The Country Road Murders

Prologue

His grandmother, EmmaJean, the one everybody calls EJ here in Cross Rivers, North Carolina, likes to say that the only thing Silas has never outgrown is where he comes from.

“This place isn’t just where you live,” she says. “It’s who you are.”

Silas Tucker fears God, loves his family and his school and the kids in it and his town. And lives his life secure in the knowledge that the town loves him back.

“You’re like the real mayor of us,” Bess Scobee, his old classmate and current owner of Scobee’s Diner, had said when she’d handed over his standard breakfast order a few minutes before. “Even though you’re still a good ol’ boy.”

“Just remember we don’t teach a course in good ol’ boy,” Silas had said. “Or allow our kids to speak it, leastways not when I’m around.”

Silas is a learned man, his brain as super-sized as everything else about him. But he is someone else who doesn’t want people to think he’d ever forget where he came from, so he’ll drop just enough of what he calls Cackalacky into his conversation, almost as a private joke with himself.

Bess had smiled. “So no North Cackalacky?”

He’d smiled back at her. “Ex-Cackalacky, what I’m talking about.”

“Bless your heart,” she said, “not that I ever captured it.”

“Wasn’t for lack of trying,” he said, and winked at her, then headed for his truck.

Next to him now on the passenger seat is his skillet breakfast sandwich—double over-easy egg and cheddar biscuit—still smelling like something wafting down from heaven above.

Silas has taken only one bite out of it so far, careful not to drip any egg, pacing himself the way he always does so he finishes his breakfast just before he pulls into the school parking lot.

While he waits to take his next bite, he is singing along with Levon Helm, old Levon leading the Band on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”:

Don’t care if the money’s no good…

Silas Tucker has never cared about money, even when he thought he might be on his way from the North Carolina Tar Heels to pro football until, halfway through his freshman year, he tore up his knee in the Clemson game.

He graduated and came home to Cross Rivers in western Carolina—only a couple of hours from Chapel Hill, but what felt like a world from there.

As long as there’s been enough coming in from his job as principal of the high school—and from the farm—to take care of family, Silas has been a happy man, and considers himself a successful one.

He was just eighteen, proud and brave…

Damn, he loves Levon’s singing. One time, not long before Levon passed, Silas had driven up to Vienna, Virginia, to hear him and the last band he ever assembled.

Had waited outside the Wolf Trap to shake his hand and thank him for songs that Silas told him seemed to have come straight out of his own heart and maybe even his soul.

He would never say this out loud, not to his wife, Carol Lee, or his boy, or even EJ, but he’s always prided himself on having a good heart. It’s why teaching replaced football as his passion—football being Silas Jr.’s dream now.

It’s a beautiful morning, the sky a much prettier shade than the pale Tar Heel blue he’d never much cottoned to.

School’s been back in session for just over a month, Silas Jr.’s youth football league team is already 3–0, and the leaves are getting ready to turn and be so pretty they like to break his heart.

God, I do love this place, he thinks, and then before long he’s singing along with Levon again, rolling down the windows and cranking up the volume and feeling like a kid himself this morning, almost like he’s riding to school with his first set of wheels.

He sees the motorcycle up ahead then, turned over right there in the middle of State Road 31.

Silas has time to check the rearview, sees there’s nobody coming up behind him, twists the wheel, and gets to the shoulder, dirt flying, the screeching of his tires as loud as the music had just been. He shuts off the engine and jumps out of his truck.

The first thing he sees as he runs toward the motorcycle is the kid in the Cross Rivers leather jacket, face down.

One of his kids.

They all are.

Silas moves fast, not as quick as he was before his knee gave out, but still quick enough for a man his age and his size, going on adrenaline and instinct now.

As he gets close, he sees that the kid isn’t moving.

He has his phone out, ready to call 911, but first needs to find out if this boy is alive.

He kneels next to him, gently turns him over.

Sees who it is.

Sees the boy smiling up at him.

Then laughing.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Silas asks angrily.

“Joke’s on you, boss man,” the kid says.

Cocky as ever.

A second too late, Silas sees the gun in the kid’s hand, pointing up at him, the last thing Silas Tucker sees in this world before the kid shoots him in the face.

Then the chest.

Then the face again, before Silas is the one in the road, dead before he hits it, even though that doesn’t stop the kid, who keeps firing until he’s emptied the gun, laughing again as he watches the body jump every time.

When he’s finished, he sees one car in the distance, maybe a half mile up, heading toward them on the flat country road.

Now he’s the one kneeling next to Silas Tucker, taking his billfold, not for the cash inside it or the credit cards.

He just wants a souvenir of this special day.

His first kill.