Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

dawns on her what she’s done, and she runs like a turkey.”
    “It makes sense,” Alafair said, excited. “It makes sense!”
    “Now, don’t go getting all het up,” Josie cautioned. “I admit it fits with what we know, but we’re just guessing, here. Maybe Maggie Ellen did it, and maybe she didn’t. Where has she been keeping herself all this time, and where is she now?”
    Alafair immediately thought of the lean-to shelter in the woods, and the little bundle of quartz and a feather.
    “She can’t have been hiding in the woods for a year, especially not right up next to her father’s moonshining setup,” Josie protested, when Alafair told her about it.
    “Well, no, but maybe just for a night or two, while she got ready to carry out her plans.”
    “How did she plan to get away in the middle of the night with a bunch of kids? She’d have had to have help.”
    “I don’t expect that would have been a problem,” Alafair assured her. “I can think of lots of folks who would have been happy to help her, maybe to be waiting up the road with a wagon.”
    “Like her aunt?”
    “Or Dan Lang. Or Dan’s daddy! He was known to be about with a buggy that evening.”
    “Could be that some of the Days were in on the plan, as well,” Josie said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if John Lee or his ma were expecting to smuggle the kids out to her.”
    “Or Naomi,” Alafair surmised. “Naomi told me herself that Maggie Ellen had promised to come back for them. And I know that little gal hoarded food. I saw it with my own eyes. I thought at the time she was just hungry, but now I wonder if she was smuggling vittles to her sister.”
    “We’ve got to tell Scott about this, Alafair,” Josie said.
    “We will, we will,” Alafair promised. “But let’s be sure we know what we’re talking about, first. Will you take me out to the Day place right now? Let’s talk to John Lee.”
    ***
    After instructing a reluctant Mary to stay in town to pick up the kids, Josie and Alafair hitched up Josie’s shay and headed out to the Day farm. As the two women drove out of town, they discussed how much they could disclose to Scott about the incident between John Lee and Harley in the woods without involving Phoebe any more than they had to. Alafair was afraid that she would have to come clean about Phoebe having given the gun to John Lee in the first place. Unless directly confronted, they didn’t see why they should tell the sheriff that Phoebe was physically present when John Lee shot at his father.
    As they neared the Day farm, they planned their strategy. They thought they would ask John Lee how he had gotten bullets for the derringer. Alafair knew that there were two bullets in a fancy little case that she kept in the gun box, but any other bullets would have to have been acquired elsewhere. When Josie asked her whether the bullet case was there when she saw that the gun was gone, Alafair had to admit that she hadn’t noticed. Mrs. Day had told Scott that there were no twenty-two caliber firearms on their farm, but twenty-two caliber bullets were easy enough to get. Even if the bullet case was still in the box, it wouldn’t mean much.
    Their main interest, though, was to find Maggie Ellen Day. It never occurred to Alafair, before now, that Maggie Ellen could be involved, and Alafair had never heard Scott evince an interest in her, either. Until this moment, the girl’s flight had been just one more sorry incident in the pitiful existence of the Day family, and, as far as Alafair knew, no one had ever made a concerted effort to discover where she had gone. Her family seemed to take for granted that she was better off wherever she was, and didn’t really expect her to make good on her promise to return. Or, they knew more about the absent Maggie Ellen than they were telling. Josie and Alafair would press John Lee on the matter, they decided, and if that plan bore no fruit, they would approach some of the other children.
    Josie reined the horse in front of the house, but before the women could disembark, Frances Day came running from the chicken coop and launched herself up the running board and into Alafair’s lap.
    “Well, howdy, there,” Alafair greeted her, surprised. The once-shy Frances was apparently becoming more sociable since her father died.
    “Howdy, Miz Tucker, Miz Cecil,” Frances responded. “Are Fronie and Blanche to home?”
    “No, they’re in school,” Alafair told her. “How come