Margaret Maron - Bloody Kin

BLOODY KIN

Margaret Maron

Copyright 2011 by Margaret Maron. (Original publication 1985.) All rights reserved.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

For Agnes Furst Maron, the standard by which all mothers-in-law should be measured

D ISCLAIMER

While North Carolina ishappilymuch more than a state of mind, it has no county named for Sir John Colleton, one of King Charles IIs Lords Proprietor. In rectifying that omission, I should like to make it clear that my Colleton County does not portray a real place and any resemblance between its fictional inhabitants and actual persons is purely coincidental.

I NTRODUCTION TO THE E B OOK E DITION

In 1984, my then-agent came down to see North Carolina for himself. It was probably the first time his feet had been off concrete in twenty years. He stood in my living room and looked out over the scruffy, nondescript landscape of flat sandy fields and scrub pines and said, You have no sea, no mountains, no raging river, no virgin forests, nothing of interest. Why in Gods name do you want to set a book here?

I looked out over that same landscape and saw fields that my family had plowed with mules, flowers that the women in my family had planted, trees that had sheltered me since birth, and I could only say, Its home. Its where I began and its where I now live again after being away too long.

He gave an exasperated sigh and said, Well, go ahead and get it out of your system.

So I wrote Bloody Kin , it was published in 1985, and I thought North Carolina was out of my system.

It wasnt.

But it took a few more years before I found an agent and an editor who thought my nondescript farm land would work just fine as a setting.

I created Colleton County for this book and although Deborah Knott and her big sprawling family do not appear, it may be considered a prequel because it is peopled with characters who keep showing up in later books, including Kate Honeycutt, who was a minor character in Death in Blue Folders .

Sharp-eyed readers may note some inconsistencies with later books, but I hope that wont interfere with their enjoyment.

The same goes for the societal changes from thirty years ago. Smoking was everywhere accepted. Women smoked when they were pregnant. They enjoyed an occasional glass of wine. Sonograms were not common and the sex of the baby was usually a surprise.

Happily for mystery writers, love and greed are timeless.

Margaret Maron

August 2011

P ROLOGUE

[Second week in October]

Jake Honeycutt spent the last morning of his life rambling through the lanes and back fields of his Colleton County farm. If hed been told it was his last morning, he might have regretted that he couldnt hold Kate one last time, but he would have been glad that it was ending here in North Carolina, not back in New York. No one told him, of course, so that October morning he drank a final cup of Lacys hot black coffee and, since Lacy himself had disappeared somewhere, whistled up the dogs and strode down the sloping hillside with his shotgun across his shoulder to see if he could flush a few mourning doves before taking the 5 P.M. flight from RDU back to New York and Kate.

Drifts of bright yellow sneezeweeds edged the vegetable garden which his uncle kept hoed clean even though nothing still grew except tomatoes and okra and a row of coarse leathery collards. Lacy had already disked under the rest of the garden plot and had sown his turnip patch for the winter. Winters here were mild enough to grow lettuce and spinach in a cold frame, but Lacy didnt hold with such. Collards, turnips, and mustard greens had nourished him for seventy winters and he didnt see the point of changing now.

Beyond the garden were five wooden tobacco barns looking like a row of cardboard half-gallon milk cartons. Their green tar-paper sheathing had ripped and torn away in places. One of these days, thought Jake, hed find time to dismantle those barns. The boards could be used for something else. Wasteful to let them just rot down. Dangerous, too, probably since the butane gas burners had never been disconnected. In the old days of mule-drawn drags, rank green tobacco leaves had been brought from the fields and string-tied by the handfuls onto four-foot sticks, about twenty-five bunches to the stick; then hung in the tall barns for heat curing, about eight hundred sticks to the barn. Originally, the furnaces were fired by hardwood cut in the winter, and men who had worked all day in the hot fields priming tobacco slept beside their barns and kept the fires going through the night. After World War II, wood gave way to oil burners with thermostats and later to gas, so that a farmer could sleep in his own bed, although Jake remembered how his father still got up in the middle of the night to check on the barns. A broken stick or a single loose leaf falling on a hot flue could send a barn up in flames and destroy a summers profits.

After several days of heat, the green leaves would be cured to a mellow gold, rich and fragrant in aroma.

From the barn, the sticks of cured tobacco were loaded onto a flatbed and hauled to the packhouse where they were piled in headhigh stacks. There, women and children carefully broke the strings and hand-stripped the leaves from the sticks. The soft lemony leaves would be graded by color and size and then bundled for market.

Getting tobacco from plant bed to warehouse used to be a painstaking, labor-intensive process that lasted well into November or Decembera thirteen-month crop, farmers joked, for plant beds were often readied in December before the crop was completely sold.

Mechanization changed all that. A tobacco harvester could strip the proper number of leaves from each plant and place them in big wire baskets that were hydraulically maneuvered into bulk containers that looked like tin boxcars and were heated by thermostatically controlled gas burners. No more hand-bundling either. Instead, the loose cured leaves were simply sheeted up in large squares of burlap: two hundred pounds at a time, and most of the crop had been auctioned off by mid-September.

All around the countryside, wooden barns like Jakes were falling into ruin. His own tobacco allotment was leased to a nearby farmer who utilized machines and migrants instead of year-round tenants, so it had been at least ten years since these barns were used.

One of the dogs put his cold nose against Jakes hand and looked at him reproachfully.

Okay, he smiled. No more daydreaming.

He skirted the barns and walked on down a sloping field given over to sweet potatoes. Although it was the second week in October, the vines continued green and lush because night temperatures had not yet dipped below the mid-fifties.

Even so, summer fought a rearguard action all around him. Morning glories still raised their blue trumpets skyward and oaks and maples had not yet begun to turn; but Virginia creeper wound like scarlet ribbons through the pines, and green sassafras trees at the edge of the woods were mottled orange and yellow.

The dogs found their favorite path through the trees and Jake followed.

These woods had been timbered by his father thirty years earlier. Fair-sized jack oaks, maples, and yellow pines now shaded the old mule lanes, but they were saplings compared to the huge turpentine pines that Jake remembered from his boyhood. He had not cried when those giants crashed to earth and were hauled away to the sawmill because his father had quietly explained how much money they needed to keep the land together after the expenses of his mothers last operation and funeral. Nevertheless, Jake never forgot how sunlight used to shaft through those tall straight longleaf pines.

In France once, he and Kate had wandered into an old cathedral early one morning, and something about the way the sun streamed around and through that forest of gray stone columns had made Jake suddenly homesick for the farm.