The Whiskey Baron Read Free Page A

enough, and Larthan was right. The man did sound shaken up—he had a quiver in his voice, like a young buck approaching a gal at a dance for the first time—but instinct told Chambers he was being lied to. Mary Jane Hopewell was a troublesome good old boy, nicknamed so on account of wearing Mary Jane dresses for too long when he was a child. He’d come off the farm twenty years ago and into the mill like the rest of them. His brother Joe and his family had soon followed, and they lived a respectable life in the Bell. Went to church twice a week, had two boys who worked in the mill, a pretty wife who came into town once in a while wearing a blue and white gingham dress and a bonnet and catching eyes all along Main Street. Mary Jane himself wasn’t as successful as his brother. Married as a young man for about six weeks, his betrothed had taken off with a traveling salesman, a real fast talker with nothing real to say, and Mary Jane had been in and out of work ever since. Lived in a hovel by the dump and knew every lowlife who set foot in Castle County, though he himself was a nice boy. He drank plenty, he lost borrowed money in card games, and he sometimes woke in a gutter on a Sunday, but he was honest and forthright and gentle. He may run with those cast into the outer darkness, but he wasn’t one of them, Chambers believed, or at least he’d never given anyone reason to think him dangerous. Some folks thought he was a little simpleminded, because if he was sober you might find him playing baseball with some kids, or you might find him sitting by the river with a stray dog for hours on end. Lately he’d been seen in the company of Widow Coleman. His old running mate, Shorty Bagwell, was in the jailhouse for driving drunk through Miss Meacham’s flowerbeds. Chambers made a note to check in with the widow and with Shorty to see what they knew.
    To Depot, he said, “You saw Mary Jane shoot them?”
    “No, but hell, Sheriff, who would have done it otherwise?”
    “I’m just trying to get the record straight, and not rule anything out.”
    Depot didn’t reply.
    “Like I was telling Larthan, I’ve known the Hopewell people for years. Not well, but the ones out in the Bell work hard and go to church and walk a straight line. Mary Jane is a bit of a hellraiser, asI’m sure you know, but he doesn’t strike me as the killing type. Can you think of a reason why Mary Jane might have done this? Did you hear any arguments, anything out of the ordinary?”
    Depot spat over the rail. “Not that I know of. All I know is what I just told you.”
    The ambulance drove up and parked on the street with its lights on, so Chambers said, “I know it’s late here, and I’m sure you want to get some sleep, but tell me something.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Why they call you Depot? I never did understand it.”
    “I don’t know. I’ve always been Depot,” he said. “I think it’s cause I liked to play around trains when I was a youngun.”
    “That’ll do it,” Chambers said. He turned and walked toward the ambulance.
    The widow Abigail Coleman lived by the river. Forty years old now, a lifetime of bad news and about to get some more. Her husband was a casualty of the war, and Chambers had shot her teenage son in 1926. A few years ago, she’d taken in Ernest Jones, who helped her farm corn. She sold much of her crop to Larthan Tull, but she had a still herself set up on the creek down in her property bottoms. She made premium whiskey and buried it along the river, mostly for herself although she was known to sell a jar to the occasional hellraiser who’d gotten too wild for the Hillside Inn. Not having spoken with her since he’d shot her son, Chambers dreaded the news he had to bring her today.
    When he arrived at her farm, east dawn was finally peeking through, the sky a blue wall with a streak of pink like a curtain rising for the day’s drama. The farm was a good plot of rolling land by the river. A rutted logging road cut