Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens

Author:Allen Eskens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

22

MOM AND THE ELGINS HAD PUT THEIR HEADS TOGETHER while I was with Sheriff Vaughan, and they decided that Thomas and I should go collect our camping gear from the woods and ride back to Frog Hollow with them. Although something about getting driven home from a camping trip seemed like surrender to me, under the circumstances, I welcomed the lift.

On the march to the moonshiner’s camp, it occurred to me that Thomas and I were going to be famous. We’d found Lida Poe. People would be talking about us on the radio and in the newspaper. By the time school started in the fall, every kid in Caulfield County would know who Boady Sanden and Thomas Elgin were. I confess, I liked the idea of being more than just another shadow in the corner, even if that notoriety came at the expense of a dead woman.

We made good time so that our parents didn’t have to wait too long, and when we emerged from the woods the sun clung to that corner of the sky where afternoon shifted to evening. A hundred yards down the fence line, near the burial site, the place buzzed with activity. Three squad cars lined the fence, and next to them was an old ambulance. The barbed wire had been cut and a couple deputies moved through the woods holding bags and staring at the ground; looking for clues, I reckoned.

Thomas and I crossed over into the field, but rather than head toward the church and the highway, I waved for Thomas to follow me toward the squad cars. We stopped at the spot where we’d seen the tire prints. They were gone. Every car parked on that hill must have taken the same path, obliterating the tread marks.

“That dumb sonofabitch,” I muttered.

“They ran right over it,” Thomas said.

I shook my head in disgust, dropped my duffel, and ran into the woods with at least one deputy shouting at me to stop. Thomas, with his bulky backpack strapped to his torso, stayed behind. When I came to the clearing, I had a mind to give Vaughan what-for, but Vaughan wasn’t there. Two deputies knelt at the grave, and a man in a white shirt and black tie stood over the body as though supervising the exhumation.

Beneath the men laid what remained of Lida Poe’s face: hollowed eyes, sunken cheeks, her gray skin stretched tight, pulling her mouth open, her teeth protruding from her jaw bone, no gums, no lips. And there, between her eyes, I saw a bullet hole, small and round and perfectly centered. It looked so clean and well placed that a person would have had to touch the muzzle of the gun to her skin before pulling the trigger. I looked away, but it was too late. I had already seen more than I wanted.

“Son, you shouldn’t be here,” one of them said.

With Vaughan not around, I couldn’t have agreed more. I walked back out of the woods, the image of Lida Poe flashing on the back of my eyelids.

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