Рита Браун - A Hiss Before Dying

“Bob,” Arie yelled.

The field patiently watched, wondering what really was going on in there, while Bob used his whip to also push through the brambles.

“There’s something wrong,” Suzanne Bischoff, Arie’s wife, murmured.

Colonel Shelton, now next to her, replied, “I hope no one is injured in there. Hounds caught up in wire or something.”

No one was injured, but someone was dead. Being a physician, Arie knew the minute he saw the corpse that the individual had been dead overnight. No point trying to revive him.

The cold night preserved him, but a few wild animals had gnawed on his fingers and nose.

“He’s been dead between twelve and fourteen hours, I would say,” Arie observed.

“Look here.” The man lay partially on his right side, and Bob pointed to his back.

Two bullet holes were visible in the back of his heavy hoodie, right in the area of his heart.

“Bob, I need to pull the hounds away from the body before they do damage. Do you have your cellphone?”

“I do,” Bob replied.

“Call the sheriff.” Arie took a breath, blew a toodle. He almost sang “Onward Christian Beagles,” which he would often do to settle them, get them ready for a new cast, then thought better of it.

The minute he emerged from the woods, his wife knew something big was wrong, although to one who did not know him, Arie appeared calm. Calm he was, but surprised, nevertheless. Who had killed a man, an African American looking to be about fifty, on the Kalergis’s property?

The three other whippers-in silently took their positions. Bob emerged from the woods, running to catch up.

Reaching the field, Arie announced, “We have an unusual circumstance and I must put the hounds up. I’m sorry to cancel the hunt—but the breakfast will start that much earlier.” As he smiled tightly, a siren could be heard in the distance. Deputy Cooper, working this Saturday, had just left Barracks Road Shopping Center after ejecting a drunken customer in Buchanan and Kiguel framing shop. That loopy soul was now in another cruiser, heading for the county jail.

The field slowly walked back to the house as Cooper drove down the driveway.

Harry reached for Fair’s hand. “Boy, it must be really bad.”

As the Waldingfield Beagle staff quickly put the hounds in their party wagon, counting each one as they did so, Cooper stopped next to them.

“Who found the body?” she inquired.

This was the first the other whippers-in heard of it.

“We did.” Bob shut the wagon door, then pointed to Arie Rijke.

“Hop in,” she ordered. The three drove back across the fields as Bob and Arie directed her to the site.

The ground was hard, there was no danger of sinking into mud. She stopped at the tree line.

Arie disembarked at the wood’s edge, leading the way through the bushes to the body.

Cooper walked around the corpse. “Shot in the back. No other marks on him. His sweatshirt is torn in spots from these thorns. Has anyone else seen the body?”

“No,” Arie answered.

“Gentlemen, we’ll need to wait here until the rest of the team arrives, which won’t be long.” She questioned them for the details as to when and how they found the body, when they pulled the hounds off, and confirmed that neither of them knew the deceased.

She checked her watch. “Forty minutes from your discovery until now.”

Seeing a glitter around the dead man’s neck, Cooper knelt down, pulled a pencil from her coat pocket, and gingerly hooked it under the chain. A brass rectangular chit hung at the end of the chain. It read in eighteenth-century script Garth and the number 5, large, centered above the name.

“Hmm” was all Cooper said.

The two tall men bent over.

Bob ventured a guess. “Some kind of ID.”

Arie, from South Africa, replied, “I don’t know.”

“Harry will know. She’s the history buff. This is old.” Cooper got on her cellphone. “Darrel, stop at the house, pick up Harry.”

Ten minutes later, Harry joined them in the woods.

“What is this? Bob says it’s an ID, maybe?”

Harry, not backed off by the sight of a murdered man, knelt down as did Cooper, who again lifted the brass rectangle with her pencil.

“This belongs to the Garth family; they owned at one time over four thousand acres. Sugarday was part of that land. At the time of the Revolutionary War, Cloverfields was about two thousand acres, but Ewing Garth, a brilliant businessman, continued to add to his holdings over the years. He finally persuaded the state to sell him The Barracks, which brought his acreage up to four thousand.”

“So this belonged to Ewing Garth?”

“It would have been given to anyone who was a slave leaving the plantation on an errand for Ewing. If he sent ten people out, they would each have one of these.”

“What’s the point?” Darrel asked, not one to read much history.

“To allow the bearer to do business unmolested. Also, back then there were gangs of mostly white men, but not always white, who would steal slaves to sell them down in the Delta—hence the expression Sold downriver. No one could say slavery was an easy ride, but in the Delta it sure was rougher than in the Mid-Atlantic.”

“So the chit would keep a man or woman safe?” Darrel asked, intrigued.

“Most times, especially if the person was owned by a powerful man. Ewing and his daughters were very powerful, both here and in North Carolina, where he also owned a great deal of land. The Holloways were powerful, Susan Tucker’s people. Holloway is her maiden name. They owned and still own Big Rawly. Her grandmother does.”

Cooper rose and her knees cracked as she stood up. “What in the devil was this fellow doing with it around his neck?” As an afterthought, she added, “Shot twice in the back.”

“This is the second corpse you’ve found in a week. Right?”

“The other man was pretty well torn up,” Darrel added.

“Do you know how he died?” Everyone there knew how Harry was, her tireless curiosity.

Cooper sighed. “No. That will take the medical examiner. Could very well be natural causes, even with his injury.”

“This guy’s in good shape except for the bullet holes.” Darrel shrugged.

“Exactly. Which is why I want you to go up to the house and ask Mary and David if they heard anything last night, say between three and five in the morning. Did the dogs bark?”

“Right.” He turned to leave.

“Was he killed here or moved here?” Harry asked.

Cooper nodded. “Hopefully we’ll be able to identify him. Makes the work easier. I can’t tell if he was moved, but I bet our forensic team can weigh in on that.

“You two notice anything else?” she asked Arie and Bob.

“No, but we had to get the beagles out of here before they damaged the body. Carrion,” Arie succinctly replied.

As Arie had served in the South African Army and Bob in the U.S. Navy, both had been trained to keep cool and decisive in a crisis.

“All right, you all go back up to the house. Pretending nothing has happened isn’t going to work, so tell people the truth, the little fellows found a body. You don’t need to elaborate. Harry, this means you.”

“Yes,” Harry simply agreed.

As the others walked away, Cooper methodically searched the ground. Nothing unusual.

Waiting for the team, she lit a cig. She’d sneaked back to smoking again and she needed the nicotine, a calming puff. Two dead men, why? Not that the deaths were related, but the circumstances around each body were unusual, not to mention the relative scarcity of unnatural mysterious deaths in the area.