Free Chesapeake Summer by Jeanette Baker Page A

was reluctant to allow it. In her experience the folks living on the wrong side of Marshy Hope Creek did not treat books with the proper respect. But when she heard the card was for Wade, she relented. He’d chopped wood for her the last two winters. She paid him fifty cents an hour and he showed up faithfully when he said he would and worked until the job was done. Owena allowed that he deserved a library card, him being sick and all.
    That was Wade’s introduction to a world outside his own. He read Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Yearling, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Works of Hans Christian Andersen and many more. For the next six years he was never without a book in hand. Heroes appealed to him. He wanted to be like them.
    That was thirty-five years and a lifetime ago, before he’d worked himself up from undercover vice to homicide detective. Now he wore a suit and tie and although his hours weren’t regular, the pay was better. He figured he would have lived out his life in Santa Monica, California, quite happily, except that his wife, Susan, died five years before. After that, his workdays were bearable but his free time wasn’t. All the old haunts, Diedrich coffee to start the day, a midmorning jog on the boardwalk, dinner at Gladstone’s, were miserable without Sarah. So, he came home, not to Darby’s Cove or Marshy Hope Creek, but to Salisbury and the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Department, both different enough from the white sand beaches of the West to ward off memories.
    The call came in at noon, an unusual time for reporting a homicide. Most were called in at night. Sheriff Blake Carlisle from Marshy Hope Creek was requesting a full crime-scene forensics team. Because Wade had high hopes of wrapping this one up in time to go straight home after his shift, he drove his own car.
    Soon, he found himself on the back roads of his boyhood, his senses reeling from the brackish smell of the Chesapeake shallows, marsh grass, nesting birds, the contrast of golden sunlight and black shadow, the frustratingly slow pace of a pickup weighted down with tomatoes on a two-lane road. He’d skirted the area countless times, but he’d never been back, not since the death of his mother when he was a teenager.
    Highway 39 was a narrow strip of road bisecting miles of marshland and pine forests. A single patrol car with blinking lights and yards of yellow tape signaled the location of the crime scene. Wade pulled the emergency brake, swallowed a goodly portion of his sixteen-ounce water bottle, grabbed his clipboard from the back seat, stepped into his boots, laced them up and hiked out to the tape border. He flashed his badge at the young police officer manning the log, stepped over the tape and, keeping toward the edge, maneuvered his way to the placards, the site of the crime and the officer in charge. “What does it look like?” he asked.
    â€œThe coroner’s on his way,” replied Sheriff Carlisle. “See for yourself.”
    Wade walked around the site, checking it out from every angle. “Hair and clothing looks good enough for lab samples,” he said to the sheriff following close behind. “There’s a close-contact entry wound in the head. Who called this in?”
    â€œA geologist from Weber Incorporated.”
    â€œWhere is he?”
    â€œBack at the bed and breakfast.”
    Wade jotted down notes on his clipboard. “Get him back here,” he said in a clipped voice. Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he squatted down for a better look at the wound, picked up a fragment of clothing lying next to the body and sealed it in a plastic bag. “This bog is nearly as good as a mummy’s tomb. The body’s got flesh, hair and a full skull.”
    Jim Marshall, the coroner, arrived mopping his brow, his bulldog face pulled down by heavy jowls and an extra fifty pounds. “Hot enough for you,