Up Jumps the Devil by Margaret Maron

Author:Margaret Maron [Maron, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Knott; Deborah (Fictitious Character), Mystery & Detective, Women Judges, North Carolina, General, Mystery Fiction, Women Sleuths, Legal Stories, Fiction, Legal
ISBN: 9780446604062
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

15

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Whether others shall follow my example or whether matters shall strike them in the same light, is what I know not, nor am I much solicitous about...

“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

I drove back to Dobbs with a zillion questions tumbling through my mind.

Like (1): was G. Hooks that good a poker face or did he have alternative options?

Like (2): was Adam really tired or was he just not anxious for more questions about his two-point-nine acres of road frontage?

Like (3): were (1) and (2) linked?

And then there were (4), (5), (6), and (7): what was Daddy up to? Where was Allen? What did Dwight want? And who did kill Jap Stancil? And why?

“That’s eight,” the pragmatist said pedantically.

“Mind your own business,” I told him.

The cold orange rays of the setting sun were nearly horizontal to the earth as I approached the edge of town. When I was a child, the town was more compact and tobacco farms began two blocks after the last stoplight. Now, with cars and the need for spaces to park them, every major road was strip-malled for two miles out with gas stations, convenience stores, video rental shops, fast food drive-throughs and grocery stores. Many of the stores were already boarded up and derelict. It reminds me of the slash-and-burn practices we so deplore in the Amazon rain forests: build a big ugly chain store, suck out all the quick money you can, then abandon that store and go build another where the action’s hotter.

“Queens Boulevard with longleaf pines,” laments a Yankee friend who says she moved down here to get away from that sort of car-centered urban blight.

She should have gone to Oregon where they have sensible growth plans, not North Carolina where we try to throw up a six-lane bypass around any town with a population of more than eighty-three people.

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