The Covenant by Jeff Crook Read Free Book Online

or a father with bones on gallows hill, but it was essentially the same.
    The kids had stopped singing by the time we crossed the log bridge over the dry creek. We were almost to the edge of the woods before they started up again, but they sounded miles away now. We hadn’t passed them on the footpath. We stopped to listen, but their voices drifted into silence, swallowed by the vastness of the woods.
    â€œI saw a Bigfoot in there once,” Nathan said in a soft voice.
    â€œGod, you are such a liar!” Holly snarled.

 
    7
    T HE DAY BRIGHTENED considerably once we were out from under the trees, and the westering sun, coming out from behind the clouds, was almost hot on our faces as we crossed the field. Our feet kicked up a cloud of dust that seemed unusual for that time of year. It hadn’t rained in a couple of weeks.
    Jenny greeted us at the road, posed by her mailbox in her black dress dotted with small white flowers and a little round black cap with a half veil covering her face. She had just taken a bundle of letters from the box. Cassie and Eli were sitting on the grass beneath the trees, the boy pushing a toy truck around and the girl pretending to play with a doll. Nathan crossed the lawn, knelt beside Eli and helped him make truck noises. He grabbed Cassie and rubbed her head with his knuckles.
    Jenny invited us in to dinner. “There’s just so much food, we can’t possibly eat it all,” she said. “Everybody has been so good.” Part of me wanted to say I had to get back, but I had nothing to get back to—an empty motel room without even a fridge to keep a cold beer. I had spent too many hungry nights to turn down a free meal, no matter what it cost.
    Also, I wanted to get another look at the place where Sam Loftin drowned. I don’t know what I hoped to find—maybe whatever the coroner was trying to hide. As we crossed the lawn, Cassie followed just behind me, and once we were inside she sat next to me on the couch. Nathan pushed in beside her and tried to make her giggle by squeezing her knees. She looked like she wanted to crawl into my lap and cry. I got up to explore the house.
    Jenny cut me off in the hall by the grandfather clock, her eyes swimming with questions I couldn’t answer. I edged into the half bath and closed the door, turned on the faucet and let it run while I sat on the toilet and tried to talk myself out of bailing on these people with their soul-sucking grief. Their money kept calling me back.
    As I turned off the faucet and dried my hands, I heard Jenny and Deacon in the kitchen. “She can help you. You will need her strength.”
    â€œBut I can’t afford it now, Deacon.”
    â€œAnd I told you before, I can help you with that, too.”
    â€œI don’t want charity. I can’t. I just have to trust in God. He’ll find a way.”
    â€œGod helps those who help themselves,” Deacon said.
    Holly met me in the hall with a plastic cup of pale wine. I took it and left through the back door.
    Jenny had a swimming pool between the house and the lake. It was shaped like the print of a shoe, with a diving board at the heel and a waterfall at the toe end, fan palms in pots and a hollow concrete tiki statue that they used as a chiminea. Beyond the pool, a path led down to the lake, where a dock and boathouse stood over their reflections in the water. One side of the yard sloped steeply uphill, and an iron gate let out to a small orchard of plum trees with dark purple leaves and pale pink flowers that glowed in the gathering dusk. A path climbed up between the trees until it reached the levee.
    I found Officer Lorio standing on a limestone boulder at the water’s edge and turning something over in his hands. At first I didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t wearing his uniform. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, jeans, cowboy boots and a hat. The wind had come up and was blowing toward us, bringing