Free Burn What Will Burn by C. B. McKenzie

he stared at me until I blinked.
    â€œI know what I know,” the sheriff said.
    If he’d called the Houston Police Department he knew that some homicide detectives there believed that if I had not exactly killed my wife I had had some hand in her death. Or rather, that I had failed to raise a helpful hand.
    My wife possessed a lot of troubles from the start—drugs, men, women, whatever. After the miscarriage she just got worse, fell completely off her rocker, spent my money like crazy, on dope, on her people. My ex-in-laws, their lawyers, their private investigator, my lawyers, the insurance investigators, my distant relations all knew I’d been in therapy over all that, had never actually received a clean bill of mental health. But having an unclean bill of mental health is not a crime, yet and truth is hard to ascertain sometimes.
    Though I was off serious medications Dr. Doc still mildly tranquilized me for my “nerves.” I didn’t usually talk much about my family affairs to strangers.
    Jacob Wells and his ill-bred brood would say I was a crazy eccentric nuisance who threw rocks at their livestock.
    Preacher Pickens, I was quite sure, despite my charitableness to his church and the fact that I paid his grandson ten dollars a week to, basically, do nothing, considered me a bad influence on his grandson Malcolm.
    Baxter grinned the sort of grin the cat gets when it gets the canary in the coal mine, just before the bird squawks.
    I wanted to drop him in a very deep hole and dump snakes on his head.
    â€œYou don’t know shit,” I said, looked away before another staring match ensued.
    Baxter sniffed and wiped a hand over his chin in another gesture that seemed well rehearsed.
    â€œWell, Mister, let me just put it to you like this—if a dead man, a dead drowned man, does show up in this creek, anywhere within hailing or driving distance from your domicile…”
    He let that veiled threat curtain between us for a moment.
    I stared at the water.
    â€œYour wife drowned, didn’t she,” Baxter stated, didn’t ask. “Official cause of death was drowning.”
    The Little Piney was moving under me. I felt dizzy.
    â€œMy wife was a drug addict, Sheriff. She fell asleep in the bathtub.”
    I saw, I imagined her face in the creek below me, her blue eyes open, her blond hair spread, darkened in the water as a nun’s black habit.
    â€œShe drowned,” Baxter reminded me again, lowered his voice. “And she had thumb marks on her neck and bruises on her shoulders.”
    She was very frail. Still beautiful, but very frail by then, junkie thin, with papery, pale skin that bruised easily.
    When I’d lifted her out of the tub she’d been light in my arms as an underfed child.
    â€œYes, Sheriff. The official cause of death was accidental drowning.”
    My lawyers had persuaded for that grand jury verdict four years and three months before. I was the older, parsimonious, boring husband of a very attractive, very unstable young woman, but there was no evidence to indict me for any wrongdoing.
    I was a good husband.
    If it was a suicide, she hadn’t left me a note. But that was no surprise to anyone. My wife had never thought much of me and had been pretty public about that disregard.
    â€œShe did drown,” I repeated, so there would be no confusion.
    It was as easy for me to understand how I lost her as it had been difficult for me to understand how I got her. Even with my money, I was not the kind of man to get a woman like that—not for long, not for keeps.
    Baxter studied me for a moment, lifted an eyebrow, tossed his straw Stetson through the open door of the cruiser.
    He had a full head of short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
    â€œI hear your daddy drowned too. That right, Mister Reynolds?”
    â€œIn a manner of speaking, Sheriff,” I allowed.
    I was still living at home then, almost twenty-five years old, taking care of