Bloody Kin by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

call a car through the turnpike this morning?” Dwight asked his mother.
    “No, I didn’t and don’t you go throwing off on my car. It’ll still be running when yours is a rust bucket back of Junior Moore’s service station,” she said tartly. Every year she sacrificed her TR to the votech automotive repair class, and every year it came back a wilder color than before.
    “Eighteen coats of Day-Glo paint’s probably all that’s holding it together,” Dwight chuckled. “I don’t suppose either you or Bessie noticed anything odd last night?”
    “Dogs were right noisy,” Bessie offered. “Willy finally roused hisself up about midnight and went out on the porch and hollered ’em shut.”
    “Which way were they barking?” Dwight asked.
    For a giddy moment, Kate remembered the Duke of Athens’s bellvoiced hounds and expected Bessie to tell him alto or soprano. It was soon apparent though that Dwight meant direction, not timbre.
    “I expect you’ll have to ask Willy that and he’s off working today,” said Bessie. “Won’t be home till suppertime. All I know, them dogs were out front. Not much moon to see by.”
    “No point asking me,” said Miss Emily when Dwight turned to her. “Once my head touches the pillow it would take the hounds of hell baying in my bathroom to wake me up. Willy’s coonhounds never do it.”
    “They might have been barking at me,” said Kate. “I drove in a little after midnight. I heard some dogs then and again when I was falling off to sleep an hour or so later.”
    “Did you come through the lane?” asked Dwight, and when she nodded, he said, “See anybody? Notice anything odd about the packhouse?”
    Kate tried to remember. She had been so tired when she turned into the rutted dirt lane. She hadn’t made as early a start as she’d planned and the need for caution on icy northern roads had stretched a ten-hour trip into eleven.
    Always before, she and Jake had shared the driving and she was usually dozing in the passenger seat whenever they reached the cutoff. “Wake up, Katydid,” he’d say. “We’re almost there.”
    Last night, tiredness had helped block out those earlier homecomings and she hadn’t been alert to details. As Bessie said, the moon was still new, a growing sliver in a star-pricked sky that had set while she was still up in Virginia, so it was quite dark beyond her headlights.
    Her lights had reflected redly in the eyes of a possum that lumbered back into the pine woods on the right as her car approached, but she remembered nothing else stirring, The packhouse had been only a dark shape on her left as she started up the slight rise, straining to see beyond the leafless branches of the apple orchard.
    “I’m afraid I was looking for a light up at the farmhouse instead of noticing the packhouse,” she apologized.
    “You mean to say Lacy didn’t even leave you a light?” fumed Miss Emily, “That man needs his ears pulled.”
    Kate smiled at the vision of little Miss Emily pulling the ears of Jake’s tall and crusty uncle.
    “You’re the one who could do it,” said Dwight, whose cowlick had suffered more than once at his mother’s hands.
    “Want me to have a talk with him?” asked Rob. “You know, Kate, legally you’re not bound to let him stay on there. Jake left you full title.”
    “Ask him to leave?” Kate was shocked that Rob would even suggest it. “Jake wouldn’t have wanted that. Lacy’s been there all his life. Where would he go? No, I couldn’t do it.”
    Bessie and Miss Emily agreed. Lacy Honeycutt might be as selfcentered as a fice dog with a sandspur in its bottom, but asking him to leave his homeplace wouldn’t be fitting.
    “All the same, it won’t hurt to remind him who’s paying the taxes,” Rob said.
    Kate shook her head. “Please don’t. I’ll work it out somehow.”
    “Was he up when you got in last night?” asked Dwight.
    “It was completely dark,” Kate said slowly, “so I thought he’d