Deputy Ed Malone was heading across the lobby of the sheriff’s office when retired schoolteacher and amateur crimefighter Frances Valentine strolled in. “Am I glad to see you,” he said to her.
“You charming devil,” Fran said. “Where’s the sheriff?”
“She’s out of town till Friday. I figured she’d told you.”
Fran sighed. “Sheriff Valentine might be my daughter, but that doesn’t mean she keeps me up to date.” She looked around and said, “So you’re the head fred, today. How does it feel?”
“Not too good. Follow me—I might need your advice.” With that, he opened the door of the sheriff’s office, where a middle-aged woman in a John Deere cap sat frowning at an older lady and a man with his left ankle in a cast. Fran knew them: the first woman was Colleen Johnson and the couple were Ms. Johnson’s neighbors, Herb Hillman and his wife Pearl. Deputy Malone asked them if Fran could sit in on the discussion, and then—when they’d agreed—asked Mr. Hillman to speak first.
“It started last week, when I put a sign in my wife’s cantaloupe patch,” Herb said.
“Sign?” Malone asked.
“It said, THIEVES BEWARE: ONE OF THESE MELONS HAS DONE BEEN POISONED. It was meant to keep kids from stealing the missus’s cantaloupes. I didn’t really poison nothin’. Anyhow, next day Pearl and me saw that two words on my sign had been crossed out and changed. Now the sign said, YOU BEWARE: TWO OF THESE MELONS HAS DONE BEEN POISONED.”
Fran chuckled, and even Malone grinned a little.
“It ain’t a laughin’ matter,” Herb growled. “Far’s I knew, somebody’d done really poisoned one.” He added, pointing at Ms. Johnson, “And I figured right then it was CollieBaby who changed the sign.”
Colleen Miller, Fran knew, had grown up the youngest of seven girls, and had been called CollieBaby since an early age. She’d taken the late Alvin Johnson’s last name when they got married, but her nickname had stuck. Ms. Johnson nodded and said, “I confess, I changed it. I thought it was funny. I didn’t poison nothing, though.”
“That ain’t true, Deputy,” Pearl said.
“So you think Ms. Johnson did tamper with one of the melons?” Malone asked.
“Don’t know. But it ain’t true she done it just to be funny. She done it so I’d be scared to enter them cantaloupes at the competition in the state fair next month.” Pearl glared at her and added, “CollieBaby grows cantaloupes too, and I bet she wanted to be sure hers’ll win the prize.”
Ms. Johnson groaned. “This ain’t even why we’re here today. Admit it, why don’t you?—we’re here because you two got mad at me and drove your big ugly truck through my tomato garden last night.”
“We did no such thing.”
“One of you did. I got proof. My neighbor, Daisy Landers, told me she saw your red-splattered pickup leaving my place late last night. She couldn’t see a face, but she said there was just one person—the driver—in the truck.”
Deputy Malone said, “How was Daisy sure it was the Hillmans’ pickup?”
“Everybody around here knows it on sight. Old gray Ford, rusted top, stick shift, LSU bumper sticker.” Ms. Johnson gave Pearl Hillman a stare. “I enter my tomatoes every year at the fair too, like they do, and them tearin’ up my plants keeps me from competing against ’em.”
Malone looked at Fran. “Ms. Valentine, could we step outside a minute?”
When they’d reached the lobby he said, “Cantaloupes? Tomatoes? CollieBaby?”
“Southerners like nicknames,” she said.
He rubbed his eyes wearily. “I wonder what the sheriff would do, here.”
“I know what she’d do,” Fran said. “She’d have a donut and wave goodbye to all three of them.”
“Should I do that?”
She sighed. “Ed, there’s been bad feelings between the Hillmans and CollieBaby Johnson for ten years. This isn’t about sabotage, or winning ribbons at the state fair. This is just neighbors who don’t like each other.”
“So?”
“So I think you should tell the Hillmans to either end this feud right now, apologize for what was done to Ms. Johnson’s tomatoes, and pay her for the damages—or face the consequences.”
“What consequences?”
“Justice for the destruction of property—a person’s crop. That’s a crime.”
“But who would I arrest?” he said.
“Do you agree that we know, through the eyewitness, that it was the Hillmans’ pickup?”
“Sure. But we don’t know for sure which one was the driver.”
Fran smiled. “They’re probably both guilty. But the driver was Pearl.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have two eyes, and I can see Herb has a broken left ankle. He couldn’t have operated the clutch on a stick-shift transmission.”
Malone thought that over, and listened for a moment to the shouting voices on the other side of the door.
“You think the Hillmans will apologize?” he asked.
“Nope. I think you’ll have to make an arrest.”
His shoulders sagged. “That means I’d have to find the keys to the cell.”
Fran smiled again. “Nobody said sheriffing was easy.”
Current bio: John M. Floyd’s short stories have appeared in AHMM, EQMM, Strand Magazine, Mississippi Noir, The Saturday Evening Post, Mysterical-E, and many other publications. Three of his stories have been selected for annual editions of The Best American Mystery Stories, and another has been optioned for film. A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, John is also an Edgar nominee, a four-time Derringer Award winner, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2018 recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s lifetime achievement award. His ninth book is scheduled for release in late 2020.
