Read Online Summer of the Dead by Julia Keller - Free Book Online

still here in Acker’s Gap.
    Now, it was just Annie.
    â€œIs your son staying with you?” Bell said. “Luke’s his name, right?”
    Surely someone was helping Annie Arnett get through this. The old woman shouldn’t be alone. Her husband had been savagely attacked just a few days ago, and grisly reminders of his death were everywhere: The crime-scene techs from Charleston had finished their work but the driveway still was cordoned off with plastic yellow tape. An evocative dark stain remained on the concrete, baked into the gray by the fierce unrelenting sunlight. That sun, Bell recalled from Rhonda’s report, was the reason Freddie Arnett had been working on the Thunderbird so late at night; it was too hot during the day. The chrome on a car could raise a blister if you touched it at the wrong time.
    â€œOh, Luke was here Friday,” Annie said. “All day, or thereabouts. But he had to go back to Louisville. Couldn’t take any more time off work. He’ll be back next week, he said. To pick up the car for Tommy.”
    Bell looked around. “But somebody’s staying with you, right?”
    â€œOh, my, yes.” Before Bell could ask, Annie added, “Rhonda Lovejoy. I’ve known her family for ages. She’s been spending the night. Ain’t that sweet? She came by here to ask me some questions the other day, same as you are now, and when I told her how scared I get at night, with Freddie gone, she said she’d be pleased to keep me company. I’m so happy to have her. Till Freddie gets back.”
    Bell thought about her assistant, whose roots in Raythune County ran deep and true, and who had an everlasting compassion for the people who walked these roads. As an employee, Rhonda could be infuriatingly scatterbrained, and her flamboyant wardrobe carried more than a hint of the bordello with its frills and its flounces, but Bell had come to have a significant appreciation for Rhonda Lovejoy, sequins and all.
    She wouldn’t tell Rhonda that she knew. That wasn’t how things were done around here. A kind gesture wasn’t undertaken to get a pat on the back. Charity that brought you compliments wasn’t charity; it was public relations.
    A thought occurred to Bell. “Excuse me, Mrs. Arnett. Did you say, ‘Till Freddie gets back’?”
    Annie nodded. “Don’t know what’s keeping him. Never been gone this long before.” She sighed, but it was a sigh of affection. “Keeps me guessing, that man of mine. He’s a handful. Gonna give him a good talking-to when he walks through that door, tell you that for sure.”
    *   *   *
    Bell paused at the end of the driveway. A ribbon of tape had worked itself loose from one of the green metal stakes and fallen across the concrete. Now it lay there, looking as flat and sad and useless as the tail of a grounded kite. There was no breeze to rouse it. There was only heat, the kind of dense, hard-packed heat that presses on the skin everywhere all at once.
    The neighborhood was quiet. Strange for a blue-skied summer Sunday, Bell thought. Where were the kids, the dogs, the bikes, the shouts and the clatter? Maybe it was still too early in the day. Or maybe—and this was a thought that pained her—a lot of people were staying indoors, pinned there by the shock of their neighbor’s fate. Up and down the tattered little street her gaze made its fitful way, seeing closed doors and silent yards and windows across which the curtains had been yanked shut. It was temporary, Bell told herself. Had to be. The street would come to life again.
    She looked back at the driveway. This was where Freddie Arnett had died—here on a strip of concrete next to his small brown stick-frame house. This was the house in which Freddie and Annie Arnett had lived for sixty-two years. Freddie had left here every morning, long before the sun came up, for his shift at the