“Sure can,” Annie says.
It’s not often someone calls Annie small these days. She outgrew Caroline and Mama a year ago. Daddy has started saying he worries she’ll outgrow him next. She’s about to show the sheriff how easily she can manage that fence, but Daddy is shaking his head at her. If she were still thirteen, or maybe even fourteen, Daddy wouldn’t have minded. But she’s halfway to sixteen and that’s altogether different from being thirteen or fourteen.
“Caroline done it too,” Annie says, wondering straightaway if that was something she should have not told. “Both of us, we climbed right on over. It’s not so high.”
“You all get up here often?”
Daddy points his thumb toward the barn’s open doors. “Lavender drying in there this time of year. Otherwise, no. Have a look.”
The sheriff steps up to the barn’s open doors and leans inside. Three-inch bundles of lavender hang from the wooden crossbeams, their bluish-gray buds dripping toward the ground.
“Doors always open?” the sheriff asks, leaning inside.
“Circulation,” Daddy says.
The sheriff nods, doesn’t have to ask. He knows all about circulation. It’s the same for tobacco. Fresh air moving across the plants means less chance of mold.
The sheriff steps farther into the barn and runs one hand across the tips of the lavender. Tiny petals pop free and flutter to the ground.
“Today is your day, then?” he says without looking at Annie. “Fifteen and a half?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ryce was right. That’s the thing that has folks worried. For girls like Annie, those with the know-how, turning of age is something special. Or maybe something worrisome.
“Fifteen and a half,” Annie says, repeating the sheriff.
“But you and your sister, the both of you, come up here to look in that well over at the Baines’ place?”
Annie nods, which makes Daddy poke her in the back. “Yes, sir,” she says. “Me and Caroline, both.”
The sheriff can’t see a nod because he’s still studying that lavender, which shouldn’t be all so interesting, even to a visitor. He’s studying it like Annie had been studying it when she thought, hoped, Daddy was in there watching over her as she made her way to the Baines’ well.
“No well of your own?”
If she wasn’t certain before, she’s certain now. The sheriff is circling around her, closing in ever tighter with each question.
“Dried up,” Daddy says, and he says it easy and casual like he isn’t at all worried about what the sheriff’s thinking.
“Didn’t figure to see nothing in a dried-up well,” Annie says, and then so the sheriff won’t think that’s something only people like Annie know about, she says, “Everyone knows that. Just ask. Just ask anyone.”
The sheriff jostles a handful of lavender petals in one hand and walks from the barn.
“And what did you see when you got over there?” he says, squinting into the sunlight and dumping the petals. “You have a light of any kind?”
“Caroline did,” Annie says. “Daddy’s flashlight. Didn’t see much except for Mrs. Baine. She was on the ground there by the well. Didn’t know it was her at the time. Just seen an arm, what I thought was an arm. It was real dark.”
Mrs. Baine was old, just about the oldest person Annie has ever seen, and that’s why she died. She had slender lips that rolled in on themselves because she didn’t have teeth where she should have had them. Her fingernails were thick, yellow, and squared off like she whittled them down with a gutting knife, and dark patches-age spots, Grandma called them-covered the backs of Mrs. Baine’s hands and the sides of her face. Deep lines ran from her forehead to her chin, and her hair was like pulled gray cotton hanging down her back. A person can only grow so old. Grandma is always saying it’ll get us all eventually, God willing. But as Sheriff Fulkerson asks yet another question, and as he settles his eyes on Annie and keeps them there, it’s certain he is of a different mind. He’s of a mind that something other than old age got its claws into Mrs. Baine.
“There were the cigarettes,” Annie says, kicking at the ground near the barn doors. “They were around here somewhere.” She keeps digging at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “A pile of them.”
“Yours?” the sheriff says to Daddy.
Daddy shakes his head. “Never smoke up here. Too dry.” Daddy glances at his watch. He should be out to the fields, helping Abraham set his tobacco. “Never smoke most anywhere. Sarah, you know. She don’t like it. Smell don’t agree with her.”
The smell reminds Mama too much of her daddy, she once said. The sheriff gives Daddy a pat on the back as if he knows all about wives and the things they don’t much like, and the three of them keep on studying the ground and searching for those cigarettes.
“Went looking for them last night when Annie first mentioned it,” Daddy says. “Didn’t want a fire springing up on top of everything else.”
“Right around here,” Annie says, pointing at a patch of ground just outside the open doors. Those cigarettes had to belong to someone, so maybe the sheriff was right. Maybe something else, or someone else, did get its claws into Mrs. Baine. Those cigarettes will mean that the someone else was not Annie.
Daddy steps up behind Annie and squats. He groans on the way down. With one hand, he pats the ground and riffles through the dirt. “You sure it was cigarettes?”
“Positive,” Annie says, and all those good feelings Daddy stirred up when he hauled off that rocker are gone as quick as they came because Daddy doesn’t believe her and he’s saying so right in front of Sheriff Fulkerson. “One was still lit even. At first, I thought they was yours. I thought they meant you was out here too, that Mama sent you. I looked for you in the barn.”
Annie says these things even though she knows they’ll hurt Daddy. Mama did send him, but he and Abraham had been drinking their whiskey. They’d been doing it more and more lately because Abraham would be getting married soon. Fun’s over once you say I do, Daddy was all the time saying and then he’d wrap Mama up in a hug and rub his stubble against the underside of her chin. Mama would swat Daddy away, but he’d keep at it until she closed her eyes and leaned into him instead of pulling away. Daddy sleeping when he should have been watching over Annie was probably why Mama burned the toast this morning. Grandma is always saying a cook who burns the biscuits is an angry cook, indeed. The same must be true for a cook who burns the toast.
“Yep,” Daddy says. “I should have been here. But wasn’t me. Wasn’t my cigarettes. Maybe you was mistaken.”
Sheriff Fulkerson joins them but doesn’t try to squat. “Probably mistaken,” he says, repeating Daddy.
“But one was orange-tipped,” Annie says, digging two hands into the dirt, gathering it in her palms and letting it filter through her fingers. She stares up at both men, looking them in the eyes so they’ll know she’s telling the truth. “It was still burning. I’m certain. Certain as can be. I snubbed it out. Daddy’s always saying we have to be careful. But I thought they was Daddy’s. I was sure.”
“There anything else, Annie?” the sheriff asks, planting the sole of his black boot right where Annie had been rummaging in the dirt. “Anything you ought tell me?”
Annie can’t tell him about the spark that’s been in the air or the trouble that’s been lurking. Folks, regular folks, don’t like to hear about things like that. But for a week, Annie’s known it was coming, and here it is, and now folks think she killed Mrs. Baine.
“No, sir,” she says. “Nothing more to tell. But I seen those cigarettes, and if they ain’t here, that means someone took them.” Annie was wrong. Aunt Juna isn’t coming home. She’s already here. “I think they were Juna’s cigarettes. My Aunt Juna’s.”