Death's Half Acre dk-14 Read online

  It vaguely worried her that women were advised to cut their hair shorter as they grew older, but she figured she had at least another six or eight years before she had to make that decision. Men liked long sexy hair and salesclerks still thought that she and Dee were sisters. Indeed, someone had recently taken a quick look at Dee’s hungover pasty face and baggy eyes and mistakenly assumed that Dee was the mother and she the daughter.

  Candace smiled at the memory of Dee’s reaction to that.

  Satisfied with her looks, she strolled over to the closet and pulled out a favorite spring dress. The white top was a respectable short-sleeved shirt with tiny pearl buttons and a boat collar cut low enough that when she leaned forward to share a confidential aside with one of her fellow board members, he could get a nice glimpse of cleavage. The skirt was green with white polka dots and cut on the bias so that it made a flirty flare at the hemline, a hemline so short that it added an illusion of length to her legs.

  The dress made her feel flirty herself and would probably tempt old Harvey Underwood into patting her knees at the board meeting tonight.

  As long as his hand stops at my knees and doesn’t try to slide on up under my skirt, she thought. If it got her his vote against the planning board’s recommendations, what did she care?

  Let Jamie Jacobson fume and make sarcastic highfalutin remarks that half the time nobody could understand. She’d teach that long-legged bitch a few lessons about trying to take on Candace Bradshaw.

  She carried the dress on into her bedroom and laid it on the bed. As she turned to a dresser for lingerie, a voice said, “Very nice, Candy.”

  “Don’t call me Candy,” she snapped as she reached for a robe to cover her nakedness. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you. Although I didn’t expect to see quite this much of you.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “You must have left the door unlocked.”

  Candace gave an unladylike snort of derision. “Not hardly likely. What do you want?”

  “Nothing that’s not well within your abilities.”

  Candace flushed, knowing this was a dig at her lack of education. Okay, so she never went to college. Big damn deal. Most of the county commissioners had degrees from State or Carolina and who was their chair? And who ran Colleton County’s largest managerial service?

  “What’s that?” she asked as the other handed her a sheet of paper.

  “What do you care? It’s a little late to go reading what you’re told to sign. Just copy it on your pretty notepaper, okay?”

  Candace Bradshaw’s eyes widened as she read the few short sentences typed on the paper. “ ‘I take full responsibility for my greediness’? ‘I apologize to everybody in the county who trusted me’? You’re crazy if you think I’ll write anything like this. Get the hell out of my house and stay out or I’ll—”

  Her voice broke off at the sudden appearance of a small pistol. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “No?” A pull of the trigger, a soft pfft, and a bullet buried itself in the pile rug next to her bare feet.

  Candace’s eyes widened in fear. “My God! You are crazy.”

  “Not crazy enough to go to jail because you messed up.”

  “Me? You’re the one who said nobody would ever find out.”

  “And they wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been so greedy that they’ve started noticing.”

  Appalled, Candace listened as the facts were laid out—the questions that were starting to be asked, the people who were doing the asking.

  Her real desk and computer were in the third bedroom, which she had furnished as a home office, but a jerk of the pistol directed her over to the dainty desk where she wrote personal notes and cards.

  It took only a moment or two to copy the typescript she had been handed.

  To whom it may concern:

  I have used my position to enrich myself and some of my friends. I acted alone though and I take full responsibility for my greediness. I am sincerely ashamed and I apologize to everyone in Colleton County who trusted me with their well-being.

  When she finished, she signed it CANDACE BRADSHAW with an angry flourish. “There! Satisfied?”

  “Not quite. Not till it’s safely locked away.”

  “I’ll tell them you made me write it,” she spat out.

  “Won’t matter. It’ll be your word against mine, Candy.”

  “Don’t call me Candy. And put down my robe!”

  “Relax, Candace. I could ask you to give me your word that you wouldn’t call Sheriff Poole and have me arrested before I can put your copy in a safe place and destroy the original, but we both know how much your word’s worth. I think I’d rather tie you up for a while, give you time to think things over and realize that anything you say about me will only make people believe it was all your doing.”

  With that pistol aimed at her chest, Candace stood up as instructed and draped the second robe over her shoulders backward so that her arms were pinned to her sides and held almost immobile when the sash and the empty sleeves were tied in back.

  All the while, her mind was racing furiously, weighing her options. The sash wasn’t too tight and there was a little slack inside the second robe. It wouldn’t be too hard to wriggle free. And then? If things really were coming unraveled, there had to be a way out of this mess. She’d call Cam. He’d help her find a way to throw all the blame on—

  Abruptly, something looped her throat. There was a sudden tightening, a constriction that left her unable to breathe. Frantically, she struggled to jerk away, but the pressure increased inexorably.

  No way to use her arms or hands to yank it away from her neck. In fear and rage, she sank to her knees and butted backward with her head, her body arching and twisting to free herself, to take one deep lifesaving breath. A quick lunge forward and she felt the cord loosen. For one second, she could almost breathe again.

  Oh please oh please oh please—

  And then the pressure was back. A frantic twist and something tore in her throat. Searing pain lanced across her dying brain and sparked a last incoherent thought of water . . . her healing shower . . . hot water . . .

  CHAPTER 2

  All the big apple orchards are gone.

  . . . peach trees, old horse apples

  that came from Civil War days.

  I remember the Indian and Clear-seed peach . . .

  All that, gone.

  —Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

  TUESDAY NIGHT

  You ain’t never gonna get a man to vote against his pocketbook, Deb’rah,” Daddy said, waving a hard roll at me to make his point. “And right now, every one of them commissioners ’cepting maybe Abe Jacobson’s granddaughter is either in the building trade or got real close ties to somebody that’s making a bunch of money offen the new folks. So lessen you plan to quit being a judge and run for commissioner yourself, you can just suck it up.”

  “I don’t want to suck it up,” I said petulantly as I dipped a piece of my own roll into the dish of olive oil on the table between us. “I just want them to start thinking about the people of Colleton County. All the people, not just the ones that pay for their political posters and campaign ads.”

  “Oh, I reckon them people’s paying for a lot more than that,” he said cynically as he waited for our server to bring him some butter.

  After finishing up a court session that ran late, I had stayed on in Dobbs to catch up on my paperwork until it was time to meet some of the family for supper. It had surprised me to get to the restaurant and find Daddy there. He doesn’t drive at night much any more and I hadn’t realized he was coming.

  Ferguson’s is a little pricy, but their steaks are dry-aged and supposedly hormone-free. Here on a Tuesday night, it wasn’t very busy and the waiter had already been around once to refill our tea glasses.

  “Anyhow,” said Daddy, “when did you start thinking county commissioners oughta be different from any other
politicians?”

  “Ever since I heard they’re letting NutriGood build a store at Pleasant’s Crossroads.”

  I have nothing against the NutriGood grocery chain, per se. I may not preach the gospel of whole grains and free-range chickens like a born-again health nut, but I do like them; and whenever I’m in Raleigh, I swing past the NutriGood to pick up store-baked bread and organic vegetables that aren’t yet ripe in our garden. Hell, I even bring my own reusable cloth tote bags so I won’t have to decide whether it’s paper or plastic that’s going to wind up in our county landfill.

  A chain store in Raleigh’s one thing, and I can grit my teeth and live with the sprawling commercial mess around the interstate exits several miles to the east of me. But an upscale town store to anchor a strip mall at Pleasant’s Crossroads? Only three short miles from my own house? That’s a whole ’nother can of something, and no, I’m not talking organic worms.

  Pleasant’s Crossroads is the intersection of two backcountry roads that used to go nowhere. Nothing was there except scrubby woods, tobacco fields, and a couple of dilapidated clapboard buildings on diagonal corners facing each other across the two-lane hardtop. One building was a little general store and single-pump service station that old Max Pleasant owned back when my daddy was running white lightning all up and down the coast and needed a safe source of sugar. It’s been closed for years. Daddy’s name was never on the deed to that store, but everyone knew who bankrolled it and who paid the bills. The other was a barbershop run by one of Max’s Yadkin cousins. That’s where Daddy and those of my eleven brothers who live out this way used to get their hair cut every four or five weeks until Baldy Yadkin abruptly hung up his scissors, sold out to a commercial builder, and bought himself a place on the Pamlico Sound, where he can fish and crab three hundred days a year.

  Bulldozers had already torn out and removed Max’s old gas and kerosene tanks and thrown up a berm around that corner so as to provide privacy for a secluded high-end “village” developed and owned by G. Hooks Talbert, one of the movers and shakers in the state’s Republican party and a descendant of the original Pleasant who held a land grant from the Lords Proprietor. Talbert’s older son used to run a wholesale nursery out there on the other side of Possum Creek from us. In fact, that nursery was responsible for my becoming a district court judge five years ago.

  It’s a long story, but all you need to know is that it gave Daddy the opportunity to pressure G. Hooks—

  “Pressure?” asked the preacher who lurks at the edge of my consciousness and tries to keep me honest.

  “I believe the word you’re looking for is blackmail,” said the pragmatist who usually approves of euphemisms.

  Okay, okay. Technically speaking, that nursery gave Daddy the ammunition to blackmail G. Hooks Talbert into asking the governor to appoint me after I lost my first race. Until then, Talbert was famous in our family for saying he didn’t care to deal with any ignorant bootlegger. Nobody’s heard him say that recently and now it’s gotten personal.

  To even the score, and knowing how it would gall Daddy to have any kind of a development—even an upscale one—so close to his borders, G. Hooks quietly bought up all the land on the south side of Possum Creek and, even more quietly, got the county commissioners to rubber-stamp his plans to build creekside houses and a tiny village centered around a café and a gift shop that stocked designer jewelry and local pottery. The first thing he did was dredge out a lake on a bend of the creek and put up a picturesque country inn with a gourmet restaurant suitable for formal weddings.

  Unfortunately for him, he underestimated the Kezzie Knott grapevine. Someone at the register of deeds office had given Daddy a heads-up before the ink was dry on the first property transfers. Daddy waited until the inn was finished and the lake was already stocked with bass and perch before it was brought to G. Hooks’s attention that our line ran along the south bank of the creek and not down the middle of the creek itself as was usual. Daddy could have made G. Hooks tear down his new million-dollar inn and fill the lake back in.

  We’ve heard that several of G. Hooks’s attorneys were fired after he was sent a copy of our deeds with the relevant parts highlighted in yellow.

  The agreement that our family hammered out with the Talbert Corporation provided that the rest of the creek and the new lake would become a managed greenway. No houses on the creek itself. Instead, there would be hiking trails and bicycle paths on both sides. We don’t have to look at the McMansions that are still going up, and in return, we allow hikers and picnickers on our side of the creek, which, according to Talbert’s site manager, is proving to be a big plus in the eyes of potential buyers who have moved to the country because they want to see a little country.

  Except for the extra cars that the new village has added to our roads, it’s been a good enough compromise, although I suspect G. Hooks is still smarting from being one-upped by an ex-bootlegger. Sequestered behind berms and fast-growing evergreen firs and hollies, there were no visual eyesores to blight the landscape.

  Until now. Now a big gaudy sign proudly announces the imminent arrival of our very own NutriGood grocery store. Soon that little homemade barbershop will be swept away as if it never existed.

  As if four generations of Colleton County farmers hadn’t swapped tall tales and bragged about how many pounds of tobacco or how many bales of cotton their land was going to produce that year.

  As if little boys who are now grandfathers hadn’t scrunched down on the wooden bench beneath the dangling bare lightbulb to listen while their elders waxed eloquent about the love and loss of a good woman or a good car or a good hound that treed his last possum more than fifty years ago.

  It’s not that I didn’t know how financial magazines regularly rate us as one of the best places to live. But it wasn’t till I saw the bulldozers scraping that corner clean that it finally hit home for me that our whole way of life is under attack. Let an ant find one tasty crumb and soon your whole kitchen counter is aswarm with them. People who live in the county’s small towns or inside Raleigh’s Beltline don’t have a clue about the changes out here in the country, of the things we’re losing.

  Two years ago, tobacco and corn grew behind that little shop. Pine trees have encroached along the back edges where dogwoods and redbuds bloom. The new strip of brick buildings will include a bath and beauty store, a Thai restaurant, a dry cleaner, and God knows what else. The parking lot will hold three hundred cars. Nothing’s been said about limiting the light pollution that will wash the rest of the Milky Way out of our night skies. Nothing about requiring trees to shade that much asphalt and help with the runoff that will surely work its way into the creek that meanders through my family’s land.

  Even though it’s downstream from us, we still care. Years ago, my brothers quit farming right up to the edge of the creek and built dikes across the fields so as to prevent fertilizers and pesticides from washing into it. They don’t go around hugging trees, but they try to be good stewards of the land and they know that we’re all interconnected—not that any of them would put it that way. But Possum Creek flows into the Neuse and the Neuse flows into Core Sound, which used to have the best scallops and oysters my brothers ever tasted. They can remember standing waist-deep in the gentle waters off Harkers Island, feeling for scallops with their bare feet. The big twins can get downright lyrical remembering their salty sweetness.

  “We’d scoop one up and wait for it to peep open,” says Haywood. “Soon as we saw that ring of shiny blue eyes, we’d slide in a clamshell, twist it open, and eat it raw right there.”

  “That was good eating, won’t it?” Herman always says.

  “Real good,” Haywood says with a sigh for what’s been lost. “Real good.”

  The Neuse was recently declared one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Seth smiling down at me. He’s five brothers up from me, but there’s always been a special bond between us. />
  “Y’all order yet?” his wife, Minnie, asked. “I’m hungry enough to eat a cow. Or at least the flank of one that’s walked past the fire.”

  She leaned over to kiss Daddy’s leathery cheek and took the chair next to mine.

  “Any of the others coming to the meeting?” I asked Minnie, meaning those of my brothers and sisters-in-law who still live out on the farm.

  “All of ’em.” She put on her glasses and reached for a menu. “Plus some of those new people from Talbert’s place. They’re not exactly clear on what a stump dump is, but they’re pretty sure they didn’t pay close to a million dollars to live near one.”

  Seth grinned as he looked up from his menu. “Not after Minnie finished talking to them anyhow.”

  Minnie used to be president of the county’s Democratic Women and she’s shepherded me through both of my campaigns. Comfortably plump and fast going gray, she keeps an eye on the larger community for the family and rallies us to the cause when she thinks we’re needed.

  “Times like this, I really miss Linsey Thomas,” she sighed.

  The owner and editor of The Dobbs Ledger died in a hit-and-run almost a year ago, a case that remains unsolved despite the large reward posted by his loyal readers. I was still messing around with a game warden from down east then, with no thought of marrying anybody, much less Dwight Bryant, Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief deputy; but I remember how long and how hard Bo’s whole force worked to find the driver, only to come up dry.

  Linsey Thomas was a straight-shooting liberal from a long line of liberals. His grandfather was labeled a commie during the McCarthy era. His father had advocated integration during the civil rights movement, back when the KKK was still active in the county. They burned a cross on the Thomas lawn and shot out all the windows at the Ledger. When Linsey took over the paper, he continued their tradition. Didn’t matter if the miscreants were Republican or Democrat, the Ledger named names and kicked butt whenever county officials favored special interests or began to think no one cared if they bent the rules for themselves or their friends. Linsey cared and he made his readers care.