Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
J enny headed to the west field to continue pulling the stumps of the trees she’d burned down earlier in the month. The cinders had been cleared away, leaving only the chore of stump removal. Orange trees didn’t have much of a root system, so Hemingway scraped a few inches of the topsoil away from the stump, then she wrapped a chain around it, then the all-terrain vehicle pulled the roots free of the sandy soil.
Ever since the skeleton had been found, investigators from the sheriff’s department had been trying to poke around the grove and pick her brain. She couldn’t let them onto her land until the west field was completely cleared, but that didn’t stop her from wondering who the woman in the cypress tree might have been. Jenny devoured every word of the medical examiner’s report in yesterday’s newspaper. She and Hemingway had been tossing around theories as they pulled stumps.
“Did your grandfather have a girlfriend?” Hemingway asked.
“He had a lot of girlfriends, but he liked them young,” Jenny confirmed. Her grandmother died of cancer when Gus was in his early thirties. The lady in the tree was at least fifty. She would have been around twenty years older than her grandfather at the time, so a romantic link was unlikely.
Hemingway scraped more dirt from the base of a stump. “Could she have worked for him? Like a bookkeeper or something?”
“Maybe,” she said, securing a chain around the remnants of the tree. The Summerlins had been poor for generations until her grandfather turned the family fortune around through clever grove management and stock market investments. A bookkeeper would make sense because although Gus was smart, he didn’t have a formal education. As he accumulated money, he built the front porch and upgraded the electrical wiring in the old farmhouse with his own two hands. Later, he built two supply sheds and an actual fallout shelter during the Cold War paranoia of the 1950s.
“I don’t think she worked for him,” Jenny said after a little consideration. “Bookkeepers simply don’t carry around Fabergé eggs.”
Hemingway mounted the ATV and slowly advanced, dragging the chained stump forward, the ropey roots flinging a spray of sandy dirt as the root ball came free of the soil. By the time they moved to the next stump, Hemingway was ready with another theory.
“Your grandfather was a hoarder,” he said. “He built two sheds to store the junk he collected from flea markets and yard sales. What if he found that Fabergé egg at a yard sale from someone who didn’t know its value?”
It could happen. Jenny had once heard about an original copy of the Declaration of Independence hidden inside the frame of an ugly painting bought at a garage sale. It was the best theory so far.
“Maybe the lady was someone he hired to appraise it,” Jenny said. “The lady figured out its value and tried to steal it. Gus was hot-tempered and wouldn’t have tolerated anyone stealing from him.”
“This still doesn’t explain how she ended up dead in the tree with the egg,” Hemingway said.
“Maybe she was hiding? Maybe Gus caught her red-handed trying to steal the egg and he came after her. She hid in the tree waiting for him to leave the grove.”
“Hid until she died?” Hemingway asked skeptically.
“Maybe a snake got to her when she was hiding,” Jenny said. Florida had its share of poisonous snakes, and if one bit the lady in the tree, it wouldn’t take long for her to die in there.
If Gus legally bought that egg at a flea market or yard sale, she and Hemingway would be entitled to keep it. The last time an egg like that had gone up at auction, it fetched $33 million. After auction fees and taxes, she and Hemingway would probably clear ten million dollars each.
She squatted down to wrap a chain around the next stump. What would she do with all that money? At the very least, she’d hire someone to yank these stumps for her.
The honk of a truck startled her and she dropped the chain, turning around to spot a television news truck idling behind the gate at the entrance to the grove.
“Hey!” a female called out through cupped hands. “Can we come inside to get a little film about where you found that skeleton?”
It was Penny Danvers, a reporter for the local news station. It was probably uncomfortable to walk on a gravel road in high heels and a snazzy suit, but it looked like Penny was ready for an on-camera interview.
Hemingway handed her the shovel. “I’ll take care of this,” he muttered, bounding down the front drive toward the reporter.
The news crew was a nerve-racking invasion of her privacy. It was a miracle that none of the people who extracted the skeleton last week raised any questions about this burned acre. If the local newscast included video footage of this part of the grove, thousands of people would see it and someone might figure out what she and Hemmingway did.
It probably wasn’t a crime. The state would howl about it, but most citrus growers would do exactly what she did if they found a case of the highly contagious citrus disease taking root in their grove. A smart grower would kill the infected trees immediately, then stake out a perimeter and burn everything nearby in case the infection had spread.
That wasn’t how the state wanted it handled. According to Florida law, trees infected with citrus canker were to be reported to the Department of Agriculture, who would quarantine the grove and cut down everything within several acres of the outbreak. Given where the infection hit on the edge of the west field, that meant she’d lose most of her grove.
There was no cure for citrus canker. It caused ugly brown splotches on the leaves and fruit, then the tree would drop its leaves and die. She had to act quickly or the entire grove would die. She’d burned the infected tree and a large swath around it to protect the rest of the grove.
The problem was now solved. Maybe it was just that she was optimistic by nature, but even after the catastrophe of Jack’s death and Wyatt’s abandonment, she was going to be okay. Thirty acres was a lot for two people to manage on their own, but she and Hemingway had done it, and she was proud.
The odd thing was that the harder she worked, the happier she became. She and Hemingway had sweat bullets to keep this grove up and running, and it had become the greatest satisfaction of her life. It was proof that nothing was impossible. The immovable object could be moved. The tide could be turned. Hard work would be rewarded if she simply refused to yield to despair.
The past eighteen months had been filled with hardships and close calls. She came within a week of having the grove repossessed because she’d neglected to pay her property taxes. Jack had been an accountant at the phosphate mine and handled the grove’s paperwork, so she never realized she’d missed several payments until an anonymous note appeared in her mailbox shortly before the deadline.
That note saved her from financial ruin and she often wondered who put it in her box. That last-minute note from a good Samaritan proved there were still decent people in the world. Most people were good, even if she’d seen too much of the bad side.
Hemingway came striding back toward her. “They’re gone?” she asked.
“They grumbled, but they’re gone.”
She nodded and leaned down to secure the chain on another stump. The less attention Summerlin Groves got, the better. The McAllisters had finally consented to allow her a visit with Jack’s six-year-old son. She hadn’t seen Sam since before the murders, and time was growing short for her to reestablish a relationship with the boy before he forgot her.
The first time she tried to see Sam was only a few weeks after that terrible night. The McAllisters had blocked her telephone number, so she drove out to their ranch in hope of discussing the issue like rational adults.
It hadn’t worked. Kent McAllister called the police and threatened to take out a restraining order against her if she tried to see his grandson again. The restraining order never materialized, but there had been no thaw in her relationship with the McAllisters until last evening when a telephone call from Mr. McAllister tersely agreed to a brief meeting with Sam this weekend. She had no idea why he changed his mind but was too grateful to question it.
She and Hemingway successfully pulled two more stumps and then Hemingway let out a curse, and she followed his gaze.
The news crew hadn’t left, and were erecting a scaffold right outside her fence. In all likelihood, they intended to take a birds-eye film of her grove, meaning they’d capture the ugly scorch mark in the west field.
“Are they allowed to do that?” Hemingway asked.
Jenny didn’t know. They weren’t allowed on her land without permission, but did the law allow them to build a scaffold to spy on her?
It didn’t matter; she needed to make them leave. She hopped on the back of the ATV and Hemingway gunned the engine, carrying them down the front drive quickly. They parked the ATV on her side of the locked farm gate.
“You can’t set that thing up here,” Jenny said, gesturing to the scaffolding that was already ten feet high and perilously close to the narrow county road.
There were three people on the news crew. Two men in blue jeans and T-shirts, and Penny Danvers, the on-air reporter, whose sleek chestnut hair was arranged in a perfect coif that ran along her jaw. Penny’s voracious ambition could devour half the state of Florida, and Jenny had dubbed her “Bad Penny” years ago.
“This is public land and we have a right to use it,” Penny said.
“It’s a safety hazard,” Jenny retorted, mimicking the way Wyatt sounded whenever he spotted people doing something risky. “People come barreling down this road at fifty-five miles per hour. You’re creating a visual distraction and it’s dangerous.”
Penny’s smile was insincere. “Then let us on your land to film. If anyone is causing a safety hazard, it’s you.”
“I am entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy on my own land, so I’m warning you not to shoot anything,” Jenny said.
“Shoot anything?” Penny asked. “I guess your family knows all about shooting things. Have you gotten your guns back? Because I don’t think a felon like you is allowed to have them.”
Jenny was too stunned to summon a reply, but Hemingway came to her rescue.
“Jenny’s not a felon,” he said in a casual tone. “She plea-bargained down to a lesser charge.”
Jenny kept her chin up, even though last year’s brush with the law over a trespasser on her property still smarted. The gun charges against her had been completely unreasonable, but an aggressive district attorney came at her with everything in his arsenal. And yes, she had been in danger of going to jail on a technicality until someone in the county government talked sense into the D.A. She was lucky to escape with probation and a slap on the wrist.
Legal threats could go both ways. The United States was the most litigious country in the developed world, and threats of a lawsuit tended to bring corporations into line.
“If you broadcast images of my grove without my permission, I will sue you and your television station to kingdom come.”
It was a bluff. Jenny didn’t have the spare cash to consult a lawyer, let alone file a lawsuit, but she must have sounded convincing because Penny conferred with her two camera guys, and a few minutes later the men returned to the truck . . . but left the scaffolding.
“We’ll be back,” Penny said.
“Bad Pennies always turn up when you least expect them,” Hemingway taunted. Penny’s glare turned poisonous before she turned heel and stalked back to the news van.
“I have no idea what you ever saw in that woman,” Jenny said.
Hemingway flashed one of his wickedly dashing grins. “She’s actually a lot of fun. Penny can juggle shot glasses while mildly buzzed and improvise poetry in iambic pentameter. She’s smart, determined, and ruthless.”
“She seems like the kind of woman who’d sell her firstborn child for a promotion.”
Hemingway scoffed. “Penny would sell her first, second, and thirdborn if it would get her a promotion to New York or London.”
“Is that why you broke up with her? Penny’s ambition?”
He shook his head. “I broke up with her because she cheats at cards. People who cheat when the stakes are low will never stick by your side when you need to storm the beaches at Normandy.”
Jenny felt like she’d been storming the beaches of Normandy for the past eighteen months. Penny and her crew left the scaffolding in place, an indication their retreat was only temporary. They were likely to come back unless Jenny could figure out a way to scare them off permanently.
Wyatt felt lousy about his blunt refusal to help the sheriff’s office make inroads with Jenny about the skeleton, but that body was dumped on the grove long before Jenny was born. She probably didn’t know anything about it, although Wyatt knew who might.
Millicent Hawkins had been his fourth-grade teacher at Amity Elementary. In a town this small, half the people in Amity had Mrs. Hawkins as their fourth-grade teacher, and the other half wished they’d had Mrs. Hawkins.
Mrs. Hawkins grew up in this town and had a long memory. He couldn’t guess her age, but everyone knew that once upon a time, Millicent Hawkins had been courted by the richest young man in town. Max Wakefield was heir to the United Phosphate mining fortune, and while in high school he and Millicent had been an item and foolishly believed that love could conquer anything.
The Wakefields might have been rich and powerful, but in the 1950s, a romance between the white son of a prominent family and the Black daughter of a postman wasn’t going to be universally popular. Max’s parents warned him against dallying with Millicent, and yet Max ignored their warnings. He and Millicent sat at the counter of the soda fountain in town. He even took her to the senior prom. Florida wasn’t the Deep South, and most people could tolerate that sort of thing, even if it wasn’t celebrated.
No one ever knew what caused their romance to fade, but after high school Max went to India to work on a charity mission before eventually coming home to attend Yale University. While he’d been gone, Millicent graduated from Bethune-Cookman College over in Daytona Beach. She became a teacher and married a dentist, then a few years later Max married the daughter of a stockbroker.
Millicent never said a bad word about Max Wakefield, even as he climbed in the world of politics, first serving as a congressman and now in his fourth term as a U.S. senator. When the senator and Millicent Hawkins were young and in love, they spent plenty of time on Wakefield land, which bordered the west side of Summerlin Groves.
Which meant that Mrs. Hawkins might know something about the skeleton in the tree.
He headed to the town square to meet with her. Amity had once been among the wealthiest small towns in Florida, which was still evident by the town square with its statuesque courthouse and a copper-topped bandstand. Quaint, bow-fronted shops lined the east side of the square, while the adjacent street had a row of grand old Victorian homes. All of it had been built on fortunes made from oranges and phosphate.
Now the orange industry had competition from Brazil, and the phosphate industry competed with Morocco. The stately town square was showing its age. The sprawling Victorian homes had been subdivided into duplexes or turned into private businesses. The grandest of them was a bed and breakfast, one was a funeral home, and the two-story Victorian painted a sunny yellow was a dentist’s office. After Dr. Hawkins retired, a new dentist moved into his office, but the Hawkins family still lived upstairs on the second floor.
Wyatt’s footsteps thudded on the front porch steps as he approached the door. He pressed the doorbell to their unit and waited, eyeing the porch with a critical stare. It was worrisome to see old people navigating all these steps. He didn’t even like ringing the bell because Mrs. Hawkins was liable to come downstairs to answer it herself.
She did. “Hello, Wyatt,” she said fondly. Mrs. Hawkins was at least seventy, but still attractive. A spray of wrinkles fanned from her eyes when she smiled, adding to her air of genteel dignity.
He nodded to the potted geraniums. “You might want to cover those,” he said. “I hear a cold front is on the way.”
She nodded and held the door open for him. “Alvin says he’s going to take care of it tonight,” she said in reference to her husband. He was still “Dr. Hawkins” to Wyatt, just like she was still Mrs. Hawkins. He followed her up the staircase to her second-story home, where the original hardwood floors gleamed with a fresh coat of varnish. As always, it smelled like lavender potpourri. Mrs. Hawkins always loved lavender. She had a framed poster of the lavender fields of France in her fourth-grade classroom, and now that same poster held a place of honor over the mantel.
He was glad Dr. Hawkins wasn’t here. This conversation might get awkward, and it would be easier without her husband nearby.
“You heard about that skeleton they found at Summerlin Groves?”
She nodded. “Have they figured out who it is?”
“Still looking.” He filled her in about the few details he was at liberty to share. “I know that you were sometimes over at the Wakefield place during the fifties. Do you remember an older woman who went missing around that time?”
“The Wakefields had a lot of help,” she said. “Housekeepers, lawn people, cooks. They were all Black. My own mother worked as their cook for twenty years. The Wakefields entertained a lot, so there were always lots of people around. High-flying people. Governors and movie stars. Princess Margaret came once. Those were the only times they asked me to stay away.”
His mouth tightened. Society had come a long way, but a woman as old as Mrs. Hawkins had living memories of being asked to leave the room or drink from another water fountain.
“Now don’t you frown like that,” Mrs. Hawkins said. “Karl Wakefield was very progressive for his time.”
Karl was the senator’s father and had been the wealthiest man in the state at the time. He died sometime in the 1980s, but he was internationally renowned as a philanthropist and even did a stint as the American ambassador to the United Nations. Mrs. Hawkins continued to defend the old man’s memory.
“Old Mr. Wakefield was never a racist,” she insisted. “He was a real gentleman and had lots of ideas about how the downtrodden should be lifted up and how the state had a duty to help the working people.”
“That’s because he was a communist,” Wyatt pointed out. According to the history books, it was why he’d lost his appointment to the U.N. during the red scare of the 1950s. Karl might not have been an official member of the communist party, but his admiration for the Soviet Union wasn’t something he ever denied.
Mrs. Hawkins was nonchalant about old Mr. Wakefield’s political views. “He grew up in the 1920s when it was fashionable to be a communist.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He was named after Karl Marx. His family got driven out of Russia before the revolution because they were communists. They changed their name from Vaykfildov to Wakefield, and never looked back.” She smiled and straightened back up. “Anyway, being a communist in the early part of the twentieth century meant that you were a free thinker and cared about the little people. It meant that you didn’t think people like me had to ride in the back of the bus.”
Wyatt shifted uneasily. “Karl still didn’t think you were good enough for his son.”
Mrs. Hawkins gave him a gentle smack on his knee. “If Max hadn’t split with me and gone to India, I never would have met my husband, so don’t get teary-eyed over me, Wyatt the Weeper,” she said, and they both laughed.
The site of his greatest humiliation happened in Mrs. Hawkins’s fourth-grade classroom, and it haunted him to this day.
She used to read to the entire class after lunch. Mrs. Hawkins was convinced that good books could open a world of possibilities to children, and over that fourth-grade year they’d gone on all sorts of adventures as she read to them each day.
Charlotte’s Web was twenty-two chapters, and she read a chapter to the class each day. Her rendition of the novel was masterful. Mrs. Hawkins could switch tones and voices with each line of dialogue, perfectly capturing the hopeful innocence of the farm girl, the brash cleverness of the rat, and the wild emotions of poor Wilbur the pig.
But Charlotte? Mrs. Hawkins used her own voice for Charlotte. It was fitting. Charlotte possessed a gentle, timeless wisdom layered over a core of steadfast strength. Each afternoon Wyatt looked forward to another chapter of Charlotte’s Web.
It was always after lunch when Mrs. Hawkins read to them, and most of the kids laid their heads on their desk while she read. The room was darkened, and Wyatt was swept along with the story as the farm animals engaged in their improbable adventures.
Charlotte wasn’t supposed to die. That wasn’t the end he’d been waiting for. It took him completely by surprise when the wise, wonderful Charlotte gracefully slipped away as death claimed her.
He started crying.
He wasn’t the only one. There were plenty of other sniffles in the classroom as it became obvious that Charlotte was going to perish after performing her great, selfless act of love, but Wyatt was the only boy caught blubbering. He tried to hide it, but it didn’t work. His cover was blown the moment his gulping sniffle echoed in the suddenly quiet classroom.
So. Wyatt the Weeper.
The taunt was slung around his neck in the school hallways and in the lunchroom and on the bus ride home. The name followed him into middle school and high school. He was the best receiver on the varsity football team, and it wasn’t unusual to hear people calling out from the stands, “Throw it to the Weeper!” Someone slipped it into the high school yearbook. The origin of the nickname was lost on a lot of people, but Mrs. Hawkins had been there that day. She remembered.
He cleared his throat and looked at Mrs. Hawkins. “I know you’ve always been a tough lady, but Senator Wakefield was a fool to let you go.” A racist fool , he silently thought, though Mrs. Hawkins’s intuition was sharp enough to read his mind.
“Look me in the eye, Wyatt,” Mrs. Hawkins ordered, a note of steel in her voice. “Senator Wakefield is a good man. Leaving me behind wasn’t easy for him, and I don’t think he ever patched things up with his father for making him leave me. It was a different time, and I don’t blame him for anything. Do you hear me? The two years I spent on Max Wakefield’s arm are something I will never regret, but it ended. Most teenage infatuations do, and that’s all it was.”
“And you don’t have any idea who that lady in the cypress tree was?”
Mrs. Hawkins shrugged. “They say she was a white lady, so that rules out the help on the Wakefield estate. And aside from Max and his family, I didn’t mingle with a whole lot of white people back then.”
Mrs. Hawkins would never lie, but her statement wasn’t a definitive denial, either. She hadn’t wavered from her calm, self-assured gentleness, so that meant she either truly didn’t know who the lady might have been . . . or she had good reasons not to reveal it.