Free Slow Dollar by Margaret Maron

told me about that visit right before she died,” I said. “What happened to the rest of the bracelet?”
    She gave a rueful shrug. “Who knows? Mom probably hocked it to buy another bottle of gin, okay?”
    “She was an alcoholic?”
    “Oh for God’s sake, Deborah. You think our mothers were anything alike? That I ran away from her because I hated algebra or was having a bad hair day?”
    “How old were you when you ran?”
    “Fourteen.”
    “I was eighteen.”
    “
You
ran away? With all that you had? Why?”
    It was my turn to shrug. “Bad hair day?”
    She gave a small, disbelieving snort. “How long did you stay gone?”
    “A few years. Long enough to learn that bad hair’s not the end of the world.”
    “Get pregnant?”
    “No, I managed to sidestep that.”
    “Must’ve been the difference between fifteen and eighteen,” she said. “Or maybe you weren’t looking for love in all the wrong places.”
    “Oh, I did a little of that, too.”
    When Mother died, everything else seemed to fishtail out of my control as well. I fought with Daddy and most of my brothers, left college at the end of my first semester, ran off with a redneck car jockey, damn near stabbed him through his sorry heart, and didn’t come home again for several years till I finally got my act together. But hard as it might have been in patches, it was hardship of my own choosing and probably an eiderdown featherbed compared to the life led by Tallahassee Ames, aka Olivia Knott.
    “Was Braz’s dad with the carnival?”
    “He was a roughie even greener than me. It was my second summer of washing dishes and working one of the grab joints and I knew how hard carnies work, okay? He thought it was going to be blue skies and cutting up jackpots. He made two jumps with us, then he was out of there. But not before I’d played possum belly queen for him. I never even knew his last name, and he was gone before I missed my first period. Sounds like my own daddy, doesn’t it?”
    “Andrew married your mother,” I said mildly.
    “With my grandpa riding shotgun all the way to South Carolina’s the way I heard it.”
    Well, yes, there was that aspect of it, I suppose. I tried to talk to Andrew about Carol and Olivia right after I first came home, but he told me it was none of my business and to shut up about them.
    “It wasn’t my baby” was all he’d say.
    But Mother had said differently that last summer. “Andrew doesn’t believe the child was his, but I only had to take one look at her, Deborah. Olivia was him all over again. Same eyes, same smile. Your daddy’s tried to find her, but Carol’s never come back again, at least not that we’ve ever heard. Amanda and Rodney Hatcher aren’t the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. He’s Old Testament righteousness and she’s under his thumb with no more backbone than a squashed beetle, so there’s no learning from either of them where Carol and Olivia are.”
    The very next day, out of curiosity, I’d driven over to that eastern part of the county. The land’s a little flatter there, more coastal plains than sandhills. The soil’s easy to tend but everything leaches through so quickly that it needs a constant supply of fertilizer and water. I found the Hatcher farm and drove slowly past it two or three times. It was a depressing sight. The crop rows were cleaner than a preacher’s jokes. Not a weed, not a blade of unwanted grass. The outbuildings were modest, but in good repair. The house itself sat in a grove of oak trees a couple of hundred feet back off the road, and if it hadn’t been for the barns that surrounded it, I would have thought it was the sharecropper shack of a tightfisted land owner. The paint was peeling, the tin roof was rusty, a few of the windowpanes had been replaced with cardboard, and there was no indoor plumbing if that outhouse behind the barn was any indication.
    A cheerless, loveless place.
    The only spot of color was a rusty washtub full of red