Bootlegger’s Daughter (20 page)

Seth swiveled around from his computer screen, leaned back in the leather chair, and said, “I don’t know how brilliant it is, but it seems to me since it’s Friday night and all the kids are going to be out cruising around anyhow, we might as well tell ’em to keep their eyes open.”

“I’ve already been on the phone to Haywood and Jack,” said Minnie, “and I left a message on Herman’s machine. We can have some of the children watching every N amp;O box in this end of the county.”

I went over and hugged Seth’s neck. “Minnie’s right,” I told him. “You are brilliant.”

“Any brighter and I’d glow in the dark,” he agreed. “Now if you’ll give me five more minutes with my wife on these figures, I’ll get out of y’all’s way and-”

“I didn’t come to talk politics this time,” I said. “I thought I’d do some fishing.”

“What a good idea!” said Minnie. “Get your mind off troubling things for a while.”

“You’re not gonna catch much this time of day,” Seth warned, “but all the fishing stuff’s out under the shelter. You just help yourself to anything you need.”

There’s a decent lane down to the pond I planned to fish, and I could have driven, but I’d had enough of cars, too. I found a bucket, one of Minnie’s old straw hats, and a couple of cane poles already rigged with sinkers, corks, and small fish hooks. Then I set off past rows of vegetables-their garden peas were hanging heavy and I made a mental note to pick a mess to take back to Dobbs with me-across a field of young tobacco, to a path through the woods that brought me out at the head of a long pond a few hundred feet on the other side of Seth’s line.

It had been dug as a water hole back when the big twins were heavily into 4-H projects and thought they wanted to start a herd of beef cattle. Then Seth and Jack fooled around with catfish for a while, and I seem to remember the little twins talking about raising eels for Asian markets. When all those projects petered out, Daddy drained the pond and restocked with bream, crappies, and bass.

Except for a clump of willows, he kept the banks mowed clean of underbrush, but trees grew right up to the mowing strip and were mirrored in the still water. I sat down with my back against a willow trunk and let peacefulness wash over me. Tractors rumbled in distant fields somewhere beyond the trees and a nearby mockingbird was singing his territory. Otherwise there was only a low steady hum of insects, lizards skittering over dry leaves, towhees scratching for bugs-the country equivalent of elevator music.

It’d been too damn long since I’d gotten off by myself like this, and I blanked my mind of everything except sky, trees, and water. Seth was right. It was still too middle-way the day to expect fish to bite. Further down the bank stood a sweet gum with a bare dead limb that stretched out toward the water. A kingfisher perched at the very end and was silhouetted against the fluffy white clouds.

Up in the sky, a red-tailed hawk spiraled lazily on thermal updrafts. Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind…

I fitted my back more comfortably against the willow trunk and thought maybe I’d just rest there a while, listening to birdsong and crickets… rest till the kingfisher’s dive signaled fish activity below the surface of the pond… till…

The sun was edging toward the treetops when I awoke to the smell of cigarette smoke and opened my eyes without otherwise moving.

Heavy brogans. Long skinny legs. Faded chinos that had been washed so many times they were soft as handkerchief linen and more white than khaki colored.

A feeling of well-being suffused me as I looked up, up, up into eyes as blue as cornflowers. Stretching like a sleepy child, I forgot that we weren’t talking to each other.

“Hey, Daddy,” I yawned.

“Hey, shug.” Any wariness that might have been there a moment earlier was now gone. He flicked his cigarette away, squatted on the grassy bank beside me, and looked out over the pond. “Catching much?”

I pushed myself upright and hugged him so hard that his white straw planter’s hat almost went into the pond.

“Here now, what’s this all about?” he said, but he didn’t offer to pull away.

“I was hoping you’d bait my hook,” I grinned. “Icky crawly worms.”

He laughed, pushed his hat back on the crown of his head, reached for a pole, and said the same thing he always said when I was a little girl. “Gonna fish with me, you’re gonna bait your own hook.”

I took a night crawler from the bait box and passed half of it over to him, then put the rest on my own hook and threw out the line.

No sooner had the line touched water than something immediately grabbed the worm and pulled my red plastic bobber down into the brown depths. The cane pole bent nearly double, and I quickly flicked the tip to set the hook and began easing back on the pole. It fought but I kept the pressure steady and soon a chunky wriggling shape broke through the surface. I flipped him up on the bank, and a moment later, I was removing my hook from the mouth of a thrashing half-pound crappie.

Before I could get him in the bucket, Daddy had a slightly bigger one ready to join him.

“Hungry little boogers aren’t they?” he said as three, four, and five elbowed one other aside to be next in our bucket.

“That’s all I feel like cleaning,” I said. “You want any?”

“Nah. Maidie’s making me chicken pastry.”

“Oh?” Chicken pastry was one of my favorite suppers.

“With chopped broccoli salad.”

Another of my favorites. Minnie or Seth was probably on the phone before I left their yard.

“You asking me to stay to supper?”

“Just saying there’s plenty.”

“You always did have a pretty way with words,” I teased.

With one accord, we pushed our bobs down the line so that our hooks would be set too shallow to attract the big fish. Then we baited up with a generous hand. Dozens of little fish swarmed up as soon as the worms hit the water, and our bobbers dipped and bounced till the hooks were picked clean.

We kept it up till all the bait was gone and shadows began to lengthen over the water. The air was golden all around. I felt utterly at peace.

“Shug?”

“Hmm?”

“Who wrote them ugly letters?”

“I don’t know, Daddy.”

“Well, who do you think?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Then how ’bout I throw you a big pig pickin’?”

I twisted around to stare at him. He’d been angry when he heard I’d filed for judge and had tried to get me to withdraw. We’d both said ugly things.

“I still don’t see why you need to be a judge,” he said, “but if that’s what you want-”

I could feel myself stiffening up. “You’re going to buy it for me?”

“I just don’t want to be the cost of you losing it,” he said, more humbly than I’d ever heard him speak.

Into the silence came raucous screams. The red-tailed hawk had drifted down almost to the treetops and three crows had banded together to fly at him and hector his passage.

“I pure-out hate a crow,” said Daddy. “A hawk’ll maybe take a biddy or two in the spring, but a crow’ll get your corn all summer long and strip your pecan trees in the fall. Look at ’em chasing after that hawk, too much a coward ’cept when they can gang up on him.”

His fierce blue eyes followed the birds. Eighty-two years old, yet he still knew what it was like to live as a hawk and feel the sharp beaks of cowards on your back.

“How ’bout I stay for supper?” I said.

Saturday morning found me braced for the worst. Those first two flyers were distributed God knows how widely, the Ledger had been out since Friday noon with its story, and my whole family had its collective hackles up.

So what happened?

Not one damn thing.

Every time we start thinking we’re the center of the universe, the universe turns around and says with a slightly distracted air, “I’m sorry. What’d you say your name was again?”

Oh, a few friends called to ask what was going on, but for the most part, silence. A runoff contest between two local judicial candidates is small potatoes compared to the one shaping up between Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte out in the western part of the state, and Mike Easley, a white district attorney from Southport down at the coast.

At least there’d been no more flyers.

Haywood’s Stevie had organized his cousins into teams and they’d cruised Cotton Grove and Black Creek until nearly two a.m armed with notepads to jot down license plates or comments on suspicious cars, sneaky-acting users of News and Observer boxes, or anything else that seemed worth noting.

“And nobody saw anything?” I asked when he reported in that morning.

Stevie laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. It was Friday night. Funny what you can see when you really start looking.”

“Keep it clean,” I told him and went off to work a senior citizens’ lunch in Widdington, then an Arts Council meeting in Cotton Grove where I had to field only three mostly friendly questions about the flyers.

After the meeting, I was approached by someone with a vaguely familiar face, a bustling sort of woman who’s on the Possum Creek Players board of directors. She trotted over with a flourish of silver bangles on both wrists and an arty paisley scarf so carelessly draped over the shoulder of her flounced dress that she had to keep clutching at it. “I’m Sylvia Dayley, Miss Knott. You probably don’t remember me from our production of Who Killed the Darling Mrs.?, but I hope you won’t mind if I ask you?”

She was another of those who end every other sentence on an upward inflection.

I waited warily. “Yes?”

“Since you’re a friend of Denn McCloy? When you saw him last night, did he say anything about Michael and him maybe going somewhere for the weekend?”

She misread my blank look. “I’ve been clerking out at the Pot Shot on the weekends-Saturday mornings, ten till two; Sunday afternoons, one to five? It’s only eight hours and I mostly do it as a favor for the boys. So hard for them to find reliable help. I have a key, of course, but Michael and Denn always let me know when they’re going to be gone so I’ll feed Lily if they leave her home, only this time they didn’t say a word to me and I’m not sure what to do with the money?”

She finally ran out of breath and her bracelets jingled as she rearranged her scarf.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have misunderstood something. I didn’t see Denn last night.”

“But Cathy said Denn called you yesterday afternoon to meet him at the theater last night?”

“Cathy King? One of their potters?”

Sylvia Dayley nodded so vigorously that her scarf slid all the way down her arm until one end trailed on the floor. “I called her when I got in and that’s what she said.”

I shook my head. “He may’ve left a message on our answering machine, but we closed early yesterday and I didn’t get it. Sorry.”

She hitched up her scarf and looked perturbed. “I hate to just leave the money at the shop. Not that it’s all that much, but still… And what if they don’t come back till Monday? Sundays are such a big day, you know? And what about Lily?”

I edged away from her as she jingled indecisively and was immediately claimed by an elderly poet and a would-be playwright who wanted to debate the Mapplethorpe photos and the First Amendment.

Wondering who else might not have realized that we’d closed early yesterday, I put in a call to the office and punched in the code that would cause our answering machine to play back. Sure enough, amid some non-urgent routine messages was Denn McCloy’s: “This is for Deborah Knott. Please ask her to meet me at the Possum Creek Players Theatre tonight at nine. I have something very special to give her.”

Like what, Denn? I asked him mentally as I looked up the number at the Pot Shot. Another round of rifle fire?

There was no answer. After five rings, their answering machine switched on. I left a message that I was returning Denn’s call and that I’d be back home by eleven. All across America, it’s machines talking to machines.

Dwight probably laid the fear of God and the law on Denn yesterday. Maybe he wanted to apologize in person. Unless-?

I suddenly remembered the luscious dark red velvet cloak he’d created for The Further Adventures of Red Riding Hood. The young woman who played Red was awful, but the costumes were great. In fact, I wanted Denn to sell me the cloak, but it was such a useful and versatile costume that he didn’t want to let it go. He’d promised though that if he ever changed his mind, I was to have first dibs, and we had a running joke about it.

Now wouldn’t that make a nice apology, I thought, turning my car south on Forty-Eight toward Makely. Too bad I’d missed him.

I was scheduled to speak at a Parents Without Partners dinner meeting at Makely that evening-they wanted legal advice about guardianships and trusts; I wanted their votes- but I had an extra hour to kill. Impulsively, I made a three-point turn right there on the highway and headed back through Cotton Grove.

It wasn’t that I expected Denn to still be sitting in the parking lot at the theater twenty-four hours later. On the other hand, if he and Michael had made up and then decided on the spur of the moment to go away for the weekend, an extravagant gesture was well within the realm of possibility. I could see him putting the cloak in a plastic garment bag and hanging it under the back arch with a large sign: Mea Culpa, Deborah, or something equally and dramatically penitent.

It was odd about couples, the dynamics of staying together or growing apart. Minnie and Seth got more like each other every year, whereas you had to wonder why the Vickerys hadn’t flown apart years ago. Pride? Lying in the bed you’d made? And Denn and Michael. Now there was an odd couple for you. Michael so cold and so conventional, if you didn’t count stringing his fences with precise crosses. And Denn so theatrical and impulsive-he’d sure given me a whole new slant on the term hair-trigger temper-but capable of a warm generosity I’d never seen with Michael. No wonder their union was in trouble.