Eyeshot by Lynn Hightower

thought she was a crank. But she was really positive about it. She got a good look at this guy, and she’s sure it was Caplan.”
    â€œWho got killed? Did she know the victim?” Sam asked.
    â€œIt was a girl, that’s all she told me. And she was pregnant.”
    â€œAnything else?”
    â€œThat’s all. She was trying to decide what to do about it. She felt funny about going to the police, since it had been so long ago. Eight years. She was going to look into it, that’s what she said.”
    â€œLook into it how?” Sam asked.
    Barber shrugged. “I know she went to the library, because she asked me for directions on the best way to get there. Said things had changed so much in the last eight years she couldn’t find her way around. I wanted to go along with her, but she said no. That’s the last time we talked.”
    â€œDid you call her again?”
    â€œYeah. But it was like I was on the back burner all of a sudden. She got real busy, and I could never catch her in her room. Since then, no calls, no letters.”
    Sonora tilted her head to one side. “You wrote letters?”
    He nodded.
    â€œWhere’d you send them? Not to the house, is my guess.”
    Barber shifted in his chair. “She had a post office box,” he said. Matter-of-factly.
    â€œLet me get that address off you,” Sonora said. Matter-of-factly.

13
    Sonora was working from home, which was not always a good idea, because it meant she could watch the kids while working, a possible oxymoron. It did allow her to wear sweatpants and not comb her hair.
    From the kitchen came the clink of Heather’s spoon against a cereal bowl. The rustle of cellophane. Clampett, asleep on the couch behind Sonora, was suddenly awake.
    â€œLet her eat,” Sonora said to the dog.
    Clampett yawned. Stretched and stepped down from the couch on top of the map she had opened out onto the floor. He was a big dog, in excess of a hundred pounds, thick coat, blond, three-legged. He’d shown up on their back porch years ago, hair thick with mats, burrs, and ticks spread liberally about his person, stomach running on empty. The kids liked to make up stories about his shady past.
    The current fiction involved Cuba and political asylum, mainly because of Clampett’s interest in a fake plastic cigar the kids had stashed in the dress-up box in the laundry room.
    Clampett licked Sonora’s wrist, and tasted her pen. A stream of saliva dripped from the dog’s mouth and landed somewhere in southeast Ohio. Sonora shoved him sideways, and he padded into the kitchen.
    Sonora squinted at the map, looking for where she’d traced I-75 with the pen. Red, she decided, was not the color to have used. The map was already full of red lines, and hers was lost in the shuffle. She frowned and wondered what color she should use. The map was a rainbow, no color noticeably missing.
    â€œClampett, no .” Heather’s voice, from the kitchen.
    She found the line she’d traced just under a hole from one of Clampett’s toenails, followed it to where the map left off in northern Kentucky.
    â€œDammit.”
    She snatched up the map, turned it over. Ohio, Indiana, northern Kentucky. Everything but Tennessee, which was what she needed. She folded the map, wondering if she had a map of Tennessee in the glove compartment of her car. The map did not want to go back into the original accordion folds. Sonora unfurled it and tried again.
    â€œClampett, stop .”
    A bowl clattered against the kitchen floor. The map bunched when it should have folded and Sonora wadded it into a large ball, and threw it across the room.
    The doorbell rang.
    Sonora looked at her watch: 11 A.M. Sunday morning. Seventh Day Adventists?
    She got to her feet slowly, the small of her back stiff and achy. Boy were these guys in for it. She ran down the stairs, opened the front door. The heat and humidity hit her like a glove in the