As I hung up the phone, I heard John Claude talking to Sherry and walked out to show them the latest, but John Claude already had a copy in his hand. I told him of my meeting at the paper and he gave a pointed look at the grandfather clock beneath the stairs.
“The first issues of the Ledger should be rolling ofF the press in about twenty minutes. I suggest we take the rest of the day off. Sherry can turn on our answering machine. Most of the novelty should have worn off by Monday. Have a nice weekend, Deborah.”
16 back where i come from
There were fish fries I should be attending, voters’ hands I should be shaking, probably even babies somewhere in the district that I should be kissing, but with those flyers kiting around and the Ledger due out in Dobbs any minute, I wanted an afternoon off. I wanted to forget lawyering and campaigning, to just get outdoors and-
As soon as I got that far, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend the next few hours. Soon I was in jeans and sneakers heading west toward Cotton Grove. On the way out of town I stopped at a bait store for some night crawlers. All I needed was a cane pole sticking out my rear window with a red bobber, and I figured I could borrow one of those from my brother Seth. I just wanted to go sit on a pond bank and watch a cork bobble on the surface of flat water.
Halfway there though, I had a sudden thought and pulled in at M.Z. Dupree’s Cash Grocery.
It was one of those small crossroads general stores that sell a little bit of everything: clotheslines, plumbing and electrical supplies, tin buckets, canned meats, bread and milk. There was a hoop of deep orange rat cheese on the counter by the cash register, glass bottles in the drink box, and just three fuel pumps out front: regular, high-test, and kerosene. In cold or rainy weather, there’d be four or five pickups nosed in toward the door. On a beautiful May afternoon like this, however, the place was deserted. All those pickup owners were out on huge green tractors, cleaning grass from their tobacco, corn, or cotton.
“Hey, Mr. M.Z., you doing all right?” I said to the owner, an elderly thin man whom I’d never seen dressed in anything but a white long-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of blue overalls.
“Can’t complain. How ’bout you?”
As many times as I’d stopped in at that store, I was never quite sure if he remembered from one time to the next who I was, even though one of my campaign handbills with my picture on it was thumbtacked beside his door.
“I can’t complain either,” I said, setting a package of cheese Nabs and an ice-cold Pepsi on the counter. Lunch.
“Wouldn’t do us no good if we did grumble, would it?” He smiled. “Now’s this gonna be all for you today, young lady?”
“I need ten dollars’ worth of high-test, and you reckon I could use your phone, please?”
“Ain’t long-distance, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well then, you just help yourself,” he said; and while he went out to fill my gas tank, I made a quick call to ask if Dr. Vickery would let me visit on such short notice.
The maid returned to say that Dr. Vickery would expect me with pleasure.
When I was a child, Dr. Vickery had his office behind the drugstore, so I’d never been in this fancy house built by his wife’s father. It was all Persian rugs and Queen Anne furniture and smelled of lemon oil and beeswax as the maid led me down the central hall, through a formal parlor replete with grand piano and gilt-framed oil paintings of big tree-filled landscapes, then out onto a lovely brick terrace. At one end a trellis arched on Grecian columns above some wicker chairs and tables and shaded them with the same climbing yellow roses I’d seen out at Michael Vickery’s barn. The maid deposited me there as Mrs. Vickery stood up from her ministrations to a stunning iris border.
Dr. Vickery immediately came around the corner with a pair of pruning clippers.
They were of equal height. As a child, though, I’d always thought of Mrs. Vickery as much taller. Probably because she’d been what folks used to call a fine figure of a woman: big boned and stoutly built with strong, well-fleshed arms and legs. These days she was still tall, but flesh had dwindled from her frame until now her good Dancy bones were starkly revealed. Now it was Dr. Vickery who looked taller and more vigorously full of life’s juices.
Mrs. Vickery wore a large straw hat, a trapezoidal garment of blue linen that was a designer version of Aunt Zell’s gardening duster, and white canvas gloves, which she did not remove as she greeted me and offered refreshment. When I refused, she nodded briskly and said, “As your business is with my husband, I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I continue weeding? Chickweed’s about to take this bed.”
“Certainly,” I murmured, though I could see almost nothing out of place among those regal stalks of blue, yellow, and royal purple.
Nevertheless, she shifted a green vinyl-covered kneeling pad a few feet over and knelt down to extirpate invisible sprouts. Her glass wall was less obvious than her son’s, but unmistakable all the same.
“Are you sure you won’t take a glass of tea?” asked Dr. Vickery as he-joined me under the trellised roses. He brushed fallen yellow petals from his chair with his own canvas gloves, then laid the gloves on the glass-topped table where an earthenware pitcher sat beside a matching ice bucket. Both were glazed with Michael Vickery’s trademark green. Dr. Vickery filled a tumbler with ice cubes, poured the ubiquitous amber tea over it, and held it out to me, but I smelled something much stronger than tea on his breath.
“No, thank you,” I smiled.
As had my brothers, I’d flourished like a green bay tree all the days of my childhood, so my memories of doctor visits were limited to periodical booster shots and the odd sprain or broken bone. He’d been an aloof, no-nonsense doctor who treated his patients’ offspring because there was no pediatrician in town, not because he was “so good with children,” and I felt no warm folksy glow at seeing him again now that I was grown. He’d sold his practice at least fifteen years ago, but he was still trim and dapper. Like Michael, he’d aged well and remained a handsome man, despite the wrinkles in his face and the liver spots on his bony hands. There was a jaded glint in those pale blue eyes that peered out at me from beneath the rim of an old sun-faded canvas boating hat.
Suddenly I had a clear memory of someone’s disapproving voice: “There was that good woman a-prayin’ in the garden with Michael and the girls while that fornicator was upstairs a-packin his bag to go to the beach with his newest girlfriend.” A white voice, but uneducated. One of Daddy’s tobacco-barning crew who’d once helped the Vickery maids here with some of the heavy cleaning? I couldn’t put a face to the voice, but it seemed as if I’d known forever that Dr. Vickery had never been overly faithful.
Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t surprised when Trish put his name on her list the night before.
Still, with Mrs. Evelyn Dancy Vickery kneeling in her iris border less than twenty feet away, I could hardly ask him if Janie had thrown herself at him.
“How may I help you, Miss Deborah?” His tone was playfully gallant as he skirted the problem of how to address someone he’d treated as a child, someone who might be a professional yet had never become a Vickery equal.
I plunged right in and explained how Gayle had commissioned me to look into her mother’s last few weeks of life. “You were her doctor, weren’t you?”
“Oh my, no. Does her daughter have that mistaken opinion?”
“I just assumed since she lived next door-”
“Ah, I see. A natural mistake.” He held the full glass of tea in lightly clasped hands. Moisture beaded up on his glass and dripped on the bricks beside his shoes.
“No, Janie Whitehead came from Dobbs, and I’m almost certain she continued with her family doctor there. Dr. Brewer, I believe. Dead now, of course. I did occasionally treat Jed Whitehead, and I was the first to examine the baby when they found her since her own pediatrician was in Raleigh. Shocking condition!”
He shook his head in wonder. “Amazing, the resilience of the human i
nfant. I scratch my arm and it takes ten days to heal. Scratch an infant and you’d be hard put to find the mark twenty-four hours later.”
He took a deep drink and set the glass on the table.
“But you did see the Whiteheads occasionally?” I persisted. “Besides Jed, I mean. Their yard did touch yours.”
The lush spring greenery at the back of their grounds completely blocked any view beyond, but I knew that poky little rental house was still there.
“No, I can’t say I did,” Dr. Vickery answered promptly.
Mrs. Vickery’s weeding had brought her within earshot again.
“What about you, Evelyn?” he asked. “Did you have occasion to speak to Janie Whitehead in a neighborly fashion?”
“Only to ask that she discourage her baby-sitters from annoying Michael,” she answered coolly.
She didn’t look up from her task. If your radar’s working, you don’t have to see flames to know when you’ve scored a direct hit.
Dr. Vickery appeared unaware of her intent. “Annoying Michael?” he queried.
“That was the spring he painted the picture over the mantle in the breakfast room. My tulips.”
“Ah, yes. Your tulips. But how was he annoyed?”
“Don’t be dense, Charles. Don’t you recall how he hated to have us speak to him when he was concentrating on his art?”
“But surely a young man in the springtime will excuse in a young woman what’s inexcusable in his parents?”
She rocked back on her heels and glared at him, and I wondered if he’d somehow managed to delude himself about Michael? Then I saw by the bland smile on his cruel lips that he wasn’t the one who yearned to be deluded.
I never liked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and I broke the tension by asking, “What about Howard Grimes?”
“Who?” He turned his handsome head to me courteously and Mrs. Vickery went back to her weeding.
“The man who saw someone in the car with Janie the day she disappeared.” Without going into details, I told him how I’d reviewed the circumstances of Janie’s murder with the SBI.
“The agent said you were his doctor at the time of his death seven years ago. I thought you’d retired much earlier.”
“I continued to see a selected few of my patients who didn’t want to change,” he said. “Howard Grimes was one of them.”
“And he really did have a serious heart condition?”
“Like many a man in Colleton County, Howard Grimes thought he could eat all the salt-cured ham, fried chicken, or hot buttered biscuits he could cram in his mouth, so yes, ma’am, he did have a serious heart condition. Long as he took his pills and watched his diet, he was just fine. Trouble with men like Howard, they can’t help digging their graves with their own teeth.”
He patted his own flat stomach complacently.
“Well, different men have different appetites, don’t they?” I said sweetly.
It didn’t faze him. “Some appetites are healthier than others, Miss Deborah,” he smiled. “Everything in moderation.”
Mrs. Vickery stood abruptly and picked up her kneeling pad. “If you will excuse me, Miss Knott?”
There were two bright spots of color in her cheeks, and even though she’d been snide about my futile attempt to flirt with Michael, I still had to admire her self-control. Been me, I’d have smashed the pitcher over the bastard’s head.
Without waiting for my ritual reply, she marched straight-backed down the terrace and through a set of french doors at the far end.
“Three kids, three fucks,” he murmured after her, so softly that I wasn’t sure I was meant to hear. Then he turned to me with his heartless smile. “Now you sure I can’t pour you a glass of tea, Miss Deborah?”
After that, it was a relief to get out to Seth and Minnie’s, where I found them together in the den, amiably bickering over the fertilizer figures they were inputting on their computerized farm records.
“Oh, good,” Minnie greeted me. “I tried to call you back, but I just kept getting y’all’s answering machine.”
“John Claude thought we might as well close early before the paper came out and wait for things to calm down over the weekend. ’Course if there’s going to be a new batch of those goddamned flyers every morning-”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Minnie beamed. “Your brother’s come up with an absolutely brilliant idea.”
Seth swiveled around from his computer screen, leaned back in the leather chair, and said, “I don’t know how brilliant it is, but it seems to me since it’s Friday night and all the kids are going to be out cruising around anyhow, we might as well tell ’em to keep their eyes open.”
“I’ve already been on the phone to Haywood and Jack,” said Minnie, “and I left a message on Herman’s machine. We can have some of the children watching every N amp;O box in this end of the county.”
I went over and hugged Seth’s neck. “Minnie’s right,” I told him. “You are brilliant.”
“Any brighter and I’d glow in the dark,” he agreed. “Now if you’ll give me five more minutes with my wife on these figures, I’ll get out of y’all’s way and-”
“I didn’t come to talk politics this time,” I said. “I thought I’d do some fishing.”
“What a good idea!” said Minnie. “Get your mind off troubling things for a while.”
“You’re not gonna catch much this time of day,” Seth warned, “but all the fishing stuff’s out under the shelter. You just help yourself to anything you need.”
There’s a decent lane down to the pond I planned to fish, and I could have driven, but I’d had enough of cars, too. I found a bucket, one of Minnie’s old straw hats, and a couple of cane poles already rigged with sinkers, corks, and small fish hooks. Then I set off past rows of vegetables-their garden peas were hanging heavy and I made a mental note to pick a mess to take back to Dobbs with me-across a field of young tobacco, to a path through the woods that brought me out at the head of a long pond a few hundred feet on the other side of Seth’s line.
It had been dug as a water hole back when the big twins were heavily into 4-H projects and thought they wanted to start a herd of beef cattle. Then Seth and Jack fooled around with catfish for a while, and I seem to remember the little twins talking about raising eels for Asian markets. When all those projects petered out, Daddy drained the pond and restocked with bream, crappies, and bass.
Except for a clump of willows, he kept the banks mowed clean of underbrush, but trees grew right up to the mowing strip and were mirrored in the still water. I sat down with my back against a willow trunk and let peacefulness wash over me. Tractors rumbled in distant fields somewhere beyond the trees and a nearby mockingbird was singing his territory. Otherwise there was only a low steady hum of insects, lizards skittering over dry leaves, towhees scratching for bugs-the country equivalent of elevator music.
It’d been too damn long since I’d gotten off by myself like this, and I blanked my mind of everything except sky, trees, and water. Seth was right. It was still too middle-way the day to expect fish to bite. Further down the bank stood a sweet gum with a bare dead limb that stretched out toward the water. A kingfisher perched at the very end and was silhouetted against the fluffy white clouds.
Up in the sky, a red-tailed hawk spiraled lazily on thermal updrafts. Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind…
I fitted my back more comfortably against the willow trunk and thought maybe I’d just rest there a while, listening to birdsong and crickets… rest till the kingfisher’s dive signaled fish activity below the surface of the pond… till…
The sun was edging toward the treetops when I awoke to the smell of cigarette smoke and opened my eyes without otherwise moving.
Heavy brogans. Long skinny legs. Faded chinos that had been washed so many times they were soft as handkerchief linen and more white than khaki colored.
A feeling of well-being suffused me as I looked up, up, up into eyes as blue
as cornflowers. Stretching like a sleepy child, I forgot that we weren’t talking to each other.
“Hey, Daddy,” I yawned.
“Hey, shug.” Any wariness that might have been there a moment earlier was now gone. He flicked his cigarette away, squatted on the grassy bank beside me, and looked out over the pond. “Catching much?”
I pushed myself upright and hugged him so hard that his white straw planter’s hat almost went into the pond.
“Here now, what’s this all about?” he said, but he didn’t offer to pull away.
“I was hoping you’d bait my hook,” I grinned. “Icky crawly worms.”
He laughed, pushed his hat back on the crown of his head, reached for a pole, and said the same thing he always said when I was a little girl. “Gonna fish with me, you’re gonna bait your own hook.”
I took a night crawler from the bait box and passed half of it over to him, then put the rest on my own hook and threw out the line.
No sooner had the line touched water than something immediately grabbed the worm and pulled my red plastic bobber down into the brown depths. The cane pole bent nearly double, and I quickly flicked the tip to set the hook and began easing back on the pole. It fought but I kept the pressure steady and soon a chunky wriggling shape broke through the surface. I flipped him up on the bank, and a moment later, I was removing my hook from the mouth of a thrashing half-pound crappie.
Before I could get him in the bucket, Daddy had a slightly bigger one ready to join him.
“Hungry little boogers aren’t they?” he said as three, four, and five elbowed one other aside to be next in our bucket.
“That’s all I feel like cleaning,” I said. “You want any?”
“Nah. Maidie’s making me chicken pastry.”
“Oh?” Chicken pastry was one of my favorite suppers.
“With chopped broccoli salad.”
Another of my favorites. Minnie or Seth was probably on the phone before I left their yard.
“You asking me to stay to supper?”
Bootlegger’s Daughter Page 15