From the backseat, I heard Stan say, “You know him?”
“Not really. Can you do my seat belt? I can’t click it.”
“Then how come you thought he had a daughter?”
“’Cause when Mama comes to pick me up at school, he’s there, too.”
Despite the heat, a chill went down my spine at the child’s words. Making my voice as casual as I could, I said, “You’ve seen him at your school, honey?”
“Yes’m, and guess what? When we stop for groceries and stuff, he goes to the same places.”
Cyl glanced at me curiously and then her eyes widened as she picked up on what I was thinking.
Goes to the same places? Childless, white Jason Bullock “goes to the same places” as Clara Freeman, a black mother?
My mind raced across the events of the last week, fitting one fact with another as everything spun like the wheels of a slot machine planning to come up cherries straight across. Unfortunately, it was another four minutes to the Freeman house and I couldn’t say a word to Cyl.
Ralph and his father-in-law were getting out of the car when we drove up. A chinaball tree had blown down near the carport, just missing one of the support posts, but that seemed to be the only damage here.
By the set of his chin, I saw that Stan meant to step between Cyl and his father so I quickly loaded him down with his and Lashanda’s overnight backpacks and asked where he wanted his radio as I carried it up to the side door. Too well-mannered to dig in his heels, he reluctantly followed Lashanda and me up the drive. I greeted a weary Reverend Gaithers with burbling cheerfulness, asked about Clara, and said how much we’d enjoyed having the two kids. All this so that Cyl could have one very quick, if very public, moment with Ralph.
“She’s doing better,” said the old man. “I really do believe the good Lord’s going to spare her. She opened her eyes this morning for a few minutes. I don’t know if she knew me, but when I squeezed her hand, she squeezed mine back.”
As we stood talking, the kids went on into the house and began opening all the windows, not that there was any breeze to mitigate the smothering, humidity-drenched heat. A chain saw three doors down made it difficult to understand each other and when it paused, I heard the siren of a rescue vehicle rushing somewhere several streets over. Ralph came up the drive and it was hard to meet his eyes as I told him I was glad to hear that his wife seemed to be coming out of her coma.
“Did you tell him Stan knows?” I asked Cyl as we drove away.
She nodded. “I’d give anything to take that knowledge away from him.”
“Ralph? Or Stan?”
“Stan.”
I started to speak, but she said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”
“Okay.” I paused at the stop sign, trying to remember precisely how we’d come. “Jason Bullock’s car is black,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“Want to bet he’s already lined up a body shop to get the dents banged out and repainted?”
“No bets.” She sighed and I wondered if that sigh was for Ralph or Jason.
Either way, I reached over and squeezed her hand.
“I guess I don’t have all the facts straight,” Cyl said gamely, trying to match my interest in Lynn Bullock’s murder. “How could Jason be at the motel killing his wife at the very same time he’s at the ball field playing ball?”
I’d already figured it out.
“Remember last night?” I told her. “How we thought Cletus was upstairs asleep? If anybody’d asked me to alibi him, I’d have taken my oath he was there all the time, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Well, it’s the same with Jason Bullock. I heard him get a call from his wife around five and he was there for pregame pictures around six-thirty. He wandered down for a Coke, and I saw him talking to people on his way to the rest area, but he could have slipped away for a half-hour and who would notice? I wonder if he got a little too cute, though?”
“How do you mean?”
“The switchboard says a man called the motel twice—right before she checked in and again after she called Jason. If he got cocky and made those calls from his cell phone, there’ll be a record of it on his bill. Reid, Millard King, and Brandon Frazier all say she wouldn’t give them the time of day anymore. Maybe she really had quit messing around with other men.”
Cyl nodded thoughtfully. “So she went to that motel expecting Jason to join her for a romantic tryst after his ball game, perhaps trying to put the spark back into their marriage?”
Our line of work made us familiar with the sexual games some couples play.
“And Jason used it to set up her death. Reid says he’s ambitious, and he’s certainly bright enough to see how a woman like Lynn could hold him back. The way she dressed, the way she’d slept with half the bar in Colleton County? He could divorce her, but then he’d be in the same spot as Dr. Jeremy Potts. Everybody knows Lynn put him through law school. He wouldn’t want to pay alimony the rest of his life based on his enhanced income potential, now would he?”
“But Rosa Edwards saw him and he came after her,” said Cyl.
“Only first, he came after an African-American woman driving a white Honda Civic,” I said.
Cyl’s lovely mobile face froze as the implications of my words sank in.
“Of course,” she said bitterly. “He didn’t run Clara Freeman into the creek, it was the car and whatever black woman happened to be driving that car. We probably all look alike to him.”
The street ahead led straight out of town and seemed to be clear as far as I could see. Nevertheless, I turned left, retracing our trek through town.
“Why are we going this way?” asked Cyl.
“Because I want another look at Jason Bullock’s car. It seems to me that that was an awfully small tree to have done that much damage. Maybe he helped it along with a sledgehammer or something.”
“And you want to play detective? No. Call the Sheriff’s Department. Let Dwight Bryant handle it. I mean it, Deborah. I want to go home.”
“It won’t take but a minute,” I soothed.
But as we turned into Jason’s street, we immediately ran into a solid wall of cars and people, all focused on the rescue truck halfway down the block.
“Oh, Lord,” said Cyl. “That’s where they were going to cut up a tree. Did that old woman have a heart attack or somebody get hurt?”
With the crowd watching whatever fresh disaster was unfolding, it seemed like a good time to slip over and take a closer look at Jason’s car. Accordingly, I copied several other vehicles and parked diagonally with two wheels on the pavement and the other two on someone’s front lawn.
“Be right back,” I told Cyl, who grabbed at a nearby woman’s arm, to ask what was going on. I saw men running with shovels from all over and I hesitated, finally registering the naked horror that hung palpably in the air.
A man I recognized by face though not by name was backing out of the crowd. He was built like a bear with thick neck and brawny arms and he was covered with sawdust and a cold sweat. His eyes were glazed, his face was greenish white. I couldn’t tell if he was in shock or about to throw up.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, God! I didn’t know he was down there. I didn’t know!”
“Know what?” I asked again.
“The stump just stood back up.”
I couldn’t make sense of his words, but someone who knew him hurried out of the crowd and put his arm around the man and told me to leave him alone. “Come away, Fred. It’s not your fault. The damn fool shouldn’t have been down there.”
If Fred couldn’t talk, there were others almost hysterical at witnessing such a ghastly accident. A hundred-year-old oak had pulled halfway out of the ground, they said, leaving behind a huge root hole, several feet across and three or four feet deep. A neighbor had gone into the hole and was bending down to cut through the roots that were still in the ground just as another
neighbor—the man they called Fred—finished cutting through the trunk’s three-foot diameter.
Released from the weight of those heavy, leaf-laden branches, the thick stump and enormous root ball suddenly flipped back into the hole, completely burying the man who was there. A dozen men were digging with shovels and picks, others were trying to hitch ropes and chains from the stump to a team of pickup trucks. They had sent for a bulldozer that was even now lumbering down the street, but everyone knew it was too late the instant the stump righted itself.
“That poor bastard!” said one of the men. “First his wife and now him.”
“Such a good man,” said an elderly white woman with tears running down her face. “He was always looking to help others.”
Before I could ask the final question, Cyl pulled me away.
“It’s Jason Bullock,” she said.
CHAPTER | 18
Most of these storms describe a parabola, with the westward arch touching the Atlantic Coast, after which the track is northeastward, finally disappearing with the storm itself in the north Atlantic.
With Jason Bullock dead, there was no way to know whether Cyl and I were right about his reasons for killing his wife—anger over Lynn’s affairs, political aspirations, or a simple wish to be free of her without paying the price of divorce. The important thing was that once Dwight’s people concentrated on him, there was plenty of proof that he had indeed done it.
I was right about his cell phone bills. He’d called the Orchid Motel from the ball field twice, trying to make it look as if another man knew she was there. We still don’t know if he jogged over to the motel or drove. No witness has come forward to say they saw him do either, but there’s at least a half-hour gap when none of us can say positively that he was at the field.
They haven’t found the envelope Rosa Edwards gave Clara Freeman, but the bloody clothes he’d worn when he butchered her were in a garbage bag at the bottom of his trash barrel, so we’re pretty sure he’s the one who stole the envelope from my house. And as soon as Clara Freeman was well enough for Dwight to interview her, she described Jason’s car and identified his picture as the white man who ran her off the road.
When Reid eventually heard that Millard King’s tie tack had also been found in Lynn’s motel room, he theorized that she must have had a cache of souvenirs and that Jason had planted them to implicate the men who had slept with his wife. He was real proud of his theory and ready to run tell it to Dwight until I reminded him why this would not be a good idea.
“But I could get my pen back,” he argued.
“Forget it,” I snarled.
Dwight beat up on himself when all the other facts were in. “Last time I believe a lawyer about anything,” he said bitterly. “That night I went to tell him about his wife? If you could’ve seen it—table set for two, salad wilting in the bowl, steaks drying up on the drainboard—and just the right mixture of shock and anger. He played me like a goddamned violin.”
“Or a jury,” I said cynically.
* * *
Five hot and sweaty days later, power was still out over the rural parts of Colleton County, although phone service had been restored in less than forty-eight hours. Eighteen states had sent crews to help restore North Carolina’s electricity but over five thousand poles were down and at least three thousand miles of wires and cables needed to be replaced.
Every day reminded us all over again just how much we relied on electricity in ways we didn’t even realize. My family could be smug about cooking with propane gas but in this heat, we were having trouble keeping food fresh in our picnic coolers without a ready supply of ice. Robert, Andrew and Haywood had portable gas-run generators and were sharing them with Daddy and Seth every eight hours so that nobody lost a freezer chest full of meat and vegetables, but all the gasoline pumps at the local crossroads stations worked by electricity and for the first couple of days, lines were long at the few in-town stations that hadn’t lost power.
We had to recharge our portable phones at work, tell time by wristwatches, prise open windows that had been painted shut after the advent of year-round “climate control,” and swelter through long smothery nights without even a ceiling fan to stir a breeze. We had to think before flushing toilets and forget about showers. Candlelight lost its romantic novelty after two days and there was a lot of grumbling about spending the evenings without any electronic entertainments.
I cleaned out my refrigerator before it started smelling and put trays of baking soda on the shelves so that stale odors wouldn’t build up. Some of my perishables went to Aunt Zell’s refrigerator over in Dobbs. I started a compost pile with the rest.
Dobbs had gone without power a mere thirty-six hours, but our courts were still on half-session.
On Thursday morning, I heard a probable cause against a Norwood Love from down near Makely, who was represented by my cousin John Claude Lee. During the storm, the back of young Mr. Love’s hog pen collapsed, revealing an underground chamber beneath the barn it abutted—a chamber full of large plastic barrels and a stainless steel cooker, all set to start making bootleg whiskey.
According to the agent who testified that morning, it did not appear that the still had ever been in operation, but mere possession of such equipment is against the law. I agreed that there was indeed probable cause and set a trial date. Since Mr. Love had no record, though, I released him without bail.
Afterwards, I visited with Aunt Zell to pick up a couple of loads of laundry that she’d done for Daddy and Maidie and me.
“If Kidd wants to come up this weekend, he can stay here,” she offered, knowing how long it’d been.
I thanked her, but said I doubted he could get away.
Truth is, I wasn’t sure if he wanted to get away.
We’d spoken a couple of times. I called him that first day to say I was all right, in case he was worried, and to hear how he was. What he was, was . . . shall we say, occupied?
The storm surge at New Bern was more than nine feet and it had flooded his daughter Amber and his ex-wife out of their house. Last time I phoned, they were both staying with Kidd, whose cabin was on higher ground. So maybe that was the reason he didn’t sound anxious to come to me, and it was certainly the reason I couldn’t go to him.
When I stopped past the homeplace to give Maidie the folded laundry, I was surprised to see Daddy standing by an unfamiliar pickup.
It was an awkward moment as Norwood Love and I recognized each other from morning court. He murmured a soft, “Sorry, ma’am,” then cranked his truck and drove off.
“How do you know him?” I asked Daddy.
“I know a lot of people, shug,” he said.
“Did he tell you he’s waiting trial for owning moonshining equipment?”
“Yeah, he told me.” He gave a rueful shake of his head. “Reckon that’s why he come to me. Thought maybe I’d understand quicker than most folks how come he needs extra work. I said I’d hire him to clear out some of them trees blocking the lanes. Your brothers got so much on their plates, we can use another pair of hands.”
Daddy doesn’t often touch on his own past history of moonshining and he’s certainly never discussed it with me even though I’ve heard a lot of the stories from my brothers and a few others from SBI and ATF agents. As I’ve gotten older and heard more, I have to say that not all of the stories have been warm and funny. Some have a violent edge that makes me uneasy to think about.
* * *
There wasn’t a breath of wind blowing when I got back to my house and the air was so steamy that I planned to jump into the pond as soon as I arrived.
Cyl was waiting for me on the porch. It was the first time I’d seen her looking halfway like herself since the storm, but then she lived in Garner where there was hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and hair dryers.
“Want to go skinny-dipping?” I said as soon as I got out of the car.
“Not really.”
There was something different a
bout her.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I just came from my grandmother’s and I wanted you to be the second to know.”
“Know what?” I asked with apprehension.
“That I gave Doug Woodall my notice at noon today. I flew up to Washington yesterday to interview with McLean, Applebee and Shaw and they made me a very generous offer.”
The name was vaguely familiar.
“They’re one of the most effective black lobbyist firms in Washington,” she said. “I’ll be going back up this weekend to look for an apartment.”
“Oh, Cyl,” I said, “are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said firmly. “I just wanted to thank you for being there when I really needed a friend.”
My eyes filled with tears. It’s in the genes. Half my family can’t watch a Hallmark commercial without crying.
She was crisp and cool, I was hot and sweaty, but I hugged her anyhow. “I’m really going to miss you, girl.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll be back to visit Grandma and you can come visit me. I’m hoping to find a place in Georgetown. Think of us in all those great shops and restaurants.”
“Yeah,” I said glumly.
“It’s the only way I can deal with it,” she said quietly and this time, she hugged me.
* * *
After Cyl left, I changed clothes, then got out the pane of glass and glazing putty I’d bought a couple of days ago and began repairing my broken window. Different brothers had offered to do it, but they’re still working on bigger repairs. At least I don’t have tall trees around my house to fall on anything. And maybe I ought to reconsider where I want to plant them. Dwight’s right: it’ll take twenty years to grow them tall enough to do any damage, but I’ll probably still be here—alone—twenty years from now. Certainly doesn’t look as if I’ll be setting up housekeeping in New Bern any time soon.
I’m probably not cut out to be anybody’s stepmom.
Unlike Cyl, who would have been terrific under different circumstances.
I hadn’t seen Ralph Freeman since the day after the storm, but I heard that Clara was making a pretty good recovery, all things considered, and would probably be home before the weekend although Amy says she’s going to need a lot of physical therapy in the next few months.
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