The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

  “You keep calling them vultures,” Rob said. “Aren’t buzzards the same birds?”

  “Technically no, idiomatically yes,” he said. “Here in the States, what you call buzzards actually are vultures. There weren’t any vultures in the British Isles, so the early English settlers lumped them under the common name for buteos, and the name gradually transferred over to your vultures to differentiate them from hawks, the way your American thrush got called a robin simply because it has a red breast similar to the English bird’s.”

  “But why turkey vultures?” asked Kate, whose city roots sometimes betray her. “They don’t eat turkeys, do they?”

  Dwight, Rob, and I smiled at that.

  “Red head, no feathers on it,” Rob told her. “Just like a wild turkey.”

  “I’m not sure why the turkey’s bald,” said Crawford, “but for vultures, it’s a cleanliness thing. Not to get gross here while we dine, but when you consider how and what vultures eat, fluffy head feathers would be a serious handicap.”

  Anne’s fork clattered onto her plate. “Changing the subject,” she said firmly, “what magazine is the article for?”

  His reply was unintelligible, and at our blank looks he said, “Sorry. In English, I suppose you could call it Modern Nature or Wildlife Today.”

  “Was that Arabic?” Anne asked.

  He nodded.

  As the import of his nod sank in, I was impressed. “You’re writing it in Arabic?”

  He looked embarrassed. “It’s actually easier than trying to translate it back from English.”

  “How many languages do you speak?” Sigrid asked.

  He shrugged, but Sigrid persisted.

  “Fluently? Only five or six.”

  With an amused lift of her eyebrow, Anne said, “But you can read—?”

  “Eight,” Martin admitted. “No credit to me, I’m afraid. A child’s brain is like a sponge. It can soak up anything, and we didn’t stay behind the embassy walls. My stepmother always did her own shopping in the marketplaces wherever my father was posted, and they sent me to the local schools. And, of course, she was Pakistani, so I had a leg up there.”

  “He was being modest before,” Anne told us. “That book you brought Mother? There are some wonderful pictures of birds flying over the pyramids and seen from above. How on earth did you get that angle? And what sort of camera did you use?”

  Mrs. Lattimore sent Sigrid up to her bedroom for the book in question, and while it went around the table, Crawford and Anne went back and forth on the merits of different cameras and lenses. The book was coffee-table quality, beautifully printed on heavy glossy paper, and the plates were in full color. Unfortunately, except for the Latin names of the birds beneath each picture, the text was in Arabic.

  By the time dessert was served—warm peach cobbler swimming in heavy cream—Mrs. Lattimore was clearly starting to fade. She left her spoon on the plate and shook her head at the offer of coffee. I could see that it was an effort for her to maintain her ramrod posture, and when her shoulders slumped of their own volition, she pushed back from the table.

  Chloe Adams appeared as if by magic until I realized there was probably an old-fashioned foot bell within reach of Mrs. Lattimore’s shoe under the table. They had likely worked out a signal. One ring for Martha, two for Chloe.

  “Please don’t get up,” she said to the men, who had begun to rise. “So tiresome of me, but you’ll hurt Martha’s feelings if you don’t stay and finish her wonderful cobbler. No, Anne, you really don’t need to come with us. Chloe will take care of me.”

  Anne ignored her mother’s protests. “I’ll say good night, too,” she told us, “but I’m sure I’ll see you all again. Martin, I’ll drive out one day if I might. I’d love to see those birds up close and I still think our paths might have crossed somewhere. You weren’t in Peru five or six years ago, were you?”

  Martin Crawford’s face brightened. “Actually, I was!” he said. “I led a tour group to the Andes to watch the condors. What a coincidence if we wound up in the same hotel or airport lounge. We’ll have to compare notes.”

  After Anne left, we finished our dessert, and when there was a lull in the conversation, Sigrid invited us back to the living room for more coffee and brandies, but Kate reminded us that tomorrow was a school day. I remembered that I had an early appointment with an attorney from Wilmington, while Dwight pleaded the need to check up on the search for that missing woman.

  “If you have some free time and want to see how a county sheriff’s department works, I’d be glad to show you around,” he told Sigrid and gave her his card.

  Rain was still sluicing down heavily when we reached the porch, so Martin Crawford did not linger on the steps. “Quite glad to have met you,” he said and splashed off to that dilapidated truck.

  “Nice man,” I said as Dwight slid into the backseat of Rob’s car with me. “Interesting, too. How long you think it’ll take your mother to rope him into talking to one of the science classes?”

  Miss Emily was the principal at West Colleton High and never missed a chance to provide enrichment for her students.

  “About buzzards?” Kate asked, shaking her head. “Yuck!”

  “Teenage boys usually like yuck,” Rob said. “Right, Dwight?”

  All the same, when we saw a dead rabbit lying by the roadside, Rob did not stop and pick it up.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Vultures have excellent eyesight, but, like most other birds, they have poor vision in the dark.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Sigrid Harald—Tuesday night

  Anne Harald came back downstairs to find Sigrid tidying up the wet bar in the corner of the living room. While they were at dinner, Martha had washed and dried their drink glasses and they now sat on a tray waiting to be put away.

  Sigrid took one look at her mother’s face then filled two of the glasses with ice cubes from the silver bucket that had been in the Lattimore family for at least four generations and poured them each a stiff bourbon, no water.

  “Thanks, honey,” Anne said. She sat down in the wing chair by the fireplace and took a deep swallow.

  Sigrid sat in the chair across from her and said, “How’s Grandmother?”

  “Chloe gave her a shot and it put her out pretty fast.” Anne drank again, a smaller sip this time. “She was really hurting by the time we got her into bed, though. We shouldn’t have let her sit so long at the table.”

  “Try telling her,” Sigrid said dryly. “You know she doesn’t want us to baby her.” She lifted her own drink and let the sweet smoky scent fill her nose.

  Her grandmother did not economize when it came to providing drinks for her guests, and the bourbon was almost half as old as she was. “Sippin’ whiskey,” Oscar Nauman had called it when he contributed this particular brand to her liquor cabinet shortly before his death, “so don’t you-all go addin’ any mixers to it.”

  Her lover’s attempted drawl was nothing like the soft Southern accents that had flowed around her since she and Anne had arrived a few days earlier. It wasn’t that Southerners talked slower, she had long ago decided; it was that they added extra syllables and stressed those syllables so differently that she had to keep mentally processing what she was hearing in order to understand and keep up. It was like wading in honey. Back in New York, Anne’s accent was only slightly noticeable. After three days here, she had almost totally reverted.

  “Why have I never known you had an aunt and a cousin?” Sigrid asked.

  “Frankly, I had almost forgotten myself,” Anne said. “It’s not as if Mother ever talked much about her sister. You heard her. Ferrabee took herself out of the family when Dad dumped her and proposed to Mother. She died young and Dad died when I was still a child, so who else would keep her memory green?”

  “Quite a coincidence that you two should both become professional photographers.”

  “And wind up in Peru at the same time…if that’s where
it was.” Anne drained her glass and went over to the bar to pour herself another.

  “Does it really matter?”

  Anne stared into the flames that flickered from the gas log. “I suppose not,” she said, but Sigrid could see that it was clearly going to bother her till she remembered.

  The ancient gas range was fueled by a tank of propane gas that sat outside the kitchen window. When the kettle began to whistle, Martin Crawford poured part of the boiling water into the teapot on the counter and wrapped a towel around the pot to keep it hot while the tea leaves steeped. The rest of the water went into a basin in the sink and he tempered it with a dipperful of cool water from the nearby bucket. The sink itself was a homemade tin tray and fresh water came from a hand pump. A kerosene lantern gave enough light to see himself in the cloudy mirror over the sink.

  While rain hammered on the tin roof overhead, he made a mental note to pick up a can of shaving cream the next time he passed a store. Wetting his beard, he made a lather with a bar of hand soap. Fortunately, he still had a razor in his toiletries kit. He had not intended to shave off his beard until he got back to London, but he could not risk having Anne remember where she’d seen his bearded face before.

  Stupid of me not to realize she’d looked at us with a photographer’s eye, he thought as his strong chin emerged from the underbrush.

  With a little luck, maybe this beardless face would soon blur her memory of the old one. He just hoped that the vultures would accept his new look.

  When they first married, real estate prices were so insane that Ginger and Wesley Todd could not touch any house on this side of town, much less a house in this neighborhood; but by the time the floundering economy had sent this 2,200-square-foot dream house into foreclosure, their pest control business was doing well enough to let them put in a serious offer. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a master suite with a huge walk-in closet, finished basement, and a two-car garage on a large lot thick with trees and bushes, and not too far from her parents’ more modest neighborhood.

  The only hitch was that the agent who first showed them the property had gone missing. Fortunately the agency owner had stepped in and was proving just as helpful.

  “So if your daughter’s bed doesn’t fit in that dormer room, it’s going to be a deal-breaker?” Paula Coyne asked as she unlocked the front door for them shortly before 10:30 that evening.

  They left their wet umbrellas dripping outside the door and wiped their shoes on the welcome mat.

  Ginger Todd knew that she was being silly, but Ms. Coyne’s tone was teasing so she smiled back. “It’s really nice of you to come out this late, in the rain and all, so we can take one last look, but this is such a huge step for us, and when we remembered the ceiling…”

  “It’s a lot of money,” the Realtor agreed, flipping on the light switches. “I don’t blame you a bit for wanting to be sure. That’s what we’re here for.”

  The house had been minimally staged: a couch and some chairs in the living room on the right, a table and four side chairs in the dining room on the left. “They’ll get the furniture out of your way as soon as you close on Thursday,” Ms. Coyne said, moving briskly to the staircase.

  The younger woman started to follow, but her husband fumbled for the light switches on the interior living room wall.

  “You know, hon, I really do like that couch. It’s long enough to stretch out on when I watch TV.” He looked up at Ms. Coyne, who was already halfway up the stairs. “Is there any chance you could get them to leave it?”

  “We can certainly ask,” she said.

  “But that color,” his wife said. “Will it go with the rest of our things?” She moved past him to consider the couch’s potential. She rather liked the pattern—large dramatic bunches of red roses and green leaves on a white background. “I don’t think our red chair will match this red, though.”

  “Sure it will,” Wes Todd said confidently. In contrast to his wife’s habit of dithering and second-guessing herself, he usually knew his own mind and made snap decisions. “Besides, it’s really more green-and-white than red.” He whipped off the bright red afghan that had been draped over one end of the couch. “See?”

  His wife started to agree, then made a face. “Forget it, Wes. Look at that yucky stain.”

  “Stain?” Ms. Coyne frowned and came back down to join them. Selling houses in this economy was hard enough with fresh paint and pristine décor. Stained furniture was unacceptable in the listings she handled. She remembered admiring the couch when she did her walk-through yesterday, so the afghan must have hidden the stain because no way would she not have noticed this ugly—

  “Oh, dear Lord!” she said. “Is that blood?”

  CHAPTER

  6

  Turkey vultures usually hiss when they feel threatened.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Wednesday morning

  I had been half joking when I said that my mother-in-law would probably cajole Martin Crawford into talking to a class at West Colleton High. It never occurred to me that she would rope Anne Harald in for something as well. Yet when I came back to my courtroom after the midmorning break, there sat Miss Emily on the front bench with Anne Harald on one side and Richard Williams on the other. Miss Emily wouldn’t meet my eyes, but Anne gave me a rueful smile and Richard beamed with his usual friendly optimism.

  As the youth minister at the Methodist church here in Dobbs and an advocate for troubled kids, Richard was in and out of the courthouse several times a week pleading that his charges be given another chance to straighten out their lives before they were sentenced to serious jail time. He could be here for the shoplifter, one of the D&Ds, the malicious vandalism, or for anyone else under the age of twenty-five.

  But Miss Emily?

  I ran my finger down the calendar until I came to Jeremy Patrick Harper, charged back in December with trespassing, and I remembered that she’d asked me where a charge of trespassing on state property would be tried. In district court or superior?

  There had been another flurry of peace demonstrations at the small county airport that forms the bottom of a triangle between our house and Cotton Grove, and it had made the national news because the protestors were claiming that the field was again being used for rendition flights. Sheriff Bo Poole’s picture even landed on the front page of the Washington Post because he had sent deputies out to keep order and they wound up arresting a photographer who had breached the chain-link fence and tried to get a look inside one of the privately leased hangars.

  “I don’t have a problem with people exercising their constitutional right to protest,” Bo was quoted as saying, “long as they don’t go trespassing on other people’s constitutional rights.”

  Like most Americans who like to think that global events don’t really touch their small safe lives, I had been appalled to learn that our country’s war on terror had included torturing suspected terrorists and even more appalled to think that some of the planes that ferried prisoners from Guantanamo to be tortured in foreign countries might have used the little airstrip here in Colleton County as a refueling or transfer stop. Yet this was what the news media claimed six or seven years ago. Call me naïve, but till then I’d been under the impression that it was just a convenience for eastern North Carolina business executives who wanted to park their Lears and Gulfstreams at less congested and somewhat cheaper hangars than Raleigh. Since I don’t own a plane and don’t know anyone who does, I hadn’t paid much attention to that airport except to vaguely wonder why there were no commercial commuter flights in and out. Dwight says its true purpose was the worst-kept secret in the county, but I must have been the last law-connected person in Dobbs to hear that while the field was officially owned by the state, it had been built with CIA money and that the planes that did fly in and out weren’t all corporate jets by any means. Or rather, they were corporate jets, but the corporations were shells set up by the CIA and Blackwater to hide their true ownership.
<
br />   Blackwater, the guns-for-hire company that originated in the swampy northeast corner of the state within commuting distance of the Norfolk SEAL base, has been renamed Xe. The last I heard, its ex-SEAL founder now lives in Abu Dhabi and claims he’s out of the government contracting business. I don’t know about our own government, but if you Google “Abu Dhabi” and dig down a couple of layers, you’ll find allegations that their government has hired mercenaries to protect the oil fields and prevent another Arab Spring within the emirate. Oh, and the Pentagon is still shelling out millions to buy airplane fuel from them through noncompetitive contracts.

  So what else is new?

  When Jeremy Harper’s name was called shortly before noon, the teenager who had been seated behind Miss Emily came forward and stood at the defendant’s table beside his attorney, Reid Stephenson, who happens to be my first cousin, once removed, and a former law partner from when I was in private practice with Stephenson and Lee.

  Small-town courtrooms can sometimes seem incestuous to strangers, but if judges recuse themselves every time a friend or relative stands up to argue a case for or against another friend or relative, court calendars would become an exercise in futility. No one’s ever accused me of favoring Reid. If anything, John Claude Lee, the other partner in my former firm (and yes, another cousin), complains that I always lean too far backwards in my determination to be fair. He himself won’t come into my court unless his case is totally ironclad.

  Today’s ADA was Claudia O’Hale (no kin to any of us), and after she’d read the charges, I said, “How do you plead, Mr. Harper?”

  “Not guilty, ma’am.” For one so tall and skinny, Jeremy Harper had an unexpectedly deep voice. He had a prominent Adam’s apple on a slightly longer than usual neck, and it didn’t help that he had very curly, very thick, and very light blond hair that poufed up all over his head. When the light hit it, his fair hair was closer to silver than gold. As he and Reid sat down, those frizzy white curls and the long neck gave him a vague resemblance to a dandelion gone to seed. If I wanted to get fanciful, I could almost imagine that his dark green sweater formed the dandelion’s basal leaves.