Read Online A Killing at Cotton Hill by Terry Shames - Free Book Online Page B

After I got out of the air force, I swore I would come back to this area and you couldn’t pry me out. I’ve stuck to it.
    But at least my world opened up when I found Jeanne. Without her I could just have easily lived in a world only slightly bigger than Leslie Parjeter’s.
    When I go back into the kitchen, I find several people have been here to visit and are ready to leave. I exchange a few words with them, a couple of them eyeing me in an odd way, wondering how I come to be here. I slip out back to get Greg. He needs to have a presence with these folks.

I see right off that Greg is not a person well suited to the morning. He comes to the door with his hair sticking out all over and his eyes unfocused. He smells like he slept in his clothes. When I tell him people are here to pay their respects and he ought to be there, he gives an ornery grunt and tells me he’ll be over at the house after a while.
    â€œI’ve let you sleep as long as I can. This is something you have to put yourself out for.”
    â€œI told you I’ll be there in a minute,” he says. Yesterday the shock of Dora Lee’s death had him a little cowed, but today he’s back to his prickly self.
    I look him up and down. “It might be a good idea if you took a shower, too.”
    Back in the kitchen, Loretta is stowing another dish of macaroni and cheese in the refrigerator. A woman I don’t recognize is sitting at the kitchen table. She introduces herself as Frances Underwood, from the next farm down. She’s in her forties and skinny, all sharp edges and bright eyes with some calculation in them.
    Although I’ve run into most people around here one time and another, I don’t know the Underwoods. Dora Lee said they were a little snobbish. I sit down across the kitchen table from her. “You’re the woman who found Dora Lee?”
    â€œI am. I don’t ever want something like that to happen to me again.”
    â€œIt must have been terrible.” I’m thinking it was a damn sight worse for Dora Lee. “What time of the morning was it?”
    â€œEarly. I was bringing Dora Lee some eggs. I’ve got a few good layers and she said she wouldn’t mind having some fresh eggs.”
    â€œYou can’t find good fresh eggs like that at the grocery store,” Loretta says. “How much do you get for them?”
    I translate. Loretta wants to know if this woman was giving the eggs, or selling them.
    â€œThey’re real reasonable. I don’t charge a bit more than you’d pay at the Quick Stop.”
    â€œYou can’t do any better than that,” Loretta says, patting the curls at the back of her neck.
    â€œWhen you came to bring the eggs yesterday morning, I don’t suppose you saw anybody around that shouldn’t be here?” I say.
    â€œThere’s nobody out and about that time of day. I like to get my business out of the way early.” She has one of Loretta’s cinnamon rolls in front of her and she picks off a little corner of it. “They say it was that grandson of hers that killed her.”
    â€œYou ever see any signs of problems between them?” I ask.
    She puts the morsel of roll into her mouth and mashes it around. She’s so skinny that you just know she and food are not on good terms. “I never saw the boy more than once or twice, so I couldn’t tell you.”
    â€œHow long have you lived out here?”
    â€œWhen Mamma had to go into a home, we moved into her house. We’ve been here almost two years now.”
    I prick up my ears. Most people around these parts move back to their parents’ old place when the old people can’t do for themselves. They move back to help out, not to displace them. “Wait a minute, I remember your folks. Ed and Agatha Shockley. Ed died, what is it, fifteen years ago now?”
    â€œThat’s right. Mamma wore herself out with the farm after