Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook Page A

silent.
    â€œThere was not a sound,” Johnson recalled, “not a word spoken. We just got out and headed toward the trailer. On the way, you could hear us racking shells into our shotguns.”
    Once again, as he had done only a few minutes earlier, Bud Alday made his way to the back door of the trailer, shoved the door open, and stepped back, unable to go in.
    Johnson stepped around him and headed into the trailer. To the right, he could see a beer can on the kitchen countertop. Across the room, he noticed a few items that appeared to have been scattered across the small dining room table, and which looked like the general contents of a woman’s purse, a compact, a mirror, hair brush, tube of lipstick.
    His eyes drifted downward, lighting on the white panties beneath the kitchen table, then further to the right into the trailer’s north bedroom, where he saw four legs hanging off the side of the bed.
    â€œWe knew something real bad had happened in there,” Johnson recalled, “and we didn’t want to mess anything up. Roy and Andy had already took up positions to guard the back and front of the trailer. We just waited, then, for the sheriff to get there.”
    Dan White pulled into the driveway five minutes later, and taking Johnson and Eddie Chance with him, moved decisively into the trailer.
    What they saw during the next five minutes as they trudged from room to room inside the trailer was unimaginable.
    In the bedroom to the right, just off the kitchen at the south end of the trailer, Ned and Shuggie lay facedown on the bed. Shuggie’s face was pressed deeply into the bed, while Ned’s was turned slightly to the side, revealing what appeared to be several wounds running in a jagged line down the right side of the face.
    Following White, Johnson and Chance headed back through the kitchen and into the living room. On a sofa by the window, they found Jimmy Alday lying facedown, one long leg slumped off the edge of the sofa so that the left foot touched the floor.
    White then proceeded back toward the far end of the trailer, while Johnson and Chance remained in the living room. They could see him standing in the doorway, staring down. “Here’s Aubrey and the other one,” he called, the only words spoken in the trailer.
    By the time Sheriff White and the others made their way out of the trailer, all the missing Alday men had been accounted for.
    Except for Mary.
    Under other circumstances, she might have become a suspect in the murders, a distraught woman who’d suddenly snapped, shot several members of her family, and fled in her own car from the scene of the slaughter.
    But then there were the panties, plain and white and lying where Mary, a very neat and very modest woman, never would have left them, crumpled and exposed beneath the kitchen table.
    Wherever the killer or killers were, the men outside the trailer reasoned, if she were still alive, she was with them.
    It was now past three in the morning, and as he stood beside the closed trailer door, Johnson could see Sheriff White talking to Bud Alday.
    Inside the trailer, Ned, his brother, Aubrey, and his three sons, Shuggie, Jerry, and Jimmy, lay motionlessly in the darkness, a family’s heart and soul. Alive they had done the heavy labor of the farm, cleared the land, plowed the fields, driven and repaired its cumbersome machinery. But they had done more than that, as Ernestine and the surviving wives and children would always remember. Ned had lit a thousand smiles with his good humor. Aubrey, with his broad red face, had never let a chance for laughter pass him by. Shuggie, stout and huggable, seemed always to have someone beneath his outstretched arm. Jerry, reticent and reserved, the least boisterous member of a boisterous family, had brought only Mary into his deepest confidence. And Jimmy, youngest of them all, a high school prankster renowned for his “dirty tricks,” had just begun to throw off