The Butcher's Daughter by Staub Wendy Corsi

The Butcher's Daughter by Staub Wendy Corsi

Author:Staub, Wendy Corsi [Staub, Wendy Corsi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, thriller, Suspense, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780062742094
Amazon: 0062742094
Goodreads: 48613288
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2020-08-25T07:00:00+00:00


Weary after a milk delivery shift that had begun in the wee hours and then all the excitement over at Travis’s place this afternoon, Rodney Lee pulls up in front of the low stone block house he shares with his mother.

She’s not home. On Fridays, she goes from her waitress job at the luncheonette to the bartending job she’d started a few weeks ago. This one is at a joint where Rodney Lee always liked to shoot pool with his buddies. Now that she’s behind the bar, he stays away, even on nights when she’s not working. No man wants to see, or even hear about, his mother falling all over the patrons, and none are off-limits when Ruth Ann Midget starts sampling as much as she’s pouring. He’s gotten into more than his share of skirmishes with guys his own age who think it’s funny to tell him they’d messed around with his old lady.

Before he throws the first punch, he always says, “Take it back, or I’ll kill you.”

Some do, right away. Others hold out a little longer.

In the end, they all take it back. Even when it’s the truth.

He parks the Impala at the curb and goes to the mailbox. A letter from Travis isn’t the only thing he’s looking for, but the other evaporates from his thoughts the moment he sees an envelope with the familiar red-and-blue-ticked border right there on top of the stack.

He opens the door, and his mother’s cat pushes out past him. It brushes against his legs, and he kicks it.

“Whole damned house smells like your piss,” he calls after it as it scampers into the weeds and disappears over the chain-link fence.

He slams the door and dumps everything but the letter onto the pile of unopened mail on the hall table. The heap topples, scattering envelopes—mostly overdue bills and collection notices—all over the floor. No draft notice today.

But it’s coming. The first week in March, he’d been summoned for his armed forces physical. Stripped down and funneled along with hundreds, maybe thousands of fellow underwear-clad healthy specimens, he wondered how many would be dead in a year’s time.

He’d passed the physical examination. And then he passed the mental aptitude tests that had tripped up his pal Buddy when he’d attempted to enlist right out of high school.

“I thought they were looking for soldiers, not geniuses,” he’d complained after being deemed mentally unfit for the army. But Buddy has a second chance, now that the Pentagon lowered the recruitment standards. He reports to basic training in a couple of weeks.

Rodney Lee’s Statement of Acceptability arrived in the mail before the month was out. It’s just a matter of time before he’s called up as an infantryman. He’ll do his patriotic duty, just like Travis.

“I wouldn’t say he’s fighting for our country,” Melody Hunter had the nerve to tell Rodney Lee the night he’d stopped to offer her a ride. Then she’d gone on to criticize President Johnson.

Until then, Rodney Lee hadn’t believed



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