instead on the cases at hand.
Start with Mitchiner. An old man with a fading grasp
on reality. Had he wandered away on his own or had
someone taken him? The hand proved that someone
knew where his body was because it had been cut loose
and carried from that isolated spot on Black Creek
downstream to a more frequented place on Apple
Creek. Why?
Because they wanted the hand to be found? Because
they knew it would lead back to the body further up-
stream?
Deborah was fond of asking “Who profits?” but on
the face of it, no one. Yes, Mitchiner’s daughter was
suing the rest home, but that was almost reflexive these
days even though most such cases no longer generated
large settlements. Besides, everyone said that she and
her son were devoted to the old man. Before he got his
driver’s license, the kid rode his bicycle over there after
school almost every afternoon to play checkers with
him; after he turned sixteen, he came as regularly to
take his grandfather out for a drive around town. The
daughter was there a couple of nights a week and again
on the weekends. On Saturdays, she had seen to his
physical well-being, trimming his hair and toenails and
seeing that he bathed properly. On Sundays, she had
taken him to church for his spiritual well-being.
According to the statements given when Mitchiner
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first went missing, he liked to visit the graveyard where
his wife and parents were buried and to walk the old
neighborhood, so that’s where their first search efforts
had been concentrated. How had he wound up in the
creek, miles from his childhood haunts?
And Buck Harris.
Everyone said he was a bull of a man, a physical man
who still liked to climb on a tractor and stay hands-on
with every aspect of his crops, yet always up for sex.
Whose ox had he gored?
The possibilities were almost endless. One of the
migrants at the camp? Someone he had done business
with? Someone whose woman he’d taken? Certainly
someone familiar with that empty shed. Mrs. Samuelson
had said the killer must be “a hateful and hating man.”
He couldn’t argue with that. To kill and butcher and
then strew the parts around for the buzzards?
And yeah, spouses and lovers were usually their best
suspects, but surely no woman would have done what
was done to Harris? On the other hand, that missing
part of his anatomy certainly did seem to suggest a sex-
ual motive. But what in God’s name could he have done
to inspire such cruelty? Think of gaining consciousness
to find yourself lying there in chains, naked and vulner-
able as a killer lifts an axe and swings it down on your
bone and flesh. The killer clearly meant for him to know
it was coming, otherwise why the chains? Why not just
go ahead and kill him quickly and cleanly?
If Harris was lucky, the first blow would have made
him black out from the shock to his system. If he wasn’t
lucky—?
Dwight tried to cleanse the images from his mind.
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MARGARET MARON
Mayleen Richards and Jack Jamison were waiting for
him near the rear of Buck Harris’s homeplace. Two
old-fashioned bench swings hung from the limbs of an
enormous oak tree and the deputies seemed to be enjoy-
ing the warm afternoon sunshine, although Richards’s
dispirited greeting made Dwight think that Jamison
must have told her about his resignation.
“Where’s Denning?” he asked.
“He’s back at the shed, going over the car with a fine-
tooth comb,” Jamison said.
“I thought he did that last night.”
“He did, but you know Denning.”
Dwight nodded. Attention to detail and a willingness
to check and recheck were precisely why he’d promoted
Percy Denning to the job.
He glanced inquiringly at the shabby, unfamiliar car
parked at the edge of the yard.
“Mrs. Samuelson’s got those two migrant women
helping her give the place a good cleaning. They got
here about ten minutes ago,” Richards said. “She ex-
pects Mrs. Harris and her daughter to stay here tomor-
row night. She also seems to think the daughter inherits
this place.”
“She’s right,” said Dwight as he rang the back door-
bell. “At least, that’s what his lawyer told me.”
After a minute or two with no answer, he rang again.
There was another short wait, then Mrs. Samuelson
opened the door with a visible annoyance that was only
slightly tempered by seeing him there instead of the two
deputies again. Today, her white bib apron covered a
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short-sleeved maroon dress and it was nowhere near as
crisp as the first time she had talked to them. This apron
had seen some serious action.
“I’m sorry, Major . . . Bryant, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Major Bryant, I’m real busy right now.”
“I’m sure you are, ma’am, but we have a few more
questions for you.”
She started to protest, but then seemed to realize that
it would save time in the long run to capitulate and get it
over with. She held the door open wide for them, “But
please wipe your feet on the mat. We already mopped
the kitchen floor.”
Feeling six years old again, they did as they were told
and followed her into the large kitchen. She invited
them to sit down at the old wooden table, but there
was no offer of coffee or cinnamon rolls today.
“You know what we found out there in that equip-
ment shed yesterday?” Dwight asked.
She nodded, her lips tight.
“That means he was killed by someone familiar with
this place. So I ask you again, Mrs. Samuelson. Who on
this farm thought they had a reason to kill Mr. Harris?”
“And I tell you again, Major Bryant, that I don’t
know. If it’s something to do with the farm, you need to
ask Sid Lomax. If it’s something to do with his personal
life, maybe you need to be asking that Smith woman.
Maybe she had a boyfriend who didn’t like her messing
around with him.”
“What about Mrs. Harris?”
“What about her? They split up, but that doesn’t mean
she hated him enough to do something like that.”
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MARGARET MARON
“When did you last see her?”
“Maybe Christmas?” The housekeeper got up and
used a paper towel to clean a smudge on the window
glass over the sink. With her back to them, she said,
“She brought some presents for the children here and
she always remembers me at Christmas, too.”
“She was the one who actually hired you here, wasn’t
she?”
“That’s right.” A fingerprint on the front of the
stainless-steel refrigerator seemed to need her attention,
too.
“Mrs. Samuelson.”
“I’m listening. I can listen and work, too.”
He got up and went over to look down into her face.
“She was here the day he went missing, wasn’t she?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“A bunch of people saw her.”
She took a deep breath and came back to the table.
“All right. Yes. She was here that Monday, but there is
no way under God’s blue sky that she could have done
that awful thing.”
“She came to the house?”
Mrs. Samuelson gave a reluctant nod.
“What time?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t in the house when I came
in that morning and I didn’t see his car, so I thought
he’d taken off. I figured she’d be coming over to bring
some stuff for the camp when the trucks came to move
most of the crew back to New Bern, and I reckon he
did, too. For all his big talk, she could always get the
best of him in an argument and anytime she was coming
to check up on things, he’d clear out.”
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She gestured to a door off the kitchen. “There’s a
little room in there with a television and a lounge chair
so I can take a rest without going out to my apartment.
I fixed lunch and then I went in to put my feet up for
a few minutes. Only I went to sleep. And when I woke
up, she was upstairs taking a shower.”
“She came all the way from New Bern to take a
shower?”
Mrs. Samuelson gave an impatient shake of her head.
“There was a mud puddle down by the camp. Had ice
across it, but it wasn’t solid and she backed into it ac-
cidentally and wound up sitting down in it. Got soaked
to the skin, she said. Cut her leg and her hand, too, so
she came over here and took a shower and changed into
one of his shirts and an old pair of jeans.”
“What did she do with her own clothes?”
“Took ’em home to wash, I reckon. They went out of
here in a garbage bag. And before you ask me, it was her
own shoes she went out in and they certainly weren’t
bloody.”
Dwight raised a skeptical eyebrow at Mrs. Samuelson’s
assertions. “Anybody see her take this tumble?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of the women helping
me?” She stood as if to go call them.
“In a minute,” Dwight said. “Your apartment. It’s
over the garage, you said?”
She nodded.
“So you would hear the door open and Mr. Harris’s
car start up?”
“If it was in the garage. A lot of times he parked
around by the side door.”
“Where you could see it from your windows?”
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MARGARET MARON
“If I was looking. If he was gone and I didn’t hear him
come in during the night, then I’d look out the window
first thing every morning to see whether I needed to
come over and start breakfast. There’s an intercom, too,
and sometimes he’d buzz me and say he wanted break-
fast earlier than usual.”
“So when’s the last time you heard or saw his car?”
She frowned in concentration, then shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Major Bryant. He came and went at all hours
and I just can’t fix it in my mind. All I can say is that
it wasn’t there Monday morning and I really did put it
down to Mrs. Harris coming. Now can I please get back
to my work?”
Dwight nodded. “One thing more though. Who did
you really work for, Mrs. Samuelson? Buck Harris or his
ex-wife?”
“He signed my paycheck,” she said promptly.
“But?”
She returned his gaze without answering.
“Is there a Mr. Samuelson? Or do you and Mrs. Harris
have that in common as well?”
Tight-lipped, the housekeeper stood up. “Which one
of those women you want to talk to first?”
Before he could answer, his pager went off and he im-
mediately called in. “Yeah, Faye?”
“Aren’t you out there at the Harris Farm?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a Sid Lomax screaming in my ear for you
to come. He says he’s out there in the field. They just
found a head.”
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C H A P T E R
26
Successful farmers do not break up a cart or so, and kill
a mule or so during each year, and then curse their crops
because the price is not high enough to pay for their extrava-
gance.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
% A clearly shaken Sid Lomax waited in his truck for
them at a cut through some woods that separated
one of the large fields from the other.
As Dwight stopped even with him, the farm manager
pulled the bill of his cap lower on his forehead. His
leathery face was pale beneath its tan and his only com-
ment was a terse, “Follow me,” as his tires dug off in the
soft dirt to lead them up a lane at the edge of the field.
Dwight put his truck in four-wheel drive and glanced
in his mirror. Denning had caught up with him and
Richards and Jamison were with him. She must have re-
alized that a car might mire down out here after all the
rain. They topped a small rise, then down a gentle slope
to where two tractors with heavy turning plows blocked
their initial view of a fence post at the far corner of the
field.
The treated post was approximately five feet high
235
MARGARET MARON
and about half as thick as a telephone pole. Several men
were clustered upwind from it. As Lomax and the depu-
ties got out of their vehicles, the men edged back and
they had a clear view. For a split second, looking at the
thing rammed down on the top of the post, Dwight was
reminded of a rotting jack-o’-lantern several days past
Halloween when the pumpkin head verged on collapse.
This head was worse—a thatch of graying hair, darkened
skin, empty eye sockets, and a ghastly array of grinning
teeth because most of the lips were gone as well.
Crows? Buzzards?
Blowflies buzzed and hummed in the warm afternoon
sun and a few early yellow jackets were there as well. A
thick rope of red ants snaked up one side of the post.
“Oh dear God in the morning!” Denning murmured
as he moved in with his camera. With his eye on the
viewfinder, he zoomed in on what was nailed to the
post almost exactly halfway between the grisly head and
the ground. “Was that his dick?”
If so, there was almost nothing left of it now except
where a nail held a flaccid strip of skin that fluttered in
the light spring breeze.
In the next hour, Dwight had called the sheriff in
Jones County, then sent two detectives down to start in-
terviewing the migrants who had been transferred over
to Harris Farm #3 between Kinston and New Bern. He
had pulled Raeford McLamb and Sam Dalton out of
Black Creek and they were now helping Jamison and a
translator question everyone who still worked here on
the Buckley place. Sid Lomax had volunteered his office
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HARD ROW
desk and his kitchen table for their use. He was under
the impression that Juan Santos could be trusted to help
translate accurately, “But hell, bo,” he told Dwight wea-
rily. “At this point, I don’t know who’s telling the truth
and who’s lying through his rotten teeth. It’s gotta be
one of ’em though, doesn’t it?”
“Somebody familiar with the farm, for sure,” Dwight
agreed and led Lomax through a retelling of how they
had discovered Buck Harris’s head.
“Between the cold and then the rain, we’re behind
schedule on the plowing. This field’s so sandy though,
the rain drains right through it and I thought it’d be
okay to finally get the tractors out here this afternoon.
First pass they made, Vazquez spotted it. Santos had
the walkie-talkie and as soon as he saw that post, he
called me. Ten minutes later, I was on the horn to 911.
I thought your people had already left. Man, was I glad
to hear they were still here and you were, too.”
Mayleen Richards had given Dwight the third set of
names that Lomax had run off for them and he held
them out to the farm manager now. “How ’bout you
save us some time and put a check mark by every name
that ever had words with Harris.”
“I’m telling you. None of ’em had that much to do
with him. Yeah, he’d come out in the fields once in a
while, plow a few rounds on the tractor, haul a truck-
load of tomatoes to the warehouse, but he didn’t speak
a word of their lingo. Harris was one of those who think
if people are going to come work in this country, it’s up
to them to learn English, not for him to have to speak
Spanish. He’d talk real loud to them. If they didn’t
understand enough to answer, then he didn’t bother
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MARGARET MARON
with them. Not that he did much, even with those that
could.”
“Like Juan Santos?”
“Nothing more than to ask how the work was going,
were the tomatoes ripening up on schedule, how bad
were the worms? I’ll be honest with you, Bryant. I don’t
think Harris thought of these people as fully human.
More like work animals. Just a couple of notches up
from horses or mules. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Harris
and OSHA, I believe he’d have worked them like mules
and stabled them like mules, too. The only time he re-
ally put his hand in for more than a day, though, was
last spring when my parents were out in California and
Dad had a heart attack so I had to fly out. I thought we
ought to bring somebody over from Kinston, but he
said he could handle it for a few days. My dad died, and
it was over a week before I could get back. He wasn’t
too happy about that, but he did keep everything on
schedule. God knows what actually went on. Santos
never said much, just that Mrs. Harris was out here and
they had a big fight about something. They were legally
separated by then, though.”
“You think he got on Santos’s ass about something
while you were gone?”
Lomax let out a long breath and settled his cap more
firmly on his head. He met Dwight’s eyes without blink-
ing. “You’re asking me if Santos could’ve done this.
Ol’ son, I don’t know anybody that could’ve done it.
Besides, that was almost a year ago. If Harris still had
a beef with him, he’d’ve fired him. And if Juan Santos
had a beef with him, I do believe he’d’ve quit or done
something about it long before this, don’t you? Who
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HARD ROW
has a hate this big that waits a year to get even? Besides,
I thought you had fingerprints.”
“We do,” Dwight conceded. “But we don’t have
comparison prints for everyone who ever walked across
this land. So tell me about Mrs. Harris?”
“What about her?”
“She get along with everybody?”
“She’s a hard-nosed businesswoman, if that’s what
you mean, but she treats her people fair. Sees that the
housing’s up to government standards, makes sure the
kids go to school. Expects value for her dollar, but
doesn’t forget that these are human beings, not work
animals. She used to work out in the fields when they
were first married, so she knows what it takes to make a
crop. Even better, she’s from the ‘trust ’em or bust ’em’
school of thought. You show that you know your job
and you’re doing it and she leaves you alone.”
“I hear she was out here that Monday when Harris
went missing. You see her?”
“Sure. She came over with the trucks to move the
workers to Farm Number Three. Trucks brought some
new furniture. Two new refrigerators. Well, new to
us. I think she buys everything at the Goodwill store.
Claims it helps them and upgrades us and I reckon she’s
right.”
“She ask about Harris, where he was?”
Lomax shook his head. “Ever since they separated,
it’s like he didn’t exist. She never mentioned him if
she could help it. She just took care of the things she
wanted done and didn’t worry if that’s what he wanted
or not.”
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MARGARET MARON
“I heard she sat down in a mud puddle around lunch-
time.”
“Yeah?” For a moment he almost smiled. “Didn’t
see it.”
“Hear about it?”
“No. Should I have?”
“The bosslady up to her butt in mud? I’d’ve thought
so.”
“We were pretty busy around then. Where’d it hap-
pen?”
“Somewhere around the camp’s what I heard.”
“Sorry. Maybe you should ask the women.”
“Good idea,” said Dwight, knowing that’s where
Mayleen Richards was at the moment, taking advantage
of the men being tied up here for a while.
But when Richards rejoined them, she had nothing to
confirm or deny the mud puddle story. “The women say
they saw her in the morning when she came with new re-
frigerators for the married quarters and they had to empty
the old ones, which were on their last legs. She asked about
the children and about their health. She had picked up a
couple of bilingual schoolbooks for the women, but after
that they didn’t see her again.”
It was nearing four before they were finished with all
the statements. Denning had bagged the head and what
was left of Harris’s penis. He stopped by the farm man-
ager’s place to tell them that he was taking the remains
over to Chapel Hill. “Don’t know if y’all noticed or not,
but there was a knotted bloody rag around the fence post
where it caught on the wire. Looks to me like it could’ve
been a gag that slipped down when the crows got at him.
Would explain why nobody heard him scream. But unless
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there’s a bullet hole I’m not seeing in this head, I don’t
know that it’ll tell the ME anything he didn’t already
know but I guess we ought to go through all the mo-
tions.”
Dwight nodded. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard any-
thing back on those fingerprints yet?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“What about Santos or Sanaugustin?”
“Yessir. I did a quick and dirty on the men. No match.
Haven’t had a chance to compare the prints on the axe
with the women’s prints yet. I can let you know by in
the morning though.”
“Good.”
McLamb and Dalton volunteered to go back to Black
Creek to interview Mrs. Stone and her son. “See if we
can’t pick up a lead from them.”
“Fine,” Dwight said. “I’ll authorize the overtime.”
Rather than go all the way back to Dobbs himself,
he called Bo and brought the sheriff up to date, then
headed off to pick up his son.
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C H A P T E R
27
When a young man gets married, and the little chaps come
along according to nature, he ought to get on a farm to
raise them.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Tuesday Night, March 7
% That night was a bar association dinner in Makely,
and Portland and I drove down together. Avery
had opted to skip the dinner and stay home with his
daughter, but we still left late because she had to nurse
little Carolyn first.
Avery asked me about the rumors flying around the
courthouse that they’d found Buck Harris’s head stuck
on a fence post, but I didn’t get a chance to call Dwight
till after I’d adjourned at five-fifteen and I was afraid I
might interrupt the talk he planned to have with Cal.
Satisfying my curiosity could wait. That head wasn’t
going anywhere.
Except maybe over to the ME’s office in Chapel Hill.
“You’re not making Dwight take sides, are you?”
Portland asked when we were finally in the car and I had
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told her a little about the situation with Cal. She was
totally thrilled when I married Dwight, and she worries
that I’m going to mess up if I’m not careful.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Because he may be crazy about you, but Cal’s his
son.”
“Like I need a lecture on this? After four years of
family court? After watching Kidd Chapin’s daughter
make him choose between her and me? Hell, Por! I may
be dumb, but I’m not stupid. Cal and I got along just
fine before Jonna died. I’m pretty sure he liked me back
then and he’ll probably like me again once he settles
in. It’s a rough time for him, a lot of adjustments, but
I don’t think he wants to split Dwight and me up. He’s
not a conniver like Amber. Besides, boys don’t usually
think like that. My brothers and their sons have always
been pretty easy to read, even when they were getting
ready to bend the rules or break the law. Unlike my
nieces. Girls are out there plotting three moves ahead.
Remember?”
“Oh, sugar!” she said with a grin, and I knew she
was recalling some of the stuff we used to get into, the
way we could manipulate teachers and boyfriends from
kindergarten on.
She pulled out a pack of Life Savers, the latest weapon
in her diet arsenal and offered me one. The clean smell
of peppermint filled the car.
“Have you talked to your friend Flame since Buck
Harris’s body was identified?” I asked.
“Yeah, she stopped by for coffee this afternoon on her
way back to Wilmington. She said there was no reason
for her to stay, that his ex-wife and daughter certainly
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MARGARET MARON
wouldn’t save her a seat at any memorial service and she
didn’t want to add to his daughter’s grief.”
“She okay herself?”
“Not right now, but she will be. I’m not going to
say she didn’t really love him, but I’m sure his bank ac-
count helped, so I doubt if her heart’s completely bro-
ken. Besides, Flame’s always known when to cut her
losses.”
“Not a total loss, though, is it?” I said as I dimmed
my lights for an oncoming car.
“Reid told her she was in the will. She didn’t say for
how much though.”
“Dwight kicked me out of his office before I could
get Reid to tell me, but remember when he took your
umbrella this morning?”
“And did not leave it at the office, the bastard.”
“Well, just before you got there, when he was trying
to borrow one from me, he said she was down for half
a million.”
“Interesting. We had lunch last week and she was
worried about the mortgage on her B-and-B. A half-
million sure makes a nice consolation prize.”
“Also makes a motive for murder.”
“No way!” Portland protested. But she mulled it over
as I pulled out to pass a slow-moving pickup. “Dwight
got her in his range finder?”
“Probably. Along with Mrs. Harris and everybody on
the farm, I should think. Not that he tells me every-
thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she jeered. “I don’t suppose he’s said
anything about Karen Braswell’s place getting shot
up?”
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HARD ROW
“Nope. But I haven’t really talked to him since this
morning and that only happened last night, right?”
“Well, when you do, would you please stress that this
guy’s gone over the edge? Bo promised to tell his peo-
ple to be on the lookout in her neighborhood and so
did Lonnie Revell, for what that’s worth.”
Lonnie Revell is Dobbs’s chief of police. Nice guy but
not the brightest star in the town’s constellation.
I repeated what Dwight had said about hurricanes
and the need to head for high ground when you know
one’s on the way.
“Moving in with her mother’s not really high ground,
but with a little luck, he’ll do something to get himself
arrested again before he finds out that’s where she is. I
just hope you’ll give him a couple of years next time.”
“Hey, no ex parte talk here, okay?”
“What’s ex parte? You’ve already heard his case and
if there is a next time, there’s not a judge in the district
who could possibly be unaware of the situation unless
it’s Harrison Hobart and isn’t that old dinosaur ever
going to turn seventy-two?”
Seventy-two’s the mandatory retirement age and
it looked like he was going to hang on till the end.
Hobart’s a throwback to an earlier age when men were
men and their women kept silent. Not only in church
but everywhere else if he’d had his way. He had tried to
keep female attorneys from wearing slacks in his court-
room, and whenever I had to argue a case before him,
he never failed to lecture me that skirts were the only
attire proper for the courtroom.
“If that’s true,” I had said sweetly, gesturing to our
district attorney who sat at the prosecution’s table and
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MARGARET MARON
tried not to grin, “then the day Mr. Woodall comes to
court in a skirt, I’ll wear one, too.”
Hobart had threatened me with contempt, but the
next day every woman in the courthouse showed up in
pants, even the clerks who didn’t particularly like me
but who liked being lectured on dress and decorum
even less. He had been censured more than once and
his last one came when he informed the jury that the
defendant might not be sitting there if her husband had
taken a strap to her backside once in a while.
“I think his birthday’s this spring,” Portland said as
I parked in front of the restaurant on the north edge of
Makely.
Because of our late start, most of the tables were
filled by the time we paid our money and looked for
seats. And wouldn’t you know it? The only table with
two empty chairs had Harrison Hobart at it. It was a
no-brainer.
We split up.
Portland caught a ride back to Dobbs with Reid, so
I headed straight home after the dinner and got there a
little before ten. Both my guys were in bed, but only Cal
was asleep. Dwight was watching the early news, but he
turned it off and came out to the kitchen for a glass of
milk and the last of the chocolate chip cookies while I
reheated a cup of coffee left over from the morning.
I told him about the dinner and Portland’s comments
about Flame Smith. “Is she a suspect?”
“Probably not. She gave me the names of people who
saw her down in Wilmington during the three days after
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Harris was last seen. I’ve got a query in with the sheriff
down there. He said he’d check her statement for me.”
“I hear you finally found the head?”
“Yeah. Stuck on a fence post at the back of one of the
fields out there, so it’s definitely someone familiar with
the place.”
“Get anything out of that migrant who knew Harris
was dead?” I asked.
“He says he stumbled into that empty shed by mis-
take, and seeing all that blood and gore’s what made
him go looking for a quick high on Saturday.”
“But?” I asked, hearing something more in his
voice.
“Oh hell, Deb’rah. I don’t know. I got the feeling that
he was holding something back, but if he ever had any
real dealings with Harris, no one seems to know about
it. The only other worker still there that had much to
do with him is Sanaugustin’s buddy Juan Santos. Both
of ’em are married. Both have kids. The farm manager,
Sid Lomax, thinks Santos and Harris might have had a
run-in last spring when he had to fly out to California
and Harris came in to run things. But that was almost a
year ago. Besides, it sounds like Harris’s real run-in was
with his wife.”
“Was he maybe trying to exercise his droit de seigneur
with one of the migrant women?”
“What’s that?”
“The privilege of ownership.”
“Like a plantation owner with his female slaves?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, his housekeeper did say he slept with the wife
of a different worker, but they moved to the farm below
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MARGARET MARON
Kinston months ago. I suppose he could have tried it
with one of the other women, although the housekeeper
says he was pretty much saving it for Flame Smith these
last few months.” He broke a cookie in half, dunked it
in his milk, then savored the soft sweetness. “You make
a mean cookie, Mrs. Bryant.”
“Why thank you, Major.” Then, just to make sure, I
said, “You really don’t mind that I haven’t changed my
name professionally, do you?”
He smiled and glanced at my left hand. “Not as long
as that ring stays on your finger.”
“What about Mrs. Harris?” I asked since he was in a
talkative mood. “Is she still wearing a ring?”
“Who knows? If we can’t pin down the time of death,
she may claim she’s a widow and not an ex. She’s sched-
uled to come in tomorrow morning.” He told me about
the tumble she supposedly took in a mud puddle the
Monday after Harris was last seen. “Only nobody actu-
ally saw her do it and the housekeeper says she bundled
her clothes up in a garbage bag and borrowed some of
his things to wear back to New Bern.”
“Whoa!” I said. “She came in the house and took
a shower and no one saw if it really was mud on her
clothes?”
“Mrs. Samuelson says there was no blood on her
sneakers, just a little mud. If she was going to lie for the
bosslady, why stop at sneakers?”
“Unless . . .” I said slowly.
“Unless what?”
“I keep a second pair of old shoes in the trunk of my
car,” I reminded him. “To save my good ones if it’s
mucky or I have to walk on soft dirt.”
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HARD ROW
“I’ll keep that in mind when I talk to her tomor-
row.”
“Speaking of talks, how did it go with Cal tonight?”
He shook his head. “It didn’t. First Haywood was
here to drop off a load of firewood to get us through
April. Then Mr. Kezzie came by for a few minutes with
some extra cabbage plants for our garden—”
“We have a garden?” I teased.
“We do now. I mentioned to Seth that it’d be nice to
grow tomatoes, so he plowed us a few short rows beside
the blueberry bushes and somebody must’ve told Doris
you were out tonight because she called up and insisted
that Cal and I had to go over there and eat with her and
Robert. That woman never takes no for an answer, does
she?”
He sounded so exasperated, I had to laugh.
“Then coming home in the truck, I was just fixing
to start and damned if McLamb didn’t pick that time
to call and report his conversation with Mitchiner’s
daughter and grandson. By the time we got back to the
house, it was bedtime and when I went in to say good
night, he had his head under his pillow, trying not to let
me hear him crying.”
“Over Jonna?” I said sympathetically.
Dwight nodded. “I just didn’t have the heart to lay
anything else on him right then.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.” I ached for Cal. For Dwight,
too, who has to watch his son grieve for something that
can never be made right.
He drained his glass and carried it over to the dish-
washer, along with my now-empty coffee cup. I switched
off the kitchen light and followed him to our bedroom.
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MARGARET MARON
“I don’t suppose McLamb got much out of the
Mitchiner family?”
“Not really,” he said as we undressed and got ready
for bed. “One interesting thing though. He said that the
daughter and the grandson sort of got into it for a min-
ute about the lawsuit. The boy wants her to drop it.”
“Really?”
“McLamb said he all but accused her of wanting to
profit by his grandfather’s death and that she got pretty
defensive.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he’s going to check out her alibi tomorrow.
She was supposed to be working and the kid had her car
until it was time to pick her up after work, but since we
don’t know precisely when Mitchiner went missing, it’s
possible that she dropped the boy off somewhere and
went on to the nursing home. Here, need some help
with that?”
I had pulled my sweater over my head and a lock of
hair was caught in the back zipper.
He gently worked it free and then one thing led to
another.
As it usually does.
(Ping!)
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C H A P T E R
28
For us, it has truly seemed that each day dawned upon a
change.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
% Cal’s emotional meltdown the night before must
have cleared his system because he was in a cheer-
ful mood the next morning and no longer seemed to be
resentful about missing Monday night’s game. He let
Bandit out for his morning run without being asked
and only had to be reminded once to take off his Canes
cap at the table. He laid a pad and pencil beside his ce-
real bowl and asked me to tell him the names of all my
brothers, beginning with Robert—“He said I could call
them Uncle Robert and Aunt Doris”—so that he could
write them down and start getting them straight.
“They could be a whole baseball team with two relief
pitchers,” he marveled and was intrigued to hear that
one of the little twins—Adam—lived in California. “Is
he near Disneyland? Could we go visit him sometime?”
It was sunshine after rain.
I was due for an oil change, so I left when he and
Dwight went to meet the schoolbus and drove over to
leave my car at Jimmy White’s. Jimmy’s been my mechanic
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MARGARET MARON
ever since I took the curve in front of his garage too fast
shortly after getting my driver’s license a million years
ago. He pulled it out of the ditch, replaced the front
fender, and let me pay him on time without telling my
parents, although he did threaten to tell his uncle who
was a state trooper if I didn’t take my foot off the gas
pedal once in a while. Gray-haired now and starting to
slow down a little, he’s turning more and more of the
heavy work over to his son James. Back then, it was
just Jimmy and one bay. Today it was Jimmy, James,
and two employees and the one bay had become three.
Instead of the old oil-stained denim coveralls they used
to wear, all four of them sported crisp blue shirts that
they put on fresh each morning and sent out to be laun-
dered every week.
After so much rain, the air was washed clean and
fluffy white clouds drifted across a clear blue sky. A soft
spring breeze ruffled my hair as we stood in the sunlit
yard waiting for Dwight to pick me up. I accepted their
offer of a cup of coffee and we talked about the changes
in the neighborhood and of all the new people that had
moved in and wanted him to service their cars with-
out trying to build a relationship. “Like, just because
they got the cash money, they think they’re gonna get
moved to the front of the line ahead of people that’s
been here all along.”
James, who had graduated from high school a couple
of years behind me, said, “What gets me hot though’s
when they don’t trust us. They’ll want us to give the
car a tune-up and if we say we had to replace one of the
belts, they’ll want to see it and half the time they act
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HARD ROW
like they think we cut it so we could charge ’em for a
new one.”
Jimmy snorted. “That’s when we tell them they need
to go find theirselves a new mechanic.”
I glanced at all the cars lined up around the yard and
said, “Looks like you’ve got more work than you can
handle anyhow.”
He nodded with satisfaction. “I’m just glad I listened
to you and bought them two acres next door and let you
do all that paperwork about the zoning. We’re gonna
break ground next month, finally build that fancy new
garage James here’s been planning and we probably
couldn’t do it if we were starting fresh today. Not with
all the big money houses going in on this road.”
I had handled some of their legal matters before I
ran for judge. Seven years ago, Jimmy hadn’t seen the
need to have his property legally zoned for business.
He’d run a messy, sprawling garage out there in what
used to be the middle of nowhere for twenty-five years
and he’d expected to run it for twenty-five more. It was
the typical rural land owner’s mind-set: “It’s my land
and I can do what I want with it.” But when the plan-
ning commission started getting serious about zoning,
I had encouraged Jimmy to get a proper business per-
mit so that he could expand if he wanted to without the
limitations often imposed on businesses that have been
grandfathered in. I’m not saying the planning commis-
sion takes race into consideration, but a lot of black-
owned shops like this one have either been denied the
right to expand or have been zoned out of existence in
the last three or four years.
“We’ll put a berm in front, plant it with trees and
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MARGARET MARON
evergreen bushes so you can’t see in from the road,”
said James. “There’s a Mexican across the branch with a
nursery that does landscaping. Diaz. We’re gonna trade
work. Make it look pretty. Enough folks know we’re
here that we don’t need to put up but just a little teeny
sign.”
“Now don’t y’all get so upscale you can’t take care of
my car,” I said as Dwight turned into their drive.
Jimmy laughed. “Girl, anytime you need a new fender,
I’ll fix you up. ’Course, now that you went and married
Dwight, I reckon you don’t drive too fast no more.”
“You think?” said Dwight who’d rolled down his win-
dow in time to hear Jimmy’s last remark. “I’m gonna
have to write her up myself to slow her down.”
James opened the passenger door for me and as I
stepped up to get in, his comment about the nursery
finally registered. “Diaz,” I said. “Miguel Diaz?”
“Mike Diaz, yes,” James said. “You know him?”
“We’ve met. I just didn’t realize his nursery was
nearby.”
“Just across the branch. They’ve made ’em a right
nice place over there.”
Jimmy promised that my car would be ready by mid-
afternoon and as we headed for Dobbs, I said, “Mike
Diaz, Dwight.”
“Who’s he?”
“Mayleen Richards’s new boyfriend, according to
Faye Myers.”
“Yeah? How do you know him?”
“He came to court last week to speak for that guy
that took a tractor and plowed up a stretch of yards,
remember? Back in January?”
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HARD ROW
Dwight shook his head. With all the violent crimes he
had to deal with, he misses a lot of the lesser ones that
make it to my courtroom.
“I thought I told you about him. Palmez or Palmirez
or something like that. One of my freaky Friday cases.”
“You told me about the guy who tried to steal one of
the old lampposts off the town commons and how Dr.
Allred ticketed a man who parked at a handicap spot
without a tag and then let a three-legged dog run free.
I don’t remember a tractor.”
I briefly recapped. “Diaz took him on at the nursery
after he got fired from wherever he stole the tractor and
he promised to see that the damages were repaired. I
forget if I gave the guy a fine or a suspended sentence.
I’d have to look it up. Anyhow, when Faye was telling
me about Mayleen’s new boyfriend, she said I’d met
him and that this Mike Diaz was the one.”
“Diaz,” Dwight said reflectively. “Why’s that name
seem familiar?”
“Faye said Mayleen met him when she was working a
case back in January.”
“That’s right. I remember seeing his name on one of
the reports she filed. He had some sort of connection
to J.D. Rouse’s wife.” Rouse was a rounder whose free-
wheeling arrogance had gotten him shot. “So Richards
is hooked up with him?”
“According to Faye she is. Remember?” I said smugly.
“I told you she was looking different.”
“Is this where I have to listen to you brag about femi-
nine intuition?” he groaned.
I laughed.
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MARGARET MARON
“So what does your day look like?” he asked. “You
gonna be able to cut out before five?”
“Unless something unexpected comes up, this could
be a light day. Four of the cases I was supposed to hear
today settled yesterday afternoon and I have good vibes
about another one, so I may be ready to roll by four.
You going to leave on time?”
“I sure hope so. Robert had some seed potatoes left
over. It’s getting a little late to plant them but—”
“Potatoes? And cabbages yesterday? I thought you
were just going to tend a few tomato plants.”
“Yeah, but I forgot how little kids love to scratch
around and find potatoes.”
I patted his arm. “Big kids, too, right?”
He gave a sheepish nod.
Faye Myers was coming on duty when we entered the
basement lobby, so I said I’d catch up with him later
and stopped to chat. There had been a bad wreck last
night, she told me. Two highschool girls killed outright
and another in serious condition at Dobbs Memorial
Hospital. Alcohol and no seatbelts were thought to be
factors.
They were from the eastern part of the county and
unknown to me, but I could still imagine the grief their
families were feeling today. That sort of news always
gives me a catch in my throat until I hear the names and
can breathe again, knowing it’s not any of my nieces or
nephews. Thank God, it’ll be another eight years be-
fore we have to worry about Cal behind the wheel of a
car. Dwight’s already told me that Cal’s first car’s going
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to be a big heavy clunker, an old Grand Marquis or a
Crown Victoria. He keeps saying that he wants a lot
of steel between his son and another car until he’s had
four or five years of experience. “No way am I handing
a sixteen-year-old the keys to a candy-red sports car,”
he says.
We’ll see. I remember the T-Bird I’d wheedled out of
Mother and Daddy. The exhilaration of empowerment.
Free to hang with my friends, to cruise the streets of
Cotton Grove on the weekends, or sneak off to the lake
with Portland. I guess my brothers had given them so
much grief when they first got wheels that they didn’t
realize girls would take just as many chances. As long as
we met their curfews, we were considered responsible
drivers.
Faye leaned closer and I was suddenly awash with a
feeling of déjà vu as she lowered her voice and said,
“I might not ought to be telling this, but Flip said he
almost got high himself from the smell of beer in that
car when he pulled them out. He says all three could’ve
blown a ten or twelve.”
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C H A P T E R
29
With ideas of false economy, some farmers employ only about
one-half the hired help that is necessary to perform the work
in the proper time and manner and by working this force to
the utmost, early and late, they endeavor to accomplish all
the work for the season at a much less expense than would
ordinarily be involved in accomplishing it.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Dwight Bryant
Wednesday Morning, March 8
% Wearing one of his trademark bow ties—today’s
had little American flags on a blue background—
and a starched blue shirt, Pete Taylor appeared in
Dwight’s doorway promptly at nine and held it open
for his client and a younger woman. “Major Bryant?
Detective Richards? This is Mrs. Harris and her daugh-
ter, Mrs. Hochmann.”
Dwight and Mayleen Richards immediately stood to
welcome them.
Mrs. Harris was what kind-hearted people tactfully
call a “right good-sized woman.” She was easily five-
ten, solidly built, with a broad and weathered face and a
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HARD ROW
handshake as strong as most men’s. She wore a maroon
tailored suit that looked expensive but did little to flat-
ter or hide the extra pounds on her frame. Her wavy
hair was cut short and was jet black, except where the
roots were showing a lot of salt and not much pepper.
Her large hazel eyes were her best feature.
Shrewd eyes, too, thought Dwight as he watched her
glance around his office, taking in his awards and com-
mendations, appraising his deputy. Eyes that didn’t miss
a trick.
Her daughter appeared to be in her late twenties. She
was equally tall and big-boned, but so thin as to almost
appear gaunt. Unlike her mother, her eyes were an in-
determinate color, set deep in their sockets, and her
cheekbones stood out in relief. Her dark hair was pulled
straight back from her face in a single braid that fell half-
way down her back. No jewelry except for a loose gold
band on her left hand. Her black pantsuit looked like
something that had been bought at a thrift store. Not
exactly the picture of a New York heiress now worth at
least three million, he thought. More like a nun who
had taken a vow of poverty. He remembered what Mrs.
Samuelson had said about her concern for the less
fortunate since her husband’s death.
“Thank you for coming,” Dwight said after they were
all seated and had declined coffee or tea. He offered
condolences to both women and set a mini-recorder on
the desk.
“This is strictly informal,” he told them, “and any
time you want me to turn it off, just ask.”
“Now,” said Mrs. Harris.
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MARGARET MARON
The daughter started to say something, then shrugged
and leaned back in her chair.
“As you wish,” Dwight said. He switched it off and
pulled out a legal pad instead. After noting the day’s
date, he addressed the younger woman.
“I don’t want to upset you, Mrs. Hochmann, but do
you know what was done to your father?”
“That he was dismembered and his parts dumped
from one end of Ward Dairy Road to the other?” Her
eyes filled, but her voice was steady. “Yes. Mr. Taylor
says that everything’s been found now?”
“All except one arm, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve been in touch with the medical examiner’s of-
fice,” said Pete Taylor. “They’ll release his body for
burial this afternoon.”
“But they won’t tell us when he died,” Mrs. Harris
said. Frustration smoldered in her tone. “All they’ll say
is sometime between the afternoon of Sunday the nine-
teenth and Wednesday the twenty-second. That’s not
good enough, Major Bryant.”
“What Mrs. Harris means,” Pete Taylor interposed,
“is that we don’t know whether or not he died before
their divorce was final.”
“I know,” Dwight said. “And I’m sorry you’ve been
left hanging, ma’am. Despite all those forensic programs
on television, unless we can find a witness or the killer
confesses, there’s no way to say with pinpoint accuracy
when it happened. I understand you were out on the
farm that Monday morning? The twentieth?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see him that day?”
“No.”
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HARD ROW
“When did you last see or speak to him?”
“I have no idea. If we needed to communicate, it was
either through our attorneys or by email. I don’t think
we spoke directly to each other in almost a year.”
“Yet you went out to the farm where he was stay-
ing?”
“Until everything is divided, that farm is as much
mine as his and it’s my right to see that our workers are
properly housed and treated.”
“Does that mean Mr. Harris mistreated them?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t you?”
She glared at him and clamped her lips tight.
“Who hated him enough to kill him like that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Any mistreatment of the workers?”
“Not that I heard anything about and I believe I
would have. The crew chief, Juan Santos, knows their
rights. Besides, we only keep a skeleton crew during the
winter and they’re free to hire out as day laborers when
things are slow.”
“I understand that Harris Farms was cited for an
OSHA violation six years ago?”
Her hazel eyes narrowed.
“I believe you were fined a couple of thousand dol-
lars?”
She gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Who was responsible for the violation? You or Mr.
Harris?”
There was no answer and she met his steady gaze
without blinking.
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MARGARET MARON
Pete Taylor stirred uneasily, but it was the daughter
who caved.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Mother! Tell him.” She turned
to Dwight. “I loved my dad, Major Bryant, even though
I hated the way he ran the farms. But OSHA and EPA
and yes, law people like you not only let him get away
with it, it’s as if you almost encouraged him to break
the laws.”
“Susan!” her mother said sharply.
“No, Mother. I’m through biting my tongue. From
now on I’m going to speak the truth. You think I don’t
know the real cost of growing a bushel of tomatoes?
That I don’t know how Harris Farms shows such a good
profit year after year?”
“Harris Farms sent you to school, miss! Gave you an
education that lets you look down on your own par-
ents.”
“Not you, Mother.” She touched her mother’s hand.
“Never you. I know you did your best.”
She turned back to Dwight. “Growers like my dad
cut against the market every way they can. They ignore
the warning labels on chemicals, they ignore phony
social security numbers, they turn a blind eye to how
labor contractors take advantage of their people, and
they don’t give a damn about a migrant’s living con-
ditions or whether or not the children are in school.
My mother does. When Harris Farms finally got cited,
Mother got involved. She checks the paperwork and
makes sure everyone’s documented, she doesn’t let lit-
tle kids work in the fields, and she made Dad get rid
of those squalid trailers he had down there in the back
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fields of the Buckley place. No decent plumbing and no
place to wash off the pesticides. My mother—”
“Your mother’s a bleeding-heart saint,” Mrs. Harris
said sarcastically.
“Well, you are, compared to Dad.”
“Only because it’s cheaper in the long run to do the
right thing,” her mother said gruffly. “It’s all dollars
and cents. I don’t want us shut down or slapped with a
big fine.”
“Slapped is the right word,” Susan Hochmann told
Dwight. “There aren’t enough inspectors to check out
all the camps and farms and follow a case through the
courts, so a slap on the wrist was all they got. A puny
two-thousand-dollar fine. Nothing to really hurt.”
“You don’t know that’s where it would stop next
time,” said Mrs. Harris, “and I don’t want to find out. I
don’t want to wake up and see Harris Farms all over the
newspapers and television like Ag-Mart. I don’t want
anybody making us an example. If playing by the rules
or decent plumbing or stoves that work and refriger-
ators that actually keep food cold can keep us out of
court, then it’s worth the few extra dollars.”
“But your husband felt differently?” Dwight asked.
“He grew up poor. We both did. And we both worked
hard in the early days. Out there in the fields rain or
shine, whether it was hot or cold, doing what had to be
done to plant and plow and stake and harvest. Wouldn’t
you think he could’ve remembered what it was like to
walk in those shoes? Instead, he griped that I was cod-
dling them. I finally had enough and when that little
redheaded bitch let him stick his—”
She caught herself before uttering the crude words
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MARGARET MARON
that were on the tip of her tongue. “That’s when I told
him I was through, that I was getting my own lawyer.
And damned if he didn’t file papers first so that I’ve had
to come to court in Dobbs instead of doing it down in
New Bern.”
She sat back in her chair and pursed her lips while
Dwight made quick notes on the legal pad.
“What about you, Mrs. Hochmann?” he said. “When
did you last speak to your father?”
“Valentine’s Day,” she said promptly. “He didn’t like
phones, but he always sent me roses and he called that
evening.”
“Was he worried about anything?”
“Worried that someone was going to . . . to—” She
could not bring herself to say the words and sat there
mutely, shaking her head.
“Mrs. Harris, are you absolutely certain you didn’t
see your husband on that Monday?”
“I’m certain.”
“In fact, you tried to avoid all contact with him,
right?”
“Right.”
“Yet you went into his house that day and took a
shower and left wearing some of his clothes.”
“Yes,” she said.
Susan Hochmann’s head immediately swung around
to look at her mother quizzically.
“Would you like to say why?”
Clearly she did not.
“Mother?”
“Oh, for pete’s sake, Susan! Don’t look at me like
that. I did not kill Buck and then go sluice his blood
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off me. I fell in a stupid mud puddle and wrecked the
clothes I was wearing. Of course I went in and took a
shower. I knew he wouldn’t be there. He was afraid to
look me in the eye.”
“Why?” asked Mayleen Richards.
Until now, the deputy had sat so quietly that the oth-
ers had almost forgotten that she was in the room.
“I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Harris.
“Everyone says he was a big man with a short fuse
and a strong will. Why was he afraid of you?”
“I—I didn’t mean it like that.” For the first time, her
voice faltered, but she made a quick recovery. “It was
because I could always get the best of him when we ar-
gued. That’s all.”
“The last time you spoke to him was last spring, you
said?” asked Dwight.
“That’s right.”
“People say you two had a huge fight then. What was
that about?”
Mrs. Harris stood up and looked down at Pete Taylor.
“Are we done here?”
Her daughter stood, too, a puzzled look on her face.
“Mother?”
“It had nothing to do with why he was killed,” she
said.
“Was it over his girlfriend?”
“I don’t want to talk about that here, Susan,” she
said and swept from the room.
Susan Hochmann turned to the two deputies with
a helpless shrug. “We’ll be staying at Dad’s place for a
couple of nights. Please call me if you learn anything
else.”
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MARGARET MARON
“I will,” said Dwight. “And Mrs. Hochmann?”
“Yes?”
“I hope you’ll call me if you learn anything we should
know.”
She nodded and hurried after her mother. Dwight
looked at Richards. “What do you think?”
“I think I ought to go back to that migrant camp and
see if I can’t find out exactly what the Harrises fought
about last spring.”
“Not Flame Smith,” Dwight agreed. “Take Jamison
with you.”
“Is he really going to resign?” Richards asked.
Dwight sighed. “ ’Fraid so.”
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C H A P T E R
30
It is only from the record of our mistakes in the past that
wisdom can ever be derived to lead us to success in the
future.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Wednesday Afternoon, March 8
% The stars were in alignment that day. It wasn’t
simply one more case that settled, it was two. I
caught up with all my paperwork and even heard one of
Luther Parker’s cases—a couple of teenage boys drag
racing after school—before wandering downstairs to
meet Dwight around three-thirty.
Bo Poole was seated in Dwight’s office and looked
particularly sharp in a dark suit, white shirt, and somber
tie.
“Hey, Bo,” I said. “Whose funeral?”
He grinned and shook his head at Dwight. “You got
my sympathy, son. She don’t miss a thing, does she?”
“I better plead the fifth,” Dwight said, smiling at me.
“So who died?” I asked again. “Anybody I know?”
“They buried poor ol’ Fred Mitchiner this afternoon
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MARGARET MARON
and I figured I ought to go and pay my respects. He’s
the one showed me how to skin a mink when I wasn’t
knee-high to a grasshopper and I feel real bad that we
didn’t find him before he drowned in the creek.”
“Surely his family doesn’t blame you for that?”
“Well, I think they do, a little. His daughter does,
anyhow. I went by the house afterwards. Thought I’d
give her a chance to vent on me. Figure this department
owes her that much. McLamb and Dalton were out
there yesterday, she said. They’d told her about how
somebody cut his hand loose and moved it and she was
still pretty hot and bothered about that, as well.”
“Poor Bo,” I said sympathetically. “I guess her son
gave you an earful, too. I hear he was over there faith-
fully.”
“Ennis? Naw. He’s a good kid. I think he’s just glad
to have it over with. In fact, I think he’s about talked
Lessie out of suing the rest home.”
“Yeah, that’s what McLamb told me,” said Dwight
as he gathered up some papers and stuck them in a file
folder. “That the staff had been good to his grandfather
and he didn’t think they ought to be penalized for the
old man’s death.”
Bo said, “Even when Miz Stone told him that it
was the insurance company that would pay, he said it
wouldn’t be right to take money when God had an-
swered her prayers.”
“God?” I asked.
“Evidently she was on her knees every night since
he wandered off, praying to God to let her find out
what happened to him, so that she could rest easy. If
she turned around and asked for money, too, it’d be like
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spitting in God’s eye, he told her. Not many teenage
boys think like that these days.”
“No,” I said, remembering those boys I’d just had in
my courtroom. Not bad kids, but kids. Kids with shiny
new drivers’ licenses who think they’re going to live for-
ever because they never think beyond the immediate
and—
“Oh,” I said.
“What?” said Dwight.
“The grandson.”
“Huh?”
“He took his grandfather out that day,” I said. “And
everybody assumes he brought the old guy back be-
cause he always did. But did anyone actually see him?”
Bo frowned and leaned back in his chair.
“You saying he killed his own grandfather?” Dwight
asked skeptically.
“No, I’m not saying that. But somebody did move
that hand so y’all would backtrack on the creek and find
his body, right? Somebody who wanted him found but
didn’t want to admit how he got there? Could it have
been the boy?”
Bo thought about it a minute, then gave a slow nod.
“You know something, Dwight? That makes as much
sense as anything else we’ve heard. Could be he’s feel-
ing guilty and that’s the real reason he doesn’t want
blood money.” He hoisted himself out of the chair with
a sigh. “Reckon I’d better go back and catch him while
he’s still strung out from the funeral. See if I can’t find
out what really happened.”
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C H A P T E R
31
It is a maxim of the law, based upon common sense and ex-
perience, that for every wrong there is a remedy, but before
the remedy can be applied, the cause from whence the evil
springs must be definitely ascertained.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Sheriff Bowman Poole
Wednesday Afternoon, March 8
% Friends from Mrs. Stone’s church were still at the
house when Bo Poole returned and it was not dif-
ficult for him to cut young Ennis Stone out of the
crowd. “I just want him to retrace the route that last
day he took his granddaddy out,” he told her. “Maybe
it’ll help him remember something we can use. We
won’t be gone long.”
The boy looked apprehensive but got in the sheriff ’s
van without protest.
“Let’s see now,” said Bo. “You picked him up after
school, right?”
“Yessir. About three-thirty.”
“And took him where?”
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“To Sparky’s. For a cheeseburger. He loved cheese-
burgers.”
“Where’s this Sparky’s?”
Ennis directed him to a fast-food joint on the south
side of Black Creek. As Bo suspected, it was only a short
distance from the footpath that led down to the creek.
He pulled into the parking lot and said, “Then
what?”
The boy shrugged. “Then I took him back to Sunset
Meadows.”
“And helped him lie down for a rest?”
“Yessir.” He pointed down the street. “That’s the
way we went.”
But Bo did not move the car. Instead, he looked back
at Sparky’s. It seemed to be a popular hangout. There
were video games at one end and teenagers came and
went. A couple of girls waved to Ennis, but he barely
acknowledged them.
“Friends of yours?”
He nodded.
After a minute, Bo shifted from neutral and drove
down the street, but instead of turning left, back into
town, he turned right and continued on till he reached
the cable where the street dead-ended.
“Your granddaddy used to run a trapline along the
creek down there. Did you know that?”
“Yessir.” It was barely a whisper.
Bo switched off the engine and turned to look at the
boy, who seemed to shrink against the door.
“You want to tell me what really happened, Ennis?”
“I told you. I got him a cheeseburger and then I took
him back. I don’t know what happened after that.”
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MARGARET MARON
“Yes, you do,” Bo said gently.
The boy’s brown eyes dropped before that steady
gaze and tears welled up in them.
“He liked to sit and watch the water,” he said, his
voice choked with grief. “He’d sit there for hours if I’d
let him. Just sit and hum and watch the water. I’d get us
a cheeseburger and walk down to where there was a log
to sit on and we’d eat our burgers and he’d start hum-
ming. He loved it. Was like he was watching television
or something. Once he started humming, he could sit
all day. He’d even try to fight me when it was time to
get up and go. That’s why I thought it’d be okay. Every
time we ever came, he never moved. Honest, Sheriff!”
Bo fumbled under the seat till he found a box of tis-
sues.
Ennis blew his nose but tears continued to streak
down his cheeks.
“I just ran back for some fries and I meant to come
right back, but DeeDee— I mean, a friend of mine was
there, you know? And we talked for a minute. I swear to
God I wasn’t gone fifteen minutes.”
“And he wasn’t here when you got back?”
“I couldn’t believe it. I ran upstream first to where the
underbrush clears out and I couldn’t see him, so then
I went downstream and . . . and . . . he was lying there
in the cold water. Dead. I just about died, too. I didn’t
know what to do.”
He broke down again and it was several minutes be-
fore he could continue. “I couldn’t go home and tell my
mom that I’d left him alone to let him go die like that.
She’d have told it in church, had everybody praying for
my sin like I was a stupid-ass creep. I know I should have
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gone for help, but he was dead and it wasn’t going to
bring him back. It was dumb. I know it was dumb! But I
figured he’d be missed real quick and then everybody’d
be out looking and I was sure he’d be found right away
but then he wasn’t and after that it was too late for me
to say I’d lied.”
Ennis pulled another handful of tissues from the box
and Bo waited till his sobs quieted into sniffles, as he
had waited out the sorrow and remorse of so many oth-
ers over the years—
“I only left the baby for a minute.”
“I didn’t know it was loaded.”
“I thought he could swim, but—”
“Better tell me the rest of it, son.”
“Mom was crying every night and praying to just let
him be found. I couldn’t take it any longer. I heard
some girls in my biology class say they were going to
go look for ferns down at the fishing hole on Apple
Creek the next day. I thought if I could move him
down there . . . but I couldn’t, so then I thought if
they found his hand . . . like they found that other
hand . . . but . . .” He broke off and took several long
deep breaths. “I had to use my knife. I kept telling my-
self he couldn’t feel anything . . . but . . .”
He looked at Bo helplessly. “You going to tell my
mom?”
“Somebody needs to,” Bo said. “Don’t you think?”
Ennis nodded, misery etched in every line of his face.
“Am I in trouble with the law, too?”
Bo thought about the man-hours spent searching.
The helicopter. The dogs.
“We’ll see,” he said.
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C H A P T E R
32
A farmer’s life is a pretty hard one in some respects, espe-
cially if he has a sorry farm and he is a sorry farmer, but the
average farmer can be about as happy as anybody.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Wednesday Evening, March 8
% We were a couple of miles out of Dobbs, each of
us immersed in our own thoughts, when I sud-
denly remembered that I’d meant to pick up something
for supper.
“Tonight’s Wednesday,” Dwight said. “How ’bout
we go for barbecue?”
“Really?” As soon as he’d said it, my gloom started to
lift. A Wednesday night at Paulie’s Barbecue House was
exactly what I needed. “You won’t be bored?”
Dwight doesn’t play an instrument although he has a
good singing voice.
“Nope. You haven’t been since Cal came and I bet
he’d like it, too. Give him some more names to add to
that list he started this morning.”
I had to laugh. It was bad enough that I had eleven
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brothers. Wait till he realized exactly how many aunts
and uncles and cousins there were, too.
“We have to plant the potatoes first,” he warned.
“Deal,” I said happily.
By the time we got to Jimmy’s, I had heard about
Dwight’s interview with Mrs. Harris and her daugh-
ter, who seemed to disdain the money her parents had
made.
“Not so disdainful that she’s not going to take it,”
I said. “Reid told me she wants to turn the house into
a migrant center or something. If Amy doesn’t get her
grant for the hospital, I’m thinking somebody ought to
introduce them to each other.”
“While Reid was talking, he happen to say what Buck
Harris did to so seriously piss off his ex-wife last spring?
Assuming she is his ex-wife and not his widow.”
“Besides taking a younger mistress?” I asked.
“You’re the one with the woman’s intuition,” he said.
“But Richards and I both got the impression that she’s
using the mistress as a smoke screen to keep from talk-
ing about what really happened.”
While I settled up with Jimmy, Dwight went on and
picked up Cal so that the three of us got home at the
same time. I called Daddy to see if he wanted to meet
us later, then changed into jeans and sneakers. By the
time I got outside, Dwight and Cal had cut the seed
potatoes into chunks, making sure that each chunk had
one or two eyes that would sprout into a plant. Seth
had opened a furrow about eight inches deep when he
was here with the plows, and Cal and I dropped the
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MARGARET MARON
potatoes in the furrow, cut side down, about a foot
apart. Dwight followed along behind with the hoe and
covered them with three or four inches of dirt. In a
week or so, after they’d sprouted, he would come back
and pull another few inches of dirt over the stems until
eventually they would be hilled up at least a foot deep
in the sandy loam.
“Why so deep?” Cal asked when the process was de-
scribed to him.
“Because the new potatoes form between the chunk
we’re planting and the surface of the soil,” I explained.
“We have to give them enough room to grow or
else they’ll pop through the ground,” said Dwight. “If
they’re exposed to light, they’ll turn green and green
potatoes are poison.”
With less than five pounds of potatoes to plant, it
didn’t take us long to get them in the ground.
Then we washed up and I put my guitar in the back
of the truck.
On the drive over, while telling Cal who he could
expect to see, I said, “Steve Paulie owns the place, but I
can never remember if he’s my third cousin or a second
cousin once removed.”
Cal was puzzled. “How do you remove a cousin?”
“Removed just means a degree of separation,” I said.
“Look, R.W.’s your first cousin because his dad and
your dad are brothers, okay?”
He nodded.
“Now if R.W. had a child, he would be your first
cousin, once removed. But if he had a child and you
had a child, they would be second cousins. Got it?”
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HARD ROW
“And if they had children, they would be third
cousins?”
“By George, ’e’s got it!” I said with an exaggerated
English accent.
“So what are Mary Pat and Jake to me?”
“Just good friends, I’m afraid, honey.”
No way was I going to try to untangle Kate’s rela-
tionship to her young ward. Enough to know they were
cousins even though Mary Pat now called her Mom.
Just as it was enough to know that the owner of Paulie’s
Barbecue House was related to me through one of
Daddy’s aunts.
Every Wednesday night, friends and relatives gather
there to eat supper and then do a little picking and singing
for an hour or so. It’s very informal. Some Wednesdays,
there aren’t enough to bother. Other times, there’ll be
twelve or fourteen of us. Before I married Dwight, I
would join them at least once a month for some good
fellowshipping as Haywood calls it, but this would be
the first time since New Year’s.
We ordered plates of barbecue—that wonderful east-
ern Carolina smoked pork, coarsely chopped and sea-
soned with vinegar and hot sauce. It’s always served
with coleslaw and spiced apples and a bottomless bas-
ket of crispy hushpuppies, and everything gets washed
down with pitchers of sweet iced tea.
“Want to split a side order of chicken livers?” I asked
Dwight and Cal.
You’d’ve thought I had offered them anchovies the
way they both turned up their noses, but Aunt Sister
was seated at the end of the long table and she called
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MARGARET MARON
down to say, “I could eat one or two if you’re getting
them.”
Dwight always wants to tell me how unhealthy they
are, but I just point to Aunt Sister, who’s over eighty
and still going strong. Daddy was there next to her and
allowed as how he wouldn’t mind a taste either, so I
moved on down the table to be closer to them.
After supper, the instruments came out. Daddy and
Haywood both play the fiddle, Isabel has a banjo and
Aunt Sister plays a dulcimer. Zach’s Emma and Andrew’s
Ruth spell each other on the piano and Herman’s son
Reese is good with the harmonica. The rest of us, in-
cluding Steve Paulie, play guitar and those that don’t
play tap their toes and sing.
There were at least a dozen of us, and soon the place
was rocking. From rousing gospel hymns to country
ballads and back again. Mother used to say that she fell
in love with Daddy for his fiddle-playing and he was in
good form tonight, his fingers moving nimbly up and
down the neck as he bowed the strings of his mellow
old fiddle. Aunt Sister’s daughter Beverly was there and
she, Annie Sue, Emma, and Ruth blended their voices
into such sweet cousinly harmony on one of the hymns
that I got chill bumps.
Cal kept his eyes glued on Reese, fascinated by the
way my nephew used his harmonica to counterpoint the
melody line or make musical jokes. I glanced over at
Dwight and he winked at me.
The music lifted me up and for a time, washed away
both the sadness I had felt for Fred Mitchiner’s grand-
son and the ugliness of Buck Harris’s death. Shortly after
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nine though, I noticed that Cal was yawning. “Time we
were calling it a night,” I said.
Aunt Sister looked at Daddy and without a word,
both began to play an old familiar tune. Annie Sue’s
clear soprano voice joined in softly before they’d played
two bars and the rest of us picked it up until it floated
over us in gentle benediction:
God be with you till we meet again
By his counsels guide, uphold you,
With his sheep securely fold you;
God be with you till we meet again.
279
C H A P T E R
33
Success may be attained once by accident, but permanent
results are found only attendant upon a practice based
upon correct theory.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
% I had just loaded the last breakfast plate in the dish-
washer the next morning when the phone rang.
“Oh good,” Dwight said. “You haven’t left yet. I’m
halfway to Dobbs and I just realized that I left some
papers I’ll need on the floor beside our bed. Could you
bring them when you come?”
“Sure,” I told him and immediately went to our room
to find them. When I circled the bed to his side, I saw
several sheets of paper on top of a manila file folder. I
picked them up and straightened them, and saw that the
top page was titled “Harris Farm #1: Workers on site as
of 1 January.” One name leaped out at me and I smiled
as I read it, then tucked the pages neatly into the folder
and placed it with my purse so I’d remember to take it
with me.
On my drive in, though, that name began to gnaw at
me. January? I thought about the blowup Mrs. Harris
had with her husband last spring, almost a year ago.
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HARD ROW
Why would someone wait nine or ten months to
avenge a wrong if that’s when Buck Harris had done
anything worth avenging? And why chop off his arms
and legs in such a rage?
Unless—?
Unbidden came the memory of how Will’s wife, Amy,
had vented last Saturday when I helped her write her
grant proposal. Emma, too, when she and her cousins
were arguing with Haywood. I coupled it with what
Faye Myers had almost told me on Tuesday and a nebu-
lous theory began to form.
At Bethel Baptist Church on Ward Dairy Road, I
pulled into the churchyard to call my favorite clerk in
Ellis Glover’s office and ask her to pull a file for me.
When I got to the courthouse, I stopped there first.
It was as I thought. The original addresses were the
same.
Downstairs, Faye Myers was on duty at the dispatch
desk. I waited till she was off the phone and then asked
her to finish telling me what she’d started to on Tuesday.
“About what Flip told you when you were telling me
about Mike Diaz and Mayleen Richards,” I reminded
her.
“Well, I probably shouldn’t repeat it,” she said. And
of course, she did.
It was worse than I’d thought, but it clarified the
whole situation and I walked on down to Dwight’s of-
fice. He saw my face and his smile turned to concern.
“Deb’rah? What’s wrong, shug?”
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MARGARET MARON
I closed his door. “Did Mayleen Richards learn much
from those migrants yesterday?”
He shook his head. “She couldn’t pry a thing out of
them except that the two women did see Mrs. Harris
take that tumble into the mud. They didn’t tell before
because they respect her and thought she would be hu-
miliated if they did. Why?”
“I think I know who butchered Buck Harris,” I told
him bleakly. “Ernesto Palmeiro.”
“Who?”
“The tractor guy that I had in court Friday.” I opened
his file and pointed to Palmeiro’s name on the list of
workers living on Harris Farm #1 in January. It was fol-
lowed by a María Palmeiro. Neither name was on the
current list the farm manager had given them.
Then I showed him the file I’d had the clerk pull for
me. “When Palmeiro was arrested in January, his ad-
dress was Ward Dairy Road. See? But that was before
you knew it was Harris’s body so it didn’t really register.
Everyone said he was loco for taking the tractor because
his wife had left him after they lost their baby. But he
was heading east, not south. I think he was trying to
get to New Bern to find Buck Harris. If he had, Harris
would have been chopped up at least a month and a half
sooner.”
“But why?”
“You said the blowup between the Harrises was last
spring. That’s when the tomato fields would have been
sprayed with a pesticide. Eight or nine months later—in
January—the Palmeiro baby was born. Stillborn. With
no arms or legs.” I couldn’t keep my voice from shak-
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HARD ROW
ing. “No arms and no legs, Dwight. Just like that torso
you found.”
“Jesus H!” he murmured as he began to connect the
dots. He opened his door and shouted, “All detectives!
In my office. Now!”
Five or six deputies came hurrying in, including
Mayleen Richards.
“Tell them,” Dwight said.
While I repeated my conjectures, Dwight took Percy
Denning aside and sent him to pull the fingerprint card
on Palmeiro. A copy of the prints had been sent to the
state’s central crime lab, but like most crime labs around
the country, ours is so underfunded and understaffed
that the fingerprints connected to a misdemeanor theft
would not have been entered into their computers yet.
As I went back upstairs to a courtroom where I was
expected to dispense a little justice, an old rhyme that
John Claude used to quote pounded through my head.
For want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, a horse was lost.
For want of a horse, a rider was lost.
For want of a rider, a battle was lost.
Or, as my no-nonsense mother used to say more suc-
cinctly, “Penny-wise, pound foolish.”
With better funding, more crimes could be solved
more quickly. In England, I hear they’re using DNA
to solve ordinary burglaries. Here in America we can’t
even afford to test for all the rapes and murders, much
less enter the fingerprints of every convicted felon into
a national database in a timely way.
. . . All for the want of a nail.
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C H A P T E R
34
Search ever after the truth—not the truth which justifies
you or your pet theories to yourself, but seek truth for truth’s
sake, and when you have found it, follow its lead.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Mayleen Richards
Thursday Morning, March 9
% While two squad cars headed for the old Buckley
place, three others peeled out for the Diaz nurs-
ery, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, with Dwight
Bryant bringing up the rear in his own truck.
Mayleen Richards was keenly aware of not being in
on the kill.
“I think not,” was all Major Bryant had said when
she asked to go with them to arrest Ernesto Palmeiro
instead of confronting the women of Harris Farm #1
again.
A cold lump still lodged in her chest from hear-
ing Judge Knott say, “Miguel Diaz of Diaz y Garcia
Landscaping came to court with him last Friday and
spoke for him. It’s my understanding that he works
there now.”
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HARD ROW
The judge had not once glanced in Mayleen’s direc-
tion, but coupled with the long level look she got from
Major Bryant when he denied her request, she was sure
they were both aware of her relationship with Mike.
And what about Mike? He knew of Palmeiro’s still-
born baby. Did he also know that Palmeiro had killed
Buck Harris?
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind now that he
was the killer, and his desperate drive with the tractor
had gone from being a funny story to something of
grim seriousness in the brief minutes it had taken Percy
Denning to look at Palmeiro’s fingerprints and find the
significant markers he had noted from the prints on the
bloody axe.
Her own fingers itched to call Diaz, but she kept both
hands on the steering wheel. Beside her, Jack Jamison
seemed to be on an adrenaline high, a combination of
wrapping up this homicide and the anticipation of leav-
ing for Texas next week.
“If I pass the selection and training process, they’ll
ship me out immediately, so this could be my last week-
end with Cindy and Jay for a year.”
“I’m not going to say break a leg,” she said tartly.
“How do you mean that?”
“Oh hell, Jack. I don’t really know. Both ways, I
guess. I still think you’re crazy to put yourself in harm’s
way like this, but if it’s what you want, then I really do
hope you pass and that it works out for you.”
It was after nine before the second team reached the
nursery. The woman who came to the door seemed
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MARGARET MARON
frightened by so many police cars. Dwight recognized
her from a murder investigation back in January and the
sight of him seemed to reassure her. In halting English,
she told them that her cousin Miguel Diaz and his crew
had left for a job nearly two hours ago.
“Ernesto Palmeiro,” said Dwight. “Is he here or with
your cousin?”
She shook her head. “No here. He leave sábado—
Saturday. Go Mexico. You ask Miguel.”
“Tell me about him,” Dwight said. But she imme-
diately lapsed into Spanish and claimed not to under-
stand.
Fortunately, they had brought along a translator.
“She says he was from the village next to theirs back
in Mexico, but they did not really know him until his
wife gave birth to a badly deformed baby in January.
A baby that died. After that, the wife left and Ernesto
went crazy. He was arrested and from jail he sent word
to her brother and her cousin that they must help him,
as compatriots of the same valley. They didn’t want to,
but felt it was their duty. They gave him work, gave
him blankets and let him sleep in the shed. They also
helped him repair the damage he had done. Saturday,
her cousin Miguel gave him his wages and told him to
leave. More than that, she says she doesn’t know.”
She did give them the number for her cousin’s cell
phone though; and when Dwight called it, Miguel Diaz
told them where they were working. The site was a new
development off Ward Dairy Road near Bethel Baptist,
less than fifteen minutes away.
He was waiting for them at the entrance of the new
subdivision, and Dwight tried to take his measure as
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HARD ROW
Diaz got out of his truck to meet them. A clean-shaven
man with light brown skin and straight black hair.
Without that black Stetson and the workboots, he’d
probably stand five-nine or five-ten, just a shade taller
than Mayleen Richards. Regular features. Slim hips and
a slender build that conveyed strength and confidence.
Hard to read his face because he wore mirrored sun-
glasses this bright sunny morning.
Dwight introduced himself and they shook hands. In
lightly accented English, Diaz asked how he might be
of service.
“We’re looking for Ernesto Palmeiro,” Dwight said.
“We’re told you went to court for him last week and
that he works for you now.”
“Did work,” Diaz said easily. “No more. He left for
Mexico on Saturday. At least that’s where he said he was
going. Is there more trouble, Major Bryant?”
“Didn’t you guarantee he’d repair the yards he plowed
up?”
“They’re finished. We put the last yard back with new
bushes Friday night. I let him work for me during the
day, then work on the damages in the evening, and I
kept his pay till it was finished, just like I promised the
judge.”
He seemed puzzled by the three cars that still flashed
their emergency lights. “All this for some flowers and
bushes? I can show you, Major. It’s all fixed.”
“Not flowers and bushes,” Dwight said. “You’ve
heard about Buck Harris? Palmeiro’s boss? Owner of
the farm where he used to live and work, and where he
stole that tractor?”
287
MARGARET MARON
“He was killed, yes?” He shook his head. “A bad busi-
ness. Very bad.”
“Ernesto Palmeiro did it.”
Impossible to gauge his reaction behind those reflec-
tive glasses. Diaz did not exclaim or protest, but he did
let out the long indrawn breath he had taken.
“You don’t seem surprised,” Dwight said grimly.
“Did I know he was the butcher? No, Major. But
you’re right. I think I am not surprised. You heard about
his son? His first child? Who died the same hour he was
born, thanks be to God?” He crossed himself.
Dwight nodded. “Why did he blame Harris?”
“It was his farm. María was working there. Beyond
that I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. I gave him
work and a place to stay. I spoke for him in court and
as soon as I had done all that I pledged, I paid him his
money and told him to leave. He said he was going
home. The honor of my village required me to help him
when he asked for it. It did not require me to like him
or take him to my bosom.”
No, thought Dwight. Just my deputy. And how much
did she know? She had flushed bright red when Deborah
mentioned Diaz’s name.
“How much money did he leave with?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars. I gave him the flowers and
shrubs at our cost.”
“We’ll want to speak to your men who worked with
him.”
“Of course, Major, but they’ll only tell you the
same.”
“I bet they will,” Dwight said. He motioned to
Raeford McLamb, who had stood nearby listening.
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HARD ROW
“Separate those men and get a statement from each of
them as to what they knew about Palmeiro.”
“Want me to translate for you?” asked Diaz with a
slight smile.
“No thanks,” Dwight said. “We brought our own
translator.”
It took less than an hour. Each man was separately
questioned, then allowed to go back to work.
Dwight did not wait to hear the predictable results.
Instead, he got in his truck and drove over to the old
Buckley place, Harris Farm #1, where Richards and
Jamison were bearing down on Felicia Sanaugustin and
Mercedes Santos, who swore separately and together
that they knew nothing about the Palmeiros or their
baby.
“I don’t understand why they keep saying that,” a
frustrated Richards told Dwight. “They know we know
that the baby was born here in the camp and that the
EMS truck responded to an emergency call here in
January. Why won’t they admit that the baby was still-
born and had serious birth defects?”
“Maybe for the same reason they didn’t tell you about
Mrs. Harris falling in the mud puddle till they knew she
had told you,” Dwight said. “Let me go see if she’s
here.”
He drove up to the house and found Mrs. Harris and
her daughter having coffee in the bright sunny kitchen
with Mrs. Samuelson. Even though the housekeeper
immediately stood and busied herself over at the sink
the moment he entered, it was clear from the plates
and cups on the table that neither woman stood on
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MARGARET MARON
ceremony with the other. No bosslady/servant protocol
here.
More than ever, the Harris daughter looked like
someone who had come straight from a soup kitchen.
She wore loose-fitting black warm-up pants and an over-
sized Duke sweatshirt that hung on her thin frame.
“We know who killed your father, Mrs. Hochmann,”
he said when the formalities were done.
She looked at him, startled. “Who?”
“One of the migrant workers here, an Ernesto
Palmeiro.”
The name clearly meant nothing to her. Even Mrs.
Samuelson looked blank. But not Mrs. Harris.
“He and his wife María worked in the tomato crop
here,” he said. “She got pregnant last spring and had
a baby here in January. Either stillborn or it died soon
after. We’ve heard conflicting stories.”
Mrs. Hochmann looked concerned and murmured
sympathetically. Her mother sat silently.
“It was born without arms or legs. It was only a torso
with a head,” he said.
“Oh my God!” said Susan Hochmann. “That’s why
he—? But why, Major?”
“Ask your mother,” Dwight said harshly.
“My mother?” She turned in her chair. “Mother?”
“Has she told you what she and your father really
fought about last spring when María Palmeiro was less
than one month pregnant? When that baby was still
forming in her womb?”
“Mother?”
“Be still, Susan! He doesn’t know,” her mother said.
“He’s only guessing.”
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HARD ROW
“Am I? We’ll subpoena the records for this farm.
They’ll show who was where when the tomatoes were
sprayed that week. Too many people know.”
“Records are sometimes spotty.” She gave a dismissive
shrug. “And these are my people. They won’t talk.”
Dwight looked at her, genuinely puzzled. “Why are
you still protecting him?”
“He made the workers go into the field before it was
safe?” asked her daughter.
“Sid Lomax described your father as somebody who
couldn’t bear to see workers standing around idly while
the clock was running,” Dwight said. “You yourself de-
scribed the trailers he used to house them in, trailers
that had no running water where they could wash off
the pesticides. Why did they need to wash off the pesti-
cides, Mrs. Harris? They would have been safe if they’d
waited forty-eight hours to go back in the fields.”
Susan Hochmann looked sick.
“Oh, Mother,” she whispered.
At that moment the light finally broke for Dwight as
he looked at the older woman’s weathered face. “You’re
afraid of another fine, aren’t you? Another OSHA inves-
tigation. Maybe a huge lawsuit. You don’t want another
scandal for Harris Farms. Did you give María Palmeiro
money to go back to Mexico, Mrs. Harris?”
“She wanted to go home,” Mrs. Harris said angrily.
“She’d lost her baby. The marriage was a mess. She
just wanted to leave and forget it all. So yes, I gave her
money. But that doesn’t mean Harris Farms caused the
baby’s birth defects.”
Susan Hochmann’s shoulders slumped as if weighted
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MARGARET MARON
down by a ton of guilt and she shook her head in dis-
belief.
“It all fits, doesn’t it?” Dwight said wearily. “Buck
Harris was killed in that empty shed, but it was a shed
that held spraying equipment. He was dismembered to
look like the baby. Then his head and his”—he hesitated
over leaving that second grisly image in the daughter’s
mind—“his head was left in the field where his wife was
contaminated. It was that back field, wasn’t it?”
Mrs. Harris nodded. “She didn’t go in too soon,”
she said dully. “She was there while they were spraying.
When I got down there that day and saw what was hap-
pening, I screamed at them to come out of the field and
I sent them back to the camp to take showers. They were
all green with it. But it was the second day of spraying
and she was at the most vulnerable stage of pregnancy.
I didn’t know she was pregnant. I don’t think she even
knew for sure at that point. Buck and I got into it hot
and heavy then. Sid Lomax wouldn’t have let it happen,
but Sid was in California. His father had died. So Buck
was in charge and by God he wasn’t going to coddle
anybody or pay a dime for people to stand around and
wait till it was safe. ‘You made me put in fancy hot and
cold showers,’ he said. ‘Let ’em go wash off. Where’s
the harm?’ After that, I stayed in New Bern and I didn’t
know about María till Mercedes Santos called me. I
came immediately. And yes, I gave her the money to
bury her baby and yes, I gave her money to fly home.
Enough to buy a little house and a sewing machine and
start a new life for herself. All her husband wanted to do
was stay drunk. She’s better off without him.”
“He didn’t think so,” Dwight said and turned on his
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HARD ROW
heel and walked out. He needed air. Long deep drafts
of clean spring air.
Mayleen Richards was waiting beside his truck. “No
luck, Major?”
He gave her a quick synopsis of what had passed in
the kitchen but before they could confer on their next
actions, Susan Hochmann called from the back porch
and crossed the yard to them.
“You were right,” she said, nodding to Richards.
“Mother’s terrified of a lawsuit. I’m not though. What
can I do to help?”
“Do you speak Spanish?” Richards asked.
The woman nodded.
“Mrs. Sanaugustin let slip something that makes me
think her husband might know more than he’s told,
but she’s clammed up altogether now and won’t say a
word.”
“Sanaugustin?”
Dwight told her about the worker who said he had
seen the bloody slaughter scene in the shed on Saturday,
two days before they discovered it.
“Sanaugustin,” Mrs. Hochmann said again. “Felicia?”
“Sí,” said Richards and immediately turned as red as
the shoulder-length red hair that gleamed in the sun-
light. “I mean, yes.”
“Let me talk to her. I think she trusts me almost as
much as she trusts Mother.”
She got in the prowl car with Richards and Dwight
led the way back down to the camp. It took a few min-
utes, but at last Felicia Sanaugustin threw up her hands
and told them everything. Yes, the baby was as they
had said. Yes, María Palmeiro had been covered with
293
MARGARET MARON
pesticide. No, she did not know the name. Only that
it was green and it made them break out in a rash even
though they washed it off every day. And yes, she ad-
mitted, she and Rafael knew that Ernesto had killed
el patrón. Early Monday morning, before it was really
light, Rafael had walked up to the sheds to get a dolly
to move the old refrigerator out in preparation for the
new one la señora had promised to bring. As he ap-
proached the empty shed, he had felt a great need to re-
lieve himself and so had stepped into the bushes there.
A moment before he finished, he heard the rusty hinge
squeak and saw the door open. Then Ernesto Palmeiro
had put out his head and looked all around.
Rafael had stood motionless. Something about the
man’s stealthy movements frightened him so that he
could not even pull up his zipper. The light was still so
poor that it was hard to be sure that it even was Ernesto.
Especially since he was not supposed to be there. He
had been fired the month before.
Sanaugustin waited until he was sure the other was
gone, then curiosity compelled him to look inside the
shed.
“She says we know what he saw,” said Mrs.
Hochmann.
“Your father’s remains?”
She put the question to Felicia Sanaugustin and the
woman shook her head.
“Sangre solamente, ” she whispered.
Only blood.
“But it was fresh blood. And it dripped from the back
of the car,” said Susan Hochmann, desperately trying
not to let the horror of the woman’s tale become per-
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HARD ROW
sonal. “He closed the door and immediately went back
to the camp and said nothing of what he’d seen to any-
one. Everyone said that Palmeiro was crazy and he was
fearful for his own life if he accused him. He told himself
that he didn’t really know anything for certain at that
point. He did not know for sure what man or animal it
was that had been killed there.”
The migrant woman continued and Mrs. Hochmann
translated. Rafael had brooded all week as the body parts
began to appear along the road, yet no one else con-
nected them with their boss, even when word drifted
down to the camp that people were starting to ask for
him.
So last Saturday, Rafael had sneaked back to the shed.
The smell! The flies! Ai-yi-yi!
This time he had taken some of the money that they
were saving to get a place of their own and he had gone
into town and bought drugs and got arrested. And
what, she wailed, was to happen to them now?
Susan Hochmann spoke in soothing tones and when
the woman had quieted, she said to Dwight, “I told her
nothing was going to happen to them, Major. They’ve
done nothing wrong. Have they?”
“Nothing illegal maybe,” said Dwight, “but they may
have just cut your inheritance pretty drastically. If he’s
willing to testify that he saw Palmeiro leave that bloody
scene early that Monday morning, then your parents’
divorce is invalid. The summary judgment wasn’t signed
until that afternoon. Depending on what your mother
does, it could mean that you won’t get half the business
now.”
295
MARGARET MARON
A wry smile flickered across her broad plain face.
“Want to bet?”
Dwight left the mopping up to Jamison and the other
detectives and told Richards to ride back to Dobbs with
him to start the reports and put out an APB on Ernesto
Palmeiro, who had a five-day lead on them and was
probably already back in Mexico by now.
Their talk was of the case and the ramifications of what
they’d learned and the very real likelihood that they’d
never get him extradited back to Colleton County. All
very professional until they were about five miles from
town and Dwight said, “Anything you need to tell me,
Richards?”
“Sir?”
“You heard me.”
“About what, Major?”
“About Miguel Diaz.”
“On a personal level? Or about him speaking for
Palmeiro and giving him work while he repaired the
damage he’d done?”
“Your personal life’s your own as long as it doesn’t
compromise your handling of the job.” He kept his
tone neutral.
Her eyes flashed indignantly. “You think I let our re-
lationship get in the way of the investigation?”
“That’s what I’m asking. Did you?”
She shook her head. “No, sir. I really don’t think I
did. I didn’t know Mike had gone to court for Palmeiro
till Friday. McLamb mentioned that he’d seen him at
the courthouse and when I asked Mike, he was ab-
296
HARD ROW
solutely up front about it. He said he felt sorry for
the guy because his baby had died and his wife had
left him. He didn’t describe the baby’s condition, just
that it was stillborn. We didn’t know the body parts
were Harris’s yet and I certainly didn’t know till this
morning when your—when Judge Knott told us that
Palmeiro had worked for Harris. That was the first
time I’d heard it.”
“It wasn’t the first time Diaz had heard it, though,”
Dwight said.
Richards let the implications of his words sink in. “Did
he know Palmeiro killed Harris?” she asked hesitantly.
“He says not.”
“Do you believe him?”
Dwight shrugged. “Know is one of those slippery
words. Did Palmeiro confess to him? Did he see the guy
swing the axe? Probably not.”
“But you think he knew,” Richards said.
“Don’t you?”
They rode in silence another mile or two, then
Richards said, “My family. My dad and my brothers and
my sister? They say that they’ll never speak to me again
if I marry him.”
“What about your mother?”
“She’ll go along with them, but she’d probably sneak
and call me once in a while.”
“Family’s important,” he observed as they reached
the Dobbs city limits.
She sighed. “Yes.”
Dwight pulled into the parking lot beside the court-
house and cut the engine. As she reached for the door
handle, he said, “Look, Richards. Your personal life is
297
MARGARET MARON
none of my business as long as you can keep it separate
from the job. But I’m going to say this even though I
probably shouldn’t. If you’re going to break up with
him because you don’t love him, that’s one thing. But
don’t use the job or what he knew or didn’t know as an
excuse if it’s really because of your family. You owe it to
yourself to tell him the truth.”
298
C H A P T E R
35
The retention of the old family homestead and farm by a
long line of ancestry for successive generations is, in many
respects a desideratum, whether we regard it in the prac-
tical light of an investment or of a pardonable pride, as
the basis of the sentiment of family honor and respectability
that is to be associated with the name and the inheritance.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
Deborah Knott
Thursday Evening, March 9
% By the time I adjourned for the day, the news had
gone all around the courthouse that Buck Harris
had been murdered by one of his field hands because his
wanton carelessness with pesticides had caused the still-
birth of that field hand’s baby.
The news media had swarmed around the courthouse
and out to the Buckley place as well, not that they got
much joy there. None of the workers wanted to talk, and
Mrs. Harris refused to meet with them; but her daugh-
ter, while sidestepping any statements that would admit
culpability, was ready to use the situation as a soapbox to
propose a more socially responsible program for “guest
299
MARGARET MARON
workers.” Reporters came away with an earful of statistics
about the appalling conditions most growers imposed on
their laborers, all for the saving of a few pennies a pound
on the fruits and vegetables they harvested. While it was
interesting that the “tomato heiress,” as they were calling
her, planned to move down from New York and turn the
family homeplace into a center for bettering the lives of
migrants, Susan Hochmann was not photogenic enough
to hold their attention for long.
Here in the courthouse, sympathies seemed to take
a slight shift from the dead man to his killer as more
and more details came out about the baby and about
Harris’s deliberate violations of OSHA and EPA regula-
tions, not to mention simple human decency.
“You hate to blame the victim,” said a records clerk
who had just come back from maternity leave with a
CD full of baby pictures as her new screen saver, “but
damned if he wasn’t asking for it.”
“I’m not saying it’s ever right to kill,” one of the at-
torneys told me, “but I’d take his case in a heartbeat. Bet
I could get him off with a suspended sentence, too.”
All cameras focused on the sensational gory murder.
It would be the lead story of the day. Not much atten-
tion would be paid to the shooting death of a young
woman by her abusive ex-husband who then turned the
gun on himself. Nothing particularly newsworthy about
that. Happens all the time, doesn’t it?
As soon as I heard, I adjourned court an hour early
and went around to Portland’s house.
“She’s upstairs,”Avery said when he let me in. “Dwight
was here before. It was good of him to come tell her
himself.”
300
HARD ROW
I found her standing by a window in the nursery. Her
eyes were red and swollen when she turned to me. “She
couldn’t make it to high ground, Deborah.”
“I know, honey,” I said and opened my arms to her as
she burst into tears.
The baby awoke as we were talking and she sat down
with little Carolyn and opened her shirt to nurse her.
“If it weren’t for you,” she told her daughter, “I’d be
killing a bottle of bourbon about now.”
Her eyes filled up with tears again. “I guess I’ll call
Linda Allred tonight. Tell her to add another statistic to
her list.”
When I got home that evening, Daddy was sitting on
the porch to watch Dwight and Cal finish cleaning out
the interior of the truck before carefully smoothing a
Hurricanes sticker to the back bumper. Cal wanted to
clamp our flag on the window, but Dwight vetoed that
idea.
“Save it for Deborah’s car,” he said. “My truck’s not
a moving billboard.”
Bandit was frisking around the yard in an unsuccess-
ful attempt to get Blue and Ladybell to romp with him,
but those two hounds were too old and dignified for
such frivolity.
Dwight followed me into our bedroom while I
changed out of heels and panty hose into jeans and
sneakers. “You hear about Karen Braswell?”
I nodded. “Thanks for going over there yourself.”
“She gonna be okay?”
“The baby helps.”
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MARGARET MARON
“God, Deb’rah. What’s it gonna take? This is the
second one in three months. We took his damn guns.
Where’d he get that one?”
“Don’t beat up on yourself, Dwight. You said it your-
self. There’s no stopping somebody who’s determined
to kill and doesn’t care about the consequences. If it
hadn’t been a gun, it would have been a knife or even
his bare hands.”
We went back outdoors and the blessed mundane
flowed back over us. Cal was antsy to leave because they
planned to pick up a new pair of sneakers for him on the
way in. The lower the sun sank, the cooler the air be-
came and my sweater was suddenly not thick enough.
“Come on in,” I told Daddy, “and I’ll fix us some-
thing to eat.”
“Naw, Maidie’s making supper. Why don’t you come
eat with us? You know there’s always extra.”
“Okay,” I said, but he didn’t get up.
“Are we expecting somebody?” I asked.
“Some of the children said they was gonna stop by,
show us what they plan to grow on that land we give
’em last week.”
Even as he spoke, a couple of pickups drove up and
several of my nieces and nephews tumbled out—Zach’s
Lee and Emma, Seth’s Jessie, Haywood’s Jane Ann, and
Robert’s Bobby, who carried a large sunflower that he
handed to me with a flourish.
“Sunflowers?” I laughed. “You’re going to grow sun-
flowers?”
“Hey, they’re real trendy now,” he told me.
“The short ones make great cut flowers,” said Jane
Ann, “but those that we don’t sell fresh, we can wire the
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HARD ROW
dried heads and sell as organic sunflower seeds to hang
from a bird feeder. Cardinals go crazy over them.”
“But this is going to be our real moneymaker.” Jessie
set a bud vase with a single stem of pure white flowers
on the table and an incredibly sweet fragrance met me
even before I leaned forward to smell. “Polianthes tu-
berosa. Almost no pests, doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer,
and we can market them for fifty cents to a dollar a stem
depending on whether we sell them retail or wholesale.
This one cost me two-fifty at the florist shop in Cotton
Grove and he said he’d much rather buy locally than
getting them shipped in from Mexico.”
“Yeah,” said Lee. “Judy Johnson, Mother’s cousin up
near Richmond, has an acre that she and her husband
tend pretty much by themselves. She says we’ll probably
be able to cut ours from the end of July till frost. Up
there, they cut anywhere from a hundred and fifty to six
hundred stems a day.”
“That’s a gross of close to nine thousand dollars an
acre,” said Emma, who seemed to be channeling the
soul of an accountant these days.
“What about fertilizer?” Daddy asked. “I hear that
organic stuff ’s right expensive.”
“Chicken manure,” said Bobby. “You know that poul-
try place over on Old Forty-eight? He raises the biddies
from hatching to six weeks and he’s got a mountain of
it out back. Says we can have it for the hauling. We’ll
compost the new stuff and go ahead and spread the old
soon as we can afford a spreader.”
Daddy laughed. “Y’all ever take a good look at some
of them things a-setting under the shelters back of those
old stick barns?”
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MARGARET MARON
Lee’s face lit up. “You’ve got a manure spreader?”
“Parked it there twenty-five years ago when we got
rid of the last of the mules and cows. It probably needs
new tires and some WD-40, but y’all can have it if you
want.”
Jane Ann jumped up and gave him a big hug that
almost knocked his hat off. “You just saved us four hun-
dred dollars and trucking one down from Burlington,
Granddaddy!”
They all rushed off to check it out before dark, as ex-
cited as if Daddy had told them he had an old spaceship
they could use to fly to the moon.
He straightened his hat and stood to go. “What you
reckon Robert’s gonna say when they drag that old
thing out?”
I laughed. “Myself, I can’t wait to hear what Haywood
and Isabel have to say about growing flowers for a
crop.”
“Beats ostriches,” he said slyly.
“What about you?” I asked as we walked out to his
truck. The hounds jumped up in back and I put Bandit
in the cab between us. “What do you think about grow-
ing flowers?”
He smiled. “Tell you what, shug. Flowers or mush-
rooms or even ostriches—it don’t matter one little bit.
Anything that keeps ’em here on the farm another gen-
eration’s just fine with me.”
304
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