Bloody Kin (12 page)

“And another two over at Gilead that I bought from Lacy last week,” said Gordon. “I know an open fireplace is an inefficient way to heat a room, but there’s nothing like a pile of roaring logs to warm the spirit on a cold rainy night.”

As Gordon soliloquized on the beauty of an open fire, Kate felt her own heat rise. How dared Lacy sell her wood to someone else!

“Lacy must be what? Seventy? Seventy-five?” asked Gordon. “I don’t know where he finds the strength to do all this at his age.”

Gordon’s words restored Kate’s sense of fairness. After all, why should she expect Lacy to work so hard for nothing? He’d said quite frankly that he and Tucker Sauls were going shares on the diseased wood and hadn’t she told him to do whatever he wished? Would she go back on her word just because he might turn a few dollars extra?

She was instantly ashamed of her pettiness. Jake was gone and she was left with serious financial obligations, but that didn’t mean she had to turn into a penny-pinching shrew. There was nothing so unpleasant as a person who counts the cost of everything, she lectured herself. If two or three cords of firewood or a few thousand board feet of planks could give Lacy a little financial profit, she wouldn’t begrudge them. Besides, if she had to hire someone to come in and cull out the borer-infested trees, she probably would spend three times whatever Lacy and Tucker Sauls were going to make.

In a burst of generosity, Kate decided that she would pay Lacy’s bill at Mrs. Fowler’s store. That ought to set things even.

Seated on the next stump, Gordon drew idle patterns in the sand with the tip of his cane. Kate had been unaware of his scrutiny until he said, “I’m glad that worked out all right.”

“Hm?”

“Whatever was bothering you. Your face is like a book,” he teased.

“First all serious as you remembered something that was bothering you, and now a satisfied that-settles-that look. Am I right?”

His lopsided smile made Kate smile, too.

“Very close,” she said. “I’ve just decided I’m not going to let Lacy Honeycutt change me into a self-pitying miser.”

“Has he been trying to?” His cane nudged a fat black beetle into scuttling retreat.

“Probably not,” Kate admitted. “But that’s the way I’ve been reacting. He doesn’t like me and even though the farm’s mine now and I’m paying all the bills, he—”

“He isn’t properly appreciative?”

His tone was sardonic and Kate flushed.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No?”

“Of course not!” she said hotly. “I don’t expect any praise or thanks. Not really. But Lacy acts as if CP&L gives away electricity and groceries appear in the pantry by osmosis; as if there’s no connection between me and his daily comfort.”

“A man as proud as Lacy Honeycutt? I imagine he’s well aware of every flourish of your checkbook,” said Gordon. “Very few men enjoy being kept.”

There was a slight bitterness in his tone and Kate was suddenly reminded that it was Elaine’s money, money that came from the sale of her family home or as an allowance from her sister Patricia, that had supported them and paid for their carefree lifestyle.

In many respects, Elaine had retained her Old South attitude toward marriage: a woman may be richer, stronger, brighter, but a good wife never lets her husband know she knows it. Publicly and, for all Kate knew, privately, too, Elaine had deferred to Gordon’s wishes. They had lived in modest luxury, free to hunt, ski, and sail, and they had seemed truly affectionate and happy with each other; nevertheless, until Patricia’s death gave him a separate allowance as Mary Pat’s co-guardian (and that only for so long as he and Elaine remained married), Gordon had been landless gentry and dependent upon his wife’s income.

Kate felt uncomfortably embarrassed, but Gordon seemed unaware of the direction his words had made her take. He looked out across the field and tried to explain Lacy to her.

“That poor old man probably doesn’t have a loose nickel to call his own. He was never in the army, so there’s no military pension; and I doubt if he ever earned enough farm income to pay social security, so unless Jake left him something?”

“N-no,” said Kate, stricken to realize for the first time the full extent of Lacy’s poverty. “We just made simple wills. Everything to each other. I never gave it much thought, and Jake—”  Her voice broke. “Jake didn’t expect Lacy to outlive him.”

Gordon reached over and patted her clenched hands.

“I know, honey,” he said, “I know. Elaine and I were the same.” In the past two weeks, they had hashed and rehashed all the possible explanations for Jake’s death and Covington’s murder. If his investigation had produced any real results, Dwight hadn’t shared it with them; so Kate and Gordon kept circling back to the who and why in total frustration.

“One thing I haven’t told you,” said Gordon, his hand still covering hers.

She looked at him questioningly.

“I know you think Southerners put an inordinate stress on bloodlines and families. We probably get too much Old Testament drilling when we’re Sunday school kids—Deuteronomy and Chronicles.”

His voice slipped into a parody of a tent revivalist’s singsong patter.

“And I say unto you, Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob and Esau, and Jacob begat Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and God knows how many more besides Joseph and Benjamin.”             

Kate began to laugh in spite of herself.

“Anyhow,” Gordon said, serious again. “I’m glad Jake begat, Kate. It’s good to know that part of him continues.”

Kate was moved by his earnestness. “Thank you, Gordon.”

Once more Gordon remembered lying in the hospital with most of the grogginess cleared and his physical pain ebbing as he tried to get used to the idea of Elaine and his brother being gone forever. Then Rob Bryant’s call had jolted him all over again with the news that Jake was dead, too. Coming when it did, that final death hit him worse than the others somehow.

“I’m the last of our Tyrrell branch and Mary Pat’s the closest thing to a child of my own that I’ll ever have, but I hope you’ll let me share Jake’s baby—maybe teach him some of the things Jake would have.”

“I’d like that,” Kate said tremulously.

She had never before realized that Gordon felt so warmly toward Jake. But then, she thought, it was here on a visit with James that Jake had introduced him to his cousin Elaine. Except for Jake, Gordon Tyrrell and Elaine Gilbert might never have met or fallen in love.

It was an emotional moment, an exchanged awareness of how much each of them had lost, but also of how much there was to live for. No more words were necessary. Gordon’s hand dropped away and Kate sat quietly, grateful for his friendship.

They missed Mary Pat almost immediately.

A few minutes earlier, she had been perched halfway up a persimmon tree. Her little pile of Indian artifacts still lay at the foot of the tree, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“Mary Pat?” called Gordon.

The field cut into the woods so deeply at that point that, from where they sat, they could hear the creek rushing along its rocky bed in the dip beyond. Kate stood up on one of the taller tree stumps and saw a flash of Mary Pat’s red sweater through the underbrush several hundred feet away.

“There she is. Mary Pat!”

The child kept going.

“She can’t hear us over the creek.”

“Oh, Lord,” Gordon sighed, heaving himself to his feet. “Next we’ll be fishing her out of the water.”

They pushed through a tangle of vines and briars.

“Don’t worry,” Kate said. “The creek’s only a couple of feet deep along here.”

“She knows she’s not supposed to go near it alone, though. It’s not like her to disobey.”

They reached the creek bank, but Mary Pat was not there. Kate scrambled over a half-submerged tree trunk and Gordon struggled to follow. His leg had strengthened in the last few weeks, but he was not yet up to cross-country broken field running.

“Be careful, Kate. You’re going to fall and hurt yourself. Try calling her again.”

Kate was still crashing through last winter’s dead vines and fallen branches. She had spotted Mary Pat through this year’s new growth.

“Come on up a little higher on the bank,” she called back to Gordon. “There seems to be an old lane here.”

The going was a bit easier and Gordon shouted Mary Pat’s name at the top of his voice.

A few hundred feet upstream, the child turned and saw them and gaily ran back to join them.

Gordon began to scold her for coming to the creek alone. “I wasn’t going down to the water,” Mary Pat protested.

One of her ponytail ribbons had come undone and Kate automatically retied the bow.

“Where were you going, sweetheart?” she asked, picking stray twigs and leaf scraps from the dark curls.

“I wanted to see what was shining and you and Uncle Gordon were talking and I’m not supposed to interrupt grown-ups,” she said, looking up at Gordon with candid calculation.

“You’re not turning into a prepubescent Portia, are you?” Gordon asked severely.

“What’s that?”

“A smart-aleck little girl who obeys the letter of the law but not the spirit.”

Mary Pat dropped her head. “No, sir,” she whispered.

“You owe Cousin Kate an apology for worrying her like that,” Gordon scolded.

“I’m sorry, Cousin Kate.”

“That’s better,” he said. “Now let’s go back and get your arrowheads and then—”

“But I want to see what’s shining,” said Mary Pat. “Please, Uncle Gordon.”

She caught at his hand and tried to stop him, but Gordon had already turned back the way they came.

“We’ve walked far enough for one day,” he said, still a little cross. “Cousin Kate and I are too tired for any wild-goose chases.”

“I am getting a bit tired,” Kate admitted. “I never noticed this old lane before, but it probably comes out near the highway just below Gilead. It might be shorter than walking back through the field. Easier too, probably. Why don’t we try it?”

“What about the arrowheads?”

“We could come back for them tomorrow,” said Mary Pat. “Oh, please, Uncle Gordon. I really did see something shine when I was way up in the tree.”

“Okay, okay,” he capitulated. “Lead on, MacDuff!”

The lane meandered with the creek and was almost obscured by small trees and several years’ accumulation of fallen leaves and pine needles.

“I’ll bet this was Lacy’s moonshine road,” Kate said.

“Moonshine?”

Mary Pat was several paces further on and Kate kept her voice low as she repeated Bessie and Miss Emily’s tale about Lacy’s moonshining days.

Gordon chuckled. “Jake once told me that the first time he was ever drunk, it was on white lightning. I didn’t realize he was so young.”

Ahead of them, Mary Pat plunged off the faint track and into a thick stand of young pines. Gordon and Kate followed.

“Oh, shoot! It’s just an old car,” said Mary Pat, disappointed to find that her something shiny was only sunlight reflected off chrome trim.

“Don’t say shoot,” Gordon corrected absently as he studied their unexpected find.

The late-model Chevrolet was dark green with a dull gray vinyl roof and it had been standing there for several days at least because wisteria vines had already looped a few tentative tendrils to the bumper and rearview mirrors.

“No dents or smashed fenders. Why would anyone abandon a car like this?” Kate wondered.

Gordon opened the unlocked driver’s door. “The keys are still in the ignition.”

Kate flipped open the dash compartment. Inside were a car manual and rental papers. A quick perusal revealed that the car had been rented at the Raleigh-Durham Airport on the sixth of March to one C. Bernard.

C
HAPTER
15

Kate was beginning to wonder if she’d ever get over this new propensity for drifting off to sleep whenever she got quiet and still. Cartoons flickering across the television screen had already lulled Mary Pat into a nap.

“I may take off my shoes,” she had told Kate a half hour earlier. Within ten minutes, she was curled into a tight little ball next to Kate on the couch.

Gordon had allowed enough time for the police to drive out from town; and, after telling Kate to ask the maid if she wanted more coffee, he had driven back to the creek bridge to direct the lawmen when they arrived.

That was over an hour ago.

Kate thought of her own bed with longing, but at least the study here at Gilead was furnished for comfortable lounging. She hooked the edge of a hassock with her toe and tugged it closer. As she settled herself into the cushions, her drowsy thought was that if Dwight Bryant didn’t come soon, she was going to be too punchy to talk.

She would have preferred to go back to the farm, but the sheriff’s office had requested that they wait together at Gilead since Gilead was nearer the abandoned car site.

She stifled another yawn just as Sally Whitley came into the room carrying a light afghan. With practiced ease, Sally shifted Mary Pat out from under Kate’s elbow and covered the sleeping child.

“Would you like a blanket, too?” she asked.

“Don’t tempt me,” said Kate, struggling to her feet.

“Please don’t get up. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

“You didn’t disturb me. In fact, I’m glad you came. Another five minutes and it would have taken dynamite to blast me off that couch.”

Kate patted her pockets in the unrealistic hope that she might have broken her own rules. For the past week, she’d quit taking cigarettes with her when she went outdoors, another ploy to stretch the time between smokes. It had been almost four hours now.

“Did you want cigarettes?” asked Sally. She took a leather box from a nearby table and held it open for Kate.

“Oh yes, please,” Kate said gratefully. “I’ve cut down a lot, but I just can’t seem to quit entirely.”

“I’ve heard it’s hard,” said Sally.

“You’ve never smoked?”

“No.”

There was an awkward moment, then, reluctantly, Kate’s politeness triumphed over her addiction. “If it bothers you—”

“Oh, no!” the younger woman assured her. “Do go ahead. Please. Tom smokes. And Mr. Tyrrell, of course. It doesn’t bother me. I just never have. I don’t know why. It’s not because I’m a health nut or anything, although they
do
say—”

“They sure do,” Kate sighed and guiltily struck a match. She would only smoke half of it, she promised herself, happily noting that the cigarette was one of the extra-long brands.

Mary Pat stirred in her sleep.

Sally looked down at the small figure indulgently. “She tells me she’s too big to take naps anymore, but she almost always falls asleep after her walks with you and Mr. Tyrrell.”

“They certainly do know their own minds at that age, don’t they?”

Sally Whitley agreed that they did.

The conversation stalled again.

“Tom’s done wonders with the packhouse,” Kate said heartily. “He’s zipped right through the new shelves and cabinets; even the new plumbing’s finished.”

“Yes, he said it was going faster than he expected.”

“Was he always so handy with tools?”

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

At Kate’s puzzled look, Sally added shyly, “We’ve only known each other about a year. In fact, we met last July, right after I graduated, and got married in August.”

“He
is
a fast worker,” Kate smiled.

Sally blushed and smoothed her fair hair away from her face with a self-conscious gesture.

Privately, Kate marveled that two such shy people had connected that quickly.

“So how are you liking the East Coast?”

“It’s okay . . . different, anyhow,” Sally said with such obvious tact that Kate couldn’t help smiling again.

“I was never away from L.A. before. The city, you know? Living in the country, inland and away from the ocean, is a totally new experience. For me. Not like Tom.”

“That’s right, he was in the army for several years, wasn’t he? Did he get overseas? Europe or the Far East?”

“Maybe Vietnam right at the end,” Sally said uncertainly. “When he first joined up, I think. He doesn’t talk about it. And Fort Bragg after that. That’s why he wanted to come back here to school. He liked North Carolina.”

“I would have thought he was too young for Vietnam,” Kate said idly.

For some reason, her words seemed to increase Sally Whitley’s self consciousness and the young woman sprang up, murmured something about laundry chores, and hurried away.

For a moment, Kate’s thoughts followed in speculation, then she shrugged and left the room herself.

In the front hall, she met Bessie’s niece, who asked, “Could I get you something, Miss Kate?”

“No, thanks, DeWanda. I’ve decided to walk back down to the creek.”

“Too late, Miss Kate. I think Mr. Tyrrell just drove up.”

She opened the front door as she spoke, and Kate saw Dwight’s car parked beside Gordon’s and both men crossing the wide veranda.

“Sorry to keep you waiting so long,” the detective apologized. He carried a boxy little black case.

“Fingerprinting time,” Gordon warned her dryly.

“What?”

“We need to get yours and Mr. Tyrrell’s and the little girl’s, too,” Dwight said.

“Now just a minute,” said Gordon, pausing in his tracks. “I’ve agreed to let you take mine, and Mrs. Honeycutt may not mind having her fingerprints on file, but I’m certainly not going to let Mary Pat’s be punched into some big brother computer. Perhaps we’d better forget the whole thing.”

“That won’t happen, Mr. Tyrrell,” Dwight said patiently. “This is just for local use. See, we’ll send all the fingerprints we find on that car to the SBI. As soon as they eliminate the ones that belong to you three, they’ll destroy your cards. Anyhow,” he reminded Gordon, “we wouldn’t have to be doing this if y’all hadn’t messed with the car.”

Reluctantly, Gordon led him into the dining room and Kate watched as he inked Gordon’s fingers and rolled each one onto a special card. He was repeating the process with her fingers when a sleepy-eyed Mary Pat, still in stocking feet, found them there.

She was interested to learn that her fingers might have left invisible marks on the car she’d found; but she was still too recently awake to ask her usual questions, and she offered no resistance when Sally Whitley appeared and led her off to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

“This is going to help a lot, y’all finding that car,” said Dwight, packing up his fingerprint kit. “From the rental papers, it looks like Bernie Covington was traveling under a simple alias. He just reversed his initials and used his real first name for a last name. He would’ve had to show a charge card and driver’s license to rent a car and they should have records. With a little luck, we can maybe trace back where he’s been and what he’s been doing since he skipped bail in Florida.”

“Did you ever hear from the Mexican police?” Kate asked, abruptly remembering all their unanswered questions.

“Well,” Dwight said slowly, “yes, we did.”

“And?” asked Gordon,

Dwight became evasive. “I probably ought to let Sheriff Poole talk to you about that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gordon asked sharply. “Have they found part of the boat?”

“Not exactly. We got a picture of Covington from California, where he served time, and sent it down to Costa Verde. Seems there’s a pretty little senorita—leastways she sounds like she might be pretty—she remembers seeing your brother have dinner with this Covington two nights before the accident.”

“Covington in Costa Verde?” asked Gordon, amazed. “With James? She’s sure?”

“Police there say she knew Mr. James Tyrrell pretty good. A Margarita Somebody-or-other.”

“Margarita Ruiz,” Gordon nodded. “She sings at one of the clubs there. James took her out a couple of times. She is pretty. But James with Covington? He never mentioned it.”

He sounded puzzled by his brother’s reticence.

“She recognized the picture of Covington. Said she saw him again a month later. Desk clerk at one of the hotels remembers seeing him, too, but he can’t remember when it was. If Covington stayed in town, he didn’t register under his own name. Sort of odd, isn’t it, that your brother didn’t say something about running into one of his old army buddies?”

Gordon spread his hands helplessly. “Maybe he did. There’s so much about that time that I can’t remember. This could be one more thing that I’ve forgotten.”

“You reckon?” Dwight asked dubiously. He moved to leave, then paused in the doorway. “Can I give you a lift down the turnpike, Kate? I need to ask Mr. Lacy how come he didn’t notice that car before now.”

Driving back to the farmhouse, Kate was thoughtful as Dwight negotiated the lane’s sandy ruts.

“Did the Costa Verde police say anything about a younger man with Covington?”

“You mean that kid that was on patrol with them?”

“Yes.”

“Nope. Not a word. According to that senorita, he had dinner with James Tyrrell alone.”

Kate sighed. “It just doesn’t make sense, Dwight. If Covington caused that boating accident, why was he still in Costa Verde a month later? And if he was in Mexico then, how could he be connected with Jake’s death up here?”

“Too soon to tell,” said Dwight, skirting the orchard and rolling to a stop near the kitchen porch.

“And with James and Jake both dead, why did Covington’s rental car wind up on our creek bank?” she asked. “Why would he come back at all?”

The burly detective had opened his door, but he hesitated with one foot in and the other on the ground. “I can’t say why, but we do know how the car got there. There’s a pull-off place beside the bridge that some of the old-timers fish from once in a while. It’s rough driving, but not too hard once you strike into that old track along the bank. We found snapped-off undergrowth, so we can tell the car came in from the highway and not from your woods.

“Whoever killed Covington might have met him in the packhouse after you and Mr. Lacy went to bed. After he killed Covington, he was probably left with two cars, so he stashed Covington’s down there and walked back for his own. I reckon he thought that dark green color was as good as camouflage if he stuck it deep enough into some dark green trees.”

Kate shivered. “That means the killer’s been hanging around the farm long enough to know about that old lane beside the creek. Since last October, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“Then he could still be here—walking in and out of our houses, stealing pictures and papers.” She stared at Dwight. “Camouflage and night maneuvers! It
is
someone they knew in Vietnam, isn’t it?”

“Well, that’s how it looks to me,” said Dwight. “We think we’ve got a name on that kid: William Thompson.”

Kate remembered the “W.T.” Jake had scribbled on the back of one of the missing snapshots. “Has he been located?”

“Not yet. Nobody seems to know what happened to him or where he is now, twelve years later. In the meantime, no matter who put the car down yonder at the creek, I don’t see how Mr. Lacy missed it if he’s been culling over your woods.”

Kate was not surprised to realize that Dwight knew everything that was going on here at the farm, not with Miss Emily and Bessie to keep him posted; but she got a demonstration of his trained powers of observation as they crossed the yard to the chicken pen where Lacy was gathering eggs.

She had walked right past Lacy’s dilapidated old pickup without a second glance, but Dwight’s first comment after he greeted Lacy was, “I see you got that ol’ mule of yours a new set of shoes.”

Kate turned and saw the truck’s gleaming black tires. Now that Dwight had remarked on them, she could even smell the fresh new rubber. “It were about time,” Lacy said defensively. “Them other ones was as slick as Tucker Sauls’s bald head.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Dwight grinned. “I was wondering how you passed your last inspection.”

Lacy was disinclined to bandy words across a poultry yard with the younger man. Remaining just outside the chicken house, he shifted the egg basket in his hand and said, “What can I do for you, Dwight?”

“It’s about that dead man, Mr. Lacy. Kate and Mr. Tyrrell found his car this afternoon.”

The old farmer’s eyes flicked over Kate stonily, but he listened without comment while the chickens pecked around his feet and the rooster, a big Rhode Island Red, ruffled his neck feathers in mild disapproval of their closeness beyond the fence wire.

It was down on the creek bank,” said Dwight. “Somebody drove it in from the highway and left it in a little stand of young pines.”

“That right?”

Kate recognized that Lacy was getting ready to dig in his heels and become as uncooperative as possible and suddenly, she was too tired to put up with any more of his irritating mannerisms.

“There’s no need to make a big deal out of this, Lacy. Everyone knows you and Tucker Sauls have looked at every tree on the place. Nobody’s spying on you or prying into your private affairs. All Dwight wants to know is if you were in that part of the woods since Covington was killed so he’ll know whether the car’s been there the whole time or not.”

Surprisingly, Lacy climbed down off his high horse. He didn’t exactly answer Kate, but he did tell Dwight, “We walked that stretch of creek last month. Didn’t see no borer beetles along there, so I didn’t have no occasion to go back, and if she found any car there, I can’t rightly say when it come. Not afore Washington’s Birthday, anyhow. His real birthday. ’Cause that’s the very day I was there—February 22. Mail didn’t run on Monday, but Wednesday was his real birthday and I remarked on that to Sauls when we was walking back to the truck.”

Artificial holidays were a pet peeve with Lacy even though Jake used to get down more often because of them. Having never planned his life around a forty-hour work week, Lacy didn’t hold with messing up the calendar just to give city folks some extra three-day weekends.