Southern Fried (22 page)

“Lot of our steady customers work at that plant. Customers can’t spend their paychecks doing business with us if they ain’t got paychecks. We’re not stupid. We’re businessmen.”

He didn’t even try to choke out the word
legitimate
. Businessmen who ride Harleys, wear do-rags, chains, and full beards, and who likely sell drugs, women, and whatever else isn’t nailed down. I didn’t ask him for a sales brochure.

“Just so you can check what I’m telling you, tell the sheriff he used a garden sprayer. It’s one of his trademarks. Dumbshit probably has the thing with him up at the trailer.”

I hoped my face didn’t give away too much at his mention of the garden sprayer.

“So you’ve all agreed to turn him in,” I said. “To take the heat off the—club.”

“And because he did it. Man went out on his own, doing his own shit. Now he’s like a bad stink comin’ back on us. Can’t have that.”

He crossed his arms to punctuate the finality of that statement.

“I’ll call Sheriff Peters.”

“Done.” He nodded and stood to kick-start his bike, then paused. “Just a word of advice, lady. You always this much of a bitch to get along with, you gonna have one hell of a time making it in the lawyering business around here.”

The roar of a dozen engines drowned out any reply I might have made. I gave a salutary wave as they spun their bikes in a complicated ballet around my yard. Too bad. Those were probably the only members of the criminal element in Camden County who could afford to pay for legal counsel. And I’d alienated them.

I went into the cabin through the front door to pull the .38 pistol out of my waistband. The trigger guard had cut a biscuit out of my rump.

With my knees shaking just a bit, I grabbed my car keys and drove to the country store.

I had to admit, painfully, that the biker’s parting words stung a bit. How long would the bitter taste of being fired from the Calhoun Firm last? Was I hard to get along with? Was that my fatal flaw—or at least a symptom of it? True, I’d lost my patience with an important trial witness—a witness who’d turned out to be not only a renowned physician, but a liar and a perjurer.

I’d certainly tested the patience of my supervising partner, who’d been a crude and abusive womanizer. In introspective moments, I considered filing a formal sexual harassment charge. The statutory 180-day filing period hadn’t yet expired. Witnesses to his abuse were plentiful, and many were victims themselves.
Making him and the Calhoun Firm squirm would be a delight. But filing a complaint would seal my fate; never a hope of another big-firm partnership.

And it was still too close in time and pain. I knew what a lawsuit entailed, the psychic energy it sapped. I could only imagine what my clients had endured, having their lives examined under a microscope in front of a roomful of people they didn’t know—strangers, news reporters—or worse, people they cared about. I certainly didn’t want any of that for myself. Better to focus on the future.

At the store, I called L J. Even sheriffs and their deputies have to take time off, I know. But I wish they wouldn’t leave idiots to take messages when they go. It doesn’t leave me feeling particularly safe.

The junior G-man read my message back to me in a whistley voice that didn’t sound as if he had reached puberty yet. He promised to call L.J at home. I trusted that he would call because he sounded excited—and more shrill—when he heard the name Noodle. I took that as a sign that the sheriff’s department had actually been looking for Noodle. Where does a biker tough pick up a nickname like that? I probably didn’t want to know.

To reward myself for my civic good deed, I counted out the change in my jeans pocket, just enough for a banana Moon Pie. Even without an RC Cola, Moon Pies are one of nature’s most perfect foods.

I gunned the Mustang down the winding few miles back to the cabin, enjoying the scenery flashing past and the stiff, almost unmanageable wheel in
my hand. Surely no one who hadn’t grown up in Dacus could appreciate its prickly charm. Coming home to a place I’d been all too anxious to leave affected me in powerful but indecipherable ways. Most of my friends had left for college when I had and most had never come home. I certainly hadn’t planned on ever coming back. I couldn’t remember even an instant in my life when I’d mentally tried on the idea of living in Dacus, and certainly never a time when I thought the idea fit.

The way the roads dipped and turned, disappearing and reappearing in the distance, the red clay soil, the rusted house trailers with yards full of red-stained kiddie cars and hound dogs, the way people studied whoever walked through the door of Maylene’s for lunch, the solemn stares of greeting—all assaulted me, both with present impression and past memory. Something resonated deep within my breastbone that sometimes made breathing an exercise I had to focus on, impressions that wouldn’t have registered had I not been away, then come home with things to compare them to.

In such a short time, I now thought of “downstate” as a distant, alien country. And this odd place, nestled into the lush and brooding Blue Ridge, with its solemn, distant people, felt welcoming.

By the time I’d pulled into the yard, the shadows had lengthened beyond dusk.

Squatting, I flipped the boat onto its bottom and studied the inside for any crawling life-forms. A lone spider scuttled down the side.

One foot inside, I struggled to balance and shove at the same time. I felt like a hog on ice. How silly to feel so awkward doing something I’d done dozens of times before, in this same boat off this same grassy bank.

My muscles eventually remembered what my mind had forgotten. When I let my instinct take over and quit trying to force the rhythm of the paddle in the water, things went more smoothly.

Had I been more practiced, I would have checked the bottom of the boat for leaks. Several yards from shore, I remembered, then tentatively peered into the darkened bottom and slapped my sneaker around, listening for the telltale slosh. Nothing.

The boat slid smoothly toward the center of the lake, never quite reaching the place where the moon’s reflection lay, but always gliding along the drawing light it cast. I laid the paddle beside me, the loud thud announcing my stealthy bobbing to anyone listening. Amazing, how water supports boats. I lay back across the seats, my rump suspended above the boat’s bottom. Not a comfortable position, but one that brought floods of memory.

I listened to the water lapping the boat on either side of my head. The stars overhead were countless. Not a city sky, but a dark sky painted bright by pinpricks of light. I twisted slightly. I spotted the Big Dipper, and there, like a smudge of light, was the comet. And its tail. Was that an optical illusion? Did it really stretch back across the sky that far? It looked as though someone had taken a finger and smeared a long, faint streak across the sky.

I lay suspended between sky and water, between the dark, painted bright sky showing off its smudgy visitor nine million miles away and the dark, lapping water. Water that showed off its secrets only occasionally—only when it wanted to or only after a fight, when they were wrestled loose by a storm. Or a wrecker winch.

With the lapping sound came the image of water churning around the rusted sheet metal of the car. The car that had sat submerged in the very water where I floated, sealing its secret in murk and mud for fifteen years.

Had I floated on this water, in this very boat, somewhere over that silent, horrible crypt? How many people had swum and fished and picnicked and made love floating on this still, dark water while she floated below, sealed in her rusting two-toned Thunderbird?

Panic seized me. Spooked, I sat upright, wobbling the rickety boat dangerously. I fumbled with the paddle, my fist a white-knuckled ball around the handle for fear I’d drop it as I paddled toward shore.

Flailing
toward shore more aptly described my progress. One of the perversities of water is that slow, steady movements are always more effective than powerful assaults. But unreasoned fear never learns.

I dragged the boat as far onto the grassy bank as I could but didn’t take time to flip it upside down. A shot of adrenaline electrified the hairs on the backs of my wrists.

I ran to the sheltering porch. As I reached for the doorknob, a low voice came from the shadows of the porch.

“You left your door unlocked.”

A
t the sound of the voice, I tried to yelp, but my terrified bolt across the lake and the yard didn’t leave my lungs enough air. I couldn’t see who sat in the shadows.

“Sorry,” the voice said, the speaker certainly able to see my fright. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Came over to check on you.”

Sadie Waynes. I didn’t know whether to hug the woman or slap her. I merely nodded, my hand on my chest. In the gloom, I couldn’t make out her rawboned face or the thick gray braided club of her hair.

“Heard them motorcycles earlier. Didn’t think much about it. Thought they ’uz just passin’. Till I heard ’em start up again after a bit.”

The rocking chair where she sat creaked once. “I come straightaway, but you ’uz gone. Got right worried. Then I saw the boat out there. Moon’s bright.”

I nodded, trying to soften my huffing.

“So I decided to wait.” She didn’t say anything about my frenzied paddling or my mad dash from the boat. Which probably meant I’d looked really
stupid. Maybe if I’d dashed into the bathroom or something, I could have saved a little face. Doubtful.

“Thanks for checking on me. I really appreciate it. My motorcycle visitors were a scary bunch. Glad to know you were there.”

“Yep. Caught sight of ’em down the road, as I came over the hill.”

“I’m sure glad to know you can hear stuff that happens here. You know. Back up at your house.”

“Been hard to miss a dozen souped-up ’cycles,” she said matter-of-factly. ” ’Course, lots goes on up here that it’s best to keep an eye on.”

Her rocking chair set up a slow, measured creak. “Not that folks always want to know what you’ve seen,” she added.

The steady creak came as an invitation. I pulled the other rocking chair across the porch, scraping it over the rough boards, and joined her in the gloom. Sadie didn’t seem in any hurry to leave, now that she was here. And I couldn’t very well leave; it was my porch.

We spent a few minutes rocking, watching the moon streak the lake with pale color. To make conversation, finally I said, “I got to admit, being on that lake tonight spooked me a bit.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I got to thinking about that car, with that girl trapped in it, under the water for all those years.”

Gentle creaking came as the only reply.

“Were you living up here then? When she disappeared? Did they look for her around here?”

“Yep. I ’uz here, all right. Lived here all my life.
Before there ’uz even a lake. And yeah, they looked for her here. Found some of her painting stuff left on a picnic table near the lake. Not a sign of her anywhere.”

She paused long enough that I thought the story had ended, but then she added, “They even drug the lake looking for her.”

“How could they miss a whole car?”

I sensed rather than saw Sadie shrug beside me. “Had divers and boats and big iron grappling hooks. Spent a coupla days. Hard to imagine missin’ a car in a little puddle of water like that. But the fellas said at the time that the visibility ’uz so bad, they wouldn’t know if the
Titanic
had sunk in there.”

I studied the lake. I knew from swimming in it that the water stayed murky and red-stained, particularly after heavy rain churned the muddy bottom.

“ ’Course, they weren’t lookin’ for a car. Only a body. They thought her car’d been stolen and her dumped in the lake. Nobody really expected to find a car under there. Maybe if they’d listened at the time. But then, even I ’uz surprised.”

“Listened?”

She took a pause before she answered. “I seen her. That day. I told ’em.”

I turned to face her. “You saw Lea Bertram up here the day she disappeared?”

In the reflected moonlight, she nodded. The angles of her large-boned face were solemn.

“Nothin’ that mattered, a ’course. But still. Her family musta been upset, not knowin’ for so long. But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Her family?”

“No, no. The po-lice. They had it figgered that she ran off with somebody. But the somebody I saw her with didn’t make sense to them. Guess even then, I ’uz just a crazy old mountain woman. What did I know?”

“You saw her up here with somebody? And they wouldn’t listen?”

“Oh, they listened to me. But they listened louder to his mama. ’Course, who’d know best where her son was—me, what saw him with my own two eyes, or his momma?”

“Who’d you see, Miss Sadie?”

She rocked for a few beats. “I have to be accurate. Don’t go listenin’ to an old woman who lets her stories get a step ahead of the truth. If I ’uz full honest, I didn’t see him that day. Only his car. But I seen him plenty enough times, just like that day. And her with her paintin’ stuff sittin’ on the table while they ’uz entertainin’ themselves inside that big Cadillac. And that’s what I told the police.”

“Whose car did you see, Miss Sadie?”

“That Garnet boy’s.”

“Harry Garnet?”

“As sad as it is, yes’m. His daddy’s big silver Cadillac, the one he always drove up here to play in.”

“To meet Lea Bertram?”

“Um-hmm.”

“Did the cops ask about that? Did she ever meet other men up here?” My questions spilled out, except the one I couldn’t ask:
Did her husband know?

“I don’t rightly know. Seems they started comin’
up after the summer folks packed up and went home. And it ’uz always that big silver Cadillac. Does seem her husband’d notice that she went away to paint a lot but never had any paintin’s to show for it.”

Now that she mentioned it, that part of the story had bothered me. Granted, I had known Lea Hopkins Bertram only by reputation, but she’d never sounded much like the dedicated-artist type.

“The cops questioned Harry Garnet. He must have had a plausible story.”