Bloody Kin Read Online Free PDF

from the door to make room for the awkward stretcher that two ambulance attendants were bringing out. The women had started to turn away when Dwight said, “I’m sorry, ladies, but I need for y’all to tell me if you’ve ever seen him before.”
    He gestured to one of the attendants, who turned back the edge of the covering.
    The man appeared to be about forty. His black hair was short and curly and he was clean-shaven. Except for a dark mole the size of a pea on his right cheek, there was nothing remarkable about his features and yet, thought Kate, there was something . . . “Do you recognize him, Mrs. Honeycutt?” asked Dwight, who was watching her closely.
    “I’m not sure,” Kate said slowly. “I don’t think I ever met him, but I have the feeling I’ve seen him somewhere.”
    “Here or in New York?” Kate shook her head.
    “I’m sorry, I can’t remember.”
    “Mama? Rob?”
    Both shook their heads, too.
    “Mrs. Whitley?”
    “No, of course not. We’ve only lived here a few months. Tom’s in school most of the time. There hasn’t been time to meet hardly anyone and besides—” The girl seemed to hear herself chattering and clamped her tongue.
    “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I never saw a dead person before.”
    Sally Whitley looked scared and so very, very young that Kate took pity on her.
    “You’re probably worried about Mary Pat, too,” she said.
    Sally Whitley nodded gratefully.
    “She’s okay. I left her with my husband’s uncle. I guess I should have called over to Gilead, but I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
    “That’s all right. She loves Mr. Honeycutt. Would follow him around all day long if I’d let her. It’s just that, well, Mr. Tyrrell’s nice about it, but he does like to have his meals on time and he wants Mary Pat there.”
    “Now don’t you worry. Rob’ll give you a ride up to the house and then drive you and Mary Pat right back to Gilead,” said Miss Emily as blithely as if she were arranging a picnic. “And, Rob, tell Lacy that Kate’s having lunch with us and see if you can make that stubborn old mule come, too. Dwight?”
    The detective shook his head regretfully. “Sorry, Mama, but get Bessie to save me a piece of that pie and I’ll stop in later.”
    His tone was easy, but Kate saw the speculative look in his eyes as he watched Sally Whitley walk away with Rob. Behind him, the ambulance doors clanged shut, and, although the sun shone just as warmly, Kate found herself suddenly shivering.

C HAPTER 3
    Casual acquaintances were constantly telling Emily Bryant what a jewel she had in Bessie Stewart. “A treasure,” they gushed. “A relic of the old days.” By which they meant the old pre-civil rights days when everyone, meaning blacks, knew his place and kept to it. The gushers were usually women who had to make do with indifferent help for which they paid premium wages, gave uneasy instructions, and were truly puzzled by the lack of loyalty they commanded.
    When Emily Bryant first came to the farm as an inexperienced young bride, she found one of her childhood playmates married to her husband’s chief tenant. A matron of eight years’ standing at that point, Bessie had taken her in hand, taught her the rudiments of keeping house, the secret of feather-light hush puppies, and how to grass tobacco and cotton without chopping up all the tender plants. She had helped deliver Dwight a year later when a hurricane blocked the roads with uprooted trees and downed power lines, and later showed Miss Emily how to turn dresses and suits to fit four growing children when hail destroyed the tobacco two years in a row and money was nonexistent. After Cal Bryant died, it was Bessie Stewart who pushed Miss Emily to get a teaching degree, “’Cause you ain’t never going to be no farmer, I don’t care how long you live on one.”
    Bessie had her own standards of what was fitting in a mistressservant relationship and she needed no movement, civil or feminist,