“What power are your binoculars?” I asked innocuously.

“What? I wasn’t spying on no one.”

The blast of red to his face confirmed my diagnosis. I figured Mr Paltry had been hoping to see a little action. A darkened parking lot just off the highway seemed the perfect venue for a fast pullover for high school kids with dates, or older types who can’t take the date home because the spouse would object.

It might have even been Paltry’s hobby: see a vehicle in the back lot and run for the binocs hoping for suggestive head bobbing or - joy of joys - a drunked-up couple that stumbles from the car and does it on the hood.

I gave him my squarest chin and most stentorian voice, the image I employ - infrequently - when receiving commendations from professional and civic groups.

“I encourage citizens’ watch groups to use the best equipment possible to assist in the fight against crime, sir. People should always pay attention to strangers in the area.”

Paltry puffed out his sunken chest, held up a finger, meaning back in a second, and padded into the next room, returning with a stubby black tube mounted on a tripod, stroking it like a kitten.

“Here’s my baby, a Bushnell spotter’s scope. See a gnat at a hunnert paces.”

I pretended to admire the instrument. “And you say the couple never got out of the car?”

“I had to pee a time or two while I was watching. It takes me a while cuz I’ve got the prostrate. And sometimes I couldn’t see them but figured it was because, ah, they was, uh …”

“Engaged in seditious acts of horizontal alliance,” I said. “Flagrant concupiscent involvement.” I took his scrawny claw and shook it. “God bless citizens like you, sir.”

He puffed out his chest even further. “One time I even saw a buncha Mexicans being sneaked down the highway. I called the cops.”

“Really, sir?”

“They was in a farm truck fulla dried cob corn. It was night and I was looking for, uh, things like you said. The driver got out and lifted a tarp on back. The corn started moving and three Mexicans stood up. They were eating and drinking some stuff when the cops rolled up.”

I flicked a well-done salute and walked away. Stopped. Something moved in my mind, but I didn’t see what it was, just that a thought had been ignited somewhere. I frowned its direction, saw Mexicans pushing from corn. Farm. Hidden. Farms have tractors and… hay.

I pulled my phone and called Harry Nautilus, my partner back in Mobile.

“I think I know how Bobby Lee Crayline got away,” I said.

“That was over six months ago, Carson. It took you this long to figure it out?”

“I’m not missing your humor, Harry. Odd, I know. The farmer’s name was something like Oakes. That’s it, Farley Oakes …”

“You think that really happened?” Harry Nautilus said after I’d laid out my thoughts.

“If it went down as I suspect, there are two possible reasons: coercion or a willing accomplice. Either way, the best approach assumes willingness.”

“He just drove away?” Harry confirmed. “The farmer?”

“It was dumb, but everyone got so busy with the dead guards and chasing a motorcycle with Crayline aboard that … well, it just happened.”

“I’ll see if I can’t get Babe Ellis and Sandhill in on this,” Harry said. “Could be fun. How’s the vacation?”

“Right now I’m helping look for a corpse that walked away from a funeral home.”

“Aren’t there more vacation-type things to do? Are there no pretty women in the area?”

“There’s one. I’m helping her look for—”

“—a corpse that escaped from a funeral home. Gotcha.”

Cherry was leaning against her vehicle when I walked up. “Anything?” she said, face hopeful.

“Thanks to the old letch, I might have figured out how a psychotic named Bobby Lee Crayline escaped while being transported to prison.”

“How does that help us here?”

“It doesn’t. And neither did anything else.”

We got back on the road and were on the Mountain Highway just east of Stanton when Cherry pulled out a notepad, studied it, exited down a ramp.

“Where we going?” I asked.

“Quick trip to tie up a loose end. I want to see if anyone’s home at the house on the lane leading to Tandee Powers’s death scene. The creek. No one was home the day we checked.”

I recalled the small house. It was probably too far from the road for an occupant to have heard anything.

“You said you knew the occupant?”

“An elderly lady. Hell, for all I know, she passed. Like I said, she was in her eighties. This’ll take a few minutes, then I’ll get you back to your packing.”

Looking over at Cherry I had a moment of doubt. But staying here would mean being sucked deeper into the black hole of my brother’s mind.

“I’ve got to get on that,” I affirmed. “I want to be Mobile-bound at daybreak.”

26

We wound down roads growing tighter and tighter. Turned on to the long slender band of crumbling asphalt that ended at the creek where Crayline had left Tandee Powers’s body floating in the water. We both knew nothing would come of the trip, but it was one of those investigative motions that had to be made, a box checked off.

“This is the only house on the road back,” Cherry said, slowing at a bend. “Let me see if the lady’s home.”

It was the small and rickety frame dwelling with a big silver propane tank at its side and the maples filled with birdhouses. A single rocking chair sat on the porch. As we pulled in the drive I thought I saw a motion at a window curtain, as though the occupant had heard us a mile back.

“Wait in the car,” Cherry said. “Some folks live deep in the woods because they fear, or don’t particularly care for, people. Strangers, especially.”

I did aghast. “Are you telling me I’m strange?”

“Sit, cowboy.”

I waited as Cherry knocked on the door. It occurred to me to put on a big yellow happy face so as not to threaten whoever, but I figured Cherry kept the happy face in the trunk with the bullhorn.

The front door opened. Cherry spoke for several minutes. I couldn’t hear her words, only her tone, like a traveler bringing news to an isolated settlement. I figured Cherry’s accent - which I was beginning to view as “richly textured” instead of “grating” - permanently marked her as a member of the mountain tribe, a powerful asset in a culture where outsiders had always been viewed with suspicion, generally for good reason.

Cherry walked back to the car, told me to come to the house. She stayed tight to my side as we approached, a hand over my shoulder. She’d never been so close or touched me, and I realized her nearness symbolized sanction. Cherry was giving me her approval so that Miz Bascomb could see that I was safe, a man who brought neither shadow nor harm.

Leona Bascomb was a tiny woman with bottle-thick glasses and few teeth remaining in a head that had seen at least eighty years of life. Her gray hair was full and fell past her waist. She wore a faded gingham dress under a starched white apron. Her brown and gnarled hands seemed constructed entirely of knuckles.

The room was Spartan in furnishing: a rocking chair, a small sofa, a pair of TV trays beside the furniture. It was the walls that drew my eyes. They were covered with sheets of cheap simple paper, the kind run through copiers. Each sheet displayed colors arranged in a variety of ways. Some colors were hard and disparate shapes, others merged and flowed. Many pages recalled works by Kandinsky, others Chagall.

There were at least a hundred such paintings taped to the walls. It took a moment to catch my breath, startled by the surprise.

“Your walls are covered with beauty, Miz Bascomb,” I said.

“They’re my birds,” she replied.

“Birds?”

She looked embarrassed. “I know they don’t look a bit like birds, an’ I cain’t he’p it. Whenever I tried to draw a bird like a pitchur, it didn’t look right. I couldn’t see birds real good anyway cuz my eyes was always on the low side. So I started drawin’ how they sound.”