Home Fires by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online Page B

I realized that A.K. had probably been telling the truth when he swore he hadn’t used the spray can.
    One hand had printed every S and every N backwards. A different hand had mixed his capitals with lowercase, then dotted each capital I. And while Andrew’s son might have written his letters that way, April’s son had been taught to print his alphabet perfectly long before he started kindergarten.
    I’ve heard SBI handwriting experts say it’s almost as hard for an educated person to mimic a crude writing style as it is for an uneducated person to mimic a correct style. Both groups almost always revert to true form somewhere in the document. I was pretty sure A.K. couldn’t have written those backward letters that consistently. Especially not after three or four beers.
    But he’d certainly had a hand in tipping over half a dozen headstones and pulling over the angel.
    “No real damage to the markers,” said Mr. Peacock after he’d walked around the little graveyard. “I can stand ’em back up, reseat them with a little mortar and they’ll be fine as new once that latex paint’s scrubbed off. Good thing they won’t using oil-base.”
    “What about that there angel?” asked Daddy.
    She was granite, not marble, about five feet tall, and she had fallen back at an angle. One wing was half-buried in the soft sandy loam, but the right wing had struck the stone wall and shattered into several chunks.
    “Now that’s gonna take some work,” said Mr. Peacock, stroking his broad chin. “I gotta be honest with you, Mr. Kezzie. It’s gonna cost. First I’ve got to see if what’s left of that wing can take drilling.”
    “Drilling?” I asked.
    He was so absorbed in the mechanics he forgot to be shy and actually met my eyes for a brief instant. “I’ll have to put in at least two steel pins to hold the new wing tip on. Then if it’s sound enough to accept the pins, I’ve got to see if I can match the color. Every stone’s a little different, you know.”
    He bent down for a chunk of the broken wing that must have weighed at least fifteen pounds and hefted it in one huge hand as if it were a two-pound sack of flour. The sun had already set and daylight was fading, but we could still see the color difference between the granite’s weathered surface and its freshly split interior.
    His hands looked like boot leather but his touch was delicate as his fingers gently traced the feathers chiseled on the broken stone he held, as if he were smoothing real feathers instead of granite.
    “And after I match the stone, I’ve got to carve the feathers so they match, too.”
    “And if the pins won’t hold or you can’t match it?” asked Daddy.
    “Then we’ll have to make a whole new pair of wings and pin ’em on back behind the shoulder blades. By the time I give her a good buffing all over and bring her back and stand her up, they ought to look all right, but it’s gonna cost you.”
    “Durn them boys,” said Daddy, shaking his head.
    “Could’ve been a lot worse,” Peacock said. “If she’d fallen on her face, we’d have to make a whole new head. You can’t never get a new nose to look exactly right.”
    As they continued to talk, I wandered around in the twilight to read the names of Crockers long gone. Old Mr. Ham Crocker had been eighty-eight. His sister Florence, laid to rest here around the turn of the century, “died a maid of 14 yrs., 3 mos., 24 days.” And there was Daddy’s great-uncle Yancy Knott “and also his beloved wife Lulalia Crocker Knott,” both dead of typhoid in 1902.
    Gardenia bushes had been planted on either side of the gate and they were in full bloom. Their heavy sweet fragrance filled the air and hummingbird moths were busily working the fleshy white blossoms.
    Lightning bugs drifted on the still June air. Mosquitoes, too, I realized, and slapped at one that was biting my arm.
    Suddenly the quiet evening was interrupted by a pager on Rudy Peacock’s belt. He squinted at