Malone - Uncivil seasons: a novel

Copyright 1983, 2001 by Michael Malone

Cover design 2001 by Chip Kidd

Cover image by William Eggleston/A+C Anthology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systemsexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviewswithout permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

The characters and events portrayed in Uncivil Seasons are fictitious. The setting is the state of North Carolina, and certain public institutions and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved in them are entirely imaginary. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Malone, Michael.

Uncivil seasons / by Michael Malone.

p. cm.

1. PoliceNorth CarolinaFiction. 2. North CarolinaFiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A43244 U5 2001
813.54dc21

2001034474

For Barry Hoffman
Round up the usual suspects.

The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of than hath not seen, mans hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called Bottoms Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke; peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

Nick Bottom, a Weaver
A Midsummer Nights Dream

Two things dont happen very often in Hillston, North Carolina. We dont get much snow and we hardly ever murder one another. Suicide is more our style; were a polite, college town, and our lives are sheltered by old trees. Maybe once a year a blizzard slips around a corner of the Smoky Mountains and blusters its way east, or a gale swells up from Cape Hatteras and runs across the Piedmont to break up our agreeable liaison with nature; but usually storms lose interest along the way. Whenever one does barge through town, merchants stockpile sleds as recklessly as Carolina blockade-runners once stowed tobacco and cotton. Schools close. Cars spin off the road. People have accidents.

They commit murders, too, but much more often in thought and word than deed. There is some impertinence in being a homicide detective in a town that wants to go on believing it is still too small and too temperate to require such expertise. That I should be the detective obliged to remind them of their susceptibility seems a further affront to Hillston, for Im one of them. My mother is a Hillston Dollard. Her family has sheltered the town since its founding; they founded it. They sheltered it with pride; defensive, unchallengeable pride in the town, and the Piedmont that circled it, and the state that circled the Piedmont, and the country that circled the state. Thats what Dol lards did. It was the family business. For me to be searching for killers among us would have struck Hillston as an improper lack of family feeling, except that, of course, as everyone said, we rarely murdered one another.

The trouble was that now Cloris Dollard was dead, had been found dead last Sunday, her skull crushed. She was my uncles wife.

The sky looks like snow, I told Mrs. Lawry Whetstone.

Never happen, sugar, Susan said.

Probably not.

I was standing naked beneath my overcoat beside the bedroom window of the Whetstone summer cottage, glumly looking across the January gray lake toward Pine Hills Inn. The Inn was Hillstons oldest restaurant; old enough to boast it had been reduced to the degradation of serving as the stables for invading Federal troops during the War of the Confederacy. My circle ate at the Inn. Snug in a booth there an hour ago, Susan Whetstone had repeated that she just couldnt see the sense in her divorcing Lawry and ruining everything. Shed poked at the shrimp sunk inside her avocado, and brushed her blond hair up from the nape of her tan neck and said, No, sugar, its better this way. Susan and I had been having an affair for eighteen months; a year ago, I hadnt thought it was better this way. Now I no longer asked her to leave Lawry, but she hadnt seemed to notice Id stopped, and she went on refusing to come away with me. It seemed impolite to point out she neednt worry about my feelings, especially after it had become so clear that Susan was not a worrier.

Susans husband, Lawry, was a vice-president of C&W Textiles, Hillstons biggest industry, a century-old complex of mills and manufacturing that Lawry was determined to haul, against the will of its elderly patriarch, into the hightech gloss of what the newspapers were in the habit of calling the New South. Lawry flew around to places like Japan and Houston and neglected to take Susan with him. Hed been away in Atlanta for two weeks now, either buying or selling. Who knows, who cares, said Susan, no backseat careerist.

I was standing by the window. She was stuffing designer sheets and towels apparently stolen from Hyatt hotels into the hamper and pulling the beige-checked coverlet over the bed. She found my shorts and tossed them at me. Shed already showered and dressed again; she had a postcoital efficiency I found depressing.

Justin, its 1:30. I better run. Laurel Fanshaw told me somebody, she wouldnt say who, was going to bring a motion to impeach me off the effing Charity Ball committee if I wasnt at this meeting today. I bet it was Patty. I cant believe you were so gaga over her; shes such a bitch.

I was sixteen. I lit a cigarette. You better run.

Arent you supposed to be back at work by two?

Im supposed to check Cloriss socialite connections. Arent you one of them? I brought Susan her suede boots. Thats what Captain Fulcher told me today. I mimicked my chiefs fidgety face. Nobody can beat Senator Dollards wife to death and rob her blind in her own house while Im at the helm. Check out everybody, Savile, but dont step on any toes. You can be sure nobody in her circle carted off a crate of Mrs. Dollards silverware, right? You know, my wife has the same pattern! Grand Baroque. I did a set of his mouth clicks.

Susan said, Funny man. I love it when you do Fulcher. He is so tacky.

Hed be crushed to know you think so; he wants to be in, like you.

Not as in as you, sweetie. She shoved her foot into the magenta boot by pushing against my bare leg. I like that scar on your leg. She opened my overcoat and ran her hand down my calf. I think its the fact that its a bullet wound that turns me on. She walked to the dresser mirror to watch herself slide into her mink coat. On TV, they said a robber killed Cloris. Meanwhile, it has got to be the creepiest thing I ever heard. Her hand stopped, lipstick poised.

I asked, Did you ever hear of anybody really disliking Cloris?

Come on! You think somebody killed her on purpose? Get real, Justin. The lipstick plummeted into the suede purse. Bye bye. I loved it today. Ill call you.

Shivering, I walked barefoot into the kitchen; like the rest of the cottage, closed for winter, the room smelled thickly of stale air. The table and counters were piled with summers leftovers: white sail bags, OFF! cans, black flippers, badminton birdies. In their empty refrigerator Id put my bottle of Jack Daniels. I poured my fourth drink of the day, carried it out on the screened porch, and stared across Pine Hills Lake, a dark, flat oval ringed by the coves where, in summer, Hillston resorted in old-fashioned vacation homes. Somewhere on the other side, behind banked evergreens, was the Rowell Dollard cottage. When I was a child, Id been brought there often, balking, to play with the daughters of the woman whose murder I was now assigned to investigate.