Uncivil Seasons (2 page)

When I called to tell my mother that Cloris was dead, she had sobbed, “Oh, my God, where’s Rowell? Is he there? Oh, poor Cloris. I’ll come over. Poor Rowell, poor Rowell. And his primary!”

Like her half-brother, Mother had been bred a Dollard. She knew that primaries were the family business.

Out on Susan’s porch now, hairs rose from the goose bumps on my bare legs. A colder, quicker wind swirled up inside my coat, and my muscles tightened to shrink away from the gusts. Gray swells on Pine Hills Lake slapped up at a gray swollen mass of clouds that had hurriedly spurned over the sky and blotted the day out. It looked very much like snow. As my head tilted up to finish my whiskey, I noticed a different shade of gray steam skyward from the crest of the piney hill that sloped up from the side of the Whetstone lot. At first I thought of a fire, then saw that it was chimney smoke, then seemed to remember that hidden in that evergreen foliage was the vacation compound belonging to old Briggs Cadmean, president of C&W Textiles.

Hillston was a quiet college town, but it took the clattering noise of Cadmean’s mills to pay for so much quietness. For the past fifty years Cadmean had owned the mills; he was the hub of the wheel. Eighty now, he was seldom seen socially. His pleasures had presumably been pecuniary and domestic: he’d made millions, he’d married often. Two wives had left his ugly downtown mansion on the arms of their lawyers; two had left in expensive coffins. Now he lived alone. I’d heard that his children, some of them old themselves, had all fled from him—several by dying. Why should his summer house be open in January? Surely, at his age, he too was not forced out here by a clandestine affair? Did the compound even still belong to Cadmean? I couldn’t remember if Susan had said he’d sold it. She’d said something about it today at lunch, but I’d been drinking at lunch, and I forgot things when I drank. What I forgot first was how frightened my Dollard relatives were that I would start drinking again. “Some men can’t handle it,” Rowell had often informed me. “You seem to be one of them.” Rowell had plans for me that meant he had to keep the skeleton gagged in the closet; to him the noise of ice in a glass in my hand sounded like the rattle of bones breaking loose and shaking the doorknob. I threw what was left of my drink toward the lake and went inside to get dressed.

•   •   •

At 2:30 I was walking unsteadily up the wide stone steps of the municipal building when I was stopped by Sister Resurrection, a tiny, old black woman who’d been trying to save Hillston for half a century. She always stopped me when I’d been drinking, somehow she sensed that’s when I was most likely to agree with her. Now she shook her makeshift cross at me and said, “God’s ready to put a stop to all this trash! He got no time to mess with mercy now! Praise Him!”

I said, “Why shouldn’t He have time? He had time to start the whole mess.”

She had no answer, or didn’t care to share it, and marched in her fluttering rags away, insistent that we all rejoice in the imminent Armageddon. I followed her and stuffed five dollars down in her sweater pocket.

Inside on the fifth floor, Cuddy Mangum, Hillston’s other homicide detective, stood in the hall, fiddling with his scores on a college basketball pool that was tacked up above the coffee machine. Captain Fulcher couldn’t fire me because of my family; he couldn’t fire Cuddy Mangum because Mangum was discreetly running the department for him. He wanted to fire us both.

At Cuddy’s feet sat the dirty, white, unclipped little poodle (more or less) that he brought with him nearly everywhere he went, despite Fulcher’s demands that he stop. The dog’s name was Mrs. Mitchell, or Martha. He’d named her for the wife of Nixon’s crony John Mitchell, and with her light frizzy bangs and sharp nose she did somewhat resemble that lady. Cuddy said he’d found Mrs. Mitchell abandoned on Airport Road the day he’d returned to Hillston from Vietnam, when he was feeling that the government had done to him about what it had done to Mrs. Mitchell, when they both had just been trying to help out.

As I came down the hall, Cuddy waggled his eyebrows. “How was your lunch break?” And he gave his crotch a few quick pumps.

I said, “Cuddy, that’s the kind of gross, white-trash social style that gets you assigned to investigate ax fights in the By-Ways Massage Emporium parking lot, while I’m off interrogating Daughters of the Confederacy with our toes dangling in their private pools.”

He winked his caustic, blue-jay eye down at me. “Is that where you were? I told your visitor you were off doing something hushed up and high-class, but
my
, I didn’t know it was toe-dangling! Sort of shrivels you up though, in January, doesn’t it, all this dangling? Now, was this pool water? You sure it wasn’t
lake
water?”

I pointed at my cubicle and felt in my jacket pocket for a cigarette. “Who’s in there?”

“I don’t know, but I’m in love with her.” He blocked me with his tall beanpole body; his white acrylic “ski” sweater smelled like pizza. He sighed loudly. “Now, tell me, Justin Bartholomew Savile the Five, why’d I have to grow up gross and country, and you so classical ivy and antebellum with your mama’s folks that used to be the governor and all just running the state so big, why when their wives get whopped on the head, the attorney general has you put right on their case without a kiss-my to our fathead captain, not to mention
me
and my four years’ seniority.”

“You’ve got pizza on your sweater. Is that what you got for lunch again? Pizza, a Coke, and a Twinkie?”

“Hey, well, I can’t afford to eat in those upper-crust tumbledown spots like where you and Lunchbreak Whetstone just got back from. Ye Olde Pine Hills Inn.”

“I guess you want me to ask you how you knew that?”

“Dee-tection.” He stuck his big bony hand in my jacket pocket and pulled out the Inn’s inscribed matchbook. “It’s never going to work with you and Lunchbreak, you know? What with you thinking
est
is Latin for
is
, and her thinking it’s those lessons she took where they teach you how to tell people ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ when you don’t plan to pay any attention to what they’ve said.”

“You just don’t like Susan.”

“Um. There’s no putting anything past you today, Mr. Esse Quam Videri.” (Once I’d made the mistake of translating for Cuddy the North Carolina state motto.)

I said, “You know, I’m very tolerant of your hillbilly affectations. Mine are just as native as yours. My great-granddaddy studied the classics and went to law school, too.”

“Well, you’ve got me there,” he grinned. “In fact, except that I’d have to get so pretty and preppie and go act in amateur Shakespeare theatricals, wearing jackass ears and tights, I almost wouldn’t mind being Justin the Five, so I could go out gobbling ye olde nouvelle cuisine with a blond adultress in a beat-up barn, and come staggering back to work smelling like bourbon and—”

“Good Christ, don’t you ever shut up?”

“Only when I….” And he began his graphic pumping again as he wandered back to erase his basketball game scores. Cuddy changed his projections continually on the basis of sudden, powerful hunches; he had never even come close to winning the pool. “Ask her if she’ll marry me,” he called over his shoulder.

I opened my office door and realized what Cuddy had been talking about. She sat in my father’s old Yale chair staring with oddly yellow eyes at the papier-mâché ass’s head I’d stuck up on the hat rack.

“It was part of a costume,” I said.

“Mr. Savile? I was told you’d definitely be back by two o’clock.” She turned around the clock on my desk and pointed. It said 2:25. “My name is Briggs Cadmean.”

I said, “Pardon me” and “I’m sorry,” and went around her to hang up my overcoat. I hit into the side of my desk and lurched against her chair. “I was detained. Briggs Cadmean?” She wore a lavender down jacket with jeans and scuffed riding boots. She had a lovely face and an annoyed look. She was clearly not the town’s oldest business magnate. I returned stiffly to my seat. “Is
the
C&W Briggs Cadmean your grandfather?”

With an even more annoyed look, she stuffed the book in her lap into a new briefcase. “Father.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Are you the youngest?”

“Yes. Number nine. Out of wife number four. Now that you have my lineage.” She was looking me over strangely. She looked familiar to me, too, but then, Hillston’s circle was not large. I was thinking: hunt club (boots), charity tennis, political cocktails, dance. “Excuse me. Haven’t we met?”

“Probably.” She was not terrifically forthcoming.

“Miss?” I asked. “Mrs.? Ms.?”

“If you prefer to be formal, how about Doctor? Or Professor?”

“Are you an M.D.?”

“No. I teach astronomy at the university.”

“My dad taught surgery at the medical school here,” I said. “He didn’t think Ph.D.’s should call themselves doctors. But I will if you want me to.”

“What you call me doesn’t matter much, since I’d like to keep this as brief as possible.”

We were not hitting it off. In fact, she slid her chair back a significant inch away from me. “I’m here,” she said, “because my sister-in-law asked me to drop in. Joanna Cadmean. She’d like to know if you could come talk with her. About Cloris Dollard, I understand.”

“Pardon? Joanna Cadmean?” I was looking for a cigarette; I hid them from myself.

“She’s the widow of one of my half-brothers. And she’s staying out at my house for a few weeks. She came here from St. Simons Island for Cloris Dollard’s funeral. She’s staying because she was thrown riding; she’s on crutches now, with a bad ankle. At any rate, she’s worried about something, and she’d like to talk with you.”

“What’s she worried about?”

“That somebody’s trying to kill her, too.”

I found a cigarette. “Any particular reason why she thinks so?”

“A premonition.”

I leaned my chair back and dismissed this Joanna Cadmean. We’d already had four other wealthy women call in, frightened that they, too, would be murdered soon, for their sterling or their diamonds or their too many years of capital and status. I said, “I’m sure it’s just that the news of Cloris Dollard’s death has upset Mrs. Cadmean.” I picked up the silver letter opener Susan had given me and balanced it on my fingers as I quoted: “‘Such tricks hath strong imagination.’
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
”

Her response was to raise an eyebrow. “I saw your performance last week.” Obviously, not a theater enthusiast either.

“Mrs. Cadmean,” I shrugged, “has spooked herself.”

“Yes, she has a strong imagination. In fact, she’s a psychic.”

“There, you see,” I said, and smiled.

“A real psychic.”

I smiled some more. “Visions and auras and foresee the future?”

“That’s right.”

“Tea leaves or Ouija board?”

The yellow eyes were flat as metal. “Please don’t be cute.”

I let my chair come back down on all fours. My neck flushed. “I’m sorry. Exactly how do you mean, ‘a real psychic’?”

She stood up. “If you keep records here, go look up her maiden name. Joanna Griffin. When she was in college, she got to be pretty famous for her work with your department.”

I stood up. “
That’s
who your aunt was? Joanna Griffin? The Hillston psychic?”

“Yes.”

“The one who found the two coeds’ bodies?” I looked across at Mr. Cadmean’s namesake. “Well then! Who’s going to kill her?”

Now she looked bemused. “She didn’t say. Ask her.”

“Why me? Why does she want to see
me
?”

“I have no idea. As I understand it, she doesn’t want to talk officially to the police, and I believe she knew your mother. We’re out at Pine Hills Lake.”

“Ah. You’re staying at your father’s summer house?”

“The lodge belongs to me.” She walked to the door.

“I’ll come out. Should we have dinner first?”

She zipped up the lavender jacket. “No, thank you.”

I wasn’t surprised. “Well, then, I’ll drive out to the lodge after I eat alone. Around eight?”

“Fine. Joanna said to be careful about the road; she said it’s going to snow.”

I opened the door for her. “Is that a psychic prediction?”

Her hair shook out behind her shoulders. “No, that’s probably the weather report. Do you know where the lodge is, Mr. Savile? It’s the compound next to Lawry Whetstone’s cottage.”

I followed her out into the hall, wondering if she and Susan could possibly be friends, and if Susan had told her about us. She so ostentatiously disliked me, I was reluctant to think it had taken only our brief conversation to make her feel that way.

As we passed Cuddy’s office, he lunged through his open door and said to Briggs, “Ma’am, would you like to marry me?”

She surprised me by leaning down to pet the poodle, Mrs. Mitchell, and then laughing. “I might,” she said, “but not today.”

“Well, how about going out for a pizza and a Twinkie?”

I was pulling on my overcoat. “Cuddy Mangum, this is Professor Briggs Cadmean. This is Detective Lieutenant Mangum, a great believer in marriage.”

He cocked his head at her. “Not
the
Briggs Cadmean that owns Hillston! Honey, you don’t look at all like your pictures in the paper. Listen, in fact you ought to talk to them. They don’t do you justice. They make you look great big and bald and sneaky and about eighty years old!”

Briggs’s surprising rumbling laugh suggested to me she didn’t care much for her father.

“Excuse me, Cuddy. I’m going to walk Dr. Cadmean to her car.”

“I don’t blame you.” He nodded toward the double doors at the end of the hall. “But what about V.D.?” He wheeled around to Briggs. “That’s just our captain’s name. Van Dorn. We call him V.D. to watch him chew up the insides of his cheeks.”

I interrupted their laughter. “I’ll be back.”

“I’ll mention you dropped by. Miss Cadmean, if you change your mind, I could be at the license bureau in the morning.” Cuddy ducked back into his office.

I opened the door to what I incorrectly assumed was her father’s new Lincoln, then watched as her big black car surged into Hillston’s afternoon traffic. Something wet caught on my eyelashes. I looked up, and saw snow floating out of the dark sky.