Free Burying the Honeysuckle Girls by Emily Carpenter Page B

mildly.
    “What did you do?”
    “Sent a few to the cloud. And my email.”
    “The fuck you did. You barely even got a shot.”
    “Why don’t you pull it out and see?”
    “I would if I could get my goddamn hand in there.” But after a few more fruitless seconds, he sat back and glared at me. I smiled.
    “Okay, well,” he said. “This has been great. An absolute riot. What do you want?”
    I reached down under the driver’s seat, pulled out the cigar box, and opened it. I held out the oldest vial, no more than an inch from his nose. He just sat there, quivering, red-faced, hands over his cock.
    “A long time ago, you sold these pills to my mother,” I said. “Start talking. Now. I want to hear everything.”

Chapter Nine
    October 1937
    Sybil Valley, Alabama
    One late-October afternoon, Jinn’s daddy sent for her.
    He did this every so often when Vonnie—the girl who looked after him and Jinn’s mama—got held up with her own father and brothers or couldn’t make it down the mountain in the winter ice. He’d let things pile up around the house until he ran out of clean dishes or discovered the coffee grounds in the pot furred with mold. Then he’d call Jinn to come tackle the mess.
    “We’ll go to Grandpap’s after I put the collards and sausages in the oven,” Jinn told Collie. “How about we make a cobbler over there and bring home half?”
    Collie nodded. “Daddy’ll like that.”
    The mist hadn’t even burned off the grass when she and Collie tramped into the apple orchard that bordered the Alfords’. Jinn watched the little girl dart into hazy puffs of moisture like they were magical clouds. Like she expected everything would feel soft and fuzzy once she was inside them. It made Jinn laugh. Collie had such an imagination.
    Jinn pushed open the front door of her parents’ frame house and crinkled her nose at the smell. There was a trail of chicken shit leading through the hall, a few pellets squashed on the linoleum floor. She could see the deep grooves from her daddy’s work boots imprinted in the mushy blobs. Farther inside the house, Jinn could hear Binnie and the other two hens clucking and scratching their claws on the wooden floor. Somebody’d probably left the back door open. Maybe Mama had got up this morning.
    Her daddy’s .22 rifle hung in its spot over the fireplace. The brass stock plate, engraved with oak leaves and acorns, glinted in the morning sun. Jinn let out a relieved breath. Her mama had been known to take the gun down on bad days, when her nerves got the best of her. She’d shoulder it, say she’d had enough of Vernon’s nonsense, and, by golly, she was going to shoot him if he didn’t straighten up. These episodes never amounted to much—Vernon kept the gun unloaded and hid the bullets—and it hadn’t happened in a while. Anyway, by now, her mama had to be too sick to heft a gun.
    Jinn shooed the chickens out of the den and into the kitchen, which was also liberally sprinkled with the sharp-smelling pellets. She clapped her hands, and Binnie and the other two hens squawked indignantly, racing in crazed circles all the way out the back door. They darted across the dirt-packed yard and to the coop, where she shut the gate behind them.
    Back inside, the house was quiet as a graveyard. The rays of the morning sun slanted in, splashing bright blocks on the rag rug. Jinn had forgotten how the house flashed with light in the mornings. She remembered being little, standing in one shimmering square that lit up, on and off, like an electric lamp.
    She walked to the bottom of the rickety staircase and looked up. She thought about her sleeping mother, what would happen if she tiptoed upstairs and peeked in the bedroom. She could do it, just creep to her mother’s bed and smooth back her fuzzy gray hair. Press her lips against the dry, crinkly skin. She only thought about those things, though. Howell had told her in no uncertain terms that her father said she wasn’t to