A Murder in Mount Moriah

by Mindy Quigley

  Rob, however, was not silenced. He quietly began to sing “Chantelle, My Belle” to the tune of the Beatles’ “Michelle”.

  Lindsay ignored him for a few minutes, but, when he didn’t stop, she said irritably, “Are you going to start naming other machines that I own? Is my hotplate going to be called Francine?”

  “As a matter of fact, your hotplate is Blaze. Blaze McSizzlington.”

  “You are such a child.”

  “A car is different from other machines. Cars have personalities.”

  As if to emphasize his point, a deep thud arose from the engine block. The car rapidly decelerated. The sudden change of speed caused Lindsay to fishtail, but she quickly regained control. “Oh no! Chantelle is really upset with you,” Rob said.

  “Shut up, Rob. I think something’s really wrong. Nothing happens when I press on the accelerator.” Lindsay piloted the car to the shoulder of the highway. She popped the hood and the two of them climbed out of the car, the frigid air cutting through their thin clothing. Lindsay raised the hood, and after a few minutes of fiddling was able to get it propped open. Her sense of accomplishment at propping the hood was short-lived, however.

  “I have no earthly idea what I am looking at,” Lindsay stated glumly. There was no obvious smoke or fire, and no giant, blinking arrow emblazoned with the words Here Is the Problem! They might just as well have been looking at the blueprints for a space ship, for all they understood. She and Rob stood staring, the icy clouds of their breath filling the air.

  “I once helped my uncle change a tire,” Rob said. Lindsay glared at him.

  They got back into the car. It was still very early, and after ten minutes, not a single car had driven past them. They hadn’t dressed for the freezing temperatures and were already beginning to shiver.

  “Well,” Lindsay said, “we’ve got a weeks’ worth of laundry in the trunk, so we know we won’t freeze to death. I think we should try to walk to the Shoney’s outside of Snow Camp. That’s the closest place.” By now, they had driven the route so many times that they were familiar with all the landmarks, large and small (and pancake-filled).

  “That has to be five miles from here.”

  “Do you have another plan? Should we wait here until a one-eyed trucker with a hook for a hand offers to give us a lift?”

  “Fine,” Rob said. “But when we get to Shoney’s, I’m having French toast and sausages. The round sausages, not links.”

  They bundled up, layering t-shirts over sweaters until they looked like turn-of-the-century strongmen. They trudged wordlessly along the shoulder of the road, gravel grinding and crunching under their feet. The rocks, stumps, and leaves at the edge of the forest were coated with a crisp layer of frost. In the flat, early morning light, the undergrowth looked like an attic full of dust-covered furniture.

  “I am not adapted to this climate. It never gets this cold in Taiwan,” Rob complained.

  “You’ve been here for almost three years. What’s Taiwanese for ‘quit being a crybaby’?”

  Ignoring her, Rob continued, “My feet are freezing. I should have put on extra socks.”

  “Do you want to run back for them? We’ve been walking for less than ten minutes. I don’t think we’ve even gone a quarter mile.”

  “Next spring, they’re going to find our frozen corpses in the ditch next to the road.”

  “If you don’t stop whining, you might be right about them finding a corpse down there.”

  “Hey, is that a house?” Rob pointed hopefully to the near distance, where a column of white smoke rose like a Grecian column into the vivid blue sky. At the edge of the road ahead, a small, colorfully painted sign marked the beginning of a narrow gravel track. “Tatum’s Tree Farm,” Rob read aloud. “How do you farm trees?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we? Maybe they’ll let us use their phone.”

  They turned down the track, passing through a hundred yards of dense forest that screened the tree farm from the road. Suddenly, there was a break in the tree line and a surreal vista opened up before them. As far as they could see, row upon row of tiny conifers dotted the undulating landscape, none of the trees more than four or five feet high. The smell of Christmas morning filled the air. The trees were a pale, silvery-green color, and they shimmered in the thin rays of early morning sun. At the crest of the next hill stood a neat two-story farmhouse. The wooden siding boards were painted in an alternating pattern of red and green. The effect was charmingly garish, as if Santa’s tackiest elf had been unleashed on this unsuspecting farm. A thin plume of white smoke rose from a stone chimney. Lindsay and Rob walked up the steps and onto the porch. As Lindsay raised her hand to knock, the door flew open.

  “I been watching y’all come up the road.”

  A small, gnome-like man with wizened reddish skin stood glowering before them. He wore red Long Johns, which revealed a surprisingly muscular frame. A crocheted white shawl was draped around his shoulders to ward off the cold.

  Taken aback, Lindsay stuttered, “Oh. Uh. I mean, our car broke down on the road back there. We were wondering if we could use your phone.”

  “Ain’t got one.”

  “Sorry to trouble you, sir. We’ll just be on our way.” Rob was already halfway down the front steps, motioning for Lindsay to follow.

  “Pop, who you talking to?” They heard a man’s low voice say from somewhere inside the house.

  “Curly here and this little Chinaman say their car broke down,” the older man said. He took a step back to allow his son to see the strangers. The son was tanned and muscular, with a short-cropped beard so blond that it was almost white. Standing barely five and a half feet tall, he looked like a miniature Viking.

  “Hi there. I’m John Tatum,” he said, smiling warmly and extending his hand.

  Lindsay and Rob introduced themselves, still shrinking uncomfortably under the older man’s stare. “This here is my Pop, Joe Tatum. You say your car’s broken down? Where is she? Let me get my coat and I’ll take a look at her.” He disappeared inside for a moment. The old man continued his vigilant watch over them.

  Rob leaned in toward Lindsay and whispered, “See, he called your car a Her.”

  John reappeared a moment later, and the three of them headed back down the gravel track.

  “Sorry about my Pop. You may have gathered that he ain’t playing off the same sheet music as the rest of the band.” He sighed and looked back over his shoulder toward the house. “Where’re y’all headed?”

  “Mount Moriah. My dad lives there.”

  “Students, then? Over at Elon?”

  “How did you know that?” Rob asked, impressed by John’s intuition. John tipped his head toward the top layer of Rob’s sweater cocoon. It had the college’s name and emblem in large blue lettering across the front. “Oh.”

  They spent the rest of the walk learning more about John Tatum and the Tatum Tree Farm. The day John graduated from high school, he had gone to work as a carpenter in Charlotte, never intending to return. After his mother died, however, he came back to the farm to help care for his father. He recently bought an old fixer-upper in downtown Mount Moriah, and he was living in the one room he had managed to make habitable.

  “Pop won’t hear of moving out of the house,” John explained. “Even after Momma died and he had his accident, the stubborn old codger still reckons he can take care of himself. He’s right for the most part. Me and my sister take turns looking in on him, though. She comes a few times during the week, and I come on the weekends. And we both lend a hand trimming them every spring and summer and spraying the trees in the September of the year they’re harvested.”

  “Spraying them?” Lindsay asked.

  John nodded. “Do you know what photosynthesis is?”

  Lindsay, ever eager with a right answer, quickly responded. “It’s how trees convert sunlight into energy.”

  “Yep. They use photosynthesis to make chlorophyll—the stuff that turns their needles green. Did you
notice how most of our trees are that shiny silver-yellow color, ‘stead of green? Well, they are White Pines. They stop photosynthesis in the colder months, when they go dormant. Less chlorophyll in the needles means that the trees look bleached out and silvery. Nobody’s gonna pay top dollar for a tree like that. When they grow big enough to sell, we need them to be green. We can't stop the trees from going dormant, so we spray ‘em. The spray stops the color from fading.”

  “You spray paint the trees green?” Rob’s eyes were round with horror. He looked like a child who had just been told that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

  “It’s not spray paint. It’s a water-based protectant. It gets washed off by rain during the fall. By the time November rolls around, the sun is low enough in the sky so as it doesn’t cause fading. When we harvest ‘em they are that bright Christmassy green,” John said. “We have to trim ‘em twice a year to get that nice triangle shape, too. Otherwise, they’d just be big, ole silvery bushes.”

  When they finally arrived at the car, it took John about fifteen seconds to render his diagnosis. “Your timing belt is busted. It shouldn’t be too bad to fix, in this kind of car, but it ain’t something I can do. You need parts that I ain’t got. We gonna have to walk back to Pop’s house and call somebody to come out and give her a tow into town.”

  “Wait, he has a phone?”

  “‘Course he has a phone. Whacha think this is, Little House on the Prairie?”

  “Oh, it’s just that your dad said you didn’t have one.”

  “He says a lot of things,” John said.

  “Did I hear you say that your father had an accident?” Lindsay asked, as they began their trek back to the farmhouse.

  “Yes, ma’am. He used to keep a garden out behind the house. There was this rabbit that kept getting through the fence and eating everything. Pop tried everything to keep that varmint out—fences, traps, everything—but this was some kind of daggone Houdini rabbit. It just kept on coming back. So early one morning, ‘fore the sun even come up, Pop sets up a little hunting blind back there and hunkers down to wait with his .22.”

  “Sure enough, the daggone thing comes hopping along. The little critter hops over to the gate, leaps straight into the air, bats open the latch, and just goes in. Pop can’t believe his damn eyes. He jumps out of the blind and starts firing away like Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral. Somehow, one of the bullets ricochets off a rock and hits Pop in the side of the head. Momma comes running out and finds Pop staggering around holding his bleeding head with one hand and that daggone rabbit’s dead carcass in the other. He tells her to drive him to the hospital, and then get herself back home to cook him some fricassee.

  “Pop was always an original thinker, but that bullet made him a bit fanciful. Hell, what I mean to say is he acts downright peculiar.”

  The trio arrived back at the farmhouse. They couldn’t arrange for anyone to tow the car until that afternoon, so John invited Rob and Lindsay to settle in. John made hot cocoa for them and they laundered the layers of clothes that they were wearing in Joe Tatum’s washing machine. The whole morning, old Joe moved warily around the edges of the room, like a cat deciding whether to pounce or bolt.

  When Lindsay and Rob finally left, they promised to stop in at the farm the following Saturday on their weekly laundry run. Even thinking back now, Lindsay could hardly make sense of all that had happened in the weeks and months that followed that first meeting. Rob and John never went on a date. The word “gay” wasn’t even thought, much less said aloud. But one day that Spring, Rob wrote a letter to his parents and the American missionaries in Taiwan, explaining that he was no longer planning to become a missionary. Together, he and Lindsay packed up his dorm room, and she gave him a lift to John’s house in town.

  Chapter 19

  Lindsay walked up the wide, circular drive that led to the entrance of Plantation Oaks Country Club. In the backseat of her car, she had wriggled into a black, long-sleeved dress, which was now serving to funnel the sun’s baking heat onto her skin and create a great deal of very unladylike perspiration. As she made her way toward the building, Lindsay remembered the only other time she had been inside the country club’s wrought-iron gates—her Senior Prom. The memories from that night were very murky and episodic. A steamy June evening. Clandestine cigarettes in the ladies’ room. Wine coolers with PBR chasers. Here Comes the Hotstepper. Tequila from a flask. Hootie & the Blowfish. At some point, she had ended up face down in a bunker next to the ninth green. She’d had a revelation the next morning, when the icy spray of the golf course’s lawn-watering sprinklers awakened her: Senior Prom would be her last bacchanal. Rebellion was exhausting. It left you shoeless, hung over, and covered in golf course sand. She decided that college was going to be about abstaining, eschewing, straightening up, and flying right. Plantation Oaks would be her Road to Damascus. And it had been. Basically.

  With a rolling green golf course and a sparkling man-made lake, the grounds of Plantation Oaks seemed an impossible Eden. A $5,000 a year membership fee walled it off from the rural tableaux of dilapidated gas stations and trailer parks that surrounded it. And the name Plantation Oaks, of course, told everyone as much as they needed to know about the skin color of most of the members. For whites, plantations conjured images of mint-julep-sipping belles. For blacks, not so much. The oldest part of the clubhouse, erected in the 1950’s, had been modeled after an old plantation house, and it sported the requisite clichés: bottle green shutters, stately Doric columns, and a grand porch with white wooden rocking chairs. Two massive glass-fronted, 80s-era additions clung to each side of the original building.

  Lindsay passed through the wide doors of the plant-filled atrium of the west addition, noting that the Richards family seemed to mark large public spaces with the enthusiasm and frequency of dogs marking lampposts. The entrance was plaque-marked as the Ella Mae Richards Vestibule of the (plaque-marked) Lavonia Richards Reception Hall. Inside, the preparations for the day’s activities were nearly complete. On one side of the room, a small dais and podium had been erected. Facing this stood rows of white fabric-covered chairs. On the opposite side of the room, dozens of round tables had been set with plateware and cutlery. A bored woman in a navy blue uniform was plunking vases of white carnations into the middle of each table.

  The Bullard women were gathered near the podium, circling Kimberlee. They brandished mascara wands and powder brushes like a Nascar pit crew readying their vehicle for the next leg. In one corner, a group of Kimberlee’s nieces and nephews were engrossed in a card game that involved violently walloping one another’s hands every few seconds. Lindsay had the incongruous feeling that she was attending a wedding, rather than a funeral. The only indication of the real purpose of the occasion was a large display table in the center of the room adorned with photographs of Vernon Young. Picture after picture showed his broad smile and twinkling, intelligent eyes. Lindsay had begun to move toward the podium when two hushed voices caught her attention.

  “I am not going to talk about this now. We are at Vernon’s memorial service, for Pete’s sake.”

  “You ‘been avoiding talking about this for weeks. Something damned funny is going on, I’m telling you.”

  Lindsay recognized the voices of Keith and Buford Bullard coming from behind a large grouping of tropical plants near the entrance. Polite Lindsay could easily have made her presence known with a discrete little cough. Very Polite Lindsay could have walked away. Instead, she casually sidestepped her way out of sight behind a potted palm and listened. She could just make out the men’s words over the gurgling of a nearby fountain and the loud hum of the air conditioners, which were struggling to keep the heat of the July sun at bay.

  “If it’s a mistake, I’ll get to the bottom of it. If there’s funny business, which I very much doubt, I’ll get to the bottom of that, too. This is why you should let me handle the business side of things, Daddy.”

  Buford’s reply came out in a low grumble, as men
acing as a peal of thunder. “Just ‘cuz you got an associates degree don’t think that makes you some kind of titan of industry. Remember, boy, I paid for you to get that degree and I’m the one who put you in charge of the restaurant in the first place. Sometimes I think there’s more common sense in the backside of a pig than there is in that thick head of yours.”

  “Yes, sir.” The tone in Keith’s voice was that of a guilty schoolboy.

  “Now come on. You go see how your sister is doing. I need to change into my uniform.”

  Keith murmured something indistinguishable and the two men emerged from the foliage about two feet in front of Lindsay’s hiding place. They spotted her immediately. “Hey, y’all,” she said. She smiled nonchalantly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the spiritual leader of the memorial service to be lurking around among the shrubbery. Buford stalked past her with the merest grunt of a hello.

  Keith was more cordial in his greeting. He waited until his father was out of earshot and then leaned in. “Don’t know how much of that you heard. Dad’s always getting his boxers in a bunch about something or other.”

  “Oh. Me? No, I just walked in. I was admiring the foliage on this bougainvillea.” Lindsay indicated the flowering bush next to them. The color of her cheeks deepened to a shade of pink that she put the blossoms to shame. Keith knit his eyebrows together quizzically, but let her lie go unchallenged, and the two of them walked together toward the females of the Bullard tribe.