The Buzzard Table Read online

  Except for his eyes. There was no curiosity in those cool gray eyes, yet I felt that we were being scanned and catalogued and that everything about us was being filed for future reference.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Reese Knott,” my nephew said. “I was over a couple of days ago. Remember?”

  “You remember hearing I don’t like company?”

  “Just buzzards. I know,” Reese said cheerfully, ignoring the man’s frosty tone. “I brought them some squirrels.”

  He hopped out of the cab and headed around to the back of his truck.

  The man continued to stare at me through the open window.

  “I’m Reese’s aunt,” I said, annoyed by the awkward situation. If he’d warned Reese off before, then clearly we were trespassing and his rudeness was somewhat justified.

  Before he could respond, Reese called from over near the slab. “Do I just throw them on top or off to the side?”

  I glanced in his direction and saw the remains of a deer carcass on the concrete slab where the buzzards had been before. The rib cage poked up from a mound of fur.

  “No!” the man shouted back, exasperation written all over him. He stepped out into the misting rain and pulled a plastic garbage bag from under the toolbox bolted beneath the truck’s rear window. The box looked new and its unchipped white enamel was a marked contrast to the rusty dents in the truck. “I told you before that I don’t want anyone bringing them food out here but me. Put them in this and I’ll feed them after you’ve gone.”

  Reese was clearly disappointed, but finally got the message. He dropped the squirrels into the plastic bag and headed back to the truck. The stranger remained where he was, looking up into the gray sky.

  “Man,” Reese said, sounding like a little kid again as he turned the ignition key. “I was hoping he’d let us watch them land.”

  As we drove back through the pasture, I leaned close to the window so that I could follow the man’s gaze. High above us, those three buzzards circled without flapping their wings. They seemed to bank and wheel almost absentmindedly whenever the thermals started to carry them away. A slight dip or rise in those big white-tipped wings brought them drifting back until they were overhead again, floating gracefully on the wind.

  Waiting.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Vultures prefer to eat fairly fresh meat. They will turn their nose up at rotten meat if there is a fresher alternative available. They also prefer the meat of herbivorous animals.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  What was all that about?” I asked Reese when we were back on the road home. “Who is that guy and what’s his problem?”

  He shrugged.

  “So how did you meet him?”

  Reese turned into a lane that would cut across the farm and bring us out near one of Daddy’s barns. “I’ve been noticing buzzards hanging around over there off and on since right after Christmas and I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, deer aren’t like elephants, are they?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” I said dryly. “For one thing, elephant antlers are a lot bigger.”

  He grinned. “You know what I mean. Elephants have graveyards, right? But who ever heard of a deer graveyard? I figured that it had to be a pretty sizable animal, though, and more than one of ’em to keep those buzzards circling in the same place for so long. Anyhow, a couple of days ago I drove over in that direction as far as I could and hiked the rest of the way. When I got across the creek, I saw that guy trying to get a deer carcass out of the back of his truck. He looked to be having trouble—I think there’s something wrong with his arms—so I went and helped him.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as somebody who’d welcome help,” I said.

  “You got that right. But as long as I was there, he let me hoist it out and onto the table.”

  “Table?”

  “That’s what he calls that old foundation. His buzzard table. Anytime he finds some fairly fresh roadkill, he picks it up and puts it there.”

  “Why?”

  Reese shrugged. “All I know is that his truck box is stuffed with tripods and camera equipment. He says he’s doing a photographic study of American vultures.”

  I had noticed the stranger’s slight accent. “He’s British? An ornithologist?”

  “Oh, hell, Deb’rah. I don’t know. It’s not like he’s somebody who’ll tell you the story of their life the first minute you meet ’em. I didn’t even get his name.”

  “But you must have talked about something when you were helping him move that deer.”

  “Just buzzard stuff. Hey, did you know that they don’t like the taste of dogs or cats?”

  “Really? I thought buzzards eat anything dead.”

  “Not meat eaters if they can avoid it. They will if there’s absolutely nothing else, but he says they’d rather have animals that eat plants. Like squirrels and deer.”

  That made me smile. “Who knew buzzards were that picky?”

  “Or that stuff could be too rotten even for them?”

  He coasted to a stop under one of the shelters that jutted off from the barn and we soon had my neon pig safely stowed in a stall that hadn’t been used since Daddy quit keeping a milk cow.

  There was no sign of Daddy’s truck up at the house, so Reese dropped me at my own back door, then headed on down the lane to see if he could scrounge some supper from one of my sisters-in-law. Most of them have a soft spot for him.

  I let the dog out, started a load of laundry, and set a spinach lasagna that I’d made the weekend before out on the counter to thaw for our own supper. Children aren’t supposed to like spinach, but it was one of my young stepson’s favorites.

  When I married Dwight December before last, the courthouse women—judges, clerks, and attorneys—gave me a recipe shower. The consensus seemed to be that Dwight would otherwise starve to death. Never mind that he’d been cooking for himself since his divorce a few years earlier. This lasagna was from Portland Avery, an attorney in Dobbs, and my oldest and closest friend. Weird to think of getting healthy recipes from her after all the Butterfingers, bacon cheeseburgers, and double-buttered popcorn we consumed together growing up.

  The rain had begun again, heavy now, and gave signs of setting in for the night, so Bandit, Cal’s terrier, was ready to come back in almost immediately. I gave him a rawhide chew and sat down at the computer to check my email. The last message, sent only minutes ago, was from Dwight’s sister-in-law Kate and was headed “TURN ON YOUR PHONE!!” in all caps. The message itself read, “Did you forget about tonight?”

  Tonight?

  I quickly switched on my phone and saw that I’d missed two messages from her and one from Dwight. It seldom occurred to either of them to try the landline first.

  I immediately called Dwight, and after he got through fuming because I won’t keep my phone on 24/7, he got around to telling me what he had forgotten to tell me several days ago. “We’re supposed to go to Mrs. Lattimore’s for dinner tonight.”

  “What?”

  At least he had the grace to sound abashed. “Sorry, shug. Kate passed on the invitation last week, but things were sorta hectic that day. That arson case, then Cal’s molar. Remember all the blood?”

  I did remember. Dwight and I contribute to the nanny that Kate and Rob hired to watch their own three. The oldest, Mary Pat, is in the same class as Cal, so he rides the school bus home with her every afternoon and Dwight usually picks him up because he gets off work earlier than I do. That molar hadn’t quite been ready to turn loose and Cal had grabbed an apple from the bowl of fresh fruit the nanny keeps for them. Two bites into it on the drive home and the molar tore free. In his determination not to swallow the thing, Cal had wound up with chunks of apple and bloody saliva down the front of his jacket, on his face and hands, and on the seat and armrest of Dwight’s truck before that tooth was found and securely wrapped in a tissue. At nine and a half, Cal’s not entirely sure there really is a tooth fairy,
but he wasn’t going to take any chances of losing a potential moneymaker.

  So yes, it was understandable that Dwight might have forgotten an invitation to dinner, especially to one that promised to be somewhat stiff and formal.

  “Sigrid Harald’s down and her mother, too,” he told me. “I can understand why Mrs. Lattimore would want Kate and Rob to come, but why us?”

  Why indeed?

  Until age and cancer overtook her, Mrs. Lattimore had been a force in Cotton Grove, our nearest town, using her money and her family connections to get things done the way she wanted them done.

  My mother and Mrs. Lattimore had been distant cousins, so distant that they were not in the same social circle, especially after Mother went and married “down,” choosing a disreputable bootlegging tobacco farmer with eight motherless little boys instead of a white-collar professional from further up the social scale.

  Our homeplace is a much-added-onto structure that began as an old-fashioned four-over-four wooden farmhouse out in the country, surrounded by several hundred acres of rolling fields and scrub woodlands.

  The Lattimore house is a three-story Victorian clapboard and shingled “cottage” with steeply pitched roofs, a turret or two, and extensive verandas. It sits on a large corner lot one block away from the town square. A life-size bronze deer stands amid head-high hydrangea bushes and stares moodily through the tall iron railings at the passing cars. Given the current price of scrap copper and brass, the Cotton Grove police chief keeps predicting that someone’s going to try and steal that deer one of these nights even though his office backs up to Mrs. Lattimore’s yard.

  “I don’t want to be left looking like a fool,” he says gloomily.

  “It’ll take a crane and flatbed to move that thing,” Dwight tells him. “I’m sure somebody would notice a crane.”

  “You think?”

  I’d never been inside the scrolled iron gates, but Mrs. Lattimore was related to Kate’s older son through Kate’s first husband, so her daughter and granddaughter had known Kate for years.

  We had met that granddaughter a few weeks earlier when we finally took a honeymoon trip to New York and stayed in the apartment that Kate still owned. Upon hearing our plans, Mrs. Lattimore asked us to take along a small bronze sculpture that she wanted to be rid of, which was how we came to know Lieutenant Harald, a homicide detective with the New York City Police Department.

  A careless word on my part had led to my having to tell Sigrid that her grandmother’s cancer had returned and that she was not expected to make it past spring.

  Through Kate, I knew that Sigrid’s mother, Anne, had made a quick trip down the day after we got back ourselves. She’d been in New Zealand when we were in New York and Kate said she’d gotten off one plane and right onto another without even going home to change. Now she was evidently back in Cotton Grove again, and this time with Sigrid, whom we’d met after a killer used that bronze to smash in someone’s head.

  Sigrid and Dwight had gotten along okay professionally during the subsequent investigation, but she and I hadn’t exactly bonded and I didn’t expect to see her again before the inevitable funeral.

  “Sorry, shug,” Dwight said again, but his tone turned hopeful. “I don’t suppose you could just call and get us out of it?”

  “Not at this late date.”

  I heard him sigh. “I guess that means a dress shirt and silk tie.”

  For work, he usually wears a soft shirt and a comfortable knit tie that comes off as soon as he gets to the office. Dinner at Mrs. Lattimore’s would surely be more formal. No footmen or finger bowls, but definitely Sunday best.

  I called Kate, who confirmed the dress code. She also offered to let Cal stay with her brood till we got home. “Aunt Jane’s not up to late nights, but just to be on the safe side, why don’t you bring over his pajamas and you and Dwight ride with us?”

  Until his last growth spurt, Cal and Mary Pat could wear each other’s PJs in an emergency. No more. He’s a good two inches taller than she now and almost up to my shoulder.

  Dwight was later than usual getting home, which didn’t give him much time to shower and change. Just as well, because his first question was, “Where’s your car?”

  “I left it at Will’s,” I said, opening his closet as he started to undress.

  “Why? It’s not acting up, is it?”

  “No, I finished up early today and stopped by to see him. Reese was there and offered me a lift. I thought I’d save a little gas and ride in with you tomorrow.” I held out two ties that would go with the brown wool sports jacket he would be wearing. “Which one?” I asked.

  As I’d hoped, it was enough to distract him from asking more questions about why I’d left my car in town, and our talk turned to the Dobbs woman who had disappeared last week.

  * * *

  Rebecca Jowett had presumably gone jogging Saturday evening, taking nothing with her but her cell phone and a house key that she could tuck into the pocket of her sweatpants. She had not been seen again. Her car was still parked in the drive, her purse and iPad were on the dining table, and her husband swore that none of her clothes were missing.

  A licensed Realtor who worked for a local agency, she habitually ran at least four evenings a week. Unfortunately, there was no fixed routine to her runs. Sometimes she circled the neighborhood where a new listing had lately come on the market, sometimes she took one of the trails that led from the town commons along the river to a historic house near the old cemetery. More times than not, she would loop around the cemetery and jog home through the quiet, tree-lined streets. The Jowett neighborhood boasted half-acre lots with mature trees and head-high azalea bushes; and although there were streetlights on every corner, she often ran past the houses unnoticed.

  “It’s not like you could set your watch by her,” a concerned friend said.

  As with every town, Dobbs has its troubled pockets of poverty and crime, yet no one could remember any incidents of violence along the routes Becca Jowett might have taken that night. Yes, someone had exposed himself to two teenage girls on the river path two summers ago, but after closely questioning all three parties, the Dobbs police officer, a sensible woman with no tolerance for sexual harassment of young girls, had concluded that the exposure was unintentional. The guilty and highly embarrassed old man had simply not stepped far enough into the bushes to relieve himself.

  “Which is not to say someone didn’t lie in wait for her along the river that night,” Dwight said. Both the town police and several sheriff’s deputies had gone over all the missing woman’s usual routes and had found nothing of significance.

  “Cold as it was?” I scoffed. “It must have been someone driving by. Someone she knew, because nobody gets in a car with a stranger. Unless it was her husband or a boyfriend?”

  He shot me a questioning look as he jangled his keys. “You hear something I need to know about? I thought you didn’t know the Jowetts.”

  “I don’t. One of our clerks—Robin Winnick? Her sister does the Jowett woman’s hair. She said her sister said that she thought the marriage was dying on the vine, and besides, aren’t husbands and boyfriends automatically at the top of the list?”

  “On the top of what list?” Cal asked, coming down the hall with his pajamas stuffed in his backpack.

  “Of men important to a woman,” I said. “Like husbands and stepsons.”

  “You can’t tag Dave Jowett for this,” Dwight’s brother Rob said firmly on the short drive to Cotton Grove. “We were in school together and I never saw him fly off the handle or lose his temper to the point of violence, not even when that Dobbs pitcher tried to beanball him. He just isn’t the type, Dwight.”

  “Even if his wife was slipping around on him?”

  “Do you know for a fact she was?” Rob asked, glancing back at Dwight in his rearview mirror.

  “Don’t know much of anything yet,” Dwight admitted.

  Sometimes it’s hard to realize that these two are br
others. Dwight looks like his father: tall and rangy, with brown eyes and brown hair. Rob is built like their mother: small-boned, wiry, with green eyes and russet hair. Dwight’s face is broad and open, while Rob’s is more pointed, with a foxy slyness that tends to make opposing lawyers decide to settle out of court.

  Rob is maybe half an inch under six feet so he was never tall enough nor muscular enough to follow Dwight onto the West Colleton varsity basketball team, but he had been an excellent shortstop on the same baseball team as Dave Jowett. Not that either of them was on my radar screen back then. Portland and I’d had our sights trained on the captain and quarterback of her school’s football team, so I had nothing to add to the discussion. Except for that one clerk’s comment, there wasn’t even any good gossip going around the courthouse.

  “You still tight with Jowett?” Dwight asked.

  “Not really,” Rob said. “His office is down the block from mine in Cameron Village so we run into each other at lunchtime now and then, and I’ve met his wife. He thinks it’s funny that I’ve wound up with three kids when he was the one who wanted to coach some sons through Little League.”

  I saw Kate lean toward him with a contented smile. All the children were related to each other through Kate, but only R.W. was his by blood. Late last summer, though, Rob had adopted Kate’s son Jake and together he and Kate had adopted Mary Pat, her orphaned cousin.

  Cal had been fascinated and asked a million questions about how adoption worked and did this mean that Mary Pat and Jake were his real cousins now that Uncle Rob was their real dad?

  Before Dwight and Rob could pick up again on Dave Jowett’s missing wife, I asked Kate what tonight’s dinner was in aid of.

  “If I know Aunt Jane, it’s to take the spotlight off her health for one evening. Sigrid doesn’t hover and Anne tries not to, but it’s hard on all three of them. Anne wants to tell her sisters and Aunt Jane absolutely refuses. I can’t say I blame her. Mary and Elizabeth both are such take-charge types that they would hound her to go for chemo or radiation or else spend the next two months berating everybody in Cotton Grove for not telling them sooner, back when it might have helped.”