Jeff Abbott - Only Good Yankee

She sucked on a piece of ice, then dropped it back into her glass. “So why do you want to see my mom? She overdue with those Dr. Seuss books she borrowed for me?” “Actually I was curious as to how you were doing. You seemed awful upset at the fire last night.” I pulled up a stool and sat down. She examined the free-floating morsels of lime pulp in her drink. “It was upsetting, seeing that beautiful old house burn down.” “I didn’t think you were the type to care much about antebellum architecture.” It was the wrong thing to say. “What the hell do you know about me, anyhow, Mr. Poteet? Where do you get off coming in and telling me what I care about? Jesus, I get enough from the King and Queen!” Her dark eyes flared in outrage, flinting like struck stones. I raised a hand in pretend surrender. “Hey, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.” Jenny snorted and sipped at her drink again. “I thought maybe you were still upset about Greg Callahan,” I ventured. Or your mother and Greg Callahan, I added silently. Her fingers had been sliding up and down the cool wet length of the cocktail glass and they braked. She stared at her hand and did not look at me. “What is any of this to you?” “I don’t want my friend Lorna getting hurt. Whoever killed Greg and Freddy might come after her next. You’d gotten to know Greg Callahan, right? Someone here killed him and we have to find out who.” She was quiet again, as silent as a statue. “Look, Mr. Poteet, just leave it alone. Okay? I’m not going to weep anymore for him. I-” “Weep for him? What was he to you?” The words tasted terrible in my mouth, but I had to know. “He was just a friend, a business associate of Mom’s. He wanted to buy Mom’s land.” “And you got all worked up over a man you hardly knew?”

“I-I cried because I’m just not used to death, okay? It shocks me.

Older people get jaded about it, but us kids, we’re different.” It nearly rang true; I remembered my first funeral, my grandmother Schneider’s when I was twelve, and fighting back unexpectedly hot tears simply at the sight of her closed coffin. But a tone in Jenny’s voice was too calculated; she would not have made for a good actress, despite her poses. “Your father didn’t seem too upset.” I remembered the excited glow in Parker’s eyes as he watched the fire. “He likes burning.” Jenny shrugged. “He gets a boner lighting a fire in winter.”

If it was intended to shock, it did. I didn’t go around talking about my folks’ sexual responses much when I was a teenager, I was too interested in my own. I suddenly didn’t want to be around Jenny Loudermilk anymore. She looked unutterably sad to me, sitting alone in this huge, cold house, a little girl drinking hard liquor to show how mature she was, trying to engage in witty repartee that she was sadly ill-trained for. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go have a word with your mother.” I stood and pushed the stool underneath the counter. “She won’t like being interrupted when she’s throwing pots,” Jenny warned me, coming a little unsteadily off her stool. “You better not-” “I think I better. And I think you better go sleep off this little afternoon drunk you’ve enjoyed.” I went out the back door toward a small potting shed, decorated on the side with fanciful paintings of children gathering mushrooms. Bright beds of wildflowers surrounded the shed, bestowing a rustic charm they usually only talk about in magazines. As I knocked on the door I could see Jenny Loudermilk watching me from the curtained breakfast nook. I rapped again on the door. I could hear a gentle humming noise from within, and then Dee Louder-milk’s hard-edged drawl: “Come in.” I entered the dark pottery studio. Dee Loudermilk sat hunched over a whirling wheel, shaping a mound of clay into something that looked like a cross between a vase and a lozenge. Her hands moved with infinite patience up and down the spinning clay, and I saw they were very like her daughter’s hands moving up and down on the glass of cold gin. I stared spellbound, and Dee, one lock of light hair hanging in her face, glanced past her errant strand at me. “Shut the door, please, and push the hair out of my face, if you don’t mind,” she said, and I obeyed. It was an oddly intimate moment as I gently moved her hair back behind the delicate shape of her ear. I stepped back, uncomfortable with the sudden closeness between us. She wasn’t bothered. “Thanks, Jordy,” she said with a workman’s bluntness. “I usually wear a kerchief, but I couldn’t find mine today.” The humming I’d heard was the whirr of her potter’s wheel, powered by electricity rather than her sandaled feet. I watched in respectful silence as she finished molding the small pot, its gentle curves taking shape under her clay-smeared fingers. Finally, when it had spun long enough, she slowed the wheel to a stop then pried the new vase free with a flat-edged knife. She stood and began to wash her hands at a soapstone sink that sat in a corner. “How is Ms. Wiercinski holding up? I heard she was staying at your place.” She kept her back to me and I could appreciate again what a fine figure of a woman she was, attractive in her dirty chambray shirt and argil-smeared black jeans, with the smell of wet clay and light sweat about her. It wasn’t hard to see why Greg might’ve liked her. “Yes, she’s there. She’s holding up well.” “I hope she’s more likable than Callahan,” Dee said, still soaping her hands clean. “Didn’t you like Greg?” One bubbled hand found the faucet and turned the water on higher. She didn’t look up at me. “I didn’t know him very well. He tried to get me to sell him land, but I wasn’t interested.” “How often did he meet with you about your land?” I asked, sitting on an empty stool. “Now, why would that be any of your business?” Dee asked, reaching for a clean towel. Her hands, free of dirt and soap, looked as though they had been freshly sculpted from some rare pink stone. I didn’t feel like pushing Dee Loudermilk. She’d tell me in no short order to get the hell out if I stepped over the line. I tried not to fidget on the stool, stared into her dark blue eyes, and decided on the direct approach. “Gossip around town suggests that Greg Callahan was chasing after you. Did you know that?” I decided to leave Jenny’s name out of it for the moment. “Funny, I used to enjoy gossip. I don’t find it nearly as interesting these days.” Dee leaned against the gray soapstone sink, surveying me with eyes that betrayed nothing. “I don’t usually listen to rumor, either. But someone has killed two people here, Dee, and they were both on one side of the riverfront development deal. My friend Lorna might be the next target. If you know anything about Greg Callahan or anyone who might have wanted him dead, and you’re not telling, I’ll have Junebug over here so quick your head’ll spin faster than your potter’s wheel.” She surprised me by laughing. “My goodness. Threatening the boss’s wife? You’ve got more guts than I gave you credit for.” “I’m not trying to be impertinent, Dee. I figured you’d appreciate me not beating around the bush.” She smiled. “Does Candace know you feel so strongly about protecting Lorna Wiercinski? She might keep a closer eye on you if she did. Look, I barely knew Callahan.” “He’d already offered you money for your land, right? In the area of fifty thousand?” I guessed that her land, close in size to Bob Don’s lot, would fetch the same price.

“Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t going to be enough to make me sell.”

“And how did Mr. Callahan take that?” “I didn’t tell him my decision.

He was dead before I got a chance to.” Dee stared away from me, at the smears of white clay on her workbench. She moved away from the sink and got out some liquids and brushes. Pulling a stool over to the workbench, she began to apply a glaze to a bowl. She glanced back up at me. “I don’t know why you’re wasting time here. None of us had a reason to kill Greg Callahan. You should be off talking to that nutty Miss Twyla or that oaf Tiny Parmalee. They’re the ones who were against him.” “You don’t know anything about Freddy’s death, either?”