Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (34 page)

"You found his spider hole?"

"I think so," I said and then described what I'd uncovered the night before.

"So if we go over there with some of the Virginia guys, we need to watch for that grenade?"

"I'm hoping he took care of that all by himself last night," I said. "Although I didn't hear any boom."

"We'll have to get a warrant and then get with the Virginia Highway Patrol to execute it. The plate was no help."

"Stolen?"

"Yup. Little old lady down in Wilmington. Belongs on a '98 Caddy."

"I knew it was too good to be true," I said. "I'm going to hole up at the house at Glory's End with my buddies for the next twenty-four. We'll see what happens when you make your roust."

"Hopefully you won't hear us do it," he said. "Prepare to explain where that thing came from, by the way."

"What thing is that, Sheriff?" I asked innocently. Then I saw Cubby Johnson.

He was coming up Mill Street toward the main drag, and he didn't have an earache. The whole left side of his head was bandaged, and the bandaging hadn't been done by any doctor or hospital. He was walking with a slight limp, and he did not look all that healthy just now. No wonder Patience had been nervous.

Well. Well. Well.

I waited until he'd turned the corner and headed toward a group of stores three blocks up from the intersection. I got out of the Suburban and let the two shepherds out. They had their game faces on, and I had my SIG in a holster on my right hip. Three teenagers on a nearby porch had been building up the courage to come over and ask me what I was doing around there, but when they saw me start down the sidewalk with two big shepherds at my heels and a big black gun on my belt, they vanished, and I heard other doors closing along the street. I stayed on my side of the street, about a hundred feet behind Cubby, who was on the opposite sidewalk. After one block, I saw him slow down and then stop. There was no traffic, so I crossed the street and walked up to within ten feet of him. I told Kitty and Frick to watch him. They advanced to half the distance between us and sat down.

"So now you know," he said, not turning around.

"
Now
I know," I said. "A minute ago I was just guessing. You had a doctor look at that mess?"

He shook his head, and I could see that the movement hurt him. "They'd ask too many questions," he said.

"Where else are you hit?"

He pointed to his left side with his right hand, where I saw a bulge of bandages under his T-shirt. I took my cell phone out to call the sheriff's office. A car filled with black people went by going the other
way, all of them staring at this tableau of a large white man with two police dogs behind a black man sporting bandages. It occurred to me that we needed to take this little drama off the streets and out of the 'hood, and that now would be nice.

"I can call the cops now, or you can come with me and tell me what the fuck is going on," I said.

"Okay," he said.

"Wait right here," I said. I left the shepherds and went back to the Suburban. I drove down to where he was standing and picked him and the dogs up. Then we drove out to Glory's End in silence. There didn't seem to be any fight in him, and his slumped posture told me that he probably had an infection going.

"You taken any antibiotics?" I asked.

"Patience had some old stuff," he said. "Ain't workin'."

"I've got a Z-pack in my first aid kit," I said. "We'll get it when we get to the house."

"Don't bother," he said. "I'm done anyway, all this gets out."

"Maybe, maybe not," I said. "Depends on what you actually did."

We pulled into the driveway of Glory's End. The gates were still open from my last visit.
Need to start using those
, I told myself,
and to schedule that backhoe.

We drove up to the house, and I put Cubby in one of the rocking chairs on the front porch while I went fishing in the Suburban for the first aid kit and some water. I punched out one of the three big pills and gave it to him, along with the water bottle. He took it immediately and then drank all the water.

"Okay," I said, sitting down across from him. The shepherds were still on watch. "I assume you've been the helper bee?"

"Didn't want to," he said. He still hadn't been able to look me in the eyes. "This goes way back."

"I am all ears," I said, checking to make sure my cell phone was
on and still had a signal. I put the SIG in my lap just in case he was faking his debilitation.

Cubby, it turned out, had been telling the truth when he said he'd done a stint in the army. He just hadn't finished it. He had deserted from the army in 1970, toward the end of the Vietnam War, when they had told him they were going to send him back for a second one-year tour as a Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol shooter. He'd had enough of spending weeks in the bush with two other guys, cut off from any friendly front lines, shooting itinerant Viet Cong and the occasional main force NVA officer from five hundred yards away.

He'd come home to Rockwell County and disappeared into the town's black neighborhoods, which were at that time hugely disaffected as the racial tumult of the sixties in North Carolina still raged. He'd met Patience while hiding out from the army CID, who had come looking for him. She had begun working for the Lees at Laurel Grove, and she got him work there as the outside man. Neither of the Lee ladies had actually inquired about his draft status, but they accepted Patience's statement that he'd been drafted, done his time, and now was out and done with it. She had showed Ms. Hester Cubby's military ID card, and that had closed the matter.

"Somehow, 'bout ten years later, Ms. Hester found out," he told me. "Wanted my ass off the place that day, but by then Patience was so much a part of the house that when she said she'd leave, too, Ms. Hester had to let it go. You from the South; you know how that goes."

I did indeed. So-called domestic servants often became utterly indispensable in southern homes. "Hester told somebody, though didn't she."

He said yes.

"You rig that well as a trap?"

He said yes again. That explained how he'd been there to rescue me. It also explained how he came to have a key to that slave collar--he'd made it.

"So it was you, putting the paper faces on the windows?"

He nodded. "He said he wanted to scare you out of the land deal, and that he'd kill you if he had to. I told him, I wasn't killin' no one. He said that didn't matter; he liked to kill people."

"I believe that," I said. "What's he look like, this guy?"

"Ain't never seen him," he said. "He gets behind me, out on the farm. Whispers."

I could relate to that. "What about those two Dobermans?"

"He got 'em from that biker woman," he said. "That night he shot her, I was supposed to be along. I'd said no, 'cause I figured he was finally gonna do what he'd been sayin' he was gonna do."

"Which was shoot me."

He coughed. It sounded like his lungs were in trouble. "That's right," he said. "That's why she was along. I wouldn't go. He got all pissed off, said he didn't have time to deal with me right then, but he'd be back. Said he'd take care of me once he was done with you. Said I'd become a loose end, and he'd get me, or maybe Patience. Fucker's crazy, scary crazy."

Now I understood some of his despair. "Is Valeria part of this?"

"Don't know," he said. "Ms. Valeria's got a streak in her. Ol' Hester, she's a damn snake, but Patience? She says Ms. Valeria's got two women inside of her. That's why she don't want me talkin' to neither of 'em. She says she never knows who she's talkin' to with that one."

"What about the major?"

"He just gone," Cubby said, coughing again. His hands were starting to tremble.

"You knew all about the underground passages out of this house?"

He nodded. "That's not all I know," he said. "Lemme show you something."

"What's that?"

"Reason why Ol' Hester don't want nobody in this house." He pointed to the dogs with his chin. "They gonna let me up?"

"They'll watch you until I tell them something different," I said. "Where we going?"

"The kitchen," he said. "I'm gonna need me a hammer."

Like I was going to give him a hammer. On second thought, watching him move was pretty painful. I went out to the Suburban, got the toolbox, and extracted a small hammer. He was waiting at the door when I got back up on the porch, but he couldn't open it. There was now a small red stain on his side. Z-pack or no, I was going to have to call EMS.

He shuffled through the house to the back stairs, and we went down to the lower level of the house. He put out his right hand for the hammer, and I gave it to him. He walked over to that huge colonial fireplace that took up most of the back wall. He moved to the left edge of it and then stepped sideways twice, to not quite the center. Then he whacked the front of that plastered, monolithic stone lintel stone, blasting a big chunk of plaster right off it. He did it again, and suddenly I saw that there was writing under the plaster. When he was finished knocking the plaster off, there were crude block letters that spelled out the name
CALLENDAR
.

He gave me back the hammer and then had to sit down in one of the creaky kitchen chairs. His forehead was covered in perspiration.

"Okay," I said. "Who's Callendar?" I pronounced it Cal-en-
dahr
, but Cubby shook his head. "Calendar," he said, pronouncing it like the familiar noun. Then I remembered the story Carol had told me, about the young buck from across the road who'd stolen away the affections of Nathaniel Lee's wife. She'd pronounced it like that as well, now that I thought of it.

"You mean the guy who got himself invited to a duel on the river bridge and all that?" I asked.

"That's it," he said. "See, Callendar Lee's come back for his inheritance."

"You mean his ghost," I said. "It's been over a hundred fifty years."

"When the Lees run Ms. Abigail off, she went on back to Wilmington," he said. "This here's her many-greats grandson, or so he claims. Patience told me that old Nathaniel had him a will, leaving everything
to Ms. Abigail, when things was still good between them. Callendar came sniffin' around, got Ms. Abigail to run off with him, and then he and Nathaniel Lee had 'em their duel. Nathaniel's wound rose up to proud flesh and killed him before he ever changed his will."

"What would that matter to Callendar?" I asked. "He died in the duel."

"Unh-unh," he said. "He got shot, yeah, but he wasn't killed. He went into the river, got carried down a ways, and then got hisself out. Made it down to Wilmington, where he ended up with Abigail. She knew all about that will, so when she was dyin' some years later, she made up her own will, and she left Oak Grove to Callendar."

"Did he make the claim?"

"Hunh-unh," he said. "By then Nathaniel's sons had the plantation, and Callendar knew if he ever come back to Rockwell County, those boys would kill him for sure, 'cause he'd put their daddy in the ground. Then the war came. Nathaniel's sons died at Gettysburg. Then they got cholera on the place. Wasn't no Lee womenfolk left, so the whole place was abandoned, then went for the taxes."

"How do you know all this, Cubby?"

"Patience," he said. "Those women over there? They talk about stuff. They talk a lot, 'specially 'bout the old days. Remember, now, that's where they livin'. Most time they act like Patience ain't even there."

"And this talk was all about this supposed will?"

"Long as they had some say in who lived there, like ol' Ms. Tarrant, they could pretend like they owned it."

"Well, hell, I'm not sure such a will would have any standing today, but why didn't this long-lost descendant just hire a lawyer to find out?"

"Hester don't want nobody over here," Cubby said. His voice was losing strength. I knew I had to get him medical attention, but there was also a lot more I needed to know.

"Why is that?"

"Somethin' to do with that," he said, pointing to the lintel. "It was Ms. Hester had me plaster over that, long time ago."

I considered that.

"How did Hester and Valeria find out about my buying the place?" I asked.

"Somebody at the courthouse," he said. "Lotta gossip over there."

That was for sure. "This is important, Cubby," I said. "Would you be willing to help me get this Callendar guy?"

He nodded and started to answer, but then his eyes closed and he slumped in his chair. I felt his pulse. It was weak and thready.

I called the Rockwell County Sheriff's Office and said I had to speak to Sheriff Walker.

In a meeting.

Get him out.

Why should we?

"I've got the shooter in the Glory's End homicide."

Wait one.

Then Walker came on. He started to ask a bunch of questions, but I cut him off. I told him I needed EMS out here immediately to attend to a gunshot wound case, and I needed him out here to handle the turnover of the individual to the EMS team. There was a moment of silence, then he agreed. Smart guy that he was, he knew better than to ask a bunch of questions in front of his people.