Free Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron Page A

on Wednesday- that left her unconscious till someone put a bullet in her brain sometime late Friday. There was no need to tie her hands. She would never have moved again on her own. The bullet just speeded things up.”
    The bottom abruptly fell out of my stomach. “Somebody put her out of her misery? Like putting down a horse or an old dog when they get tired of watching it suffer?”
    “ ’Bout what it amounts to,” he agreed, crumpling up the empty packets of sweetener. He stirred his coffee and drank up as I tried to fit the new facts over my old concepts.
    We had all heard about Janie’s head wound as soon as she was found, but I guess its seriousness hadn’t registered. The sensationalism of how she was shot overshadowed a mundane blow on the head. Fanned by one irresponsible newspaper sidebar-“Cosa Nostra in Colleton County?”-the hottest topic was that Janie had been shot behind the right ear “execution style,” as if someone had taken out a contract on her life.
    “I always assumed she was briefly knocked unconscious and then lived two fall days scared out of her mind before she was finally killed.”
    “She wasn’t molested,” Scotty reminded me.
    “Her head wound-did Dr. Hudson say what caused it?”
    “Nope. The bullet track kinda messed things up too much to say if she took a bad fall or was hit.”
    I sat silently as he described in more detail than the papers had carried exactly how Janie had been found. I’d heard most of it, but hearing Scotty’s version gave me a different perspective.
    After three days with bloodhounds and aerial reconnaissance that produced no results, a call had gone out for everyone to please check any abandoned buildings on their property.
    Ridley’s Mill fell in that category. It was only three miles from the edge of Cotton Grove as the crow flies, but more like six miles because of the way Old Forty-Eight followed the twists and bends of Possum Creek. Once a small and inefficient gristmill, it had fallen into disrepair back around the thirties when the main millstone broke and electricity proved more reliable than the broad sluggish creek. There were no more Ridleys either, for that matter, and the property had changed hands several times.
    Twenty years ago, a Raleigh banker bought it, thinking it might be remodeled into a rustic weekend fishing lodge. He died before he could draw up any plans, and his widow has sat on the estate ever since.
    The land’s posted, but nobody’s ever let a few No Trespassing signs keep them from where they want to go, and the mill’s always been used by fishermen, hunters, and teenage kids skipping school. The rutted overgrown lane leading in through the woods from Old Forty-Eight is probably still a lovers’ lane. It was back then.
    When it became generally known that Janie and Gayle were missing, said Scotty, someone living nearby had driven his pickup through the lane on Thursday afternoon. The man and his older brother had checked the millhouse from top to bottom. Both were on record that the place was empty, nothing out of the ordinary.
    Scotty paused. “Your brothers, I believe?”
    “Yes,” I replied. “Will and Seth. Possum Creek borders our land, too, and all of us have fished from the top of the millhouse at one time or another.”
    No point adding that while Will might lie about anything that crossed his mind, Seth never would.
    “Will’s wife’s the one who had a blue sedan, too?”
    “My brothers checked Ridley’s Mill simply because they knew it was there and they thought somebody ought to take a look,” I said and heard a defensive tone in my own voice.
    “Of course,” he said neutrally. “So you know all about how two black hands were clearing underbrush for Michael Vickery on the opposite bank upstream and heard the baby crying?”
    “Where the Pot Shot is now,” I nodded. “Michael had gone to get drinks or pick up a load of bricks or something and they forded the creek and found Janie and Gayle