Micanopy in Shadow (26 page)

“What do you suppose the trouble was between the couple?”

“Don’t reckon nobody outside the family knowed. But they said his fussin’ started only a couple of years after they married. Everybody knowed she had her cap set for him for years. Got him soon as the poor soul come back from the war, bad hurt. Well …” she shifted her eyes around at Brandy in what had become a familiar gesture and raised her eyebrows. “I reckon you knows they only had the one young ‘un. In them days, that meant something. They had separate bedrooms. Now, rich folks sometimes had separate rooms, but not in Micanopy. None I know of.”

Brandy heard the sound of a car engine, not far down the isolated road. The noise stopped almost as soon as it started, and the dog gave a puzzled “ruff.” The cat rose and padded toward the door again, ears perked forward.

“Are you expecting more company?” Brandy asked. With a jolt, she remembered the little silver car.

“Lordy. no. My granddaughter already dropped by today. Don’t get much company. Maybe that’s why I run on so this afternoon.” She peered at the door without stirring from her chair.” Maybe some poor soul got lost. They do sometimes.”

Grant stood, walked to the door, and opened it. An irritated growl rumbled in the hound’s throat. For a few minutes he peered down the ruts of the two-track road. His pickup parked beside a live oak was the only vehicle in sight except for Mrs. Washington’s. The wind had risen. Long strands of Spanish moss swayed on its low branches, scraping the little truck’s roof. The smell of rain hung in the air. Brandy was glad now of Grant’s presence. She wouldn’t relish navigating these shadowy backwoods roads alone. Would she have noticed the silver car this afternoon?

Brandy stood also. “It’s about time we went along.” Grant held the door open. Brandy listened, but she didn’t hear the engine again.

“Aren’t you a little nervous, living out here like this?” she asked. Brandy pictured her sitting alone at her table night after night, a bowl of steaming soup with its curious odor rising before her. What did she do during the long evenings? There was, of course, the tiny television set in the corner, and her ragged copies of
Popular Mechanics
on the little table at her elbow.

“Me and Tabby and the hound dog be fine,” Mrs. Washington said. “Been my home since I was a young’un. Papa farmed this land. I own the place now. Don’t see no need to move. I grow a lot of my vittles right outside my door. Reckon I be safe enough.” She gave a short laugh. “Folks in these parts knows I ain’t got nothing worth stealin’.” She cut her eyes again at Brandy. “’Course, word gets out I been talkin’ private stuff, I may go stay with a daughter for a spell.”

Brandy tucked her pencil and pad back into her bag. “Can we do anything for you before we leave?”

“Might let old Tabby out, while I set the pot on the stove in the icebox. Reckon I won’t leave the cat in the house.” She pushed herself up from the chair and picked up her cane.

Grant opened the door for Tabby while Brandy turned back to Mrs. Washington. “Mr. Wilson and I, we’ll be careful who we talk to.”

But how could she? She didn’t know who was dangerous.

Mrs. Washington took care of the soup, picked up a set of keys from a sugar bowl on the table, and began following them outside. She glanced at the road. “Reckon I be coming after you.”

As they stepped out on the porch, Brandy pulled her jacket tighter against raw, moist air. The dog lifted his head, sniffed, decided they were acceptable to his mistress, and laid it again on his front paws. He raised his head again quizzically as his mistress closed and locked the door behind her.

“Don’t reckon I want to be here when the word gets out I been talkin’,” she said.

As she made her way slowly down the steps, the hound pushed himself up and trotted along behind her.

“Will your own people still object?” Brandy asked, startled.

“Not my folks, no.” She had reached her shabby truck and opened the driver’s door. Before she hoisted her skirt to step up behind the wheel, the hound drew its lanky legs together, sprang up, and scrambled into the passenger seat.

Grant waited to turn his own ignition on until her old pickup coughed a time or two and the engine caught. Then Brandy settled back as he backed around to leave. “I guess hearing that other car worried her,” she said.

He nodded. For several minutes they drove without speaking. When they reached the end of the dirt road, Brandy looked for the car they had heard. None was in sight. Maybe it took the other route. But Brandy felt uneasy as she watched Mrs. Washington’s own truck clatter off in the opposite direction behind them, canine and human heads bobbing in union.

Grant noted Brandy’s frown. “I don’t think the danger is to her. We’re the ones who learned something new.” He glanced at Brandy. “You got an earful, all right.”

Brandy felt uncomfortable knowing that Grant himself learned so much. She liked sharing only with John, and now with her grandmother. She answered carefully. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to any of it, especially the old lady’s tales about the Starks and the Irons—or about your own great-grandfather. It was all mostly gossip, and second hand, at that.” She stared out the passenger window as cloud shadows slid across the darkening pastures. “I need to sort it all out.”

As Grant turned onto Route 225, a few drops of rain glistened on the windshield. He was silent with his own thoughts. Cattle still stood or lay under the outstretched limbs of live oaks, and the waters of Orange Lake still glimmered through the trees. But Brandy felt a sea change had happened in her knowledge of the case—if she could only figure out how to use the information.

After Grant finally swung from Route 347 onto Cholokka Boulevard and parked before the café, he cut the engine. “So what do you do next?”

“Find out what Zeke Wilson wrote in his reports about the revenue agent’s murder.” Brandy didn’t mention the bloodstain in Caleb Stark’s storeroom office, but she wondered if the Marshall included it in his record. “I’ve got a chance to look into Caleb Senior’s store records, too.”

Grant opened the door into the misty half-light and came around to help her out. “I have another day off. I could pick you up in the morning and take you to check the marshall’s file.”

“If you’ll prepare your grandfather and Aunt Liz.” Brandy was unsure of Grant’s motives, but she’d be glad to have his company again—and so would John.

“Their bark is worse than their bite, you know.” That wasn’t what she heard from Kyra. Grant glanced up at the lighted windows. “I’ll wait for Kyra.”

At 5:00 P.M. Brandy hurried into the living room. Kyra had already given Brad his bath and his dinner and was lifting him, squirming and giggling, out of his high chair. When he saw her, he squealed, “Mummy! Mummy! I ated my din-din!”

Brandy reached for him and snuggled him in her arms. Her lips brushed his warm cheek. “Grant’s downstairs,” she said.

Kyra picked up her jacket from a kitchen chair, but hovered. “Was it, like, a good interview?” Brandy knew she hoped for at least a brief report.

“Yes, very. Grant heard the details.” Telling about Ada still seemed hazardous and Brandy felt loyal to Mrs. Washington. But she knew Grant would tell Kyra what he’d heard. “I wouldn’t talk to anyone but Grant about it,” she added. Even as she spoke, she knew such a request might be useless. What young woman could resist sharing gossip—even eighty-one year old gossip—if it involved the town’s prominent families in domestic abuse and murder?

John was the one Brandy wanted to talk to.

As soon as he walked through the door, hung up his leather jacket, and lifted Brad high in the air a couple of times, Brandy drew him into the kitchen.

While she described the interview, she thrust two frozen turkey tetrazzini dinners into the microwave and began chopping up a tomato, onion, and asparagus for a fresh spinach salad.

“It must’ve felt good to the old lady,” she added, slathering French bread with garlic butter and shoving it into the oven. “That is, reporting the sins of white employers to another white person. For decades they lorded it over Mrs. Washington’s family and friends.”

John set the table, nodding from time to time in sympathy.

Brandy considered, then rejected telling John someone might have followed Grant’s pickup. If that were true, it meant someone had been watching her. But nothing had happened and the car might not have been following them at all.

John sat down at the table, then looked up, earnest. “Just don’t forget your promise.” When she gave an almost imperceptible nod, the conversation turned to the Irons house. “We’ve reproduced the original craftsmanship, especially in the parlor,” John said. “I’ve re-installed moldings in the corners. Moldings are usually crooked in old houses, and it isn’t easy getting the angles to make tight joints. We soaked the trim to make it bend around the bow window.” He set his fork down and leaned back. “It’s an elegant house. Irons is a lucky man.”

* * *

That evening, while John drove into Gainesville to shoot a few games of pool with friends, Brandy called her grandmother and summarized what she learned from Mrs. Washington.

“You’re still making progress, Brandy,” Hope said. “It worries me. Don’t go anywhere alone, and don’t talk to anyone else about that interview.”

“Forget it,” Brandy said. “What Mrs. Washington knows, Grant Wilson knows, too—and Kyra Gibbons soon will.”

Brandy set down the phone, led Brad into the bedroom and read
Goodnight Moon
to him twice. She let him point out all the colorful pictures until he grew fussy, then slipped him into his sleepers and settled him into his crib with his cuddly glowworm. She spent the next two hours summarizing the interview in her notebook and responding to her own correspondence and e-mail. She had been relieved to find a check from
Florida Living Magazine
for an article on the Seminole Ah-Tah-Thi Ki Museum off Florida’s Alligator Alley. It also accepted another about historical homes in Apalachicola, and an encouraging response came from the magazine section of the
Orlando Sentinel,
interested in her query letter about the history of Micanopy. She hadn’t exaggerated to the young clerk at the drugstore after all.

John came home about 9:30 and grumbled. “I was lousy again. Not enough practice. These guys are sharp.” He didn’t spend much time on the newspaper before disappearing into the bedroom. By the time Brandy tiptoed in herself—careful not to wake Brad—undressed and slipped into her nightgown, John already lay in bed. “I’m still assessing what I learned today,” she whispered as she joined him.

“Mrs. Washington told us a tidbit about your buddy Montgomery Irons’ grandfather. Apparently, he was a brute. Abused his wife—she of the steely jaw and eye. All I know about her is that she was charitable. She even befriended the Havens when Ada became their foster child.”

“It was expected of women in her social class,” he said wearily.

Brandy pulled up the covers. “A man can seem a saint to others and be a monster at home. The Starks separated. I haven’t learned anything about Ezekiel Wilson’s wife—or marriage. I’d like to remedy that.” She added a bit slyly, “It would shed light on the mores of small town Southern cultures in the twenties. Maybe there’s enough material for another book about Micanopy. A long article, anyway.”

“I guess I could ask Monty some questions, though I don’t see the relevance. I’d rather do it than have you involved again.”

“Might help,” she murmured. She was thinking about the Havens when John rolled closer. She felt his arms tighten around her and her gown loosen.

For quite a while she forgot all about the Starks, the Irons, the Havens, the Wilsons, and even about Ada herself.

S
EVENTEEN
 

At 8:30 the next morning, Brandy dressed in jeans and plaid shirt and waited for Grant, realizing she had neglected another of her grandmother’s problems. They hadn’t talked again about Snug. The deadline for selling
Trinkets and Treasures
would soon expire, and they had still heard nothing from Hope’s unreliable partner. Heaven only knew what he was up to, but it wasn’t selling antiques.

Grant arrived promptly, bringing Kyra, who sprinted upstairs—statistics text in hand—and took charge of Brad, who had finished his oatmeal and applesauce and was ready to play. Brandy peered out the window, relieved to see the overcast sky had opened up, showing patches of clear blue and a few rays of October sunshine.

“I’ll bundle him up a bit, and we’ll take a nice stroll,” Kyra said.

Brandy tucked her notebook into her canvas bag, shouldered it, and gave Brad a quick kiss. When he whimpered to go with her, he tugged at her heart but she left to join Grant downstairs.

On the drive up U.S. 441 to south Gainesville and University Avenue, they chatted above the rattle of the pickup about the weather and his ranger’s work, but her mind was on Zeke Wilson.

After Grant parked at the LaChua Trailhead, they hiked along the Gainesville Hawthorne Trail until they reached the opening in the vegetation on the left and cut across a grassy ditch to Savage Wilson’s concrete block house. From the front yard, they could see him seated in his favorite rocker in a heavy robe, a newspaper in his lap and a cup of coffee on the table beside him. The oxygen tank and coils of tubing rested behind his rocker. His eyes were on the Trail. Aunt Liz was not in view.