Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

about to give Alafair died on his lips when Phoebe appeared, and the look of absolute adoration that came into his eyes when he saw her daughter startled Alafair. Oh, she had known beforehand that she had a problem on her hands with Phoebe’s affection for John Lee. But in one moment of insight, she realized that these two children loved one another with the kind of love that would wither them if it were thwarted. She swallowed.
    “Phoebe, I’m glad to see you,” John Lee managed.
    “Oh, John Lee, me too,” Phoebe breathed.
    Alafair cleared her throat ostentatiously, and both youngsters looked at her, abashed. “Well, John Lee, I’m glad to see you’re still here,” she said.
    His eyes widened in mild surprise. “Well, I said I’d stay here ’til I heard from you, Miz Tucker,” he noted.
    She smiled. “So you did. And you’ve managed to keep from freezing, too.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. He was trying to look at Alafair, but his eyes kept straying to Phoebe against his will. “I sleep mostly during the day. Got plenty of quilts and the hay is a good insulator. I jump around a lot at night. It ain’t so bad. Worst thing is the boredom, that and not knowing what’s going on with my ma and the kids. I’d have asked for some books, you know, to practice my reading, but it’s too dim in here for that. I just been weaving things out of straw.” He reached down behind his sleeping nest and proffered a couple of little straw dolls, deftly woven.
    Alafair took one and examined it. “Pretty good,” she admitted. “Best not to be idle.”
    “Do you have some news for me, Miz Tucker?” John Lee asked, managing with some effort to control the anxiety in his voice.
    Alafair glanced at Phoebe, who had as yet made no attempt to say anything. “Well, first of all,” Alafair began, “your ma and the kids are fine, though worried about you, of course. We heard that your daddy was definitely shot in the head with a small caliber bullet out of a small pistol, but they aren’t sure whether that was what killed him or the cold.”
    John Lee’s eyebrows rose. “The head,” he repeated. A large puff of steamy breath escaped him, and he sat back down heavily on his bale of hay. “So I didn’t kill my daddy after all,” he murmured.
    “It is not at all clear,” Alafair pointed out firmly. But he looked back up at her with a face suffused with relief.
    “No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t mean I’m proved innocent. But now I know I’m innocent.”
    “You could be, son. But we’ve got to have proof. Now listen carefully, and tell me the truth. What did you do with that pistol after you shot at your father?”
    The big black eyes, now suffused with the light of hope, widened at her question. “I threw it down, Miz Tucker, right there in the woods, by the hillock where we was sitting. It’s lying there still, I imagine.”
    “You’d better hope so, boy, because if it is, and if it still has one bullet in it, then that means you didn’t shoot your daddy while he lay beside the house. If it isn’t there, then somebody came along and picked it up and probably used it to kill Harley, and that somebody could easily have been you.”
    “Or me,” Phoebe interjected. “We’re the only two who knew it was there.”
    “No,” Alafair and John Lee said at once, and Phoebe almost laughed.
    “I’m glad y’all have such faith in me,” she admitted, “but the law could see it that way.”
    “Miz Tucker,” John Lee said firmly, “I think we’re agreed that we got to keep Phoebe out of this.”
    Phoebe started to protest, but Alafair cut her off. “Oh, we’re agreed, John Lee. Question is, can we? We haven’t got much time, is the problem. One more day, maybe two. I think me and Phoebe better go over to your place tomorrow and hunt for that pistol.”
    “I can show you right where,” John Lee told her.
    Alafair shook her head. “No, you don’t stir a foot out of here ’til I tell you. It’s too dangerous for you to go hotfooting it all over the county, and you being hunted. Phoebe can show me where you all were.”
    “What about school?” Phoebe wondered.
    Alafair sighed. “I guess you’ll be sick again tomorrow,” she said.
    ***
    That night, Alafair dreamed she was running toward town with the baby in her arms. She could feel the life going out of him, and she could hear a voice screaming in fear and desperation. She knew it was herself screaming, but she didn’t have time