Page 77 of A Rose of Steel
“Thank you,” I said and stepped inside the house.
“I was just on my way out to the dock,” he said, walking toward the back. “Sit a while and think. Maybe cast a line.”
“Sounds good,” I said and followed him.
Catfish had acres of land, passed down through generations, part of the land his family got in their grant in the mid-1800s of “forty acres and a mule.” His family had been lucky. Most of the land allocated during the war ex-slaves under agrarian reform wasn’t allowed to keep it. The land got restored to pre-war owners. Not theirs.
I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs and sat on the dock, dangling my toes in the water.
Catfish sat in a chair and picked up his fishing pole. “You know I got a chair up here for you.”
“I know,” I said. “But I like sitting here.”
“Nice day.”
“Yeah. It is a nice day.”
We sat quietly for a while. Basking in the warm October day, not needing any words between us to enjoy each other’s company.
“You figured who killed Bumper yet?”
“Well, that just came out the blue,” I said and chuckled. “What makes you think I’m trying to figure that out?”
“You figured out the last one,” he said. “I remember you like a good puzzle. Plus, I figured you wouldn’t let Babet take charge of a murder investigation as a justice of the peace. She’d get it into a tangled mess.”
I laughed. “I think she already has.”
“Yeah? How so.”
“She’s got one college’s assistant football coach, a Mighty Max marketing exec, and one of Bumper’s childhood friends committing the murder.”
“Wow,” he said. A word he liked to use. “That’s pretty out there.”
“Not as out there as a couple of theories I’ve been mulling over.”
“Oh yeah? What you got?”
“My murder suspects include a man who has been dead for two months and an eighty-year old woman who can hardly hold herself upright.”
“Oh wow,” he said. “You’re getting to be just as bad as your Auntie Zanne.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
It was nearly four thirty when I left Catfish’s place. I was hungry and tired, but I had one more stop to make before I headed home.
“Hey, Cousin,” I said as I walked inside of the Sheriff’s Office. I needed to drop off the toxicology report to Pogue, and maybe share notes with him on the murder investigation so far. I couldn’t let him know too much of what I was doing because he’d told me not to do anything.
He was standing at a table that had a coffee machine, cups and a box of donuts on it.
“Hi,” he said, happy to see me. “What you doing here?”
“Can’t I stop in to see my cousin?”
“Romie, you know you’re not one for visiting,” he said.
“Why does everyone think I’m so antisocial?”
“Uh, because you are.”
