The Old Buzzard Had It Coming: An Alafair Tucker Mystery

by Donis Casey

  Alafair and Mary exchanged a glance. “I’m not inclined to disagree with you,” Alafair resumed. “I just expected that you have been troubled of late that the sheriff threw both John Lee and his mother in jail on suspicion of killing the reprobate.”

  Zorah nodded and took a sip of her coffee. “That surely did fret me at the time, but I hear now that Sheriff Tucker has arrested Jim Leonard. I’m expecting he’ll let my sister-in-law go directly. I don’t know what she was thinking, confessing to killing Harley, when I know she didn’t do it. Stupid to ruin what’s left of her life for the likes of him.” Her sharp blue-green eyes examined Alafair’s bruises critically for a second before she continued. “My sister-in-law says y’all have been good to her through all this. I heard what happened to you over by Harley’s still,” she acknowledged. “I was sorry for it.”

  “Turned out to be nothing serious,” Alafair said. “I’m getting a long layabout while my girls take good care of me.” She patted Mary’s knee. “It was worth it, though, if it helps clear John Lee and Miz Day. We’ve taken quite a shine to the Days, especially John Lee.”

  “And you’re wondering if I know anything else that could prove beyond doubt that he’s innocent of the deed,” Zorah added, at last enlightened as to the reason for Alafair’s unexpected visit.

  “That’s the nail on the head,” Alafair confessed.

  Zorah put her mug down on the side table and leaned back in her chair. She crossed her arms over her chest and regarded Alafair thoughtfully before she answered. “It’s kind of you to be concerned about John Lee,” she noted. “I don’t think he done it, and I don’t think his ma done it, but I can’t give you any facts to prove it either way. Sheriff Tucker already asked me about the morning John Lee showed up out here to ask me to get the kids, and I told him all I know. John Lee seemed pretty flibber-flobbered, but who wouldn’t be? He just said his daddy had froze to death. I didn’t know ’til later that Harley was shot. John Lee has always been a good boy—he’s the only reason that family has been able to keep body and soul together, to my thinking. I can’t imagine that he did it, but even if he did I wouldn’t blame him at all. Harley was worthless.”

  “Is any life so worthless that it deserves snuffing out just like that?” Alafair wondered.

  “Oh, yes,” Zorah said. “Harley’s was. I’m shocking y’all, I can tell.” She stood up, fussed around a little bit with the cream and sugar on the side table, and sat down again. “Yes, I’d have done him in myself, if the opportunity had ariz, and gone on about my business without blinking an eye. Did the sheriff ever tell you how Harley harassed me and J.D. after he lost out on Daddy’s will, and put my kids in danger?”

  “Why, no, he never did. You said a while back that Harley had threatened to do you harm. Did he actually try to do it?”

  “Yes, he did. It was bad at first. Mean things kept happening around here. Rat poison got in the cow’s feed. Made her dreadful sick. Her milk was off for days. The barn door and the gate to the corral or the chicken coop kept getting opened in the middle of the night, and animals would wander all over and we never found some of them again. A dead dog got throwed down the well. One of our plow mules got hamstrung—that was real bad. We kept calling the sheriff, and he kept going out to Harley’s to talk to him; threaten him, finally, I think. But we couldn’t really prove it was Harley doing it, and he denied it. Finally, my boy Doyle come running home from school one day white as a sheet, telling me that somebody tried to grab him in the woods.

  “That was about all we could take, Miz Tucker. J.D. grabbed up his shotgun and rode over there black as a tornado. I was scared out of my wits that he’d shoot Harley, not that I’d have cared about Harley, but I didn’t want J.D. to get in trouble. I begged him not to go, but he wasn’t in any mood to hear. Finally, he came back home in a much better state, and said that he’d told Harley he’d shoot him if anything else happened on our property. That was the end of it, then. Harley started drinking too much of his own liquor not too long after that, and probably couldn’t think straight enough to do mischief, anyway. The last time I ever saw Harley was about a week or so before they found him dead. He showed up here one night about supper time, drunk as a lord, pounding on the front door and cussing at us. J.D. just shooed him off like a stray dog, and he went staggering back toward home.”

  She paused in her narrative and heaved a sigh. “How does somebody get like that, I wonder,” she continued thoughtfully. “Harley just had to blame everybody in the world but himself for his troubles. How he tortured his poor wife! He never beat on the kids much, that I know of, anyway, but he made their lives miserable. Why, my niece Maggie Ellen was so scared of him that I give her the means to protect herself. She asked me for money to get away from him, and I gave her what little money I could. She wanted to take some of the kids with her, or at least Naomi, and I didn’t give her enough for that. So I guess she got out while she could. I hear she’s in Okmulgee now. Maybe I’ll go look her up, now that Harley is out of the way.”

  “Well, I never thought much of Harley, either,” Alafair told her, “but I didn’t know he was that horrible, or we’d have done more to help the family.”

  “I blame the drink. He liked to make his own brew even before Oklahoma went into the Union as a dry state. Harley wasn’t always a devil, though it’s hard to remember that after all these years. He was always full of blow and bluster and had a kind of a mean sense of humor, but he was a good enough brother. He seemed besotted with my sister-in-law, and he was a good provider at first. He asked her pa for her, and her pa let him take her, though I surely thought she was too young. She didn’t seem to mind. Harley had the bluest eyes. She liked that.”

  Alafair smiled. She thought those were the first good words she had ever heard anyone utter about the unfortunate Harley Day.

  ***

  As they drove back out onto the road to resume their trip to Boynton, Alafair broke the thoughtful silence. “I heard that Harley and J.D. was feuding, but I never realized how bad it was. Did you notice that Miz Millar said that the last time she saw Harley was a week before he was found?”

  “He showed up drunk,” Mary remembered.

  “A week before he was found is about the time he was shot, you know. Miz Millar did say her husband had threatened to kill Harley if he ever showed up at their place again.” She paused, thinking, then resumed. “If I remember right, her husband was supposed to be home from a business trip the next day, but never made it until a day later.”

  “Ma, it looks like Jim Leonard killed Mr. Day,” Mary pointed out. “Why is that not good enough for you?”

  “Something just ain’t right, honey. It just ain’t right.”

  “What did Miz Millar mean when she said she heard what happened to you at Harley’s still?” Mary asked, out of the blue. “Is there something you didn’t tell us about that shiner?”

  Caught. Alafair shot Mary a glance and sighed. “Well, I guess I’ve got to ’fess up,” she said. “Jim Leonard caught me snooping around the still and socked me in the jaw. I fell and bumped my head and Jim run off, probably scared, like you thought. But I didn’t want to scare you kids so I concocted a story. I’m sorry I lied to you, and I hope you won’t take my lapse as permission to do your own lying in the future.”

  Mary pondered this information for a moment before commenting. “Well, Ma, I don’t know whether to be amused or insulted, but I think I’m leaning toward insulted. Do you think we’re so tender we can’t be told the unpleasant truth?”

  “I’m well chastised,” Alafair admitted. “It’s not so much that I think you older kids need protecting, but I don’t want the young ones alarmed for no good reason. The ugliness of the world will make itself known to them soon enough.”

  “I’m glad Jim Leonard is in jail,” Mary observed.

  “You won’t tell the young’uns what happened?” Alafair hoped.

  Mary snapped the reins and gave an exasperated laugh. “No, Ma,” she sa
id.

  ***

  Though her bumped head was mostly healed by now, Alafair used it as an excuse not to go with Mary to the Boynton Mercantile Company to shop for the few supplies that she needed. “Drop me off at Josie’s,” she instructed.

  Josie saw her coming and was standing in the open door when Alafair reached the bottom of the porch steps. “Come on in here, girl,” Josie invited. “You’re just in time. I just this minute took four loaves of bread out of the oven. I’ll make a pot of tea and we can test a loaf.”

  By the time she had hung up her coat and sat down at the kitchen table, Josie had sliced a still-steaming loaf and set out a slab of butter and a pot of sorghum.

  “I’ve got a jar of those pear preserves from last fall that I opened yesterday, if you’d like some of that,” Josie told her.

  Alafair considered this seriously. “I think I’m partial to the sorghum today, thank you,” she decided.

  Josie put the steeping teapot on the table and sat herself down opposite Alafair. “You’ve got a dandy bruise on your jaw, but it looks like your head is none the worse for wear,” she observed.

  Alafair sliced off a chunk of the pale winter butter and was pouring sorghum over it in her plate. “Oh, I got over that in a day,” she admitted. “I just enjoy letting the girls take care of me, though I’m getting a case of cabin fever.”

  “Scott says you found the gun that killed Harley Day.”

  Alafair looked up from dicing the cold butter into the sorghum with a table knife. “That I did.” She spooned the chunky butter and sorghum onto the hot bread and watched it melt into a glorious golden amalgam. “I had told Jim Leonard that I was looking for the gun by the creek, and he said something about a ‘little pop gun.’ I didn’t think anybody had told him that the gun was a derringer, and it made me suspicious.”

  Josie nodded. “Seems it made Scott pretty suspicious, too, because Hattie just told me this morning that he’s asked to press charges against Jim for killing Harley.”

  Alafair nearly choked on her bite of bread, which was too bad, because it was delicious. “You don’t say!” she managed, at length.

  “I do say,” Josie informed her. “Seems that Scott got Jim to admit that he had found the little gun in the woods back of Harley’s place and picked it up and hid it. Scott found it right where you said it would be. He told Hattie that it was a nice, expensive little gun, and it had one bullet of the type that killed Harley still in it. So, Jim had motive and opportunity enough, Scott thinks. Hattie told me that the charges against Miz Day have been dropped, anyway. I think John Lee is picking her up from the jailhouse in Muskogee right this minute.”

  Alafair put her elbow on the table and shook her head. “Well, I’ll be.”

  Josie patted the table conspiratorially. “What’s this I hear about John Lee Day and Phoebe?” she asked.

  Alafair opened her mouth to answer before a thought struck her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Did you say that the derringer still had one bullet in it?”

  Josie nodded, perplexed. “Yes, one empty chamber and one chamber loaded with a .22 caliber bullet. Why?”

  Alafair’s heart suddenly plummeted to her boots. One bullet in Harley’s head, and one bullet in the blackjack tree, and one bullet in the gun. Three bullets in a two-shot derringer. She had twisted herself in knots to keep Phoebe’s involvement in all this a secret. She should have known that the truth always comes out. Where did that third bullet come from? Did somebody reload? Or was there a second gun? She leaned back in her chair and covered her eyes with her hands.

  “What is it, child?” Josie asked, alarmed.

  Alafair dropped her hands into her lap and prepared to tell Josie all.

  ***

  “I’ll be switched from here to Dallas!” Josie exclaimed, after Alafair had finished her tale. “No wonder you’ve been so interested in finding out who killed Harley Day! Well, I’m glad you finally told me, Alafair. This is quite a burden to bear all by yourself.”

  “So you can see the dilemma, now, Josie,” Alafair said. “Phoebe and I found one bullet in a blackjack, which lines up with John Lee’s story about shooting at Harley and missing. There was one .22 slug in Harley’s head. Then Jim Leonard says there was still a bullet in the gun when he found it.”

  “You didn’t notice if the gun was loaded when you found it at the still?”

  “I didn’t think to look. I just expected it was empty.”

  “Scott has the gun, and it has one bullet in it, now,” Josie pointed out. “He has to be thinking the same thing we are. Three bullets, two-shot derringer. Somebody reloaded. It’s the most likely thing.”

  “Or that derringer isn’t the one that killed Harley,” Alafair speculated.

  “Another gun?”

  “Maybe.”

  Josie crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. “Well, then, we’re back where we started. Anybody could have done it.”

  Alafair’s forehead crinkled, and she sat back in her chair, trying to quiet the frantic noise in her brain. In the few moments of dead silence that followed, a thought floated up from the depths of her mind, ephemeral as a butterfly. She leaned forward, trying to grasp it. “I stopped by Zorah Millar’s just before Mary dropped me off here,” she said.

  Josie blinked at this incongruous comment. “Yes?” she urged.

  “She told me that before Maggie Ellen Day ran away from home, she gave the girl the means to protect herself.”

  “You reckon that means she gave her a gun?”

  Alafair clicked her tongue, exasperated. “That comment went right by me. I could kick myself!”

  Josie waved away this superfluous comment with a flick of her fingers in the air, and got back to the point. “You’re thinking that Maggie Ellen Day might have done it. But how? She ran away a long time ago.”

  “So everybody says. But did she come back? Both John Lee and Naomi told me that she planned to come back eventually to get the kids away from Harley. Maybe she did just that.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “Well, it makes sense. If she was afraid of Harley, she might want to do it on the sly.”

  Josie nodded. “All right, then. She sneaks back onto the farm in the middle of a snowy night, intending to spirit away some or all of the kids, and maybe her mother, too. She has her gun that her aunt gave her for protection. Then, as she gets near the house, she sees the object of her hatred lying by the house in a filthy, reeking heap, freezing to death. It’s dark, it’s cold, there’s nobody around….”

  “It’s the first time she’s clapped eyes on him in a year,” Alafair continued. “All of a sudden it all comes back to her like a thunderburst, all the misery, all the humiliation. And she does it.”

  “Maybe she feels real good at first,” Josie finished the tale, “but then it dawns on her what she’s done, and she runs like a turkey.”

  “It makes sense,” Alafair said, excited. “It makes sense!”

  “Now, don’t go getting all het up,” Josie cautioned. “I admit it fits with what we know, but we’re just guessing, here. Maybe Maggie Ellen did it, and maybe she didn’t. Where has she been keeping herself all this time, and where is she now?”

  Alafair immediately thought of the lean-to shelter in the woods, and the little bundle of quartz and a feather.

  “She can’t have been hiding in the woods for a year, especially not right up next to her father’s moonshining setup,” Josie protested, when Alafair told her about it.

  “Well, no, but maybe just for a night or two, while she got ready to carry out her plans.”

  “How did she plan to get away in the middle of the night with a bunch of kids? She’d have had to have help.”

  “I don’t expect that would have been a problem,” Alafair assured her. “I can think of lots of folks who would have been happy to help her, maybe to be waiting up the road with a wagon.”

  “Like her aunt?”

  “Or Dan Lang. Or Dan’s daddy!
He was known to be about with a buggy that evening.”

  “Could be that some of the Days were in on the plan, as well,” Josie said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if John Lee or his ma were expecting to smuggle the kids out to her.”

  “Or Naomi,” Alafair surmised. “Naomi told me herself that Maggie Ellen had promised to come back for them. And I know that little gal hoarded food. I saw it with my own eyes. I thought at the time she was just hungry, but now I wonder if she was smuggling vittles to her sister.”

  “We’ve got to tell Scott about this, Alafair,” Josie said.

  “We will, we will,” Alafair promised. “But let’s be sure we know what we’re talking about, first. Will you take me out to the Day place right now? Let’s talk to John Lee.”

  ***

  After instructing a reluctant Mary to stay in town to pick up the kids, Josie and Alafair hitched up Josie’s shay and headed out to the Day farm. As the two women drove out of town, they discussed how much they could disclose to Scott about the incident between John Lee and Harley in the woods without involving Phoebe any more than they had to. Alafair was afraid that she would have to come clean about Phoebe having given the gun to John Lee in the first place. Unless directly confronted, they didn’t see why they should tell the sheriff that Phoebe was physically present when John Lee shot at his father.

  As they neared the Day farm, they planned their strategy. They thought they would ask John Lee how he had gotten bullets for the derringer. Alafair knew that there were two bullets in a fancy little case that she kept in the gun box, but any other bullets would have to have been acquired elsewhere. When Josie asked her whether the bullet case was there when she saw that the gun was gone, Alafair had to admit that she hadn’t noticed. Mrs. Day had told Scott that there were no twenty-two caliber firearms on their farm, but twenty-two caliber bullets were easy enough to get. Even if the bullet case was still in the box, it wouldn’t mean much.