down. Between the three of them, that pig was going to look just fine.
But first I had to get it stashed in one of the outbuildings on the farm before Dwight got wind of it.
My husband thinks neon is tacky, and so far I haven’t found the right place to hang the blue guitar sign I stole when I was sixteen (and spent the summer working off), the bright multicolored OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT sign that came home with me one New Year’s Eve, or the pink-and-white WEDDING CHAPEL sign that Will and Amy gave us when we got married. I’m hoping that when the pond shelter is built and Dwight sees that back wall filled with vibrant tubes of colorful lights that he’ll change his mind about neon and agree that this is exactly what’s been missing at our family get-togethers.
“What’s with the squirrel?” I asked Reese when he came around the side and opened the door.
He shook the rain from his cap, then climbed back behind the wheel and wiped his face dry on his sleeve.
“Guy I met a couple of days ago,” he said, finally getting the wipers set the way he wanted them before he put the truck in gear. “I told him I’d bring him any roadkill I found as long as it hadn’t been dead too long. Hey! Don’t change the station. I like that song. Beside, it’s appropriate.”
Diverted, I cocked my head, trying to get a fix on the music. The song was something I’d heard before, but the band?
Reese grinned. “Squirrel Nut Zippers.”
My answering smile became a frown when he turned off the paved road onto one that was dirt and gravel. We were still a couple of miles from the farm and I was in no mood for one of his side trips, not when Dwight was due home in less than an hour. As Sheriff Bo Poole’s second in command, his normal hours are eight to four, and it was already a minute or two past four.
Reese is about as reliable as a three-dollar watch. I couldn’t trust him to stow the sign where Dwight wouldn’t see it the minute he dropped in on Daddy.
“This is no time for a detour,” I said. “Where’re we going?”
“I told you. Guy I just met. I need to drop off those squirrels before they start smelling.”
“He wants roadkill? Why?”
“You’ll see.”
This road was a deserted dead end with no houses for the last half mile and I hadn’t been on it since I was in high school. A lane meanders off to the left to wind up at the creek, and it used to be a popular makeout spot. Might still be for all I knew. Back then, it was way too close to the farm for anything except a few chaste kisses in the moonlight before my date drove me home. A bootlegger—
(“Former bootlegger,” said the preacher who lives in the back of my head.)
(An amused snort came from the more cynical pragmatist who dwells there, too.)
Former or not—and as a district court judge, I live in fear that he’s going to turn up in a colleague’s courtroom one of these days—a bootlegger keeps tabs on anything happening around him, and Daddy seemed to have a pair of eyes everywhere when I was growing up. If I’d tried to park here with someone on the basketball team, word would have gotten back to him and Mother before the car windows fogged up good, so I’d kept the foggy window thing at least ten miles away.
The road ended, but another, nearly invisible lane continued on through the dripping trees, then leveled out into a sloped clearing next to a meadow that ran down to a creek. Beyond the creek was a stand of mixed hardwoods and I realized that those bare trees marked the western boundary of our family’s land.
A weathered clapboard tenant house with a rusty tin roof sat at the top edge of the meadow. Smoke drifted from the chimney and was pushed down by the heavy wet air to cloud around the rooftop.
I searched my memory and asked, “Isn’t this the old Ferrabee place? I thought it got bought up as part of Talbert’s housing development.”
Reese shrugged. The last Ferrabee died long before either of us was born, and Reese had been brought up in Dobbs, so the name meant even less to him than it did to me. I tried to think who might own this forgotten slice of woods and