Uncivil Seasons (39 page)

At the heading of the other letter was the name of a legal firm in Cape Hatteras. It advised me formally of instructions received last month from a client, Walter Charles Stanhope, regarding a bequest. Mr. Stanhope’s desire was that in the event he should predecease me, I should come into possession of property of his, consisting of a three-room house and a lot fifty by a hundred feet at Shore Walk on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. This letter ended: “I regret to have to inform you that Mr. Stanhope passed away at his home during the night of April 10. The house has been closed. Please advise us at your earliest convenience as to your wishes in this matter.”

In my living room, holding the lawyer’s letter, I saw myself creak open the bleached-gray door of the small house, shadowy under mossbearded oaks. I saw the fishing rods inside the door, saw the phonograph records still on the turntable, saw the conch shells dusty pink in their cabinet. Standing by my car in Hillston, I walked into Mr. Stanhope’s bedroom, which I had never entered, and took down the black, frayed, dusty case of his violin from atop a mahogany wardrobe, and sat down on the bed where he had died, and held it. Standing in the noise of downtown Hillston, I traveled back along the coast of the silent Outer Banks, back along the thin, flurried wild oats rustling together as they bent away from the sea, back where spume of the gray waves rolling in from an old world was salt in my eyes.

At the municipal building, Cuddy Mangum stood in the corridor outside my office, pinning to the bulletin board more of the notices with which, Etham Foster told me, our new captain was rapidly reorganizing his unnerved department.

“You’re early,” Cuddy said, spitting thumbtacks out of his mouth into his hand. “B.M., referring, of course, to old Briggs Monmouth, isn’t showing up ’til four, if then. Plus, he says we’re going to meet downstairs in the courtroom. Says he’s too old to climb all these stairs and too fat to ride in the elevator. Fact is, the old bastard just wants to refresh our memories about who paid for that courtroom and who thinks he still owns it.” Cuddy rubbed his eyes; there were dark circles under them now.

Leaning on my cane, I followed him into the big corner office where the Elvis Presley poster had replaced Fulcher’s bowling trophies, and where there was finally room enough for all of Cuddy’s books. He tapped his pencil on the large metal desk. “Now, listen here, Justin. The hardheaded truth is we just haven’t shown Mister Moize enough to tie Willis in on the Dollard case. He’s not going to take it to the grand jury. So I don’t want you to limp off brokenhearted.” His head at its old waggish tilt, he added, “You must have come in here six hours early to traipse around showing off your cane, which does have that Ashley-gimping-home-to-Tara look to it, I’ll give you that.” He stood, looking out his window over the little skyline of Hillston, now flat-edged in the bright spring sky. “Maybe I should get a cane,” he said. “Maybe that would help.”

I told him, “Alice thinks Briggs may change her mind one of these days.”

“Well, I hope Alice is going on inside information.” His head shook away thoughts, and he turned back. “Seeing as you have shown up a week before the doctor said to…”

Then there was a knock at his door, and Hiram Davies, frozen-faced as a palace guard, stepped in. “Captain, Mr. Moize needs to see you right away. I’m sorry if I interrupted. Excuse me.” With a starched nod, he backed out.

“What now?” Cuddy said. “Okay. How about start going through these reports, General.” He tapped a stack of papers on his desk. “Crime marches on, you know.” He sighed and yanked up on his cowlick and left.

So for an hour I read laconic tales told by patrolmen of my fellow Hillstonians; most of them mysteries only in God’s plot, which has always escaped detection. A car dealer on the bypass borrowed a friend’s shotgun and blew off his own head because his business was failing; his body was discovered by his eight-year-old daughter. A fight took place outside the college bierhaus between two high school students and two Pakistani university undergraduates whom the locals mistook for Iranians; one, an epileptic, was hospitalized. A battered wife blinded her husband by throwing liquid Drano in his face. An East Hillston senior citizen’s lung was punctured by a knife wound inflicted by a fourteen-year-old mugger. A North Hillston boy on speed killed his mother’s miniature chow. Last, there was a report with the heading, “Refer to Savile—homicide.” The body of a coed had been found Friday night; someone had raped and strangled her as she walked back to her dormitory from the library through University Arboretum. I was supposed to find out who.

I heard Walter Stanhope’s hoarse whisper.
Forty years, it’s enough. I stick to fish now
. Forty years, before he’d retreated to the outermost edge of the land, retired to the place where prophetic Indians had stopped the first Lost Colony, and then with all their people had fled west and west and west away from the endless waves of pale dreamers from an old world, themselves fleeing west. Forty years; that left me thirty-five more to go.

I went to the morgue to see the body of the young murdered woman, and then I drove across town with Etham Foster to walk the path through University Arboretum to the place, strewn with rain-blown pink and white petals, hidden in a canopy of leaves, where she had died, and where no one had found her until Saturday morning in the rain. “Just my luck,” grumbled Foster. “Rain.”

At 4:15 I was sitting at the table where, when court was in session, the prosecuting attorneys sat. I sat and blinked at the afternoon sun angling through the tall sets of dusty windows, and thought about my new case. On the dais in front of me rose the high empty judge’s bench, flanked by the furled flag of the state of North Carolina, with its motto,
Esse Quam Videri
, “To Be Rather Than Seem.” Beside me the empty pews of the jury box sloped up to meet the oak wainscoting.

The murdered girl’s name, said the report I held, was Virginia. Virginia. That name of the first girl born to the first colonists, the name of the first Protestant born in the new world, born on the Outer Banks to a governor grandfather named White and a father named Dare, christened in honor of a Virgin Queen for whose favor Sir Walter Raleigh had dared the dream of gold. The Lost Colony had vanished, including this firstborn of my people, this Virginia White Dare, had vanished and left only a mystery carved in a tree, a single world of warning or prophecy, the word
Croatoan
. But no one had been able to interpret the mystery, and no one had been warned away, and whites dared to keep digging the gold beneath the forests of tall pines. Raleigh had died on the block, and his dream was now a land of Hillstons.

•   •   •

Briggs Cadmean, wearing a rumpled poplin suit and holding an unlit cigar, came into the courtroom. He squinted at the hard light for a moment before he moved. Then down the tiered aisle he shambled with leisured interest, running his stiff fingers along the backs of the empty oak chairs, stooping with a groan to pick up a littered newspaper off a brown-cushioned seat.

“Good afternoon.” He smiled, reached for and shook my hand. “Justin. Mighty happy to see you in church yesterday and on the road to recovery. You had my prayers, son. I know a parent’s heart. I’ve lost five of my flesh and bone. None left to me but my Baby, and two foolish sons so scared of me they moved out of the goddamn state.” He waved his cigar at the windows. “Isn’t this the prettiest day you ever saw? All that rain just washed the world young. Between the apple trees and the cherry trees and the azaleas, I just want to fill up my lungs with Hillston! You know what they say, ‘If God is not a Tarheel, then why is the sky Carolina blue?’ Am I right? What can I do for you today?” By now Cadmean had settled himself carefully into the large spoke-backed chair where, during sessions, the court recorder sat.

I said, “You’re the one who made the appointment.”

He nodded. “Where’s Captain Mangum?”

“He had a meeting. He sends his regrets.”

“Huh. You like Mangum? Smart man, am I right? New breed.”

“Yes.”

“His people were tenant farmers, you know that? Country people. His daddy came into town applying for a job at the mills, came in his bare feet.”

“What did you do, have his genealogy traced?”

“Captain Mangum like his new job?”

“Yes.”

Cadmean grinned. “I talked to a lot of friends of mine. I heard they were getting ready to appoint a new chief. I’m all for progress, always have been.”

I said, “No reason why if you’re asked your honest opinion, you shouldn’t be happy to give it.”

Old Cadmean rolled the cigar between his palms while he told me, yes, he was always happy to be of service to the city he loved. His huge bald head swiveled slowly as he spoke; doubtless to indicate that the perimeters of this courtroom were a ready example of his affection for Hillston. He said, “Shame you never got to see the old courthouse, Justin. Man with your fine taste would have liked it. I was a teenager when it burnt down. I remember getting shown the ruts in the steps where the colored people had rolled up the whiskey barrels back when they were running the town for the Yankees in the days of Reconstruction. Couldn’t even read, and they were running the town drunk as baboons. Well now, progress.”

I said, “While you’re throwing your unprejudiced voice behind the new breed, Mr. Cadmean, I’ve got a name for you. Somebody who believes in progress and wants to get into state politics one of these days.”

“Who is he?”

“It’s a she. Alice MacLeod. Your great-grandfather sent her to college.”

He grunted. “Oh, her. Bush Scholarship. Yep, Alice is something. She’s not a scared woman. Scared women give me the fidgets. Wants to get into politics, hunh?” The fingers scraped up the fat cheek. “Hunh. Well, maybe I ought to sit down one of these days and have a talk with her.”

I said, “You’ll run into the same problem you’re going to run into with Captain Mangum. She’s not for sale.”

“That so? Wouldn’t it depend on what I wanted to buy?”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Cadmean? I’m afraid I need to get back to work pretty soon.”

“That thing over in the Arboretum Friday night?” He shook his head. “Didn’t that make you sick? What kind of girl was she?”

“Not the kind that wanted to get raped and strangled.”

Turning his chair so his back was to the shaft of sun, he squinted at me. “I saw Rowell last week.”

“Yes, he said you’d come. I went to Raleigh yesterday afternoon to visit him.”

“Must weigh down your soul.”

“Mine, yes. But I think his own actually feels a little lighter. Confession has a way of doing that. Is that why you’re here?”

“Joanna was a crazy woman. I believe I told you that. Pitiful. It just makes me want to cry.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t it you, son? Killing herself for spite.”

“Yes, it makes me want to cry. I’m sorry she died. I’m sorry she couldn’t let go.”

“What of?”

“Believing she could force someone to love her. As you know, Mr. Cadmean, it can’t be done.”

The eyelids lifted to show more yellow.

I pulled my leg off the cane I was resting it on, stood up, and, sun in my eyes, walked toward Cadmean’s brooding face. I said, “I hear the board at C&W met this past week and decided to install a new inertial-loom system in the textiles division.”

He pursed the sea-bass lips. “Well now, Justin. Who told you that? Yes, I won that vote. I had some opposition.”

“I heard you had to scramble pretty hard.”

He nodded. “I truly hate it when I have to. It reminds me I’m getting old, and that’s something I hate even more.”

“Mr. Cadmean, tell me something about this new system of yours. Are your engineers making use of Bainton Ames’s designs?”

“Could be.”

“Where’d you get them?”

He surprised me. He said, “Cloris gave them to me day before she died. Brought over a whole box of Bainton’s other old stuff besides.”

“Why’d you tell me she didn’t?”

The old man patted his hand at the air near me. “Something the Preacher Solomon says, I believe, is a prudent man concealeth knowledge. But a fool’s mouth is his destruction. I make it a practice not to answer folks, ’til I know
why
they’re asking a particular question. Hunh? You told me those particular designs were tied up with poor Cloris’s getting herself killed. Well, I didn’t believe they were. I thought you’d gone haywire, tell you the truth. But, naturally, every now and then I’m mistaken.”

I asked him, “Did she give them to you of her own free will?”

Cadmean bared his small even yellow teeth. “It’s not my way to use force against a member of the fair sex. I love women.”

I said, “Not loose ones. Not Cloris Dollard.”

“That’s true, son. And I told her so to her face. Told her something else. She had no business holding those designs back from me all these years, a whole carton of stuff mildewing down in her basement, not letting me know Bainton had advanced his ideas as far as he had way back then. ’Course, she didn’t anymore know what was in those files than a cat can read.”

“So why’d she bring them to you when she did?”

“Well now,” he rumbled. “That’s a long story.”

“Is that why you came here? You enjoy telling these long stories, don’t you? I’m not sure I have time for another one. But I’ll listen to a short version.”

I walked back to my chair and sat down. Cadmean pointed at my cane. “How long you going to have to be on that cane, son? Is that leg busted for good?”

“Probably not. Do you know Ron Willis?”

“Mighty happy to hear it. Well now, Mr. Willis used to drive a forklift on the night shift; in cottons.”

I smiled. “That’s another thing you were too prudent to reveal last time we talked?”

“No. I didn’t know it then. You obliged me to find it out after that pleasant walk we took. I like to know as much as I can about anybody working for me.”

“Did you arrange for Ron Willis to rob Cloris Dollard of the Xerox copies she’d made of those designs?”

“Oh, I already answered that question for Mr. Moize and the answer was no.”