Bloody Kin

by Margaret Maron

  “Who gets lonesome?” she teased, for by then they had been married long enough that she knew his needs.

  In those years, Jake wanted the city’s jostling, rough competition. Too long in the country made him as edgy as too long in town. The farm was quiet, too quiet, and too familiar for challenge; but Kate had expected the pattern to reverse some day, that their visits would become more frequent and, eventually, would lengthen into residence. She had thought they would grow old there together, tottering back to the city only for special occasions, to see a favorite actor or visit old colleagues.

  Neither she nor Jake had ever expected that she would live here without him, alone except for an embittered old man.

  Lacy reached for a hushpuppy and Kate saw with new clarity his callused wrinkled hand, his bony wrist extended past the worn cuff of his flannel work shirt. The ale and the laughter had relaxed his defenses and she read fatigue in the lines of his face, in the slump of his shoulders. Whatever he was up to, it was taking a physical toll.

  He’s too old for this, Kate thought. He’s Jake’s uncle, the nearest thing to a grandfather your baby will ever have.

  He stole, said another, colder part of her.

  He took, she corrected, and no more than Jake would have given if Jake had realized.

  Impulsively, she laid down her fork and said, “Before you finish settling Jake’s estate, Rob, I’d like you to transfer half those CDs to Lacy.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Kate wished she had waited. She should have known that Miss Emily would start beaming and burbling about generosity and that Lacy’s pride would be stung by anything smacking of self-serving charity.

  “What’s a ceedee?” he asked Rob. “Money? I ain’t having none of her money.” His voice was harsh.

  “Lacy, please don’t do this,” she begged and stretched her hand toward his.

  His chair scraped the floor as he shoved himself out of reach, as if her very touch were poison.

  “I don’t need her to give me no money.”

  “You’d rather steal it?” Kate asked caustically.

  “Now, Kate,” said Rob, but his mother laid a restraining hand on his arm.

  Kate didn’t notice.

  “Since when do pine borers attack black walnuts, Lacy?” she asked and anger reddened her thin checks. “There was nothing wrong with those trees, was there? They weren’t dead, they just hadn’t leafed out yet. How much did you and Sauls get for each one? Four hundred? Five?”

  Miss Emily couldn’t help herself. “Five hundred dollars for one tree?”

  “I talked to a forestry expert this evening,” Kate told her. “That’s the approximate going rate for standing furniture-quality black walnut trees around here. And Lacy and his crony cut six of them.”

  “My daddy planted them trees,” said Lacy.

  “Your daddy was Jake’s grandfather. Those trees belonged to Jake,” Kate blazed. “You had no right to steal them from Jake’s child!”

  “It ain’t Jake’s!” howled Lacy. “Jake woulda told me iffen he was gonna be a daddy.”

  Kate was stunned. “He didn’t know. It was too soon.”

  “Huh!” snarled Lacy. “He didn’t know ’cause it weren’t his. Then you come running down here to hide your shame from your New York City friends, making everybody here feel sorry for you, thinking it’s Jake’s baby; but I heared you talking on the telephone to him.”

  “Him? Him who?” asked Kate, bewildered.

  “Your parrymore, that’s who. That Richard that called you up.” Lacy’s harsh voice became mincing as he tried to imitate Kate’s. “‘Oh, Richard, darling, I’m just missing you so much, but I’ve got to have our baby down here.’ And every time you talk to that Gina woman, it’s ‘Give my love to Richard.’”

  “Richard? Richard Cromyn?”

  Kate’s mind went back to that call she’d had from her old friend at the agency two weeks ago. She could remember the silly banter between them and tried to recall how it must have sounded to Lacy’s suspicious ears. “You thought that Richard and I—? Oh, for God’s sake, Lacy!”

  She turned to Rob. “You’ve met Richard Cromyn, Rob. Will you please tell Lacy how stupid he’s being?”

  Rob’s green eyes shone with mischief. “Is Cromyn that old guy who—?”

  At Kate’s confirming nod, he shook his head at the bristling old farmer who stood across the table from him and said, “Sorry, Mr. Lacy. Not only is Richard Cromyn thirty years older than Kate, I think he’s been completely faithful to the same man for the last fifteen.”

  Rob spoke with such humorous conviction that Lacy’s belligerence faltered. “It really is Jake’s baby?”

  He looked around the table at Miss Emily, at Rob, and at last he came to Kate. Her eyes were chips of blue-green glass and his angular chin tightened convulsively. “I didn’t— I thought—”

  His words died and he made blindly for the hall door and they heard his footsteps stumble up the stairs.

  Rob started to follow, but his mother called him back.

  “Leave him alone,” she said with the sharpness of a school principal. “It’s about time Lacy Honeycutt took a good look at himself for once.”

  As reaction set in, Kate hugged herself bleakly, feeling as stripped and desolate as on the day of Jake’s funeral. “How could he think that? Didn’t he know how Jake and I loved each other? Did he think I could go to another man that quickly?”

  She shivered and helpless tears spilled down her face.

  Rob ached to put his arms around her, but he was realistic enough to know how she would react to that now, and anyhow, his mother was already there, hugging and patting Kate’s hunched shoulders.

  “He wasn’t thinking, child,” she said. “He was just hurting.”

  Unable to go on standing by uselessly, Rob cleared the table and carried the scraps out to the dogs. He sat on the edge of the porch in darkness and fed cold hush puppies to the two pointers who’d temporarily given up their romantic siege of Willy Stewart’s dog pen. Jake’s porch, he thought. Jake’s farm and Jake’s pointers. And Jake’s wife.

  There had been too much difference in their ages when they were growing up, but Jake had been tolerant of Rob’s hero worship and let him tag along occasionally when Dwight would have left him behind. They became friends after Jake came back from Vietnam and both were in school over at Chapel Hill. And Jake had enjoyed the joke when Rob claimed his brand-new wife as a distant cousin.

  “Just as long as you don’t try to pretend you’re kissing cousins,” he’d warned and there had been a sardonic, speculative look in his hazel eyes that still made Rob flush to remember.

  When Rob returned to the kitchen, the big room was deserted and he heard the murmur of his mother’s voice from Kate’s bedroom down the hall. He stowed the rest of the barbecue and coleslaw in the refrigerator, pushed up the sleeves of his baggy sweater and washed the few dishes they had used.

  Miss Emily joined him at the sink in time to dry the final plate. “I put her to bed.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  Her worried eyes peered up at him. “Will you?”

  He knew it was no use pretending not to know what she was talking about.

  CHAPTER 20

  When Miss Emily coaxed her to bed the night before, Kate had expected to lie awake until the small hours deciding what to do since it was clear she could no longer stay at the farm in the face of Lacy’s monstrous distaste for her presence. But after such draining emotion, she had fallen into a deep sleep untroubled by dreams or nightmares, and she awoke shortly before daybreak feeling rested and even somewhat hopeful.

  It was still so early that dawn was only a rumor in the eastern sky.

  The old moon, a lopsided and cold white fourth quarter now, lit up the countryside; and looking from her open windows past the yard trees, Kate saw ground mist lying across the sloping fields, making the woods beyond seem to float untethered
in the distance. Details were obscured and the luminous beauty of the scene recalled Chinese brush paintings of misty moonlit landscapes.

  From the chicken yard, Lacy’s rooster proclaimed the coming sun, and wild birds were equally noisy. Bobwhites and towhees called to each other and a Carolina wren rustled busily in the dead grass beneath her window with much chirping and quick flicks of its stubby little tail. In Miss Emily’s pasture across the road, cows mooed for their breakfast hay.

  The air that floated through the windows was cool and invigorating, with a blend of clean country smells: crab apple blossoms, hyacinths, dew-wet grass, and freshly turned earth. It stirred Kate’s blood and she threw off her robe and hastily dressed in elasticized jeans and an oversized cherry-colored sweatshirt. She planned to grab some cheese and a piece of fruit and be out of the house before Lacy awoke.

  But the aroma of fresh coffee met her in the hallway, and when she reached the kitchen, she found Lacy at the table laboring with pencil and paper. He crumpled the page as she entered.

  “I meant to be gone ’fore you got up,” he said, and pushed a small sheaf of currency across the polished tabletop toward her. “This is what’s left outten them walnut trees. I’ll try and have you the rest by the end of summer.”

  Kate was embarrassed by his hangdog look. “Oh, Lacy.”

  “I can stay with Tucker for right now and work at the sawmill till barning time,” he continued doggedly.

  “Don’t be silly. If one of us has to leave, it ought to be me. What do I know about chickens and pigs and gardens and tobacco allotments? Not to mention borer beetles?” she added wickedly.

  But Lacy was in full contrition this morning and would not be baited. “Looks like you’ll just have to learn,” he said with the mildness of a Sunday school saint. “It ain’t fitting for me to stay on here after what I done and what I said about you.”

  “Yeah, that was pretty rotten,” Kate agreed. She poured herself a coffee and refilled Lacy’s cup, too, before he could refuse. Then she sat down across from him with determination and said, “Look, Lacy, it’s time we got this settled. You’ve never liked me and I can’t say I’ve been overly crazy about you. We tolerated each other though because of Jake, right?”

  He looked at her warily, then nodded slowly.

  “So why can’t we keep on like that? We both loved Jake, but he wasn’t perfect. In fact, in one thing he was downright selfish and thoughtless.”

  Lacy’s head jerked up defensively, but Kate did not pause.

  “Jake wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. I didn’t keep him in the city, Lacy. He kept himself there. He loved his work. But he loved the farm, too, and he wanted it to stay just the way it was when he was a boy—dogs, chickens, pigs, his hunting guns oiled and ready, a bed waiting for him, one of your home-cooked meals on the stove. He wanted the orchard pruned in the fall and the grass cut in summer.”

  “He pruned them pear trees hisself,” Lacy objected hotly.

  “Okay,” she conceded, “so he did some of the work himself, but that was still weekend play. It relaxed him. And if he hadn’t felt like doing it, you would have, right?”

  Lacy would not respond.

  “Lacy, it’s not disloyal to admit Jake was wrong. I know he took care of your tab at the feed store and at Mrs. Fowler’s, and he had all the utility bills sent to New York, but he should have been paying you a real salary all those years.”

  “You don’t pay kinfolk no salary.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re a Yankee,” he said scornfully.

  “Damn it, Lacy! Taking advantage of a relative has nothing to do with the Mason-Dixon line. If you hadn’t been here to look after the farm for Jake, how much would he have had to pay a caretaker?”

  Lacy’s jaw set mulishly.

  “Okay,” said Kate, shifting tactics. “So you’re going to leave me here to fend for myself while Jake’s murderer roams the countryside. How would Jake like that?”

  “I could maybe find somebody to stay here with you and do the chores.”

  “Oh, sure. You think I’m going to give a stranger your room at a time like this?”

  Lacy’s eyes dropped to the bulge outlined by her cherry-colored sweatshirt. “Well, maybe I could stay on till after the baby comes.”

  “Your great-nephew, Lacy,” she reminded in her softest voice. “Or great-niece. Your blood kin.”

  Silence stretched between them. The first rays of sunlight edged in through the eastern windows and made patterns on the tabletop.

  “Jake were a real easy baby,” Lacy mused, half to himself. “Only time he ever cried much was with the colic once and Jane was so plumb wore-out I took him out on the porch swing with me and laid him on my chest and we swung back and forth till he went to sleep.”

  Kate smiled. “Now see there? I was never around a baby before, so you could tell me what’s normal and what’s not when it cries.”

  “I reckon you’ll get all the advice you need from Em’ly Bryant and Bessie Stewart,” Lacy said dryly. “Them two’s the buttingest-in women I ever seen.”

  Kate laughed. “In the meantime, you’d better keep this,” she said, pushing the money back to Lacy.

  He started to protest, but she said, “You and I aren’t blood kin, Lacy, so it’s only right that you should’ve been getting a salary since last October and I don’t want any more fuss about it.” She stood up briskly. “I don’t think it’s good for the baby for me to argue so much.”

  Lacy snorted, but he pocketed the money and pushed back his chair. “Reckon I’d better go see if them chickens has us some fresh eggs.”

  CHAPTER 21

  It was, thought Kate, walking down to the new studio after lunch, rather like living on the edge of a volcano. A volcano that could erupt again at any time. Jake was murdered. Of this she had no doubts. And Jake’s army comrade, Bernie Covington, had been struck down here in this very packhouse. The boating mishap that killed James Tyrrell seemed too fortuitous not to be murder cleverly disguised as an accident, and whoever was responsible—William Thompson?—was still running loose, walking in and out of Gilead and the Honeycutt farmhouse at will.

  Yet, now that she had made peace with Lacy, she could begin to plan for the future, to think about work and new projects to discuss with Gina Melnick.

  It would seem that life went on, even on the edge of a volcano.

  It would also seem that settling into a new studio was much like a shakedown cruise aboard a boat. She discovered that the drafting table would work better shifted slightly to the left, that tubes of pastels would be handier in an upper drawer, that mixing trays should be nearer the sink.

  As Kate rearranged supplies in a lower cabinet, she noticed an unfamiliar object shoved to the back of the bottom shelf. There was no memory of the crumpled grocery bag Mary Pat had carried the afternoon before, only puzzlement while she crouched on one knee to fish it out from behind a stack of blotting paper.

  Wild surmises rioted in her head when she saw the domed cedar box. James Tyrrell’s chest? Here?

  She lifted the lid upon an assortment of keepsakes very similar to those Jake had saved: bits of papers, letters, a torn map, and a clutch of photographs. Some were duplicates of the ones Jake had. Others showed jungle scenes, temples, marketplaces, unfamiliar trees and flowers: the sort of pictures an ordinary tourist might take. In the black and white snapshots, the men’s camouflage uniforms could almost pass for brightly-colored holiday patterns.

  There was Jake, barely recognizable behind what looked like a fourday growth of beard, and James Tyrrell in an unkempt mustache beside him. There was Bernie Covington in an enormous black beard that did not obscure the dark mole on his cheek. To his left was the sharply-focused face of William Thompson.

  Kate was shocked by how young he looked. No wonder he’d been called Kid. Jake said he had lied about his age and the lie must have been a whopper because this boy, this baby, actually, couldn’
t have been more than fifteen or sixteen.

  Kate turned the picture over and read the scrawled names: “Jake, Bernie, Willie, and me.”

  Willie Thompson. Into her mind, unbidden, came the name Tom Whitley.

  What had Dwight said about criminals taking simple sound-alike aliases and often reversing initials?

  Willie Thompson, Thomas Whitley? Was it possible? The boy in the photograph was as slightly built as Tom, but he was looking straight into the camera and it was difficult to judge if his chin jutted or receded, if his nose was aquiline or snubbed, if his Adam’s apple was prominent or barely noticeable. The longer Kate looked, though, the surer she grew that this was a picture of Tom Whitley. She was startled from her speculations by the rap of Gordon’s walking stick at the open door.

  “Ready to walk, Kate?” he called.

  “Oh, Gordon, look what I found—James’s missing chest!”

  “What?” Gordon was dumbfounded. “How on earth did that get here?”

  Kate stared at him blankly. “Do you know, I was so busy looking at the pictures, I never gave it a thought. Look at this, though.”

  She stabbed the baby face with a slender forefinger. “Who does that remind you of?”

  Gordon peered at the figure uncertainly. “He looks familiar.”

  “Tom Whitley,” she prompted.

  “Whitley? Really?” He turned the pictures to the north window and examined them so intently and for so long that Kate prodded him impatiently.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “It could be, but that would mean—”

  Kate nodded excitedly. “We were all wondering how a stranger like William Thompson could walk in and out of our houses, how he could roam around both farms unseen, and here he was under our noses the whole time. Lacy said his set of Vietnam pictures disappeared after he’d shown them to Mary Pat and Sally, remember? Sally or Mary Pat must have mentioned them to Tom. He was here when I unpacked Jake’s things, and heaven knows he had free access to Gilead’s attic. He must have worried that we’d notice he was one of the four. I wonder if Sally suspects? She said he was in Vietnam.”