Bloody Kin (10 page)

“Just them pictures Jake sent me.”

“Okay,” said Poole. “Now y’all stop me if I get any of this wrong, but the way I understand it is that Jake Honeycutt, James Tyrrell, this Bernie Covington, and a young man they called Kid met up together in Vietnam, right?”

“They was on patrol together,” said Lacy.

“And just by happenstance,” added Kate. “James and Jake met in basic training and they didn’t really know the other two until that dreadful patrol.”

“They got separated and everybody with them was killed except those four, right?” asked Poole.

Kate, Gordon, and Lacy nodded.

“Then a sniper tried to shoot Jake, but your brother and this Covington killed him first and later they camped in an old ruined temple where they almost bumped into a Vietcong patrol?”

“That’s what Jake writ me,” agreed Lacy.

“And so far as you know, Jake Honeycutt and James Tyrrell had nothing to do with Covington or the fourth man after Vietnam?”

Troubled, Kate murmured her agreement with the others but she began to see what Sheriff Poole was driving at.

“But they are connected, aren’t they, Sheriff? James is dead, Jake is dead, and now Bernie Covington. Oh, God!” she cried as the full meaning broke upon her.

“It
wasn’t
an accident, was it?”

C
HAPTER
12

Through the babble of voices, Kate pinned Lacy’s eyes with her own blazing glance.

“Jake always swore he was careful with guns,” she said. “Why did you let them call it an accident?”

The old man glared back at her and a muscle twitched in his bony jaw. “I fetched the law out ’fore I moved him, didn’t I?”

“Now let’s not everybody get excited,” Sheriff Poole soothed diplomatically.

“No one took anything for granted, Kate,” said Dwight. “We treated it like any unexplained death: took pictures, fingerprinted the gun, searched the whole area inch by inch. Jake was tangled up in the barbed wire; his gun was right where he would have dropped it. No scuffling of the pine straw like there’d have been if he’d fought with someone and besides, he didn’t have a single mark of any fight—no bruises, no cuts on the back of his hands where he might have hit anybody. Or been hit for that matter.”

“Then how—”

“We can’t say,” said Poole. “For all we know, it might still be a real accident. Except now, you see, we look at your husband gone, Mr. Tyrrell’s brother dead, and with this Covington man murdered, well, we’ve got to wonder.”

He turned to Gordon. “Mr. Tyrrell, I never rightly got all the details about your boat accident down in Mexico. Was there a typhoon or did the engine explode or what?”

“It was a storm,” Gordon said, his voice hesitant.

“But you don’t remember!” Kate exclaimed. “You had a concussion and when you came to, you didn’t remember anything at all about that day.”

“I didn’t, but Mrs. McDermott did,” he reminded her. “And one of the crewmen. Both said a sudden squall came up, the main mast snapped, and the boat broke apart.”

“They ever find the pieces?” asked Poole.

Gordon shook his head.

Dwight looked gratified. “So you can’t swear somebody didn’t weaken the mast ahead of time or maybe monkey with some of the equipment so that everything’d fly apart as soon as they had to take any extra strain?”

“No, of course not,” said Gordon. “But that’s all so iffy.”

“Law work mostly is till we get all the facts,” said Poole.

“Far as that goes,” offered Miss Emily, “three men out of four getting themselves killed is sort of iffy, too.”

“Mother,” said Rob.

She ignored him. “Makes you sort of wonder where that kid is, doesn’t it?”

“We’ve asked the army about him,” Poole acknowledged. “Won’t hurt to know if he’s alive and well somewhere in Utah, say.”

“Instead of skulking around here, stealing back all the pictures of himself so we won’t know what he looks like?” Gordon suggested thoughtfully.

“There’s that possibility,” Poole agreed. “Dwight?”

The younger law officer shifted his bulky frame self-consciously. “This is more iffiness, Kate, Mr. Tyrrell, Mr. Lacy, but I hope you’ll hear me out. Like Sheriff Poole here says, we have to wonder when we hear that four men served together fifteen years or so ago and now at least three of them are dead within six months of each other. That drowning and Jake’s shooting? They look like pure and simple accidents; but what happened to Bernie Covington early Thursday morning was no accident. Somebody smashed his head in and threw him down the packhouse steps.”

While Dwight spoke, Kate glanced around the wide table. Gordon and Lacy were engrossed in the detective’s words and Miss Emily seemed to be enjoying this inside look at her older son’s work. Rob’s pointed face was blank as he stared into his coffee cup. She felt Tom Whitley’s eyes upon her, yet when she looked toward him, he quickly shied away. Sheriff Poole gazed at them all with a genial expression that didn’t quite mask his watchful air.

“—so we know Covington was a crook,” Dwight was saying. “Mixed up in drugs, trained in jungle fighting, apt to get violent. A man like that wouldn’t think twice about killing. Now what if he and that younger man teamed up to get rid of James and Jake because of something that happened on that patrol?”

“Jake wouldn’t have kept something like that a secret,” Kate protested.

“Maybe it was something he knew without knowing he knew. Or else—Mr. Lacy, you said Jake told you those four had to camp all night in a temple or something with Vietcong soldiers swarming all around?”

“That’s right,” said Lacy.

“Well, maybe they found something valuable that night, a gold idol or something they couldn’t take with them then so they buried it, planning to go back after the war.”

Rob tried not to grin and Gordon snorted, “Shades of Jungle Jim! Next you’ll tell us they stole the ruby eye out of a giant Buddha and now, fifteen years later, the ancient curse is finally catching up with them.”

Dwight’s rugged face turned a dull red.

“But there was a map,” Kate said unwillingly. “Remember, Gordon? Part of an army terrain map that had been torn out of a larger map.”

Gordon’s derisive smile faded and he twisted in his chair to face her. “I
do
remember. James had something like that, too. Do you suppose—?”

Common sense reclaimed him. “No, it really is too preposterous. If James and Jake had shared a secret like that—”

“They didn’t realize!” exclaimed Miss Emily, who loved thriller adventure movies and was enchanted by the idea of hidden gold or jewels or foreign idols. “Say Jake and James didn’t know about the treasure but they each kept a map, or maybe half a map, of where that temple was located. Say Covington and that other soldier were the two who actually found and stashed the treasure. And when they couldn’t find it again after the war, why wouldn’t they come looking for the maps they knew James and Jake had kept?”

“Oh come on, Mother!” laughed Rob. “This isn’t
Raiders of the Lost
Ark
.”

“It could be,” she said stubbornly. “Why else would Covington be murdered? He and his friend probably killed James and Jake and stole the maps and pictures and then had a falling out. I’ll bet you that other man’s on his way back to Vietnam right now with both halves of the map to guide him to the treasure.”

Her plump little face was so earnest under its fluffy mobcap of improbably red curls that Rob reached across the table and patted her hand. She snatched it away indignantly. “Such things have happened, Bo,” she insisted.

“Maybe,” the sheriff conceded, “but I never heard of such in Colleton County. Course, times are changing,” he added, remembering some of the bizarre cases that had popped up in the last three or four years as more and more strangers moved into the county. He still found it difficult to pronounce the word “transvestism” and he’d never even heard of “sexual asphyxiation” until the most sophisticated of his detectives reclassified as accidental a death that the coroner originally called a suicide last year.

Hidden Buddhist idols, torn treasure maps, and murders disguised as accidents seemed only marginally more outlandish.

“We’ll have to wait and see what the army gives us,” he said. “In the meantime, Mr. Tyrrell, how about you tell us the name of that place in Mexico y’all were staying at so Dwight can see if they’ve learned anything new about that boat since Christmas.”

“If you want to stop by Gilead,” said Gordon, “I think I may even have the telephone number of the Costa Verde police prefect.”

“Fine,” said the sheriff. “And Dwight can show me the packhouse on the way over, if that’s all right, Mr. Lacy?”

“It’s
hers,”
Lacy said stonily. “And I’ve got work to do.”

“I’ll ride over, too, Gordon,” said Rob. “I ought to check the big pieces of silver against the inventory, if nothing else.”

The sunny kitchen was abruptly emptied of men.

Kate gathered up cups and saucers, stray spoons and ashtrays, and carried them to the sink of soapy water. Miss Emily automatically flapped open a dish towel and began drying the glassware, but tactful silence was not her strongest point and soon her worried eyes peered up to Kate’s.

“Does this make it worse, honey?” she asked.

Kate rinsed a saucer mechanically and set it in the drain rack. “What do you mean?”

“Is it worse knowing somebody might have killed Jake deliberately?”

Kate stared at her with a welling impatience. Had Miss Emily been widowed so long she had forgotten the searing pain, the ache of missing someone more dear than—

“At least now you know it wasn’t Jake’s fault,” said Miss Emily, busy with the dish towel; and the truth of her observation sliced open the knots that had constricted Kate ever since that October Sunday.

With the possibility of murder came a realization of what grief had done to her. She had blamed Jake for his own death, for deserting her when she loved him so desperately. But what if it wasn’t his carelessness? If he hadn’t gone by his own actions? What if someone else had taken him from her?

Miss Emily was right. Somehow that would make it a little easier.

C
HAPTER
13

As an adventurous child visiting her Aunt Bessie, DeWanda Sanders had often sneaked over to Gilead and explored its vast decayed emptiness. She had watched Gilead’s restoration with interest after Patricia and Philip Carmichael bought it from old Mr. Franklin Gilbert and as a teenager, she had often helped out at big parties or when the house overflowed with guests; therefore she knew more about Gilead’s ornaments and furnishings than the rest of the current staff.

While Gordon Tyrrell took the sheriff and Dwight Bryant up to the third floor attic to examine the burgled trunk, DeWanda accompanied Rob Bryant through Gilead’s beautiful rooms. The russet haired lawyer scanned the inventory sheets, reading aloud the most valuable of each room’s bibelots, and the young black maid either pointed it out or told him its current location.

She knew that the glass-domed 1847 skeleton clock had been sent to a clockmaker in Atlanta for regulating and that the study’s jasper cigarette box was presently in Gordon’s private sitting room. In the butler’s pantry, she was able to confirm that every silver bowl, goblet, or serving piece was in its proper slot.

To Mary Pat, the adults seemed to be playing games, part treasure hunt, part hide-and-seek. She scampered up and down the wide staircase, now up in the attic with its mysterious boxes and trunks, now down in the drawing room tugging on Rob’s hand to come see how she’d put the shepherdess on the mantle in her bedroom so it could keep Jemima Puddle-Duck and Princess Leia company.

Indulging her, for it made no difference to him in which order he took the rooms, Rob followed Mary Pat upstairs and along the hall

“Hey,” said DeWanda. “You’re going the wrong way, honey.”

But Mary Pat raced to throw open the door of a small guestroom, “This is my really truly room,” she said. “This is my bed and that’s my chair.”

“And where’re your clothes and all your pretty toys,” laughed DeWanda, who thought Mary Pat was teasing.

“Somebody put them down yonder,” said Mary Pat, her solemn little face troubled. “But this is my real room.”

Rob hesitated. He recognized that this was another manifestation of the child’s strange insistence that places and things could change irrationally and arbitrarily, but he wasn’t certain whether one was supposed to humor her and agree, or try to reason her out of it.

DeWanda had caught on, too, and her dark eyes melted in concern.

“This is a real nice room, honey,” she said, “but your other room’s pretty, too, and didn’t you want to show Mr. Rob your china dolls?”

Mary Pat was immediately diverted. Chattering of Jemima, Princess Leia, and Princess Georgiana, she willingly skipped along between Rob and DeWanda down to the room that had been hers from birth.

Princess Leia was, of course, a plastic
Star Wars
toy sold by the millions, the Beatrix Potter figurine was modern porcelain, “Princess Georgiana” a Royal Doulton antique. Mary Pat loved them equally and gave Rob a scornful look when he suggested that she should be extra careful with the shepherdess.

“Manners, Mary Pat,” Sally Whitley reminded with a gentle smile. That young woman had been sorting through Mary Pat’s winter wardrobe when the three entered the room, and she paused with a little fur-trimmed parka in her hands while Rob explained their errand.

Sally Whitley had small delicate bones and an old-fashioned prettiness. She wore a blue denim shirtwaist with white cuffs and collar. The severely cut dress was a size too large and, instead of lending maturity, made her look like a teenager playing schoolteacher. Her fair hair was very fine and wisped into natural ringlets around a thin face. A slight overbite gave her a tremulous, vulnerable look. She was naturally shy and her wide hazel eyes usually dropped first if challenged by the eyes of a more assertive person. She reminded Rob of an easily startled woods creature, a young wild rabbit perhaps, timorous and ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.

“I’m sure there’s nothing missing here,” she told Rob.

Mary Pat’s quarters consisted of a large corner bedroom, a playroom and a modern bath. Patricia had chosen bright furnishings for the nursery and, except for a low Martha Washington rocker, everything was contemporary with practical, washable surfaces. The only real item of value was a gold-trimmed mother-of-pearl comb and brush set Philip Carmichael had impulsively bought in a London antique store when Mary Pat was six weeks old.

“It’s just a pro forma exercise,” said Rob, ticking the dresser set off his inventory. “Whoever broke into the attic probably did it before you and your husband moved in and it doesn’t look like they were interested in anything but James Tyrrell’s trunk.”

“His war souvenirs,” Sally nodded. “It seems so odd. To take pictures and papers when this house is full of expensive things.”

It’s on account of that dead man,” DeWanda said knowingly.

“Sheriff Bo’s up looking in the attic right now, but he said he wanted to talk to all of us before he left.”

“The sheriff?” An expression of alarm flitted across Sally Whitley’s face.

“It’s only another formality,” Rob soothed. “He’ll want to know if you-all saw any strangers in the neighborhood last week. There may have been a second man.”

“He was under draft age back then, so he’d probably be in his late twenties or early thirties by now,” said Dwight Bryant. “We don’t have a picture of him yet or any description, but Covington—that’s the dead man’s name—he had black hair and that black mole on his right cheek; so two strangers together, with Yankee accents probably, should have been noticed.”

The room in which they’d gathered served as both dining and daytime sitting room for the staff. The Whitleys’ quarters were on the other side of the kitchen (an intercom connected their room to Mary Pat’s almost directly overhead), and the cook and two maids commuted from nearby towns.

“Yankees aren’t that noticeable anymore,” complained Mrs. Faircloth, a fiftyish woman whose beanbag figure betrayed a fondness for her own cooking. “I remember when I was little and Sam Carroll came to church the first time with his brand-new Philadelphia wife. I never heard such pretty talk in all my born days and I followed her around all afternoon and even stood on the pew bench behind her to hear if she sang her words like she talked them; but nowadays, shootfire! With television and so many strangers moving in, I wouldn’t turn around twice for a Yankee accent.”

The maids murmured agreement.

“Mrs. Whitley?”

Sally Whitley had sent a reluctant Mary Pat out to play and now looked as if she wished she could have been excused, too. “I guess we’re the western branch of the new invasion,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“From California, aren’t you?” asked the sheriff.

“That’s right. So a different accent wouldn’t seem odd to Tom or me.” She glanced around the room. “I don’t know why Tom isn’t here. Shall I go find him?”

“We talked to him up in the attic,” said Dwight, “and I think he said something about measuring for cabinets he’s going to build Mrs. Honeycutt.”

“Then he must have told you that we’ve only lived here a few months ourselves. Even if we’d seen those two men, we wouldn’t have realized that they didn’t belong here.”

“Let’s see now,” said Bo Poole. “I believe y’all came to Gilead when? Last September?”

“That’s right. Tom’s enrolled at State. We needed a place to live and Tom needed a part-time job, so when we heard that Gilead wanted a live-in caretaker—”

“It was listed with the Student Aid Office, didn’t you say, Rob?” asked Dwight.

Rob nodded and started to elucidate, but Bo Poole broke in.

“I believe I heard someone say you’re a teacher, Mrs. Whitley?”

“Yes, I’d applied at several schools, but all the positions were filled before we arrived. I was working part-time at a day-care center when Mr. Tyrrell called to ask if I’d look after Mary Pat full-time.”

“She was a lifesaver!” Gordon said warmly. “At the last possible moment, Mary Pat’s nursemaid categorically refused to leave Costa Verde; I could hardly believe our luck when I realized Gilead had a fully-certified kindergarten teacher in residence.”

It was only after a quick lunch at his mother’s and while he was driving back to Raleigh in time for the Carolina-Duke semifinal, that Rob remembered that he hadn’t clarified his answer to Dwight. A minor technicality, the lawyer decided. What difference did it make that Tom Whitley had approached him directly about the caretaker’s job at Gilead rather than through the Student Aid Office?

Overhead the sun gradually faded and the Carolina blue sky dulled to gray. He wasn’t really superstitious, Rob told himself, but he would have felt better about the upcoming game if God had left the sky blue.

“Looks as if we might have rain before dark,” said Kate, glancing out the packhouse’s single window.

“Maybe not.”

Tom Whitley had lost a little of his initial shyness with her, but Kate was learning that the Californian was almost as sparing with words as Lacy. In the hour that they had spent measuring and planning, he hadn’t offered a single personal comment. By this time, Kate would normally have the basic life history of any other workman.

Jake used to tease her about it and occasionally, when he was feeling frugal and the repairman or painter was charging fifteen or twenty dollars an hour, he would banish her to the other end of the apartment and plead with her not to come offering the man a pot of coffee and a willing ear.

“It cost us seventeen-fifty for you to hear about his wife’s troubles with their daughter-in-law,” he would grumble. “Couldn’t you just go watch a soap opera?”

But cheerful comments and tactful questions did little to loosen Tom Whitley’s tongue. “You’d think he was paying me instead of the other way around,” thought Kate.

Whitley added a final notation to the long list of materials and supplies needed to convert the dark packhouse into a well-lit studio.

“I’ll stop by the building supply place in Raleigh first thing Monday morning,” he told Kate.

Their eyes touched briefly, then he ducked away. “I can carry enough on my pickup to get started with till they deliver the rest.”

It was his longest speech that afternoon.

In the nursery wing at Gilead, Sally Whitley paused and cocked her head in a listening attitude. She no longer heard Mary Pat’s piping treble from the next room where the child had been talking to herself.

Sally rose and crossed the colorful floral carpet and peeped into the playroom. All was still and quiet.

“Mary Pat?”

She hesitated indecisively in the doorway. Technically, Mary Pat was no longer a baby and she didn’t like for Sally to hover around every single minute; but if anything happened to Mary Pat, Sally thought nervously, Mr. Tyrrell would blame her.

Fortunately, before she had to decide whether or not to go hunting for her charge, she saw Mary Pat curled up on the cushioned window seat. In the last month, Mary Pat had begun to insist she was too big to take naps. As a result, she often fell asleep in odd places three or four times a week.

Relieved, Sally tucked a light blanket around the wiry little body and went back to work. For the next hour at least, she would know exactly where Mary Pat was.

She threaded clean laces into a pair of small shoes and added sneakers to the shopping list of spring clothes she was compiling. Mary Pat continued to outgrow things before she wore them out and the current sneakers were getting too tight.

Mr. Tyrrell had told her to use her own judgment, but it was probably a waste of time to pack up even these few things, thought Sally, fitting the lid on a storage box full of heavy knitted items. She knew money was no consideration, yet these were so pretty: imported, hand-worked sweaters of cashmere and mohair. Expensive, too. But knits did stretch some and unless Mary Pat grew like a weed this summer . . . at any rate, the caps and mittens would certainly go another season and she could wait until next fall to determine if the sweaters would still fit.

Assuming they were still here. Mr. Tyrrell might decide she wasn’t all that good with Mary Pat, or Tom might lose control with the wrong person and—No!

Her thin face tightened and she pushed away that dark memory. It was only because Tom was under so much pressure at the time—that army lieutenant, the forced changeover to civilian life—even a well man would have exploded. And he hadn’t hurt her. Not really. He’d almost gone off his head with remorse afterward and ever since, he’d been so gentle.

There was nothing to worry about, she told herself. Life here was slower paced. No pressures; only the classes at State, a few hours of physical work here on the grounds or the odd jobs like remodeling Mrs. Honeycutt’s packhouse. Those army doctors were all wrong about Tom. He was just fine.

Mary Pat slept without stirring, so Sally carried the carton of winter clothes up to the attic. As she recalled, there was a trunk of summer things there from Mexico. She really ought to bring it down and see if any of them would still fit Mary Pat before they went shopping.

It was almost too warm up under the eaves of the roof. Sally slid the carton in beside Mary Pat’s trunk and lifted the lid. Inside were several little sundresses and a stack of bright cotton shorts and shirts.

As long as she was up here, Sally decided, she might as well bring down the few warm weather things she and Tom had brought from California. The new matched bags stood in a neat group off to one side: but in the attic’s dim light, it took her a moment to locate Tom’s battered old suitcase behind an unused bedstead.

Tom had wanted to throw the bag away when they came East, but everything wouldn’t fit into the new luggage her roommates had given them as a wedding present; so she’d stuffed their cutoffs, tank tops, bathing suits, and flip-flops into the case and here it had sat since last fall.

Downstairs, she stopped by the nursery to deposit Mary Pat’s things and to switch on the intercom, then lugged the old bag down the back stairs to their quarters where she slung it onto the bed and clicked open the latches.