Killing Time Read online

  “What if we could turn back time?” Ruth asked softly, bringing his attention back to her. “What if, knowing what would happen, I could go back to the day before it happened and insist she go to the hospital?”

  “I don’t believe in ‘what if,’ ” he said, though he kept his tone gentle. “You deal with what is, and go on.”

  “You don’t wish things were different?”

  “A thousand times, and in a thousand ways. But they aren’t different. This is reality, and sometimes reality sucks.”

  “This one certainly does,” she said, stroking her hand over her daughter’s tombstone.

  “Do you still come here often?”

  “Not the way I used to. I haven’t been in a couple of months, and I wanted to bring fresh flowers. I haven’t been bringing them the way I did at first, and it makes me mad that I don’t remember all the time now.”

  “Like I said, you go on.” He put his arm around her waist again and turned her, urging her away from the grave.

  “I don’t want to forget her.”

  “I remember more about when she was alive, than when she died.”

  “Do you remember her voice? Most of the time I can’t; then all of a sudden it’s as if I hear an echo of it and for a second I remember exactly; then it’s gone again. Her face is always clear, but it’s so hard to remember her voice.” She stared hard at the trees, fighting tears and, for the moment, winning. “All of those years, all of those memories. Baby, toddler, little girl, teenager, woman. I can see her at every stage, like snapshots, and I wish I had paid more attention, tried to remember every little thing. But you never think about your child dying; you always think you’ll go first.”

  “There’s a school of thought that we come back to learn things, experience things that we haven’t had in our previous lives.” He didn’t believe it himself, but he could see how the idea would bring some comfort.

  “Then I must have had great lives before,” she said. She gave a delicate snort. “And great husbands.”

  The comment caught Knox by surprise and he chuckled. Looking down at her, he saw her biting her lip to control a smile. “You’re tough,” he said. “You’ll make it.”

  “So, what are you up to?” Ruth asked as they reached her car. She hadn’t cried, and she might see that as a victory even though grief still lay like a veil over her fine-boned features. She asked the question to completely pull herself out of the past, not because she was really interested in the answer.

  “I’m heading out to Jesse Bingham’s. Somebody slashed the tires on his tractor and killed some of his chickens.”

  “Why on earth would anyone hurt those poor birds?” she asked, frowning. “That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting a lot of concern about the chickens.”

  “But none about Jesse or his tractor tires, huh?” The frown eased from her forehead and she laughed as he hugged her.

  He opened the car door for her and out of habit watched to make certain she buckled her seat belt. “Take care,” he said as he closed the door, and she gave him a little wave as she started the car and drove off.

  Knox returned to his own car, wishing he hadn’t seen her. She made him feel guilty, as if he should still be mourning as deeply as she did. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He wanted to find someone else to love and laugh with, have sex with, someday get married and have kids with, though damn if he had much chance of that, considering the rut he’d dug for himself.

  He pulled his mind back to the job and drove out to the Bingham farm to see what he could make of the vandalism. Sometimes people had a good idea of who had done it, or the neighbors had seen something, but in Jesse’s case just about everyone who knew him disliked him, and he had no nearby neighbors. He was one of those people who blamed everything that happened to him on someone else; if he had trouble with the engine in his truck, he immediately thought someone had poured sugar in his gas tank. If he lost something, he thought it had been stolen and filed a report. But they couldn’t just blow him off; they had to investigate every time he filed a report, because all it took was for him to be right one time and they’d catch hell if they hadn’t done their jobs.

  Slashed tractor tires and dead chickens weren’t produced by Jesse’s sense of persecution, though. Either the tires were slashed or they weren’t, and the chickens were either dead or running around pecking at bugs. At least there was something concrete Knox could see.

  The Bingham farm was set on a pretty piece of property, with wooded hills and neat fields. Jesse’s one good quality was that he took care of the place. The fences were always mended, the grass cut, the house painted, the barn and sheds in good repair. Jesse didn’t have any help on the place, either; he did it all himself even though he was in his late sixties. He’d been married once, but Mrs. Bingham had showed the good sense to leave him flat more than thirty years before, and go live with her sister in Ohio. Word was they’d never gotten a divorce, which to Knox’s way of thinking was a smart way to save money. Jesse sure as hell wasn’t going to find anyone else to marry him, and Mrs. Bingham was so put off marriage by her experience with him that she wasn’t interested in giving it another whirl.

  Knox parked his car beside Jesse’s truck and got out. The house’s door opened as he started up the front steps. “Took your time getting here,” Jesse said sourly through the screen door. “I’ve got chores that I need to be doing, instead of sitting on my butt waiting for you to decide to show up.”

  “Good morning to you, too,” Knox said drily. Seeing Jesse always surprised him. If there was ever a man whose appearance didn’t match his personality, it was Jesse Bingham. He was short, a little pudgy, with a round cherubic face and bright blue eyes; when he opened his mouth, though, nothing pleasant came out. The effect was that of a rabid Santa Claus.

  “Are you gonna do your job, or stand there making sarcastic remarks?” Jesse snapped.

  Knox took a firm hold on his patience. “Why don’t you show me the tractor and chickens?”

  Jesse stomped his way toward the barn, and Knox followed. The tractor was parked in the shelter of a lean-to attached to the barn, and even from a distance Knox could see that the wheels were sitting flat on the ground. “There,” Jesse said, pointing. “Little bastards got all six of them.”

  “You think it was kids?” Knox asked, wondering if a gang of kids had been extra busy last night.

  “How the hell would I know? That’s your job, finding out. For all I know, it was Matt Reston at the tractor place, so he could sell me some new tires.”

  “You said ‘little bastards.’ ”

  “Figure of speech. Don’t you know what that is?”

  “Sure,” Knox said easily. “Like ‘asshole.’ Figure of speech.”

  Jesse gave him a suspicious look. In his experience, most people either took off in the face of his nastiness, or wanted to fight him. Knox Davis always kept his temper, but one way or another he made it plain he’d take only so much.

  Knox carefully examined the ground; unfortunately, the prints in the dirt all seemed to be Jesse’s, which he could tell because they were small for a man. “You walked around out here?”

  “How else would I look at all six tires?”

  “If there were any prints in the dirt, you ruined them.”

  “Like you could look at a footprint and tell who made it. I don’t believe that crap. Millions of people wear the same size shoe.”

  Knox knew exactly where he’d like to plant a size eleven athletic shoe. He examined the tires, looked for fingerprints on the metal parts, but from what he could tell each tire had one slash in it: stab in a knife, pull downward. If the tractor had been touched at all except for that, he couldn’t tell it. Maybe he could get a fingerprint that wasn’t Jesse’s off it, though—if Jesse hadn’t wiped the tractor down this morning, and destroyed all the other evidence. Knox wouldn’t put anything past him, though he guessed the old fart wouldn’t slash his own tires, because that mea