“Charisma?”
“That’s it. Temple Buchanon had it.”
The old lady was watching him when he came up the walk. He knew a little about her, knew something about a lot of people in Elizabethville, pop. 2, 000, where he’d lived all his life and been chief of the police department the past eight years. Her place had been a dairy farm, but following her husband’s death fifteen or so years ago, she’d sold off some of the land to Temple. The going price then had been two hundred and fifty an acre, now it was two thousand. Beside the house stood a swaybacked red barn that still gave off a smell of chaff and dried manure and old wood. A dozen chickens strutted outside the barn, lorded over by a huge black and white rooster.
The face in the window disappeared as he mounted the steps, the door opened.
“It’s getting to where a body’s not even safe living in the country. Come on in.” Mrs. Dufour was a large, buxom woman in her mid-seventies. He’d seen her mowing her own lawn — and not with a riding mower, either — and once when he went by she was on her roof in a pair of coveralls knocking the soot out of the chimney with a logging chain. She led him into the living room, pointed to an overstuffed wingback chair, and sat on a horsehair couch. “I hope I never see a sight like that again. When I didn’t see any sign of life over there by nine, I called her on the phone. There wasn’t any answer, but her car was there. So I went over and...” Mrs. Dufour grimaced and was silent for a long moment. “I probably should’ve called you folks and let you discover the body. Do you know yet when it happened?”
“Around eight last night, we think. You’re the only house nearby, Mrs. Dufour. The only house with a view of her driveway.”
“Can you believe this?”
“Believe what?”
“I spend a lot of time settin’ in the window just pondering things and watching. Not much goes on around here that I don’t know about, and then, when something really big happens, naturally it has to happen on a Wednesday night, which is bingo night at the Legion.” The old lady shook her head. “Maybe it’s a good thing I wasn’t to home, I might have heard the poor thing scream.” She shuddered and looked down at her work-worn hands. When she finally looked up again, she said, “Love turned sour.”
He waited.
“Hob Chaney. Mowed her lawn, took care of her garden. For a while there, he’d go inside the house, stay an hour or so, come strutting back out with a big, satisfied grin. Made me sick, it did, a nice lady like Temple teaming up with the likes of Hob, and he being married. If you can call that a marriage. Anyway, a month ago it stopped. He kept mowing her lawn, but he quit going inside. Didn’t look happy, either. Scowling all the time. I think she broke off and it just kept gnawing on him until...” Mrs. Dufour’s voice trailed off, she wriggled a hand indicating someone going off the deep end.
The bale missed him by less than a foot. It sailed past his face so close he felt the breeze on his cheek, a piece of chaff on his eyelid. He heard a thump as it landed twenty feet below in the half-filled mow.
“Oh God,” he heard Hob Chaney say, “I almost beaned the chief of police.” Hob and Everett McAllister were throwing bales off the back of Everett’s pickup into a dusky bay below. “Just a sec, Bunk, and we’ll have this done.”
The two finished unloading, and Everett backed the truck down the barn bridge.
“Ev’s wife told us the news about an hour ago,” said Hob as he and Bunk stepped outside the barn onto the ramp. He was a broad-shouldered man with a weathered face that now wore a beseeching look. “I’ll do everything I can to help. Hanging would be too good for whoever killed her.”
“Hob.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve got to ask some questions, and you’re not going to like all of them. You worked for Temple, you knew her pretty well.”
“Come on, Bunk, you don’t think...”
Cummins shook his head. “I don’t think you did it, but I still have to know where you were around eight last night.”
Hob leaned against the barn door. “I’m in some hot water now.”
“Seeing someone you shouldn’t?”
“That’s about the size of it. Gina Dobson. Actually, I was waiting for her at her house; she was still working down at the nursing home. Okay, once in a while I pick a flower I ain’t supposed to. What the heck, Val hasn’t let me touch her in ten years, I’m only human. Does all this have to come out?”
“No. One more question.” Bunk sighed, looked out over a field of timothy and dandelion waving in the breeze like a yellow curtain. A pair of ravens swooped overhead, making raucous calls. This was the part of police work he could do without: posing nosy questions to people he knew.
“You’re not going to like this question either, but did you and Temple have anything going?”
“Me and Temple?” The handyman’s face reddened. “Are you kidding? She was a real lady. She had better things to do than fool around with a bum like me.”
“You were seen going into her house for an hour or so at a time, and then suddenly it stopped.”
Hob’s jaw tightened. “That Dufour woman’s got a nose longer than my arm. I was taking singing lessons.”
The chief stared at him.
“Go ahead, laugh. You won’t believe this, but when I was a kid in Proctorsville, I used to sing in school musicals. More fun than a barrel of monkeys. I even got the notion I might go on the stage and become another Caruso.” Hob chuckled at himself. “I could’ve always gotten a part singing ‘Pass the ketchup,’ something simple like that. I mean I do have a voice. But life didn’t turn out that way. Had to make a living right off, and so here I am, throwing hay bales and dreaming.” The big man turned, looked behind them into the dark barn with shafts of golden light slanting through cracks in the boards. “I knew what a popular teacher Temple was and last fall got it into my head to take some lessons from her. I had to do something, Bunk, I was in a rut. The same thing day in and day out, mowing lawns, digging up water lines, always driving other people to the airport so they could fly off to Timbuktu and have a grand time. But when Val realized how much fun I was having, she put a stop to the lessons. Said she’d leave me if I kept going.”
“It’s that kid snooping around again,” said Corporal Hanley.
“I wouldn’t call that snooping. I think she misses Temple.” Bunk and his rookie were at Temple Buchanon’s again the next morning, trying to determine whether anything had been stolen. There was no sign the house had been ransacked for money and valuables. They’d found a small jade and ebony inlaid box half full of jewelry, and in a desk drawer over three hundred dollars in cash. “Look, she’s sitting under that tree crying.”
Jeff stepped off the chair he’d been using to inspect the top shelf of a glass-fronted curio cabinet. “This hasn’t been my week. Monday my car throws a rod, Tuesday Tamsen and I break up, and now this murder. Which has to happen five days after I join the force. Whoever killed her could’ve at least waited till I’d gotten my feet wet.”
But Bunk was only half listening, he was at the screen door watching Tracy sitting on a bench under the sugar maple staring blankly at her sneakers. Her puppy squatted on the ground at her feet. She looked up as he stepped outside and with the heel of her hand wiped her cheeks.
“Losing a good friend hurts, doesn’t it?” he said. “What’s the dog’s name?”
“Pepper. He’s been sort of lonely ever since our cat got run over last week. Can I call you Bunk? I mean... I don’t know, I sort of feel like I’ve known you a long time.”