Crazy Like A Fox

CHAPTER 17

“Thin gruel.” Sister sighed at the papers she had organized on the table.

Betty, nose to a typed page, agreed. “We hardly ever see truly typed pages anymore. All this stuff was done before correcting tape. Whoever typed these reports was good.”

“H-m-m.” Sister returned to the papers. “The photographs, well, beauties all.”

“Right. Wish there were more photos. I can’t imagine that the women suspected of having affairs with Weevil willingly had their pictures taken.”

“No. The officer on this case did his homework. Look.” She pushed a photograph to Betty. “The illegal still site at Old Paradise. Ha. They knew it was operating. A suspected burial ground. Nothing, of course.”

“Wonder why they didn’t arrest whoever was operating it, then?” Betty’s eyebrows knitted together.

“Paid off, or maybe it was easier to turn a blind eye. Excessive rectitude in law enforcement usually produces contrary results.”

Ben Sidell walked into the small room, unadorned by certificates, photographs, anything on the walls. The county sheriff’s offices were utilitarian and spartan. No one would accuse the department of squandering funds, what little they were allotted.

“Well?” He pulled out a chair to sit with them for a moment.

“Nothing much. The DeSotos and toothy huge Buicks bring back memories. The few photographs of Main Street do, too. But, Ben, whatever happened to Weevil, not a clue, really. The pictures of the women he was said to have wooed, some of them photos from the society page—no proof. The questioning certainly took into account the class of the woman being questioned. Obviously, no one admitted to anything other than hunting behind him.”

Ben, who had seen the video on Sister’s phone, pulled a photograph of Weevil toward him. “Eerie. The video. The spitting image. And you say Weevil—or whoever—talked to Tom Tipton?”

“Yes. Tom’s words were ‘Weevil to the teeth.’ ”

“Too bad Tom didn’t ask him what happened to him.” Ben smiled a little. “As no one is injured or in apparent danger, there’s not much I can do to help you, but this is highly unusual.”

“Thank you for finding the old file.” Sister folded the papers back together.

“For my Master, anything. Actually, the county records are quite good. Then again, I have to remember that records have been kept since before the Revolutionary War. I flipped through this. Of course, the women are terrifically good-looking. The men, when questioned, tight-lipped. I’m sure each man realized he was a suspect. Since no body was ever found, everything faded away. It is still very difficult to get any kind of conviction without a corpse.”

“I guess that’s why in murder mysteries so much time is spent on disposing of the corpse,” Sister added.

“If a body is just left out or tossed somewhere, does that mean the crime was not premeditated?” Betty asked Ben.

“Not always. Given the terrain here and the rivers, a body can go unnoticed for years. If an unburied corpse is found, it’s usually by a hiker or a dog. I expect central Virginia hides many bones.”

“It has certainly hidden Weevil’s.” Sister tapped the tabletop with her forefinger.

“You don’t believe this is a ghost?” Betty inquired. “Just asking.”

“No. Deep down, no. But then again, Tom truly knew him. He believes it was Weevil,” she answered.

“Why would a man blow ‘Gone to Ground,’ then blow it again at the hunt where we ran the young fox into the rock outcroppings? Then again blow ‘Going Home’ at Old Paradise?” Betty wondered.

“You discount echo?” Ben was becoming fascinated.

“I do. What we heard was a cowhorn. Whoever had it knew how to use it, knows the calls,” Sister replied.

“Weevil,” Betty simply said.

“Some kind of weevil, that’s for sure,” Sister responded. “The other thing is I called Marion. She’s asked questions. The most helpful person was Randy Rouse, Master of Loudoun Hunt. Ben, Randy is a hundred years old, and how shall I say, undimmed. He’d hunted behind Weevil a few times, but Randy was tied down by his own hunting obligations as well as his business ones. He told Marion so many people thought Weevil’s disappearance had something to do with the rumor that he slept with the Falconers, both mother and daughter.”

Ben shrugged. “That was a brave man, if he did it.”

“Randy didn’t indicate that he knew anything more than the gossip, but Marion played the video for him and he was shocked.”

“Weevil?” Ben inquired.

Sister nodded. “Well, who is to say, but Randy swore he sure looked like the Weevil he remembered. And he, too, wondered why would he take the cowhorn. He recalled the scrimshaw on the horn. Said he remembered that from hunting, thought it was lovely.”

“Isn’t his wife thirty-eight years younger than he is?” Betty wondered.

“Is. A real looker and a fabulous rider. The two of them are well suited for each other,” Sister replied. “You know, there are so many good marriages in foxhunting. I have often wondered, is it because we share danger?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t know. I think marriage is danger enough.” Betty laughed.

Ben put a hand on some of the untidied pages, for Sister had the rest in a neat pile. “I assume the Falconers are gone?”

“Yes. Both. And sad to say, the daughter Madeline—‘Madge’—died of the same type of cancer that took her mother. They were Northern Virginia people but we all knew one another from hunting. Of course, I knew Madge and Christine only socially and from hunting. Makes me wonder if cancer is inherited. Ah, well.” Sister thought a moment. “I keep coming back to that. Love or money.”

—

Vic Harris, exposed and humiliated, knew in his gut Yvonne would kill him if she could, for love and money. Well, soured love. She did the next best thing. The decision was whether to just cave and tell the press they had settled out of court, or to fight back even harder just to make the bitch miserable.

Yvonne had instructed her lawyers at Hart, Hanckle and Himmel to release to all the social media footage she had, thanks to the most expensive private investigation firm in Chicago: footage of her husband cavorting with his two blonde mistresses. The elect, the one receiving twenty thousand dollars a month, performed many a service, but what would knock back people of his generation was how Mistress Number One was only too happy to work over the close-to-sixty-year-old man with Mistress Number Two. He kept up, literally.

So there he was, a self-proclaimed leader of the black community, for decades extolling the necessity to praise and focus on African American women. He, of course, criticized Justice Thomas for marrying a white woman. Any man of color who married a white woman came in for a blast in his magazine, on his cable network. He even blasted Hispanic men who slept with white women.

The overground media reported this fall from grace. They showed head shots of the two knockout blondes, but could not show the home-style porn. The social media showed everything.

Unfortunately, this meant that Tootie beheld her father in action when a so-called friend sent it on to her. Unfair as her father had been to her, she didn’t want to see this. She didn’t want to know what a complete hypocrite he was.

She didn’t bother to text her mother. She drove over to Beveridge Hundred once her chores were completed. Shaker had not seen the trash, and Sister was at the sheriff’s office. Tootie would have gone to Sister first, but confronting Yvonne would happen sooner or later.

“Mother!” Tootie opened the door to the cottage.

“In the back.”

Within a minute, Tootie stood in the back garden on this perfect October day.

“I saw everything.”

“Ah.”

“Mother, why did you do it?”

“I didn’t do it. That’s the point.” Yvonne dropped into a wooden red Adirondack chair as Tootie followed suit, in a blue one.

“I know, but”—she groped for words—“that was awful. Everyone we know will have seen Dad. I am so humiliated.”

“You didn’t do it. You have nothing to be humiliated about. He has acted without regard for his wife or daughter. If anything, people should be sympathetic to us.”

“I don’t know.” Tootie’s voice trailed off.

“I built that business. I worked every day for years to build that business. I made calls. I organized dinners. I talked to complete assholes and pretended they were brilliant. He thinks because I’m a woman he can cut me out, buy me off cheap. He’s been married to me for thirty-one years and he thought he could back me down? He may be able to continue running the business without me—I expect he’ll hire a regiment of ass-kissers—but he will no longer be an admired person. I wonder what the wives of our friends will do? Maybe nothing. Maybe cut him dead. What I expect is my half of the funds—quite soon, actually.”

“You don’t want to stay in the business? You liked working.”

“I did. Most of the time. I didn’t always like the people especially, but I liked building something and I liked working with him. I loved him once. I gave him everything I had. And what you saw was my reward.”

“Mom, he wasn’t always like that.”

“No. This priapic behavior”—Yvonne was careful in her choice of words—“arrived with his fiftieth birthday. He panicked. People thought I would panic when my turn came four years later. Lots of speculation about how much plastic surgery I’d have, stuff like that. I was fine. I am fine, and sixty is getting closer, not too close yet but closer. I don’t give a damn, but I do give a damn about respect.”

Tootie sat there, wiggled her toes in her boots. “I don’t ever want to see him again.”

“He is your father. I can’t interfere in your relationship or lack of one.”

“You never fought for me when I tried to explain to him why I didn’t want to go to law school or med school. He called me a nuevo field hand!”

“Tootie, at first, I somewhat agreed with him. I did and I’m sorry. I thought your desire to hunt, to literally clean shit, was beneath us. We had risen so far in the world. Like most people of my generation I couldn’t understand why any of our people would want to work in agriculture or with animals. We don’t see it as a career. As time went by, I accepted that this is your life. When you said later you wanted to be a veterinarian, I thought, okay, she will be using her brain. But now that I have actually seen you out there, like at Old Paradise, I understand you are using your brain. In time I did stand up for you, but not when he was hot. There is no talking to your father when he’s lost his temper.”

“I hate him. I really do.” Tootie clamped her lips shut. “I will never fall in love with anyone.”

A wave of guilt, sorrow, and anger lapped at Yvonne all at once. “I have been an inadequate mother. Not bad, but not so good. I wish I could take back those years when you needed me and I wasn’t there. I am so sorry.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Tootie, don’t say you won’t love anyone. It can be the most wonderful thing in the world. Much as I loathe that son of a bitch now, when I was young, when we were working together, when you were born, I loved him. I didn’t change; he did.” She paused. “Well, I did change. I got older.”

“Mom, I’m sorry.” Tootie was able to look past her own feelings of the moment.

“Do you forgive me?”

Tootie lifted her shoulders. “You’re my mother. I love you.”

Yvonne rose from the chair, knelt before her daughter, tears streaming now, and took her hand. “I love you, too, honey. I think it has taken me a long time to grow up. In so many ways you are ahead of me.” She stood now, leaned down and kissed Tootie on the cheek. “I pray someday you will find love. You will feel all the excitement and happiness I once felt, and your love will come to a better conclusion. Men”—she thought about this for a bit—“change.”

“Don’t we?”

“We do, but it’s different. Men fear age in a different way.” Noting Tootie’s facial expression. “It’s nothing to worry about now, and not everyone fears age.”

“Do you?”

Sitting now on the flat arm of Tootie’s Adirondack chair, Yvonne, voice lower, said, “When I hit forty I determined to fight it, and then one day, when someone said to me, ‘Yvonne, still so beautiful,’ I knew I couldn’t fight time. No one ever uses the word ‘still’ when you are young. No, I don’t fear age, but I fear not being able to do the things I like to do. I fear illness, some of the things that come with age.”

—

“Still beautiful. I would know you anywhere, in any century.” Daniella, stunned, listened to Weevil as he took her elbow.

Daniella enjoyed her early morning walk, and her sunset walk, as she thought of it. She missed her late son, Mercer, who would usually walk with her, but Gray and Sam, individually or sometimes together, would parade with her at least once a week.

The first Monday in October, temperatures in the high 60s, color at the top of the deciduous trees, filled her with delight. At six o’clock she grabbed her ebony cane with the ivory hound’s head, flicked it in front of her, and started her sunset walk. West Leigh, a good neighborhood west of Charlottesville proper, pretty houses, always provided something for her to look at. If a neighbor, and the yards were large, worked in the yard, she’d swing up her cane as a hello, or stop and chat. Usually she kept walking, laughing at herself and saying if she stopped it would be hard to start the motor again. She hadn’t been out for ten minutes when she heard a footfall, felt a strong hand on her elbow.

Keeping complete composure, she replied, “Weevil, you say that to all the girls.”

He chuckled. “But you were the best one. We did have fun, didn’t we?”

Brain whirring, she smiled. “While it lasted, yes. So tell me, Weevil, how is death? I’d like to know as I draw ever closer.”

“You exist in another dimension. No hunger, thirst, work. You can see people here. You can visit them if you want to, obviously. But most of us realize it is too upsetting. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

“You stole your horn from the museum.”

“Did. Missed it. There’s a little story on the scrimshaw. I wanted to see it again. Hold it. Blow it. Daniella, I can’t escort you for very long. I don’t think anyone around these parts knows who I am, but I can’t take the chance, you know? I have two questions.”

“Ask them.”

“Who is still alive? Tom Tipton, you. Is there anyone else?”

“Randall Farley. His mind is gone, gone. He’s in assisted living. But many of our generation’s children are still living.”

The long rays of the setting sun turned his golden hair to red as he inclined it toward her.

“Did anyone ever find Sophie Marquet’s fortune?”

“The founder of Old Paradise? It must have all been spent. The DuCharmes finally sold the place to Crawford Howard. He’s a rich, pushy white man.”

“People have secrets. Evangelista Bancroft did.” Weevil smiled, teeth straight.

Daniella, surprised, asked, “Edward’s late sister?”

“H-m-m. She was three, maybe four years older than Edward. Always liked him. Liked the woman he married. Loved Evangelista. But Evangelista had her ways. I was not her first.”

Daniella absorbed this. “I’m afraid I am of no help to you. I knew everyone, of course, but how could I run in the same social circles as Evangelista? I thought she was a dreadful snob.”

Weevil squeezed her elbow, then lifted up her hand and kissed her palm. “Just speaking with you has been a help.”

He dropped her hand, loped behind one of the houses, and disappeared.

Daniella, head up, breathing deeply, reached her house, closed the door, picked up her phone. “Gray!”

As she usually called with a request, Gray pretended he was glad to hear her voice. “Aunt Daniella, you sound chipper.”

“I have just had a walk with Wesley Carruthers.”