Natural Causes: (Cumberland Saga)

Lliam was up as the sun first started to ease the darkness on the eastern sky. He was going to collect eggs for breakfast. He could not figure out how to get into the hen house.

As he was poking around, the sun rose and he heard the door to the chicken-coop opened with the hum of an electric motor and the excited clucking of the 8 mongrel hens as they came charging out to forage for the day.

Intrigued, he searched around until he found the photo-eye and by shading it with his hand he was able to make the door close. By removing his hand, it opened.

Miss Shannon and her husband Bob were not as resistant to technology as the inhabitants of Copperhead Cove. Where Copperhead Cove had a super-abundance of “labor”, with Bob traveling and Miss Shannon’s time absorbed in caring for her mother...Miss Shannon's operation needed technology or the wheels would fall off the bus.

Lliam filed the memory the photocell and the automatic door in his brain. He also marveled at the rollout nest boxes. Lliam could clearly see advantages other than labor-savings. For instance, the roll-away nests had no eggs that had been cannibalized by other hens, a major source of losses in Copperhead Cove. Another advantage was that the eggs were so clean that they did not need to be washed.

 

Oh, and his ma would have appreciated that the door for collecting the eggs opened to the outside so whoever collected the eggs wouldn't be tracking chicken-shit everywhere they walked.

With nobody collecting eggs for the better part of a week, there were a LOT of eggs.

Back in the kitchen, Lliam and Eddie played short-order cooks. The easy adjustment of the LP stove was a technical marvel to both boys compared to the fiddly, little camp-stove they had been using and the wood-stoves back home. They had two griddles and all four burners fired up as they turned out flap-jacks, fried eggs, jam or syrup made from brown-sugar and coffee.

***

About nine in the morning, former-Deputy Canina received a text from the Sheriff. “Can you investigate potential homicide? Bodies at corner of Chapel-and-Hendon”

Canina texted back “Can you pay me with gasoline?”

The Sheriff replied “Yes.”

Canina borrowed the supply truck. It took the crew guarding the entrance a few minutes to knock the chocks out from beneath the log obstructing the drive and roll it out of the drive. The “Password” for when she returned was to be four, long toots on the horn. Before she left the drive, Canina double-checked the horn by giving a long toot. It would be just her luck to be borrowing a vehicle with a blown fuse for the horn!

Deputy Canina (she had reverted back to her former life oh-so-very-easily) drove the truck around the block so she approached the intersection from a direction that didn’t reveal that she had only been a mile-and-a-half from where the dead bodies had been found.

There was a very young-looking, thin to the point of painful, man nervously waiting for her. He was wearing "dress clothes" and shiny, leather shoes.

“I am Deputy Canina. And you are?” Rosa left the question hanging…

“I am Reverend Clarke. I am the new pastor at the church” he said, pointing across Chapel Road to the southwest.

Looking in that direction, Canina saw a small, weather-beaten church and cemetery just like the thousands of others that littered the rural South.

“How old are you?” Canina asked.

“Twenty-four. Why do you ask?” Rev Clarke answered.

“First church?” Canina asked. Of course it was his first church. That is where new graduates from second (and third) tier seminaries started...poor, little congregations where maybe 25 or 35 families were registered and maybe half as many regularly made contributions. If he stuck it out for three years, avoided scandals and got married, he would be offered a position in a church with 60 families, and in the fullness of time an associate position in a wealthy church with a 150 families or more.

“Yep. I graduated from seminary six months ago.” Rev Clarke replied.

Reassured that the good Rev Clarke was unlikely to call BS on anything she said, she forged ahead.

“Show me the bodies” she commanded.

Looking at the bodies, Canina was glad that the shower curtain’s pattern of goldfish and seaweed blurred Billy’s girlfriend’s private parts. She didn’t know if the preacher would have been able to keep it together if it hadn’t.

The bullet-riddled faces were a mess and unrecognizable. Canina checked the pockets of the two looters who were wearing clothes for ID even though she knew for a fact that the two looters had been relieved of their wallets.

“Let me tell you what I am going to advise the Sheriff” Canina said. “I am authorizing you to prepare and bury the bodies. If you can figure out who they are, send word to their next-of-kin. If you cannot get an ID on them, bury them as John Doe One, Two and Three and Jane Doe One. Get a snip of their hair and put it in separate zip-lock baggies with their names, JD1, JD2 and so on. Send the bill to the county.”

“Get ahold of your Elders or Church Board. You and them are going to go through the contents of the truck and figure out who it belongs to. Looks like sets of silver and such. Somebody will recognize some of the things. The rest of it, you hang onto for your orphans-and-widows fund. I gotta feeling you are gonna need it” Canina said.

“Don’t you need to keep them for evidence?” Rev Clarke gulped, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.

Canina frowned. “Evidence for what?” She asked. “They died of natural causes.”

Frowning in consternation, the Reverend looked at the multiple bullet-wounds and said “How do you figure?”

“I spent my summers with my Nana. We went to church every day and I heard a lot of the Bible. Doesn’t it say somewhere that “He who lives by the sword shall die by it”?

“Yes” Reverend Clarke said. “I believe that is in Matthew Chapter 26.”

“So if these people were looters, and all of the evidence points to the fact that they were, then their deaths were a natural consequence of the crimes they chose to commit, no?” Canina offered.

The Reverend wavered.

“If I call this a crime-scene, then the people who had their belongings stolen will not get them back until the court no longer needs them as evidence” Canina pressed.

“I don’t see any smoking gun suggesting who might have killed them. The case will get shelved, maybe for years” Canina continued. "They done wrong and got what they had comin' to them. The way I see it, they died of Natural Causes."

“What about the truck?” the Reverend asked, clearly relieved of the responsibility of having to make those kinds of decisions.

“The county has a contract with a towing company to handle abandoned vehicles. I will send them a text” Canina promised. "I won't send it until late this afternoon to give you plenty of time to get the truck unloaded. They will prolly show up late this evening."

 

Canina wanted as many people to see the truck as possible. An object lesson doesn't work if it is kept a secret. She knew that if the truck sat at the corner all day while it was unloaded and the contents processed, at least a couple of local gossips would see it and spread the word.

As she was thinking that, a neighbor sidled up to them and asked “Kin I take some pictures to put on F-book? I been gittin' a signal a couple-a hours a day.”

Canina said “No pictures of the bodies. They deserve what dignity we can give them. But you can take pictures of the cargo and maybe help the Reverend find out who it belonged to.”

As an after-thought, Canina said to the preacher “Make sure you log who claims what items. There might be a few people thinking to take advantage. Knowing that you are keeping a record might discourage some of that.”

Then, looking at the Reverend “Do you think you can handle this?” Canina asked.

The very young Reverend drew in a deep breath and then slowly let it out before answering. “With God’s Grace, I can do anything.”