Death's Half Acre (3 page)

Another perfect spring day and this was the closest she had come to enjoying it since arriving at the office early that morning. Her own pansies needed attention and she had hoped to take off an hour in midday to enjoy the task. Instead, she had eaten a sandwich at her desk and tried to keep her mind focused on work.

A slender woman with sandy blond hair that had begun to sprout a few gray hairs now that she had passed forty, Jamie glanced at her watch and sighed. Five o’clock already and it would take at least another three hours to finish the presentation needed for a client first thing tomorrow morning.

She would have to skip supper and for a moment she considered skipping tonight’s board meeting as well. As one of only two Democrats on Colleton County’s board of commissioners, she wondered why she kept bothering. Unfortunately, a vote on the planning board’s recommendations for slowing growth was scheduled for tonight and she could not pass up one last attempt to accept it, even though she knew Candace Bradshaw would use every trick in her bottomless bag to vote it down.

Much as Jamie Jacobson hated to admit it, the county’s power brokers had planned well when they picked the newest chair of the board. Candace Bradshaw was as cute as a puppy and just as tail-waggingly eager to please the men who had put her in office and who now profited from the five-to-two decisions the board usually made under her chairmanship. A giggling, cuddly woman, she loved being chair. As long as the men pretended she held real power, she would do everything she could to make them happy, and if they wanted a controversial measure passed, she could be as tenacious as a little pit bull on their behalf.

For over three hundred years, Colleton County farmers had wrested a modest living from its mellow soil. Now economists predicted that in another thirty years, the farms might all be gone, bulldozed under and covered with houses and big-box chain stores as farmers took the quick and easy money. Housing bubbles might be bursting all over the rest of the country, but the red-hot market here showed few signs of cooling.

With its temperate climate, low unemployment rate, and even lower taxes, North Carolina was regularly touted as one of the country’s most liveable places and people were streaming in from the old rust belt states. They moved into the cheaply built houses before the paint was dry and immediately looked around for a nearby strip mall and an all-night pizzeria. Happily for the newcomers, local entrepreneurs were right there to service their needs with almost no interference from the local planning boards. Most of the commissioners believed wholeheartedly in laissez-faire, and why not? Most of them were connected either directly or indirectly to the building trades and much of the new money flowed straight into their pockets.

As a battered old red Chevy pickup parked in front of the courthouse, Jamie sighed again and turned away from the window. Tonight’s meeting would probably be another exercise in futility, a big waste of time; but for the sake of the people who had voted for her, she would be there even if it meant coming back to the office afterward. Maybe after the presentation tomorrow she could take the afternoon off to smell the flowers in her own garden.

Candace Bradshaw’s house was so recently built and furnished that carpets, drapes, and sofas still had that new-car smell. Although it was one of the more modest models in this upscale development—only three bedrooms with two and a half baths—the master bathroom had been designed to her specifications.

To reach it, one walked through a hallway lined on both sides with closets that had sliding mirrored doors. More mirrors paneled all the bathroom walls, including the walls of the walk-in shower. They even fronted the cabinets. The only touches of color were the pink-flowered sink, the dark rose commode, and the matching floor tiles.

And Candace Bradshaw herself, of course, wrapped in a rose bath sheet.

She turned on the shower, dropped the towel to the floor, and smiled at the multiple images of her naked body. Overall, she was entitled to that smile. Poverty and hard work had kept the pounds off when she was a girl; rigorous dieting and three miles a day on her treadmill kept them off as she approached her forty-second birthday. Yes, she saw the slight drooping of her full breasts, and yes, her waist was a bit thicker than on the day she traded her cherry for a gold bracelet to a dirtbag who went off to Duke and came back with his nose in the air, till she won a seat on the board of commissioners and he needed some favors.

Well, that cost him more than a gold bracelet, a bracelet that was long gone anyhow, stolen by her own pa and hocked for a gallon of Kezzie Knott’s white lightning, and how Deborah Knott ever got appointed to be a judge by a Republican governor with a bootlegging Democrat for a father she would never understand. Bound to be some dirt there somewhere, Candace thought for the hundredth time, and one of these days she was going to pick up a shovel and start digging. They still had the cleaning contract for Lee and Stephenson, Deborah Knott’s old law firm, and—

A small bruise on her thigh distracted Candace Bradshaw’s attention. Now how did she get that? she wondered as she went back to evaluating her body. Her legs had always been too short in proportion to the rest of her body and she used to envy girls with longer legs until it dawned on her that men of power were often short and short men did not take kindly to women who towered over them. Much better to be small and cuddly. Besides, her short thighs were fairly free of cellulite and her calves were still shapely, her ankles still trim. She had been good to her body, and in turn her body had been good to her.

Very good to her.

It had given her a free and clear title to this house. It had helped make her a power in her own right. It would help her take care of that bastard who—

Her head turned alertly. Was that the sound of a door latch?

She quickly stooped for the towel and covered herself even though she was supposed to be alone in the house.

“Deanna?” she called. She had taken Dee’s house key, but locked doors and drawers had never stopped her daughter. Slowed her down, maybe, but never stopped her. Exasperation tinged her voice. “Is that you?”

Silence.

She walked past the mirrored closets, through her bedroom and out into the hall.

“Dee?”

No answer and a quick look through a front window did not show Dee’s car parked on the circular drive outside.

She shrugged and returned to the bathroom. Hot water from three shower heads had begun to steam up the mirrors. She stepped into the stall, lifted her oval face to the needle-fine spray like a sunflower lifting to the sun, and sighed with happiness as water sluiced down her body, pulsating to the rhythm of her heartbeats.

This was her favorite place in the house and it was not unusual for her to shower twice a day. In periods of stress, three times.

Thank God there aren’t any calories in water
, she thought.

She could win the lottery tomorrow, the party could nominate her to run for governor, and nothing—
nothing!
—would give her the same satisfaction as knowing she could have hot water at the turn of a tap, day or night.

Growing up in a dilapidated trailer with a broken water heater that was never replaced, the only way to get hot water was if she heated it on the kitchen stove. Even then, she would often come back with a final kettle to find her mother sitting in the chipped and rust-stained bathtub she had so laboriously filled. “Well, hell, Miss Prissy-pants. What’s your problem? When I was your age, the only thing we had was an old tin washtub and five or six of us would have to use the same water. It’d be pure black by the time it was my turn. You’re lucky you got a tub big enough to wallow around in, sugar Candy, and it ain’t like I’m all that dirty or gonna pee in the water like my brothers did.”

For a moment, she almost wished her parents could see her now. That she could show them how far she had come on her own with no help from them. Admittedly, it was only a fleeting wish. The happiest day of her life was when word came that Macon and Alice Wells had died in a fiery car crash, and she was suddenly free to reinvent herself, to legally change her name to Candace and call herself that instead of the Candy on her birth certificate. Not that she could ever pretend that she came from something more than the trashiest trailer park in Colleton County. The communal memory was too long to forget that her mother was a whore and her father a shiftless drunk. All the same, their ashes were now scattered to the four winds and they could never again embarrass her by showing up at her work or by calling her to come bail them out of jail.

She reached for the bar of soap.

Cake of soap, not bar
, she reminded herself as she lathered her body in rose-scented suds. Handmade from organic goat milk. And what would Ma have made of paying five dollars for goat soap?

Or twenty dollars for a bottle of herbal shampoo?

She rinsed her hair, worked a handful of fragrant conditioner into each long chestnut tress that was artfully streaked with gold every five weeks at the best hairdresser in Dobbs, then rinsed again. Even when every trace of soap, shampoo, and conditioner was gone, she continued to stand under the pulsing water. She cupped her hands beneath her breasts and lifted them up to the water till the nipples hardened. It was as if they were caressed by a lover’s gentle hands, an undemanding lover whose only desire was to pleasure her and not himself. Unlike the brutish pawings she had endured to get where she was today, each pulse was a soft pat that calmed her nerves and suffused her senses with a feeling of well-being.

At last, she reluctantly turned off the taps and toweled her body and hair dry. She smoothed scented lotion on her skin; and when she had finished making up her face, she styled her hair with a hand dryer and a brush until it hung sleek and shining halfway down her back.

It vaguely worried her that women were advised to cut their hair shorter as they grew older, but she figured she had at least another six or eight years before she had to make that decision. Men liked long sexy hair and salesclerks still thought that she and Dee were sisters. Indeed, someone had recently taken a quick look at Dee’s hungover pasty face and baggy eyes and mistakenly assumed that Dee was the mother and she the daughter.

Candace smiled at the memory of Dee’s reaction to that.

Satisfied with her looks, she strolled over to the closet and pulled out a favorite spring dress. The white top was a respectable short-sleeved shirt with tiny pearl buttons and a boat collar cut low enough that when she leaned forward to share a confidential aside with one of her fellow board members, he could get a nice glimpse of cleavage. The skirt was green with white polka dots and cut on the bias so that it made a flirty flare at the hemline, a hemline so short that it added an illusion of length to her legs.

The dress made her feel flirty herself and would probably tempt old Harvey Underwood into patting her knees at the board meeting tonight.

As long as his hand stops at my knees and doesn’t try to slide on up under my skirt
, she thought. If it got her his vote against the planning board’s recommendations, what did she care?

Let Jamie Jacobson fume and make sarcastic highfalutin remarks that half the time nobody could understand. She’d teach that long-legged bitch a few lessons about trying to take on Candace Bradshaw.

She carried the dress on into her bedroom and laid it on the bed. As she turned to a dresser for lingerie, a voice said, “Very nice, Candy.”

“Don’t call me Candy,” she snapped as she reached for a robe to cover her nakedness. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to see you. Although I didn’t expect to see quite this much of you.”

“How did you get in?”

“You must have left the door unlocked.”

Candace gave an unladylike snort of derision. “Not hardly likely. What do you want?”

“Nothing that’s not well within your abilities.”

Candace flushed, knowing this was a dig at her lack of education. Okay, so she never went to college. Big damn deal. Most of the county commissioners had degrees from State or Carolina and who was their chair? And who ran Colleton County’s largest managerial service?

“What’s that?” she asked as the other handed her a sheet of paper.

“What do you care? It’s a little late to go reading what you’re told to sign. Just copy it on your pretty notepaper, okay?”

Candace Bradshaw’s eyes widened as she read the few short sentences typed on the paper. “ ‘I take full responsibility for my greediness’? ‘I apologize to everybody in the county who trusted me’? You’re crazy if you think I’ll write anything like this. Get the hell out of my house and stay out or I’ll—”

Her voice broke off at the sudden appearance of a small pistol. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“No?” A pull of the trigger, a soft
pfft
, and a bullet buried itself in the pile rug next to her bare feet.

Candace’s eyes widened in fear. “My God! You
are
crazy.”

“Not crazy enough to go to jail because you messed up.”

“
Me?
You’re the one who said nobody would ever find out.”

“And they wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been so greedy that they’ve started noticing.”

Appalled, Candace listened as the facts were laid out—the questions that were starting to be asked, the people who were doing the asking.

Her real desk and computer were in the third bedroom, which she had furnished as a home office, but a jerk of the pistol directed her over to the dainty desk where she wrote personal notes and cards.

It took only a moment or two to copy the typescript she had been handed.

To whom it may concern:

I have used my position to enrich myself and some of my friends. I acted alone though and I take full responsibility for my greediness. I am sincerely ashamed and I apologize to everyone in Colleton County who trusted me with their well-being.

When she finished, she signed it C
ANDACE BRADSHAW
with an angry flourish. “There! Satisfied?”