Southern Discomfort (11 page)

"The line level is used to test whether a line or cord is level. It is particularly useful when the distance between two points to be checked for level is too long to permit the use of a board and the carpenter's level. However, the line level will show a disadvantage at a long distance because the line has a tendency to sag."

Few crime scenes are what Aunt Zell would call neat, but the WomenAid house was a real mess.

Literally.

The yard was a muddy pigmire. Although it had been crisscrossed with car tracks and footprints, hours of rain had blurred them into a sameness impossible to differentiate.

Inside, the floors were littered with scraps of two-by-fours, bent nails, pieces of tar paper and insulation, and plastic drink cups. Plastic tarps lay crumpled in the corners or draped over the wall spacers. When we were there working in the late afternoon, Annie Sue and I had mucked back and forth to the truck, through the sawdust that had drifted over the concrete floor; and every time Stevie and I went in and out with stepladder and tools, we'd tracked yet another load of wet mud.

Dwight's crime scene people brought portable floodlights and they began to photograph every inch of the place inside and out, but I couldn't see as how they'd find much to help them. The heat they generated made the humid air even steamier.

I showed Dwight exactly where I thought I'd stumbled on the hammer near the front door. As it turned out, when I carried it back to where I found Annie Sue, I wound up dropping it less than three feet from where Carver Bannerman's body still lay, slumped over a sawbench like one of the plastic tarps, his pants unzipped but still in place.

"And you didn't see him lying there?" Dwight asked skeptically.

"Oh sure, you can say that, lit up like it is now. When I came in, though, there was nothing but my car lights. Everything was dark and shadowy. I told you I sort of thought Annie Sue was a roll of tar paper till I heard her moan, remember? And after that, taking care of her was all I thought about. It certainly didn't occur to me to start fumbling around to see if any of those other dark lumps were human bodies."

"Come here a minute," he said and took me off to the far side of the small house, out of earshot of his officers. His brown eyes were troubled as he looked deeply into mine. "Now listen, Deb'rah, and don't mouth off at me, 'cause this is for real. You sure this is the way you want to tell it?"

"What?"

"Well, think about it. If Annie Sue was the one who bashed his head in, it seems to me it'd be a clear-cut case of self-defense. The doctor can attest to her bruises and that blow on her head. She might not even have realized what she was doing. Fighting him off and all, what if she just grabbed the hammer and flailed away?"

"And then carried the hammer out to the living room for me to trip over and came back in here to pass out close to his body?"

"People with concussions do crazy things," he said stubbornly.

"True. But then wouldn't her hand be even bloodier than mine was?" I asked.

"Did she wash or—"

I was shaking my head. "No, no, and no. That's why I took her straight to the hospital instead of home. I wanted every scrap of physical evidence to remain on her body until it was documented. You and I both know that the first thing rape victims want to do is take a long hot shower, get clean again."

He nodded.

"I didn't want her near a bathroom till a nurse with a rape kit had gone over her body with a fine tooth comb." I winced at the cliché, suddenly remembering that it wasn't a trite figure of speech: Annie Sue's pubic area would indeed have been combed for foreign hairs.

"Bambi probably took fingernail scrapings, too," I said. "Even if Annie Sue'd rinsed her hands in the rain, his blood would still be there."

"I'll check," said Dwight. "But if Annie Sue didn't do it..." His voice trailed off and his face got even gloomier. 

I was incredulous.

"You think
I
killed him?"

"Your fingerprints will be on the hammer. That's probably his blood on your skirt," Dwight said. "Say you came back and found Bannerman in the act of raping your niece. Say you had a hammer in your hand. Wouldn't you have smacked him over the head with it?"

"Damn straight!" I agreed. "But it didn't happen that way."

"You're sure."

"Dwight!"

"Okay, okay. If you say you didn't, you didn't. One more thing though." He seemed to be picking his words carefully. "You hear where they found Herman?"

My heart started to sink. "No."

"On Troop Road."

That was less than a mile from here and not on any beeline between his office and his house. "Going which direction?"

"Toward his house," said Dwight. "Away from here. It was like he wasn't going too fast when he passed out. The truck sort of coasted to a stop on the sidewalk, but he did bang his head. His face was bloody. And the time's about right."

Dwight thrust a big hand into his off-duty jeans and rattled his pocket change as he gazed at me speculatively. "So if you're sure that hammer was already sticky when you picked it up, guess I'd better have my techs take samples of the bloodstains in Herman's truck."

"I'm sure." I hated this scenario just as much as Dwight's first two, but if it were true...

"No jury in Colleton County ever convicted a man who killed his daughter's rapist."

"Even if he ran away and left his daughter behind, half-naked?"

"
If
he did that, it's because he was sick," I argued. "Not thinking clearly."

"Well, we'll worry about that down the road," Dwight said. "Right now, I want you to let Richards drive you first to Annie Sue's and then take you home."

"I'm perfectly capable of driving myself and—

He huffed at me in exasperation, just like one of my brothers. "You always got to argue, don't you? I swear I don't know why you gave up being a lawyer and took up the one job where you're supposed to listen to what people say and not fly off the handle before they finish talking."

"So finish," I snapped.

"I want Richards to collect the clothes Annie Sue was wearing tonight and I want that skirt and blouse you have on, too."

Before I could bristle, he gave me a sardonic look. "Preacher's wife, okay?"

He was right. And if I hadn't been so tired, he wouldn't have had to spell it out for me. As a judge, I not only had to appear above suspicion, I had to be able to prove it, too. Better to let them run my clothes through the system and verify that the bloodstains were wipes, not splatters, than to have awkward questions raised after the garments were cleaned.

Deputy Mayleen Richards and I got to Annie Sue's clothes just seconds before Seth's Jessica tossed them in the washer. The whole house seemed to swarm with energetic young women and every single one of them had grown up watching their mothers so they knew how southern women were supposed to behave in a crisis.

Some were in the kitchen to load the dishwasher and put away the food Nadine had cooked before she'd rushed off to the hospital. Others had tidied the house, including cleaning up the bathroom behind Annie Sue. In fact, Jessica was only waiting for the last damp towel before starting the washer. Had I stayed to argue with Dwight, we'd have been too late.

The girls hadn't heard about Bannerman's death until we arrived, and they were wide-eyed as Richards scooped the clothes from Jessica's hands and put them in a brown paper sack.

"Carver Bannerman got his head smashed in?"

Some of my eye-for-an-eye nieces immediately declared he got what he deserved. Andrew's Ruth looked apprehensive though. When Reese rushed out of the hospital to look for Bannerman with violence in his eyes, her brother A. K. had gone with him. I squeezed her hand and told her not to worry, that Bannerman was probably dead before I carried Annie Sue to the hospital.

Paige Byrd and Cindy McGee were also there at the house. Paige kept saying, "If only we hadn't left when we did!"

Cindy's face was splotched and her eyes were red and swollen. When she heard that Bannerman was dead, fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, but at least she didn't moan and shriek and overdramatize like some of my nieces would have.

Amazingly, they didn't seem to notice, and Annie Sue had loyally kept her mouth shut about Cindy.

Knowing what I did, Cindy's misery seemed palpable, but I honestly couldn't tell whether it was (1) because her erstwhile lover was dead, (2) because he'd tried to rape her best friend, or (3) because, like Paige, she was blaming herself for leaving Annie Sue when Herman's tongue-lashing made them too uncomfortable.

Maybe it was (4)—all of the above.

Despite all the evening's shocks and a mild concussion that would have me in bed sound asleep by now, Annie Sue seemed to be bouncing back okay. As soon as she'd realized that all her injuries were external, she'd become giddy with relief. Before she'd had time to come down from that, she'd been sucker-punched with her father's collapse, which sent her into a crying jag, terrified that Herman might die.

Now, just as abruptly, her attacker was dead.

"It's so weird," she told Jessica and me as we helped her pack Nadine's cosmetics and night clothes. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry or just throw my head back and simply
howl
. It's like that time when I was little out at the farm, remember? When I almost stepped on a copperhead and started screaming and Granddaddy came and chopped his head off?"

Jess and I nodded. More of Annie Sue's dramatics, but it had become family lore. First she'd screamed from fright and then she'd bawled for an hour because the snake, though poisonous, had been killed.

Driving to Chapel Hill with Jess and a couple of the others would help. If she didn't fall asleep driving over, by the time they got there, they would have hashed and rehashed every detail of the whole evening. "I said— Then he— So what did
you
do? And then?"

Telling and retelling ought to blunt the knife edge of trauma before it could cut her too deeply.

Annie Sue had already packed her overnight bag and now she closed Nadine's.

"Wait a minute, honey," I said as the others picked up the bags and headed down the hall with them to Jessica's car.

Mayleen Richards didn't want to let me—or rather my clothes—out of her sight, but I asked her to wait down the hall and I stood in the open doorway so that she could watch without hearing.

Annie Sue's eyes grew large, but she sat down on the white hobnail spread that covered her parents' bed. She had changed into a pink floral jumpsuit and her shining chestnut hair was caught up in pink hair clips. Except for the scrapes on her elbows and chin, there were no outward signs of the mauling she'd taken.

"Dwight Bryant'll probably talk to you sometime tomorrow," I said, "and I'm sure he'll ask you if you were aware of anyone else in the house when Carver Bannerman jumped you?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Think carefully, honey. Could someone have been waiting for him out in his car?"

"Maybe," she answered slowly. "I didn't see. He didn't act like anybody was there to walk in on us. Not the way he grabbed me."

"And after he threw you down?"

"Honest, Deb'rah, I can't remember. I must have been unconscious. But when I was starting to come out of it . . .

"Yes?"

"Something... a noise? Something fell? And then... yes! A car! I heard a car start up and drive away. I guess I sort of thought it was him. Driving away in the rain. Because I remember feeling like maybe everything was going to be all right. And then I guess I must have gone under again because I don't remember anything else till I heard you calling me."

"Did you recognize the sound of the motor?" I asked cautiously. Herman's new truck was only a few months old. Maybe it had no distinctive sounds yet.

She looked at me blankly. "Nope. It was just a car. Or a truck, I suppose."

"No loud rattles, no shriek when the gears changed?" She smiled. "Like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang or something?"

I smiled back, not wanting to put ideas in her head. "Or something."

She smoothed the lace collar of her jumpsuit as she considered. I could tell that she was replaying the sound of the engine in her head. A shadow flicked across her face and was instantly gone.

"It was just an ordinary car motor," she said and looked me straight in the eye as she said it.

"The wooden handscrew is relatively limited with regard to both scope and pressure... When a metal C-clamp is used for wood, the wood must be protected against damage from the metal jaw and the screw swivel on the clamp."

I probably could have borrowed a change of clothes from Annie Sue, but I'd still have to hitch a ride back with Deputy Richards to pick up my car; so I had her drive me home. She came upstairs with me, a stolid young woman who grew up in the tobacco fields near Fayetteville and who was not inclined to be too chatty with a judge that her immediate boss treated like a younger sister. After a few of her yes-ma'am, no-ma'am answers, I quit trying to put her at ease.

She took my bloodstained skirt and my soiled but unsplattered shirt and put them in a brown paper bag separate from Annie Sue's things.

"I'll just wait out in the car for you, ma'am."

"Be right with you," I promised. Stripped down to a white silk teddy, I stood barefoot in front of my closet and flipped through the hangers for fresh clothes. What's appropriate for a murder scene? I slipped a scoop-necked black cotton knit over my head and pulled a pair of old jeans over my hips. This time I meant to be ready for mud or blood.

Aunt Zell came in as I finished tying the laces on my raggedyest pair of sneakers. She had the puppy in her arms and was feeding it with its nursing bottle. "Ash wants to know how come there's a sheriff's car parked in our drive."

"We're just leaving," I said lightly. "She's going to drop me off to pick up my car."

After Mother died and Daddy went back to the farm, I moved into these two rooms that once belonged to Uncle Ash's father. Daddy and I weren't getting along too well then, and Uncle Ash was on the road even more in those days, so it seemed a sensible solution all around.

No kitchen, but otherwise it's like a self-contained apartment: sitting room, bath, and a large bedroom that opens onto the upstairs back veranda. There's even a side entrance and a second staircase, so I can come and go in private if I wish.

I've lived here off and on ever since that eighteenth summer, so Aunt Zell knows me about as well as anybody. Normally she's enough like my mother to enjoy stringing me along just to see how far I'll go before I tell the whole truth. Tonight she wasn't playing, and the lines in her face were deeper than I'd seen them in a long time, as the puppy nursed with little snorts and grunts.

"How'd you hear?" I asked. "The family tom-toms been working overtime?"

She shifted the puppy to a more comfortable position so that he could drain the bottle. "Ruth called Andrew from Herman's house. That odious creature's dead?"

I nodded.

"Are A.K. and Reese involved?"

"Is that what Andrew's afraid of? He doesn't have to worry. Honest. If any of us are in trouble, it's probably me."

In twenty-five words or less, I hastily explained how Dwight was pretty sure Bannerman was already dead when I found Annie Sue, and how we expected to find my fingerprints on the hammer that killed him, and how it'd all happened at least an hour before Reese and A.K. even heard about the incident.

She pushed my pillows up on the headboard and leaned back against them. The puppy, his fat little tummy thoroughly full again, nuzzled into the sleeve of her robe and went sound to sleep. As I talked, Aunt Zell stroked the pup's silky hair and relief smoothed away some of the tension between her eyes.

"Would you please call your brother and tell him that?"

Like Mother, she always did have a tender heart for him.

Andrew was one of the wild ones who came along during the Depression years when things got a touch rough around here. I've never known all the details of that period. Somehow it seemed a little disloyal to Mother to ask too many questions about Daddy's first wife. She was from that swampy area where Possum Creek runs into the Neuse River, much more of a backwoods in those days than now, but the land was just as sorry—"no good for nothing 'cept keeping the world stuck together right yonder"—and the people there just as suspicious of outsiders and revenuers.

Her people were dirt poor and nearly illiterate and they made her quit school in the sixth grade and set her running trot lines and boiling mash when she wasn't picking cotton for two cents a pound like the rest of her family. No wonder she married Daddy when she was fifteen and started kicking out baby boys every two years regular as clockwork. A man who owns his own land never has to let his family go hungry long as seeds sprout and hogs can be fattened, but fresh vegetables and cured hams couldn't always be traded for boys' shoes or a widowed mother's medicine. I expect that's why Daddy kept on running his own shine. It was his only dependable source of cash money.

Was it a good marriage?

I don't know.

They say she was certainly a good helpmeet. When the revenuers came sniffing around local stores to see who was buying up lots of sugar, they say it was her idea to visit every grocery store in Raleigh, Wilson, Goldsboro and Fayetteville three or four times a summer, never buying more than twenty-five or thirty pounds of sugar at a time. "And better let me have some of them big canning jars. Looks like it's gonna be a good summer for blackberries/cherries/peaches/pears. These young'uns shore do love my [insert one] preserves."

And every other year, here came another son to help with the plowing when Daddy starting buying up farms that were going under. Poor Andrew didn't get his turn as knee baby because the next lying-in brought twins, Herman and Haywood, and their mother's lap wasn't big enough to hold two infants and a toddler. He was only seven when she died of childbirth fever after birthing Jack, and Daddy remarried within the year.

Mother gentled the twins and the younger boys, but the older ones never did completely tame and seems like Andrew was worst of all. I don't think they ever resented her, they just couldn't get used to a woman who made Daddy turn loose some of his money and fix up the old farmhouse with paint and wallpaper. She brought her own things, too: bright clothes, china and crystal, family heirlooms. Rural Electrification reached the farm a few years before Mother did, but there'd never even been a radio in the house. She brought along her phonograph and a stack of records taller than baby Jack.

An upright piano, too.

"I fell in love with your daddy's fiddle, before I knew he had a houseful of boys," she used to tease them. "Hadn't been for his fiddle, I'd have stayed in Dobbs and married me a man with a fine big empty house."

Then the little ones would shiver to think what they almost missed and they'd look up at the tall fiddle-playing man who'd sired them and love him all the more for playing her into their lives.

Hymns and folk tunes weren't all they played either. She banged out bebop on the piano and soon had the boys singing right along with the Andrews Sisters and a young Frank Sinatra.

"And books," Haywood always says. "She read to us every night at bedtime.
Aesop's Fables
, fairy tales, Bible stories."

Because even though Mother was a hard worker and even though she added more boys to the ones Daddy already had, she didn't try to do it all herself the way his first wife had worked herself into the ground. She hired some of his best barn help right out from under his nose and paid them good wages to help with the cooking and cleaning, the chopping and picking, the canning and freezing, so she'd have time for the children.

Even stolid old Herman can get downright lyrical when he lets himself remember. "The first time I saw
The Wizard of Oz
—you mind the first part of the movie, how it's all black and white and gray? Your mama coming was like when Dorothy opened the door and there was all that color. That's what she brought us. Color."

Andrew and the older boys were dazzled, too, but they were like ditch cats that had never been hand-gentled, and they kept the feral streak even after she came. Took them all past forty before they really settled down "and got right with the Lord," as they put it.

In his younger, wilder days, Andrew had more than once seen the inside of a jailhouse, so he knew firsthand what kind of trouble two young men can find when they go looking for it with anger in their hearts. Didn't matter if it was righteous anger or not. Their lives could be just as wrecked, take just as long to put back together. Hadn't all that helling around lost him his first wife and little girl? Carol ran so far and so fast it was years before I got to meet the niece who was born six months before me.

Andrew tried to pretend he wasn't worried when I called; but he snatched up the phone on the first ring, and I could feel his relief when I repeated what I'd told Aunt Zell.

"You see him or hear tell of him tonight, you tell A.K. to git his butt on home where it belongs," he told me gruffly. "If it quits raining, we got ten acres tobacco needs housing tomorrow."

"I'll tell him," I promised. "You go on to bed and don't worry

"I ain't worried," he said again. "It's his mama that's worried. You tell him that, you hear?"

"I hear," I said gently.

Paramedics were loading Carver Bannerman into an ambulance when we got back to Redbud Lane.

Every house on the street was lit up like a Christmas tree. Tomorrow might be a workday, but no one was going to miss this. Even the convenience store on the corner had reopened and was doing a brisk business in soft drinks, junk food, and cigarettes as people wandered back and forth between the store and the house, undeterred by the light mist that continued to fall.

Deputy Jack Jamison was questioning them and taking down names; and as soon as she was free of me, Richards joined him.

Almost midnight and the temperature was finally beginning to moderate. I'd brought along an unlined wind-breaker made of red water-repellant nylon, but the misty air felt so clean and cool that I slung it in the trunk of my car before ducking under the police line to see what was happening.

"Here comes trouble," said Dwight when he saw me.

The man he'd been talking to turned and gave me a considering smile. He was shorter than Dwight, so his light eyes were about on the same level as mine.

Bowman Poole. Colleton County's sheriff. He's late fifties, thin hair the color of broom straw, the compact build of a gamecock in fighting trim, and a folksy style that's carried the county every election for sixteen years.

"Your Honor," he said.

We'd nodded at each other across the crowded meeting over in Makely earlier, but we hadn't actually spoken since my reception and I cocked my head at him. "You acting like a stranger because I'm a judge or because Dwight's told you I'm a suspect?"

Bo laughed. "The hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice is Kezzie's. You won't never change, will you, girl?"

Dwight had brought him up to speed on the killing, but he asked if I'd mind going over it again. Practice makes perfect. This was about my fifth telling and I was getting pretty glib. For Dwight's benefit, I added what Annie Sue had said about hearing a car drive away just before I arrived.

"Yeah," said Dwight. "The lady across the street told Jack Jamison she saw headlights as she was pulling her shades for the night, but she didn't pay any mind to them. Neighbor next door saw it, too, and thinks a white woman was driving, but he's not sure."

We talked a few minutes longer, then Dwight sighed. "Reckon I'd better get Jack and Mayleen to go over and talk to Mrs. Bannerman. Unless you want to do it," he said to Bo.

I knew Dwight never liked to be the one to break bad news to the family.

Evidently Bo didn't like to either. "Nah, you're handling everything just fine," he said. "Looks like they're about finished in there, so I'll go on now. Talk to you tomorrow."

As soon as he turned and walked away from us, I pounced on Dwight. "Has anybody seen Reese or A.K.?"

He shook his head. "I canceled that order as soon as I heard Bannerman was dead. They still out there somewhere?"

"They must be. A.K. hasn't come home and Andrew's getting worried."

"They're probably sitting out at a tavern on the truck lane about now and—"

Our attention was snagged by Jack Jamison lifting the yellow police tape for a couple of young women. I recognized the taller by sight if not by name as the one who'd worn a funny Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt—Rochelle Bannerman's friend, according to Annie Sue and Paige.

That probably meant that the shorter, pregnant one that Deputy Jamison was escorting so solicitously was Carver Bannerman's widow. Bannerman's very pregnant widow. She wore shorts and a bright yellow T-shirt that read BABY ON BOARD. A big black arrow ended at her bulging middle.

"They said he was here," she sobbed. "What've y'all done with my husband? Where've y'all got him?"

Her friend, Opal Grimes, patted her arm like she was trying to soothe her, but there was a self-important near smirk that said she was enjoying the drama. Certainly those pats only seemed to encourage Mrs. Bannerman's hysterics.

"O, Carver, Carver! My darling!" Despite the humidity, her blonde hair was freshly blow-dried around her pretty face. Her feet were thrust into yellow rubber flip-flops and mud squished between her toes as she clutched her belly and wailed, "What are me and your baby going to do without you?"

Dwight looked at me helplessly. He really does get spooked by women grieving for their dead.

I would have tried to help, but as soon as I stepped toward her, the Grimes woman whispered in her ear and her tears dried up as she turned on me.

"You the bitch judge Carver told me about?"

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me! Think just because you sit up there on that bench you can cut the balls off a man and he won't notice?"

"Now just a minute," Dwight said.

But she was beyond listening. "And then when your niece gets the hots for him, you send your brothers over to beat him up and now you've killed him and O Carver, baby!"

And here came the tears again.