“It won’t take but a minute,” I soothed.
But as we turned into Jason’s street, we immediately ran into a solid wall of cars and people, all focused on the rescue truck halfway down the block.
“Oh, Lord,” said Cyl. “That’s where they were going to cut up a tree. Did that old woman have a heart attack or somebody get hurt?”
With the crowd watching whatever fresh disaster was unfolding, it seemed like a good time to slip over and take a closer look at Jason’s car. Accordingly, I copied several other vehicles and parked diagonally with two wheels on the pavement and the other two on someone’s front lawn.
“Be right back,” I told Cyl, who grabbed at a nearby woman’s arm, to ask what was going on. I saw men running with shovels from all over and I hesitated, finally registering the naked horror that hung palpably in the air.
A man I recognized by face though not by name was backing out of the crowd. He was built like a bear with thick neck and brawny arms and he was covered with sawdust and a cold sweat. His eyes were glazed, his face was greenish white. I couldn’t tell if he was in shock or about to throw up.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, God! I didn’t know he was down there. I didn’t know!”
“Know what?” I asked again.
“The stump just stood back up.”
I couldn’t make sense of his words, but someone who knew him hurried out of the crowd and put his arm around the man and told me to leave him alone. “Come away, Fred. It’s not your fault. The damn fool shouldn’t have been down there.”
If Fred couldn’t talk, there were others almost hysterical at witnessing such a ghastly accident. A hundred- year-old oak had pulled halfway out of the ground, they said, leaving behind a huge root hole, several feet across and three or four feet deep. A neighbor had gone into the hole and was bending down to cut through the roots that were still in the ground just as another neighbor—the man they called Fred—finished cutting through the trunk’s three-foot diameter.
Released from the weight of those heavy, leaf-laden branches, the thick stump and enormous root ball suddenly flipped back into the hole, completely burying the man who was there. A dozen men were digging with shovels and picks, others were trying to hitch ropes and chains from the stump to a team of pickup trucks. They had sent for a bulldozer that was even now lumbering down the street, but everyone knew it was too late the instant the stump righted itself.
“That poor bastard!” said one of the men. “First his wife and now him.”
“Such a good man,” said an elderly white woman with tears running down her face. “He was always looking to help others.”
Before I could ask the final question, Cyl pulled me away.
“It’s Jason Bullock,” she said.
CHAPTER | 18
Most of these storms describe a parabola, with the westward arch touching the Atlantic Coast, after which the track is northeastward, finally disappearing with the storm itself in the north Atlantic.
With Jason Bullock dead, there was no way to know whether Cyl and I were right about his reasons for killing his wife—anger over Lynn’s affairs, political aspirations, or a simple wish to be free of her without paying the price of divorce. The important thing was that once Dwight’s people concentrated on him, there was plenty of proof that he had indeed done it.
I was right about his cell phone bills. He’d called the Orchid Motel from the ball field twice, trying to make it look as if another man knew she was there. We still don’t know if he jogged over to the motel or drove. No witness has come forward to say they saw him do either, but there’s at least a half-hour gap when none of us can say positively that he was at the field.
They haven’t found the envelope Rosa Edwards gave Clara Freeman, but the bloody clothes he’d worn when he butchered her were in a garbage bag at the bottom of his trash barrel, so we’re pretty sure he’s the one who stole the envelope from my house. And as soon as Clara Freeman was well enough for Dwight to interview her, she described Jason’s car and identified his picture as the white man who ran her off the road.
When Reid eventually heard that Millard King’s tie tack had also been found in Lynn’s motel room, he theorized that she must have had a cache of souvenirs and that Jason had planted them to implicate the men who had slept with his wife. He was real proud of his theory and ready to run tell it to Dwight until I reminded him why this would not be a good idea.
“But I could get my pen back,” he argued.
“Forget it,” I snarled.
Dwight beat up on himself when all the other facts were in. “Last time I believe a lawyer about anything,” he said bitterly. “That night I went to tell him about his wife? If you could’ve seen it—table set for two, salad wilting in the bowl, steaks drying up on the drainboard—and just the right mixture of shock and anger. He played me like a goddamned violin.”
“Or a jury,” I said cynically.
* * *
Five hot and sweaty days later, power was still out over the rural parts of Colleton County, although phone service had been restored in less than forty-eight hours. Eighteen states had sent crews to help restore North Carolina’s electricity but over five thousand poles were down and at least three thousand miles of wires and cables needed to be replaced.
Every day reminded us all over again just how much we relied on electricity in ways we didn’t even realize. My family could be smug about cooking with propane gas but in this heat, we were having trouble keeping food fresh in
