Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

that John Lee himself was not the culprit here, howsoever much she may have wished it weren’t so. She had to prove to herself most of all that he was innocent, for if he was not, then Phoebe was in for a broken heart. And that prospect horrified Alafair almost as much as the idea of the girl being in trouble with the law.
    ***
    After dinner was cleaned up and put away, Alafair took the slop buckets out to the sties next to the barn to slop the hogs. The two yearling boars were waiting for her by the troughs as she trudged across the yard lugging the heavy pails of scraps from last night’s supper and today’s breakfast and dinner. She made soothing noises to them, under her breath, “pigpigpig,” as she tipped the buckets over the fence into the troughs, practically over the hogs’ heads as they inhaled the tasty leftovers. She added a couple of buckets of Shaw’s blend of corn and sorghum pig food from the barrel just inside the barn door, then went inside to feed the sow and piglets in their warm nursery sty. Two barn cats insinuated themselves around her ankles while she fed the sow. Her usual companion for this chore, Charlie-dog, was absent, having chosen to accompany his boy to school today.
    Alafair was mildly surprised that Shaw wasn’t in the barn, or around the nearby outbuildings, as far as she could see. His favorite riding horse, Hannah, whom he had naughtily named after his fussy sister, was not in her stall, and his saddle was gone. He had more than likely ridden out to the pasture.
    She stood thoughtfully watching the sow and her eight frantic pigs feed, unable to keep her mind off the problem with Phoebe. Before she knew what was happening, she found herself walking out of the barn toward the trail behind the house, heading back to the creek, back to where John Lee had taken her that morning. She didn’t have a plan. She didn’t know why she was going, even. She wasn’t at all sure she could find the still again. In fact, she was fairly certain that she couldn’t. And yet, for some reason, she had to try. She had to stand there again and see if she could garner even the merest clue to this mystery.
    She was able to follow the path along the creek bank with little difficulty. She crawled through the barbed wire fence that separated the Tucker farm from the Day farm and walked beside the creek for a few minutes, past the overhung willow, until things began to look less familiar to her. She stopped walking, turned around to face the way she had come, and scanned the path and the woods for the subtle scuffs and broken twigs that would show her where to head into the brush.
    As she stood silent, studying the path, Alafair heard a noise in the woods. At first, she thought it was a breeze rustling the dead leaves in the trees, but there was no breeze. Just dead calm and an oppressive cold silence. She could barely hear the gurgle of an eddy under the thin skin of ice next to the bank. She didn’t move for a few minutes, listening patiently.
    There it was again. Alafair definitely heard a scuffle, like a small animal, then another brief silence. The next sound was the crunch of boots on leaves and twigs off to her left in the brush. Alafair squatted down quickly, still in the path, but now no longer readily visible in her brown coat among the bushes. The crunching became a crashing as whoever it was made his way out of the brush and toward the footpath. He was not worried about being discreet, this big-footed person. Alafair had pretty much decided that it was going to be John Lee or one of the other Days, so she was startled when a tall, scrawny, middle-aged man burst out onto the path so close that he nearly stepped on her. Alafair popped to her feet with a yelp, which was echoed by the man. His arms were full of earthenware jugs, and he came close to losing his footing and plunging headlong into the creek. Without thinking, Alafair reached out and grabbed his arm to save him a chilly dip.
    “Lord have mercy!” the man exclaimed. “What the blue blazes? Who is that? Is that Alafair Tucker?”
    Alafair dropped the man’s arm quickly and stepped back away from him, her heart pounding. “Jim Leonard,” she observed.
    “What are you doing here on the Day farm?”
    Leonard blinked his rheumy eyes at her, still reeling a bit from the fright, but apparently mostly sober. “I could ask you the same question,” he said.
    There was a moment of silence as they eyed one another. Leonard knew he