As Much Trouble Dead As Alive

Wade stared at Alex, his eyes widening in disbelief. For a moment, he could not think of anything to say. "Dead?" he finally croaked in voice raspy with surprise. "But when- how-"

"Like I said, someone hit him over the head," Alex said. "As far as when, it's hard to say for sure, but all the signs indicate that he's been dead for at least thirty-six hours, maybe a little longer."

"How do you know that?" Rhett asked, dismounting and moving to the door of the cabin, staring at Alex, who shrugged.

"I don't, but Young Doc does. Says it has to do with the amount of rigor in the body, and the blood pooling. He seems pretty sure, though."

Wade joined the other two men. "At least I don't have to decide whether or not to kill him now," he said. This close to the cabin, he could smell a faint but unpleasant odor of putrefaction, and had no trouble believing that a dead body lay within.

Rhett glanced sharply at him. "Did you do it?" he asked bluntly.

Wade blinked in surprise. "Did I—" he stopped and stared at his step-father, understanding what he meant. "No," he said. "No."

"I'm not going to hold it against you if you did," Rhett said. "Hell, Alex and I were urging you to do it just a little while ago, and I think both of us thought it would be less trouble if someone killed him. But if you did it, I need to know, so I can keep you out of legal difficulties for it - to the best of my ability, at least."

"I didn't do it," he said, meeting Rhett's eyes squarely. "Just aside from anything else, Uncle Rhett, if I had done it, do you think I would have been so stupid as to lead a posse here, to the very place where his body lay?"

"This was the logical place to look, though," Alex said, doubt in his voice. "I don't think you could have kept us from coming here."

"No, but I had all of last night to make sure that there wasn't a body when you came," Wade said, his eyes narrowing at this lack of trust, though his voice remained calm. "If I had killed him, there wouldn't have been anything here for you to find." Shouldering past the other two men, he entered the cabin, hoping the sight wouldn't be unbearable. Unlike Alex and Rhett, he had never been to war.

"What killed him, Young Doc?" he asked, breathing through his mouth as much as possible. The smell wasn't really that bad— not yet— but the awareness that this unpleasant odor emanated from what had once been human made it much more repellent.

"A hard blow to the back of the head," his friend told him. "And since the killer— whoever it was— obligingly left the weapon behind, I think we can safely say that it was done with the blunt edge of an ax." He indicated the worn, battered-looking tool that lay on the floor only inches from the corpse; the dull edge was matted with gore and hair. Wade turned away sharply, feeling his gorge rise.

"And it happened - when?"

"Rigor is almost completely gone, the body its at room temperature, and lividity is set," Young Doc said. "My best guess is somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six hours ago."

"I- um- I guess we need to get the sheriff, then," Wade said; a queasy feeling settled in the pit of his stomach when he thought about the rage in Sheriff Campbell's eyes when Rhett ordered him out of Tara the other evening.

"I don't think we can do that," Rhett said from behind him.

"Why not?" Wade asked, turning to face him.

"Because the sheriff knows that there was a period of time— a couple of hours— when you were not where you were supposed to be," Rhett said. And that was -what? A little more than thirty-six hours ago?"

Awareness dawned. "You mean he'll think I did it," Wade said flatly.

Rhett nodded. "Almost certainly. I mean, you even mentioned that you stopped just short of the shanty town. Even if he didn't think he had a grudge against our family, he'd probably think you did it. You had the motive, and the opportunity, and the means may very well be something that was just laying here, waiting for someone to use it."

Wade nodded slowly. He didn't like it, but he could see Rhett's point'

"So what are we going to do with him?" Jeb asked, after a moment. He had been so quiet that the other men had forgotten his presence. "Drop him in the river and forget him?"

Wade hesitated. The idea was tempting, so very tempting.

"Only as a last resort," he said. "Too many people knew Rodney was here, and too many other people knew he intended to come here. If he disappears, there will be questions, and sooner or later, an official investigation. We can't afford that."

"So what can we do?" Alex asked. "Let him stay here until the stink attracts someone's attention and he's found? Wouldn't that lead to the same kind of investigation?"

"Is there any way it can be made to look like an accident?" Jeb asked.

"Young Doc hesitated. "If there were something he could have hit his head on—" he said. "But there isn't anything here."

"No, we'd have to take him somewhere else," Jeb responded. "Somewhere that does have a place where he could have hit his head. Would a rock do it, Young Doc?"

The physician shook his head. "Not an ordinary rock. You see, the skull is broken, and any half-way competent doctor would be able to tell that it was with a very hard blow from a long, thin edge. Not thin enough to be sharp, but thin enough to cause a straight, narrow fracture. I don't think the sheriff is smart enough to see it, but he would almost certainly get someone to examine the body who would."

"Could it have been something made of wood? The edge of a shelf, maybe?"

Joe hesitated, then shook his head. "No. If the sheriff doesn't investigate thoroughly, you might could get away with that, but any competent doctor would be able to tell from the wound itself. If it had been made with a wooden edge, you would expect two things. First, the wood would have been dented—wood just isn't as hard as bone. And second, that denting would cause fragments of wood to be embedded in the wound—deep in it, and there's no way I could re-create that for you. Now it's possible that the sheriff will just get me or the doctor from Jonesborough to certify that the man's dead, but we can't count on that. As much as the sheriff is currently holding a grudge against certain members of our family, he's love to do something to embarrass us. My guess is, he'll call for a thorough investigation, and bring down a specialist from Atlanta to see what trouble he can stir up."

"So the wound has to have been caused by a metal edge?" Jeb asked.

"Not necessarily. It has to be a long, thin edge made of something that wouldn't break when it hit the head."

"Maybe we could find an edge of rock near the river?" Jeb suggested tentatively.

"And how would we explain why he laid there for a whole day and no one found him?" Joe asked reasonably. "This is the country, but it's not the dark side of the moon. People are up and down this riverbank all the time— men hunting, kids fishing. Someone would have seen him. No, it needs to be someplace hidden, someplace where no one goes, at least not often."

"You said it could be a stone edge, though? Doesn't have to be metal?" Alex asked from the doorway.

"Joe nodded at his uncle. "Yeah, stone would work, as long as it was heavy, and had a thin edge that could cause the wound."

"I know where it could have happened, then," Alex said triumphantly. "I know where he could have fallen, and accidentally done this to himself."

"So how did you happen to think of this?" Wade asked Alex, trying to keep his attention from where Rhett and Young Doc, with Jeb's help, were positioning Rodney on the stone floor of the springhouse. The tiny room was too cramped to allow all of them to help, so Wade and Alex stood back towards the entrance to let the others work. To tell the truth, Wade didn't mind at all; dealing with a dead body was unpleasant work, at best.

"You have your sisters to thank for that," Alex said, with a quick smile. "The twins, I mean, not Ella."

"What did they do?" Wade asked, with interest.

"On your wedding day, they snuck in here to get a watermelon," Alex told him. "Only they dropped one in the water channel, and they didn't know it would block the outflow pipe. So when it did, the water rose, and I happened to see it running under the door—"

Wade laughed. "I remember," he said. "You came up to the house soaking wet, and I loaned you some dry clothes—"

"Yes, and I had a talk with your sister. Katie, not Lanie; Katie has more sense. I explained to her about the outflow pipe, and how debris can block it and cause the water to rise and overflow the channel. I also talked to Rhett about getting a real latch for the door, not the simple one that was there before. He thought about keeping it locked, but we decided it would be too much trouble, since the servants are in and out all the time. We put it up high enough tat the girls couldn't reach it—not then, anyway. I suppose they can now."

Wade nodded. "Not having a lock is a good thing, too. It makes this easier; we could always break the lock and say that Rodney had done it, but the fewer lies we have to tell, the better. Sometimes it's the simplest things that get you caught."

Wade nodded, grimly turning his attention back to where Wade and Jeb carefully arranged the body. Rodney had to be lying just so; Young Doc told them that the sheriff would be able to tell if it was off by more than a little, because the blood had pooled in the lower parts of his body, causing them to have a bruised appearance.

When they were done, a suitably gory scene had been set. Rodney lay on his back, just as they found him in the shanty, with one arm flung out. His head was just at the stone lip that edged the pool, and Young Doc pronounced himself satisfied with his position.

"Now we need some blood," he told them. The men looked startled. "Enough to make it look as if he bled a little. Plain gravity might have caused a little pool of blood, and it's possible that he lived for a while after being injured, although I rather doubt it."

"You can take a little of mine," Wade said promptly. Young Doc nodded and produced a knife from his pocket. He used it to nick Wade's wrist, and directed the resulting flow of blood onto the stone, first around Rodney's head, then on the edge of the stone shelf where his head would have hit if he had indeed died the way they hoped to convince everyone that he had.

"There, that should be enough," he said at last; quickly, he applied pressure to Wade's wrist until the bleeding stopped, then wrapped a gauze bandage around it. "Keep that clean and it ought to heal fine," he advised Wade.

He looked around the small room, checking to make sure they had not forgotten anything. In spite of their best efforts, the very air here seemed uneasy, as though warning them that this was a bad idea. Young Doc shook off the feeling; they had no choice now but to play this out. It was too late to change their minds now.

Wade and Sally Jo spent the night at his mother's house that night. Wade knew that the discovery of Rodney's body would come soon, and he wanted to be there for it.

He and Sally Jo were in the kitchen, eating breakfast with the children. As always, total chaos reigned as the children chattered and argued and readied themselves for school. After much pleading on Lori's part, Ella had decided to allow Lori to go with her uncles to school, and Sophie was sulking because, at four, she was deemed too young to go as well. Ella tried rather fruitlessly to explain that she wold have more time to spend with Sophie doing 'fun' things, but the child refused to be comforted.

Only when the six older children had gone did the two youngest settle down. As they attended to their neglected breakfast, Ella became aware that Wade was extremely nervous. He kept tapping his fingers rhythmically on the table, which had been a nervous tic of his since childhood, and whenever he wasn't directly speaking to someone, his gaze wandered towards the window that overlooked the back yard.

He's nervous, Ella thought. Nervous as a dog that's been at the chickens. Something is wrong, and Wade knows it.

Glancing at her mother, she saw that the older woman was also watching Wade, her eyes narrowed. The only person who seemed completely relaxed was Sally Jo; in the euphoria of having her son back, she paid little attention to anything else. Only with difficulty had she been persuaded to allow the boy to go to school today; if he hadn't been determined, she would probably have kept him home where she could keep an eye on him.

Ella heard a rider outside. Glancing up, she saw her cousin Beau ambling up the path. If something was wrong, he showed no signs of knowing it; he whistled as he pushed open the little gate that blocked the path to the back door.

"Are you ready for work?" he called, seeing Wade sitting there. "Morning, Aunt Scarlett, Uncle Rhett, Ella. Wade is supposed to come with me to Jonesborough and get that lumber, remember?"

Wade threw down his napkin and rose to his feet. "I'd forgotten, in all the excitement," he said, glancing at Rhett. "I don't—"

Whatever he had been going to say was lost as a high-pitched scream came from the back yard. Ella jumped up. "What on earth?" she asked, peering out the window. "That sounds like Prissy."

She saw Wade turn, saw the look he gave Rhett, and knew that neither man was surprised. Whatever this is, they've been expecting it all morning, Ella thought.

"Well, we'd better go see what's the matter," Rhett said, and the five of them joined Beau in the back yard.

I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to update. My mother's health problems have become chronic, and caring for her is requiring more of my attention.

I hope there are still a few people out there who are interested in reading. Review and let me know if you still want to see this story finished!