Designated Daughters Page 9

  “What did your brother actually tell you, Mr. Barley?”

  “Do you know how long ago that was, Major…Bryant, was it?”

  “Yes, sir. More than sixty years.”

  “And I was just a kid brother who didn’t get to tag along that day.”

  “Why not?”

  “My brother was a horny teenager, if you really want to know, and he didn’t want me around, cramping his style while he showed off for this girl he liked.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Could it have been Letha? Letha McAllister?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m sorry, Major. That could have been her name. But there were a couple of girls after that—a Lisa and a Valeta—and I used to get the names mixed up.”

  “What about a Rachel?” asked Dwight. “Rachel Knott?”

  “The Knott boys’ sister? I know she liked Ransom because she was always asking me about him when she’d see me at church, but I don’t think she was the one he was after right then. I’m pretty sure it was a Lisa or Leta or something like that. But yeah, Rachel’s brother didn’t drown. At least not outright. Ransom said a rope he was swinging on broke and he landed on his head. Scared the hell out of them. One minute the kid’s playing Tarzan and the next minute he’s lying there, facedown in the creek. Ransom said all the water around his head was bright red. They pulled him out and tried to give him artificial respiration, but it was too late. So did he drown or was it the rocks? Whichever, Ransom never went swimming there again and I know he was glad when Dad said we were moving back to Georgia.”

  “You said ‘them.’ Were any other kids around that day?” Dwight asked.

  “There must’ve been, but don’t ask me who. Like I say, I wasn’t there. And after that first day, after he talked to the sheriff, Ransom never wanted to speak about it. This is the first time I’ve even thought of it in years.”

  After another few minutes in which Barley could add nothing new, Dwight gave him his phone number and said, “If you think of anything else, I’d sure appreciate a call.”

  But after he cradled the receiver, Dwight leaned back in his chair with even more questions running through his head. Did that rope really break or did someone bash young Jacob Knott with a rock? He and Jed had fought over that girl. Was there another fight down on the bank of Possum Creek?

  CHAPTER

  13

  So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

  — Cicero

  Monday morning and my calendar was filled with the ordinary messes humans keep getting themselves into: assaults, drunk and disorderly, shoplifting, check kiting, drug cases, and one case of elder abuse. There was also a probable cause hearing for the shooting death in a Cotton Grove bar Friday night.

  Deputy Tub Greene, one of Dwight’s younger officers, testified against the accused, as did a witness to the shooting who said the fight was over some young woman. The public defender did his best to squelch his client, but the tearful young black man was clearly and vocally remorseful.

  And just as clearly guilty.

  Although his attorney argued that the evidence was insufficient, I found probable cause to bind him over to superior court and set his bail at fifty thousand.

  “Please, Your Honor,” he said, tears streaking down his cheeks. “The funeral’s today at two o’clock and I really need to be there. Please? He was my best friend.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, and I really was. They probably were best friends until a girl set their testosterone levels soaring. “If you hadn’t had that gun in your pocket, you’d’ve likely blacked his eye and he’d’ve bloodied your nose and you two would probably be having a beer together tonight. As it is…?” I shook my head. “If you can’t make bail, I’m afraid you’re going to have to miss his funeral.”

  As the bailiff led him away, I couldn’t help thinking about Jacob and Jedidiah. Twins. Best friends. Until a girl named Letha came between them. “Swishing her tail in that skimpy bathing suit,” Aunt Sister said. If Daddy hadn’t pulled them off each other, would their fistfight have ended with one of them using a knife or picking up a rock?

  “Call your next case,” I told the ADA.

  “The State versus Melva Rouse Pennington, Your Honor,” said Julie Walsh, who was prosecuting today’s calendar.

  Reduced to its basics, Mrs. Pennington was a thirty-year-old white woman who had several previous misdemeanor convictions for drug possession and one for driving with a revoked license. She had been living with the seventy-four-year-old grandmother who raised her. After the grandmother refused to sign over her last pension check, Mrs. Pennington had slapped her, then kicked the chair out from under her and broke her arm. When the grandmother went to the emergency room for treatment, the hospital was required by law to report it to DSS, who made it their business to investigate, which led to Mrs. Pennington’s arrest for misdemeanor Assault Inflicting Serious Injury.

  Rather than delay the inevitable, she had waived her right to a jury trial and was ready to plead guilty, but before I sentenced her, her court-appointed attorney asked if I would hear the grandmother.

  Despite her drug addiction, Melva Pennington was an attractive brunette and she bore a distinct resemblance to the neatly dressed white-haired woman who came forward to speak on her behalf, her arm still in a sling. She seemed frail and unsteady on her feet and her voice trembled as she asked me to send her granddaughter for drug treatment rather than to prison. “It’s the drugs that made her do this, Your Honor. She needs help. If she could just get clean, she could keep a job, make a better life for herself.”

  This was not the first time a victim had stood before me to argue that the abuser was not a bad person/hadn’t meant to do it/wouldn’t do it again. Pick one. Hell, pick them all. It was a common refrain in cases of domestic violence.

  But I had read the DSS report. “This isn’t the first time she’s hurt you, is it, ma’am?”

  The old woman’s shoulders slumped in an acknowledgment she didn’t want to voice. “She’s all I’ve got, Your Honor, and it’s not really her fault. Her mother—my daughter—she did heroin. She ran off when Melva was only ten. We haven’t heard from her in years. If you send Melva away, I won’t have anyone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the second time that morning, “but if we don’t put her where she can’t hurt you, it’s only going to get worse. Next time, you could be killed, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mean to do it, but you’d be just as dead. What’s the State asking, Ms. Walsh?”

  With five priors, I could and did sentence Mrs. Pennington to 150 days and added a recommendation that she be admitted to the prison’s drug treatment program. I hoped that this longer sentence might give a treatment program time to work even though it usually takes a full six months and a true desire to quit.

  I adjourned for lunch a little before twelve and called my brother Will at his auction house to see if he wanted to meet me somewhere. I really had no intention of getting involved with Sally and her Designated Daughters group, but it wouldn’t hurt to get his take on Rusty Alexander, that auctioneer over in Widdington.

  “Why don’t you come here?” he said. “I’ve got stuff in the microwave and drinks in the fridge. Always room for one more.”

  There was a hint of laughter in his voice, and hearing him say that made me smile, because Daddy used to swear that this was Mother’s motto. “We could be sleeping four in a bed and pallets on every floor and you’d still tell the preacher and his family, ‘Y’all stay the night, we got plenty of room.’ You been a-keeping that inn, Jesus would’ve been born inside right next to the fireplace.” But he would be grinning even while he grumbled, because he loved company as much as she did. Any excuse for a little pickin’ and singin’.

  Mother and Aunt Zell’s parents used to open their spacious home for a large formal Christmas party every December. The rest o
f the year, they entertained at the country club or in restaurants. My grandmother Stephenson died before I was born, but they say she disliked the social side of my grand­­father’s practice.

  “He could have been governor if he’d run,” his former law partners have told me, “but she hated to mix with strangers and she certainly wasn’t going to shake hands with riffraff or potential voters that we’d managed to keep out of jail.”

  “She was a snob?” That had surprised me because neither Mother nor Aunt Zell had ever seen a stranger.

  “Not a snob exactly,” said my very proper cousin John Claude Lee, son of the firm’s original founder.

  “Sounds like a snob to me,” I’d said.

  “Well, maybe,” he conceded. “But in the kindest possible way. I think she felt it wasn’t their fault if people didn’t meet her standards.”

  “She must have hated having Daddy join her family.” This was something I’d really never given much thought to. Despite their differences in social standing and education, Mother and Daddy seemed so perfectly matched that I couldn’t imagine them not being married to each other. “It’s a wonder Daddy ever had the nerve to propose.”

  “We-l-l-l…” John Claude had looked faintly embarrassed. He, too, had standards that weren’t always met.

  “You mean Mother proposed to him?”

  “Really, Deborah, this is something you should be asking your father, not me,” John Claude had said firmly, and for him, the subject was closed.

  At the time of that conversation, I had been in my first race for the bench and too caught up in campaigning to pursue it. The summer she was dying, Mother had told me most of her secrets, but I realized now that she hadn’t told me everything. One of these days, maybe I would get up the nerve to ask Daddy.

  The older boys remembered her coming but not how or why. “It was like The Wizard of Oz,” Frank once told me. “Everything was black-and-white till she come, and then it was color.”

  Aunt Sister got defensive when she heard that. “Pa couldn’t afford paint just to make a place look pretty while he and Mammy was alive. And Annie Ruth wouldn’t spend a nickel on fripperies. Them boys was lucky if they got a piece of bubble­gum on their birthdays.”

  “Not true,” said Robert. “Daddy always used to come home from one of his whiskey runs with a sackful of candy.”

  “And every time he did, Annie Ruth would fuss about wasting money,” Aunt Sister told me later.

  Will was the oldest of my own mother’s four children and a perpetual exasperation to her. He was always poking through junkyards and the neighbors’ barns, learning the history of rusty machines or dilapidated furniture, looking for deals. Give him a bicycle with two missing wheels in the morning and he’d have traded it up to a television by dark, then sold the TV the next morning to buy something else. And when I say “give him,” it would probably be more accurate to say “don’t turn your back or he’ll take.” He didn’t consider it stealing to rescue an item he was sure no one really wanted, no matter how many times Daddy took him to the woodshed for not asking first.

  By the time he got his driver’s license, he’d figured out that people would pay him to clean out their garages or basements and let him keep whatever trash he hauled away. I’m not real sure his customers always remembered what was in those barrels and boxes that went off in the back of his pickup. Mother reluctantly got over the idea of turning him into a lawyer—she barely kept him in high school long enough to get a diploma—but with his easy charm and glib tongue, she thought she had a good chance of making him an insurance broker or a real estate dealer if he would just buckle down and pass the state’s minimum requirements for a license.

  She didn’t live long enough to see either of those happen. When she died, he was married to his second wife and barely scraping a living, hauling junk and selling it at flea markets. By the time I came back to Colleton County, though, he’d gone to auctioneering school and was a fully licensed auctioneer, working on his third marriage. He somehow acquired an old tobacco warehouse on the west side of Dobbs and began holding auctions every Saturday night as well as doing appraisals for a flat fee.

  He collected books on silver, crystal, and china, and taught himself how to tell whether a piece of furniture was handmade and old or machine-made and new.

  These days, he runs estate sales from the mountains to the coast and has a pretty good reputation for knowing the market values that let him get top dollar for his consignors. So far as I know, everything is totally legitimate.

  When I got to Will’s, four other vehicles were parked near the back entrance of the new auction house that replaced the old original warehouse after it burned. (And nearly took me with it.) In addition to a brand-new van with his business logo on the sides, there were two SUVs with handicap tags dangling from their rearview mirrors and the fourth set of wheels was a dismayingly familiar blue VW convertible with a bumper sticker that read: MY OTHER CAR IS A TARDIS.

  I should have known. No wonder my brother had sounded so amused when he invited me over.

  As soon as I stepped inside the air-conditioned coolness, I saw Sally behind the high counter that separates the kitchen area from Will’s conference room. The air was redolent with the mingled smells of hot bread, onions, and Texas Pete chili sauce. She held up two squirt bottles, one yellow, the other red. “I forget. You like mustard on your hot dogs or ketchup?”

  Today’s outfit was almost as conservative as yesterday’s: a blue-and-white checked newsboy cap with black bangs and a fringe of black curls peeping out all around, electric blue shirt, and blue gladiator sandals that laced up several inches above her ankles. And yes, blue eye shadow and blue nails and lipstick.

  With a gotcha grin on his face, Will said, “Coleslaw and onions?” and handed me a can of soda.

  “Mustard, slaw, and chili, yes. No onions,” I said and took a seat at the round conference table beside Frances Jones, who was folding paper towels into individual napkins. Once again, she and her niece wore shirtwaist dresses in similar summery prints.

  Cheap red microwaved wieners floated in a bowl of steaming hot water on the counter, and JoAnn Bonner was gingerly pulling hot buns from a plastic bag that had almost melted from the microwave’s heat. Marillyn Mulholland and Kaitlyn Lancaster had an assembly line going with pickles and chips on a row of paper plates, and old Mr. Lancaster sat in his wheelchair with a bag of potato chips in his lap, happily munching away and strewing greasy crumbs down the front of his shirt.

  Charles Ashton sat across from me at the table and fed bits of hot dog to his mother, who had her own wheelchair today. He saw my raised eyebrow and said, “I know, I know. Not good for her. But right now she’s aware of enjoying this hot dog. A month from now, she may not. So what difference does it make?”

  “Yeah, and when Katie takes my blood pressure tonight, it’ll be up from all this salt,” said Mr. Lancaster, popping another potato chip in his mouth, “but who gives a damn?”

  “What the hell, what the hell, what the hell?” Sally chanted, cheerfully misquoting Mehitabel the Cat. “There’s life in the old dog yet.”

  “You better believe it,” he cackled.

  Will handed me a paper plate with the hot dog he’d fixed for me. I carefully wrapped it in a paper towel because I’m bad for dripping things and I know from past experience how hard it is to get chili sauce and mustard stains off of a white silk blouse.

  “I suppose they’re here to tell you about Alexander Auctions?” I asked him.

  Pushing fifty, with the first touches of gray at his temples, Will’s still my best-looking brother. Tall and flat-bellied, he was trim in a dark blue golf shirt unbuttoned at the neck and khaki slacks. Laugh lines crinkled around his blue eyes. He was smiling now, sharing the joke with Sally. “See? I told you she wouldn’t be able to resist.”

  “Resist what?” I said indignantly. “I’m not getting involved. I just want to know if Rusty Alexander is as crooked as they think.”

>   He shrugged. “Probably. Business has been slow these past few years. Mediocre antiques and the more common collectibles aren’t bringing what they used to now that eBay lets us know that some things aren’t as rare as we thought they were, so it’s tempting to cut a few corners, try to fatten up the profits.”

  “You don’t do that, do you?”

  His smile broadened. “You think I’d tell you? And you a judge? Married to a sheriff’s deputy? Not hardly likely, little sister.” He shook his head. “Besides, that last come-to-Jesus session with Daddy put me on the straight and narrow. Well, on the straight anyhow. Funny that a man who spent the first half of his life breaking the law would take it so seriously when we did it. You ever think about that?”

  Of course I had. “I think that cheating the government out of its whiskey tax never struck him the same as stealing from a neighbor or somebody he’d looked in the eye. So far as I know, though, he never dealt dishonestly with a buyer or ever went back on his word.”

  “Well, neither have I. Not with any of my consignors anyway. And not since I got my auctioneer’s license.”

  I took his carefully worded disclaimer with a grain of salt. Just because he was honest with them doesn’t mean he’s honest with everyone else, but I wasn’t here to pick a fight or monitor his morals. I just wanted to know about Rusty Alexander.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard things. Nothing blatant. The licensing board is pretty vigilant,” he said, “but there have been a few times when he gets to auction off a nice estate and somehow the prices just don’t meet expectations.”

  “Like Frances’s mother’s tea set?” asked Sally.

  She and the others had brought their paper plates to the table and there was a companionable sound of munching as pickles and chips were consumed. Marillyn had placed another open bag of chips in the middle of the table and I was virtuously trying to ignore it.

  “Like the tea set,” Will agreed. “Georgian? Sterling? With its own sterling tray and hallmarks from one of the best silversmiths working in London at that time? It should have fetched at least seven or eight thousand, even in this market. Forget about the historical value. The melt value of silver’s around thirty dollars an ounce now and a set that large would weigh several pounds. I don’t know what all was in your house, Miss Jones. Sally says a lot of nice antiques and maybe they were. But maybe they were only high-quality factory-made pieces. Just because something’s old, doesn’t mean it’s valuable, but a sterling tea set from the early eighteen hundreds has a recognized worth and no way should it have gone for the twelve hundred you say it brought.”