in khakis tapered to the ankles and an embroidered white blouse. Silver loops dangle from her earlobes, an unusual accessory for her.
“Where you been?” I call.
“Mom’s.”
I trot to the steps, hug her around the waist, and kiss her cheek. “Erin and Holly there too?” I ask, recalling Erin’s vow that she would not return home.
“No, they left for Jackson a half hour ago. I hope Erin doesn’t get halfway home and then turn around.”
I push open the door and follow Drewe to the kitchen. “What’s in the dish?”
“Chicken and dumplings. Anna made them.”
“Yes!” Anna is the maid who raised Drewe and Erin from infancy. Even at seventy-eight, her cooking beats damn near any woman’s in the county.
“I’ve been thinking about your case,” Drewe says as she sets the pot on the stove.
“My case?”
“The EROS murders.”
“Really? What about them?”
“The pineal gland, remember?”
“What about it?”
She surveys me from head to toe. “Why don’t you jump in the shower while I heat this up? I’ll tell you when you get out.”
I look down at my clothes. I took a shower earlier, but my walk in the cotton fields soaked me with sweat. “I definitely need one,” I admit. “I’ll see you in a minute.”
In my office bathroom, I strip, then switch on the special exhaust fan I installed to keep steam from escaping around the door. Mississippi humidity is bad enough for computers, but with shower steam thrown in, mine would be a lost cause.
I bang a switch on my waterproof ghetto blaster, sending the razor-clean guitar riffs of Steely Dan’s “My Old School” bouncing around the cubicle. With the water set as hot as I can stand it, I let the spray scald my back as I sway in time to the horn parts. The knowledge that Erin has returned home lifts my spirit as much as anything could today, except maybe Brahma being caught. I’ve almost succeeded in working myself into a good mood when I feel a cold draft of air around the shower curtain. Drewe’s voice rises above Donald Fagen’s.
“You’d better get out here, Harper.”
Her tone says trouble. I pull back the curtain and see something I rarely see on her face-alarm.
“What is it?”
“We’ve got company.”
“Cops?”
“Just hurry.”
I snatch a towel off the rack and shut off the boom box. Pulling on some jeans, I get a quick premonition that our “company” is Michael Mayeux, the New Orleans police detective. But when I peek around my window curtains I see no strange car outside. Geared up for anything, I stalk barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen.
There is a stranger waiting for me. He’s tall and thin and clad in Levi’s, western shirt, Red Wing work boots, and an oil-stained Treflan cap pulled over a sidewall crewcut. He stands with his back to me, facing Drewe, who watches him warily from the hot stove. Two seconds is all I need to place him as one of our lease farmers, probably coming to me with some preharvest catastrophe, a mutilated worker or some other nightmare that will bring endless years of lawsuits.
“Here he is,” says Drewe, announcing my arrival.
When the guy turns around, it takes me a minute to understand what I am seeing. My skin heats with apprehension. Impossibly, incredibly, from beneath the bill of the Treflan cap beam the brilliant blue eyes of Miles Turner.
“Like the haircut?” he asks.
“You crazy son of a bitch.”
His mouth breaks into a wide smile. I glance at the window to make sure the curtains are drawn, but Drewe has already taken care of it. “How the hell did you get here?”
“He almost gave me a coronary,” Drewe snaps.
Miles makes an effort to look contrite. “The place is surrounded. I had to use an unorthodox entry.”
My puzzlement speaks for itself.
“The bomb shelter,” Drewe explains. “He came through the tunnel in the backyard.”
This I can’t believe. “You came through the old tunnel? In the dark? Mice and roaches and God knows what down there?”
“No choice. I moved fast. You know how I feel about closed spaces.”
With the initial shock wearing off, Drewe’s anger boils over. “My back was to the stove when he popped the latch on the trapdoor in the pantry. I almost dumped hot chicken broth all over myself.”
“How did you get here so fast?” I ask, still not believing my eyes.
Wisely directing his attention to Drewe, Miles points at our kitchen table and silently asks permission to sit.
She nods grudgingly.
He sits the way a man sits after ten hours’ plowing behind a mule. After taking a moment to collect himself, he says, “I rode the train to Newark Airport. Paid cash for a Delta ticket to Atlanta under a false name. In Atlanta I bought a ticket on a commuter flight to Mobile under another name. Then I gave a Mobile cabbie fifty bucks to take me to a juke joint where charter pilots hang out. It took about thirty minutes to find a guy who would fly me up here. Cost me fifteen hundred bucks. He thought I was running coke or something.”
“Where did you land? Yazoo City?”
“Hell no. We found a grass strip about two miles north of here.”
“I saw you! A turboprop plane? Looked like a new crop duster?”
He nods and laughs.
“You landed at the old Thornhill place? That strip is still good?”
“It’s not
“I don’t understand this,” says Drewe. “Who’s after you?”
“The FBI put out a warrant for his arrest,” I explain.
“But why?”
“A lot of reasons,” says Miles. “All bullshit. The warrant probably says obstruction of justice.”
“It does.”
“You both have some explaining to do,” Drewe says.
“Lenz called today,” I tell Miles. “He thought you’d run here. I told him he was crazy. I didn’t think you’d ever come back.”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“What happened when the vault opened at EROS?”
His malicious delight shines through his fatigue. “I told you they were guarding that vault like the tomb of Christ, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think I chose that simile?”
“Because the time lock was set for seventy-two hours?”
“You’re half right. What did they find after the stone was rolled away from Jesus’ tomb?”
“Nothing?”
Miles grins.
“But you told me Jan sealed the vault when the FBI showed up with the search warrant.”
“What did you think? She rolled a two-hundred-pound file cabinet in on a dolly? The files are on disk, man. Portable hard drive. Updated daily and then dumped to the master drive.”
