“Tha’s right,” Cooter says. “Willard and Bishop planted the seeds in the spring.”
This sounds so completely off. “How did Bishop Malloy happen to meet up with somebody like Willard?” I ask.
Cooter says, “Don’t know ’bout that. All’s I know is that come next month they’s gonna harvest the hemp, dry it in the old barn, and take it back up to New York to sell in a place called the Village.”
I’m not sure how everybody else is taking this news, but I feel like I got drug into a wet hole and left. Even if we all went up there to the Malloy farm, and stole the hemp out from under them, Clever can’t very well go draggin’ off to New York to sell it to villagers. Mothers, good mothers, the kind Clever’s gonna be, not like her mother, they don’t do those kinds of things. They paint watercolors and at night they stroke you with so much tender that you fall asleep in their arms breathing in their lily-of-the-valley scent.
“The sheriff’s in on it, too,” Cooter adds.
Surely, Cooter is mixed-up. “Well, if the sheriff is in on it and Willard was the one planted it, then they know right where that hemp is, so what the hell they need the map so bad for?”
“They don’t need it to find the hemp. They wanna get the map back to make sure nobody else finds out about what they’re doin’.”
Clever, just getting her breath back from a pain, asks Cooter, “How did ya get messed up in all this anyways? With Sneaky Tim Ray?”
He says, not ashamed at all, “Holloway got wind of what Willard and Bishop were up to and came to me suggestin’ we figure out some way to cut ourselves in. I told him gettin’ ahold a the map’d be the first step. Not sure how Holloway found out y’all had stolen the map from Willard, but that’s why we was trackin’ ya down that night.” He shrugs. “I needed money. Gramma’s gettin’ elderly.”
“Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute. First things first,” I say, trying to mask my disappointment behind an enthusiasm that I DO NOT feel. No treasure? I’d been thinking once we dug it up, we could keep a tiara for Rosie and maybe a couple other geegaws and sell the rest of it to Miss Montgomery at her downtown shop called Precious, which, amongst other things, has got a lot of fancy bracelets and broaches in the glass case right up front. We coulda used the cash she’d give us to buy boat tickets to Bolivia. Since that’s not happenin’ now, we gotta come up with another plan. My friends are not trained investigators or as perceptive as I am. It’s my professional duty to take charge. So after thinking on it a spell, focusing to make this picture clear as can be, I announce, “I know what we have to do. We gotta… number one on our very important things to do list… we gotta get Cooter clear on these charges. Prove that he didn’t murder Mr. Buster Malloy. We should forget about the treasure for the time bein’ ’cause what good will it do us if the Boys catch up with him, right?”
Our breathing sounds like a treed barbershop quartet.
“But how we gonna do that? Prove that Cooter didn’t murder Buster.” Billy’s got a funny look to himself when he says that. I don’t know what I’d call it exactly. Maybe Duplicitous: Feeling one way, but acting another.
I musta forgot to tell him. “Show ’em, Cooter.”
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the photos of dead Mr. Buster Malloy on Browntown Beach. After he passes them over to Billy and Clever to take a gander, their faces light up like the Fourth.
Billy says, “We gotta get these pictures to somebody fast ’fore-” He stops. Too late. We all know what he was about to say. They’ll shoot first, ask questions later.
Relentless: The Brandish Boys.
The Truth Doesn’t Always Set You Free
As dark draws deeper into the cave, Clever and me are cuddlin’, consoling each other over the-there ain’t no treasure ’cept for some stupid gold weed that gets ya high-news. The boys are a ways off, opening tin cans, slicing cornbread, and speaking in whispers. We can’t build a fire ’cause Billy says the Brandish Boys will spot the smoke, so we have to eat cold grub. After we get something into our tummies, we’re gonna decide what our next move should be. Keeper’s at the mouth of the cave, his snout twitching.
Even though Clever says her stomach feels like somebody reached in and pulled it out, nothing can stop her from vigorously sniffing on the dead Mr. Buster pictures. “Ya know who I think murdered him?” she asks me.
“Who?”
“Miss Loretta.”
“Why’d she wanna murder Mr. Buster?” I ask, more than a little curious.
“Well,” Clever says, using her storytelling voice, “I was gettin’ me some peanut brittle last week when Buster came into the shop to pick up a bag of his butterscotch candies.”
(She means she was stealing some peanut brittle last week.)
“When Miss Loretta apologized for not having them done up yet, Mr. Butter got real ugly with her,” Clever goes on. “Told her, ‘Ya better get on the stick, Retta, or I’ll take my business elsewhere,’ and slammed outta the shop. And Miss Loretta, when she was stickin’ her little tinker bell back up to the door, she said, ‘I could wring his stinkin’ neck, that’s what I could do. Goes and gets hisself elected governor and now he thinks he’s even more better than everybody else.’ ” Clever flashes the pictures of dead Mr. Buster in front of my face. “And look here… that’s just what somebody done, wrung Mr. Butter’s stinkin’ neck but good.”
That’s just so goddamn dumb. Miss Loretta of Candy World is always rantin’ on like that. It’s the heat in her kitchen melts her patience away. Everybody knows that it’s best to go and buy your sweets early in the morning ’fore it gets so hot in that shop. I don’t point that out to Clever though. She can get awfully ratty.
“Ya doubtin’ me?” she asks, when I don’t pipe in to agree with her.
“Not doubtin’ exactly.”
“Ya ain’t callin’ me a liar, are ya?”
“No… no, I am not callin’ you a liar.” Trying like the devil to keep her calm, the way Billy told me I should, I think fast. “Hey, Cooter told me something real dishy!” (This’ll calm her down. She’ll eat this up. Dirty gossip about high-and-mighty folks is Clever’s most favorite thing in the whole world next to shoot-’em-up movies, and stealing, and roses, and funerals, and I guess now, Cooter.) “On the way home from the jailbreak, he told me that he believes that Georgie Malloy didn’t die of natural drownin’. Cooter thinks Mr. Buster murdered Puddin’ and Pie!”
“Already knew that,” Clever says, yawning in my face. “Suppose ya don’t know either that Buster was not only Georgie’s uncle but also his daddy.”
Laboring a baby must make you temporarily insane! “Poor ole girl. That’s just not possible,” I explain to her slow and pronounced. “It’s common knowledge somebody can’t be somebody’s uncle and at the same time his daddy… that is just not humanly possible.”