Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Nothing special. I was busy, and she didn’t stay. She just asked how about dinner and a movie tonight, and she left.”

“She say where she was going?”

“No.”

“Anything about meeting Fergus Cass down by the creek where you said they met?”

“No.”

“All right, Dolly. You’ve been a help. Thanks.”

“Sure. Make me a deputy.”

She didn’t get up to show me out. At the door, I looked back for a moment, and I thought she looked scared. Maybe she was seeing Fergus Cass staring at her with black eyes that had the glaze of blindness on them. I went on down to the street and back to the patrol car in front of the Bonny. In the car, I drove out of town to the Cass place. There was a light in the front room and in the kitchen at the rear. I went around back and knocked on the door, and pretty soon Elmo Cass, the uncle, came out of the living room and across the kitchen in his sock feet.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Colby Adams,” I said.

He opened the screen door and peered out at me. He was a big man with a shock of gray hair and a bushel of eyebrows. The eyebrows made him look fierce, and it was reported that he sometimes was. He didn’t invite me in.

“What you want, Colby?”

“I’d like to talk to Fergus, Elmo.”

“What about?”

“I said to Fergus, Elmo. If you want to listen, you can.”

“If it’s about that Bratton slut, Fergus doesn’t know anything. You’re wasting your time.”

“I don’t remember seeing you at the fire, Elmo.”

“That’s right. You didn’t. I don’t go running across the fields to watch every little fire that starts up.”

“Who told you about Faye Bratton being in that stack? Was it Fergus?”

“Fergus ain’t here. He drove off in the car about five. He hasn’t been back.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know. Fergus ain’t much of one for confiding.”

“You expecting him back soon?”

“I’m not expecting him any time in particular. Fergus goes and comes as he pleases. Sometimes he’s late.”

“I think I’ll wait around for him, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself.”

He closed the screen door and hooked it on the inside. If I wanted to wait, I could wait on the outside. I went back to the patrol car and got in and waited. About ten, the lights went out downstairs in the house, and one came on upstairs. About ten-fifteen, the light upstairs went out. I waited till midnight and gave up. If Fergus was back in the morning, I could talk to him then. If he wasn’t, I could get a warrant and start looking for him. I drove back to the jail, and Rudy was still waiting in the office when I got there.

“How’d it go, Colby?” he said.

“I’m tired, Rudy,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“I told Lard about the lumps in the mashed potatoes.”

“Good for you, Rudy. What’d he say?”

“He said for you to go to hell.”

Instead, I went to bed on a cot in the next room. It was hot in there, and I didn’t sleep well.

The next morning I drove back to Crawley’s place. I didn’t stop at the house. Passing the barn, I drove on down the wide lane to the pasture and left the car at the gate. Crossing the pasture on foot, I crawled over the fence on the far side and walked on across the fallow field to the scorched patch of earth where the haystack had stood. I didn’t know what I was looking for, nothing special in mind, but the fire bothered me, and I couldn’t help thinking about it. What bothered me was why the hell it had happened. It just didn’t make any kind of sense that I could see.

After poking around for a couple of minutes, I found something. It was lying inside the blackened area, near the outer edge, and it was still warm to the touch when I picked it up. Nothing much, really. Just a small, flat can with a hinged lid. The paint was burned off the outside, but it was easy enough to identify anyhow, for I had seen thousands like it and had emptied at least a thousand myself in my time. A tobacco can, I mean. Probably Prince Albert. Maybe Velvet. I forced the narrow lid open and saw that the can still contained tobacco. It had not, then, been discarded. It had been dropped accidentally in the hay, which meant that maybe someone had been smoking in the hay, which meant that maybe the hay had been accidentally set on fire. Just maybe, of course. Just guessing. But it was an explanation that made sense. It was the only one I had been able to think of that did. There was something about it, to tell the truth, that tickled my fancy as well as my reason.

How had it happened, approximately? Well, say that someone had killed Faye Bratton, which someone had. That much was no guessing. Say the killer, needing to make a quick disposition of the body, had buried it in the hay until night came to give him time and cover to do something more adequate and permanent about it. Something like digging a hole, maybe. Then, say, someone had wandered along and stopped to lie down and rest and smoke a roll-your-own and maybe doze off in the sun with the smoke burning dangerously between his fingers, and all the while the body was there beneath him in the hay. There was a kind of grim comedy in it, the crazy disruption of a desperate plan by pure chance in the form of someone dumb enough to smoke a cigarette while lying on a haystack. And who might have been along this way late yesterday afternoon who was dumb enough? I could think of several, actually, but I began to think of one in particular. He had probably been along yesterday, as he had probably been the day before and would be today, following the course of the winding creek. Turning away from the black patch of earth, I went on across the field and over a fence and into the brush and timber along the creek. I sat down on the bank of the creek to wait a while before going on up the back way to the Cass place.

I was waiting for a kid named Snuffy Cleaker, but you could just as well have called him Snuffy Jukes or Snuffy Kallikak. He was that kind of kid, I mean, from that kind of family. As a matter of fact, he didn’t really have any family, except his old man, who lived in a shack on the west side of town and hauled a little trash and garbage now and then when he needed the price of a bottle. Snuffy lived there with the old man off and on, but you could never count on finding him there, especially in the warm months, because most of the time he was out prowling the countryside, following the creek, living on catfish and stolen chickens and vegetables and melons, sleeping in haystacks or beside hedge rows or wherever he got tired and dropped. Cherokee County’s Huck Finn. When he was a few years younger, we tried to keep him in school according to the law, but he was too stupid to learn, and we gave up before the law said we ought to. He was now about fifteen, maybe sixteen. Most people considered him harmless.

I didn’t really expect him to oblige me by coming along just when I wanted him to, but luck was with me for a change, and damned if he didn’t. I heard him in the brush before I saw him, and I got up quietly and slipped out of sight behind a tree. He came ambling leisurely into sight, cutting at the brush with a stick he’d cut, and when he came abreast of the tree, I jumped out and grabbed him. He yowled like a scared cat and tried to jerk away.

“Got you, you little son of a bitch,” I said. “Stop squirming!”

He went limp and quiet all of a sudden, and I could see that he was scared, all right. His eyes skittered wildly, refusing to look at me, and he kept making through his long nose the exaggerated snuffing sound that had given him his name. Probably he had another name, duly recorded in the courthouse, but no one could ever think of it.