Bloody Kin Read online

  “Your bedroom’s still on the back, isn’t it?” Dwight asked.

  Lacy agreed that it was.

  “And Mrs. Honeycutt had told you she was coming?”

  “For all I knowed, she could’ve changed her mind.”

  Neither man glanced in Kate’s direction, but she sensed they expected her to speak. She remained silent. What would be gained by telling the detective that she or Jake had always called if their plans changed?

  “Just the same,” said Dwight, “with it getting late and all, it’d be natural to take a chair by a back window and wait up a while to see she got in safe.”

  Lacy grunted noncommittally.

  “So did you see anything at all? A car or somebody with a flashlight?”

  “I won’t waiting up for her,” said Lacy. “Just set down to rest a spell, do a little thinking. Won’t no lights anywhere in the lane till she come.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that I went to bed,” Lacy said firmly. “I heared the Wheeler boy coming home on his motorcycle about two o’clock, but anybody else use the lane, I don’t know nothing about it.”

  He fastened the buttons of his faded blue denim work jacket and stood up to indicate that as far as he was concerned the interview was over.

  Dwight stood, too.

  “If you happen to remember where you might have seen that man before,” he told Kate, “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call at the sheriff’s office.”

  Lacy took the dangling cigarette from the corner of his mouth and said, “She seen him before? He one of her New York friends?”

  He made New York sound like an epithet.

  “Not a friend,” Kate said sharply. “There was something about that black mole on his cheek—”

  “Black mole?”

  Lacy’s pale blue eyes goggled at them and Dwight said, “That’s right—I forgot you weren’t down at the packhouse when we brought him out. You only saw him lying with the side of his face against the ground. When we turned him over, Mr. Lacy, there was a pea-size black mole on the right cheek, just below his eye.”

  “And she thought he looked familiar?” Lacy spluttered. “I reckon he did. I guaran-damn-tee you he looked familiar. You wait right here!”

  He hurried up the porch steps and into the house. The sound of table drawers scraping open reached them through the door and Dwight looked questioningly at Kate.

  She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  In a moment, Lacy returned, hugging a large scrapbook-type picture album to his bony chest. He sat down on a wicker rocker near Kate’s swing and rested the album on his knees.

  “Now just you looky here,” he told Dwight, turning the brittle black pages.

  The snapshots were tipped in with black triangular corners, many of which had lost their holding power. Several pictures had come loose entirely and Lacy tucked them between the pages as he searched. Kate remembered leafing through the album with Jake several times after they were just married when she was eager to know everything about his life before they met.

  His mother had begun it in the forties by gathering up all the stray family photographs and arranging them in chronological order. The oldest was a badly corroded tintype of an elderly man in full whiskers. There were stiffly posed studio groupings of children in petticoats and high-button shoes. Halfway through the album, brown-toned wedding pictures gave way to shiny Kodak snapshots of Jake as a baby balanced on an enormous mule by a grinning Lacy; Jake as a toddler on Andrew’s lap laughing through the steering wheel of a new tractor; Jake in a series of grammar school pictures that ended with a solemn yearbook likeness of a capped and gowned senior clutching his high school diploma.

  Jake’s mother had identified the earliest sections in tiny white-ink captions. After her death, Andrew had written the dates directly onto the snapshot borders in firm ballpoint script. Later still, Lacy’s uneven printing had labeled the pictures: “J. in basic training,” “J. in army uniform,” “J’s last leave before Vietnam,” “J. and buddies in V.”

  The printing remained, but that particular page was empty. Only the black corners showed that several spaces had been painstakingly filled at one time.

  Lacy fumbled through the loose snapshots and finally went back into the house to turn out the table drawer. The photographs he sought remained missing. “They was pictures of Jake and James Tyrrell and a Bernie-somebody.”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Kate, now that her memory had been nudged.

  “He had a black mole in the same place you say that dead man has,” said Lacy.

  “Didn’t he have a beard though?” asked Kate.

  For the past half hour, Lacy had talked around Kate, ignored her presence, and tried to pretend she didn’t exist. Even now, in his excitement, he responded to Dwight rather than answer her directly.

  “That’s right. He had a big black beard just like my granddaddy Avera had, only his was white.”

  “Can you remember his last name?” asked Dwight.

  “Bernie’s all I ever heared Jake call him.”

  “Kate?” If Dwight felt awkward using her name this first time, he didn’t show it.

  “It began with a C,” said Kate, “and I think it was rather long—like Chesterton or Columbia. Something like that.”

  “Vietnam,” mused Dwight. “That was where Jake first met James Tyrrell, wasn’t it, and Tyrrell saved his life?”

  “They was on a night patrol,” said Lacy. “Jake, James, this here Bernie, and the one they called Kid, and some others. The gooks opened fire and they got cut off from the rest of their company. Everybody on that patrol got killed ’cepting them four. A sniper had Jake right between the cross hairs of his gun and James was off to one side and seen him and got off the first shot. Took ’em three days to work their way back to their company and I reckon they had some right touchous times ’fore they was safe again.”

  “Touchous” was the word for it all right, thought Kate. On the whole, Jake had come home from Vietnam unscarred. By the time they met, he had buried the hellish parts of those eighteen months and seemed to remember only the camaraderie and the adolescent horsing around between battles.

  Only once, when he woke up sweat-drenched from a terrifying nightmare, did he let her see some of the horror he had endured.

  While a violent summer storm sent thunder and lightning crashing across the Manhattan skies, he had shivered in her arms and told of being lost in a featureless jungle, mortar fire all around them, their patrol leader blown into a hundred bloody shreds, the eerie silence when the shelling stopped, the click of the sniper’s rifle just before James’s own hastily aimed shot tore through the sniper’s shoulder, how Bernie and James had pounded that Vietcong soldier into a wet pulp while he looked on numbly and the Kid vomited in the undergrowth, of crouching in a tunnel below a ruined temple with a Cong patrol camped above them all night.

  “I know they stayed friends,” said Dwight, “’cause I remember the first time Tyrrell visited down here. I was on leave from the army myself and he and Jake and the Gilbert girls and I drove over to Chapel Hill for a basketball game. But what about this Bernie and the Kid?”

  Lacy shrugged. “They never come here.”

  “I didn’t know them either,” said Kate. “Vietnam was long before I met Jake and he seldom talked about it. I had the impression that they’d been thrown together on that patrol by chance and that they didn’t really have much in common. The Kid was a little younger. I think he’d lied about his age to join. And this Bernie might have been something of a criminal. I seem to recall Jake said he was in trouble with the MPs later, drugs or black market.”

  “The army’ll still have his fingerprints handy,” said Dwight. “Sure would help if we had a name, though.”

  “If you can wait until tomorrow,” said Kate, “I could probably give you one. The movers are due in the morning and I know exactly which carton I put Jake’s things in. There was a manila envelope of Vietnam stuff. I’
m almost positive there were pictures with names and dates on the back.”

  Lacy continued to thumb through the loose snapshots among the album pages. “Durned if I can figure out what went with the pictures of them boys. Jake must of sent me five or six.”

  “Maybe you put them somewhere else,” Dwight suggested. “When did you see them last?”

  Lacy sat back in the wicker rocker and narrowed his eyes in concentration. “Let’s see. It was back right before Christmas. Mary Pat’d come over to bring me a picture she’d drawed of Aunt Susie and a Christmas tree and we got to talking about family and I pulled out the album to show her this here picture of her mammy and daddy when they got married.”

  He opened to a color miniature of Patricia and Philip Carmichael’s wedding portrait—Patricia effervescent in white gauze, Philip gray at the temples and so distinguished in his morning jacket. Their happiness caught Kate off balance and blurred her eyes with momentary mist. She leaned back in the swing and gazed out across the yard to the pecan grove beyond, to watch the wind push small white clouds across the blue sky while Lacy talked.

  “She wanted to see the whole book and I remember them Vietnam pictures of Jake and her Uncle James was there because we was looking at ’em when that Whitley girl come to fetch her and Mary Pat made her stay and finish looking at ’em with us. And after they left, I put that album right back in the parlor table drawer and there it stayed till I fetched it out just now. So where the hell are they?” he demanded.

  Kate’s attention snapped away from the clouds as she realized that Lacy was speaking directly to her for the first time since the interview began.

  “You think I took them?” she asked. “Even if I’d wanted to, Lacy, when do you think I did it? I went straight to bed last night and you know perfectly well that I haven’t been near the parlor today.”

  “Well, somebody took ’em, cause they’re sure not here now,” Lacy said truculently.

  CHAPTER 6

  Kate had been aware of the telephone’s distant rings for several minutes before she could pull herself up from dreamless depths and make her body move. Still groggy, she stumbled barefooted out to the hall where their single phone sat on a massive black walnut chest.

  “Hello?”

  “I was beginning to think you must be out plowing the back forty,” said Gina Melnick’s amused voice.

  “No,” Kate said, fluffing her brown hair where the pillow had mashed it flat. Sunlight still brightened the west parlor, but she felt disoriented. “What time is it?”

  “Ten after four. What’s the matter? Don’t they have clocks down there?” The agent’s voice became worried. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Honest. It’s the pregnant lady syndrome. You caught me in the middle of a nap and there’s only one phone here, that’s what took me so long to answer. How’s New York?”

  “Just as it was when you left yesterday,” Gina said dryly. “Homesick for slush and sleet already?”

  Gina had not approved of this move. “It’s the farm you should be selling, not your apartment,” she’d argued; and Kate soon realized that she had not given up the fight.

  “Listen,” Gina said now. “I’ve found somebody who’ll rent your apartment for three hundred a month more than your mortgage payments. What do you say?”

  “I don’t know, Gina.” The immediate money would be useful, but long-distance landlording might be a hassle.

  “This guy’s as honest as Abe Lincoln,” said Gina, reading her mind. “Anyhow, I’ll have my lawyer draw up a no-loophole lease and we’ll put in that he has to vacate on a month’s notice if you change your mind about coming back.”

  For a moment, Kate pictured the comfortable modern apartment overlooking the Hudson River. It seemed like days instead of only hours since she had left it for this quixotic adventure. Maybe she should forget about making a home for her baby here and go back to the city where she belonged. The moment passed as she remembered how devastated New York made her feel.

  The farm might be Jake’s but curiously it did not cut at her heart the way the city did. Because it was his turf and not hers, it was now more neutral. Here were no landmarks to rise up and scald her with memories of places where she and Jake had met when they were courting: the theater dates, Sunday afternoons in the museums, or bookstores where she had glanced up from a table of bestsellers to find him waving lasciviously-titled book jackets.

  The apartment was haunted by their lovemaking—Jake sleepy-eyed and tousled or lustily macho. For the last two months, she had slept on the couch, unable to lie in their bed alone night after desolate night.

  “Kate? You still there?” asked Gina. “Look, it’s not just you I’m thinking about. My friend really does need a place to live. He’s desperate.”

  “Okay,” said Kate, warmed by her concern. “I’ll call the managing company and tell them to give you the keys.”

  They talked a few minutes longer. Kate did not mention the murder because she knew how it would upset Gina, who avoided Central Park and took the risk of subway muggings in stride, but considered the countryside full of gun-wielding escaped convicts. Let Gina hear one word of murder and that brittle sophisticate was capable of catching the next plane south. Gina Melnick under the same roof with Lacy Honeycutt, even for a weekend, was something Kate preferred not to contemplate, so she talked cheerfully of settling in and promised she would soon be sending Gina designs of stunning beauty and originality.

  “As long as you don’t start churning out bunnies and horsies and cute little kittycats,” Gina warned sardonically.

  Mollified at getting her way, she rang off and Kate went out to the kitchen. There was still some cold coffee in the unplugged coffee maker, but in deference to the baby, she conscientiously drank milk.

  There was no sign of Lacy or that he’d planned to do anything about supper, so she found a casserole that she’d left in the freezer last fall and set it on the back of the woodstove to thaw.

  She dealt with the co-op’s management company in New York, then changed the bed linens and unpacked the suitcases she’d been too tired to tackle last night. Someone—Lacy? Bessie?—had cleared the drawers and closets of Jake’s country clothes, and she lined the shelves with fresh paper. The windows had been open all afternoon and fifteen minutes with dustcloth and vacuum dealt with the rest of the room’s mustiness.

  When she went outside to cut a bowl of flowering quince, Kate heard the faraway whine of a chain saw. It sounded as if Lacy was getting a start on next fall’s woodpile.

  She added daffodils to the quince and paused at the scraggly lilac bush. Winters down here weren’t really cold enough for vigorous growth, but the fifty-year-old bush by the kitchen door managed to push out a dozen or so spikes every spring, enough to perfume her bedroom when she carried them inside, but not today. The dark purple panicles were still as tightly closed as a clenched fist. It would take at least another week of warm weather to loosen them.

  In the four years that she’d been coming to the farm, Kate had made few changes to the house beyond a new freezer and a gas range for the kitchen. Lacy always treated her with distant formality and Kate reciprocated by playing helpful guest instead of entitled resident. She usually skipped breakfast and tactfully slept in so that Lacy could enjoy Jake’s company unimpeded by her presence. After Jake added a new bath off their bedroom on the ground floor, Kate ceded the whole upstairs to Lacy and had seldom ventured up the staircase unless Jake wanted to show her something.

  But the movers were coming tomorrow with the few pieces of furniture she had saved from the apartment and space would have to be found for them.

  The front parlor was likeliest, Kate decided. It housed a perfectly horrible settee and matching side chair of horsehair and cracked leather, both of which could fuel a bonfire for all she cared. The rosewood Victorian armchair, pine sugar chest, and small, drop-leaf lamp stand, part of Jane Gilbert’s dowry from Gilead, were worth keeping and the faded chintz couc
h under the front windows was still comfortable, but the bowfront sideboard with its ugly parti-colored inlays had nothing to recommend it but age.

  The settee and chair were not heavy and she tugged them out to the front hall with little effort. The sideboard was unbudgeable.

  “What the hell you doing?” demanded Lacy.

  Startled, Kate almost dropped the cheap tarnished pole lamp she had dismantled.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said.

  “Don’t reckon you did with all the mess you’re making.” He stood with his thumbs hooked in the straps of his overalls and glared at her. “What’s the settee doing out in the hall?”

  “The movers will be here with my things tomorrow and I’ve got to put them somewhere,” she explained. “This seemed the best place. I didn’t think you’d mind. You don’t use this room much, do you?”

  She knew very well that when Lacy was here alone, he liked to hole up in the kitchen. That old-fashioned room was long enough to accommodate dining table, lounge chair, leather couch and the color television she and Jake had given him for Christmas two years ago. With the wood range for heat, the kitchen was cozy and cheerful all winter. In summer, it was well shaded and open windows on three sides provided cool cross-ventilation.

  The front parlor was rarely used, but Lacy continued to glare. “Where’re these things going?”

  “Out,” Kate said bluntly. “They’re practically falling apart.”

  “You ain’t throwing away my mammy’s settee,” warned Lacy. “Her and Pa got that set for a wedding present from her daddy. They’ve stood right here in this parlor since the day they was bought.”

  “Then it’s time they had a change of scenery,” Kate almost snapped. Then she remembered how difficult all these changes must be for the old farmer and she apologized instead.

  “I’m sorry, Lacy. I should have asked you first. I really do need this space, but if you want to save them—”

  “They can go in my room if they ain’t fine enough for your taste,” he said. “Less’n you’re aiming to throw me out, too?”