Dark River Road Read online

  Table of Contents

  One Powerful Man...

  Other Virginia Brown Novels

  Dark River Road

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  PART II

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  About Virginia Brown

  One Powerful Man...

  ...has always controlled this small Southern town. Unchallenged, until now.

  Like everyone else in Cane Creek, Mississippi, Chantry Callahan grew up in the shadow of town boss Bert Quinton. Quinton held the lives of local people in his harsh grasp, never letting go. He knew where all their secrets were buried, along with the bodies of anyone who had dared to defy him.

  As a boy, Chantry couldn’t best Quinton. Couldn’t protect the people he loved, including his own mother. But now Chantry is grown. He’s come back for answers.

  And for justice.

  “A marvelous coming-of-age saga in the new Old South. I couldn’t stop reading.”

  —Bertrice Small, author of The Border Chronicles

  Other Virginia Brown Novels

  From Bell Bridge Books

  The Dixie Divas Mysteries

  The Blue Suede Memphis Mysteries

  Dark River Road

  by

  Virginia Brown

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  eISBN: 978-1-61194-078-7

  ISBN: 978-1-61194-055-8

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2011 by Virginia Brown

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits: River - © Andriesk | Dreamstime.com

  :Mrdr:01:

  Dedication

  To Wayne Nelson Moose, who always told the best bedtime stories, and who first told me about a Catahoula Cur from Pontchatoula, LA.

  In memory of my beloved son, Michael Scott Brown, who battled the dragon for eight years. He fought long and hard, and in the end he came out the victor after all.

  And for Gabi Brown, my beautiful granddaughter who holds all the keys to her future.

  PROLOGUE

  Highway One wound through the Mississippi Delta like a cottonmouth snake, the dark asphalt with faded center lines twisting and turning around fields of cotton and soybeans. Kudzu draped telephone poles and trees, hid embankments and filled up raw gullies washed away by the river. Just over the edge of the road the Big Muddy undulated past ruined houses and knobby-kneed trees, unceasing, uncaring. Like the song said, it just kept on rolling along.

  Chantry Callahan figured Cane Creek hadn’t changed much in the past fifteen years. It probably hadn’t changed much in the past one hundred and fifteen years. Like the river, the small delta town kept on going, rolling along under the steam of one man’s greed and power.

  Sometimes he wondered what his life would have been like if Bert Quinton had never been born. Never inherited the town after his father died. But Quintons had founded Quinton County and been there for a long time. Maybe not as long as the river, but longer than the river road that kept pace with the sometimes swift, sometimes sluggish currents. The Corps of Engineers tried to keep the river from overflowing its banks and flooding towns and fields, but no one had ever tried to keep Bert Quinton in line.

  Not until Chantry. He’d tried. He’d known the old man held more than jobs and power in his grasping hands; he held lives, toyed with them like a cat would toy with a mouse. And like a cat, when he got tired of playing he ended the game. Ended lives. People disappeared and were never seen again when they crossed Bert Quinton one too many times.

  Except Chantry.

  Somehow he’d escaped. Not that Quinton hadn’t tried to get rid of him. He just hadn’t managed it. Yet.

  Now he was back. Fifteen years after leaving this dusty town and its dark, bitter memories behind, Chantry Callahan had come back. This time, he wanted answers. This time, he wanted to know where all the bodies were buried.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  June, 1987

  It was the Catahoula Cur from Pontchatoula, Louisiana, that started it all. Maybe some of it would have happened anyway. But for Chantry Callahan, life changed at precisely nine-o-two on a Saturday night the summer he turned fourteen. Nothing was the same after that.

  Rainey Lassiter, Chantry’s stepfather of nearly ten years, had taken one thousand dollars he won gambling and gone down to Louisiana and bought a Catahoula bitch about to whelp. At six on that Saturday night he’d put the dog in a pen in the back yard of their white frame house in Cane Creek, Mississippi, and come inside to brag about how much money he was going to make selling the pups. An investment, he claimed when Chantry’s mama said that the money could have been put to better use.

  Rainey stood in the kitchen by the table, his dinner ready but untouched. White beans, cornbread, fresh green onions, and fried potatoes congealed on the chipped yellow plate. A big man, still thick-muscled from years of construction work and general labor, he swayed a little and stared belligerently at his wife.

  “Folks around here need good dogs, an’ I’ll have the best. She’s a champion with good blood. A money maker.” Rainey’s narrow eyes got narrower when he’d been drinking. He looked at Carrie Callahan Lassiter with a mean squint that usually promised trouble and always made Chantry’s stomach clench into knots. “You ain’t so smart just because you got education. I know what I’m doin’.”

  Chantry doubted that, but he kept his mouth shut. He knew better than to speak up and risk a fat lip. Rainey didn’t like being crossed or sassed. And he didn’t much like Chantry, either. A reminder that his wife had been married before.

  “Used goods,” he’d called her one time, and it’d made Chantry so mad he’d said his mam
a was better than Rainey Lassiter deserved. It hadn’t mattered that Rainey hit him for his smart mouth. Mama had smiled a little when he said it and he knew she agreed with him.

  Now Rainey pushed a freckled hand through his sandy red hair and rocked back on his heels. “That dog’ll make us some money, dammit. One look at her and you can see that.”

  “Can I go see her?” Chantry asked after a minute, and Rainey gave him a hard stare.

  “She ain’t some toy. You keep away from that dog, you hear? I catch you messin’ around with her and I’ll strip six inches of hide off you.”

  “Yessir.” Chantry sat still at the kitchen table. Outside, light dwindled, shadows softening the bare look of the yard where grass had given up trying to grow. The edge of the garage with the pen built off to one side was visible through the screened door. Rainey had once tried his hand at doing woodwork, put up a sign out front that said Cabinet Making, and turned the garage into a woodshop. He’d made some extra money building cupboards and cabinets, but it’d all gone to drink and cards and he’d stopped bothering after a while. The saws, routers, and drills were sold for whiskey and poker money, and the garage settled deeper into the red Mississippi clay a little more every day like it’d given up trying to be anything but what it was, a knocked together afterthought made from old wooden pallets.

  He could hear the dog out there in her pen, and wondered if Rainey’d had sense enough to give her any water or food. It was four hours to Pontchatoula, a long trip in the bed of a truck for a dog ready to whelp.

  “Rainey,” Mama said, sounding weary and careful, “you know how I feel about raising dogs. We have gone through this before.”

  “Yeah, but this is a stock dog, not a fightin’ dog. Farmers ‘round here always need good stock dogs and huntin’ dogs. Catahoulas do both.”

  “But a thousand dollars could have been put to much better use. That is far too much money to pay for a dog. Just how much money do you plan on getting per puppy?”

  “Three hundred dollars easy. A’piece. She has six pups, that’s over a thousand bucks back on my investment.”

  Eighteen hundred dollars in all. Chantry slid his mother a quick look to see if she was pleased. A tiny frown tucked her brows together. She wore her pale brown hair pulled straight back from her face into a tight knot on the back of her neck. Faint lines marked her eyes. They were the blue like his own, but seemed to fade a little every year that went by. Sometimes it seemed that Mama faded too, getting softer and more indistinct, her lines blurred as she drifted through the days so solemnly he’d almost forget the sound of her laugh and how beautiful she was when she smiled. That wasn’t often. She most always looked . . . sad.

  “An eight hundred dollar profit,” Mama said, “if she has six puppies. To get top dollar, you’ll have to pay vet bills, buy quality food, and send off for the proper paperwork to verify pedigree. To continue making money you’ll have to breed her again. There will be breeding fees, then more puppies. Eight hundred dollars will disappear quickly. This isn’t that big a town. Who will buy all these dogs?”

  Rainey slammed his meaty hands down on the kitchen table, making the pan of cornbread and Chantry jump a little. “Damn you. Always got to lick the red off my apple, don’t you. Don’t you think I done thought of that? I got three buyers already interested. All the bitch’s got to do is drop the pups. That’s what quality bitches do, y’know. Whelp pups. Healthy pups, not sickly ones.”

  Bright red spots flamed in his mama’s cheeks and her mouth went flat. Chantry looked down at his dinner plate, pushed a few white beans around with the back of his fork, feeling sick.

  Mama’s voice was low and tight. “How dare you speak of your own son like that?”

  “I didn’t say nothin’ about him. I was talkin’ about dogs.”

  “We both know you meant Mikey. It’s not his fault he was born like that, and I won’t have you constantly degrading him with your thoughtless cruelty. Isn’t it enough that you took money to gamble, without thought of how we’ll be able to afford surgery for Mikey? Did you have to go and buy a dog that will only be one more drain on our finances as well?”

  Rainey kicked the table, his florid complexion going even redder with anger. It made his freckles stand out like mud splatters. He shoved a finger at Carrie. “I won that money. I took five hundred dollars and doubled it. Don’t you tell me how to spend my money.”

  “It’s not just your money. It’s supposed to be our money. Schoolteachers only make so much, and I cannot keep covering all the expenses with what little you’re bringing in from disability. Mikey needs so much medical care. We need to save money for him, not waste it. How am I supposed to do it all?”

  “All I know is, I got two big healthy boys from my first wife, but you birth me a kid that can’t walk straight and looks like a damn ghost most of the time. Doctors done said can’t nothin’ else be done to make him walk better, so savin’ that money’s a waste.”

  “The doctors here cannot do anything, but surgeons in Memphis can. My insurance only covers a small portion. We have to have money for that, Rainey. Don’t you care about your own son?”

  “My son? Shit. He ain’t my kid. He’s yours. Just like that other brat you got sittin’ here at my table eatin’ my food.”

  Mama sucked in a deep breath and Chantry’s fingers tightened around the handle of his fork. He hated these fights. They almost always ended up the same way, with Mama silent and Rainey taking his anger out in drink or hitting or both. It’d been that way since Mikey had come into the world with his feet twisted all up like little pink rosebuds. Rainey’d taken one look at him and said it’d have been better to have drowned him than let him live. At almost five, Mikey still had to drag his feet in braces instead of walk like other kids, but he never complained.

  Mikey didn’t look anything like Rainey, who was big and broad, with a nose that’d been broken when he was a lot younger and hadn’t healed right. Rainey might’ve been handsome once. Now his features were blurred from too much drink, his pale green eyes like faded marbles. Mikey looked so much like Mama it was startling, light brown hair, big blue eyes, and pale skin so soft and clear there were times Chantry wondered if he wasn’t just a ghost like Rainey said.

  Sometimes he felt guilty for getting bigger when Mikey stayed so sick. He’d grown some this past year, put on a few inches in height and added some weight. His skin was naturally a little dark, but he’d been working out in the sun a lot and Mama said he’d gotten brown as a berry. He hadn’t ever seen a brown berry, but he guessed there were some somewhere or Mama wouldn’t say he looked like one. Tansy said if it wasn’t for his eyes, he’d look like an Indian because of his thick black hair. He’d asked Mama if he was Indian, but she said he was part Irish, mostly just all American.

  Outside, the dog barked, and Chantry said he’d go and see if she was okay. Rainey didn’t argue with that, and he slid from his chair and out the back door. Their voices followed him, Rainey’s loud and belligerent, his mother’s soft and despairing. He was glad Mikey was already asleep and didn’t have to listen to it.

  Cooler evening air held the familiar scent of red dust and decay. A mimosa tree spread out at the edge of the garage, adding a faint peachy smell to the heat. Its leaves were already closing up for the night, folding in like tiny fans.

  Chantry went around to the pen that had once held some chickens, another of Rainey’s money making schemes. The dog lay on her side, panting. He got an old tin pie pan and put some water in it, then pushed through the gate into the pen. She looked up at him and whined softly.

  “What is it, girl?” He knelt beside her with the pan of water, but she only lapped a couple of times before getting up to turn around. She was a big dog, maybe fifty pounds. Sleek blue-gray sides bulged out, looking tight. Her fur was soft, sleek and shiny and spotted like a leopard’s. He stroked her a few times. “You about to have those pups, huh?”

  He left the dog and went into the garage, then came back out
with soft rags from the bin and some newspaper. An old wooden crate that had only three sides would be just the right size for a bed, and he put that in the pen, too. Corrugated tin formed a roof, and it was attached to the side of the garage, but the sides were open and made of chicken wire. It’d be enough shelter until cold weather set in. Then she’d need a house for the winter. If she was still here.

  Catahoula hounds were stock dogs, bred to herd livestock and used by cattlemen to help find cows that had gone deep into the wild. Chantry didn’t know where they’d originated, but he knew there were a lot of cow men in Quinton County who favored the breed. Catahoulas had short hair, often with mottled fur. Quick, aggressive, and smart.

  He knelt beside the dog a few minutes as she turned around and around in the bed, digging furiously until she mounded the rags just like she wanted. Then she flopped to her side and looked at him expectantly. He sat down to wait. Crickets beat a tinny melody, and bullfrogs sounded loud and gruff in the distance.

  It was near dark now, long shadows claiming the yard beyond the garage. Just west of town lay the Mississippi River, a rushing muddy brown torrent that flooded cotton and soybean fields on a regular basis despite the best efforts of the Mississippi Corps of Engineers. Albert Parks Quinton, whose forefathers had founded Quinton County in 1813 and carved out a town here, owned most of the land along the river. He also owned the town, the hospital, the school, and even the new Baptist church. Sometimes it seemed like he owned Mama, too.

  It’d been that way as long as Chantry could remember. His mama had come to Cane Creek when he was only three, a widow hired by old man Quinton to teach several grades in the local school. He’d offered her a house and a job and a safe place to rear her son, and when she’d been there only a year, a husband to take care of her since it wasn’t seemly for a single woman to be on her own. Maybe Rainey had been nicer then. Chantry couldn’t remember a day when he hadn’t been like he was now, surly and lazy. Drawing disability for a bad back didn’t stop Rainey from being strong enough to drink too much.