to bring back enough to keep us going through Kinston next week.”
“I see.”
“After we closed up last night, we sat out here and talked awhile.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me, the girls, Polly, my son Val, only he went to bed around twelve-thirty. My husband was already in by then, too. Windy Raines, Skee Matusik, and a couple of the independents came by for a beer. Windy and Skee left right before I went in around one. Polly was still here then, right, Eve?”
“We all turned in about then, but Polly said she wasn’t sleepy yet. She was going to read awhile at the table.”
“Yeah,” said Tasha. “That’s right. I remember waking up around four to go to the donniker and the light was still on out here and her magazine was turned down on the table. She’d left the door unlocked, too. Her door was closed, so I turned off the light and locked the door before I crawled back in my bunk.”
“You were gone a long time,” said Candy. “I needed to go, too, and I thought you were never going to come back.”
“Sorry,” Tasha said tightly. “You should’ve come and knocked. I took Polly’s magazine in with me and I guess I lost track of the time.”
“Who didn’t like her?” Richards asked.
“Nobody,” Eve said flatly, and the others murmured prompt agreement, closing ranks against the law.
“She was like a mother to us,” said Kay, beginning to sniffle again.
“What about you, Mrs. Ames?”
“This was the first season she’d worked with us,” Tally said. “Far as I know, she got along with everybody.”
I took a swallow of my beer and kept my face completely blank. Tally was family now, wasn’t she?
“How did she die?” Tally asked, going on the offensive.
“We’re not sure yet if it was suicide or murder,” the deputy said frankly.
“Suicide?” gasped Kay.
Richards nodded. “Does that seem unlikely to you?”
“Well...,” said Eve. “She
Candy nodded. “Like she had more on her mind than making her nut.”
“I didn’t notice,” Kay said tearfully.
Tasha was skeptical. “Even if she was worried about something, she wouldn’t off herself. She’d either stomp whoever was messing her over or get somebody else to do it.”
Stomp was probably not her best choice of words given the work shoes that sturdy woman had worn, and I about strangled on my beer.
“You okay?” Richards asked when Tally had stopped slapping my back and I was able to quit coughing.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I must have swallowed wrong.”
She turned back to her agenda. “Mrs. Ames, how did Ms. Viscardi and your son get along?”
“Val? Fine.”
“No, I meant your other son. Brazos Hartley.”
“The same, so far as I know. I don’t think they had much to do with each other, okay?”
“She didn’t have any reason to want him dead?”
“No, of course not! What are you saying?”
“Nothing. Just trying to see if there’s a connection between your son’s death and hers.”
“If there is,” Tally said stiffly, “I don’t know what it could be.”
The other four professed to have noticed no tension between Polly and Braz.
With that, Mayleen Richards said she was sorry, but she was going to have to take a look inside if that was all right with them. She and I both knew that she’d need a search warrant if they refused. But the trailer belonged to Tally and she offered no objections.
As it turned out, the girls’ worries about bothering Sam weren’t necessary. He slept right through Mayleen’s search, even when the deputy lifted the mattress beneath him.
“Didn’t even turn over,” Kay marveled.
“Yeah, he could sleep through a tornado,” said Tasha without thinking.
The others went silent for an instant, then started chattering like finches, but Richards didn’t pick up on that slip of Tasha’s tongue. She asked again if anyone had anything to add, and when they all shook their heads, she headed back to the Plate Pitch.
The girls took the keys to the truck and went of mournfully with duffel bags of dirty laundry and a shopping list from Tally.
“If I can just keep them from running off on me for three more weeks, we’ll have our nut for the winter,” Tally
