She reached in her coat pocket for a Kleenex. “He did love that cat. Lord, I’m going to miss that boy. There was no reason in the world for anybody to do what they did to him.”

“Are you members of his church?” Sister wanted to know.

“Dear Jesus, no.” Miss Beulah wiped her eyes. “I’m scared as hell of snakes. Worst whipping Bertie ever got was when he put a green snake down in my laundry pile. I like to have died.”

“So did I,” Bertie said. “And I was sixteen years old.”

“Just meanness. Meanest thing you ever did.”

The two of them smiled at each other.

“Bertie teaches English at the university,” his mother told us. “Monk sort of took his place, cut my grass, helped me plant my garden.”

Miss Beulah held the Kleenex to her eyes. Mary Alice and I both looked at the mountain man on our right who was smiling at us. A teacher at the university?

“It’s the January short term,” he said, as if that explained his appearance. “I don’t have any classes until February.”

“My sister is an English teacher,” Mary Alice pointed to me.

“Oh?” Albert leaned forward. “What’s your specialty?”

Specialty? Smart aleck. His mother should have whipped him harder when he was sixteen.

“Eleventh grade, but I’m retired. What’s yours?”

“Chaucer. Every one of those people is right here on Chandler Mountain.”

I looked around at the four of us and had to grin. He was right. There were questions that needed asking, though.

“How long was our cousin here, Mrs. Packard? Do you know?”

“Couple of days, far as I know. Monk was always bringing women home from his painting jobs. Rescuing them, he said. Bless his heart.”

“Do you know the names of any of the other women?”

“Sally Jo was one of them. I don’t know her last name, but I remember last summer she came and picked some okra at my house. Said she fried it some kind of special way and she’d give me the recipe. But I think she left the next day. Never got the recipe.” Miss Beulah reached down, picked up her glass and held it out to Albert who got up and took it to the kitchen. “None of them stayed more than a couple of days.”

“Did any of their husbands show up looking for them?”

“Probably. I never heard of any trouble, though.”

Albert Lee came back and handed his mother her water.

“I think Monk was running an underground railroad for unhappy wives,” he said.

“Could one of their husbands have hated him enough to kill him?” I asked.

Albert Lee Packard shrugged. “Possibly. I’m assuming Susan and Monk’s deaths are connected, though, and there wouldn’t have been any reason for a cuckolded husband to have killed her.”

“Bertie was in love with Susan,” his mother said.