Death's Half Acre Page 7

  “There is,” I said, trying to remember the way the house was furnished. We had stayed there briefly after Jonna was killed. Because she had died intestate, Cal had inherited everything. “Dwight wants to sell the house and fatten up Cal’s college fund.”

  “Many antiques?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m no expert. Her family founded the town and she had nice furniture, but only five or six pieces looked really old. There were some family portraits that Mrs. Shay wants back and Dwight says she can have them since Cal’s her only grandchild and they’ll probably come to him eventually anyhow. You’ll have to ask Dwight, but you know something, Will? It might be easier on both of them to move it all down here to your warehouse if you’ve got room for it. Less emotional for Cal to think about it here than in that house, don’t you reckon?”

  We finished eating and he walked me out to my car. Dee Bradshaw pulled in beside us as we stood talking.

  “Not late, am I?” she chirped as she got out of the car and pushed her sunglasses up on her hair.

  Before Will could reply, her cell phone began to play a rap song. She checked the screen and made a face. “It’s just my dad. He probably wants to know if you’ve fired me yet.”

  As the phone continued to boogie, Will said, “Give him a break and answer it. You’ve still got a few minutes on your lunch hour.”

  She shrugged and touched the talk button as she moved away from us. “Yeah?”

  “So why don’t you and Amy come for supper this weekend?” I said. “We’ll grill some steaks and you can ask Dwight if—”

  “What?” Dee Bradshaw shrieked. “No! When? Oh, Daddy, why!”

  She was wailing like a child and we turned to see what the trouble was.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks and her hands trembled so badly that the phone slipped to the ground. She stood there too shaken to pick it up.

  “Mom’s killed herself!”

  CHAPTER 6

  A scraping gentles an air of oak and mimosa

  and I hear sounds of boys playing basketball in the barnyard.

  —Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

  When I got back from Will’s, it was all over the courthouse. As a prominent business owner and chair of the county commissioners, Candace Bradshaw had enjoyed a degree of power that affected a lot of lives, so her death was major news. A cat’s-paw for the building trades and land developers, she was less liked by those of us who wanted to slow growth until a thoughtful plan was in place; but both sides generally conceded that however ill-equipped she might be to run the county, she was thoroughly conscientious in her ownership of Bradshaw Management. Not only did she provide benefits and health insurance, she also paid her menial employees more than the minimum wages required by law—the result, it was said, of her own humble start.

  In return, she expected to get full value for every dollar. The janitorial branch of Bradshaw Management had contracts to clean offices all around the county and it was well known that she could suddenly appear in the middle of the evening to be sure that her people were doing a satisfactory job and not simply going through the motions with their mops and buckets and dusting cloths. One uncleaned sink or toilet got a warning; two and the careless worker would be fired on the spot.

  By the time I reconvened court, courthouse regulars agreed that Candace Bradshaw had died sometime after her daughter stormed out of the house and well before noon that day, when her cleaning woman let herself in. They also agreed that she had been found in her bedroom with a white plastic trash bag over her head. After that, the real truth was up for grabs.

  “I hear she was in bed buck naked, so she’d probably been with a man.”

  “I heard she was made up to go out.”

  “Drunk as a skunk.”

  “Sober as an owl.”

  “Her face and arms were covered in bruises and somebody’d given her a black eye.”

  “No, there wasn’t a mark on her.”

  “It was murder/suicide/an accident—”

  “Bet you a nickel it was one of them . . . whadda-you-call-it? Something nasty. Auto-rotic something?”

  “Autoerotic asphyxiation?”

  “Yeah. She wasn’t getting it from any man these days, was she? Well, there you go.”

  I suppose I could’ve slipped down to Dwight’s office during my afternoon break and tried to wheedle the facts out of him, but we have a separation-of-powers agreement: I don’t ask him about any of his cases that might come before me and he doesn’t comment on any of mine until after I’ve ruled on them and signed off.

  In truth, it’s worked out better than you’d think, given my natural curiosity and his natural tendency to tell me what I ought to be doing, something he got in the habit of back when we were kids and he tried to boss me around like one of my brothers. Lucky for both of us, he doesn’t have time to keep track of all the minor felonies that show up in my court these days, and as a district court judge, I’ll never hear any of his homicide cases or major felonies. Too, he knows I’ll be discreet if he does discuss a murder with me.

  Even though this was a suicide, I put my curiosity on hold and despite all the speculations flying around, I managed to keep my mind on assault and forgery and the endless he-said/she-said that make up the bulk of a district court calendar. Between cases, my clerk kept me updated on each and every new assertion and by the end of the day, enough of the note Candace Bradshaw left had seeped out that people were starting to say she had seriously misused her office as chair of the board of commissioners and that she had killed herself rather than face the shame of exposure.

  Not to mention the humiliation of probable jail time.

  My clerk had an in with the dispatcher and whispered some of the details to me. It was a small trash bag, the kind with drawstrings, and Candace had snugged it around her neck and tied it off with a neat bow.

  It appeared that she had made the bag airtight and then laid herself calmly down to die by gentle suffocation. Not the worst way to kill yourself, I suppose. I’m told that you pass out from asphyxia first and then you pass on.

  Her body had been sent to Chapel Hill for the automatic autopsy required by the circumstances, but there were no marks or bruises on her body, no broken fingernails or any signs of a struggle, so the autopsy would be pro forma with no expected surprises. Word came up that Deanna Bradshaw was pitching a fit all over the sheriff’s department downstairs, insisting that never in a million years would her mother kill herself. “And she never wrote that note either. Okay, maybe Mom cut a few corners, did a few favors she maybe hadn’t ought to’ve, but, hell, that’s the way things work if you want to get anything done. No way would she have gone to jail for such little stuff. She knew where too many bodies are buried for anybody to try to prosecute her. Besides, Mom would never, ever kill herself without leaving me a note, too.”

  “Hmpf,” my clerk sniffed. “I heard she and Candace had a huge fight yesterday. The kid’s feeling guilty.”

  Normally Dwight leaves Dobbs at least an hour earlier than I do, but we had ridden in together that morning because his truck needed a new taillight where someone had backed into him in the parking lot, and our mechanic had said he’d work it in if Dwight could leave it there all day.

  When I got downstairs Melanie Ashworth, the department’s recently hired spokesperson, was patiently answering questions from the two reporters who were still there. One of them was Ruby Dixon herself, although she was slurring her questions and her pencil kept slipping off the lines of her reporter’s tablet as she tried to record Melanie’s comments.

  I found myself remembering how Linsey Thomas would have handled this. He would’ve sent someone sober to question Melanie, while he himself would be on the phone, running down Candace Bradshaw’s cleaning woman, questioning the other commissioners, interviewing staff members at Bradshaw Management, talking to Candace’s daughter and maybe her former husband. By now, he might even have the contents of the note she’d left behind and a
definite answer as to whether or not it was in her handwriting.

  I found Dwight in his office, so absorbed in some reports that he wasn’t immediately aware of me. He had loosened the knot on the tie that I’d bought him the week before and the cuffs of his blue shirt were turned back.

  Dwight doesn’t consider himself the least bit handsome and always says he looks like the Durham Bull in a pea jacket, muscle-bound and ungainly. Believe me. No.

  He’s taller than most of my brothers and okay, he’s built a little more like a football player than the skinny basketball hotshot he was in high school, but there’s nothing muscle-bound about him at all. Solid, yes, with big hands and feet, brown hair and eyes, and an honest, open face.

  When he realized I was there in the doorway and looked up with that warm smile, my heart turned over. “Hey there,” he said. “I was just about to go see how near done you were.”

  “You can leave now?” I asked.

  “Sure. Why not? Oh, you mean because of Candace Bradshaw?” He shrugged. “I’ve got Richards and Dalton out going through the motions, taking statements.”

  “So what was in the note she left?”

  “Now you know I’m not going to talk about that right now.”

  “But she really did break the law?”

  He shook his head at me and buttoned the cuffs of his sleeves. “Give it up, shug.”

  “At least say whether it was suicide.”

  “That’s what it looks like. Why? You hear something different?”

  “No. Just that her daughter’s refusing to believe it.”

  “Yeah, well, when we spoke to her this afternoon, she was blaming herself.” He picked up his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.

  “Because of their fight?”

  “You heard about that?” He held the door for me, then switched off the lights.

  “I heard Candace took her keys and threw her out of the house. True?”

  “Appears to be.”

  He checked out with the dispatcher at the end of the hall and paused to leave some instructions for a couple of deputies, so I waited till we were outside in the mild spring air to ask what Candace and her daughter had fought about.

  “The usual,” Dwight said. He took my arm to keep me from stepping out into the street even though the nearest car was half a block away. “She said her mother was upset that she’d dropped out of college at Easter. Plus she didn’t approve of the guy Miss Bradshaw’s seeing. Did you know she’s working for Will?”

  “I was over there when she got the phone call.”

  “Since when does Will need a private secretary?”

  “Is that what she told you? Will said she’s just a temp that he hired last night to help him take inventory for his spring sale, but I guess private secretary sounds better. Wonder who they’ll appoint to take Candace’s place on the board?”

  “Nobody you’ll take any comfort in,” he assured me as we reached my car.

  Even though judges no longer run on a political slate, everyone pretty much knows who’s a liberal and who’s a conservative and who’s a yellow dog like me.

  The head of the county’s Republican party would get to appoint Candace Bradshaw’s replacement. The best I could hope for was that they’d slip up and name someone who could think for himself.

  Or herself.

  Once again, I found myself thinking of Linsey Thomas, who would have had a lot to say on the subject of civic-minded commissioners as opposed to those who always seemed to think of personal profit first and public good last. As I turned the key in my ignition, I said, “I guess you and Bo have quit trying to find who ran down Linsey Thomas?”

  Dwight frowned. “Ran him down? You think someone killed him deliberately?”

  “Slip of the tongue,” I said. “I meant find the car that hit him.”

  “By now that car could be in a slag heap. You know well as I do that if we don’t find it in the first couple of weeks, we almost never do. I’m not holding my breath till some drunk comes in and confesses. It’s a damn shame, though. Thomas was a good man. And good for Colleton County even if he did hold our feet to the fire a few times.”

  I had been with someone else last spring so I hadn’t followed the investigation as closely as I might now, although I did remember that the SBI lab had identified the make of the car by a piece of glass found by Linsey’s body. “I guess you checked all the repair shops for a Toyota with a missing headlight?”

  “We gave it everything we had, Deb’rah.”

  “No leads at all?”

  But Dwight’d had enough of talking shop. “Haywood says the garden center’s got a sale on dwarf apple trees. Maybe Cal and I’ll run over and pick up a couple tomorrow afternoon. You care where we plant them?”

  “Up to you,” I said.

  No use pointing out that we already had peaches, two varieties of pears, a line of blueberry bushes, figs, and a plum tree, and that there was no way in the world we’d ever eat that much fruit. In addition, we had five pecan trees to go with the countless dogwoods, hollies, oaks, and cedars he had dug up from the woods and set out all around the house. Planting trees and bushes seems to be Dwight’s way of convincing himself that our marriage is as real and permanent as those roots reaching deep into the dirt beneath our feet, and I’m not about to discourage him.

  Besides, there are still enough animals on the farm to take care of our excess fruit and Cal likes feeding apples and carrots to the horses.

  After dropping Dwight off at Jimmy White’s garage to retrieve his truck and settle up with Jimmy, I drove over to his brother Rob’s house to pick up Cal. During the week, Rob’s wife Kate keeps him after school. She’s the guardian and adoptive mother of Mary Pat, who’s in the same class as Cal. Kate swears that one child more is no trouble, especially since she and Rob have now hired a live-in nanny to help with four-year-old Jake and four-month-old R.W. so that Kate could get back to designing high-end fabrics in the remodeled pack house that now serves as her studio.

  On this beautiful afternoon, the nanny, a nice young Australian with a delightful accent, had them out on the lawn playing red light while the baby slept in a net-covered carriage nearby.

  I powered down my window to say hello as Cal grabbed up his books and got in beside me, flushed and sweaty. No plopping the kids down in front of a television for this young woman.

  As I told Daddy, Cal and I have had a few bumps in the road since he came to live with us in January, but he had liked me before I married his dad and I was optimistic that he would eventually maybe even come to love me as much as my brothers came to love my mother. When he gave me one of his snaggletoothed grins, I wanted to hug him hard. Instead, I smiled back and said, “Good day?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, me and Mary Pat and Jake? We’re going to go help Bobby and Jess and Emma set out tuberoses,” he told me happily.

  Oh, to be eight again and think it a treat to spend the afternoon setting out a flower crop.

  CHAPTER 7

  The tender days are gone.

  Instinct cannot get you back.

  —Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

  The sun rose Thursday in a cloudless blue sky. In a field bounded by Possum Creek on one side and a stand of trees on the other three, longleaf pines blazed greenly against the blue. With their curving branches and clusters of stiff needles, the tall straight trees looked like fantastic plants left over from Jurassic Park. Somewhere among the shorter hardwood trees, a downy woodpecker drummed on a dead, beetle-infested oak limb and a mockingbird marked his territory in long melodic trills that warned other male mockers that he held title to this particular plat of desirable nesting land and that only females need apply.

  Kezzie Knott checked the time on a fat gold pocket watch that had once belonged to his father and slowed his rusty truck to a stop on the creek side of the field. As he opened the door and stretched his long legs, he paused to breathe in the smells of the cool morning. His brown, high-laced brogans we
re almost as scruffy as his pickup, and the cuffs of his blue shirt were as frayed as the hems of his chino pants. Both were so old and had been washed so often that they had faded to soft tones that blended with the light brown sand and pale blue sky. Two weeks ago, he had traded winter’s felt Stetson for the straw panama he would wear until October.

  These days, he had started leaving the tailgate down so that the older of his two hounds could jump out to join him without much effort. The dogs, too, paused to sniff the air as soon as their feet reached ground. This field had been plowed recently and the rows laid off, but nothing yet was planted. A faint scent of composted chicken manure wafted in on the breeze. It was not an unpleasant smell and it made Kezzie smile. He and Seth and Deborah had given this field to the grandchildren so that they could begin cleansing the land of commercial fertilizers and chemical pesticides. With the enthusiasm of youth, they intended to prove to their elders that a living could be made from the land that did not entail poisoning the environment. They were not naive enough to think that flowers would make the same profit as tobacco, but it was a first step toward a rotation of organically grown crops.

  He did not take their desire for something different as a slam at him. Tobacco had been good to the state and to his family for years before farmers like him knew how bad it was. Yes, it took a lot of fertilizer to grow and it took herbicides to control the suckers and weeds and yeah, he reckoned it was unhealthy for most people, though he himself had smoked since he was twelve and was still going strong more than seventy years later despite the way most of the children nagged him to quit. Tobacco had fed and clothed his sons and it had paid the bills when Sue made him quit messing in white lightning.