The Buzzard Table (4 page)

Sigrid Harald—Tuesday night

A
nne Harald came back downstairs to find Sigrid tidying up the wet bar in the corner of the living room. While they were at dinner, Martha had washed and dried their drink glasses and they now sat on a tray waiting to be put away.

Sigrid took one look at her mother’s face then filled two of the glasses with ice cubes from the silver bucket that had been in the Lattimore family for at least four generations and poured them each a stiff bourbon, no water.

“Thanks, honey,” Anne said. She sat down in the wing chair by the fireplace and took a deep swallow.

Sigrid sat in the chair across from her and said, “How’s Grandmother?”

“Chloe gave her a shot and it put her out pretty fast.” Anne drank again, a smaller sip this time. “She was really hurting by the time we got her into bed, though. We shouldn’t have let her sit so long at the table.”

“Try telling her,” Sigrid said dryly. “You know she doesn’t want us to baby her.” She lifted her own drink and let the sweet smoky scent fill her nose.

Her grandmother did not economize when it came to providing drinks for her guests, and the bourbon was almost half as old as she was. “Sippin’ whiskey,” Oscar Nauman had called it when he contributed this particular brand to her liquor cabinet shortly before his death, “so don’t you-all go addin’ any mixers to it.”

Her lover’s attempted drawl was nothing like the soft Southern accents that had flowed around her since she and Anne had arrived a few days earlier. It wasn’t that Southerners talked slower, she had long ago decided; it was that they added extra syllables and stressed those syllables so differently that she had to keep mentally processing what she was hearing in order to understand and keep up. It was like wading in honey. Back in New York, Anne’s accent was only slightly noticeable. After three days here, she had almost totally reverted.

“Why have I never known you had an aunt and a cousin?” Sigrid asked.

“Frankly, I had almost forgotten myself,” Anne said. “It’s not as if Mother ever talked much about her sister. You heard her. Ferrabee took herself out of the family when Dad dumped her and proposed to Mother. She died young and Dad died when I was still a child, so who else would keep her memory green?”

“Quite a coincidence that you two should both become professional photographers.”

“And wind up in Peru at the same time…if that’s where it was.” Anne drained her glass and went over to the bar to pour herself another.

“Does it really matter?”

Anne stared into the flames that flickered from the gas log. “I suppose not,” she said, but Sigrid could see that it was clearly going to bother her till she remembered.

The ancient gas range was fueled by a tank of propane gas that sat outside the kitchen window. When the kettle began to whistle, Martin Crawford poured part of the boiling water into the teapot on the counter and wrapped a towel around the pot to keep it hot while the tea leaves steeped. The rest of the water went into a basin in the sink and he tempered it with a dipperful of cool water from the nearby bucket. The sink itself was a homemade tin tray and fresh water came from a hand pump. A kerosene lantern gave enough light to see himself in the cloudy mirror over the sink.

While rain hammered on the tin roof overhead, he made a mental note to pick up a can of shaving cream the next time he passed a store. Wetting his beard, he made a lather with a bar of hand soap. Fortunately, he still had a razor in his toiletries kit. He had not intended to shave off his beard until he got back to London, but he could not risk having Anne remember where she’d seen his bearded face before.

Stupid of me not to realize she’d looked at us with a photographer’s eye
, he thought as his strong chin emerged from the underbrush.

With a little luck, maybe this beardless face would soon blur her memory of the old one. He just hoped that the vultures would accept his new look.

When they first married, real estate prices were so insane that Ginger and Wesley Todd could not touch any house on this side of town, much less a house in this neighborhood; but by the time the floundering economy had sent this 2,200-square-foot dream house into foreclosure, their pest control business was doing well enough to let them put in a serious offer. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a master suite with a huge walk-in closet, finished basement, and a two-car garage on a large lot thick with trees and bushes, and not too far from her parents’ more modest neighborhood.

The only hitch was that the agent who first showed them the property had gone missing. Fortunately the agency owner had stepped in and was proving just as helpful.

“So if your daughter’s bed doesn’t fit in that dormer room, it’s going to be a deal-breaker?” Paula Coyne asked as she unlocked the front door for them shortly before 10:30 that evening.

They left their wet umbrellas dripping outside the door and wiped their shoes on the welcome mat.

Ginger Todd knew that she was being silly, but Ms. Coyne’s tone was teasing so she smiled back. “It’s really nice of you to come out this late, in the rain and all, so we can take one last look, but this is such a huge step for us, and when we remembered the ceiling…”

“It’s a lot of money,” the Realtor agreed, flipping on the light switches. “I don’t blame you a bit for wanting to be sure. That’s what we’re here for.”

The house had been minimally staged: a couch and some chairs in the living room on the right, a table and four side chairs in the dining room on the left. “They’ll get the furniture out of your way as soon as you close on Thursday,” Ms. Coyne said, moving briskly to the staircase.

The younger woman started to follow, but her husband fumbled for the light switches on the interior living room wall.

“You know, hon, I really do like that couch. It’s long enough to stretch out on when I watch TV.” He looked up at Ms. Coyne, who was already halfway up the stairs. “Is there any chance you could get them to leave it?”

“We can certainly ask,” she said.

“But that color,” his wife said. “Will it go with the rest of our things?” She moved past him to consider the couch’s potential. She rather liked the pattern—large dramatic bunches of red roses and green leaves on a white background. “I don’t think our red chair will match this red, though.”

“Sure it will,” Wes Todd said confidently. In contrast to his wife’s habit of dithering and second-guessing herself, he usually knew his own mind and made snap decisions. “Besides, it’s really more green-and-white than red.” He whipped off the bright red afghan that had been draped over one end of the couch. “See?”

His wife started to agree, then made a face. “Forget it, Wes. Look at that yucky stain.”

“Stain?” Ms. Coyne frowned and came back down to join them. Selling houses in this economy was hard enough with fresh paint and pristine décor. Stained furniture was unacceptable in the listings she handled. She remembered admiring the couch when she did her walk-through yesterday, so the afghan must have hidden the stain because no way would she not have noticed this ugly—

“Oh, dear Lord!” she said. “Is that blood?”

Wednesday morning

I
had been half joking when I said that my mother-in-law would probably cajole Martin Crawford into talking to a class at West Colleton High. It never occurred to me that she would rope Anne Harald in for something as well. Yet when I came back to my courtroom after the midmorning break, there sat Miss Emily on the front bench with Anne Harald on one side and Richard Williams on the other. Miss Emily wouldn’t meet my eyes, but Anne gave me a rueful smile and Richard beamed with his usual friendly optimism.

As the youth minister at the Methodist church here in Dobbs and an advocate for troubled kids, Richard was in and out of the courthouse several times a week pleading that his charges be given another chance to straighten out their lives before they were sentenced to serious jail time. He could be here for the shoplifter, one of the D&Ds, the malicious vandalism, or for anyone else under the age of twenty-five.

But Miss Emily?

I ran my finger down the calendar until I came to Jeremy Patrick Harper, charged back in December with trespassing, and I remembered that she’d asked me where a charge of trespassing on state property would be tried. In district court or superior?

There had been another flurry of peace demonstrations at the small county airport that forms the bottom of a triangle between our house and Cotton Grove, and it had made the national news because the protestors were claiming that the field was again being used for rendition flights. Sheriff Bo Poole’s picture even landed on the front page of the
Washington Post
because he had sent deputies out to keep order and they wound up arresting a photographer who had breached the chain-link fence and tried to get a look inside one of the privately leased hangars.

“I don’t have a problem with people exercising their constitutional right to protest,” Bo was quoted as saying, “long as they don’t go trespassing on other people’s constitutional rights.”

Like most Americans who like to think that global events don’t really touch their small safe lives, I had been appalled to learn that our country’s war on terror had included torturing suspected terrorists and even more appalled to think that some of the planes that ferried prisoners from Guantanamo to be tortured in foreign countries might have used the little airstrip here in Colleton County as a refueling or transfer stop. Yet this was what the news media claimed six or seven years ago. Call me naïve, but till then I’d been under the impression that it was just a convenience for eastern North Carolina business executives who wanted to park their Lears and Gulfstreams at less congested and somewhat cheaper hangars than Raleigh. Since I don’t own a plane and don’t know anyone who does, I hadn’t paid much attention to that airport except to vaguely wonder why there were no commercial commuter flights in and out. Dwight says its true purpose was the worst-kept secret in the county, but I must have been the last law-connected person in Dobbs to hear that while the field was officially owned by the state, it had been built with CIA money and that the planes that did fly in and out weren’t all corporate jets by any means. Or rather, they
were
corporate jets, but the corporations were shells set up by the CIA and Blackwater to hide their true ownership.

Blackwater, the guns-for-hire company that originated in the swampy northeast corner of the state within commuting distance of the Norfolk SEAL base, has been renamed Xe. The last I heard, its ex-SEAL founder now lives in Abu Dhabi and claims he’s out of the government contracting business. I don’t know about our own government, but if you Google “Abu Dhabi” and dig down a couple of layers, you’ll find allegations that their government has hired mercenaries to protect the oil fields and prevent another Arab Spring within the emirate. Oh, and the Pentagon is still shelling out millions to buy airplane fuel from them through noncompetitive contracts.

So what else is new?

When Jeremy Harper’s name was called shortly before noon, the teenager who had been seated behind Miss Emily came forward and stood at the defendant’s table beside his attorney, Reid Stephenson, who happens to be my first cousin, once removed, and a former law partner from when I was in private practice with Stephenson and Lee.

Small-town courtrooms can sometimes seem incestuous to strangers, but if judges recuse themselves every time a friend or relative stands up to argue a case for or against another friend or relative, court calendars would become an exercise in futility. No one’s ever accused me of favoring Reid. If anything, John Claude Lee, the other partner in my former firm (and yes, another cousin), complains that I always lean too far backwards in my determination to be fair. He himself won’t come into my court unless his case is totally ironclad.

Today’s ADA was Claudia O’Hale (no kin to any of us), and after she’d read the charges, I said, “How do you plead, Mr. Harper?”

“Not guilty, ma’am.” For one so tall and skinny, Jeremy Harper had an unexpectedly deep voice. He had a prominent Adam’s apple on a slightly longer than usual neck, and it didn’t help that he had very curly, very thick, and very light blond hair that poufed up all over his head. When the light hit it, his fair hair was closer to silver than gold. As he and Reid sat down, those frizzy white curls and the long neck gave him a vague resemblance to a dandelion gone to seed. If I wanted to get fanciful, I could almost imagine that his dark green sweater formed the dandelion’s basal leaves.

Resisting the temptation to look for further parallels, I gave my attention to Claudia O’Hale, who had called the arresting officer to the witness stand. Deputy Tub Greene wasn’t much older than young Harper, but he was the complete professional in his crisply pressed shirt and creased wool slacks, despite a utility belt that strained against his disappearing waistline as my clerk swore him in. Hard to stay in shape when you sit in a patrol car too long and snack on Moon Pies and RCs.

Upon being asked about that December day, Greene described how the protestors had been issued a permit that clearly stated they had to stay outside the fence, but that the defendant had later been caught trying to get inside one of the locked hangars with his camera. When given the chance to leave the premises without penalty, Mr. Harper had become foulmouthed and verbally abusive, whereupon he was placed under arrest.

Reid stood to cross-examine. He’s tall and good-looking, with such a boyish face that women jurors have a hard time voting against him. Unfortunately for him, this was not a jury trial.

“When you say my client ‘tried to get inside,’ Deputy Greene, what do you mean?”

“When apprehended, he was carrying a crowbar.”

“Did you see him actually use it?”

“No, sir.”

“Did he threaten you with it?”

“No, sir.”

“So you arrested him merely because he was carrying a perfectly legal carpenter’s tool.”

“No, sir. I arrested him because he was trespassing and refused to leave.”

“Were you aware that my client is a freelance reporter and has had some of his pictures published in the
Dobbs Ledger
and the
Cotton Grove Courier
?”

“No, sir, not at that time. Besides, he wasn’t wearing a press badge.”

“No further questions,” Reid said and sat down.

I looked over at the ADA. “Ms. O’Hale?”

“Redirect, Your Honor. Deputy Greene, were there any members of the press at this demonstration?”

“Yes, ma’am. There was a reporter from the
News and Observer
and two television stations. There were also stringers for the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
, and the Associated Press.”

“And did any of these real reporters—”

“Objection,” said Reid.

“Sustained,” I said. “Less pejorative, please, Ms. O’Hale.”

“Sorry, Your Honor.” She turned back to the deputy. “Were those reporters wearing press badges?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And did any of the reporters with credentials push their way onto the field?”

“No, ma’am. They poked their long-lens cameras through the chain-link fence, but they respected our instructions and didn’t try to get in. Just Mr. Harper.”

“Any of them get foulmouthed because you kept them from entering?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No further questions, Your Honor.”

I looked at my cousin. “Redirect, Mr. Stephenson?”

Without rising, Reid said, “What about you, Deputy Greene? Weren’t you the one who got foulmouthed first?”

The young officer flushed a deep brick red. His mother goes to the same church as one of my born-again sisters-in-law, a church that does not hold with cussing. “I don’t remember,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

“No further questions,” Reid said.

“Ms. O’Hale?” I asked.

“The State rests,” she told me.

“Call your first witness, Mr. Stephenson.”

Reid touched the young man’s shoulder and told him to take the stand. Once Harper had sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, he told us his name and that he had turned eighteen a week after the incident.

“In your own words, Jeremy, why did you go out to that airstrip and what did you hope to accomplish?”

Despite his resemblance to a dandelion, there was nothing fuzzy about the boy’s response. He sizzled with self-righteousness. “We heard that they’d started up the rendition flights again and we called for a demonstration against it.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Reid asked.

“P-A-T. Patriots Against Torture. We’re a loosely organized Internet group of concerned citizens from wherever these flights touch down—Nevada, Maine, North Carolina. We’re people who don’t believe America should sanction torture no matter what the excuse or provocation.”

“Where are your headquarters?”

Young Harper gave an impatient jerk of his head. “We don’t have a headquarters. I told you. We’re an Internet group on Yahoo! and I’m one of the group’s administrators. It’s like Facebook except that it’s not as visible. You can’t just Google PAT and enter our website. You have to join and get the password before you can read or post. We have links to some other activist groups, so when we heard that one of the suspect planes had been seen using the Colleton County Airport, the people over in Kinston called for that demonstration. We hoped to get fifteen or twenty people, instead we got nearly forty. And it was really cold that day, too.”

Reid glanced down at his notes. “You’ve told me that the demonstration was supposed to be peaceful and nonconfrontational. Why were you arrested?”

“Because I tried to get inside one of the hangars to get a look at the identifying numbers on the fuselage of that Gulfstream jet. I was really hoping to take a picture of them changing the numbers.”

“Changing the numbers?”

“Rendition planes routinely get new numbers painted on the fuselage to keep people like me from keeping track of where they are. I thought if I could get inside that hangar I could find the paint sprayers and maybe some of the stencils they use for the new numbers, and that would be visual proof that the CIA was using our airport for these illegal activities.”

“Illegal? What’s illegal about the CIA flying in and out of the county?”

“Because they’re flying prisoners suspected of terrorism to foreign soil.
Suspected.
Not
proved
, because they won’t put those prisoners on trial.”

“Again, what’s illegal about that?” Reid persisted.

Harper’s hands tightened on the armrest of the witness chair and his curls bounced like springs as he grew more impassioned. “It may not be illegal in the technical sense, although the Constitution mandates speedy trials, but it’s hypocritical and immoral. Our soldiers aren’t fighting and dying so that America can turn into one of those fundamentalist countries where laws don’t protect its citizens. We’re supposed to be Christians. We say we don’t torture people, and it’s illegal for Americans to do it, so we fly them to a different country that’s not so hypocritical and let them be tortured there. We—”

Reid held up his hand to cut off the boy’s rant.

Jeremy Harper sank back into his chair, but instead of waiting for Reid to frame another question, he looked up to me beseechingly. “If they didn’t think it was wrong and that we would care, why do they mess with the planes’ registration numbers?”

“Do you know for a fact that they do?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. One of our members called the FAA in Oklahoma from the Kinston airport. You’re supposed to be able to give them a fuselage number and they have to tell you who it’s registered to. He gave them the number and they told him there was no such plane with that number. He said, ‘Ma’am, I’m standing here looking at the plane and those are the numbers,’ and the woman said, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. There
is
no such plane,’ and then she hung up.”

“Hearsay, Your Honor,” Claudia O’Hale murmured.

“Sustained,” I said.

“Let’s go back to the day in question,” Reid said. “You knew you were not supposed to go inside the fence?”

As if the tenor of that question had abruptly reduced his actions from high-minded nobility to juvenile misbehavior, Harper gave a sulky, “Yes, sir.”

“Deputy Greene gave you an opportunity to move back behind the fence without any charges, why didn’t you take it?”

“Because he was acting like citizens and taxpayers have no right to question anything the government does, and when he called me a Muslim-loving motherfucker—sorry, Your Honor—I called him something right back and told him he was like a Nazi soldier. Just following orders without asking if those orders were legal or ethical.”

Seated behind the prosecution’s table, Deputy Greene stared straight ahead, stony-faced except for a dull red flush creeping up from his tight collar.

To my mind,
Nazi
is an epithet too freely tossed around by people who have no true sense of what it means, but again, as when I’d sustained the hearsay, I held my tongue.