Read Online Under the Lake by Stuart Woods - Free Book Online Page B

you going?”
    “Just to make some rounds. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour, since you already contributed five bucks to the kitty.”
    “Sure. I’ve got to do some grocery shopping, though. Will we be long?”
    “An hour or two, depending on what’s happening.”
    “Fine. Nice to meet you, Scotty.”
    “Same here,” she replied, looking worriedly from Scully to Howell.
    The two men left together and got into Scully’s unmarked car. “You seen much of the area?” Scully asked.
    “Only what I saw driving up here. It’s been raining ever since, until today. This is the first time I’ve even been to town since that day we met.”
    The sheriff wound the car idly through the streets of the town. “Eric Sutherland hired an architect from Atlanta to design the look of the town,” he said, waving a hand at some storefronts. “Got the city council to pass a bill requiring any new building to conform.”
    “Looks nice,” Howell said. “Not too contrived. Simple, neat, lots of trees, too; bet it’s pretty in the fall.”
    “Lots of leaves to get raked in the fall,” Scully said.
    The sun struck the brick of the storefronts, giving them a glowing warmth.
    “Those are Harvard brick,” Scully said, seeming to read Howell’s mind. “Sutherland went to Harvard, and I guess he liked the brick the school was built out of. When the major building was going on, he imported them by thecarload. To this day, if you want another kind of brick, even to build your own house with, you’ll have to special-order it. We got two building-supply outfits here, and both of them stock nothing but Harvard brick. I reckon there’s some Yankee brickmaker up in Massachusetts wondering what the hell we’re doing with so much Harvard brick down here.”
    “Eric Sutherland seems like a man who doesn’t leave detail to chance.”
    The sheriff grinned. “You better believe it, boy.”
    Scully left the town and headed for the north shore, in the direction of Howell’s cabin, but he continued straight at the crossroads. “You know, there wasn’t even a road around the lake in the early days,” he said.
    “So Denham White told me.”
    Scully laughed. “I wish you could have seen old Denham in that canoe, towing all that lumber. Boy, he was a sight.”
    “I’ll bet.”
    “He got the nicest lot on the lake, too, for my money. Only lot Sutherland leased in that cove. His father and Sutherland got along real well.”
    “So I gathered from Mr. Sutherland. In fact, I got the impression Mr. Sutherland would have ordered me out of town if I hadn’t been old Mr. White’s son-in-law.”
    “Yeah, well, he has a better opinion of the old man than the boy, I guess. Denham got mixed up with a local girl up here a few years back, somebody not of his station, you might say. Sutherland didn’t like it a bit, called up his daddy, and old man White snatched the boy out of here pretty quick.”
    “Pregnant, was she?” Howell asked, interested.
    “Nan, just in love—at least Denham was. Never saw anybody so much in love.”
    Howell chuckled inside himself, thinking of the cool, buttoned-up Denham, now married to an icy Atlanta debutante. He wouldn’t have thought his brother-in-law would ever have had so much passion. “Who was the girl?” he asked.
    “Nobody you’d know. Catholic family. I think that pissed off old man White as much as their social standing.”
    “Yeah, well, he was a pretty hard-shelled Baptist, I guess. My wife didn’t take after him.”
    “How’s your wife feel about you coming up here for such a long time without her?” Scully seemed to want to change the subject.
    Howell hesitated. “Well, we’re separated, really. I think it’s probably best for both of us, my being up here.” Now he had said it out loud to somebody. That made it official, he supposed. He was surprised he’d let it out.
    “Kids?”
    “Nope. Just as well, I guess.”
    Howell found it very easy to talk to Bo Scully. There was something