All articles filed in Southern Dust

It was nearing five o’clock and the breeze, muted here beneath the pines, carried the smell of the marsh.

The stranger sped them on in short strokes, stabbing the creek with his paddle like a heron spearing fish.

Lamar’s Rio slid into the lot Ed’s, a dive on the edge of town some three or four miles up Sixty-one.

“Don’t know how you can drink that in this heat.”

Dark eyes, half-hid by the glare on his wire-frame glasses, and a bristly white mustache.

Ron Holbrooke was strangling her.

“If we’re going to do this,” Lamar said, “the best way is by water.”

She didn’t tell Lamar what she’d actually seen in the woods till later that evening, in his studio.