Death's Half Acre

the stuff she’d read on the flash drive. Farmer’s not talking yet, but I seriously doubt if her phone conversation with Dee was about umbrellas. Besides, Dee knew the password and her computer’s still missing.”

“She knew her mother’s password?” I asked as innocently as I could.

“Yeah. She told us last week that she was the one that showed her mom how to use a flash drive and also how to use a digital shredder to delete the cache files from her hard drive. She even set up the password for her—hot water. Run together as one word.”

Hotwater? Of course! “Our country’s greatest achievement.” And I’d even seen that bathroom.

“Hot water?” Terry grinned. “That’s where a lot of people in this county are gonna be finding themselves, don’t you reckon?”

CHAPTER 27

. . . the world’s so finely

balanced a beetle could push it along.

—Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson

THURSDAY MORNING (EIGHT DAYS LATER)

With heads rolling all around the county and rumors and promises of indictments to come in the wake of the Bradshaw murders, the burning of a warehouse and the near-murder of his very own daughter, Kezzie Knott was not surprised to see that the story of an embezzling preacher received only three or four inches of print in The News & Observer, but he did think that the Ledger would have had more to say about it.

One disillusioned member of the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal was quoted as saying, “Guess you can’t really call it embezzling if it’s all in his own name, but I sure did think we were giving our dollars to the Lord, not to Faison McKinney.”

“Looks like the bank’s gonna take the church house,” said another fallen-away member. “They say there’s not enough in the treasury to pay the light bill.”

“What you reckon happened to the money?”

“I heard it all went up his nose.”

“You know not!”

“Well you’ve seen him preach. We thought he was hopped up on the Holy Spirit, but what if it was drugs?”

“Not drugs,” someone said firmly. “My wife said she heard Marian McKinney all but say he’s got a gambling problem.”

The biggest media stories centered around the murders and the alleged malfeasance of the Colleton County Board of Commissioners, now being investigated by the SBI and the district attorney’s office. Two commissioners had already resigned and there was talk that Danny Creedmore had hired himself one of the best lawyers in Raleigh.

John Claude Lee and two other attorneys were suing that brilliant young legal star Greg Turner, and the bar association had begun its own investigation. Some of the cases Turner had won were in danger of having the judgments reversed and he faced the distinct possibility of disbarment.

Despite a cornucopia of Pulitzer-worthy material right there in its own backyard, The Dobbs Ledger managed to resist any in-depth coverage of those juicy tidbits. Instead, the paper, which came out three times a week, had devoted most of its news pages to the significance of Candace Bradshaw’s Toyota being found down in Augusta, Georgia. It ran a long interview with Sheriff Bowman Poole, who stopped just short of drawing a straight line from the dead commissioner’s car to the hit-and-run death of Linsey Thomas, the Ledger’s late and much-beloved editor.

“The crime lab hasn’t finished comparing her car with the evidence found at the crime scene,” said Poole, “but the rough findings are quite significant.”

“Yes,” said Ruby Dixon, the current editor, when asked to confirm a probable motive for her former boss’s death. “Linsey Thomas believed in sunshine and paper trails and he planned to roll up the window shades on Mrs. Bradshaw and her tenure as chair of the board. She knew it, too, because he tried to interview her a few days before he died and she blew him off.”

When asked if she would put more reporters on the board stories now, Dixon took a swallow of the orange juice that was ever-present on her desk and allowed as how maybe she would wait to see what Sheriff Poole came up with.

All in all though, thought Kezzie Knott, maybe it was just as well people weren’t paying too much attention to the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal. He had sworn the six people involved to secrecy before handing them back the title to their lands, but even though the registrar of deeds was a good ol’ fishing buddy, transferring property was a matter of public record.

“We don’t necessarily have to open the page in the right deed books where something’s recorded,” he told Kezzie, “but I can’t sequester the books either.”

“Ain’t asking you to,” Kezzie told him. “I don’t reckon they’s all that many people interested anyhow.”

“It really was all legal, wadn’ it, Kezzie?”

“He look to you like a man with a knife to his throat?”

“Naw, can’t say he did. In fact, best I remember, he was real cheerful.”

“Well, there you go, then. A willing seller taking what a buyer was willing to pay.”

“So, which one were you, Kezzie?”

The old man smiled and shook his head. “Hard to say, ain’t it?”