When Sumner Broadbent was discovered fatally shot in his kitchen one bleak January afternoon, a torrent of buckshot in what was left of his face, sheriff’s deputies jumped to the conclusion that Buster Canaday was the guilty party. But with tip-top conditions that winter for both skiing and duck hunting and NFL playoffs underway, the scanty detective work failed to produce any “actionable evidence,” as the D.A. put it before heading off to the lifts himself. And Buster had retained a crackerjack attorney from Atlanta who muddied the waters like a hound dog turned loose in a fish pond. Many informed citizens soon concluded Sumner had it coming. He’d crossed the line big time and he didn’t have many fans in town in the first place, being a notorious deadbeat and a man who told a dirty joke very poorly, liking the dirty part a lot more than the joke. It’s all forgotten now and Mrs. Broadbent, May Edna, has remarried and sold the family home, next door to Buster, to a Vietnamese fellow who’s running the cellphone plant out where the billboards and the porn shops start on the edge of town. (May’s realtor never told him about the killing or he’d have wanted a big price cut.)

 

Grass and oxalis have begun to swallow Sumner’s Government-issue bronze grave marker that just gives his years, with a cross in-between, and says “CPL, US Army Korea.” The authorities never located the shotgun. It was assumed to have been Sumner’s, which was found to be missing after the crime. Buster never owned a gun, being an inveterate fisherman and a man who kept a pump handle under his bed in case he ever had a burglar. And he wouldn’t have needed any weapon to kill old Sumner. The other possibility, May Broadbent, friends and neighbors opined, was too squeamish to fire a weapon and while a bossy sort had always seemed to get along well with the outgoing old fellow.

 

After certain unsavory details had seeped out, it was widely believed the murder had something to do with Reena Canaday, the Broadbents’ gentle, slow-witted next-door neighbor, only child of Buster, a widower and manager of the bowling alley and its next-door fishing-gear and tack shop. When questioned by deputies, the straw-haired seventeen-year-old admitted letting Sumner engage for over a year in what is currently called groping (when politicians are involved). This was in return for everything from a basket of nectarines to a baby rabbit to a ticket to the multiplex. As she had done at the funeral, she broke down in tears when she told the story and said she had been very fond of the old man who was so generous toward her and was just being nice to him, not having many friends her own age.

 

Sumner began messing around with his buxom young next-door neighbor when she was fifteen yet still started every Saturday morning with at least two hours of cartoons on TV. At first he just complimented her a lot when she came out into the backyard to water the dogs or take something off the line.

 

“Hi, there, Reena,” he’d say, preening with his Ace comb in his long gray hair like a gnarled old rooster with some freshly debuting hens in the pen. “That’s a might’ nice tee shirt y’got there. I ain’t never forgot Dale Earnhardt neither.” If he was feeling venturesome it might be, “I alluz tell the spouse, if there’s a cuter li’l gal than Reena I don’ wanna meet her for fear o’ havin’ my uppers fall out.” The possibility of ulterior motive didn’t occur to Reena.

 

Then he started asking her over to see his zucchinis and his cucumbers or his new rabbit feeder. He’d ease his hand onto her hip as he led her around the large scrubby yard, half a sculpture garden of discarded auto parts and half a thriving vegetable and fruit-tree patch, avoiding the deposits of his two bird dogs and the gopher holes he never filled in. When she was wrapped up in picking a lemon or a carob pod off one of his trees he’d put his nose into her long hair and rapturously take in its scent of fresh-baked bread that just came naturally. This was always, of course, when May Edna was off shopping bargains in town or flirting with the good old boys at a church-committee meeting. Reena never had much to say besides “Oh, lookee” or “How come you got so minny brown rabbits Mr. Summer and no white’uns?”

 

Although “academically challenged,” as her high-school file purported, they kept pushing her ahead because from sixth grade her “development” already well outpaced her coevals. But by the time they got to fractions and decimals and the three branches of government the jar appeared full to brimming, as did her often undersized apparel. The principal decided she could learn enough to give change at the five-and-dime or the McDonalds and maybe make her way when her dad passed away, as his frequent early a.m. fisticuffs at The Reb along the four-lane led neighbors to fear.

 

A dozen years ago, folks nearby had actually thought that Reena was as smart a little girl as she was pretty. She and her mother, Bettie Canaday, were seen almost daily skipping along the two blocks to the neighborhood park, usually smiling and laughing, spending an hour or more with Reena playing on every piece of apparatus and then visiting the town’s horticultural garden alongside, where Bettie, who worked in the florist shop before Reena was born, related the intricacies and arcana of botany. Reena, with Bettie’s encouragement, even told admiring ladies proudly that she was going some day to State aggie college and majoring in botany. And then Bettie got run over by some drag-racing teen-agers, who fled the scene but were soon caught by deputies. She had been crossing the street to her car in a crosswalk after coming out of the Wynn-Dixie with her arms loaded with groceries and the cake for Reena’s fifth birthday the next day. Bettie held on for nearly a month, with Buster and Reena visiting her bedside every day, slowly watching her fade away as operation after operation failed to repair her mangled insides.

 

Following Buster’s lead, Reena started out believing hopefully that hospitals were there to fix people, to make them whole again, but her optimistic spirits gradually faded along with Bettie’s life force. From the days prior to that birthday, which never got celebrated, until the day she and Buster stood at the gaping graveside hole, Reena went from talkative and insatiably curious to taciturn and inward. From being a precocious kindergartner, already reading Dr. Seuss books, she became first a mediocre student and, by the third grade, the slowest in the class. But teachers and parents soon forgot about Reena’s past and she simply became for them a child who was constitutionally backward.

 

Never as well-groomed or fashionably attired as the other girls at school and always a trial to speak with, she was rarely invited to birthday parties and other social events by parents in the town’s rising yuppie class, even if their girls suggested her name. Soon they didn’t suggest her anymore. Buster didn’t have time to be a soccer or equestrienne dad so more and more she spent her days around the house watching TV or playing with her two terriers or with younger kids. It wasn’t until she began “blossoming out” at age eleven that she began getting more notice, disparaging by many of the girls but coarsely positive by the boys.

 

The teens from well-do-do families who’d been using Lee Boulevard for a racetrack got three years in a youth facility, with time off for good behavior. Chalk that up to $750-an-hour attorneys from Bravestown. Buster Canaday, who had been a friendly, easy-going young man managing the fountain at the bowling alley, the kind folks call a gentle bear, suddenly began showing a short temper, a tendency to be hypercritical in dealing with the help and suppliers, even customers, but a driver who got things done and done well. He shouldered up as best he could to the job of being both father and mother to Reena, about the only person to whom he could show any tenderness. He even offered to take her along when he visited the lake but she said that she could never take a fish away from its family. All that was before Buster became a frequenter of The Reb and the liquor department of the Wynn-Dixie.

 

Eventually, while Reena remained in the town’s eyes under par in many respects, from a physical standpoint she left little room for improvement. At fifteen, she looked like Marilyn Monroe at twenty-five, if you were ready to excuse the snarled, seldom brushed hair, the unwashed neck and the neglected fingernails. Any lack of hair-do or perfume-counter makeup was discounted when Reena went sashaying down the boulevard with her feather-light swinging step, stopping to grin and wave through the pet store window, drop a dime in the gumball machine at the A.M./P.M. and check out the new toy arrivals at the Mini Mart. Sumner Broadbent was no talent scout but he knew primo when he saw it, even in a too-small cotton dress that had been her mother’s, with a hem coming undone and stubborn stains under the arms. At sixteen, Reena wasn’t dating yet, on her pa’s orders, though she was constantly asked — everyone from brazen or calculating classmates to new hands at the mill or soldiers home on leave suddenly transfixed to see her waiting in line, usually alone, at the multiplex just off the Interstate. Warden Brinks, the only boy she ever really cared about, going back to elementary school, she kept at arm’s length, which took considerable effort at times. Buster, beset by her vulnerability in these still tender years, had given strict instructions in this regard and Reena, remembering from childhood the switch she had to go fetch, thoroughly obliged him.

 

But Sumner was persuasive, having retired from jobbing automotive parts and accessories from Washington, D.C., to Miami and then west to Mobile. He had the good salesman’s knack of making a prospect think he was doing him a favor to let him buy. His breakthrough opportunity came when Reena had just turned sixteen and called over the fence one day, “Mr. Summer, suh. Cud I ask y’all a li’l favor?” (Sumner encouraged her in mistaking his name, telling her he was the sunshine of his ma’s life and so she named him Summer when she finally got around to christening him.) “M’class is collectin’ can goods for the poor chillin of I-raq ‘n I’s wondrin’ if you ‘n the missus had anythin’ you cud spar.”

 

“My, yes, chil’, I surely do,” he answered bright-eyed, his mind already racing. “You hustle yer pretty li’l fanny over here. Missiz Broadbent is gettin’ the car fixed over to the Ford dealer but I thank you ‘n I could stir up a li’l somethin’ real nice and, y’know, nutrishyous.” Her smallish Cupid’s-bow mouth, innocent of any lip rouge, broke into that smile that could melt ice, exposing perfect if haphazardly tended teeth that would still have been an art director’s dream for a whitener commercial.

 

When he took Reena into the kitchen after some quick sales-target strategizing, he produced a small can of Armour Vienna sausage and handed it to her like it was the Hope diamond. But he could tell, as he figured, she wasn’t thrilled.

 

“Well,” he ventured, “I ain’t worryin’ too much ’bout thangs in I-raq, wanna know what I thank, but since yer doin’ the askin’, Reena, I got a prop’sition.”

 

He could smell Reena’s flowery girl smell even though she was wearing Gap jeans with a Kellogg’s Variety Pak of soilings from thigh to cuff and a grease-spotted Dallas Cowboys tee shirt he was trying to disregard to keep his knees from buckling.

“We got this Hor-mel boneless canned ham, ’bout which I’m gonna make a deal with you, so you can be fixin’ to take this here into class ‘n be the foragin’ star of Nathan B. Forrest High School.”

 

Reena’s eyes lit up as if she’d seen the finale starburst at the Fourth of July fireworks. “Awmoddy God, Mr. Summer, that’s as nice a canned thang as I cud ‘magine. Thank you s’awful much.”

 

“Hold on. Not so fast,” Sumner said. “You thank I’m gonna give this here away for free? Not on yer tintype, I ain’t. But I ain’t chargin’ much.”

 

“Chargin’,” Reena said, her cheeks flushing vividly. “Ain’t got no money to pay, Mr. Summer.” She pulled back her elbows in dismay and the marvel produced in her tee shirt made Sumner grab a chair back and stifle a gasp.

 

He gave an emphatic “Halt” sign with one hand while he let his breath return. “Not one shiny pinny. No sirree,” he said. “Jist a li’l somethin’ I wanna ask you.”

 

Now she was interested. Maybe he just wished to have the lunch dishes cleaned. It turned out what he wanted was “a little feel.” The direction of his wide-eyed gaze left little doubt where. Just take him a quarter of a minute or so, and that was it. He added, “Just a quick touch.” She thought it over, him being a neighbor and a grandfather and all, and she had let the 12-year-old Gallagher twins each give her a feel one time when they were playing mumbly peg with her in her backyard. Wasn’t Mr. Summer about the same thing, not some fast young fellow she needed to watch out for?

 

“Just one touch?”

 

“A caress, really, my dear. You’ll hardly notice it. One side ‘n then t’other. We cud jist preten’ I’m yer doctor doin’ a li’l check.”

 

“My doctor don’ play with m’boobs,” she said.

 

“We’ll preten’ you got a sore place and I jist gotta check on it . . . That’s a might’ nice ham there, chil’.”

 

“Sure, okay, I giss,” she said. “Quarter of a minute. Y’all got a clock ’round here?”

 

“You don’ need no clock, Reena. I’m an honest man, Lord as m’judge.”

 

Reena rolled her eyes and was beginning to think maybe the price wasn’t exactly right. But Sumner, seizing on her tentative acquiescence, already had his liver-spotted, blue-veined right hand electro-charged on the blue-and-silver star on the left side of her shirt. St. Peter truly must have given the green light at the gates. Reena sighed with boredom and kept her eyes on the big canned ham. Not only was it a delectable prize but his wen-reddened nose and flaked, inflamed eyelids were also a little tough to take at such close range. Soon his respiration rate began to climb and his rabid hands to explore further. For sure she didn’t want anyone putting hands on her butt so she gently but firmly pushed him away, put the ham under one arm and walked briskly out the squeaking back-porch screen door, which slammed shut, causing his parrot on the railing to squeal with either terror or annoyance. The whole affair for Reena was summed up in her success obtaining the ham and all she mentioned that night when Buster inquired was that Mr. Summer had been very generous toward the Iraqi children.

 

“His name is Broadbent, Irene,” was all he said as he popped open a Bud and turned on the Evening News.

 

From that point on Sumner knew he had a customer, although his plan was to provide the payment and her the goods, so maybe that made her a supplier, he figured.

 

A couple weeks later he was able to entice her into his yard with the promise of some strawberries.

 

“But they ain’t free,” he said, trying his best to produce a twinkling smile.

 

“You pullin’ that stuff agin, Mr. Summer?”

 

“Quarter of a minute,” he said, “jist lok before.”

 

Reena sighed and thought how much she loved strawberry shortcake.

 

By that fall Sumner was copping feels on an almost weekly basis, in exchange for produce from his garden, a back copy of his Country Living magazine with a recipe for Key lime pie, a lanyard keychain bearing the likeness of Dwight Yoakum, an old deck of Delta Airlines cards from his last plane flight in 1990, going to a V.F.W. encampment in Washington. Reena emphatically forbade going under her shirt, her jeans or her dress, even with the offer of a twenty-dollar bill and a machine-autographed photograph of Dubya and Laura at the ranch. She even turned down, after a protracted inward debate, a most ingratiating offer to paint her toenails, which were never in great shape.

 

When May Edna discovered Sumner’s body in the kitchen one chilly winter afternoon and the two mangy old dogs whining and licking his face, she ran to the porch door and yelled to Buster Canaday, whom she had just seen standing at his broad upstairs bedroom window at the rear of the house. “Call the cops, Buster! It’s horrible. Sumner has been shot, sweet Jesus, and he’s cold already.”

 

“Honest to God?” he shouted down. “I ain’t seen a thang, Miz Broadbent. Not a damn thang. Lemme find my cellphone somewhere.”

 

Sumner had kept his shotgun in his shed in the backyard since news of some mountain lions wandering around the outskirts of town in the wake of last year’s forest fire. The gun was gone. They dusted for prints but the rotting surfaces in the shed didn’t hold much hope of getting a good specimen.

 

When Reena admitted to detectives the touchy-feely business with Sumner, going on for better than a year, they quickly thought of big Buster, although Reena swore she never told him. And people tended to believe Reena. Her teachers said she might forget a lot but she never told a lie. Buster swallowed his rage at Sumner and mortification at the circumstances and only offered sympathy toward his daughter after deputies confronted him with the sordid details during an interrogation. He told the cops he had been wondering about all the gifts she got from the old man but had no suspicions of hanky-panky, not with a guy who was already using a cane when he went uptown and was starting to shake with his Parkinson’s. The boys at the Reb figured Buster, known as an honorable man, would have done it with his mitts, not a gun, if he knew the old bastard was abusing his dumbbell daughter.

 

As for Reena herself, Buster said she’d never used a gun in her life and got the shivers if she even saw one up close. Besides she was grateful to the old man for all his gifts and had no idea that she was being lecherously exploited. The gumshoes never asked her pointblank if she had killed Sumner, only if she had seen the old guy and anything strange around his house that day. Reena answered truthfully she had seen him over the back fence, as she did practically every day, but that she had spent most all of that Saturday watching TV and teaching one of her dogs how to roll over in either direction, just like a dog did on “Sesame Street.” Had there been any feeling business that day? “No, suh, not none o’ that.”

 

Others in town nodded as if they really knew and said it was the old lady. She caught him jollying the kid, went and got the gun and did the job, telling Reena she’d get the same if she blabbed. There’d also been statements that a homeless transient had been sleeping down at the creek bank behind Sumner’s and Buster’s houses and had been casing the homes nearby for stuff to steal, apparently deterred by the fact everyone kept yard dogs. Reena said she had seen the fellow earlier and was able to give a description of sorts. An APB went out but he was never located. The murder made the Chronicle in the city the next day and then again when the D.A. said there was insufficient evidence and no suspect but the case would remain open. The articles never mentioned Reena, she being still under-age. But like all slime the word gradually oozed out, first in hushed, shocked tones and then in innuendoes and then, among rough-edged elements, in leg-slappers. “The no-good bastard; the poor innocent — maybe — child,” the proper folks declaimed. But some of the boys at the pool hall opined more like, “If I’da knowed all it took was a boxa strawburries I’da popped for a good feel m’self. ‘N then ast ’bout the prass o’ other suvvices.”

 

Buster figured the whole matter had been too traumatic for Reena, given her unwholesome reaction to Bettie’s passing, and carefully avoided bringing it up again after he and Reena attended the funeral, silently enduring the multilayered stares of May Edna’s church-going friends. He knew he’d rather roll a peanut with his nose down Lee Boulevard than discuss sex with his daughter. But he carried a knowing and detached air around her from then on, certainly no longer treating her like a ten-year-old. He was sure she realized her big mistake, at whatever depth Reena took things in these days. It was, well, fortunate the whole business had ended with Sumner’s death. After all, he only had a few more years left at best. That summer, Buster told Reena she could start dating when she was nineteen but had to bring the boy home first for vetting. She agreed, thinking to herself the idea probably made sense.

 

She was eighteen then and had, over several teachers’ objections, been graduated. So far she’d had no luck landing a job in town, though lots of juniors and seniors at high school seemed to get jobs right and left. She knew she was going to let Warden Brinks be the first boy she’d go on a date with. He’d been asking her since she was maybe fourteen and the most she’d do was let him walk halfway home with her. Maybe just a little hand-holding. Warden’s father, who was with State Forestry, was a good friend of her pa since high school. Warden was an A student and had plans to go to the state college and wanted to get a job as a crop expert with the Agriculture Department, a goal that for some forgotten reason impressed Reena.

 

Her few former girl friends, really acquaintances, from school were treating her again with aloofness and little if any sympathy. “Shur, she’s maybe good-lookin’ n’all but, m’God, I mean lok there’s totally nobody home upstairs. Lettin’ that filthy ol’ buzzard mess ’round with her bod God knows how much, prolly even got her now in a totally preggers way, makes you wanna heave.” But it was the taunts from some of the rougher boys, carrying a big attitude along with their skateboards, offering to put on a gray wig if she’d allow a feel, posing questions about Sumner’s anatomical shortcomings, that caused the most pain. And not a little fear, as well. Warden, who was not a fighter, told her to rise above it and to feel superior. What finally put a stop to it was Buster putting out the word that anybody bugging Reena, regardless of age or gender, was coming in for a thrashing. Buster had lost a lot but he maintained his credibility.

 

What was nice about Warden was that she could always talk with him and, unlike other boys she knew, he was interested in everything she said, no matter how long it took. Then one gorgeous summer day, walking home after blissfully running into her at the supermarket, he blurted out that he loved her and wanted her to marry him some day. Reena would have been less surprised if her wire-haired had suddenly carried out a running somersault. For the first time she could remember since January she suddenly felt good all over. But the euphoria was brief. A now relentless obsession almost immediately resurfaced.

 

She didn’t speak for two blocks, trying to untangle her battling thoughts. Then she said, “I gotta showya somethin’, Ward. Come on down the crik with me.”

 

“Do we have to, Reena?”

 

“If’n you love me, Ward, you gotta.” She felt her eyes brimming. And she didn’t even have a handkerchief, she realized.

 

Fighting rising fear and nausea, Warden followed. He knew where she was taking him. There was nothing more to be said at this point. She led him to a spot under a broad, luxuriantly leafed sycamore tree within the distant view of her home, put down her grocery bag, knelt and began digging with her hands in the soft damp soil. Warden watched in amazement segueing into horror. When she had gone maybe a foot deep she pulled up what looked at first like a length of metal tubing. “This here’s the shotgun, Warden. I murdered him.”

 

Warden looked at her deeply, at her lovely, so innocent face, her cheeks wet with dirty tears, at her mud-blackened hands, at the wicked instrument whose business end she clutched. “I know, Reen. I already know.” Reena’s eyes stretched wide as she tried to force together the pieces of the puzzle. “I heard enough to figure out what happened, more or less. I knew why you had killed him — because he was taking advantage of you in a monstrous way. But it wasn’t murder at all. It was wholly justified. It doesn’t matter to me what you did. In fact, I admire your courage a tremendous lot. Now, I’ll say what I was going to if you had said you’d marry me.”

 

“Y’knew, Ward? Honest to the Lord? And didn’t tell?”

 

The boy nodded. He looked into her gentle eyes, a blue paler than faintest robin’s egg, with their long baby-doll lashes. Those adorable eyes that had always epitomized honesty for him, since he was first so smitten by her in kindergarten, only to drift away for years as his reading-circle and playground friend grew more and more distant and detached. Reena was suddenly more interested in Warden’s words than the homicidal weapon she held. She knew he was going to say something now more serious than anything he’d ever said. “You gotta tell, Reen. You gotta tell. You can’t go through life carrying this. I know Jesus would say, you gotta tell. I don’t know much about the law but I’m darn sure what you did was some sort of self-defense. You gotta tell.”

 

Unused to hard thinking, Reena pressed her eyes tight shut and grappled to reach a conclusion. For a moment the agonizing struggle threatened to burst her skull in frenzy, leaving her as mutilated as Mr. Summer, her churning insides as mangled as her ma’s had been. But suddenly, with blessed relief, the warring concepts reached a resolution, like the checkout computer at the supermarket deciding on the proper change. Her normal calm began trickling back like coins into the change tray and she opened her eyes to him. For once, she didn’t have to struggle to find the words she wanted. “No. It weren’t inny self de-fense, Ward. What it was was murder. No mistakin’. He was gettin’ frail by then ‘n I coulda knocked him over if I really tried. Long as he didn’t have no gun hisself. Hell, I’s an inch taller. I hated him lok the Devil hisself then. He was a dirty ol’ man, I come to see, alluz sayin’ all kinds o’ nasty stuff to me. I wanted so he’d stop pesterin’ me alla time. What happen’ was he said he’d gimme a whole hunnert bucks if’n I’d take off alla m’clothes.”

 

Warden was listening thunderstruck, as though he was hearing how the world ends straight from St. John. Reena took a couple deep breaths as she headed into the hard part. “Soon’s I hear this thang, with his head a-bobbin’ lok it did ‘n comin’ at me with his li’l pink claws, I turn ’round rot away ‘n run home, knockin’ over that stinkin’ parrot cage he kipt on the porch rail. Phone rings no sooner I’m back ‘n get off’n the toilet. He says he’s gonna tell my Pa I’s a li’l whore ‘n everthin’ that been goin’ on for so long. ‘Oh, please, no, Mr. Summer,’ I say. I’m gettin’ tears all over the telephone in the upstairs hall ‘n shakin’ n’ as sick to m’stomach as I been m’whole life. He says I should come back to his house rot now ‘n do what he says. Well, I reckon I was a lot more ‘fraid of Pa than Mr. Summer inny day in the week.

 

“When I come back through the porch door so skeered I thought I’d burst, Good Lord he’s holdin’ his big black gun ‘n he says, ‘Take off’n yer clothes, you li’l slut,’ or somethin’ lok that. ‘I got me a cartridge in this here gun.’ I felt lok I done turned to rock ‘n weren’t movin’ inny ‘n he holds that gun so close I cud see inside o’ that black barrel. He yells for me to hurry due to the fact May Edna oughta be back shortly. It was cold ‘n I had my ol’ flannel shirt on with all them buttons but I start undoin’ ‘em real slow lok they’s ornery as a mule. He puts down the gun ’cause he’s gettin’ all egcited ‘n comes over to lind a hand with them fustiverous buttons. I’s takin’ m’time ’cause weren’t anythin’ under that shirt but me. But then his phone commences a-ringin’. He looks lok he rather eat a dog turd than go to the phone rot then with my shirt gettin’ unbuttoned and startin’ to show what’s unnerneath but he does innyway. Musta been skeered it was May Edna callin’ to raise hell ’bout somethin’ new he done. I go ‘n pick up that horr’ble shotgun lok I know what I’m a-doin’. He sees me doin’ this and starts back at me his face all crazy ‘n his claws a-wavin’ lok a horror movie. Afore I know what happen I done pulled that trigger ‘n his face ex-ploded lok a watermelon dropped out an upstairs winda. Awmoddy God, it skeered holy hell outta me, it was so loud. I still ‘member lok it was rot here the terr’ble look he had when he saw this black barrel in front o’ his face.

 

“Nex’ thang I ‘member I’m down here at the crik ‘n diggin’ a hole in the mud with my bar hands lok a dog. Lok you jist saw me do agin. I did see some wild-haired bum down here but soon’s I pointed this gun he skedaddled. Gotta git ridda this here thang was allum thinkin’. An’ I’m upchuckin’ over everthin’ most o’ the time I diggin’. Cops don’ matter but cain’t let Pa hear ’bout this. Ma’s dyin’ was bad enough for him, give him all that anger ‘n hate. This’d kill him f’shur. By that time too I’s a li’l sorrowful ’bout what happen to Mr. Summer, ‘n I don’ hate him then lok I did when he’s alive ‘n all crazy in the face. But tellin’ what I did ain’t gonna bring ‘im back none. Nope, I ain’t gonna tell innybody but you I did this thang, Ward. I cain’t let Pa know.”

 

“Oh my God,” he muttered, his mind now a maelstrom of pain and confusion. “What a thing to go through, Reen. None of it really your fault at all. Now I’m sure it was self-defense.” She was shaking her head in denial. “Reen, this was a man who was getting ready to assault you and had already threatened you, first with blackmail and then with a gun. If you committed a crime, it was a very minor one. You gotta tell the whole story now.”

 

“I cain’t figger them thangs you talk about, Ward. I took a gun ‘n I killed a man. I know you’re smart ‘n all but you ain’t never done that. You ain’t ever seed a person dead ’cause you decided to make ‘em dead. There’s this big black thang inside me that won’t go away.”

 

“Oh, my God, Reen,” he said with anguish. “Tell that black thing to get lost, like the Lord told Satan. Listen to me now if you never do again in your whole life. You haven’t done anything wrong. You just have to put the truth out there for everybody to see. Then it’ll be over. But it’s your decision now. And you’re plenty smart enough to make the right decision.”

 

“Me? Smart? You kiddin’ or somethin’?”

 

He knelt down in the mud beside her and kissed her dirt-streaked forehead. “I know you, Reena, better than anyone outside of your dad, I imagine. All you gotta do is open up your mind again, let the fresh air here in the valley and the sunshine come back in. Ms. Cambridge used to say in kindergarten you were her best pupil. You always had your hand up. Then suddenly it seemed as if you just went all inside of yourself and stopped paying attention to hardly anything on the outside.”

 

Reena focused on his tormented eyes. “I cain’t hardly ‘member Ms. Cambridge. But you ackshally thought Renna Canaday was smart? I reckon I’d alluz been a re-tard. Third-grade teacher, that fat lady who wore the sneakers with holes in ‘em, she done tol’ me I was a re-tard and oughtta be in a school for re-tards, it’d be better for me.” Then the black thing gave a sudden twist to her intestines again and he saw her eyes close with the new travail.

 

Feeling the warm dampness of the earth seeping through his jeans now and beads of perspiration rolling down his chest, he waited until she took a deep breath and opened her eyes again. “Must be nice to be smart, unnerstan’ thangs rot away. Ward, I cain’t figger out a doggone thang seems.”

 

“It’ll come, Reen. Take my word. Believe me because I love you.”

 

She grasped his hand firmly. “Oh, my Lord,” spoken like a prayer. Her tormented face revealed her resumed inward battle. How she has been mistreated by all of us, for so long, he thought. Undeserving of an iota of it. She can’t even be sure if her own thinking is valid. “Dunno, Ward, maybe I love you, too, if I knowed what that was lok.”

“I still want to marry you,” he said. She was silent.

 

“But now I gotta tell you something,” he said. “Buster told my old man right away that he’d been up at his bedroom window and saw you down digging in the creek bed. Later he went down there and dug down enough to see it was this shotgun you were burying. He knew you did it. That’s why he got that expensive lawyer, thinking he’d have to defend you, not him. My dad confided this to me when I told him we were going to get married some day. He made me swear I’d never tell a soul he knew because he’d lose his job for sure if the sheriff ever found out, maybe even get charged. But I’m telling you ’cause it’s even more important that you know the whole story too.”

 

Reena felt a crushing pressure descend upon her, squeezing her head, all her insides. Pa knew!

 

“But it was self-defense, Reen,” Warden insisted. “Trust me, it was. I’m even more certain now that you’ve told me what happened. Your dad knows. That’s why he hasn’t done a thing to punish you. He just wanted you to think you had kept your secret.”

 

Reena avoided his now-pleading eyes. Resisting the pressure with her last ounces of will, she started pushing back mud over the gun. Then she looked up at him. “Ward, I ain’t ever gonna marry no one. Never!”

 

Warden knew she meant it. He felt his mounting dread twisting at the muscles of his face.

 

“G’won ‘n leave me be, okay,” she said. “G’won!”

 

He stood, took one last look at her, and turned and walked alone up the rocky eroded path to a side street. Now he knew he had to live with Reena’s black thing too. She could not liberate herself from her mother’s death. Must it forever be the same with Sumner’s?

 

A few days later Warden came by the house, hoping to see Reena. He saw Buster raking leaves and seed pods in the front yard under his magnolia. The Broadbents’ house, newly painted, was still vacant, with a Realtor’s sign in the front yard.

 

“Reena home, Mr. Canaday?” he asked.

 

“Nope,” Buster said. “She’s gone.”

 

“Gone? Where to?”

 

Buster shrugged.

 

“For good?” Warden asked. The look on Buster’s face was enough answer. “She can’t, Mr. Canaday. She’s too messed up in her head right now.”

 

“Don’ I know it. I couldn’t lock her up, y’know. All been too much for that sweet little kid. I just hope she comes back. Lord, I hope that.” Buster took off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with a sweatshirt sleeve.

 

Warden picked up a seed pod and examined it. It was ugly as a hand grenade but with the new life of bright red seeds poking their heads out from the spiky, forbidding exterior. “She say anything before she left? About her plans, I mean.”

 

“Nope. I’m tryin’ to tellya, kid, she just done left. In the middle of the night, day before last. I thought it over, decided best not to call the sheriff. I may get over to the city in a while and look around. Don’ hold a lotta hope.”

 

“I’m just not sure Reena’s ready to go out in the world on her own.”

 

“I neither, son. She left a note ’side my TV chair.” He swallowed hard and spoke from memory — “‘I love ya, Pa. But I’m not no good. Now ever’body knows. I gotta get out of here. Tell Warden Brinks I said good-bye. Don’ you worry ’bout me. Your girl, Irene Alice.’ That was all. She took all the money outta her bank account, the money her ma left her. One thousand bucks, give or take.”

 

Warden saw that the broad-shouldered, ham-fisted man was near to weeping.

 

“All that cash — they give it her in twennies — was on the table by the first note with a little Post-It on top saying, ‘This here is to help pay for that lawyer you got ‘causa what I did.’ Can ya imagine?”

 

The big man picked up a pair of pruning shears on the ground and hurled them against the clapboard side of the house next-door. “Better leave me alone for a while, kid,” he said. “Ya hear anythin’, ya lemme know now.”