"Maybe she's called Paige by now," I suggested. "If you don't hear from her in the next couple of hours though, I think you're going to have to tell her mother."

Annie Sue'd had to put away her choir robe and I'd been stopped by a dozen people who had seen the story on the WomenAid house in the morning paper (I was in the foreground of the picture and, yes, they'd spelled my name right) and either wanted to know if I'd ever met Rosalynn Carter ("She and Jimmy are doing such fine work with Habitat") or wanted to know how I liked being a judge. As a result, we were a good fifteen minutes later than Nadine and Herman in getting away from church.

By the time we arrived, the kitchen smelled of biscuits in the oven and a fresh ham roast sat on a platter waiting to be carved. Nadine wore a butcher's ap.r.o.n over her Sunday dress and her plump face was flushed.

"Oh, good," she said when we stepped through the back door. "Annie Sue, Cindy's called twice since we got home. Would you please go call her and tell her not to call back till after dinner?"

"Yes, ma'am," Annie Sue said and darted down the hall to her bedroom.

I took an ap.r.o.n from the pantry and moved to the sink to finish grating the carrots for Nadine's vegetable salad. "Where's Herman?"

"In the den. He said to watch the news, but I think he just wanted to stretch out a minute." She quit stirring the gravy and looked at me with anxious eyes. "I'm starting to get real worried about him, Deb'rah. He's never been sick hardly a day in his life and he just won't admit he is now and I never could make him do something he didn't want to."

So what else was new about most of these Knott men? Nadine could fuss and nag like the rest of my sisters-in-law, but so far as I know, Mother was the only female who could ever turn them all west when they had their minds set to head east.

Dinner was strained. Herman filled his plate with sliced meat and vegetables and pretended that his appet.i.te was normal so Nadine wouldn't fuss, even though it was clear he was merely pushing the food around his plate. Nadine pretended she wasn't noticing, and she and Annie Sue both pretended they were interested in the conversation I was pretending-well, you get the idea.

As soon as I'd helped clear the table and the dishwasher was loaded, I pleaded things to do, told Annie Sue I'd give her a call after court the next day, and escaped.

It was just as well that I went home early. The phone in my sitting room is on a separate line from Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash's and there was a message on my machine from Ned O'Donnell.

"Had calls from Zack Young and Graham Ogburn yesterday," he said when I returned his call.

"Oh?" Graham Ogburn was the influential owner of Tri-County Building Supply and father of Layton, Zack's young DWI to whom I'd given that ninety-day jail sentence.

"Zack's pet.i.tioned me for a writ of habeas corpus. You mind telling me how come you set such a high bail?"

As a superior court judge, O'Donnell had the power to overrule me and we both knew it. As objectively as possible, I detailed Layton Ogburn's DWI priors. "I figured a half-million cash bond might keep him off the road a while."

There was a long silence at the other end of the wire. Finally I heard O'Donnell sigh. "Well, if that's what you're aiming for, I reckon it will."

"Well, well, well!" said the pragmatist.

"See?" said the preacher. "Not everybody goes by what's politically expedient. Go thou and do likewise."

Monday's court was last Tuesday all over again: same song, different singers. During one of the breaks, I collared Reid and cross-questioned him about Carver Bannerman.

"Bannerman? What about him?"

"For starters, how old is he? What's his background?"

My cousin wrinkled his handsome brow and tried to remember details. "Twenty-five or -six. Comes from Goldsboro originally. Took civil engineering at State. I think he has a double-wide over in Magnolia Park off Seventy. That's where his wife lives, anyhow."

"Wife?"

"Yeah. He's sort of married."

"How can you be sort of married? As if I didn't know."

"Well then, h.e.l.l, Deborah. Why you asking me?"

"I just love listening to how you rationalize things like that."

"Don't go laying Bannerman's morals on me," Reid said righteously. "Why do you want to know about him anyhow? From the way you came down on him about those traffic violations, I thought maybe he rubbed you the wrong way. What'd he do? Wait around to carry your briefcase after court?"

"If I came down on him, it was nothing more than he deserved," I said. "Flying through a residential zone where some child could have been playing? Failure to pull over for an ambulance? Shows a real selfish lack of concern for anybody besides himself, don't you think?"

Reid tapped his watch. "Didn't you tell them you'd resume court at ten-thirty?"

He hates lectures. And smart as he is, he's never caught on to that's how John Claude and I avoided answering some of his questions.

So Carver Bannerman was "sort of married," was he?

I wondered if Cindy McGee knew?

"Married?" Annie Sue was stunned when we met at the WomenAid house that evening. "But he wasn't wearing a ring. We looked."

She handed me the long stud drill from a bin inside the van and got out carrying a looped extension cord on one shoulder and a coil of heavy duty wire on the other. Hand tools dangled from the leather utility belt around her st.u.r.dy waist.

"Cindy's going to just die! She said he was so sweet once they were alone. And gentle. None of that macho raunchy stuff. Oh, golly, Deb'rah! She gave it to a married man? She'll flip. She'll absolutely flip."

Distressed, she followed me across the gra.s.s. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but the interior of the skeletal house was darker than I'd expected because someone had worked there that day and nailed on rigid sheets of silver-backed foam insulation.

Mistake.

As we stepped onto the porch, we heard running footsteps inside. Believing that only the wicked flee when no man pursueth, I instinctively raced through the house in time to see three kids disappearing into the underbrush at the rear of the lot. They couldn't have been more than eight or ten years old, but whether black or suntanned white, male or female was impossible to tell because they had dark hair and wore the summer uniform of pre-adolescence: shorts, T-shirts and sneakers.

From behind me, Annie Sue was fuming. "Look what they did!"

All along the back wall, big holes had been punched in the insulation. Yes, the sheets were rigid; yes, they had a high R-rating. Nevertheless, they were as fragile as a piece of paper and were supposed to be protected by siding soon after installation. Even a baby could put a fist through them, and the kids I chased had been long enough past infancy to know right from wrong.

No one answered my knock at the house diagonally across the street or next door, so I walked on down to the convenience store, where I borrowed their phone to call Lonnie Revell's office. I don't have as much confidence in Dobbs's sheriff as I do in Bo Poole, our county sheriff, but these things have to go through channels.

"Say you want somebody to do what?" asked their moronic dispatcher.

Patiently I again described the minor vandalism and how it would be nice if this street were added to the nightly patrol route. My words wouldn't penetrate his lead-shielded brain. Exasperated, I called Lu Bingham over at the WomenAid shelter, explained what had happened, and sicced her on Lonnie's dispatcher. She'd get some action.

"Bet it was those Norris young'uns," said the store clerk when I thanked her for the use of her phone. If people didn't want other people to hear, they'd use the pay phone outside, right? That was Patsy Redd.i.c.k's sensible att.i.tude. She was the same teenager who'd relayed Nadine's message to Annie Sue Sat.u.r.day evening and she didn't pretend she hadn't listened to every word I said. "Were they white?"

"They might have been," I answered. "Who are the Norrises?"

Patsy glanced around. Even though the store was empty, she lowered her voice. "You won't tell anybody it was me that said it, will you?"

I promised.

"There's three of 'em. Their mother's Kimberly Norris. I heard that when Miz Bingham and them were studying who was going to get the first house, it was almost a tie between her and BeeBee Powell, only BeeBee won. Kimmer's helping work on this one so she can get the next one, but her kids were mean-mouthing here in the store Sat.u.r.day that the only reason BeeBee got picked first was 'cause she's black and Kimmer's white."

The same old same old.

When I walked back to the WomenAid site, Annie Sue had already drilled a bunch of holes as big as my thumb through the studs and ceiling plates. I told her what I'd done, then fetched a fifty-foot tape from the truck and helped measure off lengths of the flat white electrical cable that would run from the main breaker panel to all the outlets and fixtures.

It wasn't very long before Lu Bingham came by to survey the damage, followed shortly thereafter by one of Lonnie Revell's men. I repeated my vague description of the children but didn't mention the name Norris till after he'd left.

"Do you think the Norris kids are capable of this?" I asked Lu.

"Capable? Of course they're capable," she promptly replied. "That's why they were my personal choice this first house."

Vintage Lu. Put little vandals in a nice house?

"Sure. Give 'em something to be proud of. They'd take care of it," she said and explained that the Norris woman and her children live over in what's called Seaboard City, a handful of dilapidated, cold-water trailers strung along the railroad track less than a quarter mile from where we stood.

"They're at such risk," said Lu. "Another year may be too late for them. The Powell children are living all squashed in with their aunts and cousins and BeeBee certainly deserves better as hard as she works, but at least they're in a caring environment with relatives who love them. The Norris kids have n.o.body but their mother and she's working just as hard as BeeBee to make a better life for them."

Despite her impa.s.sioned pleas, the WomenAid board had decided that a black woman and her better-behaved children would be a more persuasive advertis.e.m.e.nt for further houses.

"Bunch of amateurs," Lu sighed. "And mostly white. White do-gooders seem to have a harder time with the concept of white poverty. Weird, isn't it? If Kimmer and her kids were down on their luck because of a calamity-if they'd had a major illness or accident, if her house had burned down-that'd get their sympathy. But because she's made 'poor life choices'-? Kaneesha's father was white. Did you notice?"

Actually I hadn't. "And the Norris children?"

She nodded. "The father of Kimmer's first child was black. It's okay for a white man to sleep with a black woman-that's been going on here for two hundred years-but a white woman with a black man..."

Her voice took on the saccharine earnestness we'd heard from otherwise do-good ladies our whole growing-up lives, "'Now, honey, we don't want to look like we're rewarding miscegenation, do we?' Oh, well, at least they promised that Kimmer will be next. If we can get money for a next."

For a moment, her normal optimism seemed to dim and her shoulders slumped tiredly. "They always say money's not the problem, but darned if it wouldn't be fun to have enough just once in my life. I do believe I could take care of some of the worst blights. Save a few children anyhow."

Her eyes narrowed speculatively. "Which brings us to my next point."

"Yes?"

"Walk me out to my car?" She smiled up at Annie Sue, who was perched atop a step ladder to install a ceiling box over our heads, and said, "Looking good, kid."

No breeze outside either and the hazy, late afternoon sun kept the humid air heavy, although I thought I heard far-off rumbles of thunder in the western sky. Hopeful images of a cooling rain flickered through my mind as I waited warily to hear what Lu wanted out of me this time. Money or more time?

"See, the thing is, we don't have trouble getting volunteers to come work," she said earnestly, brushing back a lock of sweat damp hair. Her blue chambray sundress showed darker half-circles at the armholes. "We could begin another house tomorrow if we could afford to buy the materials."

I mentally reached for my checkbook. "I can't give you very much right now, but-"

Lu shook her head impatiently. "No, no. I don't want money from you. But you could-if you would-clear the way for Kimmer Norris's house."

Every word she spoke set my suspicions quivering like a blue tick on point and I waited for the gunshot that would drop the bird.

"Graham Ogburn called me this afternoon," she said, and everything went up like a covey of bobwhites. "He saw that story about us in the paper yesterday. Your picture."

"No, no, and no!" I said.

"Would you quit shaking your head and just listen? He'll give us all everything for another house just like this one. At his cost. Kimmer and her kids could be out of that broken-down trailer before Christmas."

"Don't do this to me, Lu."

"He's not asking you to drop the charges. He's not even asking for no bail. Just something he can reasonably raise. Heck, Deborah! Even murderers get a fair bail."

"Layton Ogburn was just one step away from murdering someone with a car."

"But he didn't, did he? And his father promises he'll keep him out from under a steering wheel till he comes up for trial. It's tearing his wife apart to see their only son sitting in a jail cell. Come on, Deborah. Show a little Christian compa.s.sion, okay?"

"Think of Laura Ogburn's ravaged face," whispered the preacher.

"Sooner or later, Zack Young's gonna find a superior court judge who'll give him his writ of habeas corpus," said the pragmatist. "Might as well let Lu get something for WomenAid out of it while she can."

"Okay," I said at last. "Tell Mr. Ogburn I'll enter an order for reduction of bond first thing in the morning."

"How much?"

"I'll drop it to fifty thousand. And I'll let him post a surety bond."

"Neat-o!" Lu beamed. Her slang's always been ten years out of date. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders, as if she'd never had any doubt that she'd persuade me. "Well, I'd better go lay it on the line to those Norris young'uns. Don't y'all work too hard, now."

CHAPTER 9.

SOIL BEARING CAPACITY.

"The ability of the earth to support a load... varies considerably with different types of soil, and a soil of given bearing capacity will bear a heavier load on a wide foundation or footing than it will on a narrow one."

Despite Lu Bingham's parting injunction, Annie Sue kept me busy fetching and carrying for another hour till she had a lot of the preliminaries done. Paige Byrd came by looking for her and she, too, wound up pulling stiff cables across the ceiling joists or threading them through the drilled holes.

Each time I saw Paige these days, she seemed another pound thinner and just a little more self-confident as she emerged further and further out of her sh.e.l.l. Annie Sue a.s.sured me that when the three girls were alone together, Paige could get almost as intense as Cindy at times. (Not by the littlest twitch of my lips did I let on how funny this sounded coming from someone who could make a broken fingernail sound like a major disaster.) Paige's fingers were still chubby as she pulled and poked, and her lingering plumpness gave her skin a creamy transparency that did little to disguise her emotions.

When Annie Sue told her that Carver Bannerman was married, Paige flushed with partisan indignation, and work almost came to a full stop.

"I knew it!" She rocked back on her heels and tucked behind her ears the locks of red-gold hair that kept falling over the broad planes of her face. "I just knew it! That nasty, wh.o.r.emongering adulterer!"

Irrelevantly, I couldn't help noting that, if nothing else, a strict church upbringing certainly does provide a richer a.s.sortment of synonyms than the variations of "that cheatin' summanab.i.t.c.h" I usually hear in court.