Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  “Worse?”

  The Transylvanian looked at me like a child who'd asked the meaning of a curse word. “Turn the kid, make a vampire out of someone too well-known and try to keep them around. Everybody knows rich people's business. That's why they noticed the kid's new friend in the first place, isn't it?” He laughed a hollow chuckle. “No, him killing off a couple bleeders and getting out of Dodge because the pond wasn't big enough was the best possible outcome.”

  I nodded noncommittally and then sat in silence for a few moments. “So why protect Cliff?” I gestured vaguely out into the factory somewhere. “What's the angle there?”

  The Transylvanian sighed slightly. “If his daddy turned up dead in the same spot, I can only guess that vampire is back. If he's back, he's trying to send a signal: he won't be chased off this time. He's going to eliminate everyone who reminds him of that embarrassing incident from his past, and Cliff deserves better than that. I had an insight into what had happened and told him if he came here and stayed a while he'd be safe. Least I could do. He didn't have any ties to that vampire.”

  I glanced in the direction Cliff had walked, nodding with my head. “Unfortunately, as long as he's alive he's a suspect in the eyes of the mortal authorities. It doesn't really help us to keep him around, does it?”

  Something flickered in the old man's eyes and his smile was gone. I filled the vacuum with a little grin of my own. “Not that we should kill him. I'm just thinking out loud.” With that, I stood. “I appreciate your time and your explanation. I've got a lot of rounds to make, though. This area may have been absent any vampires the last time you were out and about but times have changed and I've got a lot of social calls to make in very little time.”

  The Transylvanian didn't get up or offer to see me out. He just watched me, waiting to see if he could sense the gears in my own head. I didn't say goodbye or good night or good luck, I just walked with Smiles towards the gaping doorway I'd destroyed. The six guys standing there didn’t get out of my way until the very last second, and when they did, I smelled that same human scent I’d picked up in Clyde’s car the night he was murdered. I didn’t flinch, didn’t do a thing to show it had registered. I simply grinned real big at all of them – him especially, some young guy wearing a Redskins jersey under a black hooded sweatshirt – and trod heavily down the hall, down the stairs, out across that once-manicured front lawn, back through the gatehouse, out to my car and climbed in. Smiles slid into the back seat, impossibly lithe, and I drove away at a leisurely pace. The whole time all I could think was how much I hated being lied to by anyone, much less a country bumpkin like this Transylvanian pipsqueak, and how I was going to find out why that guy had killed my best friend so that I could explain to him what was going on before I murdered him.

  3

  LaVonde had spent two extremely unproductive days at work. A couple of stories had slipped through that would probably generate snippy letters from readers upset at the eternally slipping standards of copy-editing and et cetera, et cetera. She didn't much give a damn. Well, OK, she did give a damn. That's why she'd given people assignments everywhere but Hardison and Transylvania Counties; she wanted that territory to herself for a few days. It wouldn't do, if she was going to look into a story related to yet another story in which she already had a conflict of interest – and there were no two ways about that, she knew that conflict existed and simply could not deny it – to run into one of her own reporters at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, a long way from the office.

  The thing that had gotten her so interested was this thing that H'Diane had barely even commented on when she'd prodded her a little over dinner the night before: this mysterious outsider from the case fifty-five years before. She went over the details again: shows up in town, claims to be a song chaser, hooks up with a rich orphan and a completely out-of-place old lady from the next county over, goes out into the woods and the locals turn up dead. The outsider is never seen again. Something about that stuck between her teeth and she'd worried it for hours that night as she remoted into the Citizen-Times archives and sat reading story after story, rehash after rehash. She'd spent a while on a geneaology website with the old woman's obituary, sketchy though it had been, open in another tab. Vital records were a closed matter in North Carolina so she couldn't just go look up for herself whether she had any family left. If LaVonde were to locate anyone with a connection to that old woman then it was up to her own research skills and the obsessive-compulsive habits of family historians everywhere. Ah, well; this was why they called it investigative journalism, she told herself.

  Eventually she'd turned up the existence – at the time of the old woman's death – of a cousin who lived in Asheville. From there she'd gotten that the cousin had a daughter who was getting on into late middle-age but seemed to still be alive. There was an entry in the Google telephone lookup for her, and a street address out in Flat Rock, and tax records for a car in that name. She'd sat there with the phone in her hand the next morning, looking at the number, trying to decide what to do when finally she decided it was now or never. LaVonde just had to hope that this cousin, a Jesse Beth Harvey nee Ramsey, would be willing to talk.

  East Flat Rock was, once upon a time, farm land and tiny communities of interrelated families. It had morphed over the 20th century into prime retirement real estate. New housing developments went up all over the mountains. The Citizen-Times had done a story on water use and erosion and all the other impacts of heavy, sudden development that had managed to piss a lot of people off. She wasn't involved, but she remembered the mix of people the story described: long-time families who saw the land as theirs and viewed themselves as victims of an invasion, versus transplanted retirees who saw the locals as bumpkin mouth-breathers with no objective but a pastoral history that didn't exist.

  LaVonde drove through all that, admiring the old forests, the old homes, the bed and breakfast places, the trailer parks, the signs proclaiming the availability of homes STARTING IN THE LOW $300'S according to their over-sized text. She clucked her tongue. White people with white houses on a white patch of clear-cut earth. She would never, ever understand.

  Five miles past the Carl Sandburg Estate she turned left onto a gravel track with a state sign – bent, rusting metal once painted green – that read MERRY LANE. I doubt it, she couldn't help thinking. LaVonde slid her Subaru past a few brick box houses and past a clearing and then at the very end she found an old, white clapboard house in more or less good repair with an ancient screen on the door. There was a newish station wagon of domestic make, fairly small and fairly fuel-efficient, sitting in the driveway. Fresh gravel marked a second place for a car. LaVonde pulled into it, checked her face and hair in the mirror behind the visor, got out and walked up onto the porch.

  Jesse Beth Harvey was standing behind the screen, wrapped in an old bathrobe. “Come on in, girl,” she said heavily. “Too cold to leave the door hanging wide.”

  She made their way in and Jesse Beth shut the door behind her. LaVonde noted a house that had clearly been home to generations of one side or another of this family. There were knick-knacks in every corner, immaculately clean, and portraits of Jesse Beth and a dark-skinned, smiling man LaVonde took to be the husband. Jesse Beth had warned LaVonde they would have to talk while he was in town at a job site. They'd have an hour, maybe two. LaVonde would have to leave by three in the afternoon. He don't know that side of my family, Jesse Beth had said. Whether that meant they weren't acquainted or that he didn't know something about them, LaVonde had been left wondering. She guessed the latter.

  They sat in the kitchen. LaVonde remarked on the spotlessness of it. Jesse Beth eschewed any compliments, saying it was the best she could do, no more, certainly no less. They chatted for a few minutes about LaVonde's work. She showed Jesse Beth the badge she wore to get into the building every morning. Eventually Jesse Beth seemed to relax a little. The instant coffee did something to wake up LaVonde's curiosity and finally she got right
down to brass tacks:

  “So, it was your aunt who was murdered fifty-five years ago?”

  Jesse Beth fell silent, looked at her hands, at the coffee cup in them, then back at LaVonde. “Actually she was my cousin,” Jesse Beth drawled. “But my sisters, they were older, they called her 'Aunt Ginny.' She was named Virginia.”

  “Virginia Ramsey,” LaVonde said, and she reached for her notebook.

  “I'd rather you didn't write this down,” Jesse Beth said softly.

  LaVonde had heard that a million times, so she nodded and smiled a little. She didn't need to take notes, her memory was top-notch and she didn't plan on quoting anything Jesse Beth said in any story; she was here purely on her own recognizance. It had merely been a test, and now she knew that it had been the latter before – there was something about her cousin/aunt that Jesse Beth's husband didn't know and Jesse Beth would just as soon keep secret.

  “Do you know what she was doing out there?”

  Jesse Beth pursed her lips and shook her head. “None of us ever knew. She was a real secretive person. She never told much about what was going on in her own life.”

  “Do you know if she knew the other victim?” LaVonde started to say the name, then made a little show of checking her notebook for a moment. “Phillip English?”

  Jesse Beth shook her head a little and sighed. “I doubt Aunt Ginny knew him. She didn't have much occasion to be around rich people like him.”

  “What did she do for a living?”

  Jesse Beth sought around for a moment. “This and that. Took care of babies. Birthed them for some folks who liked...” Jesse Beth cleared her throat. “People who wanted something more traditional.”

  “Mid-wifing?”

  Jesse Beth nodded and the ghost of a smile appeared at her mouth.

  “And you? Do you do any mid-wifing?”

  Jesse Beth turned a shade paler, and LaVonde smiled back. “Is it a tradition in your family?”

  Jesse Beth looked away. “Kind of.”

  LaVonde nodded, cleared her throat, sat there in silence for a few moments, then really opened with both barrels. “Was Aunt Ginny a witch-woman?”

  Jesse Beth arched one eyebrow in stark... something. LaVonde started to classify it as disapproval and after two seconds decided it was more like defense: the startled surprise of a certain kind of Southern lady caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “What makes you ask that?”

  LaVonde laced her fingers together in her lap. “Phillip English had been seen in the weeks prior to his death in the company of a guy from out of town, said he was a professor from a college up north somewhere and that he was here as a song-chaser. Are you familiar with them?”

  Jesse Beth produced a tiny, guarded smile and nodded. “I had some kin who were recorded, way back, 1930's. Part of the New Deal, they said. They got paid to sing the old songs, some spirituals, that kind of thing.” Her nostrils flared briefly. “The reason it was talked about in my family is, see, the fellow recording them wanted them to sing old slave songs and...” She laughed abruptly. “They told him no. Told him no so loud he left town.” She smiled again, that same smile she'd had about mid-wifing.

  LaVonde smiled back and nodded at her. “Well, here's what that makes me think: if he were legit, he'd have to have someone local to show him around, take him to the sorts of people and places where he could hear those old songs. By the 1950's, most of them were already faded around here. If he'd gone up to, say, Swain County? Sure, he could stumble around and find some shape-note singers and study them and get a real warm welcome as long as he behaved himself, but here? This far down the mountain you'd need someone who knew the place already. If your Aunt Ginny was a mid-wife or...” LaVonde ran her tongue across her teeth under her lip, smiled again, “What they called a witch-woman, she'd have that knowledge. Lots of people back then still kept a lot of older folk traditions. A woman who could deliver babies, take care of them, maybe...” LaVonde waved a hand vaguely. “Maybe cure warts, an illness here or there, set a bone and rehabilitate them when it knitted?” She pointed the end of the sentence up as a question, trailing off.

  “A lot of people still keep those folk ways, Ms. Burke.”

  LaVonde stopped herself from looking surprised. She just smoothed her features over and said, quite neutrally, “I've heard that, but never had the privilege of meeting any of them myself.”

  “Privilege?” Jesse Beth looked wary again: defensive in some way.

  “Well,” and LaVonde paused to let the gears spin. “Those arts are considered long-lost in most places. Seeing someone who still practiced them would be like getting to see a...” She took a sip of coffee. “A rare and beautiful antique that's still going strong.”

  Jesse Beth sat back a little. “What, like Larry's furrow?”

  LaVonde wrinkled her brow. “Furrow?”

  Jesse Beth chuckled a little, nodded her head in the direction of the back yard. “Larry's got a garden patch out back. We grow our own corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, all the vegetables the store will rob you for. We grew bell peppers one year when they were a dollar a piece at the store. That's good money.” LaVonde smiled, still not really following and Jesse Beth chuckled. “Anyway, Larry's got this furrow – it's a big, old, iron furrow, like a little plow. You use it to run a shallow trench through plowed ground. It's good for corn, beans, lots of kinds of plants that go in a straight line from one another. A man can push it by himself. See, once upon a time we were told we'd get a mule, a plow and forty acres. Now, people around here weren't as bad as they could be in other places – this county voted 9 to 1 against secession, you know, and slavery was just about unheard of and there were a few free blacks living out here, in the country places, where no one had to see them and no one could much be bothered to hurt them – so Larry's great-grandad eventually got the furrow but neither the mule nor the forty acres. Larry still uses that same furrow. Parts of the big wheel on it are about worn down to paper, but it still works and he still uses it. You mean like that?”

  LaVonde still had a curious expression on her face but nodded. “Yeah. Like that. People kept the folk ways to make the fields produce, to keep the cows healthy, to make the children strong. Seeing that – like Larry's furrow – would be a privilege.”

  Jesse Beth smiled quietly and then sat all the way back in her chair, drained the last of her coffee. “Witch-women did all that, sure,” she said. “But that ain't all. What do you think people did before, say, Roe versus Wade?” Jesse Beth smiled a little less. “What do you think they did when a baby was born the wrong color? What do you think they did when a baby was born the wrong sex?” Jesse Beth clucked her tongue. “A witch-woman didn't just make things grow. Sometimes she made things go away. A lot of time that was real nice work – finding a baby a good home when the mother knew the father would be liable to kill it and her, helping a difficult labor get through, explaining things to a girl who'd just her first time of the month. It wasn't all pretty or wholesome, though, Ms. Burke. Sometimes it was ugly.”

  “Are you saying your Aunt Ginny was...” LaVonde had no idea how to finish the sentence.

  “She fixed problems. That's what witch-women do. If a community is too stubborn or backwards or narrow-minded or full of itself to admit it's got problems, someone has to fix those problems when they happen anyway. You make a lot of friends doing that kind of work.”

  “Not all friends, I'd guess.”

  “No, not all friends.” Jesse Beth smacked her lips, stood up to make another cup of coffee. LaVonde sat in silence as Jesse Beth spooned more Folgers into her cup, took the still-hot kettle and poured water in, stirred, added a little milk from a paper carton.

  “Is that soy milk?” LaVonde was more than slightly surprised to see what she thought of as a sure mark of yuppiedom in Jesse Beth's personal Kitchen of the Ages.

  Jesse Beth turned around, stirring with the spoon she'd used before, then put the spoon back on its saucer by the stove. “It's good for w
omen of a certain age,” she replied demurely. “Keeps us... active.”

  LaVonde fought back the chortle, cleared her throat, smiled. “Okay. So, back to Aunt Ginny. Would Phillip English have hired her to fix a problem?”

  Jesse Beth shrugged a little. “Maybe. But if it was a problem big enough to make him drive all the way out to Pisgah Forest, where nobody would know him, and hire an old black witch-woman who could barely see the end of her own arm anymore, well...” Jesse Beth took a sip of coffee, smiled. “It was a very bad problem.”

  “Gotten the wrong girl pregnant?”

  Jesse Beth made a pffft noise of dismissal. “Rich people never lacked for doctors to do their abortions, Ms. Burke.”

  “So what was it?” LaVonde tried not to sound exasperated, but she was. Jesse Beth was dancing around something, flirting with it, in a way that annoyed LaVonde still even though she'd had a thousand interviews go the same way. That this wasn't for her, she realized abruptly, that it was for H'Diane, is what annoyed her. She wanted to solve this problem. She didn't want the woman she loved wandering around in the dark in the middle of a murder investigation.

  “Something old, to go to such an old woman. Something no one saw anymore, or talked about, anyway. Something dangerous. Something that scared him so bad he couldn't tell anyone else but an old woman no one would ever believe.” Jesse Beth was staring at the coffee intently. LaVonde glanced over at it and couldn't see anything so special. It was like Jesse Beth was staring at herself in the mirror, or something she'd never noticed until she caught it out of the corner of her eye as she walked by. She seemed to sink into a quiet reverie, and finally, “Yes. Something old and dark. I've thought about that a lot, Ms. Burke, and every time I think on it, that's where I end up. He was scared of something old and terrible and he went to a witch-woman because he thought only a little magic could save him.”