1 He stood at the window studiously watching the large fluffy snowflakes fill up his mother's backyard. Rose, seating herself at the dining room table behind him, said, "Honey, I wish you'd do something besides stare at the snow. Maybe you need a hobby." "Staring at snow is my hobby," Blight County Sheriff Bo Tully replied. He was forty-two years old, with thick brown hair and a thick brown mustache, both beginning to show signs of gray. "In January anyway." Rose set a flat carton on the table. "Come help me eat this pie.
It's from Crabbs. They make the best pie. Oh, not their coconut cream or their banana cream. They're all right, but they don't put enough coconut in their coconut cream. Maybe coconut is too expensive. They put something in their banana cream I don't like. It's probably to keep the bananas from turning brown." Tully sighed.
"You plan to eat the whole pie right now?" "Goodness no, not the whole pie. I offered you a piece, didn't I?" "I guess," he said. He walked over and sat down across the table from her. Her hair had been freshly done that day and appeared to have a silvery tint he hadn't noticed before. Her bifocals had slid down onto the tip of her elegant nose. She peered sternly out over the top of them, her ash-blue eyes closing to mere slits. "I prefer you not wear your gun at the table," she said. Tully sighed again.
He took off his shoulder holster and hung it on the chair next to him. His mother frowned. He lowered the holster to the floor. "That's better." "So, what kind of pie is it, if not coconut or banana cream?" "Peach. Of course they use canned peaches this time of year, but sometimes in the summer they have fresh peach. It's heavenly." She cut a piece of pie, placed it on a saucer, and handed it to him.
"Looks good," he said. "You got any ice cream to go with it?" "In the freezer. I thought you were on a diet." "I am. The pie-and-ice-cream diet. You want a scoop?" She handed him her plate. He went out to the kitchen and returned with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on each piece of pie. She said, "Have you seen the monster lately?" "Yeah, I saw Pap yesterday as a matter of fact.
Stopped by his mansion on the hill. I'm sure you know he has a young and beautiful new housekeeper." "Housekeeper my eye! Yes, I know all about Deedee. She's a nice girl, actually. Why she has anything to do with that old man is a mystery to me." "He's rich, for one thing," Tully said. "He used to be corrupt and rich but now I think he's only rich. By the way, he seems to be shrinking.
" "Good. Maybe he will get small enough a cat will eat him." "I don't think he will get that small, but he used to be about two inches shorter than I am. Now, I doubt he's much over five ten, if that. You sure he's my father?" "Pretty sure. Why do you ask?" "As far as I can tell, we don't have a single thing in common, except for the surname." "You should be thankful. When he was sheriff, which was practically forever, everyone in the whole county was scared to death of him.
They probably still are. Blight County was wide open back then, with gambling and prostitution everywhere you looked, and Pap getting a cut of everything illegal and even some things that were legal. Drinking and dancing and carousing every night all night! It was wonderful! Oh, the fun we had in those days!" For a brief moment, a devil-may-care look flashed across her face. Tully still had childhood memories of his mother as a flashy young woman. He had heard old men talk about her as the most beautiful girl in all of Blight County. "Is that where he made all his money, getting a cut off the prostitution and gambling?" "Not all his money. He and that rascal buddy of his, Pinto Jack, sold their gold mine for a fortune, two fortunes in fact. They had this thin little vein of gold they'd been working and somehow persuaded a greenhorn from Pennsylvania that it would get bigger.