Bloody Kin Read Free Page B

brick walls and dirt floor built into the side of the slope. There, another larger door led directly outside so that tobacco could be packed temporarily into the pit immediately from the curing barn if the leaves were too brittle to handle without shattering. In the cool darkness, moisture from the earth had made the dry leaves pliable again.
    With the passing of mules, large families, and year-round tenant help, raising tobacco had become unprofitable without a heavy investment in mechanical equipment. Lacy couldn’t manage alone so Jake had leased all his crop allotments to a nearby farmer, who trucked the tobacco from the Honeycutt fields to his own modern barns. Curing and readying for market had become a simpler, mechanized process.
    The packhouse no longer served tobacco, but Lacy still used the pit to age his apple cider.
    Well, she certainly wouldn’t interfere with that, Kate thought. The ordering pit had always struck her as a perfect snake hole and Lacy was welcome to its damp cobwebby depths.
    She stood in the center of the large room, measuring its potential as a studio. Lacy had exaggerated about the floor. True, there seemed to be a rotten spot under the window where rain had seeped in around the casing and one corner of the trapdoor had broken, leaving a hole about the size of an outspread hand, but otherwise the old planks seemed quite sound.
    The one window was on the north wall.
    “Rip it out and replace the whole wall with glass,” Kate thought. “I can set up my drawing table there. Clear out all this rubbish and line that wall with shelves. Maybe a sink over here? Running water lines from the house ought not to be too expensive. Replace that light bulb dangling from the ceiling with fluorescent fixtures . . . wonder if there’s a socket for a coffee maker?”
    Her blue-green eyes followed the wiring from the light bulb across the ceiling rafters and down the wall to where it disappeared in a dark corner behind a pile of tobacco sticks jumbled onto a bundle of burlap sacks. She tugged at the burlap and several small furry forms skittered across the floor to hide beneath another pile of  rubbish.
    “Oh, dear Lord! Not rats, too?”
    Kate armed herself with a sturdy, four-foot-long tobacco stick. Spiders usually died every fall and snakes at least hibernated from October till April, but rats were a vermin for all seasons. She gingerly poked the burlap.
    “Mwrp?”
    A big gray Maltese rose and stretched among the burlap folds. The three kittens she’d been nursing when Kate spooked them came scrambling back upon hearing the mother cat’s reassuring purr.
    “Why, Fluff!” Kate laughed. “You’re a mother.”
    The big farm cat yawned complacently and lifted her head for Kate to stroke her. The kittens were almost exact replicas: the same smoky gray with elegant white bibs and neat white paws. Adorable.
    “One uff ’em’s mine,” a small voice asserted.
    Kate whirled. The child who stood just inside the doorway was very young and thin, but sturdily built, with enormous brown eyes and dark curly hair which was caught up in two perky ponytails by red ribbons. She wore red knit slacks and a rather grubby white pullover and she carried a fourth gray kitten. There was something disturbingly familiar about the tot which Kate couldn’t quite put her finger on.
    “Well, hello,” she smiled. “Did you bring your kitten back to visit its mother?”
    “This one’s not mine,” the child said, placing the new kitten next to Fluff. “All my kitty’s feet are white .” She looked up at Kate anxiously. “Which could my kitty be ?”
    Kate looked at the four kittens tumbling about their mother and was perplexed by their sameness. “But look, sweetheart. All the kittens have white feet.”
    The little girl shook her head stubbornly. “Not really and truly. They just look like they do. I want my kitty. The one Uncle Lacy gave me.”
    Suddenly, Kate knew who the child was and she was furious with