“I know, sweetie, but did you see him go?”
“Who?”
“Remember Fred? He had the bed next to you.”
Mr. Bell frowned. “Jack?”
“No, sweetie. Before Jack. Fred. Fred Mitchiner.”
Silence, then unexpected laughter shook the frail
body. “My cousin.”
“That’s right.” Mrs. Franks beamed. “That was Fred.”
“Where’d he go, anyhow? I ain’t seen him lately.”
Raeford McLamb leaned in close. “When did you last
see him, Mr. Bell? Your cousin Fred?”
“He ain’t really my cousin, you know. Crazy ol’ man.
He’s blacker’n you are.” He paused and looked up at
Mrs. Franks. “Idn’t anybody else gonna eat today?”
Mrs. Franks sighed. “It’s only nine-thirty, sweetie.
Dinner won’t be ready till twelve.”
McLamb sat back in frustration and Dalton pulled his
chair around so that his face was level with Mr. Bell’s.
“Mr. Bell? Tom?”
“Thomas,” Mrs. Franks murmured.
“Thomas? Tell us about the last time you saw Fred.”
The old man stared at him, then reached out with
a shaky hand to cup Dalton’s smooth cheek. Sudden
tears filled his eyes. “Jimmy?” His voice cracked with
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remembered grief. “Jimmy, boy! They told me you was
dead.”
In the end, Sam Dalton had to help Mr. Bell to his room.
The confused nonagenarian would not let go of his arm
until they persuaded him to lie down on the bed and rest.
Eventually, he calmed down enough to close his eyes and
release his unexpectedly strong grip on Dalton’s arm.
“Who’s Jimmy?” Dalton asked as he walked back
down the hall with Mrs. Franks to rejoin McLamb.
“His son. He got killed in a car wreck when he was
thirty-one. I don’t think Mr. Bell ever got over it.”
Back in the lobby, at the central desk, McLamb was
interviewing Mary Rowe, the LPN who oversaw the
medication schedules. A brisk, middle-aged blonde who
was going gray naturally, Rowe wore a white lab coat
over black slacks and sweater. She shook her head when
told that Mitchiner’s death might not have been as ac-
cidental as they first thought, but she was no more help
than Mr. Bell.
“I’m sorry, Officers, but like I said back when he
walked away, I gave him his meds right after breakfast
and I think I saw him in the lounge a little later, but
there was nothing new on his chart so I didn’t take any
special notice of him.”
It was the same story with the housekeeping staff
who cleaned, did laundry, and helped serve the plates
at mealtimes.
“I made his bed same as always while he be having
breakfast,” said one young woman, “and somebody did
lay on it and pull up the blanket between then and when
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they did the bed check, but I can’t swear it was him.
Some of our residents, they’re right bad for just laying
down on any bed that’s empty, whether it’s their own
or somebody else’s.”
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23
It takes time to revolutionize the habits of thought and ac-
tion into which a people have crystallized by the practice of
generations.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Tuesday Morning (continued)
% “What took you so long?” Mayleen Richards asked
when Jack Jamison finally slid in beside her in the
unmarked car they were using this morning.
“Handing in my resignation,” he said tersely.
She laughed as she turned on the windshield wipers
and shifted from park to drive, but the laughter died
after taking a second look at his face.
“Jeeze! You’re not joking, are you?”
“Serious as a gunshot to the chest,” he said, in a grim-
mer tone than she had ever heard him use.
“So where’re you going? Raleigh? Charlotte?”
“Texas first, then Iraq if I pass the physical.”
Richards was appalled. “Are you out of your gourd?”
She had seen the flyers, had even visited the web sites.
“You’re going to become a hired mercenary?”
He flushed and said defensively, “I’m not signing
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up for security. I’m signing up to help train Iraqis to
become good police officers. And in case you haven’t
noticed, you and I are already hired mercenaries if that
means keeping the peace and putting bad guys out of
business.”
“We don’t have a license to kill over here,” she
snapped. “And the bad guys aren’t lying in wait to am-
bush us for no reason. I can’t believe you’re going to
do this.”
“Believe it,” he said. “I’m just lucky I can go as a
hired hand. I can quit and come home. Soldiers can’t
and they get paid squat.”
Richards did not respond. Just kept the car moving
westward through the rain.
Eventually her silence got to Jamison. “Look, in two
years, I’ll have a quarter-million dollars. Enough for
Cindy and me to pay off all our bills and build a house.
And it’s not like Jay’ll even know I’m gone. I’ll be back
before he’s walking and talking good.”
“Be sure you get one of those life-size pictures of
yourself before you go,” she said angrily. “Cindy can
glue it to foam board and cut it out and Jay can have
his own Flat Daddy for when you get blown up by a car
bomb.”
“That’s not very damn funny, Mayleen.”
“I didn’t mean for it to be.”
“Easy for you to talk,” he said resentfully. “No kids,
your dad and mom both well and working. You’ve even
got brothers and a sister to help out if one of them gets
sick or dies.”
His words cut her more than he could ever realize,
Mayleen thought. No kids. No red-haired, brown-
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skinned babies. Because if she did have kids, then she
would have no brothers and sister. No mother or father
either. They had made that very clear.
She had gone down to Black Creek last night expect-
ing to celebrate a brother’s birthday and they had been
waiting, primed and ready to pounce. No nieces or
nephews, no in-laws around the birthday table, just her
parents, her two brothers, and her sister, Shirlee. Her
mother had been crying.
“What’s wrong?” she had asked, immediately alarmed,
wondering who was hurt, who might be dying.
“There’s been talk,” her father said, his face even
more somber than when she had told them nine years
ago that she was divorcing a man they had known and
liked since childhood, a hard-working, steady man who
didn’t use drugs, didn’t get drunk, didn’t hit her or run
around on her. That had been rough on them. There
had never been a divorce
in their family, they reminded
her. Leave her husband? Leave a good town job that
had air-conditioning and medical benefits after growing
up in the tobacco fields where her father and brothers
still labored? Ask Sheriff Poole to give her a job where
she’d carry a gun and wear an ugly uniform instead of
ladylike dresses and pretty shoes?
“You ain’t gay, are you?” her brother Steve had asked
bluntly.
She had slapped his freckled face for that. Hard.
“What kind of talk, Dad?”
“Somebody saw you at a movie house in Raleigh,” he
said. “They say you was with a Mexican and he had his
arm around you. Is it true?”
“Is he Mexican?” Steve demanded.
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“Would that make a difference?” she said coldly.
“Damn straight it would!” said her brother Tom.
“I’m thirty-three years old. I’m divorced. I’m a sher-
iff ’s deputy. Who I choose to see is my own business.”
“Oh dear Jesus!” her mother wailed, bursting into
tears again. “It is true!”
Her father’s shoulders had slumped and for the first
time, she realized that he was getting old. Suddenly
there was more white than red in his hair and the lines
in his face seemed to have deepened overnight without
her noticing.
While her brothers fumed and her sister and mother
twittered, he held up his hand for silence.
“Mayleen, honey, you know we’re not prejudiced.
If you’re seeing this man, then he’s probably a good
person.”
“All men are created equal, Dad. That’s what you
always told us.”
He nodded. “And they’ve got an equal right to ev-
erything anybody else does. But there’s a reason God
created people different, honey. If He intended us to
be just one color, with one kind of skin and one kind
of hair, then that’s how He would have made us. He
meant for each of us to keep our differences and stay
with our own.”
“So how come you didn’t marry another redhead,
Dad?”
It was an old family joke, but no one laughed tonight.
“That ain’t the same, and you know it, honey.”
“It is the same,” she said hotly. “Mike’s skin’s a
little darker than ours and his hair is black, but it’s no
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MARGARET MARON
different from Steve and Tom and Shirlee being freck-
led all over and marrying people with no freckles.”
“We’re white!” Steve snarled. “And we married white
people. White Americans. I bet he’s not even here le-
gally, is he? He probably wants to marry you so he can
get his citizenship.”
“He’s been a citizen for years,” she snarled back.
“And believe it or not, butthead, he wants to marry me
because he loves me. He even thinks I’m beautiful. So
maybe you’re right. Maybe there is something wrong
with him. Maybe he’s loco.”
But all they heard was marry.
“Oh Mayleen, baby, you can’t marry him!” her
mother sobbed.
“You do and you’n forget about ever setting foot in
my house again!” Steve had shouted.
“Shirlee?”
Her sister’s eyes dropped, but then her chin came up.
“Steve’s right, Mayleen. I’d be ashamed to call you my
sister.”
“Daddy?”
She saw the pain in his face. “I’m sorry, honey, but
that’s the way it is.”
“Fine,” she had said and immediately turned on her
heel and walked out.
With each absorbed by personal problems, Richards
and Jamison drove the rest of the way in silence, a silence
underlined by the back-and-forth swish of their wind-
shield wipers. Just before they reached the westernmost
of the Harris Farms, they met a camera truck from one
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of the Raleigh stations. A long shot of the shed was all
they could have gotten though because Major Bryant
had posted a uniformed officer there to keep the site
secured from gawkers. With rain still pouring from the
charcoal gray sky, they passed the main house and went
first to the white frame bungalow occupied by the farm
manager. Richards stopped near the back door, and at
the sound of their horn, Sid Lomax walked out on the
porch and motioned for them to drive under the car
shelter, a set of iron posts set in a concrete slab and
topped by long sheets of corrugated tin.
“I was afraid you might be those reporters back,” he
said as Percy Denning pulled in right beside them with
his field kit in the trunk.
“We need a list of everybody on the place,” Richards
told Lomax when the courtesies were out of the way.
“And Deputy Denning’s here to take everybody’s finger-
prints.”
“He was dumb enough to leave prints on the axe
handle?” Lomax asked.
“And on the padlock, too,” Denning said with grim
satisfaction.
“If you want to start with the names, come on in to
my office,” Lomax said and led the way back into the
house.
The deep screened porch held a few straight wooden
chairs. A couple of clean metal ashtrays sat on the ledges.
No swing, no rockers, no cheery welcome mat by either
of the two doors. The one on the left was half glass
and no curtains blocked a view of a kitchen so spartan
and uncluttered, so lacking in soft touches of color or
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MARGARET MARON
superfluous knickknacks, that Richards instantly knew
that no woman lived here.
The door on the right opened into a large and equally
tidy office. More straight wooden chairs stood in front
of a wide desk where an open laptop and some manila
file folders lay. The top angled around to the side to
hold a sleek combination printer, fax, and copier. A
lamp sat on a low file cabinet beneath the side window
to complete the office’s furnishings. Both the desk and
the worn leather chair behind it were positioned so that
Lomax could work with his back to the rear wall and see
someone at the door before they knocked.
He sat, pulled the laptop closer and tapped on the
keys. “I’m assuming you’re only interested in the peo-
ple working here now? Not the ones who moved to the
other farms?”
“Everybody here on that last Sunday you saw your
boss,” said Richards.
“Right.”
More tapping, then the printer came to life with a
twinkle of lights and an electronic hum as sheets of
paper began to slide smoothly into the front tray.
“Two copies enough?”
“Could you make it three?” Richards asked.
“No problem.”
They waited while Lomax aligned the pages and sta-
pled each set.
“The first list, that’s the names of everybody working
here o
n the first of January. The ones with Xs in front
of them are those we fired or who quit.”
“Any of them leave mad?”
“Yeah, but Harris didn’t have anything to do with
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them, if that’s what you’re asking. I was the one fired
their sorry asses.” His fingers touched the names in
question. “These two were always drunk. This one was
a troublemaker. Couldn’t get along with anybody. This
one went off his nut. Those five just quit. Said they
were going back to Mexico.”
Richards and Denning made notations of his remarks
on the pages he’d given them. “And the rest?” she
asked.
“They’re the ones we moved over to one of the other
farms the day after I last saw him. That was Monday,
the twentieth of February. The last page is the people
still here.”
Again, they marked the pages and when they were
finished, the farm manager held out his hands. “Want
to take my prints first?”
“Why don’t we go down to the camp and do them all
at once?” Denning said.
“Fine. I don’t know if everybody’s there, though.
Hard as it’s raining, we couldn’t get the tractors into
the field so I gave everyone the morning off.”
As migrant camps go, this one was almost luxurious
compared to some the deputies had seen. It reminded
Richards of motels from the fifties and sixties that
sprouted along the old New York–to-Florida routes
through the state before the interstates bypassed them—
long cinder-block rectangles falling into disrepair.
Here, communal bathrooms with shower stalls and
toilets, one for each sex, lay at opposite ends of each
rectangle. The men’s bunkhouse was a long room lined
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with metal cots. Most were topped by stained mattresses
bare of any linens, but some still had their blankets and
pillows and a man was asleep in one of them. At the far
end was a bank of metal lockers. Most of the doors hung
open, but a few were still secured by locks of various
sizes and styles. At the near end was a battered refrig-
erator, cookstove, and sink. An open space in the center
held a motley collection of tables and chairs where three
more men were watching a Spanish-language program.
“¿Dónde está Juan?” Lomax asked.
Richards was pleased to realize that she could catch
the gist of the reply, which was that the crew chief and
his wife, along with another woman and two men, had
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