The Clouds Roll Away (2 page)

When I turned to look at the famous man again, the rising sun had drawn a bright aureole around his head. It was as if nature was saluting his celebrity. But like most famous people, he let fame perform his introductions. A Southern girl, I wondered how to address him. He was known in the music industry as RPM, but that sounded odd, particularly for the elegant gentleman standing before me. I preferred formal titles—Mr., Miss, and Mrs.

But seriously: Mr. RPM?

Deciding to avoid the issue, I took out my notebook.

“I was playing music in the house.” He stared down at the river that rolled like a long shiver to the Chesapeake Bay. “There was a sudden flash of light in the window. I thought perhaps it was lightning. But it grew brighter and brighter. I walked over and saw flames shooting from the ground.” He paused. “And I saw that the fire was in the shape of a cross.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“Such as people?” He shook his head. “I called 911 and ran outside. My bodyguard and I threw buckets of water from the kitchen—”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes. I have children in the house. I didn't want to scare them.”

“And your bodyguard . . .”

“Sid. You met him on the way in.”

Right. The man at the front door. I wrote his name in my notebook. “Sid's last name is?”

“Dog.”

“Pardon?”

He smiled apologetically. “The spelling is even worse. D-a-w-g. Seeing Eye Dawg, otherwise known as Sid.”

“Okay.”

His smile grew. The teeth were so straight and white, they were spellbinding. “Welcome to the world of rap music, Miss Harmon. Linguistically speaking, it won't make much sense. You'll have to bear with us. It is ‘Miss,' isn't it?”

“Yes. Was Sid nearby when you saw the flames? Is that how he heard you calling?”

“Excellent question. The sheriff didn't ask about that. I feel better already. My house is equipped with an intercom system. I don't like to raise my voice, ever. Sid was in the theater, watching a movie with his lady friend. With no windows in the theater, he couldn't see the fire. I reached him by intercom.”

“How many people were here last night?”

“Sid and Cujo, the other guard you met outside.”

I let Cujo's name go. For now.

“There's a cook and a maid,” he continued, “who are like family. And the rest are my actual family. My wife, some of her extended relatives, and our children.” He smiled again. “I grew up an only child. I'm enjoying the full house I missed back then.”

“And none of them saw the fire?”

“Correct. The fire began right after 11 p.m. The women and children were in bed, so was the help. When the fire truck finally arrived, the sirens drew everyone out of bed. But by then Sid and I had put out the fire. We told the children there was some misunderstanding; the women took them back to bed. I would tell you to talk to them, but you'll need a translator.”

I looked up from my notes. “What do they speak?”

“African,” he said. “More specifically, a tribal dialect from Liberia.”

I flipped through my notebook. “When you called the FBI this morning, you said the sheriff 's department was . . .”

“Lackadaisical,” he said. “This is a cross burning. Somebody trespassed onto my property and set fire to a cross. You see how close it was to my house. It could have burned the place down—which might be the whole point of this hateful exercise. I complained to the sheriff, but he acted as if this was a friendly barbecue. For all I know he's covering up for these history fanatics.”

Since “history fanatic” described most of Richmond, I asked, “Could you be more specific?”

“That historic preservation committee, those people living along the river. They've complained about my remodel for years. My home improvements undermine the plantation's authentic history, they say. Perhaps they decided to just burn us down.”

I made more notes following his statement and said, “If you don't mind, for the official paperwork, I'll need your legal name.”

“Robert Paul Masters. When I started in the music business thirty years ago, I decided to use my initials: RPM. Marvelous stage name. Albums were called RPMs. For revolutions per minute?”

“I grew up with CDs.”

“Ancient history.” He sighed. “How long?”

“Pardon?”

“How long until we find out who did this?”

“Hate crimes are a priority with the FBI,” I said, sounding like the official investigator. “The evidence will get fast-tracked by the lab.”

He smiled. “Miss Harmon, please. You do not have to spare my feelings. How long? I can handle the truth.”

The truth? Cross burnings were nocturnal acts of bitterness, popping up in rural areas where physical distance separated neighbors and allegiances snaked back generations, particularly in the South. Figuring out who burned this cross would be like unraveling a Gordian knot glued down with hate.

But it seemed cruel to tell him, no matter how politely he insisted. The weight of last night was still on him.

So I gave him another truth, one I could be sure of.

“I will stay on this case until we know who's behind it,” I said. “You have my word.”

chapter two

I
headed west from Rapland and just before Battlefield Park, turned down an oyster-shell drive. The fractured calciferous layers glowed like broken pearls and led to a plantation dating back to a 1662 land grant from King Charles II. The plantation prospered until its slaves were freed, until carpetbaggers and federal soldiers carried away everything that wasn't nailed down. When the Depression hit, snakes slithered through the rotting pine floors and the French wallpaper hung like discarded bandages from the walls. It took a Yankee to save the place. James Flynn drove south from New Jersey in 1948, bearing a self-made fortune in the commodities of necessity—sugar, corn, bootleg— and the curse of so many Irishmen, falling for underdogs. Flynn spent years restoring the grand house and eventually Belle Grove returned to the small coterie of historic plantations along the James River.

His granddaughter ran the place these days, and when I walked around to the back of the main house, Flynn Wellington was in the glass conservatory, scooping soil into gilded pots. The air was moist and tasted of trapped chlorophyll. To either side, wooden pallets displayed poinsettias with burgundy leaves lush as crushed velvet.

“Why, Raleigh, how nice to see you.” Flynn lifted both hands, her cotton gloves smothered with black soil. “I'd give you a hug but you'd be picking dirt off your clothes the rest of the day.”

Flynn and I had been classmates at St. Catherine's School and were acquainted through her mother's penultimate husband. There were five husbands in all. Number four was an attorney my father liked—there weren't many—and on sweltering August afternoons, we would drive out to Belle Grove so the adults could sit on the wraparound porch drinking iced beverages while Flynn and I swam in the river.

“I heard y'all moved to Oregon,” she said.

“Washington. It was only temporary.”

“I can't imagine leaving Virginia.” She picked up the spade, folding the soil again. Her blonde hair bounced with the motion. “How is your mother?”

She pronounced it the Old Dominion way,
muh-thah
.

“Fine, thanks. Yours?”

“She moved to Florida with what's-his-name. What can I do for you, Raleigh?”

“Last night somebody burned a cross at Rapland.”

“Please. ‘Rapland' sounds like a theme park. You know very well the name of that plantation is Laurel.”

Yes, I knew. I knew all kinds of things. By junior high I could recite long passages of internecine gossip about families who traced their heritage to the House of Burgesses, but I only had one foot in that world. David Harmon married my mother when I was five years old. To this day, I couldn't trace my paternal heritage back one generation to my birth father. Not that I needed to: David Harmon was every girl's dream dad.

“The gentleman who owns Rapland thinks you're trying to run him off his property. Is that true?”

“Are you implying something?”

“I'm not implying, Flynn. I'm asking flat out.”

“He's ruining that place,” she said. “I don't want him there. I've never said otherwise. I've been saying it since he moved in four years ago.”

The fine bones in her neck looked as brittle as glass rods. The pretty girl I once knew was lost to hard work. Several years ago, to keep up with expenses, Flynn and her husband had turned Belle Grove into a bed-and-breakfast.

“Flynn, there were people in the house. Children. The flames were burning ten feet from the door.”

She dropped the gardening tool, wiping the back of her wrist across her forehead. “It's been awhile since you've been out this way, Raleigh, so let me explain it to you. My guests pay good money to stay here. They want a romantic retreat. They expect a visit with the historic past. We were doing fine until that rapper took over Laurel. Ever since, it's been rap music blaring down-river, party boats up and down the water. How do you think that's affected my business? Is this something I can call the FBI about?”

“That fire could have burned the place down.”

“Good.”

“Excuse me?”

“Good,” she repeated. “Then maybe he'll leave and somebody could rebuild Laurel. Somebody who will treat that beautiful property with the dignity it deserves.”

I leveled my gaze. “Flynn, I want you to answer truthfully. Did you have anything to do with burning that cross?”

She picked up the tool, waving it. “Look around. Do you see what I'm doing? I don't have time to terrorize anybody. I'm working. But we're old friends, so let me be very clear: when that guy goes back to Hollywood, or New York, or wherever he came from, I'm throwing the biggest party Richmond has seen since Antietam.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Oh, you're invited.”

“I'll pass.”

Her blue eyes flashed with indignation. “Here you come to Belle Grove and insinuate—”

“Flynn?”

We both turned.

At the back of the conservatory, where fanned banana palms brushed the peaked glass roof, the stalks parted to reveal a man walking toward us from the door to the house. He looked familiar in some distant way, somebody I'd met but couldn't place again.

“Oh, Stuart.” Flynn pulled off her gloves. “Time got away from me. I've got everything ready. It's all in the parlor room.”

He wore tan chinos and a blue cashmere V-neck, his face more hard than rugged and capped by blond hair shaved to the scalp. He turned to me.

“This is Stuart Morgan,” said Flynn with perfunctory politeness. “Stuart, Raleigh Harmon. Raleigh was just leaving.”

I shook his hand. He gave an automatic sort of smile.

“Raleigh was just leaving,” Flynn repeated.

Just for that, I took out my card and held it out to her. After staring at it for a long moment, she accepted it with a noble sort of weariness. I walked down the aisle, feeling their silence behind me, and stepped outside. A man wearing an I ♥ NY sweatshirt and jeans sat in a rocking chair on the front porch. He smoked a cigarette and flicked ash on the floor.

I drove down the oyster-shell road. A column of walnut trees reached for the blue sky like ancient black hands. It was mesmerizing land and I sympathized with Flynn's devotion to it. But as I pulled onto Williamsburg Road, heading back to town, I wondered about the past's magnetic hold. Flynn clung to her history like someone afraid of perishing, someone drowning who succeeds only in taking the saving grace down with her.

But most of all I wondered about her statement and the question it left hanging in the conservatory's moist air.

She did not have time to terrorize an unwelcome neighbor, she said.

And if she did . . . ?

chapter three

H
aving it my way, I ate two Whoppers with large fries and a Coke at the Burger King on Williamsburg Road in Sandston. For entertainment, I watched heads swiveling to look at my K-Car.

A certifiable bucket of bolts, my Bureau ride was apparently designed by engineers hoping to wipe covetousness off the face of the earth. It was a white rectangle with windows like sandwich boards. Inside things got worse. The AM radio barely worked, the heater blew cold, and the bench seats were smothered with grooved vinyl. Over the years, the sun had bleached the plastic to a color resembling dead skin.

And yet, as I licked salt from my fingers and headed back into town, it didn't matter.

I was home.

Home.

In September I got shipped out on a disciplinary transfer initiated by my supervisor, Victoria Phaup. She sent me all the way to Seattle but like a bad boomerang I came right back. The bosses above Phaup lifted my transfer for work above and beyond the call, and I was home for Thanksgiving. More importantly, I was home for the dreaded anniversary of November 29, the night four years ago when somebody shot my dad in an alley and left him for dead. His murder remains unsolved.

Phaup was no dummy. Rather than reassign the hideous

K-Car that she had handpicked for me in the first place, she kept it waiting for my return.

But as I drove into town, my heart skipped at the sight of magnolia trees dark green even in the winter, and downtown Richmond where the buildings glistened in the sun like perfect crystals, and the mighty James River, rolling over its boulders.

For all its troubled history and racial strife, this place was home.

And few things ever feel as good as coming back to where you belong, and realizing the place waited for you.

Since I wanted to stay, I went straight to Phaup's office after parking at the Bureau compound off Parham Road. Among her accusations, she claimed I operated too independently. If daily check-ins kept me in Richmond, I could swallow my pride.