dirty rims on Dwight’s pickup, I’m sure they were imagining dozens of snakes slithering around, just waiting a chance to snack on baby bluebirds.
I drove my car into the garage and remembered the boxes Will had put in the trunk on Wednesday. I suddenly itched to dive into Linsey Thomas’s files and learn just how much he’d known about my appointment, but there were steaks to marinade, potatoes to scrub, the fixings of a salad to assemble, so I carried them into the house and stuck them in the third bedroom, which we use as an office.
By the time I had finished in the kitchen, the others were back with the tin and it was time for lunch. Afterward, I helped cut and shape collars to go around the cedar poles of the half-dozen bluebird houses. The downward slope of the tin, plus its wide circumference, would baffle any snake that next tried to climb up. Naturally, the children wanted to see every nest as Dwight nailed the collars in place. One box had a clutch of unhatched eggs, one was empty, the other four had young birds that ranged from just hatched to nearly fledged.
“There,” Dwight said as we adjusted the last collar, “that should do it.”
We showered and changed into fresh jeans, then I put the potatoes in the oven to bake and he started the charcoal.
Will and Amy got there as he was taking a steak off the grill and I let the children go ahead and eat early at the table on the back porch while the adults had drinks out on the grass overlooking grill and pond. I had also invited my nephew Stevie and his girlfriend to join us. They were seniors over at Carolina, but Gayle had a major paper due, so she had stayed in Chapel Hill and Stevie brought his sister instead. Jane Ann was finishing up her first year at UNC-G in Greensboro and they had both come home for a friend’s wedding this morning.
Stevie was now almost twenty-two and of legal drinking age, yet, out of deference to Jane Ann, he opted for iced tea, too. Just as I try not to let on that Seth is maybe my favorite brother, I try not to dote on Haywood’s son, but he really is a nice kid.
“Dad tell you about the guy who wanted to join the hunt club day before yesterday?” he asked, a broad smile on his face.
Will laughed out loud and Amy said, “They still doing that?”
The Possum Creek Hunt Club is nothing but a figment of Daddy’s imagination. He learned long ago that simply posting the land won’t keep hunters off. But if the woods are posted with signs that say NO TRESPASSING. LEASED BY THE POSSUM CREEK HUNT CLUB, most people will respect them. They get three or four inquiries a year from newcomers.
“The guy was driving a Humvee and didn’t blink when they told him the initiation fee was a thousand dollars. He even wanted to bribe Dad and Uncle Robert to put him at the top of the waiting list. Dad said his wallet was full of hundred-dollar bills and he was really tempted, but Uncle Robert wouldn’t let him.”
“Hmmm,” said Will, with a faraway speculative look in his eye.
“No,” Amy told him firmly and I added, “It would embarrass Dwight to death to have to arrest you for fraud, wouldn’t it, Dwight?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, reaching for Will’s beer mug. They’ve been friends since grade school and he has no illusions about my brother. “Top anybody else’s glass off?”
It wasn’t long before the children began to clamor for the marshmallows they’d been promised and Jane Ann hopped up to help supervise. The smell of burned sugar was soon rife in the land.
“Toast one for me,” Amy called. She’s Will’s third wife, with short dark hair and dark eyes that she claims come from some Latino blood somewhere in her ancestry. She has a bawdy sense of humor and a fuse as short as Will’s. They blow up at each other at least once a month and we used to hold our collective breaths, fearful that their marriage was going to blow up, too. Over the years, we’ve come to realize that Amy loves drama and Will must as well, because he seems intent on not messing up this time.
Jane Ann brought them both a marshmallow. Dwight, too. I passed. They don’t really go with bourbon. The men licked their fingers and Will said, “Reminds me of Daddy’s bonfires.”
I smiled as he and Dwight began to reminisce about roasting marshmallows when we were kids.
Daddy never burned his brushpiles in daylight. He always waited until dark, and a moonless night was his favorite time. He would poke the fire and send geysers of sparks shooting up fifteen or twenty feet into the night sky.
“A poor man’s fireworks,” he’d say.
And Mother would often walk down from the house with a bag of marshmallows for a perfect ending to the day.
Eventually Dwight decreed that the children had eaten enough sugar and shooed them away so he could replenish the bed of coals with more from a starter can.
While Jane Ann and Amy cleared the porch table and reset it with china and tableware, I sent the kids to the showers to get rid of the stickiness that clung to their hands and mouths—Cal and Jake to his bathroom, Mary Pat to the master bath. Kate and I keep changes of clothing in both houses, so I laid out fresh pajamas for them and popped a DVD into the television in our bedroom.
“Mary Pat’s in charge of the remote and no bouncing on the bed,” I warned them as they settled back against the pillows to watch a movie they’d seen at least a dozen times.
It was full dark and the steaks were just coming off the grill when I got back out to the porch. Conversation had turned to Candace Bradshaw’s murder and the names of various prominent builders were being tossed around as suspects. Not her husband though. Dwight had told me that various neighbors had seen him from their windows throughout Tuesday afternoon.
“Her daughter says you’re her alibi,” Dwight said as he split his potato and added a large dollop of butter to the steaming interior.
“She does?” Will cut into one of the steaks on the platter to make sure it was rare enough before transferring it to his plate.
“She says you interviewed her for a job Tuesday evening. You remember the time?”
