Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Read online

  Smiling to myself, I carefully returned the box to the same place Andrew had left it, reset the trap door, then took a handful of leafy twigs and brushed away most of our tracks so maybe Andrew wouldn’t notice that we’d freed one of his rabbits.

  For just a moment, I had managed to forget the sight of poor Mr. Jap lying there on that cold concrete floor.

  By the time Hambone conceded he was never going to catch his first rabbit and we got back to the homeplace, Daddy’s old red Chevy was just pulling into the yard. Blue and Ladybelle jumped out of the back and the three dogs touched noses and smelled bottoms. From the reproachful look the older two gave me, I almost could swear that Hambone had told them of his adventure and what they’d missed.

  The wind was blowing steadily from the north now, the temperature had dropped at least five degrees, and Adam was shivering in Zach’s cotton knit shirt. Daddy slammed the truck door and held the fronts of his thin denim jacket together as he headed for the house.

  “Time to put a match to the fire,” he said.

  Adam and I followed him inside and found the kitchen already warm and cozy. Maidie and Cletus were waiting for us and had lit the old wood heater and put a fresh pot of coffee on. Vegetable soup simmered on the range and an iron skillet waited till it was time to cook cornbread nice and crusty for supper. Daddy never expects Maidie to cook on the weekends, but Adam was spending a couple of nights out here and whenever there’s company, she feels obliged to step in.

  Now she took Daddy’s jacket and handed him a thick wool cardigan that Seth and Minnie’s children gave him two Christmases ago. There was a time when he would have scorned wearing an extra layer indoors, and sorrow brushed my heart as I realized that the cold bothered him more than it used to.

  “Time was,” whispered the preacher. “Time is.”

  And time will BE! I thought defiantly.

  The pragmatist nodded. “And time will be,” he said quietly. It was neither promise nor threat, only simple acknowledgment.

  The five of us sat with warm mugs of coffee in our hands while Daddy and Adam and I took turns telling Maidie and Cletus what had happened.

  Cletus never says much, especially when Maidie’s there to do the talking, but when he does speak, he always goes straight to the point. “Reckon that shiftless Allen Stancil’s gonna be a rich man now.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depends on whether or not Cherry Lou signed her interest in the farm back over to Mr. Jap this week.”

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t see why that makes any real difference. If she didn’t do it yet, he just has to wait till the trial’s over. He is Mr. Jap’s only kin, isn’t he?”

  “There’s Miss Elsie’s niece,” said Maidie. “She’s Dallas’s first cousin.”

  “But no real blood kin to Mr. Jap,” I said. “The Yadkins and the Stancils both come down from a common Pleasant ancestor—G. Hooks Talbert does too, for that matter—but that’s too far back to count. No, the laws of inheritance are pretty clear. When Dallas died without children or a will, half of his real property—the land—automatically went to his surviving parent and the other half to his wife. Cherry Lou. But since she can’t benefit under the Slayer Statute, and, assuming a jury convicts her, her half of Dallas’s estate would automatically pass to his closest next of kin, which was his father. Now that Mr. Jap’s dead, it goes to his blood kin, and that’s Allen Stancil.”

  “But Cherry Lou’s not been tried yet,” Maidie argued, “and if Mr. Jap died ’fore he could get it, seems like to me it’ll have to start all over again back with Dallas, and Miss Merrilee and Allen will share and share alike since they’re both first cousins to Dallas.”

  Daddy agreed. “Sounds like the fairest way to me.”

  “What’s fair and what’s legal are two different things,” said Adam.

  He spoke with such bitterness that Maidie immediately gave him a worried look.

  “ ‘Get out of the way of Justice. She’s blind,’” I quoted lightly.

  “Then maybe we better get that lady a white walking stick,” Cletus chuckled.

  “What happens if Allen’s the one that did it?” asked Maidie.

  “It would be up to the Clerk of the Court,” I said. “Ellis Glover might decide Merrilee has a legitimate claim after all. On the other hand, Allen does have a couple of children and they’d be within the five degrees of consanguinity required by North Carolina law, which has to be closer than Merrilee.”

  Daddy frowned. “Con-sang-what?”

  “Consanguinity—blood kinship. You count the degrees by counting generations up to the common ancestor and then back down to the related person.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One up to Mr. Jap’s father, one down to his brother, another to his brother’s son—Allen, and then down to Allen’s children. That’s four degrees. If somebody related to you dies without a will or any immediate heirs, you can put in a claim if you’re within five degrees of blood kin.”

  Another thought occurred to me. “On the other hand, if Allen is involved, Merrilee could argue that the Slayer Statute blocks his kids from inheriting. It’d be a pretty little legal battle.”

  Daddy dismissed consanguinity as irrelevant legalistic gobbledegook since he couldn’t see that Allen had any call to hurt Mr. Jap.

  “Jap was ready to give him everything he had to get him a real car shop. Y’all know how he always liked messing with cars better’n working the land. Land ain’t never meant nothing to Jap Stancil except a place to stay, something to take money out of, never put none back in. He’s clear-cut his woods twice and never planted a single tree. Why, Billy Wall’s been a better steward of that land than he ever thought to be.”

  Proximity since childhood might have made Daddy and Mr. Jap friends and cohorts, but I realized now that Jap Stancil had never shared Daddy’s values.

  “Ever since the government closed down his shop, Jap’s been wanting to get another one,” he said. “That’s why he kept all them old cars setting around when they was fools out in Charlotte or down in Wilmington that’d give him three times what they was worth. ‘Money in my pocket, Kezzie,’ he told me. Bad as he hated losing Dallas, he was happy to get Allen. Only this time, he won’t going to fix people’s transmissions and carburetors. Him and Allen was going into pure restoration big-time, he said. Going to take them old heaps and make ’em look like they just rolled off the assembly line in Detroit.”

  “Using what to buy their tools and equipment?” I asked, hoping to goad him into telling what he knew about Jap’s plans to sell land. “Billy Wall’s corn money?”

  “It was a start,” he said mildly and shifted over to reminiscences of his and Jap’s boyhood days along Possum Creek. He told us again about Mr. Jap’s courtship of Elsie Yadkin, him a braggedy, drinking, cussing roughneck, her a timid little churchgoing lady half engaged to a deacon’s son, and how he’d made the deacon’s son back off and leave the field to him. “And Jap might not’ve quit all his bragging and drinking and cussing out in the shop, but he always remembered that Elsie was a lady and he never brought it indoors nor let Dallas bring it in the house neither. Merrilee’s a lot like her Aunt Elsie, the way she’s settled that Grimes boy.”

  “It’s a wonder they never got caught driving drunk, what with all the drinking they did,” Adam said provocatively.

  But if he was hoping to get Daddy to talk about the bootlegging days, he didn’t have any more luck than I had with Mr. Jap selling land. Daddy just sat there in front of the wood heater with his hands around his coffee mug and his long legs stretched out to the warmth and a sad smile on his lips as he remembered whatever he remembered.

  Eventually, and over their protests, I stood to go back to Dobbs.

  “The soup smells wonderful,” I said as Daddy pressed me to stay to supper and Maidie promised there was plenty for everybody, “but Aunt Zell was going to start on her fruitcakes this evening and she’ll be waiting for the pecans.”

  Maidie took a gallon bag of shelled nuts
from the freezer and put them in a paper bag for me.

  “And, Cletus, would you get her a bottle of that—gin, is it?” Daddy asked slyly. “Wouldn’t be Zell’s fruitcake without some gin.”

  The bottle Cletus took from beneath the sink had a Gilbey’s label and a broken tax seal, but if I took a sniff, I would not expect to smell juniper berries. A faint aroma of apples or peaches, maybe, but not juniper berries.

  Maidie and I rolled our eyes at each other, but Aunt Zell would be disappointed if her fruitcakes had to do without their usual drenching of homemade brandy.

  I asked Adam if he wanted to catch a movie somewhere, but he yawned and said all this fresh air was getting to him. “I think I’ll make it an early evening since I promised Herman and Nadine that I’d go to their church with them tomorrow morning.”

  “Better you than me,” I said cattily. “Their minister’s a chauvinistic born-again who gets so tangled up in his own rhetoric that it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s proved his point or the devil’s.”

  “Deborah Knott, you be ashamed of yourself!” Maidie scolded. A preacher is a preacher is a preacher to her, but Cletus gave me a wink and a grin.

  Daddy walked out to my car with me to remind me that North Carolina law requires that open containers of alcoholic beverages be transported in the trunk. (He’s an authority on those laws.)

  Once the bottle was properly stowed next to my toolbox, he whistled up the dogs. They came running through the late afternoon sunshine, Hambone trotting along after them. I opened the car door and the pup hopped right up on the front seat. As I stood on tiptoe to kiss Daddy’s leathery, wind-chilled cheek, he gave me a hug.

  “You take care of yourself, now.”

  “I will,” I promised, sliding in after Hambone. “You, too.”

  He gave me an ironic smile that said he knew how we were starting to worry about him. And then, just as he used to say when I was a very little girl, “Don’t you fret yourself, shug. I ain’t gonna die till you’re an old, old lady.”

  Now, as then, the words still made me smile. Never mind that when I was very little, thirty-six seemed old, old.

  I started to switch on the engine when Daddy rapped at my window.

  “Almost forgot to tell you,” he said. “Dwight said for you to call him when you get back to Dobbs.”

  There was a sheepish look on his face that I couldn’t quite interpret.

  15

  « ^ » Whether others shall follow my example or whether matters shall strike them in the same light, is what I know not, nor am I much solicitous about...“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

  I drove back to Dobbs with a zillion questions tumbling through my mind.

  Like (1): was G. Hooks that good a poker face or did he have alternative options?

  Like (2): was Adam really tired or was he just not anxious for more questions about his two-point-nine acres of road frontage?

  Like (3): were (1) and (2) linked?

  And then there were (4), (5), (6), and (7): what was Daddy up to? Where was Allen? What did Dwight want? And who did kill Jap Stancil? And why?

  “That’s eight,” the pragmatist said pedantically.

  “Mind your own business,” I told him.

  The cold orange rays of the setting sun were nearly horizontal to the earth as I approached the edge of town. When I was a child, the town was more compact and tobacco farms began two blocks after the last stoplight. Now, with cars and the need for spaces to park them, every major road was strip-malled for two miles out with gas stations, convenience stores, video rental shops, fast food drive-throughs and grocery stores. Many of the stores were already boarded up and derelict. It reminds me of the slash-and-burn practices we so deplore in the Amazon rain forests: build a big ugly chain store, suck out all the quick money you can, then abandon that store and go build another where the action’s hotter.

  “Queens Boulevard with longleaf pines,” laments a Yankee friend who says she moved down here to get away from that sort of car-centered urban blight.

  She should have gone to Oregon where they have sensible growth plans, not North Carolina where we try to throw up a six-lane bypass around any town with a population of more than eighty-three people.

  I parked at the back of the drive and carried Hambone, Daddy’s “gin” and the pecans in through the side door of the big white brick house.

  The warmth inside Aunt Zell’s kitchen lifted my chilled spirits a little. Every counter was covered with bowls of chopped and floured fruits, loaf pans lined with waxed paper, and canisters of flour and sugar. She was only waiting for the shelled nuts to start mixing in earnest. The Gilbey’s gin bottle got stashed in the pantry. It wouldn’t be needed till she was ready to wrap the cooled cakes in cheesecloth.

  “Soon as I take them out of the oven, Ash and I are going over to the fish house for some shrimp. Don’t you want to come, honey?”

  ‘Thanks, but maybe I’ll just fix a sandwich later.”

  She hadn’t heard about Mr. Jap, so I gave her the condensed version, then went upstairs to call Dwight, who said, “If you don’t have anything on for tonight, why don’t you come over to the office and let’s talk some and then maybe go back to my place and watch a video.”

  “Which one?”

  “Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney,” he said, knowing my fondness for old movies. “Two for the Road.”

  “I’ll bring my two-for-one pizza coupon,” I told him.

  There’s absolutely nothing romantic between Dwight and me, but that didn’t stop me from peeling off my jeans and sweatshirt and heading for the shower to wash away the smell of wood smoke and dogs from my hair and body.

  For the last few weeks, I’d been cutting back in anticipation of Thanksgiving and Aunt Zell’s fruitcake and I was pleased to discover that I no longer had to suck in my breath to button my black twill slacks. Emboldened, I slipped on my favorite fall jacket. The lines were vaguely oriental—black silk appliquéd with strips of brown and gold velvet that can do nice things for my sandy brown hair if the stars are in the right alignment. For once, it didn’t make me look like an overstuffed teddy bear.

  Gold earrings, low black heels, a dash of lipstick and I was ready to go when I finally remembered another phone call I wanted to make.

  In addition to being my former law partner, John Claude Lee is also my second cousin, once removed; so when I can’t prevail upon him as a colleague, I can always fall back upon the claims of kinship.

  I caught him just as he and Julia were getting ready to leave for a panel discussion on ethics that he’d been asked to moderate over at Campbell University, so he didn’t have too much time to debate the proprieties with me.

  He’d already heard from Cherry Lou’s attorney and from Dwight Bryant, too, which saved having to rehash Mr. Jap’s death. “Just tell me one thing, John Claude, and then I’ll let you go. Yesterday, Jap Stancil told me that Cherry Lou was going to sign her half of the farm back over to him.”

  “That was injudicious of him,” my cousin said disapprovingly.

  “But—?”

  “Injudicious and premature. As you may know, Avery Brewer is her court-appointed attorney. We finished drawing up the papers yesterday afternoon and she was to sign them on Monday.”

  “What happens to those papers now?”

  “Obviously their usefulness has been negated.”

  “She wouldn’t go ahead and sign it over to Allen Stancil instead?”

  I could almost hear his raised eyebrows over the phone line.

  “Really, Deborah,” he said frostily, clearly remembering with distaste his previous encounter with Allen. I wasn’t about to tell him that he’d gotten me an annulment for a bigamous marriage. “I should think that you of all people would see the unsuitability of that when there’s a strong possibility that he’s involved in his uncle’s death.”

  “But what if he isn’t?”

  “Then it will all come to him in due time without Mrs. Stancil’s gesture
.”

  So either way, Allen gained nothing he didn’t already have in his pocket. Even so, “I’m surprised you let a client die without a will.” I was thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer, but John Claude chose to think I was questioning his professional standards.

  “I had drafted one that he was to sign on Monday as well. A simple instrument. It divided his estate equally between Stancil and Merrilee Grimes, with Stancil getting the house, garage, equipment and all the cars and Mrs. Grimes to receive an equal value in land.”

  And an unsigned will is worth less than the paper it’s written on. But assuming either had been a motive, which piece of paper had Mr. Jap been killed to prevent? The will or the deed?

  And what if Cherry Lou or her children weren’t really all that eager to throw in the cards?

  “Is there any chance that Cherry Lou Stancil could be acquitted?” I asked.

  “With a jury, there’s always a chance,” he replied dryly. “But if I were Avery Brewer, I shouldn’t aspire to be a Johnnie Cochran.”

  “Which is why they picked you to moderate an ethics discussion,” I told him. “Break a leg, hear?”

  16

  « ^ » That these accounts are genuine and true, we hope, will appear from the following general description of the province in question, in which all that is intended, is to lay before my countrymen things most essential for them to know…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

  All was quiet when I arrived at the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department in the basement of the courthouse. Indeed, the duty officer at the front desk was absorbed in a paperback romance and she barely acknowledged my wave as I passed. Saturday night, yes, but much too early for any bloody knife-fighters, spaced-out deadheads, wife beaters, drunk drivers or other violators and disturbers of the peace who would be showing up— stitched, sober and sorry—in my courtroom next week.