Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

here?”
    Josie Cecil keeled out of the kitchen with her sails at full. Josie was a large woman, generous in every way the word could be applied. She was five years older than Shaw, and like him, a typical Tucker, with the rosy-brown complexion, the honey-hazel eyes and black hair, and the wide toothy grin that dazzled all and sundry. The selfsame grin was now warming Alafair as she felt herself enfolded in a voluminous embrace.
    “Girl, you’re a block of ice!” Josie exclaimed. “Get in here and eat something this minute.” She practically carried Alafair into her big, warm kitchen. “If you’re looking for Shaw, you’ve come to the right place. Nothing’s wrong, is there?”
    “No,” Alafair said, extricating herself with some regret from Josie’s grasp. Shaw stood up from the table when he saw her, a look of momentary alarm on his face turning to curious delight. Alafair smiled when she saw him. She couldn’t help herself. The sight of him always gave her a lift. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Mr. Turner told me you were at Scott’s.”
    “I came here to get fed,” Shaw told her. “How’d you get into town?”
    “I rode Missy. It was fast, but I may lose some toes. I didn’t know you were here ’til I saw the dogs.”
    “You’re not going anywhere ’til you try this cobbler,” Josie informed her. “I opened a quart of the peaches I canned last June. It’s still hot.” She was ladling sweet, runny peaches and crispy-gooey crust into a bowl as she spoke.
    “Josie,” Alafair attempted to protest, with a laugh.
    “I’ll put some cream on it,” Josie interrupted her, snatching a pitcher off the windowsill. “Put some meat on you so the cold won’t bother you so much.”
    Alafair sat down next to Shaw at the table without further protest. Josie’s cooking was lore and legend, and the smell of the cobbler was making her mouth water.
    “Want some more, Shaw?” Josie asked, as she set the bowl down in front of Alafair.
    “Naw, I couldn’t hold any more, Josie.”
    “I guess you won’t be needing any dinner, then,” Alafair teased him.
    “It’s three hours ’til dinner, Alafair,” Shaw pointed out.
    “Oh, well, then. Give him another bowl to tide him over, Josie,” she said. “What’s been going on with y’all?”
    Josie lowered herself into a chair at the table after filling Shaw’s coffee cup. “Not much,” she admitted. “I haven’t hardly been out of the house since the snow, except to go to church on Sunday. Jack says everybody at the bank is all agog over Harley Day being killed like that. Wonder what that poor woman is going to do with all them kids and no man? Does she intend to keep the farm, you think?”
    “I doubt she can,” Shaw opined. “It may be that John Lee has been working off the mortgage these last couple of years, but I imagine Harley owed the note. I’m guessing the bank will foreclose.”
    Josie’s brow knit. “I think he owned the farm. Day’s daddy left it to him, and I don’t think he ever mortgaged it, according to Jack.”
    Alafair was so enthralled with the cobbler that for a moment the conversation didn’t register. The heady aroma of peaches dripping with sweet heavy cream had just about knocked every sensible thought out of her. “There’s cinnamon in this crust,” she observed dreamily.
    “I grated a stick over the top before I baked it,” Josie told her.
    “Y’all aren’t going to start discussing recipes, are you?” Shaw exclaimed in mock horror.
    “You don’t mind eating what we discuss,” Josie admonished.
    Suddenly Alafair came back to earth with a wrench. “You say Day owned that ugly little farm himself?” she asked.
    “I expect so,” Josie said. “Jack told me that the bank doesn’t own it.”
    “So who gets it now?”
    “Probably his wife,” Shaw told her. “John Lee is underage, even if he wasn’t under suspicion of murder. I can bet you money Day didn’t have a will, so it will have to go to probate court, but I don’t know why she shouldn’t get it. Even so, she’ll more than likely have to sell it to pay the taxes.”
    “I hope you have things arranged so that Alafair doesn’t have to sell the farm if you get kicked in the head by a mule,” Josie interjected.
    Shaw, who had been watching Alafair’s pie ecstasy out of the corner of his eye, reached over and spooned a bit from her bowl. “Of course I do,” he assured Josie, while chewing. “I even have insurance.