Combustible (A Boone Childress Novel) (21 page)

“That’s my
ass,” Cedar said.

“
Oops.”

She removed his hand.
“Fighting is stupid.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then why did you do it?” she asked.

“Because guys are stupid.”

“No argument there.”

She started to splash more water in his face, but he stopped her and fished out his handkerchief. “Here, use this.”

“Is it clean?”

“Clean enough.”

She held the handkerchief under water, rung it out, and clumsily dropped it into the trashcan. “Damn it.” She reached for it, then stopped, “I don’t believe it.”

“What?”

Pinching only a corner, she pulled a thick plastic bag out of the trash. The bag was labeled with the words
Flagler Scientific Supply
, the same company that had provided the preserved rats for their recent dissection. It was also labeled with large black letters:
Sodium
. And underneath, in red:

DANGER:
EXPLOSIVE MATERIAL.

"Thank the Lord for half-days." Mom threw herself back into her chair. She pulled off her heels and slapped them on the desk.

Across the room, Boone
lay stretched out on the couch with the newspaper over his face. He had come home hoping for some quiet time to rest his headache, which he had gotten when he and Cedar reported the empty chemical bags to the campus cop. It took an hour to convince the cop that he didn’t steal it. Not wanting another altercation with Hoyt, he and Cedar let campus, but not before Cedar gave him the notebook she’d been working on in the student lounge.

“What’s this?” he’d asked.

“A present.” She opened it and started leafing through the pages, which contained clippings, notes, and timeline of the fires. “When I get stuck on a problem, it helps me to lay out all the details in writing. Thought it would help you, too. I did it yesterday on the bus.”

“This,” he said, picking her up and swinging her around, “is
awesome! I can’t wait to dig into it.”

With that, they’d split up, agreeing to meet later in the day, once Boone’d had time to look
the book over, which he’d been doing when Mom popped in the door. He slid it under the couch to keep it away from her prying eyes and pulled the paper over his face for camouflage.

Boone heard Mom's laptop
bing
as it booted, followed minutes later by her fingers on the keyboard, first squeaking like guitar strings, then like a fan on a snare drum. By the time he cleared his throat, she was pounding on the keys.

"You
’re making enough noise to wake the dead,” he said.

The typing did
not stop. "I intend to."

"I’m not dead," he said from under the paper.

"I'm not referring to you." She pounded on. "I am referring to the sleeping citizens of this county. Can you believe that the planning board is claiming that destroying the Tin City cemetery is completely legal?"

"Those would be the puppets?
"

"
The one and the same. They say that the development company has signatures for the relatives of the deceased giving them permission. I find that hard to believe. Don’t you find it hard to believe?”

“Yep.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not.”

“You better not. I’m tired of being patronized today.”

Boone moved the paper aside. “Does this have to do with the injunction you filed?”

“The injunction that was denied, you mean.”

“That, too.”

“You know the answer.”

“Did
you see they identified the woman from the Nagswood fire?” he asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“Any thoughts?”

“Many. I’ll share them all after I deliver
this to the courthouse. There’s a council meaning tonight, and I plan to be on the agenda."

Boone checked his watc
h. It was 1615 hours. “I was hoping for a ride to the regional history museum.”

“That’s halfway across the county. What’s wrong with your truck?”

“Oil leak.”

“Then fix it.
”

“Can you drop me by an auto parts store?
”

“Not until a
fter five PM, my dear boy.”

Boone was calculating whether or not that would leave him enough time to get to the museum before it closed
, when Lamar walked down the hallway. He was dressed in olive green slacks and a starched white shirt, along with a pair of highly polished black oxfords.

Lamar
buttoned both cuffs. “If you’re ready to go now, I’ll run you down to the store. I’ve got some errands to do.”

“Sure,” Boone said, sitting up in surprise. “I’ll get my stuff.”

While he was getting ready, the house phone rang. Mom answered and took the call outside for privacy. She finished as Boone and Lamar were leaving.

“What’s that on the grass outside?”
Mom when she came in from the gallery. “Is that cookies?”

“Possibly.”

“How long have they been there?”

“A while
.”

“
Why are they still on the grass?”

“I thought the birds would eat them, but even the crows didn’t touch them.”

“Smart birds,” Lamar said.

“Honey,”
Mom said, “did you try cooking again?”

Boone shrugged. “I had a sweet tooth, so I used your recipe to make some snickerdoodle
s. They were a failure. I don’t understand why. I followed the recipe precisely.”

Mom clamped her lips together. “There’s your trouble,” she said, struggling not to laugh. “That recipe has two mistakes in it. Cooking’s more than just trying together the ingredients and baking for a set amount of time.
You left experience out of your equation. If you want to learn how to bake, let me know. The best recipes are never in a book.”

Five minutes later, they were roaring down Highway 12 toward Atamasco at seventy miles per hour. Lamar had the windows rolled down, and Boone thought about how much chigger would have enjoyed the ride.

“Just an observation,”
Boone said, “but when I drive over the speed limit, there’s always a deputy around the next corner. Especially Deputy Mercer.”

Lamar nodded in agreement. “Normally, I would say you’re being paranoid, but that feller has given tickets
to at least three firefighters, that I know of. Julia got one on the way to that brushfire up in Black Oak Shelter.”

“He almost gave me one on the way to the Tin City fire, remember?”
Boone decided to leave out the part about the Taser. “If Sheriff Hoyt hadn’t stopped him, he would have.”

“Hoyt’s pretty good at keeping his deputy’s reined in.
It comes with the territory, I suppose.”

“I’m not following you.”

“In North Carolina, the office of sheriff is elected, which means at least half of the job is political, probably more. Hoyt is a good man, and he follows the spirit of the law, but there are some things he does because he has to stay on the voters’ good side.”

“Are you referring to a
nything in particular?”

“W
hen I read the paper today, I got a little concerned about a few things Hoyt said. Remember what I said about the sheriff being a politician? There are times when it’s a good idea to stay away from politics, if you know what I'm saying.”

Boone nodded. He
wasn't quite sure what Lamar meant, but it seemed like a good time to nod.

“By the way, I want you to know that you’re mama’s proud as could be that you were the one that found that woman. I may not like the way it happened, but there’
s no overlooking the fact that if you and Abner hadn’t been so damned nosy, they might never have found her.”

Boone said thanks. “
But we might have saved her, if the Atamasco VFD had listened to me.”

“Maybe.
Maybe not. That’s not your place to decide, even if you think it is. Listen, Boone, I know you fancy yourself some kind of bone detective like your granddaddy, and you might well be one day. As smart as you are, you can be pretty much anything you want. But the fact is, you aren’t out of school yet, and there are some things you've got to let the experts figure out.”

Boone opened his mouth to protest.
He decided not to. It was a waste of oxygen.

“So. What’s this trip to the museum for?”
Lamar said after a while.

“Research.”

“I figured that much. What kind of research?”

“North Carolina History class.”

“Extra credit?”

“Something like that.” Boone plucked his lower lip in thought. “What’s
your errand for?”

“I’m meeting with the captain of the
Atamasco VFD.”

“Extra credit?”

“Something like that. We’re going to discuss personnel.”

Lamar dropped Boone near the entrance of Atamasco Farms, the preserved section of the original homestead project. Like Dr. Echols had said in class, Atamasco had thrived more than the other towns, and it was obvious even from the small collection of buildings that have been preserved. It was also obvious because Atamasco was a small but growing town near the highway, while Tin City was literally nothing more than a graveyard.

Boone surveyed the house. It was in excellent shape for house built on the cheap more than a half century before. Clapboard siding
, small porch, double hung windows freshly painted. An aluminum roof, a modernized version of the tin ones those once were ubiquitous in the county. And, he noted, a two hundred and fifty gallon propane tank beside the house.

Mrs.
Yarbrough met Boone at the door of the museum, which was a renovated homestead farmhouse expanded to include a collection of artifacts. She led him from the entry way through the house to a small library in the back. After the usual pleasantries, she started pulling several books from the shelves.

“These will get you started,”
she said as Boone sat down. “I realized when you left the library that I had failed in my calling. I am a librarian first and a tour guide second. You had a taste of my guided tour and my family history, but what I failed to provide was the information that you needed. Make yourself at home, and I’ll make myself scarce. But before I do, let me give you a short history lesson."

Boone masked a heavy and checked his watch. Hope it's a short lesson, he thought.

According to Mrs. Yarbrough, Bragg County was a land of napping ambition. It started life as part of neighboring Pitt County, until it was split off following the civil war. The new county was named in honor of Confederate General Braxton Bragg, and after several failed attempts, the county seat was created in Stanford, a dot on the map that grew slightly larger with the building of a courthouse and nearby jail, the first two government buildings in the county.

From the beginning the county struggled. While
Greenville grew larger and more prosperous, Bragg seemed to slumber. Citizens on the coast eked out a living shrimping and fishing, and in the interior, they slowly switched from cotton farming to tobacco as the cash crop that sustained the economy for over a hundred years. There were other industries, too. Logging, trucking, small mills and blueberry farms, but tobacco was king.

Like the farmers who worked its fields, Bragg County was never one to put on airs. It enjoyed its blueberry festivals, its Sunday brass band in the courthouse gazebo, the lack of traffic,
and the slow boil of a summer day. Bragg made its money, even during the Depression, and socked it away for a rainy day that never seemed to come as the landscape of the coast changed with a steady influx of retiring baby boomers who never made it to Florida.

Then unthinkable happened. King Tobacco lost its crown. It was not a coup d'état, no quick overthrow and seizure of power. It began slowly, with the US government's tightening hold on allotments, with subsidies that made it more profitable not to grow to
bacco than to grow it. Finally, it was the creation of the Golden Leaf Foundation, which was funded with the billions that cigarette companies were forced to pay. The Golden Leaf was intended to change the way tobacco farmers farmed, but it also included buyouts for farmers unwilling or unable to adapt. Bragg County was full of such families, who were either too old or too stubborn to change. Faced with leaving behind the crop that had enriched them, had sent their sons and daughters off to college, and paid the mortgage on the house, they left it all behind. They sold their farms lock, stock, and barrel and moved on.

The people they sold it to were a new breed of carpetbagge
rs called developers. They bought huge tracts of land from Gold Leaf. Bragg County awoke from its long slumber to a frenzy of neighborhoods being built across the county line from Greenville. Large homes on small lots built quickly and with little regard to the fact that a few years early, Hurricane Floyd had buried the same areas twenty feet deep in rainwater.