Dead Right (Stillwater Trilogy #3)(38)
Author: Brenda Novak

“Not really. He continued to help Ray until my own mother…” She cleared her throat. “Well, after that, we had a couple of bad years with the farm, he had me to take care of, and people around here were struggling so he wasn’t making as much at the church. It was all we could do to get by. Then he married Irene and had his hands full raising three more kids.”

“Did anyone ever say anything about the fact that Rose Lee was found naked?” he asked.

Madeline’s forehead creased. “She was naked?”

“That’s what it said in your mother’s journal.”

“I don’t remember that. But I was only eight or nine at the time of her funeral. It wasn’t something folks talked about in front of me.”

“I can’t picture a young woman peeling off her clothes and then taking a bunch of sleeping pills,” he said.

“Maybe she’d just been involved in a romantic encounter.”

“Do you recall her having a boyfriend?”

“No. I can’t really imagine her being with anyone. She was extremely shy. After Katie died, she quit working for my father, and I rarely saw her in town. When I did run into her, she wouldn’t even look me in the eye. She’d stare at the ground.”

“So would you say Rose Lee took Katie’s death hard?”

“Harder than anyone. I doubt she ever recovered from the grief.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Before Katie died, there were times she seemed almost normal. Afterward—” she shrugged “—afterward, she would barely speak.”

Chapter Eleven

The farm was bigger than Hunter had expected. “Clay runs this by himself?” he asked as they parked to one side of the long gravel drive and got out of Madeline’s car.

“Yes. Can you believe it?”

He whistled under his breath. It wouldn’t be an easy job to manage such a large piece of property—and yet it appeared that Clay had the place well in hand. Madeline’s stepbrother obviously wasn’t afraid of hard work. Hunter had to respect that. But he wondered about some of the comments Madeline had made concerning Clay. He sounded driven, protective, determined. Madeline had also implied that Clay had a very short fuse, which was an important thing to note in a possible murder investigation. The impressions of the players involved often proved more valuable than the facts. Facts could be interpreted in several ways; it was the perspective of those who’d known Reverend Barker that would finally reveal the information Hunter was after.

“So this is where you grew up?”

Madeline deposited her keys in her purse as she nodded.

It was a white two-story A-frame that sat back from the road. It wasn’t particularly large, but it wasn’t small, either. Hunter guessed it to be about 2400 square feet. Behind the house, he could see a rather imposing barn. The wind carried the scent of animals and he heard some distant clucking, so there was probably a chicken coop next to the barn. A rooster strutted around the corner to confirm it.

Hunter couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a rooster. They weren’t exactly a common sight on the beaches of L.A.

Madeline paused when she noticed that he’d begun walking more slowly. “Be glad that’s a different bird than the rooster we had here when we were little,” she said.

“Why?”

“The old one would’ve tried to gouge your eyes out. We were terrified of it. Especially Grace. He was very territorial.”

Hunter imagined the humid days of a summer spent on the outskirts of this small Mississippi town, imagined children with denim overalls and dusty bare feet gathering at the local grocery market to slake their thirst at the Coke machine. It was a completely different world than the one he’d known growing up in Mission Viejo, one of the nicer suburbs of Los Angeles. But it held a certain appeal.

“What?” she said, and he realized he was smiling.

“I was thinking of Tom Sawyer.”

“Don’t be giving me any more of that west coast attitude,” she said, deepening her accent.

He thought about the differences between her home and his, then decided California wasn’t better than Mississippi, but it was different. “Just don’t try to feed me any collard greens, and we’ll be okay,” he teased.

“Have you ever tried collard greens?”

“No, but I hate spinach.”

Wind chimes tinkled as they stepped onto the wraparound porch, which creaked slightly beneath their weight.

“Your stepbrother takes good care of the place.”

“He does. It actually looks better than when my father was…er…here.”

She often acted as if she didn’t know whether to say “alive,” and generally veered away from it. Hunter suspected that, even after twenty years and the discovery of her father’s car in the nearby quarry, she couldn’t believe he was really dead. That uncertainty had to be difficult for her. “How’s it changed?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The house used to be an ugly, dingy green. The yard had a lot of weeds and bare spots, where our dog had dug various holes and buried this or that, usually one of our shoes.”

“Your father didn’t mind how it looked?”

“I don’t think he paid much attention. He was a bit of a mad scientist, so interested in his work that he didn’t really see anything else.”

“Didn’t you tell me that your father cared about setting a good example?”

“In some ways, he did. He was most severe in his punishments when we said or did something that reflected poorly on him. He felt the children of a devout preacher should be hardworking, sober-minded and well-versed in scripture.”

The people in Madeline’s life were beginning to seem familiar to Hunter. He’d seen a few pictures of her father, knew he’d been tall and imposing with hollowed-out cheeks, piercing black eyes and a determined jaw. Her mother had been the opposite—small, soft and gentle-looking. Madeline had obviously inherited her height and slenderness from her father’s side, but her bottle-green eyes resembled her mother’s. So did her smooth pale skin. Hunter wondered where the auburn-colored hair had come from—maybe a grandmother or an aunt. He had yet to see any pictures of extended family members but knew he’d probably run across them later, when he searched through the rest of her scrapbooks.

“Was there one child he singled out more than the others?” he asked.