confidential company records are here, too.”
Bradshaw gave the newcomers a gentle smile. “They are officers of the court,” he said trustingly. “I’m sure they won’t take anything they shouldn’t.”
Gracie Farmer’s raised eyebrow said, “Oh, yeah?” but she didn’t argue with him.
“We’ll give you a receipt for everything we do take,” Wilson assured her.
Grudgingly, the woman moved to the computer and typed in the password that gave access to everything on the hard drive.
One of the agents sat down and began scanning the file names. “Which are the files connected to her work as a commissioner?”
“It’s the one labeled CCBC.”
When the agent clicked on it, all she found was a list of names and contact numbers for the current board and a calendar marked with meeting dates. “This is all there is?” she asked.
Gracie Farmer shrugged. “I think she kept all the other files on her home computer. She really only used this one for Bradshaw Management.”
“What about hard files or CDs?”
“You’re welcome to look, but I’m telling you—she kept the two totally separate.”
While the two techie agents began to plunder both the electronic and the paper files, Dwight and Terry asked the office manager if there was someplace they could talk to her in private.
She led them to her own office, a space filled with ethnic crafts in bright colors. A small wooden oxcart painted with parrots and tropical flowers sat next to her computer and held the usual desk tools and pens. Several red- green-and-blue wooden parrots shared a perch suspended from the ceiling in a corner over pots of tropical plants in such lavish bloom that they had to be artificial even though they looked real. The walls were lined with photographs and posters of Costa Rica. It was like stepping into a tropical travel agency.
“Wow!” said Terry. “You must really love it there. Do you get down often?”
“As often as I can,” she said. “In fact, I’m hoping to retire there.”
She gestured them to chairs and immediately got down to business. “Is it true then?”
“Is what true?” Dwight countered.
“I heard Candace left a letter saying she stole from the county and took kickbacks from people the board did business with.”
“Does that fit with what you know of her?” Dwight asked.
Her plain face looked troubled and her eyes dropped before their gaze.
Trying a different tack, Terry said, “I guess you’ve known her a long time?”
Mrs. Farmer nodded and they noticed that her earrings were tiny enameled parrots that swayed when her head moved. “I was the one that first hired her to clean some rental property when the tenants moved out. In fact, I was the one encouraged her to get her GED out at the community college. She was a hard worker and didn’t mind getting her hands dirty.”
As if hearing how that sounded in this context, she shook her head. “Candace was ambitious. She wanted to be somebody. You know where she came from, right?”
“Tell us,” said Dwight.
So Gracie Farmer told them of little Candy Wells’s rocky childhood, her move to Dobbs, her struggle for a better life for herself. “I grew up dirt poor, too. My parents were sharecroppers, but they loved me and made sure I stayed in school. Candace had no one except an old sick grandmother and look how well she’s done. Running Bradshaw Management, chair of the board of commissioners. I can’t understand how she’d throw it all away for . . .”
She paused and looked at them. “If she did it, it wasn’t for money.”
“No?” asked Dwight.
“It would have been for power. Candace liked doing favors and having people beholden to her. She wouldn’t have cared for the money. It was knowing that important people came to her for favors. It would be hard for her to say no if someone like that asked her to do something that wasn’t strictly legal and didn’t really do anybody any harm. If money was involved, I’m sure she would’ve thought of it as a sort of thank-you, not a bribe or anything.”
Terry looked at Dwight with a wry shake of his head. “Kickbacks. When you care enough to send the very best.”
CHAPTER 8
On Thursday, I went to the Democratic Women’s luncheon. The speaker was Elaine Marshall, our secretary of state and the first woman ever elected to North Carolina’s Council of State. We were trying to get her to run for the U.S. Senate, but she loved the job she had and seemed quite happy to stay in the area with her husband and friends.
“Hey, Deborah, look at me!” my longtime best friend Portland Brewer called as I crossed the parking lot to the
