If Faye knew more than the bare facts though, she wasn’t responding to my clerk’s instant message, so I wandered around to Luther Parker’s office during the break. As soon as I walked in, he said, “I hear Candace Bradshaw didn’t kill herself. That true? What does Dwight say?”
“Sorry, friend. I buzzed his office but he’s not there and I don’t like to bother him on his cell phone during working hours.”
“Yeah?” He lifted an eyebrow and grinned. “Since when?”
Roger Longmire, our chief district court judge, stuck his head in. “Y’all hear that Candace was murdered?”
We batted it around for a few minutes, wondering if the motive was personal, a love affair gone wrong, something connected with her business or with her position as a county commissioner.
“I’m guessing it was something to do with kickbacks for approving some of those iffy housing developments,” Longmire said.
“I don’t know,” said Luther. “I heard she and Creedmore had a falling out over a clerk down in Ellis Glover’s office.”
Ellis Glover is our clerk of court and gives a lot of young women their first jobs. Like us, he has to run for office every four years, too, so he always seems to have an opening for the sister or daughter of constituents. Many important men—and yes, dammit, men still hold most of the power in our county—are grateful to him for looking after their female relatives. He makes sure that his “girls” are the first to hear of any opening in other county departments so that he can cycle them out and cycle in a new group to keep widening his circle of supporters. Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t much matter to Ellis. He knows that men are daddies and brothers and uncles and grandfathers first, party members second.
I didn’t recognize the name of the young woman that Danny Creedmore was supposed to be lusting after, but it wasn’t important. Most courthouse affairs have a sell-by date from the get-go and they usually end with no hard feelings on either side.
“From all I’ve heard, it wouldn’t really matter if Danny and Candace weren’t lovers any longer. They were still in bed together, weren’t they?” I asked.
Convoluted but Luther and Roger knew what I meant.
“Yeah,” said Roger. “She was still saying ‘How high?’ when Danny said ‘Jump.’ Although I did hear that she wanted to be taken seriously if she filed for Woody’s seat. She really thought she could be a state senator.”
“Hey, if Dubya could be president,” said Luther.
We laughed and returned to our separate courtrooms.
Dwight is normally finished by four and I had no compunctions about calling his cell number then. Now that Cal is part of our lives, one of us has to pick him up every afternoon.
He answered on the first ring. “On my way. What about you?”
“I may be a little late,” I told him, virtuously refraining from asking about Candace. “I need to swing past Seth’s for a few minutes.”
That encounter with Daddy at lunchtime was still bothering me. When I got to Seth’s house, though, no one was home and I decided the hell with it. Go to the source. Ask Daddy flat out what was going on. Yes, he can be touchy as a hornet when questioned about his private business, but you don’t deserve any honey if you’re not willing to get stung. And don’t bother telling me that hornets don’t make honey. You know what I mean.
There was no sign of his truck at the homeplace, and Maidie was putting his supper in the oven so the pilot light would keep it warm.
“I never know when he’s gonna be home these days,” she said. “Walk on down to the house with me, honey, so I can start Cletus’s supper. And you’re welcome to eat with us.”
“Thanks, Maidie,” I said, “but Dwight and Cal are probably waiting for me.”
Maidie was my mother’s right arm after Aunt Essie married a policeman up in Philadelphia when I was a little girl. Cletus was working for Daddy back then, too, and it got to the point that they couldn’t keep him away from the kitchen. He was eight or nine years older than Maidie, yet way too shy to pop the question.
Exasperated because he could never find Cletus when he was needed, Daddy stormed into the kitchen one day and said, “Now look here, Maidie. This man’s acting like a moonstruck calf and it’s got to quit.”
That’s when Mother and Maidie started laughing.
Daddy was too wound up to stop and Cletus had turned ashen beneath his brown color. Daddy gave him a sour look and said, “I don’t know why on earth you’d want to marry him, but if you do, for God’s sake and mine, tell him so I can get some work out of him. All right?”
Still laughing, Maidie said, “All right.”
“Huh?” Daddy and Cletus were both dumbfounded.
“She said yes,” Mother told them. “Now will you two please get out of my kitchen? We’ve got a wedding to plan.”
The little clapboard house that Maidie and Cletus have shared for thirty-odd years is just past the barn and down the lane from the main house. The garden that he and Daddy had planted was growing vigorously. Peas and potatoes were blooming and the first planting of sweet corn was almost knee-high. No stakes yet for the tomatoes because they were still too short, but the cabbage plants had begun to head up and butter beans had their first true leaves.
“I hear Dwight’s planted y’all a garden, too,” Maidie said.
“Oh yes. I’ve told him that I don’t can and I don’t freeze, but that hasn’t stopped him.”
Maidie laughed. “And how’s that Rhonda working out?”
“You were right,” I admitted ruefully, having resisted hiring someone to help me with the housework for as long as I could. “I don’t know how I ever got along without her.”
“I know exactly how you were getting along,” she said tartly. “I saw the dust and dirt in that house.”
“Dirt?” I protested. “It wasn’t dirty. Not really.”
“Them windows? Those baseboards? Them dust bunnies under the beds? I was pure ashamed of you, Deborah.”
Which was why she had bestirred herself to find someone to clean for me when it became clear that Dwight and Cal and I weren’t keeping to her standards. She no longer has a pool of nieces and cousins to draw from. The Research Triangle and state government departments have siphoned them off. But through her own grapevine, she found an energetic young white woman willing to work mornings so she could be home with her children in the afternoons, and Rhonda Banks comes once a week now. She dusts, mops, scrubs, changes the beds, and does the laundry. I pay her more than twice the minimum wage and she’s worth every penny.
But it was soon apparent that Rhonda wasn’t what Maidie wanted to talk to me about. Cletus wasn’t back yet either and we went out to the kitchen, a kitchen warm and cheerful with red-checked curtains, tablecloth, and dish towels. I picked up her big black cat and stroked it under its chin while she sautéed three thick pork chops in her iron skillet.
“Is everything okay with Daddy?” I asked, plunging into it.
“Well, now, that’s what I wanted to ask you,” she said, a worried look on her warm brown face. “You know well as me, Mr. Kezzie ain’t never been religious.”
I nodded, wondering where this was going.
“I’ve prayed on it, your mama used to pray on it, and I think Miss Zell still does, but I figure the Lord knows he’s a good man deep down even if he might not’ve always been right with the law.”
That was putting it mildly.