The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  “Why are you worrying about a job?” I said. “I’m sure Grandfather left you well taken care of.”

  I was surprised she would think otherwise.

  “You may be wrong,” she said. “He never talked about it, but for some time, I think he was just getting by. At least, that’s the impression I have.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” I said, trying to sound convincing.

  However, Eloise’s comments disturbed me. I realized I knew nothing about Grandfather’s financial condition.

  “You’ve got Still Hollow,” I said, “and I’m sure there’s insurance. We can also sell the Clarion,” I added, as the idea came to me. “You don’t want it any more than I do. We’ll talk to Ellis Hagood, if he’s still the family lawyer. He must have the details of Grandfather’s finances. You’ll see, he will be able to arrange something so that you won’t have to worry. We’ll pay him a visit as soon as we can.”

  “Would you do that for me, John David? I know it’s a lot to ask, but in the frame of mind I’m in right now, I don’t think I could concentrate on it.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said, “but if grandfather named you executor of his will—which I’m sure he did—then legally, I won’t be able to do anything without your approval.”

  “Co-executor maybe,” she said. He wouldn’t just leave you out.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” I said.

  Eloise prepared a plate for Mackenzie and took it up to her. When she came back down, she said, “I think she’s going to be okay. The poor baby just needs a little space to get everything worked out. She was worried about being so anti-social, but I told her you would understand.”

  “She’s an incredible kid and I do understand,” I said. “You’ve raised her well.”

  We went back out and sat on the front porch again. The sounds of the receding afternoon were all around us. Cicadas were serenading in full harmony in the woods, and somewhere in the hills beyond, a Whippoorwill called, its mate answering with the same lonely, lovesick sound. I was reminded of a much earlier time when Eloise and I first came to live here. A time when we’d both just learned that life could have a cruel streak.

  “Tell me about Kelly Mayfield,” I said. “I didn’t think Grandfather would ever turn the position of editor over to anyone.”

  “She’s very smart. She graduated from Smith College magna cum laude.”

  Smith. It figured.

  “She joined the Clarion about a year ago from the Charlotte Observer. Granddad thinks— thought the world of her.”

  “Charlotte Observer? That’s a major paper,” I said, and wondered if Kelly Mayfield was a victim of the downsizing occurring in newspapers all across the country, thanks to the Internet. Moving from the Charlotte Observer to the Clarion was quite a downward leap. “What on earth is she doing here?” I asked.

  Eloise frowned at me. “Not everyone shares your low opinion of small town newspapers, John David,” she said, using her big sister voice. “Kelly doesn’t. Granddad badly needed help, and since you wouldn’t . . .”

  I could feel her eyes on me. “What is it?” I asked.

  “I think it’s time you tell me what happened.”

  “What are you talking about?” As if I didn’t know.

  “That damned thing between you and Granddad.”

  I stared at the floor, thinking about why I’d never shared the sordid episode with her. The truth was, I was afraid to put a crack in the pedestal my sister kept me on.

  “Something happened during your last year in college and the two of you were never the same afterwards,” she said. “I know you got into some kind of trouble, but I don’t know the details. Granddad wouldn’t talk about it, and now he can’t. That leaves you.”

  “Do we really need to get into this now, Eloise?” I asked.

  “I think we do. Maybe for you as much as for me.”

  A gap of uncomfortable silence fell between us. She stared at me while I concentrated on a time I’d just as soon forget.

  “I did the unspeakable,” I finally said. “I disappointed him.”

  Eloise played her eyes over my face. “What could you do that would be so bad?”

  Dear, faithful, Eloise. I took a deep breath and studied a spot between my feet.

  “I guess things kind of went to my head. The football. The attention. Big man on campus. I started doing some stuff I’m not too proud of.”

  “Drugs?” she asked.

  “Among other things,” I said, as I saw the first look of disappointment on her face.

  “You were young,” she said, trying to hide it.

  “I was old enough to know better,” I said.

  She sat waiting for me to continue.

  “There was a party,” I said, remembering a vision of me snorting coke off a bare breast in a hallway of a house off campus, a detail I would leave out of the story. “I met a girl from town,” I began. “Not a student. She came with a guy, also a ‘townie,’ who always seemed to be hanging around. But she wasn’t with him, if you know what I mean. They weren’t a couple. The guy was passing around blow like it was a sugar substitute, and we all got wrecked. After a while, this girl and I took the party to her place. Just the two of us.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Eloise suppress a smile.

  “Probably not something you’d want to tell the preacher, little brother,” she said, “but not the end of the world, either.”

  “I wish that was all there was to it,” I said. “Later, I woke up in bed alone. I got up to go to the head and found her sitting naked on the toilet. At first, I thought she’d gone to sleep sitting on the john. Then I saw the rubber tube on her arm and the syringe still hanging out of a vein. She’d moved on to the industrial strength stuff sometime during the night. I put my hand on her shoulder and she was cold, too cold to just be asleep.”

  Eloise brought her hands to her face. “She was dead?”

  “Yes.” I said.

  “Surely the police didn’t think you had anything to do with it?”

  I sat and stared at her without speaking, watching the slow realization spread across her face.

  “You didn’t call the police,” she said.

  “I called the guy from the party. Her friend . . . or whatever he was. He’d given me his number. He told me to just take off. Split. Said she was a junkie and the police wouldn’t look too hard into it. It’s what I wanted to hear, I guess. I got the hell out of there.”

  Eloise looked away, but not quickly enough to hide what I saw in her eyes. She’d expected more out of me.

  “A couple of days later,’ I said, “when I was almost at a point where I could go five minutes without seeing her sitting on that toilet—the guy shows up.”

  “The guy from the party?”

  I nodded. “He gets straight to it. He wants me to shave points off the upcoming game on Saturday, or he’s going to the cops.”

  Eloise made a small, round circle with her mouth. “He was blackmailing you?”

  “I think he was trying to set me up from the beginning. He had pictures of the girl and me doing lines at the party, but her death presented him with an even more propitious moment.”

  “But what could the police do to you? It wasn’t your fault.”

  “The scandal alone would have destroyed me, Eloise. No more scholarship. No more football. No more ‘big man on campus.’ Hell, probably no more college. He made sure I understood that.”

  “Oh, John David.”

  “We were favored by two touchdowns, and he wanted it closer. He made it all sound so easy and insignificant. Fumble a snap . . . sail one over a receiver’s head . . . turn the wrong way scrambling out of the pocket. He wasn’t asking me to throw the game, he said, he just wanted me to keep it from being a runaway. I was so thrown by it I didn’t know what to say, which I guess, let him leave thinking I’d do it.”

  Eloise watched me with sad eyes.

  “That was Wednesday,” I conti
nued, “and I didn’t hear from him again until Friday. He called the frat house and I told him to go fuck himself.”

  Eloise smiled at me as if no other course of action on my part was ever possible. “What did he say to that?” she asked.

  “He added another incentive. He said he had friends who were counting on me. They had already placed bets, he said, and they were the kind of guys who’d end my football career more abruptly than the cops or bad publicity would.”

  “Oh my God, John David.”

  “By game time Saturday I was a basket case. My timing was shot and I felt like I was playing through a brain fog. Not only that, but the opposing team was better than anyone thought. We barely squeezed by, winning the game by a field goal, 20-17. On Monday, the guy strolls into my room at the frat house like he owns the place, hands me an envelope with three thousand dollars in it, and starts talking about the next game.”

  “So he thought you shaved the points?”

  “Yes he did, and nothing I could say made any difference. I realized that everybody else would think I did it too, if it ever came to my word against his. But I couldn’t let it go any further. I stuffed the money in his shirt pocket and dumped him in the parking lot. Then I phoned Grandfather and told him everything. I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “What did Grandfather do?”

  “He listened quietly, asked a couple of questions, then in as few words as possible, expressed his absolute disappointment in me and hung up.”

  “You explained that you didn’t shave the points?”

  “Dammit, Eloise, don’t you see? Even if he believed me, it didn’t matter. I’d pitched my tent across the battle line. I had fallen in with the devil’s brigade: gamblers, drug dealers, addicts and whores. I was morally corrupt. He took it as a grave, personal insult. The question of benefit of the doubt or second chance was never an option with him.”

  “So what happened?”

  “As it turned out, I didn’t need his help—or anyone else’s. The guy never came back to me and neither did these ‘friends’ of his. Maybe he got the message when I threw him out. Or maybe the cops were on to him for the drug dealing, or gambling, or whatever. I don’t know. I heard later that he left town. I never saw him again.”

  I continued. “The irony of the whole thing is that on the third play from scrimmage that following Saturday, I took a helmet to the ribs that knocked me out of the rest of the season. I lost my job to a red-shirted freshman who went on to make first team All-American, and played a few years in the NFL. I was no longer in a position to shave points, willingly or not. I’m sure Grandfather would have said that it was God’s way of getting His licks in. But I wouldn’t know. We never spoke of it again, or for that matter, about much of anything else. He never asked how it all turned out, and I never told him. I decided to let him think what he wanted—which would always be the worst. The rest you know. As soon as I graduated, I headed to Atlanta. Months turned into years . . . and here we are.”

  “What did he say to you when he came down?”

  “What?” I said.

  “He went down there and stayed a couple of days. What was that all about”

  “You’re mistaken about that, Eloise. He was on that campus twice. When he took me down my freshman year, and when I graduated. You were with him for graduation.”

  “Eloise sat frowning. “I could swear that several days after you called him he went down there to see you,” she said.

  “Well, he didn’t,” I said. “He basically turned his back on me.”

  Eloise slowly shook her head. “I can’t believe that, John David. Maybe he just didn’t know what to do to help and was heartbroken to see you suffer so. Maybe he thought he failed you.”

  “If so, he had a damned funny way of showing it.”

  She shook her head again. “The two of you were just alike. One of you should have found a way to talk about it, but you were both too pig-headed.”

  “Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” I said.

  She slid her chair over to mine and draped an arm across my shoulders.

  “I’m going to give you some advice, little brother, and I want you to listen. You can’t undo what’s been done, and you can’t live the rest of your life being sorry about it. Worse, you can’t hate him—or yourself—for it. It won’t do any good. You’ve got to get over it. I know you’re strong enough to do that. You’ve always been my hero, little brother.”

  I came home to comfort and support her, and here she was trying to console me. Something was turned around here.

  “I need to go to bed,” she said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day. I’m sure there will be a lot of people dropping by.”

  I sat for a while longer listening to the creaks and groans of the old house and the sounds of the night before going to bed. But sleep was a long time coming. Fitful, troubled thoughts circled in my head, echoing with fragments of regrets, of things left undone and words left unsaid—and a fleeting glimpse here and there of a little white patch of sand.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thursday morning Grandfather’s death made the front page (albeit below the fold) of the Greenville newspaper, delivered with a thump on the doorstep by someone in a noisy car. The obituary made it too, as promised. I brought the paper into the den and read it, and when Eloise came down, I gave it to her. Mackenzie came and sat next to her on the sofa, reading over her shoulder. There were a few tears as they read, but little comment. When they were finished reading, Eloise put the paper down, her eyes red. She quietly mouthed the word “breakfast,” and got up and went into the kitchen. Mackenzie went to help her.

  The story didn’t add much to what I already knew. Law enforcement agencies were quoted as saying that grandfather was shot and killed during the course of a robbery, and that he died at the scene—but nothing was written about why he was at the scene in the first place. There were no suspects yet, but a multiple state manhunt was under way. A highly complimentary synopsis of his career as a journalist followed; then a listing of Eloise, Mackenzie, and me as surviving family members. I was described as an investigative journalist residing in Atlanta. I didn’t know where they got the job title, but calling me anything other than a sportswriter for a weekly tabloid would have made Grandfather happy.

  After breakfast, Eloise gave me the phone number for Grandfather’s long-time lawyer, Ellis Hagood. I called him to make an appointment. I needed to get this estate-settling thing started. When the soft-spoken southern woman who answered his phone learned who I was and what I wanted, she put me on hold for a minute; when she returned, she said Mr. Hagood could see me as soon as I could get there.

  Eloise and Mackenzie went into town for the unpleasant task of purchasing appropriate funeral clothes. It seemed neither owned any somber colors. Eloise would also deliver Grandfather’s burial suit to the mortuary, and sign whatever papers needed signing. She refused my offer to do that for her, and while I felt a bit guilty about it, I didn’t fight too hard.

  After they left, I donned a navy blazer to add a little business to my casual for lawyer Hagood. As I was locking the front door, a silver late-model sedan came up the drive. An old friend was behind the wheel, and the sight of him brought a smile to my face. Bucky Streeter was my best pal growing up, a neighboring farmer’s kid who was the closest thing I ever had to a brother. Together, we’d sown our share of wild oats across our teen years, much to Grandfather’s dismay. He didn’t approve of Bucky, thinking him a bad influence—which only encouraged my friendship with him. And as to who was influencing whom, it was probably a tie.

  When I went away to college, time, distance, and different interests began the natural erosion of boyhood friendship. I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw him.

  I walked out to meet him. He’d put on a few extra pounds, and someone called a “stylist,” not a “barber,” was cutting his hair these days. But other than that, he was the same old Bucky.

  We shook hands and did
a man hug.

  “How the hell are you?” I asked.

  “The question is, how are you?”

  “I can think of a better reason for a homecoming,” I said.

  “Terrible news,” he said. “I can’t believe it. Do they have any ideas about who did it?”

  “They seem to think it was somebody looking to score money for dope.”

  “Well, I hope they get the S.O.B.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” I said. “I heard you lost your old man a while back.”

  “Yeah. He died in his sleep. Heart attack. I guess there’s worse ways to go.”

  “Sorry I didn’t hear about it in time to make the funeral.”

  “Wasn’t much of a service. He was cremated and we scattered his ashes below the falls on Whitewater, where he loved to fish.”

  Bucky looked uncomfortable talking about it. Sorrow was a subject the two of us had never shared.

  Bucky’s dad always struck me as a man irrevocably worn out by life. He seemed to approach each day as if in a chronic state of exhaustion. It was probably brought on by thirty years of trying to scratch a living out of a hundred acres of red clay and rocks. I could picture Mr. Streeter in sweat-stained overalls, coming in from the fields at dusk, a well-worn hoe slung over his shoulder, walking like he was about to buckle under the burden of it, as if it bore the accumulated weight of all the years of cleaved rows of cotton and corn.

  “I thought I’d come out and see if there’s anything I can do,” Bucky was saying.

  “You can buy me a drink somewhere before I go back to Atlanta,” I said. “We can catch up on things.”

  “Consider that done,” he said. “When are you going back?”

  “I don’t know. Grandfather was helping me with a story I’m working on and I guess I’ll stick around a little while and try to finish it.”

  He looked at me a moment then said, “Let me have your cell phone,” and held out his hand. “I’ll program in my number. When you’re ready for that drink, give me a call.”