Free Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season by Michaela Thompson Page B

you were better than anybody else. Did she say that?” She jerked his chin up, forcing him to look at her. “Answer me.”
    “Yes.”
    She let go of his face with a choked laugh. “You ought to be proud, Bo. The very best in all of St. Elmo. She had a lot to go by for comparison.”
    For the first time, Bo was roused from passivity. He looked up at Sue Nell. “She wasn’t doing that anymore,” he said. “Not since me.”
    She twisted off a tendril of honeysuckle and began stripping it of its leaves. Bo tipped the contents of his glass down his throat.
    “She wrote poems,” he said. “Rhymes.”
    Sue Nell didn’t reply, but he seemed almost eager to continue. “She would read them to me. She could always make it come out so it rhymed.”
    “Poems,” Sue Nell said. Her voice had lost its edge.
    “Songs, like,” said Bo. “Only without a tune.”
    Sue Nell sat down on the step below Bo and rested her head on her knees. Bo, staring ahead, didn’t look at her. “She’d bring me a new one every so often,” he said. “She liked to write them. She’d say—”
    “Hush,” said Sue Nell.
    Bo stopped, confused. “But you were asking, making me tell you everything, all about what we did—”
    “Just hush.”
    Bo tipped several inches of liquid into his glass and swallowed half of it. He waved the glass at Sue Nell. “Want a drink?”
    She rocked her head back and forth against her knees. When she spoke, her voice was rough. “Why did you do it, Bo?”
    He rolled the glass between his hands. “I don’t know.”
    “Were you in love with her?”
    “She gave me a lot of trouble.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “She’s dead now, it doesn’t matter.”
    “Yes, she’s dead. She’s dead.” Sue Nell raised her head and turned her wet face toward her husband.

Lily at the Courthouse
    The county courthouse was a two-story building of dusty-red brick, topped by a clock tower and overlooking a lawn of tired-looking grass. It stood on the corner of the beach highway and Milton Avenue, a heat-baked street with a straggling line of drugstore, dime store, hardware store, grocery store, and filling station.
    Parking the Nash in front, Lily glanced across the street to Maude’s Coffee Cup, where she suspected Woody spent much of his time. He wasn’t there. With Diana Landis’s body on his hands, he must’ve decided to do some work.
    On the courthouse door was a poster with Snapper’s picture and the slogan, Reelect Robert “Snapper” Landis, Your Congressman. Lily walked past it into the dim interior with its hardwood floors, droning hall fans, and dull green walls.
    The Sheriff’s Department was a left turn off the main hall. Opening the pebble-glass door, Lily saw immediately that activity had replaced the usual sleepy atmosphere of the office. Loyce, Woody’s secretary, wasn’t cutting recipes out of the Woman’s Home Companion but was banging away at her typewriter, her jaws flailing at a wad of gum, light flashing off her harlequin glasses.
    The door of Woody’s office, behind Loyce, was closed, a circumstance unique in Lily’s memory. As Lily walked in, Deputy Cecil Barnes emerged from it to rush over and put a sheet of paper on Loyce’s desk. Cecil nodded at Lily, said, “Ma’am,” and returned to Woody’s office, closing the door behind him. Loyce glanced up briefly but didn’t stop typing.
    After waiting several seconds, Lily said, “Don’t mean to interrupt you, Loyce.”
    Fingers poised over the keys, jaws still rotating, Loyce looked at Lily.
    “I’m here to see Woody,” Lily said.
    Loyce blinked. “Well, I’ll tell you, Miz Trulock. We have an emergency here. You may not have heard about the murder.”
    Lily was stung. “I’m not deaf, dumb, and blind, Loyce!”
    It was a mistake. Loyce’s nostrils closed a fraction. “Then you understand why Sheriff Malone can’t take time out now for family matters.”
    Trying to sound conciliatory without feeling it, Lily said, “I wouldn’t