Death's Half Acre

I put all those aside in a pile to take to the Colleton County Historical Center and made a note that they were being donated by William Richard Knott.

The files that remained seemed to be news stories or editorials in the making. The tabs carried the names of many prominent people in the county with a heavy concentration on our county commissioners.

I opened the one on Harvey Underwood. He’s a banker and a nominal Republican, but as Linsey’s notes showed, he wasn’t a hard-liner and he didn’t always vote with Candace. And whoa! He was involved with Barbara Laughlin at the time Linsey died? Barbara’s a VP in an insurance company, attractive, bright, divorced, with a son who’s been in front of me a couple of times for possession of marijuana and later a couple of rocks of crack. So far as I know, he’s been clean the past two years, but between his attorneys and his rehab, it must have cost Barbara a pile of money. Harvey’s a married grandfather and an advocate for the sanctity of marriage. I’d never heard a whisper of this. Either Linsey had been mistaken or they had been—still were?— pretty damn discreet.

The next folder was that of an upscale developer. Shortly after leaving the board, he had gotten board approval for a set of plans in which the houses were to be built on half-acre lots with a certain amount of land left for a playground area. According to Linsey’s notes, the lot sizes were actually four-tenths of an acre so that more houses had been built than were formally approved, and the playground area was less than specified as well. Somehow or other, this had gone unnoticed till it was too late.

Cute.

From his notes, it was clear that Linsey had intended this to be part of a larger story he planned to do on board cronyism. I guess Ruby Dixon decided not to bother when she became editor. Too much potential flak.

And just to prove that greed and chicanery crossed party lines freely, here was Greg Turner, a Democratic attorney from Black Creek. Someone had told Linsey that Turner had dipped into an elderly client’s bank account and made unauthorized withdrawals to the tune of some sixty thousand dollars. When the client’s son asked for an accounting, Turner had managed to stall it off until he could replace the money. According to Linsey’s notes, it appeared that he narrowly missed being accused of embezzlement with the real possibility of jail time and subsequent disbarment.

My internal preacher sadly shook his head. “I thought Greg Turner was as ethical as they come.”

“Yeah, but look how they’re coming these days,” said the cynical pragmatist who shares the same head space.

All the same, Greg Turner’s name resonated for some reason I couldn’t quite remember.

Oh well.

I picked up Jamie Jacobson’s file with trepidation. She was a friend. I liked her and I really didn’t want to know it if she had done anything shabby. But in for a penny . . .

To my relief, the papers inside mostly had to do with professional consultations between the two of them. Jamie’s ad agency generated a lot of the Ledger’s custom-designed advertising. The only thing puzzling was another sheet of Linsey’s doodling on a page torn from a yellow tablet, which seems to have been his way when trying to figure something out.

This time, the heavily circled center was GRAYSON VILLAGE, G. (as in Grayson) Hooks Talbert’s foray into the Colleton housing market. One arrow pointed to ADAMS ADVERTISING. Another to SASSY SOLUTIONS. An arrow from Sassy Solutions pointed to Danny Creedmore’s name, and a line of question marks led from Creedmore to Candace Bradshaw.

Huh?

Impulsively, I reached for the phone and dialed Jamie’s home number. A sleepy voice answered on the fourth ring.

“Did I wake you?” I asked.

“Deborah? No. Well, maybe. I thought I was watching a cooking show, but maybe I did drift off.”

I heard her yawn and said, “Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering. Did you do the ads for Grayson Village last spring?”

“No,” she said promptly. “We did a presentation, but a Raleigh agency got the job. Why?”

“How come you didn’t get it?”

I could almost hear the shrug in her voice. “Who knows? The client liked their presentation better. Especially since they went first and by coincidence, they had thought of some of the same angles I had, so I guess it looked like I was copying them.”

“Sassy Solutions?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What’s Danny Creedmore’s connection to them?”

“None that I know of. Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“Nothing really. Danny’s got his fingers stuck in so many pies, I just wondered if that was another of them.”

“Sorry. Did you find any blue shoes Friday?”

“Not yet. The hunt is part of the fun though. How about you?”

“I found some online that look like a good match.”

We discussed the pitfalls and conveniences of shopping online and agreed to have lunch together on Tuesday, then I went back to Linsey’s files.

So far, I had avoided the one marked BRADSHAW/CREEDMORE. The very label confirmed that Linsey had thought of the two as one. Puppet and puppeteer.