“You know something, Denn? You really are a piece of work. You take a shot at me. Spread lies about me. And then you expect me to hold your hand when you go talk to Dwight Bryant?”

The wrinkles around his mouth creased in an ironic grin. “Yeah.”

20 come on in, stay a little longer

All the way down Forty-Eight, I berated myself for a fool.

“You don’t need this,” fumed the pragmatist pacing up and down one side my mind.

“I’m not taking him to raise,” my Good Samaritan preacher soothed from his armchair on the other side. “Just being a friend in need. As soon as I can get Ambrose Daughtridge to take him off my hands…”

“Ambrose Daughtridge’s got more sense than you have. You heard what he said. He wants to stay in the Vickerys’ good graces and Denn killed their son!”

“Did he?”

“Who knows? Okay, maybe not, but it’s still none of your business.”

“Yeah? What ever happened to ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me?’ ”

A cynical snort. “Oh, well! If you’re going to start quoting the Bible-”

“Yeah, that part always embarrasses me, too. Just the same…”

“I thought you wanted to be a judge”

“I do! But not if it means-”

“Oh spare me any more Sunday school slogans.”

“Oh go to hell!”

A few miles out from Raleigh, Forty-Eight to Cotton Grove splits off to the right while Seventy goes on to Dobbs. It seemed so natural to head toward Cotton Grove that we were half a mile past the fork before I remembered that we’d agreed Denn was going to drive straight back to Dobbs and turn himself in to Dwight. I speeded up and honked my horn.

He waved and kept going.

Annoyed, I pulled out around him and signaled that we were going to stop. There was a church up ahead. I put on my turn signal and drove into the church yard. (Ask About Our Summer Salvation Plan, said the portable sign at the edge of the road.)

Denn sailed on past in the pickup.

What the hell was he pulling? I’d already cut him as much slack as I thought I could afford when I followed him through Raleigh earlier so he could return the license plate a friend of his had “borrowed.” Instead of wasting my time calling Ambrose Daughtridge and getting his runaround, I should’ve called Dwight and had him waiting at the county line.

Another couple of miles and just as I’d decided he was going straight into Cotton Grove to tackle Ambrose himself, he put on his left turn signal, waited till oncoming traffic cleared, then turned into the gravel road that led to Possum Creek Theatre. The sun never had come back out and I followed him down the drive and around back under skies as gray as my mood.

By the time I switched off the engine, he was standing on the concrete loading pad fumbling with his keys, an ingratiating smile on his thin lips.

“I know, I know,” he said. “This isn’t part of our agreement, but I just remembered that this door was open when I found Michael. I want to check and see that everything’s okay.”

“The police searched it Friday night,” I told him. “And Dwight got Leslie Odum to come over, too.”

Leslie was his assistant stage manager who probably knew as much about the storerooms as Denn did. She’d walked through and seen nothing unusual about the backstage clutter and I told him so.

I could’ve saved my breath. He unlocked the door and slipped inside, as if my words were nothing more than so much wind wafting through the tall pines around us.

The hallway was dark and still. Denn knew the way, but I had to fumble for lights, and by the time I found them, he had already reached the prop room on the far side of the building.

“Hey, Denn, you never told me what you wanted to give me Friday night.”

“Hmm?”

He stood in the middle of the big cluttered room-props shelved all the way to the ceiling on one side, costumes hung in two tiers on the other, with worktables down the middle.

“The message you left. You said you had something special for me.” I looked around for the red velvet cloak and didn’t see it at first, even though the bedsheets that normally acted as dustcovers had been rucked up onto the top tier of hangers so that everything was exposed. I went over to the racks and started pushing garments aside.

“What the hell are you doing?” cried Denn.

“Looking for the Red Riding Hood’s cloak. Wasn’t that what you were going to give me?”

He rushed over and started rearranging the costumes I’d pushed aside. “You’re crushing things. Do you know how hard it is to iron taffeta? And no, it wasn’t the cloak. Will you quit bugging me about the damn thing? You can have it when I’m dead. I’ll will it to you, okay?”

He nipped the bedsheets down and tucked them protectively around the garments, as if I’d attacked them with muddy hands.

That was the final straw. To hell with Good Samaritanism. The pragmatist was right. “I’ll call Ambrose and tell him to meet you at the sheriff’s office. See you around, Denn. Have a nice life.”

“Oh shit, Deborah, I’m sorry,” he said in instant contrition.

“It’s just-my mind’s going in a million different directions. Tell you what. If we don’t use the cloak in Bouncing Betty, you can have it, okay? Look, I’ll even make it official.”

He grabbed a loose sheet of paper from the worktable and printed in big capital letters I HEREBY GIVE DEBORAH KNOTT MY RED VELVET CLOAK NOW HANGING IN THE POSSUM CREEK PLAYERS THEATRE TO BE DELIVERED NO LATER THAN 60 DAYS FROM THIS DATE. Then he signed it Dennis Aloysius McCloy, dated it, and held the paper out to me with a flourish. “Here you go, kiddo. Okay?”

I was still ticked but he noticed that my shoulder bag was unzipped and he deftly folded the paper and crammed it inside.

“No more stalling,” I said impatiently. “Wait’ll you see if you’re going to be arrested before you start worrying about another production.”

“I’m ready.”

He flicked the light switches and the windowless prop room was plunged into darkness.

As we came down the hall, I thought I saw something move beyond the open outer door.

“See? What’d I tell you?” said the pragmatist.

“Oh dear!” sighed the preacher.

The patrol car was parked so that the pickup was completely blocked. A uniformed sheriff’s deputy leaned against the truck’s hood with a happy grin on his pudgy face and a meaty hand resting lightly on his holster. Deputy Jack Jamison.

“Major Bryant’s on his way over,” he drawled. “He said he’d ’preciate it if y’all’d wait on him.”

21 i never said it would be easy

Okay, so it turned out not to be as bad as it could have been. The fact that I’d called Ambrose from Raleigh supported my claim that I really was escorting Denn to the sheriff’s office even though, strictly speaking, Possum Creek Players Theatre wasn’t on the route.

Dwight arrived a little after six and took me off to one of the side rooms to hear as much as I could tell without compromising Denn’s attorney-client privileges, even though I hadn’t formally said I’d represent him. We sat down at a table across from each other; and starting off, it was Mr. Deputy Sheriff and Ms. Lawyer as I described how I’d wound up meeting Denn at Pullen Park. No meaningful glances, no locked eyes this go-round, and soon he was back to treating me like the Knott boys’ kid sister.

“What’s your gut feeling on him, Deb’rah?”

“Did he kill Michael Vickery?” I asked. “No.”

“Well, who does he think?”

“I don’t believe he has a clue. But if your next question’s is he telling everything exactly like it happened, your guess is good as mine. I keep trying to pin him down about why he wanted me to meet him out here, and he keeps prevaricating. You going to charge him?”