Sick of Shadows by Sharyn McCrumb Page B

“but it was probably luck.”
    Elizabeth wondered if Eileen had intentionally skipped the family gathering. She found herself staring at the dying stag in the painting, and wondering whose eyes they reminded her of.
    “Dad! Captain Grandfather!” Charles appeared in the doorway, panting for breath. “Could you come down to the lake, please?”
    The last thing Wesley Rountree wanted in his county was a murder. County sheriffs do not keep their elected positions by brilliantly solving cases the way cops do on TV. They keep them by staying on good terms with the majority of the voting populace; and if there was one thing that Wesley Rountree knew about murders, it was that they caused hard feelings, no matter what. A conviction cost you the votes of the killer’s family; an acquittal alienated the victim’s family. It was a no-win situation.
    Whenever there was a murder in Rountree’s district, he always hoped that a migrant worker had gone berserk and committed the crime, but that was never the case. Marauding tramps were incredibly rare; jealous husbands and drunken good-old-boys were fatally common.
    It wasn’t that Rountree condoned murder or wanted to see the perpetrator go unpunished. He faithfully brought to justice the local killers, regardless of personal consequences, but whenever a murder was reported to his office, his first reaction was invariably indignation that someone would be so inconsiderate of his feelings as to commit homicide in his county.
    Aside from that, the job of sheriff suited Rountree just fine. He had lived all his life in the county, exceptfor college and a four-year stint as an M.P. with the air force in Thailand. After his discharge, he had spent a couple of years with the highway patrol, and then when old Sheriff Miller had a heart attack and died, Rountree went back home to Chandler Grove and was elected sheriff in an uncontested election.
    Now, five years later, in his second term as sheriff, Rountree was beginning to think of the job as a permanent thing. At thirty-six, he was a stocky blond who fought his cowlick with a crew cut and his beer belly with diet cola. Outdoor work and pale skin had kept him perpetually red-faced and freckled. The consensus of opinion around Chandler Grove was that Wesley Rountree was “doing okay.” As a home-boy, he suited the community down to the ground; they wouldn’t have traded him for Sherlock Holmes.
    In a small rural county, where everybody knows everybody else, law enforcement is a personal matter. The voters wanted a father image, and one of the cleverest moves of Rountree’s life had been perceiving that need and filling it.
    He remembered the time that Floyd Rogers had been shot in the parking lot of Brenner’s Cafe. There wasn’t much of a mystery about it. Half a dozen people had seen Wayne Smith’s red pickup leaving the scene of the crime.
    It was pretty common knowledge that Smith had been fooling around with Pearl Rogers. “The boyfriend shot the husband?” asked Rountree when they called him. “It’s supposed to be the other way around. Don’t he watch television?”
    Rogers was in critical condition in the county hospital, and Smith had to be brought in before some of the Rogers kinfolk decided to handle it themselves. Wyatt Earp might have organized a posse; Wesley Rountree preferred to use the telephone. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of Wayne Smith’s farm.
    After six rings, the fugitive himself answered.
    “Hello, Wayne? This is Wesley Rountree. How you doing? That calf of yours going to make it? Glad to hearit. Listen, Wayne … we have a little problem here. I understand you shot Floyd Rogers a little while ago. What? Well, he told me himself, as a matter of fact. He was still conscious when the rescue squad got there. Say what? Dead? No, but he’s laid up pretty bad in county hospital. I think he’ll pull through, though. And Pearl, she’s about to run us all crazy. Seems to think there’s