Bootlegger’s Daughter

Didn’t go/no one’s allowed. Where was De

“Dwight had a search warrant,” I said, “but that lock doesn’t look forced. You sure Michael wouldn’t have left it open when he rushed out?”

I told him about the crumpled towel, the dirty sink, and then the missing panel.

De

“Why would he take it down?” I prodded. “What was the scene?”

“Scene?” he asked stupidly, staring at the empty wall a long moment. Then he sighed and shrugged his shoulder. “It wasn’t a scene. Just symbols of the Holy Ghost. You know-a white dove. Lilies. That sort of thing.”

“We have to call Dwight,” I said.

“Why?”

“If it wasn’t in the Volvo when I found Michael, that might mean he either gave it to someone or his killer took it. Either way, it could be important.”

We both looked at our watches.

“It’s eight o’clock,” De

He was right. Too soon for Dwight to have gotten back to Dobbs and getting too late if we wanted to have much time at the funeral home.

“I’ll call him from Aldcroft’s,” I said.

As we passed back through the living room, De

“Here,” said De

“It’s not much compensation,” said De

“Sorry enough to let Linsey Thomas run a statement from you in the next Ledger?” I asked.

“I-yeah, okay. I guess I owe you that, too.”

Downstairs, he found a box, swathed the pitcher with tissues, and set it on the backseat of my little sports car. Lily watched with resignation as we drove off and left her sitting in the dooryard again.

Aldcrofts have been burying the dead of Cotton Grove and Colleton County from this location on Front Street for more than a hundred years; and with two Aldcroft sons recently graduated from mortuary school, it looked as if they were going to continue on into the twenty-first century.

When the first Aldcroft’s burned down around 1910, they had replaced it with a stately white mansion reminiscent of Tara; and though the interior’s been remodeled and modernized over the years, the exterior remains firmly antebellum. Across the front was a wide veranda graced by huge columns with Corinthian capitals. Inside were wide halls and three spacious viewing rooms furnished with comfortable sofas and soft chairs. Tall, gilt-framed mirrors on the wall reflected the subdued pink light cast by lamps with pale rose-colored glass shades.

The wide parking lot was so jammed when we arrived that I had to park on the street a half block away. Even though it was a quarter past eight, there was still a line of people that extended from the front door, across the veranda, and halfway down the broad front steps.

“Oh God!” moaned De

“Yes, you can,” I soothed. “These are your friends, too.”

Taking his arm, we walked across the veranda and those who recognized De

“Natural human solicitude,” whispered the preacher.

The pragmatist was too busy responding to solemn smiles and sober handshakes and trying to get a handle on the mood to remark on natural human gossips.

At most visitations, the recently deceased is the natural focal point. As a rule, collateral members of the family-cousins, nieces and nephews, or aunts and uncles-form a sort of receiving line on the right, just inside the doorway. You’ve come to pay your respects, so you’re passed along the line till you arrive at the open coffin, where there is a moment of silence, a moment to gaze with good remembrances (often), or hungry curiosity (always), upon that still face forever silent till the trump of judgment calls it from the grave.

A closed coffin seems somehow almost antisocial. Even where there are compelling reasons for it, as with Michael, there’s always a sense of something incomplete when one is confronted with nothing more than polished wood and a blanket of carnations and baby’s breath.

Then the line moves again and now you are face-to-face with the immediate family.

I have been to wakes of unloved men that were like Sunday afternoon socials where folks caught up on their visiting and almost forgot the reason they’d come together. I’ve been to wakes for well-loved matriarchs of large families and seen such gladness for release from long or painful illnesses that the wakes often turned into bittersweet celebrations of their lives. Tragic are the wakes for toddlers, more tragic still for children and youths cut down in the morning of their lives with all those shining possibilities consigned to the grave. If I never attend another funeral for a teenager killed in a car crash, it will be too soon.

Until now though, Janie Whitehead’s was the only wake for a murdered person that I’d attended and if there was a pattern, it lay in the numb disbelief of the victim’s loved ones and in the low-voiced speculations of their friends.

De

Yet people were tactful and kind. Michael’s two sisters and their husbands and three adolescent children were first in the family line beyond the coffin and they closed ranks around De

And I had not been wrong when I reminded De

Michael and De

Nevertheless, I could feel an unusual electricity in the air, and I’m sure more than one person wondered when they murmured condolences and shook De

When I had been through the line and signed the register, I went down the rear hall to the business office and used their phone to call Dwight.

“A what?” he asked.

Patiently I described the tapestry wall hanging as De

“No,” said Dwight. “There was nothing like that in the car. I’ll get Fletcher to make a sketch of it tomorrow and we’ll keep an eye out for it.”