by Tina Whittle
Five minutes later I turned the last curve, and his house loomed into view. I could see only the very top, however, since everything below the third story was obscured by a tabby stucco wall. A security camera tracked my car as I drove to the main entrance, gated and locked.
I got out. Stood there a minute to let everybody get a good look at me. Then I walked up to the intercom and pushed the button.
A voice answered immediately. “Yeah?”
Definitely female and deep Southern, though more twangy than Lowcountry. “I’m here to see Boone.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Cheyanne? Is that you?”
A barbed silence.
“It’s me. Tai. I know we’ve never met, but—”
“I know who you are.”
I knew her too. Cheyanne was Boone’s daughter-in-law, married to Jefferson. They had two daughters, but that hadn’t mellowed them any. They were both high up in the Klan, the newly sanitized, female-friendly, uber-empowered version. Which made Cheyanne as dangerous as he was.
“I need to talk to y’all,” I said.
“About what?”
“Jasper trouble.”
A pause. I heard muffled conversation at her end. She was calling someone, either Jefferson or Boone, and asking them what to do. I crossed my fingers it was the latter—Boone had always possessed a soft spot for me, but even more importantly, he trusted me. Jefferson always acted like he preferred me stuffed and mounted.
One minute later, there was a buzzing, and the big gate swung open. I got back in the Camaro and eased it through, squashing down any apprehension as the gate closed behind me.
***
Boone’s house was shabbier than I remembered, badly in need of a new roof, the gray siding faded and pocked. He’d never been one for landscaping, but now the tangles and brambles had taken over the flower beds, and swaths of Spanish moss choked the branches. It was chaotic and wild, pure tidewater country, and despite my uneasiness, it felt like coming home.
I parked next to Boone’s old Thunderbird. Unlike the house, it had held up well. Still a deep blue, shiny in the fenders. Cars, guns, and women—the redneck trinity—the first of those well-represented in the open space beneath the house. Like most Lowcountry homes, Boone’s was built with an unfinished first floor, open so that flood water could come and go without wrecking the living areas. I saw at least six vehicles in pieces and parts under there, a couple of watercraft too, including a battered Carolina skiff and a jet ski. Boone hadn’t liquidated this collection yet, which surprised me in light of Reynolds’ revelation. I knew finances were tight, but why was Jefferson getting rid of prized antiques instead of junk cars?
Cheyanne opened the door before I could knock, wiping her hands on her apron. She was my height, maybe shading into five-seven, but twice as muscled. She’d pulled her fawn-brown hair into a ponytail as thick as my wrist, sun-bleached tendrils curling around her forehead. It created an odd halo effect and matched her deep-set eyes, topaz like a lion’s. I caught the pungent odor of fish coming off her, and when I checked her apron, I saw why—it was smeared with blood and scales and slime.
“Jefferson ain’t here,” she said. “But he said you’re welcome to wait.”
I followed her inside the massive great room with its two-story windows overlooking the salt marsh. I’d barely shut the door behind myself when two tow-headed girls came screeching around the corner, dip nets and jelly jars clutched in their hands.
The tallest held up a dirty pint of water. “Mama! Guess what we found!”
“Not now.” Cheyanne pointed toward the back yard. “Y’all go play.”
“But Mama—”
“Git!”
They got. I watched them fly through the patio door and tear down the steps, headed for the cove. The retreating tide would leave treasures of all kinds—silver bait fish, tiny crabs. The playthings of a marsh rat childhood. There were still shotguns behind each door and skinning knives lying as casually as silverware on the counter, but now there were toys scattered on the floor and family portraits hanging alongside the taxidermied deer heads. One of those featured Cheyanne with her compound bow in hand, a twelve-point buck dead at her feet, its tongue lolling.
I followed her onto the patio to the fish cleaning station just beyond the swimming pool. I couldn’t help noticing there were chunks missing from the pavement, and the pool was covered with a thick tarp and puddles of stagnant water. Cheyanne reached into a cooler, pulling out a sea trout. She grabbed it by the tail and slung it on the counter like a potter flinging clay. Then she took her cleaver and chopped the fish’s head off in a single slice. She eyed me, watching for some sign of disgust or discomfort. I almost laughed. If she was trying to out-redneck me, she was wasting her time.
“Where’s Boone?” I said.
“At the hospital.”
I suppressed a twinge of apprehension. “Is he okay?”
She shrugged. “Stable, they say. Another one of his episodes.”
“Is Jefferson with him?”
She shook her head. “No, he had to go fetch a gator.”
“A gator?”
“Somebody over in the Landings found one on the golf course.” She kept her attention on the fish. Chop, slice, chuck the guts in one bucket, heads in the other, cleaned fish in a metal pan. “He does varmint removal. Gators, snakes, bats, whatever. Had to get a water moccasin out of New Life Pentecostal’s baptismal pool last weekend.”
So that was the business now. The marshlands had plenty of troublesome creatures. Developers bulldozed the swamp, backfilled it, and threw up McMansions at the edge of the wilderness. Then everybody acted surprised at the snake in the whirlpool, the gator in the koi pond.
Cheyanne scraped scales, iridescent in the filtered light. “So what’s this trouble you were talking about?”
“You remember the third eyewitness, the one we need to put Jasper away for good?”
“Somebody named Hope.”
“Yeah. Hope Lyle. She’s missing. Her husband too.”
“You think any of us know where they are?”
“This seemed a good enough place to start.”
She went back to cleaning the fish. “You can ask Jefferson, but he’s been busy taking care of Daddy Boone and chasing varmints. I’ve been busy with the girls. We ain’t had time to mess with nobody. But even if we had, why would we?”
The pop-pop-pop of a BB gun carried over the back yard, followed almost immediately by the crash of glass and girlish shrieks.
Cheyanne’s voice went full throttle. “Dixie Lynn and Meredith Lee, I told y’all about shooting up glass! I will tan both your hides and take those rifles away if you do it again, you hear me?”
Guilty silence from the woods. Then two reluctant, drawn-out “yes, ma’am’s.”
“Get some cans if you wanna shoot. Your daddy put plenty in the recycle.” Cheyanne shook her head and went back to the fish. “I swear. You got kids?”
It took me a second to find my voice. “Nope.”
“Always into something, kids are. Watch, they’ll be setting fires or getting in a fistfight any second now.”
About that time, I heard the rolling of tires on the crushed oyster shell. Cheyanne wiped her hands on her apron, the knife too, leaving a smear of blood before she placed it carefully at the edge of the sink. The girls came thundering up from the woods, headed toward the other side of the house, barefoot and hell for leather.
“Y’all keep out of your daddy’s way!” she hollered after them. Then she turned to me. “Come on. Jefferson’s here.”
She headed for the back with the same eagerness as her daughters, and I remembered the many heads and horns mounted on the great room walls. I shot a quick glance at her boots.
Just as I suspected. Alligator hide.
Chapter Twenty-three
We reached the edge of the fishpond as Jefferson climbed down from his pick-up. He was promptly mobbed by the girls. His hair wasn’t the platinum blond of his father’s—it was the yellow-brown of wheat—but from a distance, he looked like a darker version of the Boone I remembered from my teenage years. Not tall, but lean, with a high forehead and angled Nordic features. Those features were currently hidden under a camouflage hunting cap, the rest of him head-to-toe camo too, even the bibbed hip waders covered in mud.
“It’s a little ’un, six feet tops,” he said to Cheyanne. “He did put up a nice fight, though.”
He steered the bouncing girls toward the back of the truck and pulled down the tailgate. The gator was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and staring at its captors with cold reptilian hatred. Little or not, I wouldn’t have wanted to give him a shot at me. Cheyanne helped Jefferson drag the thing out and haul it to the edge of the fishpond, next to the wooden pier. Shallow and muddy, the pond stretched like a boomerang around a hump of soggy land.
I squinted across the stretch of water, glimpsing chain link running around the entire perimeter. “New fence?”
“Yep.”
And then I heard the rolling splash of a tail hitting the water. Then another. I shielded my eyes with one hand and stepped up to the edge of the pier. A dozen alligators sunned in the waning light. I’d always heard rumors, that to piss Boone off was a one-way trip to the gator pit with marsh crabs snacking on the leftovers. I’d passed it along myself, laughing in my head because I knew it wasn’t true.
Wasn’t laughing any more.
Jefferson turned his attention to the beast at the edge of the water, its jaws roped shut. Cheyanne ordered the girls to stay back, and they obeyed wordlessly. She went to help Jefferson, grabbing one end of the critter, her biceps bunching. Together they undid the ropes and heaved the reptile into the water, where it disappeared with a snap and a whip of its tail.
“Lord have mercy,” I said. “Y’all turned the fishpond into a gator pit.”
Jefferson regarded me for the first time. “Gators are like pigs and goats. They eat anything and turn it into meat pretty fast.” He looked at Cheyanne. “Go on and take the girls back to the house. I’ll be up in a little bit.”
She did as he asked, throwing one final warning glare my way as she gathered her daughters. I slapped at the sand gnats chewing a hole in my neck. Spring brought them out by the billions, tiny specks of teeth as voracious as wolverines.
Jefferson saw my smacking and handed me a dark glass bottle. Lemon eucalyptus oil. I daubed some of it on my neck, rubbed it into my hairline. My eyes watered at the pungent citrus and menthol mixture, but short of DEET or cigarette smoke, it was the only thing that would keep the buggers at bay.
“Cheyanne said Boone was in the hospital.”
“Yeah.”
I handed the oil back to him. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. He’ll come home, though, thank the Lord.”
“You see him today?”
“No, he don’t talk to nobody when he’s in the hospital, not even me. He filed for confidential patient status on account of the people who might still be bearing a grudge for some of his previous activities. The only time I’ll hear from him is when they got the discharge papers ready, and he needs a ride back here.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Daddy’s always been a proud man. IPF is hard. It makes for weakness. He don’t want anybody to see him like that.”
“I’m gonna try anyway.”
“Of course you are.” He shoved his hat backward, resettled it lower on his forehead. “If you manage to pull it off, tell the old man I said hey.”
He pulled out a pack of Red Man, his daddy’s chew, and shoved a wad of it in his cheek. Ten years older than me, now he looked decades. Despite his anti-government proclivities, he was cooperating with the investigation. Had to, I knew. They’d dropped some charges in return, softened others, but if he reneged, he’d be in jail with Jasper.
“You coulda called,” he said. “We got phones, you know. E-mail and texts, all that new-fangledy stuff.”
He delivered the line with deadpan sarcasm. He was wary, distrustful, and didn’t like me one bit. But he was smart, in some ways, and knew we were in this together, like it or not. Which is why I knew he’d be willing to help me, up to a point anyway.
“I need to talk to Boone. But I need to talk to you too.”
He spat. “So talk.”
“John Wilde’s disappeared. Hope too.”
“So?”
“You know anything about it?”
He shook his head.
“You sure?”
His patience was unraveling. “Why would I have anything to do with that piece of shit?”
“He was threatening to set things straight, and now he’s vanished. The last anybody heard from him was a message on my machine.”
Jefferson tucked the tobacco back in his pocket. “Man always was an idiot.”
“An idiot who still owes you twenty grand. You all forgiving and forgetting now?”
He shrugged. “Every business takes a loss from time to time. I wrote that off as one.”
“You can afford to do that?”
“We’re getting by.”
“Now that you sold Boone’s pistol collection. And all his great-granddaddy’s Confederate memorabilia.”
He didn’t deny it, or ask where I’d heard such a thing. He simply watched the sunset-dappled water, following the long shapes riding the surface.
I shook my head. “Thing is, why get rid of that first? Why not all those beater cars and boats under the house?”
He shrugged. “You think I ain’t been trying? But the local junk market is over-saturated. As they say.”
“So you been keeping your nose clean, just driving around the island in your pick-up, rehabilitating gators.”
“Straight and narrow.”
He pulled out a sandwich bag full of squashed marshmallows and popped one on top of the water, where it bobbed for a second. A blunt scaly snout rose from the depths, opening and closing on the marshmallow with barely a sound. Across the pond, a half-dozen others slid into the water, headed our way. Gators with a sweet tooth. It made the reptiles seem tame, like scaled and slit-eyed dogs. But a gator was a gator. To see anything else would have been a dangerous mistake.
“You think Jasper’s got something to do with any of this?” I said. “He managed to have himself an armed rebellion right under the KKK’s nose, and he’s still got people out there, I know he does. He could disappear somebody easy, even from jail.”
“Maybe so. He does have people. But they ain’t my people.”
“Ah yes. Your people. Once Jasper started piling up bodies, all your people started hiding and lying and pointing fingers.” I let the words trip syllable by syllable off my tongue. “Including you.”
He turned hard eyes my way. “Not including me. If you’ll remember, I was the one who came to make sure you were okay in the middle of the shitstorm he created.” He looked back over the water. “I ain’t never tried to hurt you, Tee. You and me are on different sides, true enough. But you’re family, and Daddy always says that comes first.”
Tee. It had been decades since I’d heard that nickname. A contraction of Tai, which was itself a nickname, dreamed up by a sweetly oddball aunt with a disreputable Vietnamese to English dictionary. And while Jefferson delivered the words calmly, I knew it was a cover. His brother’s betrayal had rocked him to the core, and not only the attempted assassination part. Jefferson was a company man. To have his brother, his fellow Klansman, betray not just his family but the entire Aryan nation? That was an abomination beyond forgiveness.
I leaned my arms on the railing. “He’s suing me, you know.”
Jefferson’s head snapped back. “Wh
at for?”
“Assault. Suing Trey too.”
“How much?”
“Together? Nine million.”
Jefferson whistled long and low. “Damn.”
Behind him, I could see the back yard, the defunct pool. I could hear the laughter of his girls and it was almost like being a kid again, juicy with delight, ravenous and curious and burning with energy. A final lick of orange light glinted off the Thunderbird, heavy, weighted with memory…
I blinked. From this vantage point, I could see what was parked on the other side of the yard—a 2010 Harley-Davidson Night Rod Special, black on black from fender to fender, its leather and silver chrome piercingly familiar. I could feel the curve of the seat as I straddled it, the vibration of the V-twin engine against my thighs.
I pointed. “Jefferson Forrest Boone, if you haven’t seen John Wilde around here, what’s his Harley doing parked under your house?”
Chapter Twenty-four
Jefferson’s eyes tightened. “Ain’t really none of your business.”
I felt the caution catch. I’d never backed down from this man in my life, not even when we were kids, and yet I felt the sudden urge to run. I dropped my shoulders, shifted my left foot back six inches. Opened my hands and kept them loose and ready.
“It damn sure is my business,” I said. “Now do you want to explain this to me, or to the folks who are gonna come after me?”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Call the law on me?”
“Consider it called the second I don’t check in with Trey.”
Jefferson flinched. I was surprised to see something flash in his eyes that wasn’t purely anger. Anger was in there, all right, but it was mingled with affront.
He nodded slowly, coming to terms with it. “Fine. Be like that. I ain’t never laid a hand on you, Tee. But it’s good to know you think I might. That’s mighty fine information right there.”