The Clouds Roll Away Read online

“I brought over some Christmas presents,” he said. “Your mom invited me to lunch.”

  I glanced at the table. A large Virginia ham was resting on a silver platter. I could taste the salt from here. Closing the door, shucking off my coat, I sat down.

  “I have candied yams too.” She handed me a crowded plate. “DeMott, may I get you some more?”

  “Please. It’s delicious.”

  I said a silent grace and dug in. The yams were not delicious. They tasted like the can they came in. But a precooked Virginia ham was almost impossible to ruin. Smoked sweet, the ham’s outside was blackened from caramelized basting and the inside was pink, tender as a good steak. I closed my eyes, chewing, giving thanks again.

  When I opened them, Wally stood in the doorway.

  “Wally dear,” my mother said, “would you like some lunch?”

  His face battened down in a deep frown. He looked at DeMott.

  “Hi.” DeMott lifted his hand.

  “DeMutt, right?”

  “DeMott.”

  “Right,” Wally said, turning to my mother. “Where’s the glue gun?”

  “Oh, I’m making the most beautiful wreath. It has holly berries all around the—”

  “I don’t need to know that,” he said, annoyed.

  “I think it’s in the den.”

  “You think?”

  They walked down the hall, bantering back and forth while a version of “Jesu, Jesu” played on the stereo.

  “What’s up with him?” DeMott asked.

  I looked back at my plate. Suddenly I’d lost my appetite. “My mother thinks it’s the holiday. He’s got no family, his parents are dead.”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” And I didn’t, but I didn’t want to talk about it either. “How often do you talk to Flynn?”

  “Flynn? How did she get into this?”

  “She was at the rapper’s house this morning, protesting tree removal. How did she know the trees were gone?”

  He cleaned his plate. A methodical eater, he worked his way through the food, never rushing. It was soothing to watch him.

  “Flynn is like a beautiful bird with a broken wing,” he said. “She looks fine, but then she tries to fly and you realize something’s really wrong.”

  “How’d she know about the trees?”

  “Spies.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Flynn’s got spies all over. She probably paid top dollar for that information.”

  “Who’s spying for her? Not the hangers-on at his place?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got my own problems,” he said. “I’ve got to get Weyanoke ready for Mac’s stupid wedding.”

  Topic closed, in other words. I decided not to push.

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “Stuart?”

  I nodded. “Your grandfather didn’t seem thrilled with him either.”

  “This will be an amazing wedding and a bad marriage,” he said. “I’ve known Stuart since grade school. He’s the type who cheated on tests, then found another cheater to turn in.”

  “Have you told Mac how you feel?”

  “She thinks I’m jealous.”

  “Jealous of what?”

  He stared at the empty plate. His flannel shirtsleeves were rolled back, exposing forearms braided with muscles. Nice wrists. Really nice. And the right amount of hair.

  He looked up. “What if I asked you . . .” But his voice trailed off.

  “Asked me what?”

  “What if . . .”

  He didn’t finish.

  “DeMott, spit it out.”

  “If I asked you if you think—”

  My cell phone rang. He dropped his head.

  “You’d better get that.”

  I glanced down. Caller ID said it was the sheriff. More news about Flynn and the tweedy man. I walked over to the patio door, leaning against the cold glass, staring at DeMott’s back. His wide shoulders tapered into a triangle, meeting his narrow hips. My heart thumped.

  “Raleigh Harmon,” I answered.

  “Can you get out to the Chickahominy?” the sheriff said.

  I waited, expecting him to explain. But he didn’t.

  “The swamp or the river?” I asked.

  “The river,” he said. “And wear boots.”

  chapter twenty-seven

  At the river’s edge, a county deputy waited inside an aluminum skiff. I climbed in, sitting on the middle bench, and he lifted a wooden oar, shoving the boat off the Chickahominy’s muddy bank. Feculent and brown, the water smelled of decay as he rowed away from shore.

  Dropping the outboard motor, he maneuvered the skiff around the swollen and knotted bases of cypress trees. We ducked under the leafless kudzu vines dripping from the limbs and when he finally cut the engine, we were approaching a humpback sandbar that stretched across the muddy river. Three skiffs were already pulled up into the sand. A man walked by carrying a toolbox. His black nylon jacket was emblazoned with white letters: ME.

  Medical Examiner.

  The boat’s bottom scored through the sand and the deputy jumped out, splashing the shallow water, pulling it alongside the others. I climbed out and followed the ME’s assistant down the sandbar until I found the sheriff. He stood under a canopy of trees, the bare limbs so twisted they needed no leaves to block the sun. Another skiff floated across the water. The motor was lifted, the propeller blades dangling ribbons of algae. The two officers wading beside it held the gunwales and skimmed fishing nets through the water. Erlanger was one of them, the officer stationed at Rapland’s entrance last night. He glanced over his shoulder, as if expecting to bump into something. His partner was black and lifted his small net, allowing the water to drain before banging the handle against the gunwale, emptying the net’s contents into the boat.

  “Sheriff,” I said.

  “We got a call from a fisherman.” His voice was as rough and dry as pumice.

  “Yes, sir, but I’m still not clear on why you called me.”

  Like his officers, he wore rubber hip waders. They made him appear even shorter, truncated somehow, as he stepped into the river and pointed into the twisted trees.

  My stomach lurched.

  Hanging upside down, kudzu vines draping their flesh like veils, two men had been stripped to the waist. The bloated arms had been pulled open, the wrists secured to the sandbar with gray rope and steel pegs. Blood had dripped down their opalescent blue faces, drying in dark rivulets.

  I looked away.

  The medical examiner stood off to the right. A pristine woman with shiny blonde hair, Dr. Yardley Bauer exhibited little emotion, ever. It was difficult to say whether the job had changed her personality or whether her pared-down personality attracted her to the job. She stood with her hands on her hips, evaluating her staff.

  “Who’s going up?” she asked.

  Before anyone could answer, the sheriff stepped forward. “Doc, excuse me. This is Agent Harmon, FBI. Can you show her what you showed me?”

  The ME turned, passing her eyes over me. We’d met last summer. She nodded acknowledgment and stepped into the shallow water. The slow current caressed her rubber boots as she reached up, touching one man’s bare chest with her gloved hands. She turned him, the ropes creaked.

  “They were shot first,” she said matter-of-factly. “Back of the head. One bullet each. Then strung up.”

  I must have winced, because she said, “That’s not even the worst of it.”

  She pointed up, into the trees, just as the sheriff had, but I couldn’t see what she meant. I walked into the water, looking upward from the base of the trunk, following the sight of their wet trousers, the blood, until I saw the bare feet. The toes looked broken, splayed like radiating stars.

  “Somebody drove spikes through the feet,” the ME said. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hammer into these trees?”

  “Yes.” I felt sick. “The trunks are petrified.”
/>
  She seemed disappointed that I knew. But the sheriff rasped, “What do you mean, petrified?”

  When I looked at him, he’d aged ten years in one day.

  “The trees standing in the river soak up the water. It’s full of minerals. Eventually the minerals colonize all the tree cells, turning wood into stone.” I looked back up again. “The wood is probably softer the higher up you go, but not much softer.”

  One of the officers called from the water. “Sheriff, we found a shell.”

  The sheriff walked over to the boat.

  I turned to the ME. “What do you make of it?”

  “Agent Harmon, I’m sure you have your own theory.”

  “Symbolic,” I said.

  She made a noncommittal gesture with her head, a waggling motion that revealed all the beautiful highlights in her hair. “Why not just shoot them, is that it? Why go to so much trouble?”

  The sheriff walked back from the boat. “Doc, can you show her the tattoos?”

  Yardley Bauer reached up, twisting the body again. She pointed to one bloated forearm. The tattoo’s blue ink almost matched the color of the skin around it. Swollen with the accumulated fluid beneath the skin, the letters were still legible.

  KKK.

  I looked at the sheriff.

  “It’s on the other one too,” he said.

  I turned to Bauer, but she was speaking to her crew. “Pictures from every angle,” she said. “Measure everything before we take them down. Torso, head circumference, you know the drill. But I still need to know, who’s going up?”

  An argument erupted among the assistants—who performed what duty at the last crime scene, who owed favors. I turned away, walking up the sandbar, the smell of the river like a tickle at the back of my throat. As I stepped into the water, silty sand give way under my feet, the cold temperature of the water seeping through the rubber of my boots. It soothed my nausea.

  I took a pair of latex gloves and four empty film canisters from my short jacket. The Chickahominy was an ancient tributary, full of meanders and coves. I suspected its sluggish wake would carry only fine particulate as the water wormed its way across the coastal plain, down to the James River and the Chesapeake Bay beyond. Scooping soil into one of the canisters, I pinched some between my fingers, smearing it across my glove’s pale latex. Greenish gray, full of clay. Glauconitic sand. I saw shiny platelets of mica, but I hoped this soil contained something more specific. A mineral uncovered by X-ray diffraction or chemical testing, a mineral persistent enough to cling to the clothing and shoes that touched this place, turning it into deadly ground.

  Officer Erlanger pushed the boat like a shopping cart. His partner continued raking the murky water with his net.

  “May I look?” I asked.

  “Be my guest.” Erlanger dragged the boat to the bank.

  Between the aluminum benches, a rubber bin held three soaked street shoes. One white undershirt, river-stained the color of tea. Crushed beer cans, rusted fishing lures. I picked up one of the shoes, turning it over. The river had washed the fine-grained sediment from the rubber treads. At the bottom of the bin I saw the empty brass cartridge—what the deputy called a shell. I picked it up, rolling it across my gloved palm. There were no manufacturing marks. Not even caliber.

  “Guns didn’t go off at that party,” Erlanger said. “But what about out here?”

  I looked up at his wide face. He looked even angrier than last night.

  The sheriff called my name. I dropped the cartridge case back in the rubber bin and walked back to where he stood with the ME.

  “The doc has a question,” the sheriff said.

  In her green eyes, I saw the challenging expression. She enjoyed testing people, particularly other women. I assumed it was to make sure she was smarter.

  “You’re a Christian, isn’t that right?” she said.

  I nodded, bracing myself. That wasn’t the question.

  “How did they get your Savior off that cross?”

  She said the word “savior” with inflected irony, and I chose my words carefully. “Given what they’d already done to him,” I said, “they probably just tore him down.”

  She turned to an assistant. “You got pictures of the feet?”

  “Zoomed in, tight focus,” the assistant said.

  “All right,” said the ME. “Let’s tear ’em down.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  Idrove north, away from the river, following the twists of county road until I saw the grassy driveway leading to the Airstream trailer.

  The girl named Tina was standing outside, her face raised to the midday sun. In her small plump hands she clutched a gray cat, watching me wade through the piles of dead leaves.

  “Is your mom home?” I asked.

  “She’s cleaning Poppy.”

  “Would you let her know I’m here to see her, please?”

  Her brown hair flowed in long waves over skin white as refined sugar. With her bountiful figure, she looked like a maiden stepping out of a seventeenth-century canvas. Twisting her wrist, she turned the cat around, staring into its eyes. When the cat finally blinked, the girl laughed and tossed the animal into the leaves. It skittered and disappeared in the piles.

  “It might be awhile,” she said, opening the trailer door. “I guess you can wait inside.”

  The sewing room still smelled of stale cigarettes and chemical sizing, but the ceiling had been cleared of some satin. I could hear Angela Crell’s husky voice coming from the next room.

  “Don’t let it go that long,” she was saying. “I’m right here.”

  Tina picked up a pack of Salems next to the sewing machine. She shook a cigarette loose, flicked the lighter, and squinted one eye, ruining any resemblance to Rembrandt’s beauties. Her mother was discussing scatological details of liquid diets.

  “Maybe you should let her know I’m here,” I said.

  Tina took two more drags and left the cigarette burning in the ashtray. She shuffled into the next room and said, “Some lady’s here for you.”

  There was a reply, unintelligible. But it prompted Tina to offer a brief description. “The one who drives that weird-lookin’ car. What did you call it, a Mary Kay car?”

  Another low reply.

  “K-Car, whatever. She’s here.”

  Shuffling back into the room, Tina headed straight for the cigarette. The ash was long, and in the next room the radio suddenly grew louder. Burl Ives reminded us to have a holly jolly Christmas; it was the best time of the year.

  “How old is that car?” Tina asked.

  “Old.”

  “But it’s not a collector’s, huh?”

  I shook my head.

  “So why drive it?” she asked.

  “It was a gift.”

  “I’d give it back,” she said.

  When Angela Crell came into the room, she looked even more diminished than last time and completely incapable of having birthed this voluminous creature puffing her cigarettes with evident pleasure.

  “Tina,” she said. “Gimme a minute.”

  Tina shook a fresh smoke from the pack and walked into the next room. She passed by her grandfather without acknowledgment, even though Burl Ives insisted somebody waits for you.

  “I’m mighty scared of getting old,” Angela Crell said, lighting a cigarette. “You got kids?”

  “No kids,” I said.

  “You married?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re single?”

  I gave my official smile, not wanting to explain, not to somebody who was about to find out what paternal death felt like. The simple truth was, after my father died I never wanted to feel that sad again. Loneliness hurt less than lost love.

  “Okay, you’re not here for that.” She took a drag, blowing it out. “What do you want to know?”

  “Does the Klan get tattoos?”

  “What kind?”
/>   “Tattoos that say KKK.”

  “You must really think they’re morons.” She blew out the smoke, laughing bitterly. “Only a moron would do something like that. Besides, they’re mostly Baptists. They think tattoos are a big sin. I had a guy tell me nobody was getting through the gates of heaven with ink on their body. So no tattoos with KKK. If you don’t believe me, go check my daddy’s body.”

  I let the goading jab pass. The damaged condition of the men in the trees made it difficult to guess their ages. But they weren’t old.

  “The new guys you mentioned,” I said. “Do they get tattoos?”

  “Where’d you see this?” she asked.

  “I can’t say.”

  “But you saw tattoos that said KKK?”

  I didn’t reply.

  She shrugged. “Anything’s possible. The young guys are different.”

  “How so?”

  “For one, they don’t drag God into the mix,” she said.

  “They just don’t like black people.”

  “Or Jews or Catholics or Mexicans or the Chinese Commies. Did I leave anybody out? Oh yeah. Muslims,” she said. “And they’ve got money. That’s probably why they don’t talk about God.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “If you’ve got more money than God, who needs religion?”

  “They’re that rich?” I said.

  She gave me a skeptical look, an expression that resembled her usual hard countenance, only mathematically squared. “I told you. If you want absolute facts, all I can give is measurements from shoulder to wrist. The rest just comes from what I hear, what I see, what I pick up.”

  “But you’re certain they have money?”

  “One of them does. I mean, he didn’t come right out and say, ‘I’m loaded,’ but when I was taking his measurements he was talking with his buddy. After a while, they forget I’m there, like I’m the cleaning lady or something.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was talking about his honeymoon, listing all the places they were going. His buddy says, ‘Man, that’s a lot of places for one honeymoon.’ And the guy says, ‘Yeah, well, we’ve got three months.’ I almost swallowed my pins. Three months—for a honeymoon! After that, I didn’t hear nothing. All I could think was, ‘You dummy, Angela. You should’ve married yourself a rich guy when you still had some looks.’”