Dead Dancing Women by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Page A

eyebrows would knit together. After a long time maybe I’d get a drawn-out, “ Wellllllll now … ”
    He looked as if he’d been carved from a single piece of wood, not made of flesh and bone. There was something fixed about him, as if he’d always looked just this way, and there’d never been a different Harry Mockerman. Never a young Harry Mockerman. No past. No future. Just an old man living deep in the woods.
    He had, he once told me in a long, drawn-out story that took him the better part of an hour to get out, worked for the Leetsville Logging Company back in the ’20s, when he was just a boy. Which would make him close to ninety, I figured. He’d been a log skidder, he’d told me, and went on to tell me things about the lumber camps, with Indians camping on one side, loggers on the other, big stories that took him a long time to get out. A couple of the stories stretched over a two-day job, when he was fixing my dock.
    Maybe his stories were true. Maybe he was lying, taking pleasure in fooling the city girl, as so many did up here. I’d heard some fantastic tales—ghosts and witches and murder. Through all of them I’d stood in proper appreciation and wonderment, wide-eyed, playing the role I’d been handed.
    Harry’s dogs, penned up somewhere beyond the house, began to bark wildly when Dolly and I broke out of the bushes and into the clearing where the house stood. Dolly cursed under her breath and pulled brown pickers from her uniform pants. I figured I’d do mine later, when I wouldn’t have to be bent over, exposing my vulnerable backside to an empty clearing with dogs barking beyond.
    Harry’s house was small, tarpapered, and leaning. The front door and sill didn’t quite meet. The screen door hung halfway open. Behind the house—what I could see from where I stood—was a group of buildings, each in worse shape than the other. I spotted his hybrid vehicle parked back there beside one of the sheds.
    â€œThink he’s home?” Dolly straightened and looked at me. She scrunched her face, then tapped at one of her ears, meaning the barking was too loud.
    I shrugged. “Who knows? If he doesn’t want to see us, he’s long gone by now.”
    Dolly reached up and slapped, flat-handed, on Harry’s screen door. Her knock formed a kind of vacuum with the closed inner door, muting her knocks, making the screen bounce.
    â€œHarry?” I leaned around and called through the screen door with dozens of small tears in it, useless at keeping out our no-see-ums, our mosquitoes, and our killer flies.
    â€œHarry?” I called again. “It’s me. Your neighbor, Emily Kincaid. From across the road. Could you come out here a minute? There’s been some trouble over at my place and I have a deputy with me. She wants to ask you a few questions. See if you noticed anything or anyone out on the road yester …”
    The inner door had opened soundlessly and Harry stood there, framed behind the screen. I stepped back, choking on the words I’d been about to say.
    â€œGeez, Harry,” I said, recovering, forcing a smile. “This is Deputy Dolly, with the Leetsville Police. She wants to ask you a few questions. I came along because …”
    He pushed the screen door open. Not a word out of Harry. He stood with his head down, examining the cracked linoleum at his feet.
    Harry wore his usual shiny black suit, but now he’d wrapped a big white towel around his middle, protecting the suit from something. The strange thing about Harry and that suit of his was that the suit didn’t smell. If there’d ever been an odor to Harry it was always a kind of smoked smell, woodsy, like someone who lived year-round with a blazing fire.
    Harry held the crooked door wider. Dolly stepped through first, with me behind her. He led the way, without speaking, back through a cluttered but not unclean living room,