Long Upon the Land (11 page)

Her voice trailed off in the silence of lost possibilities.

The silence was broken by the door opening and a truculent old man entered and glared at Dwight. “Who the hell are you?”

“Sheriff’s Department,” Dwight said. “Joby Earp?”

“I know you,” the man said. “You’re the one married the Knott girl, ain’t you?”

Before he could answer, the old man held the door open. “I’ll thank you to get out of my house. Knotts ain’t welcome here.”

“My name’s Bryant,” said Dwight, “and you can either answer a few questions now or I can have you hauled over to Dobbs. What have you got against Knotts anyhow?”

That got him a string of curses.

Mrs. Earp said, “Joby, honey—”

“You shut the hell up,” he snarled. “You want to know who killed Vick? Go ask Kezzie Knott. He got somebody to help steal our land and now he’s had our boy killed just because Vick got some of our own back.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go ask him. And while you’re at it, tell him I know who turned me in this last time and I’m not gonna forget it.”

“Turned you in? Turned you in for what?”

But the old man just glared at him with his lips clamped tight. His wife was in tears.

“Please, Major Bryant. We need to go. Rosalee needs us to be there.”

Dwight nodded. “We’ll talk again later, Mr. Earp.”

“Go to hell!”

Back at his office, Dwight pulled up Joby Earp’s record and saw that he’d been arrested several times for possession of non–tax paid whiskey. As a repeat offender, he’d been sentenced to serve a year and a day in custody of the US attorney general, which meant forty-five days in custody, three years’ probation, and a thousand-dollar fine. What surprised Dwight was that Earp had been released from Butner only two weeks ago.

Three minutes later, he was talking to Ed Gardner, the ATF agent who had signed the original arrest warrant.

“Oh yeah,” Gardner said when Dwight told him why he’d called. “In fact, I meant to call you about that. Give you a heads-up after the
Clarion
piece. Seems to be a little range war going on out there.”

“Range war?”

“Someone gave us an anonymous tip about Earp back in the spring, then this past month, we’ve gotten tips on a couple of small operations.”

“And?”

“Can’t prove it, but it looks like Kezzie Knott’s involved.”

“Huh?”

“His name’s nowhere on record, but both those jokers were represented by Lee and Stephenson. We busted up their stills and they got the usual fines but you and I both know who pays Mr. Lee’s fees in these cases.”

Dwight sighed.

“Here’s where it gets cute, though,” said Gardner. “Both of those tips came from the same commercial phone number. Dexter Oil and Gas. Name mean anything to you?”

“That’s where our victim worked. Joby Earp was Vick Earp’s uncle and both of them seem to hold a grudge against Mr. Kezzie.”

“Soon as I read ol’ Joby’s statement to the
Clarion
, I had a feeling. He must’ve picked up those two names while he was at Butner and passed them on to his nephew. Sorry, Dwight.”

W
ith Cal off to the beach and no need to rush right home after work, Dwight and Deborah had an early supper at a Tex-Mex place about three blocks from the courthouse, taco salad for her, beans and burritos for Dwight.

“Any progress on the Earp murder?” Deborah asked as she spooned extra guacamole on her salad and dipped her fork into the creamy green deliciousness.

“If you call eliminating another possible suspect progress,” Dwight said gloomily.

“Who’s been eliminated besides his wife?”

“His brother, for one. Tyler Earp. They fought because Earp owed him for a paint job and Tyler’s probably the one who shot up his truck. He’s alibied for the first part of Friday night, though, and one of his roommates says he was drunk and still sleeping it off till midmorning Saturday. But the roommate was just as drunk and probably passed out, too, so it’s not rock solid. And that truck’s still missing. For all we know, Earp’s death might just be a carjacking.”

“Killed when someone tried to steal it?”

“Men have been killed for less and it’s only two years old, according to his wife. We can’t stop every red F-150 on the road and ask to see the registration. By now, it’s probably headed for Florida with a different plate.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

Dwight sighed. “No, not really. A carjacker would leave him where he fell, not drive his body out to the farm.” He wet a corner of his napkin in his water glass and dabbed at a spot of beans on his shirt. “I sent Mayleen and Ray to the funeral this afternoon, but they came up empty, too. They said it was a small turnout—only twenty-three people, not counting the family. His aunt and his wife were the only two who shed any tears and Mayleen thinks most of the people came for them, not Earp.”

Deborah broke off a bit of her taco shell and dipped it in the red sauce to gauge its spiciness. She liked a little heat, but what a waiter calls
mild
would sometimes set off a bonfire on her tongue. This had just the right amount of tang. “Did you know them when they lived out near the farm?”

Dwight swallowed the bite of burrito he’d just taken and shook his head. “I asked Mama about the Earp boys when I dropped the kids off there and she said they moved over to Cotton Grove while I was still in grade school. They were enough older that we wouldn’t have overlapped anyhow.”

“What about Robert and Andrew?” Deborah wondered aloud. “They ever mention Joby Earp?”

He frowned. “Why’re you asking about him?”

“Something John Claude said when I stopped by there at lunchtime. I wanted to know if my grandfather ever defended the Earps.”

“Why?” he persisted.

“Just curious,” she said, not quite meeting his steady gaze.

“Deborah?”

All three syllables. Serious.

“Vick Earp’s arrest record,” she said. “I must have read it when I issued that protection order for his wife, but it didn’t really register because I didn’t know he’d ever lived out there. I read it again this morning. You must have read it, too, Dwight. When Vick Earp was sixteen, he was charged with felony speeding to elude arrest. Also possession of untaxed whiskey. Back then, he was probably running it for Daddy because my grandfather defended him in court and he only got a light slap on the wrist. So I asked about Joby Earp, too.”

“And?”

“John Claude wouldn’t tell me but I sort of remembered that name from when I first looked through those files after I joined the firm. Something must have happened between them, though, because Grandfather dropped them before they moved to Cotton Grove.”

Dwight frowned in hesitation.

“What?” she said.

“When I tried to question Joby Earp, he got belligerent. Accused Mr. Kezzie of stealing his land.”

“What?”

“They didn’t live
near
the farm, shug. They lived
on
it. He just served forty-five days in Butner for possession of white lightning and he seems to think Mr. Kezzie’s the one who turned him in. He also thinks that if Mr. Kezzie didn’t kill Vick himself, he might have had someone to do it for him.”

Shocked, Deborah stared at Dwight. “You can’t possibly believe that.”

He didn’t answer.

“Can you?”

“Look, Deb’rah, I know you think he hung the moon and you know how I feel about him, but there was a time when he did ride roughshod over people. We both know that. He would have had to. You can’t run the kind of operation he ran without some hired muscle to back it up. He dealt with crooks and outlaws—hell, he was a crook himself. Making and distributing untaxed whiskey is a crime and you of all people know that.”

“But that was back when times were hard for him. He hasn’t done that in years!” she protested.

“You sure about that, honey?”

They both knew she couldn’t honestly say yes.

Her mother always said that was the one thing he lied to her about and he had even admitted it himself once. “It was the excitement. Running the risks. Knowing what I could lose if I got caught. That’s something your mama never rightly understood.”

“Ed Gardner says John Claude defended two moonshiners this month and you know what that means.”

“Daddy may still bankroll some small mom-and-pop operations to keep his hand in,” Deborah said. “That wouldn’t surprise me. All the same, Dwight, he would never kill anybody. And he certainly didn’t kill Vick Earp.”

But she couldn’t help remembering that he hadn’t denied knowing him.

They finished their meal and Dwight signaled for the bill. “I’m going to have to tell him what Joby Earp said and ask him where their land was. That place where Vick Earp was found might well have been part of it.”

Deborah nodded bleakly. “But just because they used to own it doesn’t mean they didn’t sell it to him. You know how Daddy is about land. He’s spent his whole life pushing the boundaries of the farm further out from the homeplace.”

“I know.”

The sun was still high above the treetops when they walked out into the parking lot to her car and humidity wrapped itself around them like a hot damp blanket. As soon as she turned the key in the ignition, cool dry air flowed from the vents and she leaned forward to let the air blow on her face. “Are you going to talk to him now?”

“No point waiting,” Dwight said.

“Can I come, too?”

He frowned.

“I won’t interfere. I promise.”

“Okay. Follow me out?”

Deborah nodded and drove over to where his truck was parked behind the courthouse. She would have preferred to get there first and give Daddy a heads-up, but she had promised not to interfere and like it or not, this was a murder investigation.

They stopped by the house first to let Bandit out of his pen and run around the yard while they changed into cooler clothes. With the little terrier on the seat between them, they drove through the lanes to the homeplace.

Her father’s truck was parked by the back porch. He himself had just finished his own supper and was sitting on an old metal glider to hand-feed a few scraps to Ladybelle and Speck, the bluetick that Robert gave him after Blue died last year. Bandit hopped out and the dogs touched noses, smelled bottoms, and then wandered out into the yard when it was clear that there were no more scraps for them.

Kezzie tipped his straw panama back on his head and gave them a welcoming smile that turned to puzzlement as Deborah sat down next to him on the glider and took her fingers through his. Dwight sat down on the top step of the porch.

“Y’all are looking mighty serious,” he said. “Something wrong? Where’s your boy?”

“Kate took him with them to the beach for the week,” Deborah said.

“It’s about Vick Earp, Mr. Kezzie,” said Dwight.

“The dead man we found?”

“Yessir. You recognized him, didn’t you?”

“Thought it might be one of them Earps, but won’t sure which one.”

“Why didn’t you tell us, Daddy?” Deborah asked, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be listening, not talking.

He withdrew his hand, reached into his shirt pocket for cigarettes, and struck a match to light it. “Me and the Earps never got along too good. Sammy Earp used to own that part of the land near Black Gum Branch.”

“Vick Earp’s grandfather?” asked Dwight.

Kezzie nodded.

“Sammy won’t much of a farmer, but he knowed how to make good whiskey and we had an arrangement. Then he started drinking it, got into debt, owed me a lot of money. Land out here in the county won’t worth much back then and he kept cutting me off a few acres till by the time he died and his boys got up in size, there won’t but just a little bit down by the branch where I found Vick. Joby, he was Sammy’s oldest. Me and him’s about the same age. He didn’t know Sammy’d deeded me so much of the land. I let them boys keep farming it after Sammy died and Joby thought the whole place was his. When I finally told him he owed me rent money, he got it in mind that I’d cheated his daddy out of their farm. He started bad-mouthing me around the community, but I let it ride till he—”

He broke off to take another drag on his cigarette.

“Till what, Mr. Kezzie?” asked Dwight.

He blew out a long stream of smoke and turned to look at Deborah. “You remember that time down by the creek after you lost that first election and you asked me if I ever killed anybody?”

She nodded. “I remember.”

“You remember what I said?”

She didn’t answer and he turned back around to face Dwight. “I told her that I wanted to a couple of times and meant to once, but never did. And that’s as true today as it was then.”

“Mr. Kezzie—”

He raised his hand to stop Dwight. “Hear me out, son. I know who it was stuck that pine cone up the
Clarion
’s backside, trying to make it sound like I killed Vick Earp. It was Joby Earp. Same man I meant to kill and didn’t all those years ago.”

The glider creaked on its rusty springs as he leaned back, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and let memory carry him back across the years.

F
or the second time in two days, Sue drives down the bumpy dirt lane to that abandoned tenant house and soon has a fire going in the old stone hearth. Dry pine cones, dead limbs, and pieces of the old collapsed siding all burn readily. The house had been built from heart pine, so the smoke billowing from the chimney is nice and black; and she is pleased to see it rise straight up in the still December air.

That end of the room still has part of the roof and three walls, and the fire soon warms the area around the hearth. She spreads one of those freshly laundered blankets on the floor in front of the fire, and settles onto the blanket with the legal documents she and Zell had registered at the courthouse first thing this morning.

She does not expect to wait long and sure enough, Kezzie Knott’s truck soon trundles down the lane. He pulls up beside her car and rolls his window down.

“I thought somebody’d set this place on fire,” he calls.

Without getting up, she calls back, “Can’t hear you.”

He frowns at that, but gets out of the truck and walks over to the ruined house. “I thought this place was on fire.”

“No, just keeping warm, but I’m glad you came. Maybe you can help me?”

“Help you do what?”

“The other day, you said your boys know your farm’s boundaries. Could you show me mine?”

“Ma’am?”

“The boundaries of this farm. It’s mine.”

“Your’n? What about your sister? Ain’t her name on the deed, too?”

She is not surprised that he would know that, but merely says, “Not anymore. I bought her half.”

It has cost her all the accrued rent money and her half of the new car that was their joint Christmas present, but she doesn’t tell him that.

“We registered the new deed this morning, but I can’t decide where the corners are.”

She spreads out the deeds that have passed down through the years from father to son and finally to a daughter. Her grandmother. The earliest one is dated 1764 and encompasses nearly 2,000 acres. By the end of the Civil War, the holding had been reduced to its present 114 acres and in addition to a written description of those final boundaries, there is a map hand-drawn by some long-dead surveyor. “I can see where it touches the creek, but where would that holly tree be?”

Reluctantly, Knott steps up into the ruined house and sits on his heels to look at the deeds. He turns the map to orient himself and while he studies it, she studies him.

A two-day growth of beard stubbles his strong chin and jawline and his deep-set eyes are a clear blue. A lock of wavy brown hair has escaped his hat to fall across his brow and she finds herself wanting to brush it back.

“That holly tree’s the beginning of my land,” he says. “Ain’t nothing left of it now but the stump. I hammered in a iron pipe there when I got that piece from the Earps.”

He picks up the 1764 deed. “Joseph Grimes? That must be why they still call it
Grimes land
on all the deeds. You come down from him?”

Sue nods.

The first Grimeses arrived in Virginia in 1703 and some of them eventually worked their way down to North Carolina. Her mother is a proud member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Sue herself has never seen the point of resting on an ancestor’s laurels and rather suspects that Joseph Grimes might well have been one of those Englishmen who were given the choice between transport and debtor’s prison.

“My granddaddy got our homeplace from this ’un,” he says, pointing to one of the post–Civil War deeds.

“And you’ve added to it?”

“Figured I might as well since they ain’t making no more land.” He sticks the deed with the map in the pocket of his brown work jacket and stands. “Come on then and I’ll show you what’s your’n.”

“Are you sure you have time? I don’t mean to take you away from your work.”

He shakes his head. “I set my own hours.”

She reaches up and after a slight hesitation, his hand takes hers to help her to her feet. She’s wearing a short wool jacket and corduroy slacks tucked inside a pair of sturdy leather boots. As they pass the dilapidated curing barn, he reaches inside for a couple of tobacco sticks and hands her one. She did enough rough hiking yesterday to know a stick will come in handy for pushing aside briars and low-hanging branches.

At the creek, they turn east to follow its run to where her land ends at Black Gum Branch.

“Never knew that little branch had a name,” she says. “Where’s the black gum tree?”

“Probably blew down years ago.” He points to a moss-covered stump. “I believe that might be what’s left of it.”

The branch peters out in a low marshy spot and after some poking around with his tobacco stick, he locates another iron stob. Due north from there, they come to the dirt road and cross it to walk along the western side of a cotton field. The dead stems hold empty bolls that still have wisps of cotton clinging to them.

“This ought to’ve been cut in last month,” he said and she hears the disapproval of a good farmer.

“You really do farm, too?” she asks.

Till then, he’s stayed a pace or two ahead of her. Now he turns. “What do you mean,
too
?”

She shrugs. “My father told me why you went to prison and you’re still making it, aren’t you?”

He glares at her, then heads south again without answering.

“Are you ashamed to answer?” she asks.

It’s not a taunt, but it makes him face her again. “I ain’t ashamed of nothing I do, Miss Stephenson, but that ain’t none of your business.”

“It is if you’re making it on my land.”

That stops him. “I ain’t making it on your land.”

“Maybe not right now, but you have in the past, haven’t you? I was out here yesterday and I walked the creek over toward your line. Looked to me as if somebody had a still there back in the summer.”

“And you’d know what a still site looks like?”

“I’m not stupid, Mr. Knott. I could see where a fire had been built. Bricks and rocks to hold the heat in beneath some sort of large vessel. A few pieces of firewood scattered around.”

“Could’ve been some hunters looking to stay warm.”

She laughs out loud at that and his own lips twitch before he turns. The field ends but he keeps on walking, breaking a trail through blackberry briars and wax myrtles out into a stand of longleaf pines new to her. A thick carpet of pine needles has smothered out the usual underbrush and there is nothing to block her view of this open expanse. She catches her breath at the way the morning sun streams through those high branches, sending down shafts of pure golden light between the tall, straight trunks of the pines, and he pauses to watch her.

“Is this mine?” she whispers, awed by the beauty. “Really, truly mine?”

He smiles at her. “Real pretty, ain’t it?”

Impulsively, she stands on tiptoe, pulls his head down, and kisses his stubbly cheek.

Startled, he takes a step back and stares at her.

She laughs. “Don’t think that means anything. That was just to thank you for showing me this.”

“Yeah?” Without warning, he wraps his arms around her and kisses her full on the lips. “That’s to say you’re welcome.”

Before she can react, the bark on the pine tree next to his head explodes in a shower of sharp chips that sting their faces. A split second later, the sound of the rifle reaches their ears.

He pulls her to the ground just as another bullet hits the pine trunk where their heads were only an instant ago.

“
Hey!
” he yells. “People here! Hold your fire!”

He looks down at her. “You okay?”

She nods.

“Fool hunter,” he growls. “He could’ve killed us.” He shouts across the clearing, “
Hey, you!
Who’s that shooting?”

No one answers.

“Stay down,” he says, then sprints across the open expanse in the direction the shots came from and crashes through the bushes at the far side.

It’s a good five minutes before he comes back. “Took to his heels,” he tells her as he helps her to her feet. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says, “but your cheek—you’re bleeding.”

She reaches out with her handkerchief, but he moves away from her touch and pulls out his own handkerchief to blot up the blood.

“A tree branch caught me. Ain’t but a scratch,” he says. “We need to finish up here. Your south corner’s down yonder.” He turns and sets off at such a fast pace that she almost has to run to keep up with his long legs.

She’s full of questions about that kiss, those rifle shots, and why he’s suddenly so anxious to be gone. But she only asks about the shots.

“Somebody was hunting on my land without asking,” he says. “Reckon that’s why he took off.”

“Your land? You own that?”

Past the stand of pines, he points to three slash marks on the north side of a huge old water oak. “That shows that your line runs on this side of the tree. Mine’s on the other side.”

She nods but doesn’t speak and they finish walking the boundary in silence.

Back at the ruined house, he immediately heads for his truck.

“I brought sandwiches,” she says, reaching for a picnic basket in her car. “Enough for both of us.”

“Thank you kindly, Miss Stephenson, but dinner’ll be waiting for me at my house and I got something that needs doing first.”

“My name is Sue,” she says.

“You’re Lawyer Stephenson’s girl. It ain’t fitting for me to call you that.”

“I kissed you, Kezzie. And you kissed me back.”

“That won’t fitting neither.” He opens the door of his truck and steps in.

“I’ll be here tomorrow,” she calls.

“Well, I won’t,” he says.

And he isn’t, even though black smoke rises from the chimney all morning.

Nor does he come the next three mornings.

On the fifth morning, he has the fire going before she gets there.