Bloody Kin

by Margaret Maron

“Well, it’d save a trip if you’d bring me some drinks. Wait a minute and I’ll get the bottles.”

  While Kate waited, Willy Stewart rumbled up from the field on his huge green tractor. He parked it at the edge of the yard and climbed down with steady deliberation.

  Kate opened her car door and got out. “Hi, Willy,” she called.

  “Afternoon, Miss Kate,” he said, removing a straw hat bleached by the sun and stained with his sweat. “How you been keeping these days?”

  Willy Stewart retained the old-fashioned courtesies of a southern black man. Although Kate had asked him to drop the “Miss,” such familiarity made him uncomfortable. Unless she was blood kin, Willy was constitutionally unable to call any female over the age of twelve, black or white, anything except “Miss” or “Aunt” and Kate had quit trying to change him. “I’m doing fine, Willy. How about you?”

  “Fine, fine. I got no complaints.”

  “You sure?” she teased. “Your Wolfpack wasn’t very fierce this year, I hear.”

  “More like puppy dogs than wolves, won’t they?” Willy said gamely. “I reckon God didn’t want us to get too prideful. But we won last year and Coach V’ll bring ’em ’round again.”

  It sounded like wishful thinking to Kate and she changed the subject to the pear blossoms drifting down around them.

  “Yeah, I think it’s gonna be a right good fruit year,” Willy said, and they walked over to look at an early plum that had already begun to set fruits.

  Although most deciduous trees were leafing out now, Kate noticed that a large one out by the tractor shelter showed no signs of life.

  “Looks like you’ve lost that tree,” she said.

  “No, black walnuts be like crepe myrtles,” he told her. “Last to get their leaves in spring.”

  Bessie appeared on the back porch. She apologized to Kate for taking so long to bring out the bottles and fussed at Willy because he hadn’t put the last one back in the carton and she’d had to hunt for where he’d left it by his recliner at lunchtime.

  “It’s all right,” said Kate. “I’m not punching a time clock.”

  She stuck the bottles in her car and drove out to the paved road, then on up to the crossroads store.

  At that time of day, the little country grocery was deserted except for Mrs. Fowler, who was watching a televised game show, and a stifflegged yellow dog that stood up and growled when Kate entered.

  “Oh, be quiet!” shushed Mrs. Fowler and, seeing Kate hesitate in the doorway, she added scornfully, “Don’t worry about him. He won’t bite biscuits.”

  His act blown, the dog lay back down, flopped its thin tail on the wide-planked floor, and closed its eyes.

  “He could have fooled me,” Kate laughed.

  She put Bessie’s empty bottles in a wooden crate and refilled the carton with cold soft drinks from an ancient refrigerated chest that still used chunks of floating ice to chill the bottles. She added orange juice for herself and handed over cash for her purchases.

  “Looks like that baby’s growing fine,” said Mrs. Fowler, ringing up the sale. “Bet you feel better now that you’ve gone to maternity clothes.”

  “I do,” Kate said. She opened her checkbook. “I finally remembered to bring this. What did you say Mr. Lacy’s tab was again? Three hundred-forty-something?”

  Mrs. Fowler looked confused, then her plump face cleared. “Oh, he paid up Saturday.”

  “He did?”

  “Sure did. Cash on the barrelhead off a roll that looked like he’d just come from an upstalk tobacco market. I told him did he hit the jackpot at Atlantic City and he said no, he’d gone and married a rich old widow woman for her money. That Mr. Lacy! He’s sure something else, isn’t he?”

  Kate closed her checkbook and agreed that Lacy Honeycutt sure was something else.

  CHAPTER 19

  Back at the farmhouse, while she loaded the car with the last of her equipment and drawing supplies and then drove down to the packhouse, Kate continued to puzzle over Lacy’s sudden wealth.

  It just didn’t add up. Lacy with a large bankroll? She knew he and Tucker Sauls hadn’t cut that many trees. Two or three cords of firewood sold, and perhaps two truckloads of logs that were sound enough to saw into a few thousand board feet of planks or two-byfours. Surely that could add up to no more than four or five hundred dollars. And since Tucker Sauls was going halves, Lacy shouldn’t have cleared more than two-fifty or three hundred for himself. Yet somehow he’d bought a set of new tires for his truck and settled his account with Mrs. Fowler.

  From a very fat wallet if Mrs. Fowler could be believed.

  Mary Pat and Aunt Susie were waiting for her on the top step of the packhouse when Kate eased the car down the rutted lane and backed it up to the door.

  “I passed your kittens in the lane,” Kate said, noting the crumpled grocery bag the child was holding. She often brought bones and scraps from Gilead’s kitchen to feed the cats and dogs.

  The little girl stood on tiptoes to open the door for Kate, who tried not to step on the old beagle as she negotiated the steps with a bulky set of large drawing pads.

  “I could help you carry stuff in.”

  “That would be nice,” Kate said.

  Mary Pat was young, but she managed the smaller boxes and proved quite helpful at several simple tasks. She arranged the tiny bottles of Winsor and Newton inks by label color, shelved books, and put sharp points on the colored pencils with Kate’s electric pencil trimmer. She separated paper clips and pen nibs from rubber bands and gum erasers, and took time off to spell out her name in push pins on the new corkboard, chattering all the time about kittens, the new sneakers she and Sally were to shop for tomorrow, and how mean somebody was to take Sally’s earrings when he wasn’t supposed to.

  Kate listened with only half an ear; and by the time Tom Whitley arrived in the late afternoon with the exterior paint, almost everything was neatly stowed away.

  “If the fluorescent lights were connected, I could start work tonight,” she told Tom happily.

  “Let me see what I can do about that,” said Tom.

  He brought his toolbox in from the truck and pulled out pliers and nippers with insulated handles. As he lifted the trapdoor to go down into the pit where the fuse box was located, Kate said, “Is Sally still upset about the earrings?”

  Tom looked at her blankly. “Earrings?”

  “Didn’t you stop by Gilead before you came here?”

  “No, why?” He let the trapdoor drop with a heavy thud. “What’s happened? Is Sally okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Kate assured him. “Well, no, not fine exactly, but not physically hurt.”

  She was startled by the abruptness of his sudden change. From shy and soft-spoken, Tom Whitley turned into a white-faced, clenchjawed fury who grasped her arm and demanded, “What’s happened, dammit?”

  “Honestly, Tom, she’s all right,” said Kate, pulling away from his bruising touch. “Someone ransacked your rooms after lunch and took some earrings that were Sally’s mothers, but she’s—”

  “The filthy bastard!” Tom’s voice was thick with venomous anger. He slammed out to his truck, jerked it into gear, and dug off up the lane.

  “Maybe I’d better go home, too,” said Mary Pat in a small voice, and edged toward the door.

  “Wait a minute and I’ll drive you,” said Kate. She closed the windows, shooed the cats and Aunt Susie outside, and turned the key in the new lock Tom Whitley had installed.

  Mary Pat was silent as they drove up the lane and Kate was concerned.

  “When you love somebody the way Tom loves Sally, you don’t want her to get hurt,” she told her small cousin. “Tom shouldn’t have flown off the handle, but he was angry because somebody made Sally sad.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t really Tom,” said Mary Pat, her face to the window.

  “Of course it was Tom. People don’t stop being themselves just because they get angry, sweetheart. Anyhow, Tom’ll calm down
as soon as he sees that Sally’s okay.”

  Mary Pat didn’t argue, but Kate saw her shoulder lift in a barely perceptible shrug.

  Gordon was standing by the study door as Kate slowed to a stop and he came out to meet them. Mary Pat hopped from the car and slipped past him without speaking.

  “Something wrong?” he asked Kate.

  “Not really.” She put the car in neutral, but did not switch it off.

  “Tom got rather emotional when he heard about the theft and I think it upset Mary Pat a little.”

  Gordon turned with a worried expression. “Perhaps I’d better talk to her. Come on in, Kate. I won’t be long.”

  “No, I can’t stay. Rob Bryant said he was going to bring dinner a little later. I just want to look at your woodpile if I might?”

  “Woodpile?”

  “The firewood you bought from Lacy. Two cords, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “No reason exactly,” Kate hedged.

  “Is this a variation on dill pickles and strawberry ice cream?” Gordon asked, half-curious, half-amused.

  “Probably. Humor me, please, Gordon, and tell me how much you paid Lacy for the wood?”

  “Eighty dollars a cord, delivered and stacked,” Gordon said promptly. “It’s in the shelter back of the garage. Want me to come show you?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll find it. You go see about Mary Pat.”

  “Okay.” He paused. “Think you’ll be free to walk tomorrow?”

  “Probably.” She shifted into low gear.

  The wide drive split at the rear of the house. Half went to the four car garage, the other circled behind the utility buildings and led between woods and fields to the Gilbert family graveyard some distance back. Kate drove around to the woodshed and cut her motor.

  She spent several minutes examining the wood while the sun dipped toward the western trees and the warm air began to cool. Pine and oak she readily identified. Pine beetles could still be heard gnawing away and she could see that the oak centers were spongy. There was some twisted hickory and some of that tulip poplar that had been struck by lightning last summer. Nothing else.

  Thoughtfully, Kate drove back to the farm and examined Lacy’s neatly stacked firewood. More of the same.

  What she sought wasn’t there.

  She walked into the empty house and pulled one of the insect books from the shelf. This time, she paid attention to what she read.

  Her anger was tempered with regret by the time she closed the book and looked at her watch. Six o’clock. No point trying to call the State Forestry Division, she decided, leafing through the telephone directory, but State University probably held evening classes.

  She dialed and eventually got through to an assistant professor in the forestry department, who listened to her questions and then earnestly apologized for not knowing the precise answer.

  “Dr. Lee’s the man you want to talk to,” he said. “All I could give you is a ballpark estimate.”

  “That’s good enough,” Kate told him.

  In less enlightened parts of the United States, “barbecue” is a verb. In eastern North Carolina, though, Kate had quickly learned that the word is always a noun, occasionally modified by the adjective “pork” for the benefit of outsiders.

  Much newspaper ink has been devoted to the identification of the best barbecue house in the area and letters to the editor regularly erupt on the subject, but purists agree that authentic barbecue begins with a whole pig split lengthways, cooked slowly all night over a bed of hickory and charcoal, then chopped and seasoned with a judicious mixture of vinegar, salt, red pepper, brown sugar, and Tabasco. The proportions may vary from chef to chef, but tomato in any form is never an ingredient. Never, ever.

  Traditionalists serve pork barbecue with coleslaw, hot and crusty hush puppies and the inevitable iced tea; but when Rob Bryant returned promptly as promised at six-thirty with a large paper bag that emitted entrancing aromas to Kate’s hungry nose, he had thoughtfully substituted a cold six-pack of imported ale.

  He had also brought Miss Emily, who bounced in wearing a pink and green plaid skirt topped with a pink sweater set.

  “Guess who invited herself to dinner, too?” he asked.

  “Hello, Kate, dear,” said Miss Emily, reaching up to give Kate a hug before she began setting out the various cartons of food.

  Rob kept extra clothes at his mother’s house and he had changed from his lawyer’s uniform of tailored gray suit and buttoned-down shirt to a pair of comfortable chinos, loafers, and a baggy rust-colored sweater that almost matched the color of his hair.

  “It’s a fine thing,” he complained with mock severity, “when a man can’t have dinner with someone without his mother horning in.”

  “Oh, hush fussing,” said his parent, confident of her welcome.

  “You bought enough barbecue to feed Sherman’s army and besides, it’s not like you and Kate are courting or anything.”

  There was an immediate and highly self-conscious moment of complete silence. Miss Emily’s prattling, innocent tongue went speechless with surprised awareness as she watched her younger son’s face flame redder than the sunset to be seen through the kitchen windows. After a day of tension and downright melodrama, Kate was back in a happy mood and, misreading Rob’s discomfort, she teased, “How would you come courting me, Cousin Robbie? Would you wine me on moonshine and dine me on fatback?”

  “Shucks, ma’am. Ain’t nothin’ fine enough fer you ’cepting a nice mess of collard greens and chit’lings,” Rob drawled.

  “Anyhow,” said Miss Emily with a flustered air, “I’m here to balance the table, so where’s that Lacy?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Kate, “but he usually shows up in time for supper.”

  They set four places at the table, but began without Lacy since there was no telling when he’d return and “hush puppies wait for no man,” said Rob, who knew by long experience that cold cornbread wasn’t worth putting on one’s plate.

  The evening was still warm and Kate had left the heavy wooden door open with only the screen door to keep out early-flying moths. As darkness fell and spring peepers tuned up in the bottom, the kitchen became lively with talk and laughter.

  All self-consciousness was gone as Kate and Rob interrupted each other to tell Miss Emily of how Bessie had rescued the snake from shotgun and hoe earlier in the day; and Miss Emily described the time she’d accidentally picked up a copperhead the first year she helped Rob’s father weed the tobacco plantbed.

  “I slung that thing halfway across Colleton County,” she said, shuddering in memory. “And I trampled so many plants getting out of the bed that your daddy had to borrow some from Andrew Honeycutt to finish setting out his last field.”

  Rob topped their glasses with rich amber ale. “Did you ever tell Kate about the year Jerry Clifton brought a pregnant garter snake to school for a science project—”

  “—and we wound up with baby snakes in every corner of the building,” Miss Emily finished for him. “You wouldn’t believe how many babies one little old garter snake could hold, Kate! And of course, you know how silly teenage girls can be. They started screaming every time they even saw a pencil on the floor, thinking it was another snake. They were in the teachers’ lounge, in the lunchroom. I still think some of those senior boys might have been bringing extras from home ’cause I know for a fact that the one that showed up in the county supervisor’s briefcase was bigger than the other babies.”

  Her plump little face took on a look of determination. “That class’ll be having its fifteenth reunion in May and I don’t care if he is a preacher now, I’m going to make Curtis Sorrell admit he’s the rascal that put one in my desk drawer.”

  Lacy’s old pickup had rattled into the yard as she talked and soon Lacy himself appeared at the screen door. He blinked in the bright light and something about the way he hesitated just beyond the threshold made Kate’s anger at him do another flip-flop be
cause she realized how the room must look to him—dinner in progress, three people in warm companionship and easy chatter, and he the outsider now that Jake was gone

  “There you are, Lacy!” exclaimed Miss Emily. “If you don’t hurry up, we’re going to eat all your supper.”

  “I ain’t specially hungry,” said Lacy, hanging his denim jacket and felt hat behind the door. He washed his hands at the sink and came to the table slowly, smoothing his thin white hair with one hand and brushing at his overalls with the other, and awkwardly took his place between the two women.

  Why, he’s actually shy, thought Kate, and handed the old farmer the bowl of chopped barbecue with a kindlier air than she could have managed an hour ago.

  Accustomed to his taciturnity, Miss Emily retold her copperheadin-the-plantbed story and chattered and charmed until Lacy loosened up enough to recall a hot summer day some two or three years ago when he and Jake went swimming in the creek and a cottonmouth water moccasin decided to join them.

  “It musta been stretched out on a tree limb we was wading under cause all of a sudden, kerplop! There it was, right in the water between us. We was halfway through the woods ’fore either one of us missed our pants.”

  It was a story Kate had heard from Jake.

  “With all the jogging I do, I thought I was in pretty good shape,” he had told her, “but Lacy’s skinny shanks stayed five yards ahead of me all the way.”

  And she had laughed at the picture the two men must have made, erupting out of the creek, mother-naked, to scandalize two respectable black women who had been fishing quietly upstream.

  “I don’t know if it’s safe to let you loose in the country anymore,” she had told him, standing in their apartment by the long windows that overlooked the river.

  Back then, it was the city that had seemed dangerous to her, not the country’s natural perils. She was not athletic and it had worried her that he ran alone through empty early morning streets. Except in hunting season, she had never felt such apprehension about Jake’s quick trips to the farm.

  “Lacy gets lonesome,” he used to say when the weeks in New York stretched out too long.