Southern Fried (3 page)

Several watchers drew in closer, forming a tighter ring around the drama. Not close enough to get in the way, but eager not to miss any of the good stuff.

One of the divers flipped a hand signal to the wrecker operator, who started pulling up cable again. Slowly.

The car inched up the ramp. Water streamed down the sides in muddy rivulets. Reddish-brown stains coated the window glass, leaving a color like someone had tried to wash away dried blood. Distinguishing between the rusty parts and the red mud was impossible.

I’m no good at identifying makes and models, but the sedan sported a boxy broad trunk and a mass of sheet metal that current gas mileage restrictions won’t allow. A Ford decal decorated the trunk.

The car’s rear end crept up the ramp. The onlook
ers craned, necks extended like vultures’ for a better look. The front seat wasn’t yet visible.

As the car emerged from the water, the front end canted sharply downward. But I didn’t have to move for a better look. The car’s passenger obliged me by floating into view against the rear window.

I’ll never look at a kid’s Magic 8 Ball in the same way again.

Murky water filled the car. Inside a shape floated into view, undefined at first. Then the face—or what remained of it—drew close to the window and took form through the murk. A human head. Not exactly a head. But not quite a skull either. A waxy yellow padding outlined the cheeks, jaw, and neck. The eye holes gaped, hollow and black.

Floating limply, the head tilted. The grinning teeth tapped once against the glass. Then the apparition floated back into a shapeless form in the murk.

The guy who’d been glad they hadn’t had to flip the car clamped his hand over his mouth and stifled a gagging sound.

T
he unexpected resurrection at the lake must have I unnerved me more than I realized, for I immediately made two mistakes: stopping by my parents’ house and calling Sheriff L.J. Peters.

L.J.’s guffaw as soon as she heard my voice told me she’d already learned about Donlee and the invented drowning of Pee Vee Probert. Pee Vee himself had shown up at the detention center to ask Donlee why he’d tried to drown him when he, Pee Vee, hadn’t even been at the lake. Then the two of them had headed off in Pee Vee’s pickup.

“Practically arm in arm,” L.J. said. “Probably headed to Tap’s to celebrate Pee Vee’s near-death experience.”

Tap’s Pool Room, the bar where Donlee worked and where Pee Vee regularly drank. And where Donlee drank and alternately lost and remorsefully reclaimed his religion.

“They’ll most likely both be back down here in detention by sometime tomorrow morning,” L.J. finished in a wry tone.

I hoped Pee Vee was the only one drinking to celebrate that he hadn’t drowned. I didn’t want a late-night call from Donlee.

As soon as I hung up the phone on L.J’s barking laughter, my mom corralled me.

“You finished, Avery? Then you can come with me to the Frank Dobbins circle meeting.”

“I don’t—”

“Those ladies would love to see you, now that you’re back in town. Some of them probably haven’t seen you in years.”

“I really need—”

“And you’re already dressed up. Though you need to spot-clean the hem of your jacket. Looks like you backed into something.”

She stuck the corner of a kitchen towel under the faucet, then proceeded to damp-mop the back of my blazer.

“Mom, I really need to stop by the hardware store—”

She picked a couple of stray red-gold hairs from my jacket. “Stayin’ up at that cabin isn’t one of your better ideas, Avery. Lord only knows, though, you’re as pigheaded as your grandfather ever had time to be. Anything could happen up there. Take that drowning this morning—”

“Mom, nobody drowned this morning. A guy made the whole thing up. It was a joke.”

“Still, that car with the body in it. That’s not the kind of place you need to be staying by yourself. Who’d they think it was?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to think about it
right now. I suppressed a shudder. The picture was too fresh in my mind—and too gruesome.

The drowning, I could believe she’d heard about. How she knew about the submerged car already was beyond me, though not much happens in Dacus that Mom doesn’t know about, mostly through her various projects.

Come to think of it, Donlee Griggs had been one of her little projects. She and I would have to have a talk about that one of these days.

But not right now. Right now, we were on our way out the door to the Frank Dobbins circle meeting.

I couldn’t very well insist on driving, since I didn’t have a car. Nothing made me question what would become of me more than reminders that I had no wheels. I’d have to attend to my lack of transportation, probably sometime after I attend to my lack of gainful employment.

Mom scooted through a yellow light in front of the Lutheran church and banked in a sweeping circle, with several bags of cans collected for recycling rattling across the back of the minivan. She parked in a diagonal space beside the church, her front wheels perched on the sidewalk.

I’ve never been certain what function the Frank Dobbins circle meetings serve—or even who Frank had been. Mostly, it seemed, a group of ladies got together at one another’s houses or in church social halls and chatted about books, ate cucumber sandwiches, and then, I assumed, spent the rest of the afternoon burping up cucumber.

My mom, being a sensible woman, didn’t seem
to fit. But she went anyway. I suspected it enabled her to enlist the aid of these ladies, their Sunday School classes, and their husbands’ checkbooks in her projects. You can’t save the world without adequate resources.

The cooing and chirping that greeted me fell in sharp contrast to the hands-in-the-pockets stares that had met me at Luna Lake that morning. But the arm-patting and polite comments masked some of the same kinds of questioning looks.

The tallest woman in the room neither smiled nor genteelly patted arms. From her vantage point near the cut-glass punch bowl, she spotted us as soon as we came through the door. She set her collision course accordingly. The lesser ships floating in her path did little to impede her progress, but her salutation reached us before she did.

“Avery. Glad you brought her, Emma.”

Seeing my great-aunt Letha in contexts other than family gatherings always brings the enormity of her into stark relief. Aunt Letha is a large person by any measure, but against lesser mortals, those less able to withstand her onslaught than her own family, she is formidable indeed.

Letha is my mother’s aunt. My greatgrandmother died in childbirth while producing my grandfather, Avery Hampton Howe. Two decades later, my greatgrandfather remarried and sired three daughters, Aletha, Hattie, and Vinnia. When my greatgrandfather later buried his second wife, Aletha assumed what all considered her birthright: the role
of matriarch. She’d held the unelected office ever since.

“Aunt Letha, it’s good to see you.” We don’t waste a lot of time hugging in my family, but a handshake seemed particularly awkward. So I simply smiled.

“Good thing you’re here. Getting out’s the best thing. Best thing to still wagging tongues.” Letha shot a look at a pillowy lady standing nearby in a tight print dress. “Afraid a mule’s gonna kick you, stand close to it. It’ll still kick. But it won’t hurt nearly as bad,” Letha said, not quietly.

The pillowy lady’s expression froze under her wiry gray curls. Like a possum caught in headlights, she couldn’t even bring herself to scurry away. I had no idea what they’d been saying about me before I got there, but Aunt Letha’s unveiled remarks left little doubt that this pinch-faced woman had been in on it.

Aunt Letha turned her attention to me, and I tried not to wince. Her directness can be rough, even on those she might intend to protect. “Good thing you’re pulling your hair back like that,” she said. “Makes that long hair look more professional. You need to meet Sylvie Garnet. She may have a wonderful opportunity for you. If you’d bothered to stop by this week, I’d have told you about it sooner.”

My mother comes by her penchant for hard-luck cases honestly, though Aunt Letha is more formidable in her aid to the downtrodden. The downtrodden better be moving pretty quick or Letha can steam right over them.

“Drat. Don’t see her right now. But I’ll introduce you. Whatever were you doing hanging around up at the lake this morning? Hattie, Vinnia. Avery’s here. Avery, you come by tomorrow. We need to go walking.”

My other two great-aunts joined us, rescuing me from further cross-examination. I really didn’t want Aunt Letha asking me about the lake.

We exchanged pleasantries, and I promised to get my mom and dad over for lunch after church. My great-aunts didn’t mention the submerged car or Donlee’s stunt—which boded badly for my reputation. Either they didn’t know—which was unlikely————or the story circulating was so embarrassing they dared not mention it. Maybe they were still so embarrassed for me over the loss of my job, they hadn’t had time yet to fret over how I’d managed to attract the attentions of Donlee Griggs.

Had anybody asked, I couldn’t really explain the loss of my job. I still wasn’t sure why I had snapped that day in court, listening to my own expert witness shamelessly perjuring himself to win my medical malpractice case. I play to win, but not at all costs. Not with an expert willing to stretch the truth beyond all recognition. I snapped. By the time I got through angrily goading Hilliard and he got through exploding, the judge declared a mistrial, the insurance company I represented settled with the injured baby’s family, and I was out of a job. True, I should’ve controlled myself in court. But my reasons were too complicated to explain in casual conversation. So I’d just keep smiling and pretending
along with everybody else in Dacus that nothing had happened.

As I looked around for Mom, Letha returned to grab my elbow and steer me at an alarming pace past clusters of dainty little ladies. I feared we’d topple someone over, bobbing as they must in Aunt Letha’s wake.

“Avery, you remember Sylvie Garnet.”

We both nodded politely. Of course I knew her, in that way you know your parents’ contemporaries. She looked a bit grayer and a tad shorter than I remembered her—a phenomenon I’d noticed since coming home. The whole town seemed older and smaller.

Of course, Sylvie Garnet still stood taller than I, slender in a willowy way, like my sister. She wore a rich red-orange Pendleton wool skirt; the matching sweater sported patchwork suede leaves. Her hair, brushed back from a well-defined widow’s peak, lay in Queen Elizabeth steel-gray waves, and she carried herself with the rigid decorum I remembered.

“Avery. I’ve been meaning to call you. We’re so thrilled you’ve come back here to Dacus.” The words rolled off in a honeyed drawl that, this close to the mountains, had to be an affectation. “I understand they had some excitement up at Luna Lake this morning.” She smiled expectantly. I just smiled back. News did travel fast.

When I didn’t volunteer anything, she continued, without looking too disappointed: “My husband has been anxious to talk to you. In a professional capacity.” She leaned forward and tapped my forearm
lightly. “Something at the plant he has questions about. He’s certain you’ll know more about it than these local boys, you being with the Calhoun Firm and all.”

“I’ll certainly be happy to talk to him.” I patted my blazer pocket as if searching for something. “I didn’t bring any business cards with me.” Actually, I didn’t have any cards. “He can reach me at Carlton Earner’s office.”

“Oh.” Her eyebrows raised. “Are you going into practice with Carlton?”

“No. But he’s been kind enough to give me the use of an office and his staff for a while.”

Whether Harrison Garnet would be able to reach me by calling Carlton’s office remained to be seen. For some unspoken reason, Lou Wray, Carlton’s receptionist, had developed a palpable dislike for me. Whenever we were out of his earshot, she all but growled and hissed. What she would do to a phone inquiry from Harrison Garnet unsettled me a bit, but right now I had no alternative.

“Actually,” Sylvie said, “the matter seems rather urgent. Something about an environmental inspection. I’m not really sure.” The shake of her head and the wave of her hand gave an unconvincing imitation of the uninvolved housewife. “Why don’t you just stop by this afternoon? After the meeting here, of course. I’ll call him and let him know you’re coming. Looks like they want us to take our seats. You go by the plant this afternoon.”

She patted my arm again to punctuate those last
words, then dismissed me by seeking out a seat with two women I didn’t recognize.

Aunt Letha had set sail for another part of the room, so I swerved by the refreshment buffet to snag something before I took a seat on the back row. With finger food, you have to choose carefully to get something substantial while not appearing gluttonous—although some of the ladies, their midsections uncomfortably harnessed by girdles and then-swollen feet spilling over their DeLiso Deb pumps, really packed away the cheese straws, petit fours, and mixed nuts without appearing self-conscious.

When I joined her, Mom smiled reassuringly, artfully ignoring my chicken puff-stuffed cheeks. I had skipped breakfast.

I also missed most of the program—something about a new book on the diaries of a Confederate war heroine. Tuning out the speaker—and squelching any thought of the body at the lake—I focused on the immediacy of what might be my first serious client. Picking up an appointment from the guy’s wife would have been an odd way to go about things at the Calhoun firm. But not in Dacus.

The only thing I knew about environmental law involved recognizing it as a tricky, regulation-laden area. I’d spent my practice life as a malpractice defense litigator. But as of a few weeks ago, I’d started from scratch. Environmental law might be as good a place to start as any—and more interesting than wills, divorces, fender benders, and real estate closings, the meat and bread of small-practice law.

The thought of general practice terrified me. I’d been used to an elaborate support network of specialist lawyers, paralegals, a law library, computer research capabilities, and a billing office. I knew how to defend a medical malpractice case, but little else. Armed only with Carlton’s receptionist, who’d obviously like to see me stuffed and mounted, I felt daunted. But that was only if I was candid with myself.