Long Upon the Land

by Margaret Maron

  “That’s me.”

  “Is there another Doctor Livingston in town?” I asked. “The one I wanted would be about eighty.”

  “Actually, he’d be about ninety-two if he was still alive. My dad. He died last year. Did you say judge? Is this a legal matter?”

  “Not at all, Doctor. I met your father down in Beaufort three or four years ago. He said he knew my mother back when she worked at the airbase in Goldsboro and I was hoping to ask him a few questions.”

  “Too bad you didn’t come sooner. He loved to talk about his war years and his mind and memory stayed clear right up till the end.”

  (“That’s what you get for chasing after an old boyfriend,” said the preacher who lives in my head and never misses a chance to lecture me on my shortcomings. “Carpe diem.”)

  (“Give it a rest,” said the pragmatist who usually cuts me a little slack. “How was she to know?”)

  Dr. Livingston saw the disappointment on my face. “When was she there?”

  “Only two years so far as I know. Maybe 1943 till the war ended.”

  “She must have made an impression on him if he remembered her after all that time,” he said. “What’s her name?”

  “Susan Stephenson,” I said. “Her sister was there, too. Ozella Stephenson. Zell.”

  He gestured to a bookshelf behind him and to a row of small red leather-bound books. “I’ve been reading his diaries, but I’m only up to the beginning of the war. Give me your card and if I see their names, I’ll let you know. I’m afraid Dad was a cross between a workhorse and a billy goat. Tires me out just to read all the work and women he got through.”

  I dug a card from my purse. “I doubt if my mother was one of them. She never mentioned him that I can remember.”

  He gave a wry laugh. “He never mentioned any of his women to us, either. And he made damn sure my mother never saw these diaries. Kept them locked in a cabinet in his office.”

  “There was one man, though,” I said slowly. “A Walter Raynesford McIntyre. From New Bern. Did you ever hear of him?”

  Dr. Livingston frowned. “McIntyre?”

  “Walter Raynesford McIntyre. He was a pilot. I think he was killed during the war.”

  “Sorry. I know the Raynesford name, of course. But McIntyre? Doesn’t ring any bells, but I’ll keep an eye out for his name, too.”

  I thanked him and said I expected to be back in New Bern next Monday.

  “Good,” said Livingston. “Maybe I’ll skip ahead in Dad’s diaries and see what I can find.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish.

  — Proverbs 31:6

  Dwight Bryant—Monday, August 11

  Shortly after Deborah left for New Bern that morning, her brother Robert drove the Cub tractor into the yard and Cal was out the door before Robert could cut the motor, leaving behind a half-eaten bowl of cereal. Amused by his son’s enthusiasm, Dwight walked out to the garden behind them to move the sprinkler hoses out of the way while his white-haired brother-in-law showed Cal how to lift and lower the set of discs attached to the tow bar.

  Even though they went over the area designated for the winter garden twice, cutting the old vines and dead plants into the ground, the whole operation was completed in less than fifteen minutes, to Cal’s disappointment.

  “Tell you what, Dwight,” said Robert. “How ’bout I take him on back with me and we’ll do Seth’s garden and maybe Andrew’s and Daddy’s, too.”

  “Can I, Dad? Please?”

  Dwight glanced at his watch. “Sorry, buddy, but I need to drop you off at Aunt Kate’s and get on in to work.” He and Deborah split the cost of the live-in nanny that his sister-in-law had hired to care for her three while she created fabric designs in her studio, a remodeled packhouse at the far edge of the backyard.

  “I can take him over when we’re done,” Robert said. “Maybe they got something needs cutting in, too.”

  Now that his daughter Betsy and her husband had moved to Raleigh, Robert and Doris didn’t see as much of young Bert as when they lived in a trailer next door and it was Deborah’s impression that Cal helped fill part of that void for her brother.

  “Please, Dad?”

  “Okay, but you mind Uncle Robert and don’t go trying to do something he hasn’t checked you out on.”

  “I won’t,” Cal promised.

  As they trundled away, the tractor in its lowest gear, Dwight put the sprinklers back on the tomatoes, okra, and field peas, then called Kate to say that Cal probably wouldn’t be getting there much before lunchtime. “And if you and Rob have forty or fifty acres you want cut in…”

  Kate laughed. “No, but if he wants to give the kids a ride around the farm, I know mine would love it. Mary Pat’s so jealous that Cal gets to drive.”

  Next Dwight called the office and sent two detectives to Dexter Oil and Gas to see if Earp’s boss and co-workers could tell them anything useful.

  Lastly, he talked to Detective Mayleen Richards to say that he planned to question Mrs. Earp and her cousin again before heading for Dobbs, which was in the opposite direction from Cotton Grove.

  “They called,” Mayleen told him. “At least her cousin did. Marisa Young. She asked if it was all right for Mrs. Earp to go back to the house? I told her you’d let her know. Ray’s on his way over there right now. He thought maybe y’all might want to take another look at the house before you let her in?”

  “Thanks, Mayleen. Give me twenty minutes, then call her back and ask her to meet us there.”

  “Sheriff Poole wants to see you when you get in and so does Ashworth.”

  As expected. Bo Poole would naturally be wanting an update on this murder, and Melanie Ashworth, who handled the department’s public relations, probably needed a statement she could give to any media inquiries.

  Fifteen minutes later, he parked in front of a modest white frame house that sat on a half-acre lot at the edge of Cotton Grove. It had green shutters and a narrow porch that ran the full width, and it seemed well cared for. Thick rows of azaleas and rhododendron separated the houses along this street, dogwoods and willow oaks shaded the front yards, and pines rose up in back. No garage on the Earp house, but the empty carport had space for two vehicles and there was a metal storage shed in the backyard.

  Yesterday, he had given the place no more than a cursory look before learning that Mrs. Earp was at her cousin’s house on the east side of town. She had tearfully handed over her keys to Ray McLamb, his chief deputy, who then came back here to examine the house with the department’s crime scene techs. They had found no blood inside the house, just what was left on the porch steps. The hot August sun had baked it to such a crust that only a few ants were still interested. No flies or wasps. Nevertheless, they scraped up a sample for the ME.

  One of the department’s cruisers slid in behind Dwight’s truck, and McLamb joined him under the carport. When Dwight left Washington and joined the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, Ray was one of his first hires and the department’s first African-American detective. Looking cool and trim in khaki trousers, a tan short-sleeved shirt, and mirror sunglasses, he sported short hair and a dapper pencil mustache.

  They had run Vick Earp’s name the day before and several incidents had popped up. Beginning when he was sixteen, there had been an open container citation, several aggravated speeding violations, a couple of DWIs, and a felony assault from six years earlier that had landed him in jail for two days. The restraining order Deborah had issued last year was his second one in four years.

  “Her cousin said someone put a bullet through the windshield of his truck,” Dwight said. “Wonder why he didn’t report that?”

  Ray shrugged. They had put out the word yesterday, but so far the truck was still missing. “Notice anything about this?” A sweep of his arm took in the whole carport, which had none of the usual clutter. “Come look at his tool shed.”

  Dwight followed him
to the backyard and watched as Ray unlocked the double doors of the ten-by-ten metal structure. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on the left wall held the usual assortment of paint cans, automotive oils and fluids, insecticides and weed-killers, each grouped according to use. Pegboards filled the other side plus the wall above a workbench at the back and each tool was outlined to fit on a specific hook. A push lawn mower had its space under the workbench.

  Ray shook his head in wonder. “The guy was a neat freak. A place for everything and everything in its place.”

  “Depressing,” Dwight agreed, thinking of his own garage.

  They walked around the house, seeing no signs of violence other than the blood on the back steps. Ray unlocked the front door of the house and the interior was as organized and tidy as the tool shed. Each corner of the blue couch had a geometrically positioned decorative pillow. No scatter of newspapers, no empty cups or saucers on the polished coffee table in the living room. Indeed, no sign of normal living at all until they moved into the kitchen, where a pan of burned bacon strips sat on the stove. The fixings for BLTs were on the counter along with a sliced lemon on a cutting board. On the floor were shards of a blue ceramic sugar bowl and sugar was strewn from the sink to the back door, along with bits and pieces from a broken glass tumbler. A crumpled dishtowel was wadded up on the counter.

  “Nothing out of place in the rest of the house. The bed’s made and the bathroom’s spotless, so this must’ve been where he hit her,” Ray said.

  Dwight nodded. “She said she was making sandwiches for their supper since it was too hot to turn on the oven. He knocked the glass out of her hand and punched her in the eye. That’s when she grabbed her keys and ran. He tried to come after her, but he slipped and fell—probably on the sugar—and that gave her enough time to reach her car and get away.”

  “You reckon that’s her blood or his out there on that step?”

  “Offhand, I’d say his. She had a black eye and there was a cut on her chin, but it didn’t look very deep.”

  Five empty beer cans, each crushed flat, were in the trash can beneath the sink, along with larger pieces of the sugar bowl and some glass. “Doesn’t look like he ate supper here, does it?”

  “More like he drank it,” said Dwight. “And see? Three of those cans are on top of the glass.”

  “Like he started to clean up and then decided to have a couple of beers instead?” said Ray.

  “Maybe.” Dwight lifted the trash bag out of the can and tied the top. “Let’s take this back to Dobbs. See if it’s only his fingerprints on these. Someone might have interrupted his cleanup and they had a beer together.”

  As they walked out onto the porch, Ray paused. “Wonder where the cat is?”

  “Cat?”

  His deputy pointed to two small bowls on a wooden table at the end of the porch. One held water, the other a few bits of dry kibble. “Must be a cat. They wouldn’t feed a dog up there.”

  While they talked, Mrs. Earp drove up in a white Toyota and parked in the carport. She was followed by her cousin in a gray minivan with a bike rack on the back.

  Both women looked to be in their early fifties. Both had brown hair lightly streaked with gray. Rosalee Earp’s was shoulder length, Marisa Young’s was short and parted down the middle. Mrs. Earp was thin and fragile looking in pale blue slacks and a sleeveless cotton tunic in a flowery print with ruffles at the neck. The bruises on her arm and around her eye were a dark purple, and a flesh-colored Band-Aid covered the cut on her chin.

  She got out of her car with a tentative, tremulous air that Dwight had seen too often in victims of domestic violence.

  Her cousin was a different matter. More sturdily built, she wore jeans and a loose, man-styled lavender shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves. He had a feeling that if any man ever raised a hand to Miss Young, he’d probably draw back a stump.

  She clearly intended to run this interview and put herself in front of Rosalee Earp when Dwight stepped forward to meet them. “Have you found Vick’s killer yet?”

  “Sorry. No.” Dwight reached past her to take her cousin’s hand. “How are you this morning, Mrs. Earp?”

  “Okay,” she said weakly. “It still seems unreal that Vick’s really gone.”

  He led her to one of the molded plastic chairs on the back porch and, once everyone was seated, asked her to tell them again exactly what had happened the last time she saw her husband.

  “He hit her,” said Marisa Young, who had taken the next chair. “That’s what happened.”

  Dwight held up his hand. “Please, Miss Young, I need to hear this in Mrs. Earp’s own words. You say you last saw him Friday evening?”

  “Friday, yes,” Mrs. Earp said shakily. “I work part-time at Wal-Mart. After work, I tidied the house and washed the kitchen windows—Vick can’t stand looking through a dirty window.”

  Miss Young gave a soft snort of indignation but subsided when Mrs. Earp laid a gentle hand on her knee.

  “Be fair, Marisa, he did just as much around the place as I do.”

  “But he got to set the agenda, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, Marisa.” She withdrew her hand and turned back to Dwight and Ray. “Vick came home a little after five and was going to cut the grass, but he couldn’t get the mower started and he was already mad because the new windshield for his truck—and where is his truck?” she asked fretfully. “Wasn’t it with him?”

  “We’re looking for it, ma’am,” Ray told her.

  “Well anyhow, the windshield didn’t come in even though they’d promised, so when the mower—he had it worked on last month, see? They told him whatever they’d done wasn’t going to hold and that he needed a new one, but he was sure it would’ve lasted out the season if they’d done their work right.”

  Marisa Young rolled her eyes, but didn’t speak.

  “It was really hot and he had a couple of beers. Usually he doesn’t have one till supper time, but with all that…” She gave a helpless wave of her hand toward the tool shed. “I was frying bacon for BLTs and I’d made some lemonade. When he came in for another beer, I tried to give him a glass and that’s when—when—” She touched the bruise on her cheek. “It spun me around so hard, I knocked the sugar bowl off the counter and he went ballistic. Like I’d done it on purpose. I knew he was going to hit me again even harder. There was sugar all over the floor and he slipped on it and fell and that’s when I ran out the door and drove over to Marisa’s.”

  With tears in her eyes, she reached for her cousin’s hand. “I knew I’d be safe there. He’s scared of her. Six years ago, she shot the hat off his head and told him that next time she’d aim a little lower.”

  “Not that I really would,” said Miss Young, “but after that, he never came around till after he’d cooled off and was ready to sweet-talk Rosy.”

  “He never meant to hurt me,” said Mrs. Earp. “And he was always so sorry. He brought me roses last time and this ring.” She touched a silver band set with three small stones. “Topazes. He said they matched my eyes. And the time before that, he took me to Wilmington for a week. A second honeymoon.”

  “While her ribs healed,” Miss Young murmured.

  “His temper would get the best of him and then his leg bothered him a lot. It didn’t heal right after his accident and—”

  Miss Young could not let that pass. “A lot of men have it a lot worse, Rosy, and they don’t punch out their wives.”

  “What time did you leave?” asked Dwight.

  “Around six?” She looked to Miss Young for confirmation.

  She nodded. “You got to my house about a quarter past. I was watching the six o’clock news.”

  “Did he come over after he cooled off?”

  Both women shook their heads.

  “The bed doesn’t appear to have been slept in,” said Dwight, “and it doesn’t look as if he fixed a meal. Any idea where he might have gone?”

  “You said someone hit him over the head,” said Miss Young. “Whe
re?”

  Dwight started to touch a place on the back of his head, but she chopped the air with an impatient hand.

  “I meant where was he?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “But when did he actually die?” Miss Young persisted.

  “Around ten o’clock Saturday morning, around the time he was found, but we don’t know when he received the blow that ultimately killed him. We’re not even sure he was still alive when he was found.”

  “Who did find him?” Mrs. Earp asked. “And where?”

  “Out near Possum Creek on a deserted lane off Grimes Road.”

  Something flashed in her eye. “Black Gum Branch? How’d he get out there?”

  Dwight was surprised. “You know it?”

  She nodded and tears welled up in her eyes. “Thirty years ago. That’s where we courted on moonlit nights after the movie. On our way home from Raleigh. It was so quiet and peaceful back there. The creek broadened out where the branch joined it, and when the moon came up…” Her voice dwindled off. “He used to live out that way. We even picnicked there a few times.” She sighed. “He was so loving back then. But after the babies came and he hurt his leg, everything started going wrong. He always wanted to farm, but we couldn’t afford to buy land or equipment. His family lost their land when he was a boy and my family never had any…he still liked to drive out there, though.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Poor Vick.”

  “Rosalee?”

  Unnoticed by them, an attractive woman had emerged from the bushes behind the tool shed. Her red hair, styled in a pixie cut, blazed like polished copper in the morning sun and she wore a short-sleeved coral jacket over a black dress that seemed a little formal for walking through bushes. She hesitated as she took in the badge dangling from Dwight’s belt. “Is everything all right?”

  “Not really, Rusty.” Mrs. Earp stood to motion her forward. “This is my neighbor,” she told them. “Rusty Reynolds.”