The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

  “But it wouldn’t have helped, would it?” I asked as we entered town and Rob slowed the car to a sedate 35 miles an hour. “Not once it’s in the liver and pancreas?”

  “And so far, she’s not in too much pain. Or so she says. She’s told Anne that she doesn’t want the others to know until it’s time for hospice. I just hope they won’t take it out on Anne.” Kate turned to face me around the headrest of her front seat. “Be prepared for Aunt Jane to give you a bit of a hard time, though.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  “You were the one who told Sigrid, remember?”

  Rob turned at one of Cotton Grove’s three traffic lights, and a moment later we glided through the open iron gates to follow the circular drive to the imposing front door.

  “Nobody swore me to secrecy,” I said. “And besides, Sigrid had already figured out that something was wrong.”

  With rain pounding on the car roof, Dwight reached for the umbrellas on the rear ledge and passed one up to Rob.

  Chivalry is not yet dead in the South.

  CHAPTER

  3

  These peaceful animals pose no risk.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  I was not surprised when Chloe Adams opened the door. A licensed practical nurse, she has an easy, reassuring manner that makes her a good companion for someone ill or dying. Early fifties now, with a trim build that belies her physical strength, her children are grown and her husband is a long-haul trucker who is on the road for such long stretches that she can move right into a spare bedroom if that’s what’s wanted and be on call 24/7.

  Elderly whites who were tended by black nursemaids in their long-vanished youth are doubly comforted by her calm professionalism in the evening of their lives. Sent to bed early by a stern parent, they could remember a soothing pat and a low voice crooning in the darkened room. “There, there, baby. Stop your crying and go to sleep now. Things’ll be better in the morning.”

  Mrs. Lattimore has never struck me as someone who would cry herself to sleep, not even with death staring her in the face. All the same and despite her wealth, she had hired Mrs. Adams rather than a fully accredited RN. I doubt if her choice had anything to do with money.

  Chloe Adams took our umbrellas and coats and told us to go on into the living room, then discreetly vanished.

  “Come in, come in,” said Mrs. Lattimore. Seated in a high-back wing chair, she gave a welcoming gesture with her thin hands. “How nice to see you all.”

  She wore a stylish cranberry wool dress with a high neck and long sleeves, and a quilted velvet throw was tucked around her legs although the room was quite warm. She seemed even more fragile than when I had last seen her at Kate and Rob’s Christmas dinner, yet she was still beautiful. Good bones always last.

  In any conflicts with school boards, town officials, or county commissioners, I’m told that Mrs. Lattimore had always begun with honey. “Although you knew the vinegar was coming if they didn’t fall in line,” my own mother had said with a grin. Over the years, I had heard so many stories about the vinegar that I admit I was slightly intimidated by her when we met at Christmas. Now I was seeing the honey as she welcomed us.

  She did not rise from her chair by the fireplace where realistic-looking gas logs burned, but Sigrid stood and so did the woman I assumed was her mother. Anne Harald resembled her mother more than her daughter, the same bones, the same beauty, the same easy poise when meeting new people. She was shorter than Sigrid, and her dark curls were heavily threaded with silver. Like her mother, now that I was noticing, her eyes were the same indeterminate bluish gray while her daughter’s were more silvery. A green silk scarf, loosely looped around her neck, brightened her dark blue sweater and slacks, and sapphire earrings caught the light as she greeted Kate and Rob with warm hugs, before turning to Dwight and me with outstretched hands.

  Charm and beauty seemed to be this family’s birthright and Anne Lattimore Harald had apparently inherited both her share and Sigrid’s, too.

  She’s a prizewinning photojournalist, semiretired now, and Kate reminded her that I’d gone to the opening reception when she exhibited some of her photographs at the art museum in Raleigh a few years back. “But of course you won’t remember me,” I said. “You must meet so many people.”

  “I’ll remember you after this, though,” she said. “Especially since Sigrid’s told me so much about you both.”

  Although Sigrid murmured politely that it was good to see us again, Anne’s bubbling warmth was in sharp contrast to her daughter’s cool reserve as she drew us over to the couch. “I’m so sorry you wound up cutting your honeymoon short. Maybe if I’d been there to take that odious bronze thing off your hands the first day, things would have turned out differently.”

  Dwight shrugged. “Not necessarily.”

  Once we were seated, I was emboldened to ask Mrs. Lattimore, “If it’s not too personal, how did you come by such a piece?”

  With a graceful air of frankness, the older woman said, “At my age, I have very few secrets left, but I probably ought not to confess with so many law people in the room.”

  Sigrid smiled. “I’m sure the statute of limitations has run out by now, Grandmother.”

  “Thank you, dear. Very well, Deborah. I stole it. Took it from my history professor’s private office when no one else was around and stuck it in my bookbag. But where are my manners? What can Anne give you to drink?” She waved her hand toward a well-stocked wet bar in the corner of the room and held out her empty cocktail glass to Rob. “Would you, dear? Another martini? Light on the vermouth, please.”

  As Anne and Rob moved over to the bar to mix our drinks, I said, “But why on earth would you steal such a thing?”

  Amusement lit her thin patrician face. “So you saw it, did you?”

  I had. And although I am not easily shocked, I have to admit that it was quite a surprise to open the package she had asked me to take to New York for Anne. Cylindrical in shape and roughly the size of a tall can of beer, the small bronze sculpture was obscenely offensive, hardly the sort of thing I’d ever suspect Mrs. Lattimore of owning.

  “My parents had sent me north to a little New England school with good academic qualifications and a reputation for respectability. Carolina did not accept female undergraduates back then and my father had heard disturbing rumors about lesbians at Woman’s College, although of course he couldn’t tell me that. Too, there was a young man here that he felt was an unsuitable match, so I was packed off north to a school where the morals were very much the same, just better hidden. I’m afraid I wasn’t quite as innocent and unknowing as my father hoped, although I was just as priggish in my own way. Ah, thank you, Rob,” she said and took a sip of the fresh martini he had brought her.

  “I thought my professor was a hypocrite because he flirted with my favorite teacher even though I knew that he preferred men. She clearly didn’t realize it and I hated him for leading her on. It never occurred to me that the poor man had no real alternatives. Back in the forties, it was stay in the closet or lose your job. The times forced him into hypocrisy. I didn’t think the piece was very valuable, but even if it was, I knew it was so vulgar that he could never describe it to the police once he missed it. I was going to be the avenging hand of God and punish him for hurting Miss Barclay.”

  Remembering her youthful indignation, she shared an indulgent smile with us. “As a judge, Deborah, I’m sure you’re well aware how foolishly self-righteous the young can be.”

  I nodded in wry agreement as I smeared some soft brie on a cracker, then slid the cheese tray down the long low table toward Sigrid and Dwight to make room for the drinks Anne handed us. “So you kept it and brought it back home with you without realizing that it was by a famous sculptor?”

  “Ah, but he wasn’t famous then,” Mrs. Lattimore said. She took another sip of her martini and let her head rest against the back of the chair. “I had planned to leave it in some conspicuous spot on campus at the s
tart of our Christmas break, but the war was getting worse and I came back from class one day to find my mother waiting for me. She and Father wanted me to transfer to Woman’s College immediately. WC might have been a den of iniquity, but its academic standards were just as high as Stillwater’s and it was much closer to home in case the Germans landed on our shores or started bombing us. It was all I could do to roll that thing up in one of my nightgowns and lock it in my dressing case before Mother caught sight of it. She found the case in the attic a few years later and brought it over to me to see if I still had the key.”

  She cradled the cocktail glass in her thin hands and smiled at us. “As I told Anne, I took it straight up to the attic storeroom here and promptly forgot all about it. It would have been something for her and her sisters to puzzle over someday had I not read that article in the Smithsonian’s journal and realized how valuable it probably was now. I’m just sorry it was used to kill someone.”

  Her mention of the murder prompted Dwight to ask Sigrid where that case stood now.

  “You heard the confession,” she told him. “In return for an immediate guilty plea, the DA’s decided to save the state the cost of a jury trial and just go with three counts of manslaughter.”

  “I guess two of them weren’t premeditated,” he agreed.

  “What about attempted murder?” I asked, indignant that the killer hadn’t been charged with nearly suffocating me.

  “That really was unpremeditated,” Sigrid reminded me dryly, and the conversation turned to other topics.

  Although I no longer felt intimidated by Mrs. Lattimore’s reputation for bluntness, I was glad that she seemed to have forgotten to scold me for letting Sigrid know about her cancer.

  Our drinks were nearly finished when Anne turned to Mrs. Lattimore and said, “Mother, don’t you think—?”

  “Yes, of course,” the older woman replied. “We won’t wait any longer. Tell Martha that we’re ready to begin.”

  She pushed aside the lap robe and reached for her cane and Rob immediately offered his arm to help her rise.

  As the rest of us stood, the doorbell rang.

  Mrs. Lattimore looked over to Sigrid. “Would you get that, dear?”

  We waited awkwardly while Sigrid went out into the vestibule. We heard the door open and a male voice.

  A moment later, the man entered the living room and went straight to our hostess. Of medium height and average build, his hair and neatly trimmed short beard were steel gray, and there were deep lines around his eyes. He wore rimless square glasses, a black turtleneck sweater, and a gold chain. His black wool suit had good lines but something about the way it hung made me think he might have lost weight since he first bought it. He took Mrs. Lattimore’s hand in both of his own and in that light British accent said, “So sorry to hold everyone up, Aunt Jane. My truck didn’t want to start.”

  It was the buzzard man.

  CHAPTER

  4

  In many parts of the world, vultures have become very brave and comfortable in the presence of humans.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Do you remember Anne?” Mrs. Lattimore asked him.

  The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t. I was what? Five? Six?” He smiled at Anne. “Sorry I missed you when you were here a couple of weeks ago, but I’m glad to see you now.”

  There was a puzzled look on Anne’s face as she peered into his eyes. “Have we met before? I mean since that time in Washington when we were children? Your face seems familiar.”

  “Family resemblance perhaps?”

  Anne frowned and shook her head, staring at him more intently. “Did you always have the beard?”

  “It comes and goes, depending on the weather. Without it, I pretty much look like everyone else, although there is a man in London that I run into once or twice a year and he’s convinced we were on the same rugby team in Colchester. I’ve never been to Colchester in my life and I’ve never played rugby.”

  “Me either,” Anne said with a laugh. “Shall I still tell Martha to begin, Mother?”

  “Please,” said Mrs. Lattimore. “Unless you’d like a drink first, Martin?”

  He waved away the offer and looked expectantly at the rest of us.

  “Martin is my late sister’s son,” Mrs. Lattimore told us as she completed the introductions. “Martin Crawford.”

  “We met this afternoon,” I said.

  His smile broadened. “So we did. I hope your nephew wasn’t offended by my abruptness. It’s been a difficult week for me. Did my aunt say you are a judge?”

  He was all genial politeness now as Anne led the way into the dining room—more of the family charm? The long formal table could accommodate twelve, so there was plenty of room for the eight of us. Mrs. Lattimore took the chair at the head of the table with her nephew on her right and Dwight on her left. Kate was next to Martin and Sigrid next to Dwight, then Anne and I across from each other and Rob at the end.

  Salads were already at our places, and as the silver boat of creamy dressing went around the table, conversation was general at first, despite the curiosity I was sure the others must share about this unfamiliar nephew.

  I hadn’t known that Mrs. Lattimore had a sister and I gathered that Kate hadn’t known either. As a quasi-relative, though, Kate was free to ask all the questions I couldn’t.

  “We were never particularly close as children,” Mrs. Lattimore explained. “As much my fault as hers, probably. And it didn’t help that she was engaged to my husband first.”

  Again that graceful shrug, followed by the same wry smile we’d seen when she announced earlier that she had no secrets left. By the time the entrée was served, we had learned that after Mr. Lattimore broke off his engagement to Ferrabee Gilbert and proposed to her sister Jane, Ferrabee had gone to live with a college roommate in Washington. A month before the Lattimores married, she eloped with a young attaché assigned to the British embassy there. Soon afterwards, he was posted to North Africa, and she never came back to America.

  “Father never forgave her and Ferrabee never forgave me.”

  “Ferrabee?” I asked Martin Crawford. “Does that mean the old Ferrabee place belongs to you?”

  “Not to me,” he replied. “To my aunt. She’s letting me camp out there.”

  “My mother was a Ferrabee,” said Mrs. Lattimore, “and I inherited it.”

  Turning back to Martin Crawford, she said, “I’ll be forever sorry that your mother and I never got a chance to mend fences.”

  “And I’m sorry I waited so long to come looking for her people,” he said, lifting a forkful of warm poached salmon. “But in all honesty, I barely remember her myself. I had a good stepmother, though. She’s still living in London. In fact, I hope to be there for her eightieth birthday next month.”

  “You’ll be finished with your research on turkey buzzards by then?” I asked.

  “With a little luck,” he answered cheerfully.

  “Research?” asked Sigrid.

  “I’m not the photographer your mother is,” he said, raising his glass to Anne diagonally across from him, “but I’ve managed to cobble together a living as an ornithologist. I lead tours to exotic-sounding places for serious birders who want to add to their life lists, and I do a little teaching. I’ve also had a bit of luck getting a couple of books published. We lived all over when I was a boy, and my stepmother always bought me a guide to that country’s birds. What would you like to know about Neophron percnopterus, the Egyptian vulture also famously called Pharaoh’s Chicken?”

  Diverted, Kate asked, “Chicken? How does a vulture get mistaken for a chicken?”

  “It’s supposed to be a humorous comment on how often the vulture is depicted in ancient hieroglyphics,” he told her. “An archaeological joke. Archaeological humor can be as dry as the Sahara, I’m afraid.”

  He smoothed his short beard and turned back to Sigrid. “But to answer your question, raptors are my specialty and I’m writi
ng an illustrated piece for a North African nature magazine. My agent interested them in a comparison of African vultures with the vultures here in your American South.”

  Mrs. Lattimore touched his hand. “Whatever your reason for coming, I’m glad you didn’t leave it until too late. I do wish you would stay here with us, though. We have plenty of bedrooms and that house out there is nothing but a shack. No electricity. No plumbing.”

  “I’ve stayed in much worse,” he assured her. “Besides, I rather doubt your neighbors would like it if I fed dead animals to vultures in your back garden. Especially if they began roosting on the surrounding rooftops.”

  Kate grimaced. “Aren’t they the ugliest, most disgusting birds around?”

  “Not a bit of it,” he said and launched into an enthusiastic defense of what he called “nature’s dustmen,” reeling off facts and figures to bolster their importance in the circle of life. “In fact, their very name—Cathartes—means ‘purifier.’ The acid in their stomachs can kill cholera germs.”

  “You’ve certainly made a believer out of my nephew,” I said and amused the others by telling how Reese had stopped to pick up a dead squirrel to drop off for Crawford’s buzzards.

  “Not mine, actually.” He held out his glass for Dwight to top off his wine from the bottle between them. “It’s against the law for private individuals to keep vultures in captivity. I merely feed them so that I can get close enough for some good pictures. They can be quite friendly once they trust you. And of course, it doesn’t hurt to provide them with a steady diet of fresh kill.”

  He turned to me with a rueful smile. “That’s why I asked your nephew not to feed them there himself. I quite selfishly want to encourage them to think of me as their one dependable food source in this area.”