Slow Dollar by Margaret Maron Page A

He was messed up pretty bad in the face, I heared.”
    But I was still reeling. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
    “What for?” he asked. “She knowed who we were and where we were. When she didn’t try to sell the farm, I figured she’d come looking us someday when she was ready to know us. We hadn’t done nothing for her growing up, so we didn’t have no claims on her now. Figured it was her choice.”
    My brother drove into the yard about then, parked his truck beside Daddy’s old Chevy, and got out. There was a puzzled look on his face.
    “Does he know?” I asked.
    Daddy shook his head. “You want to be the one to tell him?”
    “Tell me what?” said Andrew as he came up on the porch and joined us at the table.
    Of my eleven older brothers, Andrew’s third in the birth order after Robert and Frank. He’s the one that looks the most like Daddy. His thick brown hair is fast going gray and will probably be all white in another year. He’s also the one that seemed to have the hardest time of it as a child. Didn’t get a chance to be a baby long before the big twins came along and pushed him out of his mother’s lap.
    “Andrew was wild as a ditch cat,” Aunt Zell says whenever she talks about the houseful of boys Annie Ruth left behind, which explains why she always had a soft spot in her heart for him.
    Although he eventually came to love my mother, it was hard for him to show it, especially since he was the one who initially resented her the most after Annie Ruth died and Daddy remarried. Took him a long time to find his way in life, to find April, who gentled him and brought him back to the farm and a settled life.
    “Tell me what?” he asked again, beginning to get an apprehensive look on his face. “What’s wrong? A.K.? Ruth?”
    “No, no,” I assured him. “I saw both of them when I was leaving the carnival and they were fine. Enjoying the rides.”
    He didn’t relax. “What then?”
    There was no easy way to say it, but I couldn’t help trying.
    “Andrew, I heard today that Carol’s dead. She’s been dead for years.”
    He looked at me blankly, trying to think who I was talking about.
    “Carol Hatcher,” said Daddy.
    Carol was more than half a lifetime behind him, and nothing I’d ever heard made me think there’d been anything other than sexual attraction between them.
    “Olivia too?” he asked.
    “No. She’s alive and she’s here.”
    He swiveled in his chair abruptly as if he expected her to come walking from my kitchen onto the porch.
    “Not here in the house. Here in the county,” I said. “She’s with the carnival over at Dobbs.”
    “Yeah?”
    “You heard about the young man that was killed over there last night?”
    Andrew nodded.
    “That was your grandson, Andrew.”
    “The hell you say, Deb’rah!”
    “Watch your tongue,” Daddy said mildly. He never likes it when the boys use language around me.
    “Well, tell her to watch hers.” His jaws were tight with anger. “Olivia ain’t mine! How many times I got to tell y’all that Carol gave it out to every guy in three counties?”
    “You can tell it till you’re blue in the face,” I said, “but it won’t change the fact that you’re the one got tagged fair and square. She’s yours, kid.”
    “And how would you know? You won’t even born then.”
    “Because Mother said so, remember? She was so sure that she took you over to the Hatcher farm right after you and Lois were married, but Carol had gone off with Olivia again.”
    “You were just a baby,” he said. “How could you know that?”
    “I told you. Mother said so. Just before she died, she told me all about it. Besides, I’ve seen her, Andrew. I’ve talked to her. She looks more like you than A.K. or Ruth.”
    “What’s she doing back here?”
    “Right now, she’s part owner of the carnival, but she did wind up getting the old Hatcher place and she and her husband have been fixing up the house.”
    “So what does she want?”
    He was