Bloody Kin Read online

  “Why?”

  “Well, you do know that Indians lived outdoors and didn’t have metal pots and pans or electric stoves, don’t you?”

  Mary Pat nodded vigorously. “Wigwams and teepees.”

  When it came to Indian shelters, Kate was on shaky ground. She rather thought that wigwams and teepees went with people of the western plains while woodland tribes had built huts of woven twigs and bark, but she wasn’t prepared to argue the point with Mary Pat. She really should get a book, she decided, and in the meantime, she’d stick to what Jake had told her.

  “You see, the Indians that lived around here never quite learned how to make clay pots that were strong enough to sit over a campfire; so if they wanted to cook a stew, they’d fill a pot with meat and vegetables and water and then they’d bring smooth stones like this one up from the creek and put them in the fire. When the stones were red-hot, the cook would drop two or three into the stew and begin heating the food. As soon as one cooled off, she’d fish it out, put it back in the fire and drop in another. Jake told me it didn’t take much longer than cooking right over the fire.”

  “Stone soup!” exclaimed Mary Pat.

  “Not exactly,” said Kate, but she could tell from the look in the child’s eyes that the connection had been made.

  Gordon noted her rueful face as Mary Pat dashed across the furrows after another possible arrowhead. “What is it?” he smiled.

  “I have a feeling that from now on, whenever Mary Pat hears that old folk tale about the clever beggar who tricked the stingy woman into making him soup, she’s probably going to picture the fat hausfrau with feathered headband and plaited pigtails.”

  “If we had some ham, we’d have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs,” chanted Mary Pat.

  That was one of the nonsense lines Lacy had taught her. Time hadn’t helped much there and Kate began to doubt if Lacy would ever accept her presence. They walked around each other as warily as two cats and the kitchen was almost their only point of contact.

  Kate had begun skipping breakfast again, waiting until Lacy went outside to do chores before she fixed herself a pot of tea; and Lacy avoided the kitchen at noon. Kate suspected that he snacked on soft drinks and cheese crackers up at Mrs. Fowler’s store. Supper was a silent affair, prepared by Kate and eaten with the television tuned to a local news station. Lacy usually cleaned up the kitchen afterward and watched television till bedtime while Kate retired to her room immediately after supper to write letters, read, or jot design ideas in her notebook.

  Without Miss Emily popping in or her walks with Mary Pat and Gordon, Kate felt her vocal cords would have atrophied. Even taciturn Tom Whitley was more forthcoming than Lacy. If it weren’t for the baby, she knew she would have fled back to New York.

  Yet Jake had loved this farm, had drawn strength from the land, and renewed himself with frequent trips back. It was his child’s birthright, Kate thought fiercely, and no mean-spirited, begrudging old coot was going to take that away.

  Still, it was so contrary to what she had hoped for. She knew Lacy had always resented her, but to resent the baby, too? He was good with Mary Pat, patient and even playful at times, so it wasn’t as if he disliked children on principle. And he’d adored Jake. How could he not look forward to the birth of Jake’s child?

  Ever since that Saturday when Sheriff Poole and Dwight Bryant had raised the possibility that Jake’s death might have been murder, Lacy had been as prickly as a stinging nettle. Two weeks were a long time to sulk over being asked if he’d touched that envelope of Jake’s war souvenirs, but Kate couldn’t think of any other legitimate grievances.

  “Might as well accept it once and for all,” she thought. “He just doesn’t like you. Never has, never will.”

  Into her memory floated one of her father’s no-nonsense dicta: What can’t be cured must be endured.

  Well, she’d endure until July, she decided, following Gordon down the sloping hillside. After that, she or Lacy one would have to leave the farm.

  Running ahead of them, Mary Pat had reached the edge of the woods. Pleasantly tired, Kate and Gordon joined her on neighboring tree stumps. Mary Pat began to count the rings of one smooth stump that was nearly a yard in diameter. An oak? Poplar?

  Gordon looked around approvingly. “Lacy and Sauls are making a good job of it,” he said.

  Kate had to agree. The two elderly men had culled out the diseased trees and cleaned up as they went. She had seen some logging stands that looked as if a tornado had gone through them, with limbs and broken tops wantonly left wherever the chain saw had cut them.

  Here, though, Sauls had hauled out the logs as soon as each tree was felled, then he and Lacy piled up the brush and burned it—to keep the borers from spreading to other trees, as she had been reminded last week when she came upon the two putting a saw to the half-dozen walnut trees that lined the pecan grove on the south side of the farmhouse.

  “Do they have beetles, too?” she had asked, surprised.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Sauls, who turned off the saw to answer her. Lacy had continued to swing his axe as if he didn’t see her.

  “You can see how these branches ain’t got no green on ’em,” said Sauls. “Borer beetles’ll do that and you don’t want ’em spreading to the pecans.”

  She certainly didn’t. Black walnuts were so tedious to pick out, requiring a heavy hammer to crack the thick shells, that most years no one bothered to gather them. The unique flavor might be delicious, but pecans were also tasty and much easier to shell. So far, at least, the pecan trees looked healthy and were pushing out vigorous green tips. She had given a last look at the old bare-twigged walnuts and then had returned to the house before Lacy’s continued snub made conversation with Sauls too uncomfortable.

  Today as she and Gordon examined the lower stand of trees, one could barely tell that any cutting had occurred here beyond an occasional fresh stump. The woods were a little more open, that was all, and new growth would soon fill in the bare spots.

  “Sauls says they’re almost finished,” said Kate. “There must be at least four cords of firewood up at the house by now.”

  “And another two over at Gilead that I bought from Lacy last week,” said Gordon. “I know an open fireplace is an inefficient way to heat a room, but there’s nothing like a pile of roaring logs to warm the spirit on a cold rainy night.”

  As Gordon soliloquized on the beauty of an open fire, Kate felt her own heat rise. How dared Lacy sell her wood to someone else!

  “Lacy must be what? Seventy? Seventy-five?” asked Gordon. “I don’t know where he finds the strength to do all this at his age.”

  Gordon’s words restored Kate’s sense of fairness. After all, why should she expect Lacy to work so hard for nothing? He’d said quite frankly that he and Tucker Sauls were going shares on the diseased wood and hadn’t she told him to do whatever he wished? Would she go back on her word just because he might turn a few dollars extra?

  She was instantly ashamed of her pettiness. Jake was gone and she was left with serious financial obligations, but that didn’t mean she had to turn into a penny-pinching shrew. There was nothing so unpleasant as a person who counts the cost of everything, she lectured herself. If two or three cords of firewood or a few thousand board feet of planks could give Lacy a little financial profit, she wouldn’t begrudge them. Besides, if she had to hire someone to come in and cull out the borer-infested trees, she probably would spend three times whatever Lacy and Tucker Sauls were going to make.

  In a burst of generosity, Kate decided that she would pay Lacy’s bill at Mrs. Fowler’s store. That ought to set things even.

  Seated on the next stump, Gordon drew idle patterns in the sand with the tip of his cane. Kate had been unaware of his scrutiny until he said, “I’m glad that worked out all right.”

  “Hm?”

  “Whatever was bothering you. Your face is like a book,” he teased.

  “First all serious as you remembered s
omething that was bothering you, and now a satisfied that-settles-that look. Am I right?”

  His lopsided smile made Kate smile, too.

  “Very close,” she said. “I’ve just decided I’m not going to let Lacy Honeycutt change me into a self-pitying miser.”

  “Has he been trying to?” His cane nudged a fat black beetle into scuttling retreat.

  “Probably not,” Kate admitted. “But that’s the way I’ve been reacting. He doesn’t like me and even though the farm’s mine now and I’m paying all the bills, he—”

  “He isn’t properly appreciative?”

  His tone was sardonic and Kate flushed.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “No?”

  “Of course not!” she said hotly. “I don’t expect any praise or thanks. Not really. But Lacy acts as if CP&L gives away electricity and groceries appear in the pantry by osmosis; as if there’s no connection between me and his daily comfort.”

  “A man as proud as Lacy Honeycutt? I imagine he’s well aware of every flourish of your checkbook,” said Gordon. “Very few men enjoy being kept.”

  There was a slight bitterness in his tone and Kate was suddenly reminded that it was Elaine’s money, money that came from the sale of her family home or as an allowance from her sister Patricia, that had supported them and paid for their carefree lifestyle.

  In many respects, Elaine had retained her Old South attitude toward marriage: a woman may be richer, stronger, brighter, but a good wife never lets her husband know she knows it. Publicly and, for all Kate knew, privately, too, Elaine had deferred to Gordon’s wishes. They had lived in modest luxury, free to hunt, ski, and sail, and they had seemed truly affectionate and happy with each other; nevertheless, until Patricia’s death gave him a separate allowance as Mary Pat’s co-guardian (and that only for so long as he and Elaine remained married), Gordon had been landless gentry and dependent upon his wife’s income.

  Kate felt uncomfortably embarrassed, but Gordon seemed unaware of the direction his words had made her take. He looked out across the field and tried to explain Lacy to her.

  “That poor old man probably doesn’t have a loose nickel to call his own. He was never in the army, so there’s no military pension; and I doubt if he ever earned enough farm income to pay social security, so unless Jake left him something?”

  “N-no,” said Kate, stricken to realize for the first time the full extent of Lacy’s poverty. “We just made simple wills. Everything to each other. I never gave it much thought, and Jake—” Her voice broke. “Jake didn’t expect Lacy to outlive him.”

  Gordon reached over and patted her clenched hands.

  “I know, honey,” he said, “I know. Elaine and I were the same.” In the past two weeks, they had hashed and rehashed all the possible explanations for Jake’s death and Covington’s murder. If his investigation had produced any real results, Dwight hadn’t shared it with them; so Kate and Gordon kept circling back to the who and why in total frustration.

  “One thing I haven’t told you,” said Gordon, his hand still covering hers.

  She looked at him questioningly.

  “I know you think Southerners put an inordinate stress on bloodlines and families. We probably get too much Old Testament drilling when we’re Sunday school kids—Deuteronomy and Chronicles.”

  His voice slipped into a parody of a tent revivalist’s singsong patter.

  “And I say unto you, Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob and Esau, and Jacob begat Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and God knows how many more besides Joseph and Benjamin.”

  Kate began to laugh in spite of herself.

  “Anyhow,” Gordon said, serious again. “I’m glad Jake begat, Kate. It’s good to know that part of him continues.”

  Kate was moved by his earnestness. “Thank you, Gordon.”

  Once more Gordon remembered lying in the hospital with most of the grogginess cleared and his physical pain ebbing as he tried to get used to the idea of Elaine and his brother being gone forever. Then Rob Bryant’s call had jolted him all over again with the news that Jake was dead, too. Coming when it did, that final death hit him worse than the others somehow.

  “I’m the last of our Tyrrell branch and Mary Pat’s the closest thing to a child of my own that I’ll ever have, but I hope you’ll let me share Jake’s baby—maybe teach him some of the things Jake would have.”

  “I’d like that,” Kate said tremulously.

  She had never before realized that Gordon felt so warmly toward Jake. But then, she thought, it was here on a visit with James that Jake had introduced him to his cousin Elaine. Except for Jake, Gordon Tyrrell and Elaine Gilbert might never have met or fallen in love.

  It was an emotional moment, an exchanged awareness of how much each of them had lost, but also of how much there was to live for. No more words were necessary. Gordon’s hand dropped away and Kate sat quietly, grateful for his friendship.

  They missed Mary Pat almost immediately.

  A few minutes earlier, she had been perched halfway up a persimmon tree. Her little pile of Indian artifacts still lay at the foot of the tree, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Mary Pat?” called Gordon.

  The field cut into the woods so deeply at that point that, from where they sat, they could hear the creek rushing along its rocky bed in the dip beyond. Kate stood up on one of the taller tree stumps and saw a flash of Mary Pat’s red sweater through the underbrush several hundred feet away.

  “There she is. Mary Pat!”

  The child kept going.

  “She can’t hear us over the creek.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Gordon sighed, heaving himself to his feet. “Next we’ll be fishing her out of the water.”

  They pushed through a tangle of vines and briars.

  “Don’t worry,” Kate said. “The creek’s only a couple of feet deep along here.”

  “She knows she’s not supposed to go near it alone, though. It’s not like her to disobey.”

  They reached the creek bank, but Mary Pat was not there. Kate scrambled over a half-submerged tree trunk and Gordon struggled to follow. His leg had strengthened in the last few weeks, but he was not yet up to cross-country broken field running.

  “Be careful, Kate. You’re going to fall and hurt yourself. Try calling her again.”

  Kate was still crashing through last winter’s dead vines and fallen branches. She had spotted Mary Pat through this year’s new growth.

  “Come on up a little higher on the bank,” she called back to Gordon. “There seems to be an old lane here.”

  The going was a bit easier and Gordon shouted Mary Pat’s name at the top of his voice.

  A few hundred feet upstream, the child turned and saw them and gaily ran back to join them.

  Gordon began to scold her for coming to the creek alone. “I wasn’t going down to the water,” Mary Pat protested.

  One of her ponytail ribbons had come undone and Kate automatically retied the bow.

  “Where were you going, sweetheart?” she asked, picking stray twigs and leaf scraps from the dark curls.

  “I wanted to see what was shining and you and Uncle Gordon were talking and I’m not supposed to interrupt grown-ups,” she said, looking up at Gordon with candid calculation.

  “You’re not turning into a prepubescent Portia, are you?” Gordon asked severely.

  “What’s that?”

  “A smart-aleck little girl who obeys the letter of the law but not the spirit.”

  Mary Pat dropped her head. “No, sir,” she whispered.

  “You owe Cousin Kate an apology for worrying her like that,” Gordon scolded.

  “I’m sorry, Cousin Kate.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now let’s go back and get your arrowheads and then—”

  “But I want to see what’s shining,” said Mary Pat. “Please, Uncle Gordon.”

  She caught at his hand and tried to stop him, but Gordon had already turned back the way
they came.

  “We’ve walked far enough for one day,” he said, still a little cross. “Cousin Kate and I are too tired for any wild-goose chases.”

  “I am getting a bit tired,” Kate admitted. “I never noticed this old lane before, but it probably comes out near the highway just below Gilead. It might be shorter than walking back through the field. Easier too, probably. Why don’t we try it?”

  “What about the arrowheads?”

  “We could come back for them tomorrow,” said Mary Pat. “Oh, please, Uncle Gordon. I really did see something shine when I was way up in the tree.”

  “Okay, okay,” he capitulated. “Lead on, MacDuff!”

  The lane meandered with the creek and was almost obscured by small trees and several years’ accumulation of fallen leaves and pine needles.

  “I’ll bet this was Lacy’s moonshine road,” Kate said.

  “Moonshine?”

  Mary Pat was several paces further on and Kate kept her voice low as she repeated Bessie and Miss Emily’s tale about Lacy’s moonshining days.

  Gordon chuckled. “Jake once told me that the first time he was ever drunk, it was on white lightning. I didn’t realize he was so young.”

  Ahead of them, Mary Pat plunged off the faint track and into a thick stand of young pines. Gordon and Kate followed.

  “Oh, shoot! It’s just an old car,” said Mary Pat, disappointed to find that her something shiny was only sunlight reflected off chrome trim.

  “Don’t say shoot,” Gordon corrected absently as he studied their unexpected find.

  The late-model Chevrolet was dark green with a dull gray vinyl roof and it had been standing there for several days at least because wisteria vines had already looped a few tentative tendrils to the bumper and rearview mirrors.

  “No dents or smashed fenders. Why would anyone abandon a car like this?” Kate wondered.

  Gordon opened the unlocked driver’s door. “The keys are still in the ignition.”

  Kate flipped open the dash compartment. Inside were a car manual and rental papers. A quick perusal revealed that the car had been rented at the Raleigh-Durham Airport on the sixth of March to one C. Bernard.