To my surprise, Denn’s Volvo was pulled up to the far edge of the concrete loading zone. The theater’s double doors were in shadow, but I could see that one of them stood slightly ajar.
I tapped my horn.
Nothing.
I switched off my motor and stepped out of air-conditioned coolness onto sun-parched grass. Warm air flowed around my bare arms almost like the red velvet cloak itself.
The sun was down below the pines now, and silence wrapped the shadowed creek bank. I walked across the concrete pad and pushed the door wider.
“Denn? Michael?” I called. “Anybody here?”
All at once it struck me what a dumb thing it was to be walking into an isolated building out here in the middle of nowhere. Probably deserted, but maybe not. Not with Denn’s car parked only ten feet away.
“And let us not forget who’s shown himself to be just a little too damn free in the way he handles a rifle,” said the pragmatist.
“She who fears and runs away lives to fear another day,” the preacher agreed nervously.
I backed away from the door, feeling slightly foolish. On the other hand, I do keep a loaded.38 locked in the truck of my car and this seemed like as good a time as any to get it out.
The concrete loading zone was only eight or nine inches off ground level, but when I turned, I found myself looking straight down into the front seat of Denn’s car. An instant jolt of pure adrenaline jerked me backwards. I was propelled by such a strong and instinctive survival response that I had no time to reason. I could only react in primitive, headlong, terrified flight across the strip of open ground between the two cars. I dived into mine and dug out of there so fast that gravel spun out in all directions, and I hunched as low as I could, expecting to feel a shotgun blast between my shoulder blades at any second.
Like the blast that’d taken out the driver’s side of the Volvo windshield and blown away Denn McCloy’s whole face.
18 make the world go away
I’m fine,” I said for the third time.
“You sure?” asked Dwight Bryant.
As head of the detective division, he had all his people moving in the directions he wanted them to go, and now he could make time to come over to the car and get my whole story. I was parked at the edge of the grass behind the theater with my front door open and one foot on the ground, and he leaned his big muscular body against the car as we talked so he could keep an eye on proceedings.
Although there was still plenty of daylight, portable floods had been rigged to light the interior of Denn’s Volvo while they took photographs from every angle before they moved him.
So far, everything had been done by the book. I might have disturbed the crime scene by driving in and out, but after I’d gotten to a phone and called the sheriff’s department, the first deputy to respond had blocked off the theater’s drive out by the paved road. All emergency vehicles had come in by driving straight across the grass to the edge of the back parking lot, while one member of Dwight’s team took a close look at the drive and parking lot. I doubted if she’d find anything. Gravel doesn’t mark, we hadn’t had rain in more than a week, and this sandy soil becomes too dry and powdery to hold tracks after two or three days of hot sun.
Dwight wanted to know how I’d discovered the body, and I told him about Sylvia Dayley and the message Denn’d left on the firm’s answering machine.
“You thought he’d wait that long?” Dwight asked skeptically.
“Not him,” I said. “Whatever it was he wanted to give me.”
A velvet cloak seemed such a petty object in the face of Denn’s death that I wasn’t going to mention it if I could help it. Before Dwight thought to ask, I said, “He didn’t happen to hint what it was when you talked to him on Thursday, did he?”
“Nope.”
“What did he say? About shooting at Michael on Wednesday, I mean?”
Dwight gave a wry grin. “Swore he didn’t do it; promised he wouldn’t ever do it again.” He shifted his weight against my car, and I swayed with the motion of the shocks. “Makes me wonder where Michael Vickery is right now.”
“You think Michael-?”
“Well, you’re the one who talked about menopausal males,” he said.
The radio crackled on the county’s emergency rescue truck and I was suddenly reminded of where I was supposed to be. Dwight said I was welcome to ask one of the patrolmen to tell the dispatcher to get word to the Makely Parents Without Partners that I wouldn’t be coming.
As I got out of the car, Jack Jamison, a tubby young deputy, called, “Hey, Major Bryant-see you over here a minute?”
It was more than a minute, and whatever it was that Jamison was pointing out to Dwight inside the Volvo, it sure seemed to set off a whole new flurry of activity. The patrolman I’d collared had barely finished giving the dispatcher my message than I heard Dwight putting out an APB on Michael Vickery’s gray Ford pickup.
The sun finally melted into the pine trees. Not much daylight left as reaction set in. I began to feel as tired as if I’d barned tobacco all day and so utterly saddened by Denn’s violent death. He was nearly fifteen years older than me and he and Michael had done little socializing in Cotton Grove, so we may not have been close friends, but we were friends, and I mourned- the loss of his colorful personality. I could almost smile to remember how much fun he’d made The Night of January 16th, some of his outrageous comments about my fellow cast members during costume fittings. Bitchy, witty, and surprisingly insightful. The Possum Creek Players would have a hard time replacing him.
All this went through my mind as Dwight gave a physical description of the pickup’s probable driver, and I must have been even more tired than I realized because I sat there stupidly for a moment wondering why on earth Dwight was putting Denn’s description on an APB.
The rescue people were lifting the limp form from the car. I went over and tried to focus on the body, without letting myself really look at the head again.
We sure do see what we expect to see, don’t we? Earlier, I’d assumed that the man in Denn’s car, sitting where Denn was supposed to be sitting, waiting where Denn had said he’d be waiting, was indeed Denn.
Wrong.
Now I saw quite clearly that it was Michael Vickery who’d had his face blown away.
It made the eleven o’clock news on all our local channels and the front pages of several Sunday papers around eastern North Carolina.
Scion of a prominent local family, police seeking his missing male companion, body discovered by an equally prominent candidate for a seat on the bench-all the notice that I’d avoided earlier I was now getting in spades.
The television stories concentrated on Michael and Denn, but the newspapers had time and space to include me since by now it was clear that Michael had died around nine o’clock on Friday night, the time and place Denn McCloy expected to meet me. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t speculate either on or off the record about why Michael Vickery was there instead or why a meeting I didn’t keep should have led to murder.
Nice of Dwight not to speculate out loud, but it didn’t stop the media.
In addition to my usual academic and career achievements, I was described as the “only daughter of Keziah Knott, at one time alleged to be North Carolina ’s largest bootlegger.” One or two hinted that I was-till now anyhow-the only white sheep of an infamous family, while others picked up on those phony campaign flyers and left the impression that Michael’s murder had something to do with my position on sex, race, drugs, untaxed whiskey, and God knows what else.
Although they were very careful to print or broadcast nothing actionable, the open-ended quagmire of personalities, crime, unanswered questions, and suggestive innuendos kept the reading and viewing public tuned in. I had the gloomy feeling that I was watching my seat on any bench trickle right on down the drain.
