thought he said he bought new tires a few weeks ago.”
Dwight wasn’t interested in Billy’s tires, he was more concerned about Reese.
“You can talk to him,” I said. “Just try not to do it around Herman or Nadine. He was supposed to be working that morning, but he took off to see if he could get a shot at a deer back along the creek. He says he went past the shop around ten forty-five and didn’t see any sign of anybody going or coming.”
“What time did he leave?”
“I don’t believe he said, but I got the impression that he probably wasn’t in there more than thirty or forty minutes.”
Dwight made a note of it. “Okay. And thanks. This’ll save us a little running around. Maybe narrow things down even more.”
“One other thing,” I said. “And it’s probably not important.”
“But?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know why Allen’s trying to make you think he spent the whole weekend in Greensboro, but Birdie McElveen talked to his ex-wife in Charlotte about an hour ago. He stayed at her place last night and left from there this morning after giving her two thousand in cash.”
“Yeah?” He pulled the phone back closer—it was starting to wear a rut in his desktop—and said, “Faye? If you do get hold of Smithwick, I think maybe I better talk to him myself.”
As I stood to go, Dwight said, “How did Birdie McElveen happen to be talking to Stancil’s ex-wife this morning?”
I gave him my blandest shrug.
“And why’d she call you with that information?”
“Well, you said there weren’t any warrants out on him. I might’ve wondered out loud to Birdie if he was evading his responsibilities,” I admitted. “She’s in Child Support Enforcement and you know how dedicated she is to her work.”
“Yeah? Now listen, Deb’rah—”
“Oh, my Lord, look at the time! I’m supposed to be back in the courtroom in twenty minutes and I haven’t had a bite of lunch. See you,” I said and got out of there before he could start lecturing me to mind my own business and stay out of his investigation.
No sign of Allen or Jack Jamison as I hurried through the halls. He’d probably conned the deputy into buying him a real lunch.
More than I was going to have. It looked like Nabs and a Diet Pepsi from the vending machines over in the old courthouse basement again.
By late afternoon, all the routine crimes and misdemeanors of the day had been disposed of and I was left with a civil matter:
Five minutes into the case, I knew I was watching the latest episode in a long-running family soap opera.
The combatants were two cousins. Geraldine Stevens and Annice Johnson. Mid-thirties, blond, so similar in appearance they could have been sisters. When the women married, their mutual grandfather had deeded each of them adjoining building lots. Proximity had only worsened their feud.
Geraldine’s two acres made a fairly neat rectangle, slightly deeper than it was wide, with sufficient road frontage for an ample semicircular drive.
Annice’s drive was barely wide enough to let a Geo through. Her two acres looked a little like the outline of the United States if you cut off California, Oregon and Washington and squared off Texas. “Florida” was an eight-foot- wide strip that touched the road. That eight feet was Annice’s only bit of road frontage because an old family graveyard occupied a tenth of an acre where Texas and the Gulf of Mexico should have touched the road bank.
No matter who holds a title to the land where it sits, a graveyard itself is an encumbrance protected by the law in perpetuity. It may not be desecrated, moved nor adversely disturbed without a court order and the consent of the nearest kin.
According to Annice, who brought along before-and-after photographs, the graveyard had fallen into shocking condition these last eight years. Their grandfather had tended it until poor health forced him to put down his rake and hoe and pruning shears. Nobody else ever picked them up.
Once there had been only a single magnolia tree in the center. After years of neglect, volunteer pines and cedars and wild cherries had sprung up out of the very graves themselves. Honeysuckle and poison oak had overgrown the stones so badly that the men in the family had to go with bush knives and chainsaws to clear a way for the gravediggers when it was time to lay the grandfather to rest last spring.
“She was scared to do anything while Grampy was alive,” said Geraldine, “but the minute he was buried, look what she did.”
Geraldine’s suit asked for no money damages, merely that her cousin be forced to remove the new driveway that now encroached upon the cemetery.
“First she wanted me to sell her a strip of my yard and when I wouldn’t, she asked Grampy to let her take part of the graveyard. But he said no because his Aunt Sally and Uncle George were buried right there at the edge. They didn’t have a bought stone, just some rocks for a marker. Marker rocks that
I repressed a sigh. It seems that growth doesn’t affect lifestyles alone. It governs death styles, too.
Home burials have become increasingly rare and many of the little private graveyards have been abandoned as the descendants die off or move away or are simply too distantly descended to care any longer. If they even remember.
That overgrown square sitting out in the middle of a field can get real tiresome to a farmer who’s had to keep plowing around it. “Nobody ever visits it,” he rationalizes to himself and the day comes when he simply plows right through it. The stones make good doorsteps or garden benches.
