Bloody Kin Page 4

  “Oh, but surely money’s not a consideration for Gordon,” Kate protested.

  “And why not?” asked Miss Emily. “The Tyrrells may be a First Family of Virginia, but Gordon’s branch was the poor relations—plenty of breeding, but not much money. And what Elaine had from the sale of Gilead was probably all gone in two or three years. Patricia gave them a real big allowance, poor child! She always did feel guilty about Gilead. Remember, Rob?”

  Her son nodded.

  “She loved Gilead so much that she kept thinking she’d taken advantage of Elaine when she and Philip bought out her share. The allowance probably stopped when she died, but isn’t there income from a trust fund or something? How does that work, Rob?”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Rob grinned.

  “Now don’t go all stuffy and lawyerish on us,” Miss Emily wheedled. “It’s not gossiping. Patricia’s will is on file over at the courthouse for the whole world to read. And Kate has just as much right to know as anybody else. Really, now that I think about it, she has lots of right because Philip Carmichael was her cousin. Except for Franklin Gilbert, who’s let himself go senile, and honestly! that man’s only ten years older than me. He never did have any backbone. Anyhow, except for Franklin, Kate’s probably the only blood kin Mary Pat has left in the world.”

  “Am I?” asked Kate, startled. “Well, yes, I suppose I am. Here, anyway. There’s my mother, of course. She and Philip were first cousins—”

  “—so that makes you and Mary Pat second cousins,” Miss Emily said, keeping her eye on the moving pea.

  Curious as she was on the subject and rewarding as it might be now that Kate had mentioned her, this was not the time to get sidetracked into a discussion of Kate’s mother, a Ph.D. at some university out in New Mexico. At the moment, Kate’s mother was a trivial technicality. Kate was of the here and now. “So why shouldn’t she know how things stand?” she asked.

  Rob threw up his hands in capitulation, knowing he would reveal no secrets since, as his mother had already pointed out, both wills were on public record. They were straightforward instruments, drawn up before Philip Carmichael’s heart attack, and they contained no surprises.

  “When Philip died, the corporation was dissolved, all his assets liquidated, and everything channeled into various trusts for Patricia and Mary Pat. I guess he didn’t think she could handle all those interlocking subdivisions.”

  “That wasn’t it,” said Kate, defending her late cousin against implied chauvinism. “Philip used to tease Patricia that she could run his affairs with one hand behind her back if she’d give them half the attention she gave Gilead. She and Jake used to get into the most complex discussions about crop rotation or farm support legislation—things that left Philip and me numb—but he couldn’t make her read a balance sheet or a financial statement on any other part of his holdings; and after Mary Pat was born, he quit trying.”

  Kate took another of Bessie’s buttermilk biscuits. “Philip was realistic about their age difference, too,” she told Rob. “He knew Patricia would probably outlive him and that it was silly to expect she’d turn into a financial wizard the moment he was gone.”

  “Everything went into trusts?” asked Miss Emily.

  Rob nodded. “They were very flexible, though. Philip worked out the main details, but left it so that Patricia could have changed some of them if she’d wanted. So far as I know, the only thing she did was enlarge the allowance Elaine and Gordon would get if they ever became Mary Pat’s guardians.”

  Miss Emily sighed. “I declare, it just breaks my heart to think about Patricia and Elaine. Both of them with everything to live for and then both of them dying so young!”

  Bessie pulled one of the pecan pies closer and began to cut wide wedges. “Long as you’re talking so free, Rob, tell me this little thing: if Mr. Gordon’d drowned, too, who’d have Mary Pat now?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Rob. “The bank would probably establish a household for her until she was old enough to go off to boarding school.” He looked at Kate dubiously. “Or would your mother ask for custody?”

  “No,” said Kate.

  There was nothing emphatic about her answer, but it did not invite further questions.

  Bessie Stewart and Emily Bryant shared another significant glance. Both had been truly shocked when neither of Kate’s parents came east for Jake’s funeral and they had puzzled back and forth for a cause. Their grapevines pushed no tendrils farther west than Memphis, though, so the puzzle remained.

  “What might happen doesn’t matter,” Miss Emily said briskly. “The important thing is that Mary Pat still has Gordon and he’s crazy about her. I was talking to him last week and he thinks the psychiatrist is making real good progress.”

  “Psychiatrist?” asked Kate.

  Miss Emily’s plump round face became solemn under the auburn curls. “She was having bad nightmares, child. And she’d wear a dress one day, then the very next day declare it wasn’t hers, that somebody had changed them. Same with her books and toys.”

  “That must have been what happened today,” said Kate. “Lacy gave her one of Fluff’s kittens and Mary Pat brought it back this morning because she said its feet were different. I tried to show her that all the kittens had the same white feet, but she didn’t believe me.”

  “The doctor told Gordon it’s because of all the shuffling around she’s had to do these last two years. First her daddy died and she came to live at Gilead; then her mother died and she got carted off to Mexico; then her aunt drowned and everything changed again.

  “Gordon says that’s why he decided to come back here. It’s the most permanent home the child’s ever had. He and the doctor think that after a while, when the big things in Mary Pat’s life start showing some permanency, she’ll quit questioning the changeableness of little things.”

  As she spoke, there was a rap on the kitchen door and Dwight Bryant stuck his head in. “They tell you to save me a piece of pie, Bessie?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Kate had never given much thought to how a murder investigation ought to proceed, but the folksiness of this one disarmed her.

  A place at the kitchen table was cleared for Dwight, who tried to keep sticky crumbs of pecan pie off his notes while Bessie and his mother mixed facts and gossip with their answers.

  His thick brown hair was neatly brushed, except for an unruly cowlick at the crown of his head. He wore a dark red wool shirt, a black knit tie, black slacks, and a gray wool sports jacket that occasionally swung back to reveal a Smith & Wesson .357, standard issue in the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. The ring finger of his left hand was bare, but the skin was lighter there, as if a wedding band had blocked out the sun until recently. Kate dimly recalled that Miss Emily had changed the subject last summer when Dwight’s name came up and she’d retained an impression of marital troubles. Was that why Dwight had decided to “come on back home”?

  He was broader than his younger brother, with the muscular build of a professional football player. In reality, Kate was soon told, twenty years earlier and thirty pounds lighter, he had captained Zachary Taylor’s basketball team all the way to the state championship.

  Bessie was clearly fond of him and not intimidated by his official rank and power. His years in the army and a stint with the Capitol City Police had molded Dwight into a competent law officer, and she would accord him the respect due his professional capacity; but in her mind’s eye, he would forever be a hungry, gangling boy with skinned knees and a wicked hook shot that could sink a basketball from any distance four times out of five.

  “Did you happen to take that peeled grape you call a car through the turnpike this morning?” Dwight asked his mother.

  “No, I didn’t and don’t you go throwing off on my car. It’ll still be running when yours is a rust bucket back of Junior Moore’s service station,” she said tartly. Every year she sacrificed her TR to the votech automotive repair class, and every year it came back a wilder colo
r than before.

  “Eighteen coats of Day-Glo paint’s probably all that’s holding it together,” Dwight chuckled. “I don’t suppose either you or Bessie noticed anything odd last night?”

  “Dogs were right noisy,” Bessie offered. “Willy finally roused hisself up about midnight and went out on the porch and hollered ’em shut.”

  “Which way were they barking?” Dwight asked.

  For a giddy moment, Kate remembered the Duke of Athens’s bellvoiced hounds and expected Bessie to tell him alto or soprano. It was soon apparent though that Dwight meant direction, not timbre.

  “I expect you’ll have to ask Willy that and he’s off working today,” said Bessie. “Won’t be home till suppertime. All I know, them dogs were out front. Not much moon to see by.”

  “No point asking me,” said Miss Emily when Dwight turned to her. “Once my head touches the pillow it would take the hounds of hell baying in my bathroom to wake me up. Willy’s coonhounds never do it.”

  “They might have been barking at me,” said Kate. “I drove in a little after midnight. I heard some dogs then and again when I was falling off to sleep an hour or so later.”

  “Did you come through the lane?” asked Dwight, and when she nodded, he said, “See anybody? Notice anything odd about the packhouse?”

  Kate tried to remember. She had been so tired when she turned into the rutted dirt lane. She hadn’t made as early a start as she’d planned and the need for caution on icy northern roads had stretched a ten-hour trip into eleven.

  Always before, she and Jake had shared the driving and she was usually dozing in the passenger seat whenever they reached the cutoff. “Wake up, Katydid,” he’d say. “We’re almost there.”

  Last night, tiredness had helped block out those earlier homecomings and she hadn’t been alert to details. As Bessie said, the moon was still new, a growing sliver in a star-pricked sky that had set while she was still up in Virginia, so it was quite dark beyond her headlights.

  Her lights had reflected redly in the eyes of a possum that lumbered back into the pine woods on the right as her car approached, but she remembered nothing else stirring, The packhouse had been only a dark shape on her left as she started up the slight rise, straining to see beyond the leafless branches of the apple orchard.

  “I’m afraid I was looking for a light up at the farmhouse instead of noticing the packhouse,” she apologized.

  “You mean to say Lacy didn’t even leave you a light?” fumed Miss Emily, “That man needs his ears pulled.”

  Kate smiled at the vision of little Miss Emily pulling the ears of Jake’s tall and crusty uncle.

  “You’re the one who could do it,” said Dwight, whose cowlick had suffered more than once at his mother’s hands.

  “Want me to have a talk with him?” asked Rob. “You know, Kate, legally you’re not bound to let him stay on there. Jake left you full title.”

  “Ask him to leave?” Kate was shocked that Rob would even suggest it. “Jake wouldn’t have wanted that. Lacy’s been there all his life. Where would he go? No, I couldn’t do it.”

  Bessie and Miss Emily agreed. Lacy Honeycutt might be as selfcentered as a fice dog with a sandspur in its bottom, but asking him to leave his homeplace wouldn’t be fitting.

  “All the same, it won’t hurt to remind him who’s paying the taxes,” Rob said.

  Kate shook her head. “Please don’t. I’ll work it out somehow.”

  “Was he up when you got in last night?” asked Dwight.

  “It was completely dark,” Kate said slowly, “so I thought he’d already gone to bed; but now that you mention it, when I put on the hall light and he came to the top of the stairs to see who it was, he was dressed. Shirt, overalls, even his work shoes.”

  Dwight scraped the last morsel of pie from his plate and closed his notebook. “If you’re ready to leave, Mrs. Honeycutt, I’ll drive you over and speak to Mr. Lacy now.”

  “Don’t be so prissy, Dwight,” said his mother. “You taught Jake how to ride a bicycle. You two can call each other by your first names.”

  “Please do,” said Kate. “It’s going to be hard to keep saying Major Bryant when I remember some of the other things Jake said you taught him.” There was a ghost of mischief in her smile.

  Rob found himself experiencing a slight resurgence of what he used to call baby-brotherism, that frustrated feeling of being the younger tag-along who was always getting left behind and accused of being too little to keep up.

  “I’d better head back to Raleigh,” he said stiffly. “Unless you’ll change your mind about Lacy?”

  Kate shook her head again. “It’ll be all right.” Her hand found his. “Thank you for coming, Rob.” She gave Miss Emily and Bessie thank-you hugs and followed Dwight out to his unmarked car.

  He held the door for her in awkward courtesy while Bessie and Miss Emily interrupted each other with instructions for Kate to come or call if there were the least little thing either woman could do to help her settle in.

  “I’ll be home from school tomorrow by four,” said Miss Emily.

  “And I’ll be here or next door at my house all day long,” Bessie called.

  They seem real fond of you,” said Dwight as he eased the car away from the range of their voices and drove the short distance to the Honeycutt house diagonally across the road a thousand feet.

  “They’re very sweet,” Kate said. Even the death of a mysterious stranger hadn’t kept lunch from being cheerful and friendly and very comforting. She would have to be careful not to impose on their kindness.

  “Mother says you’re going to live down here for good?” His voice turned the statement into a query.

  “I don’t know about for good. For the time being, anyhow.”

  “It’ll probably be too quiet for a city girl like you.”

  Was there a hint of bitterness in his tone? Before she could counter with a question of her own, they had pulled into the circular drive and coasted to a stop before the front porch.

  Lacy Honeycutt watched their approach from the top step. His eyes squinted against the bright midday sun and there was no smile of welcome on his craggy face.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Honeycutt house had been built in the early 1870s by Lacy’s grandfather from longleaf pines felled along Blacksnake Creek. It began as a utilitarian and unpretentious two-story farm dwelling, four rooms over four with a wide central hall that bisected each floor front to back. Kitchen, sitting room, Sunday parlor, and master bedroom occupied the ground floor and the four bedrooms upstairs slept three sons and four daughters, two spinster aunts, and a widowed grandmother.

  The house was fifty years old before it received its first coat of paint, and after Rural Electrification finally came to the community in the 1930s, a new kitchen wing was added to the back and indoor plumbing replaced the hand pump and outhouse.

  Sometime during its history a deep, shed-roofed porch had been built across the front and one side. Another porch extended off the kitchen on the lane side of the house.

  The tall oaks that shaded the house in summer and allowed warming sunlight through their unleafed branches in winter had been dug out of the woods as four-foot saplings while Lacy and his brother Andrew were still in diapers. Later, when Jane Gilbert crossed the road to become Andrew’s bride, she brought rooted slips and cuttings from Gilead’s neglected gardens. Thick bushy azaleas softened the foundation with masses of pink, white, and red every spring because of Jake’s mother, and irises and daylilies bloomed in their season beneath the dogwoods that lined the half-moon drive.

  To think that those vigorous, hardworking generations had dwindled down to one embittered old man, Kate mused as she sat on the porch swing and listened to Dwight Bryant question Lacy about the previous evening.

  As if in protest, the baby gave her a soft kick in the side and she touched the place in mute apology. “Okay, little one,” she thought. “I won’t write off all the Honeycutts just yet.”

>   “I’m telling you, if they was any strangers hanging around I didn’t see ’em,” Lacy Honeycutt repeated after Dwight tried to nudge his memory a second time. “The dogs would’ve let me know the minute somebody put foot on this land.”

  “And they didn’t make a peep yesterday?”

  “Not like you mean.” He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground in front of the steps where he sat, ground it out with a scarred and battered work shoe, and immediately lit another.

  Since Jake’s accident, Lacy explained, he’d started letting the two pointers range free with Aunt Susie, his old beagle.

  “I don’t do much hunting no more and it seemed like a shame to keep ’em penned up all the time. Reckon Aunt Susie’s taught ’em a few bad habits. They was chasing a rabbit to hell and gone down by the creek. Kept up the cry all afternoon and they was plumb wore out when they come dragging up to the house last night after supper.”

  “So if somebody was hiding in the packhouse, your dogs might have been too busy chasing rabbits to notice.”

  “Maybe,” Lacy conceded.

  “And they didn’t bark at all last night?”

  “I didn’t say that. Willy Stewart’s dogs carried on right smart. My dogs give answer a couple of times. And they let me know when she come.

  “You never went out to see what was bothering them?” asked Dwight.

  “It won’t that sort of barking,” said the old man, exasperation in his voice. “Leastways not with my dogs. Can’t say about Willy’s. They’ll bark at grasshoppers. Look here, Dwight Bryant. You been up in Washington so long you don’t remember how country dogs act? You know good as me how one kind of bark means one thing and another bark means something else. Did you go out every time one of your dogs yipped?”

  Dwight admitted he hadn’t. “But that dead man got himself killed in your packhouse sometime between eight last night and four this morning most likely. Now Mrs. Honeycutt says the lights were off but you were still up and dressed when she got in after midnight.”

  “I was just fixing to go to bed when I heared her car.”