Read Online The Curse of Crow Hollow by Billy Coffey - Free Book Online Page B

she meant to wave at only one of them, and they all got out.
    Kayann had on a black dress that flaunted both the flatness of her stomach and the bulge of her chest. She hit a button on her keychain that made the Fosters’ car beep. Setting the alarm, even if near everybody in town would be inside that church and so disinclined to break and enter. Bucky rolled his eyes and tried not to let Landis see.
    Kayann asked Angela if she’d heard anything from Cordelia, Hays hadn’t bothered to call or text that morning. Bucky answered the same. Landis broke the silence that followed by making a joke that maybe Hays and Cordy had run off to get married and was met with more silence. Bucky said he was sure the kids would be there before the service started. Kayann said she hoped that was so, but a course it wasn’t. Hays wasn’t nowhere near church by then. He was tearing down the hill in his car from the Number Four, thinking the crow feather stuck to his collar and tickling the back of his neck was Alvaretta’s reaching fingers.
    Still, the four parents decided it best to maybe wait outside until Raleigh Jennings stepped out to ring the church bell, just in case the kids arrived. Townfolk came in a steady stream, men and women and children dressed in their finest, which round here meant the clothes least worn and faded. Briar Hodge arrived with Chessie. He parked his old truck near the front of the church and lumbered around to let her out, the two of them looking like lovebirds in the twilight of some gilded romance rather than the most wanted people in the county. Chessie puffed the bit of red hair in front of her eyes with her breath so she could see. She greeted the Fosters and Vests and told them to have a blessed day.
    Medric Johnston had the shortest walk of anybody in the Holler from home to church, having only to step acrost the street from the funeral parlor next door. He said hello to the little group near the steps and tried to ignore the fact that Kayann didn’t so much as lift her chin. Oh, I’m sure that coulda been on account of the way Hays had taken to spending so much of his time helping Medric with whatever poor soul had last fallen to death. Coulda also been that Medric Johnston belonged to a class and race that Kayann Foster considered well below her own. I’ll let you decide. But I guess Medric was used to being treated that way, him being just about the only black man in the Holler. I like to believe he could stand there smiling under Kayann’s glare because he was thinking of how it’d be to one day lay that woman down on the gurney in the funeral home’s basement and get her all prettied up to be put in the ground. Kayann’d probably make Landis buy the most expensive casket Medric had, which would be fine, and then Medric would dig the hole extra deep. That’d please him fine. Please Angela too.
    Doc Sullivan and Maris (who was not only wife of the town physician, but also sister to Mayor Bickford and aunt to Scarlett) stopped to visit on their way inside. Bucky was saying how fine a send-off Medric and the preacher had given Henrietta Friday evening, and how good she’d looked. Landis agreed with that, and not just because the Reverend and Belle Ramsay had all but cleaned out every bit of the grocery’s paper products and cake mix for the meal after. Whether you deal in goods or souls, ain’t much in this world better than a good death.
    Doc Sullivan said sometimes a person had to hang on until there was nothing left to grip, and after that comes the mourning. Medric took all in stride, telling Bucky and the doc that caring for a body’s like caring for a house—when you go away for good, it’s always best to make sure things is just so. Death was near as sacred to that man as life, maybe more, and he told Landis that was one of the things he was trying to teach his and Kayann’s boy. I guess that’s true. Course, Medric