“What’d he do wrong?”

  “He didn’t have much money and—” she adjusted the rearview mirror so she could bunch her hair into a ponytail “—at first he spent what he did have on booze.”

  Booze…Just the word made Hunter crave a drink, but he quickly put it out of his mind. He was doing so much better since he’d left California. “Did that change?” he asked, dodging the potholes in the narrow lane that led from Madeline’s house.

  “He became devoutly religious. He used to bring his daughter over to the church to work for my father. She even helped out at the farm occasionally.”

  “Doing chores?”

  Madeline put the mirror back in place and motioned for him to turn left at the stop sign. “She’d do filing and tidy up my father’s office.”

  “It was messy?” Hunter asked. “He strikes me as the type who’d be very organized.”

  “He was, for the most part. He neglected the repairs and painting at the farm, but he stayed right on top of his church work. I think it was more a matter of finding something he could pay her for. They really needed the money. If it wasn’t for my father, I don’t know how they would’ve survived.”

  “Her own father didn’t work?”

  “Ray’s a handyman. He was then, too. Sometimes he could get work, other times nothing.”

  Hunter loosened his seat belt a little. “If your father was trying to help them out, why not hire Ray to do some of the repairs around the farm?”

  “He did. I remember seeing Ray once in a while. But it was mostly Rose Lee, working over at the church.” She shook her head. “Emotionally, she was really messed up, a very strange girl. My father used to counsel her for hours.”

  “What about Katie Swanson?”

  “Don’t tell me my mother wrote about Katie, as well?”

  Madeline had put on a little makeup, which enhanced the already vivid green of her eyes.

  Hunter returned his attention to the road. “You’ve never read your mother’s journals?”

  “No. I…I couldn’t. Just seeing the covers brings it all back.”

  He knew what “it” was—the pain. And she was lost in it now, remembering. But Hunter had to look at the whole picture, to know what had gone on before the reverend disappeared. That was necessary if he was going to figure out the possible motives of the people around him. “Madeline?”

  “Katie was another of my father’s ‘projects,’” she said with a sigh. “She had a mother who’d sleep with anyone. No one knew who her father was. She was lonely and uncared for, and the man her mother was with at the time beat her. So my father stepped in before the state could get involved and arranged for her to live with Ray and Rose Lee.”

  “Why wouldn’t he want the state to get involved?”

  “He liked to take care of his own congregation.”

  They reached Stillwater, passed a Victorian that had been turned into a store, the police station, Walt Eastman’s Tire Service. “Where to?” he asked.

  “Keep going. The farm’s on the other side of town, off the highway.”

  He stopped at Stillwater’s only light. “Ray and Rose didn’t mind having Katie with them?” he asked, resuming their discussion. “I thought they had financial problems, too.”

  “Having Katie there was a good thing for them. They had an extra room in their trailer, and my father paid them to let her stay.”

  “Where did your father get the money?”

  “He collected alms for the poor every Sunday. There were specific members of the church for whom we were all praying, so it was really a joint effort. I think that’s what endeared my father to so many people. He took a real interest in the less fortunate.”

  Hunter gave the car more gas as they cleared the busier streets and entered an open area. “Why do you think she ran away?”

  “Word has it she was pregnant.”

  He shook his head. “At fifteen?”

  “You have to remember what her mother was like. Katie probably lost her virginity at twelve or even younger. And according to the rumors, she’d been sneaking out at night, seeing Tommy Meyers, who was three years older.”

  “It was his baby?”

  “Tommy’s always denied it, but my father was sure it was. No one really knows. She died before she had the baby, so there was no paternity test.”

  “That is sad,” he said.

  “It really upset my father. He and Ray, who blamed himself for not watching her more closely, spent hours out in his office, trying to come to grips with it.”

  “By doing what?”

  “Talking, of course. I could hear their voices coming through the door when I went to the barn to feed the chickens. Sometimes I’d see Ray’s truck in the drive late at night. They’d tried so hard to help her, you know?”

  “Did your father have any other ‘projects?’” Hunter asked. Considering the luck he’d experienced with Rose Lee and Katie, Hunter hoped not.

  “Not really. He continued to help Ray until my own mother…” She cleared her throat. “Well, after that, we had a couple of bad years with the farm, he had me to take care of, and people around here were struggling so he wasn’t making as much at the church. It was all we could do to get by. Then he married Irene and had his hands full raising three more kids.”

  “Did anyone ever say anything about the fact that Rose Lee was found naked?” he asked.

  Madeline’s forehead creased. “She was naked?”

  “That’s what it said in your mother’s journal.”

  “I don’t remember that. But I was only eight or nine at the time of her funeral. It wasn’t something folks talked about in front of me.”

  “I can’t picture a young woman peeling off her clothes and then taking a bunch of sleeping pills,” he said.

  “Maybe she’d just been involved in a romantic encounter.”

  “Do you recall her having a boyfriend?”

  “No. I can’t really imagine her being with anyone. She was extremely shy. After Katie died, she quit working for my father, and I rarely saw her in town. When I did run into her, she wouldn’t even look me in the eye. She’d stare at the ground.”

  “So would you say Rose Lee took Katie’s death hard?”

  “Harder than anyone. I doubt she ever recovered from the grief.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Before Katie died, there were times she seemed almost normal. Afterward—” she shrugged “—afterward, she would barely speak.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The farm was bigger than Hunter had expected. “Clay runs this by himself?” he asked as they parked to one side of the long gravel drive and got out of Madeline’s car.

  “Yes. Can you believe it?”

  He whistled under his breath. It wouldn’t be an easy job to manage such a large piece of property—and yet it appeared that Clay had the place well in hand. Madeline’s stepbrother obviously wasn’t afraid of hard work. Hunter had to respect that. But he wondered about some of the comments Madeline had made concerning Clay. He sounded driven, protective, determined. Madeline had also implied that Clay had a very short fuse, which was an important thing to note in a possible murder investigation. The impressions of the players involved often proved more valuable than the facts. Facts could be interpreted in several ways; it was the perspective of those who’d known Reverend Barker that would finally reveal the information Hunter was after.

  “So this is where you grew up?”

  Madeline deposited her keys in her purse as she nodded.

  It was a white two-story A-frame that sat back from the road. It wasn’t particularly large, but it wasn’t small, either. Hunter guessed it to be about 2400 square feet. Behind the house, he could see a rather imposing barn. The wind carried the scent of animals and he heard some distant clucking, so there was probably a chicken coop next to the barn. A rooster strutted around the corner to confirm it.

  Hunter couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a rooster. They weren’t exactly a common sight on the beaches of L.A.

  Madeline paused when she noticed that he’d begun walking more slowly. “Be glad that’s a different bird than the rooster we had here when we were little,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The old one would’ve tried to gouge your eyes out. We were terrified of it. Especially Grace. He was very territorial.”

  Hunter imagined the humid days of a summer spent on the outskirts of this small Mississippi town, imagined children with denim overalls and dusty bare feet gathering at the local grocery market to slake their thirst at the Coke machine. It was a completely different world than the one he’d known growing up in Mission Viejo, one of the nicer suburbs of Los Angeles. But it held a certain appeal.

  “What?” she said, and he realized he was smiling.

  “I was thinking of Tom Sawyer.”

  “Don’t be giving me any more of that west coast attitude,” she said, deepening her accent.

  He thought about the differences between her home and his, then decided California wasn’t better than Mississippi, but it was different. “Just don’t try to feed me any collard greens, and we’ll be okay,” he teased.

  “Have you ever tried collard greens?”

  “No, but I hate spinach.”

  Wind chimes tinkled as they stepped onto the wraparound porch, which creaked slightly beneath their weight.

  “Your stepbrother takes good care of the place.”

  “He does. It actually looks better than when my father was…er…here.”

  She often acted as if she didn’t know whether to say “alive,” and generally veered away from it. Hunter suspected that, even after twenty years and the discovery of her father’s car in the nearby quarry, she couldn’t believe he was really dead. That uncertainty had to be difficult for her. “How’s it changed?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “The house used to be an ugly, dingy green. The yard had a lot of weeds and bare spots, where our dog had dug various holes and buried this or that, usually one of our shoes.”

  “Your father didn’t mind how it looked?”

  “I don’t think he paid much attention. He was a bit of a mad scientist, so interested in his work that he didn’t really see anything else.”

  “Didn’t you tell me that your father cared about setting a good example?”

  “In some ways, he did. He was most severe in his punishments when we said or did something that reflected poorly on him. He felt the children of a devout preacher should be hardworking, sober-minded and well-versed in scripture.”

  The people in Madeline’s life were beginning to seem familiar to Hunter. He’d seen a few pictures of her father, knew he’d been tall and imposing with hollowed-out cheeks, piercing black eyes and a determined jaw. Her mother had been the opposite—small, soft and gentle-looking. Madeline had obviously inherited her height and slenderness from her father’s side, but her bottle-green eyes resembled her mother’s. So did her smooth pale skin. Hunter wondered where the auburn-colored hair had come from—maybe a grandmother or an aunt. He had yet to see any pictures of extended family members but knew he’d probably run across them later, when he searched through the rest of her scrapbooks.

  “Was there one child he singled out more than the others?” he asked.

  “He was hardest on Clay. But a lot of men are tougher on their sons than their daughters.”

  “So you’d say they were close?”

  “Not exactly.” She seemed thoughtful, almost philosophical. “Clay and my father were too different to ever be very close.”

  Hunter wanted to talk about the ways in which her father and her stepbrother were incompatible, but she’d already knocked on the door, and a petite woman with short brown hair and brown eyes opened it before he could say more.

  “Hi, Maddy.” She embraced Madeline, then turned to Hunter. “This must be your private investigator.”

  “With a surfer-boy image,” Madeline said wryly.

  “Boy?” he echoed, slightly offended—especially since he’d overheard her tell Kirk he was too young for her.

  She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Allie, this is Hunter Solozano. And this,” she waved a hand at the shorter woman, “is my sister-in-law. The only woman who could bring my hard-to-get brother to his knees.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever brought Clay to his knees,” Allie said, chuckling.

  “Somehow I’m not surprised to hear Clay was a challenge,” Hunter said.

  “He was more than a challenge,” Madeline responded. “To most women around here, he was the impossible dream.”

  And what had made him so remote? Hunter asked himself. Was it possible that the reverend had been too hard on his new son?

  “Whitney’s the one who has him wrapped around her little finger,” Allie said as she waved them in.

  “Whitney is Allie’s seven-year-old,” Madeline explained. “She’s in school right now, so you won’t get to meet her today, but she’s darling.”

  The inside of the house was as tidy as the outside. The living room smelled of fresh paint and was decorated in a rich burgundy. A wedding photograph sat on one end of the fireplace mantel; it showed a man who had to be Clay with the woman Hunter had just met and a young girl with round cheeks and long blond hair. The mantel also held a collection of candlesticks in varying shapes and sizes.

  Allie was friendly enough as she offered them a seat, but there was something about her eyes that bothered Hunter. They seemed wary, a bit furtive. Considering the situation, however, he supposed that was natural. It couldn’t feel good to have others suspect your husband of murder. Maybe there were even times when she wondered about the missing reverend and the part her husband might’ve played…

  “We can’t sit down. We won’t be here very long,” Madeline said. “We were just hoping to talk to Clay for a minute. Is he around?”

  “He’s out fixing the levee along the creek.”

  She didn’t offer to call him in. Hunter sensed that she was reluctant to let them speak to Clay. But if Madeline felt the same thing, she ignored it and barreled on as comfortably as any journalist would. “If you don’t mind, we’ll walk around back and look for him.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, but judging by the smell emanating from the kitchen, they’d caught her with food on the stove.

  “There’s no need to interrupt what you’re doing. We’ll find him.”

  “We could call his cell phone,” Allie said.

  Madeline smiled at Hunter. “My brother’s finally entering the twenty-first century. He refused to get a cell phone for the longest time. And I could understand it, I guess, since he rarely troubled himself to pick up his regular phone.” She chuckled. “He was such a recluse until Allie came along.”

  Allie had picked up the phone next to the couch, but Madeline told her not to bother. “I want to show Hunter the farm, anyway,” she said.

  Clay’s wife was slow hanging up. “You’re sure? It could be quite a walk.”

  “We’ll call if we don’t find him.” Madeline indicated that she had her own cell. “Okay if we go out the back?”

  Allie’s eyes ranged over Hunter in an assessing fashion. Was she merely curious?

  It was difficult to say, but Hunter could tell she was no ally. She smiled with her lips, but there was a stubborn protectiveness about her that put him on edge.

  He returned her smile as if he hadn’t noticed, then followed Madeline into the kitchen, which was as old as hers but much larger. They walked through the back door to a deep porch that overlooked several acres of farmland. The barn he’d spotted before stood to the right, beside the chicken coop he’d already assumed was there. Some farm equipment was clustered beyond that, as well as a couple of rusted trucks that seemed to hail from the 1950s.

  “My brother restores old cars and trucks,” Madeline explained before he could ask. “It’s his hobby.”

  They crossed the porch, but she didn’t immediately descend the four steps. Instead, she leaned on the railing, gazing out into the distance, reminding Hunter of the picture he’d seen of her at age eight.

  “Do you miss living here?” he asked.

  Allie stood at the door, but Madeline didn’t turn. She shaded her eyes against a pale yellow sun and stared off into the distance. “A little. Mostly it makes me sad.” She waved toward the barn. “When my father wasn’t over at the church, he was usually in there.”

  “Taking care of the animals?”

  “Writing his sermons. See that window?”

  Hunter nodded.

  “That was his office.”

  “It’s already been searched?”

  “A few times.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Of course, but there’s not much left. Clay gutted it a year and a half ago.”

  Hunter felt his eyebrows go up. “He needed the space?”

  An odd expression flitted across her pretty features. “No. I guess he just decided Dad wasn’t coming back.”

  “Which is understandable,” he said for Allie’s benefit, but when he turned he found she’d gone back inside.

  Madeline pushed away from the railing. “Come on, let’s take a look.”

  The cool, dark interior made Hunter think of the barn in Charlotte’s Web. He supposed it was because he didn’t see barns very often. But there were no horses or pigs. Mostly, it was a large garage where Clay worked on cars.

  “That’s a 1953 Hornet convertible,” Madeline said of a sky-blue car that could’ve been used in the making of Grease.

  “How much is it worth?” he asked.

  “A couple of hundred thousand.”

  Hunter coughed. There was a vehicle worth that much money sitting inside an old barn in the hills of Mississippi? “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s on eBay. The current bid is $160,000.”

  “Wow.”

  “He didn’t start out with cars this expensive,” she said. “He’s been working his way up.”