Page 83 of Hello, Summer
“The night that poor man burned to death?” Her blue-gray eyes traveled to the scorch marks on the pavement. “That was an awful thing.”
“It was,” Conley agreed. “If this is your property, do you live around here?”
The woman waved in the general direction of the fields behind her.“Right back there. How about you? What kind of news outfit do you work for?”
“I’m a reporter forThe Silver Bay Beacon.My name is Conley Hawkins.”
The woman tilted her head and studied her. “Kin to Chet Hawkins, are you?”
Conley slid easily into the Southern speech patterns she’d lost during her years in the city. “Yes, ma’am. He was my daddy.”
“Well, your daddy was a nice man. When my husband was alive, we did business with your daddy’s bank. He was always square with us.”
Conley knew this about her father, but it was nice to hear from a stranger. Her father valued being square. He’d always talked about and tried to exhibit qualities like integrity and honesty and loyalty. These weren’t just words for a DAR speech contest for Chet Hawkins. She liked to think maybe those qualities were ones she’d inherited, along with her great-grandmother’s aquamarine ring and a box of tarnished sterling silver flatware that she’d left behind in a rented storage unit in Atlanta.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said now. “About last week. Did you see or hear anything that night?” She slapped at a mosquito that had landed on her forearm.
“It’s blazing hot out here,” the woman said. “Why don’t you come on up to the house, and we’ll talk. Might as well leave your car here.”
The woman patted the dog on the rump. “Scoot over, Sport. We got company.”
The dog opened one eye, gave a baleful sigh, and slid onto the floor of the Ranger.
The field spread out before them with crops that had already grown two feet high in the hot Florida sun.
“Is all this land yours?” Conley asked.
“Yes, but we lease this part to a hunting club. Farther back on the property, we grow peanuts and soybeans. Well,Idon’t grow any of it anymore; my sons and I lease it out. Stopped farming after Alton died.” She turned and offered Conley a weather-beaten hand. “I’m Margie Barrett, by the way.”
They drove past a decaying wooden farmhouse with a collapsed front porch and saplings growing through the rusted-out tin roof. Bales of hay were visible in the open doorway.
“That’s the old homeplace,” Margie commented. “Alton and I lived there when we were newlyweds, but after that, I told him I wasn’t bringing my babies home to a house where you could see clean through the floorboards.”
The house would have made a beautifully evocative black-and-white photo, Conley thought as they passed, but she had to agree with Margie’s housing preferences.
The Ranger rumbled along the dirt road, and then they were approaching a tidy concrete-block house. It was painted pale turquoise and had an abbreviated front porch with a pair of rocking chairs and hanging baskets of ferns. A tabby cat scampered away into the yard at the sound of the approaching vehicle. The house stood in a patch of carefully tended green lawn, with beds of red, white and blue annuals.
Margie parked the Ranger and tenderly lifted the old dog and set him on the grass. “Sport’s almost fourteen years old. He doesn’t move around so good anymore. Like me. Come on inside, and I’ll get us a couple of Cokes.”
Conley settled on a sofa in a wood-paneled living room whose walls were dotted with family photos. The furniture was maple, reproduction early American. There was a worn brown vinyl recliner facing a flat-screen television. Sport parked himself on the green shag carpet near her feet.
“Here we go,” Margie said, handing her a glass. She set a small bowl of water in front of the dog, but he was already dozing.
“About last Thursday morning,” Conley said, easing her notebook out of the pocket of her jeans. “I was asking you if you saw or heard anything?”
Margie reached down and absentmindedly scratched the old dog’s ears. “Sport here is about blind, but his hearing is still pretty sharp. He got me up way after midnight. I’m not sure of the time, but I know I’d fallen asleep in the recliner, watching TV. I took him outside to pee, but after a while, he was pacing and kinda growling and yipping to be let offthe leash. I usually keep him leashed outside at night ’cause I’m scared he might hear something and take off running. Blind as he is, and old as I am, I might never find him again.” She chuckled and patted the dog’s head. “We can’t have you getting lost, can we, Sport?”
“Did he hear something?” Conley asked.
Margie nodded. “At first, I thought it was probably just a possum or a raccoon, but then I heard it myself. Voices. Coming from up the road by the highway.”
She pointed to a large picture window that looked out on the field. Conley could just barely see the gleaming metal roof of her car in the distance.
“Folks, especially townsfolk, don’t realize how far voices carry out here in the country. But once I got Sport quieted down, I heard two men’s voices. They were arguing, and it was pretty loud.”
Intrigued, Conley leaned closer, her pen poised over her notebook. “Could you make out what they were saying?”
“Not really, but I could tell from the tone that they were spittin’ mad. After a while, I heard a woman’s voice too. Now I could hear her a little better, because she was screeching. Something like ‘Stop! Just stop it!’ Then the voices got a little lower. Not too long after that, I heard car doors slamming.”
