give Daddy what for, but he never made it. I expect he got busy that day. It was a real sloppy, dreary day, I remember. Daddy didn’t have no love for Mr. Lang, I’ll tell you. He sort of had it in for anybody with money, anybody respectable, don’t you know. He always went out of his way to provoke Mr. Lang, and as nice as Mr. Lang has always been to me, I think he has something of a temper. Once or twice I thought he’d have a hissy fit while trying to deal with Daddy. There was that business with Dan, too. Mr. Lang was mighty put out with Daddy for the way he treated Dan.”
“You know, I considered Mr. Lang myself,” Alafair admitted. “Your mama mentioned that he was supposed to come by and never made it. I even went by the office and spoke to him. He says he started out to see you, but his buggy skidded into a ditch at the crossroads.”
“Really?” John Lee exclaimed, interested. “It could be he went ahead and walked on out here, since he was nearer here than to town. It would be right on his way to cut across the back there where I dropped that gun. He’d have been a lot later than he expected to be, and probably in a pretty bad mood. And then after all that to find the no-good crook passed out all stinking drunk and revolting….”
“That’s the story I concocted, more or less,” Alafair told him. “And it’s one story would be easy enough to check, when he left town to come out here on Wednesday, whether he came back late and disheveled. Somebody would have seen.”
“Mr. Turner would know the when and wherefores of the horse and buggy,” John Lee noted.
“I’ll ask him when next I have the chance.”
John Lee turned and took Alafair’s mittened hand in his own in order to help her over a slim fallen tree. “I’ll be in town this evening,” he said. “I’ll ask him.”
Alafair gathered her skirt in her free hand to keep it from snagging on stray branches and stepped over the log. “Perhaps that’s best,” she acknowledged. “I’d just as soon my husband didn’t know how deep I am involved in this.”
“Not to mention Phoebe,” John Lee agreed.
“Not to mention.”
John Lee turned to take the lead down the path, and Alafair fell into step behind him. “You know,” she said to his back, “speaking of Dan Lang, did you ever wonder whether Dan might have done Harley in?”
John Lee kept walking, but Alafair saw his spine stiffen before he answered. “No, I can’t imagine that he’d have shot Daddy. He’d never done anything to cause Maggie Ellen to think less of him.”
“Maybe he thought just the opposite,” she speculated, “that she’d get wind of what happened and admire him for it.”
John Lee shook his head. “No. I’d hate to think Dan was a killer.”
“Do you know where Dan was that night?” she persisted. She was going to tell him that Dan had been riding around in the dark, ostensibly looking for his father, but John Lee responded before she got the chance.
“Not anywhere around here,” he said, firmly dismissing this line of thinking.
They had reached the old willow, hanging precariously over the creek. The bank had been undercut by the current, washing the soil away from the tree’s roots, which dangled in the water. Some day in the not too distant future, the creek would completely undermine the willow, and it would fall. But until that day, the bare, washed-out roots created a perfect little complex of hidden storage compartments, practically invisible to the casual passerby. John Lee squatted down and ran his hand under the overhung bank. After a couple of minutes of feeling around, he sat back on his heels and stared thoughtfully across the water.
“Empty,” he pronounced. “Last time I was down here, just a day or two before he died, there was a couple of gallon jugs and maybe a dozen quart jars.”
“You think somebody cleaned him out?”
John Lee looked up at her. “I reckon. I’ve got Jim Leonard on my mind, but Daddy did business with several of the less respectable types around here, and I imagine there’s any number of folks would have thought of his cache when they heard that he was dead.”
“So where is this still?” Alafair wondered.
John Lee stood and brushed himself off absently. “He moved it around, like I said. But he usually used one of about three or four places here on the property that was suitable. I kind of liked to know where it was, so I’d come down here once a week or so to see if I could spot it. He was a pretty good hider, and you could practically trip over it when he had it hid. He’d cover it up with brush and such when he wasn’t cooking with it.”
Alafair grunted appreciatively. A good working still was a fair sized operation, and had to be run at night, if you didn’t want to be betrayed by the steam. Hiding one was not the easiest proposition.
John Lee pointed through the brush. “Last I saw the thing, it was over this way.” He started walking east along the bank with Alafair right behind him. He left the path that had been beaten down by many feet following along the creek, and ducked into the tangle of dormant limbs. Once again, Alafair had to grab the back of his coat, this time to keep from getting lost in the dense undergrowth. Alafair lost her sense of direction in about ten seconds flat, but John Lee seemed to know where he was going. He crashed through the woods purposefully while Alafair covered her face with her arm to protect her eyes from slashing branches and hung on for dear life. In less than five minutes they broke through into a small overhung clearing, where John Lee stopped abruptly and Alafair crashed into his back. He looked back at her over his shoulder. “This here is the place, Miz Tucker,” he told her.
Alafair blinked and looked around. She saw a small, roomlike clearing that had been created when a large pin oak had fallen. Dead branches and leaf litter were at least ankle deep, and the surrounding trees had filled in with their limbs overhead, effectively creating a leafy roof ten feet up. It was a neat little hidey-hole. But there was no still to be seen.
Before she could question him, John Lee had begun tossing aside man-sized dead limbs from one end of the clearing, exposing bricks, a cauldron, copper tubing….
“Well, I’ll be!” Alafair exclaimed. “I could have stood right on it and not found it! I can’t even figure out how you found it again yourself.”
John Lee, who was studying the still with his hands on his hips and his feet planted apart, shrugged. “Like I said, Daddy tended to use the same two or three spots. I’ve been here plenty of times.” He squatted down, eyed the apparatus for a minute, the
n dug his hand into the ash pile under the makeshift brick fireplace. “These ashes are warm,” he said.
Alafair thought about this briefly. “You mean somebody’s made a fire within the last few hours,” she observed.
He looked up at her. “Had to have. Looks like somebody’s got himself a still.” He looked back down. “I wouldn’t care if one of Daddy’s ne’er-do-well friends dismantled this thing and hauled it off, but I don’t like the idea of somebody doing this on our property.”
“If I was a thief and a bootlegger,” Alafair told him, “I might think there was advantages to doing my business where somebody else besides me could get blamed if it was found out.”
John Lee made a “humph” sound, then fell silent for a time, pondering the implications of this discovery.
“What do you think?” Alafair asked him, at length.
“I think I’d better come out here a few nights with the shotgun and catch this fellow,” John Lee stated.
Alafair put her hand on his shoulder. “John Lee, don’t you think you’d do better to turn this information over to the sheriff and let him pursue it?”
John Lee stood up. “No, ma’am, with all due respect, I don’t. The sheriff has got his killer, or so he thinks. If I don’t present him with the answer writ in stone, I don’t see why he’d think it worth his time to mess with it.”
Alafair glanced up at the light spot in the clouds that indicated the position of the sun. “I’ve got to get home and start dinner for Shaw,” she said nervously, “but I really want to talk about this some more before you do something rash. What if this person is the killer? What does he have to lose by shooting you? Or maybe worse, what if you end up having to shoot him and then end up being the killer you’re trying to prove you’re not? Please don’t do anything until we can get together again and plan this out. Maybe tomorrow….”
“Miz Tucker,” John Lee interrupted. “I’ve got to move fast. The sheriff is taking my ma into Muskogee today to charge her with murder.”
“Please, son,” she pleaded. “We’ll get it figured out. Please promise me you won’t try to take this all on yourself.”
John Lee eyed her doubtfully. “I’ll think on it, Miz Tucker,” he finally said. “Now let me take you out of here and get you headed for home.”
Alafair opened her mouth to argue with him, but suddenly realized that this was the best she was going to get. She nodded, and followed him as he led her back through the brush to the path by the creek, all the while anxiously wondering what she was going to do next.
***
Alafair had set a stew on slow heat early that morning, and it had cooked to soupy perfection by the time Shaw got back to the house at about 12:30. Alafair baked a short batch of biscuits and fried a few slabs of bacon, creamed a quart of corn from her pantry, fried some potatoes in drippings with onion and a bit of her dried sage, sliced some onions into thick chunks, and poured a couple of glasses of buttermilk. They discussed the homely business of the day as they ate, sitting companionably at the table for a little longer than necessary when they finished, lingering over mugs of strong bitter coffee, a bit of warm apple cake with butter, and a slice or two of homemade cheese. It was close to two when Shaw went back to work, leaving Alafair to clear the table and store the leftovers for supper. She took her time over the dishes, staring out the window over the dish pan, pondering the mysteries she found herself involved with.
Things had become too complicated. She was desperately trying to protect her daughter from—well, from anything that might hurt her. In the process, she was afraid that she was keeping things from Shaw and Scott that perhaps she shouldn’t. Alafair was beginning to fear that there was no way that she could continue to keep the law from finding out that Phoebe was involved in the events that may have led to the murder of Harley Day. That little gun. Somebody was going to find out where that little gun had come from. She really hoped that Mrs. Day or whoever had used the derringer had indeed flung it into the creek, never to be seen again, because if it were found, and Shaw saw it, he would recognize it immediately. Alafair felt some dread of what Shaw would think of her if he found out she had been keeping things from him, but that was only of peripheral importance to her compared to sparing Phoebe. Also, Alafair was not fool enough to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that John Lee himself was not the culprit here, howsoever much she may have wished it weren’t so. She had to prove to herself most of all that he was innocent, for if he was not, then Phoebe was in for a broken heart. And that prospect horrified Alafair almost as much as the idea of the girl being in trouble with the law.
***
After dinner was cleaned up and put away, Alafair took the slop buckets out to the sties next to the barn to slop the hogs. The two yearling boars were waiting for her by the troughs as she trudged across the yard lugging the heavy pails of scraps from last night’s supper and today’s breakfast and dinner. She made soothing noises to them, under her breath, “pigpigpig,” as she tipped the buckets over the fence into the troughs, practically over the hogs’ heads as they inhaled the tasty leftovers. She added a couple of buckets of Shaw’s blend of corn and sorghum pig food from the barrel just inside the barn door, then went inside to feed the sow and piglets in their warm nursery sty. Two barn cats insinuated themselves around her ankles while she fed the sow. Her usual companion for this chore, Charlie-dog, was absent, having chosen to accompany his boy to school today.
Alafair was mildly surprised that Shaw wasn’t in the barn, or around the nearby outbuildings, as far as she could see. His favorite riding horse, Hannah, whom he had naughtily named after his fussy sister, was not in her stall, and his saddle was gone. He had more than likely ridden out to the pasture.
She stood thoughtfully watching the sow and her eight frantic pigs feed, unable to keep her mind off the problem with Phoebe. Before she knew what was happening, she found herself walking out of the barn toward the trail behind the house, heading back to the creek, back to where John Lee had taken her that morning. She didn’t have a plan. She didn’t know why she was going, even. She wasn’t at all sure she could find the still again. In fact, she was fairly certain that she couldn’t. And yet, for some reason, she had to try. She had to stand there again and see if she could garner even the merest clue to this mystery.
She was able to follow the path along the creek bank with little difficulty. She crawled through the barbed wire fence that separated the Tucker farm from the Day farm and walked beside the creek for a few minutes, past the overhung willow, until things began to look less familiar to her. She stopped walking, turned around to face the way she had come, and scanned the path and the woods for the subtle scuffs and broken twigs that would show her where to head into the brush.
As she stood silent, studying the path, Alafair heard a noise in the woods. At first, she thought it was a breeze rustling the dead leaves in the trees, but there was no breeze. Just dead calm and an oppressive cold silence. She could barely hear the gurgle of an eddy under the thin skin of ice next to the bank. She didn’t move for a few minutes, listening patiently.
There it was again. Alafair definitely heard a scuffle, like a small animal, then another brief silence. The next sound was the crunch of boots on leaves and twigs off to her left in the brush. Alafair squatted down quickly, still in the path, but now no longer readily visible in her brown coat among the bushes. The crunching became a crashing as whoever it was made his way out of the brush and toward the footpath. He was not worried about being discreet, this big-footed person. Alafair had pretty much decided that it was going to be John Lee or one of the other Days, so she was startled when a tall, scrawny, middle-aged man burst out onto the path so close that he nearly stepped on her. Alafair popped to her feet with a yelp, which was echoed by the man. His arms were full of earthenware jugs, and he came close to losing his footing and plunging headlong into the creek. Without thinking, Alafair reached out and grabbed his arm to save him a chilly dip.
“Lord
have mercy!” the man exclaimed. “What the blue blazes? Who is that? Is that Alafair Tucker?”
Alafair dropped the man’s arm quickly and stepped back away from him, her heart pounding. “Jim Leonard,” she observed.
“What are you doing here on the Day farm?”
Leonard blinked his rheumy eyes at her, still reeling a bit from the fright, but apparently mostly sober. “I could ask you the same question,” he said.
There was a moment of silence as they eyed one another. Leonard knew he was caught with the goods and Alafair knew she had caught him. The question was now how to proceed.
“John Lee said he thought somebody was using his late father’s still,” Alafair opened.
Leonard glanced at the jug under his arm and shrugged. “Weren’t nobody else using it,” he noted. “Seemed like a waste.”
Alafair declined to comment. “If I was you, I think I would have moved the still off the Day property,” she said. “If John Lee catches you, he’s got a right to shoot you.”
“I doubt if’n John Lee would shoot me,” Leonard opined. “Such a mild boy.”
Alafair almost smiled. “I don’t know. He’s been in a real bad mood.”
Leonard gazed at her without comment for just a moment before replying. “I’d love to stay and jaw, Miz Tucker, but I got business.”
Alafair nodded and turned to leave, anxious to get away from him, but he quickly stepped into her path.
“Before you go,” he added, “I’d appreciate your word that you’ll keep this here little meetin’ to your own self.”
Alafair arranged her face to be the picture of calm, but her heart began beating wildly. “I don’t see as how it will come up,” she told him. “Especially if you was to dismantle this still and take it off the Day property.”