Murder in Little Egypt Read Online Free Page A

if he wanted a rest, he could get the whole house painted for five dollars, with scores of men desperate for the work.
    On December 3, 1932, Dale wrote a letter:
Dear Santa Clause,
I have been a fairly good boy. . . .
    He asked for a football and a bathrobe, a desk and a watch. His mother, he told Santa Claus, wanted a dress and a new floor lamp. His daddy wanted a billfold, a new tie, and a bird dog. That was quite a Christmas list for any Eldorado family that year, when the last thing most local men needed was a new billfold. A typical Christmas present was a pair of those overalls from Sears, and many families saved every penny they had for the spring, when they could buy some chicks from the Otis Carter Hatchery at a dollar apiece. A few White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds in your yard meant eggs and the occasional fryer throughout the year. Every morning at six A.M. over station WEBQ in Harrisburg, Otis Carter broadcast the virtues of his chicks “direct by remote control” from his Eldorado hatchery on a country-music program which was followed at seven by The Baptist Hour . Carter’s sales took off, chickens being about the only thriving business in Egypt then.
    If Peck Cavaness had been a religious man, which he was not, leaving the praying to his wife, he would have thanked the Lord at grace before Sunday dinner of chicken or pork roast. He was grateful that he and his family were spared the hunger and misery so many of their neighbors were suffering. The Cavanesses had many other advantages. Because Peck had a car and could afford gasoline, he was able to take his son fishing and hunting all over Egypt. By the time Dale was twelve they would head for the woods on a free autumn Saturday to get some quail, which Noma would fry up with her special brown gravy rich with pan juices. Dale quickly became an ace with a shotgun. He learned from his father how to imagine an invisible line between the gunsight and the target, and he had terrific eyesight and reflexes. He went after birds like a soldier stalking the enemy. Before long he had his own gun and was outshooting his dad.
    Dale wanted to win at everything. When there was no one around, he practiced sports by himself, shooting baskets and throwing balls and running wind sprints to improve speed and stamina. He would challenge anybody to a race and was always surprising boys bigger and supposedly faster than he by beating them in the last few steps.
    In the summers he and his dad, sometimes with a couple of Dale’s schoolmates along, would take drives together, expeditions over to Shawneetown to swim off the levee and eat fried catfish, or to one of the county fairs. Peck would point out places of interest. Along Route 13 near Crab Orchard, Peck would stop to explore the burned-out shell of Charlie Birger’s cabin, Shady Rest. Men still gathered in a clearing in the woods behind the cabin to throw dice, stage cockfights and reminisce about the famous gangster. It was fun to search for spent cartridges buried under leaves or in the earth and imagine what gangster or lawman had been the target of the bullet.
    There was so much in Little Egypt to appeal to the contrary in a boy, enough story, myth, legend, and history to inspire a Huck Finn or a Dracula. Everybody knew about Mike Fink the river rat who was so tough that he called himself half man and half alligator. Down at Cave-in-Rock you could play at river pirates and search for bloodstains left by the outlaws on thé walls of the big cavern. There were bloodstains too at the Old Slave House off the Harrisburg-Shawneetown road, a colonial mansion on a hill where runaway slaves had been held for resale before the Emancipation Proclamation. Under the eaves on the third floor, tiny cells with wooden bunks, chain anchors embedded in the floor, bars on the doorframes, and a torture rack made of rough timbers evoked the pro-slavery sentiments of Egypt and the peculiarly legal presence of slaves in this southeastern