already plotting her next move. Nell didn’t envy Dr. Auster’s next meeting with her sister. Vida was hell on wheels when she was angry-scarier than most men.
Nell rolled her chair back to her computer, but the longer she stared at the screen, the less relieved she felt. Things were moving too fast, and yet not fast enough. What if the cops did something today? What if they searched Dr. Shields’s house before Dr. Auster went over and removed the planted evidence? Could she afford to wait for that? Could she even trust Dr. Auster to do what he was supposed to do, even if he promised Vida that he would? The answer to that question was an unequivocal no. Nell couldn’t leave Warren Shields’s future in the hands of his sleazy partner. She would have to take responsibility herself. After a quick glance at Vida, she opened her Hotmail account and began to type.
Two thousand feet above the city, Danny told his flying student to bank the Cessna northward and head away from the Mississippi River. They’d been in the air forty minutes, mostly on the south side of town, but Danny wanted to know if both cars were still parked at the Shields house. Laurel had not replied to his last text message, and he was worried that he’d made a mistake by sending it.
A bad mistake.
“You want me to go all the way to Fort Adams?” asked Marilyn Stone, a local attorney who’d dreamed for years of learning to fly.
“No, let’s do our usual run out here. When you get to Avalon, execute an S-turn over Belle Chene Plantation, then head back to the barn.”
Marilyn nodded, her eyes on the GPS unit mounted on the instrument panel. “Why Avalon all the time? You buying a lot there or something?”
“You never know,” Danny said with a forced laugh.
He looked down at the loess hills below and tried to settle his nerves. Athens Point was a beautiful place, and the verdant forests below reminded him why he’d chosen to return after his military career. Unlike so many places that he had lived, this city had a long and colorful history. Athens Point had been founded in 1753 by a classically educated Frenchman venturing downriver through the Natchez Territory. The land was inhabited by the Choctaw Indians, but they lasted only seventy years before vanishing into Oklahoma or worse places. Removal was accomplished the way Hemingway’s Bill Gorton went bankrupt, slowly and then all at once. After the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, all that remained of the Choctaw in that corner of Mississippi was a few names, like the one taken by the county, Lusahatcha (“Black Water”), which today seemed a misnomer since the great river stretching away behind the Cessna looked reddish brown under the sun. But the Mississippi River had many faces, and Danny had seen them all while growing up beside it.
Unlike Natchez, thirty miles to the north, Athens Point had resisted the Yankee invasion during the Civil War. The town sent three companies to fight under Lee in Virginia, and those who remained behind held out until July 11, 1863, being forced to surrender after the fall of Vicksburg. While the Father of Waters thereafter flowed “unvexed to the sea,” as President Lincoln put it, the inland areas of southwest Mississippi remained vexed indeed. Gangs of Confederate deserters roamed the land, and marauding Union cavalry units under Colonel Embury Osband pillaged what remained of the state’s resources.
For a hundred years afterward, the town’s hero was Jean Larrieu, a diminutive but feisty planter who shot six cavalrymen from the windows of Belle Chene plantation before being cut down on his porch by a saber during a parley. A Union private had struck his wife, and Larrieu refused to let the insult pass. His statue still stood atop a column in the town square. Even today, antebellum city buildings bore the scars of the shelling that resulted from the town’s firing on Admiral Porter’s passing ironclads in 1863. A historical marker commemorated the seventeen citizens who perished in the fires that day, while beside it a second marker memorialized six African Americans who died in Lusahatcha County during the struggle for civil rights.
The prejudice so prevalent in Danny’s childhood had diminished to a mild undercurrent between the races, but even today black and white remained largely divided in the physical sense. Black families tended to congregate in the city proper or to the south, while affluent whites and a few wealthy blacks built shining new subdivisions in the forests along Highway 24 to the north. Avalon was the newest and most exclusive of these, patterned after subdivisions of the same name in Gulfport and Natchez. Apparently the developer intended to replicate his utopian concept across the state. Danny could just make out the serpentine bends of Larrieu’s Creek, which marked one boundary of Avalon.
Avalon had been tastefully carved out of forestland that had been locked up in the trust of an old Athens Point family for a hundred years. A massive wrought-iron gate greeted prospective buyers as they turned off Highway 24 onto Cornwall, a broad street that wound its way eastward through the upscale development. Only fifteen houses had been built so far, with a handful of others under construction. The smallest lots available were 6.5 acres. The Shields house was easy to spot from the air, because its acreage was bordered by a bend of Larrieu’s Creek.
“I’ve been thinking,” Marilyn said, “I might want to try for an instrument rating after I get my VFR license.”
Danny chuckled. “You’re always pushing, aren’t you?”
She grinned. “I’m a trial lawyer. I guess it’s in my blood.”
He knew she expected him to keep up the banter, but his mind was on the land below. He could see the Shields house coming up on his left. “Drop down to five hundred feet. I think I see a herd of deer.”
Marilyn responded smoothly, and the Cessna quickly descended.
“Good. Stay well clear of those houses.” Danny would have liked to let Laurel hear the plane, but if there was any chance that Warren suspected Danny was her lover, then drawing attention to the Cessna would be insane. Warren had flown this plane so often that he would recognize it at a glance. And since Laurel-or Warren, for that matter-had not responded to the two text messages he had sent her, he had to play things very cool. “Somebody complained to me at the hardware store the other day,” Danny added. “Asked if we’re planning to bomb the neighborhood.”
Marilyn laughed and slid the plane a quarter mile to the east.
Danny got a perfect view of Laurel’s Acura parked behind her husband’s Volvo. The sight tied a knot in his stomach. What the hell was going on down there?
“See any bucks?” Marilyn asked.
“What?”
“The deer. See any bucks?”
“Nah. Nothing but does, and they skipped into the trees.”
“Should I start my turn?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” Danny closed his eyes and tried to think logically, but his nerves kept getting in the way. Or was it his emotions?
“An S-turn over Belle Chene?” Marilyn asked.
“Let’s skip that,” said Danny, glancing at his watch. “Let’s take her back to the airport. I’ve got something I can’t be late for.”
“Suits me,” Marilyn said, watching him from the corner of her eye. “I’ve got a deposition this afternoon. Big case coming up.”
“I pity the lawyer you’re up against.”
She laughed. “You don’t know whether I’m a good lawyer or not.”
He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Oh, yes, I do.
“How?”
He tapped the bridge of his nose. “I’m a good judge of character.”
Marilyn elbowed him in the side, and he saw some color come into her cheeks. “I’ll bet you are,” she said, looking as if she wanted to say more.
Danny resisted the urge to look back toward Avalon as she made a controlled 180-degree turn.
“Are you all right?” she asked in a concerned voice.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“You look worried to me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you worry before.”
