The Buzzard Table

by Margaret Maron

  Sigrid Harald—Wednesday afternoon

  “—and the porcelain clock came from Gilead, too. English. Probably 1840. More of Matilda Louise’s frivolous tastes. She almost bankrupted the family, building and furnishing Gilead. I’m told that her husband could deny her nothing.”

  Sigrid glanced at the dainty little clock that graced the mantel in her grandmother’s bedroom, then entered its description on her laptop: approx. 10" tall, pale green and white porcelain, sprigged with pink and yellow flowers, English ca. 1840. “Does it still work?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mrs. Lattimore said. “It did the last time I wound it, but that must have been thirty years ago. I much prefer my electric alarm clock.” She lay back against the pillows that let her sit upright in the old four-poster bed and looked at the lighted dial on the bedside stand. “Is that everything?”

  “What about the rug?” The oriental pattern looked bright and unfaded.

  “No value,” her grandmother said. “I bought it on sale for less than four hundred dollars in the nineteen-nineties.”

  Sigrid dutifully listed it and gestured to three small leather and wood cases ranged on some shelves beneath the window. “Anything in those jewelry boxes?”

  “A few pearls and garnets,” Mrs. Lattimore said. “Mostly it’s just costume things. Before we start on the jewelry, though, perhaps you can go to the bank and bring me whatever’s in my box? There’s a Tiffany brooch that Mother always meant for Ferrabee to have, along with an onyx signet ring I’d like to give to Martin as well. It belonged to my father. And I suppose I ought to go ahead and give the diamond pieces to Elizabeth and Mary. Heaven knows they’ve hinted for them enough times these last few years. Unless…do you think Anne—?”

  “Earrings, perhaps,” Sigrid said. “I’ve never seen her wear anything else except her wedding ring.”

  “You either?”

  Sigrid shrugged and Mrs. Lattimore shook her head ruefully. Small gold studs gleamed in the younger woman’s ears. Hard to imagine diamonds and sapphires dangling there. At least the child now wore colors. Instead of the shapeless beige and black clothes that once filled her closet, she had finally begun to dress in the rich jewel tones Mrs. Lattimore had urged on her from girlhood. Today’s cardigan was a vibrant turquoise over black slacks and a silk top patterned in deep blues and greens. With her dark hair cut short, lipstick, and a smudge of mascara, this odd duckling had morphed into—if not a swan, certainly into a woman who could hold her own among the more conventionally beautiful women of the family.

  Remembering a pair of relatively simple emerald earrings in her bank box, Mrs. Lattimore smiled at this granddaughter she had come to value more than ever in the last month. With Sigrid she didn’t have to sugarcoat her condition or keep up a pretense of being pain-free. Sigrid didn’t fuss or moan or avoid the subject of impending death.

  “Tired?” Sigrid asked now, closing her laptop.

  “A little, but on the whole I’m rather enjoying this. It’s giving me a feeling of lightness. Only two more rooms to go. All my life I’ve had the weight of these possessions on my shoulders, keeping them safe for the next generation, worrying about breakages or scratches. You must have hated visiting here when you were a child. It probably felt like visiting a museum.”

  “At times,” Sigrid agreed. “But the rules were clear, and when the other cousins were here, you didn’t seem to mind what we did outside or up in the attic playroom.”

  “And when there were no cousins? When your mother dumped you on me for your school holidays and went wandering off to the four corners of the earth?”

  “She was working, Grandmother. She had to take those assignments.”

  “But?”

  “But I didn’t think you liked me very much because I was so homely.”

  “You were never homely, honey. I just thought you weren’t trying.”

  Sigrid smiled. “I wasn’t. I didn’t see the point.”

  There was a moment of silence as Jane Lattimore closed her eyes and waited for a wave of pain to subside. According to the clock, Chloe Adams was due to arrive with her next pills in eleven minutes and she was determined to last till then.

  With her eyes still closed, she said, “Was he good to you?”

  “Nauman?”

  “Yes.” She opened her eyes and said, “I think he was good for you, but to you?”

  Sigrid was silent. Oscar Nauman had exploded into her life, shaken up her habits, and made love to her as no one ever had. Then he’d died in a car crash and left her his entire estate—a house in Connecticut and a body of work that had made him one of the leading artists of the twentieth century while he was still young enough to enjoy it. He had also left her more desolate than she could ever have imagined and his loss was a continuing ache. Despite all the changes that short year had brought, she had not overcome the reserve that made it difficult for her to speak of her most private feelings.

  “Yes,” she said at last.

  Mrs. Lattimore did not press her for more. She merely said, “Good.”

  “What about Grandfather?” Sigrid crossed to the chest on the other side of the bed and lifted the small silver-framed photograph of a young man standing with one arm around the neck of the bronze deer that guarded the side lawn downstairs. “You’ve never talked about him. At least not to me. And you never remarried.”

  “When people ask, I usually say that once you’ve dwelled in Eden, you don’t care for suburbia.” She gave a wry smile and reached for the picture in Sigrid’s hand. “Does that sound too fanciful?”

  “Did Eden come before he died or after?”

  Mrs. Lattimore’s cool eyes warmed with amusement. “I always knew you were my most intelligent grandchild. You’re the first to ask me that.” She looked down at the photograph. “I adored him. I went from my father’s house directly to this house when I was nineteen years old. I never lived alone, I never worked for wages, and I never had my own money. I only had to ask to be given anything I wanted.”

  She paused.

  “But you always had to ask?” Sigrid said, filling in the pause.

  Her grandmother nodded. “Benjamin was witty, charming, attentive, and, so far as I know, utterly faithful, but he went to his grave believing that if you put your wife up on a pedestal, she should never step down and try to be your equal. As much as I loved him, I had no desire to yoke myself to another man of his generation and upbringing.”

  She handed the picture back to Sigrid. “Would you have married your artist had he lived?”

  “Probably not,” Sigrid said, setting the picture so that her grandmother could see it with a turn of her head. “He was larger than life in so many ways. He took up so much space. And I had lived alone.”

  They looked up as Chloe Adams entered the bedroom with a lunch tray and the pills that dulled the worst of the pain.

  She was followed by Anne Harald, whose cheeks were red from the chilly February wind. She still wore her fleece-lined jacket and boots and her lips were cold when she bent to kiss her mother. “How are you feeling?” she asked, automatically trying to fluff the pillows and straighten the covers.

  “I’m fine,” Mrs. Lattimore said, patiently bearing her daughter’s attempts to make her more comfortable. “I’ve spent the morning boring Sigrid to death. Why don’t you take her out to lunch and show her the wonders of Cotton Grove?” She waved a thin hand toward the nightstand. “The key to my safety deposit box is in the top drawer if you’re passing the bank. I’ll call and tell them to expect you.”

  “Bank?” Anne asked.

  “Sigrid knows.” She swallowed the pills, then lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes. “Y’all go on now. Chloe will take care of me.”

  Helplessly, Anne allowed herself to be shepherded from the room. As the door closed, they heard the nurse say, “You may not be hungry, Miss Jane, but you know you have to take a little bit of food with those pills.”

  Anne paused at the top of t
he stairs and looked down at the wide entrance hall, lined with antique chests and gilt-framed portraits.

  “Thanks for doing the inventory, honey.” Tears glistened in her eyes and turned them the color of unpolished pewter. “I don’t think I could bear it. She’s being so brave about leaving all this.”

  “Not a problem,” Sigrid said. “I’m glad I could do it for her and I like hearing the family stories attached to the pieces.”

  Privately, she thought her grandmother was very wise in trying to make her coming death easier on her three daughters. “They say you never know someone until you share an inheritance with them,” she had told Sigrid. “Some of these things are quite valuable and I don’t want my girls to wind up squabbling over them.”

  She had held up her hand when Sigrid started to protest that Anne would never squabble. “I’m not talking about your mother,” she had said dryly.

  Once everything in the house was described and listed on Sigrid’s laptop, her plan was to give a copy to two appraisers and hire them to price each item. Sigrid was surprised to hear that one of the appraisers was Deborah Knott’s brother, the owner of an auction house over in Dobbs, the county seat. The other was a Grayson Gallery in Raleigh. The lower appraisal would be the base value and the total figure would be split among the three daughters. At that point, Anne and her sisters could take what they wanted, but the monetary value of their choices would be deducted from their third. If two of them wanted the same object, then they would have to bid on it, and again, the winning bid would be deducted from their third. Whatever remained in the house would be sold, as would the house itself, and the proceeds split three ways.

  “Your Aunt Elizabeth wanted to know what would happen if Mary made her bid ten thousand for a sideboard appraised at five,” Mrs. Lattimore had said when she explained her plans to Sigrid. “She was not happy to hear that this meant she had ten thousand less to bid with unless she wanted to pay her sisters twenty-five hundred each.”

  Sigrid had laughed and Mrs. Lattimore looked pleased. “I do hope you’ll come back for the fun, honey.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Sigrid assured her.

  Anne had received a phone call from Dwight Bryant’s mother before breakfast and had left the house before Sigrid came down.

  “Where have you been all morning and what did Mrs. Bryant want?” Sigrid asked now as she buckled her seat belt and Anne turned the ignition key of Mrs. Lattimore’s Lincoln.

  “You know she’s the principal of West Colleton High School?”

  Sigrid nodded.

  “She wanted me to look at some photographs one of her students had taken and I made the mistake of saying they showed talent.” Anne fastened her own seat belt and turned the heater fan on high. “Next thing I knew, I was sitting in Deborah Knott’s courtroom and had volunteered to help a youth minister structure the kid’s community service.”

  “You did what?”

  “That woman is a force of nature,” Anne said with a rueful shake of her head. “She could probably sell scuba lessons to Eskimos.”

  Sigrid was shaking her own head as her mother described Jeremy Harper and how he had been charged with trespassing.

  “An airfield for rendition flights?”

  “Yeah, that surprised me, too,” her mother said as she drove through the tall iron gate and turned onto the street. “But I guess they have to be somewhere. We’re not very far from Fort Bragg, you know. And Blackwater did have its beginning up in the northeast part of the state.”

  “I thought that was disbanded.”

  “Who knows?” Anne said cynically. “I long ago quit trusting what the CIA tells us.”

  “You’re not going to get involved with that, are you?”

  “Don’t worry, honey. My days of reporting on dangerous situations are over. I’m way too old for it. Somalia was my swan song. It cured me of thinking I was invulnerable.” She shivered, remembering how close she’d been to coming home in a body bag. “I’ve promised Mac that I’ll do only human interest stories and cute babies from here on out.”

  It had been awkward when Sigrid first learned that her former boss and her mother were seeing each other. His retirement had made the new relationship easier to take; and, mirabile dictu, after years of restlessly changing apartments more often than most women rearranged their furniture, Anne had settled into Mac’s place and showed no signs of ever moving again.

  “Barbecue or shrimp and grits?” Anne asked, slowing the car to a crawl along Cotton Grove’s main street.

  Sigrid was amused by how quickly her mother went native each time she returned to her hometown. In Manhattan, she was an adventurous gourmet who delighted in sampling the ethnic cuisines of the city’s many cultures. Down here, it was chili dogs with coleslaw, fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits drenched in redeye gravy.

  “Salad,” Sigrid said firmly.

  “Good idea,” Anne said. “I haven’t had any of The Rosebud’s chicken salad since I got back. They use toasted pecans and lots of Duke’s mayonnaise.”

  Sighing, Sigrid followed her mother into the tearoom next to a hardware store.

  Over lunch, Anne told her about the community service options she and Richard Williams had discussed for the boy. “Of course, Deborah Knott was the judge who sentenced him, and she has to approve. And we have to get Jeremy on board, too. He’s so hung up on the airstrip and who the planes are ferrying in and out of the country that it may be hard to get him to do something more mundane. He thinks that proving who’s changing fuselage numbers would be a national service, not just community.”

  “Are his pictures any good?” Sigrid asked.

  “Not bad for high school,” Anne said, spearing a toasted pecan half with her fork. “He has a good eye for details, but he’s all over the map when it comes to knowing the focus of the story he’s trying to tell with his camera.”

  “So what have you and this youth minister come up with?”

  “Well, Jeremy says he wants to be a photojournalist, so I thought that I could talk to him about that, maybe rope Martin in to show him how you can earn a living taking noncontroversial pictures.”

  “He’s what? Seventeen? Eighteen? And his brother was killed in Afghanistan?”

  Anne nodded.

  “You think he’s going to be distracted by birds as long as there are wars and people shooting at each other?”

  “Probably not,” Anne agreed. “That’s why Richard suggested that we take him to a disabled vets’ center and have him document the stories of local veterans. He thinks it might help with Jeremy’s grief over losing his brother. But Martin could still give him some tips. Did you look at the book he gave Mother? Unless he manipulated the images, he must have been on a mountaintop with a really powerful telephoto lens to get some of those shots, looking down on those birds in flight.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Want to ride out there with me?”

  “Out where?”

  “To the old farmhouse where Martin’s staying. I haven’t been there in years, but I think I can still find it. It’s not far from Gilead and you’ve never seen that place either, have you?”

  “As long as we’re back before the bank closes,” Sigrid said.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Vultures prefer to eat fairly fresh meat.

  —The Turkey Vulture Society

  Major Dwight Bryant—

  Wednesday afternoon (continued)

  Yes, we have found blood,” Dwight admitted to an angry Dave Jowett, “but until we have a sample of your wife’s DNA to test it against, we can’t know for sure that it’s her blood.”

  “Who else’s would it be?” the man asked as his anger gave way to apprehension and the beginning of grief. “My God, she is dead, isn’t she?”

  “It was a lot of blood,” the big deputy said quietly. “Be a real coincidence if it isn’t hers what with her missing and all, but coincidences do happen.”

  He nodded to Mayleen Richards, who leaf
ed through the file folder on the table and pulled out a form.

  Dwight handed it to Jowett. “This gives us permission to search your house.”

  “Search my house? Why? The blood was in that other house, not ours.”

  “But there might be clues that will help us identify who she was meeting.”

  When Jowett hesitated, Dwight leaned toward him and said, “Right now, we don’t have enough to get a formal search warrant, but if you make us wait until we do, you’re giving whoever’s responsible more time to cover their tracks.”

  Dave Jowett reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pen. “Where do I sign?”

  “Is there a computer at your house?”

  “Yes, but Becca never uses it. She gets all her mail on her iPhone and uses her iPad for everything else.” He finished filling in the blanks, then signed and dated the form.

  “One more thing, sir,” Richards said.

  She was turning a faint pink and Dwight realized that she was about to say something embarrassing despite her experience here on the force.

  Seeing the gleam of amusement in her boss’s eyes, Mayleen lifted her chin with determination. “When did you and your wife last have sex?”

  Outraged, Jowett glared at her.

  “It’s for purposes of elimination,” she said, stubbornly holding her ground and looking him squarely in the face.

  “Along with the blood, we found semen stains on the couch,” Dwight told him.

  Now it was Dave Jowett who looked embarrassed. “Not since New Year’s Eve.” Completely deflated now, he dropped his eyes and added, “I guess she’d drunk enough champagne to give me pity sex.”

  While Dwight turned to other matters that required his attention, Richards gathered up a team that included Percy Denning and Detective Raeford McLamb, and they headed over to the Jowett home, where Dave Jowett let them in. He gave them his cell phone number and said, “I’m going over to her mother’s. Lock up when you’re finished.”