CASE #1 – ANNA’S COLD CASES
November in Jeffries means corn stubble, gray skies, and the crack of shotguns across the fields when quail season opens. In 1938, a covey of quail on the supper table wasn’t sport for most families. It was meat. This case lives at the edge of a cornfield, where the law and an empty stomach met.
The Setup
Ward Hollis, 41, is found dead in a cornfield on the Eberly farm on the afternoon of Thursday, November 10, 1938. Ward was a deputy game warden for the county and an Army veteran of the Argonne. He had gone out that morning to hunt quail with his oldest friend, Ben Saylor.
Ben walked into town white as paper and told the sheriff what had happened. A covey flushed between them. Ben swung on the birds and fired both barrels. When he lowered his gun, Ward was down in the stubble. The county doctor ruled it a hunting accident, the kind that happens every fall somewhere in Indiana. Nobody blames Ben out loud. Ben blames himself. He hasn’t eaten since.
Ward is buried on Armistice Day. Anna goes out to the Eberly farm the next morning with the sheriff, who wants to close his report, and notices four things.
First: the wound. Ward had a single small, round hole just under his left shoulder blade. Anna’s father hunted quail every fall of her childhood, and she knows what a load of No. 8 birdshot does to a man. It peppers him with a spray of tiny wounds. This was one hole. Birdshot doesn’t make one hole. A rifle does.
Second: the distance. Ben says he was across the field from Ward when he fired. Anna paces it off between the spent shotgun shells where Ben stood and the flattened stubble where Ward fell. It’s eighty-four yards. At that distance, birdshot from a 12-gauge might sting a man through a canvas coat. But it won’t kill him.
Third: Ward’s coat. In the game pocket are two quail. In the side pocket, the sheriff finds three freshly pulled wire snares, their loops still bent from holding open, and a coil of brass snare wire. Snaring rabbits was illegal in Indiana. Ward had found a trapline that morning, and he’d taken it up.
Fourth: the fencerow. On the north edge of the cornfield, where the Eberly farm meets a scrubby woodlot, Anna finds a small brass shell casing in the leaves. It isn’t from a shotgun. It’s a .22 rimfire casing, the kind every farm boy in Jeffries has been firing since he was ten. Beside it, a hand-rolled cigarette sits, smoked down to almost nothing. Whoever stood there had been waiting a while.
Ben Saylor believes he killed his best friend. He didn’t. Who did, and why were they standing in that fencerow?
Annie will let you know what she found next week.
