Free Chesapeake Summer by Jeanette Baker

some old drifter.”
    â€œMaybe,” she said slowly.
    â€œNothing ever came of speculation. Blake’ll figure things out and if it’s more than he can handle, he’ll call in the forensics team from Salisbury.” He stood. “Thanks for the lemonade. I’ll collect my dog and be on my way.”
    â€œSay hello to the girls.”
    â€œI’ll do that. Maybe I’ll send Chloe over with Gina Marie.”
    â€œYou can keep Gina at home if it’s all the same to you.”
    â€œYou’re a cruel woman, Verna Lee, and because I’m a good guy, I won’t tell your sister that you’re less than enthusiastic about your very own niece.”
    â€œI’m enthusiastic about one of them. The other terrifies me.”

Eight
    D etective Wade Atkins, chief homicide detective of Wicomico County Sheriff’s Department, was no stranger to Marshy Hope Creek. He’d spent most of his formative years six miles out of the town limits in a two-room shack set low on a piece of land optimistically called Darby’s Cove. The name evoked images of pleasure boats with white sails moored neatly in a harbor, bordered by charming restaurants and shops crowded with tourists. In reality it was a mosquito-infested glade, thick with alligators, toads and catfish all filled with enough radiation from the Pax River to make them inedible. Uncared-for front lawns boasted inoperable vehicles set high on blocks. The view from broken screens led to other faded shacks and mobile homes.
    As soon as he was legally able, Wade hitched a ride on a big rig filled with sweet potatoes and made his way west where a stint in the army and the GI Bill earned him a place at California State University, Long Beach. From there he was accepted at the police academy.
    Wade figured he was about as far away from his roots and Marshy Hope Creek as a man could be. Growing up, he and his brothers, the Atkins boys, “river rats” or “white trash,” depending on who was doing the describing, weren’t big on community service. In fact, you might say they were more of a high-risk factor than anything else. Clem and Howard, the two oldest, spent more nights at the juvenile detention center in Salisbury than they did at home, and it was a known fact that the First Baptist Church took up a collection to buy Mace cans for their elderly, single ladies, just in case they should happen on one or, God forbid, both of the Atkinses’ distinctive white-blond heads while walking down the street.
    Wade, however, was different, not in appearance but in temperament. Like the others, he was towheaded with a mass of freckles, so many of them they all ran together, giving his face an attractive tanned look, paired with steely blue eyes, a jutting chin and a wide linebacker’s body. But he was missing the mean streak that every male Atkins, from one generation to the next, never failed to inherit. In fact, Wade managed to clear four years of high school without a single knuckle-bruising scuffle. He was also, according to his teachers, fairly intelligent, with a kind of practical common sense that completely bypassed the rest of his clan. It made some people wonder if Carrie Eileen Atkins had been messing with the postman nine months before Wade was born. But then they looked at old Morris, at the steely blue eyes and that thatch of white hair shared by all his boys, especially Wade, and knew it wasn’t so.
    Wade didn’t subscribe to the notion that he was born different. He attributed his path to a mild case of scarlet fever and subsequent bed rest. Carrie Atkins was beside herself trying to keep an active twelve-year-old boy cool and immobile in a house the size of a cracker box. She began by buying comic books. But when it became clear that each ten-cent copy was devoured in twenty minutes, she did what no Atkins had ever done before. She applied for a library card.
    At first, Owena Harper, the librarian,