“She’s fallen in love since we got home, though.”

“Who with?” Bo took a sweetroll and blew on it to cool it.

“A man named Virgil Stuckey. The sheriff of St. Clair County.”

“Really? I know Sheriff Stuckey. He’s a nice guy.”

Bo looked up suddenly. “The sheriff of St. Clair County? Y’all been messing around up there, getting in trouble?”

“Well, you heard about the snake-handling murders?”

Bo shook her head in disbelief. “Damn. Should have known.”

“Well, it’s Pukey Lukey’s wife’s fault. She ran off with the snake handler. At least, Luke thought she had.”

Bo nodded and took a big bite of her sweetroll. By the time I finished telling her all that had happened, she had eaten two rolls and had finished her second cup of coffee. The telling, eating, and drinking were punctuated with Bo’s favorite expression, “Do, Jesus!” Bo is a wonderful listener, probably one of the reasons she’s such a good policeman.

“Sounds like a mess,” she said when she realized I had finished the story with the man in Vanderbilt Hospital who had the migraine attack and Virginia having thought he was dead.

“It is,” I agreed. “Thank goodness Virginia’s shown up. We’re out of it now. It’s up to the sheriff.”

“That’ll be the day.” Bo licked some icing from her finger. “You and Mary Alice are going to help him out by finding out who did it, aren’t you?”

“Nope, Miss Smart Aleck. But I am going to tell him he needs to take a good look at a man named Joe Baker. We met him yesterday and you could just see the mean in his eyes. You know how that is?”

Bo nodded that she recognized mean in peoples’ eyes.

“He’s Monk Crawford’s brother-in-law, and now that Susan and Monk are both dead, he’ll probably be the chief snake handler.”

“Now that’s something to aspire to, isn’t it? Snakes. Yuck. You know,” Bo stuck her finger in the crumbs on her plate and licked them off, “my mama was the dickens on potty training. Had us all out of diapers by the time we were eighteen months old. But last fall I was spreading pine straw under my shrubbery and picked up a handful with a little snake in it. Lord! I peed my pants.”

I laughed. “What kind of snake was it?”

“Don’t know. I threw him a winding and went to take a shower and wash my clothes.” Bo placed both of her hands on the table and spread her fingers out in what looked liked a gesture of surrender. “Deliver me from those things.”

We sat quietly for a moment and I remembered that I hadn’t told her the most important thing of all.

“Debbie had her baby, Bo. They’re fine.”

Bo’s smile beamed again. “That’s wonderful. Mary Alice beside herself?”