Bloody Kin Page 2

  Once when Kate and Jake were at dinner, an enameled television celebrity passed their table wearing a dress fashioned from fabric Kate had designed. Amusing to contrast the chic New York restaurant with the mossy creek bank where those clumps of brilliant red bee balm grew, yet Kate hadn’t felt superior to the actress who wore a dress splashed with flowers she’d never seen growing wild because Kate thought she was just as dependent on concrete, neon, and doormen as the actress.

  Jake had been her common denominator between city and country, and after that dumb, stupid, senseless accident—

  “Why, why didn’t I come down with him?” she flogged herself again. “Morning sickness, the push to finish the repeats I’d promised Gina, that head cold—such trivial excuses!”

  And what if she had been here, part of her coolly asked. Even if she’d been out in the woods with him last October, she couldn’t have prevented it.

  Jake’s nonchalance with loaded guns was the only thing they really quarreled about.

  “It’s your damn machismo!” she would snap.

  “Like hell it is! I’ve been hunting since I was five,” he would answer indignantly. “And I didn’t get through eighteen months in Nam without knowing how to handle a loaded gun. You think a squirrel’s going to sit on its haunches and wait for me to load both barrels every time?”

  When Rob Bryant called that Sunday afternoon, Kate’s first reaction, before the numbness set in, had been sheer exasperation. She was so angry, she had wanted to beat her fists against Jake’s hard chest and scream, “You stupid idiot! You thick-skulled redneck! I told you so. Oh God, I told you!”

  If only he hadn’t been so pigheaded. If only she’d nagged him harder, blown her cool.

  Kate clasped her hands to keep them from shaking.

  “Hey, now, no more of that,” she warned herself sternly. “That’s what started Gina hinting for you to try her analyst. You shake like that in front of Lacy and he’ll cart you off to Dix Hill in a strait jacket.”

  Jake’s uncle thought she was the reason Jake didn’t come home to live. Lacy had kept the farm going when Jake’s father died while Jake was in high school. Lacy hadn’t hung on to his own inheritance, but he had been a good steward for Jake’s and he resented her intrusion into their cozy masculine enclave.

  “What do I have to do?” Kate had asked Jake. “Why does he treat me like Little Missy from de big house?”

  “He’s always been scared of beautiful women,” Jake had grinned. “Don’t worry, Katydid, he’ll come around.”

  “Have a baby,” Philip had advised smugly.

  Philip Carmichael was Kate’s cousin from the wealthy branch of the family and a New Yorker, too, but he and Patricia had produced Mary Pat and suddenly he seemed less an outsider.

  Even Lacy had warmed to Philip. Especially since he and Patricia had restored Gilead, the antebellum mansion which had belonged to Patricia’s family and which had been falling into ruin near the Honeycutt farm. Lacy thought Jake would have done the same if Kate hadn’t kept him in New York.

  “As if Jake had Philip’s wealth and didn’t have to work for a living!” Kate thought indignantly.

  Well, she’d worry about Lacy later, she decided. Until the baby came—the baby they’d planned for, but had only begun to suspect when Jake died—until then, she would concentrate solely on the present.

  No ice on the First-Breath-of-Spring today. The air was sweet with its fragrance. It was the eighth of March and one of those glorious springlike days which still took Kate by surprise even after four years.

  Only yesterday, in New York, she’d had to wait for a garage attendant to shovel the sidewalk before he could get her car out, and the Jersey Turnpike had been treacherous with icy patches. Here in North Carolina, though, it was a day for light sweaters and walking through newly turned fields. Fluffy clouds drifted across clear blue skies and the voice of the tractor was loud in the land.

  “I was right,” she thought, suddenly relaxing. “Despite all the memories, Gina’s forebodings, or Lacy’s hostility, I was right to come here.”

  She held her hands up to the sunlight and was pleased by their steadiness.

  The packhouse door stood half ajar and she pulled it open.

  The old barnlike building sat on a slight slope. Its large upper room, the striproom, had high exposed rafters. It was spacious and felt dry and airy, even though light entered from only one small window and the open door behind her. The walls and floor were unpainted boards milled from trees Jake’s grandfather had cut. Some of the planks were more than fifteen inches wide and still held the mellow aroma of cured tobacco.

  This was where those yellow-gold leaves had been stripped from the sticks on which they had been cured, then carefully sorted by size and color and hand-tied into small bundles before being carried to a warehouse over at Dobbs, the county seat, and auctioned to the highest bidder.

  A trapdoor at the far side of the striproom led down to the ordering pit, a sort of half-basement with solid brick walls and dirt floor built into the side of the slope. There, another larger door led directly outside so that tobacco could be packed temporarily into the pit immediately from the curing barn if the leaves were too brittle to handle without shattering. In the cool darkness, moisture from the earth had made the dry leaves pliable again.

  With the passing of mules, large families, and year-round tenant help, raising tobacco had become unprofitable without a heavy investment in mechanical equipment. Lacy couldn’t manage alone so Jake had leased all his crop allotments to a nearby farmer, who trucked the tobacco from the Honeycutt fields to his own modern barns. Curing and readying for market had become a simpler, mechanized process.

  The packhouse no longer served tobacco, but Lacy still used the pit to age his apple cider.

  Well, she certainly wouldn’t interfere with that, Kate thought. The ordering pit had always struck her as a perfect snake hole and Lacy was welcome to its damp cobwebby depths.

  She stood in the center of the large room, measuring its potential as a studio. Lacy had exaggerated about the floor. True, there seemed to be a rotten spot under the window where rain had seeped in around the casing and one corner of the trapdoor had broken, leaving a hole about the size of an outspread hand, but otherwise the old planks seemed quite sound.

  The one window was on the north wall.

  “Rip it out and replace the whole wall with glass,” Kate thought. “I can set up my drawing table there. Clear out all this rubbish and line that wall with shelves. Maybe a sink over here? Running water lines from the house ought not to be too expensive. Replace that light bulb dangling from the ceiling with fluorescent fixtures . . . wonder if there’s a socket for a coffee maker?”

  Her blue-green eyes followed the wiring from the light bulb across the ceiling rafters and down the wall to where it disappeared in a dark corner behind a pile of tobacco sticks jumbled onto a bundle of burlap sacks. She tugged at the burlap and several small furry forms skittered across the floor to hide beneath another pile of rubbish.

  “Oh, dear Lord! Not rats, too?”

  Kate armed herself with a sturdy, four-foot-long tobacco stick. Spiders usually died every fall and snakes at least hibernated from October till April, but rats were a vermin for all seasons. She gingerly poked the burlap.

  “Mwrp?”

  A big gray Maltese rose and stretched among the burlap folds. The three kittens she’d been nursing when Kate spooked them came scrambling back upon hearing the mother cat’s reassuring purr.

  “Why, Fluff!” Kate laughed. “You’re a mother.”

  The big farm cat yawned complacently and lifted her head for Kate to stroke her. The kittens were almost exact replicas: the same smoky gray with elegant white bibs and neat white paws. Adorable.

  “One uff ’em’s mine,” a small voice asserted.

  Kate whirled. The child who stood just inside the doorway was very young and thin, but sturdily built, with enormous brown eyes and dark curly ha
ir which was caught up in two perky ponytails by red ribbons. She wore red knit slacks and a rather grubby white pullover and she carried a fourth gray kitten. There was something disturbingly familiar about the tot which Kate couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  “Well, hello,” she smiled. “Did you bring your kitten back to visit its mother?”

  “This one’s not mine,” the child said, placing the new kitten next to Fluff. “All my kitty’s feet are white.” She looked up at Kate anxiously. “Which could my kitty be?”

  Kate looked at the four kittens tumbling about their mother and was perplexed by their sameness. “But look, sweetheart. All the kittens have white feet.”

  The little girl shook her head stubbornly. “Not really and truly. They just look like they do. I want my kitty. The one Uncle Lacy gave me.”

  Suddenly, Kate knew who the child was and she was furious with Lacy for not telling her that Gilead had been opened again. She cupped the tiny chin—Philip’s chin—in her hand and looked into eyes so like Patricia’s. “Don’t you remember me, Mary Pat?” she asked softly. “Your father and I were cousins.”

  “Daddy’s dead,” the little girl told her.

  “I know, sweetheart,” Kate said helplessly.

  “And Mommy and Aunt ’Laine and Uncle James and Cousin Jake and Cousin Kate.” Her voice was quite matter-of-fact.

  “No, Mary Pat, I’m Kate. You haven’t seen me in almost a year, but I’m not dead.”

  The child looked at her dubiously and pulled away from her touch.

  “There’s just me and Uncle Gordon and Uncle Lacy that’s not dead,” she insisted, stroking Fluff’s fur.

  One of the kittens tumbled off the pile of burlap and danced across the floor. Mary Pat was after it in a flash.

  “There he is!” she shrieked. “My kitty!”

  Before she could grab it, the kitten dived through the hole in the trapdoor and refused to be coaxed out again.

  “Wait,” said Kate. “I’ll open it for you.”

  She tugged on the rope handle and the door creaked up heavily. The light bulb overhead was so dim that at first Kate thought the dark heap at the foot of the steps was another bundle of burlap.

  Then Mary Pat said, “Is he dead, too?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Robert Bryant couldn’t quite keep from grinning as he drove out from Raleigh. An unidentified body discovered less than a thousand feet from his mother’s house and she was forced to miss all the initial excitement.

  He had no idea how she’d heard about the dead man so quickly this morning, but it never occurred to him to doubt her facts. As principal of Zachary Taylor High School, Emily Bryant kept tabs on the whole community and frustration had filled her voice when she telephoned Rob.

  “I can’t get hold of Dwight and the county supervisors are due here this morning, so I can’t possibly leave before noon,” she’d fumed. “But at least you’ll be there and you can fill me in.”

  “Why will I be there?” Rob had asked cautiously.

  “You’re one of Mary Pat’s trustees, aren’t you? You should be there for her.”

  “I keep telling you, Mother, I’m not her trustee. A bank in New York is trustee and they only delegated me to keep a watching brief. Besides, Gordon’s there and he’s her legal guardian.”

  “Well, you were Jake’s lawyer, weren’t you?” she wheedled. “It’s his packhouse and his widow, isn’t it? Oh, poor Kate! How dreadful for her.” Miss Emily’s natural sympathies overtopped her curiosity and, in the end, Rob had agreed to go out and offer his services.

  He took his foot off the gas as he neared a neat white frame house that stood on the eastern edge of Gilead, the old Gilbert family plantation.

  Philip Carmichael’s money had sloshed over it, too, but Rob could remember how shabby the little house was when Patricia and Elaine Gilbert were girls.

  He remembered barefoot summers here, lukewarm Kool-Aid and climbing the chinaball trees that shaded the front porch. Elaine was a daredevil even back then, hanging upside down from the highest limbs; at the creek, always swinging out further on the rope than anyone else before splashing down near the rocks; slinging nasties on her father’s old Allis-Chalmers tractor during barning time. That was before Franklin Gilbert had stopped trying to make a go of the farm himself.

  Even after the girls grew up, Franklin Gilbert had remained in the overseer’s cottage, a self-imposed exile and all alone until his gathering senility required a nursing home in Raleigh. Something had gone out of Franklin when he’d had to abandon Gilead and move into a hired man’s house. Selling off the last of the good furniture hadn’t compensated for sporadic crop failures and mismanagement; and, when Gilead’s roof went in a windstorm, so did the Gilbert family. It was a practical move, but to Franklin Gilbert, it was an admission that he was less than the generations which had built and adorned Gilead, and he had never again entered the main house.

  The move had taken place when his two daughters were quite young and couldn’t have mattered less to Elaine, but Patricia had always mourned the loss. Rob remembered wandering the big ruined house with her.

  “This was Great-grandmother’s sewing room,” she’d say. “Satin and velvet and silk, Robbie! And this was Great-great-aunt Sally’s bedroom. She had a canopy bed ruffled with white lace and when Aunt Jane Lattimore came to visit, it was hers and she said it was like lying on a cloud.”

  Rob hated to think how much that bed had cost Patricia when she finally tracked it down somewhere in Virginia. By that time, of course, money didn’t matter because Philip Carmichael had so much. He splashed buckets of it over Gilead with no more thought than if he’d been drawing water from the old open well on the back porch. He paid Franklin three times what the place was worth and counted it a bargain for the glow in Patricia’s eyes when Gilead was restored far beyond any earlier glory in time for their wedding.

  And yet, for all that, they hadn’t actually spent much time at Gilead. Philip’s financial interests took him all over the world; and, having married so late in life, he wanted his young wife and later their baby daughter with him wherever he went. After his heart attack in Yokohama, Patricia had brought him back to lie in her family graveyard on a wooded hillside above the creek.

  Less than a year later, she had been brought there herself after losing control of the car on Old Stage Road during a sleet storm.

  Under the complicated terms of their wills, Mary Pat passed into the dual guardianship of Elaine and her husband, Gordon Tyrrell. Warmhearted and generous, Elaine had swooped in and carried her little niece off to their Costa Verde camp on the Gulf of Mexico.

  Camp was the proper word, too, Rob thought wryly, for Franklin Gilbert had given his younger daughter most of the money from the sale of Gilead and Elaine had embraced the life of a globe-trotting daredevil. She and Gordon were constantly off to new slopes to ski, new mountains to climb, new ways to risk their lives.

  In over one hundred and fifty years, Elaine was the first Gilbert whose body did not lie in Gilead’s soil.

  Ironically, it was to have been only a pleasant autumn cruise without the slightest thought of risk-taking; but of the dozen aboard the yacht when an unexpected squall ripped across the Gulf, only three survivors had been picked up by that fishing boat out of Tampico. A bad concussion and broken jaw kept Gordon Tyrrell unconscious for nearly two weeks in a Mexican hospital. They never found James’s body either.

  Losing a wife and brother, too, had sobered Gordon completely, thought Rob; made him quieter and less restless. He’d brought Mary Pat back to Gilead just before Christmas and, in these last few months, devoted himself to giving her a normal secure childhood.

  The road dipped to cross Blacksnake Creek, then curved up to higher ground where Gilead’s white pillars gleamed through the huge bare-branched oaks, the inheritance of a little girl who’d seen more of death in her short four and a half years than most people see in fifty. More of life, too, thought Rob, if you equated the world
with life.

  Take Lacy Honeycutt, who’d lived his whole seventy-plus years just across the road and down the lane from Gilead. Too young for the first war, too old for the others, he’d never been further from home than Raleigh; while Mary Pat Carmichael had already built sandcastles along the shores of all seven seas.

  Opposite Gilead’s drive, a sandy lane cut through the fields. The western part of the Honeycutt farm was a large wooded triangle and the lane—local wits called it the Honeycutt Turnpike—connected the paved road past Gilead with a dirt road past Miss Emily’s house. Many preferred its bumpy directness to driving nearly a mile around the tip of the triangle, and teenagers had been known to linger at the bottom of the dip on warm moonlit nights.

  As Rob topped the lane’s crest, he saw the field van of a Raleigh television station, an ambulance, and three patrol cars down by the packhouse. Beside it, his older brother Dwight, Sheriff Poole’s second in command, stood talking to Kate Honeycutt, whose long honeybrown hair gleamed golden under the noon sun. The TV crew was being kept at a distance by a cordoned-off police line.

  Everyone looked up at his approach. Dwight motioned him past the line, but Kate seemed not to recognize him until he said, “Hello, Cousin Katie.”

  She smiled wanly and Rob was shocked to see how much weight she’d lost since Jake’s funeral last October. She had always been slender, but now her wrists emerged from her loose shirt with every bone apparent beneath the pale skin. Her blue-green eyes had dark circles under them, and he noticed how her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. Dwight Bryant was puzzled. “Are we any kin to Mrs. Honeycutt?”

  “You’re not, just me,” Rob grinned at his brother. “Katie and I are fifth cousins twice-removed.” He was rewarded by a warmer smile on Kate’s bloodless lips.

  In a county where everyone’s family seemed to have settled in before the Revolution, Kate had felt defensive at first about her latearriving ancestors. It had taken a long time to understand that when a Southerner asks who your grandparents were, it’s not from snobbishness but from a genuine desire to place you. Of course, it never hurts if your forebears held a land grant from a royal Lord Proprietor, but nothing delights a Southerner more than to learn that your greatgreat-grandfather and his great-grandmother were brother and sister, even if one had been an illiterate dirt farmer and the other the neighborhood whore.