Designated Daughters

by Margaret Maron

  “Probably eat up with arthritis,” said Doris, who had a touch of it in her thumbs.

  Using his laser pointer, Dwight put a red dot on the profile of another white-haired man who stood between Seth and Dr. Howell near Aunt Rachel’s bed. His head was turned away, so we couldn’t see his face. “Who’s that, Seth?”

  “Never saw him before. Daddy?”

  Daddy leaned forward. “I’m not rightly sure. You know him, Sister?”

  She shook her head and Dwight moved on to the next picture. At that point, a three-minute burst of video flashed on the screen, and each time the camera strayed from Aunt Rachel’s face, he would pause it so that everyone had a chance to comment.

  “Oh, I know who that must’ve been before,” said Jay-Jay. “That’s his wife over there talking to you, Sally.”

  “Kitty Byrd? He’s Sam Byrd?”

  “We met her Friday after the funeral,” I reminded Dwight, adding an asterisk to both names to denote someone over seventy-five. “She gave you a list of names, remember?”

  “They live just up the road from Mama’s and she used to let us come pick blackberries in their back pasture. Lord, the chigger bites we used to endure for Mama’s blackberry cobblers. Remember, Jay-Jay?”

  “Did you know them when y’all were young?” I asked Daddy.

  “Naw, never met them till atter Rachel and Brack set up housekeeping,” he said, giving me a speculative look.

  It’s always hard to slide anything past him. If he knew we were concentrating on the over seventy-fives today, he’d realize where Dwight was going with this.

  “Who’s that?” someone asked as Mrs. Byrd’s “bald man, big red nose, blue shirt” passed in front of the camera.

  Dwight immediately reversed the film and paused it there.

  “I know him,” Robert said unexpectedly.

  “Jim Collins,” said Sally before I could chime in. “He owns a big company down in Fayetteville. Something to do with medical equipment for the military, I think. He used to love to stop by Mama’s vegetable stand on his way home and listen to her talk. Said she reminded him of his own mother.”

  “That’s right,” said Robert, “and there’s his daughter right behind him. Real pretty, ain’t she? I forget her name.”

  “Amanda,” Sally said. “Mr. Collins says she goes to Mere­dith College now. Majoring in business so she can go to work with him.”

  I recognized that this was the girl whose pearls had broken when we both used the bathroom across the hall from Aunt Rachel’s room. Slender and blonde, she was short like her father, with a narrow nose set in a very pretty face.

  “She must take after her mother,” I said.

  Sally took a peppermint from the bowl on the coffee table. “No, Mrs. Collins was just as dumpy.”

  Jay-Jay leaned forward with a smile. “She’s—”

  Dwight immediately paused the picture again. “Something, Jay-Jay?”

  “Naw,” my cousin said. “Just thinking how lucky she was not to get his nose.”

  Dwight had moved on and we all focused again on the screen. Some of the videos were fuzzy and shot at an odd angle and none of them were very long.

  I get it that videos taken with a cell phone can eat up a lot of valuable battery power that could better be used for texting and talking, but I also get it that teenagers have a short attention span and a hard time not talking while they’re filming. Emma was the only one who managed to keep her mouth shut and her camera focused on Aunt Rachel for a full ten minutes.

  We listened as she rambled on from Jacob to Jed to the house fire that had killed Richard Howell’s sister and her two young daughters to bathing suits and recurring references to Letha, whoever she was. With so much background noise, it was difficult to hear everything.

  “Mayleen’s sent a copy of this DVD over to the SBI lab,” Dwight said. “They say they can maybe clean up the sound and get more of what Miss Rachel was saying.” He paused the action as Aunt Sister registered that mention of soup being ruined.

  “Lordy, lordy!” she said. “I plumb forgot about that! It was hot as the dickens that day Jacob died, but the vegetables were ready and Mammy and Rachel were canning soup mixture. You young’uns don’t know what hot is till you try to can vegetables in a water bath on top of a wood-burning range in the middle of summer. No air conditioning. No ’lectric stove. We’d shelled and shucked the night before and Mammy got started first light peeling tomatoes and slicing corn, but it was atter dinner and her and Rachel was still working on ’em when I went to the field. Hot as it was out there in the midday sun, me and Jed at least got a breeze. Not like the kitchen. When they hollered that Jacob was dead, Mammy just ran out of the house and—”

  Her voice broke as the vivid memories of that day flooded over her.

  “By the time we walked back in the kitchen, all the water had boiled out of the pot, the soup was burned, and three of them half-gallon jars had busted,” she finished quietly. “That’s what Rachel meant.”

  We all sat silent for a minute, and Dwight looked over at me.

  “Let’s take a break,” I said. “Cal, would you get Aunt Sister a Pepsi, please? Anybody else want one? How about a glass of tea?”

  “I could use a glass of that last beer you made,” Seth told Dwight, and some of the others joined them at the tap Daddy had given him as a wedding present. Doris allowed as how she wouldn’t mind a little glass if Robert was having one, but the rest of us opted for tea or soft drinks.

  Emma helped me set out bowls of chips and nuts while some took turns in the bathrooms. As we waited for everyone to settle again, I said, “Who was that Letha she kept mentioning? Was she Jacob’s girlfriend or something?”

  “She’s why Jacob died,” Aunt Sister said tightly.

  Daddy was as surprised as the rest of us. “What’re you saying, Sister?”

  “Well, she was. Jacob wouldn’t’ve been down there at the creek if not for her. I never said before and then she ran off to Widdington to live with her sister right after that and I thought I wouldn’t never have to think about her again, but Rachel going on and on about her’s brought it all back. The way she led all the boys on. You, too, Kezzie. She tried it with you. Tried to turn you from Annie Ruth.”

  “She might’ve tried, but it didn’t work.” Daddy shook his head as if clearing away cobwebs of memory. “I knowed what she was and I never looked at her twice after me and Annie Ruth got together.”

  “That’s ’cause you had more sense than the boys did. She played them off against each other and that last day, Jed came storming up from the woods and went right to the field and started on them suckers. Wouldn’t even come to the house for dinner. I asked him if he’d seen Letha and he said he never wanted to hear her name again. All the same, she’d been by that morning on her way to the creek, swishing her tail in a skimpy bathing suit and looking for somebody to go swimming with her. Me and Rachel had to work. Not that we’d’ve gone. Mammy never let us go swimming when other boys were around lessen you was there, but Letha’s mammy just let her run wild.”

  Daddy frowned. “She’s what the boys were fighting about that morning?”

  Now it was Aunt Sister’s turn to look bewildered. “They fought?”

  “I had ’em splitting logs for the cooker and they got into it so bad, I sent Jed back to the house to start suckering. Jacob wouldn’t say what they was fighting about, so I told him to finish splitting the wood and stay away from Jed till they could act civil. Last words I ever spoke to him. Always felt like it was my fault he went to the creek alone.”

  “What actually happened?” asked Sally, who had opted for a Diet Mountain Dew that matched the pale yellow green of today’s wig. She had dressed more conservatively for today’s meeting. White cotton capris and a high-necked black tee that was so loose even Doris and Bel couldn’t fault it. “Y’all keep saying he drowned, but why? How?”

  “We had us a rope tied to the limb of a big ol’ water oak,” Daddy said. �
��We’d swing out and drop down in the middle of the creek where the water was real deep. They said the rope broke and Jacob, he hit his head on some rocks near the edge. They got him outen the water ’fore I got there, but I seen his head.” He laid his hand on the side of his own head above his right ear. “It was all caved in.”

  “Who was ‘they,’ Mr. Kezzie?” Dwight asked.

  “Ransom Barley and Billy Thornton.”

  “Not this Letha?”

  “Letha McAllister.” His voice came harshly. “If she was there, she must’ve run home soon as it happened, ’cause she won’t there when I got to the creek and today’s the first I knowed she was even anywhere around.”

  “Well, maybe if you’d’ve told us they fought that morning—”

  “I couldn’t say nothing, Sister. Jed was hurting so bad. Last time he seen Jacob, they was cussing each other. I won’t gonna rub more salt in his wounds.”

  “Did you know he’d enlisted in the army?” Jay-Jay asked.

  Daddy shook his head. “He took off the same day we buried Jacob. Didn’t know where he went. I put out the word but nobody’d seen him. Was almost a month ’fore Mammy got a postcard from him. I drove down to Fort Bragg to get him. Even took his birth certificate to prove he won’t old enough to join up, but I got there four hours and twenty-eight minutes too late. I fetched him home anyhow, though. They wanted me to wait and let ’em send him home proper, but I told ’em the hell with that. I’d take him home my own damn self and they could go f—”

  He broke off abruptly and there was a grim silence as images of what that ghastly trip home must have entailed flashed in our minds.

  “Granddaddy?”

  I realized that Cal was about to blurt out a question, but Dwight said, “Not now, buddy,” and he subsided.

  The other grandchildren were looking subdued and anxious. They had never heard him use language before. Even my brothers and their wives were silent.

  To get us back on track, I said, “On Wednesday, Daddy, you said Ransom Barley and his family moved back to Georgia a few years after that. What about this Billy Thornton?”

  “What about him?”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Ain’t heard nothing about him in years.”

  “Won’t he Davis Thornton’s daddy?” Haywood asked. “Sharecropped with Leo Pleasant?”

  “I reckon.”

  “I think they moved to Johnston County when me and Herman was in the eighth grade. Ain’t that about right?” he asked his twin.

  Herman nodded. “Last I heard, Davis was working in a welding shop in Benson. Don’t know about his daddy.”

  I made notes of what they’d said. If this Billy Thornton was still around, Dwight would find him. In the meantime, we moved on with the pictures. Church friends and family made up the bulk, of course. There was one more old-timer in the crowd, but he was one of Aunt Rachel’s longtime customers and not someone who’d lived in our neighborhood as a boy.

  At the very end, a pudgy male figure dressed in blue scrubs walked past the camera and Dwight paused. “Who’s that?”

  Sally squinted at the screen. “Just one of the orderlies. They sent up a supper tray every evening for whoever’s there and he always brought it up. Real pleasant. Asked a lot of questions about you, Uncle Kezzie, and what it was like growing up on a farm. He said his name, but I forget it. You remember, Jay-Jay?”

  Her brother shook his head.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dwight said easily as the last pictures flashed across the screen, but I knew he’d have the guy’s name by midday tomorrow.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Youth has many more chances of death than those of my age.

  — Cicero

  Dwight Bryant—Monday morning, May 20

  Shortly after he came back to Colleton County and was sworn in as Sheriff Bo Poole’s second-in-command, Dwight had gone fishing on one of the farm ponds with the man who was now his father-in-law. Kezzie Knott had been almost like a father to him after the early death of his own dad. All through his adolescence, he had hung out with the Knott boys—fishing, hunting, swimming, and playing whatever ball was in season. Their house had drawn him like a magnet. Miss Sue always seemed to know when he needed to talk during those tough years when his own mother was stretched to the breaking point to earn a living for her four children and get the academic degrees that eventually made a better life for all of them. And half the time he wasn’t sure Mr. Kezzie realized he wasn’t another son to be cuffed or praised, depending on the circumstances.

  The rowboat was drifting in the middle of one of the farm ponds and their hooks were in the water when the older man said, “So you’re gonna be a deputy sheriff now, boy? Lot different from working in Washington, I reckon.”

  “I dunno. Crime’s crime.”

  “And it’s always black and white to you?”

  “’Fraid so, sir.”

  “Well, as long as you stay straight and play fair, you’ll do good.”

  Up until he was in his early teens, when Miss Sue finally got Mr. Kezzie to quit making whiskey himself, Dwight had actually helped the boys chop firewood for cooking the mash in one of those large copper stills, so it felt weird to say, “I hope you won’t take this wrong, Mr. Kezzie, but I’ve got to say it—”

  “No, you ain’t,” he interrupted. “You catch me doing what’s against the law, you gotta do what the law says.”

  Like the sly old fox he was, he gave Dwight a sardonic grin. “’Course now, you gotta catch me doing it first.”

  And Dwight had laughed as a sun perch took his hook and dived for the bottom of the pond.

  He had not yet had to arrest Deborah’s father, but they both knew he would if the proof was there. Not that the old man was still actively making it. Dwight was pretty sure of that, but there was a suspicion that he might be bankrolling the smaller productions of men who were, just to keep his hand in. So far, though, it was all rumor and speculation. No one had offered evidence or even made a direct accusation. But nature and moonshiners both abhor a vacuum and Colleton County still had stretches of isolated woodlands and plenty of men who knew the trade. Word was out that a fairly large still must be in operation somewhere close to the line between Colleton and Johnston Counties, and he’d been asked to a strategy lunch with some of Johnston’s officers and a couple of Alcohol Law Enforcement agents.

  With Sheriff Bo Poole sitting in on the morning briefing, Dwight said, “Long as I’m down that way, I’ll go on over to Benson and see if I can locate this Billy Thornton or his son.”

  Poole looked skeptical. “You really think Rachel Morton’s death goes all the way back to that drowning?”

  Dwight shrugged. “Seems to me that the only reason to kill her was to stop her from talking about something bad that happened years ago and her brother’s drowning is what she kept going back to. Don’t know if it’s relevant but we’ve gotta start somewhere and it’s the only thing I know to go with right now.” He turned to the red-haired deputy he had come to rely on for all things related to computer searches and data bases. “Mayleen, see if you can locate a Ransom Barley down in Georgia. He’d be around eighty now. His father worked for CP&L fifty years ago, and his younger brother’s name was Donald. I’m afraid that’s all the information I have.”

  Richards smiled. “Should be enough, Major.”

  “And there was a Letha McAllister. She moved to Widdington back when she was a teenager, so she’d be around eighty as well, if she’s still alive.”

  “That might take a little longer,” Richards said. “Especially if she got married.”

  “Five or six times probably,” Dwight said and repeated some of Miss Sister’s assessment of the girl.

  Both of the other two detectives on duty had court appearances that morning, but he asked them to take a look at the end of Mayleen’s video, then go over to the hospital when they were finished in court and see if they could ID that orderly. “And question the staf
f again. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll remember seeing someone enter or leave that room after the family left.”

  Sheriff Poole gave them a quick update on the jailor accused of brutality. Three former prisoners had filed a formal complaint and he had been arrested last night. “Hate to say it, but it looks like they have a case. I’ve suspended him, but he’s waived his PC hearing and now we wait for the DA’s office to indict. I’ve called a meeting for the other jailors and the bailiffs, too. Sometimes the uniforms go straight to their heads and they forget they’re not in charge of the universe.”

  The youth Tub Greene had arrested for Friday night’s barroom brawl was sitting in a cell two corridors over. His probable cause hearing was that morning and he would no doubt be bound over for trial in superior court.

  “Good work,” said Poole, and the rookie detective turned bright red under the praise.

  A little before ten, Mayleen Richards tapped on the open door. “Major? I’ve located a Donald Barley down in Waycross, Georgia. He says his brother Ransom died six years ago. You want to talk to him?”

  Dwight nodded.

  “Line two,” she said.

  Dwight pressed the lit button and was soon introducing himself to one of the last living friends of the Knott twins.

  “Yes, I remember them,” Donald Barley told Dwight. “What’s all this about?”

  “We’re trying to reconstruct the day Jacob Knott supposedly drowned,” Dwight said. “Were you there?”

  “Supposedly? What do you mean, ‘supposedly’? He drowned in the creek, didn’t he?” Before Dwight could answer, he said, “What was it called? Possum Creek? Save me, Jesus! I haven’t thought about that creek in years.”

  “Were you there when it happened?”

  “No, but my brother Ransom was.”

  “Did he tell you what happened?”

  “Oh. That’s what you meant by ‘supposedly.’ It was that fall on the rocks that probably killed him, not drowning, right?”