Free Signs in the Blood by Vicki Lane

short distance between her cove and the cove just on the other side of the mountain.
Birdie said his name was Johnson, and there are Johnsons still living over there.
    The ridge runners had traveled these high trails till after the Second World War, when improved roads and affordable cars had made horse and foot travel obsolete. Now most of the fields and pastures were covered with second-growth timber and the insidious multiflora rose. Subsistence farming had given way to jobs in the city, and many old mountain farms had been abandoned. The sturdy log tobacco barns still stood, though, their rusting metal roofs incongruous amid the encroaching trees.
    Elizabeth noted down the nearest hollows on the other side of the mountain; many were named on the map by the branch or creek that ran through them—Little Branch, Devil's Branch, Sweet Water Creek—but others had names taken from some long-forgotten event—Lonesome, Turkey Feather, Hog Run, Buckscrape. She could imagine the early settlers naming these places: “You mind that ole holler where them big bucks clean the velvet offen their antlers—we call it the Buckscrape?” She had been in a few of these “hollers” years before when she and Sam had tracked some of their cows that had gotten out through the old barbed-wire fence at the top of the mountain. But most of the hollers, though only a few miles away, were totally unknown to her. To get to them by car she would have to go down Ridley Branch to the bridge and then up the road that ran by Bear Tree Creek for four or five miles.
I'll talk to Birdie about it tomorrow, after I find out about the autopsy. If we have to go hunting, Birdie can suggest the likely places to start.
     
    Early Monday morning, Elizabeth fed her chickens and walked through her vegetable garden, trying to decide which chores should take precedence. The tomato plants that she had started in a cold frame were too small to set out yet. The potatoes were pushing up through their thick blanket of hay and needed no attention. She could hoe around the young broccoli and collards, or she could do some weed-eating.
But first you call the sheriff,
she reminded herself.
    The deputy who took her call was vague as to the sheriff's whereabouts but reasonably sure that Cletus Gentry's autopsy had not yet taken place. He suggested that she call back toward the end of the week. No, there was still no reason to regard this as anything other than an accident.
    “Well, hell,” said Elizabeth, hanging up the phone. It startled her by ringing immediately.
It's going to be Birdie, and you can probably forget about getting that weed-eating done,
she told herself as she picked it back up.
    “I'm ready, Lizzie Beth.” The old woman's voice was quavering but steely with determination. “I done packed us some sausage biscuits and some applesauce biscuits and a jar of buttermilk and I'm just a-settin' here waiting for you. Reckon we could start by goin' up Lonesome Holler.”
     
    As they drove the narrow road that wound its way up Bear Tree Creek, Elizabeth glanced over at Miss Birdie, who was clearly enjoying herself. She had something to say about each farm or house they passed. “They must of got their baccer set right before that last big rain; hit looks real purty
. . . That
old place was like to fall down, then some Florida people bought it and fixed it up good as new. . . . Look-a there, they done set their mailbox up on an old bull-tongue plow.”
    Elizabeth had been somewhat surprised at Birdie's calm acceptance of the fact of Cletus's death. Birdie had not shed a tear, to Elizabeth's knowledge; instead, she had resolutely concentrated her emotion on the question of how Cletus had met his end. The old woman was just commenting on a cow in a pasture by the road—“. . . puts me in mind of that old Jersey we used to have, old Polly. She poured the milk but was awful bad to kick. Cletus, he wouldn't have nothin' to do with her, though he was usual a right