Night's Landing by Carla Neggers

Author:Carla Neggers [Neggers, Carla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Suspense
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2004-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

Ethan lit his first cigarette in eight months. Charlene used to harp on him for smoking, but he’d always believed something would get him before smoking did.

Something got her, instead.

Someone.

It was dusk, the sky muted and purplish against the darkening landscape of trees as he walked up the path from the river and across the overgrown lawn of the Poe house. The mosquitoes were out. One buzzed around his head. He heard crickets chirping in the tall grass, boats puttering down on the river. He had his Smith & Wesson strapped to his right ankle and one of his Brownings tucked in a belt holster under his Titans shirt. No damn overalls tonight.

He didn’t plan on killing anyone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t prepared.

There were rumors on the river that the Poe House Trust was considering selling off some of the acreage lots to country-western music stars, to raise money for a visitors’ center. But even understated development would change the isolated, rural character of Night’s Landing, make it harder to visualize the kind of lives the Poes had led there since the Civil War. The rumors weren’t true, but if they were, Ethan figured Sarah Dunnemore would have a fit. Yet locals also said she couldn’t stay steeped in the Poe house the way she had been for some years. She had to leave its future to other people, people who were more objective, who didn’t have such a personal involvement.

Leola and Violet Poe had died within two years of each other more than a decade ago. They’d lived to see the boy they’d raised move into the Tennessee governor’s mansion, but not the White House. People said they’d had mixed feelings about John Wesley—that was what the sisters had always called him—entering politics, even leaving Night’s Landing.

Ethan ducked past twin dogwoods in the front yard and headed up the back road that led to a down-on-its-luck fishing camp. After a hundred feet the pavement turned to gravel. He could hear his running shoes crunching, but stealth wasn’t an issue, not tonight. He didn’t care who the hell saw him, who heard him.

It was an old-fashioned camp with a row of a half-dozen, one-room cabins with shed roofs and no frills. Conroy Fontaine struck Ethan as a frills type. But maybe he was saving himself for when he hit it big with his book. Maybe he’d do damn near anything, including sleep on a moldy horsehair mattress, to get what dirt he could on President Poe.

Poe hadn’t lived in Night’s Landing in years. He and his wife had a place in Nashville. Nothing huge. A Victorian they’d fixed up. The Poe House wouldn’t be open to the public for another couple years, at least. By then, maybe someone would have torched the fishing camp up the road. Each cabin had its own rusted lawn chair and ancient charcoal grill. The smell of smoke and trout hung in the air, fishy, not anything Ethan would want to eat.

He stopped

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