Bitter Blood (17 page)

Driving away, the young man was eager to know what had happened but uncertain whether he should ask. He told the older man that he had been frightened when the policeman appeared. The cop only wanted to see if he’d been drinking because he was driving so slowly, his friend said. He’d told him he was having trouble with a wheel bearing and was just trying to nurse the car home.

“I don’t think he radioed in the license number,” he said.

“Did you give him your real license or a fake?” the young man asked.

“I’ve got a fake, but I didn’t want to dig around for it, so I just gave him mine. I can have a new one made later without the beard, report the old one lost. It’s a good thing he didn’t ask me to get out of the car. I had my forty-five under my jacket and I’d have had to blast him. He had on a vest, minimum protection, not as good as mine. I’d have shot him in the head anyway.”

The young man reached Interstate 40 without knowing how he had done it, and soon was on Highway 52, heading northward again, back to the mountains. He was hungry for details of the touch, but his friend was sparing with them, telling him that the less he knew the better it would be for him and the Company. He said only that the mission was successful, that he’d had to kill three people, two of them guards.

“Did you have to use the knife?”

He nodded grimly. “On the guards.”

The older man was thirsty, and they stopped for soft drinks about twenty miles north of the city. They stopped again on the edge of Mount Airy and used the toilet at a convenience mart. The older man removed the surgical glove, some pieces of blue foam rubber, and the hat from the briefcase, shredded them with the bayonet, and tossed them into a dumpster. After changing shoes, he took over driving, stopping a short time later at the Virginia Welcome Center on Interstate 77. He took a bag into the rest room, changed clothes, and removed his bullet-proof vest. Standing before the mirror at one of the five sinks set in red Formica, he began shaving his beard with his rechargeable razor, reverting to medical snips when the charge ran down, finishing with a straight razor. He handed the bullet-proof vest and T-shirt to the young man and told him to stash them in the Blazer. As the young man was secreting them under camouflage netting in the back of the truck, he saw a young man in a Washington and Lee T-shirt getting out of a car. He assumed him to be a fellow student, although he did not recognize him, but he studiously attempted to avoid him in case the student had seen him around campus. Soon, the older man appeared, clean shaven, and before they left, he tossed the shoes he’d worn on the mission into a garbage can.

By the time the Blazer reached Interstate 81, the young man was drowsy. His friend stopped for more soft drinks, and soon after they were back on the highway the young man fell asleep. He awoke when the Blazer pulled into a truck stop north of Roanoke for gas. Dawn had broken, and the young man rousted himself to go to the rest room. The next stop was at a trash dump in the mountains above Buchanan. The older man dug a hole and buried the ammunition from the briefcase then ripped apart the briefcase and returned it to the Blazer.

They reached the campground at about 7 A.M. and began a fire for coffee. The older man got a handful of tablets from his medical bag and instructed the young man to take several. “They’ll cut down the coughing,” he said, swallowing a handful himself.

He removed a roll of money from his pocket and handed the young man thirty-five dollars. “That’s for your gas Friday,” he said.

“Forget it,” said the young man, declining the money.

“No, I promised you half if I had to make it look like a robbery. That’s what this is.”

The young man pocketed the money and turned his attention to the fire, which was barely smoking. He blew it alive, put water on to boil, and fetched military field meals from the Blazer. His friend went downhill to the rest room three times before they ate, returning the final time with a grinning explanation. “I always get the runs about twelve hours after a job, probably a nervous reaction.” The young man soon found himself in the same fix.

After eating, both got back into the Blazer and went looking for places to dispose of remaining evidence. They stopped at a picnic area, and the older man shredded the gray jacket and threw the remains into a dumpster along with the mangled briefcase. They drove around the lake and stopped at an access path opposite the campground. The young man stayed in the Blazer while the older man scrambled down the steep path to the water, carrying the barrel from his .45 and the sheathed bayonet. He was gone for fifteen minutes and returned with the bayonet to report that he’d thrown the pistol barrel into the lake. He drove to the parkway, turned northeastward past the lodge, and shortly made a U-turn, stopping on the shoulder. Carrying the bayonet, he disappeared into the woods and was gone again for long minutes. The young man saw him emerge near the edge of the woods carrying only the sheath, which he used to dig a shallow trench. He rammed the sheath into the trench, then stamped it down with his boot before scraping loose dirt back over it.

Back at the campground, they packed their gear and left, stopping at the nearby ranger station and museum to get maps of the area. The young man went across the road to the camp store for cigarettes. On the way back to Lexington, he was instructed to familiarize himself with the maps. It was important that he be able to knowledgeably verify the story of the camping weekend and night hike up Flat Top Mountain. His prospects with the Company could depend on it.

He had done well despite his fear, the older man told him, and he had begun to feel good about his weekend’s work and his prospects for the future. But he was curious about one thing. Would a career with the Company preclude marriage and a family?

“It could,” the older man said, going on to tell of his own failed marriage. When he’d proposed, he told his wife everything, he said, and she said that she could handle it. But after a couple of years, she tired of it.

“She threatened to go public if I didn’t get out and settle down. I had to tell her that if she did that, an
accident
would be arranged. Some poor soul would die in my Blazer and that would be the end of me.” He smiled. “I don’t have any dental records. I told her that she would have an accident, too, but it would be a real one.”

The message was clear to the young man. The secret of this weekend always would be safe. He wanted no “accidents” to happen to him.

14

The afternoon had slipped up on Rob Newsom. Shortly after four, his wife, Alice, asked what could be keeping his parents. They should have been home by now, bringing Rob and Alice’s daughter, Page, with them.

For more than two years, Rob and Alice and their three children had lived with his parents in their two-story brick and frame house on Fairgreen Drive in Hamilton Forest, an upper-class subdivision in northwest Greensboro. Soon, Rob and Alice would have the house for themselves, because his parents, Bob and Florence, were planning to move back to Bob’s family home near Winston-Salem, thirty miles away, so that they could keep a closer watch on Bob’s mother, Hattie—Nanna to the family. Nanna was eighty-five, and her family had decided that she should no longer live alone. This was May 19, and since Thanksgiving, when extensive renovations had begun on Nanna’s big house, Bob and Florence had spent nearly every weekend with her. The renovations were only a couple of weeks away from completion, and Bob and Florence already had been carrying things over in anticipation of their move. After a troubled Friday morning, they had left for Nanna’s at about 2 P.M., hoping to use the weekend to accomplish some cleanup work. They were due back Sunday afternoon, and they were to bring Page with them. Page was eleven, the eldest of Rob and Alice’s children. She had spent the weekend in Winston-Salem with her mother’s parents, Fred and Page Hill, so that she could take part in a cousin’s wedding on Saturday. Bob had said he would pick her up at mid-afternoon because he needed to get back to Greensboro and attend to some business.

At 5 P.M., Alice’s mother called. The Newsoms hadn’t picked up Page yet. Was something wrong? Should they feed her?

Yes, feed her, Alice said. She’d try to find out what was wrong and call back. She called Nanna’s house but got no answer. That was puzzling. Could Bob and Florence have gone out with Nanna? Wouldn’t they have let somebody know? Could Nanna have fallen ill and Bob and Florence be now at the hospital with her?

Perhaps Nanna was at church, Rob thought, and his father, preoccupied, had just forgotten to pick up Page and driven straight to his office in downtown Greensboro to do his work. Knowing his father was not apt to answer the phone at the office, Rob drove there to check but found nobody.

For the next two hours, Rob and Alice kept trying Nanna’s number without success. Maybe they all were out in the yard working, as they frequently were. Maybe they had gone to a church supper. Maybe the phone was out of order.

Alice called her parents and arranged to pick up Page. Her parents would drive Page to Suzie’s Diner, just off Interstate 40 at Kernersville, halfway between Greensboro and Winston-Salem, and Rob and Alice would meet them there. They left for Kernersville about eight o’clock, and after returning home, they kept trying Nanna’s number. Worry had replaced concern by the time they settled in front of the TV to watch a miniseries about Christopher Columbus. Neither could concentrate.

At ten o’clock, Rob stood up abruptly. “I’m going over there,” he said.

“Let me call mother,” Alice said.

Her mother suggested calling the Suttons, Newsom family friends, who lived not far from Nanna’s. Maybe they could check.

Homer Sutton had been the Newsom family doctor for more than thirty years. He’d seen Nanna only a few days earlier, when he’d sent her to a cardiology clinic for a test. She had an irregular heartbeat, and he liked to keep close watch on it. He was lying in bed reading when Rob called. Rob knew him well. They had been neighbors when Rob was growing up in Green Meadows, a small, private development on two small ponds, only two and a half miles from his grandmother’s house, and the Suttons still lived there. Dr. Sutton had heard nothing from Bob or Nanna. He was sure he would have if any of the Newsoms had fallen ill or been injured. He’d be glad to drive over and see what he could find out, he said.

Dr. Sutton and his wife, Katy, arrived at Nanna’s house at 3239 Valley Road, near Old Town, at about 10:20. They both loved the old two-story brick house with black shutters, even had considered buying it at one time, when Nanna’s late husband, Robert, claimed to be tired of yardwork and threatened to sell it. It sat well back from the road under huge oaks and was as elegant and homey as Nanna herself. A low chain-link fence separated the yard from the road. A walkway that led from the road to the front door had been overtaken by huge boxwoods that lined it. An asphalt driveway with a gate at the road led to a parking area at the northwest side of the house and looped back on itself.

As Dr. Sutton drove slowly up the dark drive, the headlights of his car fell on three cars. One he recognized as Bob Newsom’s new Buick. The blue Plymouth Fury and gold Plymouth Voláre, he knew, were Nanna’s. Like her, they were getting on in years. If all three cars were here, surely so were the Newsoms. Perhaps they’d been out and had just returned. Lights were on inside.

The Suttons got out and started for the back door, behind the garage, the door the family always used. The house was quiet. They could hear a dog barking across the street. As they stepped onto the flagstone patio, they saw that the upper glass in the storm door had been broken, the step littered with shards. That was odd. Nanna wasn’t one to leave broken glass lying around.

“Something bad has happened here,” Dr. Sutton said suddenly.

He peeked in through the living room window. A lamp was on in a far corner and he could hear the TV playing softly just under the window. Through the sheer curtains, he saw Nanna. She was in a beige nightgown, lying on a walnut-frame antique sofa upholstered in beige with tiny pink roses. A plaid afghan in autumnal colors that she normally kept on the back of the sofa covered her nearly to her chin. She seemed asleep. On the floor lay Florence. She was on her right side, wearing a white skirt and knit top, no shoes. At first glance, Dr. Sutton thought she might be lying there watching TV, but he knew her dignity wouldn’t allow that. He looked closer.

“There’s blood on the floor,” he said. “Something has happened to them.”

He tapped the window. No response. Nanna and Florence, he realized, were dead. Where was Bob? He couldn’t see him. Had Bob gone berserk and killed his wife and mother? Was he dead in another room? Was a murderer still lurking inside? The immensity of his discovery sent a shudder through him.

“Let’s get out of here,” his wife said, and they hurried back to their car, shaken by dread and fear.

15

“There was forever in that town a smell of raw tobacco, biting the nostrils with its acrid pungency. It smote the stranger coming from the train.”

—THOMAS WOLFE, writing about Winston-Salem in
Look Homeward, Angel

Winston-Salem is a city of two histories, two major influences, that melded in the marriage of Robert W. Newsom and Hattie Carter as they did in the merging of their two towns. He was Winston, she Salem. He was tobacco, she Moravian.

The Moravians came first to this hilly, forested land in the North Carolina Piedmont. The Brethren, they called themselves. A pacifist Protestant sect, they had been driven from their homes in Bohemia, later to become Czechoslovakia, by persecution from the Catholic Church. They settled first in Austria, then sent emissaries to find a place in the New World. An attempted settlement in Georgia failed, but in 1740 a permanent settlement was established in Pennsylvania at a place the group called Bethlehem. Twelve years later, Lord Granville offered the Brethren land in North Carolina, and Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenburg chose 100,000 acres in what was to become Forsyth County. He called the tract Wachovia, in honor of the Austrian family who had offered protection to the early Moravians. In 1753, fifteen single men arrived from Bethlehem to hack a settlement out of the wilderness, and two years later, seven married couples came to join them. They called their commune Bethabara, and as it grew, some found it too restrictive and moved three miles away to begin another settlement called Bethania. Both towns thrived as more members moved south from Pennsylvania, and in 1765, the elders chose a site on a hillside five miles southeast of Bethabara, which by then was generally called Old Town, for a third, central town designed for tradesmen. Soon the new town of Salem began to rise, growing beyond expectations until it surpassed both early settlements to become the state’s major frontier town.