Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller Read Online Free Page B

LLC. Hardy figured the initials stood for “lily-livered cowards,” but the legal documents probably spelled out some long-winded horse manure drummed up in a Yankee law school.
    Hardy hadn’t been aware that it was a crime to step out on the porch armed for protection when a bunch of squirrel-eyed strangers pulled up in a long, shiny Cadillac. The sheriff explained that such shenanigans constituted “communicating a threat,” which apparently trumped the trespassing charge Hardy could have sworn against the suits. To Hardy, it had simply been a case of marking territory and cutting the need for chatter. They wanted him to sell and he wouldn’t sell for a barn’s worth of gold bullion and a lifetime’s supply of Louise Templeton, not that he had much demand for her particular ware in his old age.
    Two, the upper side of the mountain was no longer in the Eggers family. Brother Tommy and sister Sue Ellen had sold off their portions of the family birthright to Budget Bill Willard, who built his fortune as a photographer with pictures on calendars, postcards, and the pages of “Southern Living” magazine. Budget Bill, who was second-generation local, parlayed his makeshift camera shop into a cottage industry and then had gone into land development. The stumpy, bald-headed peckerwood was known for his scenic shots of old-timey mountain farmsteads, but now he was using the money to bulldoze those very sites and turn them into second-home subdivisions for flatlanders who drove too slow and talked too fast.
    Hardy figured he was probably the only coot in Pickett County to see the irony in Budget Bill’s career trajectory; only a hypocrite would pretend to celebrate the thing he was actively destroying. But that was Budget Bill for you, and his type of crime was not only tolerated but written up big in the papers and showered with plaques from the Chamber of Commerce, like he was some sort of hero. Just went to show you could get away with murder as long as you did it with a camera or a bank note or a bulldozer instead of a gun.
    Two shots, though
.
    October was too early for squirrel hunting, and the elk that gave the developers their fancy-pants subdivision name had been extinct for two centuries. Daniel Boone and his pack of musket-toting tourists had accomplished in ten years what the Cherokee hadn’t managed to do in a thousand. And Hardy figured by the time Budget Bill’s group of bankers and lawyers were done, not even a skunk would be left on Mulatto Mountain.
    There was one other possibility, but he liked that one even less. The Hole had been quiet for years-ever since they’d taken a piece of his son-but who could say what would happen when bulldozers scraped and gouged ill-rested ground? And whether the family’s skeletons might rattle and dance free of the closet?
    Hardy parted the curtains and peeked out, just to play it safe. He still clung to a herd of short-horns, even though the Republicans had stomped out farm subsidies and pretty much guaranteed farmers would have to sell off their property eventually. The cattle were grazing in the blue-green grass under the soft autumn sky, all accounted for, so nobody had been taking pot shots at the livestock. And nothing hungry had come out of the dark cracks in the mountain to haul off some fresh, writhing meat on the hoof.
    A thump came from the stairs, the irregular clatter of shoe leather on wood. His wife Pearl was limping down, arthritis and all. Hardy had tried to talk her into moving their bedroom to the first floor of the farmhouse, but she was having none of it. Their four-poster bed, hand carved from cherry, had withstood forty-three years of loving and fussing, and she saw no reason to go rushing into change. Besides, Donnie was on the second floor and moving him would be a mite harder.
    The thumping stopped and her face peered over the banister, eyes as bright as marbles despite the lines around them. “What’s going on?”
    “Somebody shooting on