Out Of Time (23 page)

Returning to 15-501, I turned right, then followed the long driveway, as it wound over hills and around sharp curves, to Pete Bunn’s farm. Obviously, he valued his privacy. I wasn’t sure what I would say to him when I arrived at his doorstep, but I was acutely aware of three things: one, he had been among the last people that I knew of to see both Roy Taylor and George Carter alive; two, I lacked firepower, thanks to the office ransacker; and three, I wasn’t in the mood to add a bullet hole to the list of my current injuries. I reminded myself to ask Bobby D. if I could borrow one of his many firearms, and continued up the dusty lane.

Just as I reached the crest of a hill and spotted a white farmhouse nestled in a hollow below me, I noticed a small dust storm making its way toward me: another vehicle on its way out toward the main road. I automatically slowed down. It wasn’t a very wide road, and we’d have to pass each other eventually. But the vehicle in front of me picked up speed, churning dust until I could barely make out that it was a truck. It roared past in a whoosh of engine and dirt, blinding me and forcing me to veer over onto the grass. I caught a glimpse of taillights through the dust before the truck reached the top of the hill and disappeared from sight.

Any normal person would have considered the situation and retreated. Not me. I made my way toward the farmhouse, pulled the big-ass Cutlass to a stop in the front yard beside a white Chevy Impala. I pounded on the front door for a good three minutes without success. Okay, I thought, if that had been Pete Bunn in the truck, he was mighty late for an important appointment. At any rate, there was no one home and that left me free to snoop.

But what would I do if he returned to find me poking around his property? Trespassing was a surefire way to get my cellulite studded with lead, and I wasn’t anxious to have a backside that resembled a Little Debbie raisin cake. I had a better idea. I made my way back to the main road without seeing anyone, and returned to the horse farm. A hand- painted sign proclaimed it to be the LAZY K RANCH. That was an understatement. Not a dragonfly stirred in the spring heat. I followed the sounds of whinnying to a paddock behind a long barn, where I discovered a plump woman with gray hair combing a colt. She agreed to rent me an overweight nag, which looked as though it was about two months away from the glue factory, provided I could demonstrate that I knew the difference between a trot and a canter. I was pretty sure my horse had asthma, but agreed to swap twenty dollars for a few hours of freelance exploring.

“She’s old, but sneaky,” the owner explained, slapping on a saddle and tightening the straps. “You’ve got to be firm with her or she’ll try tricks like this.” She kicked the mare in the stomach, causing its belly to deflate with a hearty whoosh that emanated from both ends of the nag. The saddle slipped to one side, where it dangled a mere inches from a sudden urine stream. “See what I mean? That’s why we call her Miss Bitch, even though her real name is Beauty.”

I decided that Miss B. and I would get along just fine. We had a lot in common, including a nickname.

I took Miss B. through her paces under t Spact=“he disapproving eye of her owner and was finally cleared for takeoff. It felt good to be back in the saddle again. Men always wonder why women love riding horses so much. I’d tell, but it’s a state secret. As I rode off toward a nearby hill where Pete Bunn’s farmland abutted the pasture, I remembered a story I’d heard from a Chatham County deputy a few months ago. It seems that one night last spring, four migrant workers had been caught on a barn’s security video having their way with a mare from a Chatham County farm. Three of the men had left town and headed south toward the border, suffering from acute embarrassment. The remaining miscreant had served six months in jail, no doubt being paid back by incarcerated horse lovers. I wondered if the Lazy K Ranch and Miss B. had been in on the action.

“Mi quapita,” I whispered to Miss B. She didn’t blink an eyelash. Definitely not the same horse.

Pete Bunn’s farm was separated from the Lazy K by a chicken-wire fence that sagged to the ground along much of its perimeter. This was fortunate. I don’t think Miss B. could have jumped a rabbit hole, much less a fence. We picked our way over the wire and, when she spotted a nice clump of new grass ahead, Miss B. impressed me by picking up steam. Soon we were deep onto Pete Bunn’s land, and I had the passable excuse of having gotten lost should he discover me on his property. I would simply claim to be sorry and make like heigh-ho, Silver back to the Lazy K.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I started with the farmhouse. It was still deserted. I tied Miss B. to the porch railing, then searched for a way inside. No such luck. The doors and windows were locked securely. I did not want to force my way inside, at least not if it meant breaking a window or leaving other telltale clues of my visit. I contented myself with peering into the darkness of the interior. It was a tidy if uninspired home, heavy on brown-checked upholstery, cheap pine furniture, television sets and vinyl-covered kitchen chairs. The usual decor for an old bachelor cop. When I returned to the porch, I found that Miss B. had christened the front steps with her own unique housewarming gift, no small feat considering she’d had to back up to do it.

“You’re one talented lady,” I told her, remounting for more exploration. I didn’t bother to clean it up. What the hell was Pete Bunn going to do? Call in a forensic team to run tests on horse poop?

It wasn’t a working farm, just a small farmhouse next to a modest barn used primarily for storing tools. The rest of the property consisted of empty paddocks and lots of green pastures. There wasn’t an ounce of livestock to be found— unless you counted the butterflies swarming over the un- tended fields and the mounted deer head I’d seen through one of the farmhouse windows. Maybe Pete Bunn hadn’t owned the place long enough to get his god’s little acre going yet.

After surveying the empty fields, I meandered through the surrounding pine forest and discovered a clearing about a quarter of a mile from the house. It was linked to the main dirt road by a lane hardly wide enough for the combined size of Miss B.‘s rump and mine. The clearing included an impromptu dumping site about twenty feet across, the kind found on f Snd loarms everywhere. Rather than cope with the hassle of EPA regulations or local restrictions, lots of landowners chose to dump dead livestock, brush, barn muck, used oil and other assorted junk in an isolated spot away from the watershed. We’d had our own dumping ground when I was a kid, and I helped Grandpa sprinkle powdered lime over the carcass of a newly departed animal many times.

Of course, Pete Bunn had no livestock, and the farm wasn’t a working operation. So what the hell did he need a dumping ground for?

I dismounted and snooped around the junk pile, lifting up old mattress springs, rotting wooden crates and piles of branches without discovering much. I found nothing more exciting than a partially burned black-and-green checked lumberjack shirt stuck to a set of old mattress springs and an ancient army boot with the sole rotted out. The shirt intrigued me, but then I discovered a whole mound of discarded clothing—including women’s clothing from the 1930s—and thought it likely that Pete Bunn had been cleaning out his attic. More searching revealed a couple of old farm tools, a smashed-up baby safety seat, some cracked flower pots and a small mountain of rotting pecans. Nothing to write home about, though I bemoaned the loss of so many potential pecan pies. Ah well, at least I’d enjoyed a nice afternoon with a nonhuman beast. There were worse ways to pass the time. I hoped Pete Bunn was as innocuous as his farm was and decided to return later for a person-to-person chat. 

By the time I headed back to Durham, it was late afternoon, and I felt rested and ready to tackle an interview with the missing George Carter’s wife. His neighborhood was easy to find.

Durham is an odd town when it comes to urban renewal. Beautifully restored historic homes stand side by side with ramshackle mill houses owned by absentee slumlords. Even the best neighborhoods are never more than a few blocks from the worst. Yet it seemed to work, having the good alongside the bad like that. Durham was a town that didn’t try to hide its problems. It was one reason I liked calling it home.

George Washington Carter lived in a solid middle-class neighborhood just off of Duke Street, about half a mile before the 1-85 interchange. It was a five-block-square area of brick ranch homes perched on neat rectangles of well-tended lawns. In other words, the kind of neighborhood where people grilled out in the backyard on Sunday afternoon and watched you with wary eyes when you strolled by their yards, especially if they’d never seen you before. It was not the kind of neighborhood you walked away from without warning. Where in the world had George Carter gone?

An old black Toyota was parked in the driveway of his house, so someone was home. I was in luck. His wife answered the door before my finger touched the bell.

“Thank god you’re here. I’m running late.” She thrust a plump brown baby into my arms and rushed past, reaching the driveway about the same time the little tyke began to yowl. “His name is George Jr.,” she called back to me. “Jiggle him and he’ll stop. I just fed him and changed his diaper. I expressed s SI e yowlome milk for later. The bottles are on the second shelf of the refrigerator. I’m working in the emergency room of Durham Regional tonight. Call if you have problems. I’ll sign your time sheet when I get home.”

I looked down at the baby. He stared back blankly, his dark almond eyes trying in vain to focus on my face. I’m not an expert on children, but this little sucker couldn’t have been more than a few months old. His head wobbled on his neck as though it was attached with a ball bearing. “I’m not the baby-sitter,” I shouted after her before she could zoom away.

She dashed back and snatched away her pride and joy before I could kidnap him. The kid stopped crying the second he felt his mother’s touch. I tried not to be insulted.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded, blocking the front door with her thin frame. For someone who had just had a baby, she was downright emaciated. Her dark skin could not disguise the even darker circles under her eyes, and her head seemed almost shrunken beneath the mountain of beaded braids piled on top. Her nurse’s uniform hung off her limply, as if worry was eating her away from the inside and the baby was working on her from the outside.

I figured I had ten minutes tops before the real baby-sitter showed up. I’d have to make it quick. I pulled out my identification—which was not and never had been strictly legit, but could fool most people outside of law enforcement—and gave her a brief rundown on why I was there. She heard only the part she wanted to hear.

“You’re trying to find George?” she asked, opening the door wide and gesturing for me to come inside. All suspicion vanished as her face lit up with hope.

I hated myself for causing her voice to rise with optimism. If George didn’t want to be found, it was unlikely that I would ever be able to find him. I’d been down that empty road before. “Sort of,” I explained. “It’s all part of my broader investigation into Roy Taylor’s death.”

“He was good friends with Roy,” she explained. “It took a lot out of him when Roy died.” With that, she was off and running. The words rushed out of her in a torrent. Either she was desperate for help in finding her husband or she was a single mother on overdrive.

“We’d been dating about a year when Roy was murdered,” she added. “Before that, he and George were as tight as can be. They really had a connection. Do you think George’s disappearance had anything to do with Roy’s death? That happened such a long time ago.”

Before I could stop her, she marched into a small living room that was miles cleaner than my own, plopped George Jr. on the couch, then pulled out two fat photo albums from beneath the coffee table. She opened one and showed me several pages of photos featuring her husband and Roy Taylor. They were drinking beer, grilling burgers, holding up long strings of fish and goofing for the Sfinos feacamera—a pictorial of male bonding in action. “That’s at Roy’s fishing cabin,” she explained. “They went up there all the time. It was on some smaller lake a few miles from Lake Gaston. I don’t know exactly where. It was strictly no women allowed. We hadn’t been together long enough then for me to tell him to cut out that shit.” She complained happily, clinging to the normalcy of bitching about her husband, pretending that he hadn’t disappeared more than two months ago.

“I was happy he was friends with Roy,” she continued. “It was hard for George back then, finding friends on the job. At the time, he was the only African-American patrolling their beat. They hired a lot more later on. Roy was the only one he could talk to about the job. They really got along. It tore him up when Roy was murdered. He didn’t even hear about it until I told him the next afternoon. He’d driven up to the cabin in the morning, before the murder hit the papers. I broke the news to him when he called me later that afternoon—”

“George went up to the cabin alone?” I interrupted. “Before he knew Roy was dead?”

She nodded. “He promised Roy he’d do some repair work on the icebox up there. George was handy about things like that. I don’t know what to do now when something gives out. I don’t have a clue.”

Neither do the rest of us, I thought to myself.

“He was so upset when I told him about Roy,” she said. “Later on, he told me that he’d just sat there, staring off the end of the dock, wondering why Gail had done it. Wondering if he could have stopped it from happening. He’d followed them home that night, you know, to make sure they arrived safely. But he left right away because Gail’s mother was waiting for them, angry they’d been so late returning from the bar. He didn’t want to interfere. He kept thinking that if only he had stayed a little while, things might have been different. He was never the same after that. I sometimes wonder if Roy’s death was what made George…” Her voice trailed off into silence.