Death's Half Acre

CHAPTER 14

The house is part of the whole

Cohesive world we live in.

—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

Saturday morning is usually the beginning of a peaceful family weekend. Or so we always hope.

Cal rides his bike down to the mailboxes at the end of the lane to pick up the paper for us while Dwight and I take our time with second and third cups of coffee. Reading The News & Observer is a communal activity for us. Cal gives us the long-range weather report and shares the comic strips that make him giggle. I read aloud the human interest stories or the latest outrageous thing our politicians have done. Dwight does the scores of selected sports events and lets us know about any local happenings that might affect us. One of us will explain Dwayne Powell’s political cartoon for Cal if he doesn’t get it, and whoever gets to that page first scans the obituaries for any visitations we might be obligated to attend. (If you have to run for office, you try not to miss too many funerals for your dearly departed constituents.)

After breakfast, Cal stacks the dishwasher and shakes out the blanket in Bandit’s crate while I straighten up the beds and tidy the house, and Dwight gives the bathrooms the lick and a promise that keep things halfway decent till Rhonda comes.

Dwight and I usually mind Kate and Rob’s older two on Saturdays because the Aussie nursemaid has the weekends off. As we were leaving to go pick them up, Cal asked if we could open one of the bluebird boxes scattered around the property.

“Sure,” I said.

He chose one out by the drive and lightly tapped on the side of the box so any adult birds would fly out, then pulled out the long nail that holds the front in place and tilted up the hinged board. Inside was a shallow plastic box that let him gently slide out the whole nest. There, huddled together in the center, were four tiny bluebirds, so young that we could still see their skin through the downy fuzz. Their eyes were not yet open and their yellow bills looked rubbery and way too big for their marble-sized heads.

“Awwww,” said Cal, and I smiled, too, as he slid them back inside, lowered the board, and put the nail back in its hole.

At Kate’s, I warned her that I might be a little late bringing the children back.

“Will and Amy are coming over and I thought we’d grill some steaks outside since it’s so warm and then let the kids roast marshmallows, if that’s okay?”

“Great,” she said. “Miss Emily’s going to sit with R.W. this afternoon so that Rob and I can go to a kiln opening at Jugtown.”

“Say hey to the Owenses for me,” I told her, turning the key in the ignition.

At home, as we drove back into the yard, Dwight was in front of the garage with a hose, washing his truck, with Bandit supervising. The little terrier danced toward us as we got near. Suddenly, Cal started yelling and opened the door before I’d come to a full stop.

“Dad! Dad!”

“Cal, wait!” I cried, but he was already out of his seat belt and there was no stopping him.

“Snake!” he screamed, pointing to a birdhouse out in the middle of an azalea bed.

At that instant, a slender black snake no thicker than my thumb gained the top of the box and inserted its head into the hole. The adult birds were dive-bombing it in a brave, if hopeless, frenzy.

Dwight instantly realized what was happening and almost without thinking, he jumped over the low stone wall and in two strides reached the box, yanked on the snake’s tail, and sent it flying across the yard.

Bandit rushed back and forth between Dwight and Cal, but he hadn’t seen the snake and didn’t seem to understand what all the ruckus was about. Unfortunately, the rest of us saw a baby bird lodged in the snake’s mouth as it disappeared under a pink azalea bush.

Cal and Mary Pat were almost crying. Jake, who was still too young to comprehend the finality of death, was in awe that Dwight had actually grabbed a snake barehanded.

Truth be told, I was, too, even though I know that black snakes are harmless to humans. I was never one of those kids who stroked a snake at petting zoos.

Still don’t.

“Sorry,” Dwight told me. “I knew I should have put collars around the poles before now.”

“Can’t you just kill that mean ol’ snake?” Mary Pat asked, tears streaking down her pretty little face.

“Yeah, Dad,” said Cal, who stood on the wall and looked fearfully over at the bushes where the snake had gone to earth.

“He’s not mean, honey,” he told Mary Pat. “Black snakes eat a lot of mice and rats and other pests so we can’t blame them if they get a bird now and then. That’s just their nature. What we can do is fix it so they can’t get at any more nests. I think I saw some tin under Uncle Robert’s shelter the other day. Y’all help me finish washing the truck and we’ll go borrow some.”

After Cal came to live with us, all three of the kids began to call my brothers and their wives Uncle and Aunt. From the way they immediately tackled the dirty rims on Dwight’s pickup, I’m sure they were imagining dozens of snakes slithering around, just waiting a chance to snack on baby bluebirds.

I drove my car into the garage and remembered the boxes Will had put in the trunk on Wednesday. I suddenly itched to dive into Linsey Thomas’s files and learn just how much he’d known about my appointment, but there were steaks to marinade, potatoes to scrub, the fixings of a salad to assemble, so I carried them into the house and stuck them in the third bedroom, which we use as an office.

By the time I had finished in the kitchen, the others were back with the tin and it was time for lunch. Afterward, I helped cut and shape collars to go around the cedar poles of the half-dozen bluebird houses. The downward slope of the tin, plus its wide circumference, would baffle any snake that next tried to climb up. Naturally, the children wanted to see every nest as Dwight nailed the collars in place. One box had a clutch of unhatched eggs, one was empty, the other four had young birds that ranged from just hatched to nearly fledged.

“There,” Dwight said as we adjusted the last collar, “that should do it.”

We showered and changed into fresh jeans, then I put the potatoes in the oven to bake and he started the charcoal.

Will and Amy got there as he was taking a steak off the grill and I let the children go ahead and eat early at the table on the back porch while the adults had drinks out on the grass overlooking grill and pond. I had also invited my nephew Stevie and his girlfriend to join us. They were seniors over at Carolina, but Gayle had a major paper due, so she had stayed in Chapel Hill and Stevie brought his sister instead. Jane Ann was finishing up her first year at UNC-G in Greensboro and they had both come home for a friend’s wedding this morning.

Stevie was now almost twenty-two and of legal drinking age, yet, out of deference to Jane Ann, he opted for iced tea, too. Just as I try not to let on that Seth is maybe my favorite brother, I try not to dote on Haywood’s son, but he really is a nice kid.

“Dad tell you about the guy who wanted to join the hunt club day before yesterday?” he asked, a broad smile on his face.

Will laughed out loud and Amy said, “They still doing that?”

The Possum Creek Hunt Club is nothing but a figment of Daddy’s imagination. He learned long ago that simply posting the land won’t keep hunters off. But if the woods are posted with signs that say NO TRESPASSING. LEASED BY THE POSSUM CREEK HUNT CLUB, most people will respect them. They get three or four inquiries a year from newcomers.

“The guy was driving a Humvee and didn’t blink when they told him the initiation fee was a thousand dollars. He even wanted to bribe Dad and Uncle Robert to put him at the top of the waiting list. Dad said his wallet was full of hundred-dollar bills and he was really tempted, but Uncle Robert wouldn’t let him.”

“Hmmm,” said Will, with a faraway speculative look in his eye.

“No,” Amy told him firmly and I added, “It would embarrass Dwight to death to have to arrest you for fraud, wouldn’t it, Dwight?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, reaching for Will’s beer mug. They’ve been friends since grade school and he has no illusions about my brother. “Top anybody else’s glass off?”

It wasn’t long before the children began to clamor for the marshmallows they’d been promised and Jane Ann hopped up to help supervise. The smell of burned sugar was soon rife in the land.

“Toast one for me,” Amy called. She’s Will’s third wife, with short dark hair and dark eyes that she claims come from some Latino blood somewhere in her ancestry. She has a bawdy sense of humor and a fuse as short as Will’s. They blow up at each other at least once a month and we used to hold our collective breaths, fearful that their marriage was going to blow up, too. Over the years, we’ve come to realize that Amy loves drama and Will must as well, because he seems intent on not messing up this time.

Jane Ann brought them both a marshmallow. Dwight, too. I passed. They don’t really go with bourbon. The men licked their fingers and Will said, “Reminds me of Daddy’s bonfires.”

I smiled as he and Dwight began to reminisce about roasting marshmallows when we were kids.

Daddy never burned his brushpiles in daylight. He always waited until dark, and a moonless night was his favorite time. He would poke the fire and send geysers of sparks shooting up fifteen or twenty feet into the night sky.

“A poor man’s fireworks,” he’d say.

And Mother would often walk down from the house with a bag of marshmallows for a perfect ending to the day.

Eventually Dwight decreed that the children had eaten enough sugar and shooed them away so he could replenish the bed of coals with more from a starter can.

While Jane Ann and Amy cleared the porch table and reset it with china and tableware, I sent the kids to the showers to get rid of the stickiness that clung to their hands and mouths—Cal and Jake to his bathroom, Mary Pat to the master bath. Kate and I keep changes of clothing in both houses, so I laid out fresh pajamas for them and popped a DVD into the television in our bedroom.

“Mary Pat’s in charge of the remote and no bouncing on the bed,” I warned them as they settled back against the pillows to watch a movie they’d seen at least a dozen times.

It was full dark and the steaks were just coming off the grill when I got back out to the porch. Conversation had turned to Candace Bradshaw’s murder and the names of various prominent builders were being tossed around as suspects. Not her husband though. Dwight had told me that various neighbors had seen him from their windows throughout Tuesday afternoon.

“Her daughter says you’re her alibi,” Dwight said as he split his potato and added a large dollop of butter to the steaming interior.

“She does?” Will cut into one of the steaks on the platter to make sure it was rare enough before transferring it to his plate.

“She says you interviewed her for a job Tuesday evening. You remember the time?”

Will’s eyes narrowed as he visualized the scene. “Yeah. She was the only one who answered my ad. She got there at five on the dot and by five-thirty I had hired her. All I need is someone who can spell and use a computer for a few hours a week. Of course, she was only there for one morning and then Cam Bradshaw called her with the bad news. Guess I’ll have to find someone else now.”

Stevie paused in the middle of slathering A.1. sauce on his steak. “Dee really did get a job?”

“That surprises you?” I asked at the same time that Dwight said, “You know her?”

“Sure. We graduated from high school together. And yeah, I’m surprised that she got a job.”

“Why? She’s not in school any more,” said Dwight.

Jane Ann made a face. “She was just yanking her mother’s chain.”

“By getting a job?”

“She told us that nobody in her mom’s family had ever gone to college. In fact, Mrs. Bradshaw was the first to finish high school even if it was with a GED, so it was real important to her for Dee to graduate.” Jane Ann served herself some salad made with the greens Cletus had given me and passed the bowl along to Amy. “But Dee wanted a new car, and when Mrs. Bradshaw wouldn’t buy her one, she threatened to quit school and get a job so she could have some decent wheels.”

“She’s a spoiled slacker,” Stevie said flatly. “She’s never had to do a lick of work, she got a big allowance, and she had a car of her own that ran just fine. Remember last spring, when my car was in the shop? She gave me a ride home to pick it up and all she could do was bitch about how her mother gave a worthless, good-for-nothing cousin her practically new Toyota and then bought herself another new one while Dee had to keep driving the Audi she’d had in high school.”

“She thought her mother would come around with a new car to keep her in school. But Dee’ll go back. You’ll see,” Jane Ann said cynically. She shook her head at the offer of garlic bread. “In fact, she’ll probably stay on for two masters and a PhD so that she doesn’t have to punch a time clock for another five years.”

After supper, Stevie and Jane Ann had other plans for the evening. They offered to drop off a pair of sleepy children on the way. Cal’s eyelids were drooping, too, and he only offered a pro forma objection when Dwight scooped him up and carried him to his own bed. He was probably already asleep by the time Dwight came back to join us.

Amy poured coffee and I spooned warm peach cobbler into dessert dishes, then topped each with a dab of vanilla ice cream. Dwight and Will dug in as enthusiastically as if I had peeled the peaches myself and made the flaky crust from scratch.

Amy enjoyed hers, too, but couldn’t resist asking me what brand of piecrust I bought.

“Sh-hhh,” I told her. “Don’t spoil the illusion.”

Will grinned. “She just wants to know because this crust tastes better than what she buys.”

“Bastard,” Amy said amiably.

“If you can’t tell it from the real thing—” I hesitated one second too long.

“What?” said Dwight. He really does know me way too well at times.

“When you go in to appraise an estate, Will, do you ever do jewelry?”

He took another bite of cobbler and shook his head. “Not usually. Most people either want to keep it or else get a jeweler to do the appraisal. And more likely than not, they have an inflated sense of what it’s worth. Why?”

“Just wondering. What about costume jewelry?”

He laughed. “There it’s just the opposite. Most people think it’s worth less than it is because it’s fake. They see Bakelite and think ‘plastic.’ Well let me tell you something, honey. An authentic vintage Bakelite bracelet can fetch anything from two hundred to two thousand dollars depending on its condition and rarity.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Don’t believe me, go check out eBay.”

“What about rhinestones?”

“Again, it depends on the quality and whether the piece is signed by a collectible name.”

He looked at me speculatively over the rim of his coffee cup. “C’mon, Deb’rah. You’re not just wondering. You happen onto a nice find of old costume stuff?”

I shook my head.

The three of them were now too curious to let it drop.

“All right,” I said finally, “but you’ve got to promise not to say anything to the rest of the family about this. I’m probably making mountains out of what’s nothing more than an anthill and I want y’all’s word on it, okay?”

They all promised, so then I told them about my encounter with Daddy in that consignment shop yesterday, about the flash and sparkle of an earring, about the words I thought I’d heard that clerk with the jeweler’s magnifying eyepiece say, and how Daddy had sent me on my way so brusquely.

Will frowned. “You’re sure he used a loupe?”

“And put it in his pocket as soon as I walked up—the instant that Daddy palmed the earring.”

“Tall thin guy? Had his glasses pushed up on his forehead? Starting to go bald in front?”

I nodded.

“Then he had to be looking at something really interesting if he was using his loupe. I know him. Dave Carter. Good guy. Why don’t I drop by and see him Monday?”

“Only if you think he won’t call Daddy the minute you’re out of the store,” I said. “You know how mad he can get if he thinks we’re checking up on him.”

Dwight looked at me quizzically. “You don’t really think he has diamond earrings worth thirty thousand dollars, do you?”

“Makes about as much sense as rhinestones worth twenty,” I told him.

We batted it around for a few minutes more till Will said, “I’ll talk to Dave on Monday,” and the talk turned to other subjects.

I briefly considered telling them what Maidie had confided about Daddy’s sudden interest in getting right with the Lord, but decided I’d already been disloyal enough for one evening.

“You have a chance to go through Linsey’s papers yet?” Will asked as he and Amy were leaving.

“Tomorrow,” I promised.