Money To Burn (16 page)

“That’s right.” He opened the screen door. “Won’t you come in and sit down? My wife has fresh pound cake and lemonade.”

No one ever treats me cordially. I was dumbfounded and grateful. I followed him inside a small parlor crammed with a piano, overstuffed furniture, small round tables and photos of an extended family so large they made the Osmonds seem positively barren. I remembered what the men at the store had said about his son being a vegetable, but there was no hint of a hospital bed or other medical apparatus anywhere.

I sat on a flowered sofa covered by white doilies. The old man disappeared through a doorway and returned a few minutes later with a tray that held a huge slab of cake and two glasses of lemonade. It had been thirty years since I’d had fresh-squeezed lemonade. As I took a sip, I remembered suddenly and vividly that my mother made fresh lemonade for me one summer night almost thirty years ago, after I’d heard a man on the radio rhapsodize about it during an episode of “Lights Out.” The memory was startlingly real, down to the tart first sip, the smell of the swamp, the odor of my mother’s orange blossom perfume and the chirp of crickets out by the well. Then, in an instant, the feeling disappeared. Funny how a little thing like lemonade can stick with you for so many years.

But there was something else about Sanford Hale’s tiny house crammed with memories that brought thoughts of my own family to mind. What? I shook off the old ghosts and took a sip from my glass. The lemonade made my mouth pucker, the way I liked it, and the pound cake was unbelievable.

“This cake is incredible,” I admitted.

“Roses,” he explained. “My wife Livinia makes it with rose petals. Secret recipe.” I didn’t care if it contained fertilizer. I scarfed up every crumb and accepted another slice when he offered it.

Sanford Hale waited politely while I ate. Here was a man in no hurry, who didn’t care that the rest of the world had accelerated to a hundred-mile-an-hour pace. He was a farmer, time for him was measured in seasons, not minutes. It was rejuvenating just to be in his company.

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“What exactly happened to Mr. Nash?” he asked when I was done with my second piece of cake. He settled back in a tattered brown Lazy Boy recliner that looked as if it had been his favorite chair for decades.

When I told him about the fire, the old man seemed genuinely shocked.

“Terrible way to go,” he said. “A nice man like that.”

“Nice man?” I repeated. “I thought he’d kicked you off his project?”

“That?” the old man said. “It was a misunderstanding, is all. It would have been corrected in time.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Mr. Nash got an anonymous call about me,” Sanford Hale explained. “From a man who didn’t leave his name.”

“What did the man say?”

“He told Mr. Hale that there had been illegal dumping on my land, that I had let some chemical company drop their toxic waste here for a lot of money. He warned him that the toxins would leach into my soil and ruin Mr. Nash’s crop.”

“Was it true?”

The farmer’s eyes flashed. “No one touches my land but me. It’s been in my family ever since August of 1865, and you better believe I take as good care of it as my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather before him. We don’t hardly use pesticides on our crops, that’s one reason why Mr. Nash chose me for the project in the first place. I was following his rules easily. No chemicals. No additives. Hand-picked off the tobacco budworms. Sprayed with organic compound every week, no questions asked. No sir, there was nothing in my soil the good Lord hadn’t intended. The whole phone call was a lie.”

“Why would someone do that to you?” I asked.

Sanford Hale shrugged, his massive shoulders rolling beneath his short-sleeved red-checked shirt. “Couldn’t tell you. Jealousy, maybe. My tobacco wins blue ribbons at the state fair in Raleigh each year. Maybe someone just wanted to make trouble for me. That’s all I can figure.”

Or maybe someone didn’t like a black farmer being so successful, I thought, though experience had taught me that when a man gets along with his neighbors for generations, race trouble is pretty rare.

“You must have been upIt’have beset,” I said, “to be accused like that.”

He removed his hat and scratched at his scalp absently, his mind only half on my question. “I learned a long time ago not to get upset about lies. I just told Mr. Nash it wasn’t true and he promised to come out and take soil samples. He’d get it straightened out, he told me that. In the meantime, I was what you call suspended from the pilot project. Mr. Nash said he couldn’t afford for any rumors to get out and I understood that and respected it.”

“Then why did I hear that you were upset?” I asked. “His partner says you were ranting and raving.”

The old man thought for a moment, then his face broke into a bemused smile. “Sanford Jr. made that phone call. He was mighty upset that someone had called his daddy a liar. That was how he saw it. You know these young boys, they’re a little hot-headed. Sanford Jr. more than some.”

Outside, the gospel choir lifted their voices in a tune I had never heard. No wonder Sanford Hale kept his cool when faced with lies about his integrity. It would be impossible to live an angry life surrounded by such sounds.

“Is Sanford Jr. the son who was in that terrible accident?’ I asked. “I mean no disrespect by asking.”

The old man stared at me for a moment, his eyes clouding over. “That son can’t talk on the phone. He’s in what you call a perpetual care facility near Southern Pines. Sanford Jr. is my other son, the eldest of all my children.”

“Would it be possible to talk to Sanford Jr.?” I asked. “Where does he live?”

“In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” the old man replied, laughing at my perplexed expression. It was a sly, wheezing sound, one that let me know he was starting to enjoy our little chat. My continual confusion amused him.

“Pardon me?”

“Sanford Jr.‘s in the navy. A career man. Spends most of his time on a carrier. He’s a mechanic. Fixes jet plane navigational systems.”

“How did he know about the pilot tobacco program?”

“He was on leave, loading up on his mom’s home cooking, when Mr. Nash called with the bad news. He reported for duty again five, maybe six weeks ago.”

That ruled him out. Unless he was a very good swimmer. I sighed, and I guess my frustration showed.

“Sorry I couldn’t help you out more,” the old farmer apologized. “I don’t like to hear of any man leaving the world that way. Least of all a nice man like Mr. Nash. He was out to the farm once and I could tell he loved the land, the way he sifted the soil through his fingers. I’m sorry he died that way.”

So was I.

I thanked him for his time and gave him my card. He promised to call if he could think of anything else that might help. When that didn’t perk me up, he disappeared into the kitchen and returned with half a pound cake wrapped in plastic. I’m never too proud to accept pound cake.

“Take this,” he insisted. “Livinia’s made enough to feed an army. Or at least a gospel choir.” He laughed again and the sound followed me all the way out to the porch, where the choir had turned up the heat. They were rocking back and forth beneath the July sun, clapping their hands, throwing their heads back, swaying their bodies perfectly in synch with the music, like they were all part of the same joyous being. Which, I suppose, they were.

I stood on the porch beside Sanford Hale for a moment, listening to the choir sing. I became aware that Mr. Hale was intently watching his wife, as if seeing her for the first time. I followed his gaze. Her strong dark face glistened with sweat and little droplets danced from her tightly curled hair as she moved, the sun reflecting off the beads of moisture as if she was surrounded by a halo of diamonds. She was oblivious to anything but the music. Nothing mattered to her at that moment except for the sound she was sending up to the heavens. Her big arms cut through the air in eloquent curves, beckoning the choir to keep pace. I know that Sanford Hale thought her as beautiful as I did, and probably more so.

“She’s really something,” he said out loud. I didn’t have to ask who he meant.

“They really are good,” I told Mr. Hale as I shook his hand good-bye, anxious to remove myself from what had suddenly become a very private moment. “Good luck at the competition.” I glanced toward the cars in his side yard. “And good luck to everyone who has to make it back down that road of yours.”

He looked at me and laughed. “That’s just some old abandoned back road you took in,” he explained. “No one ever uses it. We leave it that way to discourage salesmen. Take the front way out.” He gestured toward a neatly packed dirt lane that led between his tobacco fields. “It takes you right to Highway 55.”

Like I said, those country boys will get you every time.

I drove away slowly, savoring the fading sounds of the gospel choir. My hangover was long gone, banished by the fresh air and sheer joy of hearing my own private summer concert beneath a clear blue Carolina sky.

xt”windowtHalf an hour later, I was knocking on the door of a small ranch house located off a deserted two-lane highway near Kittrell. There was a pale yellow Chevrolet sitting in the concrete driveway. There was nothing remarkable about the house or the acre plot surrounding it. It seemed an unlikely place for a genius like Tom Nash to have grown up. When no one answered, I knocked again and double-checked the address to confirm that Nash’s parents did indeed live there. Still no one answered. That would teach me to show up on doorsteps without calling first. I wondered what to do next.

A nap in the backseat seemed like a real possibility, but I decided it was better to work off my lingering hangover. I hopped back into my Porsche and hightailed it toward Youngsville, where Tom Nash’s brother, and only sibling, lived. I’d planned to visit him tomorrow, but there was no time like the present. Maybe Bobby could look up his address for me.

I stopped at a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of town to call in for my messages. At home, a guy who wanted to sell me a health club membership and a woman pushing discount nutritional supplements had both left their office numbers. Maybe I could get the two of them together. When I called work for my other messages, Bobby intercepted the call to give me some unexpected news.

“This is a little weird, Casey,” he warned me. “Are you ready?”

“What?” I asked, visions of Lydia offing Nash flashing through my mind.

“You wanted me to look into the will of the Talbot girl’s mother, right?” he asked. “To see if there was any money there that might be a motive?”

“Right, right.” I said impatiently. “Is there?”

“Not exactly,” Bobby said. “When she died, her personal estate was evenly divided between her three children, which meant the will was pretty up-to-date since the youngest kid was only about one or so. So maybe she knew she was dying, is my point. Anyway, each kid got plenty. Her husband got nothing, but there was a paragraph in the will stating that this was because he was plenty loaded already and was entitled to half of their marital assets. It wasn’t because she didn’t love him.”

“Hard to think of anyone loving Randolph Talbot,” I said. “So what’s weird about the will? She left it all to her kids and didn’t play favorites.”

“What’s weird is that it turns out your client’s mother died exactly ten years before Thomas Nash was offed. To the day,” Bobby D. told me. “And you know what I think about coincidences.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They don’t exist.”

“Exactly.”

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“So what does it mean?”

“Beats me,” Bobby D. said cheerfully. “Thinking is your department.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” I said. “Any news yet on the Nash estate?”

“That’s interesting, too,” Bobby said. “And it’s just now being filed, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

“I hear no evil and speak no evil,” I assured him. Two out of three ain’t bad.

“This is the scoop on your dead man. First, I checked his bank accounts and credit history. No big deposits for the last three years, no big purchases, nothing unusual at all. So forget the under-the-table payment theory. So far as his will goes, he left everything to his brother, including his patents and future royalties, cash and half the stock in King Buffalo. It’s a nice haul for the brother.”

“Nothing to his parents?”

“Nada,” Bobby confirmed. “Maybe they’re already loaded?”

I thought of the small ranch house. “They’re not,” I told him.

“Okay, maybe he hated them,” Bobby conceded. “But there’s something a little bit odd about the bequest to his brother.”

“More weirdness?” I said.

“Not that weird. He left it in trust. In an airtight arrangement with a bank. The principal can’t be touched by anyone and the interest goes to the brother.”

“Why wouldn’t he leave it to his brother outright?” I wondered.

“I figure he must be a dope fiend or something,” Bobby said. “Or maybe he’s prone to being sued or not paying his taxes. I don’t know. But the way the trust is structured, no one but the brother can get money out of it. Not his creditors, not any future wives or ex-wives. The only exception is medical care for Nash’s parents. The trustees may decide, at their discretion, to release money to the parents for healthcare purposes.”