by Ann B. Ross
My rows were getting short and, if you don’t know what that means, it means that the end was approaching. Time was running out with Hazel Marie getting bigger by the minute, as well as getting well enough to take off on her own. At the same time Mr. Pickens was working as hard as he could on Sam’s case, and, if he was right about either the judge or the sheriff, he’d soon come up with an answer, then be off on his own, as well. Something had to give before they flew off in different directions.
I walked past the holly tree and stopped at the graceful limbs of an abelia bush. That was worth a minute or two of study, so that’s what I gave it. While I fingered the leaves as if I knew what I was doing, my mind sifted through the options open to me.
First of all, I couldn’t let Hazel Marie face the going-away party that Emma Sue was planning. She would never be able to withstand the questions about her new job that didn’t exist or the scrutiny of her new waist expansion that would be part and parcel of any social gathering where she’d be the focus of all eyes. I’d have to tell her that according to Mildred, Emma Sue would call us late Monday afternoon to come over for an important discussion about some church problem. And, furthermore, if either Hazel Marie or I declined to come, she would move the whole party, lock, stock, and barrel, to my house. Whatever it took, Emma Sue intended to surprise us with a party that would send Hazel Marie off with the town’s best wishes to her new job in Palm Beach.
I shuddered at the thought, knowing what the news of that would do to Hazel Marie. She’d start packing with a vengeance. She might even leave before the weekend was out, and here it was already Friday with me floundering around about what to do. And still, Lloyd knew nothing—no what, why, or when, especially why.
One good thing—Hazel Marie could hardly take him with her if she left in such a hurry. The school year started on Monday, so there was every reason in the world to leave him with us. But, oh, how would I sleep, knowing that Hazel Marie was alone and friendless in the wilds of south Florida?
But then, out of the blue, some of the ideas that had been randomly floating around in my mind began to fall into place. I quickly turned away from Mildred’s horticultural display and, with determined strides, headed for home. I’d made up my mind.
I realized that there was a remote possibility that Hazel Marie would refuse Mr. Pickens because of his heretofore mulishness, even if, contrary to his track record, he promised lifelong marital fealty. But I had decided to take that risk. Hazel Marie might never speak to me again for betraying her trust, but I had decided to run that risk, as well.
I stopped midstep as a sudden bright thought zinged into my head. Maybe she wanted me to!
Of course, I thought, that’s it! She doesn’t want to give in to Mr. Pickens after having turned her back on him and flounced off as if he didn’t matter to her. She had her pride, but it had worked her into a corner of her own making, which she couldn’t unbend enough to get out of. I could understand that. I’d done it to myself more than once.
But she wanted him back, I was convinced of that. I mean, what woman, facing the arrival of not one but two infants, wouldn’t want another pair of helping hands, if nothing else?
“Lillian,” I said, quickly closing the door behind me to keep the cool air inside the house, “My mind is made up, and, regardless of the consequences, I know what I have to do.”
“Well, ’fore you do anything,” Lillian said, dipping green beans from a saucepan into a bowl, “you better get on in yonder, ’cause supper almost ready. An’ Mr. Sam an’ Mr. Pickens in the livin’ room starvin’ to death, they been waitin’ on you so long.”
“Is it that late?” I glanced at my watch and saw that it was. “Is Lloyd home?”
“He settin’ in there with ’em, ’bout to cave in he so hungry.”
“They’ll just have to wait a few minutes more because, Lillian, you won’t believe what Mildred told me.” I walked over close to her so I could whisper the news. “Emma Sue is planning a going-away party for Hazel Marie! Can you believe that?”
“Why, Miss Julia, that so nice.”
“Nice! It’s terrible. Well, I mean the thought is nice, but if there’s anything that’ll send Hazel Marie away from here—maybe even tomorrow—it’s hearing about a party where everybody’ll be looking at her and asking questions.”
“Well, yessum, I see what you sayin’. She not up for something like that, the pore little thing.”
“The only good thing, it’s supposed to be a surprise party, so I’m not obligated to tell her about it. But come Monday, she’ll know and so will everybody else. Something’s got to give before then, Lillian, and I intend to see that it gets done.”
I paced between the stove and the refrigerator, then turned back to her. “Well, I can’t do it right now, so go ahead and call the others to the table. I’ll just slip through the back hall and speak to her. I’ve hardly seen her all day. Is Latisha with her?”
“No’m,” Lillian said, opening the oven door and turning her head from the blast of heat. “I leave her with the neighbor lady. Miss Hazel Marie, she act too sad today for any kind of play-pretty foolishness.” She pulled a pan of yeast rolls from the oven, then looked up at me. “An’ she kinda gettin’ up on her high horse again, too.”
“Oh, my. What’s upset her?”
Lillian nodded toward the living room. “I ’spect it ’cause of him settin’ in yonder. Soon as she hear him come in talkin’, she say she lose her appetite, an’ feel like she ’bout to start th’owin’ up again.”
“Well, that just does it,” I said, dismayed that my recently-decided-on plan was coming apart at the seams. I walked over again to Lillian and whispered, “Lillian, I had made up my mind to go ahead and break my promise to her. I was going to get Mr. Pickens off to himself—tonight, if possible—and just flat out tell him what’s what. But I need to do it when she’s in a good mood, because I know that just as soon as I tell him, he’s going to go flying in there. And it would be a disaster if he went in when she’d already worked herself into a state. He wouldn’t stand a chance.” I grabbed Lillian’s arm and held on. “But I am going to do it before the weekend’s out, and I don’t care what I have to suffer for doing it. It’s for Hazel Marie’s own good, and his, too.”
Lillian sighed and patted my hand. “I been thinkin’ an’ prayin’ ’bout the same thing, wonderin’ when you gonna do something. I know you hate to break a promise, but look like when you ’tween a rock an’ a hard place, they’s nothin’ else to do. Jus’ look what happened to Jephthah when he make a promise he ought not to make, an’ wouldn’t go back on it. I can’t help but b’lieve the Lord woulda let him off, if he jus’ ask right.”
I stared at her a minute, trying to remember who Jephthah was and what kind of ill-advised promise he’d made. I didn’t have time to look him up, but I could trust Lillian. She knew her Bible, and if she thought he’d have been better off breaking his promise than keeping it, well, that certainly set a precedent, didn’t it?
Chapter 35
“Hazel Marie?” I said, as I tapped on her door and walked into the room. At the sight of her blotched face and puffy eyes, I came to an abrupt stop. “Oh, my goodness, are you all right? What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” she sobbed, sitting there in her pink work-out outfit, dabbing at her eyes. “He’s here again, and I just can’t stand it.”
“Well, honey,” I said, taking a chair next to her, “he’s here only for Sam. He’s not going to bother you, and, Hazel Marie, I do think he’s trying to make amends. He brought you that lovely box of candy, which shows he’s trying to be nice, don’t you think?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t.” She threw down a wet Kleenex and snatched a fresh one from the box. “It just shows how selfish he is. He’s the one who likes candy so much, not me.” She blew her nose, threw down the Kleenex and snatched another one. “I’d like to take that candy and cram every piece of it down his throat!”
“Now, Hazel Marie, you mustn’t get so worked u
p. It’s not good for you.”
“Well, he ought to know what he’s done.”
I took her hand and held it a few minutes, trying to comfort her. But in just that instant, my mind lit up like the sun rising in the east. There it was! Exactly as I’d thought.
As Lillian began tinkling the little silver bell, summoning us to the table, I stood up and said, “Hazel Marie, try not to worry. Things are going to work out, I’m convinced of it.”
Hurrying through the back hall to the kitchen, I grabbed Lillian’s arm as she headed to the dining room, almost tipping over the platter of fried chicken she was carrying.
“Lillian,” I whispered, since I could hear Sam and Mr. Pickens at the table just beyond the door. “Wait a minute. I just got the green light from Hazel Marie. She wants Mr. Pickens to know!”
Lillian set the platter on the kitchen table and looked at me in some disbelief. “What she say?”
“She said, ‘He ought to know what he’s done.’ That’s exactly what she said as sure as I’m standing here. And if that doesn’t release me from my promise, I don’t know what does.”
Lillian studied on it for a minute, repeating my words. “He oughta know what he’s done, he oughta know what he’s done. I don’t know, Miss Julia, I can see it mean he oughta know ’thout bein’ told.”
I waved my hand, not wanting to be deterred. “A technicality, Lillian. Let’s not get tangled up with alternate meanings. She said it, plain as day. And tomorrow morning Sam’s taking Lloyd to buy school supplies, and I’m going to get Mr. Pickens off to himself and lay it on the line.” I thought for a minute. “I might need you to help me.”
“He left everything in a trust,” Sam said, after we’d finished dinner and Lillian had cleared the table. With Lloyd excused to visit with his mother, Mr. Pickens and I sat listening to Sam’s report on Judge Robert Eugene Baine. “A will is open to the public, but a trust is not, so that’s a closed door. But I got to talking with a woman there in the records office who knew the family—I think I just missed you, Pickens. Anyway, according to her, the judge’s wife died about thirty years ago, and an unmarried daughter stayed on, looking after the house and taking care of him in his old age. Apparently, she’s still living on the home place out on Staton Bridge Road.”
“When did the judge die?” I asked, as I stirred my coffee. We were lingering around the table trying to decide what our next step should be.
“Sometime in the late nineties,” Sam said, consulting his notes. “Anyway, the clerk I was talking to lived fairly close to the Baines, and she told me that he turned into a bitter old man in his last years.” Sam looked up and smiled. “Couldn’t have been much of a change, though, from what he was on the bench. According to her, everybody felt sorry for the daughter, but she never called on anybody for help—just put up with it, I guess. I’ll tell you this, though, I couldn’t find a lawyer in town who’d kept up with him after he lost that last election. It was like he dropped out of sight, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief to have him gone.”
“My goodness,” I said, “it’s a shame when old people get so cranky nobody can stand to be around them. And, Mr. Pickens, no need to look at me that way. I wasn’t speaking of Sam.”
That was worth a laugh from all of us, from me especially since it had gladdened my heart to see Mr. Pickens’s teasing smile and cocked eyebrow aimed at me. He had lately been entirely too despondent, and I wanted to reach across the table to comfort him. As the laughter died away, though, the lines on his face reappeared and I had a great urge to just tell him what he needed to know, then and there.
But I had had time to think over my decision, and a cooler head was prevailing. To be on the safe side of keeping my promise to Hazel Marie—in spite of what I’d taken as a clear release from it—I now thought it best to get Sam to tell him, and to tell him right away. I reasoned that Mr. Pickens would take it better coming from another man—a man whose esteem he valued. Because, see, it had occurred to me while we were eating Lillian’s fried chicken that I had been assuming a lot in thinking that Mr. Pickens would immediately do the right thing as soon as he knew. But what if he didn’t?
What if, as soon as he heard that twin babies were in the offing, he up and took flight? His moving to Charlotte as soon as things didn’t go his way certainly proved his propensity to run from trouble. I was hoping that hearing the news from Sam, rather than from me, would make him think twice before pulling up stakes.
“Well, okay then,” the man himself said, turning us back to the case at hand. “I guess the next thing is to go see this daughter.” He glanced up at Sam. “She doesn’t have a record, does she? I mean, she wasn’t involved with the group you interviewed, was she?”
“Nope, and I looked. There’s nothing on her. Tell you the truth, though,” Sam said, scratching his head, “I never knew he had any children, much less one that took care of him. From what I could gather, she was, and still is, pretty much of a homebody, nobody seems to know much about her.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Um, let me see.” Sam flipped the pages of his notebook. “Here it is. Roberta, according to Lila Boyd, the clerk I talked to.”
“I’ve never heard of her,” I said in some surprise, since I thought I knew, or knew of, just about everybody in the county.
“Me either,” Sam said, “but I wasn’t interested in knowing any more about Judge Baine than I had to. I did get the impression from Lila that she’s a little strange. Which might explain why she’s stayed home all these years.”
Mr. Pickens had been doodling in his notebook, but he looked up and asked, “How old would she be now?”
“I’d guess around sixty or so,” Sam said. “Lila’s retiring this year, and she went to school with her. Rode the school bus together, anyway. So they’d be about the same age. You think she’s worth interviewing?”
Mr. Pickens nodded. “Yeah, I do. But it’ll be dicey. If we go in there implying that her daddy was the reason those records and tapes were stolen, we won’t get much out of her.”
Sam ran his hand down his face. “He’s got to be the reason, though—him or the sheriff. There’s no way around it, they keep turning up, one way or another, in every case I’m looking at.”
“But,” I said, “she may know nothing about any of it. If she never left home and never had any social life, how would she know what her father did in the courtroom?”
“Yeah, well, still,” Mr. Pickens said, “we ought to talk to her. To be thorough, if nothing else. Sam, maybe you should be the one to approach her since you knew the judge.” Mr. Pickens leaned back in his chair, thought for a minute, then went on. “You could say you want to interview her about her father for your book, without making any mention of the theft of the records. In other words, don’t let her think you’re looking at him for any reason other than his prominence in the county.”
Sam nodded. “I can do that. And would’ve done it even if there’d been no theft.” He smiled with some chagrin. “And if I’d known there was a daughter to be interviewed.”
“Okay,” Mr. Pickens said, “put that on hold for a minute and let me add something else to the mix.” He pulled some papers covered with jotted notes from his briefcase. “Would it surprise you to know that Judge Baine sold a large tract of land to Sheriff Hamilton in nineteen fifty-nine?”
Well, yes, it would, for Sam had a startled look on his face. “How large? Where was it?”
“Couple of hundred acres in the River Bend area. Bordering as near as I can tell from the survey maps that tiny piece that Amelda Tillman sold to the sheriff ten years later.”
Sam and I looked at each other, both of us realizing exactly what that meant. “River Bend,” Sam said, leaning back as things began to fall into place. “That, my friend, is where the River Bend Inn and Country Club are. Along with a gated community of single-family homes and condominiums owned mostly by summer residents.” Sam rubbed his hand across his face. “I missed tha
t because I was concentrating on the sixties, but, wait. That tract wasn’t developed until the late seventies, and I don’t remember Al Hamilton having anything to do with it.”
“He didn’t,” Mr. Pickens said, “except for selling it to a development company in seventy-three.”
“Well now,” Sam said, “his buying a useless piece of land from the Tillman woman makes sense. He was adding to what he’d already gotten ten years before from the judge. Maybe by that time, he saw development on the horizon.”
“I expect he did. Interesting thing, though, Judge Baine missed out all the way around. He sold that land to the sheriff for ten dollars and other valuable considerations, and the sheriff sold it to the development company the same way. But that deed had enough document stamps on it to indicate a sizeable amount of money changed hands. No stamps on the first deed.”
“So,” Sam said, “what that suggests is that the ‘other valuable considerations’ of the Baine sale could’ve been for Sheriff Hamilton’s silence and/or complicity in the dispositions of these cases.”
Mr. Pickens nodded. “That’s what it looks like to me, and eventually it paid off for the sheriff, big time.”
Sam twisted his mouth, thinking it all over. “That puts a different light on things, doesn’t it? I don’t know what, but I’ll certainly have a new chapter to write if I ever get back to writing. But to be thorough, as you say, I’d better go ahead and try to interview the Baine woman. Julia,” he said, turning to me, “will you go with me? I have to run over to Asheville tomorrow afternoon to see a retired judge who knew Baine, so I’d like to see her in the morning.”
Well, there went my plan. How could I get Sam to talk some sense into Mr. Pickens if they were going off in a dozen different directions? But I nodded in answer and said, “She’d probably be more comfortable with both of us instead of a strange man showing up by himself. But wait, Sam, weren’t you going to take Lloyd to get his school supplies in the morning?”
