Signs in the Blood (5 page)

Afore long we had it all ready and set it on the table. Clytie like to break a leg tryin to be the one to go to the door and call them in. I just let her go and busied myself fillin the drinkin mugs with cold buttermilk I'd fetched from the springhouse.

Daddy and the stranger man come in and Daddy cut his eyes all round the room. Where's Romarie at? he asked real sharp-like. When we told him she was over to Phelpses, he just snorted and said that maybe that was just as well. We all set down to the table and Daddy says, Girls, this here's Mister Tomlin. Him and me has struck a little deal. He's needin lodging whilst he's in this country and I done told him we had plenty of room and plenty of gals to do the cookin and washin. Then he asked Mister Tomlin would he return thanks and Mister Tomlin begun to pray like one thing. I had my head bowed and my eyes most shut but I was a-lookin at him while he prayed.

His eyes was squinched tight but his head was rared back like he was sendin his words straight up to Heaven and you could tell from the way he talked that he was right certain Jesus was a-listenin. Mister Tomlin had black whiskers with some gray coming into them, but they was trimmed close and neat and the black hair on his head was sleek and shiny. His clothes looked to be all store-bought and near bout new, though dusty with travelin. They was a gold watch-chain stretched against his vest front and on the little finger of his left hand he had a golden finger-ring with a bright red stone in it that I thought was the prettiest thing I ever seen. Hit put me in mind of the sun just a-glancin off a redbird's wing. I peeped around to where Clytie was settin there next to me and seen that she was a-watchin him and lookin at that finger-ring too.

All the while we was eatin, Daddy was a-braggin on our cookin and promisin Mister Tomlin that another day we'd really show him what we could do. I got me a taste for some fried chicken, girls, he said, and I believe you could find a mess of early peas. We just said yessir, for Daddy don't hold with us talkin too much at table, especially when they's company, but I could see Clytie smilin and figgered she was thinkin about makin one of her ginger and dried apple stack cakes too.

So Mister Tomlin came to stay with us as a boarder. Like Daddy said, we had a plenty of room for our house was a big log house with a box stair and rooms above. Downstairs was the big room with the fireplace where we done all our cookin and a pie safe and the table and benches and chairs. Daddy's big old bed with the feather tick was over to one corner. Us girls all slept upstairs where there was two big rooms. Daddy had fixed hit thataway back when him and Mommy thought that they'd have a big family. But now there was just me and Clytie in the one room and Romarie in t'other. There was one more room in the house, a little small room downstairs, built right next to the chimbly. It was meant to be a bornin room or a place if someone was sick and needed to keep extry warm, but since Mommy had died in there, it hadn't been used none.

Daddy set us to cleanin that room and Mister Tomlin took the saddlebags off his fine horse and brung them in. He also brung in a fine long double-barreled shotgun and stood hit in the corner of his room. I heard Mister Tomlin tell Daddy hit was of English make and the best of hits kind that there was. When Daddy looked at that shotgun his eyes got all hungry—like me a-lookin at that red stone finger-ring.

CHAPTER 4

L
UNCH AT
F
ULL
C
IRCLE
F
ARM
 (
S
UNDAY)

“O-oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind.
She's always contro-olled; she's always confined.
Controlled by her pa-a-rents, until she's a wife.
A slave to her husband the rest of her life.”

E
LIZABETH SANG THE OLD BALLAD LOUDLY AND NOT
very tunefully as she ambled down to her garden on Sunday morning to pick lettuce for the sandwiches. As she sang, she did a mental run-through of her lunch plans. The turkey breast was roasting in the oven, well seasoned with garlic slivers, lemon juice,
herbes de Provence,
and crazy salt. A bottle of white wine was in the refrigerator, as well as some St. Pauli Girl beer and a pitcher of unsweetened iced tea.
I don't know what he'd like to drink so I'll have several choices . . . oh, and pick some of the Blue Balsam mint for the tea,
she reminded herself, carefully breaking off the crisp outer leaves of the young lettuces. There was her homemade sourdough bread to be warmed at the last minute and those decadently good rosemary-and-olive-oil potato chips from the Fresh Market.
And cut-up strawberries and mangoes for dessert. That should do it.

As she climbed the steps back to her porch, Elizabeth's thoughts returned to the problem of Miss Birdie. After the “prophesies” of the night before, Birdie was adamant in her belief that Cletus had been murdered somewhere back in the mountains before he had been thrown into the river. And Elizabeth was reasonably sure that Miss Birdie would not be satisfied till her son's missing shotgun had been found, no matter what the sheriff said.
And that's going to mean going up in a bunch of those deep hollers “where the sun don't never shine,” like they say.

She paused at the top of the steps as a tiny shudder shook her body.
Gramma would have said that was a rabbit running over my grave,
Elizabeth thought, but the idea of the deep dark hollers continued to nag at her.
They tell stories about some rough folks in this county, but everyone I've met has been pretty nice, at least once you get to know them. It'll be interesting,
she told herself,
seeing some of these places that are just down the other side of the mountain. Cletus rambled all around the area—

She stopped in mid-thought, pushing away the unspoken
and look what happened to him.
“I'd better get this lettuce washed,” she said aloud. As she went inside she reassured herself,
Maybe I'll call the sheriff tomorrow and see if they've looked for the shotgun at all. Birdie was so sure that Cletus would have kept it with him no matter what . . . it's probably in the river and just hasn't been found.

The kitchen clock told her that it was a quarter to eleven. Forty-five minutes till she was to meet Phillip Hawkins down at the lower barn. She'd warned him not to attempt the last steep quarter-mile of her road in his car. “It's not just the steepness,” she had explained, “it's the water breaks.” These were five deep trenches across the road, used to carry off water from a heavy rain. While a car with four-wheel drive could creep slowly over a water break, an ordinary car, needing a fair amount of speed to pull the steep grade, would hit each trench hard, sometimes with appalling results for the undercarriage.

She glanced at the dining table there against the row of windows that looked across the valley to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. She'd already set the table with her cobalt pottery plates and the indigo-and-white batik napkins. A creamy old ironstone pitcher held three clusters of crimson rhododendron blooms and several spikes of Siberian iris, their deep purple petals looking like a flight of exotic butterflies above the lush rhododendrons.

“So who is this Hawkins guy?” Ben called from the little office where he was updating farm records on the computer. “Someone you and Sam used to know?”

“I told you, Ben, he was in the navy with Sam. I never met him till he came to the memorial service. He's moving to Asheville and he has some pictures of Sam for me. And he just wanted some information about the area.”

“Oh, right, I remember now.” Ben wandered into the room, twisting his long sun-bleached hair into a ponytail and eyeing the table. “Looks nice, Aunt E; what're we having for lunch?”

Elizabeth looked at her tall, handsome nephew, and thought, as she often did, how lucky she was that Ben had wanted to come to live at Full Circle Farm. Two years ago Ben Hamilton had finished college with a degree in philosophy and a desire for what he called “the simple life.” Though he had grown up in Florida, where his mother, Elizabeth's sister, still lived, he'd often spent the summer with Sam and Elizabeth and their girls, reveling in the freedom of exploring the mountain's woods and pastures with his two cousins.

When Sam had died four years ago in the crash of a friend's small plane, Elizabeth had been determined to carry on the herb and flower business they had built up together. Although she was financially secure in a modest way, due to the unexpectedly generous insurance settlement after Sam's death, she had welcomed the endless physical toil in the fields and drying sheds. The exhaustion she felt at day's end, as well as the sense of duties fulfilled, dulled the pain of her loss and made it easier to fall asleep in the lonely bed at night. But as time passed and her daughters became ever more involved in their own careers, she began to find the work, even with hired help, increasingly difficult. And then last year, Ben had come to her, asking to learn the business. He had set about becoming knowledgeable in every aspect of growing and marketing the herbs and dried flowers that the farm produced, and had moved into the old log cabin across the creek from Elizabeth's house.
Little Sylvie's cabin,
she thought with a sudden memory of the story Birdie had told.

“By the way, Aunt E,” Ben said, having satisfied his curiosity about the menu by a look around the kitchen, “Julio wants to rent the old house down by the workshop. He's bringing his wife and family up from Mexico.”

Elizabeth smiled. Between Ben and Julio, most of the actual work of the business and the farm had been taken out of her hands. She constructed the elegant dried-flower-and-herb wreaths that were the farm's signature product and that fetched such surprising prices in a few upscale shops, but the backbreaking field work was no longer her job. She maintained her own vegetable garden and her flowers, as well as doing huge amounts of weed-eating in the summer, but she had more free time now than at any other point in her life on the farm.

And that's given me time to miss Sam,
she thought ruefully.
But it also means I'll have plenty of time to help Birdie discover what happened to that shotgun . . . and to settle her mind about Cletus. I wonder what Sam would have thought about this—was it an accident or . . .
The word “murder” formed in her mind but she rejected it.
And you're not here to help me find out, are you, Sam? I'm on my own. Again.

Elizabeth arrived at the big red barn on the lower part of her property a few minutes before eleven-thirty. This was where she had told Hawkins that she would meet him and there was an unfamiliar gray car parked over to one side, but no Hawkins. Then she saw him out in the field bending down to examine a gray-green row of fragrant lavender. He straightened up and came walking briskly toward her, his olive-skinned face alight with pleasure.

“Mr. Hawkins, I'm glad you made it. I hope my directions were fairly clear.”

“Perfect,” he said with a grin. He was as she remembered him: a compact and burly man, just slightly taller than herself. The black hair rimming a tanned bald scalp showed a little more gray, but otherwise he was unchanged. “I'd allowed some time for getting lost and I got here early. But could we just make it Phillip?”

“Sure,” she answered after a small hesitation, “and I'm Elizabeth.”

After lunch was finished, Ben excused himself to go back to his computer and Elizabeth and Phillip took their coffee out to the front porch. “You and Ben have answered a lot of my questions already,” he said, settling comfortably into one of the rocking chairs. “From what you've told me, I think I'll start by looking for a place in Weaverville; that's plenty close to Asheville.” A lean red hound with luminous black-rimmed yellow eyes nudged at his knee and he leaned down to scratch behind her ears. “Aren't you a beautiful girl!” He looked up at Elizabeth. “What's her name?”

“That's Molly, and the shaggy black one asleep over there is Ursa, and the small brown one is James.” James, clearly the result of an ill-advised union between a dachshund and a Chihuahua, rolled on his back and bared his teeth ingratiatingly.

Phillip scratched James's stomach gently, then, as Ursa roused and pushed her way forward, began to massage the big black dog's ears. She pressed even closer and buried her shaggy head in his lap. Hawkins chuckled. “I've wished I could have a dog, but living alone and with the weird hours I used to have to keep, it just wouldn't have been fair to the dog. Maybe when I finally do retire . . .” His voice trailed off.

Without even realizing she'd done so, Elizabeth made up her mind. “Mr. Hawkins—Phillip—you're a police detective, aren't you?”

“For the past, ah, twenty-two years.” He raised his thick black eyebrows quizzically.

“Well, I'd like to ask your advice about something. You see, I have this neighbor . . .”

It took refills on the coffee to get all the way through the story of Miss Birdie, her dead son, and the prophetess of the Holiness church. “The thing is, the sheriff says it was an accident, but Miss Birdie is convinced Cletus was killed somewhere else and then dumped in the river,” Elizabeth explained. “She's asked me to help her—”

“What did the autopsy show?” Hawkins broke in. “Was this Cletus drowned or not?”

Elizabeth put her coffee mug on the porch railing before replying. “I have to admit I didn't think to ask. But that would clear it up nicely, wouldn't it? If Cletus was drowned, then Birdie would have to accept the fact that he died in the river, not back on the mountain.”

She paused, thinking rapidly, then went on, “Of course, he could have been killed by the fall onto the rocks. The river's pretty shallow a lot of the time. I'll call the sheriff tomorrow; I'll tell him Miss Birdie's not satisfied they've got it right and find out what the autopsy showed.” She paused again, feeling a sudden pang of guilt. “I should have done it earlier; I'm afraid the sheriff doesn't take Miss Birdie very seriously.”

“You say they found him last week?” Hawkins asked. “If the sheriff thinks it was just an accident, it could be several weeks before the autopsy gets done—at least, back in Beaufort that's how it would be. Medical examiners' offices are usually overloaded. Maybe it's different up here.” He shrugged and, standing, leaned on the railing to watch a pair of red-tailed hawks circling in the distance. He stood in silence, eyes fixed on the wheeling birds, then said slowly, “You know, I thought that since I've lived on the coast most of my life I'd miss the water when I moved here.” His eyes followed the hawks as they disappeared behind a ridge. “But in a place like this you still get that same feeling, that feeling of . . . I guess you'd call it spaciousness.”

He looked down at the open deck below the porch and at the little goldfish pool nestled in the green and gold and silver evergreens. The filmy-tailed fish swam in lazy circles and a patterned snake slid off the rocks edging the pond into the clear water. “Whoa! That looked like a copperhead!”

“No, that's a northern water snake. They do look a lot like copperheads—that is, till you see the real thing. The water snakes don't have that triangular viper head, but they get killed for copperheads just the same.”

“It doesn't bother you to have snakes so close?” Hawkins watched intently as the snake emerged from the pool, followed by a second smaller one. The two reptiles coiled themselves elegantly on a flat rock in the sun. “A lot of people can't stand to be around snakes of any kind. Like that church service you told me about with the serpent boxes.” He grinned and shook his head. “I know quite a few folks who wouldn't have set foot in that church if there was even a chance of snakes being there, boxes or not.”

“They don't bother me as long as I know what they are. I like to watch them, and they keep the goldfish population under control. And they always go and hide when I have to reach into the pond to get at the filter to clean it.”

Hawkins continued to stare at the little pond. Then he asked abruptly, “Could we walk around and you show me some more of the place? Sam was so proud of what you two had accomplished, called it ‘an earthly paradise.'” He waved an arm toward the tiered garden and the masses of blooming shrubs. “Didn't he say that this was originally a tobacco field and you two did all this landscaping? Amazing!”

Leaning over the railing he peered at a drooping fir dotted with bright coral cones. “You've got a lot of plants and things I don't recognize, but some I do remember from my aunt's place. Did I tell you I used to spend summers up here? My mother's people are from Shut In, and I stayed with Aunt Omie every summer till I turned sixteen.” He was silent, evidently remembering those long-ago summers, then he continued, “Do you know Shut In?”

“Actually, Miss Birdie and I passed near there last night on our way over the mountain to the church in Tennessee. Shut In's almost an hour from here,” she explained.

“It was a great place for a kid.” Hawkins's eyes were dreamy. “I had a little hideout under this big bush by the front porch—it was like those bushes with pink flowers there where you parked the car. Aunt Omie called them old pink flower. Or ‘flahr,' as she would have said. What's their real name?”

“Weigela,” said Elizabeth. “Those were just tiny sticks when I planted them about twenty years ago. Now they're eight feet tall and I have to prune at them every year to keep them from taking over.”