Death's Half Acre (26 page)
“Make it two and you’ve got a deal,” I said and asked him to bring me a T-shirt and sweater. I keep sneakers in the car, but two hot dogs and an evening of cheering for Jackson would probably wreck the beautiful turquoise silk shirt I was wearing.
I wish I could have been there when they courted.
—The Persimmon Tree Carol,
by Shelby Stephenson
B
y the time my guys arrived at the Dobbs High School ball field, I was hungry enough to gnaw on the back leg of a rabbit hound. It didn’t help that Will and Amy kept offering me bites of their chili dogs, although I did let Will buy me an iced Pepsi. I was early enough to get a hug from Jackson before his team took the field to warm up. He’s tall and rangy like all the Stephenson males from Mother’s side of the family and he loped across the field like a young pony feeling his oats.
We staked claim to some lower rows of seats between third and home where we could cheer for his every play.
My niece Annie Sue arrived a few minutes later, pushing her daddy’s wheelchair. Herman is Haywood’s twin, one of the “big twins,” as opposed to Zach and Adam, the “little twins,” so called because they’re several years younger even though they’re actually taller. But Herman and Haywood are a lot broader, although Herman is a little thinner now that he’s confined to a wheelchair.
Like his twin, Herman has no inhibitions and as soon as he spotted us, a big grin broke across his broad face. “Guess what, y’all?” he hollered.
“Oh, Dad!” Annie Sue protested.
“What?” Amy called back.
“She’s got her ’lectrician’s license!”
We erupted from our seats in hugs and laughter and congratulations. There had been a time when Herman was less than thrilled at the idea of his baby daughter following in his footsteps, but it finally penetrated his thick skull that she was the only one of his four children with a natural talent for electricity and a real love for the work. Immediately after high school, she had enrolled at the community college and taken all the necessary courses to become a licensed electrician herself, acing the tests and graduating at the head of the department.
“So are you changing the name of your business to Knott and Daughter?” Amy asked with a mischievous grin.
“Naw, she won’t let me,” said Herman.
Annie Sue shrugged her sturdy shoulders. “No point rubbing Reese’s nose in it.”
“Hell, girl,” said Will. “He’s gonna be working for you someday, idn’t he?”
“I hope it’ll be a partnership, Uncle Will. We sure don’t want him to quit. He’s a good electrician and he’s pulling his share of the load. This way, he can work off my license, too, now.”
Herman’s oldest child, Edward, is a white-collar office worker out in Charlotte. Ditto Denise in Greensboro. Reese and Denise are twins and Annie Sue was an “oops” baby. Reese is still single, but he’s never been one to crack the books. As long as he can earn enough to pay for his truck, his trailer, and his tall ones, it doesn’t seem to much matter to him who’s higher in the pecking order. All the same, it was so like Annie Sue to consider his male pride. If and when Herman turns the business over to them, I’m sure it’ll be on equal terms.
Dwight and Zach arrived in the middle of our spontaneous celebration and offered to treat her to the supper of her choice—hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, or tacos. I took the T-shirt Dwight had brought me and headed to the restroom to change.
When I got back to the hot dog stand, I saw Dwight in conversation with his deputy, Mayleen Richards. Standing beside her was a good-looking Latino in jeans, hand-tooled boots, a large silver belt buckle, and a black Stetson. Without the boots and hat, he was probably only about a half-inch taller than she, but he had an easy air of confidence that was at odds with her self-conscious awkwardness.
And at the moment, she looked more self-conscious than usual and had flushed until her fair skin was the same shade as her freckles. As I joined them, she took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and said, “Good to see you, ma’am. I’d like you to meet my friend Mike Diaz. Mike, this is Judge Knott, Major Bryant’s wife.”
“We’ve met before, I believe,” I said, shaking the hand he held out to me. He had once come to court to speak for one of his compatriots.
“
Si
,” said Diaz, “but this time is better. Mayleen says I must learn baseball if I want to be a true American.”
“But surely you’ve seen baseball in Mexico,” I said.
“Oh yes. Half the major league teams here have Mexican players, but she says I have to see it like a native.” He lifted his hot dog and made a wry face. “Tacos are better, but when in Rome . . .”
We all laughed and Mayleen’s face was almost its natural shade by the time we parted for separate sections of the field.
“I like him,” I told Dwight when we returned to the family with drinks and dogs for everyone. “Does this mean Mayleen’s going to go against her family for him?”
He had told me about how conflicted she was over this relationship and how her family had threatened to disown her if she did not break it off.
“Don’t know, honey,” Dwight said. “But if she’s coming out in public with him around town here and introducing him to folks, it must mean something.”
We distributed the food and drinks. Cal took his and immediately joined some younger kids standing down by the fence behind home plate.
At the end of the first inning, the score was one–zip in favor of the visitors and that’s the way it stayed till the bottom of the ninth when Jackson reached first for the third time in the game and a teammate smashed one over the fence.
2–1 Dobbs!
On the drive home, Dwight said that they had come up with a name for Candace’s cousin and that someone would probably be eyeballing her old car tomorrow if the cousin still owned it.
I told him about going to her house with Will. “Did you see that bathroom?”
“Pretty fancy, huh? Mirrors on a bedroom ceiling’s one thing. I’m not real sure I’d want that many in the bathroom.”
“Bradshaw told Will that Dee’s laptop was stolen?”
“Yeah. Sort of confirms that the two deaths are linked. The Ginsburg twins think that Dee might have found the flash drive that Candace used and that’s why she was killed.”
“Really?” I was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded that the flash drive everyone was so anxious to find was probably the one in my purse.
Cal had fallen asleep in the backseat. Overhead, the stars blazed down from a cloudless sky. Very romantic. Dwight smiled over at me. “Remember when all cars had bench seats instead of buckets?”
I smiled back. Unfortunately, there was a console and a gearshift between us.
But he was in a talkative mood and told me about the phone calls Dee Bradshaw had made the evening she was killed: two to Gracie Farmer about the dollhouse and Farmer’s umbrella, one to her boyfriend, who was too drunk to talk, one to Will to ask him to come out and make her an offer, one to Roger Flackman about the possibility that her mother had been skimming the company’s take, and one to Danny Creedmore, who claimed that she had ended the conversation shortly after eight because someone was at the door.
“And Greg Turner says she left a three-minute message on his answering machine, but he swears she said nothing important and he immediately erased it.”
“You think one of them killed her?” I asked.
“Still up in the air,” he said. “I don’t know how the office manager would benefit unless she was in on some skimming, but Flackman says the books are in perfect order and we’re welcome to audit them.”
“Are you?”
“Hell, yes.”
“What about the others?”
“Well, we don’t think Will had a reason to do it,” he teased. “And Danny Creedmore’s been pretty open about the relationship. Oh, he doesn’t admit in so many words that he put her in place and has told her what to do from the beginning, but we’ve never heard a word of disagreement between them and he seems to have eased her over to Woody Galloway.”
“To take his body or take his seat?”
He laughed. “I don’t think he cared which. Woody’s a pretty empty suit as far as the county’s benefited, but he doesn’t take orders from Danny, so maybe backing her for the state senate wasn’t just going to be a holding action.”
“If Woody gets knocked out of the governor’s race, will he still keep his seat now?”
“I expect so, don’t you?”
“Yeah. He’s not totally dumb. If we’ve heard rumors that Candace wanted to run for real, he must have, too. Sounds like a decent enough reason for murder.”
“Except that he was in conference in Raleigh with a half-dozen senators when Candace was killed.”
“Greg Turner wasn’t in their pocket,” I said. “He’s a Democrat and often voted against the others. He and Jamie Jacobson both.”
“Yeah, but you read what Linsey Thomas wrote about him. Maybe Candace and Danny helped keep it quiet about him dipping into a client’s funds.” He hit the steering wheel in frustration. “I just wish to hell we could find her flash drive.”
“It’s bound to turn up sooner or later,” I said soothingly.
“You think?” He slowed to turn in to our drive. “If the killer took it, it’s probably been smashed with a hammer and thrown in Possum Creek.”
Now there was a thought.
I don’t know what’s happening,
and I don’t know how to say it.
—Paul’s Hill,
by Shelby Stephenson
W
eekday mornings are normally harried and a rush to get Dwight off to work and Cal off to school, but Wednesday morning seemed to move on snail legs. Cal’s backpack was sitting by the kitchen door at least twenty minutes before he needed to leave with Dwight to catch the bus at the end of our long drive and he had already bicycled down and back with the morning paper.
There was plenty of time for him to show us the new trick he had taught Bandit. I’ve always liked dogs, but I became particularly fond of this one after he helped get me out of a very tight spot last winter.
“Watch, y’all!” said Cal.
He told the little dog to sit, then gave an upward swoop of his hand.
Immediately, Bandit rose on his hind feet and bobbled across the kitchen floor.
Dwight laughed and I shook my head. “All that dog needs is an opposable thumb and he could be people.”
Cal beamed and gave Bandit a small morsel of food as a reward.
He performed twice more, then it was finally time for them to go meet the bus.
“Lunch?” I asked Dwight as they headed out to the truck.
“Buzz me,” he said. “I don’t know what the day’s going to be like.”
Once I was sure they were really gone, I rushed to my computer and popped the flash drive into one of the side ports.
To my total chagrin, the thing was password-protected. Who the hell protects a flash drive?
“
Someone with something juicy to hide
,” said the pragmatist, looking up from the morning paper.
“
So give it to Dwight and take your punishment
,” said the preacher.
“You’re never going to get into it.”
“
Oh, don’t be such a pessimist
,” said the pragmatist, laying aside the paper.
“You like puzzles. Maybe you can solve this one yourself. It’s worth a try.”
I started with the obvious things—variations of her name and the company’s name, her daughter’s name, Danny Creedmore’s, Woody Galloway’s, the Colleton Board of Commissioners, with A-B-C or 1-2-3 before and after each one. Nothing.
By the time I was ready to bang my head against the screen, I had to quit to get dressed and go to work, but I put the flash drive in my purse and a notebook and pen on the passenger seat beside me. On the drive to the courthouse, I jotted down everything I could think of that Candace might have used as her password.
At the break, I found a computer down in the clerk of court’s office that wasn’t being used and ran through my list in about four minutes flat.
No luck.
As I slowly returned to my courtroom, I had to admit to myself that I had only three choices at this point: smash this stubborn piece of aluminum, plastic, and memory circuits to bits, give it to Dwight, or slip it back in the dollhouse. I was pretty sure it would fit inside the miniature freezer and I could suddenly “remember” that I had heard the freezer clunk after I’d wrapped it and then got so distracted when Will and Mr. Bradshaw came back, that I hadn’t unwrapped it to see what caused the clunk.
Okay, that was weak. Dwight knows how seldom I let my curiosity go unsatisfied, but maybe he’d be so glad to get the damn thing that he’d overlook how it actually turned up.
Besides, if Candace had recorded anything about Daddy, Talbert, and me, his knowing I’d palmed it would be the least of my concerns.
When I buzzed Dwight at noon, he was too tied up to meet me. I took that as an omen that it was okay to implement my third option and to drive over to Will’s warehouse.
On my way out of the courthouse, I was surprised to see Daddy coming up the steps with a man I didn’t recognize.
“Daddy! Hey. Were you coming to look for me?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said. “I just got a little business needs tending to.”
I looked at the other man inquiringly and Daddy reluctantly introduced us. “This is my daughter Deb’rah, Mr. McKinney. Deb’rah, Mr. McKinney’s the preacher at that new church over near us.”
“The Church of Jesus Christ Eternal?” A sour taste rose in my throat. This was the pompous bastard who used scripture to humiliate his wife and keep the women of his church in check?
“Brother Kezzie’s told me a lot about you, Judge Knott,” he said, taking my hand in a two-handed clasp that was no doubt meant to convey warmth and pleasure in the meeting.
Brother Kezzie?
All of Maidie’s forebodings rushed back to me. Was Daddy trusting this control freak to get himself straight with the Lord?
I was speechless, and when I looked at Daddy there was an odd expression on his face that I couldn’t quite interpret.
“Sorry, Deb’rah, but we ain’t got time to stand here a-chitter-chattering,” he said briskly.
