Goes to the same places? Childless, white Jason Bullock “goes to the same places” as Clara Freeman, a black mother?
My mind raced across the events of the last week, fitting one fact with another as everything spun like the wheels of a slot machine planning to come up cherries straight across. Unfortunately, it was another four minutes to the Freeman house and I couldn’t say a word to Cyl.
Ralph and his father-in-law were getting out of the car when we drove up. A chinaball tree had blown down near the carport, just missing one of the support posts, but that seemed to be the only damage here.
By the set of his chin, I saw that Stan meant to step between Cyl and his father so I quickly loaded him down with his and Lashanda’s overnight backpacks and asked where he wanted his radio as I carried it up to the side door. Too well-mannered to dig in his heels, he reluctantly followed Lashanda and me up the drive. I greeted a weary Reverend Gaithers with burbling cheerfulness, asked about Clara, and said how much we’d enjoyed having the two kids. All this so that Cyl could have one very quick, if very public, moment with Ralph.
“She’s doing better,” said the old man. “I really do believe the good Lord’s going to spare her. She opened her eyes this morning for a few minutes. I don’t know if she knew me, but when I squeezed her hand, she squeezed mine back.”
As we stood talking, the kids went on into the house and began opening all the windows, not that there was any breeze to mitigate the smothering, humidity-drenched heat. A chain saw three doors down made it difficult to understand each other and when it paused, I heard the siren of a rescue vehicle rushing somewhere several streets over. Ralph came up the drive and it was hard to meet his eyes as I told him I was glad to hear that his wife seemed to be coming out of her coma.
“Did you tell him Stan knows?” I asked Cyl as we drove away.
She nodded. “I’d give anything to take that knowledge away from him.”
“Ralph? Or Stan?”
“Stan.”
I started to speak, but she said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”
“Okay.” I paused at the stop sign, trying to remember precisely how we’d come. “Jason Bullock’s car is black,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“Want to bet he’s already lined up a body shop to get the dents banged out and repainted?”
“No bets.” She sighed and I wondered if that sigh was for Ralph or Jason.
Either way, I reached over and squeezed her hand.
“I guess I don’t have all the facts straight,” Cyl said gamely, trying to match my interest in Lynn Bullock’s murder. “How could Jason be at the motel killing his wife at the very same time he’s at the ball field playing ball?”
I’d already figured it out.
“Remember last night?” I told her. “How we thought Cletus was upstairs asleep? If anybody’d asked me to alibi him, I’d have taken my oath he was there all the time, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Well, it’s the same with Jason Bullock. I heard him get a call from his wife around five and he was there for pregame pictures around six-thirty. He wandered down for a Coke, and I saw him talking to people on his way to the rest area, but he could have slipped away for a half-hour and who would notice? I wonder if he got a little too cute, though?”
“How do you mean?”
“The switchboard says a man called the motel twice—right before she checked in and again after she called Jason. If he got cocky and made those calls from his cell phone, there’ll be a record of it on his bill. Reid, Millard King, and Brandon Frazier all say she wouldn’t give them the time of day anymore. Maybe she really had quit messing around with other men.”
Cyl nodded thoughtfully. “So she went to that motel expecting Jason to join her for a romantic tryst after his ball game, perhaps trying to put the spark back into their marriage?”
Our line of work made us familiar with the sexual games some couples play.
“And Jason used it to set up her death. Reid says he’s ambitious, and he’s certainly bright enough to see how a woman like Lynn could hold him back. The way she dressed, the way she’d slept with half the bar in Colleton County? He could divorce her, but then he’d be in the same spot as Dr. Jeremy Potts. Everybody knows Lynn put him through law school. He wouldn’t want to pay alimony the rest of his life based on his enhanced income potential, now would he?”
“But Rosa Edwards saw him and he came after her,” said Cyl.
“Only first, he came after an African-American woman driving a white Honda Civic,” I said.
Cyl’s lovely mobile face froze as the implications of my words sank in.
“Of course,” she said bitterly. “He didn’t run Clara Freeman into the creek, it was the car and whatever black woman happened to be driving that car. We probably all look alike to him.”
The street ahead led straight out of town and seemed to be clear as far as I could see. Nevertheless, I turned left, retracing our trek through town.
“Why are we going this way?” asked Cyl.
“Because I want another look at Jason Bullock’s car. It seems to me that that was an awfully small tree to have done that much damage. Maybe he helped it along with a sledgehammer or something.”
“And you want to play detective? No. Call the Sheriff’s Department. Let Dwight Bryant handle it. I mean it, Deborah. I want to go home.”
“It won’t take but a minute,” I soothed.
But as we turned into Jason’s street, we immediately ran into a solid wall of cars and people, all focused on the rescue truck halfway down the block.
“Oh, Lord,” said Cyl. “That’s where they were going to cut up a tree. Did that old woman have a heart attack or somebody get hurt?”
With the crowd watching whatever fresh disaster was unfolding, it seemed like a good time to slip over and take a closer look at Jason’s car. Accordingly, I copied several other vehicles and parked diagonally with two wheels on the pavement and the other two on someone’s front lawn.
“Be right back,” I told Cyl, who grabbed at a nearby woman’s arm, to ask what was going on. I saw men running with shovels from all over and I hesitated, finally registering the naked horror that hung palpably in the air.
A man I recognized by face though not by name was backing out of the crowd. He was built like a bear with thick neck and brawny arms and he was covered with sawdust and a cold sweat. His eyes were glazed, his face was greenish white. I couldn’t tell if he was in shock or about to throw up.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, God! I didn’t know he was down there. I didn’t know!”
“Know what?” I asked again.
“The stump just stood back up.”
I couldn’t make sense of his words, but someone who knew him hurried out of the crowd and put his arm around the man and told me to leave him alone. “Come away, Fred. It’s not your fault. The damn fool shouldn’t have been down there.”
If Fred couldn’t talk, there were others almost hysterical at witnessing such a ghastly accident. A hundred-year-old oak had pulled halfway out of the ground, they said, leaving behind a huge root hole, several feet across and three or four feet deep. A neighbor had gone into the hole and was bending down to cut through the roots that were still in the ground just as another neighbor—the man they called Fred—finished cutting through the trunk’s three-foot diameter.
Released from the weight of those heavy, leaf-laden branches, the thick stump and enormous root ball suddenly flipped back into the hole, completely burying the man who was there. A dozen men were digging with shovels and picks, others were trying to hitch ropes and chains from the stump to a team of pickup trucks. They had sent for a bulldozer that was even now lumbering down the street, but everyone knew it was too late the instant the stump righted itself.
“That poor bastard!” said one of the men. “First his wife and now him.”