Cypress Grove Read Online Free PDF

ago.”
    “Heard someone bought it. That house’s been empty a long time. Few rungs down from fixer-up would be my guess.”
    “I’m doing most of the work myself. My grandfather was a builder, the kind that back in his day handled everything himself, plumbing, electric, carpentry. He raised me. I started crawling under houses when I was eight or nine.”
    “And haven’t quit yet,” I said.
    “I thought I had. But we’re so often wrong about such things, aren’t we? Not that I get much chance to crawl and so on, between my own work and what I do for the barracks. Hope you don’t mind my tracking you down, Sheriff. I saw your Jeep outside.”
    “Not at all, Miss Bjorn.”
    “Val. Please.”
    Suddenly Thelma was at the booth saying, “Here, let me clear some room,” scooping up plates and laying them along her left arm. “Get you anything else, boys? Ma’am?” Their eyes met briefly. “Some more coffee? Just made a fresh pot.”
    “Gettin’ too late for this old man,” Bates said. “Prob’ly be up through Tuesday or so, as it is.”
    Don Lee and I also declined.
    “I’m fine,” Val said. “But thank you.”
    “We have the check?” Bates said. Thelma turned back and shook her head. He shook his.
    “How long we been doing this, Thelma? Four, five years now?”
    “Sonny says I don’t give you a bill. You know that.”
    “And you know—”
    “He’s my boss, Lonnie. I got to do what he tells me. That’s how most of us live. What, this job isn’t hard enough already?”
    “Okay, okay. Anyway, your shift’s almost over now.”
    “Life’s just chockful of almosts, ain’t it.”
    Waiting till she was gone, Bates pulled out his wallet, extracted a twenty and a five, and tucked them under the sugar bowl. Easily twice what the bill came to.
    “She’s dying to know who you are,” he told Val.
    “I got that.”
    “You want to come on back with me to the station, pick up that kit?”
    “Would you mind if I waited and came by on my way in to work tomorrow, Sheriff? I’d dearly love to go on home now, get some rest.”
    “Wouldn’t we all.” He nodded. “What time you figure to be swinging by?”
    “Seven, seven-thirty?”
    “Good enough. I’m not still there, Don Lee will be.”
    We stood and made our way to the door.
    “Goodnight, then,” Val told us outside. Her eyes met each of ours in turn. She shook hands with Bates.
    “Lisa’s gonna hang me out to dry,” Don Lee said.
    “Reckon she will. Not to mention having fed your dinner to the pigs.” Bates turned to me: “You’ll be needing a ride back.”
    “You don’t live in town?” Val said.
    I shook my head. “Cabin up by the lake.”
    “Nice up there.”
    “It is that.”
    “Awfully late, though. He’s one of yours, Sheriff, right?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Look, the lake’s a long way. I have a spare room. Not much in there yet, an old bunk bed with a futon thrown across it, some plastic cubes, a table lamp without a table. But all that could be yours for the night.”
    “A kingdom.”
    We drove out of town in the opposite direction from the lake, past Pappa Totzske’s sprawling apple orchard and spread of seventy-five-foot chicken houses. The back seat of Val’s six-year-old yellow Volvo was piled with boxes, portable files, clothing, a stack of newspapers. When she hit the key, old-time music started up at full blast. Gid Tanner, maybe. She punched the reject button on the cassette player.
    “Sorry, I usually have this world to myself.”
    “Trying to assimilate?”
    She laughed. “Hardly. I grew up with this, been listening to it, playing it, since I was ten years old.”
    “Right after you began your carpentry career.”
    “Exactly. Hammer, screwdriver, mandolin. Lot better with the hammer, though.”
    The old Ames place was six or seven miles outside town, at the end of a dirt road so deeply pitted that it could have been passed off as a child’s projection map of the Grand Canyon. Papershell pecan trees