Slow Dollar Page 6

  Leaving the big twins to fasten that blue rosette to their cooker and bask in their glory, Seth and Minnie walked into the Ag Hall with me for the Some Yam Thing or Other contest. Seth is five up from me and the brother who’s always cut me the most slack. Minnie is my self-appointed campaign manager and she’s the one who volunteered me to judge today. She believes in keeping me in the public eye. (At least, she believes in keeping me there as long as there are only positive things for the public eye to see.)

  Since last night’s murder hadn’t come up in front of her, I could safely assume she hadn’t yet heard of my involvement. I was hoping to keep it that way for the time being.

  As I glanced around In hall, I noticed other family members and looked at Minnie suspiciously. “I thought we agreed that none of the kids would enter.”

  “What makes you think they have?” she parried.

  “Oh, come on, Minnie. Why else are Doris and Robert here? And there’s Jess, your own daughter. And Zach’s Emma.”

  “Now, don’t worry about it, honey. There’s no names on anything. You just judge it like you would if you didn’t know they were in it.”

  It was a good thing that I had two colleagues to help with the judging or rumors might have started that the fix was in.

  “Yoo-hoo, Deborah!” my sister-in-law Doris called. When she caught my eye, she shifted her own eyes significantly from her grandson Bert to the table that held entries for the under-sixes.

  “I saw that,” said Luther Parker. Luther is tall and gangly and looks sort of like a black Abe Lincoln without the beard. He’s Colleton County’s first African American district court judge and has a dry sense of humor. “No playing favorites, now.”

  I looked around the hall and saw his wife Louise. We exchanged waves as a bright-eyed little girl ran up to her and tugged at her hand.

  Luther and Louise’s first grandchild.

  “May we assume Sarah’s entered in the first category?” I asked sweetly.

  He gave a sheepish shrug.

  “And what about you?” I asked our third judge, Ellis Glover, who’s Clerk of Court.

  “I don’t have a dog in the first fight,” he laughed, “but my sister’s son’s in the six-to-sixteen bunch.”

  “I probably have some nieces there, too,” I told them. “Shall we all recuse ourselves and go home?”

  “Not unless you know which entries are which,” said Luther.

  I admitted I didn’t and the same held true for Ellis and him, so we got down to it.

  The object, of course, is to give out as many rosettes as possible to the younger children. Neither Bert nor Sarah won first, second, or third, but they each carried off one of the ten green ribbons for honorable mention and were too young not to be pleased with their success.

  In the second group, I was pretty sure that the wagonload of yam children pulled by a remarkably horse-shaped yam was Jess’s entry. She’s crazy about horses and it would have taken something serendipitous like this for her to enter when I’d asked the family to skip the contest this year. Ellis and Luther had marked it as a possible winner on their first ballots, so I didn’t feel bad keeping it in the first round, too. The yam baby had a natural indentation that made it look as if it was bawling its head off.

  It was cute enough to win a unanimous second place, but the blue ribbon went to a Hispanic boy’s tableau that featured space yams walking on the moon along with some yam aliens. When Jess bounced up to accept her award, we both pretended we didn’t know each other. Wouldn’t have looked good for a judge to hug one of the winners.

  That didn’t stop Minnie and Seth, though, and while they were distracted, I slipped back to the pig cookers. The Ladies Auxiliary of Colleton Memorial Hospital had brought coleslaw, spiced apples, hushpuppies, and various desserts to augment the meat and were now selling plates of the donated barbecue to benefit the children’s wing. I asked Isabel and Nadine if I could have a foam take-out box of barbecue and another of slaw and apples.

  “Not that you’re not welcome, Deborah, but what’re you going to do with so much food?” they asked me.

  “I thought I’d take it over to the family of that boy that got killed yesterday,” I said. “They’d probably like something a little more substantial than corn dogs and elephant ears.”

  That’s all I had to say. I don’t know if it’s genes or something in the water, but death or sickness always triggers the female impulse to provide food for the afflicted, and the next thing I knew, Nadine and Isabel were cutting into the serving line to fill more foam boxes with hushpuppies and banana pudding, too. They divided the boxes between two shopping bags and I set off down the midway like someone making a delivery from a Chinese restaurant.

  When I reached the compound where all the carnival vehicles were parked, I saw Dwight standing beside the open back end of a tractor-trailer van with Arnold Ames and a couple of uniformed town officers. I didn’t have to ask him which travel trailer belonged to the Ameses. There was a small spray of white carnations wired to the lamp beside the door.

  CHAPTER 5

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  I tapped on the metal door, and eventually Tally Ames opened it. Like me, she was wearing a long blue skirt and her charm bracelet. Her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, and she stared at me a moment as if trying to think why I was there.

  “I thought you were another reporter.”

  “Have they been bothering you?” I asked.

  “Not as much as you’d’ve thought. Carnies are like migrant workers far as the local newspapers ever care.” Her tone was bitter as she held the door wider for me to step inside. “They’re always so sure it’s one of us whenever there’s any trouble, and as long as we’re killing each other...” She shrugged in resignation.

  Those first few minutes of a condolence call are always awkward. Anything I say sounds so trite in the face of such loss and it’s even worse when it’s the death of someone young.

  I held out my shopping bags of food cartons. “My sisters-in-law thought maybe you and your family might be able to eat a little something.”

  “That’s nice of them.” She took the bags with a wan smile and set them on the kitchen counter that probably doubled as a snack bar.

  This travel trailer was fairly big, designed to be pulled by a two-ton truck. The master bedroom was two steps up over the flatbed, and there was a pop-out bedroom at the back end. In the middle were a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a surprisingly roomy dining room/den combination. The deep blues, turquoise, and amethyst of the furnishings had been chosen with a knowing eye for her dark hair and blue eyes, and the space was brightened by September sunlight that spilled through a line of skylights in the ceiling.

  Except for a drink cup of clear purple plastic on the shelf beside the plaid couch and an ashtray with three cigarette butts, there wasn’t a paper or thread out of place. Janice Needham would’ve been hard-pressed to find something to pick at here.

  I glanced around as we sat down in the chairs at opposite ends of the couch. The doors to both bedrooms were open and she seemed to be alone. A house of bereavement is normally crowded with relatives, friends, and neighbors. In this case, though, relatives and neighbors were probably back in Florida, and friends here would be out working the carnival. This sunny Saturday had brought out lots of people and profit margins were probably too small to let natural sympathies take precedence till after hours.

  She noticed my glance. “Arn’s over at Braz’s trailer with your deputy friend. And we’re so shorthanded, I told Val he might as well help keep the stores going. Nothing else for him to do right now till they release Braz’s body. I guess that sounds sort of mercenary to you?”

  I shook my head. “My mother died near the end of barning season. The neighbors did what they could, but they had their own fields to harvest. So I know a little bit about what it’s like for you.”

  “Yeah, I was sorry when I heard she’d died.”

  That surprised me. “You knew
my mother?”

  She abruptly reached for her glass and stood up. “I’m going to have another glass of tea. Can I fix you one?”

  I stood, too. “Let me get it for you. You’re the one who should be sitting.”

  “Trust me, I’m not, okay? If I sit still for too long, my mind keeps going over and over all the thing I might’ve done different, things that might’ve kept Braz safe.”

  “Mrs. Ames, how did you know my—”

  “Call me Tally, okay? Unless you mind if I call you Deborah?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Or is it Deb?”

  “Never,” I said firmly. “Too many Little Debbie jokes when I was a child. Dwight—Major Bryant said you wanted to see me?”

  She put ice cubes in a second glass and poured tea from a jar in the small refrigerator. As she handed it to me, both our bracelets tinkled and she gave me a wan smile. “You do remember, don’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Now it was her turn to look puzzled. “Isn’t that why you wore your bracelet to come here today?”

  “Because I saw yours in court? No, I came across mine by accident this morning. I’d almost forgotten I even had it.”

  “Pure coincidence, huh?”

  Her tone was flatly skeptical and I didn’t understand why.

  She held out her wrist and said, “Take a good look at mine.”

  From the weight of the charms as I touched them, I was sure they were solid gold and worth a lot more than my sterling ones. And yet, there amongst all the little gold totems was a single silver one, a tiny teddy bear identical to mine.

  A silver teddy bear?

  I could almost hear Mother’s voice. “Just like yours, Deborah. You were only three, though. That’s probably why you don’t remember.”

  “Olivia?”

  Her smile was half-defiant. “Or should I call you Aunt Deborah?”

  I couldn’t believe it. But here were those blue, blue eyes that I had noticed that first day in court.

  Cornflower blue.

  Knott blue. Like every one of my daddy’s children.

  Like all his grandchildren, too, it would seem. And on some visceral, subliminal level, my subconscious had picked up on Tally’s eyes—on Braz’s as well—and sent me a dream of blue quarters.

  “I had just turned five,” Tally was saying. “You weren’t quite three. My mom had dumped me on my Hatcher grandparents that summer, and you and your mom came out to the farm. She gave me a bag of chocolate candy and a silver charm bracelet just like yours. I forget what all was on mine besides the teddy bear. It came loose and I kept it in a little box by itself or it’d be gone now, too.”

  “She told me about that visit right before she died,” I said. “What happened to the rest of the bracelet?”

  She gave a rueful shrug. “Who knows? Mom probably hocked it to buy another bottle of gin, okay?”

  “She was an alcoholic?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Deborah. You think our mothers were anything alike? That I ran away from her because I hated algebra or was having a bad hair day?”

  “How old were you when you ran?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “I was eighteen.”

  “You ran away? With all that you had? Why?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Bad hair day?”

  She gave a small, disbelieving snort. “How long did you stay gone?”

  “A few years. Long enough to learn that bad hair’s not the end of the world.”

  “Get pregnant?”

  “No, I managed to sidestep that.”

  “Must’ve been the difference between fifteen and eighteen,” she said. “Or maybe you weren’t looking for love in all the wrong places.”

  “Oh, I did a little of that, too.”

  When Mother died, everything else seemed to fishtail out of my control as well. I fought with Daddy and most of my brothers, left college at the end of my first semester, ran off with a redneck car jockey, damn near stabbed him through his sorry heart, and didn’t come home again for several years till I finally got my act together. But hard as it might have been in patches, it was hardship of my own choosing and probably an eiderdown featherbed compared to the life led by Tallahassee Ames, aka Olivia Knott.

  “Was Braz’s dad with the carnival?”

  “He was a roughie even greener than me. It was my second summer of washing dishes and working one of the grab joints and I knew how hard carnies work, okay? He thought it was going to be blue skies and cutting up jackpots. He made two jumps with us, then he was out of there. But not before I’d played possum belly queen for him. I never even knew his last name, and he was gone before I missed my first period. Sounds like my own daddy, doesn’t it?”

  “Andrew married your mother,” I said mildly.

  “With my grandpa riding shotgun all the way to South Carolina’s the way I heard it.”

  Well, yes, there was that aspect of it, I suppose. I tried to talk to Andrew about Carol and Olivia right after I first came home, but he told me it was none of my business and to shut up about them.

  “It wasn’t my baby” was all he’d say.

  But Mother had said differently that last summer. “Andrew doesn’t believe the child was his, but I only had to take one look at her, Deborah. Olivia was him all over again. Same eyes, same smile. Your daddy’s tried to find her, but Carol’s never come back again, at least not that we’ve ever heard. Amanda and Rodney Hatcher aren’t the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. He’s Old Testament righteousness and she’s under his thumb with no more backbone than a squashed beetle, so there’s no learning from either of them where Carol and Olivia are.”

  The very next day, out of curiosity, I’d driven over to that eastern part of the county. The land’s a little flatter there, more coastal plains than sandhills. The soil’s easy to tend but everything leaches through so quickly that it needs a constant supply of fertilizer and water. I found the Hatcher farm and drove slowly past it two or three times. It was a depressing sight. The crop rows were cleaner than a preacher’s jokes. Not a weed, not a blade of unwanted grass. The outbuildings were modest, but in good repair. The house itself sat in a grove of oak trees a couple of hundred feet back off the road, and if it hadn’t been for the barns that surrounded it, I would have thought it was the sharecropper shack of a tightfisted land owner. The paint was peeling, the tin roof was rusty, a few of the windowpanes had been replaced with cardboard, and there was no indoor plumbing if that outhouse behind the barn was any indication.

  A cheerless, loveless place.

  The only spot of color was a rusty washtub full of red petunias that bloomed by the front steps, and as I drove past the third time, an old white woman came out and poured water on them from her dishpan.

  Everything for the land, nothing for the woman who helped tend it. Probably nothing for the daughter, either. I could understand why Carol had shrugged off the reins and tore loose. It all happened before I was born, but I knew the rough outlines.

  Andrew, nine brothers up from me and going through his own wild teen years, had gotten a Widdington girl pregnant.

  Or so she claimed.

  Andrew swore he wasn’t the only one having sex with her at the time, but her father had literally pointed a shotgun at him and asked him what he meant to do about the situation. There had been a hasty drive to Dillon, South Carolina, where underage kids could get married without a waiting period or blood test, and he’d moved into this shabby old house with her parents, prepared to “do the right thing,” even though he roiled with anger at getting trapped. That’s when he started drinking heavily.

  The arrangement lasted till two or three months after Olivia was born, when Carol told them all to go to hell and she’d lead the way. That was the last time anyone in my family ever saw her again. Daddy let it be known around the Hatcher neighborhood that he’d be mighty grateful if anybody heard tell of a girlchild being there, but it was five years before someone sent hi
m word.

  The summer she was dying of cancer, Mother told me all sorts of things she thought I ought to know, things she trusted me to keep to myself till the knowledge was needed.

  Olivia was one of those things.

  “Your father was set to run right over there as soon as he heard,” she had said, “but he and the Hatchers had already had so many hard words between them by then that I said I’d go for both of us and I’d take you as my shield. Rodney Hatcher’s a foul-mouthed old man, but I suspected he’d behave in front of a little girl like you. Lucky for both of us, he wasn’t even home that day. As soon as I saw the child, though, I knew she was Andrew’s. I should have just gathered her up and brought her home with me then and there, but I was waiting for the right time to speak to Andrew. That was barely a month or so after he married Lois, remember?”

  Well, certainly I still remembered Lois. Andrew’s second marriage only lasted about two years longer than his first one, but the wedding itself had been a big splashy circus. That may have been the first time I was pressed into service as a flower girl. After a while, all the weddings ran together, so there must have been something special about Andrew’s.

  “You were so cute,” Mother said nostalgically.

  As if there’s ever been a three-year-old flower girl who wasn’t.

  “What happened when you told him?” I’d asked.

  “He still claimed Olivia wasn’t his daughter, but he went with me to see her. When we got there, though, the child was gone. Carol had taken her again.” Her eyes had glistened with tears then. “I’ll never stop blaming myself that I didn’t do something quicker. If she ever comes back, you make sure she’s part of this family if she wants to be, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “Promise?”

  I promised.

  “Should I call you Olivia or Tally?” I asked her now.

  “Tallahassee’s my legal name, okay? They called me Tally when I joined my first carnival in Tallahassee and I made it official when I married Arnold Ames the day I turned twenty-one.”