spun against the loose gravel, before they gained trac-
tion and began to inch upward.
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MARGARET MARON
Tree branches brushed either side of the car. Normally
she enjoyed the roller-coaster effect of this drive, but
that was in daylight. Tonight, the sky was overcast. No
moon. No stars. Only her headlights to illuminate the
opening between the trees. Driving up here to Buck
Harris’s mountain retreat had been an impulse fueled
by bourbon and anger.
That he could be so cavalier as to go off to sulk about
the money he was going to have to give up in this di-
vorce settlement! Did he really think that staying away
from court would somehow make that fat greedy wife
of his settle for less? And even if she did wind up with
a full half of their assets, how much money did a per-
son need? As someone who had been forced to scrabble
for every dime, Flame was ready to settle down and be
taken care of by a man with an ample bank account. It
did not have to be billions. A modest five or six million
invested at six percent would do just fine. She could live
very happily on that.
But land and money were how men like Buck kept
score. The sale of Harris Farms, if it came to that, would
leave him cash rich. He could keep his yacht, buy two
more houses to replace the two he would have to give
up, and still have enough spare change to fly first class to
Europe or Hawaii whenever he wanted. Nevertheless, it
galled him to know that Suzu Harris could, if she chose,
force the sale of the land they had so painstakingly ac-
quired in their early years. Could even hold his feet to
the fire over their first tomato field, the thirty acres that
had been in his family since before the Civil War.
By the time she reached Wilkesboro, Flame was stone
cold sober and beginning to think that running Buck
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into the shallows was probably a mistake. She had played
him like a fish these last two years, giving him enough
line to let him think it was his idea to come to her. Start
reeling in too hard and she was liable to have him break
the line or spit out the hook. As long as she had come
this far, though, it was easier to go on than turn back.
“Thank God it’s not icy,” she muttered as she steered
to avoid a hole where the gravel had washed out and
almost scraped the car on an outcropping of solid rock.
Another quarter-mile and the drive ended in a circle in
front of a large rustic lodge built of undressed logs. She
did not see his car, but the garage was on the far side
of the house. Nor were there any lights. Not that she
expected any. Not at—she pressed a button on the side
of her watch and the little dial lit up. Not at one-thirty
in the morning.
The front door was locked and she rang the bell long
and hard until she could hear it echo from within.
To her surprise, the interior remained dark.
She rang again, leaning on the bell so long that no
one inside could possibly sleep through it.
Nothing.
A long low porch ran the full length of the house
and she retrieved a door key that was kept beneath the
second ceramic pot. Within minutes, she was inside the
lodge, fumbling for the light switches.
“Buck, honey? You here?” she called.
No answer.
With growing apprehension, she mounted the mas-
sive staircase that led to the bedrooms above.
105
MARGARET MARON
In the small hours of Saturday morning, Detective
Mayleen Richards drove through the deserted streets
of Dobbs. The only other person out at that time was a
town police officer, who gave her a friendly wave from
his cruiser that indicated he’d be glad to share a cup
of coffee from his Thermos and kill some boring time.
Another night and she might have. Tonight though, she
merely waved back and continued on to her apartment,
a one-bedroom over a garage on the outskirts of Dobbs
where town and suburbs merged.
The elderly couple who lived in the main house spent
their winters in Florida and were glad to have a sheriff ’s
deputy there to keep an eye on things. Richards was
glad for the privacy their absence gave her. Even when
the owners were in residence, they went to bed early
and seemed singularly uninterested in their tenant’s ir-
regular comings and goings.
Not that there had been anything very irregular about
her personal life before this. She pulled her shifts. She
attended a Spanish language course two nights a week
out at Colleton Community College. She visited her
family down in Black Creek almost every weekend. She
harbored no regrets for ditching either that dull com-
puter programming job out at the Research Triangle
nor the equally dull marriage to her highschool sweet-
heart who had achieved his life’s goal when he traded
farm life for a desk job. Except for fancying herself in
love with Major Bryant, law enforcement had absorbed
and satisfied her.
Richards could smile to herself now and see that re-
cent adolescent crush for what it was—attraction to an
alpha male, generated by proximity and nothing more
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HARD ROW
than the needs of a healthy body that had slept alone for
way too long.
She coasted to a stop beside a shiny gray pickup with
an extended crew cab and cut the ignition, then hurried
up the wooden steps that led to a deck and to the man
who waited inside.
“I thought you’d be gone,” she said, absurdly happy
that her prickly reaction to his first overtures had not
sent him away.
“No.” He carefully unzipped her jacket and eased the
soft pink sweater over her head, then buried his face in
the waves of her dark red hair as his hands unhooked
her bra.
“Muy hermosa,” he murmured.
Later, lying beside him in her bed, brown legs next
to white, she was almost on the brink of sleep when she
remembered. “McLamb said he saw you at the court-
house today?”
Miguel Diaz nodded, one hand lazily moving across
her body. “One of the men from the village next to my
village back home. He took a tractor and I was there to
speak for him.”
“Tractor? Was he the guy who plowed up a stretch of
yards out toward Cotton Grove?”
“Ummm,” he murmured, kissing her shoulder.
“He works for you?”
“For now. The other place, they fired him when he
took the tractor.”
Mayleen Richards laughed, remembering the jokes
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MARGARET MARON
the uniformed deputies had made. “What was he think-
ing? Where was he trying to go?”
She felt him shrug. “Who knows? It was the te-
quila driving. Maybe he
thought he could get to his
woman.”
“She’s in Dobbs?”
“No. Their baby died and she went back to
Mexico.”
“Oh, Mike, that’s so sad.”
“Yes. But our babies will be strong and healthy.”
“Our babies?” This was only their third time together
and he was already talking babies?
“Our red-haired, brown-skinned babies,” he said as
he gently stroked her stomach.
The image delighted her, but then she thought of her
parents, of her family’s attitude toward Latinos, and she
sighed.
Intuitively, he seemed to understand. “Don’t worry,
querida. Once the babies come, your family will grow
to like me.”
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C H A P T E R
13
A man can’t throw off his habits as he does his coat; if con-
tracted in youth they will stick in manhood and old age,
whether they be good or bad.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Saturday Morning, March 4
% Dwight got home so late Friday night that I
slipped out of bed next morning without waking
him, and Cal and I tiptoed around until it was nine
o’clock and time for me to go pick up Mary Pat and
Jake.
“Are the children ready to go?” I asked when Kate
answered the phone.
“No, I’m keeping them home today,” she said and
I was immediately apprehensive. “Is something
wrong?”
“Did you speak to Cal like I asked you?”
“Absolutely. Don’t tell me—?”
“I’m sorry, Deborah, but I am not going to have Jake
treated the way Dwight used to treat Rob.”
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MARGARET MARON
“What?”
“You must know that when they were kids and Dwight
went over to play with your brothers, half the time he
wouldn’t let Rob come.”
I heard Rob’s voice protesting in the background and
heard Kate say, “Well, that’s what you told me he did.
Isn’t that why he’s not taking this seriously?”
Rob’s reply came faintly, “Kate, honey, that’s what
kids do.”
“Not in this house,” Kate said firmly, and I knew she
was laying down the law to both of us, and probably to
Mary Pat, too, if the child was within hearing distance.
“Kate, I’m so sorry,” I said, “but unless you spoke to
Dwight yesterday when he came by for Cal, he doesn’t
know anything about this.”
Cal had only been half listening, but when he heard
me say that, he froze and guilt spread across his face.
At her end of the phone, I heard the baby begin to
cry.
“Look, I promise that Mary Pat and Cal will include
him today,” I said, fixing Cal with a stern look. “Let me
come and get them. You need the break, okay?”
There was a long silence, then a weary, “Okay, but if
I hear—”
“You’re not going to hear,” I promised.
As soon as I hung up, I called Dwight’s mother and
when Miss Emily finished exclaiming over those body
parts she kept hearing about on the local newscast—
“And now a whole body?”—I asked if she could pos-
sibly drop by Kate and Rob’s and offer to sit with little
R.W. during his morning nap so that Rob could take
Kate out for an early lunch. “I’ll keep the children over-
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night, but she sounds as if she could stand to get out of
the house.”
“What a good idea,” said Miss Emily. “I’ll walk over
there right now. Isn’t it nice that we’re finally getting a
taste of spring after all that cold?”
“Are we? I haven’t been outside yet.” I glanced out
the window. Sunshine. And the wind was blowing so
gently that the leaves on the azalea bushes Dwight and
I had set out in the fall barely stirred. “Maybe we’ll see
you in a few minutes.”
Cal headed for the garage door.
“Sit,” I said quietly.
He sat down at the kitchen table and I took the chair
across from him. “You want to tell me what happened
yesterday?”
He shrugged, twined his feet around the legs of the
chair, and tried to look innocent. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
His brown eyes darted away from mine. “Nothing
really.”
I waited silently.
“We were just playing.”
“And?”
“He kept bugging us. Aunt Kate wouldn’t let us
use the PlayStation because she said we weren’t letting
Jake have enough of a turn and when we let him play
Monopoly with us, he couldn’t count his money, so—”
He hesitated.
“So?”
“So we said we’d play hide-and-seek and then . . .”
His voice dropped even lower than his head. “I guess
we sorta hid where he couldn’t find us and we didn’t
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MARGARET MARON
come out even when he said he gave up and then he
started crying and Aunt Kate got mad and made Mary
Pat go to her room.” He looked up with a calculated
glint in his eyes that more than one defendant had tried
on me. “But then I did read Jake a story.”
I wasn’t any more impressed with that than I gen-
erally was in the courtroom when the defendant says,
“But I only hit him twice with that tire iron and then I
did take him to the hospital.”
again?”
He shrugged, but his jaw set in a mulish fix that was
so reminiscent of Dwight that I might have laughed
under different circumstances.
“You promised me on Thursday that you were going
to be nicer to Jake and cut him some slack.”
“Sorry.” It was a one-size-fits-all, pro forma apology.
“But Mary Pat—”
“No, Cal, this isn’t about Mary Pat. This is about
you. You gave me your word and you broke it.”
“I don’t care!” His head came up angrily. “You’re not
my mother and you’re not the boss of me!”
It was the first time he’d snapped at me and we were
both taken aback. Defiance was all over his face, but I
think he had shocked himself as well.
I took a deep breath. “You’re absolutely right, Cal. I’m
not your mother, but now that you’re living here—”
“I didn’t ask to come here and I don’t have to stay.”
His eyes filled with involuntary tears and he wiped them
away with an impatient fist. “I can go back to Virginia
and live with Nana.”
“No, you can’t,” I said with more firmness than I felt.
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“That’s not an option and you know it. I may not be
your mother, but I am married to your father and that
gives me the right to haul you up short when you step
over the line.”
He glared at me.
“Unless you want me to let him handle it?”
That got his attention.
“No! Don’t tell him. Please?”
Uncomfortable as this was for both of us, I knew
that something had to be done, but this was going to
take more than a simple time out or an early bedtime.
Besides, there was no way I could send him to bed early
without Dwight’s knowing and for now I was willing to
respect Cal’s plea that he not be involved.
“You know that what you did was wrong?”
He gave a sulky half nod.
“When your mother punished you for something se-
rious, what did she do?”
His eyes widened and he turned so white that the
freckles popped out across his nose. “You’re going to
spank me?”
Even though my parents had occasionally smacked our
bottoms or switched our legs when it was well deserved,
I was almost as horrified as he. “No, I’m not going to
spank you. But you know we can’t let this go.”
He thought a moment. “I could not watch television
for a whole month.”
“And what’ll you tell your dad when the Hurricanes
play an away game and you don’t watch it with him?”
As soon as I’d said that, I knew what would be
appropriate.
“Here’s the deal,” I told him. “You hurt Aunt Kate’s
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MARGARET MARON
feelings when you left Jake out and made him cry, so
now it’s your turn to miss the fun. You’ll stay home
from the next Canes game and I’ll go with your dad.
You can say it was your idea and you have to make him
believe it or else he’ll ask you for the whole story. If that
happens, you’ll have to tell him yourself and you’ll still
stay home. Is it a deal?”
He nodded and by his chastened look, I knew I’d
gotten through to him.
“If I hear from Aunt Kate that you’re not trying to
turn this situation around with Jake, you’re going to
miss the next game after that as well. Three strikes and
you’re out of all the others the rest of the season. Is that
clear?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” I said sternly, unwilling to let him get away
with that deliberate show of disrespect.
“Yes, ma’am,” he muttered.
“Just because Mary Pat is six months older than you
doesn’t mean you have to let her lead you around by
the nose.”
“But then she may not want to play with me,” he
protested.
“I seriously doubt that, Cal. You’re smart and funny