Free Cold Morning by Ed Ifkovic Page B

me.”
    â€œLet me tell you first about Cody Lee, my boy.” She took a deep breath. “A good boy, but always a slow one. A kind boy. Gentle. Trusting.”
    â€œWhat are you telling me?”
    â€œOnly that he’s the kind what has a heart easily broken. Like he meets a girl and he thinks—well, I’ll marry her and we’ll have children and…” She threw back her head. “It never works out.” Her eyes brightened. “Like some foolish girl who goes to a dance and comes home and dreams of cottages and white picket fences. Well, that’s my boy.”
    â€œWhere are you from?” I wondered about the accent, a mixture of country twang and clipped drawl.
    â€œWe come out of the Sourland Mountains, back of Princeton. Tarpaper shack and dirt roads and coyotes and mountain lions. Near to where Colonel Lindbergh built at Hopewell.” She clicked her tongue. “Back then you could climb a fir tree and see the roof of his house. Before the tragedy. My husband hauled lumber like Cody Lee does. A little bootlegging, some. But the Depression stunned the land there. A fire one night, real bad. My husband died, my children were long gone then, dying young, except for Cody Lee. Him and me—all that’s left. I got me a cousin down here who says an old farm couple need a housekeeper and a handyman.” She grinned. “Mother-and-son team, one size fits all.”
    She stopped talking as the waitress placed two cups of coffee on the table, then backed away.
    â€œTell me about Annabel Biggs.”
    For a moment her face closed in, her mouth sagging. “Cody Lee mostly helps out at the farm, keeps the outside humming. Old couple—the Myersons own it, too old to do anything now—so Cody does the lifting, as needed. Winters, like now, like his daddy, he hauls timber up to the mills in Trenton. One night, back down here, outside of town, he stops for a beer at this roadhouse. The Oak Tavern, a speakeasy now legal as all get out. That’s where he met this Annabel, fresh to town. She’s hired because of the trial. I guess they sort of liked each other, leastwise that’s what he told me, but he’s a quiet sort, painfully shy around girls, even though he’s now thirty-five years old. Two girls in all his life, both fickle, walked away from him and he mooned over them for years.”
    â€œAnnabel?” I prodded.
    â€œWell, yes, Annabel, she likes him, looking for a guy to take her around—buy stuff. I mean Cody Lee is big and tough-looking, that rough face, but a nice smile and dimples—and kindness women can pick up on right away. Like a puppy that catches your eye, makes you smile.”
    â€œThey went out?”
    â€œThey seen each other a lot for a few weeks, I guess. I mean, I know the little cash he got hauling lumber disappeared at the roadhouse. He’d pick her up in his old pickup and off they’d go.”
    I sipped my coffee. “You ever meet her?”
    â€œOnce. Like when he was taken with her, he brung her to the farm. All the whistles in a mother’s head start to go off. A gold-digger where there was no gold to dig. You know what I mean? She struck me as a shifty girl biding her time. Looking for fun and games until she was ready to move on. Her eyes were always looking over her shoulder—at the horizon.”
    â€œWhy? What did she say to you?”
    She thought for a second as she ran her fingertip along the rim of the cup. “It warn’t so much what she said, Miss Ferber, it was the way she was. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like Cody Lee was a play toy, like one of those wooden toys you pull along on a string. Head bobbing, eyes bulging. She liked the dumb attention from him. I seen her teasing but in a mean way. She ain’t a nice woman, her with that British accent and all. That was clear to me. It was also clear that she didn’t care for him.”
    I