Southern Fried

by Cathy Pickens

  “They think he murdered her?”

  She shrugged. “He sure didn’t give folks much reason to think otherwise. Didn’t appear concerned when nobody heard from her, first for days, then weeks. And practically the whole town knew they hadn’t been getting along. Lea blabbed everything she knew to those hens at work. And they, of course, blabbed to everybody else in town. Once Lea went missing, it all became especially interesting. And the way she behaved left plenty for folks to be interested in.”

  I had faint glimmers of memory about the case, one of those peripheral intrigues that had mostly affected adults. Fifteen years ago, I’d been in high school and too busy trying to outgrow Dacus to worry about small-town tales, so the details had passed me by.

  “He left town himself, which didn’t help anybody’s opinion of him. The whole thing was sordid and trashy. But folks usually get no better than they deserve.”

  I glanced at my watch. I’d need to be leaving before long. Now probably wouldn’t be a good time to mention the name of my afternoon appointment.

  Four rows of headstones over from where we sat, a faded blue Buick—one of those gas guzzlers nobody could afford to drive very far—stopped on the two-rutted gravel drive that cut through the grave-yard. A lean man, grayed and stooped, folded himself out of the driver’s door and walked around to unlock the trunk, then ambled loosely the few steps to a nearby grave. I watched, amazed, as he used a whisk broom to brush leaves and imaginary dust off the bronze plate on the ground.

  He carefully picked a couple of stray fall leaves from the silk flowers that exploded from the bronze vase. Another trip to the trunk brought clippers to trim some grass straggling from the edges of the marker. Another brushing with the whisk broom and he straightened stiffly, one hand on his hip. He stood only a moment, studying his handiwork, retraced his steps, cranked the yacht-sized Buick, and crunched down the gravel drive.

  Aunt Letha didn’t comment on the performance. She found the oddest things perfectly ordinary.

  “I’ve got to run, Aunt Letha. I’ve got to meet somebody in a few minutes. Mind if I leave my car at your house? It’s about as quick to walk to the office from here.”

  “Sure, hon.”

  She looked me up and down as I stood and smoothed my skirt. She didn’t say anything. Her look said she wanted to, but she restrained herself with some effort. I never know which is worse—the comments she makes or the ones she refrains from making.

  “Bye, Bud. See you later, Aunt Letha.”

  I walked through the grass alongside the gravel drive. I’d taken enough risks with skinning the heels of my pumps. Of course, after mincing through the grass, I’d have to remember to check my heels for clods of mud.

  I entered Carlton Barner’s office through the front door of the asbestos-sided old house. Our arrangement was so temporary, he hadn’t seen fit to give me a key to the back door. I’d fallen into this layover office after my mom had a chat with Carlton’s cousin about me “coming home.” I hadn’t wanted to argue. I certainly hadn’t expected to be so thankful for a haven in which to hide from my own unemployment.

  Back in my clerking days in law school, I’d worked for a small personal injury firm. One client had been so banged up in a car accident that he hadn’t been able to return to his traveling sales job for almost two years. He introduced himself to everyone as a consultant—even though he never could show me any income from clients. I’d thought his reaction pathetic and odd, but now I realized how much of myself had been defined by my job—my condo, my car, my wardrobe, my acquaintances, my time, my life. All gone. So now I told people I was in town for a while, sharing space with Carlton Barner, to keep from having to say “I have no job.”

  Today, clients filled Carlton’s waiting room. On second glance, maybe two clients and accompanying family members.

  Of course, that meant two more clients than I had waiting. As I stood on the worn hallway carpeting and looked through the receptionist’s window, I had qualms about Melvin Bertram meeting me here.

  I glanced at my watch. I was plenty early for our appointment, but too late to make other arrangements. If everybody in town knew the stories Aunt Letha knew, news of this meeting would make the rounds by suppertime.

  Was I overreacting? Nobody remembered old gossip or grudges like Aunt Letha.

  Unless it was Lou Wray, the gorgon receptionist. Why all Carlton Barner’s clients weren’t arranged in the entry hall as frozen stone statues, I’d never know. After Melvin Bertram showed up, her sharp tongue would be slicing open old gossip before the dinner bell at the textile mill sounded.

  “Miz Wray.” I leaned through the receptionist’s window, trying fruitlessly to get her attention. “Miz Wray.”

  She waited a count of three before turning slowly. Not that she seemed to be doing anything important, sitting at the farthest of the three desks. Nothing more important than ignoring me, that is.

  “Miz Wray, I’m expecting a client at four. When he arrives, could you tell him to come on back?”

  Her only reply came as a marked tightening around the corners of her mouth. But it spoke eloquently. I’d keep my ear out for Melvin Bertram.

  Carlton had loaned me the office he’d set up for his summer clerks. Spartanly furnished, it sat at the end of the hall past the kitchen and directly across from the bathroom door.

  The most attractive feature of the nondescript house was that it stood only a block from the court-house. The small rooms were brightened—and made cooler—by the ten-foot windows. Its high ceilings dated from the 1920s, designed for hot, unair-conditioned Southern summers. In late autumn—even on mild November afternoons after I’d walked a few blocks in the sun—the rooms settled into a damp chill difficult to shake.

  I paced between my office door and the kitchen, trying to keep an eye on the front door without drawing too much attention.

  Fortunately, Melvin arrived five minutes early. At least I hoped it was him as I whisked down the hall to greet him before the barracuda could swim out from her hidey-hole.

  “Mr. Bertram?” When he cocked his head expectantly, I added, “I’m Avery Andrews.”

  He gave me a cool, firm handshake, his grasp gentle and strong. I half expected him to cup my hand in both of his, one of those courtly, Sunday-morning handshakes.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Miz Andrews.”

  “Avery. Please.”

  I tried not to stare. He looked perfectly average—average height and weight, his sandy hair held only highlights of gray. Midforties, judging from what I knew of his history, though he didn’t look it. Dressed in navy corduroy slacks and a patterned pullover sweater, he looked like a business executive on vacation. Not like a man who, by his mere presence, fanned the gossip fires sizzling around town.

  I led him into my office and took a seat beside him in the chairs in front of the desk.

  “So, Mr. Bertram. What—”

  “Melvin. Please.”

  I nodded.

  “This is a bit awkward,” he said, turning to face me. “If what I’m about to ask you is inappropriate in any way, please tell me. But I’d like to ask your opinion about—a couple of things.”

  Clients often launch into long explanations to avoid telling me what they’ve come for, trying to avoid the unpleasant but true. I nodded and leaned forward slightly, hoping to encourage him to get on with it.

  “I understand you were at Luna Lake yesterday when they discovered a submerged car.”

  Whatever I’d expected, that wasn’t it. I nodded.

  He paused, studying my face, no doubt seeing my surprise. “I understand it was a 1978 Ford Thunderbird.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know much about makes and models of cars. It was old. And rusted. And had a Ford emblem on the trunk. That’s about all I know.”

  “Red? With a white top?”

  “Hard to say. It was almost solid rust.”

  “And—there was a—skeleton inside?”

  “That I can tell
you.” I shuddered, remembering that Magic 8 Ball skull.

  “Could you—could—well, tell anything about—” Words failed him, but the desperation in his eyes spoke what he couldn’t say.

  “No. To tell you the truth, the car wasn’t far enough up the ramp to allow the water to drain out. About all I can tell you is it was a skeleton. And, to my untrained eye, that of an adult.”

  I didn’t mention the peculiar deposits on the face bones. For one, it had looked too weird and I didn’t know how to describe it. For another, Melvin Bertram didn’t look like he could deal with that picture in his mind any better than I could. Whatever pictures did parade across his brain, they were apparently gruesome enough that he didn’t press for any more details.

  “May I ask, why are you asking me about this?” I suspected, but I needed to hear it from him.

  He sat back in his chair, his sigh deflating his desperation. Not completely, though.

  “The sheriff came to see me today. At my brother’s house. I’m visiting for the holiday.” He paused. “The car has been identified as my wife’s. The license tag and description match hers. Pending an autopsy—which will be delayed because of the holiday—Sheriff Peters expects the body inside will be hers.”

  His voice died out, as if he’d saved just enough air to say that last sentence, but had no more in him. He stared at the top of my desk, not seeing the legal pad or my Waterman pen or the absence of billable cases. Then he continued. “Of course, she’s been gone for fifteen years. I don’t suppose a delay for the medical examiner’s Thanksgiving meal is really going to make much difference.”

  What could I say to that? “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bertram. Melvin.” To keep from staring at him, I glanced down. A clod of mud clung to the heel of my pump.

  He shifted in his chair. “I just needed to confirm some things. I heard you’d been there. And I wanted to know what parts of Sheriff Peters’s innuendo I could believe. Trust me,” he said, eyeing me with an even gaze. “I learned fifteen years ago that cops can shade the truth any color they want it to be. Different sheriff, I know. But same mentality, I figure.”

  Different sheriff, all right. Fifteen years ago, L. J. Peters had been with me in the—what? ninth or tenth grade at Dacus High. L.J. was Lucinda Jane to her mother but L.J. to those of us who had lived in fear of her. By high school, L.J. had abandoned her daily ritual of slamming me against the bathroom wall, a sort of exercise regimen for her through most of elementary school. She’d given that up for more mature pursuits, like sneaking cigarettes behind the gym and sneaking glass-pack mufflers past the Highway Patrol. Lucinda Jane had grown up—and I mean up, to about six feet—and become sheriff of Camden County. That thought frequently frightens me.

  “Guess L.J. hasn’t changed a lot since I last saw her,” I mused.

  “You know Peters?”

  I nodded.

  “I forget what it’s like to live in a town where you expect everybody to know everybody else. And everything.”

  That last comment was loaded. He fixed me with his steady blue-flecked gaze, as if trying to read how much I knew. And trying to decide how much he wanted me to know.

  He decided quickly. “Avery, thank you so much for your time.” He pulled a slip of paper from his pants pocket. “My brother’s address. You may bill me there.”

  “I really didn’t do anything,” I said, as I accepted the proffered slip of paper. “But if I can be of assistance, please give me a call.”

  We did the handshake thing, and he left without causing any discernible ripples among the group waiting to see Carlton. Lou Wray stayed out of sight.

  I needed to consider more permanent arrangements for my life, make some calls. Network, as they say. This arrangement with Carlton and the Dragon Lady would serve temporarily—but, thanks to the Dragon Lady, only temporarily.

  What that meeting with Melvin Bertram had been about, I couldn’t tell. He obviously hadn’t learned anything he hadn’t already known. I shrugged mentally. Might as well call it a day. And a busy one it had been, meeting with both my clients in one day.

  I went to retrieve Mom’s van from Aunt Letha’s house. As I covered the handful of blocks up Main Street, Dacus’s version of rush hour—which lasted all of five minutes—moved past on both sides of the crape myrtle-filled median. Daylight faded fast and no one else walked the sidewalks.

  Past the central business district, which filled only three or four blocks, Main Street became a hodgepodge of houses. The newest one probably dated to 1950. A few were stately and multistoried, a couple boasted wide verandas. Most were nondescript clapboard or brick.

  Dacus claimed no special architectural heritage. No grand, glorious past. No landed gentry with elegant town homes. Downstate South Carolina claimed that pride, where the plantation owners—or the modern version, the sharecropper leaseholders—kept their families in town and away from the grubbiness of actual work.

  Dacus, nestled into the foothills of the Blue Ridge, had first been settled by Germans searching for some place that looked like home. And it had attracted an independent, almost asocial cast of characters over the decades. But they all knew work. And didn’t much revel in hollow neighborliness. I hadn’t understood the difference until my exile downstate. For such a small state, South Carolina maintained a rare diversity, in accents, work ethic, social proprieties. And temperatures.

  The crispness in the air invigorated me. The weather statistics always show a five- or ten-degree difference over the 150-mile distance to Columbia. But the cheek-chilling bite of fall never shows up accurately in those numbers. I loved the way the air felt here.

  I bent to unlock the van door just as Aunt Hattie nosed the 1980 LeSabre onto the sidewalk, peeking around the driveway shrubs before she pulled into the street. I waved and walked to the passenger window, on Vinnia’s side.

  “Avery,” she called over the top of the window as she cranked it down. “Come go with us.”

  “Where you off to?” I leaned against the car door.

  Hattie, the older of the two by eighteen months, grasped the steering wheel in both hands. Tall and angular, she had no trouble seeing over the car hood’s acreage, and she commanded it with the same authority she’d exercised over generations of biology students. Or pupils, as she referred to them. Disparagingly, I’d always thought.

  Grandmotherly-looking Vinnia, shorter by close to a foot and softer and rounder, nestled back in the passenger seat. “To church. The Sunshine Girls are going to the community Thanksgiving service out at South End Baptist. Hattie, you remembered the keys to the church bus?”

  “Of course.” Hattie, used to bossing high-schoolers around, tolerated Vinnia’s remindings. Vinnia had mothered five children and couldn’t get out of the habit.

  “Church bus?”

  Vinnia nodded. “The Sunshine Girls—of course, we just call them that, but we’d take any men who lived long enough to qualify—”

  Hattie snorted at that. “—and could keep up with us.”

  A frightening prospect for some man of certain years to find himself mixed up with a bunch that included my great-aunts.

  “Anyway, we’re all going together. Hattie and I take the bus around to pick up the girls who can’t drive after dark.”

  “You drive the church bus, Aunt Hattie?” I was picturing the repainted Blue Bird school bus that usually sat parked behind the church.

  “Certainly.” She leaned over enough so she could get a clear view of me. “Have for years.”

  I hesitated, about to tread on dangerous territory. “Aunt Hattie, do you have a commercial driver’s license?” Hattie had retired from teaching five years ago—and that had been more than a decade after most of her contemporaries had retired.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Well, it’s required now. To operate a commercial vehicle. It’s like the old chauffeur’s license.” Only the requirements are much more stringent.

  Hattie propped her left arm on the steering wheel so s
he could lean farther across the front seat. I knew, in a momentary flash, what it must have been like to accidentally knick an earthworm’s intestine in her biology class.

  “I’ve been driving that bus to pick up those girls since before I taught you to rollerskate, Avery.” She didn’t have to say anything else.

  Vinnia scrunched back against her seat so I could have the full force and effect of her older sister. But Vinnia, too, fixed me with her soft blue eyes. In a pitying tone, she said, “Avery, honey, sometimes you know just enough to spoil everyone else’s fun. It’s not a becoming trait, sweetie.”

  I tapped the car door lightly, surrendering gracefully. “You all have fun.”

  I hoped my smile smoothed things over. What cop in his right mind would stop the Sunshine Girls? All the cops had probably had Aunt Hattie’s biology class. They likely wouldn’t go out of their way to encounter that stern stare again.

  I waved as Aunt Hattie bumped the Buick’s back tire over the curb.

  The sun had dropped below the trees. Suddenly, the drive up the mountain to the lake cabin seemed a cold, lonely trek.

  Something about this time of day, hanging between daylight and dark, always distresses me. I try to stay busy until good dark. Somehow, then it’s okay. But the death throes of daylight and the loneness of an empty house and the inevitability of the evening news and a microwave dinner were things I wanted to avoid. Or to share with someone.

  I turned toward my parents’ house.

  Five

  The chaos at my parents’ house built to a crescendo I on Thanksgiving morning. Aunts Letha, Hattie, and Vinnia joined my parents, my sister Lydia and her husband, my niece and nephew, two Japanese exchange students from the college, and some drug rehab kid my mother had taken in. I hoped the newcomers were all sufficiently rehabbed and ready to deal with my family in full force and volume.