Daddy frowned. “Don’t know about the death certificate. Maybe Duck’s daddy?”
Aldcrofts had been burying Knotts for two or three generations and Duck Aldcroft is the current owner of the funeral home.
“No, wait a minute,” Daddy said. “The sheriff did come out and the coroner, too, now that I think about it. Asked a lot of foolish questions. Thought we should’ve left Jacob a-laying in the water instead of bringing him up to the house. They went down to the creek and looked, but the sheriff was more interested in me and what I might be doing than in what happened to Jacob. They saw the broke rope, heared what Ransom and Billy had to say, and then left. If there was any death certificate, it would’ve come to Mammy, but I don’t remember ever seeing one.”
“I’ll see what I can find tomorrow,” said Dwight. “If the sheriff came out, there should be a record.”
He took a final bite of his third hot dog and tossed the bun end to the dogs. “I’m not ready to say Jacob was murdered, Mr. Kezzie, but see, the thing is, Ransom Barley may have talked to the sheriff, but he wasn’t actually there when Jacob fell. If he fell. According to Barley’s widow, Jacob was facedown in the water with his head bleeding. Only Billy Thornton and this Letha McAllister were there and I’m afraid Thornton’s dementia’s too bad to say what happened. He got real agitated when I kept asking him about Letha. Then he cussed her and said it was all her fault.”
“All her fault?” asked Daddy.
“I know,” said Dwight. “It could mean that it was her fault that Jacob fell because he was showing off for her, or it could mean that Jacob and Billy fought over her like you say he and Jed had fought a little earlier.”
“Or it could mean that Billy picked up a rock,” said Andrew.
Dwight nodded. “Yeah, it could mean any of those.”
“And Rachel kept worrying about it,” Daddy said slowly. “Talking about it.”
The sun had set completely now, but between the fire and the nearly full moon, he could see all of us quite clearly. He gave the glowing coals a strong poke and a fountain of orange and red sparks spurted straight up into the night sky.
“Y’all think somebody kin to the Thorntons or the McAllisters was in Rachel’s room last Wednesday?”
“I don’t know,” I told Dwight when we were getting ready for bed later that evening. “What if it’s not about Jacob’s death but something else? Letha McAllister’s probably dead and you say Billy Thornton’s senile. Even if he actually did kill Jacob, it’s not like anybody could prove it after all these years. So why kill Aunt Rachel? She wasn’t even there.”
“It must have been an impulse thing,” Dwight said through the open door of the bathroom as he stripped off his work clothes and tossed them in the laundry hamper. “Whoever picked up that pillow couldn’t’ve been thinking clearly. Probably just wanted to stop her from talking again, keep her from blurting out something bad about a parent or grandparent.”
“But what if it’s something else? Would you try to stop somebody from saying your grandfather was a killer? I sure wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, and from the tone of his voice, I knew he was remembering some of the impulsive things I’ve done in the past without fully thinking them through.
“You know what I mean. What if it was about domestic violence or something to do with money?”
Toothbrush in hand, he smiled while watching me shed my own clothes for the oversize Carolina T-shirt I wear at night.
I took the other sink to brush my teeth, then we put out the lights and got into bed. Both of us take morning showers so the minty smell of toothpaste mingled with the woodsy smell of smoke as we turned to each other.
“You sleepy?” Dwight asked.
“Not really,” I murmured. “You?”
(Ping!)
CHAPTER
18
The life of the dead is in the memory of the living.
— Cicero
Dwight Bryant—Tuesday
Shortly before noon, with most of the paperwork cleared from his desk, Dwight joined his detectives in the squad room to bat around their current investigations.
There had been another of those annoying break-ins in the Black Creek area and Sheriff Bo Poole was starting to get an earful about it from county commissioners and nervous residents alike.
The elderly victims of yesterday’s home invasion had been treated and released from the hospital. The 83-year-old husband, a Mr. Jenson, had four stitches in his head, and his 80-year-old wife had been mentally traumatized but not physically harmed. Not surprisingly, they could name one of the men who had kicked in the door of their doublewide. Too often, criminals prey on people they know, and this man had done landscape maintenance for the owner of the trailer park, so it was only a matter of time before he and his partner were picked up.
“Most of the residents are retired,” Mayleen Richards reported, “and neighbors say this isn’t the first time that guy’s roughed up someone. Usually he tries to bully them into paying for jobs like cutting the grass, pruning bushes—stuff that the owner’s already paid for—but Mr. Jenson wouldn’t pay and said he was going to report it to the owner. That’s when it got violent.”
“One good thing, though,” Tub Greene said. “The owner has liability insurance so whatever Medicaid doesn’t cover, his insurance will. That was really worrying the Jensons. This could’ve wiped them out.”
“Ray gave the owner one of Mike’s cards in case he wanted a different lawn service,” Mayleen said. Her new husband had begun with a single broken-down lawn mower and now owned a thriving landscaping business.
“Not coercing the public, are you?” Dwight asked.
“Just being helpful, boss.”
Dwight leaned back in his chair and tried to look stern. “To the owner of that trailer park or to Mayleen and Mike?”
“Whichever.” Ray McLamb’s flashing smile was unrepentant beneath his pencil mustache. “He doesn’t have to use the card.”
“Except that he already did,” said Mayleen, who was smiling, too. “He told Mike our rates were less than the other guy’s, so it’s win-win all around.”
She was letting her cinnamon-colored hair grow out and it softened the angles of her freckled face, freckles she no longer tried to cover up. But it wasn’t just the hair, thought Dwight. There was a new softness to her face. Marriage must agree with her, too.
“We talked to that orderly in the video,” McLamb said. “Chad Rouse. No help, I’m afraid.”
“And still no luck locating Letha McAllister?”
“Sorry,” said Mayleen. “But I’m checking one more possibility.”
While her sturdy fingers moved over her keyboard, Dwight turned to McLamb and Greene and told them to go back to the Black Creek area. “Take another hard look at these break-ins, talk to the victims again, hit the local pawnshops. By now, someone over there should be hearing something useful.”
On the way back to his own office, Dina Willner, a wheelchair-bound departmental clerk, called to him down the hallway. “Major Bryant? You asked me to look for a record on that drowning?”
Dwight walked down to meet her. “Find anything, Dina?”
“Just these.” She handed him a couple of papers. The first was a photocopy of a page from a long-gone sheriff’s logbook. It was dated the day of Jacob’s drowning: “Called out to Pleasants X-rds. Jacob Knott, age 15¾. Son of Robert A. Knott, deceased, & Martha Knott, widow. Drowned in Possum Ck. Coroner certified death.” The second sheet was a copy of Jacob Knott’s death certificate and it was signed by the man who’d held the coroner’s office all those years ago.
“That’s it? No inquest? No pathology report?”
“I’m afraid not, Major. Accidental deaths didn’t get much attention back then.”
Dwight thanked her and carried the papers back to his office, where he added them to the folder he was compiling.
He turned to the list of hospice visitors the day Rachel Morton d
ied and was making notes for follow-up when Mayleen came through his door with a big smile on her face. “Got her!”
“Yeah?”
“I ran the name McAllister back through the archives of the Widdington Post and came up with an obituary for a Clarence McAllister, who died twenty-four years ago up in Rockville, Virginia. Among the survivors was a sister, Letha Wallace of Widdington, North Carolina. I tried variations of that name and bingo!”
She handed Dwight the printout of an obituary dated eight years earlier for a Letha McAllister King Wallace Cornwall. “Three husbands.”
“I’m surprised it’s not four or five given all we’ve heard about her when she was a girl.” After a moment, Dwight looked up from the printout. “Did you read this carefully?”
“You mean, did I notice that one of her survivors was a grandson named Chadwick Rouse? Yes, sir!”
“Invite him in for a talk,” he said, and as Richards headed back to the squad room, he added, “Good work, Mayleen.”
Less than an hour later, Richards met Chad Rouse at the front desk and escorted him to an interview room around the corner from Dwight’s office.
“I don’t understand,” he said when Dwight introduced himself. His round chubby face looked puzzled. “Like I told that other officer yesterday, I didn’t go back to the hospice wing that evening, so I don’t know anything about what happened except what I heard. Is this going to take long? I’m supposed to go on duty at two and I still haven’t had lunch.”
“You never met Rachel Morton before she became a patient?”
“No, sir.”
“Or knew who she was?”
“They said she was Kezzie Knott’s sister.”
“You know him?”
“Well…not to say know him. Know who he is, though. Heck, everybody around here’s heard of him.”
“Did you know about his brothers?”
“Brothers?” The young orderly shook his head. “I thought he just had sisters.”
“Your grandmother never mentioned them?”
“My grandmother? She lives in Pennsylvania. How could she—?”
“Your grandmother Letha. Letha McAllister”—he glanced at the printout in his hand—“King Wallace Cornwall.”
“Letha? She passed years ago.”
“Did she ever talk about when she was a girl?”
Chad Rouse shrugged. “Not really.” Enlightenment spread across his wide face. “Hey, that’s right! She came from out near Cotton Grove. Did she know the Knotts? Is that what you mean? She’d’ve been about Mrs. Morton’s age, wouldn’t she? Were they friends?”
“That’s what we’re asking you,” Dwight said patiently.
“My mom might know.” He gave them her name and address and seemed surprised to hear that there might have been a connection between his grandmother and the Knotts when she was younger. “Mom might know” was his dubious answer to every question.
“Tell you the truth, Major Bryant, I don’t think she liked kids. My mom’s got a half sister by Letha’s first husband, but that’s it. She gave both girls to their daddies and didn’t bother with them again till after they were grown and she needed to borrow some money once in a while. I’ve got two sisters and a couple of cousins, and she made us all call her Letha. She wasn’t the kind of grandmother who babysat or made cookies. She liked to roadhouse, if you know what I mean. Big hair. Tight leather pants. Long red fingernails. I forget how old she was when she crashed her car coming home from a dance, but my mom says she started hitting on one of the troopers that pulled her out of the wreck.”
“Sounds like the Letha we’ve come to know and love,” Dwight said wryly when they let Chad Rouse leave for work after wringing as much family information from him as they could.
“She left her children for someone else to raise?” Strong disapproval was written all over Mayleen’s freckled face. “Doesn’t seem like somebody whose reputation needed protecting, does it?”
Dwight was too experienced to say that he could never be conned, but Chad Rouse certainly didn’t feel like a killer. “All the same, it’s a pretty big coincidence that Letha McAllister’s grandson was in that hospice room Wednesday, so get me some confirmation, Mayleen. Talk to the mother and some of Rouse’s cousins. See if they’re as disconnected as he says. In the meantime, I’m going to ride out to Miss Rachel’s house and talk to her old neighbors.”
“Another fishing expedition?” she asked.
Dwight nodded. “Just wish I had some fresh bait.”
Driving over to the Morton home felt more like running in place than fishing, though. Mr. Kezzie had already stated that he’d never met any of his sister’s neighbors until well after her marriage, so it seemed highly unlikely that any of them could add anything about that long-ago drowning, but you never knew what Miss Rachel might have told them over the years.
Maybe Deborah was right, Dwight thought. Maybe her aunt’s death had nothing to do with Jacob’s. Even though he’d never been out to the Morton homeplace, he knew that the road he wanted was the last left turn before the county line, but he’d forgotten to look up the address. Luckily, he’d only driven a quarter mile down that sparsely settled track before spotting Sally Crenshaw’s bright blue VW convertible parked among other cars in the driveway of a rambling one-story wooden farmhouse. There were no railings on the wraparound porch and three pickups with their tailgates down were backed up side by side to the front edge. A couple of muscular young men were loading the trucks with furniture and they paused to stare as Dwight got out of the cruiser.
He was wearing his usual lightweight summer sports jacket and khaki slacks instead of a uniform, and he pushed back the flap of the jacket so that they could see his badge.
“Sally Crenshaw here?” he asked.
“Hey, Ma!” the taller man called. “Somebody here to see you.”
He reached out to shake the hand Dwight offered. “Kevin Crenshaw, and this is my brother Andy.”
“Dwight?” Sally Crenshaw came down the central hall of the house and dodged around a third young man, who was bringing out a couple of dining room chairs. Today’s purple wig was slightly askew and her white capris had smudges on her thighs where she must have wiped dusty fingers. The faceted glass “jewels” on her sandals flashed in the afternoon sun. “What are you doing out this way? You remember my boys, don’t you?”
Dwight nodded even though he didn’t think he’d ever seen them before their grandmother’s funeral last week.
Sally’s brother Jay-Jay followed her out and they were joined by a couple of young women, Jay-Jay’s daughters.
“We thought we’d get a start on cleaning out Mama’s house,” Sally said.
She rattled off names and relationships too rapidly for Dwight to keep track. In all, there seemed to be two nieces, a nephew, and their spouses as well as a wife and girlfriend of her own two sons.
“I don’t reckon you’re here to tell us who killed Mama, are you?”
“’Fraid not, Sally. Just more questions.”
“Well, come on and let’s get out of their way.”
“Aunt Sally?” One of the young women stepped onto the porch with a shallow concave wooden tray. “Who gets Grandma’s bread tray? Abby or me?”
“Neither one of you,” Sally replied. “Mama made biscuits in that thing every morning of my life. Y’all can fight over it after I’m gone, but it’s coming home with me for now, so just put it in my box.”
“You still making biscuits?” Dwight asked as they moved out of the line of traffic to the west side of the wraparound porch.
“No, but it’s the memory that counts. Don’t reckon Deborah makes them either, does she?”
“As a matter of fact, we had biscuits Saturday morning.”
She sat down in one of the wooden rocking chairs and looked up at him skeptically from beneath those purple bangs. “Real ones? Made from scratch or frozen from a can?”
“Made from scratch,” he assured her.
; Sally laughed. “You’ve got the smuggest damn look on your face. Good biscuits to go along with the good sex, huh?”
At the far end of this section of the porch, Jay-Jay emerged from the open kitchen doorway with cans of soft drinks, which he set on a nearby wrought-iron table, then held up a pocketknife. “You mind if I have this, Sal?”
“Dad’s whittling knife?” She reached for his empty hand and pulled him down into the chair next to her. “Honey, you can have anything in this house you want. You know that.”
He snapped the top on his drink can and winked at Dwight. “Even Mama’s bread tray?”
“Well, maybe not that. I know he whittled out birds for our kids, but if you come across a bluebird, that one’s mine, too. I forget what he carved you.”
“A chuck-will’s-widow,” Jay-Jay said promptly, rocking back in his chair. “It’s setting on the mantel in my living room.”
“Did he make Deborah’s hummingbird, too?” Dwight asked, suddenly reminded of the little green bird with scarlet throat and long black bill that hung in their kitchen window. It was crudely carved and naively painted, but she’d had it back when she was living in her Aunt Zell’s upstairs apartment.
As if echoing his thoughts, Sally said, “He wasn’t all that good at it, but he loved messing with ’em.”
The Morton house lay on a slight rise. Across a five-acre field from where they sat, above the distant treetops, a tall brick chimney stood starkly against the blue sky, its bricks burned black from that long-ago fire.
“That the Howell house?” he asked.
Jay-Jay nodded.
“I’m surprised the chimney’s still standing.”
“Mama wanted it knocked down,” Sally said, “but Richard left it as a memorial to his sister and her little girls. He didn’t want them forgotten. Like any of us ever would. After Jannie’s marriage went bust and she moved out here, I used to go over and play with the babies.”
Designated Daughters Page 13