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chairs while Dwight tried to refresh my memory. “He lives on the far side of Cotton Grove. Drives an oil truck for Dexter Oil and Gas. Wife Rosalee, two daughters, both grown and both living out of state.”
    “Because they were tired of watching him beat up on their mother,” I said. “I didn’t recognize him yesterday and I can’t quite put a face to her but I do remember her saying that about her daughters. Yet she never divorced him, did she?”
    “No.”
    “Have you talked to her?”
    He nodded and swirled the ice cubes in his glass with a deep sigh. Telling the relatives is the hardest part of his job. “Even with a black eye, a cut on her chin, and a big purple bruise on her arm, she still says he was a good man till he wrecked their first car and one leg wound up shorter than the other.”
    “Always somebody else’s fault,” I said. “Never his own sorry doing. As I recall, he’d been drinking when he crashed. Did she kill him?”
    “Who knows? We caught up with her at her cousin’s house. She claims she’s been there since around six Friday evening and her cousin backs her up. Says she doctored the cut on Mrs. Earp’s chin and then put her to bed with a sleeping pill.”
    “Is that when his head got bashed in? Friday night?”
    “Hard to say. Singh puts the actual time of death about a half hour before Mr. Kezzie found him yesterday. That would make it around ten o’clock. No way to tell when Earp got hit or when he was dumped, though. He was hit at least three times and he had bruises on his knees like he’d fallen. What did him in was probably the blow to the back of his head with something straight and narrow. Like a thin but heavy four-inch-wide board. Ray and Tub and I went over to the house. There’s blood on the back steps. Looks fresh. No sign of whatever was used to hit him with, though.”
    “A man that violent must have enemies,” I said.
    “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Mrs. Earp said no when I asked her, that he was pretty much a loner. Her cousin did say he was on the outs with his brother. She also said somebody took a shot at him last weekend through the windshield of his truck. I’ll go back and talk to them tomorrow.”
    “If he lived on the other side of Cotton Grove and if that blood’s where he was struck down, why do you reckon he was brought out here?”
    “Well, Mr. Kezzie did say that kids have been known to park there on a Saturday night. Maybe someone remembered it as a fairly isolated spot.” He suddenly grinned. “You ever park there with anybody?”
    I laughed. “You have to be kidding.”
    “You telling me you never made out with anybody in the backseat of a car?”
    “No. I’m just saying I never did it within five miles of the farm. Daddy seemed to have eyes everywhere in those days. Still does, for that matter.”
    “You gonna name names?”
    “Right after you do,” I said. “Seems like I remember hearing that you and Will got bogged down in that branch one night on your way home from a ball game. Not that the branch is on the way to your house from the school gym. I believe one of you had to sneak past our house without Daddy knowing so you could wake up Seth to pull you out with a tractor.”
    He laughed. “Those girls never went out with us again.”
    Before I could tease him for their names, the sound of a motor made us look around to see that little red Cub putt-putting down the lane in second gear. Cal was in the driver’s seat, a big grin on his face. Robert stood behind him on the tow bar and he was beaming, too.
    “Show us where you want it cut in,” Robert called to Dwight, “and we’ll get ’er done tomorrow.”
    We walked out to the garden, which seems to have grown exponentially this season. You can give a country boy a town job, but he’s never going to buy all his food in town. Not if he has a square foot of dirt to play with.
    Dwight pointed to the rows where garden peas, zucchini, and potatoes had grown and been