Sticks and Stones Read online

  CHAPTER 3

  Carry and Jonathon relaxed under the cherry trees in Carry’s backyard. The boughs were hanging low from the weight of cherries. The fruit was plump and in bunches. Some had fallen, littering the ground. The sun gleaming from their skin made them look like perfect rubies. Abe had recently mowed the lawn, and the smell of fresh grass hung in the air. A crow flew across the open, clear sky cawing all the way. Off behind the yard a yellowhammer darted in and out of the oak trees, probably on the lookout for insects.

  The still air that had started the day had changed. Even though it was later, the heat was much more tolerable on account of a wind that had picked up. It kept blowing Jonathon’s red hair all sorts of different directions. Both he and Carry were wearing shorts and T-shirts. Carry’s shirt was navy and she had on yellow shorts. Jonathon’s shirt was black and he wore red shorts with white stripes up the sides.

  “What a lazy day,” Carry said. A burst of wind erupted and blew a pile of cherry leaves from beneath the tree into a small eddy before letting them land again. “Windy,” Carry said, “but lazy.” A cherry dropped from the tree, barely missing her head. She tucked a blond lock of hair behind her ear that had come free from her ponytail.

  “I love lazy days,” Jonathon said. Leaning over, he gave her a kiss. Not a kid’s kiss like he’d given her six months ago when they first started dating, but a full-on relationship kiss, openmouthed and everything. Carry loved the way he kissed.

  “Wow,” Carry said, a smile spreading across her face. “Now I love lazy days, too.” Above her head, a blackbird sat among the branches and leaves of the tree, singing a blackbird song. Every few minutes a gust of wind erupted and blew back its feathers.

  “It really is beautiful to be alive in the summer, isn’t it?” Carry asked.

  Jonathon took a look at her, from head to toe. “Now it is. You make summer beautiful.”

  Carry playfully punched him in the stomach. “You are such a flirt. You always know exactly what to say.”

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. Sometimes I think you’ve had a hundred girlfriends to practice on, you’re so good at it.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. Mr. Hundred Girlfriends.” He leaned back. “Nope, I just fly by the seat of my pants. Besides, I told you, my family comes from a long line of romantics. Wait’ll you meet my grandpa.”

  “I’m goin’ to meet your grandpa?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s time.”

  “Well, you’ve definitely made my mother fall in love with you,” she said.

  The blackbird hopped to a lower branch, still singing.

  “Can I ask you something?” Carry said.

  “Anything, my love.”

  “Why do you never talk about your folks, only your grandpa?” She hesitated, then added: “If it’s some sort of touchy subject, I’m really sorry for asking. I can’t believe I’ve never asked you before.”

  “No,” he said, sounding somber, “you’re allowed to ask anything you want.” He clapped his hands together. “Let’s see, where to start? Well, my father is a drug addict. I have no idea where he is, but my ma took me away from the run-down little town we lived in up in Mississip and brought me here to Alabama. So I got away from Mississip and him. I don’t reckon he has any clue what part of the country I’m even in.”

  Carry frowned. She wished she hadn’t asked him. “That’s harsh. So what about your ma?”

  With a click of his tongue, Jonathon answered. “She was fine for a while, looking after me, getting me to school, holding down two jobs so she could afford rent and groceries, but it became too much for her. She had a nervous breakdown. She’s in Satsuma in a long-term care facility. I see her sometimes. Like, every month or, I don’t know, two. I can’t even remember if I’ve seen her since we started going out. It’s fine. She has her own life and I don’t mind how it worked out. I like living with my grandpa. I think you’ll like him, too.”

  The wind picked up again. Suddenly, a loud noise rose from the other side of the house. It sounded like a jet engine. The blackbird jolted out of the tree and flapped away.

  Carry’s heart hammered in her chest. Both she and Jonathon got up to a sitting position. She looked at him and saw the same thing she felt: terror.

  Then something did come over the house. At first it came so quick Carry couldn’t make out what it was. Then she started to calm down. It turned out to be the most bastardized version of a kite she had ever seen.

  “What in God’s name is that?” Jonathon asked, getting up. Carry stood beside him.

  They watched the thing quickly soar above the oak trees out back, growing smaller and smaller. The yellowhammer darted away. A flock of sparrows burst from the trees like black darts being thrown across a clear blue sky.

  “I don’t know, but I have a pretty good idea who’s behind it,” Carry said once her heart slowed down.

  Both of them ran to the front of the house. They went so fast, Jonathon hit his side on the handlebar of Dewey’s bike. When they made it to the front yard, sure enough there was Abe and Dewey standing with their eyes focused over the house. Dewey had a roller in his hand. There was no string on the roller.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Carry asked Abe.

  “We just built Dewey’s newest invention and it actually worked!”

  “It was a kite!” Dewey said. “A really good one! Did you see it go?”

  Jonathon came up, still holding his bruised side.

  “What happened to you?” Carry asked him.

  “I hit Dewey’s handlebars on my rush around the house.”

  “You okay?”

  “I will be. Just give me a minute.”

  “Want me to kiss it better?” Carry asked.

  “Maybe later,” Jonathon said.

  “I think the kite worked a little too good, Abe,” Dewey said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look.” He showed Abe the empty roller in his hand. “I’m not sure if the string just wasn’t tied to the roller or if it just snapped when it got to the end.”

  “You mean you don’t have control of it?”

  “No, it’s gone.”

  “What the hell was that thing made of?” Jonathon asked. “It sounded like a damn lion coming over the house.”

  “We constructed it from cedar two-by-fours and industrial-strength plastic we found in Abe’s ma’s garage,” Dewey said.

  “And you managed to get it to fly?” Jonathon asked, still holding his side.

  “I knew it would. I did the calculation.”

  “How much did it weigh?”

  Dewey did another calculation. “I reckon ’round ’bout five, maybe six pounds.”

  “And you no longer have the end of the string?”

  “No,” Dewey said sullenly. “I don’t think I calculated string tension properly.”

  “That kite’s goin’ to come down and kill someone!” Carry said.

  “It’s definitely goin’ to scare someone,” Jonathon said. “I sure hope it doesn’t hit anyone or come down on a car or nothing. Especially if someone’s driving when it happens.”

  Carry walked over to Jonathon and hugged him from behind. They all just stood there, looking at each other.

  Abe turned to Dewey. “I think we should go see my ma.”

  Dewey looked away. “Do I have to come?”

  “You’re the reason we’re goin’. To find out what to do about your little ‘invention’.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Here we go, Leah thought. You have something to say, girl, and it’s best be said. No point in letting rust grow on it.

  She opened the door to Ethan’s office without even knocking—something she never did. Ethan Montgomery was a big man, with a full head of brown hair and sideburns. The rest of his face was clean shaven. He had a big voice to fit the rest of him, and when he was mad, you knew it. Right now, his voice wasn’t so big.

  “Since when in hell do you have the r
ight to just march into my office?” he asked Leah. He sat behind his huge oak desk. So big, Leah often wondered how it had ever fit through the door.

  “Well, I guess we’ve all just stopped following rules, maybe? You reckon so, Ethan?”

  “Now, what in the Sam Hill are you talking about?”

  Leah still held her coffee cup in her hands. She was standing, looking down on him in his plush and noisy chair. “You know exactly what I’m goddamn talkin’ about. I’m talkin’ about a dead woman who might not be dead today if our ‘police chief’ had more brains.”

  Ethan pointed a finger at her. “Now, you just watch your respect, little girl. And for Christ’s sake, close the door. Chris doesn’t need to hear all this.”

  “I agree!” Chris yelled from his desk.

  “Oh, I already gave him a piece of my mind.” A phone started ringing. Leah heard it mainly from her and Chris’s desk outside of Ethan’s office. The phone on Ethan’s desk rang much quieter than the other two.

  “Please close the door?” Ethan asked, and gestured toward the two empty chairs across from him. “And have a seat, for Christ’s sake?”

  She paused a moment and decided to acquiesce. She closed the door so hard the blinds on it shook. Only the outside wall directly opposite Ethan had its blinds open. Sun flooded the front of the office like water pouring out of a summer sprinkler. The view showed a portion of the sidewalk, Main Street, the edge of Apple-smart’s Grocery, and a lone fig tree planted just outside the glass. That fig tree had grown immensely since Leah first joined the force thirteen years ago.

  To Ethan’s left bookshelves spanned the entire wall, covering the blinds and any view of the outside. Law books stuffed those shelves, not quite as tightly as the binders in the main office. Leah reckoned Ethan hadn’t ever opened even one of those books. They were there to make him look smart. She wondered if it fooled anyone.

  Usually, other than the pictures, Ethan’s desktop was kept clean. Today it had a foot-high stack of file folders on it. Leah decided not to ask about them. She was too pissed off.

  The real telltale giveaway about the man was the television mounted on the ceiling in the far corner of the room. Ethan sat in his office watching sports of every assortment near on all day long. The thought struck Leah that maybe she was the only employee who took her police work seriously. She decided to leave this thought to herself, though. Things were about to get pretty bad, and comments like that would just cause the fire to blaze even higher.

  Currently the television set was dark and turned off. But then, she’d only given Ethan a few minutes to get comfortable.

  Leah sat down, choosing the seat closest to the door. It didn’t really matter which one she’d picked—both were uncomfortable and low, especially compared to the plush chair Ethan sat in. Maybe he thought it gave him an air of authority. Well, today she’d show him what authority really meant even without a cushy chair.

  Ethan leaned back with a loud squeak. Today, that squeak especially bothered her. “When are you goin’ to fix that GD chair of yours?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I have to sit here and listen to it, that’s what it is to me. Christ, if you won’t do it, I’ll call someone in to do it this afternoon. Or maybe tomorrow before you get in. That would give him lots of time.”

  Something flashed in Ethan’s eyes, and she knew she’d hit a nerve. He leaned forward with another squeak. His big arms came halfway across his desk, which had pictures of his family and even some of Leah’s family sitting along the edge. That’s how close Ethan and Leah’s pa had been. Almost family.

  “Now, you listen here, Leah,” Ethan said, lowering his voice and keeping it calm and steady. “I know you’re mad, but I will not take you talking to me in this tone. Now, get on with whatever you came in here to get on with so we can just move past it.”

  Hearing him talk so quiet and calmly practically unnerved Leah. It was almost enough to make her apologize for wasting his time and ask to be excused so she could go back to her desk.

  Almost, but not quite.

  She did find herself shaking slightly, though, especially the hand holding her coffee mug. She decided the quicker she finished drinking it so she could set the mug on the floor, the better.

  “You let a woman die last night,” she said. “Well, she was probably already dead, but you had a chance of catching the killer.”

  “No, we didn’t let anything happen,” Ethan said. “We found her too late.”

  “You should’ve called me. Christ, I could’ve called Dan down. God knows he can get here in an hour the way that man drives. You and Chris didn’t have time to search that swamp by yourselves.”

  “This isn’t part of Dan’s jurisdiction,” Ethan said at last. He swallowed and Leah could tell his mouth was dry. She bet he wished he’d gotten a coffee on his way in after all.

  “When in hell’s name did we start worrying about jurisdiction? I thought we was here to save lives. Seems to me, if that’s our main objective, we failed pretty much completely last night. And you didn’t have to.”

  “You’re right, we didn’t. But we decided not to call you out of respect for your daddy.”

  “First,” Leah said, “there is no we, Ethan. You call the shots, so take responsibility for it. You decided not to call me. And how in the hell was that respecting my pa at all?”

  “We thought you’d get too emotional. We know how much your pa and the rest of you at home were affected by the Stickman the first time ’round.”

  “By ‘the rest of you’ I’m assuming you mean my ma on account of there was nobody else around?”

  “Now, don’t go making trouble where there is none. I didn’t leave your ma out as any form of disrespect. I apologize for the oversight. Now, we were talkin’ ’bout the Stickman murder last night?”

  “This isn’t the Stickman. The Stickman is dead, Ethan. I all but saw the body, I heard my pa tell that story so many times.”

  “Well, if it ain’t the real Stickman, it’s someone who knows his MO perfectly and his signature. I assume Chris told you about the letter?”

  Leah nodded. “He did. Glad someone did.”

  “Figures. Well, whoever killed this victim also knew to send the letter ahead of time, something we managed to conceal from the press.”

  “You mean the letter addressed to me? The one I should have opened?”

  Ethan let out a huge sigh. “It’s more complicated than that. And you weren’t here to open it.”

  “How in God’s name could this be any more cut-and-dried? You went on a hunt with two-thirds of your team when you didn’t need to. I should’ve been called.”

  Ethan swiveled his chair sideways. It was hot in his office. A wooden fan spun slowly from the ceiling’s center, but so slowly it didn’t seem to offer any breeze. And it always spun, whether it was winter, spring, summer, what have you. Leah often wondered the purpose of it.

  She took a big sip of coffee and looked back out at the street. A mockingbird sat on one of the boughs of the fig tree, its white wing patches and feathers standing out brightly in the summer sun.

  Ethan gently drummed his fingers on his desk. He hadn’t responded for a while, and if he was angered at all by what Leah was saying, she couldn’t tell. She was calming down. “Well then,” she asked, “tell me, who do you reckon did it?”

  “At this point, we have to believe it’s the same Stickman we were after fifteen years ago. Everything about the killin’ matches perfectly. I haven’t heard back from Mobile, but to me, even the handwriting in the letter matches.”

  This struck a part of Leah’s brain like a mallet hitting a timpani. “How can you—whoever’s doin’ your ‘handwriting analysis’ in Mobile . . . He’s in on the secret. He has to be.”

  Ethan ignored her. “We’re not talkin’ ’bout that. We’re talkin’ ’bout the Stickman.”

  “The Stickman was Harry Stork and Stork’s dead. My pa shot him.”

  “I ag
ree that your pa shot Harry Stork. What I’m starting to reckon is that maybe Stork wasn’t the Stickman after all.”

  Leah’s “tone” came back. “Yes, he was. My pa was certain of it. He was on that case goin’ on the long part of a year and six months. He got it right.”

  Ethan put up his hands. “I am not putting down your daddy in any way. That case near on killed him. Every new death weighed him down. In the end, the total was what? Nine victims? That’s a lot of extra weight to be carryin’ around.”

  “And then,” Leah said, “Pa shot Harry Stork, and, lo and behold, the killin’s ended. There were no more Stickman murders.”

  “Until last night.” He lowered his voice. “There’s more you don’t know. Stuff nobody knows except me and your pa and, I think, Peter Strident.”

  Leah shook her head, slack-jawed. “How much stuff am I goin’ to get dumped on me today?”

  “This is stuff your pa just didn’t want anyone to know on account of how it would’ve made him look. In fact, I can tell you right now, after it all went down, your daddy started wondering if he’d made a mistake. The kind of mistake you don’t come back from.”

  “And what mistake might that be?” Leah asked.

  “Shooting Stork dead. Your pa started thinking later that maybe he wasn’t the Stickman.”

  “He never told me that. Besides, he shot out of self-defense. Harry pointed his gun at him.”

  Ethan leaned forward and whispered, “The gun’s magazine was empty. No bullets. Not one.”

  “What?” Leah asked, astonished. Why had her pa never told her this? “Did he have one chambered?”

  “Nope. Empty magazine, empty chamber.” Ethan dropped his voice even more. “There’s more,” he said.

  “I don’t know that I can handle much more, Ethan.”

  “The last thing Harry Stork said before dying was that he had been set up. That he was a patsy.”

  “Then why did he continue to point his weapon at my pa? Unloaded or not? My pa had no way of knowing that.”