Long Upon the Land by Margaret Maron Page B

the top. “Let’s take this back to Dobbs. See if it’s only his fingerprints on these. Someone might have interrupted his cleanup and they had a beer together.”
    As they walked out onto the porch, Ray paused. “Wonder where the cat is?”
    “Cat?”
    His deputy pointed to two small bowls on a wooden table at the end of the porch. One held water, the other a few bits of dry kibble. “Must be a cat. They wouldn’t feed a dog up there.”
    While they talked, Mrs. Earp drove up in a white Toyota and parked in the carport. She was followed by her cousin in a gray minivan with a bike rack on the back.
    Both women looked to be in their early fifties. Both had brown hair lightly streaked with gray. Rosalee Earp’s was shoulder length, Marisa Young’s was short and parted down the middle. Mrs. Earp was thin and fragile looking in pale blue slacks and a sleeveless cotton tunic in a flowery print with ruffles at the neck. The bruises on her arm and around her eye were a dark purple, and a flesh-colored Band-Aid covered the cut on her chin.
    She got out of her car with a tentative, tremulous air that Dwight had seen too often in victims of domestic violence.
    Her cousin was a different matter. More sturdily built, she wore jeans and a loose, man-styled lavender shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves. He had a feeling that if any man ever raised a hand to Miss Young, he’d probably draw back a stump.
    She clearly intended to run this interview and put herself in front of Rosalee Earp when Dwight stepped forward to meet them. “Have you found Vick’s killer yet?”
    “Sorry. No.” Dwight reached past her to take her cousin’s hand. “How are you this morning, Mrs. Earp?”
    “Okay,” she said weakly. “It still seems unreal that Vick’s really gone.”
    He led her to one of the molded plastic chairs on the back porch and, once everyone was seated, asked her to tell them again exactly what had happened the last time she saw her husband.
    “He hit her,” said Marisa Young, who had taken the next chair. “That’s what happened.”
    Dwight held up his hand. “Please, Miss Young, I need to hear this in Mrs. Earp’s own words. You say you last saw him Friday evening?”
    “Friday, yes,” Mrs. Earp said shakily. “I work part-time at Wal-Mart. After work, I tidied the house and washed the kitchen windows—Vick can’t stand looking through a dirty window.”
    Miss Young gave a soft snort of indignation but subsided when Mrs. Earp laid a gentle hand on her knee.
    “Be fair, Marisa, he did just as much around the place as I do.”
    “But he got to set the agenda, didn’t he?”
    “Oh, Marisa.” She withdrew her hand and turned back to Dwight and Ray. “Vick came home a little after five and was going to cut the grass, but he couldn’t get the mower started and he was already mad because the new windshield for his truck—and where is his truck?” she asked fretfully. “Wasn’t it with him?”
    “We’re looking for it, ma’am,” Ray told her.
    “Well anyhow, the windshield didn’t come in even though they’d promised , so when the mower—he had it worked on last month, see? They told him whatever they’d done wasn’t going to hold and that he needed a new one, but he was sure it would’ve lasted out the season if they’d done their work right.”
    Marisa Young rolled her eyes, but didn’t speak.
    “It was really hot and he had a couple of beers. Usually he doesn’t have one till supper time, but with all that…” She gave a helpless wave of her hand toward the tool shed. “I was frying bacon for BLTs and I’d made some lemonade. When he came in for another beer, I tried to give him a glass and that’s when—when—” She touched the bruise on her cheek. “It spun me around so hard, I knocked the sugar bowl off the counter and he went ballistic. Like I’d done it on purpose. I knew he was going to hit me again even harder. There was sugar all over the floor and he slipped on it and