Death's Half Acre

get if he thinks we’re checking up on him.”

Dwight looked at me quizzically. “You don’t really think he has diamond earrings worth thirty thousand dollars, do you?”

“Makes about as much sense as rhinestones worth twenty,” I told him.

We batted it around for a few minutes more till Will said, “I’ll talk to Dave on Monday,” and the talk turned to other subjects.

I briefly considered telling them what Maidie had confided about Daddy’s sudden interest in getting right with the Lord, but decided I’d already been disloyal enough for one evening.

“You have a chance to go through Linsey’s papers yet?” Will asked as he and Amy were leaving.

“Tomorrow,” I promised.

CHAPTER 15

Back when I came along, everybody used to wrestle, jump—

see who could do the most work.

Now we study money.

—Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

Next morning, I slept in while Dwight dropped Cal off for Sunday school at the church he and I grew up in. Cal’s not crazy about putting on Sunday clothes, but his Uncle Rob teaches the Junior Class and he’s made friends with some of the boys, so he seems to enjoy it once he’s there.

Preaching services begin at eleven, which meant that Dwight and I had a little time alone for this and that.

Mostly that.

We were a few minutes late getting there, but everyone was standing for the first hymn, so it wasn’t noticeable when we slipped into a back pew.

Because the minister is new and we don’t make it to church every week, I haven’t quite taken his measure, but with Rob on the pulpit committee, he can’t be too far right. Not as intellectual as Carlyle Yelvington at First Baptist in Dobbs, but nowhere near as opaque as the preacher at Nadine and Herman’s New Deliverance down in Black Creek. And nothing—thank you, Jesus!—like that demagogue at the Church of Christ Eternal.

Every time I think about the way that arrogant bastard humiliated his wife, I want to throw up and then go slap him across the face with a dead trout.

No, Sweetwater’s Quincy Bridges is young and earnest and doesn’t seem to have an arrogant bone in his body. He doesn’t threaten with hellfire and brimstone; he entreats with the promise of a well-lived life for those who follow the Golden Rule.

After lunch, Dwight and Cal went off to the woods to see if they could find a couple of redbuds small enough to move up to the house, and I started going through Linsey Thomas’s files that Will had found.

Last night, Dwight had told me about Candace Bradshaw’s missing flash drive and how it might hold something about me on it.

“Me?”

“Well, not you per se,” he’d said. “More likely John Claude or Mr. Kezzie. Richards found a file folder with the firm’s name and a sheet of paper with yours and Mr. Kezzie’s names and a note to herself referencing that damn flash drive.”

That sent a chill down my spine. Dwight doesn’t know about Daddy and Talbert. We’ve never sat down and exchanged lists and details of people we’ve been in bed with and I figure G. Hooks Talbert falls in that category.

Once I got into Linsey’s files, I breathed a lot easier. It was clear that he suspected something fishy about Hooks Talbert speaking up for me with the Republican governor in office back then, but he had never connected all the dots and there was nothing new or incriminating in those files. The news clippings and references to Daddy and me were all in the public domain. I transferred the more flattering notices into a folder I’d started in my own file cabinet, and shredded the rest. One of these years, I really might get around to putting together a scrapbook.

“Yeah,” said the voice of the pragmatist who lives in the back of my head. “Right after you label all those digital pictures and transfer them to a CD.”

Another of the folders could have been Linsey’s own scrapbook. Here were clippings from the N&O and the Ledger of milestones in his life. His high school report cards, a picture of his class in front of the UN building in NY, his diploma from Carolina, his marriage certificate and passport, the obituary of his wife, and a notarized living will that directed his doctors not to prolong his life were he to fall into a persistent vegetative state.

Poor Linsey, I thought. Instantly killed by a hit-and-run driver as he walked home from the newspaper on a warm spring evening. No old age, no long descent into peaceful death. I hoped he didn’t know or care what had happened to his beloved paper. Too bad he died without a will. And yet, who would he have left it to? No siblings, no close cousins. Maybe that was why he’d never gotten around to writing one.

Which only served to remind me that Dwight and I hadn’t updated our own wills since the wedding, something we really needed to do for Cal’s sake if not our own.

The next folder that came to hand was the one with the Civil War picture of an ancestor. It held more family pictures, each identified on the back by name and date. Here was a copy of the affidavit each white adult Confederate male had been required to sign after the war, swearing allegiance to the Union, before his citizenship and voting rights were restored. And here was an envelope addressed to Linsey’s grandfather that carried a 1923 postmark. Inside was a lock of light brown hair, tied with a faded blue string. Unlabeled. Whose?

If I knew that, I’d know why he’d kept it.