forth close by the teeter-totter.
“Hey, mister.”
He looked up. It was a kid, maybe eight, ten years old—a small boy wearing miniature bib overalls and worn- out shoes three sizes too large. Kid had an older brother, Longarm guessed. “Yeah, son?”
“Get on the other end, please?” The kid pointed to the far end of the teeter-totter, a device damn near impossible to enjoy by oneself.
“What the fu …” Oh hell, why not? It had been a rather long time. But Longarm managed to remember how the stupid things worked. He straddled the two-by-eight slab of wood, sitting fairly close to the balance point so as to make the kid’s weight about even with his when the laws of leverage applied themselves, and he and the scruffy kid were bouncing up and down like that when Sylvie Allard showed up.
“Am I interrupting anything?” she asked.
“Yeah, you are. An’ I thank you for it too.” He beckoned the boy over to him and handed the kid a dime. “Go get yourself some ice cream,” he said, figuring he still owed the ladies at the ice cream parlor something, considering. Besides, it would get the kid out of earshot.
“Thanks, mister. Thanks a lot.” The boy charged off like a coyote after a jackass rabbit, and Longarm and the woman drifted down toward the riverbank where the dark water swirled and gurgled over some white, flat rocks.
“I was commencing to think you weren’t coming,” Longarm admitted.
“I almost didn’t, actually.” She hesitated. “Would you really tell my husband?”
He shook his head. “No, I reckon not.”
That elicited a small smile. “I didn’t think you would. Not really.”
“But you came anyway.”
“You said something that made me come.”
“Not that stupid threat about …”
“No. What you said was that you want to find the man who killed Peter.”
“And your local law?”
“They will want the killing to stop, of course. But they will only charge and convict anyone if he proves to be …”
“Convenient?” Longarm suggested.
“Yes. Thank you. That is a nice way to put it.”
“Everyone seems t’ think politics is already involved in these killings,” Longarm said.
“Yes, of course. We are very political around here, you know. Every since those damn carpetbaggers came in after the War and we didn’t know how to defend ourselves from them. Well, we learned. Perhaps too well, if you see what I mean.”
“Yeah, I s’pose I do, sort of.”
“Yes, well, it is true that Peter was county secretary of the Whig party. There was talk about running him for state office too. In the party, I mean. Peter was a very quiet man. He never wanted the public exposure that holding elective office would have required.” She dropped her eyes, and he thought she might even have blushed a little. “He always said he didn’t want to take on anything that would mean moving away from Addington.”
“He must have loved you very much,” Longarm said, in response more to her demeanor than to what she was saying.
The remark hit home. Tears began to slide, silent and unheeded, down her cheeks. She pretended not to notice so he did too.
“Will you even be able to attend the funeral?” he asked.
Sylvie Allard shook her head. “My husband would wonder why. I can’t have that.”
“No, of course not.”
“I am not a bad woman, Officer.”
“No, I’m sure you aren’t.”
She gave him a sharp look. “I mean it, Officer. Appearances to the contrary.”
“I meant it too, ma’am.” Which was not entirely true, but what the hell. “Can we get back to Peter Nare and the reasons why someone might have wanted him dead?”
“I don’t suppose you know about our local politics,” she said.
“Not much, no.”
“There is a group, old residents mostly, old families here, who want to take over the Whig party and make it into something of their own. Peter opposed them. I think it is more than possible that someone from this new faction could have murdered him to make way for someone of their own choosing in Peter’s office.”
“These people would feel so strongly about it?”
“Some of them might,” she answered.
“Could you give me any names? Not as an accusation, of course. I realize you would have no way to know for sure. But some names for me to look into.”
