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  He took his time assessing my statement, then jerked his head toward the smoother road. “Up at the barn.”

  “Thanks. I’ll look for her there.” I saw no place to turn around, so I backed up. The only thing that kept it from being one of the crookedest backing jobs ever performed by woman was the fact that my wheels couldn’t leave the ruts. My whitewalls would never be the same.

  Finally I reached the graded drive. No horse ever headed for a barn with greater relief.

  The structure, big enough to house ten horses and their feed, sat near the edge of the thin pine forest that separated the Sanders property from Trevor’s workshop. Through the pines I had a clear view of the back of the workshop, which included wide double doors through which, presumably, he took animals to be worked on.

  Near the barn were a parking area, a makeshift training ring, and a small feedlot. The feedlot’s ground had been churned by hooves into an even brown. Beyond that, a large green pasture stretched to distant trees. A white SUV and a silver BMW were parked in the lot. Three riders cantered across the pasture, while a tiny figure perched on a tall gray horse was being led around the ring by a woman I recognized by her flyaway black hair and the glint of sun on her glasses.

  I pulled to a stop beside the BMW and lowered my windows to be comfortable while I waited for the woman and child to complete their lesson.

  “She’s doing well, isn’t she?” asked a voice from the BMW.

  A mother with anxious eyes watched the little girl on the big horse.

  “Seems to be doing fine,” I replied.

  The woman lowered her voice, even though nobody could hear us. “The rest of the family may be trash, but Missy is good with children. Dana was terrified the first time, but this is only her second lesson, and already she doesn’t seem afraid, does she?”

  Not half as afraid as her mother. I wondered if the mother was afraid the child would fall, fail, or be contaminated by Missy’s “trashiness.”

  “She’s doing beautifully. Next thing you know she’ll be out there riding with the best of them.” I pointed toward the riders in the pasture.

  The mother nodded. “It’s so important for a child to be exposed to a variety of experiences, don’t you think? Things like horseback riding, ballet, soccer, and violin. Of course, they all take up a good bit of time. We have a soccer game at one.” She looked at her watch and I did the same. It was half past eleven. We let the conversation die from lack of interest.

  “Oh, gross!” she exclaimed a few minutes later.

  I first thought she was staring at me with that sick look on her face, then realized she was looking at something on the far side of my car. From where we were parked, through the thin forest separating the Sanders property from Trevor’s business, we watched as Trevor and one of his assistants wrestled an enormous head from a garbage bag in the back of a tan pickup. “Looks good,” Trevor boomed. He held the head up for his assistant to admire. I couldn’t tell at that distance whether his helper was Wylie or Robin. A short, thick man standing to one side talked excitedly, speaking so loudly that some of his words wafted our way. “…all day to get him…straight through a marsh.” I wondered where he’d been. Hunting season didn’t start for several weeks.

  Shrieks from the other side of our cars distracted us. The child had finished her lesson and was running toward the car, calling, “I did it, Mommy. Did you see me? I did it!”

  In record speed the mother gathered the little girl into the protective cocoon of the car, shielding her from the sights next door, and hustled her off to their next activity. I hoped the child would get lunch on the way.

  I climbed out and went toward Missy, who was already wiping down the horse. Close up, the beast looked as old as me. Dana had little to fear from that animal.

  “Missy Sanders?”

  She gave me the courtesy to pause in her grooming. “Yes, ma’am. You wanting riding lessons?” Her voice was high and nasal, unexpected in a woman that thick and strong, but her tone made me want to climb up on that horse and gallop across the pasture to show her I could—if the old horse still could.

  However, Mama raised me to be polite. “No, hon. I started riding before I could walk, on my daddy’s farm horse.” We exchanged the smiles of women who learned to ride because it was necessary. “I’m MacLaren Yarbrough, from Yarbrough Feed, Seed, and Nursery.”

  Magnified by their lenses, her eyes flickered. “The judge. I know. Didn’t Daddy send the check for our last feed bill?”

  “This isn’t about money. It’s about Starr Knight. Evelyn Finch, who works with me, said you were a friend of hers.”

  She turned back to the horse and started rubbing him down double-time.

  “I’m not here with questions about her death. I want to ask about something that puzzles me: the way Starr was dressed when she died.”

  Missy finished wiping down the horse’s forelegs before she spoke. I got the feeling she’d been planning her answer. “Starr ain’t been out this way for months. Not since she got a place of her own in town.”

  I’d walked close to the edge of truth in my lifetime. I knew how to read between her lines. “But you had been seeing her somewhere else, right? At her apartment?”

  “She never let me go to her place. Said it was real trashy.”

  Trash is relative. Dana’s mother considered Missy’s family trash, but that woman must have led a sheltered life. There were hovels in Hope County that made the Sanders clan look downright middle class. Most of our slum housing had been built—thrown together, to be more exact—by Gusta’s husband and passed on, unimproved, to his widow. Gusta considered herself a benefactress of the poor because she charged so little rent. She neither knew nor cared that the low rent attracted mostly the desperate—those who scraped together all the pennies they could find to buy drugs.

  I pressed Missy again for the truth. “So where did you meet her?”

  With a huff of defeat, she capitulated. “Hardee’s. We’d go get a burger and talk. She was real sick lately.”

  If Missy suspected the truth about Starr’s “illness,” I respected her desire to protect her friend. If she didn’t, I wasn’t about to enlighten her.

  “Was she going to see a doctor? Was that why she left town last week?”

  When Missy didn’t answer my question, I tried another. “Do you know why she was dressed like she was?”

  When she still didn’t answer, I warned, “You don’t have to tell me, Missy, but you will have to tell the sheriff. I’ll have to report that you know something and are holding back. He is determined to find whoever killed Starr.”

  She jerked back a step and blazed back at me. “Do you know what happened to her?” She barely gave me time to nod. “Leave them alone!” she shouted. “You’d do better to put your hand in a nest of rattlers. You ain’t got a notion who you’re meddling with!”

  Her use of Joe Riddley’s favorite word stung me into also speaking louder than I intended. “I’ve got only one notion: locking up whoever killed her and throwing away the key. You’d do well to have the same notion yourself.”

  Her jaw clenched. “You have to catch them first. And you heard what they done to Starr. That’s what they’re like!”

  I lowered my voice. “Do you know who they are?”

  She shook her head and followed my lead. I had to step closer to hear. “If I did, I’d tell. I swear I would. But I don’t know. And I’m scared they might think I do.” Her eyes, magnified by the thick lenses, were huge and scared. She licked her lips and her gaze flickered to the right and left, as if she feared that a horde of Starr’s enemies might be lurking behind a fence post or over behind the truck at Trevor’s back door. Trevor and his helper were still talking to the hunter beside his truck.

  I had better things to do than watch other people chat. “Why would they hurt Starr? Do you know that?” I asked.

  Missy hesitated. “She planned to turn them in. They musta found out and got her—just like she was scar
ed they would. Leave it alone, or they’ll get you, too!”

  “The sheriff isn’t about to leave it alone, and you know it. He’s going to scour this county, and the whole state of Georgia, if necessary, to bring them in. And so help me God, if you are protecting them—”

  Her voice rose again. “I ain’t protecting nobody! I tried to help. I even loaned her my clothes, but look what they did to her!” She stomped around to the other side of the horse and pressed her forehead against its neck, not even pretending to groom the beast any longer, merely using it for support. It stood and twitched, offering what comfort it could.

  “Do you know who she was going to talk to?”

  She took her time about it, but finally she nodded. “She had a secret meeting all set up with the DEA, over in Augusta. She said that now that Bradley was safe, she could talk. She thought they might help her get clean again and put her in a protection program somewhere. It like to killed her to think about leaving Bradley even for a little while, but once D-Facs took him, she made up her mind. ‘I’m gonna clean up my act and get him back,’ she told me, ‘and then I’m gonna ask them to put us in that witness protection program and send us far away from here.’ It like to killed me to think about losing her like that, but now…she’s gone for good.” The last words were a wail. Missy laid her head on the horse’s neck and bawled.

  I gave her time to recover. The sun was warm on my shoulders, the air fragrant with scents I grew up with: horses, pasture, barn. Two horses nuzzled each other by the feedlot fence. The three riders were headed back our way from far across the pasture. The only discordant note in the pastoral scene was over at Trevor’s, where—barely screened by the skimpy forest—the head of the big animal was finally being carried through the double doors.

  “Do they often unload them outside like that?” I asked, trying to introduce a more neutral subject.

  Missy looked over her shoulder as if she hadn’t noticed the activity next door. Her shrug confirmed that it was a common occurrence. “They have to. Can’t drive a truck into the shop. They even butcher deer out there, if somebody wants the meat for eating. Too many chemicals inside, Mr. Knight says.”

  “I don’t guess any of you saw Starr take Robin’s truck that day, did you?”

  She blinked and fumbled in her jeans pocket for a tissue. “Starr wouldn’t take Robin’s truck. She hated that woman.”

  “Why?”

  “She never said.” Missy sniffed. “My mom claimed Starr was afraid Robin would marry Trevor and they’d get custody of Bradley. That might have been it. I know she wouldn’t let him play with Robin’s girls, and they’re sweet kids.”

  “Maybe if she hated Robin, that’s why she took Robin’s truck—to hassle her.” I was fumbling in the dark and we both knew it.

  Missy shook her head. “Starr wouldn’t drive a vehicle with an automatic transmission. She had a big thing about that. Said they were for wimps and sissies. Besides, Uncle Jacob saw two men at her truck—”

  She broke off and gave me the glare of somebody who’d been tricked into saying more than she had intended. “He won’t talk to the sheriff. You’d be wasting your time sending him out here to try to talk to any of my family. We stay clear of the sheriff and he stays clear of us.”

  “You could at least go tell him where Starr was headed. Was she wearing your clothes?”

  She gave me a grudging nod. “I told her she needed to look respectable for them to take her serious.”

  Without meaning to, I glanced down her muscular torso, which was several sizes larger than Starr’s. Correctly reading my expression, she added hotly, “The pants had an elastic waist. They were a tad big, but they didn’t fall off her.”

  I remembered that the deputy had said the pants were baggy. I wondered if either the sheriff or the coroner—both males—had considered the significance of the fact that Starr’s clothes were too big.

  Missy had another concern. “Don’t tell Trevor. I don’t want him to pay for them, or nothing.”

  “I won’t tell Trevor, but you do need to tell the sheriff.”

  I had spoken in the process of leaving, so my words were louder than usual. A voice called from the barn, “You haff trouble, Missy?” The accent was heavily German.

  I looked up and saw the double of the man around front—except this man’s hair was silver. He stood in the shadows that filled the doorway, carrying a pitchfork in one beefy hand. He stepped into the light like Goliath, broad of back and thick of thigh. David’s taunt echoed in my brain:

  You come to me with a shield and a sword

  But I come to you in the name of the Lord.

  I didn’t feel real confident at the moment that I did come in the name of the Lord. Maybe I came in the name of my own curiosity. Maybe this giant German had been sent by God to drive me away. Maybe Sheriff Gibbons had everything under control. Maybe I ought to get on my horse and ride into the sunset.

  I couldn’t leave without a low warning. “Tell the sheriff what you know. It’s the only protection you’ve got.”

  Her glasses reflected the light of the sun so I couldn’t see her eyes. “I don’t know nothing! You got that? I don’t know a dad-blamed thing.” She grabbed the reins of the old horse and led it away.

  8

  The rest of the weekend I wondered if Missy had called the sheriff, or if my visit had accomplished nothing except ruining my whitewalls.

  Sunday afternoon I said to Joe Riddley, “How about we invite Buster to join us at Dad’s Bar-be-que tonight?”

  “You planning to interrogate him about Starr’s murder investigation?”

  “Don’t be silly. We haven’t had a chance to enjoy a good meal together for weeks, and it’s finally cool enough to eat outdoors again.”

  A stiff breeze had even driven off the gnats and mosquitoes, so when we got our plates, I suggested we eat at a distant table under the trees. I congratulated myself on finagling it so we were out of earshot of other diners without arousing Joe Riddley’s suspicions—until he set his tray on the table. “Okay, Buster, fill us in. Little Bit’s ears are flapping.”

  Buster’s bloodhound face looked as mournful as I’d ever seen it. He swung his long legs across the bench and settled himself on one side of the picnic table. He poked at the coleslaw on his plate with a white plastic fork, looking for all the world like he was hunting clues in its mayonnaise. He took a bite and chewed it slowly. He snailed a handout for his sliced-beef sandwich and unwrapped it as carefully as if it were fine crystal. I expected us all to die of old age before he said a word.

  I attacked my pulled-pork sandwich to keep from smacking him.

  He swallowed, took a swig of Coke, and said, “Forensics folks think Starr was killed on Monday or Tuesday, although with the car windows rolled up in that heat, it was hard to tell. Nobody has come forward to admit they were walking out on the bypass last week before the cleanup crew found her on Thursday, and the vehicle wasn’t visible to drivers. It could have been there all that time. My hunch is that she met up with somebody who provided her with drugs, that she reneged on paying him, he followed her home, managed to get her to stop, and killed her.”

  I gave him a minute to take another bite before I asked, “Have you talked to Missy Sanders?”

  Joe Riddley stopped chewing and fixed me with a stare that used to make defendants before his bench quiver in their boots. “What does Missy Sanders have to do with anything?”

  Fortunately, I’ve known him too long to quiver, and I was wearing sandals. “I ran into her yesterday, and she said Starr had borrowed her clothes just before she was killed, and that Starr was going to talk with some Drug Enforcement Agency people.” That got their attention. I filled them in on what Missy had said. “I told her to go talk to you, Buster, but I guess she didn’t.”

  “Not that I’ve heard, but I’ve been fishing all weekend. I had just gotten home when you called to ask me to supper.” He frowned. “I sure wish Starr had talked to me. We suspect there�
�s a meth lab somewhere in the area, but haven’t a clue where to look. Nobody’s buying any supplies they shouldn’t, and every lead we’ve gotten has fizzled out.”

  “Maybe Missy can help you.”

  “Not if all she knows is where Starr was going and why she dressed the way she did the day she died.”

  “It’s a beginning, Buster. She was probably killed by whoever was supplying her with drugs. Now if we—”

  Joe Riddley slammed one fist down on the table and roared. “Stay out of it, Little Bit!” I think he was as astonished as we were, because he swallowed and said in a normal voice, “The sheriff can take it from here.” He stood. “I’m getting some more tea. Anybody else need some?” I held up my paper cup and he strode off.

  “He’s really worried, you know,” Buster said unnecessarily. “Those boys are dangerous. He doesn’t want you to get hurt again.”

  “I’m not going to get hurt, because I’m not getting involved. The only thing I want to know from you is whether or not you’ve found anything that points to a suspect.”

  He didn’t say a word, just sat there eating his sandwich.

  I gave him plenty of time to speak. Finally I said, “I wonder why Starr was out on the bypass. She wouldn’t have used it to drive to Augusta, either from her house or from Trevor’s. How did anybody lure her out there to kill her?”

  “She wasn’t killed out on the bypass.” Buster finished his sandwich, wiped sauce off his hands and chin, and took a swig of his drink before he followed up on that bombshell. “We’ve been over every inch of the dirt on that roadside, and there wasn’t a speck of blood. None at her place, either, so she wasn’t killed there.”

  “Was she killed in the truck?” When I was a child, some slaughterers had fetched my favorite calf from Daddy’s farm and beat it to death with the head of an axe in the back of their truck, while my little brother, Jake, and I watched. Daddy never used them again, but that didn’t erase the memory. It still made me sick to my stomach to remember. I pushed my plate away.