Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (14 page)

Her face was relatively unlined for her age, smoothly white. Kate’s grandmother had this nearly flawless complexion—fed by the constant humidity and vigilantly protected from the damaging rays of the sun. It was the mark of gentility in their generation, a Southern legacy of climate and convention.

“Ms. Mays, my name is Kathrine August,” Kate said, smiling. She didn’t offer her hand. It was perhaps acceptable in the city for women to shake hands, but it was not the custom in rural Georgia. “I’m a reporter for an Atlanta newspaper, and I’d like to talk to your husband, if he has time.”

The curve of Velma Mays’s mouth, a small Cupid’s bow, widened. Her blue eyes sparkled behind the wire-frame bifocals. “Time?” she questioned, poking fun at Kate’s politeness with her friendly smile. “Wilford Mays’s got nothing
but
time, and that man surely likes talking, especially to somebody as pretty as you. Just as pretty as a picture. You from Atlanta originally?”

They were about to play an old Southern game called
Who Are You Kin To.
Kate was as familiar with its rules as her hostess. “Tupelo,” she said readily.

“I don’t believe I know any Augusts,” Velma said, raising her chin to get a better view of Kate through the half-moons at the bottom of her glasses, as if trying to judge her genealogy by an examination of her features. “Who’s your mother, dear?”

“She was a Montgomery. Her daddy was Boyd Montgomery, but he was raised on the coast. Near Savannah.”

“Montgomery,” Velma said, crinkling her forehead in an attempt to place the family. “There’s a big family of Montgomerys lives near Dalton. Wilford had some business with a man there named Herbert. Any kin to your granddaddy?”

“I don’t think so,” Kate said truthfully. She knew it didn’t really matter if they made a connection. It was the attempt that was important.

“Well, no matter. I’m sure your family’s real proud of you. A reporter, you say. Why, when I was growing up, we’d never have thought about a woman being a reporter.”

Kate smiled again, feeling no reply was necessary. Apparently none was expected because Velma continued.

“Why don’t you sit down, Miss August, while I take these beans in and then find Wilford for you. He won’t have gone far. There isn’t far to go out here,” she said with a laugh. “And I’ll bring you some tea while you’re waiting. This weather is just awful. I don’t know how you people in the city stand all that concrete. It just seems to magnify the heat.”

Kate sat down obediently in one of the white wicker rockers that flanked a matching table. All the furniture was lined up in a row, backs against the front of the house, facing outward for the best view of the passing traffic on the narrow road.

“I’ll be right back,” Velma promised. She bustled by to disappear through the screen door. Kate had caught the faintest whiff of rose water as she passed, pleasantly reminiscent.

Despite what Barrington had told her about Wilford Mays, despite the trepidation she’d felt in coming out here alone, the visit so far seemed as pleasant as an afternoon spent on her grandmother’s wisteria-shaded veranda in Mississippi. After a few minutes, Velma Mays pushed open the screen with her elbow to carry out a glass of tea, the clinking movement of ice inviting. She put it down on the table by Kate and handed her the small paper napkin she carried.

“Now you just sit here and try to keep cool while I locate Wilford,” she said. She walked to the side of the porch and, putting her hand on the column, she stepped down the three low steps, and then disappeared around the corner of the house.

Kate picked up the glass and sipped. The tea was sweetened, of course, and flavored with something that she couldn’t identify. The taste was tantalizingly familiar, but elusive. She took a larger swallow, rolling the coldness over her tongue.

“Grape juice,” Wilford Mays said. He was standing on the bare patch that Velma’s small feet had made through the years, trampling the grass as she had stepped off those low steps, always in the same exact spot, the repetition demanded by the placement of her steadying hand on the porch column.

“Of course,” Kate said. “I couldn’t quite figure it out.”

“Velma’s mother always put grape juice in her ice tea.”

“It’s wonderful,” Kate said, preparing to stand.

“Don’t bother to get up. Velma said you wanted to talk to me. Something about a paper in Atlanta.”

“I’m Kathrine August—” Kate began only to be interrupted.

“You’re doing that series on the bomber,” he said. “The one they’re calling Jack the Tripper.”

Kate felt a tug of unease that he had so readily recognized her name. He was watching her reaction, his eyes penetrating in a way his wife’s had not been. He was as spare as Velma was rounded, dressed in overalls over a plaid shirt, both as meticulously starched and ironed as his wife’s housedress.

“That’s right,” she said, offering the same smile that had created a matching friendliness in Mrs. Mays. His eyes remained cold, and the thin lips never moved. He ascended the steps and folded his length into the swing his wife had vacated.

“I don’t have nothing to do with those,” he said. There was no rancor in his denial. Only a statement of fact.

Kate was surprised. She had been prepared for coyness, a denial of his reputation even, but not this open disclaimer of responsibility for the current murders. She needed to be careful of what she said, she reminded herself. Mays was no fool. Barrington had characterized him as both shrewd and cunning.

“That
is
why you’re here, ain’t it?” he asked.

“Not really,” Kate lied. “I wanted to talk to you about Judge Thornedyke Barrington.”

“I read your piece. You seem to think mighty highly of that conniving bastard. Talked about him like he’s some kind of hero. He’s got you just as hoodwinked as the rest of ’em.”

“Hoodwinked?” she repeated.

“All that mess you wrote about his fine record, his
integrity.
” His inflection of the word was an insult. “That’s all it is, Miss August. A bunch of mess. He railroaded me, and if he’d do it to me, then you can be sure he done it to a heap of others. I’m surprised somebody ain’t tried to blow up that crooked son of a bitch before now.”

“Why would Judge Barrington want to railroad you, Mr. Mays?”

“’Cause he was in cahoots with the cops. In their pockets. They spit, and he had to jump. He needed to make a name for hisself. His daddy had a career in politics all laid out for his boy, and then ole Jack come along and ruined it.” He laughed, the sound without humor, bitter and vindictive.

“And you’ve always blamed Judge Barrington for your conviction,” she suggested.

“You trying to get me to say I got a motive for blowing the bastard sky-high? You got a microphone hid somewhere? That’s been tried, only I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I just thought, since you feel so strongly, that you might like to comment on Judge Barrington’s character, to provide a different slant. Something I could include in the series as a contrast to the view of him we offered our readers before.”

“You ain’t interested in my views. You’re just interested in making a case against me for being the one trying to blow him up. Only you ain’t quite figured out why all them other people got blowed up, too. Why do you think I’d do those, Miss August? What’s your explanation for all those other people dying?”

“All I know is, from what you’ve told me, that you aren’t an admirer of Thorne Barrington.”

“I ain’t told you nothing,” he said. There was no discernible change of expression and his voice had not changed, but suddenly malice toward her was in his eyes. “And I don’t
intend
to tell you nothing. You or no other reporter.”

“Did the authorities ever come out to talk to you about the bombings, Mr. Mays?”

His lips moved, deepening the creases age had carved into the lean cheeks, but his cold eyes didn’t change. “Somebody come all right. Scared Velma to death. She thought they was fixing to put me away again on some other trumped-up charge, ’cause I keep fertilizer in the barn, maybe, and folks been known to make bombs out of that. Took me more’n a week to calm her down.”

“And you still deny that you had any part in the school bombing?” she asked. That wasn’t what he’d been charged with, but she wanted to see how he responded to the suggestion.

“Somebody told you I did that?” he said, a pretended disgust at the ridiculousness of that accusation in his tone. “Do I look like a man that would want to blow up a school or want to kill some poor little children? Do I strike you as that kind of man?”

His eyes were openly mocking now, the questions sarcastic, and Kate felt a shiver of apprehension. Barrington had been right. A venomous old snake. Still dangerous, still deadly.

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Miss August. One you might do well to remember. A bomber’s a special kind of man ’cause he ain’t real particular about who gets blowed up by what he does. He can’t afford to be particular. Anybody could have opened those packages. A secretary. Anybody. Or they could have gone off by accident ’fore they ever reached the person they was intended for. A man who sends bombs just don’t care. You understand what I’m telling you? He don’t
care
who gets blowed up in the process of getting what he wants. A bomber’s got to have that kind of mind. You remember that. He purely don’t care.”

“Even if it’s children who get blown up?” Kate asked, forcing her eyes to hold his.

“You ain’t old enough to remember how it used to be down here, are you?”

“No,” she agreed softly. There was some shadow of the irrational in his eyes and clearly now there was hatred, gray and cold as winter. “I don’t remember. I’m just glad, despite the efforts of people like you, it’s not
that
way any longer.”

“You get off my property, girl,” he said, his voice as low as hers had been. “Don’t you ever come near us again. I don’t like you, and I sure don’t like that piece of trash paper you write for. Now you get out of here before I regret lettin’ you.”

She stood up, frightened, despite her determination not to be, by the bizarre transformation. Mays was openly menacing now, no longer bothering to hide his hostility.

“You ready for some more tea, dear?” Velma asked, coming out of the screen door with a cut-glass pitcher in her hand. “Oh, surely you’re not thinking about leaving,” she protested in dismay when she saw Kate was standing. “You just got here. And you haven’t even touched your tea.”

“Now, Mother,” Wilford said, the polite veneer again in place before his wife. “Miss August has a long drive ahead of her, and she knows her business better than you. Besides, she don’t
like
your tea.” There was a deliberate cruelty about the comment, considering the effort Velma had made to be kind.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, dear. I should have asked. I can fix you another. Fix it any way you like.”

“The tea’s delicious, Ms. Mays, but your husband’s right. I do have a long drive, and I better get started.”

“I hope Wilford told you what you wanted to know. Since you came so far to talk,” Velma said, smiling at her.

Kate stepped off the porch onto the front steps. She could still feel his eyes focused on her, cold as a snake, although she didn’t look at him again. “Mr. Mays has been very helpful. Thank you, ma’am, for your hospitality.”

“You come again, dear. We’re always glad to have company.”

I
T WAS AFTER FOUR
before she got back to the office. She had spent the drive into Atlanta thinking about what Mays had told her. Every time she remembered the madness in his eyes, she shivered, but she was really no closer to knowing whether or not he had had anything to do with the current bombings.

She still was left with the possibility of three different bombers, and no way to know if there was a connection between them. Obviously, she had been targeted because of the series—obvious unless she was willing to believe that Thorne Barrington had sent the confetti-filled package because she had entered his house uninvited. If he had, then he had also been the person who had broken into her apartment while she was out of town and put the matching confetti in her bed.

But if that were true, why would he agree to meet with her—despite his well-known hatred of the media? And what did Wilford Mays have to do with the Tripper bombings? There was no doubt he hated Barrington enough to do almost anything, but as he had reminded her, there would also have to be a link between him and the other victims. Logic told her there couldn’t be three bombers, but she couldn’t decide where the incidents overlapped.

She stopped by Lew’s office on her way to the newsroom. He was working, on the phone, top shirt button undone and his tie loosened, but he motioned her in. She sat on the other side of the cluttered desk and listened to him handle whatever problem had arisen with his usual efficiency. He hung up, jotted a final note on his desk calendar and then looked up to smile at her.

“Change your mind?” he asked. In contrast to the gray hatred in Wilford Mays’s, Lew’s brown eyes were full of understanding. He thought she had come to beg off the series.

“No, but I probably should,” she admitted. “I just spent the afternoon with Wilford Mays. Remember him?”

“Mays?” Lew repeated, questioning, but his memory was better than hers had been. “The school bomber?”

“
Alleged
bomber,” she corrected, smiling.

“You think he has some connection to what’s going on now?”

“Not if you consider only method, but the interesting thing is that Barrington was the judge who finally put him away. On some lesser charge, of course, but he burned him with as much time as he could. Barrington’s convinced Mays did the school bombing. Mays, as you can imagine, hates Barrington’s guts.”

“So what does that mean as far as the Tripper bombings are concerned?” Lew asked carefully.

“Damned if I know,” Kate said, shrugging, feeling the frustration of not knowing as strongly as she had on the way back into the city. “But it’s
got
to mean something. Doesn’t it?”

Lew said nothing for a moment, thinking about whether it did or not, she guessed, trying as she had been to fit the pieces of the triangular-shaped puzzle together. Only, Lew was probably not considering the confetti bomber as part of the equation.