Bloody Kin (4 page)

“That must have been what happened today,” said Kate. “Lacy gave her one of Fluff’s kittens and Mary Pat brought it back this morning because she said its feet were different. I tried to show her that all the kittens had the same white feet, but she didn’t believe me.”

“The doctor told Gordon it’s because of all the shuffling around she’s had to do these last two years. First her daddy died and she came to live at Gilead; then her mother died and she got carted off to Mexico; then her aunt drowned and everything changed again.

“Gordon says that’s why he decided to come back here. It’s the most permanent home the child’s ever had. He and the doctor think that after a while, when the big things in Mary Pat’s life start showing some permanency, she’ll quit questioning the changeableness of little things.”

As she spoke, there was a rap on the kitchen door and Dwight Bryant stuck his head in. “They tell you to save me a piece of pie, Bessie?”

C
HAPTER
4

Kate had never given much thought to how a murder investigation ought to proceed, but the folksiness of this one disarmed her.

A place at the kitchen table was cleared for Dwight, who tried to keep sticky crumbs of pecan pie off his notes while Bessie and his mother mixed facts and gossip with their answers.

His thick brown hair was neatly brushed, except for an unruly cowlick at the crown of his head. He wore a dark red wool shirt, a black knit tie, black slacks, and a gray wool sports jacket that occasionally swung back to reveal a Smith & Wesson .357, standard issue in the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. The ring finger of his left hand was bare, but the skin was lighter there, as if a wedding band had blocked out the sun until recently. Kate dimly recalled that Miss Emily had changed the subject last summer when Dwight’s name came up and she’d retained an impression of marital troubles. Was that why Dwight had decided to “come on back home”?

He was broader than his younger brother, with the muscular build of a professional football player. In reality, Kate was soon told, twenty years earlier and thirty pounds lighter, he had captained Zachary Taylor’s basketball team all the way to the state championship.

Bessie was clearly fond of him and not intimidated by his official rank and power. His years in the army and a stint with the Capitol City Police had molded Dwight into a competent law officer, and she would accord him the respect due his professional capacity; but in her mind’s eye, he would forever be a hungry, gangling boy with skinned knees and a wicked hook shot that could sink a basketball from any distance four times out of five.

“Did you happen to take that peeled grape you call a car through the turnpike this morning?” Dwight asked his mother.

“No, I didn’t and don’t you go throwing off on my car. It’ll still be running when yours is a rust bucket back of Junior Moore’s service station,” she said tartly. Every year she sacrificed her TR to the votech automotive repair class, and every year it came back a wilder color than before.

“Eighteen coats of Day-Glo paint’s probably all that’s holding it together,” Dwight chuckled. “I don’t suppose either you or Bessie noticed anything odd last night?”

“Dogs were right noisy,” Bessie offered. “Willy finally roused hisself up about midnight and went out on the porch and hollered ’em shut.”

“Which way were they barking?” Dwight asked.

For a giddy moment, Kate remembered the Duke of Athens’s bellvoiced hounds and expected Bessie to tell him alto or soprano. It was soon apparent though that Dwight meant direction, not timbre.

“I expect you’ll have to ask Willy that and he’s off working today,” said Bessie. “Won’t be home till suppertime. All I know, them dogs were out front. Not much moon to see by.”

“No point asking me,” said Miss Emily when Dwight turned to her. “Once my head touches the pillow it would take the hounds of hell baying in my bathroom to wake me up. Willy’s coonhounds never do it.”

“They might have been barking at me,” said Kate. “I drove in a little after midnight. I heard some dogs then and again when I was falling off to sleep an hour or so later.”

“Did you come through the lane?” asked Dwight, and when she nodded, he said, “See anybody? Notice anything odd about the packhouse?”

Kate tried to remember. She had been so tired when she turned into the rutted dirt lane. She hadn’t made as early a start as she’d planned and the need for caution on icy northern roads had stretched a ten-hour trip into eleven.

Always before, she and Jake had shared the driving and she was usually dozing in the passenger seat whenever they reached the cutoff. “Wake up, Katydid,” he’d say. “We’re almost there.”

Last night, tiredness had helped block out those earlier homecomings and she hadn’t been alert to details. As Bessie said, the moon was still new, a growing sliver in a star-pricked sky that had set while she was still up in Virginia, so it was quite dark beyond her headlights.

Her lights had reflected redly in the eyes of a possum that lumbered back into the pine woods on the right as her car approached, but she remembered nothing else stirring, The packhouse had been only a dark shape on her left as she started up the slight rise, straining to see beyond the leafless branches of the apple orchard.

“I’m afraid I was looking for a light up at the farmhouse instead of noticing the packhouse,” she apologized.

“You mean to say Lacy didn’t even leave you a light?” fumed Miss Emily, “That man needs his ears pulled.”

Kate smiled at the vision of little Miss Emily pulling the ears of Jake’s tall and crusty uncle.

“You’re the one who could do it,” said Dwight, whose cowlick had suffered more than once at his mother’s hands.

“Want me to have a talk with him?” asked Rob. “You know, Kate, legally you’re not bound to let him stay on there. Jake left you full title.”

“Ask him to leave?” Kate was shocked that Rob would even suggest it. “Jake wouldn’t have wanted that. Lacy’s been there all his life. Where would he go? No, I couldn’t do it.”

Bessie and Miss Emily agreed. Lacy Honeycutt might be as selfcentered as a fice dog with a sandspur in its bottom, but asking him to leave his homeplace wouldn’t be fitting.

“All the same, it won’t hurt to remind him who’s paying the taxes,” Rob said.

Kate shook her head. “Please don’t. I’ll work it out somehow.”

“Was he up when you got in last night?” asked Dwight.

“It was completely dark,” Kate said slowly, “so I thought he’d already gone to bed; but now that you mention it, when I put on the hall light and he came to the top of the stairs to see who it was, he was dressed. Shirt, overalls, even his work shoes.”

Dwight scraped the last morsel of pie from his plate and closed his notebook. “If you’re ready to leave, Mrs. Honeycutt, I’ll drive you over and speak to Mr. Lacy now.”

“Don’t be so prissy, Dwight,” said his mother. “You taught Jake how to ride a bicycle. You two can call each other by your first names.”

“Please do,” said Kate. “It’s going to be hard to keep saying Major Bryant when I remember some of the other things Jake said you taught him.” There was a ghost of mischief in her smile.

Rob found himself experiencing a slight resurgence of what he used to call baby-brotherism, that frustrated feeling of being the younger tag-along who was always getting left behind and accused of being too little to keep up.

“I’d better head back to Raleigh,” he said stiffly. “Unless you’ll change your mind about Lacy?”

Kate shook her head again. “It’ll be all right.” Her hand found his. “Thank you for coming, Rob.” She gave Miss Emily and Bessie thank-you hugs and followed Dwight out to his unmarked car.

He held the door for her in awkward courtesy while Bessie and Miss Emily interrupted each other with instructions for Kate to come or call if there were the least little thing either woman could do to help her settle in.

“I’ll be home from school tomorrow by four,” said Miss Emily.

“And I’ll be here or next door at my house all day long,” Bessie called.

They seem real fond of you,” said Dwight as he eased the car away from the range of their voices and drove the short distance to the Honeycutt house diagonally across the road a thousand feet.

“They’re very sweet,” Kate said. Even the death of a mysterious stranger hadn’t kept lunch from being cheerful and friendly and very comforting. She would have to be careful not to impose on their kindness.

“Mother says you’re going to live down here for good?” His voice turned the statement into a query.

“I don’t know about for good. For the time being, anyhow.”

“It’ll probably be too quiet for a city girl like you.”

Was there a hint of bitterness in his tone? Before she could counter with a question of her own, they had pulled into the circular drive and coasted to a stop before the front porch.

Lacy Honeycutt watched their approach from the top step. His eyes squinted against the bright midday sun and there was no smile of welcome on his craggy face.

C
HAPTER
5

The Honeycutt house had been built in the early 1870s by Lacy’s grandfather from longleaf pines felled along Blacksnake Creek. It began as a utilitarian and unpretentious two-story farm dwelling, four rooms over four with a wide central hall that bisected each floor front to back. Kitchen, sitting room, Sunday parlor, and master bedroom occupied the ground floor and the four bedrooms upstairs slept three sons and four daughters, two spinster aunts, and a widowed grandmother.

The house was fifty years old before it received its first coat of paint, and after Rural Electrification finally came to the community in the 1930s, a new kitchen wing was added to the back and indoor plumbing replaced the hand pump and outhouse.

Sometime during its history a deep, shed-roofed porch had been built across the front and one side. Another porch extended off the kitchen on the lane side of the house.

The tall oaks that shaded the house in summer and allowed warming sunlight through their unleafed branches in winter had been dug out of the woods as four-foot saplings while Lacy and his brother Andrew were still in diapers. Later, when Jane Gilbert crossed the road to become Andrew’s bride, she brought rooted slips and cuttings from Gilead’s neglected gardens. Thick bushy azaleas softened the foundation with masses of pink, white, and red every spring because of Jake’s mother, and irises and daylilies bloomed in their season beneath the dogwoods that lined the half-moon drive.

To think that those vigorous, hardworking generations had dwindled down to one embittered old man, Kate mused as she sat on the porch swing and listened to Dwight Bryant question Lacy about the previous evening.

As if in protest, the baby gave her a soft kick in the side and she touched the place in mute apology. “Okay, little one,” she thought. “I won’t write off all the Honeycutts just yet.”

“I’m telling you, if they was any strangers hanging around I didn’t see ’em,” Lacy Honeycutt repeated after Dwight tried to nudge his memory a second time. “The dogs would’ve let me know the minute somebody put foot on this land.”

“And they didn’t make a peep yesterday?”

“Not like you mean.” He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground in front of the steps where he sat, ground it out with a scarred and battered work shoe, and immediately lit another.

Since Jake’s accident, Lacy explained, he’d started letting the two pointers range free with Aunt Susie, his old beagle.

“I don’t do much hunting no more and it seemed like a shame to keep ’em penned up all the time. Reckon Aunt Susie’s taught ’em a few bad habits. They was chasing a rabbit to hell and gone down by the creek. Kept up the cry all afternoon and they was plumb wore out when they come dragging up to the house last night after supper.”

“So if somebody was hiding in the packhouse, your dogs might have been too busy chasing rabbits to notice.”

“Maybe,” Lacy conceded.

“And they didn’t bark at all last night?”

“I didn’t say that. Willy Stewart’s dogs carried on right smart. My dogs give answer a couple of times. And they let me know when she come.

“You never went out to see what was bothering them?” asked Dwight.

“It won’t that sort of barking,” said the old man, exasperation in his voice. “Leastways not with my dogs. Can’t say about Willy’s. They’ll bark at grasshoppers. Look here, Dwight Bryant. You been up in Washington so long you don’t remember how country dogs act? You know good as me how one kind of bark means one thing and another bark means something else. Did you go out every time one of your dogs yipped?”

Dwight admitted he hadn’t. “But that dead man got himself killed in your packhouse sometime between eight last night and four this morning most likely. Now Mrs. Honeycutt says the lights were off but you were still up and dressed when she got in after midnight.”

“I was just fixing to go to bed when I heared her car.”

“Your bedroom’s still on the back, isn’t it?” Dwight asked.

Lacy agreed that it was.

“And Mrs. Honeycutt had told you she was coming?”

“For all I knowed, she could’ve changed her mind.”

Neither man glanced in Kate’s direction, but she sensed they expected her to speak. She remained silent. What would be gained by telling the detective that she or Jake had always called if their plans changed?

“Just the same,” said Dwight, “with it getting late and all, it’d be natural to take a chair by a back window and wait up a while to see she got in safe.”

Lacy grunted noncommittally.

“So did you see anything at all? A car or somebody with a flashlight?”

“I won’t waiting up for
her,”
said Lacy. “Just set down to rest a spell, do a little thinking. Won’t no lights anywhere in the lane till she come.”

“And after that?”

“After that I went to bed,” Lacy said firmly. “I heared the Wheeler boy coming home on his motorcycle about two o’clock, but anybody else use the lane, I don’t know nothing about it.”

He fastened the buttons of his faded blue denim work jacket and stood up to indicate that as far as he was concerned the interview was over.

Dwight stood, too.

“If you happen to remember where you might have seen that man before,” he told Kate, “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call at the sheriff’s office.”

Lacy took the dangling cigarette from the corner of his mouth and said, “She seen him before? He one of her New York friends?”

He made New York sound like an epithet.

“Not a friend,” Kate said sharply. “There was something about that black mole on his cheek—”

“Black mole?”

Lacy’s pale blue eyes goggled at them and Dwight said, “That’s right—I forgot you weren’t down at the packhouse when we brought him out. You only saw him lying with the side of his face against the ground. When we turned him over, Mr. Lacy, there was a pea-size black mole on the right cheek, just below his eye.”

“And she thought he looked familiar?” Lacy spluttered. “I reckon he did. I guaran-damn-tee you he looked familiar. You wait right here!”

He hurried up the porch steps and into the house. The sound of table drawers scraping open reached them through the door and Dwight looked questioningly at Kate.

She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

In a moment, Lacy returned, hugging a large scrapbook-type picture album to his bony chest. He sat down on a wicker rocker near Kate’s swing and rested the album on his knees.

“Now just you looky here,” he told Dwight, turning the brittle black pages.

The snapshots were tipped in with black triangular corners, many of which had lost their holding power. Several pictures had come loose entirely and Lacy tucked them between the pages as he searched. Kate remembered leafing through the album with Jake several times after they were just married when she was eager to know everything about his life before they met.

His mother had begun it in the forties by gathering up all the stray family photographs and arranging them in chronological order. The oldest was a badly corroded tintype of an elderly man in full whiskers. There were stiffly posed studio groupings of children in petticoats and high-button shoes. Halfway through the album, brown-toned wedding pictures gave way to shiny Kodak snapshots of Jake as a baby balanced on an enormous mule by a grinning Lacy; Jake as a toddler on Andrew’s lap laughing through the steering wheel of a new tractor; Jake in a series of grammar school pictures that ended with a solemn yearbook likeness of a capped and gowned senior clutching his high school diploma.

Jake’s mother had identified the earliest sections in tiny white-ink captions. After her death, Andrew had written the dates directly onto the snapshot borders in firm ballpoint script. Later still, Lacy’s uneven printing had labeled the pictures: “J. in basic training,” “J. in army uniform,” “J’s last leave before Vietnam,” “J. and buddies in V.”

The printing remained, but that particular page was empty. Only the black corners showed that several spaces had been painstakingly filled at one time.

Lacy fumbled through the loose snapshots and finally went back into the house to turn out the table drawer. The photographs he sought remained missing. “They was pictures of Jake and James Tyrrell and a Bernie-somebody.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Kate, now that her memory had been nudged.

“He had a black mole in the same place you say that dead man has,” said Lacy.

“Didn’t he have a beard though?” asked Kate.

For the past half hour, Lacy had talked around Kate, ignored her presence, and tried to pretend she didn’t exist. Even now, in his excitement, he responded to Dwight rather than answer her directly.

“That’s right. He had a big black beard just like my granddaddy Avera had, only his was white.”

“Can you remember his last name?” asked Dwight.

“Bernie’s all I ever heared Jake call him.”

“Kate?” If Dwight felt awkward using her name this first time, he didn’t show it.

“It began with a
C,”
said Kate, “and I think it was rather long—like Chesterton or Columbia. Something like that.”

“Vietnam,” mused Dwight. “That was where Jake first met James Tyrrell, wasn’t it, and Tyrrell saved his life?”

“They was on a night patrol,” said Lacy. “Jake, James, this here Bernie, and the one they called Kid, and some others. The gooks opened fire and they got cut off from the rest of their company. Everybody on that patrol got killed ’cepting them four. A sniper had Jake right between the cross hairs of his gun and James was off to one side and seen him and got off the first shot. Took ’em three days to work their way back to their company and I reckon they had some right touchous times ’fore they was safe again.”

“Touchous” was the word for it all right, thought Kate. On the whole, Jake had come home from Vietnam unscarred. By the time they met, he had buried the hellish parts of those eighteen months and seemed to remember only the camaraderie and the adolescent horsing around between battles.

Only once, when he woke up sweat-drenched from a terrifying nightmare, did he let her see some of the horror he had endured.

While a violent summer storm sent thunder and lightning crashing across the Manhattan skies, he had shivered in her arms and told of being lost in a featureless jungle, mortar fire all around them, their patrol leader blown into a hundred bloody shreds, the eerie silence when the shelling stopped, the click of the sniper’s rifle just before James’s own hastily aimed shot tore through the sniper’s shoulder, how Bernie and James had pounded that Vietcong soldier into a wet pulp while he looked on numbly and the Kid vomited in the undergrowth, of crouching in a tunnel below a ruined temple with a Cong patrol camped above them all night.

“I know they stayed friends,” said Dwight, “’cause I remember the first time Tyrrell visited down here. I was on leave from the army myself and he and Jake and the Gilbert girls and I drove over to Chapel Hill for a basketball game. But what about this Bernie and the Kid?”

Lacy shrugged. “They never come here.”

“I didn’t know them either,” said Kate. “Vietnam was long before I met Jake and he seldom talked about it. I had the impression that they’d been thrown together on that patrol by chance and that they didn’t really have much in common. The Kid was a little younger. I think he’d lied about his age to join. And this Bernie might have been something of a criminal. I seem to recall Jake said he was in trouble with the MPs later, drugs or black market.”

“The army’ll still have his fingerprints handy,” said Dwight. “Sure would help if we had a name, though.”

“If you can wait until tomorrow,” said Kate, “I could probably give you one. The movers are due in the morning and I know exactly which carton I put Jake’s things in. There was a manila envelope of Vietnam stuff. I’m almost positive there were pictures with names and dates on the back.”

Lacy continued to thumb through the loose snapshots among the album pages. “Durned if I can figure out what went with the pictures of them boys. Jake must of sent me five or six.”

“Maybe you put them somewhere else,” Dwight suggested. “When did you see them last?”

Lacy sat back in the wicker rocker and narrowed his eyes in concentration. “Let’s see. It was back right before Christmas. Mary Pat’d come over to bring me a picture she’d drawed of Aunt Susie and a Christmas tree and we got to talking about family and I pulled out the album to show her this here picture of her mammy and daddy when they got married.”

He opened to a color miniature of Patricia and Philip Carmichael’s wedding portrait—Patricia effervescent in white gauze, Philip gray at the temples and so distinguished in his morning jacket. Their happiness caught Kate off balance and blurred her eyes with momentary mist. She leaned back in the swing and gazed out across the yard to the pecan grove beyond, to watch the wind push small white clouds across the blue sky while Lacy talked.

“She wanted to see the whole book and I remember them Vietnam pictures of Jake and her Uncle James was there because we was looking at ’em when that Whitley girl come to fetch her and Mary Pat made her stay and finish looking at ’em with us. And after they left, I put that album right back in the parlor table drawer and there it stayed till I fetched it out just now. So where the hell are they?” he demanded.

Kate’s attention snapped away from the clouds as she realized that Lacy was speaking directly to her for the first time since the interview began.

“You think I took them?” she asked. “Even if I’d wanted to, Lacy, when do you think I did it? I went straight to bed last night and you know perfectly well that I haven’t been near the parlor today.”

“Well, somebody took ’em, cause they’re sure not here now,” Lacy said truculently.