Long Upon the Land (17 page)

W
hen I got home, the dishwasher was running, the counters were tidy, and Dwight and Cal were playing cribbage at the kitchen table. Cal was half a street ahead and they were both talking trash to each other, which meant that everything was back to normal between them.

I poured myself a cup of coffee, kibitzed for a while, then took a long soaking bath. Cal was watching a baseball game and Dwight was working on his computer when I came out, so I checked my email. Two inspirational forwards from Doris, a bawdy joke from Bel, and a reminder from Seth’s wife about a political lunch next week. Minnie’s my campaign manager and keeps tabs on whether or not I’m holding up my end. Karen had sent pictures to all of us of Adam and their two sons out in California. She tries to keep the family links strong and would love to have the boys spend some real time here on the farm. Several of us have invited them to come for extended visits but they keep finding perfectly valid reasons why they just can’t be away for more than a weekend. Karen regrets that they’ll never feel connected to their Colleton County roots but realistically, I know their roots were never here. The farm she grew up on was sold last fall when her mother died and Adam will probably sell his share of the family holdings after Daddy’s gone.

“That’s fine with me,” Daddy says. “I ain’t gonna try to run things from the grave. His part’ll be one of the outlying farms near town. None of y’all need to worry about having a housing development plunked down at your back door, ’lessen that’s what you want.”

Adam is Zach’s twin and the family’s success story if you count money as success. He started a company that develops computer programs and esoteric applications for the banking industry. Don’t ask me what, though. My brain went numb the time he tried to explain it. As a child, he hated the heat and dirt of farming and his one ambition was to work with computers in an air-conditioned office. Despite his BMW, his big house, and his swimming pool, Haywood, Robert, and Andrew feel a little bit sorry for him. They and their wives have visited him out there and they all came home saying it was real nice “but you couldn’t pay me to live out there. Too many people and not enough trees.”

I looked long and hard at the pictures of Adam’s sons. Almost strangers and yet so familiar. One of them had a smile like Zach’s son, Lee, and his eyebrows could have been lifted from Haywood’s Stevie. Eyes, chins, noses—they were our eyes, chins, and noses. I sighed and printed out the pictures for Daddy.

Rain continued through the night and even though cooler air was predicted, the front seemed to have stalled over us. Next morning found Pennsylvania enjoying cool dry air while we were subjected to more heat and still more humidity. I could almost feel mildew poised to attack the white posts and railings of the porch when we walked out to the garden through thick muggy air.

Cal immediately ran over to read the rain gauge. “Four and a quarter inches,” he reported.

A few stalks of corn had blown over and I held them straight while Dwight pulled wet dirt back over the roots with his boot and tamped it down.

When we got to the pond to check on Cal’s fish, the rowboat was almost swamped and would need bailing before anyone could use it again. The two fish he’d caught were still swimming around in the bucket, but they were so much smaller than he’d remembered that he decided to let them grow a little longer and upended the bucket back into the water.

Dwight checked his watch. “Time to get moving, buddy.”

“Okay,” Cal said, casting a wistful eye at the boat.

I followed them back to the house, watched them leave, and then got dressed for court, wishing all the while that Dwight and I could forget about work and spend the day out on the pond fishing with Cal.

The morning session brought a couple of cases of domestic violence. Both women had fresh bruises and cuts and were there to seek restraining orders against the men, but while the white woman came across as timorous and defeated, her black counterpoint was boiling mad.

“I been subjugated, dominated, intimidated, and humiliated but if he ever raises his hand to me again, he’s gonna be castrated. I put up with his mess when he was drinking, but a dry drunk that’s this flat-out mean? No, ma’am, I’m not taking it any longer.”

At the afternoon break, I found Dwight seated at the desk in my office. “Any chance you’ll finish early this afternoon?” he asked.

“I have an emancipation petition and a couple of divorces,” I said. “Why?”

“I need to get Vick Earp’s truck back to his widow and since we live out that way, I thought I could drive his truck, you could drive mine and then ride in with me tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said.

He stood up to go, then paused and very deliberately closed my office door. “Remember the first time I came up here to your office after you said you’d marry me?”

I smiled. Did I remember? Oh yes.

I went into his arms and this kiss was just as wonderful as that one. He took his time, slow and thorough, and I felt myself melting into the smell of him, the taste of him. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this less often,” I murmured as his hand caressed my body and sent my pulse racing.

He laughed and kissed me again. “Feel free to text me any time.”

Back in the courtroom, I took care of all the routine proceedings first, mostly a matter of approving arrangements worked out by the parties involved, signing orders, and setting new court dates for continuances.

Then came the juvenile petition for emancipation of one Eva Jones, age fifteen, white, bright, and much taken with her own importance. She stated that she had been forced to live with her father and stepmother and she wanted to be emancipated so that she could live where she wanted.

The father was there in court to oppose her petition.

I let Miss Jones speak first.

“My mom’s remarried to a drug addict and she kicked me out of the house because she’s jealous of me. Thinks I flirt with her loser husband. She’s an alcoholic and we fight all the time, but my stepmother hates me, too, and she makes me share a room with her ten-year-old daughter. I get good grades in school and I work twenty hours a week so I can pretty much support myself until I finish high school.”

And just where did she plan to live until then?

“My boyfriend’s mom says I can live with them,” she said cheerfully, pointing to the woman who sat on the front row behind her next to a young man with those Justin Bieber eyes that young girls seem to find so sexy. “He’s totally responsible, too. He’s got his GED, he works full-time, and he’s never missed a single support payment.”

“Support payment?” I asked.

“Yeah, he had a baby with his ex-girlfriend.”

“Are you having sex with him?”

“We’re going to get married as soon as I’m emancipated, but I’m using birth control. No babies for me till I graduate from college.”

I hardly knew where to begin. “You’re a minor, Miss Jones. Do you realize that he could be arrested for statutory rape?”

Behind her that young man’s eyes widened with apprehension.

“
Rape?
” She was indignant. “How is it rape if I want it, too? I told you. We’re going to get married.”

I looked at her lawyer, not the brightest star in our district’s judicial sky. “Mr. Whitbread, why is she here in my court taking up our time?”

“I’ve been hired to advise her, Your Honor, and she’s a very determined young lady.”

“Who hired you?”

“Miss Jones.”

I turned back to the petitioner. “Where did you get the money to hire an attorney, Miss Jones?”

“My boyfriend’s mother lent it to me. I’m going to pay her back when I get my inheritance.”

“Inheritance?”

“Yes, ma’am. My grandfather left me fifteen thousand dollars to go to college but I can’t get it till then.” She paused and looked at me speculatively. “Or if I’m emancipated, maybe I could get it right away?”

I spent the next ten minutes trying to explain the law to Miss Jones.

“You can’t get emancipated just because you don’t want to obey your parents or share a bedroom with your stepsister or because you want to have sex with someone who’s obligated to support another woman’s child until that child is eighteen. As for your inheritance, depending on your grandfather’s will, you may not be able to spend that fifteen thousand on anything except college.”

“That’s not fair!” she exclaimed.

“When you’re fifteen, life seldom is,” I said bluntly. “I suggest that you make peace with your father and stepmother, finish high school, go to college, and find someone to marry who hasn’t already made half his life choices by fathering a child while he’s still living at home with his mother. Your petition for emancipation is denied.”

Furious, the girl whirled away from her seat and stomped out of the courtroom, followed by Sexy Eyes and his mother.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” said her father.

“Good luck,” I told him and turned to the two divorces.

The first was simple and uncontested. All the formalities had been taken care of and both parties had signed all the necessary forms. All they needed was my signature.

The second had a property issue they hadn’t yet settled. It had been to mediation and was now back to me. The Bumgardners were mid-forties and childless. He was an accountant, she taught high school math. They’d already had their ED hearing in which their marital possessions had been, in layman’s terms, equitably divided between them. That had been accomplished without major arguments or delays. Now it was just a matter of who would get custody of their dog, a two-year-old King Charles spaniel named Bertie.

They had not brought Bertie to court, but they had brought pictures and for the record, yes, he was adorable. He had been bought with their joint credit card and the credit card bill paid for from their joint bank account. I did not sense any anger between the two humans, just a strong attachment to the animal. Neither disputed the other’s affection for the dog or claimed that it liked one of them better than the other, but Mrs. Bumgardner argued that she was the one who had found him at a reputable kennel, that she walked him most of the time, and, since she was retaining the Colleton County house with its large yard, that it would be less traumatic for Bertie to live with her rather than in her ex-husband’s Raleigh apartment.

Mr. Bumgardner argued that he was the one who had driven to Tennessee to fetch the dog from the kennel and that the only reason she walked him more was because her teaching schedule gave her the summer off and allowed her to get home earlier every afternoon during the school year. “I take him out every morning and I give him his evening walk if she hasn’t already done it. Bertie’s an indoor dog, Your Honor. We’ve never let him out in the yard alone. Besides, my apartment’s next to a park with a fenced-in dog area if he wants to run off the leash. And yes, she got the house, but she’s been talking about moving to Virginia and that will be just as traumatic for him.”

“Is this true?” I asked.

“I haven’t made up my mind, Your Honor,” she said. “But Virginia pays its teachers a lot better than North Carolina does. Better than South Carolina and Georgia, too, for that matter.”

That made me wince. Our state used to lead the area in education. Now we’re ranked forty-eighth in the nation for per capita public school spending. Virginia beats us by miles. And it isn’t just education but the court system as well. We’re understaffed and underfunded and we took more deep cuts this past year.

“I can sympathize, Mrs. Bumgardner,” I said now, “but if I decide on joint custody, how would you get Bertie back here when it’s Mr. Bumgardner’s turn?”

In the end, I gave them joint custody. Every Friday afternoon, whoever had Bertie would take him to a shopping mall in Garner, halfway between their two abodes, to make the exchange at six o’clock. “If you want to agree on a different time, fine, but repeated failure to get there within the agreed-upon hour will be grounds for the other to come back to court. If one of you moves out of the area, we can revisit the schedule. Maybe extend the time to two or three months.”

After a few months of this, one of them might cave and buy another dog, but I didn’t count on it.

In dividing up possessions in a divorce, there are various categories. Among them are items that both agree are marital and belong to both of them, items that clearly belong to one or the other exclusively, items of disputed ownership, items of value, items of no value, and items that neither spouse wants. I once handled a divorce in which both spouses listed their special needs child in that last category.

I have never had a pet listed there.

The Bumgardners were not happy with my decision, but half of something is still better than all of nothing, so they agreed to live with it for the time being.

By now it was 5:23. I adjourned and met Dwight, who’d already let Kate know we’d be running a little late. Because of my family’s connection to the Earps, we had discussed the case in fairly comprehensive detail, so I knew who Marisa Young was and why he was delivering Vick Earp’s truck with its spiderwebbed windshield over there.

As I followed him out to Cotton Grove, I couldn’t help thinking about Daddy and Haywood. Not for one moment did I think either of them could have had anything to do with the murder, but I could understand why the
Clarion
, pushed by Joby Earp, kept insinuating that Daddy was getting special treatment by Sheriff Bo Poole’s department.

Vick Earp was, by all accounts, a loner who pretty much kept to himself, which limited the pool of suspects. Yes, it might have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, a sudden rush of anger from some homicidal maniac whose buttons got pushed, but let’s face it: homicidal maniacs are more the stuff of fiction than real life. In most cases, you have to know a person, interact with him, be enraged or thwarted by him to take that irreversible step.