The Old Buzzard Had It Coming (11 page)

Chapter Nine

Alafair was a lioness. She was in her hunting mode, her senses heightened to the point of clairvoyance, waiting and watching for the perfect time to pounce. Her prey, the little doe Phoebe, had no idea she was being stalked, and so when her mother finally went for the kill, she was doomed.

Alafair made her move after supper was cleared away, in that short happy period before bed when the family gathered in the parlor. She managed by some plausible ruse to get Phoebe alone with her out on the enclosed back porch. It was cold, and both women wrapped their shawls around themselves more tightly. But it was private.

“What did you want me for, Ma?” Phoebe asked, her breath fogging in the chilly air. She cast an innocent glance around the porch, looking for some likely task that needed doing.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Alafair began. “Phoebe, you know that John Lee’s dad was shot. What you may not know is that he was killed by a small caliber derringer.”

Phoebe froze as still as a hunted rabbit. She paled so suddenly that it occurred to Alafair that she might faint, but she stood solid and gazed at her mother out of eyes huge with horror. She said nothing.

“Phoebe, where is my little silver pistol that I keep in my chiffarobe?”

Phoebe’s lips parted and a little squeaky sound emerged, but she said nothing intelligible.

Oh, yes, you’re caught now, my dear, Alafair thought. “Did you give my gun to John Lee?” she persisted.

“Mama,” Phoebe managed with a gigantic effort.

“Girl, I’m not your enemy. I want to help you. I want to help John Lee if I can. I know John Lee is holed up in the soddie. I followed you out there the other night. Now, don’t panic,” she interjected quickly, grabbing Phoebe’s arm when it looked as though she might bolt out of sheer inability to think of any other response. “I haven’t told anybody, not even your daddy. Not yet. I talked to John Lee, and he told me his version of what happened. I want to believe him, honey, so I thought I’d see what was what before he turns himself in, and he has to turn himself in, Phoebe. You know it and he knows it, too. Of course, that was before I knew that my pistol is missing. Did you give it to him? And don’t you lie to me, child. I’ll know if you do, and it’ll go worse for you.”

Her horror at being caught out had subsided enough for Phoebe to think, and she was doing just that with manic speed. She knew very well that her mother had some sort of supernatural ability to tell when her children were lying, but she also knew that that ability wasn’t 100 percent. What had John Lee told her? Knowing John Lee, he would have told Alafair as much of the truth as he could without involving Phoebe in it at all. But now her mother knew that Phoebe was involved, though not quite how. Phoebe’s assessment of the situation was done in the twinkling of an eye. To deny knowledge would be stupid, dangerous, and an insult. “Yes, Mama, I took your pistol.”

Alafair said nothing, but Phoebe could feel the heightening of the tension in the atmosphere. “I know it was wrong,” Phoebe continued, “but I felt like I had to help John Lee. Things had got so bad that I was afraid his daddy was going to kill him, and I wanted him to have some protection.”

“Don’t they have their own guns over to the Day place?” Alafair asked. Her voice was crisp to the point of being brittle.

“Yes, but I figured that little gun would be easier to hide, and not make his daddy so mad if he saw it.”

“When did you give him the gun?”

There was the briefest of hesitations before Phoebe answered. A look of fear came into her eyes that made Alafair’s heart constrict. “I took it over there that evening that Mr. Day disappeared.”

“What in heaven’s name were you doing sneaking over there to the Day place?”

“Oh, Mama, I’ve been sneaking over there once a week to see John Lee for the last six months. I love him so much I couldn’t help it. His pa was a monster, Ma. He wouldn’t allow John Lee to court me proper, or come and speak to you and Daddy. He didn’t want him to have a life or any happiness at all.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about this,” Alafair asked, aghast, “instead of going behind our backs? Do you know what people will say? Do you know what your daddy will say?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Phoebe protested, suddenly on the verge of tears. “John Lee couldn’t come over here, and I knew you wouldn’t let me see him on the sly, without his folks knowing.”

“That’s certain!”

“But, Ma, I have to see him! I love him. We never did anything wrong. Ma, please, don’t you remember what it’s like?”

For a second, Alafair was struck dumb. She gripped Phoebe’s shoulders in an icy vice, trying to decide whether to comfort her or shake her within an inch of her life.

Did she remember what it was like? Did she remember Shaw Tucker with his honey-colored eyes and his lopsided grin? She was seventeen, just the same age as Phoebe was now. She had known of Shaw and all the Tuckers. She had disdained him, and all boys, until that strange day that was burned in her memory like a brand. She had gone with her mother to the drug store in Lone Elm, and while her mother had been replenishing her store of patent medicines, Alafair had noticed a rangy youth watching her from behind the counter.

Now, Alafair had seen boys before, and she had seen handsome boys before, and she had seen handsome boys ogling her before. But on that day, something about this handsome boy ogling her nearly caused her to stagger and catch at her breast as though a mule had kicked her. And Alafair Gunn, who until that moment had regarded all the male race except for her father with the contempt it so richly deserved, had instantly been reduced to an inner helplessness that she would rather have died than shown.

But in Shaw, she had been lucky, and she knew it. Little had he known, but she would have done anything for Shaw; gone against her better judgment, ruined herself, anything rather thanlose him. If Phoebe felt like that about this boy….

Fear gripped her. Alafair had been lucky. Shaw was good. But what of sweet Phoebe, so vulnerable to hurt in a way the other children didn’t seem to be?

Her hands dropped from Phoebe’s shoulders in helpless resignation. “Well, you’re in the soup, now, girl,” Alafair said. “You might as well tell me about it.”

“I went over there Wednesday afternoon. I can get away for an hour or so on Wednesday afternoons, because Martha doesn’t work but half a day and everybody’s home. You don’t usually need me, and if I only do it once a week or so, nobody much notices I’m gone.”

Alafair suddenly remembered an incident of two or three weeks earlier. Had it been on a Wednesday? “Where’s Phoebe?” she had asked the milling crew of kids in the kitchen.

“Down to the root cellar,” Alice had answered with timely ease, and Alafair had gone back to her cornbread unconcerned. When dinner was on the table, Phoebe had been at her place. Alafair made a mental note of Alice’s complicity.

“We usually met way over behind their barn so John Lee’s daddy wouldn’t see. John Lee would always wait for me there on Wednesday evenings, even though I couldn’t always make it.”

“What did you do at these meetings?”

“John Lee never put a finger on me, Ma, I swear it on a stack of Bibles a mile high.”

“I believe you,” Alafair assured her. She did, too. She may have despaired of Phoebe’s reputation, but she knew Phoebe too well to doubt her honor. “Now, go on.”

Phoebe visibly relaxed. “Mostly we’d just talk. He likes to hear about my family. I think he likes to know that somewhere there’s folks who are happy. Sometimes I’d bring him books to read. He can’t read too fast, but he wants to know things. Sometimes I’ll help him….” With no warning she burst into tears. “Oh, Mama,” she sobbed. “He’s so good. Why does God send him all this trouble?”

Touched almost to tears herself, Alafair enfolded her daughter in an embrace. “We can’t understand the ways of God, sugar,” she soothed, “but sometimes I think God tempers special people like steel. He makes them able to stand great sorrow and able to experience great joy.”

“When is John Lee going to get some joy, Ma?” Phoebe asked, her voice muffled by her mother’s shawl.

“Patience, child. The boy is only nineteen. Besides, you must be a great joy to him.” She drew back and lifted Phoebe’s chin, brushing the tears from the girl’s cheeks with her fingers. “I know you are to me.”

Phoebe mastered herself, calm again. “You may not think so when I tell you the rest of the story, Ma. You say you would have forbidden me to go over to the Day place, and you would have been right to do it. Mr. Day was a bad, dangerous man, and John Lee and I knew it. John Lee didn’t want me coming over any more than you would have, and I’d never have done it, either, except that we couldn’t figure out any other way to see one another without big trouble. We talked about running away. But John Lee felt he had to protect his ma and the kids. Besides, we’d have had to run far away so his daddy couldn’t find him, and I don’t want to be away from you. So we just met by his barn when we could. We never spent more than half an hour together, and we never got caught, until that night.

“There was more to it than just that Mr. Day wanted John Lee for a slave. John Lee told me that his pa hated us Tuckers. Envy, I reckon. There’s so many of us, and we aren’t poor. And Cousin Scott is the sheriff, and Uncle Paul is the mayor, and Uncle Alfred is the president of the Grane. You can imagine.”

Alafair was listening to this discourse in amazement. Phoebe, her little bunny rabbit of a girl. Well, still waters run deep indeed, and Phoebe had quite grown up while Alafair’s attention was distracted by some of the more unruly members of the family.

“So we figured we’d just have to wait,” Phoebe was saying. “We expected that things would change, somehow, someday.”

“You might have had to sneak around for years!”

Phoebe’s bottom lip pooched out in determination. “We knew that. But what else was there, unless we both just gave up on our families and our responsibilities? John Lee’s sister Maggie Ellen did that, you know, ran away. He said it hurt his mother something awful. We just know that we are meant to be together, and that we’ll get our opportunity someday.” She took a breath. “I didn’t want it to be this way. John Lee shouldn’t have run away, I know it. But I saw what happened with my own eyes, and I offered to help him my own self, at least ’til we could figure out what to do. He was protecting me, Ma. If he hadn’t shot at his daddy, Mr. Day might have done me an injury.”

Alafair pushed Phoebe away from her and clutched her chest in shock. “Oh, my Lord, when your daddy hears this story, he’ll have an apoplexy. I might have one myself right now. Let me sit down and tell me what happened, for pity’s sake.”

“Mr. Day come upon us. We were reading and didn’t hear him in time to hide. He was drunk, of course. He called me a bad name, and him and John Lee got into it. They had already had one dust-up earlier that day. He caught John Lee one on the eye and knocked him silly for a minute, just long enough to reach over and grab me by the skirt. He’d dragged me over when John Lee came to himself and pulled out the little pistol I’d given him. He hollered at his pa to let me go, and when he didn’t, John Lee shot. I thought by the way Mr. Day staggered that he was hit, but I never saw any blood. Mr. Day just let me go and wandered off toward the barn. Me and John Lee ran and ran. We stopped for a while by the creek and got our breath and brushed ourselves off. I cleaned his cut eye as best I could. Then he walked me all the way up to the house. It was the first time he’d ever walked me up to the door, and I was so proud of him.”

“Did John Lee only fire once?”

“Yes, I think just once. Yes, just once.”

“Now, think, honey. Are you absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mr. Day walked away toward the barn under his own steam?”

“Yes, ma’am, I know it for a fact.”

“You said you thought at first that Mr. Day had been hit. Where did you think the bullet hit him?”

“Why, in the right side. He staggered a bit to the left. Sure not in the head, Ma. He would have dropped dead right then and there, wouldn’t he?” Her cheeks flushed, and a look of excitement came into her eyes. “Ma, I can be his alibi, can’t I? I mean, I saw the whole thing. I saw that John Lee didn’t shoot Mr. Day in the head, that he was still alive when we ran away. That proves that John Lee didn’t kill his father, doesn’t it?”

“What did John Lee do with the gun?”

Phoebe drew up. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I didn’t pay no attention.”

“That gun is a two-shot, Phoebe. Maybe John Lee came upon his dad passed out next to the house later that evening, after he left you, and finished him off. That fight Mrs. Day told us John Lee and his pa had, I don’t know if that was before this business with you or after.”

“Oh, no, Ma,” Phoebe exclaimed. “It couldn’t be. No, he threw the gun away, I remember now.”

“Mercy!” Alafair clapped her hands against her cheeks in dismay. “Oh, my girl, God smite me for letting you get mixed up in this ugly thing.”

Phoebe was surprised. “You didn’t have anything to do with it, Mama. How can you know everything all the time?”

“Because I’m your mother. Oh, why didn’t you tell me your problem? It’s a hard one, I know, but maybe Daddy and I could have helped you some way. Maybe we could have got that man locked up for something.”

“Are you going to tell Daddy?” Phoebe asked anxiously.