Death's Half Acre

butted backward with her head, her body arching and twisting to free herself, to take one deep lifesaving breath. A quick lunge forward and she felt the cord loosen. For one second, she could almost breathe again.

Oh please oh please oh please—

And then the pressure was back. A frantic twist and something tore in her throat. Searing pain lanced across her dying brain and sparked a last incoherent thought of water . . . her healing shower . . . hot water . . .

CHAPTER 2

All the big apple orchards are gone.

. . . peach trees, old horse apples

that came from Civil War days.

I remember the Indian and Clear-seed peach . . .

All that, gone.

—Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson

TUESDAY NIGHT

You ain’t never gonna get a man to vote against his pocketbook, Deb’rah,” Daddy said, waving a hard roll at me to make his point. “And right now, every one of them commissioners ’cepting maybe Abe Jacobson’s granddaughter is either in the building trade or got real close ties to somebody that’s making a bunch of money offen the new folks. So lessen you plan to quit being a judge and run for commissioner yourself, you can just suck it up.”

“I don’t want to suck it up,” I said petulantly as I dipped a piece of my own roll into the dish of olive oil on the table between us. “I just want them to start thinking about the people of Colleton County. All the people, not just the ones that pay for their political posters and campaign ads.”

“Oh, I reckon them people’s paying for a lot more than that,” he said cynically as he waited for our server to bring him some butter.

After finishing up a court session that ran late, I had stayed on in Dobbs to catch up on my paperwork until it was time to meet some of the family for supper. It had surprised me to get to the restaurant and find Daddy there. He doesn’t drive at night much any more and I hadn’t realized he was coming.

Ferguson’s is a little pricy, but their steaks are dry-aged and supposedly hormone-free. Here on a Tuesday night, it wasn’t very busy and the waiter had already been around once to refill our tea glasses.

“Anyhow,” said Daddy, “when did you start thinking county commissioners oughta be different from any other politicians?”

“Ever since I heard they’re letting NutriGood build a store at Pleasant’s Crossroads.”

I have nothing against the NutriGood grocery chain, per se. I may not preach the gospel of whole grains and free-range chickens like a born-again health nut, but I do like them; and whenever I’m in Raleigh, I swing past the NutriGood to pick up store-baked bread and organic vegetables that aren’t yet ripe in our garden. Hell, I even bring my own reusable cloth tote bags so I won’t have to decide whether it’s paper or plastic that’s going to wind up in our county landfill.

A chain store in Raleigh’s one thing, and I can grit my teeth and live with the sprawling commercial mess around the interstate exits several miles to the east of me. But an upscale town store to anchor a strip mall at Pleasant’s Crossroads? Only three short miles from my own house? That’s a whole ’nother can of something, and no, I’m not talking organic worms.

Pleasant’s Crossroads is the intersection of two backcountry roads that used to go nowhere. Nothing was there except scrubby woods, tobacco fields, and a couple of dilapidated clapboard buildings on diagonal corners facing each other across the two-lane hardtop. One building was a little general store and single-pump service station that old Max Pleasant owned back when my daddy was running white lightning all up and down the coast and needed a safe source of sugar. It’s been closed for years. Daddy’s name was never on the deed to that store, but everyone knew who bankrolled it and who paid the bills. The other was a barbershop run by one of Max’s Yadkin cousins. That’s where Daddy and those of my eleven brothers who live out this way used to get their hair cut every four or five weeks until Baldy Yadkin abruptly hung up his scissors, sold out to a commercial builder, and bought himself a place on the Pamlico Sound, where he can fish and crab three hundred days a year.

Bulldozers had already torn out and removed Max’s old gas and kerosene tanks and thrown up a berm around that corner so as to provide privacy for a secluded high-end “village” developed and owned by G. Hooks Talbert, one of the movers and shakers in the state’s Republican party and a descendant of the original Pleasant who held a land grant from the Lords Proprietor. Talbert’s older son used to run a wholesale nursery out there on the other side of Possum Creek from us. In fact, that nursery was responsible for my becoming a district court judge five years ago.

It’s a long story, but all you need to know is that it gave Daddy the opportunity to pressure G. Hooks—

“Pressure?” asked the preacher who lurks at the edge of my consciousness and tries to keep me honest.

“I believe the word you’re looking for is blackmail,” said the pragmatist who usually approves of euphemisms.

Okay, okay. Technically speaking, that nursery gave Daddy the ammunition to blackmail G. Hooks Talbert into asking the governor to appoint me after I lost my first race. Until then, Talbert was famous in our family for saying he didn’t care to deal with any ignorant bootlegger. Nobody’s heard him say that recently and now it’s gotten personal.

To even the score, and knowing how it would gall Daddy to have any kind of a development—even an upscale one—so close to his borders, G. Hooks quietly bought up all the land on the south side of Possum Creek and, even more quietly, got the county commissioners to rubber-stamp his plans to build creekside houses and a tiny village centered around a cafe and a gift shop that stocked designer jewelry and local pottery. The first thing he did was dredge out a lake on a bend of the creek and put up a picturesque country inn with a gourmet restaurant suitable for formal weddings.

Unfortunately for him, he underestimated the Kezzie Knott grapevine. Someone at the register of deeds office