Pond fish, bass excluded, are too small to split or scale if you’re going to grill them, and they’re full of bones. They’re also wonderfully succulent and these were cooked to perfection.
“Fresher’n this and they’d still be swimming,” said Daddy, as he expertly laid open a little sunperch and deboned it.
The first few minutes were devoted to food talk, then Seth mentioned Dwight and how he had to leave for a homicide at the Orchid Motel.
Amy looked up in interest. “Any of y’all know Lynn Bullock? We heard that’s who it was. One of the EMS drivers told somebody in ER that she was choked to death. They say Tom and Marie O’Day found her stark naked with just a black stocking tied around her neck. Stiff as a board, too.”
Amy works on the administrative side at the hospital and hears every rumor that floats through the medical complex.
“Lynn Bullock?” I asked, removing a small bone from my mouth. “Not married to Jason Bullock?”
Amy nodded. “She’s one of our LPNs.”
I put down my fork. “That can’t be right. I was sitting next to him at the ball game last night when she called him from a motel in Yanceyville.”
“How’d he know?” asked Will.
“I assume he knows his own wife’s voice.”
“No, I mean how did he know she was calling from Yanceyville?”
“Because she and her sister had gone antiquing up there.”
There was a slightly cynical smile on Will’s lips, a smile just like the one on Terry’s. Though butter wouldn’t melt in either mouth these days, both men know a thing or two about creative cheating. There’s a reason they’ve both been married three times.
Seth and Andrew merely looked interested. Seth because he’s never looked at another woman since Minnie, Andrew because, even though he messed up two marriages before April came into his life, infidelity was never the problem.
“Bullock,” said Daddy. “Didn’t one of Vara Seymour’s girls marry a Bullock?”
“I believe her mother’s name
“Likely was,” Daddy said, helping himself to another fish. “Vara, she sort of got around a bit.”
“Who’s Vara Seymour?” Minnie asked.
“Charlie Seymour’s girl. Little Creek Township. He used to do some work for me. She were a pretty little thing, Vara were, but her mammy died when she was just starting to ramble and Charlie didn’t know nothing about raising a girl.”
From his tone of voice, I could guess what work Lynn Bullock’s grandfather had done for him. He’s out of the business now, of course, but Daddy was once one of the biggest bootleggers on the East Coast and he’d financed a string of illegal moonshine stills all over this part of the country before Mother reformed him.
“I don’t know what kind of a woman her mother was,” said Amy, “but Lynn herself was bright as sunshine.”
“Won’t never nothing wrong with Charlie Seymour’s brains,” Daddy said mildly.
“Excellent LPN,” Amy said. “She was really good with scared pre-op patients. One of those people who never saw a stranger. She’d start in talking to them like she’d known them all her life. Didn’t mind getting her hands dirty either. A lot of doctors are going to miss her.”
“But not all?” I asked, picking up on something in her tone.
“Well-l-l.”
“What?”
Amy shrugged. “I don’t think we have to worry about Dr. Potts crying at her funeral. Lynn got her husband to represent Felicia Potts for their divorce.”
“What’s so bad about that?” asked Terry as he took another piece of cornbread.
“Ask Deborah.”
The Potts divorce took place in May so it was still quite clear in my mind. It was the first case Jason Bullock had argued before me. Might have been his first case in association with Avery and Avery, for all I knew. Equitable division of marital property in a bitterly contentious divorce.
Felicia and Jeremy Potts had met and married at Carolina. Felicia soon dropped out and went to work full-time in order to help Jeremy get his undergraduate degree, then to send him to med school. Nine years later, having completed medical school and his residency at Dobbs Memorial, and having passed all his boards, he was poised to join a lucrative private practice there in Dobbs. At that point, Dr. Jeremy Potts suddenly decided Felicia hadn’t “grown” as a doctor’s wife and he had filed for divorce.
They had been formally separated for over a year when the case came to me for final disposition. There wasn’t much marital property beyond the furniture in their rental apartment and two five-year-old cars, and Dr. Potts generously offered her all the furniture and a ten-thousand-dollar settlement. He also offered to pay college tuition if Felicia now wished to go back for a degree.
Jason Bullock, who had only recently taken on Mrs. Potts’s case, asked me to consider Dr. Potts’s own degrees as marital property.
“You think you can split up a medical license like a set of dining room chairs?” sneered the good doctor.
His attorney asked to speak to his client in private. When they came back to the bargaining table, the attorney
