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?”
James Ennis pulled his small black truck in behind a late-model SUV that was parked on the shoulder of woodlands that were back in his family again, only this time it was his mother’s name on the deed and not his grandmother’s, despite the older woman’s self-pitying indignation that she no longer had a say in how the land was to be used or dispersed. She trotted out the Biblical commandment to honor thy father and thy mother, “and this does me dishonor,” she told her daughter.
“Sorry, Mama,” Mary Pritchard Ennis had said. “You gave our land away once. You don’t get a chance to do it twice. After I’m gone, it’s going to my boys.”
Before he got out of the truck, Ennis made a note of the SUV’s license plate. One bumper sticker read JESUS LOVES YOU; the other THIS CAR HAS GPS—GOD’S PROTECTIVE SALVATION.
He lifted his .22 rifle from the gun rack across the rear window, stepped onto the pavement, and studied the ditch bank until he saw where someone had gone into the woods. The trail was easy to follow. A hippopotamus could not have trampled down a wider swath of weeds and briars, and dead limbs had been knocked off some of the pines to make for easier passage.
A wren scolded from its perch on a wild cherry branch in lacy white bloom and a brown thrasher flew up from a clump of dried broom sedge still standing from last fall.
About fifty feet into the woods, where the land began to slope down to a stream, he saw an oak that had come down in one of the hurricanes to create a rough clearing beyond the pines. A chunky-looking white man labored there with a shovel. He wore dark blue slacks, a blue-and-white striped open-necked polo shirt, and shiny polished town shoes that had probably started off a lot shinier than they were right now. As Ennis watched, he saw the man wipe his face with a large white handkerchief that he stuffed back into his pocket before climbing down into the hole he had dug. It was waist-deep on the man and as damp dirt flew up from the hole, Ennis could hear him puffing with the unaccustomed effort of digging through rocks and roots.
He moved out of shadows into the sunlight, the rifle held loosely in the crook of his arm, and looked down on the man. “Mind telling me what you’re doing, mister?”
Startled, the man stepped back with the shovel across his chest as if for protection, slipped, and went down heavily on his rump. Sweat poured from his soft face and his eyes widened as he looked up and saw the rifle.
“This is private property, mister, and you’re trespassing,” James Ennis said, standing over the trench the man had dug. “How come you’re out here digging?”
“This your land?” The voice changed to warm molasses. “Then you must be one of Sister Frances’s grandsons, right?”
Ennis gave a tight nod.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are, Preacher, and you don’t own one square inch out here any more, so I ask you for the last time”—he shifted the rifle significantly in his hands—“what are you digging for?”
Faison McKinney pulled out his handkerchief again and looked at it distastefully. It had begun the day ironed and neatly folded just as he liked his handkerchiefs, but now it was so streaked with dirt and sweat stains Marian might never get it clean. Nevertheless he wiped his face, then used the shovel to hoist himself to his feet. There was only wet sandy clay beneath his shoes. No parachute, no bones, no sign that this soil had ever been disturbed.
“You ever get left all night at the end of a long dirty ditch holding a bag?”