I hoped not intimately.

“I’m worried about Mama.” He teared up again. “She’s upset about what’s happening to me, and that’s not good for her condition.”

“I tell you what. I’m going to check on her myself, on my way home,” I said, coughing again.

A tear slid down his cheek and he roughly wiped it with the backs of cuffed hands.

“One other thing I’m going to do,” I said as footsteps sounded on the stairs again. “I’m going to see what I can do about you. I don’t believe you killed anyone, Keith. And I’m going to post your bond and make sure you have a lawyer.”

His lips parted in disbelief as the deputies loudly entered the room.

“You really are?” Pleasants asked as he almost staggered to his feet, his eyes wide on mine.

“If you swear you’re telling the truth.”

“Oh yes, ma’am!”

“Yeah, yeah,” a deputy said. “You and all the rest of ’em.”

“It will have to be tomorrow,” I said to Pleasants. “I’m afraid the magistrate’s gone home for the night.”

“Come on. Downstairs.” A deputy grabbed his arm.

Pleasants said one last thing to me. “Mama likes chocolate milk with Hershey’s syrup. Not much else she keeps down anymore.”

Then he was gone, and I was led back downstairs and through the women’s section of the jail again. Inmates were sullen this time, as if I no longer were fun. It occurred to me someone had told them who I was, when they turned their backs on me and someone spat.

Thirteen

Sheriff Rob Roy was a legend in Sussex County and ran uncontested every election year. He had been to my morgue many times, and I thought he was one of the finest law enforcement officers I knew. At half-past six, I found him at the Virginia Diner, where he was sitting at the local table, which literally was where the locals gathered.

This was in a long room of red-checked cloths and white chairs, and he was eating a fried ham sandwich and drinking coffee, black, his portable radio upright on the table and full of chatter.

“Can’t do that, no sir. Then what? They just keep selling crack, that’s what,” he was saying to a gaunt weathered man in a John Deere cap.

“Let ’em.”

“Let ’em?” Roy reached for his coffee, as wiry and bald as he ever was. “You can’t mean that.”

“I sure as hell can.”

“Might I interrupt?” I said, pulling out a chair.

Roy’s mouth fell open, and for an instant he did not believe whom he was looking at. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He stood and shook my hand. “What in tarnation are you doing out in these parts?”

“Looking for you.”

“If you’ll excuse me.” The other man tipped his hat to me and got up to leave.

“Don’t you tell me you’re out here on business,” the sheriff said.

“What else would it be?”

He was sobered by my mood. “Something I don’t know about?”