Cypress Grove Read Online Free

furtively to see if anyone noticed. “It’s been a while, as I said. But as I recall, we generally started with a body.”
    “And while we do things our own way up here, we don’t do them that differently.” Bates smiled. “Don Lee was on duty that night.”
    Caught by surprise, the deputy said, “Right,” then took a sip of coffee to gather himself. “Call came in a little after twelve, which is when the bars close ’round here—”
    “What day was it?”
    “Beg pardon?”
    “I’m assuming it had to be a weekday, that bars don’t close at twelve on weekends even ’round here.”
    “Right. It was a Monday.”
    “Back in Memphis everyone called Monday the day nothing ever happens.”
    “Hard to tell it from any other day ’round here.”
    “You were on by yourself, right? There’re only the two of you?”
    “Lonnie and me, right. We have someone on dispatch, on the radio that is, eight to four every day. Lonnie’s daughter, mostly, or else Danny Lambert. He was sheriff close to twenty years before retiring. And we get lots of part-time help with answering phones, filing, all that, from Smith High. Secretarial classes looking for . . . what do they call them?”
    “Practicums,” Bates said.
    “Right.”
    “Look,” I said. “I don’t want to come on like some kind of asshole here.” Maybe I was bearing down too hard. “You two’ve worked together a while, you have a pace of your own. So does the town. Out of habit, experience, just because I’m who I am, I’m inclined to go about this a certain way. But it’s your investigation—yours all the way. I’m a ride-along.”
    “Appreciate your saying that,” Bates said. “But we’d be more than one kind of fool not to accept the very assistance we asked for.”
    “Okay. . . . So how’d the call come?” I asked.
    Don Lee answered. “Kids phoned it in, out there looking for a place to park. They’ll go out to a block of new houses—every few years developers put these up, but no one ever seems to move into them—and they’ll back in a driveway like they belong there. Girl stops with bra at half-mast. What’s wrong? Seth says. Seth McEvoy. Quarterback with the high school team, plays clarinet, honor student. What is that? Sarah says. Sarah Perkins, her family runs the local dollar store. Sarah herself’s a few steps off to the side of most of us, I guess. At any rate, she points.”
    Our food came. Thelma dealt plates off an extended arm, stepped away and came back with a tray holding A-1 steak sauce, Tabasco, ketchup, Worcestershire. Seeing it, I had a rush of recognition. If we ordered iced tea, she’d ask sweetened or unsweetened.
    “Y’all set, then?”
    “Looks great, Thelma. Thanks.”
    “What she was pointing to was what looked like a scarecrow standing there at the side of the carport. Sarah says it moved—that was why she noticed. Doc Oldham says no way, the body’d been dead four, five days. So we figure something else moved.”
    “Field mice, most likely,” Bates said. “We build subdivisions where they used to live, the mice don’t know they’re supposed to leave.”
    “Especially if provisions keep getting shipped in,” I said.
    “Right. Seth gets out of the car and goes over to look. Male, mid- to late forties, Doc figures. He’s wearing two or three shirts, a pair of Wranglers so old the rivets are worn away. Been homesteading under the carport for a while from the look of it. Had a bedroll there, couple of sacks of belongings, an old backpack with one strap.”
    “He’d been chewed on some. Eyes and tongue, mostly.”
    “Postmortem?”
    Don Lee nodded.
    “Cause of death?”
    “The developer had finished up the subdivision in a hurry and moved on. Yards still had these stakes set out in them, eighteen inches long, sharpened at one end. Someone pulled up one of those and drove it into his chest. Someone’s seen one too many vampire movies, Doc said.”
    “That’s not gonna be easy,” Bates said.