Dwight frowned. “Ran him down? You think someone killed him deliberately?”
“Slip of the tongue,” I said. “I meant find the car that hit him.”
“By now that car could be in a slag heap. You know well as I do that if we don’t find it in the first couple of weeks, we almost never do. I’m not holding my breath till some drunk comes in and confesses. It’s a damn shame, though. Thomas was a good man. And good for Colleton County even if he did hold our feet to the fire a few times.”
I had been with someone else last spring so I hadn’t followed the investigation as closely as I might now, although I did remember that the SBI lab had identified the make of the car by a piece of glass found by Linsey’s body. “I guess you checked all the repair shops for a Toyota with a missing headlight?”
“We gave it everything we had, Deb’rah.”
“No leads at all?”
But Dwight’d had enough of talking shop. “Haywood says the garden center’s got a sale on dwarf apple trees. Maybe Cal and I’ll run over and pick up a couple tomorrow afternoon. You care where we plant them?”
“Up to you,” I said.
No use pointing out that we already had peaches, two varieties of pears, a line of blueberry bushes, figs, and a plum tree, and that there was no way in the world we’d ever eat that much fruit. In addition, we had five pecan trees to go with the countless dogwoods, hollies, oaks, and cedars he had dug up from the woods and set out all around the house. Planting trees and bushes seems to be Dwight’s way of convincing himself that our marriage is as real and permanent as those roots reaching deep into the dirt beneath our feet, and I’m not about to discourage him.
Besides, there are still enough animals on the farm to take care of our excess fruit and Cal likes feeding apples and carrots to the horses.
After dropping Dwight off at Jimmy White’s garage to retrieve his truck and settle up with Jimmy, I drove over to his brother Rob’s house to pick up Cal. During the week, Rob’s wife Kate keeps him after school. She’s the guardian and adoptive mother of Mary Pat, who’s in the same class as Cal. Kate swears that one child more is no trouble, especially since she and Rob have now hired a live-in nanny to help with four-year-old Jake and four- month-old R.W. so that Kate could get back to designing high-end fabrics in the remodeled pack house that now serves as her studio.
On this beautiful afternoon, the nanny, a nice young Australian with a delightful accent, had them out on the lawn playing red light while the baby slept in a net-covered carriage nearby.
I powered down my window to say hello as Cal grabbed up his books and got in beside me, flushed and sweaty. No plopping the kids down in front of a television for this young woman.
As I told Daddy, Cal and I have had a few bumps in the road since he came to live with us in January, but he had liked me before I married his dad and I was optimistic that he would eventually maybe even come to love me as much as my brothers came to love my mother. When he gave me one of his snaggletoothed grins, I wanted to hug him hard. Instead, I smiled back and said, “Good day?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, me and Mary Pat and Jake? We’re going to go help Bobby and Jess and Emma set out tuberoses,” he told me happily.
Oh, to be eight again and think it a treat to spend the afternoon setting out a flower crop.
CHAPTER 7
The sun rose Thursday in a cloudless blue sky. In a field bounded by Possum Creek on one side and a stand of trees on the other three, longleaf pines blazed greenly against the blue. With their curving branches and clusters of stiff needles, the tall straight trees looked like fantastic plants left over from
Kezzie Knott checked the time on a fat gold pocket watch that had once belonged to his father and slowed his rusty truck to a stop on the creek side of the field. As he opened the door and stretched his long legs, he paused to breathe in the smells of the cool morning. His brown, high-laced brogans were almost as scruffy as his pickup, and the cuffs of his blue shirt were as frayed as the hems of his chino pants. Both were so old and had been washed so often that they had faded to soft tones that blended with the light brown sand and pale blue sky. Two weeks ago, he had traded winter’s felt Stetson for the straw panama he would wear until October.
These days, he had started leaving the tailgate down so that the older of his two hounds could jump out to join him without much effort. The dogs, too, paused to sniff the air as soon as their feet reached ground. This field had been plowed recently and the rows laid off, but nothing yet was planted. A faint scent of composted chicken manure wafted in on the breeze. It was not an unpleasant smell and it made Kezzie smile. He and Seth and Deborah had given this field to the grandchildren so that they could begin cleansing the land of commercial fertilizers and chemical pesticides. With the enthusiasm of youth, they intended to prove to their elders that a living could be made from the land that did not entail poisoning the environment. They were not naive enough to think that flowers would make the same profit as tobacco, but it was a first step toward a rotation of organically grown crops.
He did not take their desire for something different as a slam at him. Tobacco had been good to the state and to his family for years before farmers like him knew how bad it was. Yes, it took a lot of fertilizer to grow and it took herbicides to control the suckers and weeds and yeah, he reckoned it was unhealthy for most people, though he himself had smoked since he was twelve and was still going strong more than seventy years later despite the way most of the children nagged him to quit. Tobacco had fed and clothed his sons and it had paid the bills when Sue made him quit messing in white lightning.
He could not repress a rueful grin at that. ’Shine was about the only thing he had ever lied to her about. To please her, he did indeed cut back on his bootlegging activities, but he never quite gave it up entirely, and over the years, he continued to finance a few trusted men and a couple of enterprising women, too, who wanted to make
