Once Upon a River Page 0,66
the Murrayville pizza shop. One night she was sitting on the high curb there reading discarded newspapers by the streetlight, and she came across a news story from Heart of Pines. It detailed how gunshot victim Paul Daniel Ledoux was discovered in a pontoon boat that was found parked in Heart of Pines two weeks after he was shot. A shotgun was found beside the body, under a tarp. The only fingerprints on the gun were the victim’s, but officials did not think the death was a suicide. The boat was found to contain a gallon jug of some raw material for making an amphetamine that was capturing the attention of law enforcement. The killing was assumed to be drug related. There was no mention of the cabin or the drum of liquid or a riverside informant. The victim left behind a wife and three children, ages five, seven, and nine. Margo put her mushroom-and-sausage slice back in the pizza box. She read the last paragraph again. She had not thought of Paul’s wife when she pulled the trigger, or of their three children, who would now grow up without a father.
From the dark river, she sometimes watched her daddy’s house and the stranger living there, a tall, stoop-shouldered, gray-haired woman Margo had seen at a Thanksgiving party a few years before. The woman smoked a pipe the way a man would. Margo saw her toss things into a big hole someone had dug behind the house. Margo didn’t dare approach because the woman kept a white pit bull chained to the swing set frame Margo had used for stringing up her bucks. It occurred to Margo that two years ago she had been gutting and skinning her deer in the most obvious place, so that all the Murrays must have known about her kills. Her daddy had been right that she was reckless. She felt sorry for the white dog for being chained up, but the one time she approached, it barked a high-pitched, manic rhythm and strained against its tether as though wanting to attack her. The old woman came out with a pistol in her hand and shouted into the darkness, “Who’s out there?” but Margo was already on the water, rowing away.
The following midday, Margo was poking around in the woods upstream when she saw a white Murray Metal Fabricating truck pull into the driveway of the marijuana house. Out of it toppled a tall man, who leaned against the truck’s door pillar until he could get hold of forearm crutches. Margo was too far away to make out features, but she knew who he was. He unlocked the door and entered the little building. Margo hoped she’d left the plywood flush against the window so he wouldn’t notice it had been messed with. A few minutes later a dark-haired girl came running to the door, and she looked both ways before entering. Julie Slocum. Margo did not approach the house, but headed upstream to her camp. She had been foolish and unkind to ever be angry with poor Julie.
Margo returned to the Murray place that night and climbed the riverbank to investigate the barn beside which she had shot clay disks with Billy and Junior. A lone pig snorted under a corrugated metal hut. Grandpa had always kept the barn painted, but now the red was peeling all along the side by the river. The whitewashed shed was padlocked from the outside. The golden light of incandescent bulbs showed in the windows of the big house, giving the impression of safety and warmth. Margo was wary of setting off the beagles, but when she got up her nerve to come close to the house, she heard no barking. The kennel was empty. Moe was nowhere to be seen, either. Margo stood beneath Junior’s bedroom window, listening to the squeaks of flying squirrels. She was readying to toss a rock when she saw the figure of a younger kid, Toby or Tommy, looking out. She considered knocking on the kitchen door, but chickened out and instead went behind the house and stole pole beans and Brandywine tomatoes from the garden. More beans were toughening on the vines than usual, and more tomatoes had been left to rot, suggesting Joanna was behind on her canning.
Margo returned the following night and circled the house, trying to get a glimpse inside. The house was built on concrete block footings that raised it above the hundred-year flood level, so in