The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

  “Oh?”

  “Was it you?”

  “Anonymous, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Probably someone who wanted to be helpful but didn’t want to become involved, wouldn’t you say? From the size and grandeur of that housing estate, surely one or two of her majesty’s subjects might live there and have telephones?”

  “Would you mind if we looked at the call record on yours?” Dwight asked bluntly.

  “Actually, I bloody well would,” Martin said. He was at least four inches shorter than Dwight but he drew himself up pugnaciously. “I’m not used to having my veracity questioned.”

  “Martin,” Anne said softly, and he turned to her with a what-the-hell? shrug of his shoulders and a sheepish smile.

  “Quite right, my dear.” He went into the closed and unheated bedroom and returned with two cell phones. One was the latest iPhone, the other was a cheap throwaway. “I haven’t used either of them in several days. This one’s for overseas calls and this disposable toy is for local calls to the library and Aunt Jane. It costs too much to use my regular mobile here in the States.”

  He selected the outgoing call option on both phones and handed one to Dwight and the other to Mayleen Richards.

  It took them only a moment to see that he had told the truth.

  “I apologize, Crawford,” Dwight said, returning the phones. “It’s just that when I saw the buzzards kettling above the body, I thought maybe they made you curious enough to go over and take a look.”

  “Quite all right. I expect it goes with the job.” He laid the phones on the table and turned toward the kitchen. “Now, I can’t offer you tea, but I do have an extra glass if you’d like a spot of something else?”

  “Another time,” Dwight said. “Right now, we have to get back to Dobbs. I have to tell the woman’s husband that she’s been found.”

  Sigrid watched him go with torn loyalties.

  Martin Crawford might be family, but Dwight Bryant was a fellow law officer.

  When her cousin had given them a brief tour of the house earlier, there had been an open satchel on the floor beside his sleeping bag. He had immediately directed their eyes to the north wall papered in old newspapers to keep out the worst of the winter chill. Most of them dated back 30 years and Anne had marveled at some of the headlines. When Sigrid looked again at the satchel, a pillow lay on top of it, hiding the four or five throwaway phones she had glimpsed before.

  None of her business, she told herself. If Martin was the one who had made that call, he had acted responsibly. He wouldn’t be the first person who preferred not to get involved with murder.

  “What did Dwight mean when he said the buzzards were kettling?” Anne asked.

  “It’s a fanciful way of describing the way they move up and down when they circle over prey. It reminds people of air bubbles in a pot of boiling water.” Martin smiled. “Speaking of which, shall I make us another pot of tea?”

  CHAPTER

  13

  Turkey vultures not only find food individually when foraging, but also may notice when other vultures in flight begin to descend to food and then follow those vultures to the food source.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Late that afternoon, my clerk, Frances Warren, leaned in to tell me that Rebecca Jowett’s body had been found. “Out near where y’all live,” she said, but that was as much as she knew.

  My calendar turned out to be more packed than expected, thanks to the inefficiency of our current DA, so there was no time to go chasing down rumors if we hoped to get through everything. Happily, Frances kept all the paperwork moving and together we reached the last case just as the hands on the courtroom clock passed five.

  It was a he-said-she-said bar brawl involving a young white woman, her current black boyfriend, and her white ex-boyfriend, and I had heard all I needed to when the door of my courtroom opened and a little boy with a backpack hanging from one shoulder entered and slipped into the last row of benches. He gave me a snaggletoothed smile and held up a book to let me know he was going to sit there and read until I was finished.

  Cal.

  I smiled back at him and quickly disposed of those three. A night in jail had calmed them all down, and from the way she was flouncing and smirking and tossing her long hair back from her face every few minutes, I suspected that the young woman was rather pleased to be the object of hot desire for two good-looking men. Indeed, she had probably incited them. Nevertheless, they were the ones who had thrown the punches and broken some glassware, although she seemed to have done her bit to keep the fight going. I gave them each three days, with credit for time served and the rest to be suspended on the usual conditions. They were to make restitution of seventy-five dollars to the bar owner for the breakages. (He was asking for two hundred even though I knew from past testimony that seventy-five dollars would buy five or six dozen bar glasses at Sam’s Club.)

  At this point, I paused and looked at the white bar owner, who is in court at least once a month to testify about similar occurrences. “If you like, sir, I can order them to stay away from your premises.”

  “Naw, that’s okay,” he said. “Long as they behave theirselves, they can come on back.”

  “That’s your decision,” I told him, “but I’m putting you on notice now that if you or any of your customers are back here anytime soon, I might be forced to see about shutting you down for maintaining a public nuisance.”

  He started to protest, but I held up my hand for silence.

  “Every time you or your patrons wind up here in court, it costs the taxpayers money, and you’ve used up more than your share of tax dollars these last few months. If you can’t maintain order, we’ll have to see who can.”

  I turned back to the first three. “Pay the clerk in the hall on your way out and you’re free to go.”

  “We each got to pay seventy-five for them broken glasses?” the young woman asked.

  “No, twenty-five apiece, but you each do have to pay court costs. The clerk will work out a payment schedule if you don’t have the cash on you.”

  I winked at the bailiff and gave a crisp formal tap of my gavel. “Court adjourned, Mr. Overby.”

  “All rise,” he said solemnly even though Cal was the only one still seated on the benches. My stepson came immediately to his feet.

  “This court is now adjourned,” Overby said, then smiled. “Hey there, Cal! How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” he said shyly as he came forward.

  Frances greeted him by name as well.

  Dwight is well liked around the courthouse, and in the year that Cal has lived with us, he’s become familiar to a lot of the people who work here and they would spoil him if they could. Part of it is the usual brownnosing. After all, I am a judge and Dwight is Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief deputy. But Cal’s a nice kid, quiet, polite to his elders, and doesn’t try to take advantage of our positions.

  Overby held the door behind the bench for Frances and her files and would have held it for me, but I gestured for him not to wait because Cal had left his backpack and jacket on the bench.

  As he came back up to the bar, he looked around the modern room with its pale blue walls and its bleached oak furnishings. There’s a big gilt seal of state on the wall behind my blue leather chair, with an American flag on one side and a North Carolina flag on the other. Otherwise, the room is quite plain. “Is this where Mary Pat and Jake got adopted?”

  “No,” I said. “That was in the old courtroom. Want to see it?”

  “Sure.”

  We stopped by my office so that I could drop off my robe and pick up my parka, then crossed over to the older wing.

  The main courtroom is still used for superior court trials and for swearing-in ceremonies or whenever else the participants wish to invoke the power and stone-footed majesty of the law. Twice as big as the other courtrooms, the cavernous space is paneled in dark oak and the raked floor is carpeted in deep red wool.
Acanthus leaves are carved into the plaster medallions on the high vaulted ceiling and pierced brass lanterns hang down from the center of each on long black cords above solid oak benches. They cast a golden glow over the courtroom.

  Most adoptions are just a matter of filing the correct forms, which the clerk of the court checks to see that all the hoops have been jumped through, but Kate and Rob got him to make a nice little ceremony out of signing the final form, and they did it here.

  “It looks like church,” Cal said in a hushed voice.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” I said, feeling a bit proprietary.

  I had been sworn in here, my daddy holding the Bible on which I took my oath, with all my kinfolks looking on (and taking up a good quarter of the benches). I still get goose bumps thinking about all that these venerable walls have witnessed over the past hundred years.

  “Mary Pat said it felt a little bit like getting married.”

  “What about Jake?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think he cared. Besides, Aunt Kate’s his real mother—his biological mother,” he elucidated in case I was confused. (There had been much discussion of “real,” “biological,” and “adoptive” during the whole adoption process last summer.) “And he’s been calling Uncle Rob Dad ever since he could talk.”

  “So where’s your own dad?” I asked, glancing at my watch. “Are you riding home with him or me?”

  “With you. He said tell you he’d be home by seven.” He cut his eyes up at me with a mischievous grin. “He also said he’d have told you himself if you’d had your phone on.”

  I fumbled in my parka pocket and found my phone. “It was on,” I said. “See?”

  “But it was in your office. And your door was locked. And I bet it was on vibrate.”

  I laughed and called Dwight back. My call went straight to his voice mail. “Got your message and your son,” I said. “See you at seven.”

  My friend Portland had given me a ride out to Will’s place at lunchtime, so my car was waiting for us in my parking spot across from the courthouse.

  Cal slid into the front seat beside me and dropped his backpack on the floor behind us.

  As he talked about school and how Dwight had picked him up early, I realized that he hadn’t wondered why Dwight was out that way. Cal’s certainly aware of what we do for a living, but we try to keep the worst from him and I could understand that Dwight wouldn’t want him to know why he’d had to wait in the squad car while his dad went in to talk to some man.

  On the other hand, he’s no dummy. “There were a lot of cars at that house,” he said, “but I don’t think it was a party.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  “Did somebody get killed?”

  “I’m afraid so, honey.”

  “Somebody’s mom?” he asked in a small voice.

  “No, I don’t think she had any children.”

  “That’s good.”

  There was a pensive look on his face. I never know whether it’s the right thing to talk about Jonna or not, but Dwight and I had agreed we would try not to make it awkward for Cal to speak of her. I reached over and gave his hand a quick squeeze. “You’re thinking about your mother, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “When she got killed, there were all those cars at Grandmother’s house.”

  “That’s because so many people loved her and were sorry she died.”

  We rode in silence for a few minutes. The sun sank closer to the horizon, turning the bare-leaved twigs and branches into delicate wrought-iron tracery against the orange-and-blue stained glass of the sky.

  Cal sighed. “The thing is…sometimes I can’t remember what she looked like.”

  Before I could speak, he said, “I mean, I have her picture in my room, and there’s that album we brought back, but sometimes it doesn’t feel real. I try to remember what it was like up in Virginia, but it sort of gets tangled up with here.”

  Embarrassed, he brushed away the involuntary tears that filled his eyes and turned away from me to stare out the side window.

  “You’re afraid that you’re going to forget her?”

  He didn’t answer but I saw his head nod.

  “Cal, I know it doesn’t seem fair to your mother, but it is natural. That’s what time does for all of us. If everything stayed fresh and sharp, we wouldn’t be able to get on with our lives. I know how much it hurt when she died, because I remember how bad it was when my own mother died, but if we didn’t let time smooth away some of those memories, we wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. You’ll always be sorry she died, but you won’t ever completely forget her, so you don’t have to feel guilty because some of the memories get mixed up. Wherever her spirit is, she knows you still love her.”

  Miraculously, it must have been the right thing to say, because by the time we got home, he was himself again.

  We let Bandit out and he lit the fire Dwight had laid that morning. Our cleaning woman had been there that day so the house was shining, the laundry folded and put away, and supper would be the spinach lasagna we hadn’t eaten last night. While I changed into jeans and comfortable shoes, Cal reviewed his spelling words and I called them out to him. The drill was i-before-e words and he got most of them right the first time through. After that, he picked up The Hobbit and asked if we could read another chapter. We had gone through all the Harry Potter books by Christmas and my sister-in-law Barbara, who runs the county library system, had assured me that Cal would understand The Lord of the Rings if we read it together.

  Neither Dwight nor I are huge on books, and neither of us had read the Tolkien saga, but I had discovered that I liked reading aloud and I liked it that Cal snuggled next to me on the couch to follow along with the words. Even Dwight got caught up in the adventure and would come in to listen if he was home. I could say that both of them took after Dwight’s mother, who always had two or three books going on her bedside table, but I knew that it was Jonna who had read to Cal from the time he was a baby.

  There was much about Dwight’s first wife that was less than admirable, things I hoped Cal would never learn, but when he leaned against me, too absorbed in the story I was reading aloud to pull away if I put my arm around him, I always sent her a mental thank-you.

  The lasagna was nicely browned along the edges and the aroma of basil, garlic, and tomato sauce filled the house when Dwight got home so shortly after seven that he could claim he was on time.

  “Hello, my precioussss,” Cal hissed as he set the table.

  Dwight laughed and caught him up in a bear hug that ended with Cal slung over his shoulder as they headed off to the bathroom to wash up. “What did I miss, buddy? Does Gollum know that Bilbo has the ring?”

  Cal’s recap of the chapter Dwight had missed carried us through supper.

  It wasn’t till Cal was in bed with Bandit curled up beside him that I could finally ask Dwight about Rebecca Jowett and hear how she had been found across the creek from the farm on a trash dump, less than a mile from us as the crow flies.

  “Or as a buzzard flies,” Dwight said sourly.

  He was convinced that Martin Crawford was the one who had found the body and called it in. “No way would somebody studying buzzard habits not walk over that way to see why they were kettling.”

  “But if he showed you his phone?”

  “He could have erased the call as soon as he made it.”

  “He probably just doesn’t want to get involved,” I said soothingly. “A stranger in a strange land? At least he called. If he called.”

  “All the same, there’s something off about that man. And I think Sigrid feels it, too.”

  “Sigrid?”

  “Yeah, she and her mother were at Martin’s when Mayleen and I got there. She doesn’t say much, but I get the impression that nothing important gets by her.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  Male and female turkey vultures are identical in appearance.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society


  Major Dwight Bryant—Thursday morning

  Thank you for coming in,” Dwight said, extending a hand to Wes Todd and his wife, Ginger. “This shouldn’t take too long. We do understand that time is money.”

  “Not as much as it used to be,” Mrs. Todd said with a self-conscious laugh. “So many people are behind in their mortgage payments, they don’t worry about termites or carpenter ants.” She wore a billed cap with a cutout and an adjustable plastic band in the back. Her flaming red hair, the color of maple leaves in October, was pulled away from her heart-shaped face in a long ponytail that protruded from the cutout and bounced against her shoulders whenever she moved her head. “We’ve laid off some workers and I’ve had to get back out in the field myself because there’s not enough office work to keep me busy all day.”

  “It’s just temporary till the economy picks up,” Wes Todd said, as if nettled by her comment on the state of their business.

  When they shook hands, Dwight noticed that Mrs. Todd’s were almost as callused as her husband’s. Despite her slim build and hesitant smile, this was a woman who probably helped haul extension ladders in and out of their trucks and who could drill through concrete foundations to get at termite nests.

  She took one of the chairs at the table in the interview room and undid the zipper of her jacket. Like her husband’s, it was sturdy brown canvas with the words “Todd Pest Control” and a local phone number stitched in orange on the back. They both wore brown canvas coveralls and work boots, too, but while those work clothes made her husband look competent and strong and ready to face anything from coons and bats to mice and hornets, she looked more like a tagalong tomboy who would cringe from a garter snake.

  “Now, honey,” her husband said, taking charge, “they don’t want to hear about our business. They want to hear what we know about Becca Jowett, right, Bryant?” His dismissive man-to-man tone made Dwight glad he’d sent Mayleen Richards out to interview the dead woman’s mother and sister this morning. Todd’s attitude would have had her hackles rising.