He glared at her with clenched jaws.
“A hundred thousand will save the church, Hooks.”
“What?”
“Or maybe I’ll write a magazine article, give a few interviews.”
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“A hundred thousand.”
Her eyes did not drop beneath his glare and he could see her resolve growing firmer until it hardened into marble.
“A hundred thousand, Hooks. You can take it out of petty cash.”
Defeated, he shook his head and, with a wry smile, reached for the checkbook in the breast pocket of his jacket. “If I give you a hundred and ten, will you put some windows in that damn church? And a decent lighting system?”
Her answering smile was serene. “I’ll ask,” she promised.
CHAPTER 28
Hey,” Dwight said when I got home a little before six that Thursday evening. He was frying chicken strips to top a green-beans-and-rice dish he had invented.
Before he could say anything else, Cal piped up. “Blue’s dead, Deborah. We found him in the lane when we came home.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” said Dwight, turning the chicken strips to brown them evenly. “I don’t know if he was hit by a car first or just died of old age.”
“Does Daddy know?”
He nodded. “We took him over to the house and I dug the grave.”
“How’s he taking it?”
“Okay, I guess. After all, it’s not the first dog he’s had die.”
True. Nonetheless, when I went to change clothes and he said that supper would be ready in about ten minutes, I told them to go ahead without me. “I think I’ll run over there for a little while.”
Five minutes later, I was driving through the rutted lanes to the homeplace, absently scratching at the bandage on my arm. Despite all the blood, it had only been a flesh wound and was healing very nicely. I would have a scar, but the doctor assured me it wouldn’t be too noticeable.
I seemed to have lucked out all around. Ten days now since Candace Bradshaw’s flash drive had been found and the contents transcribed, and it would appear that there was absolutely nothing about Talbert, Daddy, or me on it. Nothing that wasn’t already public knowledge anyhow.
(“
If I had thought it through a little more carefully, I probably could have handed it over to Dwight as soon as I found it and saved myself a lot of grief. Daddy was not going to talk about it, Talbert had no reason to, and I’d certainly never told a soul nor written anything down for Candace to find when she rifled the law firm’s records. Besides, if what I’d heard about her the last few weeks was true, she wasn’t all that clever about extrapolating from incomplete data.
I was trying not to extrapolate too much myself, but I had put in a few hours at the computer that week and I had questions for Daddy that had nothing to do with Blue’s death.
He was sitting on the porch swing when I got there and Ladybelle was sprawled on the wooden floor nearby. She stood up as I approached. I know we give human attributes to our animals much too easily, but I swear it seemed to me that her tail did not wag as vigorously as usual.
“Hey, Daddy,” I said, shaking my head in sympathy. “I was real sorry to hear about Blue.”
“Yeah, I reckon his heart just wore out. Twelve years old last Thanksgiving.”
He sighed and moved over so I could sit down beside him on the swing, but I took the top step instead so I could pet Ladybelle, who put her nose under my hand to get me to scratch her ears.
There were almost two hours of daylight left and we could easily see the graveyard down the slope from the porch, where family members have been getting buried for over a hundred years. My mother’s there and so is the mother of the older boys. Inside the fence there are formal stones, stones with proper names and dates, but outside the fence is a long row of rough stones, some no bigger than a football, others big enough to sit on. None of them are chiseled, but there are names in black paint and every spring, when my brothers and I get together to clean off the weeds and trim back the rosebushes, someone will get out the can of black paint to touch up the letters, and we’ll start remembering the various animals that have shared our lives.
“I guess you put him down there?”
“Yeah. Dwight dug the grave hole and Andrew fetched a rock from the creek.”
I remember when Blue arrived. He was a Christmas present from Andrew, who traded two of his rabbit dogs to
