Bloody Kin (2 page)

“One uff ’em’s mine,” a small voice asserted.

Kate whirled. The child who stood just inside the doorway was very young and thin, but sturdily built, with enormous brown eyes and dark curly hair which was caught up in two perky ponytails by red ribbons. She wore red knit slacks and a rather grubby white pullover and she carried a fourth gray kitten. There was something disturbingly familiar about the tot which Kate couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Well, hello,” she smiled. “Did you bring your kitten back to visit its mother?”

“This one’s not mine,” the child said, placing the new kitten next to Fluff. “All my kitty’s feet are
white
.” She looked up at Kate anxiously. “Which could my kitty
be
?”

Kate looked at the four kittens tumbling about their mother and was perplexed by their sameness. “But look, sweetheart. All the kittens have white feet.”

The little girl shook her head stubbornly. “Not really and truly. They just look like they do. I want
my
kitty. The one Uncle Lacy gave me.”

Suddenly, Kate knew who the child was and she was furious with Lacy for not telling her that Gilead had been opened again. She cupped the tiny chin—Philip’s chin—in her hand and looked into eyes so like Patricia’s. “Don’t you remember me, Mary Pat?” she asked softly. “Your father and I were cousins.”

“Daddy’s dead,” the little girl told her.

“I know, sweetheart,” Kate said helplessly.

“And Mommy and Aunt ’Laine and Uncle James and Cousin Jake and Cousin Kate.” Her voice was quite matter-of-fact.

“No, Mary Pat,
I’m
Kate. You haven’t seen me in almost a year, but I’m not dead.”

The child looked at her dubiously and pulled away from her touch.

“There’s just me and Uncle Gordon and Uncle Lacy that’s not dead,” she insisted, stroking Fluff’s fur.

One of the kittens tumbled off the pile of burlap and danced across the floor. Mary Pat was after it in a flash.

“There he
is!
” she shrieked. “My kitty!”

Before she could grab it, the kitten dived through the hole in the trapdoor and refused to be coaxed out again.

“Wait,” said Kate. “I’ll open it for you.”

She tugged on the rope handle and the door creaked up heavily. The light bulb overhead was so dim that at first Kate thought the dark heap at the foot of the steps was another bundle of burlap.

Then Mary Pat said, “Is he dead, too?”

C
HAPTER
2

Robert Bryant couldn’t quite keep from grinning as he drove out from Raleigh. An unidentified body discovered less than a thousand feet from his mother’s house and she was forced to miss all the initial excitement.

He had no idea how she’d heard about the dead man so quickly this morning, but it never occurred to him to doubt her facts. As principal of Zachary Taylor High School, Emily Bryant kept tabs on the whole community and frustration had filled her voice when she telephoned Rob.

“I can’t get hold of Dwight and the county supervisors are due here this morning, so I can’t possibly leave before noon,” she’d fumed. “But at least you’ll be there and you can fill me in.”

“Why will I be there?” Rob had asked cautiously.

“You’re one of Mary Pat’s trustees, aren’t you? You should be there for her.”

“I keep telling you, Mother, I’m not her trustee. A bank in New York is trustee and they only delegated me to keep a watching brief. Besides, Gordon’s there and he’s her legal guardian.”

“Well, you were Jake’s lawyer, weren’t you?” she wheedled. “It’s his packhouse and his widow, isn’t it? Oh, poor Kate! How dreadful for her.” Miss Emily’s natural sympathies overtopped her curiosity and, in the end, Rob had agreed to go out and offer his services.

He took his foot off the gas as he neared a neat white frame house that stood on the eastern edge of Gilead, the old Gilbert family plantation.

Philip Carmichael’s money had sloshed over it, too, but Rob could remember how shabby the little house was when Patricia and Elaine Gilbert were girls.

He remembered barefoot summers here, lukewarm Kool-Aid and climbing the chinaball trees that shaded the front porch. Elaine was a daredevil even back then, hanging upside down from the highest limbs; at the creek, always swinging out further on the rope than anyone else before splashing down near the rocks; slinging nasties on her father’s old Allis-Chalmers tractor during barning time. That was before Franklin Gilbert had stopped trying to make a go of the farm himself.

Even after the girls grew up, Franklin Gilbert had remained in the overseer’s cottage, a self-imposed exile and all alone until his gathering senility required a nursing home in Raleigh. Something had gone out of Franklin when he’d had to abandon Gilead and move into a hired man’s house. Selling off the last of the good furniture hadn’t compensated for sporadic crop failures and mismanagement; and, when Gilead’s roof went in a windstorm, so did the Gilbert family. It was a practical move, but to Franklin Gilbert, it was an admission that he was less than the generations which had built and adorned Gilead, and he had never again entered the main house.

The move had taken place when his two daughters were quite young and couldn’t have mattered less to Elaine, but Patricia had always mourned the loss. Rob remembered wandering the big ruined house with her.

“This was Great-grandmother’s sewing room,” she’d say. “Satin and velvet and silk, Robbie! And this was Great-great-aunt Sally’s bedroom. She had a canopy bed ruffled with white lace and when Aunt Jane Lattimore came to visit, it was hers and she said it was like lying on a cloud.”

Rob hated to think how much that bed had cost Patricia when she finally tracked it down somewhere in Virginia. By that time, of course, money didn’t matter because Philip Carmichael had so much. He splashed buckets of it over Gilead with no more thought than if he’d been drawing water from the old open well on the back porch. He paid Franklin three times what the place was worth and counted it a bargain for the glow in Patricia’s eyes when Gilead was restored far beyond any earlier glory in time for their wedding.

And yet, for all that, they hadn’t actually spent much time at Gilead. Philip’s financial interests took him all over the world; and, having married so late in life, he wanted his young wife and later their baby daughter with him wherever he went. After his heart attack in Yokohama, Patricia had brought him back to lie in her family graveyard on a wooded hillside above the creek.

Less than a year later, she had been brought there herself after losing control of the car on Old Stage Road during a sleet storm.

Under the complicated terms of their wills, Mary Pat passed into the dual guardianship of Elaine and her husband, Gordon Tyrrell. Warmhearted and generous, Elaine had swooped in and carried her little niece off to their Costa Verde camp on the Gulf of Mexico.

Camp was the proper word, too, Rob thought wryly, for Franklin Gilbert had given his younger daughter most of the money from the sale of Gilead and Elaine had embraced the life of a globe-trotting daredevil. She and Gordon were constantly off to new slopes to ski, new mountains to climb, new ways to risk their lives.

In over one hundred and fifty years, Elaine was the first Gilbert whose body did not lie in Gilead’s soil.

Ironically, it was to have been only a pleasant autumn cruise without the slightest thought of risk-taking; but of the dozen aboard the yacht when an unexpected squall ripped across the Gulf, only three survivors had been picked up by that fishing boat out of Tampico. A bad concussion and broken jaw kept Gordon Tyrrell unconscious for nearly two weeks in a Mexican hospital. They never found James’s body either.

Losing a wife and brother, too, had sobered Gordon completely, thought Rob; made him quieter and less restless. He’d brought Mary Pat back to Gilead just before Christmas and, in these last few months, devoted himself to giving her a normal secure childhood.

The road dipped to cross Blacksnake Creek, then curved up to higher ground where Gilead’s white pillars gleamed through the huge bare-branched oaks, the inheritance of a little girl who’d seen more of death in her short four and a half years than most people see in fifty. More of life, too, thought Rob, if you equated the world with life.

Take Lacy Honeycutt, who’d lived his whole seventy-plus years just across the road and down the lane from Gilead. Too young for the first war, too old for the others, he’d never been further from home than Raleigh; while Mary Pat Carmichael had already built sandcastles along the shores of all seven seas.

Opposite Gilead’s drive, a sandy lane cut through the fields. The western part of the Honeycutt farm was a large wooded triangle and the lane—local wits called it the Honeycutt Turnpike—connected the paved road past Gilead with a dirt road past Miss Emily’s house. Many preferred its bumpy directness to driving nearly a mile around the tip of the triangle, and teenagers had been known to linger at the bottom of the dip on warm moonlit nights.

As Rob topped the lane’s crest, he saw the field van of a Raleigh television station, an ambulance, and three patrol cars down by the packhouse. Beside it, his older brother Dwight, Sheriff Poole’s second in command, stood talking to Kate Honeycutt, whose long honeybrown hair gleamed golden under the noon sun. The TV crew was being kept at a distance by a cordoned-off police line.

Everyone looked up at his approach. Dwight motioned him past the line, but Kate seemed not to recognize him until he said, “Hello, Cousin Katie.”

She smiled wanly and Rob was shocked to see how much weight she’d lost since Jake’s funeral last October. She had always been slender, but now her wrists emerged from her loose shirt with every bone apparent beneath the pale skin. Her blue-green eyes had dark circles under them, and he noticed how her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. Dwight Bryant was puzzled. “Are we any kin to Mrs. Honeycutt?”

“You’re not, just me,” Rob grinned at his brother. “Katie and I are fifth cousins twice-removed.” He was rewarded by a warmer smile on Kate’s bloodless lips.

In a county where everyone’s family seemed to have settled in before the Revolution, Kate had felt defensive at first about her latearriving ancestors. It had taken a long time to understand that when a Southerner asks who your grandparents were, it’s not from snobbishness but from a genuine desire to place you. Of course, it never hurts if your forebears held a land grant from a royal Lord Proprietor, but nothing delights a Southerner more than to learn that your greatgreat-grandfather and his great-grandmother were brother and sister, even if one had been an illiterate dirt farmer and the other the neighborhood whore.

Kinship stitches you into the community fabric and makes you familiar.

Anecdotes about people dead a hundred years were not uncommon and everyone seemed to have the most intricate relationships at their tongue tips. Kate once heard one old lady tell another, “Why sure you know him! Remember my Uncle Rassie? Mama’s second-oldest brother? Well, his wife’s brother married this boy’s granddaddy’s sister.”

Since Kate’s first American ancestors had emigrated from Ireland in the mid-1800s, she was hopelessly out of it. Or so she thought. Then Rob Bryant had seized on her maiden name, O’Bryan, and immediately she was his “little Cousin Katie from up North.”

What began as a joke was soon picked up by local genealogists and, six months later, Kate had been amused to overhear someone murmur, “Jake Honeycutt’s bride. You know: she and Rob Bryant? Their great-granddaddies were first cousins.”

Smiling at Rob, Kate realized for the first time how comforting such kinship, even make-believe kinship, could be.

Jake’s lawyer was tall and whiplash thin with pointed, almost foxlike features. Sleek russet hair and rakish eyebrows added to his feral look; and when he smiled, small even teeth gleamed whitely. But his eyes were a clear, astonishing green, and Kate was as grateful for his presence as if he really were a protective cousin.

“I didn’t realize you and Rob were brothers, Major Bryant,” she said. “Miss Emily always spoke of a son on the Washington police force.”

“That’s me,” said the burly detective. “I decided last winter I’d been in the big city long enough and it was time to come on back home.”

Miss Emily often said her children split the genetic deck between them: “Rob and Beth look just like me, and Dwight and Nancy Faye are the spitting image of their daddy.”

Kate had never met Calvin Bryant. He’d been killed when his tractor overturned on him years ago while all his children were very young; but having seen Nancy Faye and now Dwight, Kate began to form an idea of Miss Emily’s dead husband. Dwight was two years older than Rob, two or three inches taller, and at least thirty pounds heavier with wide shoulders, thick brown hair, and brown eyes. Where Rob seemed to have a reined-in intensity, Dwight appeared easygoing and uncomplicated. It was hard to reconcile Miss Emily’s boasts of all the difficult cases her son had solved up in Washington with this country-talking, lazy-looking man.

Nevertheless, reclassified by Rob’s claim to kinship, she could sense a relaxing in the detective’s formality, a formality she hadn’t even realized was there until she felt the subtle shift in her status from suspected outsider to accepted one-of-us.

“Mama called you, I reckon?” he asked Rob.

“She did. And she’s going crazy because no one could tell her who’s been hurt.”

“I’m with her,” Dwight Bryant said, “but he doesn’t seem to have any ID on him.”

A small spare man appeared in the packhouse doorway, delicately brushing cobwebs from his immaculate gray suit. L.V. Pruitt, the county coroner, blinked in the bright March sunlight, nodded to Rob and spoke to Dwight in the hushed tones of a professional funeral director, which he was.

“They’re bringing him out now. You’ll have to wait for a complete autopsy, but tentatively, and very tentatively, mind you, I would say a blow on the back of the head and then thrown down the stairs.”

“Murder?” asked Kate incredulously.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so,” Pruitt said solemnly.

“Any idea when?” asked the detective. The little undertaker was reluctant. “Now, Dwight, you know I’m no real pathologist.”

“Oh come on, L.V., make a guess,” Dwight urged.

“Well, judging from my experience, I’d think no earlier than eight last night and not much past four this morning. We’ll know more after they’ve had a look at him over in Chapel Hill.”

The beep of a car horn drew their eyes to the top of the lane and they saw a young woman standing there watching them.

“Who’s that?” Kate asked. Before Rob could answer, a bright purple Triumph whipped over the crest and skidded to a stop beside the girl, who got in after a momentary pause.

“School’s out,” Rob murmured. He stepped forward to meet the iridescent little car, which jounced on down the lane and pulled up behind Pruitt’s sober black Lincoln.

“You must have rushed those supervisors around on roller skates,” he told his mother.

Emily Bryant thrust oversized, wraparound sunglasses into a tangle of brick-red curls, bounced out of the car, tugged down the tunic of a lavender plaid pantsuit, and said, “Don’t be impertinent, Robert. Hello, Kate. What a dreadful thing for you to come home to!”

She held out her arms and embraced Kate warmly. “Oh, my dear, how skinny you’ve gotten! Don’t they feed you in New York? Bessie’s making pecan pies today. You just come home with me for lunch and we’ll start fattening you up again. You, too, Sally,” she said to the fairhaired girl who’d gotten out of the TR and shyly joined them. “Oh, no, that’s right. You have to find Mary Pat and— Kate! You haven’t met Sally yet, have you? Sally Whitley, Kate Honeycutt. Sally and Tom are helping out at Gilead while Tom goes to State. Isn’t Gordon lucky to have such a pretty young nursemaid for Mary Pat?”

Dwight and Rob’s plump, nosy, gregarious mother had to be nearing sixty-five, but her energy was unflagging and only her shrewd eyes gave away her age. Kate knew better than to try to speak before Emily Bryant ran down, so she merely smiled at Sally Whitley and waited for Miss Emily to pause for breath, something she showed no signs of doing.

“Oh, Dwight, good! I was so afraid it would be that Jamison man from the south end of the county and I don’t know him from Adam. Or else that lazy Silas Lee Jones and why Bo keeps him on—”

There was a sudden stir of movement inside the packhouse and even Miss Emily fell silent as they all stepped back from the door to make room for the awkward stretcher that two ambulance attendants were bringing out. The women had started to turn away when Dwight said, “I’m sorry, ladies, but I need for y’all to tell me if you’ve ever seen him before.”