Alafair Tucker 01 - The Old Buzzard Had It Coming

you’re not in school today?”
    “I’m helping out around here,” Francis told them. “I been feeding chickens.”
    “You’re a big girl,” Josie acknowledged. “I’ll bet you’re a big help.”
    “I am,” Frances informed her, with a grin.
    “Well, we’re here to see John Lee, if he’s back from Muskogee,” Alafair said. “Is he here?”
    “No, he ain’t back yet,” the girl said. “He’s gone to get Mama from the jail and bring her home, but John Lee told us he probably wouldn’t be home ’til almost dark.”
    “Well, then, I expect Naomi is around here somewhere, isn’t she, sugar?” Alafair pressed on.
    “She was,” Francis told them cheerfully, “but she walked back toward the creek a while ago, looking for the goat. That old goat runs away regular.”
    “Has she been gone for a long time?” Josie asked.
    “I don’t know. Sometimes she’s gone for hours and hours. But it’s all right. Jeb Stuart is in the barn, and he’s watching me.”
    Alafair and Josie looked at one another, disappointed. “What now, Josie?” Alafair asked.
    “I don’t rightly know,” Josie confessed. “If we go back into town, and tell Scott about the bullet in the tree, maybe he can start looking for another little gun.”
    “Will he be willing to think about our idea that there was a second gun and not just that somebody reloaded the first one?”
    Josie shrugged. “I expect he’ll decide it was a reload. That’s the most likely thing. But he might decide to humor us and look to see if there could have been a second gun.”
    “Maybe it was a regular twenty-two rifle that did the deed,” Alafair posed.
    “Not likely. Scott said there were powder burns….” Josie hesitated, mindful of the little girl. It wouldn’t do to say that a rifle, even a .22 caliber, fired at such close range would have made a bigger mess of Harley’s head. “I’m thinking it would have had to be another small pistol like the first one.”
    “Are you looking for a little bitty gun?” Frances interjected.
    A stunned silence as heavy as a boulder fell on the two women. “We are,” Alafair admitted, at length. “What do you know about a little bitty gun, Frances?”
    “Maggie Ellen had a little bitty gun,” Frances said. “Aunt Zorah give it to her a long time ago. I never seen such a little gun before.”
    “Whatever happened to this little gun of Maggie Ellen’s?” Alafair urged. Her heart was pounding. Josie gripped Alafair’s arm.
    “I know where it is,” Frances informed her blithely. She jumped down from the buggy, and the two women followed her as she headed around the side of the house.
    Frances knelt down on the ground near the back corner of the clapboard house and pulled a loose brick from the foundation. The masonry brick was almost too big for the little girl to handle, and she had to ease it out and let it drop into the moist earth that girdled the house. Frances peered into the dark hole for half a second, then reached her arm in up to her shoulder. When she withdrew, she was holding a burlap-wrapped bundle about the size of a loaf of bread. She bounced to her feet and eagerly unwrapped the package for Alafair and Josie’s inspection. The two women bent over to see that lying on the dirty burlap were a variety of small odds and ends that a girl might hide as treasures. A length of ribbon, a rose stone, a pretty pine cone, a piece of quartz, like the ones Alafair had found in the lean-to, and a nickel-plated two-shot derringer that had seen better days.
    Alafair’s hand hovered over the gun. “May I see it?” she asked Frances, then carefully picked it up when the child nodded.
    Alafair could see immediately that the gun was empty. She showed it to Josie.
    “How do you expect this got under the house?” Alafair asked Frances. “Did Maggie Ellen give this to you before she left?”
    “No,” Frances assured her. “Mattie and me found it a while back. Maggie Ellen didn’t want us playing with her nice things, but sometimes we did, and put them back real careful and she didn’t know.”
    “Does your mama know about this cache?”
    “I don’t know,” Frances said. “Me and Mattie never said nothing to anybody about it.”
    Alafair and Josie were gazing at one another, trying to comprehend the implications of this, when Frances yelped and hastily began rewrapping the bundle. Naomi was standing at the corner of the house, half hidden in her too-big coat, gazing at them without