Wesley Rountree rolled up his napkin and pitched it at the wastebasket beside Clay’s desk. “Bingo! You know, if I keep eating cheeseburgers from Brenner’s for dinner, pretty soon Mitch Cambridge’ll be doing an autopsy on me.”
Clay Taylor stopped typing, his two index fingers poised in midair. “If I were you, Wes, I’d worry about those diet drinks you’ve been having. No telling what’s in those artificial sweeteners.”
Rountree grunted. “Nobody lives forever, Clay. Sometimes I think I’m lucky to have made it this long. My mama was always after me to quit the highway patrol ’cause she was afraid I’d get killed in a highspeed chase, and now you’re trying to take my diet sodas away from me.” He shook his head. “Ain’t nothing safe.”
“Not even getting married,” said Clay.
“Lord, who ever told you that was safe? Oh! You mean the Chandler girl?”
“Is Cambridge sure about the results?”
“Now, you know Mitch Cambridge. If he wasn’t positive, you couldn’t get an answer out of him with a stick! The official cause of death, to which he will testify at the inquest, was the bite of a poisonous snake-”
“Water moccasin?”
“Yep, which bit her four times on her neck and upper back. He thinks she fell on the snake in the boat.” “And it wasn’t an accident?”
“No indeed. See, there’s also a subdural hematoma, which is what Mitch likes to call a bruise, on the back of her head. Skull was fractured due to a sharp blow to the”-he consulted a piece of paper on the desk in front of him-“to the occipital bone.”
“So somebody hit her on the head and threw her in the boat.”
“That’s about the size of it, Clay.”
Rountree scooted forward in his swivel chair, and began to root in the papers that littered the top of his desk. He had what Clay liked to call an archeological filing system: the papers nearest the top were the most recent. He generally managed to find what he was looking for, though. Eventually. Really important items, such as warrants, were kept under the bronze sphinx paperweight at the top center of his desk. Rountree had inherited the desk along with his job from the late Sheriff Miller, who had kept both for thirty years. “I don’t want to change nothing except the calendar,” Rountree had vowed when the office became his. It gave him a sense of continuity with the past, as though Nelse Miller were still around somehow, backing him up.
“Have you seen the mail today?” Rountree asked, momentarily giving up the search.
“Doris always puts it on your desk,” said Clay, between taps at the typewriter.
“I was afraid of that,” sighed Rountree.
He pawed through another stack of papers and pulled out a small bundle of letters bound by a red rubber band. “This must be it,” he muttered, flipping through them. “Hardware store sale, light bill, something from the community college.” He opened the yellow circular and scanned it briefly. “Seems they’re advertising their courses for this fall.”
“Yeah, I got one at home,” said Clay. “They must’ve put me on their mailing list, since I took their scuba diving course.”
“How would you like to take another one?” asked Rountree. “I see one in here that would be mighty useful for a deputy.”
“Oh, the judo course? I’ve been thinking about it.”
“No. That isn’t the one I had in mind,” said Rountree, running his finger down the page. “It’s this one, B-14: Beginning Shorthand.”
Taylor gave him a sour look and went back to typing.
“Well, admit it. You do more note-taking than fighting,” Rountree persisted.
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” said Clay.
“It’s useful, all the same. Is that what you’re typing up now?”
“The notes on the Chandler case, yeah. I thought you might want to see them.”
“That’s the honest truth,” sighed Wesley. “These people not being what I’m used to is sure throwing me off my stride. You take our average cases now. When Vance Wainwright gets drunk and disorderly, where’s he gonna go?”
“To his ex-wife’s trailer,” said Taylor promptly.
“Right. And when the statue of the pioneer is missing from the high school lawn, where do we look?”
“All over the grounds of Milton’s Forge High.”
“Right.” Rountree chuckled. “Remember the time we found him on the fifty-yard line? But this case is in a class by itself.”
“Looks like it’s going to take a while,” mused Clay.
“That reminds me,” said Wesley, lifting the telephone and extracting the phone book, which he kept underneath it for quick location. “You and I are going to be tied up and out of the office for most of the day tomorrow, so I’d better call Doris and tell her we need her here to keep the office open.”
“On Saturday?” Clay whistled. “Don’t hold the phone too close to your ear.”
“And I’ll call Hill-Bear Melkerson, while I’m at it,” said Rountree, ignoring Taylor’s last remark. “He can take the car out on patrol while you and I are conducting this investigation.” He was dialing the number as he talked. “Hello, let me speak to Hill-Bear. This is Sheriff Rountree calling,” he said into the phone.
When people heard the name Hill-Bear Melkerson, they usually expected to meet an American Indian, but this was not the case. Hill-Bear, a squat and solid Anglo-Saxon, had picked up the name in his French class at Chandler Grove High. He had previously been known by his given name, which was Hilbert. For seventeen years he had endured life as Hilbert, occasionally squashing adolescent comedians who teased him about it, but in high school French all that changed. On the first day, the teacher had assigned everyone French names: John became Jean and Mary, Marie. When she came to Hilbert, the teacher informed him that his name was already French, but that in class it would be pronounced “Hill-Bear.” Hilbert Melkerson had been so delighted with the sound of this sobriquet that he had insisted on being called that ever since. By that time, he was a 230-pound tackle on the Chandler Grove varsity squad, so he got his way. Hill-Bear he became.
“Hill-Bear, is that you?” Rountree cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder, while he scribbled on a notepad in front of him. “I’m fine; how ’bout yourself? That’s good. Listen, Hill-Bear, we’re gonna need you to work tomorrow if that don’t interfere with your plans too much. Oh, just regular patrol in the squad car. Doris will be here in the office, keeping an eye on things. No, I won’t be off. Fishing? I wish I was. No, I’m afraid something pretty serious has happened out at the Chandler place and Clay and I will be investigating. No, it wasn’t a break-in. Listen, Hill-Bear, I don’t want to be talking about this on the phone. When I see you tomorrow morning, I’ll fill you in. Okay. Around eight. All right. ’Bye now.”
“He’s coming in?” asked Clay.
“Oh, yeah. He’ll be here at eight.” Rountree flipped through the card file on a metal stand beside the phone. “Hill-Bear’s a good old boy. You can always count on him.”
Hill-Bear Melkerson was not a full-time employee of the sheriff’s department as Taylor was. He worked for Rountree part-time on an as-needed basis, when he wasn’t on his regular job at the paper mill in Milton’s Forge. He usually handled the parking at Chandler High football games or at the county fair, and filled in for Rountree or Taylor on their days off. He was good for New Year’s Eve road patrols, too. No one was ever drunk enough to argue with Hill-Bear.
“Guess I better call Doris,” Rountree groaned. “I sure do hate to ask her to come in tomorrow.”
“You can’t be that concerned about spoiling her weekend, Wes,” said Clay.
“No, the fact is I’m not,” Rountree admitted. “But if I ask her to come in, she’ll want to know why, and if I tell her, it’ll be all over the county by morning.”
Geoffrey had been cutting tuna fish sandwiches in resolute silence for several minutes. Elizabeth had not talked to him, partly because she was preoccupied and partly because she didn’t know what to say. Any expression of sympathy might provoke either tears or an outburst of mordant wit, neither of which she was prepared to deal with. She had confined her utterances to basics: pass the mayonnaise, is there more bread? The rest of her mind retraced the sequence of the day’s events and tried to make sense of them.
She stole a glance at Geoffrey, still working like an automaton on the pile of sandwiches. “Do you think this will
