The Buzzard Table Page 9

  She slowed and turned into the drive of a large white house, then came to a stop as soon as the car was off the pavement. The driveway continued on past tall magnolias and ancient oaks and curved up to a set of tall fluted columns that ended in Doric scrolls.

  “Tara?” Sigrid asked dryly.

  “Gilead,” her mother answered. “Your grandmother could say when our Gilberts branched off from the ones who inherited the place. I think it was her grandfather who was the younger son. He got money while his brother got Gilead, back before the Civil War.”

  “Who owns it now?”

  “Kate Bryant’s adopted daughter.”

  “Really? How did that happen?”

  “It’s a long and complicated story and I forget most of the details. Get Kate to tell you if you’re interested.* Short version: Mary Pat’s mother was a Gilbert and the house was falling to pieces when she married a man with a ton of money. He restored it as a wedding present.”

  “Some present,” Sigrid said.

  * See Bloody Kin.

  “Both died before Mary Pat was four,” Anne said sadly. “Kate was the child’s closest relative through the father’s side, which is why she was given custody. Everything’s in trust for the little girl, including Gilead.”

  “Poor kid,” Sigrid said.

  Anne shook her head in wry amusement. “Not everyone considers a large inheritance a burden, honey.”

  She backed out of the drive onto the road again, drove about a hundred feet, then turned left into a rough dirt lane that cut through fields green with winter rye.

  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Sigrid asked as they bumped over the rutted track.

  “Sorry, but this is the only way I know how to get to the Ferrabee place.”

  The lane dipped down past a boxy wooden structure and Anne explained that they were now on Kate’s farm. “This used to be a packhouse, but Kate’s converted it into a studio for her fabric designs.”

  There was no sign of Kate and the lane continued straight through the far side of the wide yard to exit onto another road. Anne pointed to a smaller white farmhouse off to the right. “That’s where Rob and Dwight’s mother lives.”

  She made a left, then a right that took them through stands of head-high pines that were planted in uniform rows. “This used to be all tobacco,” she said. “Now it’s pulpwood. Not much has changed on this side of the creek, though.”

  As they passed a mailbox, she gestured to a well-tended lane that was lined with a double row of young bare-branched trees. Sigrid realized that a house probably lay somewhere beyond those thicker trees.

  “I think Dwight and Deborah live down there,” her mother said.

  Sigrid twisted in her seat to look back, but nothing could be seen of a house. “Why do I have the impression that Deborah comes from a large family?”

  “Because she does,” said Anne. “Ten or twelve brothers, all older, and she was the only girl.”

  The thought of sharing a house with that many brothers made Sigrid feel slightly claustrophobic. “Did you know them when you were growing up?”

  “I knew who the boys were, but they went to school out here in the country and I was at the school in town. Besides, the older ones dropped out of school early and the others were younger than me. I think we’re distantly related to Deborah through her mother, but most of her brothers are from her father’s first marriage. He was a bootlegger, you know.”

  “What?”

  Before Anne could elaborate, they came to a stop sign and she looked around in surprise at a cluster of unfamiliar buildings that had sprouted in what used to be soybean fields. There was a gas station directly opposite them. Behind it was a large parking lot that fronted a NutriGood grocery store. An Italian restaurant, a hardware store, and some smaller shops lined the left side of the lot. “What the hell’s a strip mall doing way out here?” Anne asked.

  Cars zipped back and forth and Sigrid smiled. “Look at all the rooftops over there. Sorry, Mother, but I don’t think this is ‘way out’ anymore.”

  On a corner to the left of them, tasteful signage indicated that the houses that could be glimpsed behind the expensively landscaped berms were part of Grayson Village. A smaller sign, equally tasteful, discreetly announced that homes were available “from the low 450’s.”

  Anne waited for a gap in the flow of traffic and sped across the intersection. After a mile or two, she shook her head, perplexed. “I don’t recognize anything. Maybe I should have taken a left back there.”

  Suiting action to words, she executed a U-turn, and soon they were back on the busier road. She glimpsed a fingerpost and slowed to read it aloud. “Four miles to Highway Forty-Eight. Okay, this is right. And there’s the road!”

  She flipped her left-turn signal and cut the Lincoln in front of an oncoming vehicle so quickly that Sigrid cried, “Watch out!” and braced for impact.

  “Sorry, honey.”

  Almost immediately, they heard the wail of a siren and, glancing behind them, saw a patrol car, its blue lights flashing.

  “Oh, hell,” Anne sighed and pulled onto the shoulder.

  Before she could switch off the engine, the car shot around them, kicking up gravel and even a little dust despite last night’s rain. A moment later, a second patrol car passed them, its siren wailing, too.

  When the way behind was clear, Anne eased back onto the road and followed. “What do you suppose that’s all about?”

  They rounded two more curves and came upon a cluster of official vehicles, all lights flashing. A tall uniformed trooper guarded the entrance to a rough track that branched away to the left from the dirt road. It had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape.

  Sigrid frowned as her mother slowed to a stop beside one of the squad cars. “Is this the Ferrabee place?”

  “No, that’s on down further, but see that kid with the camera? Jeremy Harper.”

  With her foot on the brake and the engine running, she rolled down her window and called to the boy, who loped over as soon as he recognized her. To Sigrid, he resembled an early Dr. Who, right down to his skinny height, an exuberance of fuzzy blond curls, and that long striped scarf.

  “I’m not trying to get past the tape, Ms. Harald, honest,” he said in one of the deepest bass voices Sigrid had ever heard. She stared in fascination that such a voice could come out of such a long thin neck. He had a camera case slung over one shoulder and an expensive-looking digital camera around his neck.

  “Good,” Anne said sternly. “Why are you even here?”

  “Somebody called in a dead body about an hour ago. I heard it on my scanner.”

  “You have a scanner?” Sigrid asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you that Jeremy’s a reporter, too?” Anne said. “This is my daughter, Jeremy. She’s a homicide detective in New York.”

  “Wow! You gonna help with this investigation?”

  “No, she’s not,” Anne said, “and neither are you.” She glanced at her watch. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Dobbs right now, prepping with Richard Williams for your first session with the disabled vets?”

  “I was almost there when I remembered something I’d forgotten at school,” he said, wrapping that striped scarf tighter around his neck. His nose and his bare ears had turned a bright red in the chill wind that whipped up the hill.

  He gave a sheepish grin as his new mentor gave him a jaundiced look. “Okay, I heard the call for more backup, and since it was so close to where we used to live, I thought I’d just run back and—”

  His eyes dropped before Anne’s steady gaze. “Okay, okay. I guess I’m going.”

  Anne waited until the boy got into an old blue Toyota and drove off in the opposite direction, then took her foot off the brake and continued on down the road. The road itself ended in yet another of those ubiquitous lanes that Sigrid was beginning to know and dislike.

  “You do remember that this is a Lincoln Town Car and not a tank?” she said as tree b
ranches brushed their windows.

  “Something bigger’s already been back and forth here,” Anne said. “See the broken twigs?”

  “You never mentioned that you were a Girl Scout,” Sigrid muttered, sinking back into the cushioned seat.

  Anne laughed. “Oh, honey, there’s a whole bunch of stuff I never mentioned.”

  The brush gave way to an open pasture. To the left, a banged-up black truck was parked beside a wooden tenant house badly in need of paint. The house sat on a slight rise and the land sloped down from it to a line of trees and bushes in the far distance.

  “That must be the buzzard table Deborah told us about,” Anne said, pointing to the ruins of an old foundation a few yards from the creek.

  She drove on over to the house, but before they reached it, Martin Crawford emerged from inside and waited for them on the porch.

  “Sorry I didn’t call before coming,” Anne said in cheerful greeting, “but we forgot to exchange numbers last night. Hey, you shaved off your beard!”

  “I told you it came and went with the seasons,” he said. “Hullo, Sigrid. Did you come to see the vultures? I’m afraid they’re not here right now.”

  He pointed back the way they had come. High above the treetops, they could see four of the big creatures circling around and around.

  “They seem to have found something over there that interests them more than my squirrels. But do come in. I’ve just put the pot on for tea.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  Circling vultures often indicate the presence of a carcass.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Sigrid Harald—Wednesday afternoon (continued)

  The old Ferrabee tenant house was typical of the living quarters a landowner might provide a sharecropper family in the thirties, forties, and fifties. It would have had electricity, but no running water or indoor plumbing and certainly no central heating. Martin Crawford gave Anne and Sigrid a quick tour to show how he had weather-stripped the doors and windows and layered threadbare carpets over the cracks in the floor. Mrs. Lattimore had invited him to rummage in her attic for pieces of cast-off furniture—the carpets, three mismatched chairs, a badly scarred and water-stained oak kitchen table, and a bookshelf. A few kitchen utensils and a single-bed mattress to put under his sleeping bag came from a thrift store in Cotton Grove, as did the kerosene lanterns. There were four rooms, but he was using only three: the kitchen, a bedroom, and the front room. A potbellied stove in the front room was enough to keep those three rooms warm and cozy.

  The table was more than six feet long. Camera cases, a laptop, and several file folders littered the near end. He shifted a pile of photography magazines and news journals from two of the chairs and invited them to join him at the table.

  When they told him that a woman’s body had been found nearby, he said, “Do they know who she was?”

  “We haven’t heard, but according to the local newspaper, a Realtor went missing Saturday,” Sigrid said.

  Talk turned to other matters while Martin added more tea to the pot, brought out a tin of shortbread, and opened the door of the little iron stove so that the dancing flames could be seen.

  “You’ve made yourself very comfortable here,” Anne said, “but Mother still doesn’t understand why you can’t stay with her and drive back and forth to photograph your vultures.”

  “This is luxury living compared to some of the places I’ve slept in,” he told her as the teapot and biscuit tin went around. He described camping in the high Andes to photograph condors, of being stalked by a leopard while trying to get a shot of lammergeiers in the Elburz Mountains.

  Anne countered with a mud hut in Ethiopia and a yurt in Mongolia.

  And Sigrid sat quietly watching both of them as they compared notes and tried to decide where they might have overlapped in the past. She had interviewed so many criminals in her career that she had gone on automatic alert the first time their cousin’s eyes flicked from Anne’s face to hers, as if to see how she was taking it before flicking back again to Anne’s. Without his beard, his own face seemed more expressive than before.

  “My father was stationed in Islamabad for a couple of years. That’s the closest I ever came to Mongolia, so it must have been Peru,” Martin said at last. “I forget when, though.”

  Sigrid wanted to shout, “Don’t tell him!” But with no good reason to explain why, she kept silent; and when Anne supplied the year and the month, Martin nodded in agreement.

  “That sounds correct. I do remember that it was May.”

  Like hell you do, Sigrid thought. But why would he lie about something so innocuous?

  “What about So—?” Before Anne could complete her question, her teacup somehow collided with the pot Martin was holding out and hot tea splashed on her trouser leg while the pot went flying.

  Her teacup shattered but the teapot landed on the pile of magazines and survived its fall.

  “Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry,” Anne said, picking up the pieces of the broken cup.

  “No, no. My fault entirely.” He hurried to the kitchen and came back with a roll of paper towels for Anne to dry herself off with. “Fortunately, the carpets aren’t Persian.”

  Which led to talk of Iran and how stupid the United States and Great Britain had been to orchestrate the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh and replace him with a dictatorial shah.

  “You think we could have had a secular Muslim state there like Turkey?” Anne asked.

  “Probably. That’s what my father always thought.” He sighed. “But enough about politics. I have some wonderful photographs of Medina. Were you ever there? Let me show you.”

  He swiveled his chair around to open the laptop on the table and the two women pulled their own chairs closer. Once they were past the novelty of an Arabic keyboard, the pictures had Anne oohing and ahhing over some of the effects he had achieved and how his pictures of village life captured the ebb and flow of the culture.

  “This is exactly what I’m hoping Jeremy can learn,” she told Sigrid, her eyes snapping with excitement.

  “Jeremy?” he asked.

  She described her morning in court and how Deborah Knott had consented to a community service plan she hoped to put together with a youth minister in Dobbs. “Would you talk to him, too, Martin? Show him some of your work? Please?”

  He raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Talk to him about the poverty-stricken life of a freelance ornithologist?”

  “About making a living with words and a camera without breaking the law. If we hadn’t come along just now, I have a feeling he would have found a way to sneak through the woods to where the body is. Deborah went pretty easy on him this morning, but if he keeps pushing the boundaries, she could send him to jail for violating his probation, right, Sigrid?”

  Sigrid rather doubted it would come to that, but she nodded anyhow, knowing Anne thought it would strengthen her appeal for help.

  “Well…” he said.

  “Great! Give me your phone number so I can call you. Maybe we can set something up for tomorrow and—” Movement through the front window caught her eye. “More company, Martin. A police car.”

  There was a tap of the horn—a way of announcing oneself that country people still used—then someone emerged from the squad car.

  Sigrid’s chair gave her an unobstructed view of the yard. “It’s Dwight Bryant,” she said. “He probably wants to know if you saw anything over there.”

  As Dwight and Mayleen Richards stepped up onto the porch, Martin Crawford opened the door for them.

  “Bryant,” he said, holding out his hand to shake. “Good to see you again. It didn’t quite register last night that you’re a police officer. Come in, come in. I’m afraid I’m a bit short on chairs, though.”

  As Dwight introduced his deputy to the others, Martin gestured for her to take his chair and refused to take her no for an answer. He closed his laptop and pushed the clutter down to the far end of the long stur
dy table.

  “I think it will support both of us,” he told Dwight; but as he backed up to the table and started to press down with his arms to hoist himself up, they saw an involuntary grimace of pain. Embarrassed, he settled for leaning against the table.

  Concerned, Anne said, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Really. Took a bad tumble last year and broke both arms. Fell down the stairs in my own house. Would you believe it? Slipped on a loose tread. I keep forgetting that they haven’t completely healed.”

  Another lie? Sigrid wondered. In her experience, people deviating from the truth tended to give more information than was needed. She glanced at Dwight Bryant, who was leaning against the doorframe. His face showed nothing more than polite sympathy.

  “I’d offer you some tea, but I only have three cups.” Martin smiled at Anne. “Actually, I seem to be down to two at the moment. I shall have to see about getting more.”

  “That’s okay,” Dwight said. “We can’t stay. We’ve discovered the body of a missing woman on the other side of those woods there and wondered if you could tell us anything about it?”

  “A missing woman? I’m afraid not. As you know, I was away last night until after ten and I went straight to bed when I returned.”

  “We think she may have been put there three or four nights ago. We’re hoping to find someone who saw car lights at an odd time or noticed an unfamiliar vehicle on the road. It’s a dead end and you’re probably the only one using it much on a regular basis.”

  Martin Crawford shook his head. “Sorry, Bryant. I’m a stranger here myself so I wouldn’t know who did or didn’t belong. For what it’s worth, when your wife and her nephew stopped by yesterday, they were my first visitors in the two months I’ve been here. I have heard some young chaps larking up and down the road on their quads, and they did try to come through here a few weeks ago, but I told them they were trespassing and sent them packing. Can’t have my vultures scared away, you see.”

  “The thing is,” Dwight said, continuing as if the other man hadn’t spoken, “someone called it in around two this afternoon. An anonymous man. Sounded like he had an accent very much like yours.”