Sins of the Fathers (25 page)

“Let me talk to her.” Katharine reached for the receiver. Miranda hesitated but finally handed it over.

“Mona? This is Katharine Murray, Dr. Flo Gadney’s friend. Is Burch there?”

“No, he’s gone to fetch Hayden. Hayden’s car’s in the shop.” Did Katherine imagine it, or was Mona out of breath? She certainly breathed twice before adding, “They ought to be there not long after you all get there.”

“Is your father-in-law at the house?”

“He’s out and about somewhere. What did you want with him?”

Katharine ignored the question. “How about Chase?”

“He’s gone down to feed Agnes’s animals. What’s this about?”

“Are you coming down for the disinterments?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Well, listen, there’s somebody shooting down there. We arrived early, and nearly got killed. Could you call the sheriff and ask him to send a deputy to Stampers?”

“Somebody got shot at Stampers?” Katharine couldn’t tell if Mona had heard wrong or was deliberately misunderstanding. “You’ll need to call him yourself. I’m busy getting together a few things for—you know, digging up the graves.” She hung up.

Katharine handed Miranda the receiver, picturing Mona collecting shovels and spades.

“Would you call the sheriff, please?” She added, to satisfy Miranda’s blatant curiosity, “We got to the cemetery early and somebody shot at us. We need for the sheriff to get down there and see if he can figure out who it was.”

Miranda dropped the receiver like it was a dead thing. It hit the floor with a clatter. “How come you asked Miz Bayard was Chase there?”

She was no dummy, this child.

“I was trying to find out who might be out with a rifle.”

“Chase don’t shoot people.” Miranda’s eyes glittered like chips off a green bottle. “He don’t shoot nothing if’n he can help it. ’Sides, he’s a terrible shot. I swear it.”

Katharine had no doubt whatsoever that Miranda would swear black was white if it would help Chase Bayard. However, there was no point in upsetting her. “I wanted to know who was at the house. Call the sheriff, Miranda! This is important.”

Miranda picked up the cord and pulled the receiver up hand-over-hand with deliberate slowness. “You ain’t gonna tell him Chase shot at you.”

“I’m not going to tell him anything. I’m going to ask him to go down to the cemetery and look for casings or whatever they look for to identify a gun. Are you going to call him, or shall I?” Katharine started around the end of the counter.

Miranda held up an imperious hand. “Nobody’s allowed behind this counter.”

A voice spoke at the door. “Make that call and make it fast, you hear me?” Hollis could have been a rock star as she stood there in her stark black clothes, mahogany hair, and sunglasses. She was certainly somebody whose authority Miranda respected more than Katharine’s.

She dialed and spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece. “Hey. This is Miranda Stampers down at the store by the road to Bayard Island. Yeah, that’s right, Iola’s my granny. Listen, I got somebody here who says—maybe you better talk to her your own self.” She handed Katharine the phone with a pout.

Katharine explained who she was and what she wanted. The woman on the other end dithered. “The sheriff’s at a convention this weekend and most of the deputies are handling a crisis down in Darien. Major White’s the only person I’ve got in that area right now. If you can wait an hour or so—”

“The major will be fine,” Katharine told her. “Please tell him to hurry.”

She returned to the SUV with four cold Cokes and climbed in front beside Hollis.

“You want to drive, Aunt Kat?”

“You’re doing just fine, honey. Keep it up.”

When the cruiser pulled into the lot ten minutes later, Katharine had immediate regrets. It arrived with siren blaring and lights flashing and turned into the parking lot so fast it spun out and stopped inches from her car. The deputy climbed out with a smirk on his face, hitched up his pants, and headed her way. He was chunky and sloppy, his uniform shirt un-tucked, his badge crooked. He didn’t look more than thirty, but a brass plate on his chest read
MAJOR WHITE
. She wondered what he had done to get promoted so high so young.

When he saw a car full of women, he shoved the thick fingers of one hand through his greasy brown hair and his smirk widened to a leer. “Well, hello.” He drew out the last syllable. “You the ladies what got shot?”

Katharine was appalled. She had met a number of law enforcement officers across Georgia. They had been invariably courteous and literate. This man went to show that stereotypes have to come from somewhere.

“We were shot at,” she corrected him, “out on Bayard Island.”

“That right?” He turned his head and spat. “What was you doing on Bayard Island, if I may ask? That’s posted property and the Bayards don’t take kindly to trespassers.”

“We’re supposed to meet them at two-thirty for a disinterment. We got there early.”

“And you got in the way of a hunter or something?”

“No, we think somebody deliberately shot at my friend.”

“I doubt that. We don’t run to many murders down this way, except’n’ when somebody gets likkered up on a Saturday night. Most likely an accident, if you ask me.”

“I’m asking you to investigate.”

“Exactly where did this purported attempted murder take place?”

“At an old cemetery on the island.”

He shrugged. “I can take a look. Got to go thataway, anyway. Burch is shifting graves today so he can fix up the place, and he asked me to be present.” He grinned down at Hollis. “You follow me, sweetie, if you can keep up.”

“I can keep up,” she assured him grimly.

“Wrens is never going to believe this,” Posey said to nobody in particular.

At the turnoff into the woods, the deputy stopped parallel to them and rolled down his window, motioning Hollis to do the same. “Why don’t you go in first, sweetie, so you can show me exactly where the purported incident took place?”

“It was no purported incident,” Hollis snapped. “Somebody fired four bullets at them, including one at my mama, and shot out our back window.”

He gave her a wide smile. “You’re mighty cute when you’re mad.”

“Please hurry,” Katharine urged him. “And we’d rather you went first, in case the sniper is still there.”

With the grunt of a henpecked man, he lurched down the road faster than he should.

As they followed, Posey reminded Katharine, “Somebody’s gonna have to find my shoes when we get there. I’ve got more in my suitcase, but none of them match this suit, and I’m not changing clothes in that clearing with a madman loose. I don’t want to get shot half-naked.”

That picture diverted Katharine for the rest of the drive.

When they got to the clearing the second time, they found what they had expected earlier: two men in a truck with a backhoe chained to the bed. Between the backhoe and the cab was a double stack of large wooden boxes. Nearby, another man sat in a black Lincoln with the engine running. Katharine supposed he was using his air conditioner, but marveled that anybody needed it. They had driven all the way back with the heat on and still her bones felt cold.

The deputy went over and parked next to the Lincoln, but Hollis circled and parked facing the clearing exit. “In case we need to beat it out of here,” she explained.

As the deputy climbed out of his car, the man from the Lincoln sauntered to meet him. “I pity his dry cleaner,” Posey said softly. “He’s gonna have trouble getting sand out of those cuffs and sandspurs out of silk pants without picking them.”

“Those shiny shoes are going to be a mess by the end of the day, as well,” Dr. Flo added.

Katharine silently blessed Posey for distracting her for at least a moment.

The funeral director was a handsome man with iron-gray hair above a face that reminded her of Humphrey Bogart, but Katharine wondered if anybody in America ever looked at him and didn’t know immediately what he did for a living.

The deputy stuck his thumbs in his belt and strolled over to the SUV. When Katharine lowered her window, he said, “Nobody’s shooting at the moment, but let me check out the situation and get back to you. I recommend you stay in the car.”

“Do you want me to show you where the bullets hit?”

“Just tell me.” When she had, he said, “Let me take a look first. I’ll get back to you if I have any questions.”

As he swaggered toward the cemetery, Posey cracked her door and yelled after him, “Hey, while you’re over there, would you look under the green tent and bring back my shoes when you come? Black sandals. They’re there somewhere.”

“Oh, Mama,” Hollis groaned.

Major White gave no sign he had heard either one.

The funeral director followed the deputy, and the two men from the truck climbed down to join the parade. From his gestures, the deputy was explaining what had happened. The workers and the funeral director began to walk with uneasy glances around them.

Posey mimicked the deputy. “‘I recommend you stay in the car.’ Can you all think of any reason on God’s green earth why we ought to get
out
of this car? But I sure feel like a sitting duck.”

“Me, too,” Katharine admitted. “Let’s sit low in our seats.” She slid down, every muscle in her body tense to fling her into the floor at the slightest provocation. “Dr. Flo, I’d feel a lot better if you were to go ahead and sit on the floor.”

“I’m not climbing down on that floor. Let him shoot me if he wants to.”

“You can’t think like that,” Posey admonished her. “We don’t know that he wanted you in particular. People are crazy these days, shooting other folks for no reason whatsoever except pure meanness.”

“This wasn’t random, honey.” She called up to Katharine, “Which of them do you suppose it was? Do you think it was the same one who shot Agnes?”

“That would be my guess,” Katharine agreed.

“Wasn’t Agnes the woman with the cats?” Hollis asked.

Katharine nodded.

“She was shot?” Posey demanded. Katharine sighed. “Yes, she was.”

“You didn’t say a word about her getting shot. You think it was on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“You all were crazy to come back down here!”

Nobody gave her any argument about that.

In her side mirror, Katharine watched while the deputy and his companions circled the fenced cemetery. As they approached the Guilbert plot, a buzzard rose and joined companions circling in the sky. One of the shots must have hit something. She felt sick. She hoped Dr. Flo hadn’t seen the bird.

The deputy motioned the others to keep back, then stepped over the tabby wall and made a cursory examination of the site, including bending over the obelisk to feel the nick the bullet had made. Katharine wondered why he bothered to keep the other men outside the plot. He himself was tromping over whatever evidence might be there—although the sniper had been so far away, there probably wouldn’t be any clues in the cemetery to disturb. The deputy reached for his phone. As he talked on the phone, he turned and watched the clearing in a 360-degree angle, so he must have had at least a niggling worry that a sniper was still around. She had never before appreciated the courage it took to be an officer of the law.

The two men and the funeral director stood to one side, having a discussion. When the deputy closed his phone, the flatbed driver’s voice boomed over the cemetery. “…gonna be able to lift these graves this afternoon, Major? Or had we just as well go on home and come back another day? I could be playing ball with my kid about now, you know. It’s not how I’d rather spend a Saturday. And are they gonna want to lift the one we buried this morning? If’n they’da told us earlier, it could’ve saved us a lot of trouble.”

The deputy stretched and flexed his biceps. “Everything is still go, Ned. I just talked to Burch, and he said folks from town was out here huntin’ around noon, but they’re all gone now. What we had here was clearly somebody shootin’ at that rabbit over yonder that the buzzard’s been picking on. Those ladies just got excited and thought they were the targets.”

“Got excited?” Posey gasped. “He’d get excited, too, if somebody shot at him three times and then shot out his window on the road.”

She said the same thing a few minutes later when the deputy came back. Katharine noticed he was holding in his gut—probably for Hollis’s benefit.

“Yes, ma’am, I can see they got your window, but you
were
trespassing and the property is clearly posted. The Bayards don’t take kindly to people coming onto their island uninvited.”

“I told you, we
were
invited,” Katharine said, exasperated. “Besides, there is a possibility that Dr. Flo is the legal owner of this portion of the island.”

He peered into the back at Dr. Flo, and narrowed his eyes. “What you folks tryin’ to pull? The Bayards have always owned this island. I’m sorry you all got in the way of a stray bullet, but that’s why they put up all them signs. They don’t want people gettin’ hurt.”

“Those weren’t stray bullets!” Posey insisted, indignant. “Two of them were aimed straight for Dr. Flo and one was aimed at me!”

“Can you prove that in a court of law?”

One by one each shook her head.

“You didn’t see anybody, right?”

“We were too busy saving our hides,” Posey reminded him hotly.

“Well, I’m real sorry for your inconvenience, but in the future, I’d suggest you stay off posted property.” He turned and lumbered over to where the other men were standing beneath a sycamore.

“Of all the nerve!” Posey sounded like she was ready to climb out of the car and wallop him.

Hollis muttered, “If we were men, he’d be taking this seriously.”

“What can we do?” Dr. Flo asked.

“Nothing at the moment,” Katharine replied. “We didn’t see a soul and you haven’t proven a claim to the land, so I guess we were technically trespassing, since we got here early.”

Burch Bayard drove into the clearing in the old black truck Katharine and Dr. Flo had seen first at Stampers and then parked in front of his house. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a yellow power tie. He looked real happy until he saw the green tent—then he headed straight for the funeral director’s car.

He leaned out his open window and yelled, “What the hell’s that tent doing here, Sykes? So help me, if you buried that bitch on my land…”

Mr. Sykes spoke in a voice the women in the car could not hear. Katharine wondered if the ability to speak so only a few could hear was something they taught in mortician school.

Mr. Sykes might be inaudible, but Burch wasn’t. He spewed out a stream of profanity which boiled down to, “I don’t care where she requested to be buried, you knew good and well we were planning to move this cemetery this week and she had no right to be buried here.”

More murmurs from Mr. Sykes.

“On Wednesday?” Burch sounded flabbergasted. “She waltzed into your office this past Wednesday, showed you a deed, and asked to be buried here? Then came home and shot herself to be sure it happened before I got my digging permits in order? I’m not paying for her removal, I can promise you that.” He opened the truck door and, shouldering Mr. Sykes out of his way, stomped over to the SUV. “Did you all have anything to do with that?” He pointed toward Agnes.

“Heavens no,” Katharine assured him. “We don’t shoot or bury people. I’m not convinced she shot herself, though. She was chipper when we talked with her Tuesday night.” She knew she shouldn’t bait him, but the temptation was irresistible.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Hayden Curtis clambering down from the passenger seat of the truck. He was sweating so profusely that he had circles at the armpits of his blue seersucker suit, which looked as out of place in the clearing as the funeral director’s black. The pudgy attorney did not look happy.

“Let’s not get carried away.” He flapped his little paws in Burch’s direction.

Burch ignored him. “Why were you were down at Agnes’s on Thursday messing up the place?”

“We didn’t mess up a thing. We were looking for letters she promised Dr. Flo. As it turned out, she mailed them before she died.”

From the backseat, Dr. Flo added, “She mailed a copy of the deed to this property, too. It’s very explicit that if Agnes’s family doesn’t have heirs, the land reverts to the descendants of the family for whom the house was built. That may well have been my family.”

Burch glared at her, but it was Katharine to whom he spoke again. “That is flat-out impossible. I’ve already told you—”

Dr. Flo spoke again. “Who was Mallery?”

He blinked, then shrugged. “How the hell should I know? The relative of one of my ancestors, Elizabeth Mallery Bayard, is all I can figure out. I’m gonna re-bury him near her in a little family plot up near our house. It’s going to be real picturesque.”

That word again.

It grated on Katharine’s sensibilities, but she said nothing, steeled for Burch’s next attack. Instead, he clutched his head with both hands and cried, “I’m trying to do the best I know how, here. Why do folks keep interfering?”

He stomped off toward the other men. As he approached them, Major White nodded toward the SUV and said, “Those are the ladies making the complaint about getting shot at.”

“Let ’em complain. Wish somebody would finish them off.”

The funeral director came over to their car. “Which of you is Dr. Gadney, who wants the three re-burials delayed until Monday?”

Dr. Flo identified herself, but before she could say more, Hollis demanded, “Sir, how did that deputy get to be a major?”

A smile flickered across his face. “That’s not his rank, it’s his name. His mother thought it would give him something to live up to. Mostly it’s been something he’s had to live down. If you could step over to my car, Dr. Gadney, I have papers for you to sign.”