Authors: Cathy Pickens
We settled into a companionable silence. The graveyard—the only one in Dacus, if you didn’t count the country church cemeteries scattered outside town—covered the two blocks behind the Lutheran church. Weathered granite and marble monuments, some with lettering scrubbed away by wind and water, were sprinkled thickly all around
us. Most stones bore the family names of original German settlers.
Flowers brightened the graves—some clamped onto the tops of headstones, some in metal canisters stuck into holders, others on spindly legged wire stands. In odd contrast to the solemn, fall-colored plastic and fabric flowers, I noticed several Mylar balloons, shining and dancing in the sun. Balloons on graves? I didn’t comment on them. Aunt Letha surely had a well-rehearsed diatribe on Mylar and Lutherans that I didn’t need to hear.
“Got any clients yet? Besides that white trash you’ve been picking up at the courthouse.”
“Yes’m, I do, as a matter of fact. Two new ones this week, it looks like.”
“Harrumph,” she answered. “It’s a wonder. Avery, you’re gonna have to mind what kind of folks you find yourself attracting. What kind of clients you gonna have, you keep associating yourself with weirdos like that Donlee Griggs? That boy acted like he’d been struck stupid by lightning when he was in my eleventh-grade history class. And time has not improved his lot. What few synapses the unfortunate circumstances of his breeding left him, he ruined with drink.”
I nodded. No argument from me on that.
“You realize folks are going to have enough trouble taking you seriously.”
I half turned to get a better look at her.
“Can anything good come out of Nazareth, Avery? If folks’ve known you any stretch of time, they
have trouble believing you have a lick of sense. That’s just the way it is with folks.”
Her biblical turn implied a generic reference, not one directed solely at me, except as illustration.
“You have to give people a reason to take you seriously, Avery. People in this town still remember you wearin’ those shiny red satin shorts and those white leather boots off down Main Street.”
“I never—”
“Don’t tell me. I stood right there and watched.” Bud stirred at the sharpness in her tone, ready to leap to her defense, should the need arise. Of course, he’d never actually had to defend Aunt Letha. How could the need ever arise?
“Marched right down Main Street in it.”
The occasion she referred to leapt from a distant memory. “Aunt Letha,” I said, exasperated. “I was three years old. In the Christmas parade, for Pete’s sake.”
“People remember, Avery.”
“You were three years old once, in this same town.” Though, even as I said it, I had trouble imagining it. “People don’t have any trouble taking you seriously.”
“Never pranced down Main Street in red satin and white leather boots with my bare legs a-shinin’.”
“And a baton, Aunt Letha. I twirled a baton.”
“Dropped it a time or two, best I remember.”
Hard to argue with fact.
We sat, studying the gravestones and the bobbing balloons and listening to the distant traffic sounds.
Casually, as though searching for nothing more
than companionable gossip, I asked, “What do you remember about Melvin Bertram?”
“He’s back in town, I hear.”
“Um-hmm.”
“I remember his younger brother in high school. His parents aren’t from here. Moved in after Melvin would’ve been in my class, best I remember.”
Which meant they’d been in Dacus some decades—still newcomers, by Dacus measure.
“His father was with one of the new plants that moved in about that time. From somewhere over in Georgia. Sordid doings, that about his wife.”
“Whose wife?”
“Melvin’s, of course. She upped and disappeared. Must have been"—she calculated in her head—"fifteen years ago. That was the high school’s centennial celebration. I remember Melvin’s mother on the covered dish committee with Vinnia. Tiny, chirpy like a bird. Always wore shoes with a strap across the instep.”
Tiny, next to Aunt Letha, could mean almost anything.
“I don’t remember Melvin,” she continued. “His brother was a smart kid. Better in math than in the verbal arts. You could tell he had to be an engineer—or whatever else that type might turn to. Couldn’t do much else.”
Like my dad, the engineer turned renaissance newspaper publisher.
“But, my, the talk that steamed around town about that wife of his. Lea Hopkins, she was in high school. And quite a little piece of work, even then.
Not that old-lady schoolteachers were supposed to know about such, but the football team apparently passed her around with more completions than they did the football.”
I snuck a glance at Aunt Letha, my eyes wide. To be a lady of a certain age, her practical earthiness could jolt me sometimes.
“She headed off to college, but within a year or two, the engagement announcement, photo and all, appeared in the newspaper. Melvin was a bit older than she, but only four or five years. Not enough to be unseemly, you know. Settled in, him working as a CPA. She typed or something in the office at Garnet Mills. I remember because, of course, when she didn’t show up for work and all the talk started, they interviewed everybody who knew her.”
As we sat, side by side, staring across the gray-brown autumn lawn and the cold stones, a figure limped through the gate from the south side of the graveyard.
“Who’s that?” I asked, recognizing the man I’d seen in the Garnet Mills parking lot, the one who’d approached the biker at the gate.
“Nebo Earling. Visiting his momma’s grave, I guess. She died years ago, bad to drink. His daddy took off long before that—nobody ever had any idea who he was, though they suspicioned about one or two.”
He limped away from where we sat, toward the far side of the park. As we watched, he stooped at a grave, picked up an arrangement of yellow and orange flowers, studied them, then chunked them hap
hazardly back into the vase. He moved a couple of graves down, chose a bunch of bright red silk flowers, limped across to another grave, and placed the flowers in the empty vase.
“Look at him. I know that boy hasn’t got good sense, but even a jaybird knows when it’s stealing.” Letha shrugged. “Reckon if anybody cares, they’ll spot their flowers and reclaim them.” She sighed expansively and crossed her arms. “Yep. One Thursday Lea took the afternoon off. To go up the mountain to paint, she’d said. ‘Least, that’s what she told Rita Wilkes.”
Rita Wilkes. The woman who presided over the Garnet Mills office. No wonder she acted as if she owned the place. She’d been there forever.
“But Lea didn’t show up for work the next morning. They called her husband. And later the cops. Fact that Melvin hadn’t raised a hue and cry when his wife didn’t come home all night struck folks as odd. That, more than anything, fueled the suspicions. Don’t they always say look around the house when somebody gets murdered, likely a loved one did it?” She nodded sagely.
“They think he murdered her?”
She shrugged. “He sure didn’t give folks much reason to think otherwise. Didn’t appear concerned when nobody heard from her, first for days, then weeks. And practically the whole town knew they hadn’t been getting along. Lea blabbed everything she knew to those hens at work. And they, of course, blabbed to everybody else in town. Once Lea went missing, it all became especially interesting. And
the way she behaved left plenty for folks to be interested in.”
I had faint glimmers of memory about the case, one of those peripheral intrigues that had mostly affected adults. Fifteen years ago, I’d been in high school and too busy trying to outgrow Dacus to worry about small-town tales, so the details had passed me by.
“He left town himself, which didn’t help anybody’s opinion of him. The whole thing was sordid and trashy. But folks usually get no better than they deserve.”
I glanced at my watch. I’d need to be leaving before long. Now probably wouldn’t be a good time to mention the name of my afternoon appointment.
Four rows of headstones over from where we sat, a faded blue Buick—one of those gas guzzlers nobody could afford to drive very far—stopped on the two-rutted gravel drive that cut through the grave-yard. A lean man, grayed and stooped, folded himself out of the driver’s door and walked around to unlock the trunk, then ambled loosely the few steps to a nearby grave. I watched, amazed, as he used a whisk broom to brush leaves and imaginary dust off the bronze plate on the ground.
He carefully picked a couple of stray fall leaves from the silk flowers that exploded from the bronze vase. Another trip to the trunk brought clippers to trim some grass straggling from the edges of the marker. Another brushing with the whisk broom and he straightened stiffly, one hand on his hip. He stood
only a moment, studying his handiwork, retraced his steps, cranked the yacht-sized Buick, and crunched down the gravel drive.
Aunt Letha didn’t comment on the performance. She found the oddest things perfectly ordinary.
“I’ve got to run, Aunt Letha. I’ve got to meet somebody in a few minutes. Mind if I leave my car at your house? It’s about as quick to walk to the office from here.”
“Sure, hon.”
She looked me up and down as I stood and smoothed my skirt. She didn’t say anything. Her look said she wanted to, but she restrained herself with some effort. I never know which is worse—the comments she makes or the ones she refrains from making.
“Bye, Bud. See you later, Aunt Letha.”
I walked through the grass alongside the gravel drive. I’d taken enough risks with skinning the heels of my pumps. Of course, after mincing through the grass, I’d have to remember to check my heels for clods of mud.
I entered Carlton Barner’s office through the front door of the asbestos-sided old house. Our arrangement was so temporary, he hadn’t seen fit to give me a key to the back door. I’d fallen into this layover office after my mom had a chat with Carlton’s cousin about me “coming home.” I hadn’t wanted to argue. I certainly hadn’t expected to be so thankful for a haven in which to hide from my own unemployment.
Back in my clerking days in law school, I’d worked for a small personal injury firm. One client had been so banged up in a car accident that he hadn’t been able to return to his traveling sales job for almost two years. He introduced himself to everyone as a consultant—even though he never could show me any income from clients. I’d thought his reaction pathetic and odd, but now I realized how much of myself had been defined by my job—my condo, my car, my wardrobe, my acquaintances, my time, my life. All gone. So now I told people I was in town for a while, sharing space with Carlton Barner, to keep from having to say “I have no job.”
Today, clients filled Carlton’s waiting room. On second glance, maybe two clients and accompanying family members.
Of course, that meant two more clients than I had waiting. As I stood on the worn hallway carpeting and looked through the receptionist’s window, I had qualms about Melvin Bertram meeting me here.
I glanced at my watch. I was plenty early for our appointment, but too late to make other arrangements. If everybody in town knew the stories Aunt Letha knew, news of this meeting would make the rounds by suppertime.
Was I overreacting? Nobody remembered old gossip or grudges like Aunt Letha.
Unless it was Lou Wray, the gorgon receptionist. Why all Carlton Barner’s clients weren’t arranged in the entry hall as frozen stone statues, I’d never know. After Melvin Bertram showed up, her sharp
tongue would be slicing open old gossip before the dinner bell at the textile mill sounded.
“Miz Wray.” I leaned through the receptionist’s window, trying fruitlessly to get her attention. “Miz Wray.”
She waited a count of three before turning slowly. Not that she seemed to be doing anything important, sitting at the farthest of the three desks. Nothing more important than ignoring me, that is.
“Miz Wray, I’m expecting a client at four. When he arrives, could you tell him to come on back?”
Her only reply came as a marked tightening around the corners of her mouth. But it spoke eloquently. I’d keep my ear out for Melvin Bertram.
Carlton had loaned me the office he’d set up for his summer clerks. Spartanly furnished, it sat at the end of the hall past the kitchen and directly across from the bathroom door.
The most attractive feature of the nondescript house was that it stood only a block from the court-house. The small rooms were brightened—and made cooler—by the ten-foot windows. Its high ceilings dated from the 1920s, designed for hot, unair-conditioned Southern summers. In late autumn—even on mild November afternoons after I’d walked a few blocks in the sun—the rooms settled into a damp chill difficult to shake.
I paced between my office door and the kitchen, trying to keep an eye on the front door without drawing too much attention.
Fortunately, Melvin arrived five minutes early. At
least I hoped it was him as I whisked down the hall to greet him before the barracuda could swim out from her hidey-hole.
“Mr. Bertram?” When he cocked his head expectantly, I added, “I’m Avery Andrews.”
He gave me a cool, firm handshake, his grasp gentle and strong. I half expected him to cup my hand in both of his, one of those courtly, Sunday-morning handshakes.
“Thank you for seeing me, Miz Andrews.”
“Avery. Please.”
I tried not to stare. He looked perfectly average—average height and weight, his sandy hair held only highlights of gray. Midforties, judging from what I knew of his history, though he didn’t look it. Dressed in navy corduroy slacks and a patterned pullover sweater, he looked like a business executive on vacation. Not like a man who, by his mere presence, fanned the gossip fires sizzling around town.
I led him into my office and took a seat beside him in the chairs in front of the desk.
“So, Mr. Bertram. What—”
“Melvin. Please.”
I nodded.
“This is a bit awkward,” he said, turning to face me. “If what I’m about to ask you is inappropriate in any way, please tell me. But I’d like to ask your opinion about—a couple of things.”
Clients often launch into long explanations to avoid telling me what they’ve come for, trying to avoid the unpleasant but true. I nodded and leaned
forward slightly, hoping to encourage him to get on with it.