David Allen began to tell her about Robin's death, but she cut him off almost immediately. "I already know about the murder and the booby trap," she said. "I have informed the children, who seem to be taking it well. Of course, they were as aware as the rest of us that the woman was an ignorant, immoral, filthyminded whore and therefore hardly a great loss."
"She were not," Hammet said from behind David Allen.
"There you are, you wicked, wicked child!" Mrs. Jim Bob said. "How dare you sneak away like some slimy snake?"
Before Hammet could point out that snakes wasn't slimy, Sissie opened the front door. "There's some man a-bellowin' for you on this contraption. Sounds like a right ornery peckerwood." Which ruled out Arly and LaBelle, who weren't men, and Brother Verber, who never sounded like an ornery peckerwood. Squaring her shoulders in much the same way the Christians had when ushered into the presence of lions, Mrs. Jim Bob told David Allen that he would simply have to come back in the morning when she could receive him. She went inside and locked the front door, then crossed the living room to the telephone in order to have a word with her husband, who was all the way down in Hot Springs at a municipal league meeting. At least she dearly prayed he was.
David Allen stood on the porch for a while, then finally got into his wagon and drove over to Ruby Bee's Bar and Grill, where over a beer and a cheeseburger he related his news to an interested party.
I woke up the next morning at some absurd hour, heated water for coffee on my camp stove, ate cornflakes from the box, and tidied up the tent. All that got me to seven o'clock. I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, and had another cup of coffee. That got me to seven-fifteen. I doubted my weekend gardeners would show anytime soon, so I went down to the jeep and made sure it was invisible under the scrub pines and branches I'd piled on it. Seven-thirty. I checked for tire marks along the road, just in case my boys were wily enough to notice. Seven-forty. I was back at the tent, preparing another cup of coffee, when my beeper beeped from somewhere inside the sleeping bag. Although it was not my favorite sound, it was pleasant to reaffirm the existence of an outside world. I went back to the wagon (seven-fifty-five) and called in on the radio. "Somebody need me?" I asked optimistically.
"This is LaBelle, honey. The sheriff just wanted me to check on you and see how it's going up there. You caught any criminals as of yet?"
"Not as of yet," I said, watching a squirrel scamper up a tree and fling itself into space like a furry Frisbee. "But tell Harvey that I've set up camp and found a place from which to keep surveillance on the scene. I think odds are good that the perpetrators will show up today or tomorrow. If not, I'll drag myself back tomorrow night and admit defeat."
"I just know as sure as the sun rises that you'll nab them, Arly."
"Thank you, LaBelle."
"Oh, and Harvey says he feels rotten that he couldn't send a man up there for backup, but we're plumb busier than ants at a Sunday-school picnic these days. He also says for you to check in every four hours, so we'll know you're okay, that you haven't been eaten by wild animals or shot in the head by these awful dopers and left to bleed to death all by yourself up on the ridge. So you check with me every four hours, rain or shine. Can you remember all that?"
"Yes, LaBelle, I can. Did Harvey really say all that?"
"Verbatim, honey. Oh, and Ruby Bee called to talk to you. She seemed to think your beeper was like a walkie-talkie and that she could holler into it and you'd hear her, but I had to inform her otherwise." LaBelle licked her lips as she pondered some folks' misconceptions about police technology. "Anyways, she said for you not to worry about her and Estelle interfering in the police investigation, because they're not."
The squirrel had stopped on a nearby branch to glare at me through little red eyes. I glared back so hard, he backed into the leaves. "Just what did Ruby Bee mean by that?" I said grimly.
"I really couldn't say. She just told me to give you the message. Well, I've got to run, Arly. Harvey's bellowing for coffee, and he can be worser than a mangy old grizzly bear if he doesn't get it. You have a nice time up there in the woods."
Her voice faded in a crackle of static. I fetched a blanket, my book, a thermos, and my camera, then went to the spot I'd chosen and made myself as comfortable as possible, considering. I could see the patch and part of the road beyond it. I figured I'd hear a car engine long before it arrived, or even the snap, crackle, and pop of dried leaves if someone tried to approach on foot. Eight-fifteen.
After a while the birds, gnats, mosquitoes, and squirrels decided I was harmless and began to squawk, buzz, bite, and chatter. I leaned back against a tree trunk and considered the case. Robin Buchanon had a ginseng patch (e-i-e-i-o). She'd come to it about a week ago, with her gunnysack and hoe and expectations of digging up the roots to sell to a wholesaler. A nice autumn day, the family patch, an easy hundred dollars or so. Her only source of legal income, although it was hard to imagine that she reported it for income-tax purposes.
But someone had found the patch earlier in the year, probably toward the middle of the summer, and decided it was the perfect spot to grow a little dope. And why not? It was flat, with good drainage and a creek not too far away to provide water, and best of all, it was smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. The ginseng had been a scattering of low plants then, with no berries or distinctive leaves to hint at its value. So that someone(s) had cleared the ground and put in a half acre of marijuana.
The fact that there were booby traps was uncommon, but not unheard of. Plenty of ole boys thought they'd be right sly and put various traps around their patches to spook hikers and hunters, or those who failed to follow the philosophy of the Little Red Hen and hoped for an easy profit. The growers could hardly report the theft. I'd heard stories of punji pits, of baby rattlesnakes tied to the plants, of all sorts of crazy devices made from clothespins, detonator caps, gunpowder, and Plasticine.
So that didn't get me anywhere. Now that I thought about it (eight-forty-six), I was most likely wasting my time. True, it was the end of the harvest season and time to cut the plants. True, the perps were likely to do so on the weekend, since they could pretend they were out scouting for deer or taking a little nature hike. True, all I had to do was get a good look at them and maybe at the vehicle. True, true, true. It was also true that I was intending to sit on my fanny in the middle of the woods for forty-eight hours on the off chance they might show up. There was an equally good chance I'd nab wee green men in shiny saucers complete with Christmas lights and synthesizer music.
I wondered how David Allen had made out with Hammet, his siblings (I was beginning to regret my vocabulary lesson), and Mrs. Jim Bob. That arena of thought made me uncomfortable, so I moved right on to Kevin and Dahlia and the jeep. It wasn't too tough to conclude Kevin had taken up the junior G-man cause, and had managed to persuade Dahlia to accompany him on his harebrained mission. But what had happened to them? I made a mental note to have LaBelle check at the high school to see if he had shown up for work yesterday.
Dahlia, of course, worked for my mother, the same woman who'd sent the message that she wasn't interfering in the police investigation. Which meant that she was. Ruby Bee's easier to read than a Reader's Digest condensed book. But I couldn't come up with any theories to explain what she and Estelle might be doing. They weren't perched in a tree to assist in the stakeout, since no one knew about the dope patch except for the sheriff's department, Merle Hardcock, and yours truly. For that matter, only that select group knew there'd been a murder-or any other crime.