Bloody Kin (17 page)

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth, I suppose,” he said, with one of his engaging lopsided smiles.

Kate was past being charmed. “You thought someone would recognize you from those old snapshots?”

“I should have left well enough alone,” he admitted. “I just don’t understand how my chest got here, though. I hid it in an old suitcase up in the attic and the next time I checked, it was gone. I found it in the Whitley bedroom, but the chest wasn’t there.”

“You were that thief, too? You took Sally’s earrings?”

“I had to make it look like a real burglary,” he said sheepishly.

“Then someone else knows!”

“Not necessarily. By the time the police came, the suitcase was back in the attic. I’d say it was Sally, only she’s as timid as a field mouse.”

“She hasn’t been here, so it must have been Tom.”

“Who cares?” James said impatiently. “Anything he says or does from now on is going to look suspicious.”

“You’re wrong,” she said and pushed away from the drawing table in a rush for the door, but he reached out with his cane and tripped her so that she fell heavily to the floor.

She tried to get up, but James brandished the heavy stick. “Be sensible, Kate,” he coaxed.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, sinking back to the floor.

“I don’t know yet. I’ve got to think.” His voice broke. “Oh, God, let me
think!”

“It’s all coming apart. There’s no way you can kill me and make it look like an accident. Too many people know you’re here right now. Lacy knows we were going to take a walk and you must have told someone at Gilead where you would be.”

He didn’t answer, but she could almost see his brain at work, furiously trying to conjure a scenario that would fit all the details.

“Okay,” he said at last, and Kate was chilled by the cold resolution in his tone. “There’s no way to keep up the charade, so listen very carefully. I’ve got to hide you somewhere for a few hours, long enough for me to get to Raleigh and put together some cash and then disappear. I don’t want to hurt you, Kate, but I will if you make me.”

He searched for a threat that would keep her cooperative. “If you want that baby, you’d better do exactly as I say, because I promise you that if you make me hit you with this stick, I’ll aim for the baby first. Do you understand?”

Kate was appalled to realize that he meant it, and she crossed her arms over her abdomen protectively. “I understand,” she said shakily.

James scanned the studio until he spotted some electrical flex that Tom had left on a nearby countertop. “Okay, stand up and put your hands behind you,” he ordered.

He bound her wrists together tightly and left a length of the plastic-covered wire to act as a leash. From the box of soft rags Kate kept to wipe pens and brushes with, he took strips to act as an eventual gag.

“You’re not going to put me in the pit, are you?” she asked fearfully.

“No, they’d find you too fast here.”

“Like Bernie Covington?”

“I would have moved him that night, but my leg gave out on me.”

“Why did you really kill him? It couldn’t have been for Jake’s sake. That was five months ago.”

“He was getting greedy,” James admitted. “He wanted a bigger percentage of Gordon’s trust fund than I could spare. I told him to meet me here and we’d discuss it. We’d met here before, so he didn’t suspect a thing. I should have loaded his body in his car and left it a hundred miles from here, but I couldn’t manage with my leg.”

He opened the studio door and took a good look around, but the lane was deserted in both directions and there was no sign of anyone, not even the dogs.

Holding tightly to the electrical cord that bound Kate’s wrists, James helped her down the packhouse steps and pointed her toward the row of abandoned tobacco barns. “Down there,” he said. “They won’t think to look there immediately.”

It was only a few hundred feet to the low, tar-paper-covered door and James guided Kate over the step-down threshold to the dirt floor.

The old barn was dank and musty, and ancient cobwebs draped down from the wooden tiers overhead. Ordinarily, light would have filtered through beneath the eaves and air vents under the tin roof, but generations of sparrows had blocked all the spaces with thick straw nests until there was no sunlight or moving air except that which came through the open square door.

James guided Kate to the back of the barn, eased her down onto the damp earth and tied her to one of the wooden tier supports. He was almost gentle as he inserted the gag and left her in the gloomy corner.

He disappeared for several minutes; then, to Kate’s horror, returned with a long thin piece of lightwood, the resinous “fatty” heart pine which Lacy often split for kindling.

“Kate, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I can’t leave Gilead. You can understand that, can’t you? I’m a Tyrrell and a Tyrrell without land is nothing. I’m a good steward, too. How could I give it up?”

Terrified, Kate watched him light the wood with his cigarette lighter.

He lifted the bonnet of the gas burner closest to Kate and holding the torch away, turned the knob.

Nothing happened.

He tried a second burner. “What the devil? I know there’s gas. When I opened the valve on the tank outside, the gauge still registered three-quarters full.”

He held the torch closer and saw that the jets were clogged with dirt dauber nests. He banged them sharply and the clay fell away, and a slight hiss of gas could be heard.

Pleased, he moved on to the third burner and repeated the maneuver, explaining as he worked. “I’ll jam this torch about halfway up the racks and it’ll burn like a candle until enough gas builds up under the rafters. I should have at least three or four hours to establish an alibi. I’ll say I came to walk with you, but you weren’t at the studio and I went on back to Gilead. By the time a fire truck gets here, it’ll be too late and they’ll think it was Willie Thompson again. Willie! I wonder where the kid really is now?”

Kate tried to protest through the wad of cloth in her mouth, to reason with him. Only distressed murmurs were audible. “I wish you wouldn’t struggle,” he said worriedly. “Please don’t. Try to relax. Maybe the gas will put you to sleep first. I wish I didn’t have to do this. Oh, God, Kate! Why did you have to recognize me?”

Kate watched helplessly as he approached the fourth and final burner, diagonally opposite from the corner where she was bound. Lying on the dank ground, her view was blocked by the defective burner in front of her. She could only see the top of James’s head, the flickering lightwood torch and the shadows it cast on the planked walls.

She heard James tilt back the hood and bang on the jets and she heard the hiss of gas, but there was no way for her to see the semi-comatose corn snake as it writhed from hibernation beneath the burner hood, only inches from James’s hand.

James saw the snake’s lethargic shape, though, and with an involuntary gesture of revulsion and fear, he jabbed at it with the fiery stick.

The gas ignited in a loud swoosh; then pressure cracked the outdated gas line and the whole burner exploded in a blast that took out the side of the barn behind James.

The explosion sent Kate into darkness as flames raced up the tarpaper siding, devoured the sparrows’ straw nests and began in earnest on the wooden structure itself.

C
HAPTER
22

It was well after midnight before Dwight got back to the hospital and took the elevator to the intensive care unit on the sixth floor.

Even though a hospital is never completely quiet, footsteps are softer along the upper halls late at night, voices are hushed, and the lights are dimmer.

The intensive care unit’s waiting lounge was nearly empty and the sleepy-eyed volunteer who manned the reception desk looked blank at Dwight’s question. “He might have gone down for coffee,” she whispered.

At that hour, the only snack bar open in the hospital was a dreary room lined with vending machines on one wall and a row of vinyl upholstered booths on the other.

Dwight found his brother alone, staring into a foam cup of corrosive-looking black liquid. “I’d advise against the coffee,” Rob said with a weary smile. “It’s probably how they keep the beds filled here.”

Dwight considered his choices and selected a can of tomato juice.

“How are they doing?” he asked as he sat down across from Rob.

“The doctor came by around eight,” said Rob, stifling a yawn. “Lacy’s burns are pretty superficial. Just his left hand and shoulder where the tier pole hit him. The doctor said it was more of a gash than a burn. They’re keeping him overnight for observation because of his age. I went in to see him about ten and they’d given him something to help him sleep.”

“What about Kate?”

“They won’t let me see her. She’s in sterile isolation with seconddegree burns on the front of her calves. The doctor says she must have gone into fetal position instinctively to protect the baby. There’re first-degree burns on her face, neck and shoulder, and her shoulder was scraped where Lacy wrenched her from under the burner. And a concussion from the blast, of course.” He kept his voice steady and unemotional as he catalogued Kate’s injuries. “She’ll be in a lot of pain when she finally comes to. They’re afraid to give her anything too strong because of the baby.”

“The baby’s okay?”

“Too soon to know. Its heartbeat was too fast. That could be temporary stress. They think so. They hope so.” Rob gave a disconsolate shrug. “What about you?”

Dwight thought of all he’d done since the call came in after lunch that one of the Honeycutt barns had exploded in flames. Three people seriously hurt and on their way to Southern Wake, he’d been told, and he had reached the hospital shortly after the rescue ambulance to find Gordon Tyrrell dead on arrival, Kate Honeycutt burned and unconscious, and Lacy Honeycutt hurt and near shock, but lucid.

While the emergency-room staff worked on his wounds, Lacy explained how he’d heard the blast as he was stepping into his old pickup and how he’d driven the truck wide open down the lane to the blazing barn. Gordon’s body had been lying across the gaping hole in the side. Flames were everywhere. He’d pulled Gordon free but there was no sign of Kate and she didn’t answer when he called, so he’d run around to the back of the barn and jerked open the rear door.

“She was laying on the ground with a burner ’crost her shoulders and I tried to yank her out, but I couldn’t budge her and then I seen she was tied to the tier pole with a gag in her mouth and I thought I won’t never gonna get her cut loose. That s.o.b. was trying to kill her, Dwight! Why’d he want to do that?”

Across the emergency room on another gurney, Kate writhed in pain just below consciousness. “James,” she muttered, as doctors and nurses treated her injuries, “. . . no, James . . . don’t . . .”

Dwight had looked at the third gurney then, at the still form abandoned to death, and he began to understand.

“The SBI checked his fingerprints with the army and they confirmed it—he was James, not Gordon.” Dwight pulled the tab on the juice can and inserted a straw. “We searched his rooms at Gilead. Had to jimmy the lock on his desk, but we found Sally Whitley’s earrings. And Jake’s Vietnam things.”

“Somehow Kate must have recognized him.” Rob rubbed his eyes. They felt bloodshot and full of grit.

“Smart lady,” said Dwight, studying his younger brother. It had been a long day for him, but an even longer one for Rob. “You’re getting right attached to her, aren’t you?”

Rob shot him a wary glance, expecting the needle. It wasn’t there.

“You going to marry her?”

“If she’ll have me,” Rob said humbly.

Dwight finished his juice. “Oh, I imagine she’ll have you. Don’t you get everything you ever go after?”

             
“What?”

“Well, look at you. You took all the looks in the family. You’re educated. You know how to dress. Women always notice you while I look like the Durham bull in a pea jacket.”

Tired as he was, Rob had to laugh. In Dwight’s voice, he heard the flip side of his own jealousies.

“I always thought you and Nancy Faye got the family beauty,” he grinned. “I sure as hell knew who got all the athletic talent.”

“And how much good did it do me? You finished college, got a law degree. I’m just an ex-jock and ex-married cop.”

“A damn good cop,” said Rob. “And you’d have hated law school.”

Dwight smiled ruefully and for a moment their faces mirrored each other’s. “I know, but every once in a while . . .”

Rob nodded. “Me, too,” he confessed.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Her first conscious thought was an awareness of dulled sheets of pain layered upon her body. Then the smell of antiseptics, the blip of electronic monitors, and the sound of moans.

Her moans.

She became aware of a presence beside her and opened her eyes.

The nurse was completely gowned and masked, but her eyes were compassionate. “How do you feel, Mrs. Honeycutt?” she asked gently.

“It hurts,” Kate whispered.

The next time she came to, the pain was still with her but somehow more bearable. She lay very still and remembered finding the pictures, realizing that Gordon was actually James, and then lying on the damp dirt floor waiting for death.

She knew she was in a hospital, though, so she was alive, but there was a growing desolation within her as she realized that the baby had not made it. There were no funny little flutters under her heart, no soft little turns and kicks. Only a small weight that lay still and unmoving.

She raised herself on one hip and physical pain shafted through her, but it was nothing compared to what she felt as her unborn infant’s body drifted to that side of her womb and she knew that the movement was due to gravity, not independent life.

James had won after all. Jake was completely dead now.

“Mrs. Honeycutt? Mrs. Honeycutt.”

Like the nurse earlier, the two doctors were clothed in sterile gowns and masks. “It’s Teresa Yates, Mrs. Honeycutt,” said the taller figure. “Your obstetrician, remember?”

Kate nodded.

“This is Dr. Yeh, who’ll be taking care of you.”

Dr. Yeh had chubby cheeks and shiny black eyes that almost disappeared when he smiled at her above his mask. His English was good, but his slight Chinese accent was filtered through Oxford by the sound of it.

“Sorry about the masks, luv, but we can’t risk bacterial infection. You are quite the lucky young woman,” he told Kate. “Your burns are much less extensive than we thought at first. They scrubbed up rather nicely and you shouldn’t even have scar tissue. You’ve lost a lot of fluids, however, and your body’s been under enormous stress. We shan’t need the heart monitor any longer,” he said, removing the leads, “but we’ll keep you on IV a few days. Make sure your fluid level gets back to normal. There’s a mild anesthetic in it.” He rattled off a chemical name that meant nothing to Kate. “It won’t take away all the pain, but we can’t risk giving you anything that’ll cross the placental barrier, can we?”

Kate closed her eyes as involuntary tears spilled down the side of her face.

Dr. Yates took her hand. “What’s wrong, Mrs. Honeycutt? The pain too severe?” “My baby,” Kate mourned. “It’s dead.”

“What?” She quickly fitted the stethoscope to her ears, laid the cool metal disk on Kate’s swollen abdomen, and listened intently.

“It doesn’t move,” Kate cried. “Not since I’ve been here.” And she bit her lips to stop the grief that threatened to spill from the very core of her being.

“Mrs. Honeycutt—Kate, listen,” said Dr. Yates. “You’ve been through an explosion. You’ve been burned, your whole system has suffered unbelievable stress. And that includes the baby. When I first examined you last night, the baby’s heartbeat was arrhythmic and speeded-up. This morning, it’s almost back to normal and he’s gotten very still. That’s completely usual in cases like this. It’s as if the body says, ‘Okay, cool it, kid. I promise you that he’ll be bouncing around like crazy again in a day or two. In the meantime, here!”

She put the stethoscope to Kate’s ears and miraculously the baby’s heartbeat was there between her own, like soft spring rain on a tin roof.

They let her go home the day before Easter.

Miss Emily drove Kate’s car to pick her up. Lacy came along with his hand still bandaged and Mary Pat had to be cautioned against flinging herself at Kate when they tucked her into the back seat.

“My arms are fine,” Kate protested and hugged her little cousin tightly. “We just have to be careful with my legs for another few weeks.”

She was slightly disappointed not to see Rob with them. He’d been by the hospital at least once a day since the doctors allowed visitors, and he had sent a flood of flowers, books and silly get-well cards.

“He said there was something he wanted to get for dinner,” said Miss Emily. “What he wants, I couldn’t tell you. Bessie’s cooked one bowl of every food known to civilized mankind.”

“Yeah, and how many pies and cakes did you bring over?” Lacy asked her tartly. 

“Well, Dwight’s coming, too,” Miss Emily said, “and he always was a big eater.”

“Me, too,” said Mary Pat, who seemed to have accepted James’s death without any real damage, as if the freedom to voice her misgivings about his identity somehow compensated for his loss.

“Am I really going to come live with you and Uncle Lacy and the baby and Aunt Susie and the kitties?” she asked Kate.

“You are if Rob can arrange it,” Kate promised. It had rained all that week and everything was lushly green. Every stem, blade and leaf was full of water and tender-fresh, and dogwoods and azaleas were at their peak for Easter. Sourweed reddened some fallow fields and toadflax made blue mist of others.

“Willy finished setting his tobacco this week,” said Miss Emily when Kate remarked on the fields of young new plants. “Bluebirds is nesting in every one of my boxes,” Lacy reported. “And I heared a chuck-will’s-widder two nights ago.”

Another season, another beginning, Kate thought, and contentment wrapped her as they drove past Gilead and turned into the lane. She found that she could look at the burned-out shell of the tobacco barn without the deep grief she’d expected. The inner scars were finally healing.

Rob and Dwight were sitting on the back porch rockers when they drove into the yard, and Bessie immediately appeared at the kitchen door to welcome Kate home and urge everybody to wash up.

“Biscuits’ll be out of the stove in ten minutes,” she warned, “though where I’ll put ’em, I don’t know. Won’t enough room on that table for an ant to walk sideways and here comes Rob with two more bowls.”

“The South’s not what it used to be,” said Rob with a perfectly straight face. “I found some frozen collards in your freezer, Mother, but I had to try six different grocery stores before I found any chit’lings.”

“Chit’lings!” Bessie said disgustedly. “Whoever heard of collard greens and chit’lings at Eastertime?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said demurely. “They certainly make a change from flowers and candy.”