The sheriffs office was a storefront in the square. Inside, a radio operator and two female clerks sat in an open office area separated from the public by a counter. He recognized one of the women immediately. What was her name? She had been a features writer on the Constitution when he was there. She recognized him, too, and beat one of her coworkers to the counter. “Can I help you, sir?” She quickly held a finger to her lips., her face miming urgency. Heather MacDonald, that was her name. He had seen her byline in the paper not more than a few weeks before. “What can I do for you?” she asked, her back to the others.
“Oh, I just want to pay a parking ticket.” Scotty, they called her. She was small, with short, dark hair; pretty. He had eyed her in the city room more than once.
“May I see the ticket, please?” Her eyes were begging him to go along.
He handed her the ticket. What the hell was she doing in Bo Scully’s office? He glanced over her shoulder. The sheriff was at his desk in a glassed-in office at the rear.
“That’ll be five dollars,” she said, reaching for a receipt book. She palmed a note pad at the same time. “Name?”
“John Howell.”
“Address?”
“The Denham White cottage on the north shore.”
“RFD 1, that would be.” She quickly wrote something on the notepad and turned it around, then went back to the receipt. It read: “Just shut up and leave. I’ll contact you later.”
“I guess so. I haven’t received any mail yet.” Howell looked up and saw Scully coming toward them. “Hi, Bo,” he said.
She quickly crumpled the note and ripped off the receipt. “Here you are, sir.”
“What brings you to see us, John?” Scully asked, stepping up to the counter.
“Came to pay a fine; forgot about a parking meter.”
Scully laughed. “Pity you didn’t see me instead of Miss Miller, here. You might have bribed me to fix it.”
Howell laughed, too. Miss Miller? What the hell was going on here?
“John, meet Scotty Miller, our latest addition here. She’s hell on the word processor. Scotty, this is John Howell, the famous newspaperman.”
“The former newspaperman,” Howell said, shaking Scotty’s hand.
“So he keeps telling me,” Scully said. “I was just on my way out, John; want to take a ride with me?”
“Where you going?”
“Just to make some rounds. I’ll give you the ten-cent tour, since you already contributed five bucks to the kitty.”
“Sure. I’ve got to do some grocery shopping, though. Will we be long?”
“An hour or two, depending on what’s happening.”
“Fine. Nice to meet you, Scotty.”
“Same here,” she replied, looking worriedly from Scully to Howell.
The two men left together and got into Scully’s unmarked car. “You seen much of the area?” Scully asked.
“Only what I saw driving up here. It’s been raining ever since, until today. This is the first time I’ve even been to town since that day we met.”
The sheriff wound the car idly through the streets of the town. “Eric Sutherland hired an architect from Atlanta to design the look of the town,” he said, waving a hand at some store fronts. “Got the city council to pass a bill requiring any new building to conform.”
“Looks nice,” Howell said. “Not too contrived. Simple, neat, lots of trees, too; bet it’s pretty in the fall.”
“Lots of leaves to get raked in the fall,” Scully said.
The sun struck the brick of the storefronts, giving them a glowing warmth.
“Those are Harvard brick,” Scully said, seeming to read Howell’s mind. “Sutherland went to Harvard, and I guess he liked the brick the school was made out of. When the major building was going on, he imported them by the carload. To this day, if you want another kind of brick, even to build your own house with, you’ll have to special order it. We got two building supply outfits here, and both of them stock nothing but Harvard brick. I reckon there’s some Yankee brickmaker up in Massachusetts wondering what the hell we’re doing with so much Harvard brick down here.”
“Eric Sutherland seems like a man who doesn’t leave detail to chance.”
“You better believe it, boy,” the sheriff grinned.
Scully left the town and headed for the north shore, in the direction of Howell’s cabin, but he continued straight at the crossroads. “You know, there wasn’t even a road around the lake in the early days,” he said.
“So Denham White told me.”
Scully laughed. “I wish you could have seen old Denham in that canoe, towing all that lumber. Boy, he was a sight.”
“I’ll bet.”
“He got the nicest lot on the lake, too, for my money. Only lot he leased in that cove. His father and Sutherland got along real well.”
“So I gathered from Mr. Sutherland. In fact, I got the impression Mr. Sutherland would have ordered me out of town if I hadn’t been old Mr. White’s son-in-law.”
“Yeah, well, he has a better opinion of the old man than the boy, I guess. Denham got mixed up with a local girl up here a few years back, somebody not of his station, you might say. Sutherland didn’t like it a bit, called up his daddy, and old man White snatched the boy out of here pretty quick.”
“Pregnant, was she?” Howell asked, interested.
“Nah, just in love – at least, Denham was. Never saw anybody so much in love.”
Howell chuckled inside himself, thinking of the cool, buttoned-up Denham, now married to an icy Atlanta debutante. He wouldn’t have thought his brother-in-law would ever have had so much passion. “Who was the girl?” he asked.
“Nobody you’d know. Catholic family. I think that pissed off old man White as much as their social standing.”
“Yeah, well he was a pretty hard-shelled Baptist, I guess. My wife didn’t take after him.”
“How’s your wife feel about your coming up here for such a long time without her?” Scully seemed to want to change the subject.
Howell hesitated. “Well, we’re separated, really. I think it’s probably best for both of us, my being up here.” Now he had said it out loud to somebody. That made it official, he supposed. He was surprised he’d let it out.
“Kids?”
“Nope. Just as well, I guess.”
Howell found it very easy to talk to Bo Scully. There was something very companionable about the man. “You married?”
Scully shook his head. “Nah. Never got around to it. I was engaged, once, to a girl in the valley, but she… it didn’t work out. I was just a kid, anyway.”
“No more close calls?”
The sheriff grinned. “Oh, sure. I found the perfect girl once, but, like the fellow says, she was looking for the perfect man.”
“I wouldn’t think there would be much of a supply of single women in these parts.”
“Oh, it’s not too bad. Fair number of divorcees. I’d have a shot at little Scotty in my office, if she wasn’t so close to home. You ought to give her a call, you know. Nice looking girl. Smart, too; she’s done a lot to shape up the office.”
“You said she was new?”
“Came a little more than a month ago.”
“Local girl?”
“Nah, Atlanta. Said she wanted to get away from big city life. She had real good references from a law firm – she was a legal secretary – and I just snapped her up. You don’t find many girls around here with that kind of experience.”
“I guess not. Seems like a pretty good life up here, too. I can see why she might want to get away.” He couldn’t see at all, really. She was up here with a phony name and phony references, obviously up to something.
“You better believe it’s a good life. Shoot, I can’t hardly believe it sometimes.”
“How long you been sheriff?”
“Since ‘62.I got a deputy’s job when I came back from Korea. When old Sheriff Bob Mitchell hung it up, I ran. Got elected. Been getting elected ever since.”
“Much crime up here?”
“Not much. Not the way you’ve got it in Atlanta, anyway. Oh, we get our share of cuttings, and burglary’s happening a lot more often than it used to. We get a murder once or twice a year, usually a domestic situation.” He grinned. “We stay busy, but we don’t bust our asses.”