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  Storm Track

  ( Deborah Knott - 7 )

  Margaret Maron

  Storm Track Deborah Knott Mystery [7] Margaret Maron Thorndike Press (2000) Tags: Cozy Mystery, Contemporary

  Cozy Mysteryttt Contemporaryttt

  SUMMARY:

  Hurricanes rarely make it inland as far as Colleton County, North Carolina. Domestic storms, on the other hand, hit with regularity. But when the scantily clad body of a lawyer's promiscuous wife is found in a motel, the killing resounds like a thunderclap. With her handsome cousin a suspect in the murder, Judge Deborah Knott gets personally involved in the case. She soon uncovers a web of secret and illicit affairs that stretches from the African-American church community to Deborah's own family. Then murderer strikes again, even as a real-life killer storm rages up the Carolina coast.

  STORM TRACK

  DEBORAH KNOTT BOOK 07

  Margaret Maron

  All chapter captions are taken from The Complete Story of the Galveston Horror, edited by John Coulter. United Publishers of America, © 1900 by E. E. Sprague.

  A DF Books NERDs Release

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  STORM TRACK . Copyright © 2000 by Margaret Maron. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN 0-7595-8393-5

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Mysterious Press.

  First eBook edition: May 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.iPublish.com

  M ARGARET M ARON grew up on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, but for many years lived in Brooklyn, New York. When she returned to her North Carolina roots with her artist-husband, Joe, she began a series based on her own background and went on to write Bootlegger’s Daughter, a Washington Post bestseller and winner of the major mystery awards for 1993. Her next Deborah Knott novel, Southern Discomfort, was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Novel; Shooting at Loons, which followed, received Agatha and Anthony award nominations, and Up Jumps the Devil won the Agatha for Best Novel of 1996.

  By Margaret Maron

  Deborah Knott novels:

  Home Fires

  Killer Market

  Up Jumps the Devil

  Shooting at Loons

  Southern Discomfort

  Bootlegger’s Daughter

  Sigrid Harald novels:

  Fugitive Colors

  Past Imperfect

  Corpus Christmas

  Baby Doll Games

  The Right Jack

  Bloody Kin

  Death in Blue Folders

  Death of a Butterfly

  One Coffee With

  Short story collection:

  Shoveling Smoke

  CONTENTS

  Late August

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  DEBORAH KNOTT’S FAMILY TREE

  LATE AUGUST

  Afternoon shadows shaded the dip in the deserted dirt road where a battered Chevy pickup sat with the motor idling. On the driver’s side, a puff of pale blue smoke drifted through the open window as the old man inside lit a cigarette and waited. The two dogs in back tasted the sultry air and one of them stuck its head through the sliding rear window. The man reached up and rubbed the silky ears.

  A few minutes later, a green Ford pickup approached from the opposite direction and pulled even with the Chevy. The old man acknowledged them with a nod, then stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it on the sandy roadbed.

  “Evening, Mr. Kezzie,” said the stocky, heavyset driver who appeared to be in his early fifties. His hair was thinning across the crown and his face was lined from squinting through a windshield at too many sunrises.

  The other, younger man was probably early thirties. He wore a neat blue shirt that had wet sweat circles under the arms.

  Kezzie Knott peered past the driver. “This your cousin’s boy?”

  The older man nodded. “Norwood Love, Ben Joe’s youngest.”

  “I knowed your daddy when he was a boy,” Kezzie said, tapping another cigarette from the crumpled pack in his shirt pocket. “Good man till they shipped him off to Vietnam.”

  “That’s what I hear.” Norwood Love’s jaw tightened. “I only knowed him after he come back.”

  And won’t asking for no pity, thought Kezzie as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. Well, that part won’t none of his business. Exhaling smoke, he said, “He the one taught you how to make whiskey?”

  “Him and Sherrill here.”

  “I done told him, Mr. Kezzie, how you won’t have no truck with a man that makes bad whiskey,” his cousin said earnestly. “Told him ain’t nobody never gone blind drinking stuff you had aught to do with.”

  “And that’s the way I aim to keep it,” Kezzie said mildly as he examined the cigarette in his gnarled fingers. There was no threat in his voice, but the young man nodded as if taking an oath.

  “All I use is hog feed, grain, sugar and good clean water. No lye or wood alcohol and I ain’t never run none through no radiator neither.”

  Kezzie Knott heard the sturdy pride in his voice. “Ever been caught?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Sherrill says you got a safe place to set up.”

  “Yessir. It’s—”

  Kezzie held up his hand. “Don’t tell me. Sherrill’s word’s good enough. And your’n.” His clear blue eyes met the younger man’s. “Sherrill says you was thinking eight thousand?”

  “I know that’s a lot, but—”

  “No, it ain’t. Not if you’re going to do a clean operation, stainless steel vats and cookers.”

  He leaned over and took a thick envelope from the glove compartment and passed it across to Norwood Love. “Count it.”

  When the younger man had finished counting, he looked up at the other two. “Don’t you want me to sign a paper or something?”

  “What for?” asked Kezzie Knott, with the first hint of a smile on his lips. “Sherrill’s told you my terms and you aim to deal square, don’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, then? Ain’t no piece of paper gonna let me take you to court if you don’t.”

  “I reckon not.”

  “Besides”—a sardonic tone slipped into his voice—“there don’t need to be nothing connecting me to you if your place ain’t as safe as you think it is.”

  As Norwood Love started to thank him, Kezzie Knott touched the brim of his straw hat to them, then put the truck in gear and pulled away through August heat and August humidity that had laid a haze across the countryside.

  Ought to’ve paid more mind to the noon weather report, the old man told himself as he headed the truck toward home. Thick and heavy as this air was, he reckoned they might get another thunderstorm before bedtime.

  Automatically he took a mental inventory of the
farm—not just the homeplace but all the land touching his that his sons now owned and farmed.

  Cotton was holding up all right, and soybeans and corn could take a little more rain without hurting bad, but all this water was leaching nutrients from the sandy soil. Bolls was starting to crack though so it was too late to spray the cotton with urea to get the nitrogen up enough to finish it off. Tobacco had so much water lately, it was all greened up again. Curing schedule shot to hell. Just as well, he supposed, since the ground was so soggy along the bottoms you couldn’t get tractors in without bogging down.

  Playing hell with the garden, too. Maidie was fussing about watery tomatoes and how mold on the field peas was turning ’em to mush. That second sowing of butter beans won’t faring so good neither—them fuzzy yellow beetle larvy making lace outen the leaves. Every time him or Cletus dusted ’em, along come the rain to wash off all the Sevin before it had a chance to kill ’em.

  The boys was worried, but that’s what it was to be a farmer. First you lay awake praying for rain, then you lay awake praying for it to quit. You done it ’most your whole life, he thought. All them years Sue tried to make you put farming over whiskey. Got to be a habit after a while. Certainly was for the boys.

  And now another round of hurricanes setting up to blow in more rain?

  Deb’rah won’t going to be any happier ’bout more rain than the boys. She said she was about to get eat up out there by the pond. Fish couldn’t keep up with the eggs them mosquitoes was laying in this weather.

  Through the open back window, Ladybelle’s nose nudged the back of his neck. Kezzie took a final drag on his cigarette and stubbed the butt in his overflowing ashtray.

  “Still don’t see why she had to go and build out there when the homeplace is setting almost empty,” he grumbled to the dogs.

  CHAPTER | 1

  The situation . . . is portrayed day by day exactly as it existed, and is not the product of imaginings of writers who put down what the conditions should have been; the storm has been followed from its inception.

  August 31—Hurricane Edouard is now 31° North by 70.5° West. Wind speed approx. 90 knots. (Note: 1 kt. = 1 nautical mile per hour.) (Note: a nautical mile is about 800 ft. longer than a land mile or .15 of a land mi.)

  Math was not Stan Freeman’s strongest subject. In the margin of his notebook, the boy laboriously scribbled the computations so he’d have the formula handy:

  90 kts. =

  90 + (90 x .15) =

  He rummaged in his bookbag for his calculator.

  The fan in his open window stirred the air but did little to cool the small bedroom. Perspiration gleamed on his dark skin. His red Chicago Bulls tank top clung damply to his chest. It’d been an oversized Christmas present from his little sister Lashanda, yet was already too tight. His distinctly non-stylish sneakers lay under the nightstand so his feet could breathe free. Three sizes in six months. After he outgrew a new pair in one month, Kmart look-alikes were all his mother would buy “till your body settles down.”

  At eleven and a half, it was as if his limbs had suddenly erupted. The pudginess that had lingered since babyhood was gone now, completely melted away into bony arms and legs that stretched him almost as tall as his tall father. He was glad to be taller. Short kids got no respect. Now if he could just do something about his head. It felt out of proportion, too big for his gangling body, and he kept his bushy hair clipped as short as his mother would allow so as not to draw attention to the disparity.

  At the moment, though, he wasn’t thinking of his appearance. Using his light-powered calculator, he multiplied ninety by point fifteen, then finished writing out his conversion:

  90 + (13.5) = 103.5 mph.

  For a moment, Stan lay back on his bed and imagined himself standing in a hundred-and-four miles per hour wind.

  Freaking cool!

  And never going to happen this far inland, he reminded himself. He sat up again and picked up where he’d left off in his main notes: Hurricane warnings posted from Cape Lookout to Delaware, but forecasters predict that Edouard will probably miss the North Carolina coast.

  Gloomily, he added, Hurricane Fran downgraded to a tropical storm last night.

  With a sigh as heavy as the humid August air the fan was pulling through his open window, Stan took out a fresh sheet of notebook paper and made a new heading.

  NOTES—Meterolg

  He paused, consulted the dictionary on the shelf beside his bed, tore out the sheet of paper and began again.

  NOTES—Meteorologists say we’re getting more tropical storms this year because of a rainy summer in the deserts of W. Africa. (Reminder—look up name of desert) (Reminder—look up name of country) This makes tropical waves that can turn into storms. At least they think that’s what caused Arthur and Bertha so early this year.

  He couldn’t help wishing for the umpteenth time that he’d known about this new school’s sixth-grade science project earlier in the summer. If he had, he might have thought about documenting the life and death of a killer hurricane in time for it to do some good. Unfortunately, nobody’d mentioned the project till this past week, a full month after Bertha did her number on Wrightsville Beach. Cesar and Dolly had been right on her heels, but both of them wimped out without making landfall.

  Like Hurricane Edouard was about to do.

  Just his luck if the rest of hurricane season stayed peaceful. When he came up with the idea of doing a day-by-day diary of a killer storm, Edouard was still kicking butt in the Caribbean and had people down at the coast talking about having to evacuate by Labor Day. Now, though . . .

  He wasn’t wishing Wilmington any more bad luck, but a category 3 or 4 hurricane would sure make a bitchin’ project.

  Sorry, God, he thought, automatically casting his eyes heavenwards.

  “Son, I know you think you have to say things like that to be cool with the other kids,” Dad chided him recently. “But you let it become a habit and one of these days, you’re going to slip and say it to your mother and how cool will you feel then?”

  Not for the first time, Stan considered the parental paradox. His father might be the preacher, but it was his mother who had all the Thou Shalt Nots engraved on her heart.

  As if she’d heard him think of her, Clara Freeman tapped on the door and opened it without waiting for his response.

  “Stanley? Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “Sorry, Mama, I was working on my science project.”

  Clara Freeman’s face softened a bit at that. Guiltily, Stan knew that schoolwork could always justify a certain amount of leeway.

  Yet schoolwork seldom took precedence over church work.

  “Leave that for later, son. Right now, what with all the rain we’ve been having, Sister Jordan’s grass needs cutting real bad and I told her you’d be glad to go over this morning and do it for her.”

  Without argument, Stan closed the notebook and placed it neatly on his bookshelf, then began cramming his feet into those gawdawful sneakers. His face was expressionless but every cussword he’d ever heard surged through his head. Bad enough that this wet and steamy August kept him cutting their own grass every week without Mama looking over the fences to their neighbors’ yards. Sister Jordan had two teenage grandsons who lived right outside Cotton Grove, less than a mile away, but Mama could be as implacable as the Borg—which he’d only seen on friends’ TV since Mama didn’t believe in it for them. If ever she saw an opportunity to build his character through Christian sacrifice, resistance was futile.

  Any argument and she’d be on her knees, begging God’s forgiveness for raising such a lazy, self-centered son, begging in a soft sorrowful voice that always cut him deeper than any switch she might have used.

  On the other hand, if he spent the next hour cutting Sister Jordan’s grass, Mama wouldn’t fuss about him going over to Dobbs with Dad this evening.

  * * *

  This was the second time they’d made love. The first had been in guilty
haste, an act as irrational as gulping too much sweet cool water after days of wandering in a dry and barren land.

  And just as involuntary.

  Today they lay together on the smooth cotton sheets of her bed, away from any eyes that might see or tongues that might tell. Despite the utter privacy, and even though her mouth and body had responded just as passionately, just as hungrily as his, her lovemaking was again curiously silent. No noisy panting, no long ecstatic sobs, no outcries.

  Cyl moaned only once as her body arched beneath his, a low sound that was almost a sigh, then she relaxed against the cool white sheets and murmured, “Holy, holy, holy.”

  “Don’t,” Ralph Freeman groaned. “Please don’t.”

  She turned her face to his, her brown eyes bewildered. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t mock.”

  “Mock? Oh, my love, I would never mock you.”

  “Not me,” he said miserably. “God.”

  She traced the line of his cheek with her fingertips. “I wasn’t mocking,” she whispered. “I was thanking Him.”

  * * *

  Over in Dobbs, Dr. Jeremy Potts decided he’d put it off as long as he could. Having slept in this morning, he’d had to wait till late afternoon to go running. This hot and humid August had kept his resentments simmering. If not for the three biggest bitches of Colleton County, he told himself, he could be working out in the lavish air-conditioned exercise room at the country club instead of running laps on a school track under a broiling sun. He could follow that workout with a refreshing shower instead of driving back to his condo dripping in sweat. Thanks to his ex-wife who’d been wound up by her lawyer’s wife, not to mention that judge who gave Felicia everything but the gold filling in his back molar, it would be at least another two years before he could afford the country club’s initiation fees and monthly dues.

  Thank you very much, Lynn Bullock, he thought angrily as he laced up his running shoes.