by Janis Owens
He was actually looking forward to going out to Hendrix. He had taken the phone book to bed with him the night before and scanned the local listings. He found Camp Six long dissolved, of course, and only a handful of familiar names listed: Johnsons and Bryants, Stallings and Hamiltons and Hitts, but no Kites. When he finally climbed out of the Jacuzzi, refreshed and relaxed and starving to death, he knew, sight unseen, that the local sausage would be a thing of beauty, homemade and country, probably the kindly remains of someone’s fat-bellied hog. He was so eager to get at it that he didn’t bother to dress. He wrapped a big hotel towel around his waist and headed down the hallway, which smelled deliciously of fresh coffee and fried pork. He was almost to the corner when he clearly heard Charley say, “Naw, it was on Granny’s land, not the—”
“No!” Hollis cried without thinking, but he was too late.
He turned the corner on a chummy, domestic sight. Charley was in his old farmer clothes, sitting at the table calmly sipping coffee, the Hoyt woman sitting across from him with her own coffee, reading the pages Hollis had printed out in Memphis, her face a study in disbelief. “And it was posted online? With my name on it?”
“No!” Hollis insisted, clutching his towel at the waist and snatching the papers from her hands, his being undressed causing Charley to clamber to his feet and shout, “Hollis? You lost yo mind? Git some clothes on, son!”
Hollis answered in kind, then pointed a warning finger at both of them. “Hush your mouth—both of you. Not another word till I get dressed. You hear me?”
He turned on his heel and went back to the bathroom to throw on some clothes and get back and straighten it out before Charley ruined everything, but found he’d left his clothes in the bedroom. He had to open the door and shout for Charley to bring him his damn pants. He stood on the old plank floor, dancing with anger, till Charley finally appeared, unruffled and unhurried, and told him the coast was clear: Miz Hoyt had gone to work.
“Well, that’s great,” Hollis breathed, stalking naked down the hallway and ripping open his suitcase, telling Charley over his shoulder, “That was a nice move, spilling your guts, first chance you got. What the hell were you thanking?”
Charley was old, but unbent, and paid no mind to his brother’s nagging. He just returned to his seat and poured another cup of coffee with infuriating mildness. “I never meant to creep back here like a thief in the night. I ain’t got nothing to hide.”
“Good for you,” Hollis snapped, yanking on his pants with fast, angry hands and dressing as quickly as he could.
He didn’t bother letting Charley in on his plans, but laced his shoes and hurried down the drive to his car, knowing that his window of opportunity was rapidly shrinking, and hoping to catch Sam Lense before he’d received any fair warning. He punched his dash phone to voice activation so he could drive and talk at the same time and chatted up a dozen different receptionists as he went east, till he pinpointed the office of Samuel B. Lense.
Apparently Mr. Lense was no longer connected with the archives, but was an officer in Economic Development, high enough on the masthead to have a corner office and a shared secretary who wasn’t at her desk. A note taped to her computer screen said she’d be back at two. Hollis was sidetracked, but undeterred, and after a little snooping found Mr. Lense in a glassed-in room across the hall, sitting at a long conference table that was piled high with fee schedules, open manuals, and reams of computer paper. He was dressed in the uniform of the Florida bureaucrat: pressed chinos and a white button-down with sleeves rolled to his elbows. His stockiness made him look more reformer than accountant, and he had a definite hint of urban assertiveness when he saw Hollis at the door. He came briskly to his feet and extended a strong hand, shaking it solidly and asking, “Are you from District Four? You’re early. Everyone’s at lunch. I’m about to eat at my desk. Can I send for something for you?”
He was obviously expecting someone, and Hollis didn’t forfeit the advantage. He was very understanding about the mix-up and agreeable to waiting in Lense’s office, though he passed on the food. The office was as jam-packed as the conference room, with an oversize monitor full of numerical gibberish and a printer in a corner, spewing thin sheaves of pale, sickly green paper. Mr. Lense cleared off a space and, between phone calls and quick bites of an enormous club sandwich, conveyed a good bit of personal information, as if they were fellow passengers on a long layover in Atlanta, killing time in the bar. With no prodding at all, Hollis learned that Lense was Miami-born and divorced and had a kid and a brother with cancer, a widower father, and an assumed mortgage Lense was hoping to convert to a low-interest loan.
He offered the insider edition of his life as generously as he did his bag of Kettle chips, and it wasn’t difficult for Hollis to maneuver the conversation in a generic direction, bringing up football, and commenting off-hand, “So, you were a Gator? What did you major in? History?”
Lense was finished with his sandwich and gathered up the trash. “Anthropology,” he said, hitting the can with his wadded-up napkin in a perfect three-pointer, then turning back to Hollis and, for no reason he could surmise, suddenly seeming to smell a rat. “How the hell did you know?” Lense asked with what must have been a characteristic bluntness. “That I went to UF?”
Hollis smiled disarmingly. “I read a paper you wrote, on the Creek Indians. A very interesting paper,” he added in a sincere compliment, then dropped his bomb without preamble: “Henry Kite was a neighbor of mine.”
Mr. Lense’s reaction was telling in its absence of guilt. He didn’t so much as flinch. “Henry who?”
“Kite. The man who was lynched in ’38, in Hendrix. You mentioned him, in yo paper.”
“Oh.” Lense sat back casually and crossed his arms protectively across his chest. “What about it?”
Hollis understood that he’d shown a few cards by speaking so honestly, but Mr. Lense seemed capable of handling a little unvarnished honesty, and Hollis laid it out plainly: “Well, you mention in yo paper how they cut off Kite’s fangers. Kept ’em in a gin bottle, out in Hendrix.”
Mr. Lense listened closely, but his earlier gregariousness was gone, his face speculative as he repeated, “What about it?”
“Well, whoever told you it that way told it wrong. Them fangers weren’t Kite’s. They belonged to a neighbor of his, name of Buddy Frazier. Men from the mill come on him working his fields and cut off two of ’em trying to make him talk. Kept ’em, too—showed ’em off around town later thet night. I know that for a fact.”
A local man might have argued the point, but Sam Lense was obviously not local, and obviously not connected by bone marrow or raw nerve to anything in Hendrix. He denied nothing, but unexpectedly confirmed the story. “Yeah, I heard. They terrorized the town after—set the turpentine stills on fire and killed five people, including a pregnant woman.”
“Kite’s sister,” Hollis offered equably. “Eight months gone, and namore guilty of murder than the man in the moon. But I ain’t here for the Kites. Buddy Frazier was my father.” Hollis unconsciously lifted his chin. “Them fangers are mine—and I want ’em back.”
Sam Lense seemed taken aback for the first time. “Want ’em for what?”
Hollis looked at him in wonder. “To bury with the rest of his mortal remains. Whatchu thank?”
Lense just blinked at the answer, then shook his head and told him plainly, “Well, I don’t have ’em, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Didn’t thank you did,” Hollis rejoined quickly, touchy at the hint of big-city smart-assness when speaking of so sacred a subject. “But somebody does. I’d like to talk to your sources.”
“In Hendrix? What makes you think they’re even alive? I mean, I wrote that thing in ’96. They were old, even then.”
It was Hollis’s turn to be annoyed, as he’d assumed it was recent work, a stupid assumption, now that he thought of it. In a rare show of temper, he rapped his knuckles on the desktop.
“Damn,”
he whispered, staring out the smudged window at a depressingly urban stretch of pebbled roof and treeless parking lot. He considered it a moment, till the single obvious lead came to him. “I can talk to Jolie Hoyt. She still lives there. She might know.”
At the mention of the name, Lense’s face went suddenly, carefully blank. “Maybe, but Hoyt’s a common name out there. Half the county is a Hoyt,” he explained, though the evasion was obvious. He proved it in his next breath, when he asked with great, guarded nonchalance, “Were they really involved in the Kite murder?”
“Hell yes, they were involved. Everybody in Hendrix was—Cleary, too. Doan ever let ’em tell you different.”
Mr. Lense didn’t argue the point, but retrieved a paper clip from his desktop that he unbent absently. “Which ones?”
“Don’t know no names. I’se a kid when Mama put us on the train. My brother Chollie—he remembers more. Done things to Kite I wouldn’t have done to a dog. You know thet?”
Sam Lense kept his eyes on his paper clip, thoughtful, a little grim, and shrugged to indicate that, yes, he had heard rumors to that effect. “Yeah, but Hendrix was always a Red Stick town, and Florida aborigines often tortured their enemies—dismembered them ceremonially. I think Kite might have fallen into some sort of deep-seated, archetypal pattern.”
“A whut?”
Lense refused to repeat it. “Never mind. Well, shit,” he said after a glance at his watch. He came to his feet in dismissal. “Well, as much as I’d love to sit and chat about ritual mutilation, I got a quarterly meeting and budget pending.”
Hollis had noticed that the empty offices had come back to life, a steady stream of clerks and secretaries and staffers drifting across the hall to the conference room. He saw it was time to be leaving and came to his feet and extended another hand to Mr. Lense, to thank him for his time.
Mr. Lense accepted with another firm shake and lowered his voice. “And I’d keep to the main roads in Hendrix, if I was you—wouldn’t go down there alone unless I had to.”
He said it without macho swagger, in a low-key note of caution, offered so seriously that Hollis paused in the door to ask, “It’s still that way?” The comfort of the old B&B had made him think it might be otherwise.
Sam Lense met Hollis’s eye a moment in answer, then took a step back into his office and yanked his shirt from his waistband with impatient hands, exposing an intricate tracery of well-healed scars, now faded to a pearl gray. Hollis was retired military and knew a rifle wound when he saw it.
“Hendrix?” he murmured in a small, wary voice, as if the town were a physical entity, capable of evil intent.
“A stray shot by a poacher on the river.” Mr. Lense dropped his shirt and went about tucking it in. “Or that was the official verdict. If I was you, I’d go to the archives and do my legwork there. The Hoyts”—he paused—“they’re a slippery bunch.”
“Including Jolie?”
Mr. Lense looked pained at the question, but was grudgingly positive. “She’s all right—safer than Hendrix, at least.” He tucked in his shirt as he walked Hollis to the elevator. “Lives in Cleary, I hear—somewhere downtown. She’s probably at work this time of day, shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Hollis was glad of the tip as he’d not got around to sniffing out his landlady’s day job. “She work at the bank?” he asked as he punched the down button, opening the scuffed metal doors.
“Try City Hall. The mayor’s office.”
Hollis raised his eyebrows. “She works for the mayor?”
For the first time, he got a ghost of a smile from the hardworking Mr. Lense, who leaned in and dropped his voice to confide, “She is the mayor.”
“Of Cleary?” Hollis cried, more shocked at this than he’d been at the sight of Sam’s chest. “A Hoyt?”
“From Hendrix.” Sam grinned, then added in an even slier aside, “You ever watch televangelists—you know, the God channel, on TV?”
“Never,” Hollis murmured.
“Watch it tonight, around eight. Might see a familiar face.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jolie Hoyt’s meteoric rise in local politics was neither as melodramatic nor torrid as either Hollis Frazier or Sam had imagined it to be from afar. She actually walked a well-trod path blazed by the clubwomen of previous generations, who’d proved their mettle in political deal-making on beautification and temperance boards across the South. They were perfumed, be-gloved, well connected, and ruthless, and the bane of any elected official who crossed them.
Jolie emulated them as closely as she did every other mother figure in her life and took the plum job of mayor after paying her dues in the ordinary way, with a long stint on the Historic and Beautification Board, and back-to-back terms as a rare female city commissioner. Her rise had been quick, but hard-won, as she had no deep roots in Cleary proper to recommend her, other than Hugh, who alienated as many voters as he won with his smart mouth and condescending ways. Her real base was her old pals in the Garden Club set, who were her great and steadfast supporters as she transformed the faded, deserted little downtown into a well-known stop on the local antiques circuit. The oasis of cobblestoned streets and graceful Drake elms had won a Florida Main Street Award, and a bit of national attention.
After four years in office, it was still her crowning achievement, though she’d grown into the job in time and learned to satisfy the conflicting agendas of her varied constituency, which was rural enough to still be rigidly divided by race and economics. White Cleary was still numerically the majority, though they were increasingly split along the blue-state, red-state divide. The latter was working class, churchy, and pro-business in any form, be it farming, nuclear waste, or bringing in prisons. They liked homeschooling, guns, and Fox News and were generally supportive of Jolie in that she was churchy, pro-jobs, and laughed at their jokes. But she was a slightly better fit with what served as blue-state in Cleary—a vocal, politically correct handful of young lawyers and doctors and artistes who weren’t locally grown, but had come to the area for the rural charm and had a great commitment to preserving a small-town aesthetic. They went practically insane at the cutting of the most rotten urban oak.
The locals called them yuppies, and they called the locals rednecks, and the white vote usually split between them, leaving the city government to be largely decided by the hitherto ignored sector of Southern politics that was black Cleary. This was a sizable base, the third generation of the slaves of a few local plantations, and the old turpentine camps, who had memories as long as the Hoyts, maybe longer. They were children of the civil rights era and had only voted for a Hoyt after Jolie had done the one thing that no white candidate had done before: she’d taken the fight to the churches.
That was her home turf, after all, and the month before her first election, she’d appeared at any church that would have her and spoken for three minutes at the end of the service. She hadn’t tried to avoid the obvious, but admitted that, yes, she was a Hoyt from Hendrix, “. . . and I know that out there in your cemetery, the saints of God who have gone before are rolling in their graves this minite. Which is the reason I’m here: to tell you that I ain’t a racist and I never was, and if your children went to school with me, they know that—you ask ’em, they’ll tell you. Neither was my brother, Carl. He was an idiot, but he wasn’t a racist. And if you’re worried I won’t give the black citizens of Cleary a fair shake, well, take a good look around the city offices next time you pay your electric bill, and tell me how many black folk you see working there now, in the cable company or water treatment, or on the commission. You ask yourself how less represented can you get than you are now. If you’re ready for a change, so am I.”
That was her basic message, straight and to the point, and with such a blunt appeal she had taken office and kept it two terms, running City Hall much as her father had run his church, with equal parts affection and exasperation, and a keen understanding of the imperfectability of man. There at first, she had t
aken pains to explain to everyone, in Hendrix and Cleary alike, that Hugh was her business, not her romantic, partner.
But as the years went by, she had mellowed in the way that all Southerners do and had pretty much embraced her reputation as a hustling country girl who’d worked her way out of poverty by dint of a good pair of legs and a nose for aligning herself to the right menfolk. That reputation, like everything else in her life, was true as far as it went (it just didn’t go very far). She was never tempted to wax too nostalgic over her lost childhood, as Carl did, and aside from the occasional trip to El Bethel to attend the odd funeral or visit one of the old Sisters, she no longer concerned herself with its mysteries, till the Frazier brothers laid the matter on her doorstep.
• • •
When she left the carriage house that morning, she went straight to her office at City Hall, which, thanks to her superior skills in snagging beautification grants, was housed in a forties-era bungalow a block off Main Street. Jolie found it hopping as usual on a second Monday, as the electric bills had gone out the Friday before and such was the compactness of Cleary’s citizenry (not to mention their cheapness) that the smallest infraction merited a phone call to City Hall, or in a few cases a visit to wave the offending bill in the city staff’s face and demand divine justice.
Jolie didn’t stop and chat as she usually did, but went straight to her office at the end of a long hall, which had once been a closed-in sun-porch and still faced a bit of original garden. She loved the view, even in the doldrums of winter, but had yet to figure out a way to properly heat the room, thanks to the bank of drafty double-paned windows. Her fabulous tiger-oak desk—a gift from Hugh on her first day in office—was cold as a block of ice, and without taking off her coat, she dropped her purse in her desk drawer and went down the hallway to the city manager’s office at the far end of the house.