Death's Half Acre

CHAPTER 15

Back when I came along, everybody used to wrestle, jump—

see who could do the most work.

Now we study money.

—Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

Next morning, I slept in while Dwight dropped Cal off for Sunday school at the church he and I grew up in. Cal’s not crazy about putting on Sunday clothes, but his Uncle Rob teaches the Junior Class and he’s made friends with some of the boys, so he seems to enjoy it once he’s there.

Preaching services begin at eleven, which meant that Dwight and I had a little time alone for this and that.

Mostly that.

We were a few minutes late getting there, but everyone was standing for the first hymn, so it wasn’t noticeable when we slipped into a back pew.

Because the minister is new and we don’t make it to church every week, I haven’t quite taken his measure, but with Rob on the pulpit committee, he can’t be too far right. Not as intellectual as Carlyle Yelvington at First Baptist in Dobbs, but nowhere near as opaque as the preacher at Nadine and Herman’s New Deliverance down in Black Creek. And nothing—thank you, Jesus!—like that demagogue at the Church of Christ Eternal.

Every time I think about the way that arrogant bastard humiliated his wife, I want to throw up and then go slap him across the face with a dead trout.

No, Sweetwater’s Quincy Bridges is young and earnest and doesn’t seem to have an arrogant bone in his body. He doesn’t threaten with hellfire and brimstone; he entreats with the promise of a well-lived life for those who follow the Golden Rule.

After lunch, Dwight and Cal went off to the woods to see if they could find a couple of redbuds small enough to move up to the house, and I started going through Linsey Thomas’s files that Will had found.

Last night, Dwight had told me about Candace Bradshaw’s missing flash drive and how it might hold something about me on it.

“Me?”

“Well, not you per se,” he’d said. “More likely John Claude or Mr. Kezzie. Richards found a file folder with the firm’s name and a sheet of paper with yours and Mr. Kezzie’s names and a note to herself referencing that damn flash drive.”

That sent a chill down my spine. Dwight doesn’t know about Daddy and Talbert. We’ve never sat down and exchanged lists and details of people we’ve been in bed with and I figure G. Hooks Talbert falls in that category.

Once I got into Linsey’s files, I breathed a lot easier. It was clear that he suspected something fishy about Hooks Talbert speaking up for me with the Republican governor in office back then, but he had never connected all the dots and there was nothing new or incriminating in those files. The news clippings and references to Daddy and me were all in the public domain. I transferred the more flattering notices into a folder I’d started in my own file cabinet, and shredded the rest. One of these years, I really might get around to putting together a scrapbook.

“Yeah,” said the voice of the pragmatist who lives in the back of my head. “Right after you label all those digital pictures and transfer them to a CD.”

Another of the folders could have been Linsey’s own scrapbook. Here were clippings from the N&O and the Ledger of milestones in his life. His high school report cards, a picture of his class in front of the UN building in NY, his diploma from Carolina, his marriage certificate and passport, the obituary of his wife, and a notarized living will that directed his doctors not to prolong his life were he to fall into a persistent vegetative state.

Poor Linsey, I thought. Instantly killed by a hit-and-run driver as he walked home from the newspaper on a warm spring evening. No old age, no long descent into peaceful death. I hoped he didn’t know or care what had happened to his beloved paper. Too bad he died without a will. And yet, who would he have left it to? No siblings, no close cousins. Maybe that was why he’d never gotten around to writing one.

Which only served to remind me that Dwight and I hadn’t updated our own wills since the wedding, something we really needed to do for Cal’s sake if not our own.

The next folder that came to hand was the one with the Civil War picture of an ancestor. It held more family pictures, each identified on the back by name and date. Here was a copy of the affidavit each white adult Confederate male had been required to sign after the war, swearing allegiance to the Union, before his citizenship and voting rights were restored. And here was an envelope addressed to Linsey’s grandfather that carried a 1923 postmark. Inside was a lock of light brown hair, tied with a faded blue string. Unlabeled. Whose?

If I knew that, I’d know why he’d kept it.

I put all those aside in a pile to take to the Colleton County Historical Center and made a note that they were being donated by William Richard Knott.

The files that remained seemed to be news stories or editorials in the making. The tabs carried the names of many prominent people in the county with a heavy concentration on our county commissioners.

I opened the one on Harvey Underwood. He’s a banker and a nominal Republican, but as Linsey’s notes showed, he wasn’t a hard-liner and he didn’t always vote with Candace. And whoa! He was involved with Barbara Laughlin at the time Linsey died? Barbara’s a VP in an insurance company, attractive, bright, divorced, with a son who’s been in front of me a couple of times for possession of marijuana and later a couple of rocks of crack. So far as I know, he’s been clean the past two years, but between his attorneys and his rehab, it must have cost Barbara a pile of money. Harvey’s a married grandfather and an advocate for the sanctity of marriage. I’d never heard a whisper of this. Either Linsey had been mistaken or they had been—still were?—pretty damn discreet.

The next folder was that of an upscale developer. Shortly after leaving the board, he had gotten board approval for a set of plans in which the houses were to be built on half-acre lots with a certain amount of land left for a playground area. According to Linsey’s notes, the lot sizes were actually four-tenths of an acre so that more houses had been built than were formally approved, and the playground area was less than specified as well. Somehow or other, this had gone unnoticed till it was too late.

Cute.

From his notes, it was clear that Linsey had intended this to be part of a larger story he planned to do on board cronyism. I guess Ruby Dixon decided not to bother when she became editor. Too much potential flak.

And just to prove that greed and chicanery crossed party lines freely, here was Greg Turner, a Democratic attorney from Black Creek. Someone had told Linsey that Turner had dipped into an elderly client’s bank account and made unauthorized withdrawals to the tune of some sixty thousand dollars. When the client’s son asked for an accounting, Turner had managed to stall it off until he could replace the money. According to Linsey’s notes, it appeared that he narrowly missed being accused of embezzlement with the real possibility of jail time and subsequent disbarment.

My internal preacher sadly shook his head. “I thought Greg Turner was as ethical as they come.”

“Yeah, but look how they’re coming these days,” said the cynical pragmatist who shares the same head space.

All the same, Greg Turner’s name resonated for some reason I couldn’t quite remember.

Oh well.

I picked up Jamie Jacobson’s file with trepidation. She was a friend. I liked her and I really didn’t want to know it if she had done anything shabby. But in for a penny . . .

To my relief, the papers inside mostly had to do with professional consultations between the two of them. Jamie’s ad agency generated a lot of the Ledger’s custom-designed advertising. The only thing puzzling was another sheet of Linsey’s doodling on a page torn from a yellow tablet, which seems to have been his way when trying to figure something out.

This time, the heavily circled center was GRAYSON VILLAGE, G. (as in Grayson) Hooks Talbert’s foray into the Colleton housing market. One arrow pointed to ADAMS ADVERTISING. Another to SASSY SOLUTIONS. An arrow from Sassy Solutions pointed to Danny Creedmore’s name, and a line of question marks led from Creedmore to Candace Bradshaw.

Huh?

Impulsively, I reached for the phone and dialed Jamie’s home number. A sleepy voice answered on the fourth ring.

“Did I wake you?” I asked.

“Deborah? No. Well, maybe. I thought I was watching a cooking show, but maybe I did drift off.”

I heard her yawn and said, “Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering. Did you do the ads for Grayson Village last spring?”

“No,” she said promptly. “We did a presentation, but a Raleigh agency got the job. Why?”

“How come you didn’t get it?”

I could almost hear the shrug in her voice. “Who knows? The client liked their presentation better. Especially since they went first and by coincidence, they had thought of some of the same angles I had, so I guess it looked like I was copying them.”

“Sassy Solutions?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What’s Danny Creedmore’s connection to them?”

“None that I know of. Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“Nothing really. Danny’s got his fingers stuck in so many pies, I just wondered if that was another of them.”

“Sorry. Did you find any blue shoes Friday?”

“Not yet. The hunt is part of the fun though. How about you?”

“I found some online that look like a good match.”

We discussed the pitfalls and conveniences of shopping online and agreed to have lunch together on Tuesday, then I went back to Linsey’s files.

So far, I had avoided the one marked BRADSHAW/CREEDMORE. The very label confirmed that Linsey had thought of the two as one. Puppet and puppeteer.

“Should you be reading that?” the preacher asked sternly. “Isn’t this Dwight’s province?”

“Oh, one little look can’t hurt,” said the pragmatist. “You’ll be doing him a favor, saving him some time by seeing if there’s real evidence of wrongdoing or just pure speculation.”

Linsey had kept news clippings and public tax records and scraps of notes to himself. There was also a very rough chart that appeared to list cause and effect. It would seem that Danny Creedmore had given Candace Bradshaw specific directions on how to vote on certain issues. Okay, that was generally known. What I couldn’t immediately understand was that Candace seemed to have given him information on deals that hadn’t actually come before the board, deals that allowed him to get in early and either buy up land before it had been offered at a public sale or put in bids for jobs that weren’t yet formulated.

It looked as if Candace had a network of spies all over the county. Maybe we’d underestimated her. Maybe she was a lot more savvy than we’d thought. Linsey had felt the same way, because scribbled after one of those deals was his frustrated “How the sandpaper did she know?” and it was circled in heavy black lead.

Seeing that gave me a bittersweet smile. One of Linsey’s more endearing traits was his refusal to use regular cusswords.

If Linsey’s facts and figures were right though, Candace must have been doing very well from her liaison with Danny. For sure, he had gotten rich off of her information. What’s weird is that the partnership began long before she ran for the board.

Was her board seat a reward for services already rendered instead of a positioning for services to come?

No matter which, if Terry Wilson’s Ginsburg twins could substantiate these charges, Candace could well have been looking at jail time.

Danny, too.

How lucky for them that Linsey had died and Ruby Dixon had taken over the paper.

“Yeah, wasn’t it?” said the pragmatist.

Dwight and Cal came back to the house about a half-hour later. They had found and tagged three young redbuds that Dwight planned to move the next time rain was predicted. I thought he was running out of places to put trees, but he seemed to think that because they don’t make heavy shade they could go in one of the azalea beds.

He was ready to stretch out on the couch and watch a ball game, but Cal asked if he could ride his bike over to Andrew’s. One of the rabbit dogs had a new litter of puppies and he was anxious to see them.

“Finished your homework?” Dwight asked.

“Yessir.”

“Okay with you, Deborah?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just don’t try to talk Uncle Andrew out of one. Bandit might get jealous.”

“Okay,” he said and promised to be home before dark.

Dwight wandered out to the kitchen, where I was pouring myself a glass of wine. “Any of that peach cobbler left?”

“One serving. With your name on it.”

Dwight sat down at the table to eat it and I gave him Linsey’s file on Candace Bradshaw. “You may think this is crazy, darling, but what if Candace found out that Linsey had all this material and was getting ready to write about it in the paper? What if she was out in her car the night he was killed?”

“Huh?”

“Well, you heard Stevie. Dee’s still sulking because Candace gave away a practically new Toyota last spring and then immediately bought another one. And y’all never found the Toyota that hit him.”

He paused with his fork in midair. “She griped about it to Terry and me Friday, too. And you know what else? Dee even said it galled Candace every time Linsey wrote something negative about her. A no-good cousin from Georgia, huh? Be a real convenient way to get it out of the area.”

He put down his fork, picked up his phone, and punched in some numbers. When he reached the detective on duty, he said, “See if you can run down Dee Bradshaw or her dad and find out when Candace Bradshaw got rid of her old car last spring. And while you’re at it, get the name and address of the cousin she gave it to.”