Slender fingers of sunlight pushed through the branches of the trees overhead.

Sister pressed her face to the window to watch the scenery. "Me and Baby met a nice lady at Azalea Acres. Miss Neola Scott. She told us all about how she worked for that Rhyne family, worked there until she was eighty-seven years old. Now she lives at Azalea Acres, and she has her food put in a blender 'cause her dentures gives her blisters.

"Neola said that Mr. Broward Poole was shot to death right out there in that pecan grove," Sister went on. "Them Rhyne ladies, all of 'em are lawyers. Big Kitty, she's the old lady, she's a invalid now, and then there's Little Kitty, and her daughter used to be called Itty-Bitty Kitty, only she come back from Atlanta and told people she wanted to be called Catherine, so don't n.o.body but family call her Itty-Bitty no more. And Little Kitty, she did some lawyering for the wife, Virginia Lee, after she killed Mr. Broward Poole."

"You girls did a great job," I said, watching the roadside for the red mailbox Edna had mentioned. "The biggest thing to happen to this town in twenty years was Broward Poole's murder," I said. "But n.o.body wants to talk about it officially. I couldn't get any local lips unzipped. Especially that Catherine Rhyne."

"That's 'cause you were barking up the wrong tree," Sister said. "You don't know 'bout the jungle telegraph."

"What's that?" Edna asked. "I don't know about it either."

"That's the way colored folks used to find out about white folks' business. Used to be white folks didn't pay no attention to colored folks. Thought we were too stupid to figure out what was goin' on. But if you just keep your mouth shut and your ears open, you know who's been drinking too much whiskey and who's been sleeping in separate bedrooms and who can't pay their bills," Sister said.

"We heard all about them Rhyne women," Baby said. "Miss Neola, she run that family."

Five minutes out of town on the main road I saw the sign for Dry Creek Road, swung the Lincoln onto the potholed asphalt, and started looking for the gate and the red mailbox.

I found both, but Edna's sources had neglected to mention that the rusted cattle gate had an imposing new chain and padlock strung through it.

"Now what?" Edna said, getting out to try the lock. It held tight.

She got back in the front seat of the car. "Getting kind of late, isn't it?"

It was, but I still wanted to see the Poole place.

"You girls sit tight here," I said. "If anybody stops and wants to know what you're doing, tell them the car was burning oil and we pulled over to let it cool off."

I opened the trunk of the Lincoln and dug out the thick gray sweatshirt I'd thrown in with my cleaning supplies the day before. My shoes were plain black suede flats, not bad, but they weren't exactly snake boots either. I took off my wool blazer and pulled on the sweatshirt, then turned my back so Edna and the girls wouldn't see me stuffing my Smith & Wesson in the right pocket of my slacks. I had a suspicious-looking bulge on my right hip, but it couldn't be helped.

"Be careful," Edna called.

The gate was about four feet high, with metal slats. I took my time climbing it and still managed to sc.r.a.pe both my shins as I was hopping down onto the other side.

I spied a stout pine branch lying in the tall weeds at the edge of the sandy track that led onto the Poole property and immediately adopted it as a snake stick. As a kid I'd spent a summer on a distant cousin's tobacco farm in Lyons, Georgia. I'd learned then that you always get you a snake stick before venturing into the woods.

The pecan trees edging the road onto the Pooles' plantation made a leafy yellow canopy overhead. All I could see on either side of the road was pecan trees. Here and there pecan hulls studded the track, and dozens of gray squirrels leaped and chattered and jumped overhead from limb to limb, like a troupe of circus aerialists.

Mourning doves were perched on some of the low-hanging limbs, cooing softly to each other, and from the cool depths of the grove I heard the high-pitched twitter of a pair of whippoorwills. More sandy tracks trailed off between the rows of pecan trees. At one time these would have been kept mowed and weed-free, but two decades of neglect had taken their toll on the place. Weeds were knee-high, and in places small shrubs had grown up in the middle of the tracks.

I trudged along for a quarter of a mile before I saw anything that looked like civilization.

People always think Tara when they think of plantations in the South-white columns, wide porches, smiling darkies offering silver milt julep cups. It looks fine for the movies, but Broward Poole obviously wasn't into antebellum chic.

Five hundred yards from the house the sand track switched to an asphalt driveway. The house was in a clearing in the pecan grove, surrounded by overgrown camellia and azalea hedges. What had once been a sweeping lawn was now a field of weeds, with pine tree seedlings poking up here and there. The house itself was a yellow brick split-level. Somebody's idea of cutting-edge fifties architecture, it had metal-framed two-story-high picture windows, a sharply peaked roof with orange tiles, and a one-story wing that jutted to the left of the front door, the brick walls punctuated with high transom windows. To the right of the front door the driveway led to an empty two-car carport.

Approaching the picture window made me nervous. Anybody inside could have seen me coming from a mile off. There wasn't anybody inside, I knew that, but I still skirted around to the side of the house, toward the wing with those high windows.

The back of the house consisted of floor-to-ceiling windows. Heavy curtains of rotted avocado-green fabric hung in shreds at the windows, and a yellow brick terrace wrapped around the s.p.a.ce. Weeds poked up through the brick, and a heavy wrought-iron patio set had been piled up in one corner, the top of the table broken into a million pieces of frosted gla.s.s. A red dome-topped barbecue grill had been over-turned onto the heap of patio furniture, all of it covered with a thick layer of pine needles.

Pine trees towered over the terrace, and their shadows cast it into deep shade. I shivered, looked around, tried to imagine the Wuvvy I knew in this setting. Hard to picture her in a domestic setting, in a miniskirt, holding a tray of hamburgers for her land-baron husband Broward.

"Cute little old thing," Robert Hickey, my friend at the cafe, had called her. Wuvvy?

21.

A breeze stirred in the top of the pine trees, sending a shower of dried needles onto my shoulders. I brushed the needles off, looked up at the sky. Dark clouds scudded on the horizon. It was getting late. What was I looking for? Some sense that Wuvvy had lived here? Who she had been all those years ago?

Holding my breath, I tugged on the handle of a sliding gla.s.s door that led off the patio into the house. It held tight. Of course it would be locked. The front, too. Why bother trying?

Anna Frisch said the only time Jackson Poole talked about his childhood he'd mentioned an old pecan tree. She'd intended to look for it. Maybe I'd look, too.

The rows of trees in the pecan grove looked remarkably alike, of uniform size and age. How old, I wondered, were these blackened brooding trunks? How could somebody tell one from the other? On the way back to the car, off to the left of the dirt road, I noticed a slightly wider path cut through one of the rows. Here the trees were set farther apart. There were gaps in the row, too, where stumps were all that remained of long-gone pecan trees.

Get going, I told myself, it must be close to six. If I took too much longer, Edna and the girls would probably abandon ship and come looking for me.

But I've never been able to resist a dirt road. I swerved to the left and jog-trotted down the path.

I still hadn't seen much evidence that this had been a working farm. Maybe this was a service road. The house had been strictly residential. I had no idea what kind of equipment it took to grow and harvest pecans.

The trees seemed to go on forever. I was beginning to get some idea of just how big this farm was.

I'd just decided to turn around when I saw a flash of color up ahead.

Dull red through the browns and yellows and greens of the trees. Paint. I quickened my step again.

The red paint belonged not to the barn or equipment shed I'd expected. It was a tiny house, a wooden shack really, with more silvery wood showing than red paint. The corrugated tin roof had been blown off in places, and a single crude window had been boarded up with another piece of tin. There was no porch or doorstep, just a blank wall indented with the single window and a weathered plank door.

The shack drew me as the house had not. A tenant farmer's house, I thought. But there had been no tenants in a long, long time.

There was no doork.n.o.b left to turn. The door swung open easily. Swaths of cobwebs completely covered the inside of the doorway. I batted them aside with my trusty snake stick, started in, then backed out just as quickly.

The smell didn't retreat. It was the smell of mildew, of decay, of a place long shut away from sunlight and fresh air.

I took a deep breath, thrust my stick inside, and tamped the wood floor with it as loudly as I could.

"Okay, snakes," I announced. "Go away, little mousies and spiders and squirrels. And bats," I added as an afterthought. The shack was cavelike.

And empty.

With fading streaks of daylight creeping over my shoulder, the little house still refused to yield up any secrets. The crude wooden floor was carpeted with leaves and pine needles and clumps of dirt. A huge wasp's nest hung down from one corner of the single room, and broken gla.s.s and rusted beer cans were scattered around. I thought of an old Faron Young song that you hear only on jukeboxes these days. "h.e.l.lo, walls."

h.e.l.lo-who?

I went outside and walked completely around the shack. There was a kind of lean-to attached to the back of the shack, nothing more than a shed roof and four walls, none of which came to a right angle at any corner. If there had been a door, it was gone now. The floor was cement, and there was another door made from a single sheet of warped plywood. I pulled on it and found a combination bathroom and storage shed. A harvest gold sink and grungy white porcelain commode with a broken toilet seat took up one corner. So the tenants had plumbing. Broward Poole must have been a model of generosity. The other corner of the closet was stacked to the ceiling with wooden packing cases, broken bits of furniture, even a rusted green ten-speed bike. h.e.l.lo, walls.

From a distance, I heard a car horn honking.

Jesus H. Christ! Had something gone wrong with the girls?

I turned so fast my foot slipped on something and I went down in a heap on the floor. I scrambled up and dashed outside and around to the front of the shack.

Nothing was there, of course. I hurried back to the car. Edna honked the horn again as I scrambled over the cattle gate.

"What?" I asked, out of breath and annoyed.

"Me and the girls need to get to a bathroom," Edna said.

"We're hungry, too," Baby put in. "All this investigating makes folkses get an appet.i.te."

I dusted off my shoes and slacks and started to open the car door.

"I'll drive," Edna said. "Genella told me there's a good steakhouse up on 341. That's what me and the girls want for dinner. Steak."

The parking lot of the Black Lantern steakhouse was so full that Edna had to let the girls off near the front door and park on the shoulder of the highway. The steakhouse obviously was Hawkinsville's hot spot. People stood shoulder to shoulder in the lobby. There was no lounge, but lots of brown paper sacks and plastic go-cups being pa.s.sed around. The dark air was blue with smoke and thick with laughter and conversation. This was the Bible Belt all right, but at the Black Lantern, n.o.body appeared to be worried about the evils of tobacco, alcohol, or red meat.

It looked like we'd have a long wait for a table. Until Edna held a whispered conference with the hostess, who looked sympathetically at the girls, nodded her head, and five minutes later showed us to a table for four in the front room.

"Don't you worry," the hostess said, patting Edna's arm. "We'll get your daughter some food right away."

As soon as we were seated, a waitress appeared with winegla.s.ses, a basket of steaming yeast rolls, and a large bowl of salad. Baby and Sister wouldn't drink wine in front of other people, but they fell on the salad and bread as though they hadn't eaten in a week. The waitress took the steak orders and promised to have them back "in a jiff."

"What did you tell her?" I asked Edna. "How come we're getting the royal treatment?"

Edna helped herself to a roll, broke it open, and started slathering b.u.t.ter across it. "Just that you're a very sick woman, that we checked you out of the hospital for the day, and that we're all your nurses. She has an aunt who gets low blood sugar, too, and when that happens, her aunt has to eat real fast before she pa.s.ses out."

I took a roll, too. "Someday somebody's gonna catch you in one of these lies of yours."

Edna smiled. "I'll just lie my way out of that, too. What did you see on the plantation? Did you see the shack where Broward Poole caught Wuvvy with the other man?"

I dropped my roll. "What other man? What are you talking about?"

"Oh yes," Sister said, pushing a piece of lettuce into her mouth with her fingertips. "Neola told us all about that. That Wuvvy was a real hussy. She was carrying on with some other man. And Mr. Broward, he found out about it and was gonna fix her wagon for good."

"The official story," Edna said, bending forward to be discreet, "was that Broward Poole was out in the pecan grove, shooting crows out of the trees, and somehow he tripped over a branch or something, fell, and the gun went off and killed him."

Baby hooted. "Edna, please. n.o.body believed that mess."

"Why not?" I asked.

"That man in the Red Hawk Cafe knows a lot about guns and pecan growing," Edna said. "He used to work pecans until his heart give out. He told me it was all pretty obvious. Broward Poole was shot in the head, close range. The district attorney knew that wasn't right, and he confronted Wuvvy with that, but she kept right to her story, kept saying she'd heard the gun go off, and had gone looking and found his body."

"What else besides that?" I asked.

"For another thing," Edna said confidently. "Mr. Hickey at the cafe says you had to look at where it happened. Right out there by that tenant's shack. All those trees were old and diseased even then. Stinkbugs, pecan weevils, all kind of stuff. They hadn't been producing in years. n.o.body messed with 'em. Especially not Broward Poole. When they had Wuvvy on trial, it came out that he'd told one of his workers he was gonna have 'em chopped down. He never got around to it."

"If he wasn't shooting crows, what was he doing?" I asked.

"Seeing what his pretty little wife was up to," Baby said.

"And what was she up to?"

"Shacking up in the shack," Edna said, laughing at her own little joke. "It was all over town, Wuvvy had a boyfriend. Little town like Hawkinsville, you can't just check into the No-Tell Motel. But that shack out there, he'd moved the tenant out a year earlier. Wuvvy was using it as a hangout. Broward wouldn't let her listen to rock 'n' roll in the house. He was strictly a country-music type. So she'd take her record player out there, hang out, party down."

"I heard about that shack," Sister said. She lowered her voice. "Neola went out there once, looking for Miss Catherine. She said Wuvvy and some other young folks were smoking that marijuana out there. They never proved it at the trial, but that's what everybody said. And Miss Kitty, she didn't want Catherine going over there, but Catherine snuck over there sometimes anyway."

The waitress brought our plates, slid them onto the table. My steak was so big it lapped over the side of the plate. The foil-wrapped baked potato was approximately the size of a cruise missile. "Okay, hon?" she asked.

"Fine," I said. "I can feel my blood sugar rising already."

"Broward Poole had a bad temper," Edna said. "Genella at the dress shop said everybody in south Georgia knew that. He'd as soon whip you as look at you. And that young wife of his was wild, Genella said."

"Hot stuff, that's a direct quote from Neola," Sister added.

I took dainty little bites of steak, dainty little nibbles of salad, mere morsels of baked potato, and waited while the girls entertained me with the facts and gossip they'd gathered that day.

"On the day Broward Poole was killed, Wuvvy called the sheriff," Edna said. "And when the sheriff got there, Wuvvy had bruises all over her face and up and down her arms. She was hysterical, said she'd had to run a long way to get to the phone after she found Broward, and she'd fallen and hit her head. n.o.body believed it."

"Pretty obvious," I said.

"He caught his wife with another man and beat the tar out of her," Edna said. "Broward Poole probably threatened to kill 'em both with his shotgun. Somehow Wuvvy got it away, and turned the gun on him."

"What happened to the boyfriend?" I asked.

"Now that's a mystery," Sister said. "Couldn't n.o.body at the A.M.E. Church or Azalea Acres say who that boyfriend was."

"Genella always thought it was a man worked at the pecan warehouse," Edna said. "But Wuvvy never would say. When it was obvious she'd been caught in a lie, all she'd ever say was that he'd been beating on her for a long time. That day, he hunted her down out in the shack, beat her up again, held the shotgun to her head, and, uh, a.s.saulted her."

"Raped her?" I asked.

"Shhh," Edna said, gesturing at the people whose chairs crowded around us in the dining room.

"Of course, Wuvvy was married to the man," Edna said. "And Robert, the man in the cafe, he pointed out that Wuvvy never complained a single time before that that he was beating on her. But during the trial, after the other stuff came out, she changed her whole story. She said he raped her once and had the gun to her head and was going to do it again and she was scared he'd kill her, so she got the gun away and killed him instead. Then tried to make it look like some big hunting accident. Dumb. Not to mention it made everybody mad that she was bad-mouthing a dead man who couldn't defend himself."

"If it happened today, a jury would call it self-defense," I said.

"Maybe in Atlanta," Edna said. "Not down here. Anyway, her lawyer got her to plead guilty before it came to all that. She could have gotten the death penalty. Instead she got a life sentence. Wuvvy went to prison, Broward Poole went to the grave-yard, Jackson Poole got sent to school up in North Carolina and never came back."

"And Virginia Lee Mincey never did either," I said.

"Folks down here got all riled up when the governor let her out of the jailhouse," Sister said. "Neola Scott said the white folks and the colored folks were ready to send a lynch party up there to the governor's mansion, they were so worked up about it."

The waitress came back to the table, clutching a coffeepot.