Free A Killing at Cotton Hill by Terry Shames

that.”
    â€œAnd how’s your mamma doing?” Loretta saves me from having to ask. Her voice is full of sugar. She’s thinking the same thing I am, that this woman stashed her old mother somewhere and confiscated her house.
    â€œShe died a few months back,” Mrs. Underwood says. “Mamma was glad we wanted to keep the old place. So many folks don’t appreciate the land. But my husband wanted to do a little farming.”
    She wants us to know that she had her mother’s blessing. But I didn’t notice a lot of farming going on at the Underwoods’. Like Dora Lee’s land, it is sorely depleted by years of cotton crops, and most people don’t have the money to repair the soil. Alfalfa is about the only thing that will grow, and there’s plenty of that, so the prices aren’t worth planting it to sell.
    â€œLet me ask you something,” I say. “I was talking to Dora Lee a couple of days ago, and she said she saw a car around here that she didn’t recognize. You see anything like that?”
    She manages to swallow the piece of roll. “I wouldn’t have noticed such a thing. My husband and I lived in San Antonio for twenty years before we came out here. We got used to seeing all kinds of people coming and going.”
    â€œWhat sort of work did your husband do in San Antonio?” Loretta asks.
    â€œWasn’t just my husband. We had ourselves a real estate office. I worked right alongside him.”
    About then Greg comes in the back door, smelling of soap and with his hair slicked down. Mrs. Underwood’s eyes widen, like she can’t believe he’s walking around free. And it isn’t long before she scoots out of there.
    Loretta fusses over the boy, and he is properly appreciative of the cinnamon rolls. By the time he wolfs down the third one, there’s no way Loretta believes he could have killed his grandmother.
    After that, things speed up. We have funeral arrangements to make and people in town to call. All this recalls bad memories for me, but I remind myself this boy has been through more than I’ve ever had to deal with, so I push it all back.
    At some point I call Gary Dellmore down at the bank and tell him to set up a temporary account in my name to pay for Dora Lee’s funeral and farm expenses. I tell him I’ll drop by in a while to transfer some funds into it from my bank in Bobtail. He asks me why I would take care of Dora Lee’s expenses. I come close to telling him it’s none of his business, but if I do, it’ll be all over town that Dora Lee and I were up to something. So I tell him that Dora Lee’s poor grandson has nobody to fend for him and that as Dora Lee’s old friend, I’m lending a hand. I tell him I’ll get my money paid back when the estate is settled.
    â€œI wouldn’t count on that. Dora Lee’s got it mortgaged to the limit.”
    I tell him there may be some things he doesn’t know about. I don’t mean anything by that, but it satisfies me to know that he’s eaten up with curiosity. Plus, it doesn’t sit well with me that he’d blab Dora Lee’s financial information so easily, which is why I’ve always kept most of my funds in a bank in Bobtail, so Dellmore has no idea what I’m worth.
    Ever since Frances Underwood introduced herself, I’ve been trying to remember where I saw the name Underwood recently. It has to have been in the papers I sifted through last night. It doesn’t take me long to find what I’m looking for. In the stack of correspondence I put together last night, there’s a letter dated last May, from Clyde Underwood. I read it over, and it makes me so mad I have to sit quiet for a minute. It seemed that Mr. Clyde Underwood wanted to do Dora Lee the favor of buying her land. Cheap.
    Back when I was in my forties, after I was finished with my stint as chief of police, my brother-in-law hired me as a