Freefall (9 page)

Although the original house had blown away in a hurricane and a second had been burned by Union troops during the war, the land on which Whispering Pines stood had been in the Honeycutt family since the seventeen hundreds. There'd been a time when the Honeycutts had owned Nate's ancestors.

Once freed, most of his people had stayed on to work the fields, as they had since being dragged to this country in chains.

They'd had a hardscrabble life, but Nate Senior had risen above his humble roots to become the first Spencer to graduate from high school, the first to go to college, and one of the first black men anywhere in the South to become the law that so many Southern people of color had once feared. Often with good reason.

Even after desegregation, a lot of black people continued to resent the way things had been during the years when cotton was king. And later, during those deadly Jim Crow years. According to some of the old tales Nate had overheard during family reunions, the Spencer family had definitely harbored its share of bitterness.

Then Nate Senior had got himself drafted, landed in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, and by his third tour in 'Nam had figured out that life tended to be a lot easier and you stayed a lot saner if you dealt with the present and looked toward the future, rather than dwelling on a past you couldn't do anything about.

Something Nate had figured out for himself during a deadly posting in Somalia during his Marine days.

Whispering Pines may have been built in the late eighteen hundreds, but it definitely maintained the look of more-prosperous, and indolent (at least indolent for the white folks), antebellum times. In fact, there were those who insisted on calling it Little Swannsea, because it resembled the home of the Swanns, who were cousins to the Honeycutts.

But where Swannsea boasted twenty-seven two-story Doric columns on three sides of the gleaming white house, Whispering Pines had settled for eight onestory pillars in the front. Swannsea had two sets of front steps; Whispering Pines, one. Swannsea, eight chimneys, Whispering Pines, three.

And then, of course, there was the damn golf course development Brad Sumner was building right against the Honeycutt property line.

But even the smaller of the two homes was a palace compared to the tar paper sharecropper's shack without plumbing that Nate Senior had grown up in.

After Reconstruction, when the market for Southern crops plummeted, the Honeycutt men had turned to medicine. For over a hundred years they'd treated patients in a clinic set up in their home, and Nate knew the two doors on the side of the house were for those not-so-long-ago days when "coloreds" and "whites" had bided their time before appointments in separate, and definitely not all that equal, waiting rooms.

Still, he thought, as he climbed the steps to the front door, he supposed the Honeycutt physicians got points for treating their black neighbors, which sure as hell hadn't always been the case over on the mainland.

The doorbell played the opening bars of "Dixie"; a moment later, an elderly housekeeper wearing a black dress with white cuffs and collar and a blindingly bright scarlet, purple, and turquoise turban answered the door.

"Mr. Nate." The Geechee woman greeted him with a huge smile. She'd been brought to Whispering Pines as a teenager, to care for the doctor from the day he'd been brought home from the hospital as an infant. "How lovely to see you again."

Eugenia Pickney might have been born into a Gullah home, but her diction was pure Lowcountry society white.

"It's good to see you, too, Miss Eugenia." Nate wished he was there under any other circumstances—not that he'd ever been invited to Whispering Pines for any social occasion.

"The doctor's waiting in his operating room."

A euphemism, they both knew, for his autopsy suite, since any actual surgery required by live patients was done off island at Somersett's St. Camillus Hospital.

As he passed the formal parlor on the way to the back of the house, a voice called out to him through an open pocket door.

"Nate Davis. How lovely to see you again." The mistress of the house unwittingly echoed her servant.

Nate stuck his head into the room. The doctor's wife was sitting on a brocade sofa, a needlepoint frame in her lap, a spiffy electric wheelchair by her side. Proving that even the rich didn't get a free pass through life, she'd survived polio as a girl only to have it reappear with a vengeance in her later years.

"Good to see you, too, Miss Lillian."

"If only it weren't for such a somber reason. I swear, I don't know what the world is coming to." She clucked her tongue. "Who'd have ever thought we'd have two murders on Swann Island? Let alone two in such a short period of time."

"It is unfortunate," Nate said, proving himself the master of understatement.

It was a lot more than unfortunate. He knew he was under a microscope, not only because of his color but because he was Big Nate Spencer's son. If he didn't close these cases, and fast, the good citizens of Swann Island would start looking around for another candidate for his badge.

The fact that he didn't want to give it up surprised Nate nearly as much as the fact that he'd agreed to take it in the first place.

"Would you stay for dinner? Eugenia picked up some fresh scallops at the market and has planned a special dessert."

"Thank you, Miss Lillian. I certainly appreciate the invitation, but I'm afraid I have a prior engagement."

It was weird how whenever he got into a conversation with Lillian Honeycutt he started talking like Ashley Wilkes.

Pale blue eyes lit up with feminine interest. "A date?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"With Titania?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Oh, she's such a lovely girl. And so talented!" She clapped her hands together with pure feminine glee. "I bought some of her ladyfingers for my book club last week and all the ladies raved on and on about them. I swear they were all pea green with envy."

Her hand trembled as she pulled the needle threaded with yarn through the canvas. The picture emerging appeared to be of Whispering Pines in spring, with white dogwoods blooming and red azaleas flaming.

"So, when are you going to make an honest woman of her?"

"Ma'am?"

"When are you going to marry the girl?"

Nate was grateful that his ebony complexion hid the blush he felt burning in his cheeks, and he realized that he'd begun rubbing his shoe on the Oriental carpet. Like a six-year-old called to the principal's office, he was struggling to come up with a response when he was saved by a big, booming voice.

"There you are!" Dr. Harlan Honeycutt, clad in blue scrubs, came down the hall with long, purposeful strides.

He wasn't a tall man, but with his full head of thick white hair, piercing blue eyes, and year-round tan from a penchant for golf, tennis, and sailing, he had a rugged, healthy appearance that Nate figured inspired confidence in his patients. "I was about to start without you."

"It was my fault, Harlan." Lillian broke in before Nate could respond. "I was asking him about his intentions regarding Titania."

"Women." Honeycutt exchanged a what-can-you-do-with-them look with Nate. "If y'all had your way, every male on the planet would be married."

"And wouldn't, just perhaps, the planet be a more civilized place if that were the case?" she countered pertly. She smiled up at her husband. "Marriage hasn't seemed to harm you."

"Now I'm not going to argue with you there, my love."

Putting aside his bluster, he bent down, picked up her hand, and brushed his lips across her knuckles. "However, before you back our good sheriff into an even more uncomfortable corner, he and I have work to do."

"I know." She sighed and her eyes misted up. "It's so tragic." She looked up at Nate. "You will catch this monster, won't you, Nathaniel? So we can stop living in fear?"

Nate jutted out his jaw, unaware that in that moment he was a dead ringer for his father. "I have every intention of having the perpetrator behind bars very soon, ma'am."

He hoped.

"Sorry about my wife putting you on the spot like that," Harlan said as they walked down the hallway. "We've always been fond of Titania. And, of course, her brother." He shook his leonine head. "Hell of a shame about her daddy."

"Yes, it is." Nate also found it a shame that the woman he loved to distraction was using her father's medical condition as an excuse not to discuss their future.

"I've been meaning to get out to visit him, but between you, me, and the fence posts, I keep letting things get in the way because I can't stand the idea of seeing Joshua so diminished."

"I know the feeling." Nate hated everything about the nursing home Titania and Line had finally been forced to put their father in. But love meant sharing the bad as well as the good. "If it's any consolation, most days he wouldn't recognize you, anyway."

"Still, it'd be the right thing to do."

Since he couldn't disagree with that, Nate said nothing.

The autopsy room was brightly lit and as cold as a meat locker. A white body bag lay on a metal table that, although he didn't know all that much about the field of medical forensics, Nate took to be top of the line.

Which made sense. While not nearly as wealthy as their Swann cousins, the Honeycutts had never done anything in half measures.

"I think I'll go out there this Sunday after church," Harlan said. "Take along some of Eugenia's fried chicken and potato salad. Whenever Lucie'd have barbecues at Swannsea, Joshua couldn't get enough of that chicken."

"Isn't any better," Nate agreed, feeling a little disloyal since, if truth be told, he thought Titania's was more flavorful.

"Did you know," Harlan asked as he handed Nate a bottle of wintergreen oil, "that the first recorded autopsy was of Julius Caesar?"

"No. I'd never heard that."

Although he was all too familiar with the smell of death, and even occasionally relived the battle immortalized in the book and movie
Black Hawk Down
in his sleep, Nate rubbed a bit of the oil beneath his nostrils.

He was going to have to run home, shower, and change clothes before going over to Titania's. Bad enough he'd left her hanging last night. Showing up with the stench of a murder victim on him would probably be the final straw.

"It's true. It was found in the account of Caesar's death written by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, aka Suetonius the Gossip."

Harlan tied a heavy rubberized apron over his blue scrubs. "According to Suetonius, the body was examined by a physician named Antistius, who then went to the Forum to inform the senators that Caesar had suffered twenty-three stab wounds, one of which proved fatal."

He took a pair of latex gloves from a box and snapped them on. "While I admittedly never imagined during my gross anatomy class in medical school that part of my career would involve dissecting bodies for scientific purposes, I have to admit that I rather enjoy the link to the past."

"Well, you're living in the right place, then."

"The only place I'd ever want to live." He lowered the zipper on the thick white bag. "As Eudora Welty once said, 'A known past and a sense of place open the doors of the mind.' And Swann Island surely has a plethora of both."

Nate couldn't disagree.

History—the good, the bad, and the ugly—was woven with the present throughout the South, but no more so than here on the island, where first indigo, then rice, then finally sea island cotton had made white planters wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

By the mid eighteen hundreds, at the height of the plantation era, most of the island's land and riches had been divided among three families: the Swarms, the Honeycutts, and the Somersetts.

Who, despite reverses after the Civil War brought down the cotton dynasties, still possessed most of the power and wealth.

The autopsy didn't reveal anything Nate hadn't already suspected. Dental records confirmed that his Jane Doe was indeed Hallie Conroy. Her throat had been cut with the same instrument as the earlier male victim, and she'd been dead when she was thrown into the marsh.

Although her body had begun to putrefy in the warm water, and her café au lait skin made it more difficult to date the bruises by color changes, Harlan suspected some had occurred postmortem.

"Suggesting she was killed elsewhere, then transported to the marsh," Nate murmured, trying to see it, to think it through, as his dad would've done.

"That's how I see it," the doctor concurred.

Where she'd been dumped like yesterday's garbage.

The flesh at her wrists and ankles had been rubbed nearly to the bone in places, suggesting she'd been chained for some time. Which was bad enough. But it was about to get worse.

"See these?" Harlan pointed toward a series of double parallel linear bruises from her shoulders to her ankles, front and back. They were separated by paler, undamaged sections of skin. "These are tramline contusions, caused by impact from a rod-shaped object."

"She was beaten."

"Severely. Over an extended period of time."