“That’s what we came to discuss,” I said as I tipped books out of the nearest chair and sat down. “I have no idea who sent out that garbage in my name.”
“Huh? What in all the sulfuric flames you talking about?” he boomed. “I was addressing my remarks to Mr. Parker here.”
“Wait a minute.” I reached for the paper he kept waving around. “This isn’t my letterhead.”
“Who said it was?”
Luther Parker was too polite to dump a chair full of books on the floor, but he seemed to have no scruples about reading over my shoulder. Evidently he read faster than I did, because I was only halfway through the first sentence when he began spluttering.
This one was on his letterhead and it was almost a duplicate of the one circulated in Makely the day before, only this time, the beast with seven horns that Judicial District 11-C was being warned about was me.
If one could believe everything in this open letter, Luther Parker was an upright, foursquare Christian family man who sang with the angels when he wasn’t defending Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Ms. Deborah Knott, on the other hand, was an unmarried, (a) castrating bitch, (b) promiscuous whore, or (c) closet lesbian (pick one), the daughter of the biggest bootlegger in Colleton County history, and a defender of foreign drug dealers from whom she was probably getting a cut of the profits. “If Ms. Knott is elected to the bench, it will be speedy trials and speedier acquittals for drunks, junkies, and perverts of all kinds.”
“They were on nearly every News and Observer box in Dobbs,” said Linsey in his dulcet, window-rattling tones. “Not the ones here on Main Street, but all the out-of-the-way places where there’s not much nighttime traffic.”
He sat behind his desk and twisted a few hairs of his exuberant moustache while reading the flyer with my letterhead. As soon as he’d finished, he swiveled over and flicked the intercom. “Hey, Ashley,” he shouted. “Get me Hector Woodlief, okay?”
I don’t know why he bothered with the intercom since his door was still open.
“Hold on there a minute,” Luther objected. “You don’t want to involve Woodlief. Even if he had a hand in it, you sure we want to remind voters there’s a Republican alternative?”
“Smart thinking,” Linsey agreed. “Ashley? Cancel that call.” He swiveled back to us. “But if it’s not Woodlief, who else benefits?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said tightly, “but I seem to be the only one with serious damage here and I get it coming and going. In one I’m a redneck racist, in the other I’m the devil’s mouthpiece for organized crime. Mr. Parker’s accused of being black. Period.”
He acted like he was fixing to protest, but Linsey was nodding in thoughtful agreement, and after a moment’s consideration, Luther nodded, too. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said.
“You don’t sound terribly sorrowful,” I observed. “And the Ledger endorsed you, didn’t it? Tell me, Linsey. Am I being set up here?”
Both men acted genuinely shocked that I could even consider such a possibility, but when challenged to produce another person who benefited from those two letters, their one pitiful candidate was Hector Woodlief. Yes, Hector files for some office or other almost every election, but it’s just to keep Democrats honest. He’s never really campaigned and would hardly begin with this sort of dirty trick.
We briefly discussed our two primary opponents who’d come in third and fourth. Sour grapes?
I didn’t think so.
In the end, I reluctantly agreed to a story that downplayed specifics and appealed to voter intelligence and sense of fair play when confronted with obviously phony campaign literature.
Sure.
Back at the office, I called Minnie and told her the depressing news. Her initial outrage and indignation quickly gave way to a practical curiosity as to who was behind the flyers and why.
“Makely Wednesday night, Dobbs last night. Sounds like a one-man job. Wonder where he’ll strike tonight? Cotton Grove?”
As I hung up the phone, I heard John Claude talking to Sherry and walked out to show them the latest, but John Claude already had a copy in his hand. I told him of my meeting at the paper and he gave a pointed look at the grandfather clock beneath the stairs.
“The first issues of the Ledger should be rolling ofF the press in about twenty minutes. I suggest we take the rest of the day off. Sherry can turn on our answering machine. Most of the novelty should have worn off by Monday. Have a nice weekend, Deborah.”
16 back where i come from
There were fish fries I should be attending, voters’ hands I should be shaking, probably even babies somewhere in the district that I should be kissing, but with those flyers kiting around and the Ledger due out in Dobbs any minute, I wanted an afternoon off. I wanted to forget lawyering and campaigning, to just get outdoors and-
As soon as I got that far, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend the next few hours. Soon I was in jeans and sneakers heading west toward Cotton Grove. On the way out of town I stopped at a bait store for some night crawlers. All I needed was a cane pole sticking out my rear window with a red bobber, and I figured I could borrow one of those from my brother Seth. I just wanted to go sit on a pond bank and watch a cork bobble on the surface of flat water.
Halfway there though, I had a sudden thought and pulled in at M.Z. Dupree’s Cash Grocery.
It was one of those small crossroads general stores that sell a little bit of everything: clotheslines, plumbing and electrical supplies, tin buckets, canned meats, bread and milk. There was a hoop of deep orange rat cheese on the counter by the cash register, glass bottles in the drink box, and just three fuel pumps out front: regular, high- test, and kerosene. In cold or rainy weather, there’d be four or five pickups nosed in toward the door. On a beautiful May afternoon like this, however, the place was deserted. All those pickup owners were out on huge green tractors, cleaning grass from their tobacco, corn, or cotton.
“Hey, Mr. M.Z., you doing all right?” I said to the owner, an elderly thin man whom I’d never seen dressed in anything but a white long-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of blue overalls.
“Can’t complain. How ’bout you?”
As many times as I’d stopped in at that store, I was never quite sure if he remembered from one time to the next who I was, even though one of my campaign handbills with my picture on it was thumbtacked beside his door.
“I can’t complain either,” I said, setting a package of cheese Nabs and an ice-cold Pepsi on the counter. Lunch.
“Wouldn’t do us no good if we did grumble, would it?” He smiled. “Now’s this gonna be all for you today, young lady?”
“I need ten dollars’ worth of high-test, and you reckon I could use your phone, please?”
“Ain’t long-distance, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well then, you just help yourself,” he said; and while he went out to fill my gas tank, I made a quick call to ask if Dr. Vickery would let me visit on such short notice.
The maid returned to say that Dr. Vickery would expect me with pleasure.
When I was a child, Dr. Vickery had his office behind the drugstore, so I’d never been in this fancy house built by his wife’s father. It was all Persian rugs and Queen Anne furniture and smelled of lemon oil and beeswax as the maid led me down the central hall, through a formal parlor replete with grand piano and gilt-framed oil paintings of big tree-filled landscapes, then out onto a lovely brick terrace. At one end a trellis arched on Grecian columns above some wicker chairs and tables and shaded them with the same climbing yellow roses I’d seen out at Michael Vickery’s barn. The maid deposited me there as Mrs. Vickery stood up from her ministrations to a stunning iris border.
Dr. Vickery immediately came around the corner with a pair of pruning clippers.
They were of equal height. As a child, though, I’d always thought of Mrs. Vickery as much taller. Probably because she’d been what folks used to call a fine figure of a woman: big boned and stoutly built with strong, well-
