Up Jumps the Devil

20

« ^ » None of either sex or profession need fear the want of employment, or an ample reward and encouragement in their different occupations and callings.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

“What’s going on here?” I asked inanely.

“Stancil’s helping us with our inquiries,” Dwight said in a deadpan parody of a cliché-ridden British mystery we’d watched together a few weeks ago.

Allen didn’t quite catch the reference, but he understood the game. “Dwight here don’t know whether to tell me he’s sorry about Uncle Jap or read me my rights. You’re still a lawyer, ain’t you, darlin’? Reckon I could hire you?”

“Using what for money?” I asked. “I thought you were broke.”

“Oh, I always keep a little jingle in my jeans,” he said with an easy smile.

“You may not need an attorney, but you can’t blame Dwight for wondering how come you ran off like that.”

“Hey, I didn’t ‘run off.’ Uncle Jap knew where I was. If I’d of thought for one minute he was going to get hisself killed—”

“So where were you?”

“Greensboro. Like I told Dwight, I had to go look at a car.”

Greensboro’s about ninety minutes to the west of us, give or take ten minutes, depending on road conditions and how heavy you’re willing to push the speed limit. It’s also only a little more than halfway to Charlotte and I didn’t understand why Allen was lying. Seems like he’d want to document as much distance as possible between himself and the murder scene.

He must have seen the disbelief on my face because he started shoring up.

“One of my old buddies asked me to take a look under the hood of a car he’s thinking to buy. I give you his number, Dwight. You don’t believe me, just call him.”

Dwight looked at the crumpled piece of paper that held a scrawled phone number. “What’s his name again?”

“Raiford Hollyfield. His wife’s Jan.”

“Anybody else see you there?”

“His sister stays with ’em. I forget her name. But I got there around ten o’clock Saturday morning and we went right over to see that car. A nice little Cutlass Supreme. They’ll tell you.” He turned back to me. “All I’ve heard is that somebody’s killed poor old Uncle Jap. Not when, not how. Come on, Deb’rah. Don’t I have the right to know?”

“You’ll get all the details soon as I confirm your story,” Dwight said sternly. He raised his voice and called, “Hey, Jack! You out there?”

A slightly pudgy, baby-faced officer came to the open doorway. “Yes, Major?”

“How ’bout you take Mr. Stancil here into the squad room? Get him a cup of coffee, maybe a sandwich?”

“And a newspaper?” Allen said slyly.

“Sure,” said Dwight. “Give him the latest Ledger, Jack.”

The Ledger is Dobb’s biweekly. It comes out on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today being Monday, it wouldn’t help Allen much.

“He’s probably already read about the murder,” I said, taking the seat Allen had vacated.

“I doubt it,” said Dwight. “Even if it made the Greensboro paper, they wouldn’t have as much on it as the News and Observer and you know what that was.”

A bare paragraph on an inside page of the Metro section: “Man Killed in Colleton County.”

“Not to say he couldn’t have talked to somebody down here an hour after Mr. Kezzie found the body. Phone lines were still working, so far as I’ve heard.”

He punched in the numbers on his own phone. The connection between Dobbs and Greensboro was extraordinarily clear for I could hear the rings from where I sat, then a woman’s staccato “Hello?”

“Mrs. Hollyfield?”

“Just a minute. Jan?” Jan Hollyfield’s voice was too soft for me to make out more than a murmur.

Dwight identified himself, then explained that he was trying to confirm Allen Stancil’s whereabouts this past weekend. Could Mrs. Hollyfield help him? Had she seen him? She had? When?

“No, ma’am, he’s not in any trouble. Not if you can tell me when you saw him… Yes, ma’am, he does know I’m calling you. That’s how I have your name and number, ma’am.”

Whoever Jan Hollyfield was, she was certainly cautious about divulging anything to a police officer she didn’t know.

“Yes, ma’am. I understand.” He slowly spelled his name and rank and gave her the Sheriff’s Department’s number, then hung up.

“She’s going to have her husband call me back.”

“Through the switchboard? Cagy lady.”

“Does make you wonder why, don’t it?” He pushed a button on his keypad and spoke into the receiver. “Faye? Could you call Detective Harry Smithwick over in Charlotte? Remind him that I talked to him last week about that chop shop they broke up a month or so ago. Ask him if he’s got anything on a Raiford or Jan Hollyfield, now living in Greensboro, okay?”

Dwight pushed the phone away and gave me an inquiring look. “You come downstairs because you heard we’d picked up Stancil?”

I shook my head. “Actually, the main reason was to ask if you’ve put names to all the tire treads past Mr. Jap’s that morning.”

He shuffled through the folders on his desk and came up with a set of black-and-white photographs. “This one’s your dad’s, this one’s Dick Sutterly’s, the bald one’s Billy Wall’s, and we don’t have a match to these diamond treads yet, why?”

“They’re Reese’s. Herman’s boy?” I paused and took a closer look at the tracks left by Billy Wall’s truck. “I thought he said he bought new tires a few weeks ago.”

Dwight wasn’t interested in Billy’s tires, he was more concerned about Reese.

“You can talk to him,” I said. “Just try not to do it around Herman or Nadine. He was supposed to be working that morning, but he took off to see if he could get a shot at a deer back along the creek. He says he went past the shop around ten forty-five and didn’t see any sign of anybody going or coming.”

“What time did he leave?”

“I don’t believe he said, but I got the impression that he probably wasn’t in there more than thirty or forty minutes.”

Dwight made a note of it. “Okay. And thanks. This’ll save us a little running around. Maybe narrow things down even more.”

“One other thing,” I said. “And it’s probably not important.”

“But?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know why Allen’s trying to make you think he spent the whole weekend in Greensboro, but Birdie McElveen talked to his ex-wife in Charlotte about an hour ago. He stayed at her place last night and left from there this morning after giving her two thousand in cash.”

“Yeah?” He pulled the phone back closer—it was starting to wear a rut in his desktop—and said, “Faye? If you do get hold of Smithwick, I think maybe I better talk to him myself.”

As I stood to go, Dwight said, “How did Birdie McElveen happen to be talking to Stancil’s ex-wife this morning?”

I gave him my blandest shrug.

“And why’d she call you with that information?”

“Well, you said there weren’t any warrants out on him. I might’ve wondered out loud to Birdie if he was evading his responsibilities,” I admitted. “She’s in Child Support Enforcement and you know how dedicated she is to her work.”

“Yeah? Now listen, Deb’rah—”

“Oh, my Lord, look at the time! I’m supposed to be back in the courtroom in twenty minutes and I haven’t had a bite of lunch. See you,” I said and got out of there before he could start lecturing me to mind my own business and stay out of his investigation.

No sign of Allen or Jack Jamison as I hurried through the halls. He’d probably conned the deputy into buying him a real lunch.

More than I was going to have. It looked like Nabs and a Diet Pepsi from the vending machines over in the old courthouse basement again.

By late afternoon, all the routine crimes and misdemeanors of the day had been disposed of and I was left with a civil matter: Stevens vs. Johnson. Desecration of a family graveyard.

Five minutes into the case, I knew I was watching the latest episode in a long-running family soap opera.

The combatants were two cousins. Geraldine Stevens and Annice Johnson. Mid-thirties, blond, so similar in appearance they could have been sisters. When the women married, their mutual grandfather had deeded each of them adjoining building lots. Proximity had only worsened their feud.

Geraldine’s two acres made a fairly neat rectangle, slightly deeper than it was wide, with sufficient road frontage for an ample semicircular drive.

Annice’s drive was barely wide enough to let a Geo through. Her two acres looked a little like the outline of the United States if you cut off California, Oregon and Washington and squared off Texas. “Florida” was an eight-foot-wide strip that touched the road. That eight feet was Annice’s only bit of road frontage because an old family graveyard occupied a tenth of an acre where Texas and the Gulf of Mexico should have touched the road bank.

No matter who holds a title to the land where it sits, a graveyard itself is an encumbrance protected by the law in perpetuity. It may not be desecrated, moved nor adversely disturbed without a court order and the consent of the nearest kin.

According to Annice, who brought along before-and-after photographs, the graveyard had fallen into shocking condition these last eight years. Their grandfather had tended it until poor health forced him to put down his rake and hoe and pruning shears. Nobody else ever picked them up.

Once there had been only a single magnolia tree in the center. After years of neglect, volunteer pines and cedars and wild cherries had sprung up out of the very graves themselves. Honeysuckle and poison oak had overgrown the stones so badly that the men in the family had to go with bush knives and chainsaws to clear a way for the gravediggers when it was time to lay the grandfather to rest last spring.

“She was scared to do anything while Grampy was alive,” said Geraldine, “but the minute he was buried, look what she did.”

Geraldine’s suit asked for no money damages, merely that her cousin be forced to remove the new driveway that now encroached upon the cemetery.

“First she wanted me to sell her a strip of my yard and when I wouldn’t, she asked Grampy to let her take part of the graveyard. But he said no because his Aunt Sally and Uncle George were buried right there at the edge. They didn’t have a bought stone, just some rocks for a marker. Marker rocks that she moved.”

I repressed a sigh. It seems that growth doesn’t affect lifestyles alone. It governs death styles, too.

Home burials have become increasingly rare and many of the little private graveyards have been abandoned as the descendants die off or move away or are simply too distantly descended to care any longer. If they even remember.

That overgrown square sitting out in the middle of a field can get real tiresome to a farmer who’s had to keep plowing around it. “Nobody ever visits it,” he rationalizes to himself and the day comes when he simply plows right through it. The stones make good doorsteps or garden benches.

Bulldozers dispose of gravestones even more efficiently.

Every time new crowds up against old, old is what gives way.

A few years earlier, the cousins’ grandfather had drawn a diagram of the different plots, each rectangle neatly labeled in his old-fashioned wavery handwriting.

I was shown this drawing along with a copy that had all the property lines drawn in to scale. In that one, the rectangles labeled “George Patterson—d. 1894” and “Sally Patterson—d. 1913” appeared to be approximately ten feet from Geraldine Stevens’s property line.

“Here’s how it is right now, Your Honor,” said her attorney, one Brandon Frazier, who was so young that you could almost hear his shiny new law degree crackling in his back pocket. “These two little piles of rocks right there have been moved so that they’re now almost twenty feet from my client’s property line.”

Fifteen of those feet had been paved over in August.

“She’s driving back and forth right over her own great-great-aunt and -uncle!” Geraldine said tearfully. “And it’s wrong!”

“Tell me, Mrs. Stevens,” said Edward (“My friends call me Big Ed”) Whitbread as he rose ponderously to his feet. Ed Whitbread is not my favorite attorney. He’s pompous and dull-witted and he opposed me in the primary when I first ran for judge. “How old was your grandfather when he drew this diagram?”

“I don’t know. Seventy-five or eighty maybe.”

“And was he a professional draftsman?”

“No, he was a farmer.”

“A farmer,” Whitbread said portentously. “I see. Yet you claim he made an accurate drawing, to scale, with no formal training, when well past seventy?”

“My Grampy was sharp as a tack right up to the month before he died, and he certainly knew where his Aunt Sally was buried. He was eleven years old and he remembered going to her funeral.”

“I’m sure he thought he remembered,” Whitbread said genially.

As the questioning continued, Allen entered the back of the room and slid into a rear bench. He was alone and didn’t appear to be fleeing, so I had to assume that his alibi stood up to a cursory check and that Dwight had turned him loose.

But why was he here?

And why was I worrying about Allen when young Mr. Frazier was summing up for the plaintiff?

With little else to fall back on, he cited the drawing as ample proof that his client’s cousin had willfully changed the dimensions of the cemetery, thereby showing great disrespect for the dead who had a right to lie undisturbed.

“No respect for her ancestors?” Ed Whitbread snorted at the very idea. “Your Honor, you’ve seen the photographs of how disgracefully overgrown that cemetery looked before my client took it in hand. And you’ve seen the photographs of how it looks today.”

I might disdain Whitbread, but he had a point. In the earlier snapshots it was hard to even see the headstones. Now the trash trees were gone, a single magnolia’s lower limbs had been pruned so that a concrete bench sat in its shade, and the well-mowed grass made the plot look almost like a small park. Azalea bushes neatly bordered the wide new driveway. Very pretty.

“Mrs. Stevens,” I said. “In the years preceding your grandfather’s death, did you ever help your cousin clean off that graveyard?”

“She never cleaned it off,” said Geraldine. “I would’ve helped if everybody else did. But after Grampy quit doing it, nobody else ever offered.”

(What Allen thought of her answer could be read on his face. He was following the testimony like a play and her words made him roll his eyes at me. One thing—maybe the only thing—that could be said in Allen Stancil’s favor: I never saw him shy away from hard or dirty work.)

My options were clear. If I believed Geraldine and dear old Grampy’s diagram, which I was inclined to do, then opportunistic Annice had indeed moved the rocks and, in defiance of the laws of North Carolina, was now driving over the remains of her great-great-aunt and uncle. Not that much could be remaining after nearly a century.

No matter how I ruled, the animosity and hard feelings between these two cousins would no doubt continue. If I found for Geraldine and ordered Annice to remove the paving and restore her drive to its previous narrow width, the cemetery would probably fall back into a neglected state. Clearly Geraldine cared nothing about old Grampy’s final resting place. It wasn’t in her front yard. The important thing was to give her cousin grief by making Annice tear up that new driveway.

If I found Geraldine’s suit without merit—and except for a freehand diagram drawn by an old man, she had shown me no overwhelming proof to support her accusation—the graveyard would probably be kept in immaculate condition from here on out. Not, however, because Annice gave a true goddamn about the place. She reminded me of Adam, only instead of a business in California, her goal was a driveway wide enough to accommodate a Cadillac. One thing about it, though: from now on, Annice would be forced to prove to a watching world (i.e., her neighbors and the rest of the family) that she had more respect for her ancestors than anyone could ever ask.

“The law is the law,” the preacher said sternly. “You can’t overlook the desecration of two graves just because a half-abandoned site is now prettied up.”

I thought of our own family graveyard, bordered in old-fashioned roses and kept in loving repair. My mother is there. So is Daddy’s first wife. They lie amid my grandparents and great-grandparents and children that died of diphtheria and croup a hundred years ago. Daddy and some of the older boys want to be buried there, but will any of the grandchildren?

“The law is the law,” the preacher repeated inexorably.

“The letter of the law is not always the spirit of the law,” the pragmatist pointed out.

I remembered Roots and the Bicentennial and how they inspired amateur genealogists to go out and inventory all the little graveyards in the state, and I knew that this law had been expressly written to keep them from quietly disappearing beneath a farmer’s plow or a developer’s bulldozer.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Frazier,” I said, “but your client has failed to provide meaningful proof of her claim that this graveyard has been desecrated. I find her suit without merit. Case dismissed.”

Allen Stancil caught up with me as I was pushing open the rear door to head for my chamber.

“Just what I’d of done, darlin’. If you’re finished now, could you give me a lift home?”