One Foot in Eden Read Online Free PDF Page A

farm.
    What she told me was the truth, all of it, because it all made sense – Billy acting so unsurprised to see me, Holland disappearing but his truck being here, the shot she’d heard.
    ‘He was wearing his soldier uniform,’ Mrs. Winchester said.
    ‘He always wore it when he went over there.’
    For the first time her voice wavered.
    ‘However is it fair that he could do all that fighting in Korea and not get much more than a briar scratch, then come back home and get shot in his own back yard? Can you answer me that, Sheriff?’
    I shook my head. I had no answer, at least none I wanted to tell her. She was an old woman who’d outlived two, maybe three, of her children. Whatever mistakes she’d made raising them she didn’t need to be reminded of. I just looked down at the ground between us, knowing she and I had more in common than she probably realized.
    I had lost a child too, not like her but in my own way. There ‘had been times as the years passed when I’d wonder what that child would have looked like had it been born alive. I’d imagine a child at five or six or eight or ever how many years had passed since the miscarriage. Sometimes I’d imagine a boy, sometimes a girl. Picking at scabs, that was all I was doing at such times, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
    I put my hat back on.
    ‘I’ll do all of what I can to find your son, Mrs. Winchester.’
    ‘I thank you for it,’ she said.
    I stepped off the porch and walked into the woods, meeting Leonard and Bobby and Tom on their way back.
    ‘It’s like he’s done disappeared into thin air, Sheriff,’ Leonard said. ‘We got out there in front of Holcombe’s house and the trail went colder than grave frost. I figured I’d start Stonewall again out in front of Mrs. Winchester’s, see if he can sniff up another trail.’
    ‘If Stonewall doesn’t, you all start dragging the river,’ I said.
    ‘You speak to anybody over there?’
    ‘No,’ Bobby said. ‘I saw Holcombe’s wife peeking behind a window but she didn’t come out.’
    ‘Well, I’m going to talk to the both of them. I’ll get up with you later.’
    I walked on, the cicadas making their racket above me in the trees, calling for rain as Daddy used to say. Doing a pretty poor job of it too, for the pieces of sky I saw through the trees were blue as a jaybird.
    I stepped through the barbed wire fence. Down toward the river I saw Billy in his field, but I stepped up on the porch instead. I rapped my knuckles on the door.
    When she looked at me through the screen I saw what had brought Holland this way. Amy Holcombe was blue-eyed with yellow hair that fell to her waist, tall and slim but full-breasted. When she opened the screen door, I saw she was pregnant.
    I wondered right then and there whose child it was.
    ‘What brings you out this morning, Sheriff?’ she asked, trying to act surprised—as if she hadn’t noticed the dog and searchers tramping all over her yard.
    ‘Holland Winchester’s missing,’ I said. ‘His momma says he was over here yesterday.’
    ‘I don’t know the least thing about that,’ Amy Holcombe said, and she said it in a flat kind of way, the way someone would say something they’d memorized for a test.
    ‘You mind me visiting with you a minute, Mrs. Holcombe?’ I asked and stepped a little closer.
    ‘I’ve got a bushel of chores to do,’ she said. ‘I ain’t even cleared breakfast off the table.’
    ‘Just for a minute, Mrs. Holcombe. Then I’ll be on my way.’ She didn’t want to let me in, but I could tell she was calculating it would be more trouble not to. She opened the screen door wider.
    ‘The house is ever a mess. Like I said, I got a lot to do.’
    I smelled the wood smoke as I stepped inside and remembered I hadn’t seen a gap in the trees for a power line. A clock that didn’t work lay on the mantle above the hearth. Beside it an oil lamp, against the wall a couple of ladder-back chairs. That was enough to know they