For the record, the turducken was delicious, and the consensus at the table was that being shot at increases the appetite.

Congressman William Graves or, more correctly, former Congressman Graves entered a plea of guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to serve his time at the medium security facility in LaGrange, Kentucky. Todd Grayson, in response to the media’s hyped outrage at the plea, made a statement that Harlan has framed now and hanging on a wall in the kitchen.

“My sworn duty is to take the criminal off the streets. We have done that in the case of William Graves. He has been isolated from the possibility of committing further crimes. To those of you who proclaim that he should be made to pay for his crime, I say this: The very idea that anything could be considered sufficient or even partial payment for what he did is obscene.”

Bobbie’s story won a Pulitzer Prize. When it was submitted, it included a part four, the part about the sniper incident. She is still conferring with Harlan and Gloria about the book and movie rights. The offers are significant.

Doctor Donna Brodigan did not get a ride in the sidecar.

Harlan did not get a ride in the Nash Metropolitan…at least, he has not yet.

After the plea was entered for Graves, the State released the whisky barrel, the one from Cooper’s cellar, to the distillery. They, in turn, provided it to the bidder. The eleventh barrel was destroyed, to Deanna’s dismay.

The Trappist Monks continue to offer hospitality to Cooper. The charges against him were not prosecuted.

The Aldergast Distillery and Restaurant are prospering. They now sell a line of pork products—ham, bacon, and lard.

Harlan Stone is in the final stages of planning his first truly illegal undertaking. He has decided that the mineshaft provides a perfect setting for distilling his own moonshine.

Major sections of Kentucky, well south and west of the center of the state, are wilderness. The two lakes, Kentucky and Barclay, which were created by the TVA, are a major recreational area and attract a flood of visitors through the spring, summer and fall. In winter, the area is isolated and desolate. It is miles to any significant population centers. There is some bottom-land farming. There is still some coal being mined. There are miles and miles of countryside empty of people and nearly empty of the signs of people.

During spring break, a young couple from SIU in Carbondale, Illinois, sneaked away for three days of togetherness at one of the few year-round motels in the Land Between The Lakes area, at less than half the seasonal rate. During one of their breaks from the otherwise non-stop togetherness, they drove, then walked out in the woods. In a small clearing, far removed from the main road, they came across the partially burned remains of an old hunting cabin. There was a pickup truck parked next to it. They looked through the window opening on the front of the cabin and saw enough to think there was a dead person inside. They left the woods quickly, drove back to the motel, and phoned the State Police. After making their statements and being assured there would be no need for follow-up, they left the area. Both were supposed to be somewhere other than together in a motel during spring break.

The State Police processed the license on the pickup truck, finding it listed as the vehicle of someone with an outstanding warrant, in Kentucky.

Phone calls came in to Harlan and Gloria from three different people, almost simultaneously. Shelby Logan called first. Bobbie called within an hour of the first phone call. Jack Lutz called later that same day, and all three carried the same news.

Calvin Fuller had been found.

“I insist,” Fritz said.

“I don’t like it up there,” Gloria replied.

“Well, then, humor me,” Fritz pleaded. “I promise you’ve never smelled the place like it’ll be smelling this morning. Please. We’ll just pull it out, see if it needs to be draped with foil, then put it back. It won’t take a second.”

Fritz was trying to organize what he was calling a safari to the other kitchen to check on the turducken. He was proud of it, proud of how it looked almost more than how it would taste. He had exercised his suturing abilities to the maximum when he put the boneless amalgamation together. He stuffed both of the legs and sewed them up so that they looked like typical drumsticks. He had even done the wings, something most people don’t bother with.

Harlan was at the sink, peeling potatoes and dropping them in a pot of water. It was a task he didn’t mind doing as long as he wasn’t rushed. Gloria was at the computer, checking on email and watching the TV screen simultaneously.

“Email from Craig. They were pulling out at five-thirty. When’ll that put them here?”

“Probably nine, not later than nine-thirty,” Harlan responded over his shoulder.

“From Cincinnati,” Fritz commented. “That’s fast.”

“Time zone,” Harlan said. “They’re Eastern, we’re Central.”

Bobbie hadn’t appeared. Fritz had walked a cup of coffee back to the bedroom for her. She was still in the shower. Gloria and Harlan had been, as promised, up before the guests. Harlan started the coffee, then signed on and printed out his crossword puzzle. Gloria squeezed a pitcher of orange juice, then took her position at the computer. Somehow, one computer had never caused a conflict for them. Separate kitchens, separate bathrooms, yes. Gloria even had a thing about her car—she didn’t want Harlan to drive it. But one computer served them just fine.

Harlan took a break from potato duty and put a one-pound slab of hickory-smoked bacon in a skillet, setting the heat to low. Then he returned to the potatoes. They would cook and mash nearly ten pounds. Leftover mashed potatoes were considered almost a delicacy in the Stone household.

Bobbie came into the room carrying her empty coffee cup. Her hair was fluffed from being towel-dried. Her glasses were in her pocket, and she wore no makeup.

“My God, you are a vision,” Fritz said, smiling.

“Why, thanks,” Bobbie said, coloring sufficiently to put the cosmetics industry out of business. She refilled her coffee cup. “Morning, Harlan,” she said.

“Bobbie.”

“Is there a paper anywhere?”

“You’ll have to use the computer,” Gloria called over her shoulder. “We stopped taking a paper paper. Pain in the butt to get it in the morning. Pain in the butt to get it stopped when we’re out of town. Pain in the butt to bundle them up for recycle.”

“And if you don’t have a bird cage or wrap a lot of fish,” Fritz added, “what good is it?”

“You forgot housebreaking,” Harlan said.

“Am I being attacked here?” Bobbie asked. Everyone was smiling.

“Here, I’m done,” Gloria said. “What do you want, Courier-Journal, New York Times?”

“Courier-Journal,” Bobbie said, carrying her coffee over to the computer station. Gloria punched it up and slipped out of the chair. Bobbie sat and started scrolling. The aroma of the bacon was creeping into the room.

“That smells so good,” Fritz finally said, breaking the silence.

“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “So, are we going on this safari before or after breakfast?” Fritz had told her about his plan before they got out of bed.

“Two likely schools of thought on that,” Harlan said. “A safari would put a real edge on the appetite. On the other hand, mine doesn’t really need an additional edge.”

“I vote for the second,” Bobbie called over her shoulder.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Gloria grumped. She knew that she would go up to the kitchen with them, and she really did not like it—not the kitchen, especially not the mine shaft. Even with the panel closed, it disturbed her.

Harlan stopped doing potatoes and turned the heat up under the bacon.

“Plain old scrambled okay with everybody?” he asked. He got a chorus of yeses.

Breakfast, then, was orange juice, salt-rising toast, bacon, and scrambled eggs. They sat at the kitchen table and ate heartily. It was a harvest-style table, with a long leaf hinged down each side. Usually it had both leaves collapsed. For supper and the morning meal, one of the leaves was extended. For the big meal later, both leaves would be up and in use. It could easily seat eight, and there would be only six of them.

After breakfast, Bobbie stepped out on the porch and walked to the down slope end, facing across the small valley. The sun was just beginning to show, and there was some ground mist, not too heavy. She lit her cigarette and shivered. She had misjudged the temperature, and the cold was biting quickly through her sweater. She finished her smoke quickly and beat a hasty retreat to the house.

“Whew,” she said, “that is way more than sweater weather out there.”

Harlan had cleared the table. Gloria was loading the dish washer. Fritz was standing at the windows, enjoying the same view Bobbie had from out on the porch.

“I’m getting a jacket before we make the trek,” she continued.

“Are we ready to do it?” Fritz asked cheerily.

“Gloria?” Harlan asked.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she grumped, and started putting on her coat, which hung with Harlan’s, next to the door. Harlan followed suit. Bobbie returned from down the hall, wearing her jacket and carrying one for Fritz.

“Okay,” Bobbie said, then started singing, “Oh, turducken we will go, turducken we will go . . .”

Harlan followed last and closed the door. They all headed for the other kitchen.

“Where the hell did you get the recipe for that thing?” Gloria asked. “Did you make it up?”

“No, I heard it on public radio,” Fritz answered. “I think it was Paul Prudhomme, actually. Part of some virtual feast thing they run every holiday.”

“You ever do it before?” Gloria continued. She had to keep up the chatter to avoid thinking about the kitchen and the mine shaft.

“Nope,” Fritz said. “first time.”

“Well, how do you know it’ll be any good?” Gloria asked. She was not really a cook and meant the question.

“I don’t know,” Fritz said. “You can just tell when you read it. You just know.”

Gloria, who experienced ‘just knowing’ whenever she was looking at the report of a murder or some other crime, still rejected it in this explanation. She would not find the parallel on her own and if Harlan, characteristically, pointed it out to her, she would reject it. They reached the side porch of the kitchen, and Fritz was bending over to pick up the stock pot and take it inside. Bobbie opened the door to the kitchen and was feeling around for the light switch. Gloria was hanging back, wanting to be last in and first out, as soon as the ceremony took place.

The first bullet smacked into the log side of the kitchen with a loud, dull thock. An instant after that, the sound of the shot cracked through the air. Harlan and Fritz froze for a second. Gloria turned toward the sound of the gunshot. She saw the shape of a person slipping and stumbling down the steep embankment that separated the driveway from the house. The shape was carrying a gun and fired again, from the hip. Gloria saw the muzzle flash, and they all heard the report. The bullet went somewhere.

Simultaneously, Gloria said, “What the hell?” Fritz said, “Jesus Christ!” Harlan said, “Get inside!”

They scrambled inside, and Harlan went straight to the ADT alarm pad and hit the POLICE button. It beeped, but no shrieking alarms went off. That was the way it was programmed. Harlan reasoned that if they ever needed it, shrieking alarms in the middle of the woods would not have the same effect as in an urban or suburban setting.

“What is it?” Bobbie said.

“Fuller, I think,” Harlan said. He went to the back wall and pushed the secret panel open. He grabbed two flashlights from the shelf, handed one to Fritz, and pushed him inside. He turned to Bobbie and Gloria.

“I am not going down in that goddamn coal mine, I don’t care . . .” Gloria’s protest was interrupted by the glass in one of the door panes shattering, followed instantly by the larger sound of one of the front windows exploding, both the work of the same bullet. Bobbie grabbed Gloria and lifted her off the floor, and they went straight into the mine shaft entrance. Harlan eased the panel back into place from the inside, made sure it latched, then followed the other three. Fritz had the flashlight trained on the floor so they could see their footing. Harlan turned his on.

“I think we need to get down the shaft,” he whispered, “far enough to be below floor level.”

Fritz turned and started shuffling down the incline. Bobbie, with Gloria still in tow, followed. Harlan closed in behind them. When they were far enough, Harlan whispered a halt. They all stopped and turned and stared back up the shaft toward the panel, even though they couldn’t see it.

“Is there another way out of here?” Fritz whispered.

“Not really,” Harlan whispered back.

“What happens now?” Fritz asked.

“I hit the panic button that goes straight to the police,” Harlan said. “We have half-expected this. That’s why Jack, the guy we know, has been dropping by every day. So, they’ll get here, I don’t know how long. We just wait.”

“God, I hope they’re careful,” Fritz said.

They waited in silence. They heard, faintly, another gun shot. Then they heard the door into the kitchen from outside slam open and a muffled voice yell, then stop.

“Just now, I’m thinking I’m real glad I didn’t write about the secret panel,” Bobbie whispered. No one responded.

“I really do think we’re all right,” Harlan whispered. “I’ve checked and double-checked, and I don’t think anyone can tell that the door is there. All we have to do is wait, try to relax.”

Gloria harumphed, the first sound she had made since entering the mine.

“In fact, if I had an opener,” Harlan continued, “I might even have a beer.”

“Swiss Army knife do?” Bobbie whispered.

“I knew I wanted to bring you home with us,” Harlan said.

<<<   >>>

The sniper was puzzled, couldn’t figure out where they had gone. There was no back door to the place. But they had to be outside somewhere. No point hanging around inside when they weren’t there. Must have gone out through the blown out front window. Must be running in the woods somewhere. Need to get outside and listen.

The sniper stepped back out the door and dropped off the porch to circle around the front of the building. Had to reload while there was time. Reached into the pocket of the anorak and fed cartridges into the magazine, all the time listening intently for the sound of thrashing in the woods. It was a puzzle. These people couldn’t be experienced in stalking and outdoors skills. They had to be hiding, not running. All the better. And, they’ll probably try to get back to the house. Patience. That’s all it would take. Been patient for years, a little more patience wouldn’t take much. Then it would all be fine, just fine. Take care of these vermin, these know-nothings who come in and wreck everything. They wreck other people’s lives, they pay. It’s only right. Everybody knows that. Patience. Patience.

<<<   >>>

The alarm signal went to the ADT monitoring facility and instantly transferred to police dispatch. The dispatcher did two things at once. She punched in the code that would signal Jack Lutz and typed out a message that went instantly to the front seat computers on all the patrol cars in the area. Then she triggered her mike and sent the same message out in voice, in case someone was drowsing or out of the car for some reason.

“We have a code seven at the residence of Harlan Stone. A code seven. Highway Sixty-four, two point five miles from the intersection with Booneville Highway, north side of the road. Private driveway, unmarked.”

“Dispatch, this is twenty-four. I am en route, ten miles from the location. ETA about seven minutes.”

It took Jack Lutz less then three minutes from the time he heard the signal until he was on the highway, foot to the floor. He was home, lounging around the den, enjoying his coffee. His wife was still asleep. They had no kids at home. When he heard the signal sent out by dispatch, he grabbed his firearm, his radio, and a jacket and jumped into his pickup.

“Daryl,” he said into the mike, “this is Jack Lutz. I’m going to be about ten minutes behind you. Do you know the layout of the place?”

“Not really,” the reply came back.

“Damn,” he said, then keyed his mike. “Look, Daryl, this is not some minor incident. We have been watching for this. There may be some real trouble over there, real trouble.”

“I hear you,” Daryl replied. The sound of his racing engine was audible through the radio. “What do you want me to do?”

“Approach without noise,” Jack said. “The driveway has a gate about a hundred feet in. It looks like it’s locked, but it’s not. You just have to flip the latch. Stop before you go around the bend after the gate. Ease out and very carefully take a look, see if you can see anything.”

“Ten-four,” Daryl replied. There was no radio traffic for a minute.

“Jack, this is dispatch, over.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you want the State cars responding to this?”

“If they’re in the area, absolutely.”

“Ten-four.”

Time seemed to crawl by for both Daryl and Jack, even though both were hitting speeds above ninety at times. The roads were virtually empty at this time on a Thanksgiving morning. The only thing slowing the two deputies down was the nature of some of the roads they had to use, two lane, curving, hilly and narrow. Twice, Jack’s pickup topped a small hill and left the ground completely.

“Jack, this is Daryl,” the call came back. “I’m here and there’s a car right by the gate, blocking the driveway. It’s a blue Chevy sedan, four-door. Kentucky plate, Hardin County, WMB five four nine. The driver’s door is open.”

“Daryl, you be real careful,” Jack responded. “I’m almost there.”

“I’m walking up to it now,” Daryl came back after a moment. “Keys are still in the ignition, and the hood is still warm.”

“Dispatch, are you running that plate?” Jack said into the radio.

“Already running,” dispatch replied.

“Daryl, you have to stay low. Don’t try to move any farther in,” Jack said.

“Ten-four,” Daryl said. The urgency in Jack’s voice was making him jumpy. He checked his holster and slipped the leather tie down from his weapon. He plugged an ear piece into the radio so he could continue to monitor without having it heard. He slipped the latch on the gate and eased it open. Then he waited.

Once Jack was on the straightaway, the last two miles of open highway before Harlan’s driveway, he leaned across and opened the glove box. Watching the road, he felt around and came out with a box of cartridges for the hunting rifles he carried in a rack just behind his head. He opened the box and dumped the contents into his jacket pocket. Then he fumbled with his key chain, removing the key to the gun rack from it. He was at the driveway just as the key came loose. He pulled in, quietly, and stopped behind Daryl’s patrol car. When he saw Daryl, just inside the gate and apparently okay, he felt a flood of relief.

He slid out of the truck and turned to unlock the gun rack. Grabbing his deer rifle, he opened the bolt to jam cartridges into the magazine as he walked toward Daryl. His service piece, a Glock, was in his pocket.

“Jesus, am I glad to see you,” Daryl whispered.

“Likewise,” Jack said. “Have you seen anything or heard anything?”

“Nothing,” Daryl answered. “I stayed put when you told me.”

“Good,” Jack said. “Down here a bit, there’s a spot where we can get up over this rise and get a good view down the slope. Let’s go.”

They moved down the driveway, watching and listening as they went. They got to the spot Jack had mentioned and saw signs, disturbed leaves, and a clear indication that someone had already climbed in the same place, recently.

“Oh, shit,” Jack muttered through gritted teeth. “You stay down, on the driveway, and cover my back. I’ll go over the top and look. And get your goddamned weapon out.”

Daryl scrambled to comply.

“Just don’t shoot me in the back.”

Jack climbed the incline and eased over the top. Then he crawled forward until he could see the house and garage below and the separate kitchen building. He wasn’t sure what to expect. For all he knew, he might stumble into someone at any moment. He felt with his finger to make sure the safety was off on the rifle.

There was a strange car on the apron in front of the garage. It had been there all night, Jack could tell, by the rime frost on the roof and back window. He scanned the area and saw no signs of activity. He gave himself a good two minutes of silent, still observation, and still saw nothing. He pulled his radio from his pocket.

“Daryl,” he said softly into the radio, “you hear me?”

“Go ahead,” the reply came back.

“I want you to walk on around the corner of the driveway and start down toward the house. Do it very slowly, very carefully, and be ready to hit the ground. Clear?”

“Clear,” came back.

Jack continued to watch the house and grounds, watching for any sign of movement. When Daryl had advanced far enough down the driveway, Jack could see him out of the corner of his eye. His attention never left the scene below.

It happened fast. A shape appeared from around the front of the outbuilding. It was carrying some sort of gun, a long-barreled rifle. Jack could tell that the person down there was looking up the driveway, straight at Daryl. The rifle stayed at the hip, and a stream of curses poured from the sniper’s mouth.

Jack yelled “Get down,” at the same time as the rifle down there cracked off a shot. Jack glanced in Daryl’s direction. He was down, but he couldn’t tell if he was hit. That would be either a very skilled or a very lucky shot, from the hip at that distance.

Jack wormed closer into the ground, sighted on the sniper, and called out.

“This is the police. Drop your weapon immediately.”

The sniper took a moment to follow the direction of the sound, to discover that it wasn’t coming from the driveway. Slowly, the sniper turned in Jack’s direction.

“Drop your weapon now,” Jack yelled again.

The sniper fired again, still from the hip, in Jack’s general direction. That was the signal. No more warnings. No more yelling. Jack sighted in on the center of the shape and pulled the trigger.

The impact of the bullet knocked the sniper backward, arms flying outward and rifle spinning off to the ground. Jack chambered another round and waited to see if it would be needed. The sniper was still standing. Jack wasn’t emotional, he wasn’t angry. He felt nothing, at the moment, for the person in his sights. He was thinking only about his safety, Daryl’s safety and the safety of the people who lived here. When the sniper did not go down, did not move, Jack pulled the trigger again. This time, the sniper tumbled backward and fell.

Jack was up immediately, racing down the incline. As he approached the downed figure, he was checking for hands. Both were in view, and neither held a weapon. With his rifle still pointed dead center on the prone figure, he moved close to check for signs of life. The eyes were half open and fixed. There was no sign of breathing, no mist escaping from the lips in the cold morning air. He heard a sound off to his left and whirled. Daryl was limping down the driveway. His face was ashen, and there was a blood stain growing on his slacks, right next to the left pocket.

He looked back at the downed sniper, to make sure nothing was stirring, then keyed his radio.

“Dispatch, this is Jack. We need an ambulance. Daryl got winged. I want backup here as soon as possible. Tell whoever is first arriving to walk to the front of the line and drive the vehicles on in. Right now the driveway’s a road block.”

“Ten four. Is Daryl okay?”

“He’s okay. He needs some attention, though.”

“What about the residents.”

“Going to check that now. Did I mention we need the medical examiner?”

“No. I’ll get to him, too.”

Jack turned to Daryl. “Are you hit bad?”

“Don’t think so. I hear if you’re hit bad, it doesn’t hurt. This son of a bitch is killing me.”

Jack almost smiled.

“Stay here and watch this body. Make sure it continues to be a body. I have to find the Stones.”

Jack went to the house first, walked in the kitchen door carefully, then went through the whole house quickly. Finding nothing, he came out and headed for the kitchen. As he got there, he saw the shattered windows and stepped in with profound misgivings. He scanned the room. He was relieved to see no bodies and no signs of blood. He walked over and looked out through the shattered window. Nothing below the window that looked like a body. He turned back into the room. He walked over to the door and saw the first of the road block vehicles coming down the driveway. Good. He stayed in the kitchen. Part of his brain was beginning to register the delicious aroma.

It came to him in a flash. He knew about the coal mine Harlan used, knew it opened into the kitchen. It wasn’t too hard, knowing that, to figure the entrance was on the back wall. He checked in the half bath, then in the utility room. He noticed that they weren’t deep enough to account for the entire breadth of the wall, so he came back out and started tapping along the center of the wall.

The foursome heard the tapping, and huddled closer. They killed the flashlights, throwing the tunnel into pitch blackness.

“The only way we’ll have a chance,” Fritz whispered, “is to be right at the door, if it opens.”

He and Harlan, each carrying a full beer bottle by the neck, crept back up the incline to position themselves at the entrance. The tapping continued, seeming to center on the secret panel. Then it stopped. Harlan and Fritz froze in position. They almost screamed, both of them, when Jack hollered through the wall.

Jack cupped his hands and held them against the middle of the panel, between two shelves, and yelled.

“Harlan. Harlan Stone. It’s me. Jack Lutz.”

The panel started to move as Harlan released the latch from inside. Jack backed away and raised his rifle to his hip. The panel opened all the way and revealed the two men with upraised beer bottles. When their eyes started to overcome the extreme brightness, they beheld a figure holding a rifle pointed at them. It was touch and go, for a second. Then Jack spoke. “My God, are you okay? Is anybody hurt?”

Harlan lowered his beer bottle and reached up to turn on the light string in the mine shaft. Jack lowered his rifle and walked forward.

“We’re all okay,” Harlan said. “Is he gone?”

“Gone, I mean, dead. Did you see more than one?”

“Nope, just the one,” Harlan answered. He turned back toward the shaft. “You can come up now. I think it’s over.”

Bobbie and Gloria emerged from the shaft, each carrying an open beer bottle. Gloria looked at Jack and smiled. Bobbie stepped over and held out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Bobbie Fisher,” she said. “are you the cavalry?”

“I guess,” Jack said and smiled a little. “If you all are okay, I need to get back outside. This place is going to be filling up with people in pretty short order.”

“I’ll go make more coffee,” Gloria said.

“I’ll go with you,” Bobbie chimed in. “Is the jug still in the freezer?”

“Not for long,” Gloria said.

“Anybody want to take a peek at the turducken before you go?” Fritz asked. It earned him a short, baleful stare from Gloria and a snicker from Bobbie.

Fritz, who was accustomed to the aftermath of violence, turned to check on Harlan. He was inspecting the shattered windows. He turned to Fritz.

“Well, Gloria’s been into the mine shaft,” he said and smiled.

Fritz checked on the entrée in the oven, draped it with a sheet of foil, and got the stockpot on the stove and heating. Then he and Harlan headed for the house. On the way past the growing group of police officers, gathered around the body of the sniper, he called out to Jack Lutz.

“We’ll be at the house. Gloria’s making coffee, enough for everyone,” he said.

Most of the busy activity centered outside. The great room provided a peaceful retreat. Gloria and Bobbie had, indeed, retrieved the jug from the freezer.

“I’d say this is a little more serious than snake bite,” Bobbie said, then took a sip.

“Going into that mine shaft is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” Gloria said, and took her turn at the bottle. Bobbie looked at her, round-eyed and slack-jawed.

“Gloria, honey, you were just shot at,” Bobbie said.

“Oh, that. He missed, didn’t he. But that mine shaft, I don’t think I’ll ever get over that.”

Gloria’s body did a complete, involuntary shiver, then she took another drink from the jug.

Harlan and Fritz were sitting in the great room. The TV was on, but there wasn’t any mention, yet, of the incident they had just lived through. Jack and two other officers had been in and out, checking on them and asking a few questions. Harlan mentioned that there was a bathroom up in the kitchen if anybody needed one. Harlan was thinking about getting some plastic sheeting out of the garage and covering the place where the shattered window had been. He decided to wait until things died down a little. His cell phone chirped. He looked at the Caller ID.

“It’s Craig,” he said and flipped the phone open.

“What’s going on?” Craig yelled into the phone. “Are you guys okay?”

“Everybody’s fine,” Harlan said. “Nobody hurt. Where are you?”

“I’m at the top of the driveway. They won’t let me in.”

“Hang on, I’ll get somebody to get you through.”

Harlan walked to the door, spotted Jack Lutz, and called out to him.

“Jack, my son’s at the top of the driveway. Can someone let him through?”

Jack waved and Harlan told Craig it would be a second.

<<<   >>>

Craig and his new lady had settled in, Craig explaining to her that it was always like this around here. He halfway meant it. Fritz had the turducken out of the oven and sitting on top of the stove, staying warm. The body had been removed, and a tow truck was preparing to tow the blue Chevy out of the driveway. Bobbie and Gloria were more than slightly tipsy and intended to stay that way for the duration. They were all sitting by the fireplace when Jack Lutz came in, his notebook open.

“Does that about wrap it up?” Harlan asked him.

“Yes, it does. We got the identity on the shooter.”

“Calvin Fuller,” Harlan said.

“Well, no,” Jack said. “That’s right! You never came out and looked at the body. We checked the car registration and found the driver’s license in her purse.”

“Her?” Harlan asked, sitting up.

“Purse?” Gloria said at the same time.

“That’s right,” Jack said, checking his notebook. “The sniper was one Agnes Morehouse.”

“Holy shit,” Bobbie said slowly. All eyes turned to her. “She was Congressman Graves’s office manager in Elizabethtown, been with him ever since his first term. She was under subpoena by the Grand Jury that’s investigating the possible ties between Graves and old Tom Aldergast. Wow.”

“So, it ties in—I mean, it makes sense that she would be, well, gunning for you?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, I guess it does,” Gloria said.

“In fact,” Bobbie said, “it makes perfect sense, if anything like this ever can, I mean. I have no doubt that she was the primary link between Graves and old Mr. Tom. She was working for Tom when Graves won his first election. Now, she was out of a job and about to be grilled about past activities I don’t even want to imagine.”

“Well, she doesn’t have to worry about that now,” Jack said, closing his notebook.

“There’s only one problem,” Harlan said. Everyone looked at him. “Where’s Fuller?”

“What the hell is a turducken?” Gloria yelled from one of the bedrooms. She was putting out fresh towels and making sure the rooms were ready for company. Fritz had called to inform them that he was bringing a culinary triumph for their Thanksgiving meal. He instructed Harlan to have his oven ready to go when he and Bobbie arrived, a slow oven in which the turducken would be roasting all night.

“I don’t know,” Harlan called back. “Check on Google if you can’t stand the suspense.”

The weeks since Bobbie had run the story on the mystery motorcycle couple had not been as bad as Harlan and Gloria had thought they would be. The answering machine had filled up with a mix of polite and not-so-polite requests for interviews from the local stations in nearby Evansville. Harlan had taken the task of returning the calls and declining the opportunities. Gloria had, tongue-in-cheek, noted that she, perhaps, was not the one most suitable for interacting with the media.

Harlan’s sister, Ann, called and passed along an offer from her friend Deanna. She said that Deanna would be honored to take on the job of publicist for them and take over the burden of dealing with all of the media inquiries. Harlan allowed as how it didn’t seem like a good use of funds to pay someone to say no. He thought he could handle that pretty well himself. Ann agreed.

The gate Harlan installed at the top of the driveway from the road was working out well. He had located it a hundred feet or so from the highway, so it was not in plain view. It spanned the black top at a point where steep banks and trees came right down to the road surface. As a result, they did hear the occasional vehicle having to reverse out of the driveway. The gate had a latch, not a lock, but it looked like a lock. Invited visitors or those who knew they were welcome easily opened the gate and drove in. Jack Lutz, from the sheriff’s office, was a daily visitor. He told Harlan that he would be visiting until there was some word on Calvin Fuller.

On today’s visit, Jack brought two entire tenderloins of venison, wrapped and frozen.

“This time of year,” he explained to Harlan, “every one of us carries a tarp, a knife, and the gear to dress out a deer. Call comes in about a car hitting a deer, the race is on. Luck of the draw, I’ve been on the spot four times this season, and three times it was a doe and two of those were still living. I had to put them down. We all help each other out, cover for the time spent on the deer, share the meat around. Anyway, these are two tenderloins from does, sweetest meat in the world. Don’t mess around with soaks or marinades. Just cook it up like a piece of prime roast beef. Maybe drape a little bacon across the top.”

Harlan thanked Lutz and gave him a case of ‘two-bottle-stupid’ for his Thanksgiving feast. Lutz had just solved the ‘what’s for dinner?’ problem. Christmas Eve was always Chinese carryout. Thanksgiving eve did not have a tradition for the Stones. Harlan had given some thought to going into town for Chinese. Now he didn’t have to.

The coverage on Congressman Graves had ebbed. Only the Fox news cable continued to milk the story, mostly with lurid tales of sexual misconduct in the hallowed halls of Congress. They ran segments with obscured faces and distorted voice interviews with former interns claiming to be in fear of retribution. Even those stories had started to ebb. Harlan and Gloria didn’t notice. Fox was not one of their primary sources.

Bobbie and Fritz were due to arrive sometime in the afternoon. Bobbie was certain she remembered how to get to the spot on the highway where Harlan’s driveway began. Harlan had explained to her the operation of the gate. Craig, Harlan and Gloria’s son, was driving in Thanksgiving morning. He did have a new woman in his life, and they had reached a compromise with her family: Wednesday evening with them and Thursday morning in Newburgh. Craig suspected that his parents’ celebrity status helped with the compromise. He promised autographed pictures.

Fall weather was moving in for the holiday weekend. Lows overnight would be in the twenties and highs Thanksgiving Day would be in the low forties. The leaves had dropped. Actually, they had been hammered down by a driving rain the past weekend. Harlan swept and mulched the accumulation of leaves on the driveway and around the house. The rest he left to nature.

They had decided that they wouldn’t be traveling any more that season, so Harlan had gone ahead and winterized the RV, running the grain alcohol solution through the pipes after multiple flushing on the gray water and black water systems. The RV’s hard stand was on the east side of the house, protected from the weather, most of which came in from the west. The leveling jacks were in place, taking some of the pressure off the tires. The schedule for starting and running the engine was already posted in the kitchen.

Harlan walked up to his kitchen. He was baking salt-rising bread for use tonight and tomorrow morning. He had four loaf pans sitting at the back of the stove, filled with expanding dough. The awful smell the salt-rising bread causes happens in the early stages of the making, when the potato water really begins to ferment. At the final point, there is no bad smell and, when it was in the oven, the wonderful smell of baking bread would take over. He checked under the damp linen towel and found the dough ready to bake. Turning on the oven, he put some water on the stove to boil.

While the heat was building up in the oven, he opened the secret passage and put two cases of beer out on the kitchen floor. After resealing the passage, he took the cases out onto the porch next to the door. The outside air would chill them nicely, and the alcohol content would protect them from freezing overnight.

Back at the stove, he carefully removed the towels from the loaf pans and set them at the front edge, ready to go into the oven. He used a large metal ladle to dip boiling water into a shallow pan at the bottom of the oven, then quickly put all four loaves in to bake. The steam would give the bread an extra-crisp top crust. He closed the oven and set the timer, the one he carried on the hammer loop of his overalls when he was cooking. He had learned that a timer is useful only if you and the timer are in the same place when it goes off. Clipping it to his overalls was the solution, once he figured out that staying in the same place was rarely likely to happen.

When Fritz announced that he was bringing the main course, a turducken, Harlan agreed that he and Gloria would be responsible for all of the rest of the meal. Gloria had pies in the oven all afternoon—mince and pumpkin. Everything else would be prepared tomorrow morning, after breakfast. Fritz promised that the turducken would generate ample pan juices for a bounty of gravy, calling for a bounty of potatoes. The stuffing was somehow already incorporated in the turducken thing.

Just in case they were in the mood for it, Harlan set up the big fire pot just below the porch toward the down slope side of the house. He brought out chairs, set up the big pot, and loaded it with firewood. He had no doubt that they would use it at some point during the long weekend. Bobbie and Fritz were planning to stay until Sunday afternoon. He was back at the kitchen, about to go inside, when he heard a car approaching.

Harlan guessed he was subconsciously expecting Fritz and Bobbie to drive in her Metropolitan. Instead, he saw a late model van—a Voyager or Caravan or something. He stopped on the path and watched carefully as the car approached. Then he saw Fritz’s face through the window and then Bobbie’s. He checked the timer on the hammer loop  and determined that he had enough time. He picked up an opener from the porch rail, grabbed three bottles of beer in the fingers of one hand, and headed across to the apron where they were stopping, in front of the garage.

Bobbie and Fritz were both out of the car when he got there, stretching legs and shaking arms. Gloria came out the side door of the house and walked along the porch to the front. Everyone met at about the same time.

“Well, there you are, and welcome,” Gloria said. She stepped off the porch and walked toward the van. “What’re you doing with a soccer mom car?”

“Fritz’s idea,” Bobbie answered. “Says he likes them. They do drive well, I have to admit.”

Harlan popped the tops off the beer and handed them to Fritz and Bobbie.

“Thanks,” Fritz said. “You do run a great welcoming party.” He took a big swig of the beer.

“What do you need help with?” Harlan asked.

“The guest of honor,” Fritz said, smiling. He opened the sliding door and disclosed a large block of Styrofoam, larger than any standard cooler.

“Yeah,” Bobbie said, “that’s why we’re a little late. Dr. Kaplan had to put the finishing touches on his work of art. Then we had to lug it out through the carriage house to the alley and load it. I thought sure we were going to get nailed by the traffic, but it wasn’t bad.”

“What kind of cooler is that?” Gloria asked, walking closer to look.

“You don’t want to ask,” Fritz said. Gloria stopped short and looked at him. He just smiled. “Have to keep that baby cool until it goes in the oven.”

“If it’s in a body bag, I don’t even want to hear about it,” Gloria snapped, then backed away from the van.

The timer on Harlan’s overalls began to beep.

“You have a pager?” Fritz asked.

“No, it’s my bread paging me,” Harlan answered. “I have to get it out of the oven. Want me to grab one end of the cooler and we’ll take it up now?”

The foam box had handles and was more bulky than heavy. Harlan and Fritz carried it easily and set it on the porch next to the beer. Bobbie and Gloria took the luggage out of the van and into the house.

“So, this is the kitchen,” Fritz said. He walked around, checking things out while Harlan pulled the loaf pans from the oven. “Bobbie said the coal mine entrance is back here. Right?”

“That woman can’t keep a secret,” Harlan said, pretending to be miffed. “Guess that’s why she’s a reporter.” He closed the oven. “When do you want to start cooking the turducken?”

“As late as possible,” Fritz said. “It needs about thirteen hours, so if we put it in at ten, we can pull it at eleven tomorrow. Gives us plenty of time to work on gravy and stuff.”

“Sounds like we’ll eat at one,” Harlan said. “That works. Craig and his lady will probably be here by ten.”

“Coming in from . . .?”

“Cincinnati,” Harlan supplied. “He’s in banking in Cincinnati.”

Harlan was tipping the loaves out of the pans and setting them on racks to cool. They were a deep golden color, and the crust was beginning to crackle as the loaves cooled. Fritz stood beside Harlan and studied the bread. “What is it?” he asked.

“Salt-rising bread,” Harlan answered. “Best bread in the world, I think. Especially toasted for breakfast. It has flavor that plain old sourdough could never achieve.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Fermented potato water,” Harlan said.

“Aha,” Fritz, who knew his biochemistry, said. “That’s why you got kicked out of the house.”

“It was the straw, so to speak,” Harlan admitted. “You want to see the mine shaft?”

“I do, I do,” Fritz answered. “I have to see if it’s as eerie as Bobbie describes it.”

Harlan released the panel and pushed it inward, then stepped through and flipped on the light string. Fritz stepped in behind him.

“Yep. Exactly as eerie as Bobbie said,” he commented, staring down the shaft to where the lights ended. “And you’ve been how far into it?”

“The first time we checked it out,” Harlan said, “we went quite a ways in, down far enough to get into some water. That was with my son and a couple of his friends. They seem to know their way around in the mines pretty well. Youthful activity about which Gloria and I knew nothing.”

Fritz ventured down the shaft about half the length of the lighted section, then returned.“Okay,” he said, smiling. “I did it.”

“Gloria thinks I should install a forged iron gate down there, to keep the . . . well I’m not sure what. Anyway, to keep whatever out. She can’t accept the logic that there ain’t nothing going to be coming from that direction.”

They stepped back into the kitchen, and Harlan eased the panel closed.

“Let me grab a couple of these loaves, and we can head down to the house,” Harlan said.

“Do you have a big stockpot up here?” Fritz asked.

“Think so,” Harlan said and pulled one from a cabinet. “Is this big enough?”

“Perfect,” Fritz said. “I’d like to get the stock going now, if that’s okay. I have a huge sack full of bones.”

“I’ll fill the pot, you get the bones,” Harlan said.

Fritz opened the large cooler and retrieved a clear plastic bag that contained all of the bones from the three birds that were the turducken.

“See,” he said to Harlan, “no body bags, just good old, store-bought storage bags.”

Once the stockpot was squared away, the two men washed their hands, grabbed the bread, and headed for the house.

“When we put the turducken in to roast tonight, I’ll set the stockpot out on the porch, if that works for you.”

“Absolutely,” Harlan said. “I am a proponent of natural refrigeration.”

<<<   >>>

Bobbie and Gloria hauled the personal bags in through the side door. Gloria set her share in the entranceway to the hall.

“There’s four bedrooms down there. Nobody has dibs on any of them. You guys can use one or two, doesn’t matter. When Craig gets here, they’ll use only one. He never brings someone here unless the relationship has gone past the separate bedrooms stage.”

“Thanks. I’ll put the stuff away and be right back. You need any help with the kitchen?”

“Harlan got some venison today from the guy we know who works for the sheriff. I think he plans to get Fritz to help him cook it.”

“Sounds both easy and yummy,” Bobbie said, and disappeared down the hall with the luggage.

When Harlan and Fritz came in, the group gathered near the fireplace and settled in. Harlan went to the freezer and came back with a stoneware jug.

“Shelby Logan, the detective, brought us some moonshine, sort of in exchange for the beer I gave him,” Harlan explained. “The only way to drink it, I’ve found, is from a narrow-top jug and straight from the freezer.”

He took a swallow and passed the bottle to Bobbie. Bobbie just stared at it, then at Harlan.

“I think Fritz can confirm that germs don’t have a fighting chance against that stuff,” Harlan said.

“And don’t worry,” Gloria added, “take a small sip the first time. I think you’ll like it.”

Bobbie took her sip and passed the jug on to Fritz. The she sat back in her chair and swallowed. Her eyes widened and she smiled.

“Wow!” she whispered, “that is warm all the way down.”

“Knew you’d like it,” Gloria said.

“I’ll do supper in little while,” Harlan said, “with Fritz’s help. We got some venison tenderloin from a friend.”

“Venison?” Fritz asked. “How the hell do you get venison?”

“The way Jack tells it, this time of year, when all the deer are out roaming around and getting in front of cars, there’s a race any time a call comes into the police. First one there claims the deer and everyone helps out dressing it.”

“So you’re saying we’re having road kill for supper?” Bobbie asked.

“Jack said he had to shoot this one when he got there, so, no, technically it’s not road kill,” Harlan explained. “Besides, this is the only way to get doe meat. It’s illegal to hunt does.”

“You ever hunt, Harlan?” Fritz asked.

“Nope. Never did,” Harlan answered. “Gave the firearms my dad had to my little sister. Her husband hunts. We don’t have a gun in the house.”

“What the hell is a turducken?” Gloria asked out of the blue.

“Simple,” Fritz answered. “It’s a turkey, duck and chicken, all completely boned and left intact. Stuff the chicken with one kind of stuffing, plain old sage and onion. Then put the chicken inside the duck and add the cranberry and wild rice stuffing to the duck. Then put that inside the turkey with the sausage and corn bread stuffing. Pull it all together just right and it looks like a roast turkey. Cook it forever and, tomorrow, you’ll swear it’s just a golden roasted turkey. Then you’ll marvel as we take a long knife and slice it like a jelly roll.”

“You get all three meats and all three stuffings in one big piece,” Bobbie added. Gloria looked at her quizzically. “Fritz explained it on the drive over.”

“It’s all set to go,” Fritz added. “We can put it in right before bedtime, let it cook all night.”

The afternoon gave way to evening. The jug passed around a few times, then Harlan put it back in the freezer. He and Fritz prepared the venison roast simply and served it with game chips and a salad. The foursome loaded their plates in the kitchen and returned to eat by the fire. Gloria and Bobbie had jug red wine with the meal. Harlan and Fritz drank the beer. The weather channel played continuously in the corner of the room, the sound muted.

Later in the evening, Bobbie went to the bedroom and brought back a portfolio.

“This is the series of stories printed out on special paper,” she told the group. “I brought it for you two to have. There’s also a bunch of prints from the photo visit. There’s some really great shots we didn’t have room to use.”

“Well, thanks,” Harlan said, accepting the package.

“Harlan’s sister sent us a copy cut out of the paper and all folded up,” Gloria said. “We read the story on line and saved it to disk. This’ll be nice to have.”

When the yawns started, Harlan stood and signaled to Fritz. They walked up to the kitchen through the crisp, chilly air to get the turducken started. Bobbie and Gloria picked up the remaining bottles and glasses and stacked them in the kitchen.

“What time’s reveille around here?” Bobbie asked.

“Don’t take this as a challenge,” Gloria said. “Take it as a statement of fact. You’ll never be up before Harlan or me, so don’t worry about it. When you roll out, just wander on into the kitchen. There’ll be coffee, guaranteed.”

One of the many, many things that no one knew about Agnes Morehouse was that she had an astrologer she consulted regularly, had for the past fifteen years. She had always wondered about such things, particularly when it came out that Nancy Reagan had used an astrologer and her husband had listened to the advice. When the name and contact number of one of the ‘good’ ones had come across her desk, she kept it, then finally made contact. The guidance she received had been on the money, more often than not, and she never stopped going back for more.

Her advisor’s name was Christine, not some trumped-up, Gypsy-sounding thing. She lived on the West Coast, and Agnes had never met her, probably never would. She was the genuine article, Agnes thought, and when the charts had bad news to deliver, Christine didn’t pull the punches. The night before had been one of those bad news charts, all murky and foreboding without being able to pinpoint anything in particular. That was unusual, and both Agnes and Christine had said so.

“Honestly, Agnes,” she had said on the phone, “with charts like this, about the only guidance I can offer is stay in bed.”

Well that wasn’t going to be possible, Agnes thought as she shuffled into the kitchen to make the coffee. This was a busy day, and she had to be there. The boss was flying in from Washington, one of the ‘whisky’ flights, they called them—a private Beechcraft King Air belonging to one of the big distilleries. She had set up the car and driver to meet the flight, made sure the office was shipshape, reminded the staff about dressing well, and gone home, knowing everything was set. Then the call with Christine.

“Stay in bed,” Agnes muttered as she headed to the front porch to retrieve the paper. She opened the paper, a Courier-Journal, on the table in the breakfast nook and scanned the headlines while waiting for the coffee to finish. Nothing of particular note jumped out at her. When the coffee was ready, she stood, sipping from the large mug and reading the paper more closely. Still nothing to grab her attention. The brief attention from the media about that little tramp had blown over quickly, like those things always do. No worry there. She hadn’t heard a peep out of Fuller since their little encounter. That was good. There were no rumors touching on her or the boss floating around, not that she could detect. That was good.

At times like this, Agnes sincerely wished that Christine’s analyses had been wide of the mark more often than they had been. Then she would feel more comfortable brushing it off and getting on with the day. Well, comfortable or not, she had to get on with the day.

She was in the office by eight. The rest of the staff was there and working steadily by nine. At about half-past ten, Agnes saw the Lincoln TownCar drive past the front of the office and head for the parking lot in back. Agnes walked back and opened the door to the parking lot, then the back door to the Congressman’s office that opened off the corridor. She knew he preferred to go straight into his office and get squared away before he saw anybody.

The Congressman got out of his car and headed in the door. He nodded to Agnes. The driver got out and walked the Congressman’s carry-on and briefcase around the car and handed them to Agnes, then headed back to the car. He was pulling away when Agnes looked across the parking lot as she was going in the door, and saw a Kentucky State Police cruiser drive onto the lot. She thought nothing of it and closed the door behind her. She carried the bags to her office, where the boss would expect to find them if he needed anything.

She heard the front door of the office open and looked up to see Todd Grayson, someone she knew on sight, enter with two uniformed State Troopers behind him. He walked through the waist-high gate on the fence that separated the working office from the public area and approached the door to the boss’s office.

“What are you doing?” she sputtered as she hurried across the room to try to place herself between Grayson and the door.

“Is the Congressman in his office, Agnes?” Grayson asked, sounding formal.

The two Troopers were standing just behind and to either side of Grayson.

“He just arrived. He needs some time before he’s ready to see anyone,” Agnes announced. “Did you make an appointment?”

Grayson stepped around Agnes and knocked on the office door. The two Troopers stayed at Garyson’s sides as he did this, effectively blocking Agnes from any interference.

“Congressman Graves,” Grayson said loudly, “please open the door.”

Everything in the office came to a standstill. All eyes turned in the direction of the activity by the boss’s office door. Nobody even noticed the two people, one with a digital camera, who had entered and were stepping to one side of the public space to get a good view. Another photographer was still outside, getting pictures of the cruisers parked in front of the office with the election posters prominent on the windows. The outside photographer worked his way around to the back and caught the cruiser parked by the rear door on film as well.

“Congressman,” Grayson said again and knocked loudly.

The door opened inward, and Congressman Graves stood there. He had a puzzled look on his face. Grayson was pleased. The lockdown on the information had been successful. Nothing had leaked, and no one was forewarned.

“Congressman William Graves, I am Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Todd Grayson,” Grayson said. “Sir, I am placing you under arrest on the charge of murder in the second degree. . . .”

Agnes shrieked and started to move toward the group. One of the troopers placed his body between her and the action.

“If you could just step back, sir,” Grayson said, “we could complete this with a little more privacy.”

Graves stood stock still, unmoving, in shock.

“Very well,” Grayson said, after a moment and then read the Congressman his Miranda rights. He signaled the trooper to move in and handcuff Graves. There was no resistance. Graves was still inanimate, apparently unable to comprehend what was happening. Agnes was still standing and had partially collapsed sideways against a wall. She had begun to sob.

“Trooper,” Grayson said, “let’s move through the office and go out back.”

The group, with troopers on either side of the Congressman, moved through the office to the private back entrance. The cruiser was in position near the door when they came out. The second photographer was in position to catch a number of shots of the Congressman, handcuffs apparent, being led to and helped into the cruiser. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. Grayson and the remaining trooper walked around the outside of the building, got into their cars, and left.

The Courier-Journal reporter and photographers sprinted to where they had left their cars. The reporter was on the phone instantly, dictating from her notes. The photographers had their laptop computers fired up and were setting up to transmit the digital pictures back to Louisville. Even though the Courier-Journal was a morning paper and would not be carrying the story until the next morning, it would go out on the wire under the Courier-Journal name as an exclusive. The story and the photos would be available to their broadcast affiliates in Louisville, as well. Within the half hour, the news would be on the air.

The reporters drove away in their cars, heading for the inevitable press conference, and missed the second visitor to the Congressman’s office. A sheriff’s cruiser pulled up and stopped at the curb. The deputy got out and walked into the office, where he found the staff all gathered around someone in a chair. They were fanning with sheets of paper. One was holding a paper cup of water. The deputy cleared his throat, and the group looked his way, straightened up, and backed away to expose Agnes, collapsed in the chair, tears still streaming down her cheeks.

“Agnes Morehouse,” the deputy said, “this is a subpoena from The Grand Jury, compelling you to appear before them. The dates and the matters they are investigating are spelled out in the document.”

He stepped over and held the papers out to Agnes. She didn’t move, didn’t reach to take them. The deputy reached over and placed the papers on top of her hands in her lap. Then he turned and left the office. Agnes gasped and jerked her hands up to cover her face, spilling the papers onto the floor. Then she started another chorus of sobs. The staff was stymied. Agnes, for all of them, was an unemotional, unfeeling ogre. There was no nice way to say it. She was barely civil to them, all the time. She never pretended to like them or care about what was going on in their lives. There was no warmth, no empathy. For them, it was like watching an inanimate object suddenly begin to move. A shock, perhaps, but not emotionally disturbing. Finally, one of the more senior of the group went to the phone and contacted the office in Washington. She got the senior staffer there on the phone and detailed what had just occurred. The Washington staffer told her he would handle it, then hung up.

Quietly, while the warrants were being served, Cooper rode to the courthouse with his lawyer and Joe Samuels. Grayson had made arrangements with Samuels to bring Cooper in so they could serve the warrant, arrest him, arraign him, then release him on his own recognizance. When that process was complete, Cooper left with Brother Samuels and returned to the monastery.

Grayson had phoned Marcus, at the distillery, the day before and explained that the subpoena was being issued. Marcus thanked him for the call and, during the day, had all of the old records moved into one room. When the subpoena was delivered by a deputy, together they sealed the room until such time as the legal staff working for the Grand Jury could either take possession or, more likely, set up shop in the room to study the documents. Marcus had already offered the accommodation when he spoke to Grayson.

The arrest warrant for Calvin Fuller was issued, and a cruiser with two troopers drove out to the Fuller residence. No one was home to answer the door. The grass was long and shaggy, and there was a general air of abandonment about the place. They peered through the garage door windows and determined that no vehicles were inside. Then they returned to the post and listed the warrant as un-served and outstanding. They also listed the two vehicles registered to Fuller in a bulletin.

A press conference was announced for two that afternoon. One news van was stopped for speeding, trying to get to Elizabethtown in time for the conference. Despite the short notice, a sizable group from the press was gathered on the steps at the courthouse when Grayson approached the podium.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, appearing confident and at ease. “Thank you for attending on such short notice. This morning, at ten forty-five, Congressman William Graves, of Elizabethtown, was arrested and charged with the murder of Sarajane Lewis in nineteen-seventy-nine. He has been arraigned and is in custody, awaiting the arrival of his lawyer. Warrants were also issued for Calvin Fuller and Harley Wayne Dowdell in connection with the murder and the subsequent concealment of the body in a whisky barrel at the Aldergast Distillery. Mr. Dowdell has been arrested and charged. Mr. Fuller is, officially, a fugitive. The charges are all separate and individual. The absence of Mr. Fuller will not impede our forward progress toward a speedy trial for Congressman Graves.”

“What about Dowdell?” a voice called out.

“We will also be able to move forward with the legal process regarding Mr. Dowdell,” Grayson answered. “I will not be able to discuss any of the details of our investigation or of our evidence at this time. It would be inappropriate to do so before the defense has had an opportunity to review it.”

“What about statute of limitations?” another voice called out.

“Kentucky law contains no statute of limitations, no matter what the crime,” Grayson answered. “In the case of murder, I don’t believe any state or commonwealth accepts a limitation on a charge of murder.”

“Is this a capital charge?”

“No, it is not a capital charge,” Todd answered. “We have entered a charge of second degree murder.”

“Can you explain that?” another of the reporters asked.

“No sir,” Grayson answered calmly, “not without addressing the details of the evidence, which we will not do today.”

“Is your action based on some new information?” a reporter asked. “Did you find something new, or did you time the arrest to affect the elections?”

It was an impertinent question. All of the media people in the group would agree with that assessment. Nevertheless, they listened intently for the response. Grayson paused, but he did not lose his cool demeanor.

“Can you identify yourself, please?” he asked.

“Mike Barnes, Washington Post,” the reporter answered.

“Thank you,” Todd went on. “A question like that needs a name attached. We received new information, critical to our case, very recently. Until we had that information, it would have been possible but reckless to move forward with the arrests we have carried out today.”

“Mr. Grayson, Julie Newsome, GNN. Did the mystery motorcycle people have anything to do with the new information?” Luanne, the stringer who had fed her the original question about the motorcycle couple had urged her to ask about them. All she had was a gut feeling about it. Julie was growing to trust this girl’s gut feelings.

This time, Grayson was able to smile at the mention of the mystery motorcycle people. “Yes, Miss Newsome,” he said. “I can confirm that they did supply my office with information critical to the case we have assembled.”

“Can you tell us who they are?” she continued.

“No. They are private citizens who are in no way officially connected to the case,” he replied. “If they choose to reveal their identities, they can. We will not.”

“Are they witnesses?” someone else asked.

“No,” Grayson answered. “As I said, they are not in any way officially connected with the case.” Then hurriedly, to stave off further questions, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, that will be all for now. Thank you for being here.”

<<<   >>>

Bobbie’s editor was standing in his office watching the news conference unfold when the question about the motorcycle people was asked. He glanced through the glass and saw Bobbie at her desk. She wasn’t looking his way. He walked to the door of his office and spiked a chalk board eraser at her. It hit the top of her desk, startling her. She looked up and saw him waving her to his office. As she entered his office, he was rewinding the tape of the news conference. He stopped it and hit play so Bobbie could watch the news conference with him.

“Is it ready?” he asked her abruptly. “Can we run it tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, we could,” Bobbie said. “It’s long, feature length. You might want to start it tomorrow, and tease it to two more parts.”

“Can you keep specific identity out of part one,” he asked, “so we can at least get in two days of exclusive before the world lands on them?”

“Sure,” Bobbie said, “in fact, I’ve kept specific ID out of the whole story. They’ll get found, no doubt, and they know it. But I didn’t write the story in a way that puts a big target up on their backs.”

“Is the copy ready for me to read?”

“I’ll send it across right now. When do you want to see the art?”

“As soon as I’ve read the copy,” he said. He was excited. They had an exclusive story on the wire about the arrests, complete with pictures. Now they would have an exclusive on the mystery motorcycle couple. It just didn’t get better than this.

When Bobbie returned to her desk, she tagged the files with the story parts and sent it to her editor. Then her phone rang.

“Bobbie Fisher,” she said as she hit the send button on the computer.

“Miss Fisher, do you remember me—Sarajane’s roommate?” the voice on the phone said.

“Yes, I do,” Bobbie said. She could tell that her caller was crying.

“I just had to call. Did you have anything to do with what I’m seeing on TV right now?”

“Well, yes I did,” Bobbie said.

There was a pause and the sound of gulping as her caller tried to regain some composure. “I just want to thank you,” she said, the end of the sentence getting swallowed up in the crying. “You . . .you have no idea. . . .”

“I think I do,” Bobbie said, “and you are welcome. I think you should know that what you told me made a big difference and never had to be repeated. Everything we talked about is still confidential.”

“I’m sure that will make a difference later, but, right now, the way I feel, I wouldn’t care if it wasn’t.” There was a pause. The caller was gaining more control. “Do you think they really have him?”

“Yes, I think they do,” Bobbie answered. “They have him definitely as the father, so you can at least be sure that his time in Washington is over.” Bobbie knew about the DNA match from Fritz. She felt no compunction about revealing it to her caller. “And, I’m no lawyer, but I really think they have him on the murder.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” the voice said.

“Really, my pleasure,” Bobbie said. “You have no idea how much of a pleasure. Now, you take care of yourself, put it behind you. It’s finally over. And, look, if you ever need someone to just sit and talk to, you call me. Okay?”

“Okay,” the voice said. “Goodbye.”

After hanging up the phone, Bobbie just sat, to let her emotions begin to ebb. She didn’t trust herself to look around or speak or anything. She had, in her career, been thanked before for the effect her writing had had on people and situations. Never had she experienced what she was feeling now.

When she had regained some control and was sure she could look up without her eyes leaking all over her face, Bobbie got up and walked to the coffeepot, poured herself a cup, and returned to her desk. She picked up the phone and dialed Harlan’s cell phone number. “You watching TV?” she asked immediately.

“No, I’m up in my kitchen. What’s going on?”

“They arrested him,” Bobbie almost shouted, “this morning.”

“Keep talking,” Harlan said. “I’m heading down to the house now.”

“You guys got a mention,” Bobbie continued to talk as Harlan nearly ran for the house. “Some cable reporter asked about the mystery couple, and the prosecutor actually acknowledged that you guys helped.”

Harlan bounded onto the porch and burst through the door. Gloria was standing in front of the TV screen. She was waving her hand behind her, at Harlan—a signal to be quiet. He moved up next to her and watched as the news conference was played back again. While Grayson was making his announcement, the Courier-Journal’s still photos of the arrest and the movement to the cruiser were on the screen. Then the picture went back to the conference in time to catch Grayson’s face smiling at the question about the mystery motorcycle people.

“Are those your guys’ pictures?” Harlan asked, quietly. Gloria looked at him quizzically. “It’s Bobbie,” he explained, indicating the cell phone at his ear with a nod of the head.

“Yep,” Bobbie answered. “They were johnny-on-the-spot, thanks to you-all.”

When the replay of the conference was over, Gloria lowered the volume on the TV. She had no interest in what the talking heads had to say, never did. In fact, whenever she tried to watch them, or when she slipped up and didn’t have the mute button at hand, everything she heard reconfirmed her often-expressed opinion of their marginal intelligence and even, on occasion, their parentage.

“Okay,” Harlan said into the phone. “Guess you’re feeling pretty good, huh?”

“I think it’s called cloud nine,” Bobbie said. “Heads up. My story on you all is going to break with part one tomorrow morning.” Harlan’s call waiting signal beeped in his ear and he ignored it. Five seconds later, Gloria’s phone chirped. “There are no direct references to your exact location, but you know they’ll track you down.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go ahead and put up a gate. Gloria wants one, but I’ve been resisting. Don’t know why.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Bobbie offered. Gloria, on her cell phone, mouthed, “It’s Craig” to Harlan.

“So, it runs tomorrow,” Harlan said. “What’s the earliest anybody will see it?”

“Oh, about nine tonight,” Bobbie said.

“I’d better get off and get busy,” Harlan said. “What about Thanksgiving?”

“Fritz said yes, enthusiastically,” Bobbie said. “He’s going to call you with some idea he has about the food. It’ll mean we have to get there Wednesday.”

“Perfect. Sounds great,” Harlan said. “I’m going now.”

“Me too,” Bobbie said. “See ya.”

Gloria’s heads-up call to Bobbie led Bobbie to have a conference with her editor. They agreed to have a reporter, with camera, discreetly stalk the principals in Elizabethtown—the prosecutor, the sheriff, and the detective. They also had their Washington Bureau keep close tabs on the Congressman’s travel schedule. They surmised that the arrest would be made in Kentucky. They intended to be there when the action happened. After the session, Bobbie’s editor held her back and closed the door.

“Is this in any way connected to the story you’re working on, the mystery motorcycle people?” he asked her.

“In fact, it is,” Bobbie said. “I don’t know if the prosecutor’s office will ever acknowledge this, but it was Gloria who wouldn’t give up. She kept researching and finally found the missing link in the case. Yesterday, she and Harlan met with the prosecutor and his detective over in Indiana—wouldn’t set foot in the State. She says she gave him all of the information and the citations she had pulled from LexisNexis, said he grabbed them and left there at top speed. When she got home, she called me and…well, here we are.”

“These people must really be something,” the editor mused.

“You have no idea,” Bobbie said, “at least until you read my story.”

“Where does it stand?”

“I need to go out to their place, fill in some blanks, and get some pictures,” Bobbie said.

“You and I both know that, when this hits, your story will be hot property. So, when are you going out to their place?”

“I’ll have to call them, but there’s no reason I can’t go tomorrow.”

“Good. Company car and all that. Do you want a photographer? I’m thinking I want some really good art for this.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Bobbie answered. She knew the difference between her own photography and the kind of work their staff photographers could produce.

“Check and get back to me,” he said. “Then I’ll lay on a photographer.”

<<<   >>>

It took Grayson a week to get everything gathered, sorted, analyzed and confirmed. He sent Logan to Maryland to take personal possession of the court files that contained the DNA profile. He had three different experts analyze the DNA prints. All three confirmed a nearly perfect match. Another group of experts confirmed that Graves was the biological father of the fetus. When he had it all together, he convened a Grand Jury and spelled it out for them: the DNA evidence, Cooper’s complete statement, including the GRAVES vanity plate, the participation of Fuller in the disposal of the body and, by inference, the tie between Graves and Tom Aldergast. The Grand Jury issued a bill of indictment almost instantly, charging Congressman Graves with second degree murder and with conspiracy to obstruct justice. Both Cooper and Fuller were named in indictments on the charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Grayson reminded the panel members of the requirement for secrecy, then took his indictment and huddled with his boss, filling him in completely.

It is the nature of a Grand Jury that they can undertake their own investigations. The case against Graves for murder appeared to them to be locked up. What wasn’t locked up was the apparent linkage between Graves and the now-dead Tom Aldergast, the possibility of corruption in high office. The jury was composed of mostly long-time residents of the region, people who had heard hints and whispers for years and wondered why somebody didn’t do something about it. They missed the irony that they had thought and wondered while, every two years, returning Graves to Washington. They did, however, take the bit this time and expand the investigation. They were Grayson’s Grand Jury, and Grayson was their lawyer. They started driving the train.

They called Grayson back into session and instructed him to issue the necessary subpoenas to bring them details on the Aldergast/Graves connection. They wanted to hear from Agnes Morehouse. They wanted access to the accumulated files and documentation that were housed at the distillery and the files from the Congressman’s local office. They wanted to hear from Calvin Fuller and from Harley Wayne Dowdell (Cooper).

Grayson had suspected that the panel would react in the way they were doing, which is why he had not proceeded before he had a virtually airtight case. The Grand Jury’s requirements were about to light a powder keg under the community, not three weeks before Election Day, and Grayson was about to be busier than he could recall ever being before.

Grayson’s first priority was to determine the best way to serve the warrant and arrest Congressman William Graves. He and his boss set up a conference call with the State Attorney General to discuss the issues. They decided to hold the warrant until Graves was in the state, which he was due to be any day, because of the elections. They decided that they could not, under the circumstances, condone bail. So they decided that the best place to hold the Congressman would be in a State facility, most likely the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange. It was medium-security and not nearly as far away as the maximum-security penitentiary out in the western part of the state, in Eddyville. They correctly estimated that placing Graves in a minimum security facility, places the general public referred to a country clubs, would be politically untenable. At the same time, they didn’t think it would be necessary to place the man in the same prison that housed Kentucky’s death row.

Grayson returned to his Grand Jury panel and explained to them the issues and the timing. Everyone agreed to the timing that Grayson proposed. The necessary warrants were issued for the arrest of Graves, and then everyone sat back and waited for him to arrive.

<<<   >>>

Bobbie used her cell phone to call Harlan when they exited the Interstate and headed south, toward the river. He gave them instructions that would put them on the highway headed in the right direction, then told them to watch for him on the left side of the road. Their acreage of trees completely blocked any view of the house from the road, and Harlan did not have a mailbox out, never had. They gathered their mail at the Post Office.

They rounded a curve in the highway, and Bobbie spotted Harlan, standing next to a motor scooter. She put on the turn signal, and she saw Harlan wave, then step on to the scooter and start back up the asphalt driveway. She turned in and followed the nearly quarter of a mile through the trees, around a sharp turn and down a slope toward the house. Harlan stopped the scooter in front of the three-door garage. and Bobbie pulled in next to him.

“My God,” Bobbie said, emerging from the car, “you never said it was a log cabin. This is perfect, just perfect.”

“Glad you like it,” Harlan said, smiling. “We’re sort of partial to it.” He turned to the young man riding with Bobbie. “Harlan Stone,” he said, offering his hand.

“Oh, hi,” the man replied and shook Harlan’s hand, “I’m Dave Hart, photographer.”

“Good to meet you, and welcome,” Harlan said.

“Harlan, this is gorgeous. I can’t get over it,” Bobbie said. “The leaves are turning, the colors are magnificent—I could sell this place in our travel section.” She was walking in a small circle behind the car, taking in everything she could see. “Is that the kitchen with a coal mine?” she asked, pointing to the log building about fifty yards away.

“That is my kitchen, yes,” Harlan answered, smiling.

“A coal mine?” Dave, the photographer, asked.

“It’ll be easier to show you,” Harlan said, “but, first, come on in. Cup of coffee. Use of the facilities.”

Harlan stepped onto the covered porch that ran around three sides of the log house.

“I’ll get my stuff,” Dave said, “and be right behind you.” He didn’t want to miss even one opportunity for a shot.

Harlan and Bobbie walked past the front door, which Harlan couldn’t remember the last time he had opened, and walked down the side porch to the kitchen door. When they entered, Gloria was at the kitchen counter, pouring the hot water into a press pot. The business end of the kitchen was to their left, toward the front of the house. To their right, as they entered, the house opened out into the great room. The back wall of the room was glass, looking out across the wooded valley with the same view Harlan enjoyed from his kitchen.

“Gloria, this is to die for,” Bobbie gushed as they entered.

“Hey, Bobbie,” Gloria said, turning from the coffee task. “Yeah, we like it.”

“Facilities are down there,” Harlan said, pointing down a hallway. “Second door to the left.”

As Bobbie left the room, Dave came in, carrying a camera bag.

“Dave Hart, photographer,” Harlan said, “this is Gloria Stone.”

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Dave said.

“Same, and we can cut out the ‘ma’ams’ right now. I’m Gloria and you’re Dave,” Gloria said. “Call me ma’am again and I’ll start calling you sonny.”

Dave almost slipped and answered, “Yes, ma’am.” He caught himself and simply nodded.

Harlan gathered cups and sugar and cream and carried them to a table out in the wide part of the great room. The gas log was burning in the fireplace, giving the area a comfortable warmth. Harlan and Gloria had given up burning wood, in their other house, at about the same time as the manufacturers starting producing believable gas logs. When they moved to the cabin, surrounded by a stand of their own mature trees, they still stuck to the gas log arrangement. They both felt that there were better things to do than chop wood, haul ashes, and clean up afterward. When they did have a wood fire, it was outdoors in one of those oversized black metal fire pots. They kept a stash of firewood for that and to take along when they were camping.

Bobbie returned from the bathroom and directed Dave to it. She then sat on a comfortable chair by the fireplace.

“Tell me about this place,” she said. “Did you guys build it or find it?”

“Built it,” Harlan said.

“I think we fought about the design for a year,” Gloria said, walking over with the coffee pot. “We found the land and spent a lot of time out here before we even started designing, and this is what we came up with.”

“There’s four bedrooms back in there,” Harlan said, pointing in the direction of the hallway, “and a loft.” He pointed up toward the cathedral ceiling. The loft overlooked the entire L-shape of the kitchen and great room.

“What we didn’t do is put in a ‘living room,’ ” Gloria said. “The front door, which we never use, opens into an entryway that leads back here and off to the bedrooms. No need for one of those rooms you furnish and then never go in.”

“My mother used to say those were the rooms where you entertained the preacher,” Harlan added. “We don’t do much of that kind of entertaining.”

Bobbie already had her notebook open and was writing furiously to catch the nuances she was hearing. Dave retrieved a camera from his kit and joined the others in the seating area.

“Dave,” Bobbie said, “you are sworn to professional secrecy on what we’re about to discuss, understand?”

“Got it,” he answered.

“So, we’ve got the Washington Bureau on full alert,” Bobbie began to explain to Harlan and Gloria. “We’re putting a couple of people in E-town on alert, just so they’ll be there when the ball drops. Any ideas on when it’ll be?”

“Well, they have to get the files from Maryland. Figure they’re doing that today,” Gloria said. “Then they have to compare the DNA profiles, and I don’t know how long that’ll take.”

“I’m betting they’ll wait,” Harlan said, “let him get back home before they hit. It would probably be a real mess to try to serve the warrant in the Capital, then transport him and all of that.”

“Yeah,” Gloria said. “I don’t envy that Grayson guy right about now.”

“So, what do you think, a week maybe?” Bobbie pushed.

“Not much more than that,” Harlan said, “but, yeah, a week.”

“Good,” Bobbie said. “that gives me enough time to get the story down and polished.”

“So, what do you want?” Gloria asked.

“Just what we’re doing,” Bobbie answered. She looked around and spotted the sitting area further along the front wall of the room. There, she saw the TV screen, turned on with no volume, showing The Weather Channel, and the computer set up. “Is that where you do the schlocking?”

“That’s it,” Harlan answered. “We’re too far out for cable or even DSL lines, so both TV and Internet access are through the dish. That’s our spot.”

Dave was backing away from the grouping and beginning to snap pictures. The light through the windows with the Southern exposure was ample, so he wasn’t disrupting the conversational atmosphere with strobes.

“How many of these things have you guys done?” Bobbie asked.

“That’s hard to say,” Harlan started.

“It started when one of us, watching a story, would say something like ‘so-and-so did it’,” Gloria continued, “and the other one would say ‘want to bet?’.”

“When the bets started getting serious, like clean the bathrooms for a month, Gloria started getting impatient,” Harlan said. “She wanted to win the bet NOW.”

“Before he wised up,” Gloria added, “he lost a ton of bets, lots of solo duty in kitchen and bathrooms. Then we stopped betting against each other and started working together on the cases, whenever something interesting would come up.”

“I guess you could say that we have studied seven or eight big ones in the past few years,” Harlan said. “One of the big ones was a double murder over in Iowa. At first we thought the police were using the media to feed false information for some good reason. Gloria and I would sit here and listen to what was coming over the TV and know that it was wrong.”

“Yeah, like one hundred eighty degrees wrong,” Gloria said.

“After a while, we decided that they weren’t,” Harlan said, “that they were simply dead wrong. So we contacted the authorities. That went bad on so many levels, it’s hard to describe.”

“First they wouldn’t listen,” Gloria said, “threatened to charge us with making false statements. Then when they started to piece some of it together, they decided that the only way we could know what we did was to be connected with the murderer.”

“Things didn’t improve when Gloria told some guy from the State Investigator’s office that he had shit for brains,” Harlan said, smiling. Dave, the photographer, snorted and missed a shot. “That was not pleasant. See, for us, it has been a speed game, trying to get there first and knowing that the authorities will get there in time. That was the only time the authorities were never going to get there, at least without a nudge.”

“What happened?” Dave asked.

“What happened is they found the guy where we said they’d find him,” Gloria said.

“But, what happened to you, I mean,” Dave continued.

“Nothing,” Gloria said.

“Never heard from them again,” Harlan said. “When they got to the end of the thing, it was sort of like looking back from the center of a maze. Lot’s easier to see the path that way. Well, I think they were too embarrassed to ever contact us again, so the last we heard was the sputter at the other end of the phone when Gloria said . . .what she said.”

Bobbie was smiling and writing furiously. Dave was smiling and snapping pictures.

The rest of the day was an ongoing conversation. They moved outside to walk around. Harlan opened the garage and rolled the R-sixty-nine out for some pictures. He and Gloria declined to dress up and get in. Dave, using the strobe in the darker areas in the garage, got pictures of Harlan’s other motorcycles and the two Honda scooters they usually took on trips.

They walked up the path to the out building—the other kitchen. Dave heard the basic explanation about the need for a separate kitchen as they walked. When they stepped onto the porch and Harlan opened the door, no further explanation was needed.

“Oh, my God,” Bobbie said, “did something die?”

“See?” Gloria said.

“It’s only salt-rising bread,” Harlan said, a touch defensively, “and besides, you get used to it.”

They went ahead stepped inside. Dave began snapping pictures. Gloria hung back by the open door.

“This is where the ‘two-bottle-stupid’ is concocted,” Harlan said proudly.

“Where is it?” Bobbie asked.

“Call me silly,” Harlan said, “but, I want to go off the record, orally and photographically, for a second. Okay?”

Dave lowered his camera and Bobbie nodded agreement.

“He’s got a secret panel,” Gloria called from the door, a touch of derision in her voice.

“Humor me,” Harlan said. “I just don’t want the secret panel photographed or mentioned.”

“Can I still say you have a mine shaft?” Bobbie asked.

“Oh, sure,” Harlan said. “Everybody knows that.”

Harlan moved to the center wall at the back of the kitchen, moved something on a shelf, then gently pushed the section of wall away from him. It opened on darkness. Bobbie and Dave moved up close behind Harlan and peered past him, into the blackness. Gloria stayed by the door.

“I’ll flip on some lights,” Harlan said, “then you can get some pictures and take a tour.”

Bobbie couldn’t decide if the lights, extending down the shaft, then stopping, made the thing more or less eerie. She stepped forward, still on the floor of the kitchen, not in the shaft itself.

“You can see everything from there,” Harlan explained as he stepped down about ten steps. “If it bothers you, you don’t have to come in.”

“I won’t go in that thing,” Gloria called from the door where she held her position. “Even if the Russians were bombing us, I wouldn’t. Never have. Never will.”

“You can see that I just have a bunch of rude shelving where I store the bottles while they age.” Arrayed along the wall were at least thirty cases of the dark bottles.

“Seems like a lot,” Bobbie said, still standing on the threshold.

“Stocking up for the holidays,” Harlan explained. “You know, you won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t take pictures. Not much here to see anyway.”

“Right,” Bobbie said as she backed away. “I agree.” She found her gaze drawn, almost hypnotically, to the utter blackness that took over just past the last light bulb. She gave a shiver, then stepped back into the kitchen. Dave had not said anything and allowed his camera to stay at his side. Gloria was watching him, saw the look of relief on his face, and smiled.

“That is the stuff of nightmares,” Gloria said. “I don’t see how Harlan can stand being down there. I swear he must have the imagination of a toadstool.”

Harlan was turning off the lights and pulling the panel back in place.

“It isn’t a question of imagination,” Harlan said, starting another professorial observation, one that Gloria had heard before. “It is a matter of controlling it.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Gloria said and stepped off the porch toward the house.

“That’s the tour,” Harlan said cheerfully. He escorted Bobbie and Dave from the kitchen, turned off the light, and closed the door. Dave walked to the back to see how the kitchen was built right into the face of the hill. Harlan stayed with him, and Bobbie caught up with Gloria. Gloria checked to see if they were alone.

“Any plans for Thanksgiving?” she asked Bobbie.

“Nothing to speak of,” Bobbie admitted.

“Any chance you could shanghai Fritz and come on over on, say, Wednesday evening?” Gloria continued. “I mean, you can come without him. I just thought. . . .”

“It’s a great idea, and I would love to come,” Bobbie said. “I’ll extend the invite to Fritz, and we’ll see what happens.”

“Good. It’s settled,” Gloria said. “Our son, Craig, will be here. If he has a latest woman in his life, she might be here. We never know, and there’s always tons of room.”

“Sounds terrific,” Bobbie said.

Bobbie and Dave loaded up, used the facilities one more time, then pulled out. They would be back in Louisville a little after dark.

Later that evening, Gloria mentioned that Bobbie was coming for Thanksgiving and that maybe she would be bringing Fritz.

“Great,” Harlan said. “Maybe we can get him to cook.”

Todd Grayson was finishing up a briefing session with his boss, the elected Commonwealth’s Attorney. He had kept him minimally informed on the whisky barrel case, telling him just enough to allow him to be ‘fully’ informed, but not enough to get him into political hot water should the case ever move forward. At the present time, it did not look hopeful.

“What I have is half a murder case,” he explained. “I have a body, and I can link that body to a location with witnesses and with forensics.” The carpet fibers from the old carpet, the square cut from underneath, were a match. “I have body hairs from two separate contributors, if I ever come up with anything to match them to. I have two people I can charge with obstruction of justice. One of them seems to have disappeared. I have some circumstantial evidence linking the activities of the evening the girl was killed to a known person, but it’s not enough to move forward on.”

Grayson was purposely omitting the mention of the Congressman. He had no way to indict, and unless and until he did, he was not going to be throwing the name around, even to his own boss. At this point in time, only Grayson, George Elliot, and Shelby Logan knew the full content of Cooper’s statement. Logan had also shared Gloria’s fervent assertion that Graves was guilty. Grayson was assembling his briefing papers, preparatory to leaving when the intercom buzzed.

“There’s a call for Mr. Grayson on three,” the voice said. “It’s Detective Logan.”

“I’ll take it out there,” Grayson responded, then took his papers and left the office. At a spare desk, he picked up a phone and punched a button. “This is Grayson,” he said, then listened. “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.”

He left the office and headed for his own, farther back in the building. When he got there, Shelby Logan was waiting. They went into his office and closed the door.

“I just got a call from the mystery motorcycle people,” Logan began. “They think they’ve come up with something that’ll help the case.”

“What is it?” Grayson asked him.

“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me,” Logan said. “They want to meet with you, and here’s the twist: They don’t want to come here. In fact, they don’t want to meet anywhere in Kentucky.”

“What is this?” Grayson snapped, “some kind of fear of prosecution. Are they crazy?”

“Well, Todd, they might be crazy,” Logan said. “Even so, the odds are that when they say they have something, it’ll be worth hearing. Don’t forget, she had the name of the body nailed down that first day and he’s the one who flushed Cooper. These people are worth hearing from.”

“So what do they want?” Grayson asked. “Am I supposed to go to their place?”

“I asked, and they said no,” Logan answered. “They suggested sort of a halfway point: Cannelton, Indiana.”

“Why there?”

“I guess it’s a pretty easy drive for them,” Logan explained, “and it has the only bridge over the Ohio between Brandenburg and Owensboro. We could drive from here in about two hours, give or take.”

“When?” Grayson asked, resigned to the idea.

“I’m supposed to call them back, set a time.”

Grayson looked at his desk calendar.

“Okay. See if we can do it tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll take your car, leave after breakfast. If it doesn’t take too long, I can still check on things here before the end of the day.”

They met for breakfast at the diner from which one deputy sheriff was notably missing. The information from the sheriff in Indiana had caused a speedy career change for the deputy responsible for the phone call.

“So, where are we meeting them?” Grayson was asking.

“Place in town called The Castlebury Inn. They say they’ll be there by ten and will make arrangements for a room where we can meet.”

“What’s the route?”

“We’re stuck taking Highway Sixty all the way,” Logan said with a groan. “There just isn’t any other way to get there, really.”

Highway Sixty runs the full length of Kentucky, along its northern border, for the most part following the Ohio River. In Eastern Kentucky, it is called the Appalachian Highway. In the western half of the state, it isn’t called anything, at least anything someone would put on a sign. It’s a two-lane highway winding through the tail end of the western slope of the mountains. It has curves for its entire length that locals refer to as ‘dead man’s curve.’ Logan’s groan was sincere. It is not a road to choose if there is any possible alternative.

They arrived in Hawesville by eleven, crossed the river, and drove into downtown Cannelton. The Inn was easy to find and stood out because of the beautiful restoration efforts someone had made. They parked and entered. Harlan and Gloria were standing in the front hallway, surrounded by mid-nineteenth century furnishings. The sight was almost comical in its contrasts, the two Stones in motorcycle leathers, holding their helmets in the manner of the medieval knight, standing before the monarch. The two pairs stood motionless, for a moment, gazing at each other. Logan broke the ice.

“Mr. Stone, Mrs. Stone,” he began, “this is Todd Grayson.”

“Yes, we spoke,” Harlan said, stepping forward and offering his hand.

“It’s always good to put a name to a face,” Logan said. “Very nice to meet you, too, Mrs. Stone.”

“Can’t we get over that?” Gloria said. “I’m Gloria and this is Harlan—okay?”

“Works for me,” Grayson answered. “I’m Todd, and you already know Shelby.”

“We have a parlor room down the hall, here,” Harlan said, stepping back and sweeping his arm in the direction of the hall. “Coffee service is set up, so we don’t have to interrupt once we get going. Restrooms are just to the left there.”

“I’ll make a quick stop,” Grayson said, “then let’s get going.”

They settled into the room, which looked like a parlor straight out of the nineteenth century. The chairs, facing the couch across a low table, were large and comfortable. Logan and Grayson took the two chairs. Harlan and Gloria settled into the couch. The coffee service was on the table between them. The door was closed.

“I’ll start,” Harlan offered. “Gloria and I discussed this, and we want to be very sensitive to the position you’re in, Todd. So, other than ‘pass the sugar’ or ‘nice weather,’ we think we should do all of the talking. We will set up the situation as we see it and then provide the information Gloria found. You can leave here without ever saying anything, if it becomes necessary for you to claim that at some point in the future. Agreeable?”

The two men from Kentucky nodded yes.

“Okay, here goes,” Harlan said. “You have half of a murder case.”

Grayson gulped, hearing his own words coming across the table.

“You have the body, the location, the people who disposed of the body, and even a possible motive: the pregnancy. You have DNA evidence, not only from the fetus but also from the hairs found in the barrel with the body. We think that you also have some evidence from Cooper that he was cautious about not letting us hear. We also think you have a prime suspect but insufficient evidence to announce or indict.”

“And we know that with a high profile suspect, you can’t afford to go fishing,” Gloria jumped in.

Grayson looked sideways at Logan, who was eased back in the chair and seemingly enjoying the show.

“See, if you only had some DNA to compare your evidence to, everything would get a whole lot simpler is what we think,” Gloria continued. “So, I asked myself, if the sexual escapades that go on in Washington are anything like the picture we’ve gotten, then doesn’t it seem extremely unlikely that this one little mistake, this one little slip of the condom, was a one-time occurrence?”

Grayson’s jaw dropped open, and Logan’s smile broadened into a grin.

“Well, yes,  I answered myself, it does seem unlikely. Extremely unlikely. In fact, I figure the lecherous old bastard has probably been spraying his seed around pretty liberally, inside the beltway, so to speak.”

Logan just went ahead and laughed out loud. Grayson broke a smile, then glanced over to make sure the door was closed.

“Murder is not a particularly desirable form of birth control, so I figure the one murder was unique. In fact, I would bet it was a spontaneous overreaction, in the passion of a moment, not a pattern of behavior—the murder, I mean”

“So, I didn’t go looking for murders or suspicious disappearances, things like that,” Gloria continued. “Instead, I went looking for the tracks a perverted libertine might leave.”

“She actually calls them pecker tracks,” Harlan offered. Both of the men from Kentucky laughed.

“So, I went looking for paternity suits, settlements, funded endowments, things like that,” Gloria said, “and guess what I found?” She paused and poured some coffee for herself. No one else moved.

“Peterson v. Graves, in Maryland, suit for support payments for a child, Graves accused of paternity. For some reason, this thing made it into court, wasn’t settled quietly. Unfortunately, the girl, Tracey Peterson, lost the case. There’s no doubt our Congressman Graves had visited the plaintiff on occasion—perhaps many occasions…at least, no doubt in my mind. Problem was, she was a very sociable person and simply picked the wrong ‘donor’ to take to court.”

“Oh, my God,” Grayson said. The implications were beginning to hit him.

“So, to cut to the chase,” Gloria said, “somewhere in Maryland’s judicial system, a copy of Congressman Graves’s DNA profile is on file and I believe they would be public records, right? If he had settled, paid her off, there wouldn’t be. So, hopefully—and I don’t want you to think I am a vindictive person—we will watch the bastard’s petty little triumph  over that girl turn to ashes on him.”

“Hoist on his own petard,” Harlan added.

Logan’s grin was as broad as it could get. He did feel like he was the sponsor, so to speak, of Harlan and Gloria, that he was the reason this little meeting had taken place. He was both proud and excited.

“Okay, I’m going to talk, now,” Grayson said, sitting forward. “Where did you find all of this?”

“LexisNexis,” Gloria answered.

“You use LexisNexis?” Grayson asked, incredulous. Access to the service was a constant budget battle for him, up against the old-timers who remembered clerking in dusty law libraries.

“It was a birthday present,” Harlan said, as though that explained everything.

“Do you have the cites?” Grayson asked. Gloria handed him the sheets of paper she had printed out. “Are these for me to keep?”

“Well, sure,” Gloria said. “I don’t have any use for them.”

“Don’t think this is rude, please,” said Grayson, stuffing the papers into his briefcase, “but, I want to get right back, I mean. . . .”

“I think you’ll find that Gloria thinks the same thing, that you need to hit the road, go fast, and get to work on this,” Harlan offered. They all stood. “First, if you want to take advantage of the facilities before you go, I believe Detective Logan and I have some private business to transact.”

Logan’s eyes lit up. Harlan indicated the door with a nod of his head, and they moved out and down the hall. As they walked out the front door, Harlan said, “I was able to fit a case in the sidecar. I hope that’s enough.”

They walked to the sidecar; Harlan unlocked the little trunk and extracted the case of dark bottles with no labels. He carried it and followed Logan to the trunk of his car. Logan popped the lid and turned to take the bottles from Harlan. As he straightened up, he had a brown bag in his hand.

“I can’t get home brew,” he explained, “but I do have access to other types of homemade things.” He offered the bag to Harlan. “It’s cut to about ninety proof, crystal clear, and some of the best stuff in our area. I know the guy personally.”

“But, isn’t that against the law or something?” Harlan asked, taking the offered bag.

“If you study up on it a little,” Logan said, “you’ll find that all of the conflict around moonshining is a Federal thing, not a state thing. It’s the Feds who want their pound of flesh, and the revenooers are just that, ATF guys looking for the tax dollar. Guess I’m sort of a hard-nose State’s Rights kinda guy…know what I mean?” Logan winked.

“Well, thank you,” Harlan said.

“Don’t mention it,” Logan said, as Gloria and Grayson emerged from The Inn.“ Literally.”

Harlan deposited the bag in the trunk of the sidecar as Grayson approached.

“So, this is the mystery motorcycle,” he said.

“Seemed appropriate to use it for this meeting,” Harlan replied.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Grayson said. “I can’t thank you all enough. I do believe you’ve made it possible to move this thing forward, and quickly.”

“Our pleasure,” Harlan said.

“And don’t be too long about it,” Gloria added. “I’ve got other things I need to concentrate on, and until this thing is out in the open and moving, it’s all I can think about.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Grayson said. “I’ll get right on it.”

Harlan and Gloria reentered The Inn as Logan and Grayson drove away. They settled the bill and retrieved their helmets.

“Lunch here or at home?” Harlan asked as they came out.

“Home, I think,” Gloria answered, and began to zip up her leathers. “I want to call Bobbie, give her a heads-up. What were you putting in the trunk when we came out?”

“You know I brought Shelby some beer,” Harlan said, “and he brought me some moonshine. Two quarts, in Mason jars, judging by the feel of the package.”

“Moonshine?” Gloria said. “I’ve never tasted moonshine. Is it good?”

“Very good,” Harlan replied.

“Okay, home it is. I feel the need for a celebratory drink, and what’s more appropriate than moonshine.”

“He is going to get away with it—you just watch,” Gloria declared.

Harlan was just coming in from the porch and was hanging his coat and hat on a peg next to the door. Gloria had the TV on to CNN and was watching the crawling headlines across the bottom.

“This thing has fallen out of sight faster than ‘dog bites man’ stories,” Gloria continued. “What’s it been—two weeks? I’ve had this on for an hour, and not one mention of the case. He is going to walk away, I swear.”

Harlan and Gloria had packed up and pulled out the morning after the visit from the detective, Shelby Logan. They decided there was no good reason to stay, and they needed to get home. As Harlan had pointed out, they were completely out of ‘two-bottle stupid.’ They were up early, coffee only, knowing they would stop down the road for breakfast. They were on the Interstate, heading in toward the bridges before the full morning rush hour hit and cleared the bridges into Indiana without a problem. Later, they would hear from a number of people that the traffic helicopter from one of the local TV stations had picked them up and followed them, off and on, until they were outside the area of traffic coverage, zooming in on the motorcycle riding uncovered on the trailer.

They drove home on the Indiana side of the Ohio River. They had no intention of even skirting the edges of the whole Elizabethtown/Bardstown area. As they crossed the bridge, they sang the opening lines of ‘Back Home Again In Indiana’ horribly. Neither could carry a tune.

When they got to their place in Newburgh, Harlan drove the RV onto the concrete pad he had built for it, next to the garage. The pad was not a completely enclosed structure. It was open on all sides and had a roof supported on pipes, leaving ample clearance for the body of the RV. The hard stand had an electrical feed and water for the RV and had pump-out capabilities that connected to the sewer system. When they selected the site for their home, they had located as far from town as they could and still have sewer and water.

The motorcycle went into the garage, the trailer next to it, and the various trunks that contained their gear were opened and emptied for cleaning and maintenance. Harlan would take care of the equipment while Gloria cleaned the inside of the RV. They hadn’t decided whether to winterize the water system. It was still early in the season, and they might want to take another run somewhere. Besides, there was enough electrical heat available to withstand a night or two of below freezing. Eventually, though, Harlan would have to bleed the system and run antifreeze into the exposed pipes. Not commercial antifreeze, which was poisonous—Harlan used a solution of grain alcohol, like moonshine, but not as expensive or as tasty.

The day after they got home, Harlan drove to Booneville, the county seat, to check in with the sheriff’s office. He met with Jack Lutz, the deputy who had called them.

“So, you’re back,” Jack commented, shaking Harlan’s hand.

“Got in yesterday,” Harlan said. “It was an easy trip. Came home the Indiana side.”

“I’ve got some stuff for you,” Jack said, reaching into a desk drawer. “This is a copy of the section of the tape I mentioned. This is a copy of the memo I filed with the office regarding the call and regarding my conversation with you.”

“Is it legit for me to have them?” Harlan asked, “because I plan to mail them to the Commonwealth’s Detective we met, the one who’s assigned to the barrel case.”

“Tell you what,” Jack said, “you keep those for yourself and I’ll have the office send a full set to the detective. Sort of makes it more official.”

“That’s perfect,” Harlan said. “I’ll be calling him today anyway, to tell him about the Caller ID stuff. I’ll let him know this stuff is coming.”

“Caller ID?” Lutz asked.

“About the same time you got your call, we had a few hang-up hits on the home phone. Had to wait ‘til we got back to check the ID. It was the same guy who made a threatening call to a reporter we know. Did the calls right from his home telephone.”

“Does he have anything to do with the other stuff that was going on there, the murder and stuff?” Lutz asked.

“We don’t know for sure,” Harlan answered. “I think he does, but it’s not public yet. And he seems to have dropped out of sight.”

“On the run?”

“Maybe,” Harlan said, “but, day before yesterday, there was nobody chasing him. He was just not around, according to the detective.”

“Who is he?” Lutz asked.

“His name is Calvin Fuller.” Harlan noticed that Lutz was writing the information down. “He was apparently the henchman for an old guy who had lots of people in his pocket, lots of politics and all that. There is talk that the old man had the Congressman from there in his pocket, too.”

“Sounds like you went wading in a snake pit,” Lutz said.

“Yeah. The girl whose body was in the barrel was an intern for the same Congressman. There is talk about the sex parties that happened in Washington, maybe still do. Talk about this intern and the Congressman, pregnancy and so on.”

“What? Are they thinking this Congressman did it?” Lutz asked.

“Don’t know what they’re thinking,” Harlan said. “Gloria is absolutely sure he did.”

“Wow. Well, you watch your back,” Lutz said. “People kill for a hell of a lot less than staying in office.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re out of it now,” Harlan said. “It’s all in the hands of the authorities, and Gloria and I aren’t even considered witnesses.”

“Still, I’m going to keep your place on the watch list,” Lutz said. “Do you have an alarm out there?”

“Sure,” Harlan said. “The standard ADT set-up.”

“You don’t mind,” Lutz went on, “I’d like to have them route the panic button straight to us, not have the delay that’s usually built in.”

“Sure,” Harlan said. “Panic button?”

“Take a look at your keypad when you get home. One of the buttons says POLICE. You ever hit that button, there’s no delay, it goes straight to the monitoring facility. In your case, I’ll have them patch it straight through to us.”

Harlan had located the button on the control pad, next to the kitchen door where he always hung his coat. He showed it to Gloria and explained the procedure. She pooh-poohed it.

In the first week home, Harlan began another batch of beer and pulled two cases of a previous batch from deep down the sloping shaft of the old coal mine. When Gloria had insisted that he build his own kitchen, he picked the location with the old shaft instantly. He had built the structure against the south-facing slope that was punctured by the old adit. It provided him with the natural earth insulation on his north wall. The south wall was nearly all windows. With occasional help from local contractors, he had run full plumbing to the kitchen. He installed a supported wooden floor, much easier on the legs and feet than poured concrete. He had a commercial gas range, a large-capacity refrigerator, and glass fronted cabinets for his supplies. There was a super sized deep well double sink for cleaning and sterilizing the oversized crocks and bottles he used for beer-making.

The interior walls were natural pine planking and matched the planking on the floor. Against the back wall, one door led into the half-bath, and another door enclosed the utility room, water heater, and furnace. Between the two doors, the back wall seemed to be continuous, not exposing that the center section shifted to allow access to the mine shaft entrance. The idea of a secret panel appealed to Harlan. When he had dismissed the idea of a round door, and he had considered it, he chose the secret panel approach instead.

He had installed rough shelving along one side of the shaft, down to about fifty feet. He had strung lights overhead, bare bulbs, to the same distance. He had cleaned up and stabilized the footing, simply disposing of the accumulated rubble by throwing it farther into the old mine. Other than the first time he explored the shaft, with his son and two of his son’s friends along as experts, he had never gone any deeper than about a hundred feet.

The boys who grew up in the area knew about mine shafts. Before driving and girls took over their lives, they had explored a number of old shafts. It was not an activity to tell the parents about. In fact, Harlan and Gloria had no idea until Craig offered to get his friends to help explore the shaft on the new property. Craig had calmed his mother by pointing out that the sloped shafts were not the danger. The danger was the vertical air shafts that dotted the countryside. When, after years of weathering, the structures that had marked the tops of the shafts disintegrated, they left unmarked and un-protected death traps. They carefully searched their acreage and found no such shaft openings. Gloria remained unconvinced and never ventured into the wooded areas.

“Have you heard from anyone?” Harlan asked.

“Just Bobbie,” Gloria said. “She’s working on the story and called with questions. She says she doesn’t know anything more about the case, doesn’t know why they haven’t moved forward. I told her she was full of it, that we all know why they haven’t moved forward on the thing. The DNA stuff.” Gloria looked up from the small quilting frame where she was working and used the remote to change channels. “By the way, Bobbie says she needs to come take some pictures.”

“Pictures of what?” Harlan asked.

“Oh, you know, us, the motorcycle, where we live,” Gloria answered. “I told her just to let us know.”

“It’d be nice if she could stay over a couple of days,” Harlan said. “Maybe she could talk Fritz into coming along.”

“What are you doing today?” Gloria asked. The two led very comfortably separate lives. Their plans did not have to be linked and mostly were not. That way, they had discovered, no one got in anyone’s way, plans didn’t have to be shifted or canceled. It worked.

“I’ve got some bottling to do,” Harlan answered. “What about you?”

“In a minute, I’m going to get back on LexisNexis,” she answered. “I know I can get my speed up on the thing. It just takes practice.”

“Yeah,” Harlan said, “and a stack of legal dictionaries.”

On the trip home from Kentucky, Gloria announced that she wanted LexisNexis, a database used extensively by law firms to research cases. Harlan suggested it would be a nice birthday present. Gloria stated that she had no intention of waiting for some artificial gift-giving excuse. She was just going to get it. Gloria did have an opinion about gift-giving as dictated by the Department of Commerce or something.

When they got home, she signed up for the service and began the process of learning her way around the software and the data. It was complex. She knew to pace herself, actually setting an alarm clock when she was sitting down to use the database and stopping when the alarm went off. Without the discipline, she would hack away at it to all hours, frustrate herself, and clearly piss off Harlan. So she was uncharacteristically patient.

Harlan returned to his kitchen to complete the bottle preparation. He had learned very early in his beer-making efforts that clean and sterile were necessary. He had soaked the accumulated bottles and now needed to dip them in a sterilization solution and upend them to dry on the special racks he had built. The racks hung on the wall above the big double sink. Rows of dowels stuck out at an upward angle from the rack, long enough to hold each bottle as it came from the solution.

While the bottles dried, Harlan set up the capping machine and the wooden crates he stored the filled bottles in. He had found some in antique shops and yard sales, then built more himself. They had wooden dividers inside that kept the bottles from bumping against each other while the brew aged. He had only once produced a volatile batch, bottling the liquid before it had stopped the fermentation process. The result was a dangerously compressed situation. Tapping just one of the bottles in a batch could set off a chain reaction explosion of beer and flying glass. Harlan had escaped with his eyesight intact, found much stronger bottles, and added an extra day to the brewing time, just to be safe.

The ten-gallon brewing bottles, each sporting the brewer’s airlock from the rubber stopper in the top, were on a large-wheeled rolling cart. During the brewing process, they stayed on the level landing Harlan had built at the top of the mine shaft, just inside the hidden door. Now he wheeled the cart into position at the worktable. Using a siphon, he would fill a case’s worth of bottles, then cap them and rack them in the wooden case. It was a quiet, calming procedure that could use up an entire afternoon. NPR was on the radio, low and in the background.

Neither Harlan nor Gloria believed that instant and constant communication was desirable or even necessary. Their son, Craig, had questioned not having an intercom between the house and the kitchen.

“Most things can wait ’til I get to the house,” Harlan had reasoned. “No one is calling on the phone. My cell is in my pocket. So, about the only thing that your mother would be likely to use the intercom for is to tell me to turn on some news channel. Insufficient reason.”

Harlan had just stopped the flow from the tube, having filled a batch of twenty-four bottles. If he hadn’t, there would likely have been spilled beer when he heard Gloria calling his name at the top of her voice.

“Harlan!” she yelled, then again. “Harlan!”

He had an instant of panic. He looked out the front window wall and saw Gloria standing on the covered porch, waving her arms in Harlan’s direction. She appeared to be okay. He stood, surveyed the uncapped bottles for a second, then stepped to the door.

“What is it?” he called out.

“I got him,” Gloria yelled. “I got him.”

“Got who?” Harlan called back, stepping down and walking toward the house.

“Him. The Congressman,” Gloria yelled back, then let out a whoop.

Harlan reached the porch and stood at ground level and looked up at Gloria.

“Are you sure?” he asked, in a normal voice.

“I’m pretty sure,” Gloria answered. “There’s still some stuff I have to figure out and track down, but, it’s there, it’s there.” Gloria’s face was beaming.

“I need to go back and finish what I’m doing,” Harlan said, “then I’ll be down and you can tell me all about it.”

“Hurry up!” Gloria said. “I can’t wait.”

As much as it was not in Harlan’s nature to hurry up, he finished the bottling in record time, for him. When he had all of the cases filled, capped, and stored in the mineshaft, he ran soaking water in the big sinks and set his brewing bottles in the water. He dried his hands, turned off the radio, and hit the light switch on his way out the door.

Gloria was still at the computer. A stack of papers had built up in the printer tray. Harlan picked them up and began to leaf through them, stopping from time to time to peer more closely at certain sections. Gloria, having found the latest thing she was seeking, hit the print button and pushed back from the computer.

“I think this calls for a celebration,” she announced and walked over to the cabinet where they kept their various liquors. She moved bottles around in order to look behind the front row and came out with a bottle of cream sherry. She poured herself and Harlan a small glass, then held hers out to toast.

“Here’s to LexisNexis, persistence, and the calling to account of one Congressman William Graves,” she said.

Harlan clinked glasses with her and they sipped.

“So, what do you want to do with it?” Harlan asked. He knew he would hear, in detail and more than once, whatever Gloria had found. His interest was in the forward action.

“Well, I want to give it to them, of course,” Gloria said, “but—I don’t know, I think I don’t trust them to get going on it. Face it, Harlan, we don’t know for sure that this Commonwealth’s Attorney guy is on the up and up. Never met him. Now, the detective I trust. Met him. Looked him in the eye.”

“So, what?” Harlan asked. “You want to look this attorney in the eye, make sure he’s okay before you give him what you found?”

“I guess so,” Gloria answered.

“You want to drive to Elizabethtown and . . . ?” Harlan started to ask.

“You couldn’t pay me,” Gloria declared.

“Is it something you think they’ll find, eventually?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Gloria said. “You know, I think I’ll just sit on it for a minute or two, sort it out a little.”

“Fine by me,” Harlan said. “Mind telling me what you found, though?”

“I have found the Congressman’s DNA,” Gloria announced with a flourish. “At least, I know where it is.”

Harlan had pulled the blue tarp off of the motorcycle so Shelby Logan could see it and admire it.

“So you completely redid the thing yourself?” Logan asked as he circled the machine.

“Mostly,” Harlan answered. “I mean, I sent various pieces off to be sand-blasted and painted. I didn’t do the painting. And I have a guy up in Indiana who knows the BMW inside and out. I hit a problem, I take it up there and he talks me through it—doesn’t do it for me—just talks me through it while he keeps working on his own stuff. He is amazing.”

“I’ll bet,” Logan said, leaning in close to look at the engine.

“Mr. Logan,” Gloria called through the kitchen window of the RV, “would you like a glass of tea while we talk?”

“Sure would, if it’s no trouble,” he answered.

“No trouble at all,” Gloria called back.

Harlan had called Shelby Logan that Tuesday morning and arranged to meet at the RV in the campground. He wanted to have the comfort of home turf for the conversation. Logan arrived just after ten and found Harlan folding the tarps and stowing them. Harlan had decided that the mystery was over and that they would not have to hide out any longer.

The morning was warm enough for them sit outside. Harlan had set out the chairs under the awning. Gloria came out with the iced tea glasses and a pitcher and set them on the table. The three settled into chairs and just sat, sipping the tea.

“So, you all call yourselves amateur sleuths?” Logan started.

“Well, no, we don’t,” Harlan said. “I think that’s what some other folks have started calling us. What we do, when we’re home, mostly, is try to figure out crimes before the officials do, just using the media and the Internet. It can be a fascinating game. We have never been out in the field like this time, and, I venture to guess we never will again. This was a fluke.”

“And you say you figured out who the victim was the first day?”

“It was actually pretty easy,” Gloria chimed in. “The stuff from the distillery pinpointed the time window accurately. The rest of it was Internet stuff.”

“All that on the Internet. It does seem hard to believe,” Logan said.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Gloria said. “Shelby Logan, born in 1949, Whitesville, Kentucky. Two sisters and a brother. The name, Shelby, is probably from your maternal grandmother’s maiden name.”

Logan stared at Gloria, dumbfounded.

“Went to Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, pre-law,” Gloria continued. “There’s more where that came from. Want it?”

“No,” Logan said, chuckling. “I believe you, I really do.”

“So, what can we do for you, Detective Logan?” Harlan asked.

“I guess our biggest question is whether you have any more thoughts or ideas on this thing,” Logan said. “You know, about the murderer, the motive. Hell, we wonder if you have any ideas about Cooper’s trailer burning down last Thursday morning.”

The trailer fire had not made the papers, had not come to official attention, even after Agnes had warned the sheriff. Both Harlan and Gloria were caught off guard by the news.

“Is he all right?” Harlan asked.

“What happened?” Gloria asked right on top of him.

“Cooper’s fine. He wasn’t there,” Logan said. “As for what happened, nobody knows. You have any thoughts?”

“Detective, despite the appearances, we are more in the dark than you are,” Harlan said. “I’m sure you already know things from Cooper that he didn’t tell us. You have the forensics, the hairs, and the carpet fibers.”

“Now, isn’t that interesting,” Logan interrupted. “Get that from the Internet, did you?”

Everything stopped for a long moment.

“You see, you make my point for me,” Logan continued. “You all are resourceful, that’s all. I don’t care where or how you’re getting your information. Neither does my boss, although I think we’ll be seeing some classes on how to use the Internet in our future, once he hears about that. We’re just saying we’d like to know if you have anything else that you might share with us. Unofficial, no tape recorders, no statements. Just us, sittin’ and shootin’ the breeze, so to speak.”

Everyone sat still, sipping tea and letting the thought sink in.

“What about Cooper’s trailer?” Harlan asked.

“Guy that works Cooper’s farm, Harvey Miller, driving by Thursday morning, saw it. Nothing but a pile of ashes with half a toilet and an ice box sticking up. Those trailers, you get a fire started in one of them and it’ll pretty much take it to the ground.”

“Is there an investigation?” Harlan asked.

“There wasn’t,” Logan said, “but now that Cooper’s a witness, maybe there will be. Don’t think it’ll do any good. Fire like that is too easy to start without leaving traces of strange stuff.”

“I bet they would find that it started outside, not inside,” Gloria said. “That would be worth knowing.”

“Yes, I reckon they could figure that out,” Logan said, nodding, “and it would be worth knowing. You’re right. See?”

“Well, you know it was that guy, Fuller,” Gloria declared.

“You think so, huh?” Logan said. “That’s interesting. Our Mr. Fuller doesn’t seem to be around. No one home out to the house. No one’s seen him at the local diner. Looks like he might have gone for a vacation. What do you think?”

“I met him, you know,” Harlan said, “and I didn’t like what I saw. I think he was behind some calls back to our home, trying to get information on us. I think he even made some hang-up phone calls to our place. Won’t know for sure ’til we get home. He called the Courier-Journal and tried to warn off a reporter.”

“Cooper didn’t name any names to us,” Gloria said, “but we’re positive he was working with Fuller that night they hid the body.”

“Well, unofficially I can tell you that you’re right,” Logan said.

“And we think he knows who was sitting in the car at the diner,” Harlan said, “the one who passed over the key.”

“Yep, probably,” Logan said.

“So, he’s gone missing?” Harlan said.

“I’m just saying he’s not around,” Logan said. “Like, when you all are away, people don’t say you’re missing, do they? They just say you’re away. Fuller’s away. Interesting timing, I will say that. At some point, I’m afraid I’ll have to go looking for him. Right now, he’s just away. What else are you thinking?”

“I think you might hook up with those new folks at the distillery,” Harlan offered. “I don’t know how deep your investigation is going to go, but they have a ton of old records and documents, from back when the old guy was running it and, from what we hear, a lot of other things around there.”

“Tom Aldergast,” Logan said, shaking his head. “I’m happy I don’t have to tangle with that mess. Good point, though. Anything else?”

Gloria was getting impatient.

“I can tell you there isn’t squat in the sheriff’s files from when that girl went missing,” Gloria said. “I can tell you that Cooper said he never touched the body; he just assembled the barrel.”

“Mr. Stone, anything?” Logan asked.

“I’m sorry,” Harlan said, coming back to the conversation. “I am not real happy about Fuller being places unknown. Do you know him?”

“I’ve met him a few times,” Logan said, “but mostly I just know the stories, some of the same ones you’ve probably heard.”

“I just wish you all had a handle on him,” Harlan said.

“Or a big old piece of rope, right around his neck,” Gloria added, edgier than before.

“Well, we’ll get going on that sooner rather than later,” Logan said.

Gloria couldn’t stand it any longer. “Are you going to charge him?” she blurted.

“Who, Fuller?” Logan asked. “I’m sure we’ll. . . .”

“No! Not Fuller,” Gloria interrupted. “The Congressman, Graves. Are you going to charge him with the murder?”

“Why, do you think we should?” Logan said, and he wasn’t being coy. The knowledge of the vanity license plate was very closely held.

“Well, you know he’s the father of that poor girl’s unborn child. The DNA will show that,” Gloria rattled off. “He probably is the one whose hairs are in the barrel contents. DNA will show that, too. Everyone knows he was in that old man’s pocket. I don’t know how you’d prove that. But, he’s the one, no doubt in my mind.”

Logan shifted his gaze from Gloria to Harlan.

“Boy, that Internet,” he said in mock wonder, “it just keeps on amazing me.”

Gloria stood and strode into the RV. Logan watched, and Harlan held his tongue. She returned almost immediately with a handful of paper. “You go talk to the people on this list, the former interns,” she said, handing the papers to Logan. “They’ll tell you about Congressman Graves, I bet.”

“Have you talked to them?” Logan asked.

“No. Not yet,” Gloria answered.

“But you’re planning to talk to them?” Logan continued.

“If I have to,” Gloria stated. “The thought that he could get away with this just because he’s a Congressman…well, it just burns my butt.”

Gloria sat down, her little rant over for the moment. Logan squared the edges of the paper stack and set them on the table. Harlan just watched.

“Mrs. Stone,” Logan began, softly, “if there is reliable evidence that the Congressman did this thing, or was involved in any way, and if my boss can get his hands on that evidence, he will take the man to trial, Congressman or no Congressman. I just want you to know that. He’s a good man. He is not a politician, doesn’t want to be. If he can put the case together, he will prosecute, have no doubt.”

“Well, good,” Gloria said.

“As close as you have been to this thing and as smart as you are,” Logan continued, “I’m sure you see the problems.”

“Just one,” Gloria said, “getting his DNA.”

“Let me ask you,” Logan went on, “do you think my boss, Todd Grayson—do you think he thinks what you do?”

“He’d have to,” Gloria said, “except, he hasn’t been looking at it as long as I have, so, maybe not. But, he will.”

“And, just out of curiosity,” Logan said, “who else knows what you think happened?”

“Just two others,” Harlan answered, “friends we made here in town. We can both vouch for their discretion.”

“I hope so,” Logan said, “because, if this is the way it goes, life will be very difficult if things get leaked out and lawyers start building barriers and all that.”

“We’ve thought about that,” Harlan said, “and we came to the same conclusion.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask if there’s anything else,” Logan said, smiling.

“No, I don’t think so,” Harlan said.

“May I hang onto these papers, Mrs. Stone?”

“Sure. I brought them out for you,” Gloria said.

“Thank you. What are you folks planning to do now? Is this over for you?”

“Pretty much. Gloria’s still snooping around online, but it’s over,” Harlan said. “We’ll probably head home in the next day or two. I’m out of beer, the stuff I make myself, and there’s stuff to do around the place to get ready for cold weather.”

“You make your own beer?” Logan asked.

“Sure do. If I weren’t fresh out, I’d be glad to give you some,” Harlan said.

“Good home brew,” Logan said wistfully. “Sure wish I had some.”

“Well, if this thing brings us together again, I’ll make it a point to bring some along,” Harlan said. “Or, if you’re ever in our area, let us know. You have our number and you can reach us there. Same thing if you think of any other questions.”

“Thanks, I will,” Logan said, “and when I get word on Fuller, I’ll call and let you know.”

“I would appreciate that,” Harlan said.

Logan made his way to the car, got in, and drove away with a wave. Harlan and Gloria remained standing outside long after he was out of sight.

“You think he didn’t know about the Congressman?” Gloria asked.

“My gut says he didn’t,” Harlan answered.

“You want to get your sister out for dinner tonight?” Gloria asked.

“Sure, that works,” Harlan said. “Maybe hit the road tomorrow.”

“Um-huh,” Gloria said, still staring off, thinking. “So, the whole thing is going to hinge on that old fart’s DNA.”

“I think he’s a year or two younger than me,” Harlan said.

“Like I said,” Gloria continued. “Can’t ask for the DNA unless you can prove you need it. Can’t prove you need it until you have it. Humph! Isn’t that just one hell of a mess.”

“I’d say so,” Harlan said. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I’m going to keep looking.”

Bobbie answered the door at Fritz’s house Monday night, apron tied around her waist and paring knife—or the surgical equivalent—in one hand.

“Well, if it isn’t the mystery couple on the motorcycle,” she said looking past them as if scanning for the motorcycle. “C’mon in.”

Harlan and Gloria both glanced back over their shoulders. It would be accurate to say that they were starting to get jumpy.

“We’re back in the kitchen, of course,” Bobbie continued, heading down the long hallway. Harlan and Gloria exchange glances and nodded. They had both decided that Fritz and Bobbie should discover each other. It seemed fitting.

As they entered the kitchen area, Fritz looked up from his prep work and smiled. “Welcome back,” he said.

“Thanks,” Harlan responded. “Do you happen to have a beer handy?”

Fritz gestured toward the fridge. “Help yourself, please.”

“Do I take it,” Bobbie said, continuing her paring work across from Fritz, “that you all are not finding the motorcycle mystery fame particularly amusing?”

“Oh, that’s nothing, really,” Gloria said, walking over to where Fritz and Bobbie were working, “It’s mostly a pain in the butt. What are you making?”

“I’m working on the apple pie,” Bobbie proudly answered. “So, if it’s not the media thing, what seems to have you two in a blue funk?”

“What, it shows that clearly?” Harlan said. He joined the group at the prep table. “When I try to form an answer to the question, I’m afraid it gets trivial to the point of laughter.”

“That’s sounds good,” Bobbie said. “Give it a try and we can all laugh.”

“Oh, he’s just grouchy ’cause we’re not in a KOA,” Gloria said and snatched a slice of the apple Bobbie was cutting up.

“It is a bit more than that,” Harlan said, “but not much. Okay, we’re in some other campground and it really is just fine. The motorcycle is sitting on the trailer, covered with a blue tarp and backed into the trees and we’re driving some nondescript rental car. The thing that gets to me is that all of these adjustments were forced on us. I hate that.”

“At the risk of sounding like a counselor,” Fritz joined in, “sounds to me like these are all choices you made to avoid notice. What’s being forced on you is attention, the never-sleeping eye of the media. Wouldn’t you agree, news hound?” He looked at Bobbie.

“You are simply trying—in vain, I predict—to avoid your Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame,” Bobbie said. “Just because the two of you riding through town on that motorcycle would probably stimulate wrecks, traffic jams, and an unauthorized parade, you’re grumpy. You’re so used to being the observer, you have no stomach for being the observed. You probably haven’t even practiced your autograph technique.” She turned toward Fritz, speaking to him directly. “You know, there is a technique, just like the Queen’s wave. Did you ever watch that?” She set the knife down and turning in a full circle, imitating the upraised hand, facing in, barely moving. “They say you can keep that up for hours, if need be. Now the autograph technique. . . .”

“Okay. I surrender,” Harlan interrupted.

“I don’t see a smile yet,” Bobbie said.

“I’m working on it,” Harlan replied and took a large swallow of beer.

The trip back from Cumberland Gap had been pleasant. The RV campground Harlan had found on the Internet was adequate—in fact, it was quite good. On the way up, Gloria had called Ann on the cell and canceled the evening plans. They didn’t know, she explained, what sort of snags they would run into.

It had taken extra time inside the campground to find a site on which they could back the trailer out of sight. That had worked out well. Harlan had questioned the owner of the camp about who could just walk in and check his registration book. The owner assured him that it would require a credentialed officer of the court to do so, and only with the proper paperwork. Harlan was somewhat mollified by the information.

Monday morning, Harlan had arranged for an Enterprise rental car to pick them up. He and Gloria took advantage of the opportunity and went out for a restaurant breakfast on the return trip from the car place. When they got back to the RV, Gloria checked the answering machine at home and Harlan placed the call to Todd Grayson in Elizabethtown. Before making any calls on his cell, Harlan checked his owner’s manual and his list of features from a phone bill. Then he activated the name and number blocking feature on the phone. When Gloria was finished checking the answering machine, he did the same thing on hers. The last thing they wanted was callbacks on the cell phones.

The phone call with Grayson was short and to the point. Harlan described his and Gloria’s involvement. Grayson acknowledged that what Harlan described sounded at least believable, even the hobby explanation. “Still,” Grayson had said, “I’d like to get more of your insights on this situation. Sounds to me like yourall’s insights are worth probing.”

“Mr. Grayson,” Harlan had responded, “I’m sure you can understand our intention not to return to your neck of the woods anytime soon.”

“Yes, well . . .” Grayson thought a moment, “yes, I can. Would you at least spend some time with my detective? He’s back and forth to Louisville and Frankfort all the time. Are you still in Louisville?”

“We can meet your detective in Louisville,” Harlan answered without answering.

So, they had agreed to a meeting in Louisville. Harlan noted the detective’s name and cell phone number and arranged to place a call to him on Tuesday morning before nine.

Gloria updated Fritz and Bobbie on their adventure while Harlan sat quietly with his beer.

“I’m probably the one who spilled the beans to the prosecutor,” Fritz said. “I did not, however, give him the cell phone number.”

“I noticed,” Harlan said. “Thanks for that.”

“No problem,” Fritz said. “Your visit and your leads have given me almost celebrity status over there. I mean, I actually rode in the mystery motorcycle. Donna, my colleague who ran the post, wants to meet you guys in the worst way. I told her I’d see what I could do.”

“And, I should tell you that Ned—you remember, the librarian,” Bobbie added, “wants an autograph, preferably on the story I’m writing about all of this.”

“And you’re telling me all of this to cheer me up?” Harlan said.

All three of the others just stopped, like someone had pressed the ‘still’ button on the remote, then slowly turned and looked at Harlan. It was a take worthy of Jack Benny. After five seconds, Bobbie snickered, then Fritz laughed out loud and Gloria joined. It was infectious laughter and Harlan couldn’t resist. It was as though he visibly deflated, losing his ‘puffed-upness’ right in front of then. Then he joined in the laughing.

“Okay, okay, I’m over it,” he said. Then he walked to the fridge and helped himself to another beer. “Anyone else, as long as I’m here?” Everyone indicated a ‘no’, and he closed the door and opened his beer.

“By the way,” Fritz said, “I tried your home brew over the weekend. That is very good stuff. It beats most of the really good micro brews I can find around here.”

“Thanks. I’m getting happy enough with it to repeat recipes,” Harlan said. “Spent the last five years working on it and drinking some uncommonly bad failures.”

“I made him build himself his own kitchen, away from the house,” Gloria said. “You have no idea what even a good batch of that stuff can do to the smell in the house. So now he has his own place to stink up, and he can do beer and salt-rising bread to his heart’s content.”

“No kidding, your own separate kitchen?” Fritz asked.

“Yeah, and I built it right over the entrance to an abandoned coal mine. There was coal mining in our area for some time. Shafts are really dangerous, but I checked ours out down to about a hundred feet, and it’s okay. That’s where I store the stuff I make.”

“A coal mine entrance in your kitchen?” Bobbie said.

“His kitchen, not mine,” Gloria jumped in.

“Yep. Right there. I even thought about making the door round, but I got lazy. Figuring out the hinges on a round door when you don’t have magic in the tool chest is a little tough.”

It was working. Getting Harlan talking about one of his passions was diverting him from the hassles of the day. The whole room began to feel lighter.

“So, in addition to apple pie, what are we having tonight?” Gloria asked. “Better not be sweetbreads.” She arched an eyebrow at Fritz.

“Nope,” Fritz said, smiling. “Pork chops, turnips and their greens, garlicky white beans, and polenta.”

“That’s corn meal mush where I grew up,” Harlan offered. “But I love it.”

“And how appropriate,” Fritz said. “The pork chops are a la Shake ‘N’ Bake, the greens have bacon grease in them, and the white beans are of the Navy variety.”

“When do we eat?” Gloria asked.

“Shortly,” Fritz answered. “I did whip up an appetizer, those chicken liver-bacon-water chestnut things. They’re in the oven now.” He glanced at Gloria. “I know—organ meat.”

“You’re forgiven,” Gloria answered. “I like them.”

“Okay, so what’s the news?” Harlan asked.

“I’ll start,” Bobbie offered. She had finished the apples, and they were sitting in the bowl, macerating with sugar and spices. “A sinister call did come in to the paper, checking on me. It was a slightly veiled threat, something to the tune of ‘people ought not go nosing around where they don’t belong.’ Idiot called one of the reporters who cover the State. I guess he doesn’t realize that saying something like that to the media will always get the exact opposite result. Anyway, the reporter brought it to me, and we took it to my editor. And, guess who it was.”

“Calvin Fuller,” Harlan said.

“Bingo! Veiled threat from his home phone. What an idiot,” Bobbie said.

“I think there are a ton of people out there who have no idea about the technology that is in the consumers’ hands,” Fritz offered. He was taking the appetizers out of the oven. “I bet this guy thinks that tracing a call is something that works like in old film noir classics.”

Fritz tonged the appetizers onto a plate and set the pan aside. Then he brushed their tops with a concoction from a small bowl.

“What’s that?” Gloria asked him.

“A little sweetness with sesame,” Fritz answered. “Better give them a minute to cool down.”

He picked up a deep-dish pie plate and began to arrange the pie crust in it. Then he upended the apple bowl and poured slices and juices into the pie crust. He sliced a small, very green tomato and distributed the slices across the top of the filling, dotted the whole thing with butter, then set the top crust in place, crimped it, and cut vents in it.

“We’ll bake the pie first, give it time to cool while the chops cook,” he said.

“So, what did your editor say?” Gloria asked Bobbie.

“He just asked what it was about, if it was something I was working on,” Bobbie answered. “You want wine?” Gloria nodded, and Bobbie handed her a glass. “I filled him in on the outline and the angle my feature is taking. He likes it. Of course, now that I’ve told him, he’ll be pushing me to publish. After the weekend coverage of the mystery couple on the motorcycle, he dropped by my desk this morning, wondering if I knew anything about it.

“I said yes and he wanted to break it in the paper, some ‘Mystery Solved’ headline. I talked him out of it, told him we’d look foolish, that it really wasn’t a mystery, that it had no direct bearing on the actual crime in question, and that it could hamper us. He bought it.”

“I caught the prosecutor on the TV earlier,” Fritz said. “His responses to questions about the mystery couple were pretty good. He simply pointed out that the only people for whom they are a mystery seemed to be the reporters, that the mystery couple are private citizens not in any way connected to the official investigation or prosecution of the murder. Then he declined to name them or to respond to any other questions about them—you, I mean.”

“Good for him,” Harlan said. “Of course, he lied.”

“Not really,” Bobbie said. “He covered himself with the word official. You all are not the subjects of any official investigation.”

“I think I’d rather that,” Harlan said, “than the unofficial snooping that’s going on.”

“What, the call to the paper?” Bobbie asked.

“Well, like that, only creepier, maybe,” Harlan said. He then filled them in on the call from the sheriff at home. “That creeped me out, I admit.”

“Me, too,” Gloria said.

“I’m pretty sure it had to be Fuller, and I’m positive the only way it could have happened that fast was from the registration at the KOA in Elizabethtown. That’s why we’re not back in the KOA here,” Harlan said. “I will have some words with the KOA people about that.”

“So now what?” Bobbie asked.

“I think Cooper’s written statement names Fuller. Don’t know it, but I think so. Grayson did say that he had left out what he considered dangerous information when he talked that day.” Harlan paused for a bite of the appetizer and a sip of beer. “So, I think the threat goes away with prosecution.”

“The prosecution, yes,” Fritz said. “Grab that plate and let’s relax over here for a minute.” They all moved to the seating area by the fireplace. “There’s going to be some good forensic material, according to Sharpton. He’s found hairs that are not from the girl, hairs of at least two people. He’s found carpet fibers. And it has all been well preserved by the alcohol. All the hair evidence is out for DNA. The DNA on the fetus is already back. It is shaping up to be a good case.”

“Yeah, but against who?” Gloria said. Everyone paused to think about that.

“You know, you’re right,” Bobbie said. “So far, there’s lots of speculation, but no one has been named as a suspect.”

“I mean, I know who did it,” Gloria said, flat out. “Not a doubt in my mind it was that Congressman.” She grabbed two of the appetizers and sat back in her chair.

“Boy, I’m glad I’m not in that prosecutor’s shoes right now,” Fritz said.

“What do you mean?” Harlan asked.

“Think it through. Suppose Gloria’s right and the prosecutor thinks the same thing,” Fritz continued as he got up to check on the pie. “Now what does he do?”

“I guess it depends on what he has,” Harlan responded.

“Okay. Cooper didn’t say anything about the Congressman, did he?” Fritz went on.

“No, he didn’t,” Harlan said. “But he did say the room was empty, except for the body, when they got there. And he said they stopped on the way, and Fuller got the key from someone sitting in a car at a diner somewhere.”

“So you’ve got nothing that puts, say, the Congressman at the scene of the murder,” Bobbie said. “You’ve got Cooper putting himself and, we think, Fuller there afterward—that’s all. Right?”

“Except,” Gloria said quietly, “DNA could put him there.”

“What,” Fritz jumped in, “the fetus? That would put him somewhere, no doubt, but not in the motel room.”

“No,” Gloria continued, “the hairs.”

“Oh, boy,” Bobbie said, “that’s pretty slim. See, when you start screwing around with a Congressman or a Senator or even a President, you better have things buttoned down pretty tight. If you don’t and you have to go fishing, you’ll get slaughtered.”

“If his DNA is on the body, is that buttoned down tight?” Gloria asked.

“Probably,” Bobbie continued, “but how are you going to get his DNA for comparison before you have it buttoned down? Write him a friendly note and ask him to cooperate?”

“I do believe you have identified the sticking point,” Harlan said.

Fritz went to work pulling the pie out and putting the chops in to bake. Then he started organizing the rest of the meal. Gloria sat and stared off into space. The conversation had her thoughts going a mile a minute. Bobbie lit a cigarette, and Harlan walked over to Fritz’s area to get away from the temptation.

Over dinner, Bobbie explained that she was unable to get her source, the roommate, to do any more than she’d already done.

“She probably has media knocking on her front door already. If not today, then definitely by tomorrow. Somebody will trace it and find her. I feel kind of sorry for her.”

“It occurs to me,” Harlan said, “that we should have no more discussion of her and her story. Both Gloria and I are going to talk to the investigator tomorrow. We don’t have the same journalistic claim to anonymity you enjoy, and I would prefer not to be put in the position of lying.”

“I agree,” Bobbie said, “and thanks for the implied intent to protect the source.”

“You’re right, though,” Gloria added. “She’ll have them all on her doorstep as soon as they find her married name. I’ve been poking around on the net, and there are a ton of names out there. If this thing goes public with the Congressman’s name in an official indictment, there’ll be knocks on a lot of doors.”

“So, you’re still looking?” Fritz asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Gloria answered.

“What, exactly, are you looking for now?” Bobbie asked.

There was a pause. Harlan knew what was coming. He’d heard it earlier in the day.

“I guess you’d say I’m looking for pecker tracks,” Gloria said proudly.

Maybe no one is absolutely stable. Maybe stability is circumstantial and, given the right circumstances, anyone could find himself stumbling across the line that marks his own stable space. That line of demarcation might even shift with changes in circumstances, the kind of shift that causes people to say, “Well, you know, he’s fragile right now.”

No one would be saying that about Cal Fuller because no one, not even his wife, was close enough to Cal Fuller to know the circumstances, know they were shifting, and know that he was having a little difficulty maintaining his balance, his mental and emotional balance. Not even Agnes. Fuller himself didn’t even know it—know that he was fragile. What he did know was that things didn’t seem to be going exactly right for him.

It was eating at him that the whole barrel screw up had happened, and every time he started casting about for someone to blame—a skill he had honed over the years working for Mr. Tom—he could come up with only two names: his and Mr. Tom’s. So he blamed Mr. Tom for not telling him to do something about it. That didn’t stop the blame machine. It satisfied nothing. He still found himself caught up in the circle of recrimination and blame. He had no practice at or familiarity with blaming himself. He was on foreign territory. Foreign territory will make one fragile. Fuller was fragile.

“Cal, you know I’m not supposed to do this.” It was the KOA owner out on Highway Sixty-two. “I mean, well, if I get caught giving you information on guests, I could lose my franchise.”

“Bobby, you ain’t going to get caught,” Fuller said. “Who’s going to know? Besides, you know we’ll take care of you.”

“That’s just it, Cal,” Bobby went on. “Who is the ‘we’? Mr. Tom is dead.”

“I know, Bobby. I know,” Fuller said. “Look, you going to do me this one favor?”

“Well, okay,” Bobby said, “but, this is it, you know? I can’t be doing any more of this stuff. Things just aren’t the same as they used to be.”

At least his friend in the sheriff’s office hadn’t changed.

“Sure, I’ll make the call, Cal,” he said. “One fellow I know from conventions works in those parts. Right kind of guy, you know? Feels the same about troublemakers as we do. Yes, sir.”

The problem was that another deputy, following up on Harvey Miller’s information, also stopped by the KOA. Bobby was gone and his wife was on duty.

“Isn’t that strange,” she commented, as she looked up the information for the deputy. “This is the same guest that Cal Fuller was out here asking about.”

The deputy reported the conversation to his boss, the sheriff. The sheriff, elected on the same ‘clean sweep’ slate that had brought Todd Grayson’s boss into office, knew the ins and outs without ever having participated himself. So he knew who to call.

“Agnes, I don’t know what, but something’s going on, and it’s about to get serious,” he explained. “So, I thought you could maybe get hold of Cal Fuller and tell him to back off, stay home, sit on his hands, or something. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to be in the picture when whatever this is starts to unfold.

“Sure I know he doesn’t answer to you,” he went on. “Near as I can tell, he doesn’t answer to no one, the hard-headed. . . . Anyway, I do know that he might listen to you, that’s all. I’d consider it a big favor.”

Before Agnes could find time to contact Fuller, the identification of the body in the barrel had turned her world topsy-turvy. After she had bullied the first two reporters to show up at the office back into the street, she had unilaterally decided to lock the doors, close the blinds, turn on the answering machine, and get out of there. She sent the staff home with harsh instructions not to talk to anyone from the press. She called Washington and informed them of what she was doing. She had the private number, so she was able to get through. The main lines into the Congressman’s office were clogged with calls from the press. Then she went home.

Agnes lived a very private private life. Everyone knew she was not married and lived alone. No one knew if she was ever married or even in a romantic situation. There were rumors about her and Mr. Tom, faint rumors, the kind that get told in the kitchen but never out in public, like at the diner. Most people who knew Agnes or knew of her didn’t even know where she lived. She wanted it that way.

The people who supplied Agnes with the basics—groceries, dry cleaning, auto maintenance, lawn mowing—knew not to talk about it. When Agnes wanted to shop or when Agnes wanted to go out for a nice dinner and maybe get a little tipsy, she’d go to Louisville or to Nashville. When she was home, she ate at home, she drank at home, she watched TV, she read. Two or three of her closest neighbors knew who she was and what she did, but they didn’t talk about it. Trick-or-treaters knew to skip her little bungalow with attached garage. Most of the staff at the office did not know where she lived and did not want to know. Life in the office was routine. There were never weekend crises or last minute work. No one ever had to take documents by her house on weekends. For most of the world, the only place Agnes existed was at the office. When she left the office, she disappeared.

That didn’t mean that Agnes was out of touch. She reached out by phone to keep tabs on developments. She knew about Cooper’s trailer. She talked to the sheriff about it. When she heard that it was not being investigated, she suggested that it might just turn around and bite the sheriff in the ass. She had her own ideas about the trailer fire, and they had nothing to do with smoking in bed.

She knew that Cooper had provided a statement to the Commonwealth’s Attorney, or to his assistant, then disappeared. She had run into brick walls on that one—she couldn’t track down his whereabouts. She knew that there was a whisky barrel locked up in one of the cells at the jailhouse, locked up and sealed. She knew that a search warrant had been issued for the Dixie Motel and dismissed it. There couldn’t be anything incriminating in that old derelict.

She did not know who the mystery motorcycle people were or what significance they had. No one she’d reached out to had any idea. She knew that Fuller had been trying to check up on them, which was what had prompted the request from the sheriff. She knew that no one had been named in an indictment on the body in the barrel case. She was confident that nothing existed that could link her boss, the Congressman, to the case, except. . . .

When the knocking on her door started, she assumed it was the press. How they had found her was a puzzle. She ignored it. When the knocking persisted, she finally went to the small window that provided her with a view of the front porch and peered out. It was Fuller, parked right in front of her house and standing on the porch, pounding away at the door. She still intended to ignore the knocking. Then, he started hollering out her name.

“Agnes, come on. Open up. I know you’re in there. Agnes.”

She jerked open the door and practically pulled Fuller inside. She slammed the door and reeled around to face Fuller. She was fuming. “Do you have any brains at all?” she spat at Fuller. “What in the hell are you doing standing on my porch, hollering out my name? Do you have even an ounce of brains left in that head?”

Fuller had his hat off, held with both hands in front of him. He was already beginning to think that coming by was not one of his best ideas. He had seen Agnes in full roar before, but he had never, in all the years, had it turned on him.

“I, uh, I thought we should talk,” he stammered. “Cooper’s disappeared, and I don’t know what he might be doing. I thought we should make a plan or something.”

“What? Like set fire to his trailer?” Agnes snapped back at him.

That brought Fuller up short. How could she know that? If she knows, who else knows?

“What does he know?” Agnes demanded. “What could he be telling them?”

“He just knows about the girl…I mean, that we put her in a barrel,” Fuller murmured.

“Are you positive?” Agnes demanded.

“Well, yeah, he knows that. He was there,” Fuller responded.

“Did he see anyone else? Does he know anything else?” Agnes persisted.

“No. He couldn’t.”

“And you, what do you know?” Agnes demanded. That night when the call came in, she had immediately passed the information to Mr. Tom. Then she had let it drop. She was as startled by the news of a body in a barrel as everyone else. It had not, however, taken her very long to put two and two together.

“Well, I did have to get the key to room forty-five,” Fuller mumbled, “and he was in the car there, at the diner.”

“He, who?” Agnes pushed.

“You know, your boss,” Fuller answered.

“Cooper didn’t see him?” Agnes asked.

“No. He stayed in the truck, his truck.”

Agnes stood still. She shifted her gaze from Fuller’s face to a spot on the wall next to him. Fuller didn’t budge.

“Calvin,” she said after a minute’s thinking, “you need to go fishing or something. You got cash?” He nodded. “Good. You leave right now before somebody officially decides you shouldn’t be going anywhere. You hear? Don’t use credit cards. Find a hunting cabin or something and take a nice long rest. You hear me?”

Fuller nodded.

“You do it now. You drive straight to the house, get your things together, and leave. Don’t call anybody, and don’t talk to anybody. Is the wife at home?”

“No, she’s out,” he said.

“Good. Leave her a note. Just say there’s something you have to do,” Agnes instructed him. “Now, get on out of here. Give it a few days and call my office, and, Cal, don’t screw this up. There’s too much at stake here.”

As Fuller was making his way to the truck, Agnes scanned up and down the street, saw no one and slammed the front door. Fuller pulled away and went straight to his house. He followed Agnes’s instructions to the letter. By lunchtime on Saturday, Fuller was clear of the area. He’d decide where to go later, after he got clear.

As he drove, his mind continued the search for someone to blame, someone who was the cause of his current situation, someone who was messing with his life. He couldn’t blame Agnes. It wouldn’t do any good to blame Mr. Tom. He’d found that out. Somehow, he couldn’t blame Cooper, maybe because he still thought of Cooper as dead in the fire. His mind kept at it as the miles drifted by. Had to be someone to blame, someone to get even with. Had to be.