Signs in the Blood by Vicki Lane Read Free Book Online Page B

hit in the corner of his room. I heard Mister Tomlin tell Daddy hit was of English make and the best of hits kind that there was. When Daddy looked at that shotgun his eyes got all hungry—like me a-lookin at that red stone finger-ring.

CHAPTER 4
    L UNCH AT F ULL C IRCLE F ARM
 ( S UNDAY)
    “O-oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind.

She's always contro-olled; she's always confined.

Controlled by her pa-a-rents, until she's a wife.

A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”
    E LIZABETH SANG THE OLD BALLAD LOUDLY AND NOT very tunefully as she ambled down to her garden on Sunday morning to pick lettuce for the sandwiches. As she sang, she did a mental run-through of her lunch plans. The turkey breast was roasting in the oven, well seasoned with garlic slivers, lemon juice,
herbes de Provence,
and crazy salt. A bottle of white wine was in the refrigerator, as well as some St. Pauli Girl beer and a pitcher of unsweetened iced tea.
I don't know what he'd like to drink so I'll have several choices . . . oh, and pick some of the Blue Balsam mint for the tea,
she reminded herself, carefully breaking off the crisp outer leaves of the young lettuces. There was her homemade sourdough bread to be warmed at the last minute and those decadently good rosemary-and-olive-oil potato chips from the Fresh Market.
And cut-up strawberries and mangoes for dessert. That should do it.
    As she climbed the steps back to her porch, Elizabeth's thoughts returned to the problem of Miss Birdie. After the “prophesies” of the night before, Birdie was adamant in her belief that Cletus had been murdered somewhere back in the mountains before he had been thrown into the river. And Elizabeth was reasonably sure that Miss Birdie would not be satisfied till her son's missing shotgun had been found, no matter what the sheriff said.
And that's going to mean going up in a bunch of those deep hollers “where the sun don't never shine,” like they say.
    She paused at the top of the steps as a tiny shudder shook her body.
Gramma would have said that was a rabbit running over my grave,
Elizabeth thought, but the idea of the deep dark hollers continued to nag at her.
They tell stories about some rough folks in this county, but everyone I've met has been pretty nice, at least once you get to know them. It'll be interesting,
she told herself,
seeing some of these places that are just down the other side of the mountain. Cletus rambled all around the area—
    She stopped in mid-thought, pushing away the unspoken
and look what happened to him.
“I'd better get this lettuce washed,” she said aloud. As she went inside she reassured herself,
Maybe I'll call the sheriff tomorrow and see if they've looked for the shotgun at all. Birdie was so sure that Cletus would have kept it with him no matter what . . . it's probably in the river and just hasn't been found.
    The kitchen clock told her that it was a quarter to eleven. Forty-five minutes till she was to meet Phillip Hawkins down at the lower barn. She'd warned him not to attempt the last steep quarter-mile of her road in his car. “It's not just the steepness,” she had explained, “it's the water breaks.” These were five deep trenches across the road, used to carry off water from a heavy rain. While a car with four-wheel drive could creep slowly over a water break, an ordinary car, needing a fair amount of speed to pull the steep grade, would hit each trench hard, sometimes with appalling results for the undercarriage.
    She glanced at the dining table there against the row of windows that looked across the valley to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. She'd already set the table with her cobalt pottery plates and the indigo-and-white batik napkins. A creamy old ironstone pitcher held three clusters of crimson rhododendron blooms and several spikes of Siberian iris, their deep purple petals looking like a flight of exotic butterflies above the lush rhododendrons.
    “So who is this Hawkins guy?” Ben