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Wallis’ drive was empty as I approached his cabin. I hung round on his porch for a while, but after a time, I gave up and walked back to my truck. I was easing on to the road when I saw his pickup heading my way.
He pulled up next to me, and we rolled down our windows. “I just heard, young Abit. I was over helping Keaton settle in when a neighbor brought the news. Come on back to the house. We need to talk.
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“GOB-BLISTERED WORMFOOD!” he shouted when we got inside. He pointed to a chair for me and plunked down on the couch, a saggy old thing that almost swallowed him. “It’s a terrible injustice to our beloved music. I just know these murder ballads and murders are all tangled up together, but who could be this mean? Or should I say crazy?”
I didn’t quite follow his way of thinking. I hated the way the murder ballads were being acted out, too, but Wallis had skipped over the fact that these ballads were about awful murders in the first place. I waited a beat before saying, “I’ve been studying the ‘Tom Dooley’ story. It fits with the recent murder, doesn’t it?”
“Does it fit? Like a halter top in a whorehouse. This whole Ferguson thing is right outta the Dula story. You do know that the real name is Dula, right? The way local people pronounced Dula made outsiders misspell it. Anyway, he was a randy SO-AND-SO, and the murder of Laura Foster was brutal. With a mattock, if you can imagine, which is a lot like a pickax—just like the poor woman two days ago.” He folded his hands over his lap and added, “Oh, this makes me sick to my stomach.”
I felt relieved Wallis and I were of the same mind, but I worried we still didn’t have what we needed. “Do we have enough information to go to the sheriff and not be laughed outta his office?”
“In a word, no. It still doesn’t pass the WHAT THE FUDGE test.”
“I’m not following.”
“We can’t answer how linking our murders to murder ballads helps catch the SON OF A MONKEY. That’s what we’ve got to figure out before you set yourself up for public ridicule. Those lawmen types don’t take to us civilians telling them their business.”
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Back home, I made myself go out to the woodshop. I was all keyed up and thought working on a dining table I’d promised for next week would help. It didn’t. I’d mentioned early on how I tended to put off working on the dining table orders “for some reason,” but that wasn’t exactly true. I did know why.
It was the same kinda table I’d made for Fiona, back when we broke up, before we married. She’d left me for one of the doctors at her hospital. To add to my misery, Dr. Gerald Navarro pulled up in his Porsche one day, swept into my workshop, and in a voice that wouldn’t melt butter ordered a dining table for her. “Fiona speaks so highly of your woodworking skills,” he’d offered like a preacher’s blessing, as if I’d been just her handyman. All those troubles came up because of my fear of having young’uns of our own.
Everything worked out in the end, but to be honest, that doctor never really left me. Deep sorrow does that. A stubborn ache in the heart that hangs round like a living thing, ghostlike ‘til something wakes it up. I reckon some things you never get over; you just learn to live with them. Not that his memory took anything away from the love I felt for Fiona and Conor. Not a bit. But some days that old pain sure cast a fine dusting of hurt.
I’d thought about not making that design any more, but I just couldn’t let Dr. Navarro rule my life thataway. Not to mention it was my best seller. I just wished I didn’t think of him every damn time I worked on one.
I gave up on the table and moved on to a corner cabinet. After a while, my mind drifted back to Dula and that lipsticked cocktail napkin. Not a good idea while running the table saw; I almost cut myself. I stopped and took a walk down by the creek to try and clear my head. I needed to be more careful if I wanted to keep all ten fingers. (There was a reason a furniture plant over near Franklin got the nickname “Finger Factory.”)
When I came back, I switched jobs to something safer—wet-sanding a small table—and I let my mind drift back to Dula. Just as I was finishing up, a thought slipped past like a wraith. Hadn’t I heard someone recently mention Wilkes County? Not the Ferguson murder, but in a different way? I stopped to think, but nothing came to mind. It wouldn’t come ‘til suppertime.
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Conor was taking a bath and getting ready for an evening of supper and a little TV. I was alone in the kitchen and got busy chopping vegetables from the garden. I kinda jumped when Fiona came in from work and dropped her purse on the kitchen table.
“Sorry to scare you, Rabbit,” she said as she hugged me from behind. We smooched a little while our boy was busy upstairs, but then she wanted to talk about the latest murder before he joined us. As I started to fill her in on what little I knew, a terrible weight came down on me. “Why are there so many awful people in the world?” I asked.
“It’s just one in a million, darlin’.” She was trying to soothe me, but I knew she was upset too.
“Still, how could you live with yourself?”
“Well, some folks are mentally ill, and others, depending on how they were reared, grew up with some pretty crazy people—like you did.” She kissed me again. “But not everyone takes the fork in the road you chose. Some just want to hurt others back the way they were hurt.”
That stirred something in me, a mix of shame and regret. I knew I wasn’t as good as Fiona made out. I had plenty of dark thoughts lurking under the surface. I always tried to stuff them down deep, but what she’d just said put me on edge.
Fiona musta picked up on my mood, because she was awful quiet when we sat down to supper—one of Fiona’s fine cottage pies and the salad I’d pulled together. But pretty soon we were laughing about Conor getting some mashed tater on the end of his nose. He was getting to be such a little imp, I wouldn’t’ve put it past him to have put it there on purpose. I loved how his sense of humor was coming along. (I don’t believe I said anything funny—on purpose, anyways—till I was 17 or 18 year old.)
As Fiona leaned over and playfully wiped his nose, she said, “No telling what you might get up to next! You are one crazy son.”
And that’s when it hit me. Wallis’ son, Keaton, had moved to Wilkes County. And he’d been back for several months after being away for five year. And he knew a lot about our music. I didn’t want to think he could be the murderer—Wallis had become my friend—but the facts stared me in the face. Not to mention he was creepy.
But for the second time that evening, I pushed unpleasant thoughts away. Surely that was all just coincidence.
By the next day, though, the notion wouldn’t leave me alone. I was in my shop fretting over it when Shiloh asked me why I was frowning so.
“Just something on my mind. Nothing worth sharing.” He looked offended, like I didn’t trust him, but this wasn’t the kind of thing you told someone without thinking it through. “Sorry, Shiloh. Nothing personal, but it’s bigger than I can handle.”
“Then share it—you won’t be carrying the burden alone.” That sounded like one of his Zen sayings, which often made sense to me, or at least made me want to think more about them. But I needed to honor Wallis more than Shiloh. I shook my head.
“The noble-minded are calm and steady. Little people are forever fussing and fretting,” he said before going into the other room I’d built to help keep dust offa everything out front.
I tried not to bite, but after a few minutes I called out: “Okay, who said that?”
He turned off the sander and shouted, “You don’t think I could have come up with something that insightful?”
“I’m sure you could with time, Shiloh, but not on the spot like that.”
He laughed and said it was Confucius. I mumbled something like I knew who that was. (I had heard of him, just didn’t know the particulars.) We went back to our respective chores and worked together contentedly for the rest of the afternoon.
That evening, Fiona had the second shift, so oncet I put Conor to bed, I was alone with my thoughts. Instead of fussing and fretting, I just sat quiet with them, the way Shiloh would’ve. And sure enough, with time I knew what I needed to do.