Death's Half Acre

by Margaret Maron

  Jane Ann brought them both a marshmallow. Dwight, too. I passed. They don’t really go with bourbon. The men licked their fingers and Will said, “Reminds me of Daddy’s bonfires.”

  I smiled as he and Dwight began to reminisce about roasting marshmallows when we were kids.

  Daddy never burned his brushpiles in daylight. He always waited until dark, and a moonless night was his favorite time. He would poke the fire and send geysers of sparks shooting up fifteen or twenty feet into the night sky.

  “A poor man’s fireworks,” he’d say.

  And Mother would often walk down from the house with a bag of marshmallows for a perfect ending to the day.

  Eventually Dwight decreed that the children had eaten enough sugar and shooed them away so he could replenish the bed of coals with more from a starter can.

  While Jane Ann and Amy cleared the porch table and reset it with china and tableware, I sent the kids to the showers to get rid of the stickiness that clung to their hands and mouths—Cal and Jake to his bathroom, Mary Pat to the master bath. Kate and I keep changes of clothing in both houses, so I laid out fresh pajamas for them and popped a DVD into the television in our bedroom.

  “Mary Pat’s in charge of the remote and no bouncing on the bed,” I warned them as they settled back against the pillows to watch a movie they’d seen at least a dozen times.

  It was full dark and the steaks were just coming off the grill when I got back out to the porch. Conversation had turned to Candace Bradshaw’s murder and the names of various prominent builders were being tossed around as suspects. Not her husband though. Dwight had told me that various neighbors had seen him from their windows throughout Tuesday afternoon.

  “Her daughter says you’re her alibi,” Dwight said as he split his potato and added a large dollop of butter to the steaming interior.

  “She does?” Will cut into one of the steaks on the platter to make sure it was rare enough before transferring it to his plate.

  “She says you interviewed her for a job Tuesday evening. You remember the time?”

  Will’s eyes narrowed as he visualized the scene. “Yeah. She was the only one who answered my ad. She got there at five on the dot and by five-thirty I had hired her. All I need is someone who can spell and use a computer for a few hours a week. Of course, she was only there for one morning and then Cam Bradshaw called her with the bad news. Guess I’ll have to find someone else now.”

  Stevie paused in the middle of slathering A.1. sauce on his steak. “Dee really did get a job?”

  “That surprises you?” I asked at the same time that Dwight said, “You know her?”

  “Sure. We graduated from high school together. And yeah, I’m surprised that she got a job.”

  “Why? She’s not in school any more,” said Dwight.

  Jane Ann made a face. “She was just yanking her mother’s chain.”

  “By getting a job?”

  “She told us that nobody in her mom’s family had ever gone to college. In fact, Mrs. Bradshaw was the first to finish high school even if it was with a GED, so it was real important to her for Dee to graduate.” Jane Ann served herself some salad made with the greens Cletus had given me and passed the bowl along to Amy. “But Dee wanted a new car, and when Mrs. Bradshaw wouldn’t buy her one, she threatened to quit school and get a job so she could have some decent wheels.”

  “She’s a spoiled slacker,” Stevie said flatly. “She’s never had to do a lick of work, she got a big allowance, and she had a car of her own that ran just fine. Remember last spring, when my car was in the shop? She gave me a ride home to pick it up and all she could do was bitch about how her mother gave a worthless, good-for-nothing cousin her practically new Toyota and then bought herself another new one while Dee had to keep driving the Audi she’d had in high school.”

  “She thought her mother would come around with a new car to keep her in school. But Dee’ll go back. You’ll see,” Jane Ann said cynically. She shook her head at the offer of garlic bread. “In fact, she’ll probably stay on for two masters and a PhD so that she doesn’t have to punch a time clock for another five years.”

  After supper, Stevie and Jane Ann had other plans for the evening. They offered to drop off a pair of sleepy children on the way. Cal’s eyelids were drooping, too, and he only offered a pro forma objection when Dwight scooped him up and carried him to his own bed. He was probably already asleep by the time Dwight came back to join us.

  Amy poured coffee and I spooned warm peach cobbler into dessert dishes, then topped each with a dab of vanilla ice cream. Dwight and Will dug in as enthusiastically as if I had peeled the peaches myself and made the flaky crust from scratch.

  Amy enjoyed hers, too, but couldn’t resist asking me what brand of piecrust I bought.

  “Sh-hhh,” I told her. “Don’t spoil the illusion.”

  Will grinned. “She just wants to know because this crust tastes better than what she buys.”

  “Bastard,” Amy said amiably.

  “If you can’t tell it from the real thing—” I hesitated one second too long.

  “What?” said Dwight. He really does know me way too well at times.

  “When you go in to appraise an estate, Will, do you ever do jewelry?”

  He took another bite of cobbler and shook his head. “Not usually. Most people either want to keep it or else get a jeweler to do the appraisal. And more likely than not, they have an inflated sense of what it’s worth. Why?”

  “Just wondering. What about costume jewelry?”

  He laughed. “There it’s just the opposite. Most people think it’s worth less than it is because it’s fake. They see Bakelite and think ‘plastic.’ Well let me tell you something, honey. An authentic vintage Bakelite bracelet can fetch anything from two hundred to two thousand dollars depending on its condition and rarity.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Don’t believe me, go check out eBay.”

  “What about rhinestones?”

  “Again, it depends on the quality and whether the piece is signed by a collectible name.”

  He looked at me speculatively over the rim of his coffee cup. “C’mon, Deb’rah. You’re not just wondering. You happen onto a nice find of old costume stuff?”

  I shook my head.

  The three of them were now too curious to let it drop.

  “All right,” I said finally, “but you’ve got to promise not to say anything to the rest of the family about this. I’m probably making mountains out of what’s nothing more than an anthill and I want y’all’s word on it, okay?”

  They all promised, so then I told them about my encounter with Daddy in that consignment shop yesterday, about the flash and sparkle of an earring, about the words I thought I’d heard that clerk with the jeweler’s magnifying eyepiece say, and how Daddy had sent me on my way so brusquely.

  Will frowned. “You’re sure he used a loupe?”

  “And put it in his pocket as soon as I walked up—the instant that Daddy palmed the earring.”

  “Tall thin guy? Had his glasses pushed up on his forehead? Starting to go bald in front?”

  I nodded.

  “Then he had to be looking at something really interesting if he was using his loupe. I know him. Dave Carter. Good guy. Why don’t I drop by and see him Monday?”

  “Only if you think he won’t call Daddy the minute you’re out of the store,” I said. “You know how mad he can get if he thinks we’re checking up on him.”

  Dwight looked at me quizzically. “You don’t really think he has diamond earrings worth thirty thousand dollars, do you?”

  “Makes about as much sense as rhinestones worth twenty,” I told him.

  We batted it around for a few minutes more till Will said, “I’ll talk to Dave on Monday,” and the talk turned to other subjects.

  I briefly considered telling them what Maidie had confided about Daddy’s sudden interest in getting right with the Lord, but decided I’d already bee
n disloyal enough for one evening.

  “You have a chance to go through Linsey’s papers yet?” Will asked as he and Amy were leaving.

  “Tomorrow,” I promised.

  CHAPTER 15

  Back when I came along, everybody used to wrestle, jump—

  see who could do the most work.

  Now we study money.

  —Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

  Next morning, I slept in while Dwight dropped Cal off for Sunday school at the church he and I grew up in. Cal’s not crazy about putting on Sunday clothes, but his Uncle Rob teaches the Junior Class and he’s made friends with some of the boys, so he seems to enjoy it once he’s there.

  Preaching services begin at eleven, which meant that Dwight and I had a little time alone for this and that.

  Mostly that.

  We were a few minutes late getting there, but everyone was standing for the first hymn, so it wasn’t noticeable when we slipped into a back pew.

  Because the minister is new and we don’t make it to church every week, I haven’t quite taken his measure, but with Rob on the pulpit committee, he can’t be too far right. Not as intellectual as Carlyle Yelvington at First Baptist in Dobbs, but nowhere near as opaque as the preacher at Nadine and Herman’s New Deliverance down in Black Creek. And nothing—thank you, Jesus!—like that demagogue at the Church of Christ Eternal.

  Every time I think about the way that arrogant bastard humiliated his wife, I want to throw up and then go slap him across the face with a dead trout.

  No, Sweetwater’s Quincy Bridges is young and earnest and doesn’t seem to have an arrogant bone in his body. He doesn’t threaten with hellfire and brimstone; he entreats with the promise of a well-lived life for those who follow the Golden Rule.

  After lunch, Dwight and Cal went off to the woods to see if they could find a couple of redbuds small enough to move up to the house, and I started going through Linsey Thomas’s files that Will had found.

  Last night, Dwight had told me about Candace Bradshaw’s missing flash drive and how it might hold something about me on it.

  “Me?”

  “Well, not you per se,” he’d said. “More likely John Claude or Mr. Kezzie. Richards found a file folder with the firm’s name and a sheet of paper with yours and Mr. Kezzie’s names and a note to herself referencing that damn flash drive.”

  That sent a chill down my spine. Dwight doesn’t know about Daddy and Talbert. We’ve never sat down and exchanged lists and details of people we’ve been in bed with and I figure G. Hooks Talbert falls in that category.

  Once I got into Linsey’s files, I breathed a lot easier. It was clear that he suspected something fishy about Hooks Talbert speaking up for me with the Republican governor in office back then, but he had never connected all the dots and there was nothing new or incriminating in those files. The news clippings and references to Daddy and me were all in the public domain. I transferred the more flattering notices into a folder I’d started in my own file cabinet, and shredded the rest. One of these years, I really might get around to putting together a scrapbook.

  “Yeah,” said the voice of the pragmatist who lives in the back of my head. “Right after you label all those digital pictures and transfer them to a CD.”

  Another of the folders could have been Linsey’s own scrapbook. Here were clippings from the N&O and the Ledger of milestones in his life. His high school report cards, a picture of his class in front of the UN building in NY, his diploma from Carolina, his marriage certificate and passport, the obituary of his wife, and a notarized living will that directed his doctors not to prolong his life were he to fall into a persistent vegetative state.

  Poor Linsey, I thought. Instantly killed by a hit-and-run driver as he walked home from the newspaper on a warm spring evening. No old age, no long descent into peaceful death. I hoped he didn’t know or care what had happened to his beloved paper. Too bad he died without a will. And yet, who would he have left it to? No siblings, no close cousins. Maybe that was why he’d never gotten around to writing one.

  Which only served to remind me that Dwight and I hadn’t updated our own wills since the wedding, something we really needed to do for Cal’s sake if not our own.

  The next folder that came to hand was the one with the Civil War picture of an ancestor. It held more family pictures, each identified on the back by name and date. Here was a copy of the affidavit each white adult Confederate male had been required to sign after the war, swearing allegiance to the Union, before his citizenship and voting rights were restored. And here was an envelope addressed to Linsey’s grandfather that carried a 1923 postmark. Inside was a lock of light brown hair, tied with a faded blue string. Unlabeled. Whose?

  If I knew that, I’d know why he’d kept it.

  I put all those aside in a pile to take to the Colleton County Historical Center and made a note that they were being donated by William Richard Knott.

  The files that remained seemed to be news stories or editorials in the making. The tabs carried the names of many prominent people in the county with a heavy concentration on our county commissioners.

  I opened the one on Harvey Underwood. He’s a banker and a nominal Republican, but as Linsey’s notes showed, he wasn’t a hard-liner and he didn’t always vote with Candace. And whoa! He was involved with Barbara Laughlin at the time Linsey died? Barbara’s a VP in an insurance company, attractive, bright, divorced, with a son who’s been in front of me a couple of times for possession of marijuana and later a couple of rocks of crack. So far as I know, he’s been clean the past two years, but between his attorneys and his rehab, it must have cost Barbara a pile of money. Harvey’s a married grandfather and an advocate for the sanctity of marriage. I’d never heard a whisper of this. Either Linsey had been mistaken or they had been—still were?—pretty damn discreet.

  The next folder was that of an upscale developer. Shortly after leaving the board, he had gotten board approval for a set of plans in which the houses were to be built on half-acre lots with a certain amount of land left for a playground area. According to Linsey’s notes, the lot sizes were actually four-tenths of an acre so that more houses had been built than were formally approved, and the playground area was less than specified as well. Somehow or other, this had gone unnoticed till it was too late.

  Cute.

  From his notes, it was clear that Linsey had intended this to be part of a larger story he planned to do on board cronyism. I guess Ruby Dixon decided not to bother when she became editor. Too much potential flak.

  And just to prove that greed and chicanery crossed party lines freely, here was Greg Turner, a Democratic attorney from Black Creek. Someone had told Linsey that Turner had dipped into an elderly client’s bank account and made unauthorized withdrawals to the tune of some sixty thousand dollars. When the client’s son asked for an accounting, Turner had managed to stall it off until he could replace the money. According to Linsey’s notes, it appeared that he narrowly missed being accused of embezzlement with the real possibility of jail time and subsequent disbarment.

  My internal preacher sadly shook his head. “I thought Greg Turner was as ethical as they come.”

  “Yeah, but look how they’re coming these days,” said the cynical pragmatist who shares the same head space.

  All the same, Greg Turner’s name resonated for some reason I couldn’t quite remember.

  Oh well.

  I picked up Jamie Jacobson’s file with trepidation. She was a friend. I liked her and I really didn’t want to know it if she had done anything shabby. But in for a penny . . .

  To my relief, the papers inside mostly had to do with professional consultations between the two of them. Jamie’s ad agency generated a lot of the Ledger’s custom-designed advertising. The only thing puzzling was another sheet of Linsey’s doodling on a page torn from a yellow tablet, which seems to have been his way when trying to figure something out.

  This time, the heavily circled cent
er was GRAYSON VILLAGE, G. (as in Grayson) Hooks Talbert’s foray into the Colleton housing market. One arrow pointed to ADAMS ADVERTISING. Another to SASSY SOLUTIONS. An arrow from Sassy Solutions pointed to Danny Creedmore’s name, and a line of question marks led from Creedmore to Candace Bradshaw.

  Huh?

  Impulsively, I reached for the phone and dialed Jamie’s home number. A sleepy voice answered on the fourth ring.

  “Did I wake you?” I asked.

  “Deborah? No. Well, maybe. I thought I was watching a cooking show, but maybe I did drift off.”

  I heard her yawn and said, “Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering. Did you do the ads for Grayson Village last spring?”

  “No,” she said promptly. “We did a presentation, but a Raleigh agency got the job. Why?”

  “How come you didn’t get it?”

  I could almost hear the shrug in her voice. “Who knows? The client liked their presentation better. Especially since they went first and by coincidence, they had thought of some of the same angles I had, so I guess it looked like I was copying them.”

  “Sassy Solutions?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “What’s Danny Creedmore’s connection to them?”

  “None that I know of. Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “Nothing really. Danny’s got his fingers stuck in so many pies, I just wondered if that was another of them.”

  “Sorry. Did you find any blue shoes Friday?”

  “Not yet. The hunt is part of the fun though. How about you?”

  “I found some online that look like a good match.”

  We discussed the pitfalls and conveniences of shopping online and agreed to have lunch together on Tuesday, then I went back to Linsey’s files.

  So far, I had avoided the one marked BRADSHAW/CREEDMORE. The very label confirmed that Linsey had thought of the two as one. Puppet and puppeteer.