Combustible (A Boone Childress Novel)

by CC Abbott

  “The injunction that was denied, you mean.”

  “That, too.”

  “You know the answer.”

  “Did you see they identified the woman from the Nagswood fire?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “Many. I’ll share them all after I deliver this to the courthouse. There’s a council meaning tonight, and I plan to be on the agenda."

  Boone checked his watch. It was 1615 hours. “I was hoping for a ride to the regional history museum.”

  “That’s halfway across the county. What’s wrong with your truck?”

  “Oil leak.”

  “Then fix it.”

  “Can you drop me by an auto parts store?”

  “Not until after five PM, my dear boy.”

  Boone was calculating whether or not that would leave him enough time to get to the museum before it closed, when Lamar walked down the hallway. He was dressed in olive green slacks and a starched white shirt, along with a pair of highly polished black oxfords.

  Lamar buttoned both cuffs. “If you’re ready to go now, I’ll run you down to the store. I’ve got some errands to do.”

  “Sure,” Boone said, sitting up in surprise. “I’ll get my stuff.”

  While he was getting ready, the house phone rang. Mom answered and took the call outside for privacy. She finished as Boone and Lamar were leaving.

  “What’s that on the grass outside?” Mom when she came in from the gallery. “Is that cookies?”

  “Possibly.”

  “How long have they been there?”

  “A while.”

  “Why are they still on the grass?”

  “I thought the birds would eat them, but even the crows didn’t touch them.”

  “Smart birds,” Lamar said.

  “Honey,” Mom said, “did you try cooking again?”

  Boone shrugged. “I had a sweet tooth, so I used your recipe to make some snickerdoodles. They were a failure. I don’t understand why. I followed the recipe precisely.”

  Mom clamped her lips together. “There’s your trouble,” she said, struggling not to laugh. “That recipe has two mistakes in it. Cooking’s more than just trying together the ingredients and baking for a set amount of time. You left experience out of your equation. If you want to learn how to bake, let me know. The best recipes are never in a book.”

  Five minutes later, they were roaring down Highway 12 toward Atamasco at seventy miles per hour. Lamar had the windows rolled down, and Boone thought about how much chigger would have enjoyed the ride.

  “Just an observation,” Boone said, “but when I drive over the speed limit, there’s always a deputy around the next corner. Especially Deputy Mercer.”

  Lamar nodded in agreement. “Normally, I would say you’re being paranoid, but that feller has given tickets to at least three firefighters, that I know of. Julia got one on the way to that brushfire up in Black Oak Shelter.”

  “He almost gave me one on the way to the Tin City fire, remember?” Boone decided to leave out the part about the Taser. “If Sheriff Hoyt hadn’t stopped him, he would have.”

  “Hoyt’s pretty good at keeping his deputy’s reined in. It comes with the territory, I suppose.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “In North Carolina, the office of sheriff is elected, which means at least half of the job is political, probably more. Hoyt is a good man, and he follows the spirit of the law, but there are some things he does because he has to stay on the voters’ good side.”

  “Are you referring to anything in particular?”

  “When I read the paper today, I got a little concerned about a few things Hoyt said. Remember what I said about the sheriff being a politician? There are times when it’s a good idea to stay away from politics, if you know what I'm saying.”

  Boone nodded. He wasn't quite sure what Lamar meant, but it seemed like a good time to nod.

  “By the way, I want you to know that you’re mama’s proud as could be that you were the one that found that woman. I may not like the way it happened, but there’s no overlooking the fact that if you and Abner hadn’t been so damned nosy, they might never have found her.”

  Boone said thanks. “But we might have saved her, if the Atamasco VFD had listened to me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. That’s not your place to decide, even if you think it is. Listen, Boone, I know you fancy yourself some kind of bone detective like your granddaddy, and you might well be one day. As smart as you are, you can be pretty much anything you want. But the fact is, you aren’t out of school yet, and there are some things you've got to let the experts figure out.”

  Boone opened his mouth to protest. He decided not to. It was a waste of oxygen.

  “So. What’s this trip to the museum for?” Lamar said after a while.

  “Research.”

  “I figured that much. What kind of research?”

  “North Carolina History class.”

  “Extra credit?”

  “Something like that.” Boone plucked his lower lip in thought. “What’s your errand for?”

  “I’m meeting with the captain of the Atamasco VFD.”

  “Extra credit?”

  “Something like that. We’re going to discuss personnel.”

  Lamar dropped Boone near the entrance of Atamasco Farms, the preserved section of the original homestead project. Like Dr. Echols had said in class, Atamasco had thrived more than the other towns, and it was obvious even from the small collection of buildings that have been preserved. It was also obvious because Atamasco was a small but growing town near the highway, while Tin City was literally nothing more than a graveyard.

  Boone surveyed the house. It was in excellent shape for house built on the cheap more than a half century before. Clapboard siding, small porch, double hung windows freshly painted. An aluminum roof, a modernized version of the tin ones those once were ubiquitous in the county. And, he noted, a two hundred and fifty gallon propane tank beside the house.

  Mrs. Yarbrough met Boone at the door of the museum, which was a renovated homestead farmhouse expanded to include a collection of artifacts. She led him from the entry way through the house to a small library in the back. After the usual pleasantries, she started pulling several books from the shelves.

  “These will get you started,” she said as Boone sat down. “I realized when you left the library that I had failed in my calling. I am a librarian first and a tour guide second. You had a taste of my guided tour and my family history, but what I failed to provide was the information that you needed. Make yourself at home, and I’ll make myself scarce. But before I do, let me give you a short history lesson."

  Boone masked a heavy and checked his watch. Hope it's a short lesson, he thought.

  According to Mrs. Yarbrough, Bragg County was a land of napping ambition. It started life as part of neighboring Pitt County, until it was split off following the civil war. The new county was named in honor of Confederate General Braxton Bragg, and after several failed attempts, the county seat was created in Stanford, a dot on the map that grew slightly larger with the building of a courthouse and nearby jail, the first two government buildings in the county.

  From the beginning the county struggled. While Greenville grew larger and more prosperous, Bragg seemed to slumber. Citizens on the coast eked out a living shrimping and fishing, and in the interior, they slowly switched from cotton farming to tobacco as the cash crop that sustained the economy for over a hundred years. There were other industries, too. Logging, trucking, small mills and blueberry farms, but tobacco was king.

  Like the farmers who worked its fields, Bragg County was never one to put on airs. It enjoyed its blueberry festivals, its Sunday brass band in the courthouse gazebo, the lack of traffic, and the slow boil of a summer day. Bragg made its money, even during the Depression, and socked it away for a rainy day that never seemed to come as the landscape of the coast changed with a steady
influx of retiring baby boomers who never made it to Florida.

  Then unthinkable happened. King Tobacco lost its crown. It was not a coup d'état, no quick overthrow and seizure of power. It began slowly, with the US government's tightening hold on allotments, with subsidies that made it more profitable not to grow tobacco than to grow it. Finally, it was the creation of the Golden Leaf Foundation, which was funded with the billions that cigarette companies were forced to pay. The Golden Leaf was intended to change the way tobacco farmers farmed, but it also included buyouts for farmers unwilling or unable to adapt. Bragg County was full of such families, who were either too old or too stubborn to change. Faced with leaving behind the crop that had enriched them, had sent their sons and daughters off to college, and paid the mortgage on the house, they left it all behind. They sold their farms lock, stock, and barrel and moved on.

  The people they sold it to were a new breed of carpetbaggers called developers. They bought huge tracts of land from Gold Leaf. Bragg County awoke from its long slumber to a frenzy of neighborhoods being built across the county line from Greenville. Large homes on small lots built quickly and with little regard to the fact that a few years early, Hurricane Floyd had buried the same areas twenty feet deep in rainwater.

  As those homes sold, the building expanded up the highways, hopscotching between existing farms to the land that had been sold out. Eventually, the frenzy found its way across the county, where it petered out on Highway 12 near Frisco. It appeared the western part of the county had escaped the sprawl, until the NC State Transportation Department announced a new bypass.

  That's when the real buying frenzy began.

  Developers who had concentrated on the coast turned their eyes to the family farms that blanketed the area covered by the proposed corridor, huge plots of land that made them drool. But the gold rush ended before it really began. Most of the deeds for the property surrounding the corridor had never been registered. Over the generations the land was left to children then grandchildren and then their own grandchildren. Ownership was so murky, no one knew who really owned what.

  "That means the land will stay undeveloped," Boone said.

  "Not so fast," Mrs. Yarbrough said. "North Carolina has a little provision called unencumbered interest, which allows the court to grant one part-owner the right to buy everyone else's shares."

  "Whether they like it or not?"

  "That would be correct. All you would need is the capital."

  "That doesn't sound fair to me. The rich owner exploiting the rest of them."

  She nodded. "That is often the way."

  "Well," he said, turning his attention to the stack of books. Lamar would be ready to go soon. "It's a moot point, because nobody living in Tin City or Nagswood has the cash to buy that much land."

  She smiled wryly. "Why do think it would have to be someone living there?"

  "What do you—"

  "I told you earlier, I have several connections with Tin City. I am not the only faculty member who does. This is a library, and it is full of information. Perhaps you should look into it."

  With another ironic smile, she disappeared into the other room, leaving him to scratch his head.

  For the next half hour, Boone poured over the materials she gave him. He found that the homesteads were created under the separate program, but they were dramatically different. Atamasco was a social experiment by a Greenville cotton baron who had diversified into electricity, railroads, and later, aerospace. During the Depression, he bought one square mile of farmland in central Bragg County and then sponsored hundreds of Dutch immigrants to settle the farms. Skilled laborers and farmers, they helped build a utopian farm village, complete with homes, stores, slaughterhouses, and granaries—everything a town needed to be self-sufficient. The baron then used his political clout with the Democratic machine to sell the idea of homestead farms to the Roosevelt administration. The government bought in, the baron cashed out, and the community survived.

  The same wasn't true of the three homesteads. Logging tycoon E.D.S. Landis tried to replicate the Atamasco experiment by selling three one thousand acre tracts of timber land to the government, creating Tin City, Nagswood, and Black Oak Hill by recruiting poor residents from New Hanover County and other parts of the Carolinas. The books didn’t mention much about the towns, except that they were not built to be self-sufficient and the residents were by and large not skilled laborers. Some farms succeeded, but most failed, and the government sold off the land at auction.

  "Mrs. Yarbrough?" Boone said as he closed the last book, collected his notes, and ventured toward the front of the house. "I'm ready to go."

  She met him there and opened the front door. "Hope you found everything you were looking for."

  "Sort of," Boone said. The information was interesting, but it couldn't help make the connection between the past and the present homesteads. "I was hoping for some more, though. I'm curious about the farmhouses that burned down recently in Tin City and Nagswood."

  "Oh?" Her ears perked up. "Were those houses built for the homestead programs?"

  "I'm not sure," he said. "'They look a lot like this one, except they were two stories."

  She clicked her tongue. "Why, that would be just terrible."

  "Why?"

  "Because if they were homestead houses, they would be historical landmarks, just like this house and the rest of the structures on the museum grounds. Destroying them is not only illegal, it is immoral, as well. I hope they catch whoever did it."

  "Did what?"

  "Burned them to the ground, of course, along with that poor woman, may she rest in peace. Don’t look so shocked, dear, this is a small town. Word travels fast among the blue haired set." Her eyes twinkled. "Good luck with whatever direction your journey leads you."

  Boone was reviewing the pages of compressed but neat handwriting in his notebook when he reached the Atamasco Volunteer Fire Department. The firefighters were washing down the pumper and doing an equipment check.

  "Hey, it's the possum," one of them called to the others. They all had a chuckle at his expense.

  Boone rolled his eyes. He knew, though, that if he objected, he would never hear the end of it. Firefighters rode one another pretty hard. It came with the territory. So he waved to them all and ducked inside the station.

  Compared to the Frisco station, the Atamasco station was a brand new building, with six bays downstairs, sleeping quarters on the second floor, and the captain's office to the side. It was there that he found Lamar.

  Boone took a seat in the bench outside the captain's office. The door was half open, and since the building was all steel and concrete, the sound of their voices carried well into the bays.

  "What a firefighter does on his own time is his own business," the captain said. "Especially a vollie. I ain't saying that I approve, mind you. He's got some old fashioned notions."

  "Old fashioned, huh?” Lamar said. “And you're saying that these notions don't keeping him from doing his job."

  "I believe that's what I just said."

  "That woman who died out in Nagswood might argue with you."

  "We settled this problem on the site, Lamar."

  "But that was before the body was found. My stepson heard her screaming. I'm wondering why Loach didn't."

  Lamar’s defending me now? Boone thought.

  The captain raised his voice. "What exactly are you hinting at? That those vollies had something to do with it?"

  "I ain't hinting nothing, captain." Lamar's chair scrapped across the floor. Boone guessed that he was now standing. "In this envelope is a formal complaint against your firefighters for dereliction of duty, refusal to render aide, and endangering the safety of a fellow volunteer."

  Lamar filing charges against another firefighter? Unbelievable.

  The other captain's chair scraped on the concrete, too. "Lamar, you want to think about this good and hard before you go after Eugene. He’s got friends, and this is a small town. R
emember that."

  "Yep," Lamar said, "I hope other folks remember that, too."

  He came out of the office a couple of seconds later. His cap was pulled down over his eyes, and he was staring at the ground, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.

  Boone left the building hard on Lamar's heels but not so close that his footsteps could be heard over traffic noise. He was glad he had heard the captains' conversations, but he knew Lamar wouldn't like him eavesdropping.

  The truck was parked across the street underneath a row of live oaks. Lamar trotted out to the yellow line, waited for a car to pass and then crossed to the parking slot. The meter showed red, indicating that Lamar had been in the fire station almost thirty minutes.

  Boone paused on the sidewalk to let several logging trucks pass. One sped by close to the side of the road, blowing dust and pine bark chips in its wake. It was a Landis Logging Company truck. They were infamous speeders, but the deputies always looked the other way because of the Landis name on the side. Boone wondered if Deputy Mercer would have the guts or stupidity to pull one over.

  The instant a break opened, Boone made a dash for it. Halfway across the highway, his cellphone started ringing. On the centerline, he checked caller ID. It was Abner.

  "Terrific timing, Doc," he said as he answered. "A logging truck's about to obliterate me."

  "I've got news."

  "Hang on." Boone jogged across the street. Instead of hopping into Lamar's vehicle, he ducked behind an appliance delivery truck. He wanted to finish the call out of the range of Lamar's ears.

  "Did you read the paper about the Nagswood victim? It said the medical examiner identified her."

  Abner scoffed. "Don’t believe everything you read. But that’s not why I called. That finger you sent? Meredith ran some tests, and it had some interesting chemical compounds on it."

  "Like what?" Boone peeked around the side of the delivery truck. Up ahead, Lamar was kicked back in the cab of the truck, his hat pulled down to cover his face, the radio cranked to a rock station. The sound of an old Molly Hatchet song drifted down the street.