Long Upon the Land by Margaret Maron

steps. Vick finally did it, didn’t he? He kept threatening to, but Rosalee was sure it was just his temper talking. And it’s all my fault.” She reached for the box of tissues in her desk drawer and blotted her eyes. “I forgot that I was going to get home late Friday and I didn’t leave any food out for him, which means he would’ve gone back to Rosalee’s and if Vick had been drinking—” She reached for a fresh tissue.
    “He’d threatened to kill the cat before?” asked Dwight.
    She nodded. “Poor ol’ Diesel thought everybody loved him. But every time he twined around Vick’s legs, Vick would…well…not flat-out kick him, but the next thing to a kick if he’d been drinking. Diesel never seemed to learn. Vick kept saying he was going to stomp the daylights out of him.” She sniffed and looked at them sadly. “So he finally did it, didn’t he?”
    “We’re not sure what happened, but yes, that was cat blood on the steps.”
    As more tears welled up in her eyes, Dwight said, “Did you see either of the Earps Friday afternoon?”
    His routine question seemed to steady her. She blew her nose, then took a deep breath. “No. I told you. I came home late. Around eight-thirty. I called for Diesel, but he never came.”
    Dwight looked at his notes. Mrs. Earp had said, and her cousin confirmed, that she had fled the house around six. “There’s still plenty of daylight at eight-thirty. Did you happen to look over their way and notice his truck? Hear any voices?”
    “The trees and bushes are so thick back there that I can’t see through them even in the dead of winter. I did go out to water my flower beds, but I didn’t hear anything.”
    “You mentioned your son. Was he there that evening?”
    Mrs. Reynolds shook her head. “He and my husband have gone down to visit relatives in South Carolina. They left Friday morning and won’t be back till this evening.”
    After more pointed questions, she admitted that the Earp marriage was violent. “When you’ve been neighbors this long, you can’t help knowing about each other. Not that Rosalee would ever say, but I could see the bruises and she did call the cops on him last year and got a restraining order, but then he talked her into coming back. Except for Marisa, she doesn’t have any family to go to. They’re like sisters, though. Both of them are only children. Their parents are dead, Marisa doesn’t have kids, and as for Rosalee’s daughters, they live up near Washington. On the Maryland side, I believe.”
    “Did Earp hit them, too?”
    “Rosalee always put herself between him and the girls.” She sighed. “But it’s not like it happened every day or even every month, Major, and to be fair, he was a hard worker. You saw what their place looked like. Neatness was almost compulsion for him. He detailed her car and his truck every Saturday morning, kept the grass cut and the leaves raked. On the other hand, he was always finding fault. Cutting her down, criticizing her. If he was at home and she let Diesel in, he complained the whole time about cat hair and he wouldn’t hear of keeping a litter box. He just couldn’t stand any kind of mess or anything out of place.”
    “And yet he didn’t put away the lettuce and mayonnaise and he left most of that mess on the kitchen floor,” Dwight said when he and Ray were back in the parking lot. “Why?”
    “The cat?” Ray suggested. “Or maybe he was interrupted. If we do find different prints on one of those beer cans, we’ll know somebody else was there, somebody who maybe asked him to step outside so they could bash his head in.”
    “Either one’s possible,” Dwight agreed dryly. “See if you can run down his brother and get a statement. And while you’re at it, see if he’s ever registered a gun and ask if he’s the one that put a bullet through Earp’s windshield. I’ll go talk to the uncle.”
      
    Back in the fifties, before the county got serious about zoning, any