Legacy of Masks

by Sallie Bissell

  “Me, neither,” Keener said, pumping Martin’s hard, callused hand. “Money spends fast enough on its own. Seems crazy to throw it down a slot machine.”

  Martin grinned. His hard-hat suntan ended just below his receding blond hairline, revealing skin the color of biscuit dough. Keener wondered if the daughter would be that same color, stretched out naked in the back of his car.

  “Let me introduce my family.” Martin gestured to a thin corn shuck of a woman, who climbed out of the truck with another child. “That’s my wife, Darlene. She’s got Chrissy, who’s four.” He put a hand on the shoulder of the young girl who skipped over to stand beside him. “This here’s Avis, who’s eleven. Everyone, meet my new boss, Mr. Keener.”

  “Please call me Deke.” He grinned at Martin’s family, careful to keep his eyes well away from Avis. “Welcome to Hartsville. Welcome to Keener Construction.”

  “We’re just so happy to be here, Mr. Keener, uh, Deke,” the wife said, her voice breathless with gratitude. He’d heard that tone so often, he knew the subtext by heart. Oh, my God, a job! No more living off the credit card! No more peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for dinner or husbands who can’t get it up at night because they can’t bring home any money during the day. “Thank you so much for giving Earl a chance,” this one added.

  “My pleasure,” Deke assured her. “I’ve got great plans for him.” He chucked the younger child under her chin, then, finally, he allowed his gaze to skim across Avis. Beneath her Braves baseball cap he saw that she did, indeed, have her father’s blue eyes, her mother’s cottony hair. His smile widened. This was too perfect. He couldn’t believe his luck. A new family, with one daughter primed and ready for him and a younger one to watch grow.

  “So what do you do, short stuff?” He turned and addressed Avis in just the right tone—teasing, yet avuncular.

  “Nothing much.” She looked down at her cheap Kmart sneakers, uncomfortable under the scrutiny of her father’s new boss.

  “Oh, come on. You must do something.” Giving Earl and his wife a conspiratorial wink, he knelt down to her level. “Talk on the phone? Listen to music? Lie around and eat chocolates all day?”

  Earl put a muscular arm around his daughter’s shoulders. “Mostly Avis keeps her nose buried in a book,” he told Deke. “But last summer she played a little softball.”

  “No kidding?” Deke grinned. “What position?”

  “Third base,” Avis whispered, finally lifting her eyes to look at the man who’d so improved her family’s fortunes.

  “Really? Well, gosh, the Keener Kats need a good third baseman. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to play with us, would you? Of course, you’d have to put up with me, since I’m the coach....”

  The girl giggled and turned to her father, not knowing what to say.

  “I’m sure she’d love to,” the mother broke in hastily, lest her daughter’s bashfulness offend. “We were worried about her having a bad summer, not knowing anybody here. We figured she’d read herself blind.”

  “We have a great time on the softball team. After the season, I take all the girls on a trip. Myrtle Beach, Disney World, someplace like that.” Deke stood up and returned his attention to the adults. “To me, Keener Construction is a big, extended family. We like to make our new members feel at home right away. Come on in the office. You can meet some of the guys and Linda, my secretary. She’s the one who really runs things around here.”

  The Martins followed him across the parking lot and into the neat brick ranch house that served as headquarters for Keener Construction. They entered through the front door, into a living room that had been converted into a reception area.

  “Hi, Deke.” A young blond woman looked up from her computer. “The mayor’s office has already called twice this morning, and John Thoman needs to talk to you about Acquoni Acres.”

  “I’ll get back to them in a few minutes. Linda, this is Earl Martin and his wife, Darlene. Earl’s going to foreman the Tsali Trail job. I need to get them going on their house.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” The blonde smiled, revealing deep dimples in both cheeks. “Welcome to Keener Construction.”

  The Martins nodded shyly, then followed Keener down a long hall, into his private office.

  “Darlene, did Earl explain to you about the company houses?” Deke asked as he sat down behind a sprawling desk covered with blueprints.

  Mrs. Martin shot her husband a nervous glance. “He said housing would be provided, as long as he worked on this job.”

  “Well, it’s kind of like that.” Deke pulled open his lap drawer. “I like to keep up with all the new stuff the industry comes out with. Test it all first in real-life environments, to see what’s worth a damn.” He fished a set of keys from the drawer. “To do that, I put a few of my more important employees in what I call test houses. We buy some acreage, put up a house, and have a family live there a year before we build any more in that development. We find out a lot about drainage and erosion and how much road maintenance we’ll need in the winter.”

  “So you’re out on a lot all by yourself?” Darlene Martin sounded hesitant.

  “For a while. And you’ve also got to put up with us coming in and switching out fixtures and paint and carpeting and such.” Deke smiled. “That’s the downside. The upside is you get to live free in a brand-new home. At the end of a year, you can buy it from us at cost, or you can move somewhere else entirely. It’s totally up to you.”

  The Martins looked at each other as if they’d washed up on a beach in paradise. “Why are you being so good to us?” Mrs. Martin finally asked. “Earl’s never worked for anyone like you.”

  “Because I want to build the best houses in North Carolina, and I want the best people building them.” He smiled at Avis, who was staring at Houdini, a chameleon he kept in a glass cage behind his desk. “And I also want to have the best softball team in the league this year.”

  “You can depend on me, Mr. Keener,” said Earl Martin. “You won’t regret the day you hired me.”

  “I have no doubt about that, Earl.” Deke winked at Avis as he handed her father the keys to their new house. “No doubt at all.”

  Deke watched from the window as the Martins returned to their U-Haul. Avis had once again become all arms and legs, at one point running to jump on her dad’s broad back. As Deke pictured her doing that to him in very different circumstances, the hum that had dwelt inside him ever since that night with Tracy Foster kicked into high gear. The notion of Earl Martin hurrying to snug his two daughters into a test house to which he had a key made him laugh. People were such fools. Did they not realize that there’s a string attached to everything? You might not see it right off the bat, but it’s always there. “And somebody just like me will come along and yank it, every time.”

  He spent the morning returning his phone calls and meeting with a real estate agent who was trying to broker an out-of-state deal. At noon he left his office to drive downtown for the weekly Rotary Club lunch. Though he found Rotary about as exciting as a horseshoe tournament, he showed up every week, regular as clockwork. He liked to keep an eye on things in town.

  He found a parking space in front of the Baptist Church, dug his small gold Rotary pin out of the ashtray, and stuck it in his lapel. Dodging a cement mixer that lumbered down Main Street, he walked over to Layla’s restaurant, where the usual crew of Rotarians was gathering in the private dining room at the back. Deke couldn’t remember who was scheduled to speak today, but he hoped it would be somebody zippier than the ass-numbing preacher who’d held forth on the moral challenges of Pisgah County at the last meeting.

  “Hey, Deke, how’s it going?” His old Scout mate Randy Bradley, now the local Ford dealer, waved as he entered the dining room.

  “Great!” Deke slapped Randy on the back, smelling the whiskey already on the man’s breath. By the time they had reached high school, Randy was sipping moonshine from the back of his pickup. As his taste and income had g
rown, he now kept a pint of Maker’s Mark in the glove box of his Lincoln, augmented by a full case of the stuff stashed in the trunk.

  “You wanna play golf with Butch Messer this afternoon?”

  Deke shook his head. “Some other time, Randy. I’ve got softball practice.”

  “The girls or the men?”

  “The girls,” he replied, the memory of Avis Martin’s rosebud breasts sending a twinge of desire rippling through him.

  Bradley snorted. “I don’t know why you waste your time, Deke. Them girls ain’t even fun to watch. They can’t hit, they can’t field, and they’re too little to have anything jiggle when they run.”

  “I don’t know about that, Randy,” Lester Mathis chimed in. “Couple of Deke’s older girls jiggle plenty when they run.”

  Deke was about to respond when another former Scout walked up. Though Jerry Cochran had outgrown his girlish voice, conquered his fear of the woods, and now, amazingly, wore a badge as the newly elected sheriff, Deke still considered him a fool and wondered what in the hell Tracy Foster had ever seen in him.

  “Hey, guys, guess who I saw today?”

  “Who’d you see, Cockroach?” Randy Bradley now cozied up to the new sheriff by using his old Scout nickname. If Cochran took offense, he never showed it. Mostly he just looked at Bradley as if he were a gnat—annoying, but hardly worth the effort of a swat.

  Cochran smiled. “Deke’s old nemesis. Mary Crow.”

  “Mary Crow?” Deke turned, remembering the Cherokee girl he’d never been able to beat in debate. “Are you sure?”

  Cochran nodded. “Saw her going into George Turpin’s office.”

  “But I thought she was a big-time DA in Atlanta. That’s what they said when she took Logan down.”

  “Well, she may be, but she was up at the courthouse today, and looking like she meant business. Black suit, black briefcase, legs that stretched from here to Jesus.” Cochran raised one eyebrow appreciatively.

  “Man, she was hot back in high school.” Floyd Nations shook his balding head. “Where was she when I needed a date for the prom?”

  “She was with Jonathan Walkingstick, Floyd,” Deke reminded him.

  “While you were beating your meat in the boys’ room!” Randy Bradley bellowed, red-faced, howling with laughter. While the other men hooted at Bradley’s joke, Deke noticed that Cochran just lowered his eyes and smiled.

  They went into the dining room and sat down at the long table. Sims Buchanan tapped on his glass, bringing the meeting to order. Though Deke managed to pay attention through the minutes and the treasurer’s report, for the rest of the meeting (an earnest young computer geek, urging them to help bring the Internet to the hollers of Appalachia) he considered Mary Crow. She was the only woman he’d ever met who came close to being his intellectual equal. Gorgeous but reserved, she’d moved to Atlanta shortly after her mother died, and had gone to law school there. According to the local paper, she’d earned the nickname “Killer Crow” with a string of high profile convictions. So why was she up here talking with that fat fool Turpin?

  The answer to that question came to him so quickly that he nearly choked on his strawberry pie. Mary Crow must be moving back home! She was a prosecutor—naturally she would join Turpin’s team. He put his fork down as he remembered the girl’s clever wit and persuasive tongue. What would he do if she came up here and got a whiff of his secret life? What would he do if Mary Crow spoiled all the plans he’d made for Avis Martin?

  You can’t let that happen, he told himself as the geek droned on about how hillbillies deserved a place in cyberspace as much as anybody in New York or California. All your life you’ve waited for another Tracy Foster. You simply cannot allow Mary Crow to come along and spoil it.

  3

  Two days later, Mary had visited every law office in Pisgah County. Shocked to find the ex-Atlanta DA sitting across their desks inquiring about a job, all the attorneys read her resume with interest, asked a number of encouraging questions, then politely turned her down.

  “Your lack of noncriminal litigation bothers me.” Marie Bolt, of Bolt and Hughes, shook her head, enormous gold earrings flashing like Spanish doubloons.

  “You have no experience in tribal law.” Pudgy-faced Orrie Taylor, vice-chief of the Eastern Cherokees, gave a regretful sigh. “I’d love to hire you, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t do us much good.”

  “You’ve got a fine record, but I’ve already got two criminal litigators,” growled old Ben Bryson, a man who’d argued in front of Irene Hannah many times. “Truth be told, I probably ought to let one of them go. Not that much crime goes on here, thank God.”

  Mary assured him that she could be up to speed on other areas of law in weeks, but his bristly brows drew down in a frown. “Once you get a taste for criminal prosecution you’re spoiled for everything else,” the old man declared, jamming a thick cigar in one corner of his mouth. “Three months here and you’d be back in Atlanta, begging for your old job back.”

  Bryson’s had been the last of ten legal firms and two Cherokee tribal government departments. After his rejection, Mary walked back out into the soupy June afternoon, needing to put some distance between her and the legal establishment of Pisgah County. She trudged down the street and headed to Bayberry’s, a small café squeezed in beneath the bookstore. Collapsing at the corner table on an otherwise deserted patio, she ordered a glass of iced tea from a tall mountain flower of a girl who had roses in her cheeks, but a flicker of sadness in her green eyes.

  Probably just her aching feet, Mary decided as she slipped off her pumps. Her hours of looking for work had left her with a painful blister on her left heel and a wrinkled blue suit that looked like she’d hiked the Appalachian Trail in it. She sighed. If Bayberry’s had served anything stronger than fruit tea, she would have ordered two triples and rolled home drunk.

  “No one wants you,” she whispered, absently pulling a packet of saccharin from the collection of sweeteners on the table. “You don’t know either North Carolina statutes or Indian law and you don’t have a clue about figuring billable time.” Though she remembered all her grandmother’s adages about seeing something funny in any bad situation, the truth stung too sharply for her to see the silver lining in this particular cloud. Here she sat, Atlanta’s great Killer Crow, turned down by every practicing attorney in her own hometown.

  “And that’s just the job scene,” she muttered. “I can’t wait to see what kind of reception I’ll get at Jonathan’s.” She’d decided early on to reestablish herself in Hartsville before she made the drive to Little Jump Off. Experience had taught her that she needed a functioning home and a viable career to protect herself against the vagaries of her relationship with Jonathan Walkingstick. The last time she’d presented herself to him, he’d taken her in his arms, told her that he would always love her, but he was going to have a baby with Ruth Moon. The memory of that night still made her queasy.

  “That’s ancient history,” she reminded herself. “Concentrate on the now.”

  Taking a pen from her purse, she began to make a list on a paper napkin. What she had, what she needed, and what she could do without. Though her bank account had not quite plummeted to zero, some major expenses were circling her little nest egg like hungry wolves. When she’d first returned to Irene’s house and turned on the water, nothing but a rusty kind of slop oozed from the kitchen faucet. All the bathroom faucets produced the same thing, as did the washer connection. Puzzled, she’d called Irene’s closest neighbor, Hugh Kavanagh. “That’s a well gone dry, Mary girl,” he pronounced, his Irish brogue thick. “You’ll have to call Turnipseed.”

  “Turnipseed?” Mary wondered at the odd un-Cherokee name, but jotted down the number Hugh rattled off. An hour later, a rangy man with no front teeth pulled up in a rusted pickup. When she showed him what was dripping from her faucets, he confirmed Hugh’s diagnosis.

  “You’ll have to find you a new well.” He peered out the kitchen window, rubbing a
hand over a grizzled chin as he surveyed her land. “Shouldn’t be too hard, but you never can tell. . . .”

  Though she would have preferred to have a job before making such a major expenditure, she needed a house with functional plumbing. So she’d hired, at a hundred dollars per diem, Mr. J. T. Turnipseed, well digger of note. Add to that Irene’s leaky roof and a suspension bridge that needed a new foundation, and she knew she had some major financial hits headed her way.

  “You’ve got to get some money coming in, kiddo,” she whispered. “Otherwise Irene’s pretty little house is going to fall down around your ears.”

  She wadded up her napkin and gazed at a honeysuckle vine that curled up a trellis beside the patio. The fragrance reminded her of a section of Lima where jasmine bloomed at night, and she wondered again if she hadn’t lost her mind. She’d left an untroubled life with a wonderful man for a waterless house in a backwoods town that regarded her more like Typhoid Mary than Killer Crow. If she had any sense at all, she would book the next flight back to Lima. Gabe would be waiting. Gabe would be thrilled to have her back. But Gabe would also still be Gabe. Never Jonathan. Never the man who’d haunted all of her dreams and a good many of her waking moments ever since she’d left the States. No, this time she was going to see this through. This time she and Jonathan were either going to work it out or she was going to shake the Pisgah County dust from her shoes for good.

  The waitress snapped her back to reality, putting a glass of tea and a plate of lacy cookies down in front of her.

  “Sorry it took so long,” she apologized. “We had to brew a fresh pot. I brought you some cookies to make up for it.”

  “Thanks.” Mary smiled, noticing an unusual pendant hanging from the girl’s neck. Intricately carved, it was a cluster of strawberries that curled delicately between her collarbones. “That’s a lovely necklace.”

  “Thank you.” The girl took it in her fingers. “My boyfriend carved it for me.”