Bootlegger’s Daughter

by Margaret Maron

  “Just saying there’s plenty.”

  “You always did have a pretty way with words,” I teased.

  With one accord, we pushed our bobs down the line so that our hooks would be set too shallow to attract the big fish. Then we baited up with a generous hand. Dozens of little fish swarmed up as soon as the worms hit the water, and our bobbers dipped and bounced till the hooks were picked clean.

  We kept it up till all the bait was gone and shadows began to lengthen over the water. The air was golden all around. I felt utterly at peace.

  “Shug?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Who wrote them ugly letters?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy.”

  “Well, who do you think?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Then how ’bout I throw you a big pig pickin’?”

  I twisted around to stare at him. He’d been angry when he heard I’d filed for judge and had tried to get me to withdraw. We’d both said ugly things.

  “I still don’t see why you need to be a judge,” he said, “but if that’s what you want-”

  I could feel myself stiffening up. “You’re going to buy it for me?”

  “I just don’t want to be the cost of you losing it,” he said, more humbly than I’d ever heard him speak.

  Into the silence came raucous screams. The red-tailed hawk had drifted down almost to the treetops and three crows had banded together to fly at him and hector his passage.

  “I pure-out hate a crow,” said Daddy. “A hawk’ll maybe take a biddy or two in the spring, but a crow’ll get your corn all summer long and strip your pecan trees in the fall. Look at ’em chasing after that hawk, too much a coward ’cept when they can gang up on him.”

  His fierce blue eyes followed the birds. Eighty-two years old, yet he still knew what it was like to live as a hawk and feel the sharp beaks of cowards on your back.

  “How ’bout I stay for supper?” I said.

  17 didn’t expect it to go down this way

  Saturday morning found me braced for the worst. Those first two flyers were distributed God knows how widely, the Ledger had been out since Friday noon with its story, and my whole family had its collective hackles up.

  So what happened?

  Not one damn thing.

  Every time we start thinking we’re the center of the universe, the universe turns around and says with a slightly distracted air, “I’m sorry. What’d you say your name was again?”

  Oh, a few friends called to ask what was going on, but for the most part, silence. A runoff contest between two local judicial candidates is small potatoes compared to the one shaping up between Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte out in the western part of the state, and Mike Easley, a white district attorney from Southport down at the coast.

  At least there’d been no more flyers.

  Haywood’s Stevie had organized his cousins into teams and they’d cruised Cotton Grove and Black Creek until nearly two a.m armed with notepads to jot down license plates or comments on suspicious cars, sneaky-acting users of News and Observer boxes, or anything else that seemed worth noting.

  “And nobody saw anything?” I asked when he reported in that morning.

  Stevie laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. It was Friday night. Funny what you can see when you really start looking.”

  “Keep it clean,” I told him and went off to work a senior citizens’ lunch in Widdington, then an Arts Council meeting in Cotton Grove where I had to field only three mostly friendly questions about the flyers.

  After the meeting, I was approached by someone with a vaguely familiar face, a bustling sort of woman who’s on the Possum Creek Players board of directors. She trotted over with a flourish of silver bangles on both wrists and an arty paisley scarf so carelessly draped over the shoulder of her flounced dress that she had to keep clutching at it. “I’m Sylvia Dayley, Miss Knott. You probably don’t remember me from our production of Who Killed the Darling Mrs.?, but I hope you won’t mind if I ask you?”

  She was another of those who end every other sentence on an upward inflection.

  I waited warily. “Yes?”

  “Since you’re a friend of Denn McCloy? When you saw him last night, did he say anything about Michael and him maybe going somewhere for the weekend?”

  She misread my blank look. “I’ve been clerking out at the Pot Shot on the weekends-Saturday mornings, ten till two; Sunday afternoons, one to five? It’s only eight hours and I mostly do it as a favor for the boys. So hard for them to find reliable help. I have a key, of course, but Michael and Denn always let me know when they’re going to be gone so I’ll feed Lily if they leave her home, only this time they didn’t say a word to me and I’m not sure what to do with the money?”

  She finally ran out of breath and her bracelets jingled as she rearranged her scarf.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have misunderstood something. I didn’t see Denn last night.”

  “But Cathy said Denn called you yesterday afternoon to meet him at the theater last night?”

  “Cathy King? One of their potters?”

  Sylvia Dayley nodded so vigorously that her scarf slid all the way down her arm until one end trailed on the floor. “I called her when I got in and that’s what she said.”

  I shook my head. “He may’ve left a message on our answering machine, but we closed early yesterday and I didn’t get it. Sorry.”

  She hitched up her scarf and looked perturbed. “I hate to just leave the money at the shop. Not that it’s all that much, but still… And what if they don’t come back till Monday? Sundays are such a big day, you know? And what about Lily?”

  I edged away from her as she jingled indecisively and was immediately claimed by an elderly poet and a would-be playwright who wanted to debate the Mapplethorpe photos and the First Amendment.

  Wondering who else might not have realized that we’d closed early yesterday, I put in a call to the office and punched in the code that would cause our answering machine to play back. Sure enough, amid some non-urgent routine messages was Denn McCloy’s: “This is for Deborah Knott. Please ask her to meet me at the Possum Creek Players Theatre tonight at nine. I have something very special to give her.”

  Like what, Denn? I asked him mentally as I looked up the number at the Pot Shot. Another round of rifle fire?

  There was no answer. After five rings, their answering machine switched on. I left a message that I was returning Denn’s call and that I’d be back home by eleven. All across America, it’s machines talking to machines.

  Dwight probably laid the fear of God and the law on Denn yesterday. Maybe he wanted to apologize in person. Unless-?

  I suddenly remembered the luscious dark red velvet cloak he’d created for The Further Adventures of Red Riding Hood. The young woman who played Red was awful, but the costumes were great. In fact, I wanted Denn to sell me the cloak, but it was such a useful and versatile costume that he didn’t want to let it go. He’d promised though that if he ever changed his mind, I was to have first dibs, and we had a running joke about it.

  Now wouldn’t that make a nice apology, I thought, turning my car south on Forty-Eight toward Makely. Too bad I’d missed him.

  I was scheduled to speak at a Parents Without Partners dinner meeting at Makely that evening-they wanted legal advice about guardianships and trusts; I wanted their votes- but I had an extra hour to kill. Impulsively, I made a three-point turn right there on the highway and headed back through Cotton Grove.

  It wasn’t that I expected Denn to still be sitting in the parking lot at the theater twenty-four hours later. On the other hand, if he and Michael had made up and then decided on the spur of the moment to go away for the weekend, an extravagant gesture was well within the realm of possibility. I could see him putting the cloak in a plastic garment bag and hanging it under the back arch with a large sign: Mea Culpa, Deborah, or something equal
ly and dramatically penitent.

  It was odd about couples, the dynamics of staying together or growing apart. Minnie and Seth got more like each other every year, whereas you had to wonder why the Vickerys hadn’t flown apart years ago. Pride? Lying in the bed you’d made? And Denn and Michael. Now there was an odd couple for you. Michael so cold and so conventional, if you didn’t count stringing his fences with precise crosses. And Denn so theatrical and impulsive-he’d sure given me a whole new slant on the term hair-trigger temper-but capable of a warm generosity I’d never seen with Michael. No wonder their union was in trouble.

  “At least they’re all still honoring whatever vows they made,” said the preacher starchily.

  The pragmatist held his tongue.

  The Possum Creek Players Theatre began life as a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town a hundred years ago. The one room grew to three before it was abandoned for a new brick school in the twenties. A pentecostal congregation immediately bought the building and moved it to the banks of Possum Creek about five miles north of Cotton Grove. In the fifties, shortly after the church elders had taken out a new mortgage to remodel the structure, long-simmering animosities over scriptural interpretations suddenly came to a boil and emotions ran so high that the church split right down the middle. The wealthier members pulled out and built a new church at a crossroads south of Cotton Grove. The rest of the flock, unable to meet the mortgage payments, soon drifted off to other churches, and the bank foreclosed.

  After that, the building sat empty for several years. The property kept changing hands. Different enterprises tried and failed out there, but nothing seemed to work until the Possum Creek Players organized and eventually raised enough money to take it over on a fairly sound financial footing. Raleigh was near enough to furnish better-than-average amateur actors; and Raleigh provided a dependable paying audience as well, once the theater had built a reputation for campy musical comedy, farce, and melodrama.

  A gravel road wound in from the highway, through a stand of pine trees and azaleas out to the old white clapboard building on the banks of the creek. With the sun at my back, I drove into the sprawling dirt parking lot where a neat square sign announced that Bouncing Betty’s Betrothal would open the first of June. As I thought, the parking lot was empty, but I drove around back. There, a covered archway sheltered a set of double doors used to move sets and furniture in and out of the building.

  To my surprise, Denn’s Volvo was pulled up to the far edge of the concrete loading zone. The theater’s double doors were in shadow, but I could see that one of them stood slightly ajar.

  I tapped my horn.

  Nothing.

  I switched off my motor and stepped out of air-conditioned coolness onto sun-parched grass. Warm air flowed around my bare arms almost like the red velvet cloak itself.

  The sun was down below the pines now, and silence wrapped the shadowed creek bank. I walked across the concrete pad and pushed the door wider.

  “Denn? Michael?” I called. “Anybody here?”

  All at once it struck me what a dumb thing it was to be walking into an isolated building out here in the middle of nowhere. Probably deserted, but maybe not. Not with Denn’s car parked only ten feet away.

  “And let us not forget who’s shown himself to be just a little too damn free in the way he handles a rifle,” said the pragmatist.

  “She who fears and runs away lives to fear another day,” the preacher agreed nervously.

  I backed away from the door, feeling slightly foolish. On the other hand, I do keep a loaded.38 locked in the truck of my car and this seemed like as good a time as any to get it out.

  The concrete loading zone was only eight or nine inches off ground level, but when I turned, I found myself looking straight down into the front seat of Denn’s car. An instant jolt of pure adrenaline jerked me backwards. I was propelled by such a strong and instinctive survival response that I had no time to reason. I could only react in primitive, headlong, terrified flight across the strip of open ground between the two cars. I dived into mine and dug out of there so fast that gravel spun out in all directions, and I hunched as low as I could, expecting to feel a shotgun blast between my shoulder blades at any second.

  Like the blast that’d taken out the driver’s side of the Volvo windshield and blown away Denn McCloy’s whole face.

  18 make the world go away

  I’m fine,” I said for the third time.

  “You sure?” asked Dwight Bryant.

  As head of the detective division, he had all his people moving in the directions he wanted them to go, and now he could make time to come over to the car and get my whole story. I was parked at the edge of the grass behind the theater with my front door open and one foot on the ground, and he leaned his big muscular body against the car as we talked so he could keep an eye on proceedings.

  Although there was still plenty of daylight, portable floods had been rigged to light the interior of Denn’s Volvo while they took photographs from every angle before they moved him.

  So far, everything had been done by the book. I might have disturbed the crime scene by driving in and out, but after I’d gotten to a phone and called the sheriff’s department, the first deputy to respond had blocked off the theater’s drive out by the paved road. All emergency vehicles had come in by driving straight across the grass to the edge of the back parking lot, while one member of Dwight’s team took a close look at the drive and parking lot. I doubted if she’d find anything. Gravel doesn’t mark, we hadn’t had rain in more than a week, and this sandy soil becomes too dry and powdery to hold tracks after two or three days of hot sun.

  Dwight wanted to know how I’d discovered the body, and I told him about Sylvia Dayley and the message Denn’d left on the firm’s answering machine.

  “You thought he’d wait that long?” Dwight asked skeptically.

  “Not him,” I said. “Whatever it was he wanted to give me.”

  A velvet cloak seemed such a petty object in the face of Denn’s death that I wasn’t going to mention it if I could help it. Before Dwight thought to ask, I said, “He didn’t happen to hint what it was when you talked to him on Thursday, did he?”

  “Nope.”

  “What did he say? About shooting at Michael on Wednesday, I mean?”

  Dwight gave a wry grin. “Swore he didn’t do it; promised he wouldn’t ever do it again.” He shifted his weight against my car, and I swayed with the motion of the shocks. “Makes me wonder where Michael Vickery is right now.”

  “You think Michael-?”

  “Well, you’re the one who talked about menopausal males,” he said.

  The radio crackled on the county’s emergency rescue truck and I was suddenly reminded of where I was supposed to be. Dwight said I was welcome to ask one of the patrolmen to tell the dispatcher to get word to the Makely Parents Without Partners that I wouldn’t be coming.

  As I got out of the car, Jack Jamison, a tubby young deputy, called, “Hey, Major Bryant-see you over here a minute?”

  It was more than a minute, and whatever it was that Jamison was pointing out to Dwight inside the Volvo, it sure seemed to set off a whole new flurry of activity. The patrolman I’d collared had barely finished giving the dispatcher my message than I heard Dwight putting out an APB on Michael Vickery’s gray Ford pickup.

  The sun finally melted into the pine trees. Not much daylight left as reaction set in. I began to feel as tired as if I’d barned tobacco all day and so utterly saddened by Denn’s violent death. He was nearly fifteen years older than me and he and Michael had done little socializing in Cotton Grove, so we may not have been close friends, but we were friends, and I mourned- the loss of his colorful personality. I could almost smile to remember how much fun he’d made The Night of January 16th, some of his outrageous comments about my fellow cast members during costume fittings. Bitchy, witty, and surprisingly insightful. The Possum Creek Players would have a hard time replacing him.

 
All this went through my mind as Dwight gave a physical description of the pickup’s probable driver, and I must have been even more tired than I realized because I sat there stupidly for a moment wondering why on earth Dwight was putting Denn’s description on an APB.

  The rescue people were lifting the limp form from the car. I went over and tried to focus on the body, without letting myself really look at the head again.

  We sure do see what we expect to see, don’t we? Earlier, I’d assumed that the man in Denn’s car, sitting where Denn was supposed to be sitting, waiting where Denn had said he’d be waiting, was indeed Denn.

  Wrong.

  Now I saw quite clearly that it was Michael Vickery who’d had his face blown away.

  It made the eleven o’clock news on all our local channels and the front pages of several Sunday papers around eastern North Carolina.

  Scion of a prominent local family, police seeking his missing male companion, body discovered by an equally prominent candidate for a seat on the bench-all the notice that I’d avoided earlier I was now getting in spades.

  The television stories concentrated on Michael and Denn, but the newspapers had time and space to include me since by now it was clear that Michael had died around nine o’clock on Friday night, the time and place Denn McCloy expected to meet me. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t speculate either on or off the record about why Michael Vickery was there instead or why a meeting I didn’t keep should have led to murder.

  Nice of Dwight not to speculate out loud, but it didn’t stop the media.

  In addition to my usual academic and career achievements, I was described as the “only daughter of Keziah Knott, at one time alleged to be North Carolina ’s largest bootlegger.” One or two hinted that I was-till now anyhow-the only white sheep of an infamous family, while others picked up on those phony campaign flyers and left the impression that Michael’s murder had something to do with my position on sex, race, drugs, untaxed whiskey, and God knows what else.

  Although they were very careful to print or broadcast nothing actionable, the open-ended quagmire of personalities, crime, unanswered questions, and suggestive innuendos kept the reading and viewing public tuned in. I had the gloomy feeling that I was watching my seat on any bench trickle right on down the drain.