“He knows something,” Roger said as they got in.
Davis nodded agreement.
“Why would he be lying, do you think?” the sheriff asked.
“He’s not lying, exactly,” Roger told her. “You have to understand hillbillies.”
“Roger Dale, I grew up in this county,” she reminded him. “You didn’t.”
“I know that,” Roger said. “But you grew up in town, as Judge Roland’s daughter. And you went all the way through high school and off to college with the other honor students. And you go to First Presbyterian in town instead of one of them little deep water, shouting churches back in the cove. Even politicking, the only ones of the cove people you meet are them that might make it to a meeting at the schoolhouse, and they ain’t the typical ones.”
She interrupted him. “This sounds like a long lesson. I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn, but right now tell me the part that has to do with Amon Scroggs.”
“I didn’t mean to lecture,” Roger told her.
“You did too. Now tell me about Amon.”
“The people that live way back in one of these coves are clannish in the oldest way. They’re all kin to one another, and they don’t trust outsiders, even from two, three miles outside the cove, let alone all the way down in town. The most important thing in the world to one of them is to not let down another one. They won’t tell on each other any more than young’uns will when the teacher’s trying to find out who wrote a dirty word on the blackboard. But to the best of them — and Amon’s one of the best — the next most important thing is their word.”
“Yeah,” Bud put in. “When I go to arrest one of them, if he’ll promise to meet me in town the next morning I don’t go to the trouble of taking him in.”
Roger went on. “So when a fellow like the storekeeper who’s generally friendly and talkative enough don’t want to talk to us about something as interesting as a murder in his own neighborhood, it’s because he feels like he can’t. He don’t want to lie to us, and again he don’t want to tell us the truth. That means he knows something, and it has to do with some of his people — some of these Scroggs Cove folks.”
The whole time they were talking they remained parked in front of Amon’s store. Davis hadn’t even started the engine.
“By us sitting out here like this, won’t he realize we’re suspicious of him?” the sheriff asked.
Both men winked and nodded. “That’s the idea,” Fornby said. “Let him sweat a little more. But I guess we’d better get on with it.”
As procedure required, Davis radioed in to the office as he started the engine. Sheriff Taylor’s secretary responded to his call.
“Bud, I mean G.S. Two, the lab called from Raleigh. That lead you sent down was from a .30-.30 just like you thought it was.”
“Thanks. Anything else important going on?” he asked.
“Yes. One more thing I think you’d want to know. You remember Jubal Scroggs from up there in the Cove? He called in and said somebody broke into his house last night and stole his best rifle. He said it was a .30-.30. I started to dispatch Seth or Billy, but with it being the same kind of gun that was used in the murder, and y’all being out that way already, I thought maybe you’d want to cover it yourself.”
“That cannot be a coincidence. You done good, Betty,” Davis told her. “We’re on our way. Sheriff, let’s put a badge on that girl and get another secretary.”
The radio crackled again. “Y’all know how to get there?” Betty asked.
“I think so, but give us directions anyway,” Bud said as he pulled out of the store lot and turned up Scroggs Cove Road.
“Which way do you figure it?” Bud asked Fornby as they rode.
“Too early to say,” Fornby answered.
“What do you mean, ‘which way’?” the sheriff asked.
“Well, it’s got to be one of two ways,” Roger told her. “Maybe somebody did steal ol’ Jubal’s gun and kill the breadman with it. Or maybe Jubal killed the breadman. He’s a deer hunter. He could get out to the laurel patch, and he could make that shot. He might have thought that everybody would miss that one bullet hole in a burned up body and call it an accident. Once he heard, maybe from Amon, that we know it’s murder, he got scared. Even up in Scroggs Cove folks know we can match up a bullet to a gun that fired it. So he got rid of the murder weapon. Then, to turn suspicion away from him, he reported the gun stolen.”
“Wouldn’t that be sort of stupid?” Sheriff Taylor asked. “I mean, as many good shots as there are in this county, we might never get around to him if he didn’t call attention to himself with that theft report.”
“Right,” Roger answered. “It would be kind of stupid. One of the reasons we catch most murderers is because we’re smarter than they are. And for me and ol’ Bud to be smarter than them, some of them have to be pretty stupid. Hey, Bud, ain’t we supposed to turn left up there?”
“Yeah. Just past that sign,” Bud answered.
The sign, which stood in front of a neat little crackerbox of a house, read FLO AND DOLLY’S BEAUTY SHOP.
“I didn’t know there was a beauty shop all the way up in here,” Roger commented. “It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been this far back in the Cove.”
“That’s about when they opened it,” Bud told him as they swung off the asphalt onto a sharply rising gravel lane. “Two sisters, Dolly and Flo Wilson. I think they do pretty good. There ain’t another beauty shop between here and town.”
Just then they passed a sign informing them that they were on a Private Road. A few yards farther a second ordered them to Keep Out. A third, a hundred yards past the second, announced that TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
“Either he’s awfully possessive or he values his privacy more than most folks,” observed the sheriff.
“His ancestors fought for this land,” Roger told her.
“From the looks of it, they must have been hotheads,” said Bud, glancing around at the thin, rocky soil. He drove past an old gray barn and pulled in view of a white frame house almost at the top of the ridge. “You know, he’s Enos Scroggs’s son. Enos killed a man over a dollar.”
“Why did he kill a man over a dollar?” Sheriff Taylor asked.
“Your daddy asked him that in court. He said, ‘Enos, why would you kill a man over a dollar?’ And Enos just looked at him and said, ‘It was my dollar.’ It was before my time, but they tell it for the truth.”
Bud stopped the car in front of the house. As they got out, they heard dogs barking wildly from behind it.
Bud pointed to a sign warning, Biting Dogs.
“Reckon he put them dogs up, knowing we was coming,” he opined.
“Or maybe he just turns them loose when he wants ’em to bite somebody,” Roger said.
As they started up a long flight of wooden steps to the front porch, a tall, lean man stepped out the door.
“Come around to the back,” he ordered curtly. “That’s where they got in.”
With that, he turned and stomped through the house, leaving them to walk around the outside. The house was set into the side of a steep hill, so that it was over two stories high in the front, but barely one in the rear. As they came up to the back comer of the building, the man they had seen in the front beckoned to them from just inside a solid wooden door.
Again he offered no greeting, just called out, “Over here.” He pointed to two neat screw holes in the wood of the door frame. “Looks like they took a screwdriver or something and popped the hasp right off her.”
“You don’t have a latch and knob on the door,” Bud noted.
The man shook his head. “Not the back door. It don’t go right into the house. It’s a kind of a storage room, and my paw just put a hasp and a padlock on it when he built the place. We used to lock the door between it and the rest of the house, but I reckon I got out of the habit. Come in, and I’ll show you what they done in there.”