Southern Discomfort Part 1

Southern Discomfort.

Margaret Maron.

PROLOGUE.

PLANS AND SPECIFICATIONS.

"The construction drawings, plus the specifications to be described later, are the chief sources of information for the supervisors and craftsman responsible for the actual work of construction."

i.

The male mockingbird teeters on the edge of a whitewashed brick wall and flexes his wings in a motion designed to flush unwary insects from the ground below.

Nothing.

He glides down to an open patch of sunlit gra.s.s between the wall and a rhododendron bush and again flicks open gray-feathered wings, exposing flashes of white.

A startled cricket hastily dives under a sheltering blade of centipede gra.s.s.

Too late.

The mockingbird pounces, tweezers it from the gra.s.s with a sharp and deadly accurate bill, then flies up to a crepe myrtle and checks for enemies. At the far end of the long wall, a big yellow cat drowses in the shade provided by tall rhododendrons, extravagant in lavender bloom.

They are old adversaries who long ago established a modus vivendi of mutual respect. He knows she would eat his babies were they left unguarded, but a warning chirr usually discourages her predatory nature. His nest is well hidden among spindly, difficult to climb twigs; and if she tries, his outraged screams will marshall other birds to hurl raucous threats and help peck her unprotected back.

Only this morning, he and his mate banded with the thrashers and blue jays that inhabit this quiet suburban street to chase a snake from their territory. The sleeping cat is no real threat. The mocker swoops down onto the wall, pauses a moment to pound the cricket into a more easily digested mush, then hops along the bricks to where dogwood twigs brush the top of the wall at this corner.

Here in mid-May, the dogwood has finished blooming. No white flowers gleam among the broad leaves, only swelling green berries that will redden in the fall and provide sustenance when spiders and insects have buried themselves out of sight against winter's coming.

Here in the heart of the tree, the mockingbird and his mate have built a nest safe from prying eyes, and four half-fledged babies open their soft bright yellow beaks the instant they sense his arrival. He stuffs the broken cricket down the most insistent gaping mouth and flies off in search of more food.

All is quiet on this tree-lined street save the drone of a nearby power mower, and nothing disturbs the orderly coming and going of birds at work.

Cars pa.s.s, occasional screen doors slam, the lawn mower goes silent, and the mockingbirds shuttle back and forth with their beaks full of gra.s.shoppers and beetles to stuff those insatiable little gullets.

Babies must be fed. The young are always hungry...

Into the silence comes the sound of a crooning voice.

The mockingbird buzzes a raspy alarm and watches as a human at the end of the wall stretches out a hand to the cat. She rises, sniffs the strange hand, then allows it to stroke her sleek back.

No threat to his mate or their babies, the mockingbird decides, and goes back to scanning the yard. His eye locks onto a huge gra.s.shopper there at the base of a nearby flowering judas. It's one of those big brown-and-green creatures, enough to fill at least three ravenous beaks. The instant the bird approaches, it springs up; but the bird is quicker and catches it on the wing.

Intent on smashing the struggling gra.s.shopper into manageable bits, the mockingbird pays no attention to what's happening at the far end of the wall; and by the time he flies up to the nest to distribute his grisly morsels, the cat has vanished from his tiny brain as completely and as finally as she has vanished from the wall.

There are babies to feed.

Only the babies matter.

ii.

Boxer shorts.

That's how she always thinks of him.

The old-fashioned kind made of striped cotton. With snap fasteners. Except that half the time they'll be unsnapped, with a little circle of damp where he's gotten up to use the bathroom and has been careless about the last drop or two before tucking his thing back inside the striped cotton.

If it's after midnight and her light is still on, he comes into her room without knocking, as if hoping to catch her doing something forbidden.

"Time you were asleep," he growls before lumbering back down the hall.

That's okay. A lot of fathers do stuff like that.

What's not okay are the nights she gets home after they've gone upstairs and he comes to the head of the stairs and stands there looking down at her, his bathrobe hanging open. Or he's waiting in the living room, sitting spraddle-legged in his lounge chair, and he makes her sit down on the couch across from him while he cross-examines her about the evening.

"Why is your skirt so wrinkled? Were you in the backseat of his car? Did you let him put his tongue in your mouth? That's the first thing men want with a girl-to get their hands inside her blouse, put their hands in her panties. Did you let him? Did you? Is my daughter nothing but a s.l.u.t? Look at me when I talk to you, young lady!"

But she doesn't know where to look. At his eyes, hot and greedy for something she doesn't understand? At the gaping slit in those boxer shorts where his thing hangs dark and disturbing against those wrinkled hairy lumps?

When he sees her looking there, the striped fabric quivers and rises as the thing beneath engorges and swells. He usually stands then. "I just want your solemn word that you're still a virgin," he says.

Sobbing now, she swears that she is.

And now he knots his robe around him and retires in patriarchal seemliness to the master bedroom.

Her mother often complains of insomnia; yet somehow, she never wakes up when he lectures her at night like this.

iii.

The kitchen is even filthier than the rest of the trailer-every surface littered with fast-food cartons, soft drink cans, wilted lettuce leaves, dirty dishes, gummy knives and forks.

"What'd you expect," she bristles. "House Beautiful? Supper on the table? When half the time you don't even come home for three days? What's the matter? Couldn't find any fresh meat to poke it into tonight?"

And now she's in there on the couch crying 'cause she got the slapping she was begging for. Well, d.a.m.n it all to frigging h.e.l.l, a woman pushes a man like that, what's she expect?

A bunch of roses?

All her fault.

Yeah, and it's her fault, too, if he has to go looking for what he can't find at home anymore.

Including a clean gla.s.s.

Every single gla.s.s they own is sitting dirty on the narrow counter. Enraged, he sweeps them all to the floor and bangs out of the back door to go where it'll be cool and quiet and clean gla.s.ses appear with the snap of a finger.

iv.

George Jones's nasal tw.a.n.g fills the flashy little car-two speakers in the rear and one on each door-but the thief's mind isn't on cheating and hurting songs at the moment, and it's certainly not on the lush green trees and fields flashing past the closed car windows. No, it's remembering details from those articles in the News and Observer last summer.

They made it sound so easy. Like Velma Barfield, the "Death Row Granny" and last woman executed in North Carolina. Five or six people died before anybody started really noticing. A woman's crime. Middle-aged women. Women like Blanche Taylor Moore, who's sitting up there on death row right this minute. Before her trial actually began, they were saying she might have poisoned as many as nine people.

So who'll notice one more? Anyhow, you really can't count that first time. Because you don't know for sure that's what did it.

There had been only a few syrupy drops left in that little bottle under the sink in the church kitchen. Like liquid saccharine and who's to say it really made much of a difference to that last gla.s.s of iced tea? He might've gone on and died anyhow.

But those few drops emptied the bottle and where to get more?

It's just like all the old-timers keep mouthing: n.o.body ever notices what's slipping away till it's mostly already gone.

Isn't there one single old-fashioned honest-to-G.o.d country store left in the whole state of North Carolina? Used to be you could count on a storekeeper keeping stuff-old stock pushed to the back of the shelves, new stuff shoved in at the front. Root around a little and you could find 1979 goods still marked at 1979 prices and the owner would never dream of saying, "Hold on a minute, I b'lieve that's gone up a dime or two since I shelved it."

When did hick stores start acting like 7-Eleven quick-stops with computerized inventory controls, wide and brightly lit aisles, even video cameras to record everybody who steps up to the cash register?

After driving up and down every back road in Colleton County this steamy Sat.u.r.day morning in mid-June, the thief's almost ready to consider other alternatives when suddenly, at a nothing-looking crossroads in the middle of tobacco and sweet potato fields, here it is: a big shabby cinderblock with battered gas pumps and a promising air of neglect. The hard-packed dirt yard is thickly cobbled with forty years' worth of rusty bottle caps and the dirty plate gla.s.s windows hold faded announcements of long past gospel sings or benefit fish frys. From the number of pickups and cars parked out front, business is pretty good, which means that whoever runs the store must be too lazy and/or too tight to spend money fixing things up.

Coming in out of the bright noonday sun makes the crowded interior seem even dimmer than normal, but a quick glance around through dark gla.s.ses confirms that all the white, black and brown faces belong to strangers. Anyhow, most of them seem to be migrant workers who mill around the cash register to pay for the weekend's wine and beer or to settle up for lunchtime drinks and beans and wedges of hoop cheese bought on the tab all week.

The fat white man behind the counter nods and his sallow-faced wife says, "Let me know if you need any help," but both are too busy making sure their dark-skinned customers aren't stealing to pay much attention to an ordinary white person.

The narrow aisles are crammed head-high with canned goods, farm implements, seed bins and fishing poles; and the smell of fertilizer mingles with sweat and cigarette smoke. Towards the back, mops and brooms are jammed upright between plastic and tin buckets, mothb.a.l.l.s and rat traps. Next to these, at eye level, is a shelf full of a.s.sorted insecticides. Modern aerosol cans, all with labels claiming to protect Earth's ozone layer, have been dumped in beside pump bottles of evil green liquids that may have been sitting in this very same spot since before what's her name-Rachel Carson?-wrote that book.

With quickening excitement, the thief pushes aside dried-out rolls of flypaper and boxes of shiny tin ant traps that never work worth a flip and spots a stack of orange cardboard boxes: Terro Ant Killer. The top ones have a little Roman numeral II after the name and are priced at $2.19. According to the box, each bottle of clear syrup is laced with "sodium tetraborate decahydrate (borax)."

Borax? Isn't that for washing clothes? What good is borax?

A little further digging unearths a battered and faded box marked 98. On the back, small black letters read: Active ingredients:.

Sodium a.r.s.enate.....................2.27%.

Total a.r.s.enic (as Metallic).....0.91%.

a.r.s.enic in water soluble.

form (as Metallic)..................0.91%.

This is followed by a large orange WARNING: May be fatal if swallowed.

There are two small bottles left on the shelf.

Shielded by a support post in the middle of the aisle, the thief slips one in each pocket, crams the empty boxes back where they came from, and looks around for something innocuous to buy.

Back up at the front, the fat owner rings up $6.75 for a rusty mole trap and ninety-nine cents for the mothb.a.l.l.s. Plus tax. "That'll be eight twenty," he says.

"Looks like somebody's fixing to get rid of some pests," says his gaunt wife as she bags the two items.

Thinking how much nicer life is soon going to be for a certain person, the thief smiles and hands over a ten-dollar bill. "We sure plan to try."

CHAPTER 1.

GRADING THE PLOT.

"Grade elevations of the surface area around a structure are indicated on the plot plan....This grading operation involves removing earth from areas which are higher than the prescribed elevation (cut) and filling earth into areas which are below the prescribed elevation (fill)."

My swearing-in ceremony was held on a hot and humid Monday afternoon in Colleton County's oldest courtroom, a big cavernous s.p.a.ce paneled in dark oak and weighty with the stone-footed majesty of nineteenth-century law. The high vaulted ceiling is plastered with acanthus leaves; pierced bra.s.s lanterns hang down on long black cords above solid oak benches. Now that three bright-colored modern courtrooms have been added on to the top floor of the new jail annex, this part of the courthouse is used so infrequently that the air was cool and musty even though the place was jammed with well-wishers and a bailiff said the air-conditioning wasn't working right.

If and when we ever got around to the actual robing-put a microphone in front of some people and they never hush talking-I knew I'd appreciate the room's coolness. That heavy black garment had started out miles too big, but Aunt Zell had gathered and st.i.tched and cut and hemmed till it no longer swam on me. Not that I'm the dainty flower of southern womanhood G.o.d probably meant for me to be-I came out of my mother's womb a size fourteen and it's been a struggle to get down to a twelve ever since-but Carly Jernigan had been six one; and back when he served two terms on the district bench sometime in the late seventies, he must've weighed two-forty easy.

My sister-in-law Minnie was the closest thing I had to a campaign manager when I ran for judge, and since Carly Jernigan had been Minnie's mother's oldest brother, his widow thought it'd be nice to pa.s.s his robe on to me.

"I'm real sorry about the smell," Miss Abby apologized the day she and Minnie brought it over to Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash's house, where I live.

A homemade potpourri of rose petals and heartleaves fills a Chinese bowl that sits atop a Queen Anne chest amid the formality of Aunt Zell's pink and green living room, but its delicate fragrance was blotted up by coa.r.s.e mothball fumes the minute I opened the long fiberboard coat box.

"I've had that thing hanging on my back porch for a week," said Miss Abby. "Ever since Minnie told me you were going to be appointed. I'm afraid it'll have to get dry-cleaned before you can stand to wear it, though."

After pricing new robes in a catalog of judicial accoutrements that a soon-to-be colleague had loaned me, a dry-cleaning bill was nothing; and I sincerely meant it when I told Miss Abby how much I appreciated her generosity.

Nevertheless, a faint aroma of naphthalene still met my nose whenever Aunt Zell shifted the robe from one arm to the other as we bowed our heads that afternoon for Barry Blackman's invocation. Barry is pastor at Bethel Baptist Church. Sweet.w.a.ter Missionary Baptist was actually my home church, but the new minister had only been there two months whereas I'd known Barry forever-in fact, he was the first boy I'd ever kissed for real-so it was nice that I could get him to come pray G.o.d's blessing on my new career without hurting anybody's feelings. (Politics makes you sensitive to stuff like that.) We'd already been called to order by Ellis Glover, Colleton County's clerk of court, and we'd been welcomed by Pete Taylor, current president of the county bar a.s.sociation.

Programs rustled up and down the aisle as Barry said Amen and returned to his seat in the old jury box. My brother Haywood's Stevie was videotaping the ceremony and he took advantage of the momentary stir to switch camera angles.

Ellis came back to the microphone set up in front of the high carved bench where the Honorable Frances Tripp reposed in unselfconscious dignity. Forever a politician, Ellis spent the next ten minutes recognizing just about everybody in the audience. He began with the elected: two state representatives, four judges, the sheriff, three mayors, a police chief, six county commissioners, four members of the school board, and the register of deeds.

(If Colleton County ever goes back to electing dog catchers or town criers, our clerk of court will recognize them, too.) We clapped for two preachers, the head of the Democratic Women, the head of the Democratic Men, the leader of the county's Black Caucus, the president of the local Jaycees, a fire chief, the dean of our local community college, and somebody from the state auditor's office who had innocently wandered over from Raleigh on other business and now had to wait till I was sworn in before courthouse routine would return to normal.