He took his foot off the brake and pressed the accelerator. The tires spun and the Jeep slid sideways toward the ditch before it found traction. Diane heard the mud spattering on the sides and under the vehicle. She sat back in the seat, wet, cold, tired, and depressed.
“I hope so too,” he said.
They drove up to the house. It took less than three minutes from where he had picked her up on the road. The water and chocolate were doing some good. Diane was feeling better.
“I went in as far as the dining room door,” she said. “Short, straight path. I didn’t deviate from the path on my way back out after I found them. I tried the phone near the door. It was dead.”
He nodded his head. They got out of the Jeep and walked up the steep steps.
“I didn’t hear anyone in the house,” said Diane, “but I didn’t search it either.”
“You did right,” he said.
Deputy Conrad took his gun out of his holster and approached the door. He eased it open with one hand while holding his gun in the other. He slowly walked into the house.
Diane sat on the porch steps to wait. She clenched her teeth and listened. Just a few steps to the dining room.
“Oh, Jesus. Roy? Oh, God. Ozella? No.”
Diane hadn’t imagined it. It was true. They were sitting at the table, heads resting at odd angles, long gashes in their throats. Dead. Diane started to rub her eyes with the tips of her fingers, but stopped and looked at her hands in the dim light. She heard the floor creak and guessed that Deputy Conrad was searching the house.
She looked out into the night and watched the lightning bugs blink. Mosquitoes were biting and she put her arms under the poncho. She felt the knife. It weighed heavily on her conscience. But not enough to hand it over just yet. The sheriff might not have it examined for blood. It would be clear to him that a stranger out on a rainy night with a knife must be the killer.
Diane wondered if the killer was the man who attacked her on Massey Road. That seemed more likely. Although he and the Barres weren’t close neighbors, Diane imagined their property adjoined. The Barres’ property was very large, about fifty thousand acres, Diane had heard. That might cause a lot of friction. Many people fought over land ownership and property- line disputes.
In a few minutes Deputy Travis came out and sat down. He put his head in his hands.
“Jesus, lady, I was hoping you were crazy,” he said.
“Me too,” said Diane.
“I got to get more deputies out here.” He jumped up and rushed behind a large tree. Diane heard him retching. He came back, wiping his mouth with a bandanna.
“Shit. Daddy’ll never let me live this down,” he said.
“Leland Conrad is your father?” asked Diane.
“Yeah. That’d be him,” he said. “He’s out of town. Put me in charge. What a time to be in charge.”
He went to the Jeep. Diane heard him calling on the police radio.
“Jason, you and Bob get up here to Roy Barre’s place right now.” There was a pause and static. “I don’t give a shit if it does leave the office empty. Call Shirley and tell her to get her fat ass out of bed and come answer the phone. Get over here, now. Both of you, and I mean now.” There was another short pause. “No, it’s not about the skeleton in the tree. It’s something else. Now get over here.”
He came back to the steps and sat down next to Diane. “We’ll have to wait for them to come. I don’t want to leave the house unguarded. When they get here, I’ll take you to get your car. While we wait, you want to tell me the story about the skeleton?”
Diane explained about the tree falling in the rain and the human skeleton slamming against her windshield. She told him about the man grabbing her.
“That sounds like Slick Massey,” he said. “He’s usually harmless. Lives in that run-down house with his girlfriend. Raises huntin’ dogs. Walker hounds, I think.”
Diane showed him her scratched arm. “This happened when I was trying to get out of his grasp,” she said.
“Damn, that looks sore. I’ll have a talk with him. But I have to tell you, I don’t know about a skeleton in a tree. That just sounds crazy. Are you sure?”
“I’m a forensic anthropologist,” she said.
“Yeah, I know, but . . . Anyway, we’ll see what ol’ Slick has to say for himself.”
Diane told him about the trek through the woods and about meeting the stranger. Deputy Conrad’s attention perked up.
“There’s some stranger running around in the woods, taking pictures, you say?”
“He said he was camping in the national forest. I think he was the one who called you. I asked him to. He offered to take me to the sheriff, but I declined.”
“That was probably wise. So, do you think this guy could have been the killer?” he asked.
“I don’t know. He was helpful. Gave me this rain gear,” she said, indicating the poncho. “He took my jacket to try to fool the dogs. He knew they were Walker hounds. He said his uncle raised them. He said he recognized the voices.”
“They do have a twang to their bark, that’s for sure,” he said.
When the other deputies drove up, Deputy Conrad stood up to meet them. Two men got out of a Jeep that looked much like Conrad’s. He introduced them as Jason and Bob. Jason was a slender man and, although he looked to be in his mid-twenties, had severely thinning hair. Bob, older by ten or fifteen years, had a thick head of dark hair, was cadaverously thin, and had a slight kyphosis of the spine that gave him a permanent slouch. Diane wondered if his hair was a wig.
“What’s this about, Travis?” asked Jason.
“Roy and his wife’s been murdered,” said Conrad.
“What? Murdered? No. We just saw him. You and me, at the Waffle House, yesterday.”
Bob looked over at the house. “Murdered? Here? The two of them?”
“Look, I want the two of you to guard the house until I get back. I’m taking Miss Fallon to get her car and find out what’s up with Slick Massey,” said Deputy Conrad.
“You want us to guard the house?” said Bob. “From what?”
“Trespassers, murderers, raccoons—anything. We don’t want anybody coming in. We especially don’t want Roy Jr. to decide to pay his folks a midnight visit and find them. Now do what I say. And don’t you go sitting in their den watching TV while they’re sitting at the dining room table with their throats cut,” said Conrad.
“We wouldn’t do that,” said Jason, looking hurt.
“Throats cut?” said Bob. “Somebody’s done cut their throats? I don’t know, Travis. What if they come back?” Bob put a hand to his own throat.
“Then you arrest the son of a bitch. It’s what you get paid for. I’ll be back in a little bit.” Travis Conrad turned to Diane. “Now let’s go see Slick Massey.”
Chapter 6
Diane shuddered at the thought of facing Slick Massey again. She tried to calm herself as she and Deputy Conrad walked to his Jeep and climbed in. Diane looked back at the Barre house. She saw the deputies sitting on the porch with flashlights trained out to the front yard. She wanted to ask Conrad if his deputies would be okay there by themselves, but thought better of it. Instead, she approached another, more controversial topic.
“You know,” she began, “this is the kind of crime the Georgia Bureau of Investigation can be a big help with.”
“We’re gonna have to call the GBI. Daddy’s gonna balk, but we ain’t had no killings like this. We’ve had wife killings and bar killings—the kind of homicide you don’t have to work up a sweat to solve—the kind where we know the guy who did it and where to find him.” He shook his head. “But this is the kind of thing you see on crime shows. We just ain’t had nothing like this here. You saw Jason and Bob. They’re good guys and they mean well, but . . .” He shook his head. “Bob mainly does the paperwork, and Jason, well, he’s Jason.”
He paused and Diane didn’t say anything—relieved that he was open to getting outside help. She wanted the Barres’ murderer caught, and she didn’t think the current constabulary here in Rendell County had the know-how to go about finding the killer, unless he left a trail of blood they could follow.
“Daddy won’t go to the Rosewood Crime Lab,” he continued. “He’d go to Tennessee for help before he’d ask Rosewood or Atlanta for any. Daddy thinks Atlanta is Satan and Rosewood is one of its disciples.”
“I’m sorry we’ve made such a bad impression,” said Diane.
Deputy Conrad chuckled. “Don’t take it personally. It’s just the way people think here.” He sighed. “Daddy thinks he knows everybody in the county—knows what they’re like. He knows his generation, but he don’t know young people or people that’s moved into the county. None of them older folks do. Brother Sam—he’s the preacher over at Golgotha Baptist—he’s dead set against getting a cell phone tower in the county, and he keeps his congregation all riled up about it, so we got no cell service. Lots of them deacons from the churches got theirselves elected to the county board, and they do their earnest best to tell the rest of us what to do. Lucky for us, a lot of the Baptists, Primitive Baptists, and the Pentecostals don’t agree among themselves, so the county board don’t get much done but arguing.” He laughed again. “If the county’s ever going to get any businesses moving in, we’re gonna have to get ourselves a cell tower, for starters, and do something about these roads. Can’t nobody have a decent car around here.”
“They are hard to drive on in the rain,” said Diane, remembering her trip down the road earlier. She appreciated that when Deputy Conrad talked, he kept his eyes on the road.
“One of the cell phone companies offered Roy Barre a lot of money to put a tower up on one of his mountains.”
“Was he considering it?” asked Diane.
“I think he was. He talked like he was. Roy wasn’t as against some of the modern stuff like the rest of the older folks around here. I swear, if they weren’t addicted to
WrestleMania
and the cowboy channels, they’d be fighting over whether we should even have television. Not that they could stop people, but they could sure fuss about it.”
“Would any of them be angry enough at Roy Barre over the cell phone tower to kill him and his wife?” asked Diane.
“You mean, thinking they figured they were killing the devil’s disciple and doing a good deed? I don’t think so,” he said. “They aren’t crazy or anything—just trying to keep the sins of Atlanta out of our little mountains. Most people here like to fuss, but they don’t carry it beyond that. Our families have known each other forever around here—at least the old families. My great-granddaddy and Roy’s granddaddy were good friends. Same with a lot of families. We’ve all been friends and enemies and friends again a long time, but we’ve never killed nobody over anything.”
Diane looked out the window at the dark silhouettes of trees as the Jeep slid and swerved its way down the muddy mountain road. She felt as if she were riding in a stagecoach. She wondered about a place that had insulated itself the way this one had—families who knew one another for generations, with boundaries to the outside world maintained by mountains, family ties, and inhospitable dirt roads. Of course, there were changes over the years. People weren’t forced to stay. They did travel, join the military, work outside the area, have television, but Diane wondered how they would change if they merely paved their roads. They would certainly have more visitors in the mountains if the roads outside the towns could carry vehicles other than four-wheel-drives. And nothing brought change like visitors. She wondered to what degree some of the citizens hated cell phones. Hated the idea of their kids sending and receiving text messages all day long, having the phones ring in church, in school.
Diane had heard that some people wanted to make Renfrew, the county seat of Rendell County, into a tourist town, along the lines of Helen, Georgia, a picturesque alpine village in the North Georgia mountains. She had no doubt it could likely happen. But there were those who would fight it all the way. She wondered if those people would kill to protect their wilderness from encroaching outsiders. Was Roy Barre’s willingness to allow a phone company to erect a tower on his property seen as the first crack in the dam they had built to hold in their traditional values? But, like Deputy Conrad, Diane couldn’t imagine anyone would kill to stop the erection of a tower.
Diane wanted to ask who inherited the Barres’ land, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to sound as if she were sticking her nose into their business—something she fully intended to do, but more discreetly. She did wonder about the taxes on property the size of the Barres’, and she asked Conrad about them.
“Not as much as you might think,” he said. “Barre was on the county board, along with other big landowners, and they keep property taxes down. We use sales tax and government grants to fund the schools and the sheriff’s office, the road department, and such.”
“What did folks think about that?” asked Diane.
“Mixed. Them that own property like it. Others don’t,” he said. “I don’t think it would be a motive for murder, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I suppose not,” said Diane. She thought back to the image of the Barres at the dining room table. That was a very angry crime.
Something
was a motive. Something more serious than cell towers and property taxes.
“I’ve been thinking about running for sheriff when Daddy retires,” said Conrad. “I could get the votes of both the old-timers and the younger people around here. Of course, no telling when Daddy will retire. He likes his job. Considers himself the county’s gatekeeper. Just around this bend we’ll come to the Massey house.”
So soon
, thought Diane. “What’s his story?” she asked. “Is his family one of the older families?”
“Sure is. But it looks like ol’ Slick is going to be the last Massey. The family usually had girls, so the Massey name kind of disappeared. Slick inherited the house when his daddy died about seven years ago. I don’t think he’s done much to keep it up. He raises hunting dogs and works at the sawmill in Riverdale. He’s been living with his girlfriend for about five years. I think she’s a stay-at-home girlfriend. I don’t know that she works anywhere.”