Authors: Virginia Brown
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective, #Sagas
Dark River Road
...has always controlled this small Southern town. Unchallenged, until now.
Like everyone else in Cane Creek, Mississippi, Chantry Callahan grew up in the shadow of town boss Bert Quinton. Quinton held the lives of local people in his harsh grasp, never letting go. He knew where all their secrets were buried, along with the bodies of anyone who had dared to defy him.
As a boy, Chantry couldn’t best Quinton. Couldn’t protect the people he loved, including his own mother. But now Chantry is grown. He’s come back for answers.
And for justice.
“A marvelous coming-of-age saga in the new Old South. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Bertrice Small, author of
The Border Chronicles
From Bell Bridge Books
The Dixie Divas Mysteries
The Blue Suede Memphis Mysteries
by
Virginia Brown
Bell Bridge Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
eISBN: 978-1-61194-078-7
ISBN: 978-1-61194-055-8
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 by Virginia Brown
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo credits: River - © Andriesk | Dreamstime.com
:Mrdr:01:
To Wayne Nelson Moose, who always told the best bedtime stories, and who first told me about a Catahoula Cur from Pontchatoula, LA.
In memory of my beloved son, Michael Scott Brown, who battled the dragon for eight years. He fought long and hard, and in the end he came out the victor after all.
And for Gabi Brown, my beautiful granddaughter who holds all the keys to her future.
Highway One wound through the Mississippi Delta like a cottonmouth snake, the dark asphalt with faded center lines twisting and turning around fields of cotton and soybeans. Kudzu draped telephone poles and trees, hid embankments and filled up raw gullies washed away by the river. Just over the edge of the road the Big Muddy undulated past ruined houses and knobby-kneed trees, unceasing, uncaring. Like the song said, it just kept on rolling along.
Chantry Callahan figured Cane Creek hadn’t changed much in the past fifteen years. It probably hadn’t changed much in the past one hundred and fifteen years. Like the river, the small delta town kept on going, rolling along under the steam of one man’s greed and power.
Sometimes he wondered what his life would have been like if Bert Quinton had never been born. Never inherited the town after his father died. But Quintons had founded Quinton County and been there for a long time. Maybe not as long as the river, but longer than the river road that kept pace with the sometimes swift, sometimes sluggish currents. The Corps of Engineers tried to keep the river from overflowing its banks and flooding towns and fields, but no one had ever tried to keep Bert Quinton in line.
Not until Chantry. He’d tried. He’d known the old man held more than jobs and power in his grasping hands; he held lives, toyed with them like a cat would toy with a mouse. And like a cat, when he got tired of playing he ended the game. Ended lives. People disappeared and were never seen again when they crossed Bert Quinton one too many times.
Except Chantry.
Somehow he’d escaped. Not that Quinton hadn’t tried to get rid of him. He just hadn’t managed it.
Yet.
Now he was back. Fifteen years after leaving this dusty town and its dark, bitter memories behind, Chantry Callahan had come back. This time, he wanted answers. This time, he wanted to know where all the bodies were buried.
June, 1987
It was the Catahoula Cur from Pontchatoula, Louisiana, that started it all. Maybe some of it would have happened anyway. But for Chantry Callahan, life changed at precisely nine-o-two on a Saturday night the summer he turned fourteen. Nothing was the same after that.
Rainey Lassiter, Chantry’s stepfather of nearly ten years, had taken one thousand dollars he won gambling and gone down to Louisiana and bought a Catahoula bitch about to whelp. At six on that Saturday night he’d put the dog in a pen in the back yard of their white frame house in Cane Creek, Mississippi, and come inside to brag about how much money he was going to make selling the pups. An investment, he claimed when Chantry’s mama said that the money could have been put to better use.
Rainey stood in the kitchen by the table, his dinner ready but untouched. White beans, cornbread, fresh green onions, and fried potatoes congealed on the chipped yellow plate. A big man, still thick-muscled from years of construction work and general labor, he swayed a little and stared belligerently at his wife.
“Folks around here need good dogs, an’ I’ll have the best. She’s a champion with good blood. A money maker.” Rainey’s narrow eyes got narrower when he’d been drinking. He looked at Carrie Callahan Lassiter with a mean squint that usually promised trouble and always made Chantry’s stomach clench into knots. “You ain’t so smart just because you got education. I know what I’m doin’.”
Chantry doubted that, but he kept his mouth shut. He knew better than to speak up and risk a fat lip. Rainey didn’t like being crossed or sassed. And he didn’t much like Chantry, either. A reminder that his wife had been married before.
“Used goods,” he’d called her one time, and it’d made Chantry so mad he’d said his mama was better than Rainey Lassiter deserved. It hadn’t mattered that Rainey hit him for his smart mouth. Mama had smiled a little when he said it and he knew she agreed with him.
Now Rainey pushed a freckled hand through his sandy red hair and rocked back on his heels. “That dog’ll make us some money, dammit. One look at her and you can see that.”
“Can I go see her?” Chantry asked after a minute, and Rainey gave him a hard stare.
“She ain’t some toy. You keep away from that dog, you hear? I catch you messin’ around with her and I’ll strip six inches of hide off you.”
“Yessir.” Chantry sat still at the kitchen table. Outside, light dwindled, shadows softening the bare look of the yard where grass had given up trying to grow. The edge of the garage with the pen built off to one side was visible through the screened door. Rainey had once tried his hand at doing woodwork, put up a sign out front that said Cabinet Making, and turned the garage into a woodshop. He’d made some extra money building cupboards and cabinets, but it’d all gone to drink and cards and he’d stopped bothering after a while. The saws, routers, and drills were sold for whiskey and poker money, and the garage settled deeper into the red Mississippi clay a little more every day like it’d given up trying to be anything but what it was, a knocked together afterthought made from old wooden pallets.
He could hear the dog out there in her pen, and wondered if Rainey’d had sense enough to give her any water or food. It was four hours to Pontchatoula, a long trip in the bed of a truck for a dog ready to whelp.
“Rainey,” Mama said, sounding weary and careful, “you know how I feel about raising dogs. We have gone through this before.”
“Yeah, but this is a stock dog, not a fightin’ dog. Farmers ‘round here always need good stock dogs and huntin’ dogs. Catahoulas do both.”
“But a thousand dollars could have been put to much better use. That is far too much money to pay for a dog. Just how much money do you plan on getting per puppy?”
“Three hundred dollars easy. A’piece. She has six pups, that’s over a thousand bucks back on my investment.”
Eighteen hundred dollars in all. Chantry slid his mother a quick look to see if she was pleased. A tiny frown tucked her brows together. She wore her pale brown hair pulled straight back from her face into a tight knot on the back of her neck. Faint lines marked her eyes. They were the blue like his own, but seemed to fade a little every year that went by. Sometimes it seemed that Mama faded too, getting softer and more indistinct, her lines blurred as she drifted through the days so solemnly he’d almost forget the sound of her laugh and how beautiful she was when she smiled. That wasn’t often. She most always looked . . . sad.