Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 7-9: Buried Alive, Her Last Scream, The Killing Game. J. Kerley A.
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.”
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.”
I studied the walls again and began to see the music, the rhythmic bursts of color. The shading of notes gliding into others, or tapering off as a trill must have tapered into the air. One compelling picture displayed a three-color arc: blue, becoming a sideways, bottom-weighted crescent of purple, transmuting into a wavering series of lines, blue again. The background was coal black, providing a stillness behind the color, the sense of a night sky. I’d heard those colors recently.
“This one,” I said, pointing to the picture. “It’s a whip-poor-will, right?”
Cherry’s eyes turned to me with surprise. Miss Bascomb stared through the thick lenses, canting her head as if bringing me into focus. She walked to me, took my hand in hers. Her hand felt like driftwood.
“You’re the first person to ever see one right,” she said, leading me past the walls like at a gallery opening, pointing out towhees, starlings, robins, crows – a nervous jitter of black and yellow – martins, several varieties of thrushes and finches, bluebirds, cardinals, willets, grebes, plovers, and dozens more. When the tour was finished, a smiling Leona Bascomb went to fetch tea and cookies.
“How did you do that, Ryder?” Cherry whispered when the bird artist had retreated to her tiny kitchen, clattering dishes. “How did you know those splotches were a whip-poor-will?”
“I couldn’t imagine it being anything else.”
When Miz Bascomb returned, Cherry steered her into our questions. I sipped tea and nibbled a sugar cookie, happy to be out of the limelight.
“I wasn’t here that morning the poor woman’s body got found,” Miz Bascomb said to Cherry. “The health service came by real early and took me to the clinic for my six-month look-see. I’m good, praise God.”
“You mentioned hearing a car the night before?”
“It was almost midnight. I was up, puttering. Cain’t never sleep no more, just doze. I heard a car out on the road. Sounded big. I can tell by the sounds of the motors. I cain’t see hardly none any more, but God gave me ears as good as they git.”
“Is that common, Miz Bascomb, nighttime traffic on the road?” Cherry asked.
“Any traffic ain’t real common. Nothing back there but the ol’ logging camp. In the daytime, local kids sometimes go back there in summer to splash around. But most of ’em goes to the divin’ rock over in the Red River. Water’s deeper and there’s other kids to show off for. I did the same myself, when I was a girl.”
“So the vehicle on the road caught your ear?” Cherry asked.
“I was waiting for it to come back out. It did, ’bout two hours later.”
“The same vehicle?”
“No way to tell that perzactky. Same kind of one, to tell by the sound.”
Cherry made some notes in her pad. “So a vehicle went in around midnight, came out around two. Possibly the same vehicle.”
The old woman nodded.
Cherry looked at me. It fit the timeline, given what we’d learned from the lab about time of death. Tandee Powers was probably taken from her home around eleven, driven past Leona Bascomb’s house, then another desolate mile to the creek. She’d been dressed in a sexually suggestive manner, dragged