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  Red Harper was still wearing the shiny black suit he’d worn to the funeral. The deputy with him was in standard uniform, although he had removed his hat. He was looking about, taking in the details of the room, as bouncy as a racehorse in the starting gate, appearing as eager as Beck Merchant had described him.

  The sheriff said, “I hate to hold you up, Sayre, but Deputy Scott here wanted to ask y’all some questions.”

  “I appreciate your thoroughness,” she said, speaking directly to the younger officer. “I admire your sense of duty. But I don’t have any information for you. I don’t live here and hadn’t had any contact with Danny for more than a decade.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but you might know more than you think.” His twang sounded more Texan than Louisianan. “You mind staying just a while? This will be short, I promise.”

  Reluctantly she returned to her place on the sofa.

  “Beck, pull two chairs away from the game table for the lawmen,” Huff directed from the comfort of his recliner. “You can sit there by Sayre.”

  The sheriff and his deputy sat in the chairs Beck dragged forward for them. Beck sat down next to Sayre. She glanced at Huff and saw a familiar gleam of devilment in his eyes as he fanned out another match and dropped it into an ashtray.

  He said, “Well, Red, you called this meeting. You’ve got our attention. What’s on your mind?”

  The sheriff cleared his throat. “You know, I hired Wayne to serve as a detective for the department.” He said it almost as an apology.

  “So?”

  “So, he’s been doing some detective work out at your fishing camp, Huff, and there are facts relating to Danny’s suicide that aren’t sitting right with him.”

  Huff shifted his gaze to the young deputy. “Like what?”

  Wayne Scott scooted forward in his seat until he was practically perched on the edge of it, as though he’d been anxiously awaiting his turn to speak. “The shotgun that killed him—”

  “Shotgun?” Sayre exclaimed.

  When Beck told her that Danny had died of a gunshot wound to the head, she had assumed it was a handgun. She didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of firearms, but she definitely knew the difference between a pistol and a shotgun, as well as the damage each was capable of inflicting.

  Depending on the caliber and trajectory, a bullet fired point-blank from a pistol into a person’s head would be lethal and certainly messy. But nothing compared to the damage to a human skull that a shotgun shell would cause.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the detective said solemnly. “He didn’t stand a chance of surviving.”

  Beck said tersely, “Maybe you should get to the point.”

  “Well, Mr. Merchant, my point is this. The victim still had his shoes on.”

  For several moments they all continued to stare at him with misapprehension. Huff reacted first. “I don’t know what the hell you’re up to, but—”

  “Hold on.” Beck raised his hand to silence Huff, but he was looking at Scott. “I think I understand Deputy Scott’s confusion.”

  Chris, tugging on his lower lip, nodded. “He’s wondering how Danny pulled the trigger.”

  Scott vigorously bobbed his head. “That’s correct. I investigated a suicide by shotgun one time over in Carthage. East Texas? Anyhow, the man pulled the trigger with his big toe.” He glanced contritely at Sayre. “Forgive me, Ms. Hoyle, for talking so straightforward about—”

  “I’m not going to faint. And by the way, my name is Lynch.”

  “Oh, sorry. I thought—”

  “That’s all right. Please go on.”

  His eyes darted around the circle of faces watching him. “Well, I was about to say that everything with Mr. Hoyle’s apparent suicide is consistent with that other case. Except it keeps nagging at me how he managed to pull the trigger.

  “It’d be a real trick to do, considering the length of the barrels and— Oh, that’s another thing that’s got me stumped. This weapon was a side-by-side double-barrel, and both barrels were loaded. Now, if you’re planning to shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun, why would you bother to load both barrels? You’d hardly need that second shell.”

  No one ventured a comment or an answer. Red Harper cleared his throat again. “Do you recall the last time you saw that particular shotgun, Huff? I don’t see an empty space in your gun cabinet there.”

  He nodded toward the corner cabinet with the glass doors. Huff owned an array of firearms, including several handguns, deer rifles, and a shotgun used for bird hunting. All were on display.

  “That was an old gun. None of us liked it. We retired it, so to speak. Kept it out at the fishing camp for emergencies. I don’t know when it was last fired.”

  “I do.”

  Everyone’s attention shifted to Chris. Judging by his characteristic insouciance, they could have been discussing anything—a missing glove, or the weather. Nothing as significant as the weapon that had killed his brother.

  “One weekend—it was about three months ago, wasn’t it, Beck?” Beck nodded. “The two of us spent the night out there. Late that night, Frito started going crazy. We went outside to see what had stirred him up and spotted a bobcat. Beck fired the shotgun into the air twice just to scare it off. The cat hightailed it into the woods.”

  Beck took up the story from there. “The next morning I cleaned and oiled the shotgun and put it back in the rack above the door.”

  “Did you reload it?” Sheriff Harper asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, somebody did,” Scott said.

  “Have you checked it for fingerprints?”

  He replied to Sayre’s question with a polite “Yes, ma’am. Your brother’s—Danny’s—are all over it, along with some others. One of the latent prints will probably turn out to be yours,” he said to Beck.

  “So you know that Danny handled the shotgun,” Sayre said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I just don’t know when.”

  “Is his fingerprint on the trigger?”

  “We didn’t lift any distinct prints off the trigger,” Red Harper said. “Which is also a bit confounding. I mean, if Danny was the last one to touch it . . .” He left the thought unfinished.

  Huff seemed to reach the limit of his patience. He came out of his recliner, rounded it, and took a bead on Wayne Scott. But he addressed Red Harper. “Why in hell are you letting this new detective of yours drag us through all this? To earn his crisp new uniform? Is that it? If so, let me give him something better to do, like patrolling the shop floor at my foundry and knocking heads with anybody who starts talking about unionizing. Now that would be putting his duty time to good use.

  “As it is, he’s wasting my time and keeping me thinking about things I don’t want to think about anymore. Danny is dead. We buried him. That’s the end of it.” He shook a fresh cigarette from the pack.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Hoyle, but that’s not the end of it.”

  Huff glared at Scott as he lit the cigarette.

  Bravely, the young man continued. “It’s not just the position of the shotgun on Mr. Hoyle’s body that raises questions. Or the contortions he’d have had to go through to pull the trigger with his finger while the barrels were in his mouth. There’s more to it that puzzles me.”

  The new detective’s face had turned red, whether with embarrassment or with fervor, Sayre didn’t know. But he was standing up for himself before the mighty Huff Hoyle, and she commended him for that, even though she guessed that, after tonight, his days in the sheriff’s employ were numbered.

  “Well, let’s hear what’s got you bumfuzzled,” Huff said.

  “It was your son’s newfound religion.”

  The surprises just kept coming. Sayre glanced at Chris and then at Huff to see if they were laughing over the bizarre notion of a Hoyle with religion. But they remained stone-faced. If anything, Huff’s frown deepened.

  She turned toward Beck, who evidently sensed her bewilderment. “Danny had recently joined a congregation
of—”

  “Bible thumpers,” Huff snarled.

  “He had embraced their beliefs and became very devout,” Beck continued.

  “How recently?”

  “For about a year. He never missed a Sunday service or Wednesday night prayer meeting.”

  “He became a real bore,” Chris added. “He stopped drinking. Got upset if we took the Lord’s name in vain. He’d become a real Jesus freak.”

  “What brought it on?”

  Chris shrugged.

  “You never asked?”

  “Yes, Sayre, we asked,” he replied snidely. “Danny refused to discuss it.”

  Beck said, “We couldn’t trace his sudden involvement back to a particular incident, like a near-death experience or anything like that. Suffice it to say, he became a different person the last few months of his life. He changed completely.”

  “For better or worse?”

  In answer to her question, Huff said, “That’s a matter of opinion.” His scowl expressed his opinion of Danny’s religious conversion.

  She turned back to the young deputy. “How do you think this relates to his suicide?”

  “I’ve questioned his pastor and members of the congregation who talked to Danny Sunday morning. Without exception, everybody said he was upbeat and happy. Left the services on fire for God and telling everybody he would see them that night at evening vespers.” He made eye contact with everyone in the room before adding, “It seems peculiar that a man in that mood, on a spiritual high so to speak, would go off and shoot himself.”

  “Are you saying it was staged to look like a suicide?” Sayre asked.

  “Now, don’t go putting words in Wayne’s mouth, Sayre,” Red Harper said, casting an uneasy glance in Huff’s direction. “All he’s saying—”

  “What I’m saying is that the circumstances surrounding Danny Hoyle’s death warrant further investigation.”

  “The parish medical examiner didn’t equivocate when he ruled it a suicide.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Merchant, but the cause of death was obvious.” He glanced at Sayre. “I’ll spare you the graphic terminology that was in the ME’s written autopsy report.” Then to Beck he said, “It’s the method of death that, in my opinion, remains undetermined.”

  “The method of death,” Beck repeated, his eyes narrowing on the detective. “The barrels of the shotgun were still in Danny’s mouth, indicating that he did not pull the trigger.”

  “Right,” Scott said, nodding somberly. “Otherwise the weapon would have been knocked away from the body by the recoil. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that someone held the muzzle inside Danny’s mouth. It was a homicide.”

  Red Harper winced as though in pain. “Which brings me to the question I’ve got to ask. Do y’all know anybody who would have wanted Danny dead?”

  chapter 6

  The afternoon heat had taken its toll on the floral arrangements that covered the new grave. Blossoms had withered. Petals had turned brown, curling downward upon their stems as though in total defeat.

  Because there was no breeze to disperse it, the smoke from the blast furnaces of the foundry had formed a gray cloud bank above the cemetery. It hung there, an ugly pall.

  Sayre thought of it as Danny’s shroud. She’d gone to the cemetery in the hope of finding some measure of peace, but after the session with Deputy Scott, she thought it unlikely that Danny’s death could be that easily reconciled.

  Of Huff’s three children, Danny had been the least like him. He’d been mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and to her knowledge had never committed a spiteful act or harbored any malice toward anyone.

  When they were kids, Danny had always deferred to her and Chris, putting up token resistance if he was wronged, but eventually yielding, especially to Chris, who was the undisputed bully of the three. Chris was also devious and knew how to manipulate his younger brother. Danny invariably fell for Chris’s tricks, which were often cruel.

  She’d had the fiercest temper. Whenever she unleashed it on Danny over some real or perceived affront, he bore her tirade with grace and didn’t hold a grudge later for the hateful things she had screamed at him.

  Once, during one of her most vicious tantrums, she had thrown his favorite toy truck into the bayou. He had cried, and called her names, and ordered her to dive in and retrieve it. Of course she had refused and, instead, had described to him in tortuous detail how his shiny truck would rust and erode even before it reached the Gulf of Mexico.

  Danny had wailed for hours, then lapsed into a funk that lasted for days. When Laurel demanded to know why he was so blue, he declined to tattle on Sayre. He never told what she’d done. If he had, she would have felt justified for having done it. But he had let her get away with it, which made her deeply remorseful for her meanness to him.

  Their mother had doted on Danny because he was the baby of the family. Sayre remembered Huff saying often that Laurel was going to make a mealymouthed sissy out of the boy if she didn’t stop coddling him. Yet, despite their mother’s obvious favoritism, ironically it was Huff’s approval that Danny craved most.

  Chris had automatically gained it by being the firstborn. His temperament and interests also mirrored Huff’s. It fed Huff’s ego to have Chris near him because he was a mini-personification of Huff himself.

  Sayre was regarded as the rather useless but decorative princess of the clan and treated accordingly. She was a brat who constantly demanded her way, and when she didn’t get it, she pitched tantrums. While her mother looked upon these fits of temper as improper behavior for a young lady, her father thought they were amusing. The more infuriated she became, the harder he laughed.

  Because Danny was self-effacing and well-behaved, he was last in line for Huff’s attention.

  Growing up, Sayre had sensed this family dynamic but lacked the intellect and insight to analyze it. Now, as an adult, she realized how hurtful it must have been for Danny always to be Huff’s afterthought, the far distant second son.

  The family had been operating under the same dynamic when Danny died. Chris was the indulged, anointed heir apparent who could do no wrong in Huff’s eyes. Sayre was the thorn in his side, the one who had rejected him. That left Danny to be the obedient child, who did as he was told and never voiced a contrary opinion, the one to be counted on but rarely acknowledged.

  Was it that feeling of invisibility that had prompted Danny to kill himself?

  If he had killed himself.

  She pinched a dying rose off one of the sprays and twirled it against her lips. A tear slid down her cheek. It was unfair that the sweetest, most harmless of them had died young and violently. And, if Wayne Scott’s intuitions proved correct, he hadn’t died voluntarily.

  “Ms. Lynch?”

  Sayre spun about to see a young woman standing not two yards away from her.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said with apology. “I thought you would have heard me.”

  Sayre shook her head. Finally able to find her voice, she said, “I was lost in thought.”

  “I don’t want to disturb you. I can come back later. I wanted to come . . . wanted to come and say good night to him.” The woman was about her age, possibly a few years younger, and she was struggling not to cry. Sayre remembered seeing her at the wake but hadn’t had an opportunity to meet her.

  “I’m Sayre Lynch.” She extended her hand, and the young woman shook it.

  “I know who you are. I saw you at the wake. Somebody pointed you out to me, but I had already recognized you from photographs.”

  “The photographs in the house are all old. I’ve changed.”

  “Yes, but your hair is the same. And Danny had showed me a recent newspaper article about you. He was very proud of your accomplishments.” She laughed, and Sayre was impressed by the musical quality of the sound. “When I remarked on how glamorous and sophisticated you are, Danny said that looks could be deceiving and that you were actually a hellion. But he meant it affectiona
tely.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m sorry. Jessica DeBlance. I am . . . I was Danny’s friend.”

  “Please.” Sayre motioned toward a concrete bench beneath a tree a short distance from the grave.

  Together they walked toward it. Jessica was wearing a tastefully cut linen dress. Her hair was light and fell into soft waves to her shoulders. She was petite and wholesomely pretty.

  They sat down on the bench. By tacit agreement they shared a long moment looking toward the grave without speaking. Jessica sniffled into a tissue. Acting on instinct, Sayre placed her arm across the woman’s thin shoulders. At her touch, Jessica began to tremble with weeping.

  There were dozens of questions Sayre wanted to ask her, but she refrained from saying anything until Jessica’s crying had subsided and she mumbled a gruff apology.

  “Don’t apologize. I’m glad my younger brother had someone who cared enough to cry for him in front of a perfect stranger. Apparently you were very good friends.”

  “Actually, we were going to be married.” Jessica extended her left hand, and Sayre stared speechlessly at the round diamond solitaire on a narrow platinum band.

  “It’s lovely.”

  And because the understated ring embodied a simple declaration of love, the quiet kind of profession that Danny would make, she was engulfed in pity for the young woman. She was also furious at Chris and Huff. Danny’s fiancée should have been included in their family observances. It was a glaring snub.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make it a point to speak to you at the house, Jessica. I didn’t know Danny was engaged. No one told me.” Maybe Danny had tried. Maybe that was what he’d been calling to tell her.

  “No one knew about our engagement,” Jessica said. “No one in your family. Danny didn’t want your father or brother to know about me until after we were married.”

  Although she felt she already knew the answer, Sayre asked the obvious question. “Why?”

  “He didn’t want them to interfere. He knew they probably wouldn’t have approved of me.”