"You were there," I said slowly. "At the Yacht Club. Halloween night. I saw you come in. You and Wuvvy went outside. When she came back, she was by herself. But she said she'd gotten the money to pay the back rent. You gave it to her, didn't you?"

She put a hand to her hair and smoothed it, unnecessarily. "It's not a secret," she said. "Virginia was an old family friend. She'd tried to call me down here. Mother told me she was desperate to talk to me."

The way Catherine said "mother," it came out "m.u.t.h.ah." All her vowels had that softened, mushed-up sound.

"I just happened to be up in Atlanta. I keep a law office down here, too, you know, and most weekends I leave Atlanta by noon on Thursdays. But I had a hearing that kept me late Friday, and I'd intended to drive down to Hawkinsville in the morning. Poor Virginia," she sighed. "I was happy to lend her the money. But when I saw they'd started construction on that restaurant, I knew it was too late. Virginia just wouldn't face things. She was always like that."

"You'd known her a long time?"

"Since she married Broward Poole and moved to Hawkinsville. The Pooles were old family friends. My daddy and Broward were fraternity brothers at Tech. Virginia wasn't from here originally."

Catherine gave me an indulgent smile and patted my arm. "I've got to be getting along now. Mother has invited the ladies from church over for tea. She's been upset about all this awful mess. First Jackson, and now Virginia. This is a quiet little town, you know. We're not used to crime like you are up in Atlanta."

"Was Broward Poole's murder the only time anybody ever killed anybody else around here?"

I'd said it deliberately, to see if I could, as Edna would say, put a twist in her knickers. It had the desired effect.

Catherine Rhyne kept her hand on my arm, but her fingers dug into my sleeve ever so slightly. "That was all a long time ago," she said icily. "It was a horrible time for all of us. This isn't Atlanta. You can say anything you like to me. But you really can't go around here talking like that. Digging things up. Hurting people. Virginia's dead. She's been dead a long time. She tried to make herself into something else, but it didn't work. People can't really change."

She smiled again suddenly. "You just send that bill along to my office in Atlanta. If I were you, I'd hurry along now. You don't want to get caught in that Macon traffic at rush hour."

Catherine Rhyne didn't slam the door as she left the funeral home. She didn't need to.

19.

Courthouses have the best secrets.

And the Pulaski County courthouse, with its crumbling stucco and gloomy old magnolias, seemed ripe with records of the kind of small-town transgressions and transactions that keep the machinery of justice churning.

If Catherine Rhyne wouldn't talk about Wuvvy's past, I could just look up the old trial transcripts. I found the court clerk's office easily-there were only four offices in the high-ceilinged courthouse lobby, and the hand-painted sign over the clerk's mahogany office door was impossible to miss. But there was another door-a weathered, rusted screen door. It had been pulled shut over the wood door, and fastened with a spring latch.

GONE TO LUNCH said a sign that had been written in pencil on a legal-sized file folder.

It was after three. Court clerks down here kept unusual hours, I thought.

But I hadn't had any lunch myself. I ambled out the door and walked around the corner. There is an unwritten law in Georgia, maybe in all the Deep South, that provides that every county courthouse shall have a meat-and-three-vegetables cafe within a five-minute stroll of the halls of justice.

Half a block down Lumpkin Street I found the Red Hawk Cafe. Faded yellow gingham curtains were pulled halfway across the front window. A bell jangled when I pushed the door open, and my nostrils quivered at the comforting smell of hamburger grease and french fries.

The only soul in the place was a heavyset man in his fifties, who was slinging chairs on top of the Formica-topped tables. His graying black hair was brushed straight back from a high forehead. He wore baggy brown slacks and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

"We're fixin' to close," he said. "I thought Doreen had locked that door."

"She forgot," I said, and then, because I really was starving, "Couldn't I even get something to go? Please?"

He quit stacking chairs, looked at me with open curiosity. "Kinda late for lunch, ain't it? Most people around here are thinkin' about what's for supper. And you the second person stopped in here in the last thirty minutes."

"I'm from Atlanta," I said. "I came down for the funeral service for Virginia Lee Mincey, and I didn't have time for breakfast or lunch."

He moved behind the lunch counter. "I heard they was burying her today. That older lady, she was from Atlanta, too. Come down here for Virginia's service. Reckon that gal had more friends up there than she did down here. After what happened and all."

So Edna had already hit the Red Hawk. I was still starved.

"Griddle's been cleaned, so I can't fix nothin' hot." He opened the door of a gla.s.s-fronted cooler. "I got egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and sliced hard-boiled eggs."

"Perfect," I said.

"Forget about the takeout," he said. "If you don't mind eating while I clean, you can just stay right here."

Five minutes later he plopped a green plate onto the lunch counter in front of me. It was the time-honored cold plate, the three paprika-frosted mounds arrayed around a scoop of cottage cheese with an iceberg lettuce leaf and a tomato slice on the side. He gave me a tall gla.s.s of iced tea, too, and three packages of cellophane-wrapped club crackers.

Mayonnaise! I'd been feeling like a pariah after my big brushoff from Hap and Catherine Rhyne, but things were suddenly starting to look up. I took a cracker and used it as a platform for the tuna salad.

"Did you know Virginia Lee?" I asked the man, who'd started sweeping behind the counter.

He kept sweeping, short, brisk strokes. As a cleaning professional, I always appreciate good technique.

"Sure," he said. "Virginia Lee come in here all the time when she come to town with Jackson. She was a cute little ol' thing. Never could see what somebody like her saw in Broward Poole."

"Did you know Broward?"

"Oh, yeah," he said dryly. "Everybody knew Broward. He made sure of that."

"How about Catherine Rhyne?" I asked, cutting off a piece of hard-boiled egg with the edge of my fork. "Do you know her?"

"Which one?" he asked, not looking up. "Big Kitty, Little Kitty, or Itty-Bitty Kitty?"

"You're joking," I said, temporarily slowing the fork-to-mouth action.

"It's a Rhyne family tradition. They ain't got but one name for the womenfolk, and that's Catherine."

He took a big plastic jug out of the cooler, poured himself a gla.s.s of iced tea, and came to stand by the counter in front of me. His big friendly face had an odd color to it, like flour, and there were huge puffy bags under his eyes.

A woman came bustling out of a door behind him. She wore a white rayon pantsuit, and she had her pocketbook in one hand and a key ring in the other.

"Robert Hickey, who in the world are you talking to out here?" she demanded. "We're supposed to be closed and on the way to your doctor's appointment in Perry."

He gestured toward me. "Doreen, this here's another lady from Atlanta. Come down here for Virginia Lee Mincey's funeral, and didn't have the first bite to eat today. So I fixed her a little something."

Doreen was at least ten years younger than her husband and not nearly as open-minded about nosy strangers from Atlanta.

"Tell the whole world somebody else's business," she muttered. "A man's a worse gossip than any biddy I ever met."

She grabbed a pad of paper, scribbled on it, and slapped it down on the counter in front of me. "That's five-twenty-five. Me and Robert got to go now."

Doreen stood right there while I gulped down a last bite of chicken salad and washed it down with a mouthful of tea, then counted out the six ones I handed her. She followed me to the front door, waited until I was on the sidewalk, then flipped the CLOSED sign on the door with a flourish.

Robert Hickey flashed me an apologetic grin before his wife pulled down the green shade on the door.

The gals in the clerk's office were a merry duo. They were both in their mid-fifties, one with a brownish-reddish bouffant, the other with a blondish-grayish bouffant.

The brown bouffant came to the counter and looked down her nose through her clear-rimmed bifocals at me when I told her I wanted the transcripts from Virginia Lee Mincey's murder trial.

"You mean Virginia Lee Poole," she said firmly. "That's how it's in the records, and I don't care if she did take back her maiden name. She was married to Broward Poole, and that made her a Poole, like it or not."

The blonde stopped rubber-stamping papers. "We know everybody lives in this county. And n.o.body around here is interested in Virginia Lee Poole anymore."

"They're public records," I pointed out.

The brown bouffant said, "You want to see them, you'll have to get an order from Judge Nyberg."

She went and sat back down at her desk and started rubber-stamping like mad. The blond bouffant gave me a smirk. "Anything else?"

"How do I apply for an order?" I said.

The brown bouffant just kept stamping. "Judge'll be back here in Pulaski the second week of January for criminal docket."

"January? But that's two months away!"

"Judge Nyberg is a busy man. It's a ten-county circuit," the blonde said. "This ain't Atlanta."

She was at least the second person that day to remind me that I was not in the capital of the New South, and that down here in Hawkinsville they did not care how they did things up there in Atlanta.

"How about a telephone book?" I asked, looking around the room. Three of the four walls were lined with old golden oak file cabinets, all of them stacked high with yellowing legal folders. Anna Frisch had mentioned going to see the Poole family homeplace before she left town. Maybe I'd have better luck out on the farm.

"There's a public phone out in the lobby," the blond bouffant said.

"Probably need a court order to use it," I said under my breath. For now, anyway, Hawkinsville's secrets were safe for another day.

20.

I came out of the courthouse with a list of phone numbers and addresses for eight Pooles living in the greater Hawkinsville metropolis and no clear idea of how I would proceed from there.

A horn tooted at me and I jumped, halfway ready to be arrested for disturbing the peace.

It wasn't the sheriff, though. It was Edna, double-parked beside the sheriff's car right in front of the courthouse and waving me to join her.

I jumped in the front seat and she gunned the motor. "d.a.m.ned strange town," she said, speeding down Lumpkin. "Good lunch plate, though." She patted a paper sack on the seat beside her. "And I picked up a nice blouse for your Aunt Olive's birthday at Genella's Fine Fashions. Only eight-ninety-nine."

"Where are the girls?" I asked, looking in the backseat.

"We're going to pick them up right now," Edna said.

"Where's that?" I asked.

"At the nursing home," Edna said. "And don't you go getting any ideas. You'll be ready for the nursing home a long time before I am."

Azalea Acres was a small, olive-green cinderblock building two blocks off Hawkinsville's main drag. A painfully manicured four-foot-tall hedge of azaleas hugged the building's profile, and a clump of pine trees provided the only shade around. The residents had arranged their wheelchairs and walkers in a circle under the trees, and as we pulled into the gravel parking lot I could see that the only two ambulatory members of the group were Baby and Sister.

Edna tooted the Lincoln's horn again. Heads swung our way. Baby and Sister took their own sweet time with their departure. First they went around the circle, hugging and kissing and patting various withered cheeks. Then they leaned over a particularly frail person wrapped in a pink blanket in an old-fashioned high-backed wooden wheelchair, and held a long conference with her.

"Whose idea was this?" I asked Edna.

"It was all our idea, if you really want to know," Edna said. "We divided up the territory. I took the Red Hawk Cafe, and they went to the bus station luncheonette. That's where black people eat lunch down here," she explained. "We stopped by the A.M.E. Church, then I carried them over here while I went to the Feed and Seed and Genella's Fine Fashions."

"A nursing home?" I asked.

"The girls know what they're doing," Edna said tartly. "What did you find out about Wuvvy and her family?"

"Not much," I admitted. "The natives weren't too friendly today."

"Here they come now."

Sister clung to Baby's arm as they strolled toward the car. Compared with the crowd taking the afternoon air under the shade of the pine trees, the two of them looked particularly perky.

I got out and, for the benefit of the watching crowd, made a big show of opening the back doors and helping them into the car. As we pulled away from Azalea Acres I caught the two of them waving at their newfound friends like a couple of travel-weary d.u.c.h.esses.

"Well?" Edna demanded.

"Ooh, honey," Sister said. "Me and Baby done heard all kind of wickedness about this town."

"Did you find out about the Pooles?" I asked.

"Sure did," Baby said. "There's two sets of Pooles down here. Mostly all the Pooles still living in town now are colored. All of that crowd is kin to Mrs. Frankie Poole. She works in the office over at the elementary school."

"What about the other Pooles?" I asked.

"I found out about them," Edna said proudly. "The white Pooles, the ones related to Broward Poole-they've been gone from here a long time. That boy Jackson, he was the last, and he got sent away to boarding school after his daddy got killed. There's some cousins up North, related to Broward Poole's first wife, but they never had anything to do with Hawkinsville.

"The pecan farm is still here," Edna continued. "Ain't n.o.body worked it since Broward Poole was killed. The lady in Genella's Fine Fashions said n.o.body goes out there. It was left just the way it was when they sent Wuvvy off to prison."

"You say a pecan farm?" Sister perked up. "Maybe we get some good pecans out there. This right now is pecan season, ain't it? Me and Baby, we could pick up some pecans quicker than a herd of squirrels."

"I know just how to get there," Edna said. "We came past the Poole place on the way into town. Dry Creek Road is on your right, and there's an old red mailbox before you get to the gate."

I turned the car back toward the road leading out of town. I wanted to see where Virginia Lee Mincey had lived before she reinvented herself as Wuvvy. And Anna Frisch, my new client, had mentioned a pecan tree Jackson had liked to climb near the old homeplace.