“Okay.” Olivia yawned and stumbled out of bed. Sela hurried back downstairs. Mike was standing with his back to the fire, warming that side of him while he sipped the hot coffee.
“Were the Livingstons hurt?” she asked as she pulled on her shoes and a coat.
“No, but they’re pretty shook up.”
“Who was it?”
“Man named Phil Millard, Milford, something like that. From Nashville. He had a driver’s license on him.”
Nashville was over two hundred miles away; as alarming as the break-in was, just as alarming was that the intruder had traveled that far to the valley, rather than moving straight south down the interstate. Why come here? What had been the lure? They’d never know now, but it was worrisome.
Olivia came down the stairs, still yawning, with a jacket over her pajamas. Sela said, “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I gave her a pain pill about three hours ago, so she’ll sleep for a while yet.”
“Okay.” Olivia was slipping through Carol’s bedroom door as Sela and Mike went out the front. She was glad that Olivia was still too groggy to ask questions, because she herself had more questions than answers and she didn’t want to alarm the others when she couldn’t tell them anything beyond the bare bones that Mike had told her.
The predawn air was cold, and their breath fogged in the air; she and Mike walked fast, lighting their way with flashlights. “Jim took Mary Alice next door and woke his neighbor, who went to get the community patrol,” Mike said. “I guess one of us could make it to Sevierville and see if anyone is at the sheriff’s department.”
“If there was, I doubt they’d come out.” It had been weeks since they’d seen a county patrol car, and before that only rarely.
“We should probably take the body in . . .” Mike’s voice trailed off as he realized how futile that would be. There was nothing the sheriff’s department could do that they themselves couldn’t do right here. There was literally no working law enforcement, no way to investigate anything. They couldn’t even notify his family, if he had any.
“We’ll keep his ID, take a picture, write down what happened, and bury him here,” Sela said, feeling helpless. There was nothing else they could do, except say a prayer for the man.
Mike nodded, and she had the abrupt, discomforting realization that he was taking her opinion as a directive, as if he’d assumed without question that she’d be taking over Carol’s role. He hadn’t been there yesterday when Carol had told her she’d have to handle things now, and she was staggered that he’d so easily come to that conclusion. Evidently the people around her had more faith in her than she had in herself.
That was something worth thinking about—later. Right now there was a serious situation that had to be dealt with.
There were a lot of flashlights bobbing around the Livingston house and the neighbor’s house, with some hunting lanterns providing additional illumination. A lot of people milled around in the yards, the street; probably almost everyone who lived anywhere in the neighborhood was out there, as well as several members of the community patrol.
“Might as well get it over with,” Sela murmured to Mike, gathered her nerve, and entered the Livingston house. There were more people inside, some of them in the living room but most of them in the kitchen.
“In there,” someone said, indicating the kitchen, so she and Mike joined the crowd grouped along the cabinets and around the small eat-in table. The dead man lay awkwardly on his side in the middle of the floor, facing away from her. A chair and trash can had been knocked over, and no one had picked them up. The air was ripe with the odors of death and Sela gulped, then tried to breathe only through her mouth.
Trey Foster was propped against the sink; when he saw Sela he straightened and said, “We haven’t moved anything. The guy’s pistol is lying right there, no one has touched it. He got off a shot, the bullet went through the wall.”
They had all watched so many police procedural shows on television that, overall accuracy aside, none of them were about to touch a weapon that had been used in a crime. In other circumstances, Sela would have smiled. Instead she tried not to look at the body, and focused on the people standing around who were all watching her, waiting for guidance.
“There isn’t a lot we can do,” she said. “Does anyone here have their cell phone with them? No? Then someone find one, and take the man’s picture. Also get a picture of the bullet hole in the wall. Better yet, see if you can find a regular camera. I’ll talk to Jim and Mary Alice, and write down their account of what happened.” She paused, trying to think of what else might be done, wishing someone else would step up and take charge. No one did. “Is there any way we can take the guy’s fingerprints? I don’t know what good it will do, but it seems sensible.”
A few people shrugged. A man who had been a park ranger before retiring several years back said, “Maybe an index card and some graphite scraped from a pencil. Or ink, if we can find some.”
A woman said, “Mary Alice has one of those rolling things that she used to black out her address and info on papers she was throwing away. I’ll go ask her where she keeps it.” She slipped away through the crowd.
“Is there anything else, other than burying him?” Sela asked, looking around.
“Not that I can think of,” Mike said. “You have it covered.”
Trey looked down at the body. “I hate to waste good wood building a coffin for someone who would rob old people and try to kill them, but it don’t seem right to just dump him in a hole so I’ll get it done. I can’t waterproof it, so we’ll need to bury him somewhere he doesn’t pollute the water supply.”
Sela blinked at the pragmatic outlook. But pragmatism was what they needed to get through this crisis, both the immediate one and the ongoing one of having no electricity.
“If y’all can handle the pictures and the fingerprinting, I’ll go talk to Jim and Mary Alice.” She looked at Mike and he nodded, indicating they’d get it done.
She went next door to find Jim and Mary Alice huddled in the neighbor’s living room, a single quilt wrapped around both of them because they were both barefoot and in their nightclothes, Jim in pajamas and Mary Alice in a nightgown. The house didn’t have a fireplace, and Sela wondered how the people who lived here were keeping warm. She made a mental note to ask, once this crisis was taken care of.
Quietly she asked if anyone had a pen and paper, and when that was in hand she sat down beside the old couple.
“Am I going to jail?” Jim asked, his thin voice quivering.
“Lord, no!” Sela’s response was automatic. “You did exactly what you had to do, to protect yourself and Mary Alice.” In other times and other places his worry would have been justified, but not here, and not now.
Mary Alice burst into tears and fiercely hugged Jim. “Thank God, thank God,” she said over and over.
Something else occurred to Sela, and she hoped this was the last “something else.” Getting up, she went over to a group of women standing in the kitchen, where a coffeepot was heating over a camp stove. In a low voice she said, “Once the men get the body moved out of the house, is anyone willing to go over and clean up the kitchen? Mary Alice shouldn’t have to deal with that.”