The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [60]
Unc said nothing.
Then we were at the light for Broad Street, in front of us a horse and carriage tour, the driver standing there with his rebel soldier’s cap on and red sash around his waist, pointing at the customs house to the left of us, the huge old building with its porticoes and windows.
“What makes you think this isn’t anything other than just stupid greed?” Unc said.
I turned to him. “The paperweight.”
He shook his head. “A paperweight. A pine-sap paperweight. The woman’s about to commit suicide, and she came to you, because she couldn’t find me.” He paused. “It’s a gift. Her to me. Now me to you.”
The light changed, and the carriage started off.
I leaned over, saw no oncoming traffic, drove around them.
“But she told me she didn’t do it,” I said. “She told me to tell you she didn’t do it. Didn’t kill her husband.”
Now we were south of Broad, East Bay now East Battery, where the mansions were, that layer of shops and trinkets and restaurants, then that layer of slums on top of that gone now, like it’d never existed. Only these homes mattered now, all else forgotten for the piazzas and joggling boards and perfect walled gardens.
“If she didn’t kill her husband, which you got to believe is the truth, then who did? And why?” I glanced at him again, then back to the street. To the left was the seawall, past it Charleston Harbor itself, on the right these mansions, and I slowed down, looked for the number 26.
“Third house past Atlantic Street,” Unc whispered.
But there was something different on his voice, that whisper not the mournful one he’d given when we’d stopped at the place in Hickory Plantation.
He was thinking on what I’d said.
“So if you think this is all just over who’s going to buy the land,” I said, not quite certain of what I would say, where I was going, “and if you think she was just handing out a paperweight for fun, then you think she did it. And you give up.”
“He’d gone maverick on them,” Unc said. “Charlie did.”
“And goods. Goods. They want the land, what has goods got to do with anything?”
Here was Atlantic Street, a narrow alley off East Battery. I counted three houses down.
And there was a parking spot, right in front.
“We got to get Mom,” I said, and cut the engine. “And we got to get who killed Simons. I think it’s Yandle. Maybe Thigpen. Maybe one of those shits in the truck Thigpen rolled.”
He turned to me, popped open his door. He said, “You keep your mouth clean. We’re here to pay respects.”
A black wreath hung on the huge oak door. We were high above the street, the flight of steps up a good fifteen feet on this three-story brick house, the porch itself as long and wide as the single-wide. White pillars, porch painted gray, the ceiling above us a mint green.
A heavy black woman answered the door. She had on a black maid’s dress, white apron. She looked at us, the door open barely a foot.
Unc’d left the stick in the cab, and he held on to my arm.
She said, “Mrs. Dupree is receiving no more mourners today,” and started to close the door.
He quick let go my arm and took off his hat. He bowed a little, said, “My name is Leland Dillard, and I have come to give my condolences to Mrs. Dupree.”
“Leland?” came a feeble voice from behind the maid, and she looked to her right, and to Unc, then opened wide the door.
A Persian rug ran from one end of the foyer to the other, what seemed fifty feet, to where a staircase emptied out, big and wide. What parts of the wood floor you could see gleamed in the light from a chandelier above us, and already I could smell the flowers, though I couldn’t yet see any. Dark oak went halfway up the walls, above the wood wallpaper thick with a flowered pattern, all golds and reds, the ceiling twelve or fourteen feet in here.
I put a hand to my hair, raked it over, started to tuck in my shirt, one tail hanging out from under my Levi’s jacket, and saw the maid looking at me and Unc both, a hand at the door into the room to our right.
I smiled, nodded