Time's Witness (78 page)

“Bertie” was what his parents had been calling him before they saw him, but when he slid yelling in the world burning like the sun, his fuzzy head shiny and the color of Alice's nutmeg hair, I dubbed him “Copper” on the spot. And “Copper” he is to all his honorary godparents on the force at HPD, which he tours regularly, first from an L.L. Bean pouch on Justin's chest, then from a hand-carved wooden stroller that had been in the Dollard family since the primordial mud. “I don’t like plastic,” Justin says. But Copper and I have an understanding. He secretly admires the plastic board of buzzing, whirring gizmos I gave him, and the musical robot I bring
out when my godson comes to visit me, and we’re already whispering together about computer basketball, maybe an electron microscope.

Justin and I never talk about Winston Russell. But sometimes I dream of that orange moon and the crooked gravestones. And I think of Winston's empty eyes whenever Nancy looks sad. I was best man at her and Zeke's wedding.

As for my life, I do my job, read my books, do my job. I was a witness for the prosecution at Dyer Fanshaw's pretrial hearing, where Isaac (Dr. Rosethorn, now that he's been awarded an honorary degree by Haver University) drove Mitch Bazemore into such a bulging rage he popped his collar button. Dr. Rosethorn says Nora and he plan to “tear me to shreds” when I take the stand against Dyer, in what will be the old lawyer's “absolutely last case” before turning the business over to his partner. Sometimes I think Isaac and Martha both will survive me, and live on midnight snacks forever, snarling at each other in that cluttered, smoking room at the Piedmont. Isaac visits the Halls once a week, and Edith Keene once a week, and I visit him more regularly than I used to.

Fall finally had blown through Hillston by November, and in a three-day spree painted the town red with falling leaves. People could breathe again; they came out from behind their air-conditioners, took to the sidewalks, carried on vigorous conversations about football and politics. One day the sky was so crisp that on the spur of the moment I bought an Italian bicycle and rode it home to River Rise. For the last blocks, I followed behind a bouncy school bus, and when Laura and Brian Howard got off it in a plaid tumble of children, I raced over, violently squeezing my horn.

“He really is the police chief,” Laura told her friend.

For about two weeks, health enthusiasts—like my new sergeant, John Emory—had great hopes for me. Every day I pedaled down-town and back, and even twice sped across the Shocco Bridge fifteen miles out to my little cabin on Pine Hills Lake. Then I locked up the bicycle, and went back to traveling by Oldsmobile, like before. I’ll probably sell the cabin, although everybody tells me I was smart to invest in waterfront property, and ought to hang on to it. But, of course, I can’t explain I invested too much in the place
besides money, and suffered a loss.

On the first Tuesday in November, a day of cold gray drizzle, Andrew Theodore Brookside was elected governor of the state of North Carolina. Nora came over that night, offering a bottle of champagne in exchange for a chance to watch the election returns on my huge Mitsubishi screen. The gubernatorial race turned out to be a close one; much closer than Carl Yarborough's victorious bid against Brodie Cheek's candidate for his second term as Hillston's mayor. Communist candidate Janet Malley, who also ran against Carl, gave her old “the fire next time” concession speech twenty minutes after the polls closed. Julian Lewis didn’t concede to Brookside until almost midnight, but then he conceded with that pleasant, tanned, ingratiating Dollard charm that was the family's best-cultivated stock. His followers cried when he thanked them, and he got an appealing lump in his throat as he told them to be of good cheer, “because after all, as someone said, tomorrow
is
another day!” Meanwhile, he planned to take a rest in Bermuda, then come home and—affable chuckle—look for a job.

The closeness of the race had nothing to do with any last-minute revelations about Lewis's personal involvement in a cover-up of his cronies’ crimes, or any last-minute exposés of Brookside's—in Molina's phrase—imprudence. Neither of those stories ever made it to channel seven's Action News, or to the
Star
, or anywhere else. Whether because the two camps had come to an understanding, or because the media had reached a gentlemen's agreement, or even because Edwina Sunderland (who owned most of the shares of most of the news in the state) had helped Bubba keep the lid on—I really couldn’t say for sure. Like I told Andrew Brookside when Lee introduced us, I’m not tight with the powers that be.

As Lewis began his concession speech, Nora and I shot the champagne cork out the balcony sliders into the night rain. We toasted four years of a hero, even a wounded one, instead of more of what he’d called the “same smug, dumb thieves.” As Carol Cathy Cane took us live to Brookside's celebration at the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, the ballroom looked like VE-Day in Times Square. Even Jack Molina was hugging people, though not his wife, Debbie,
who was nowhere in evidence. Nora, kneeling close to the screen, pointed out Justin and Alice in the crowd: Justin, wearing a tuxedo, in a circle of North Hillstonians; Alice near the podium, chatting to a couple of slimeball ward bosses. (Her support of Andy Brookside had stayed as intense as ever, even if she hadn’t wanted to be his “executive secretary.”) Father Paul Madison was in the crowd too; still resembling, despite the ugly blaze of his scar, a cherubim beaming down from the frescoed ceiling of some aristocrat's palazzo.

As soon as the band struck up the Brookside theme song, “Carolina in the Morning,” and the governor-elect stepped, like a star through clouds, out between the dark drapes behind the podium, his campaign workers rushed toward him, so antic with joy that excitement overwhelmed even Carol Cathy, who shouted over the bedlam, “This is really, oh, it's
wonderful!
”

With eyes glowing, with arms stretched out to all the hands reaching for him, with his bright hair, his lover's smile, Andy Brookside was radiant. He shone. I don’t know another word for the way the man wore glory. The whole room lightened as he stepped to the microphone. “Tonight…tonight, ‘you few, you happy few’ have won a great victory for the state of North Carolina!
Tonight the Past
died! Tomorrow, with the sun, the phoenix of the Future rises! We will be there, together, on its wings!
”

Lee stood beside him, applauding with the others. She was very beautiful. She seemed happy for him.

I noticed Nora glance at me, then back at the screen; then with a deep slow breath that lifted her shoulders, she clicked the set off, swiveled on the knees of her jeans, all the way around to face the couch, where I was lying, my champagne glass resting on my HPD sweatshirt, Martha's chin on my bare feet. Outside, the rain kept falling. It tapped on my windows, steady as time.

“Listen,” Nora said, and smiled, her head tilting, “why don’t you give me a chance? Come on, don’t you bet if I had, oh, five hundred million dollars or so, I could look pretty good too?”

On the screen behind her, the Brooksides shrank to a bright diamond, and went out.

I laughed, and she nodded at me. “Good,” she said. “You’re
laughing. Laughter's a very good sign.”

Champagne spilled on my hand; I brought it to my mouth, cool and sweet. “Oh, honey, laughter's our one hope in hell. And the only one.”

Nora said, “If you could spare me the next thirty or forty years, Cudberth, I think I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you don’t believe that at all.”

Rain leapt dancing down from my balcony, keeping warm the winter earth.

Please enjoy the following preview of
First Lady
,
Michael Malone's third
Justin and Cuddy novel, available from
Sourcebooks Landmark.

I go riding in the mornings on a horse named Manassas. I ride the old bridle path that runs behind the summerhouses at Pine Hills Lake. The lake is just outside Hillston, North Carolina, where my family has always lived. A hundred years ago, they drove their pony carts along North Cove Road and tipped their straw hats to one another. My family's circle is wide. My circle is this narrow red clay track around the lake.

At dawn the past is still peaceful at Pine Hills Lake, so I begin my ride just as the sky brightens to pink, while a mist still floats above the cove, curling in slow drifts toward shore, as if restless beneath the dark water the Lady of the Lake were waiting to rise through the mists with her sword. This early in the day, before the Southern sun makes everything too clear, even the Piedmont can be Camelot and that's how I prefer it.

It's rare on my rides to come across anyone out on the old bridle path. Certainly I never expected someone like her.

She was standing, motionless, mist swirling around her, at the far end of the gray wooden dock. In the fog the dock looked like a road floating out into the water that she could walk on to the other side of the lake. I saw her without warning, when Manassas cantered past a clearing in the pines that opened onto a small pebbled beach. It was owned by a luxury resort called The Fifth Season, built a year ago to look like one built in the twenties. The sight of the woman stopped me as if I were racing toward a wall I couldn’t clear and I twisted Manassas sideways, his long black neck wrenching at the reins, his wild eye surprised.

Slender, luminous, with hair the color of lions, she was so perfectly beautiful that her appearance startled me the way a great bright tropical bird would have shocked me, flying all of a sudden out of the pines. Maybe it was because of the intense way she was staring across the lake that I thought of the heroine of
The French
Lieutenant's Woman
, but the two were nothing alike. This young
woman wore a thin short red silk robe instead of a hooded black cloak. No whitecaps beat against a causeway and I didn’t call out to
her to take care and she didn’t turn around to stare at me. She did something more unanticipated.

Just at the moment when the first gold of the sun rose above the trees behind her, she shrugged the red robe off her shoulders and let it fall to the worn wood of the dock. She stood there for a moment entirely naked. Then she raised her white arms, arched her back and sang out a long lovely phrase of notes that came toward me through the woods like a magic message in a fairy tale. As the phrase ended, in a sparkle of slanted sunlight, she dived far out into the misty water and disappeared.

The bright red silk lay like a pool of blood on the gray dock, and fearful that her leap was an act of despair, I kicked Manassas into a gallop. A homicide detective, I am trained after all to respond to matters of life and death and I worried that even if the woman weren’t suicidal, she might not have anticipated the hidden rocks into which she’d dived, or how cold the deep North Cove water could be even in late June.

But as I reached the edge of the beach, she burst flying up out of the lake in a spray of shaken gold hair. She looked around, saw me on Manassas, and laughed with pleasure. Then she raised an arm, waved, and as I waved back, she blew me a kiss with her arm extravagantly outflung. As long as I could see her, I watched her swim strongly away, her feet kicking a path of diamonds behind her.

I knew that there was something extraordinary about her. But I didn’t know that she was going to change my life.

Chapter 1

The morning mist burned to haze. Even a thunderstorm tossing tree branches onto sidewalks could do nothing to cool the sun, and by noon drizzle steamed from the steps of the building that housed police headquarters. Climbing them, I was thinking about the woman I’d watched diving from the dock at the lake, how unlikely it was that I would ever know her name.

Here in Hillston, we still call ourselves Southerners but it doesn’t mean as much. The South has not only forgotten the past, it has forgotten the whole idea of the past. Our old passports have all expired because in the New South they’re useless—not because we already know each other so well, but because we have no expectations of ever being more than strangers to one another. In the past, a Hillston homicide came out of the Piedmont particularities of our town, its tobacco and textiles, its red clay farms and magnolia shaded university, its local people tied to town or college or family, it came out of something distinctive and therefore traceable. But that world is as distant as my grandparents’ straw hats and pony carts, and in the Hillston we live in today, there are no landmarks to guide me to the murderous.

“Watch where you’re going,” someone snarled, and I was jostled by the crowd pushing out into the soft rain, hurrying for lunch before the Norris murder trial resumed in Hillston's Superior Court. It was the county sheriff Homer Louge who’d knocked into me while reading a magazine with a rock star on the cover. I turned to watch him shoving his way down to the street. At the intersection his path was blocked by two small foreign women, but he shouldered between them, kicked at a garbage bag piled on the sidewalk, and turned the corner.

They were middle-aged women in cheap black clothes, with thick black straight hair and skin the red color of clay earth. I had no idea whether they were Mexican or Peruvian or Native American—or what odd circumstances might have brought them to
Hillston. Each carried a large shopping bag from Southern Depot, an upscale market in the old train station not far from the court-house. These women did not look like typical shoppers for the good Brie or nice Merlots or chrome cappuccino makers sold there. Silent, they stood by the curb in the rain, just waiting. It was the third day I’d seen them on the corner. They noticed that I was staring at them and hurried away.

In the South it's not polite to stare at strangers, yet staring at strangers has turned out to be my life's work. Since I’m the head of a homicide division, usually the strangers are dead when I first see them, and usually they don’t stay strangers for long. Certainly not as long as the murder victim we were still calling G.I. Jane. In mid-March we had found this young woman in the woods near a Hillston subdivision. It was now the twentieth of June and we still didn’t know who she was. No identification had been left on her body, no file matched her prints, no one claimed her, no one seemed to miss her. According to the local newspapers, the fact that after three months Hillston's police department still didn’t even know the victim's name meant that I wasn’t doing my job very well— which meant that our police chief Cuddy Mangum wasn’t doing his.