Death's Half Acre

CHAPTER 27

. . . the world’s so finely

balanced a beetle could push it along.

—Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson

THURSDAY MORNING (EIGHT DAYS LATER)

With heads rolling all around the county and rumors and promises of indictments to come in the wake of the Bradshaw murders, the burning of a warehouse and the near-murder of his very own daughter, Kezzie Knott was not surprised to see that the story of an embezzling preacher received only three or four inches of print in The News & Observer, but he did think that the Ledger would have had more to say about it.

One disillusioned member of the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal was quoted as saying, “Guess you can’t really call it embezzling if it’s all in his own name, but I sure did think we were giving our dollars to the Lord, not to Faison McKinney.”

“Looks like the bank’s gonna take the church house,” said another fallen-away member. “They say there’s not enough in the treasury to pay the light bill.”

“What you reckon happened to the money?”

“I heard it all went up his nose.”

“You know not!”

“Well you’ve seen him preach. We thought he was hopped up on the Holy Spirit, but what if it was drugs?”

“Not drugs,” someone said firmly. “My wife said she heard Marian McKinney all but say he’s got a gambling problem.”

The biggest media stories centered around the murders and the alleged malfeasance of the Colleton County Board of Commissioners, now being investigated by the SBI and the district attorney’s office. Two commissioners had already resigned and there was talk that Danny Creedmore had hired himself one of the best lawyers in Raleigh.

John Claude Lee and two other attorneys were suing that brilliant young legal star Greg Turner, and the bar association had begun its own investigation. Some of the cases Turner had won were in danger of having the judgments reversed and he faced the distinct possibility of disbarment.

Despite a cornucopia of Pulitzer-worthy material right there in its own backyard, The Dobbs Ledger managed to resist any in-depth coverage of those juicy tidbits. Instead, the paper, which came out three times a week, had devoted most of its news pages to the significance of Candace Bradshaw’s Toyota being found down in Augusta, Georgia. It ran a long interview with Sheriff Bowman Poole, who stopped just short of drawing a straight line from the dead commissioner’s car to the hit-and-run death of Linsey Thomas, the Ledger’s late and much-beloved editor.

“The crime lab hasn’t finished comparing her car with the evidence found at the crime scene,” said Poole, “but the rough findings are quite significant.”

“Yes,” said Ruby Dixon, the current editor, when asked to confirm a probable motive for her former boss’s death. “Linsey Thomas believed in sunshine and paper trails and he planned to roll up the window shades on Mrs. Bradshaw and her tenure as chair of the board. She knew it, too, because he tried to interview her a few days before he died and she blew him off.”

When asked if she would put more reporters on the board stories now, Dixon took a swallow of the orange juice that was ever-present on her desk and allowed as how maybe she would wait to see what Sheriff Poole came up with.

All in all though, thought Kezzie Knott, maybe it was just as well people weren’t paying too much attention to the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal. He had sworn the six people involved to secrecy before handing them back the title to their lands, but even though the registrar of deeds was a good ol’ fishing buddy, transferring property was a matter of public record.

“We don’t necessarily have to open the page in the right deed books where something’s recorded,” he told Kezzie, “but I can’t sequester the books either.”

“Ain’t asking you to,” Kezzie told him. “I don’t reckon they’s all that many people interested anyhow.”

“It really was all legal, wadn’ it, Kezzie?”

“He look to you like a man with a knife to his throat?”

“Naw, can’t say he did. In fact, best I remember, he was real cheerful.”

“Well, there you go, then. A willing seller taking what a buyer was willing to pay.”

“So, which one were you, Kezzie?”

The old man smiled and shook his head. “Hard to say, ain’t it?”

James Ennis pulled his small black truck in behind a late-model SUV that was parked on the shoulder of woodlands that were back in his family again, only this time it was his mother’s name on the deed and not his grandmother’s, despite the older woman’s self-pitying indignation that she no longer had a say in how the land was to be used or dispersed. She trotted out the Biblical commandment to honor thy father and thy mother, “and this does me dishonor,” she told her daughter.

“Sorry, Mama,” Mary Pritchard Ennis had said. “You gave our land away once. You don’t get a chance to do it twice. After I’m gone, it’s going to my boys.”

Before he got out of the truck, Ennis made a note of the SUV’s license plate. One bumper sticker read JESUS LOVES YOU; the other THIS CAR HAS GPS—GOD’S PROTECTIVE SALVATION.

He lifted his .22 rifle from the gun rack across the rear window, stepped onto the pavement, and studied the ditch bank until he saw where someone had gone into the woods. The trail was easy to follow. A hippopotamus could not have trampled down a wider swath of weeds and briars, and dead limbs had been knocked off some of the pines to make for easier passage.

A wren scolded from its perch on a wild cherry branch in lacy white bloom and a brown thrasher flew up from a clump of dried broom sedge still standing from last fall.

About fifty feet into the woods, where the land began to slope down to a stream, he saw an oak that had come down in one of the hurricanes to create a rough clearing beyond the pines. A chunky-looking white man labored there with a shovel. He wore dark blue slacks, a blue-and-white striped open-necked polo shirt, and shiny polished town shoes that had probably started off a lot shinier than they were right now. As Ennis watched, he saw the man wipe his face with a large white handkerchief that he stuffed back into his pocket before climbing down into the hole he had dug. It was waist-deep on the man and as damp dirt flew up from the hole, Ennis could hear him puffing with the unaccustomed effort of digging through rocks and roots.

He moved out of shadows into the sunlight, the rifle held loosely in the crook of his arm, and looked down on the man. “Mind telling me what you’re doing, mister?”

Startled, the man stepped back with the shovel across his chest as if for protection, slipped, and went down heavily on his rump. Sweat poured from his soft face and his eyes widened as he looked up and saw the rifle.

“This is private property, mister, and you’re trespassing,” James Ennis said, standing over the trench the man had dug. “How come you’re out here digging?”

“This your land?” The voice changed to warm molasses. “Then you must be one of Sister Frances’s grandsons, right?”

Ennis gave a tight nod.

“I’m—”

“I know who you are, Preacher, and you don’t own one square inch out here any more, so I ask you for the last time”—he shifted the rifle significantly in his hands—“what are you digging for?”

Faison McKinney pulled out his handkerchief again and looked at it distastefully. It had begun the day ironed and neatly folded just as he liked his handkerchiefs, but now it was so streaked with dirt and sweat stains Marian might never get it clean. Nevertheless he wiped his face, then used the shovel to hoist himself to his feet. There was only wet sandy clay beneath his shoes. No parachute, no bones, no sign that this soil had ever been disturbed.

“You ever get left all night at the end of a long dirty ditch holding a bag?”

“No, sir, can’t say as I have.”

“Well, this here’s the ditch and I’m the fool that thought it was full of snipe.”

G. Hooks Talbert finished ordering and handed the elaborate menu back to the waiter. Located off Glenwood Avenue, this was one of Raleigh’s best restaurants, the food adventurous, the service impeccable. Tonight, the tables would be filled. Here at lunchtime, however, he and the plainly dressed woman seated across the table from him had a corner of the room to themselves, which was precisely why he had chosen it.

Talbert considered himself a connoisseur of beautiful women and this woman would never be beautiful, but with better clothes, an expert hairstylist, and proper makeup, she could be striking.

She looked like hell, he thought, but his words were kindly when he said, “I wish you didn’t have to dress like one of those born-again cult women.”

“I am born again, but our church is no cult.”

“Then why dress like it? There are lots of good religious women who don’t consider it a sin to wear nice things. You don’t have to look like all your clothes came from a Goodwill store.”

“If you’ll recall, Hooks, I didn’t grow up with silks and satins. After the divorce, Mother was lucky if she could keep me in denim and cotton.” She was not complaining, merely stating the facts.

“You may not have had it so plush as a kid, but you got a generous inheritance. Don’t tell me it’s all gone?”

The younger woman shrugged and Talbert shook his head in disbelief.

“But I offered to invest it for you, to give you security.”

“I invested it in my marriage.” She smiled serenely as he gave an involuntary scornful humph. “How many wives have you gone through now, Hooks? Three?”

When he didn’t answer, she said, “Our father had four.”

She smiled a thank-you to the waiter who set butter and a woven silver basket of freshly baked yeast rolls before them, then turned back to her older half brother. “I’m still married to the only man I ever gave myself to.” She took one of the warm rolls, breathed in its fragrance, and reached for the butter.

“And what kind of marriage is it, Marian?” he asked, unable to control his dismay. “You drink his spit. Do you eat his shit, too?”

“If he asked me to.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“You will not take the Lord’s name in vain,” she said, speaking sharply for the first time. “My husband’s a righteous man, Hooks, and he has it in him to do good work. If he gets a little zealous at times—”

“Your husband’s a fool who fell for one of the oldest scams in the book if what you’ve told me are the facts. Traded all your assets for a bag of fake jewelry because a bootlegger with a grade school education conned him into thinking they were real? He spent half of your inheritance when you two went off to—where was it? Patagonia? Syria?”

“Lebanon,” she murmured, buttering another piece of her roll.

“To Lebanon to convert the Muslims. Then he takes the rest of your money to build this church, bankrupts it, and now you come asking me to bail him out?”

He heard the anger in his voice and realized this was not the way to move her. “Even if he does mean well, haven’t you had enough, honey? You deserve so much better than this. Hasn’t he embarrassed you enough? No wonder he’s ashamed to say what happened to the money. I can understand that he’d rather people think he’s a crook than think him a fool, but that’s what he is and he’s pulling you down with him. Just say the word and I’ll get you the best and most discreet attorney in the country. I’ll even give him a settlement to let him get a fresh start somewhere else. Please, Marian.”

The waiter returned with the bisque they had ordered and Talbert was so distraught that he was almost oblivious to the appetizing aroma of lobster and well-seasoned cream. He gave it a ritual taste and then accepted a light sprinkle of pepper from the waiter’s grinder, but it was only a formality.

Marian McKinney shook her head when it was offered to her.

“I can’t leave him, Hooks. I love him and I believe in what he’s doing. This whole experience has humbled him and he needs me now more than ever. Yes, he was prideful before. And yes, maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly when he used me to make a point about following God’s commandments. He thought he didn’t care for worldly glory. But when temptation came, he was weak and he yielded. He really did think of all the good he could do if those jewels had been real. But he knows now that he was also thinking about the glory to himself, not to God. I’m glad this has happened!”

Her eyes sparkled with the intensity of her emotions. “I’m glad because now that he’s stumbled, now that he’s admitted his weakness to me and to God, he understands how frail we all are when we don’t trust God to give us the strength to resist the worst in our own natures. He’s changed, Hooks, and he can lead others to change. That’s why I’m pleading with you to help me help him save our church.”

He looked at her in sorrow that was tinged with exasperation. In his world, he was used to giving orders and having them followed—his wives, his sons, his employees, the associates who were bound to him with golden chains. But this sister!

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’d pay for the best attorney in the country to get me a divorce but you won’t pay a dime to save my marriage?”

“Please. Eat your soup while it’s still hot.”

Obediently, she dipped her spoon into the thick creamy bisque and ate quietly for a few minutes.

He had finished his soup and sat silently stewing in his own thoughts until the waiter removed their bowls and brought them salad.

“Did I get a fair inheritance, Hooks?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Did I get a fair share of our father’s estate?”

He shrugged. “How should I know? He told his attorney what to write and he signed the will while ‘of sound and disposing mind.’ Considering that your mother didn’t like to let you visit us, I’m sure he thought it was commensurate with the circumstances.”

“Circumstances he created when he kicked her out after five years of marriage for a little whore half his age.”

“Granted Cheryl was a whore,” he agreed mildly, “but as I recall, your own mother was only half his age herself.”

“Stop evading the question. Did I get a fair share?”

“Even if you had, it would be gone now, too.”

“Then you admit that Father’s will was unfair?”

“I don’t admit a damn thing except that you’re married to a bastard who humiliates you in front of a whole congregation and you don’t have enough backbone to tell him to go fuck himself!”

She leaned back in her chair and gave him a long level look.

He held her gaze for a moment, then gave a resigned sigh and apologized.

“I’m sorry, Marian. There’s no excuse for that kind of language.”

She continued to look at him without speaking.

“What?” he said irritably.

“It’s not me that’s been humiliated, is it, Hooks? It’s you.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Whoever told you about what happened Easter Sunday knows that I’m your sister. You’re the one it humiliated when you heard it.” Her quiet voice taunted him. “The great G. Hooks Talbert, the millionaire who tells governors and senators what to do, and his sister drank the spit water of a man he himself wouldn’t spit on.”

He glared at her with clenched jaws.

“A hundred thousand will save the church, Hooks.”

“What?”

“Or maybe I’ll write a magazine article, give a few interviews.”

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“A hundred thousand.”

Her eyes did not drop beneath his glare and he could see her resolve growing firmer until it hardened into marble.

“A hundred thousand, Hooks. You can take it out of petty cash.”

Defeated, he shook his head and, with a wry smile, reached for the checkbook in the breast pocket of his jacket. “If I give you a hundred and ten, will you put some windows in that damn church? And a decent lighting system?”

Her answering smile was serene. “I’ll ask,” she promised.