Then the howling'd start, and a buck might've skipped out from across the road, heading back into those woods and toward the deer trails down by the river. He'd have watched and waited for that howling, that bust loose in the brush, that deer. But this was a dead body. And here's the thing. Here lies the dead son of a bitch Charles Middleton Simons, MD, killed and manicured by his loving wife.
Busy hands can be the devil's workshop as well.
It was all written in a girly curlicue, a black marker. And here was my uncle's name, plain as day. Nobody'd yet said a thing, none of the dozen or so of us standing at the edge of these woods. It wasn't even sunup yet, the sky still gray and yellow. He'd been the one to tell me to stop the truck.