Delta Ridge Read online

  Delta Ridge

  By Frances Downing Hunter

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. If they seem familiar, it is likely because we all know people who touch, nourish, impact, or even terrorize us as we journey along our unique and fascinating paths through life.

  © 2016 by Frances Downing Hunter

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning,

  or other — except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Address inquires to PhillipsMemphis, POB 613378, Memphis, TN 38103 or [email protected]

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hunter, Frances Downing 1939-2016

  Delta Ridge

  1.Title. 2. Frances Downing Hunter. 3. Mystery.

  4. Contemporary Fiction.

  Table of Contents

  1 The Discovery

  2 The Return

  3 What Day Is It?

  4 Holly Meets The Firm

  5 Reflecting On Michael And Men

  6 Getting Over Michael

  7 Good Hair Day

  8 Weekend At The Farm

  9 Wakes And Waves

  10 Death Is Contagious

  11 Dining Out

  12 Dreams And Nightmares

  13 Michael’s Note

  14 Road To Jericho

  15 Holly’s Investigation

  16 Simon Calls

  17 The Cruelest Month

  18 Ashes To Ashes

  19 Talking Drunk

  20 Jack Calls

  21 Holly Gets A Shoulder X-Ray

  1 The Discovery

  HER EYES, PROTRUDING from the mud pack covering her face and girdling her chin, were locked on the television’s crackling snow. Buttressed by mounds of tattered lace pillows, she sat upright in bed as if resting a moment before entering her bath and preparing her final toilette. The February hyacinths, their lavender faces peeking from the Delft blue vase on the bedside table, emitted a cloying scent that permeated the room and camouflaged the odor of fresh death, a death that was merely six hours old, according to the coroner who took Mildred Tice’s temperature after he arrived at the house at 8:00 A.M. on Friday morning.

  Mildred’s husband Dr. Bill Tice appeared to have suffered a somewhat harder night. His body, splayed face down on the gray marble bathroom floor, appeared to the casual observer far less comfortable than hers. His silk Charmeuse pajama trousers were knotted tightly about his knees so that his final act was perhaps a defiant mooning of his retreating killer. Now the scene was captured again in photographs for the somewhat jaded officers called in to investigate the double murder event.

  “Whoever did it must have scared the crap out of him,” said the younger officer with a wry smile and a face ashen as the marble beneath his feet.

  Glancing at Dr. Tice, my stomach churned. What am I doing here? Please, God, don’t let me faint.

  “Good morning, officer,” I said. “How are things progressing?” Not waiting for a response, I shot him my best sardonic smile, feigning confidence. My eyes wandered through the open bathroom door and settled on the toilet as I questioned whether flushing it would be tampering with evidence.

  TIME TO CALL the firm. Marie Mason, personal secretary to Hamilton Carter, senior partner of the Carter Law Firm, answered my call by speaker phone.

  “It’s Holly, Ham. She says it’s urgent.”

  “I’ll take it in my office, Marie.” I heard him tell her.

  “Yes, Holly?” His tone was quizzical.

  “Ham, we’ve got a double murder. It’s bad. Old Doc Tice and his wife stabbed to death sometime last night. The maid found their bodies this morning when she came to make breakfast at seven o’clock.”

  “My god, where were they?” His years as prosecutor took over, although, at seventy, he had not held the office officially in two decades. He merely controlled who did. “Were there any signs of forced entry?” he asked before I answered his first question.

  “I don’t think so. There are three detectives here now. The coroner just left, and I was told it looks like massive stab wounds as the preliminary cause of death. There’s blood everywhere, but they haven’t found the weapon. A specialist from Little Rock is coming to sweep for fibers.”

  “Is the crime lab in Little Rock sending someone up, as well, to do luminal testing on the kitchen knives?”

  “Chief Collins says they will, and they’re sending scrapings to the FBI for DNA testing. Right now, they’re doing splatter tests.”

  “Holly, what the hell are you doing there?”

  “Well, I seem to be the only one in this law firm who arrives at 7:30 A.M. I took the call and headed here straight away.”

  “Really? Are you okay?”

  “Of course, why wouldn’t I be?” I tried to iron out the shakiness from my voice. But Ham knew me better than that.

  “I think you should come back to the office right now. Until Garland gets home from the Caribbean, our new deputy prosecutor can handle this.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Great way to start the week, Holly! I guess you’re a rookie no more.” He chuckled as he hung up the phone.

  Ham wasn’t there when I returned to the firm, so I went into my new office, closed the door, and tried to process the scene I had just left without screaming.

  Like the great dramatist Ibsen said and I often recall, “Humankind cannot bear too much reality,” and I, a self-proclaimed drama queen, have had far too much of it in my life, created both by myself and by my mother long before today’s double murder occurred on my first day of my new job.

  But it was so eerie going back into the Tices’ house after being away for so many years. I lowered my clammy face into my shaking hands now that no one could see me. Just terrible! That horrified look on a face that had once been so kind to a lonely child reluctantly traveling from school to a home that was less than welcoming.

  I HAVEN’T SEEN Victoria in two years, and I don’t know what mask she’s wearing these days. I’d called her occasionally because my therapist told me to, and I’d say, “Victoria, what’s up with you?” She likes me to call her by her given name, because she doesn’t want anyone else to know that she’s the mother of a thirty-year-old daughter. She really isn’t. Every time I needed her to be a mother, she was out of state or out of her mind. Consuming gin and prescription drugs took up a good bit of her time during my formative years when I walked through the back alley to eat cookies at the now-deceased Mrs. Tice’s house prolonging my return home. Queen Esther, our housekeeper, kept our house and me clean and safe while Victoria was away on her frequent spa trips and rehabbing vacations.

  I’m told that Victoria is clean now. I don’t know for certain. She speaks straight enough on the phone—sort of flat lined, like she just buried her pet spider monkey; but I prefer the polar to the bi. In her case cold is better than flame. In the past she could burn up everyone in her path before anybody knew there was a match in the house. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, and dramatically too; but her scorched earth policy singed my hair (and my heart) numerous times. I’m still jumpy and a little tense when I’m around her even when I try hard to remain detached. I don’t hate her anymore, although I still suspect her of committing a deplorably evil act. I also imagine that she feels as much guilt over it as she’s capable of feeling, being permanently stuck with the brain of a teenager.

  Yes, I’ve read all those studies of drug damage to the prefrontal lobe. And yes, of course, I know that manic depression can’t be turn
ed on or off like a fire hose. Any place it takes up lodging becomes a drowning pool for the other residents. Like the Eagles’ song “Hotel California,” you can never leave; neither does the disease.

  There used to be a joke around the local country club that the board had added lithium to the drinking water because all the nightly bar maniacs self-medicated with alcohol and pills and duplicated themselves twice, unfortunately, once in their children.

  Even Mother’s benign projects are ridiculous because her judgment is so bad. One time she built an aviary at the farm to hold all the native birds in the Spring River region—birds that had appeared quite happy flying free over the thick woods and the green river. But no, she determined that captivity was safer, and she could show off her feathered-friend collection to her other friends and entice busy people to visit her at the farm. When a huge oak tree dropped a loose limb on her glass palace, sixty-two species flew away, leaving her with half a serrated iceberg, all frosted glass and jagged edges. She talked of turning the broken structure into a solarium to house rare orchids she didn’t yet own; but Ham said, “No, Vickie, why don’t you take up oil painting. I’ll have the side porch glassed in for you to use as a studio?” Because she preferred to go forward only with her own half-baked ideas, the ones that came flying out of her polar ice cap world, she stalled, as Ham knew she would, and half a crystal palace still stands at the farm as a symbol of Mother’s folly and Ham’s quick thinking.

  On a foggy day when it’s difficult to see hardly anything, a driver can turn the sharp curve on the winding gravel road that leads from the highway, and a ghost house seems to magically appear. It’s creepy. Her fans might say, “It’s as strangely beautiful as is Victoria when she appears, half-hidden, in her own mysterious haze.” They might say that beautiful damage, at first neither discernible nor visible, always tricks the eye, that like her airborne birds, when her imagination takes flight, her projects too, fly to thinner air. And she always flees with them, leaving us, her subjects, mere groundlings below. They might say that any woman capable of committing the most violent of acts yet able to keep her position in society is fascinating; but I would say, “She’s creepy.” But then again, is there anything harder than spending one’s life pursuing something one has no talent to achieve? I think Victoria is a failed writer, a writer who tries and tries and tries but can’t write. Maybe it’s because she can’t love either.

  FORTUNATELY, THERE ARE others in my family who nurture me. During my years in Little Rock, in both law school and later at work, I lived frugally, trying to detach myself from any dependence on my grandfather who owns most of Delta Ridge, and who would like to own me again. I have always been his little buddy—a relationship that began in my childhood when my mother was otherwise occupied. Ham never trusted many people, but even as a child, I kept confidences.

  “Did you see how that woman looked at me, Holly? Women aren’t supposed to leer. I like to do the pursuing.” His planting of those adult disclosures created an intimacy early on that grew throughout my adulthood and kept me from trusting men—I later decided. I love my grandfather, but I know he’s an old chauvinist who doesn’t see women as people. But like any hardened man, he has his soft spots. For Ham it’s his family, the extensions of himself. We are the only people he really cares about. Others have burned him, or tried too, so he is not given to trust.

  Even as a teenager I could see that Ham was a fraud in most every way, but my love for him never diminished. I knew that, like a lot of Southern men, he controlled as much of his world as he could. He couldn’t always control his women or his drinking, but he had a way of making certain that everything around him functioned to disguise that. As best he could he created the world he wished to live in, though he himself was as heavy-handed and rough-cut as the raw timber sheared from his own daddy’s mud-filled lumber yards. I grew up seeing Southern elegance poured out of a magazine, bathing my grandfather’s house, even though nothing about him personally was elegant.

  “Waterford on the sideboard, hand-tied on the floor, and original art on the wall, not some crapped up copy of an old master—that’s what separates us from the ribbon cutters and new rich who don’t know the difference between what is valuable and what isn’t.”

  I’m sure that in his mind Ham wants to find me a prince and make all my dreams come true—bring home the right man for me like he did for my mother. But I know that Ham’s presents have streamers and strings tied to them, dangling and twisted as spider webs, sticky with obligation, sometimes forever. Despite Ham’s attempts, pride disallows me a captive prince even though my mother married her chosen one. And like Ham, because my mother lacks self-control, she wishes to control everything around her—except for me, of course. She never bothered with me; I was not intriguing enough to gain her interest or her heart.

  I’VE OFTEN WONDERED if all the women among my early ancestors, who came to America in the 1700s, wanted what I want; but I know they couldn’t have imagined having what I have. And I know they would not have felt so unblessed by it, either. From both sides they were farm-working women with dirt in their nail beds. They descended from English aristocracy and fell into hardscrabble, new-world lives and became mere brood stock in a much harder land. As they trailed their men from the tall ships of Virginia’s rough coast to the hard mountains of North Carolina, then on to South Carolina and Alabama before finding their entrance into eastern Tennessee, they passed through the early settlements of Fayetteville and Somerville and Savannah, then ended up in the yellow fever lowlands of Memphis—losing babies along the way. Many of them slipped into death too early and probably too quietly.

  Twelve children was the average number they bore so that most of the sturdier ones lived to an adulthood of tedious labor, planting small plots of corn and pole beans and cucumbers to can for the winter. The mother, used up quickly, usually departed quickly, leaving the father to continue sowing his seed both in the fields and in the next, younger wife. He was meant to live on and sire more children to work the land they walked through, spreading out their number so that each would have enough. Always some settled along the way on a shady hill beside Reed’s Creek in Virginia, above the Ocoee in North Carolina, before the strong-hearted ventured onto the easy rolling hills of southern Tennessee, where some continued to settle and others slogged on. Then, like the wild beasts they encountered along the way, they pushed their young on to new territory to find more land so all could survive. And only those with more dreams than substance fled the fever and forded the big river to surrender finally to the little mountains and settle on the ridge.

  My grandmother Charlotte Thornton Cantrell Carter comes from that line. She married up socially before discovering she had lost her peace and serenity—finding that she must move sideways to save her mind. She married once at twenty-five to a hell-raising man, left him when she was fifty, and moved back to her farm. She left Ham but never divorced him, because there had never been a divorce on her side of the family. Besides, it would have been too complicated—too messy. Charlotte saw herself more as a widow like her own mother had been. At her family’s Spring River farm, she lived simply as had her parents before her. An only child, she inherited the farm and lived off the income it produced. Less than an hour away from Delta Ridge, Spring Hill seemed more like a world away. Charlotte knew she would never want another man, and Ham thought it good to have a wife still out there somewhere. She was his golden-edged shield, used to protect him from the trafficking women who scrambled to marry him as he’d married the others, all three of them, before he met Charlotte when he was forty and found twenty years of peace. For him their marriage was forever. But Charlotte could scarcely find reason or excuse to manage Ham’s wild antics after two decades. She wanted back the peace of her own docile family and her resulting childhood—a peace nobody could hold on to in the eye of Ham’s stormy push-pull moods.

  Ham was embarrassed when Charlotte left him. Sometimes a man who is no good cannot live with a woman who is
, because over time her goodness magnifies the corruption deep in his own soul. A low-down woman who haunts the grainy beer halls and picks up so many men she can’t remember their number or their names can make a weak man feel strong. Charlotte was the only good girl Ham ever wanted, and he always wanted her; but her kind, he had discovered quickly, was too much work. Her image of what he should be lodged in his head and became the yardstick he could never give good measure. Always guilty, that was how her unspoken expectations made him feel. His favorite girls were the available ones, who never took up space in his head, nor tainted his own malevolence. “Never love a complicated woman,” was Ham’s advice to younger men.

  But Grandmother, the product of a God-fearing, circuit-riding Methodist preacher father and a tough, bootstrap mother, had different views. “Girls are supposed to be better than boys,” she drilled into me. “Always remember, Holly, the woman who pollutes her womb spoils the next generation.” I always suspected that Ham had polluted enough wombs to kill a cotton crop, but I knew that my relic-of-another-age Grandmother was trying to save me from the same kind of unhappiness Ham had brought her. The first to refuse his overtures, Ham courted her until she married him and lent her integrity and dignity to his money. His wealth and influence meant nothing to her; she would have loved him for himself if she had found a self she could hold onto and understand well enough to love.

  Perhaps I was the fresh slate; the last one Charlotte could teach the old ways. I was malleable, a seeker, unlike Felicia, her other Grandchild, whom no one influenced. Everyone knew the strength of her will almost from birth when she refused to be born for nearly forty hours, with her own mother facing death. From a weaker generation than their forbearers, my mother Victoria and her sister, Aunt Elizabeth, ordered one baby each (all they could handle).

  Aunt Elizabeth, the younger, much-married daughter of Ham and Charlotte, finally gave up on her fourth set of vows and turned to the study of psychology down at Ole Miss. She and Victoria were of the generation who hired nannies or dumped us girls on Charlotte while they made their shopping trips to Memphis, Little Rock, or even New York each November. Their days in Delta Ridge were spent helping other people’s children through the Junior Auxiliary or co-chairing the first Swine Flu Virus Committee to inoculate the county. Grandmother’s house was the place they went for a last-minute sitter, and where we went for love, attention, home cooked food, and the advice that was a side dish that surprisingly we hungered for.