Dark Places by Reavis Z Wortham Read Free Book Online Page A

bomb’s ground zero.

Chapter Nine
    It was a cloudy, drizzly morning and Ned couldn’t put it off any longer, now that Leland was pronounced. “Cody, you want to go with me to tell Melva that Leland’s dead?”
    They were dreading the task. Though Ned had done it many times, such visits always took the wind out of him for days. This one would be especially difficult, because Melva was an odd woman, taken to nervous giggles at the worst times. Then, after a while, she might laugh before melting into long crying jags. Ned had seen it several times since Melva moved to Center Springs.
    They had one son, a mama’s boy named Marty Smallwood, from her first marriage. Marty was a little feller when they bought a few acres not far from Isaac Reader’s house. Though a friendly guy, Charley was a half-hearted farmer and spent an inordinate amount of time in the honky-tonks across the Red River, where he drank gallons of 3.2 beer and shot pool until they closed at two in the morning.
    They had a daughter together, whose name Ned couldn’t remember because Charley ran off with the toddler one night, leaving Marty behind. Some folks said he took up with a Choctaw woman in Oklahoma. Others reported seeing him in Dallas a few months later, without his daughter, checking in the Adolphus Hotel with a colored woman on his arm.
    Ned didn’t care one way or another, but he hated the divorce for the little girl and Marty’s sake, though Charley didn’t seem to pay much attention to the boy anyway. Leland arrived a few months later and married Melva before the end of the year. Now he was gone.
    Cody shrugged. “I guess we don’t have much choice.”
    â€œGood.” Ned led the way to Cody’s Ford Galaxy on the side of the road. Bubble lights rotated on each side of the roof-mounted speaker. The threat of a shower had instead become a soft, soaking mist. “You can drive now that you’re in a decent car.”
    Cody followed. “What don’t you like about my El Camino?”
    â€œBecause this is a car for law work, not that half-breed truck of yours,” Ned dropped into the cloth seat, “and I don’t have to put it on, one leg at a time.”
    They’d been watching a steady stream of cars and trucks arrive at the peeling farmhouse on the far side of the pasture. The drive was short and Leland’s yard was full when they turned off the red dirt road into the drive, telling Ned the country grapevine was working just fine.
    â€œNot a one of these people knows Melva that well.” Ned shook his head, threading through the haphazardly parked vehicles. “Half of ’em are folks who care maybe a little bit, the other half’s nosey.”
    The porch flexed under their feet and Cody stepped carefully. “Watch that rotten place.”
    â€œHell, most of the planks on this porch wouldn’t make good firewood.” Ned ground a foot on a rotting board that crumbled to dust over the floor joist, leaving two nails exposed. “Somebody’ll have to come over and fix that for her now.”
    â€œShe has a boy.”
    Ned snorted. “I know him, too. Like I said, somebody’ll need to do it for her.”
    Hats in hand, they entered the living room. Melva was sitting on the couch between two farm wives. Winnie Louise’s orangy-red hair was tied up in a scarf, as if she intended to get up at any moment and start cleaning house, and she probably would when the mood struck her. The other was Fannie, an interesting name for the Baptist preacher’s wife and Cale Westlake’s mama.
    The trio watched Ned the way a dog minds its master when a scolding is on the way. Their eyes filled when Ned stopped, though they had little use for Leland, and less for Melva.
    Never one to draw anything out, Ned shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s him, out in the pasture, Melva. Leland’s dead. I’m sorry.”
    She wiped