Sharyn McCrumb - Sick Of Shadows

“I expect she’s out painting,” said Captain Grandfather. “When I got up at the sensible hour of seven”-he paused to glare at Geoffrey’s rumpled dressing gown-“I found a box of cereal and a used bowl on the table here. I expect she got an early start today.”

“She needs time to work on it,” mumbled Geoffrey sleepily. “Why not just leave her alone?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it!” snapped Amanda. “This is one of my little girl’s last family breakfasts as a-as a-”

“Chandler,” suggested her husband softly.

“Thank you, Robert. As a Chandler.” She turned to Dr. Shepherd with a careful smile. “Dr. Shepherd, you must think we have shocking manners! But I’m sure you know what a special time like this can do to the nerves of a sensitive girl like Eileen. But I do apologize for her.”

Shepherd murmured that he quite understood and went on eating his eggs.

“Charles,” Amanda continued, “go and fetch your sister, please. Or, perhaps Michael would like to have a few moments-”

Charles stood up quickly. “Now, Mother, you know she especially doesn’t want him to see the painting before it’s finished. I’ll go get her. Save me some toast.”

“Have you talked to her since last night?” Elizabeth whispered to Michael.

He shook his head. “I thought I’d just leave her alone,” he muttered.

Amanda interrupted them at this point to deliver a monologue on wedding rehearsal plans, and Carlsen Shepherd began to talk quietly to Captain Grandfather, moving the silverware around in positions suspiciously resembling the armada of the previous evening’s game.

“Who won?” asked Dr. Chandler, indicating his coffee spoon, which had just been turned into a Turkish fleet.

“Well, I did,” said Shepherd, “but it was probably luck.”

Elizabeth wondered if Eileen had intentionally skipped the family gathering. She found herself staring at the dying stag in the painting, and wondering whose eyes they reminded her of.

“Dad! Captain Grandfather!” Charles appeared in the doorway, panting for breath. “Could you come down to the lake, please?”

The last thing Wesley Rountree wanted in his county was a murder. County sheriffs do not keep their elected positions by brilliantly solving cases the way cops do on TV. They keep them by staying on good terms with the majority of the voting populace; and if there was one thing that Wesley Rountree knew about murders, it was that they caused hard feelings, no matter what. A conviction cost you the votes of the killer’s family; an acquittal alienated the victim’s family. It was a no-win situation.

Whenever there was a murder in Rountree’s district, he always hoped that a migrant worker had gone berserk and committed the crime, but that was never the case. Marauding tramps were incredibly rare; jealous husbands and drunken good-old-boys were fatally common.

It wasn’t that Rountree condoned murder or wanted to see the perpetrator go unpunished. He faithfully brought to justice the local killers, regardless of personal consequences, but whenever a murder was reported to his office, his first reaction was invariably indignation that someone would be so inconsiderate of his feelings as to commit homicide in his county.

Aside from that, the job of sheriff suited Rountree just fine. He had lived all his life in the county, except for college and a four-year stint as an M.P. with the air force in Thailand. After his discharge, he had spent a couple of years with the highway patrol, and then when old Sheriff Miller had a heart attack and died, Rountree went back home to Chandler Grove and was elected sheriff in an uncontested election.

Now, five years later, in his second term as sheriff, Rountree was beginning to think of the job as a permanent thing. At thirty-six, he was a stocky blond who fought his cowlick with a crew cut and his beer belly with diet cola. Outdoor work and pale skin had kept him perpetually red-faced and freckled. The consensus of opinion around Chandler Grove was that Wesley Rountree was “doing okay.” As a home-boy, he suited the community down to the ground; they wouldn’t have traded him for Sherlock Holmes.

In a small rural county, where everybody knows everybody else, law enforcement is a personal matter. The voters wanted a father image, and one of the cleverest moves of Rountree’s life had been perceiving that need and filling it.

He remembered the time that Floyd Rogers had been shot in the parking lot of Brenner’s Cafe. There wasn’t much of a mystery about it. Half a dozen people had seen Wayne Smith’s red pickup leaving the scene of the crime.

It was pretty common knowledge that Smith had been fooling around with Pearl Rogers. “The boyfriend shot the husband?” asked Rountree when they called him. “It’s supposed to be the other way around. Don’t he watch television?”

Rogers was in critical condition in the county hospital, and Smith had to be brought in before some of the Rogers kinfolk decided to handle it themselves. Wyatt Earp might have organized a posse; Wesley Rountree preferred to use the telephone. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of Wayne Smith’s farm.

After six rings, the fugitive himself answered.

“Hello, Wayne? This is Wesley Rountree. How you doing? That calf of yours going to make it? Glad to hear it. Listen, Wayne… we have a little problem here. I understand you shot Floyd Rogers a little while ago. What? Well, he told me himself, as a matter of fact. He was still conscious when the rescue squad got there. Say what? Dead? No, but he’s laid up pretty bad in county hospital. I think he’ll pull through, though. And Pearl, she’s about to run us all crazy. Seems to think there’s gonna be a shoot-out or some such foolishness. What, Wayne? Well, you’ve sobered up some now, haven’t you? I thought you had. Listen, we need to have a talk about all this, Wayne. You need to come on down here so we can get this straightened out. No, you don’t have to do that. I’ll come out and get you in the county car. You just wait there, okay? Maybe you could put a few things in a canvas bag; we might have to keep you here. Your razor, change of underwear, things like that. Then you just go out on the porch and wait, okay? Right. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Stay calm, Wayne. Bye, now.”

Case closed. Floyd Rogers had pulled through all right, and Bryce had got Wayne Smith off with two years’ probation. Rountree hadn’t lost either of their votes.

When the call came in about the death at the Chandler place, Rountree took down the particulars with a heavy heart. “Please, Lord,” he muttered. “Let it be an accident, or all hell’s going to break loose!”

“What’s that, Wes?” asked his deputy.

Rountree looked sourly at Clay Taylor, with the law enforcement degree from the community college, and the rimless glasses, and the peculiar idea that a cop was a social worker.

“I think we got us a homicide,” he grunted. “Chandler place.”

Clay Taylor whistled softly. Cases involving the county gentry were rare. Occasional reports of trespassers or petty larcenies, that was about it. “The old man?” he asked.

“No. The daughter. They found her in a boat on the lake. Cause of death undetermined. We better get out there.”

“Right, Wes. Want me to call the coroner?”

“Oh, Taylor, you asshole! Dr. Chandler is the coroner! What the hell you think I’m worried about? The damned coroner is a damned suspect !”

In a time of crisis, did people really never suspect what had happened, or did they show surprise because it was expected of them? When Charles appeared in the doorway asking them to come down to the lake, Elizabeth’s mind framed the thought that Eileen was dead. Drowned in the lake, perhaps-images of Geoffrey’s description of Eileen as a Vogue Ophelia flashed in her mind-or slumped down before her easel dead from heart failure. Still, if anyone had asked her later, she would have insisted that she had no idea what had happened to upset Charles. Perhaps she would even have believed it herself, because when people appeared upset, she always did imagine the worst, and she was almost always wrong. Almost always-but not this time.