“Buddy Janss helped me out, because as soon as I paid for my squash, he came back to chat up Hester, about late produce deliveries. I swear, Buddy has put on more weight. His chins now have chins.”
“Buddy may be fat but he’s light on his feet. He was a hell of a football player in high school and college. It’s a pity that retired linemen run to fat so often.”
“Boxers, too.” She watched rolling hills pass by.
“Maybe you should go live with Buddy. The two of you could be Team Tubby.” Tucker knew this would start a fight.
“Don’t,” Mrs. Murphy counseled in vain.
“Bubble Butt. Poop Breath!” Pewter hissed loudly.
Harry twisted around in the front seat just in time to see Pewter hook the dog’s shoulder with one claw.
“Ouch,” Tucker yelped.
“Next, your eyes.”
“Pull over, honey. There will be fur all over the car if I don’t stop this right now.”
He pulled over on the side of the road. The field on the north side of the two-lane road was jammed with corn. Morrowdale Farm usually put these fields in good hay, but this year row after row of healthy corn filled them. They had somehow escaped the small drought.
Opening the door to again castigate the backseat passengers, Harry remarked, “This has to be one of the best-run and prettiest farms in Albemarle County.”
“Sure is.”
They looked out to the scarecrow in the middle of the field, currently being mobbed by crows.
“I thought scarecrows were supposed to frighten crows,” Fair said.
“Those crows are having a party. Look at that. Pulling on the wig under the hat.” Harry laughed. “What are all those birds doing?”
Fair stepped out of the car to stare intently as a crow plucked out an eyeball.
“Honey, that’s not a scarecrow.”
“Tucker, come back!” Harry called to the corgi as the dog raced across the cornfield.
Fair, in his shock, hadn’t closed the station wagon door, so all three animals had rushed out after deciding to see what was going on.
The corn rustled as the strong little dog bounded through.
The two cats also sped down a row, curiosity raging.
“Selective hearing.” Harry shook her head as she followed, starting into a corn row.
“Honey, they’ll be back. You should stay where you are, otherwise you might destroy footprints or some other kind of evidence.”
She stopped, turned to face her husband. “You’re right.”
“I’m not sure you want to see the corpse anyway.”
Harry leaned up against the Volvo. “Death really is ugly and this one is probably especially so. But, Fair, why truss someone up like a scarecrow?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “Clever, really. How many people passed by this field on Garth Road? Plenty, I bet, and still no one stopped or called the sheriff’s department. The only reason we did was because of the ruckus raised by our passengers, and then the crows caught our eye, and … well.”
As the married couple waited for the sheriff’s department to arrive, the three investigating animals reached the base of the scarecrow.
A blue-black crow perched on the straw hat looked down. “Beat it!” he squawked.
Mrs. Murphy knew she could climb the dead man’s leg if need be, so she stood on her hind legs reaching far up, feeling the cold flesh under the faux scarecrow’s pants. “I can climb up and shoo all of you away,” she threatened the birds.
A second crow in this mob, on an outstretched arm, gibed, “Go ahead. We’ll fly away, circle, and come right on back.”
The first crow opened his wings to their full span, the light picking up the blue highlights. “What do you want with this feast? Cats don’t eat carrion.”
Pewter ignored the question and asked one of her own: “Did you see the scarecrow being set up?”
The second crow spoke. “No, but he hasn’t been here long. We caught a whiff as we flew over this cornfield on our way to Shelford Farm. When we tear off a juicy piece of meat, some blood still drips.”
Few scarecrows are well dressed. Neither was this one. It wore a drab, wrinkled shirt over a red undershirt. Worn, old pants, rope for a belt, took care of his bottom half. Old work boots, the sole separated from the left one, covered his feet. The straw hat, edges frayed, hatband missing, gave the fellow the final country touch.
As blood pools in the extremities, the crows provided valuable information. The scarecrow wouldn’t show the signs of rigor mortis because the body was tied, arms outstretched, legs tied down, too. No blood was moving, the body temperature had cooled down, but this was a fresh kill, relatively.
Mrs. Murphy noticed that the eyes had been plucked out and a lot of flesh had already been eaten off his face and hands. Eventually, the crows would have torn through the clothing.
“Did you smell another human?” the tiger cat asked.
“No. The sun had been up about an hour. What we smelled was him,” the first crow reported, his olfactory powers acute, especially for blood and meat.
“Without his eyes, I can’t tell if he was strangled,” Pewter matter-of-factly announced. “They’d be bulging and bloodshot.”
“Eyes are so tasty.” A smaller crow opened his beak wide. “A real delicacy.”
“Any idea how he was killed?” asked Mrs. Murphy.
“You didn’t hear him scream, did you?” Pewter, normally not interested in much besides her own meals, was oddly thrilled at having discovered such an unusual murder.
“How could we have heard him scream?” a young crow replied. “He was dead and gone by the time we found him.”
“Eat what you can, because the sheriff is on his way. He’ll cut him down,” Mrs. Murphy advised.
Tucker sniffed the bottom of the stake, sniffed the corpse’s shoes, then picked up the diminishing odor of a set of rubber boots. Raising her nose, she sensed the smell moving away from the body, then, nose to ground, she began to track, the cats in her wake. As the three friends stuck to their trail of the pair of rubber boots, presumably those of the person who had carried the body, the crows burst out singing a song whose refrain was “Oh, those beautiful eyes, those great big beautiful eyes.” Then they burst into raucous laughter.
“Gross,” Tucker said.
“Yeah.” Pewter looked back. “Twisted. They’re really twisted.”
“It’s the killer who’s twisted,” Mrs. Murphy sensibly replied as she, too, kept her nose down.
The three followed the line until it came out to the side of the road, where there was a small stain that smelled like motor oil.
“Every third person wears rubber boots around here when it’s wet.” Tucker sat down. “But I think this is the spot where the scarcrow’s companion parked, then carried out his body from here.”
“A strong person. They don’t call it dead weight for nothing,” Mrs. Murphy noted.
“She’s red in the face,” Pewter said, referring to Harry, calling their names in the distance with increasing frustration. “We’d better go back to the wagon.”
When they got back to the Volvo, Harry scooped them up, put them in the back, and closed the door. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she huffed, unaware of the irony of Harry Haristeen making such a statement.
“Yeah, yeah.” Pewter put her paws on the window just to make a smear.
“She’s upset.” Tucker put her head on her paws.
“Pop is, too. Humans can’t face death.” Pewter was right about that.
“This is murder. Worse.” Mrs. Murphy heard cars coming closer.
“I found a head in a pumpkin, remember?” Pewter reminisced.
“We’ve heard that story a hundred times,” Tucker grumbled, heading her off. “This is just as weird. And we were first on the scene. I mean, after the crows and the killer.”
The sheriff’s car rolled up. Sheriff Rick Shaw stepped out from the driver’s side and Deputy Cynthia Cooper emerged from the
other. Cooper—Harry never called her Cynthia—rented the farm next to Harry’s farm, the old Jones homeplace. The two women had become friends.
The two law enforcement officers carefully pushed through the late-maturing corn, the leaves rattling, ears full on the stalks. They looked downward as they walked but were rows away from the footprints that Tucker had found.
Harry and Fair stayed with their station wagon as instructed. They could see how carefully Rick and Cooper looked about, conferred, looked down. Then the two circled the scarecrow. The crows flew in loops around them.
One crow dive-bombed. “Leave us alone!”
Cooper ducked, then waved her hands at the noisy birds. “Damn.”
Rick, tempted to take out his sidearm and fire, did not. No need to alert the residents of Morrowdale or anyone else at this moment.
After twenty minutes, they returned.
“Do you know who it is?” Harry asked.
Cooper shook her head. “The face is pretty well gone. But he’s youngish, and had been in fairly good shape. Look, why don’t you two go on home? I’ll get a statement from you later. If there’s anything of immediate importance, tell me now. Otherwise, you’ll get caught up in the removal team, the forensic team, and, of course, the news team, as they know where we are every minute thanks to being able to listen in to all our calls.”
Tucker barked from the car. “There’s a drip of oil just up the road. And footprints in a corn row.”
“Save your breath,” Pewter, paws on the windowsill, counseled.
“They’ll find the footprints,” Mrs. Murphy said. “The humans will crawl over that cornfield and the two of them will be down at Morrowdale questioning everyone and going through the barns and sheds.”
Harry and Fair drove west down Garth Road, then turned toward Crozet, heading south. The Blue Ridge Mountains were now on their right. They passed a large cattle farm, Dunrovin, with Herefords in the pastures; they passed by rolling acres of grapes, the land dotted here and there with old farmhouses and the occasional new structure, always sited for the view.
“You okay?” Fair asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.” They passed the apple shed now housing Chuck Pinell’s leather shop. “Yeah, but …” His voice trailed off.
“Creepy.” Harry shivered.
“People kill for lust, for love, in a fit of anger, or for money, and some because they are plain nuts,” Fair said.
“You’d need to be pretty demented to take someone you’ve just killed and tie them up as a scarecrow, especially with Halloween just around the corner,” Harry said. “Or it could be a side show designed to cover up another crime. Think about it.”
Fair couldn’t take his eyes off the road, because it was two-lane and treacherous. “I’d rather not.” As he continued, his voice was firm, for his wife was more curious than the cats. “You don’t need to think that much about it either. It was a shock. An unfortunate discovery. We can say a prayer for the victim and then go about our business.”
“Prayers are wonderful. So are results. Who speaks for an innocent victim? Until I know more, I’m assuming he’s innocent.”
Knowing he was losing the battle against his wife’s curiosity, he calmly replied, “Just leave this to Rick and Cooper.”
“Of course.”
“Boy, was that a fib.” Pewter giggled.
The others laughed with her.
Harry then said, “Whoever did it has quite the imagination.”
“The last thing this county or state needs is an imaginative killer,” said Fair, “especially if you’re one of the victims.”
“Fair, think about this: Don’t most murderers try to dispose of their victim’s bodies so no one finds them? Or if it’s a crime of anger or passion, they run away and leave it, but they don’t turn the corpse into a scarecrow or a public display. Whoever did this had time to plan it out.”
“I guess.”
“So I don’t think it’s a crime of passion.”
“Unless the killer meant to make a mockery of the corpse.” Fair braked at the stop sign at the Amoco station in Crozet. “Dammit. Now you’ve got me thinking about it. Let’s just let it all go.”
“Mmm.” Harry was already off and running.
On the kitchen table, Pewter flopped on her side, her tail gently swaying. She thought this her best angle. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker thought otherwise.
As Harry opened the oven door to pop in a casserole, Pewter lifted her head.
“I know you’re making that for me.” Her voice hit the dulcet-tone register.
Mrs. Murphy and Tucker, each curled up in their faux-sheepskin-lined animal beds by the door to the back porch, observed with amusement.
Mrs. Murphy imitated the gray cat’s voice: “I am the most loving kitty in the world.”
Pointedly ignoring this, Pewter again sweetly meowed. “I could use a little tuna until the casserole is ready.”
Harry closed the door, set the timer, then turned to behold the cat, whose head was now raised, tail moving a bit faster. “Does smell good, doesn’t it, Pewts?” Harry said. She caressed the cat’s silken fur.
“I have suffered a terrible shock,” Pewter panted, pushing her head into Harry’s hand. “The sight of a shredded face. Crows devouring human flesh before being impertinent to me. If one of those vile birds had dropped even two feet, I could have leapt up and torn it to bits.”
“You’re laying it on a little thick.” The dog raised her head.
“Shut up, Bubble Butt. If she breaks out the cookies, you owe me big-time.” Pewter rolled onto her back, cocking her head to one side.
“All right.” Harry opened the treat cabinet, counted out two greenies, and gave them to Tucker. Next she opened a bag of cat treats in the shape of fishes. She gave half of these to Pewter, then walked over and gave the rest to Mrs. Murphy.
“You owe me!” Pewter cried in triumph as she gulped her tiny yellow fish.
Harry—unaware of the exchange, it sounded like meows and catcalling to her—walked back to her husband’s small office in the old farmhouse.
“Forty-five minutes,” she told him.
“Huh.” He looked up from the screen. “Okay.”
“Work?”
Fair was the best equine veterinarian in central Virginia.
He smiled sheepishly. “No. That’s the trouble with the Internet. Easy to get sidetracked.”
“And?” She came up behind him, placing her hands on his broad shoulders.
Not an inch of fat on the man.
“Uh, well, I’ve been kind of reading about bizarre murders. This website has examples going back to the eighteenth century. Really weird things, like duels fought in costumes or heads put on London Bridge with fake crowns. I guess that’s political. But here’s one from Wisconsin in the 1850s that caught my eye: A guy would kill men for no particular reason, or at least one no one could find, and he’d put them in a boat, push it out onto Lake Michigan, and set it afire. A Viking funeral. His victims were all men he had admired.”
“Sometimes I wonder when I hear or read these things whether anyone is normal.”
Fair leaned back in his chair. “I guess that’s debatable.” He rolled his chair around to face her, the rollers clicking on the hardwood floor. “I guess I can’t fuss at you. Sometimes I’m a little too curious myself.”
She kissed his cheek. “Makes me feel better,” she said, then headed to the kitchen.
He followed the wonderful aroma of her chicken casserole, her mother’s recipe.
“That scent brings back so many memories,” Harry said. “And, hey, Halloween is what, two and a half weeks away? More memories.”
“Heads in pumpkins,” Pewter blathered.
Tucker listened, then put her head back on her paws. “I thought they were about to discuss food. They’d be much better off focusing on things that matter rather than random corpses.”
The tiger cat silently agreed as she left her own bed t
o curl up with the corgi.
Both animals felt the chill of premonition.
The day after the grisly discovery, the temperature dropped twenty degrees and rains came. Like all farmers, Harry had a rain plan. There were the chores that one did no matter the weather, and then there were those set aside for downpours.
The tack room in the old barn doubled as her office. If she had fixed up an office in the house, she knew she’d bother Fair or vice versa. The tack room made sense plus she could smell the leather, the horses, and their sweet feed. She liked sitting in the old knotty-pine room, the size of two good stalls, twenty by twenty-four feet. One wall held saddle racks and bridle holders. Under those items rested her personal tack trunk, as well as her husband’s. Each horse stall also had a tack trunk in front of it, carrying items Harry felt should be separated from the main tack room. And each tack trunk hid treats: dried apples, special horse cookies. When a lid was lifted, the nickering started.
At fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature hit the perfect mark for the horses. Most of them were turned out in the rain, which was now steady but soft. Once on the other side of the equinox, Harry switched her schedule, bringing the horses in at night and turning them out during the day. Horses needed to move about.
Pewter, splayed out on Harry’s tack trunk, which was covered with a lush saddle pad, had no such inclination. Tiny snores emitted from her body. Mrs. Murphy, wide awake, sat on the desk surface just inches from her human, who was trolling the Internet and considering seed purchases for the spring. If Harry ordered now, she would benefit with a ten percent discount from Southern States, the large supplier. She would always double-check with Augusta Co-op to see if those prices were better.
Brow furrowed, chin resting on her hand, Harry scrolled through various seed types as the tiger cat peered at the screen, too.
Tucker, knocked out in her plaid bed under the desk, was as oblivious as Pewter.
An old massive teacher’s desk, painted hunter green, a tall wooden file cabinet, and two director’s chairs as well as the wooden teacher’s chair in front of the desk took up the space opposite the saddle wall.
The Litter of the Law Page 2