Philadelphia. But a loving-natured Aunt Essie met a widowed Philadelphia policeman with two motherless teenage girls and Maidie met Cletus Holt, one of Daddy’s best tenants, and both of them decided they’d landed in greener pastures.
Even though IRS irregularities were what had sent Daddy to prison before I was born, his farm workers preferred cash under the table and no Social Security deductions. Mother wouldn’t play those games with the people she hired, and she was always meticulous about paying into Social Security and a pension plan, too, for Maidie and Cletus. Maidie made him keep it up after Mother died.
I suppose if I were more politically correct, I’d bemoan this surviving remnant of old-time mutual dependence— white landowner, black domestic. Instead, I was grateful for the continuity.
“Where’s that good-looking man of yours?” Maidie asked me now. “Not run off with some pretty young thing, has he?”
“As a matter of fact, he has,” I said ruefully.
Instantly, her teasing smile faded into concern, but before she could offer me sympathy and start heaping scorn on Kidd, I quickly explained that the pretty young thing in question was his daughter. Maidie wasn’t completely mollified.
“She’s living right there in New Bern, ain’t she? How come they can’t see enough of each other through the week?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s her birthday or something.”
Maidie gave me a shrewd look. “Onliest child your boyfriend’s got and you don’t know when her birthday is? ’Pears to me you don’t like her much, do you, honey?”
“She’s the one doesn’t like
“Which one of you’s the grown-up?” Maidie said, as she went back to gathering flower seeds.
I may have a law degree and I may be a judge, but seems like I never win an argument with her.
It was a good half-mile to where Maidie thought Adam was and when I got there, I saw a smoldering bed of embers, all that remained of a pile of brush. There were dog tracks and the imprints of a boot that could be Adam’s, but no other immediate sign of him.
I whistled and Blue and Ladybelle came loping up the cut that leads down to the homemade bridge across Possum Creek. Hambone gave one sharp excited bark when he saw them, then hurried over to me for protection, knowing he was the interloper in their territory.
The two older dogs approached in measured dignity. I assured Hambone that they were friendly and he took me at my word, frisking around the taller dogs, inviting them to romp. Ladybelle was too polite to raise her eyebrows at Blue, and both of them patiently endured the youngster’s enthusiasm, but their manner clearly questioned my judgment in requiring them to put up with such an unruly visitor without a nip to teach him some manners.
The four of us walked to the head of the cut. Across the bridge, at the opening into the far field, I saw Adam and another man standing beside a white pickup. At first I thought it was Reese, but as the dogs and I started across the bridge, the second man got into the truck. When he slammed the door and drove away, I saw a familiar logo on the door: Sutterly Homes.
“Was that Dick Sutterly?” I asked curiously as Adam met us halfway across the bridge. “Why’d he take off like that?”
“We were finished talking for now,” Adam said.
We got to the end of the bridge and Adam squatted down by the water’s edge to dip his left hand in the creek. I saw that his handkerchief was tied around it like a bandage.
“You hurt?” I asked. “What happened?”
“Burned myself,” he grunted. “Nothing serious.”
Nevertheless, he held his hand in the water another minute or two before pulling it out with the handkerchief dripping wet. I could see red around the edges on the palm of his hand, but he wouldn’t untie it to let me see just how bad it was.
“I told you. It only stings a little, okay?”
“Fine. So what were you and Sutterly talking about?” I asked, still suspicious of Sutterly’s motives and Adam’s meeting with him.
“Hey, back up there,” he said sharply. “This isn’t one of your courtrooms.”
The boots he wore were probably his, but the jeans were probably Zach’s. Certainly the maroon-and-green rugby shirt was Zach’s because I’d given it to him two Christmases ago. Makes cross-country packing easy if, at the other end, you can borrow from your twin’s wardrobe.
My brothers from Daddy’s first marriage tend to be big-boned and solid, and they top out between five ten and six one. Like Will and Zach, Adam stands about six three with the hard lean build of the men on Mother’s Stephenson side of the family. Unfortunately, I got the worst of the genetic blend: Daddy’s bones but the same volatile Stephenson temper as Mother and my three youngest brothers. We’re quick to anger, quick to tears, quick to forgive.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that Dick Sutterly makes me nervous the way he wants to slap a house on every square inch at this end of the county.”
But Adam wouldn’t let me off that easily. “What difference does it make to you? You live over in Dobbs. Not out here.”
“And because I don’t live here, I’m not supposed to care? Because you live in California, it doesn’t matter if you help wreck it for the others?”
“Get off my case,” he said angrily, striding away so abruptly that the dogs were torn between staying with me and trailing after him.
I almost had to run to keep up with his long legs. “What’s going on here, Adam? You’re the richest one of us