The Litter Of The Law

Sunlight flooded Hester’s kitchen, which faced east. The morning after the reception, Cooper and Rick Shaw sat at the kitchen’s small square wooden table with Sarah Price. After apologizing for troubling her at such a time, the two law enforcement officers began their questioning of Hester Martin’s niece.

“Did you ever meet the young man in the photograph?” Rick Shaw asked Sarah. The silver-framed photo of Hester and Josh Hill sat on the table in front of them.

“Not that I remember,” the pleasant woman replied. “I don’t know who he is.”

“She never mentioned Josh Hill?” asked Rick.

Sarah looked again at the photo. “No.”

“Did she talk about fishing?” Cooper asked.

“Some. Aunt Hester and I would speak over the phone about once a week. She wouldn’t text me or email. She said she wanted to hear my voice, then she’d know if I was okay.”

“Did she talk about her other interests?” Rick folded his hands then unfolded them.

“Aunt Hester loved to lecture! That is, once she had inquired about my health, boyfriend status—I’m divorced—and my career advancement or lack thereof.” Sarah smiled. “After all that, I would be treated to discussions about the global food crisis, why agribusiness couldn’t meet the demand, and why she refused to sell foods treated with pesticides. She admitted organic farming was less efficient. A lot of goods are lost to bugs and stuff. You didn’t so much talk with my late aunt as you listened.”

Both Rick and Cooper smiled before Cooper spoke up. “Did your aunt ever talk about what she was reading? That’s a gorgeous library. All those books from the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. She must have loved reading or at least collecting.”

“Much of that library she inherited, but she was an avid reader. Often she read in French, especially plays and novels. We would laugh about something she quoted from Molière. But mostly, with me, anyway, she would talk about something she’d read in English about farming or about human impact on wildlife.”

“It’s funny, Miss Price,” said Cooper. “I have stopped at your aunt’s roadside stand for years and I never knew she could read in French, never knew she owned such beautiful things.” She looked around the kitchen, her eyes resting on the old wooden cupboards.

“That doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know as I would classify Aunt Hester as secretive so much as, uh, compartmentalized.” She leaned to her left, toward Rick. “Her friends and interests fell into categories, which didn’t overlap.”

“Did she talk about them with you?” Rick inquired.

“Not much. Most of what I knew came from my dad, who died about six years ago from lung cancer. He was older than Hester by two years. They got along but weren’t close. Too different.”

“How?” Cooper often found that an offhand comment, a recollection, pointed in the right direction.

“Oh, Dad was sophisticated, driven. And social. Houston is a great city in which to be social. He married very well. Both my parents loved fine things, evening-gown parties. You know the type. Aunt Hester thought he was superficial.”

“Was he?” Rick’s eyebrows lifted.

A silence followed this. “By Virginia standards, he was. He talked about money too openly. His suits were too flashy and he wore a big gold Rolex, which Aunt Hester called a Texas timepiece. But Daddy had a heart of gold, so if he wanted to wear a little gold, okay. He made sure I got the best education possible. He went to Houston to make money and he did. Sure, he indulged Mother and he indulged me, but he also made sure I knew right from wrong, and he could be tough. Can you tell? I loved my dad.”

“He sounds like a good fellow.” Rick nodded. “And Virginians can be snobs. Aunt Hester might have filled those shoes.”

“Oh, she didn’t mean anything by it. Dad took it with a grain of salt. He called her the Old Maid and declared if she’d find a good man she’d be much less judgmental. I remember Aunt H, as I would call her, used to say to my mother, ‘He’s my brother, I love him, but how can you live with him?’ Mom would laugh.”

“What did you think?” Cooper shrewdly asked.

“I guess in some ways I agreed with Dad, but you never got the full picture with Aunt H. Her interests were passionate but compartmentalized, as I said. Like the fishing, for instance. She rarely talked to me about it but she would talk about it for hours to Mom, who liked to fish, too. Once they went together to the Snake River in Wyoming. Dad paid for everything. Aunt Hester was appalled that Mother put on makeup to fish.” Sarah laughed, a tinkling, engaging laugh.

“Maybe the fish liked it.” Rick laughed with her.

“They must have, because Mom caught more than Aunt H, and that didn’t sit well.”

“Do you know if she traveled to other places?” Cooper kept on.

“I do know, again through Mom, that Aunt Hester usually fished in Bath or Highland County in Virginia. They both swore it was the best fishing on the East Coast.”

“I’ve heard that,” Cooper said. “Do you fish?”

“No. I’m a golfer. Love being out there surrounded by such green vistas, sometimes all by myself. Other times in a foursome. Houston has some wonderful courses. Of course, Charlottesville, for such a small place, does, too.”

“Farmington?” Rick raised his voice as a question.

“Those long fairways. Keswick Club is a challenge. Glenmore. A short drive to the Country Club of Virginia. And in four hours I can drive down to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to one of the most fabled golf courses in the country.”

“Did Hester golf?” Cooper pressed on.

“No. Her interests were, as you know, varied: fishing, farming, the library, old buildings. She loved the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Loved Monument Avenue. She had a quiet, longstanding interest in the Virginia tribes.”

Cooper sat up straighter. “Why do you think she was interested in Virginia Indians?”

“Our maternal line is Sessoms, a Cherokee name,” Sarah explained. “But they adapted so well to the early colonists—I mean early as in eighteenth century—that the Sessoms farmed, wore English clothing, spoke English, and intermarried with Europeans. Over time they became so much like the English that they didn’t have the trouble the other tribes did, including the Cherokees in the more southern states. Those people went through hell. Sessoms is a common last name in the tribe, just like Adams is a common last name for the Upper Mattaponi.”

“Did you know that Josh Hill was an Upper Mattaponi?” Cooper felt that little buzz when she knew she was finding her way on a case.

Where it was going, she didn’t know.

Sarah shook her head. “I knew nothing about this fellow, but he appears to have been a fishing buddy, and if he was a member of a Virginia tribe, Aunt H would have been fascinated.”

“She never spoke to you about this? About the Cherokee connection?”

“No. It was Dad who told me about that part of our ancestry.” She thought a moment. “Once I mentioned something about a bracelet I saw that had been made by the Pueblos. Aunt H said southwestern Indians, Texas Indians, were much different from the East Coast tribes but all were fascinating to study.”

“Anything else?” Cooper persisted.

“She said—and this I do remember, because I heard it at odd times, not a lot but enough to remember, and I heard it repeated by my dad, too—the Indians never raped the land.”

Both sheriff and deputy sat quietly for a moment, then Rick asked, “Were either of your parents ever involved in environmental causes or perhaps trying to return tribal lands to their original owners?”

“They supported the Nature Conservancy. They made vacations to go on field trips, wonderful places like southern Chile, Moosehead Lake in Maine. They really pitched in with the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited. We had to live in the now. Mom and Dad wholeheartedly believed that. Dad said that he thought in some ways Aunt H lived too much in the past.”

“And Aunt Hester’s attitude?” Cooper asked.

“That we needed to make amends. We needed to preserve the past and also make amends to other peoples, to wildlife. As you see, she preserved the past in this house. Aunt H was consistent and she really did care about providing good food at her stand, about taking care of the land. Maybe that’s why she liked fishing. She could get away but still be part of nature. I suspect she threw back whatever she caught. Mom always did.”

Both interrogators smiled.

Cooper then said, “We combed her roadside stand. Lolly—you met Lolly?” When Sarah nodded yes, Cooper continued. “Showed us the back rooms, everything. She opened the cash register, lifted the tray where Hester kept notes, odd returned checks, stuff like that.”

Sarah quietly interrupted, “And you found that my aunt Hester was organized about everything but her financial records. I’ve found old bank statements in kitchen drawers, in the visor of her truck.”

Cooper smiled. “She appears to have used a system unique to herself. What interested us was a check for a thousand dollars written to Joshua Hill. Written on the bottom memo line was ‘Research.’ It had been cashed.”

Sarah registered surprise. “She wouldn’t write a check that size on a whim.”

“We don’t know what the research was, and his records are sparse,” Rick said.

“So there is a connection between the murders.” Sarah spoke lowly.

“It certainly seems possible,” Cooper answered.

“May I ask you a question?” said Sarah.

“Anything.” Rick liked her, obviously.

“Do you have any idea who would kill my aunt, or why?”

“I won’t b.s. you,” he answered. “We don’t but I promise you, Sarah, we will find out and we will bring them to justice. Your aunt was a good woman.”

Cooper looked Sarah in the eye. “I apologize for pushing you with questions, but you knew Hester as well as anyone, perhaps better. The rest of us took her at face value, and even those who had been in her home, like Mim Sanburne, only knew a fraction of who and what she was.”

“You don’t think she was involved in anything illegal, do you?” asked Sarah, distressed. “I mean, I can’t imagine her doing something illegal. Aunt H was a straight arrow.”

“No. But my hunch, and it is just a hunch, is she may have stumbled onto something someone else was doing that was illegal.”

Sarah’s hand covered her heart for a moment.

“I wonder if she knew she was in danger. She would have kept it to herself. She was so independent, had lived her whole life alone—if she did think she was in danger, she would have thought she could handle it.” Sarah swallowed. “I make her sound unrealistic but who could have foreseen something like this? Aunt H never did understand evil.”