Bones of Contention (25 page)

“Use this to shunt it aside.” She dropped the tent pole on the beach and stepped out of its reach. “If the goanna turns on you, I won’t let you suffer.”

They were standing in front of the last row of cages. Angrily, he snatched up the pole and, working his way back down the line, he began to dislodge the latches and liberate the captives. Lizards and various small marsupials scampered out and made a beeline for the trees. The parrots and cockatoos squawked and flapped as they swooshed off into the bush. The green snake uncoiled and crisscrossed the sand with surprising swiftness. The goanna hissed and charged, switching its heavy tail from side to side, but Burdett deflected it with the pole and it scuttled away toward the safety of the woods.

When all of the cages had been emptied, Burdett stood at the opposite end of the line from Dinah, a short sprint to the truck. A shorter sprint to the rifle he’d put down. She felt a rush of panic. What if he drove off and left her stranded? What if he picked up the gun and started shooting?

His face was a study in disgust. Shaking his head in frustration, he hurled the tent pole like a javelin into the trees and slogged back across the sand toward Dinah. The nearer he came, the queasier she began to feel. Why hadn’t he driven off? In hindsight, she should’ve given more thought to why her hands were so loosely tied, why the key was left in the ignition, and why he laid down his rifle so obligingly when asked.

He flumped down on the grassy dune where she was standing and handed her a cell phone. “You’d better dial zero-zero-zero.”

“Is that…?”

“It’s Oz’s nine-one-one.”

Chapter Forty-four

Dinah paced up and down in Jacko’s Katherine office, scratching her mosquito bites and listening to his end of a conversation with somebody she surmised to be high up in the Australian Federal Police.

“You should’ve notified local law enforcement about your bloody federal lurk if you didn’t want a balls-up. And that drongo Burdett who let my witness be gassed and kidnapped couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, much less a major bloody drug bust.”

Dinah felt bad for Burdett. She hoped he didn’t suffer any career repercussions as a result of her recklessness, but she didn’t have time to sit around and postmortem the government’s mistakes. This was D-Day, the end of denial, and she had places to go and things to do.

“Stop your whinging, Danneman.” Jacko hunched over his desk and stabbed a pen up and down on a notepad with measured ferocity. “It wasn’t my lot that put the mockers on the operation and reaming me out gets you sod-all. It’s down the gurgler and you may as well admit you bollixed it up when you tried to do an end run around us yobs here in the Territory.”

Dinah got the sense that a turf war between Jacko and the feds was the only reason she wasn’t scratching her mosquito bites inside a jail cell. Not that Burdett or anyone else could blame her for what happened. She hadn’t gone to Black Point of her own free will or torpedoed their drug bust on purpose. They should be thankful she hadn’t killed anybody. Not yet, at least. Of course, the day was young. If Jacko didn’t cut her loose soon, she would strangle him with her bare hands.

She’d been forced to spend last night in Jabiru where she was debriefed by what seemed like a whole battalion of policemen. The hours had oozed by like molasses in January and by the time she arrived back in Katherine this morning, she was mad to be on her way to Crow Hill. Jacko had promised not to keep her long, but the phone call from Danneman had lasted approximately a millennium and still no wave of dismissal.

She tuned out his voice, pulled her mother’s letter out of her tote, and read it again.
Remember
Campiglio
. That was it. Two slapdash words scrawled on a piece of scented blue stationery were the sum total of her mother’s contribution to knowledge. The freaking mystique never ended.

“Bloody hell, Danneman, are you going to rabbit on about it all day or am I…you what?”

Dinah could stand it no longer. She picked up her tote and walked out. If Jacko had anything more to say to her, he could bloody well chase her down. She ran out into the street and jumped into the Rav. It’s go time, she thought, and drove to the Katherine Lodge where she made a call from the public telephone.

***

Seth loafed outside the lodge bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the house. There were only two cars out front, Seth’s and Cleon’s. She parked behind Cleon’s Mercedes. Her thoughts were yeasty, foaming with anger and disillusionment and a host of disorderly feelings she couldn’t sort. She tried to marshal them, line them up to march into battle. Get him talking, lull him into a relaxed state of mind, be oblique, go with the yin. Or was it the yang?

She got out of the car and started toward the door.

Jiggling the ball in one hand, Seth walked around and joined her. “I was hoping I’d see you again before I left.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Your friend, the inspector, carted Wendell off to the clink day before yesterday. Margaret’s in town doing the mother hen thing and trying to round up an attorney for him. Tanya quit and Neesha and the kids had an emergency. She’s taken Thad to the hospital.”

“Oh, my God! Drugs? What happened?”

“Seems Thad wouldn’t give K.D. her journal back and she rubbed some of those poisonous Gympie-Gympie leaves on the inside of his jeans. The kid left here wearing nothing but his briefs and screaming in agony. I think K.D. got more payback for her prank than she counted on.”

Neesha certainly got more payback than she’d counted on when she mated with Cleon Dobbs and bore his devilish progeny, thought Dinah. She felt a pang of guilt that Thad had taken the rap, and suffered K.D.’s over-the-top revenge, for her meddling. But sometimes people were punished for things they didn’t do, which was what had brought her here this afternoon. “Where are Mack and Lucien and Eddie?”

“Mack came back this morning, all was forgiven, and the three of them motored off in pursuit of art. Cleon and I are the only ones holding down the fort.”

She knew that Cleon was here. She’d telephoned and warned him to expect her. “I need to speak with you, Seth.”

“Let’s go inside. There may still be some coffee.” He salaamed. “After you.”

The kitchen was dark and cool with a greasy smell of fried mutton. The late morning sun filtered through the dirty window above the sink, but it seemed only to accentuate the gloom. The room had the feel of a grotto. Poor little Cantoo, abandoned and despondent, rested her head on her paws in front of the pantry and paid them no heed.

Seth poured leftover coffee into one mug, filled another with water and set them in the microwave. The seconds ticked by. Neither spoke. When the beeper beeped, she flinched.

He handed her the mug of coffee, dropped a tea bag into the hot water and dunked it up and down. “Shall we sit?”

“No.”

“You sound kind of uptight. What’s on your mind?”

“How did Cleon take Wendell’s arrest?”

“Howled like a hyena. He and Margaret can’t believe he’s guilty.”

“He’s not. Not of murder anyway.”

Seth shrugged.

She said, “Cleon must be pleased. In spite of sticky-fingered Thad and meddlesome me, his plan worked like a dream. I expect you’ll be rewarded for your stellar performance.”

“What plan are we talking about?”

“Payback. Vengeance. A final settling of accounts.”

“Against Wendell, you mean?”

“Wendell, Lucien, Neesha. And you were instrumental, weren’t you?”

“I just know that if I stand here long enough you’re going to say something I can follow.”

“You’re not Cleon’s son. That was a pretext, a way for him to introduce you into the household and jerk everybody’s chain.”

“Why would he want me around if I’m not his son?”

“To help him punish Lucien and Wendell. They’d each betrayed him. He hatched a plan to out-Judas the two of them before he died.”

“And how is it you think I furthered this fiendish plan?”

“That first night, you phoned the lodge to let Cleon know you were on your way. You identified yourself to Mack as Kellerman, Cleon’s P.I. But you couldn’t keep the name straight. You told me that Kelliston was the P.I. For a pro, you’re not a very adept liar, Mr. Farraday.”

“I misspoke. We’d had a fair amount of wine as I recall.”

“The night Fisher died, you didn’t go into Wendell’s and Lucien’s rooms to search. Your job was to plant. The memory stick you slipped into Wendell’s briefcase lays out the details of a huge drug operation. Cleon’s operation, not Wendell’s. Wendell may be a cad, but I’m guessing he’s clueless about his father’s avocation as a money man for the sale and distribution of illegal drugs.”

“Why would I help the old man frame Wendell?”

“Somehow you got wind of poachers in Kakadu and connected the operation to Fisher. That shouldn’t have been hard to do. Fisher did a lot of reckless talking. You traced him to Sydney and found him keeping company with Cleon. I don’t know how you and Cleon fell into your conspiracy. You wanted to spy on the doctor, maybe kill him. But Cleon made you a separate proposition, didn’t he?”

“You’re strung too tight, Dinah.” He smiled his Mona Lisa smile and bunched into a t’ai chi stance, moving his arms in slo-mo as if floating under water. “The dark and downward-seeking force is the yin. The t’ai chi master learns to yield so that the negative is overbalanced by the opposing force of the yang.”

“Cleon probably brought the knife with Wendell’s prints on it with him from Sydney. But tell me this, did you poison Fisher or did he?”

He rotated his torso, pivoting on the ball of his left foot while his right hand rose in a balletic arc. “You know, t’ai chi would mellow you out. It cleanses the mind, lets the negative energy flow past.”

“The negative flow from you would shame Niagara.”

He reached out a hand and caressed her hair. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs and relax.”

“Don’t!” She jumped away and slapped him across the jaw.

He grabbed her arm. “Hit me again and I’ll deck you. You know I didn’t kill Fisher or you wouldn’t be fronting me off like this without a gun in your hand. Where is my gun, by the way?”

She twisted free and regarded him with loathing. “Jacko impounded it.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Dinah. I’m on the side of the angels. Fisher was a poacher. All I wanted was to watch him and figure out when and where I could catch him in the act with my camera.”

With an effort, she dialed back her anger and softened her tone. “Did Cleon know you were an avenging angel for Earth’s Turn?”

“What do you think?” Seth tasted his tea and put it back in the microwave. “Cleon knew who I was from the get-go. The poaching operation might never have shown up on our radar if he hadn’t put out the word and invited me to come and see for myself. He said if I pretended to be his son, I’d have access to Fisher. I didn’t know he planned to murder him.”

“Then you must have been fit to be tied when you arrived to find Fisher dead and Cleon about to instigate a full-scale murder investigation. You had to know that Earth’s Turn was already under suspicion for the murder of Bryce Hambrick.”

“That was something of a facer. But now you know it wasn’t us that killed Hambrick. I spoke with your friend Inspector Newby on the phone this morning. He says that Hambrick’s killers are the same men who abducted you and carried you off to Black Point. He’s already got a confession out of one of them.”

Dinah believed Seth when he said he hadn’t killed Fisher. It was all Cleon from the start. He had planned to poison Fisher from the time he left Sydney, and he’d built too many redundancies into his frame-up of Wendell for Jacko to do anything about it.

The microwave beeped. She waited until Seth’s tongue touched the superhot tea and asked, “Where’s the money Thad found, Seth?”

“Like the Buddha says, the world’s an illusion. Love is an illusion. Happiness is an illusion. That sack of money is an illusion. You haven’t heard Cleon report it stolen, have you?”

“No, but I believe it exists, one more clincher in the case against Wendell. Cleon probably dusted it with coke or heroin.”

“If Wendell’s innocent, then you should be glad I’m weakening the case against him by taking the money. And it’ll go to a good cause. Some of it already has. You wouldn’t believe the way Tanya’s crabby old face lit up when I tipped her ten grand for her trouble.”

Against her will, Dinah liked him for that. She’d told Jacko about the money and it wasn’t her job to get it back. If some of it went astray and made Tanya happy, then she hoped Jacko never found it. And she didn’t really care if Seth profited from Cleon’s crimes. Up to a point. “I want the paintings back, Seth.”

“Now that’s out of left field.”

“Not really. You made another slip.”

“What’s that?”

“I watched Lucien mat and frame them. The little Maltese crosses you saw are watermarks, a design impressed into the paper when it was manufactured. They were in the margin of the painting, under the mat. You couldn’t have known they were there unless you’d taken off the mats and held the paper up to the light.”

“You’re really taking me to school, aren’t you? All the same, I think I’ll hang onto them. Cleon will leave you a nice cushion and the money those babies will fetch can do more good for the environmental movement.”

“They’ll get you busted. They’re fakes.”

“Lucien?” He started to laugh. “So forgery’s Saint Lucien’s secret vice.”

“Where are they, Seth?”

“My room. Behind that ‘Welcome to the Trough’ drawing of the pig Lucien so graciously penned for me. Take them. Consider it my parting gift to the family. I wouldn’t want you to think money is all I’m about.”

She said, “I’m revising my assumptions about everyone. Doesn’t the Buddha say to forget your old assumptions and begin anew if you want to shed your illusions?”

“It’s called satori.” He finished his tea. “I’m going upstairs to pack and then hit the trail. If you’re ever in Phuket…”

“Good-bye, Seth. Convey my deepest sympathy to Mrs. Farraday.”

Chapter Forty-five

The great room was cloaked in shadow. Cleon lolled in a club chair in his dressing gown, listening to Willie Nelson and waving an empty martini glass in time with the music. He seemed to be staring up at the boars who stared back with their usual ennui.

“Hello, Uncle Cleon.”

“It ain’t polite to keep an old man waiting, especially one who’s a short-timer on this earth.” He pushed himself out of the chair and ambled over to the bar. The butt of a gun peeked out of the pocket of his dressing gown.

His face was grim. No more the avuncular old charmer, he’d crossed some internal boundary. The rawness of his voice gave her goose flesh. Belatedly, she wished she’d brought Seth along for the reading of the indictment.

He said, “Come have a drink with me.”

“Why would I want to drink with someone who tried to have me killed?”

“I told those bozos to handle you with kid gloves. But you can’t hardly find reliable help nowadays.”

As if performing a sacrament, he spritzed a mist of vermouth into two chilled glasses, tonged a few cubes of ice into the old silver cocktail shaker, sloshed in a pint of gin and shook twice. “We’ve all had ourselves quite a time these last few days.” He poured the martinis and sank the olives. “Don’t just stand there. You called this meetin’. Are you comin’ in or not?”

She lifted her shoulders and stepped through the door, crossing an internal boundary of her own.

He handed her a glass and touched his to hers. “To the love that lies in a woman’s eyes…and lies and lies and lies.” He chuckled.

She said, “It’s you who’ve told the lion’s share of the lies.”

“I may have fudged the truth once or twice. It ain’t a capital offense.”

“Murder is.”

“The inspector tells us now that Wendell did the dirty. Couldn’t wait to inherit poor Dez’s money, I reckon.”

“Oh, stop it. Save the innocent act for somebody who’ll buy it.”

He sipped his martini and regarded her with glacial detachment. “I can see you ain’t satisfied with my story line. But that’s all right. What you believe is immaterial. It’s what the police believe that matters.”

“How many false clues did you plant, Uncle Cleon?”

“What with you and Thad unplantin’ ’em, I had my work cut out for me.”

“Wendell didn’t know anything about the flash drive. What did he think I had?”

“Aw, Neesha got all worked up and wrote him a mash note.”

“Which you took.” She shook her head in disgust. “Why didn’t you just tell them you knew? Throw down the gauntlet and have it out? All this playacting garbage is sick. I would have thought it beneath you. Beneath the man I thought you were.”

“You’re a smart girl, Dinah. Not wise like your mama, but smart. Swan, now, she knows what to bear down on and what to leave alone.”

“Like your involvement in the drug trade? She let that alone.”

His face was a wall. She could picture him sitting at the defense table staring down the prosecution’s witnesses with just that face.

He said, “Go on and drink your martini. It’ll help you to refine your argument.”

She took a galvanizing sip of the gin. “You’ve been dabbling with drugs for decades. In the beginning, when you were young and broke, you were probably just a courier. You were good at it, the way you’ve always been good at whatever you turned your hand to, and you were ambitious. Even after you became a successful attorney, after you were making legal money hand over fist, you couldn’t retire from drugs. You no longer had any physical contact with the product, of course. You just put up the money and hired Desmond Fisher as your go-between with the smugglers and retailers.”

“Objection.” He fished the olive out of his martini, popped it into his mouth and rolled it around. “Supposition.”

“Overruled,” she said. “And don’t BS me.”

“Both prosecutor and judge? Well, I reckon I’m in the right place to be tried by a kangaroo court.” A suggestion of the old wit tugged at the corner of his mouth, but she was no longer susceptible to his subversive charm.

“Was it just for the purpose of framing Wendell that you killed Fisher or had he become too much of a loose cannon?”

“Half and half, I’d say. Dez couldn’t lay off the bottle or politics, kept gettin’ hisself written up in the papers. He had a hankerin’ for publicity. He was feedin’ that unfortunate journalist, Mr. Hambrick, his usual crap about death with dignity, but Hambrick had his own pet peeve about Nigerians insinuatin’ themselves into the Aboriginal community. When he spotted Fisher with some of our Nigerian friends, well. One thing led to another. Can you believe not one of ’em had sense enough to make it look like an accident or weight down the body and throw it in the ocean?” He was as blasé as if he were talking about a blown play in a football game.

“Your associates killed a man and that’s all you can say about it?”

“It was a foul-up and I was riled, but it didn’t affect Dez’s life expectancy. I decided to kill him months ago.”

Who was this monster? Dinah tried to throw a mental grappling hook back to the past, to catch onto some constant, some irreducible kernel of truth. But her memories were liars. The past had changed. “You must have gone to a lot of trouble tracking down Lucien’s forgeries. Why?”

“The fool was turnin’ out copies like a damn rollin’ mill. Somebody had to clean up after him. I couldn’t have Swan see him end up in the pen.”

“How’d the paintings end up in Fisher’s estate?”

“Dez didn’t know they were fakes. I told him I’d laundered a few million in the art market and asked him to take title for me so Neesha wouldn’t get ’em. I humbled myself and told him she was whorin’ with a new man.”

“You didn’t tell him it was Wendell?”

“That didn’t fit my plan.” He finished his martini and poured himself another.

“So Dez made his will in favor of Lucien and Wendell just out of the goodness of his heart?”

“Drug smugglers ain’t much diff’rent from the folks down the road when it comes to parcelin’ out their holdings when they die. As you know, Dez was a bearcat about matters relatin’ to death. He had a medical directive and burial instructions more detailed than a pharaoh, but no up-to-date will. I was changin’ mine and advised him to do the same or his money would wind up in the government’s coffers fundin’ socialized medicine. He always had a soft spot for Maggie. I figured he’d make her and Wendell his beneficiaries and, since the art was mine, I told him to leave ’em to Lucien.”

She said, “The copies started out as a joke. Lucien didn’t intend to sell them.”

“People don’t fabricate affidavits and certificates of authenticity for what they don’t mean to sell, or put a million dollar price tag on their jokes.”

“Lucien faked the documentation?”

“Somebody did. Lucien claims it was his friend. He wasn’t supposed to sell ’em. Lucien went back to New York City and got into it with the fella. But it’s all water over the dam. I’ve pulled his chestnuts out of the fire.”

She wondered if Cleon had bought back Lucien’s forgeries or stolen them. She thought about what Margaret said about Swan’s cygnets. “So Lucien gets a pass for his sins, but not Wendell?”

“There’s sins and there’s sins. Bein’ cuckolded by my own spawn is where I draw the line.”

“If you hated Wendell so much, why didn’t you kill him, too?”

He emptied the last of the gin into his glass and stepped behind the bar to mix another pitcher. “I thought about killin’ him. But a bullet’s too quick and easy. Durin’ my first round of chemo, I commenced to reflect on a more judicial revenge. Bein’ deprived of his freedom and his family for all time, that’ll be Wendell’s punishment.” The ice clattering in the shaker sounded like Chinese New Year. “You better finish that drink, sugah. You’re gonna need it.”

“What do you mean?”

He topped up her glass with his right hand and with his left, pulled the gun out of his pocket. Its short barrel stuck out from between his knobby fingers like an animal’s snout.

Her body tautened. “What are you…?”

“Carry on with your prosecution. I’m interested to hear your summin’ up.”

She tried to pick up her thread of thought, but she couldn’t tear her eyes off the gun. “You set Wendell up as a fall guy long before there was any adultery by persuading Fisher to give him an interest in the fish processing plant. I guess the connection to a pillar of the community lent a semblance of legitimacy to the business if it should ever come under scrutiny.”

“At the time, there wasn’t much risk.”

“You turned it into one. His partnership with Fisher, the will, the flash drive, the prints on the knife. What other clues did you rig to incriminate Wendell? I assume there’s a dusting of drugs in that sack of money you and Fisher brought home from Katherine.”

He belted his martini and poured another without taking his hand off the gun. A lesser man would be bombed by now, but the gin seemed to have no effect on Cleon except to make his eyes more glacial. “Are you restin’ your case?”

The thought of what might happen after the prosecution rested unnerved her. She strained her ears. Maybe Seth hadn’t left the house yet. Maybe if she screamed…

“What’s th’ matter? Cat got your tongue?”

“Apart from sending her lover to prison, what revenge have you cooked up for Neesha?”

“A right good one. I’ve spent all my assets and then some. All of the clean money, and I’ve borrowed heavily against the farm and other properties. I’ve emptied my retirement and partnership accounts and short-changed the I.R.S. by several hundred thousand. I’m leavin’ the whole shebang to my darlin’ wife and if she can hang onto that diamond ring after my creditors are done pickin’ over the bones, she’ll be lucky.” He looked at his watch. “Well, there’s your Perry Mason confession. I won’t be repeatin’ it on the stand.”

“I can,” said Dinah. “I can testify that you confessed to everything.”

“Anything you repeat of our conversation would be hearsay. You’re not wearin’ a wire, are you, sugah?”

I am an idiot, she thought. If she’d asked Jacko to fit her up with a wire, her problems would be over now. Not to mention Wendell’s problems. “I’m not wearing a wire.”

“I believe you.” He dispatched the last of his martini, picked up the gun, and motioned her toward the door. “Let’s move out onto the veranda.”

“Uncle Cleon, no. Let’s call Inspector Newby. You don’t want to do this to Wendell.”

“Time’s past for an appeal.” He took her elbow in a vise-like grip and strong-armed her out the door.

“Let go of me. You’re despicable. Consumed with revenge.”

“Lay out your facts and save the rhetoric for closin’.”

He released her arm and pointed the gun at her. The man who’d taken her to Disneyland for her tenth birthday was pointing a gun at her. Fear flooded her thoughts, fear not just that he would kill himself but that he would kill her. If Cleon had ever loved her, it made no difference now. He was unhinged.

“
Actus non facit reum nisi sit rea
. In the eyes of the law, it ain’t always what we do that makes us guilty, it’s what we’re thinkin’ when we do it.”

“Did you have a guilty mind when you watched Dez Fisher die?”

“I thought I was doin’ the world a service.”

“What
do
you feel guilty about, Uncle Cleon? The drugs you’ve sold must have destroyed countless lives over the years.”

“Doin’ drugs ain’t compulsory. It’s one of a million ways people can waste their lives if they’ve a mind to. I did what I did and in the end, the only judgment that matters is my own.”

She played the daughter card. “You care what my mother thinks.”

“That’s as may be.” He frowned and looked at his watch. “My extracurricular money is in a numbered account in Panama, Banco Dorado de Colon. The account number’s on a slip of paper in my right-hand pocket along with some travelin’ money. I want you to take charge of it, dole it out to the twins on an as-needed basis as you see fit.”

Fear changed to disbelief. “What in the name of God are you talking about?”

He said, “Don’t spoil ’em with a lot of expensive falderal. Make it go as far as you can. Thad’ll have to give up whinin’ to that pushover psychologist of his. But he’ll prob’ly be in the reformatory before too much longer and have a court-appointed shrink. Give ’em college if they want it and the balance when they turn thirty.”

Disbelief ratcheted toward fury. “They’re children. Your children. My God, how can you make them dependent on dirty drug money?”

“What they don’t know can’t hurt ’em. It didn’t hurt you.”

She hated him. “What makes you think I won’t keep the money for myself?”

“You won’t. And if you don’t take charge of it, the kids get nada from me. I’ve left instructions. It’s you or nobody. The feds will probably freeze Fisher’s assets, so I reckon th’ young’uns will turn out paupers without your good offices.”

His callousness made her blood boil. “Lucien was right about you. You never loved any of your children.”

“I love you. I love Lucien.”

“No, you don’t. You didn’t buy Lucien’s forgeries back for him because you love
him
and you didn’t establish a trust fund for me because you love
me
. You did it for my mother. Everything you’ve done since the moment you met her has been for Swan.” Suddenly, the years of ambiguous undertones and subliminal impressions coalesced into a lurid vision. A body was flying through the windshield of a truck. “You were there the night my father died!”

He didn’t blink. “You’ll prob’ly hear a lot of guff from Neesha ’til she lands herself a new sugardaddy. Don’t give in to her cryin’ or let her soft-soap you for more money than’s needed. And pay yourself a fat commission. I want you to. It’s your inheritance, as well as the twins’.”

“Damn your money.” Her throat felt too tight for the words. “Did you kill him?”

“You don’t want to rehash your daddy’s death. It’s ancient history.”

“Answer the question. You thought you could get my mother back if he was dead, didn’t you? What did you do, tell him how he could make a fast buck moving a truckload of marijuana for you and then cut the brake lines?”

His eyes shuttered, as if he were casting into the dark sea of memory for some elusive detail. “My truck was broke down and he’d loaned me his. I picked up a shipment in Florida and was on my way back to Brunswick when a storm blew up. I stopped off at y’all’s place for a cup of coffee. You and your mama were out. Your daddy had business in Brunswick the next mornin’. He said he’d drive on up there with me that night and stay over. I told him I was haulin’ hay.”