But Daddy’d already had the same thoughts. “I’m not gonna mess up Dwight’s trail,” he assured me, and carefully drove off into the weeds where it was clear no other tires had passed since the rain stopped last night.
“Mind where you put your feet,” he warned Adam and me as he stepped across the overlapping tire tracks.
Dwight’s tracking skills were going to be put to the test if he tried to sort them all out. It was clear that at least three or four different vehicles had been past today.
The dirt drive that enters beside the old garage continues across an expanse of fallow ground too weedy and unkempt to be called a lawn, circles on around behind Jap’s house, then exits onto the road on the other side of the house. But the drive forks in a couple of places along the way. One fork leads over to Dallas’s house and storage barn. Another joins the lane Kidd and I had used a few weeks earlier. It was the one Dick Sutterly took after he finished talking to Adam, the same one that Daddy had used just now to cross the creek when he met Adam and me.
Mr. Jap was never territorial about Daddy and the boys or their tenants crossing his land. We’ve all used it as a shortcut to the stores at Pleasant’s Crossroads. Nor has Gray Talbert ever complained, not even when he had good reason to keep strangers from poking around his place. Not that actual strangers would know much about the back lanes since the woods on both sides of the creek are posted with those phony Possum Creek Hunt Club signs. A lane can look well traveled and still dead-end at an irrigation pond.
Seeing poor Mr. Jap was as bad as I expected, but by no means as bad as it could have been. Sprawled face-down on the damp cement floor halfway across the shop, he looked a little larger in death than he had in life. Adam seemed uneasy with this close view of violent death and murmured, “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
Along with the Bible, Dickens and
Daddy gave me an odd look. I shrugged and we both turned our attention to the condition of the shop. At the far rear corner stood a massive iron safe so old that its original green paint and gold lettering were nearly undiscernible beneath the layers of dirt and grease. According to Daddy, this was where Mr. Jap had kept the few papers he considered valuable: his farm deed before he signed it over to Dallas, his marriage certificate, Dallas’s birth certificate, Miss Elsie’s death certificate, Social Security papers, promissory notes, insurance policies and the like.
The acetylene torch lay atop the safe door, which had been burned off its hinges, and papers were scattered all around.
Adam started to walk over there, but Daddy pulled him back. “Better not mess with anything till Dwight gets here,” he said and we stayed clustered just inside the doorway.
“Why was he killed?” I asked.
Daddy pushed his white straw hat back on the crown of his head and said, “Don’t know, shug. He sure won’t worried about dying when I seen him down at the crossroads this morning.”
He gestured to Mr. Jap’s truck parked just beyond the door and we could see some conical bushel baskets sticking up above the tailgate. “He brought some of that fancy corn, a few squash and pumpkins and a dozen bags of turnip greens down to the flea market to sell. I told him I was going to eat a sandwich at the store when I finished getting my haircut. Asked if he was going to be there, but he said he had to come on back. Said there was somebody he was expecting.”
“Who?” Adam wondered.
“He didn’t say, but I expect it was the Wall boy. He was supposed to come sometime this weekend and settle up with Jap about the com.”
“Did you know Mr. Jap was thinking about selling some of his land?” I asked.
Daddy gave me a hard look. “Who told you that?”
“He did. Sort of.”
“How could he do that?” Adam protested. “You said it was going to be tied up in court till after the murder trial on Dallas’s wife.”
“He said John Claude had about talked Cherry Lou into renouncing any of her rights to the land. She thinks it would take away her motive, maybe get her a lighter sentence.”
“When’d he tell you all that?” asked Daddy.
“Yesterday.” I felt my face flush as I added, “Jimmy White was too busy to look at my car, so Allen Stancil changed the alternator for me here. Mr. Jap was here, too.”
I wasn’t sure if Adam remembered my involvement with Allen or even knew about it in the first place since he was off in California then, but certainly Daddy did. Neither of them said anything, although Adam looked around as if wondering for the first time where Allen was. “I never knew him too well, but didn’t he used to be even rougher than Dallas when he was growing up?”
Daddy shrugged. “Elsie did what she could for both of ’em. Dallas got hisself straightened out a long time ago. I don’t know about Allen. Jap didn’t talk much on him.”
And with good reason, as Daddy and I both knew.
We heard the patrol cars first as they made the turn off New Forty-Eight, then we saw the flashing blue lights come over the rise.
“Well, now,” said Daddy, and Adam and I automatically snapped to attention. “I don’t believe we ought to say nothing to Dwight—not right yet anyhow—that Jap was talking about maybe gonna sell some of his land.”
12
«
