Home Fires dk-6

by Margaret Maron

  “Smudge! Stop that this minute,” she scolded.

  Dogs are amenable. He stopped barking and began wagging his tail instead.

  “Come in, come in,” Mrs. Avery said, holding open the screen door and looking askance at the two uniformed officers behind me. “Is something wrong, Deborah?”

  I murmured inconsequentially and introduced Jamison and Richards. Dwight she had met before.

  “Oh, but where are my manners? Please! Do have a seat.”

  The house stood in a grove of ancient oak trees, some of them eight or ten feet in circumference and more than seventy feet tall. Despite the heat, the open porch was cool and shady. We had our choice of porch swing, rocking chairs or Adirondack chairs, all freshly painted in that notorious green enamel.

  Since it was my idea, Dwight thought I should be the one to speak, so when she asked if this was an official visit, I said, “I’m afraid so. You see, Mrs. Avery, when Mount Olive’s sexton died in that fire, the arson stopped being a simple felony and became a capital offense.”

  “Capital?” She sank down in the rocker next to mine and looked at me, appalled. Smudge pricked up his ears and came to stand by her chair as if to comfort her. “You mean that Raymond could be put to death?”

  “If he and Starling were found guilty, yes.”

  “But surely they didn’t intend for anyone to die. I’m positive they didn’t know that poor man was there.”

  “Intent doesn’t matter, ma’am,” Dwight said. “Anybody who sets fire to a dwelling—”

  Mrs. Avery was shaking her head. “It was a church!”

  “It was also Arthur Hunt’s dwelling,” I said gently, suddenly feeling like a Judas. “He lived in that room at the back.”

  “So even if they didn’t know it was a dwelling, they’re still liable,” Dwight said inexorably.

  “But all the evidence isn’t in place,” I told her, “and that’s why we’ve come. Raymond Bagwell has been working for you how long?”

  “I didn’t move back here until I retired in May, but I’d hired Raymond, let me think… in March, it was. Yes, because I had him paint my bedroom before I came. And he’s been working on the grounds. I wish you could remember what the flower gardens were like when my mother was alive. It’s slow work bringing them back to life, but Raymond’s been such a good hard worker.”

  She turned abruptly to Dwight. “Are you absolutely sure he’s really involved? Maybe it was just the Starling boy alone. Isn’t there some way to tell who did the spray-painting? Compare their handwriting or something?”

  “They were together both nights,” Dwight said. “They alibi each other.”

  “Oh.” She took a deep breath and sank back in her chair in resignation. “You asked how long he’s worked for me? Almost five months. And occasional jobs for my brother before that, of course. My brother died last November, you remember, and that’s when the house and land passed to me.”

  “And Raymond had access to every part of it?”

  “Access?” She seemed bewildered by my question.

  “Maybe I should rephrase that,” I said. “Were there any parts of the house or farm that you’d put off-limits to him? Any of the barns or shelters?”

  “No, of course not. He had to be able to get to the tools and equipment—the lawn mower, tractor, the rakes and shovels.”

  “What about the house? Basement, attic?”

  “There is no basement. As for the attic, there’s nothing up there for him. In fact, he never goes beyond the kitchen unless I need him to move a heavy piece of furniture.”

  “So the kitchen is the only place he would feel free to enter?”

  Her neat gray head gave a firm nod. “And then only if I were here.”

  “There might be times though when you were gone and he was working outside alone?” I persisted.

  “Well, yes, but—“

  “Mrs. Avery, Major Bryant here has a warrant to search your house.”

  Dwight drew the warrant from the inner breast pocket of his sports jacket. Smudge cocked his head, but Mrs. Avery did not reach for it.

  “Search? My house?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Whatever for? I told you that he wasn’t allowed—oh! You think he came in when I wasn’t here?”

  “Have we your permission?” I asked

  “Well, yes, of course, although if you brought a search warrant, it seems to me you don’t need my permission, do you?”

  She started to rise, but Dwight touched her arm and said, “Why don’t you wait out here with Deborah, ma’am? It might be less upsetting for you.”

  As Dwight followed his two deputies inside, Mrs. Avery shook her head. “It’s wicked, just wicked.”

  “The search?” I asked.

  “That Raymond could be put to death for something he didn’t even know he was doing.”

  Her distress seemed genuine as she pleated the soft cotton fabric of her skirt between her fingers. The dog put his head on her knee and she stroked his silky ears until some of the tension went out of her face.

  We sat without speaking for a time and gazed out over the shady green lawns that stretched through new flower beds down to the branch. Beyond the dip of the branch, there wasn’t much left of Burning Heart of God. Those workers had been industrious and had hauled away the burned-out trailer that had served as Sister Williams’s home. “I understand there was a reversion clause in the deed your grandfather gave the church.”

  “Such a surprise. But so fortuitous that I can hold it in trust for them,” Mrs. Avery said with a touch of her usual complacency. “My grandfather was a farsighted man.”

  “Once you get rid of those old wrecked cars out by the little graveyard, this will be a pretty view.”

  “It was my grandmother’s favorite place to sit when I was a little girl. Preacher Renfrow used to keep that little church pretty as a postcard. He and the congregation would get out twice a year and have cleanup day and you could hear them singing of a Sunday evening. So restful.” She sighed.

  “Things were different when Sister Williams took over,” I said softly.

  “Oh Deborah, you don’t know! I was just glad that Gramma wasn’t here to see how trashy it got. I nearly died when she hauled that old trailer in. And now look over there at that garbage heap—smashed-up car old washing machine and refrigerator! Not that my brother ever noticed. ‘Live and left live,’ he’d say. ‘It could be worse. We could have a shot house there or a house of bad women.’ He didn’t care how bad it looked. When he wasn’t out on the tractor, he was inside watching television. He just didn’t care.”

  “But you did.”

  “Well, of course I—” She broke off and her vehemence turned contemplative. “It was awful to see it burned like that, but in a way you can’t really blame Raymond. I mean, here he was, working on this side to make everything beautiful again, while over there… I mean, it’s not as if Sister Williams had a churchful of members.”

  “Didn’t hurt much to burn Balm of Gilead either,” I said.

  “Exactly! They were going to tear it down anyhow. And Mount Olive’s going to be finer than ever.” Her voice faltered. “Only, that poor man. But to be passed out drunk at church—and on Sunday, too?”

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish?” I asked bluntly.

  “Oh, now, Deborah, it’s not for us to judge the worth of a person.”

  The screen door opened and Dwight said, “Mrs. Avery, we wonder if you could tell us about something in here?”

  As she rose, Dwight caught my eye and gave an imperceptible nod.

  We passed through the kitchen and, to my surprise, skirted the study where several cartons of school papers still waited for Mrs. Avery to sort through them.

  “I see you still haven’t thrown any of those papers away or sent them to be recycled,” I said.

  “Not yet. I’ve been too busy.”

  Dwight continued on upstairs and we trailed along. Smudge, too.

  “Ray
mond came up here?” she asked. “What was he doing?”

  At the end of the upper hall was a narrow, inconspicuous door that led to a steeper set of steps.

  Mrs. Avery stopped short when she saw the open door. “The attic? What on earth—?”

  Slowly she followed Dwight up the steps. The dog’s nails clicked on the uncarpeted wood. Mrs. Avery was almost breathless when we came out under a roof with such a high pitch that even Dwight could stand up without worrying about banging his head. Jamison and Richards were there, too, and they wore white latex gloves to keep from contaminating the evidence.

  Naked lightbulbs hung down from the rafters. It was hot up here, but ventilator fans in the roof kept it from being unbearable. For such an old house, the attic was surprisingly uncluttered. Boxes and trunks lined the sides, but the middle space was completely empty except for several pieces of thin plywood lying face down along the tops of the boxes, which were piled chest-high. The largest piece of plywood was no more than eight feet long by twelve or fourteen inches wide, the smallest measured something like four feet by eight inches. There must have been half a dozen pieces.

  Slowly, the deputies turned them on edge so that we could see what was lettered there in green paint—the same racist epithets repeated over and over in nearly identical letters. A spray can stood on the floor next to a pair of paint-speckled yellow rubber gloves.

  Mrs. Avery put out her hand to steady herself on the stair railing. “I don’t understand. Why would Raymond—”

  “No, Mrs. Avery. Not Raymond. You.” Dwight held out a sheet of ruled notebook paper covered with lines written in pencil. At the top of the sheet was the student’s name: Charles Starling, English II. The paper was covered with a fine green mist and certain words were underlined in red pencil. Bigger, for instance, had been written with the same combination of capitals and small letters as the nigger on the boards.

  I had hoped they would discover samples of Starling’s school papers in a compromising hiding place. Finding her actual practice boards was gravy on the tree, as Haywood is fond of saying.

  “You were in court the day the boys were tried for vandalism,” I said, “and you realized that they had just given you a perfect way to get rid of that eyesore across the branch. You would burn down some black churches, sandwiching raggedy little Burning Heart of God in the middle, and pray Starling got all the blame because it would be only his printing on the walls.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” she snapped. “Really, Deborah.”

  “Not half as ridiculous as you pretending you didn’t know your grandfather had placed a restriction on that church deed. As carefully as you’ve researched your family’s records for the past four hundred years? I don’t think so. If we look through your scrapbooks, I bet we’ll find copies of every deed your family’s ever held.”

  “You leave my scrapbooks alone!” she said sharply. “I won’t have you touching them!”

  Officer Mayleen Richards rolled her eyes as she sealed the spray can and the gloves in separate plastic bags. Dwight was doing the same with the notebook paper.

  “Fingerprints,” I said succinctly and Mrs. Avery flinched as the full implications began to sink in.

  “No! It was Raymond. Raymond and Charles.”

  “A man died because you couldn’t stand an eyesore on land that used to belong to your grandfather.”

  “No one was supposed to get hurt,” Mrs. Avery said, the beginning of a whimper in her voice. “It was his own fault. Really it was. If he hadn’t been drinking, he could have walked away in plenty of time.”

  She held out her hand to Dwight beseechingly. “Surely you can understand that? It wasn’t my fault.”

  26

  Faith is a way of walking, not talking.

  —Pisgah Church

  Isaac Mitchiner was buried beside his sister, Cyl’s mother, in the cemetery at Mount Olive, a hundred feet away from where he had lain for twenty-one years. The graveside service, simple and direct, was conducted by Reverend Ligon with the assistance of Reverend Freeman.

  The hot morning sun poured down on us. The choir sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “There Is a Rock That Is Higher.”

  I went.

  Wallace Adderly didn’t.

  Cyl sat amongst her light-skinned family and I remembered her saying that when her cousins jeered, Isaac had comforted her—“We’re the only true Africans.”

  As I passed through the line afterwards, she clasped my hand with a wry smile. “I still owe you dinner.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  Daddy called me near the end of July. He doesn’t like to talk on the telephone, so his conversations are always short and to the point.

  “You gonna be out this way tomorrow evening?”

  “Didn’t plan to, but I can if you want me to. Why?”

  “Thought you might like to see that there angel go back up.”

  “What time?”

  “ ’Bout six?”

  “No problem.”

  “Fine. See you then, shug.”

  He was waiting for me beside his old beat-up Chevy truck and I stood on tiptoe to kiss his leathery cheek. It was as hot and dusty as the first evening we’d driven out to the Crocker family cemetery.

  The cotton was waist-high now and full of big white blooms and tiny little green bolls.

  Once again, Rudy Peacock’s big two-ton truck was there beside the low stone wall that enclosed the small graveyard, only this time, a bulky form stood in the bed of the truck. It was wrapped in burlap sacks and secured with strong, light cables.

  A.K.’s black pickup was there, too. He and Raymond Bagwell had spent the last two hours raking and tidying away all the final bits and pieces of broken granite. The graveyard was as neat as Aunt Zell’s living room.

  No sign of Charles Starling. Probably too Little House on the Prairie for him.

  Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to see Smudge come running through the cotton rows.

  Raymond shrugged. “Mrs. Avery’s daughter’s going to take him back to Washington with her after school starts. I told her I’d take care of him till then.”

  Gambling that her age and previously unblemished record would get her a quick parole, Mrs. Avery had accepted the plea bargain she’d been offered and was already serving time down in Atlanta. She might could have mounted a defense of insanity. Certainly her obsession with restoring the King family homeplace held a touch of madness. Instead, rather than defend her person, she’d opted to spend her money defending the land and, to her daughter’s dismay, had retained Zack Young to fight Sister Williams’s lawsuit to reclaim that newly landscaped acre.

  Rudy Peacock was even bigger and more muscular than I’d remembered. Shyer, too.

  “Did the wing take drilling?” I asked. “Or did you have to carve a whole new set?”

  “Your nephew here got lucky,” he said, not quite meeting my gaze. “Everything worked perfect. Would you believe I found a piece of granite the same exact shade in my scrap pile? It’d been out there so long, it even weathered good. ’Course, y’all will have to tell me if you think I’m as good a carver as my dad was.”

  As he spoke, he troweled fresh mortar onto the angel’s pedestal.

  “Now when I lower her down,” he told A.K. and Raymond, “y’all got to make sure she’s on here straight and hold her down, okay?”

  “Okay,” they chorused.

  Peacock pulled himself up into the bed of the truck and attached the hook on his hydraulic winch to the cable wrapped around the angel. Then he pushed some buttons and the arm of the winch slowly rose in the air. When the angel was clear of the bed, he pushed another button and the arm ponderously swung the angel out over the wall.

  “Little more this way,” A.K. called. “Little more... little more... stop!”

  He and Raymond grabbed the statue and steadied it straight over the pedestal. “Down a li
ttle... more... perfect!”

  The angel settled gently onto her former perch and while the boys continued to hold her steady, Rudy Peacock removed the cable and burlap.

  He used a small edging trowel to clean up the excess mortar, then stepped back proudly. “What do you think?”

  “Beautiful!” we told him.

  She was as naively sculpted as when I first saw her and her features still showed the effects of weathering, but the new wing tip was almost indiscernible and he had buffed her all over so that she gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight. No one would ever mistake this angel for a Renaissance creation, but here in this cotton field, open to all the elements, she would serve the Crockers another generation or two.

  Daddy brought out his checkbook. “How much I owe you, Rudy?”

  “Your money’s no good with me, Mr. Kezzie,” he said. “These two here already give me something on it and they’re going to work off the rest. My youngest boy’s going off to college next month and he don’t want to do this anymore. Says it’s too near like work, so I been needing more help.”

  “Well, I sure do appreciate it,” Daddy said. “Looks real good.”

  A.K. and Raymond swarmed up over the truck, secured the winch hook and the cables, and folded up the burlap sacking.

  With a wave of his hand, Rudy Peacock headed back down the lane, kicking up a cloud of white dust as he went.

  The boys put their rakes and baskets in the back of A.K.’s pickup. Raymond whistled for the dog, who came running and jumped up on the tailgate, then A.K. slammed it shut and the two boys climbed in front.

  Daddy continued to lean against the fender of his truck with a cigarette in his hand and I was sitting cross-legged atop the stone wall.

  “Ain’t—aren’t y’all coming?” A.K. asked.

  “We’ll be along directly,” said Daddy, who has never handed out praise too freely. “Boy?”

  “Yessir?”

  “I’m right pleased with you.”

  Blue eyes met blue eyes. A.K. nodded, settled his ball cap more firmly on his head and turned the key in his ignition.