“So you think the privy skull goes with the Lancaster skeleton, and that the person could be Charlotte Grant Cobb.”
“Yes.” I told him why. “It’s a long shot.”
“Zamzow told you Cobb wasn’t that tall,” Ryan said.
“He said she wasn’t an Amazon; if the leg bones were disproportionately long, that would have skewed the height estimate.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“Track down Cobb’s family, ask a few questions.”
“Can’t hurt,” Ryan said.
I updated him on what I’d learned from Slidell and Woolsey.
“Curiouser and curiouser.” Ryan liked saying that.
I hesitated.
What the hell.
“See you soon?” I asked.
“Sooner than you think,” he said.
Yes!
After checking a map on Yahoo! I crawled into bed.
Can’t hurt, I thought, echoing Ryan.
How wrong we both were.
33
NEXT MORNING, I WAS UP AT SEVEN-THIRTY. SILENCE IN THE DEN suggested Geneva and Tamela were still dead to the world. After spinning Boyd around the block, I filled pet bowls, set cornflakes and raisin bran on the kitchen table, jotted a note, and hopped into the car.
Clover lies just beyond the North Carolina–South Carolina border, halfway between a dammed-up stretch of the Catawba River, called Lake Wylie, and the Kings Mountain National Park, site of Ryan and Boyd’s Revolutionary War excursion. My friend Anne calls the town Clo-vay, giving the name a je ne sais quoi panache.
During off-peak traffic hours the trip to Clo-vay takes less than thirty minutes. Unfortunately, every driver registered in either the Palmetto or the Old North State was on the road that morning. Others had joined them from Tennessee and Georgia. And Oklahoma. And Guam. I crept down I-77, alternately sipping my Starbucks and drumming the wheel.
Clover was incorporated in 1887 as a railway stopover, then boomed as a textile center in the early nineteen hundreds. Water seepage from the railroad tanks kept the place damp and carpeted with clover, earning it the name Cloverpatch. Aspiring to a more imposing image, or perhaps wanting to dissociate from the Yokums and the Scraggs, some citizens’ committee later shortened the name to Clover.
The image polishing didn’t help. Though Clover is still home to a few mills, and things like brake parts and surgical supplies are cranked out nearby, nothing much happens there. A perusal of chamber of commerce literature suggests that good times are had elsewhere: Lake Wylie, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Carolina beaches, Charlotte Knights baseball games, Carolina Panthers football games.
There are a few antebellum homes hiding in the hills around Clover, but it’s not a place for French country hand towels and stripy umbrellas. Though very Norman Rockwell, the town is strictly blue-collar, or, more correctly, no- collar.
By nine-forty I was at the point where US 321 crosses SC 55, the beating heart of downtown Clover. Two-and three-story redbrick buildings lined both blacktops forming the intersection. Predictably, Route 321 was called Main Street along this stretch.
Remembering the Yahoo! map, I went south on 321, then made a left onto Flat Rock Road. Three more rights and I found myself on a dead-end street lined with longleaf pines and scrub oaks. The address Zamzow had given me led to a double-wide on a cement slab eighty yards down at the far end.
A front stoop held two metal lawn chairs, one bare, the other with green floral cushions in place. To the right of the trailer I could see a vegetable garden. The front yard was filled with whirligigs.
A carport hung by suction cups to the trailer’s left end, its interior filled with oddly shaped stacks covered with blue plastic sheeting. A stand of shagbark hickories threw shadows across a rusted swing set to the left of the carport.
I pulled onto the gravel drive, killed the engine, and crossed the yard to the front door. Among the whirligigs I recognized Little Bo Peep. Sleepy and Dopey. A mother duck leading four miniature versions of herself.
A skeletal woman with eyes that seemed too large for her face answered the bell. She wore a saggy, pill- covered cardigan over a faded polyester housedress. The garments draped her fleshless form like clothes hanging on a hanger.
The woman spoke to me through an aluminum and glass outer door.
“Got nothing this week.” She stepped back to close the inner door.
“Mrs. Cobb?”
“You with the kidney people?”
“No, ma’am. I’m not. I’d like to talk to you about your daughter.”
