The Buzzard Table (9 page)

The brush gave way to an open pasture. To the left, a banged-up black truck was parked beside a wooden tenant house badly in need of paint. The house sat on a slight rise and the land sloped down from it to a line of trees and bushes in the far distance.

“That must be the buzzard table Deborah told us about,” Anne said, pointing to the ruins of an old foundation a few yards from the creek.

She drove on over to the house, but before they reached it, Martin Crawford emerged from inside and waited for them on the porch.

“Sorry I didn’t call before coming,” Anne said in cheerful greeting, “but we forgot to exchange numbers last night. Hey, you shaved off your beard!”

“I told you it came and went with the seasons,” he said. “Hullo, Sigrid. Did you come to see the vultures? I’m afraid they’re not here right now.”

He pointed back the way they had come. High above the treetops, they could see four of the big creatures circling around and around.

“They seem to have found something over there that interests them more than my squirrels. But do come in. I’ve just put the pot on for tea.”

Sigrid Harald—Wednesday afternoon (continued)

T
he old Ferrabee tenant house was typical of the living quarters a landowner might provide a sharecropper family in the thirties, forties, and fifties. It would have had electricity, but no running water or indoor plumbing and certainly no central heating. Martin Crawford gave Anne and Sigrid a quick tour to show how he had weather-stripped the doors and windows and layered threadbare carpets over the cracks in the floor. Mrs. Lattimore had invited him to rummage in her attic for pieces of cast-off furniture—the carpets, three mismatched chairs, a badly scarred and water-stained oak kitchen table, and a bookshelf. A few kitchen utensils and a single-bed mattress to put under his sleeping bag came from a thrift store in Cotton Grove, as did the kerosene lanterns. There were four rooms, but he was using only three: the kitchen, a bedroom, and the front room. A potbellied stove in the front room was enough to keep those three rooms warm and cozy.

The table was more than six feet long. Camera cases, a laptop, and several file folders littered the near end. He shifted a pile of photography magazines and news journals from two of the chairs and invited them to join him at the table.

When they told him that a woman’s body had been found nearby, he said, “Do they know who she was?”

“We haven’t heard, but according to the local newspaper, a Realtor went missing Saturday,” Sigrid said.

Talk turned to other matters while Martin added more tea to the pot, brought out a tin of shortbread, and opened the door of the little iron stove so that the dancing flames could be seen.

“You’ve made yourself very comfortable here,” Anne said, “but Mother still doesn’t understand why you can’t stay with her and drive back and forth to photograph your vultures.”

“This is luxury living compared to some of the places I’ve slept in,” he told her as the teapot and biscuit tin went around. He described camping in the high Andes to photograph condors, of being stalked by a leopard while trying to get a shot of lammergeiers in the Elburz Mountains.

Anne countered with a mud hut in Ethiopia and a yurt in Mongolia.

And Sigrid sat quietly watching both of them as they compared notes and tried to decide where they might have overlapped in the past. She had interviewed so many criminals in her career that she had gone on automatic alert the first time their cousin’s eyes flicked from Anne’s face to hers, as if to see how she was taking it before flicking back again to Anne’s. Without his beard, his own face seemed more expressive than before.

“My father was stationed in Islamabad for a couple of years. That’s the closest I ever came to Mongolia, so it must have been Peru,” Martin said at last. “I forget when, though.”

Sigrid wanted to shout, “
Don’t tell him!
” But with no good reason to explain why, she kept silent; and when Anne supplied the year and the month, Martin nodded in agreement.

“That sounds correct. I do remember that it was May.”

Like hell you do
, Sigrid thought. But why would he lie about something so innocuous?

“What about So—?” Before Anne could complete her question, her teacup somehow collided with the pot Martin was holding out and hot tea splashed on her trouser leg while the pot went flying.

Her teacup shattered but the teapot landed on the pile of magazines and survived its fall.

“Oh, Martin, I’m so sorry,” Anne said, picking up the pieces of the broken cup.

“No, no. My fault entirely.” He hurried to the kitchen and came back with a roll of paper towels for Anne to dry herself off with. “Fortunately, the carpets aren’t Persian.”

Which led to talk of Iran and how stupid the United States and Great Britain had been to orchestrate the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh and replace him with a dictatorial shah.

“You think we could have had a secular Muslim state there like Turkey?” Anne asked.

“Probably. That’s what my father always thought.” He sighed. “But enough about politics. I have some wonderful photographs of Medina. Were you ever there? Let me show you.”

He swiveled his chair around to open the laptop on the table and the two women pulled their own chairs closer. Once they were past the novelty of an Arabic keyboard, the pictures had Anne oohing and ahhing over some of the effects he had achieved and how his pictures of village life captured the ebb and flow of the culture.

“This is exactly what I’m hoping Jeremy can learn,” she told Sigrid, her eyes snapping with excitement.

“Jeremy?” he asked.

She described her morning in court and how Deborah Knott had consented to a community service plan she hoped to put together with a youth minister in Dobbs. “Would you talk to him, too, Martin? Show him some of your work? Please?”

He raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Talk to him about the poverty-stricken life of a freelance ornithologist?”

“About making a living with words and a camera without breaking the law. If we hadn’t come along just now, I have a feeling he would have found a way to sneak through the woods to where the body is. Deborah went pretty easy on him this morning, but if he keeps pushing the boundaries, she could send him to jail for violating his probation, right, Sigrid?”

Sigrid rather doubted it would come to that, but she nodded anyhow, knowing Anne thought it would strengthen her appeal for help.

“Well…” he said.

“Great! Give me your phone number so I can call you. Maybe we can set something up for tomorrow and—” Movement through the front window caught her eye. “More company, Martin. A police car.”

There was a tap of the horn—a way of announcing oneself that country people still used—then someone emerged from the squad car.

Sigrid’s chair gave her an unobstructed view of the yard. “It’s Dwight Bryant,” she said. “He probably wants to know if you saw anything over there.”

As Dwight and Mayleen Richards stepped up onto the porch, Martin Crawford opened the door for them.

“Bryant,” he said, holding out his hand to shake. “Good to see you again. It didn’t quite register last night that you’re a police officer. Come in, come in. I’m afraid I’m a bit short on chairs, though.”

As Dwight introduced his deputy to the others, Martin gestured for her to take his chair and refused to take her no for an answer. He closed his laptop and pushed the clutter down to the far end of the long sturdy table.

“I think it will support both of us,” he told Dwight; but as he backed up to the table and started to press down with his arms to hoist himself up, they saw an involuntary grimace of pain. Embarrassed, he settled for leaning against the table.

Concerned, Anne said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Really. Took a bad tumble last year and broke both arms. Fell down the stairs in my own house. Would you believe it? Slipped on a loose tread. I keep forgetting that they haven’t completely healed.”

Another lie?
Sigrid wondered. In her experience, people deviating from the truth tended to give more information than was needed. She glanced at Dwight Bryant, who was leaning against the doorframe. His face showed nothing more than polite sympathy.

“I’d offer you some tea, but I only have three cups.” Martin smiled at Anne. “Actually, I seem to be down to two at the moment. I shall have to see about getting more.”

“That’s okay,” Dwight said. “We can’t stay. We’ve discovered the body of a missing woman on the other side of those woods there and wondered if you could tell us anything about it?”

“A missing woman? I’m afraid not. As you know, I was away last night until after ten and I went straight to bed when I returned.”

“We think she may have been put there three or four nights ago. We’re hoping to find someone who saw car lights at an odd time or noticed an unfamiliar vehicle on the road. It’s a dead end and you’re probably the only one using it much on a regular basis.”

Martin Crawford shook his head. “Sorry, Bryant. I’m a stranger here myself so I wouldn’t know who did or didn’t belong. For what it’s worth, when your wife and her nephew stopped by yesterday, they were my first visitors in the two months I’ve been here. I have heard some young chaps larking up and down the road on their quads, and they did try to come through here a few weeks ago, but I told them they were trespassing and sent them packing. Can’t have my vultures scared away, you see.”

“The thing is,” Dwight said, continuing as if the other man hadn’t spoken, “someone called it in around two this afternoon. An anonymous man. Sounded like he had an accent very much like yours.”

“Oh?”

“Was it you?”

“Anonymous, you said?”

“That’s right.”

“Probably someone who wanted to be helpful but didn’t want to become involved, wouldn’t you say? From the size and grandeur of that housing estate, surely one or two of her majesty’s subjects might live there and have telephones?”

“Would you mind if we looked at the call record on yours?” Dwight asked bluntly.

“Actually, I bloody well would,” Martin said. He was at least four inches shorter than Dwight but he drew himself up pugnaciously. “I’m not used to having my veracity questioned.”

“Martin,” Anne said softly, and he turned to her with a what-the-hell? shrug of his shoulders and a sheepish smile.

“Quite right, my dear.” He went into the closed and unheated bedroom and returned with two cell phones. One was the latest iPhone, the other was a cheap throwaway. “I haven’t used either of them in several days. This one’s for overseas calls and this disposable toy is for local calls to the library and Aunt Jane. It costs too much to use my regular mobile here in the States.”

He selected the outgoing call option on both phones and handed one to Dwight and the other to Mayleen Richards.

It took them only a moment to see that he had told the truth.

“I apologize, Crawford,” Dwight said, returning the phones. “It’s just that when I saw the buzzards kettling above the body, I thought maybe they made you curious enough to go over and take a look.”

“Quite all right. I expect it goes with the job.” He laid the phones on the table and turned toward the kitchen. “Now, I can’t offer you tea, but I do have an extra glass if you’d like a spot of something else?”

“Another time,” Dwight said. “Right now, we have to get back to Dobbs. I have to tell the woman’s husband that she’s been found.”

Sigrid watched him go with torn loyalties.

Martin Crawford might be family, but Dwight Bryant was a fellow law officer.

When her cousin had given them a brief tour of the house earlier, there had been an open satchel on the floor beside his sleeping bag. He had immediately directed their eyes to the north wall papered in old newspapers to keep out the worst of the winter chill. Most of them dated back 30 years and Anne had marveled at some of the headlines. When Sigrid looked again at the satchel, a pillow lay on top of it, hiding the four or five throwaway phones she had glimpsed before.

None of her business, she told herself. If Martin was the one who had made that call, he had acted responsibly. He wouldn’t be the first person who preferred not to get involved with murder.

“What did Dwight mean when he said the buzzards were kettling?” Anne asked.

“It’s a fanciful way of describing the way they move up and down when they circle over prey. It reminds people of air bubbles in a pot of boiling water.” Martin smiled. “Speaking of which, shall I make us another pot of tea?”

L
ate that afternoon, my clerk, Frances Warren, leaned in to tell me that Rebecca Jowett’s body had been found. “Out near where y’all live,” she said, but that was as much as she knew.

My calendar turned out to be more packed than expected, thanks to the inefficiency of our current DA, so there was no time to go chasing down rumors if we hoped to get through everything. Happily, Frances kept all the paperwork moving and together we reached the last case just as the hands on the courtroom clock passed five.

It was a he-said-she-said bar brawl involving a young white woman, her current black boyfriend, and her white ex-boyfriend, and I had heard all I needed to when the door of my courtroom opened and a little boy with a backpack hanging from one shoulder entered and slipped into the last row of benches. He gave me a snaggletoothed smile and held up a book to let me know he was going to sit there and read until I was finished.

Cal.

I smiled back at him and quickly disposed of those three. A night in jail had calmed them all down, and from the way she was flouncing and smirking and tossing her long hair back from her face every few minutes, I suspected that the young woman was rather pleased to be the object of hot desire for two good-looking men. Indeed, she had probably incited them. Nevertheless, they were the ones who had thrown the punches and broken some glassware, although she seemed to have done her bit to keep the fight going. I gave them each three days, with credit for time served and the rest to be suspended on the usual conditions. They were to make restitution of seventy-five dollars to the bar owner for the breakages. (He was asking for two hundred even though I knew from past testimony that seventy-five dollars would buy five or six dozen bar glasses at Sam’s Club.)

At this point, I paused and looked at the white bar owner, who is in court at least once a month to testify about similar occurrences. “If you like, sir, I can order them to stay away from your premises.”

“Naw, that’s okay,” he said. “Long as they behave theirselves, they can come on back.”

“That’s your decision,” I told him, “but I’m putting you on notice now that if you or any of your customers are back here anytime soon, I might be forced to see about shutting you down for maintaining a public nuisance.”

He started to protest, but I held up my hand for silence.

“Every time you or your patrons wind up here in court, it costs the taxpayers money, and you’ve used up more than your share of tax dollars these last few months. If you can’t maintain order, we’ll have to see who can.”

I turned back to the first three. “Pay the clerk in the hall on your way out and you’re free to go.”

“We each got to pay seventy-five for them broken glasses?” the young woman asked.

“No, twenty-five apiece, but you each do have to pay court costs. The clerk will work out a payment schedule if you don’t have the cash on you.”

I winked at the bailiff and gave a crisp formal tap of my gavel. “Court adjourned, Mr. Overby.”

“All rise,” he said solemnly even though Cal was the only one still seated on the benches. My stepson came immediately to his feet.

“This court is now adjourned,” Overby said, then smiled. “Hey there, Cal! How’s it going?”

“Fine,” he said shyly as he came forward.

Frances greeted him by name as well.

Dwight is well liked around the courthouse, and in the year that Cal has lived with us, he’s become familiar to a lot of the people who work here and they would spoil him if they could. Part of it is the usual brownnosing. After all, I
am
a judge and Dwight is Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief deputy. But Cal’s a nice kid, quiet, polite to his elders, and doesn’t try to take advantage of our positions.

Overby held the door behind the bench for Frances and her files and would have held it for me, but I gestured for him not to wait because Cal had left his backpack and jacket on the bench.

As he came back up to the bar, he looked around the modern room with its pale blue walls and its bleached oak furnishings. There’s a big gilt seal of state on the wall behind my blue leather chair, with an American flag on one side and a North Carolina flag on the other. Otherwise, the room is quite plain. “Is this where Mary Pat and Jake got adopted?”

“No,” I said. “That was in the old courtroom. Want to see it?”

“Sure.”

We stopped by my office so that I could drop off my robe and pick up my parka, then crossed over to the older wing.

The main courtroom is still used for superior court trials and for swearing-in ceremonies or whenever else the participants wish to invoke the power and stone-footed majesty of the law. Twice as big as the other courtrooms, the cavernous space is paneled in dark oak and the raked floor is carpeted in deep red wool. Acanthus leaves are carved into the plaster medallions on the high vaulted ceiling and pierced brass lanterns hang down from the center of each on long black cords above solid oak benches. They cast a golden glow over the courtroom.

Most adoptions are just a matter of filing the correct forms, which the clerk of the court checks to see that all the hoops have been jumped through, but Kate and Rob got him to make a nice little ceremony out of signing the final form, and they did it here.

“It looks like church,” Cal said in a hushed voice.

“It does, doesn’t it?” I said, feeling a bit proprietary.

I had been sworn in here, my daddy holding the Bible on which I took my oath, with all my kinfolks looking on (and taking up a good quarter of the benches). I still get goose bumps thinking about all that these venerable walls have witnessed over the past hundred years.

“Mary Pat said it felt a little bit like getting married.”

“What about Jake?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think he cared. Besides, Aunt Kate’s his real mother—his biological mother,” he elucidated in case I was confused. (There had been much discussion of “real,” “biological,” and “adoptive” during the whole adoption process last summer.) “And he’s been calling Uncle Rob Dad ever since he could talk.”

“So where’s your own dad?” I asked, glancing at my watch. “Are you riding home with him or me?”

“With you. He said tell you he’d be home by seven.” He cut his eyes up at me with a mischievous grin. “He also said he’d have told you himself if you’d had your phone on.”

I fumbled in my parka pocket and found my phone. “It was on,” I said. “See?”

“But it was in your office. And your door was locked. And I bet it was on vibrate.”

I laughed and called Dwight back. My call went straight to his voice mail. “Got your message and your son,” I said. “See you at seven.”

My friend Portland had given me a ride out to Will’s place at lunchtime, so my car was waiting for us in my parking spot across from the courthouse.

Cal slid into the front seat beside me and dropped his backpack on the floor behind us.

As he talked about school and how Dwight had picked him up early, I realized that he hadn’t wondered why Dwight was out that way. Cal’s certainly aware of what we do for a living, but we try to keep the worst from him and I could understand that Dwight wouldn’t want him to know why he’d had to wait in the squad car while his dad went in to talk to some man.

On the other hand, he’s no dummy. “There were a lot of cars at that house,” he said, “but I don’t think it was a party.”

“Probably not,” I agreed.

“Did somebody get killed?”

“I’m afraid so, honey.”

“Somebody’s mom?” he asked in a small voice.

“No, I don’t think she had any children.”

“That’s good.”

There was a pensive look on his face. I never know whether it’s the right thing to talk about Jonna or not, but Dwight and I had agreed we would try not to make it awkward for Cal to speak of her. I reached over and gave his hand a quick squeeze. “You’re thinking about your mother, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “When she got killed, there were all those cars at Grandmother’s house.”

“That’s because so many people loved her and were sorry she died.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes. The sun sank closer to the horizon, turning the bare-leaved twigs and branches into delicate wrought-iron tracery against the orange-and-blue stained glass of the sky.

Cal sighed. “The thing is…sometimes I can’t remember what she looked like.”

Before I could speak, he said, “I mean, I have her picture in my room, and there’s that album we brought back, but sometimes it doesn’t feel real. I try to remember what it was like up in Virginia, but it sort of gets tangled up with here.”

Embarrassed, he brushed away the involuntary tears that filled his eyes and turned away from me to stare out the side window.

“You’re afraid that you’re going to forget her?”

He didn’t answer but I saw his head nod.

“Cal, I know it doesn’t seem fair to your mother, but it
is
natural. That’s what time does for all of us. If everything stayed fresh and sharp, we wouldn’t be able to get on with our lives. I know how much it hurt when she died, because I remember how bad it was when my own mother died, but if we didn’t let time smooth away some of those memories, we wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. You’ll always be sorry she died, but you won’t ever completely forget her, so you don’t have to feel guilty because some of the memories get mixed up. Wherever her spirit is, she knows you still love her.”

Miraculously, it must have been the right thing to say, because by the time we got home, he was himself again.

We let Bandit out and he lit the fire Dwight had laid that morning. Our cleaning woman had been there that day so the house was shining, the laundry folded and put away, and supper would be the spinach lasagna we hadn’t eaten last night. While I changed into jeans and comfortable shoes, Cal reviewed his spelling words and I called them out to him. The drill was i-before-e words and he got most of them right the first time through. After that, he picked up
The Hobbit
and asked if we could read another chapter. We had gone through all the Harry Potter books by Christmas and my sister-in-law Barbara, who runs the county library system, had assured me that Cal would understand
The Lord of the Rings
if we read it together.

Neither Dwight nor I are huge on books, and neither of us had read the Tolkien saga, but I had discovered that I liked reading aloud and I liked it that Cal snuggled next to me on the couch to follow along with the words. Even Dwight got caught up in the adventure and would come in to listen if he was home. I could say that both of them took after Dwight’s mother, who always had two or three books going on her bedside table, but I knew that it was Jonna who had read to Cal from the time he was a baby.

There was much about Dwight’s first wife that was less than admirable, things I hoped Cal would never learn, but when he leaned against me, too absorbed in the story I was reading aloud to pull away if I put my arm around him, I always sent her a mental thank-you.

The lasagna was nicely browned along the edges and the aroma of basil, garlic, and tomato sauce filled the house when Dwight got home so shortly after seven that he could claim he was on time.

“Hello, my precioussss,” Cal hissed as he set the table.

Dwight laughed and caught him up in a bear hug that ended with Cal slung over his shoulder as they headed off to the bathroom to wash up. “What did I miss, buddy? Does Gollum know that Bilbo has the ring?”

Cal’s recap of the chapter Dwight had missed carried us through supper.

It wasn’t till Cal was in bed with Bandit curled up beside him that I could finally ask Dwight about Rebecca Jowett and hear how she had been found across the creek from the farm on a trash dump, less than a mile from us as the crow flies.

“Or as a buzzard flies,” Dwight said sourly.

He was convinced that Martin Crawford was the one who had found the body and called it in. “No way would somebody studying buzzard habits not walk over that way to see why they were kettling.”

“But if he showed you his phone?”

“He could have erased the call as soon as he made it.”

“He probably just doesn’t want to get involved,” I said soothingly. “A stranger in a strange land? At least he called.
If
he called.”

“All the same, there’s something off about that man. And I think Sigrid feels it, too.”

“Sigrid?”

“Yeah, she and her mother were at Martin’s when Mayleen and I got there. She doesn’t say much, but I get the impression that nothing important gets by her.”