Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

their first meeting, not long after the engagement was announced, “but it’s taken our people a long time to rate a minstrel in the family.” And his eyes—his bright, narrow, happy, entitled, avian old eyes—gloated on their small, mean victory, before Clive turned away, putting Ran to death. He’d been at the zenith then—Ran hadn’t recognized it as the top, of course, but, looking back, it was. “Talking in My Sleep” was winning airtime in every major urban market in the country; they’d been nominated for a Grammy. Growing up in Bagtown, being Mel Hill’s son—he’d put all that behind him, or thought he had, till Clive, in a single second, with a single word, sent him plummeting right back. Like his sister Tildy seemed intent on doing now.

“Don’t let her get to you,” he whispered to himself, aloud. But the voice said, Oh, go ahead and let the old bitch have it—it might even do her good. You know damn well if she’d ever gotten fucked, if she’d loosened up that much, just once, she wouldn’t have turned into such a spiteful, raisin-faced old judge and monster. Give her a dose of her own meds—a bog-Irish car bomb with a lithium chaser on the side.

“Shut up,” Ran said, no longer fully sotto voce. Across the street from Hope, a man came out of a house and reached into his pocket…. Beep, beep. It was only a remote, thank God. Thank God! The trunk of a Mercedes popped.

“What?” Tildy demanded as he muttered to himself. “What did you say to me?”

When he turned, Ran’s expression had left the artificial country of goodwill. “Look, Tildy, Miss DeLay, whatever I’m supposed to call you after nineteen years, I’m not here to fight.”

“Why are you here?” she demanded, imperious and unmoved.

“Because this morning two dead bodies turned up at Wando Passo, buried in shallow graves.”

Tildy blinked and blinked again. “So they’ve finally found them.”

“Found who?”

“Harlan and Adelaide DeLay.”

His jaw flexed. “We’re on the same wavelength, then. He died from a gunshot to the head. She may have been shot, too. They’re taking the remains to Columbia to examine them.”

“God, rest them. God, rest their souls.” Tildy, for the first time, looked away. “Claire should be telling me this, not you. Why isn’t she?”

“She was at school when it happened. She still doesn’t know. I drove straight here after I talked to the police.”

“Why?” Tildy demanded.

“Why? Because I want to know what happened to them. I want to know what you know.”

“Then you’ve driven a long way for nothing. The records from Wando Passo were destroyed when Grandfather’s law office burned in the Great Earthquake.”

“There must be stories….”

“Very few. Mother believed they went to Cuba. She said Harlan came back from the war”—waw, she said—“destitute and broken. They couldn’t make a go, so they ran away, like Keats’s lovers. ‘Aye, ages long ago, These lovers fled away into the storm.’ I don’t suppose you know ‘St. Agnes.’”

“No, but I’d say we can rule that theory out.”

“Mother’s temperament ran to the romantic. Daddy”—Deaddy, she said—“believed the nigras did it.”

“The ‘nigras’?” Ran couldn’t help himself.

Tildy glared. “I suppose you find it ironic, the way I refer to the colo’eds. I am a product of my time and place, as are you, Ransom Hill, whether or not you have the wit to recognize the fact. What you’ve said turns my suspicions toward the husband.”

“Harlan.”

“Harlan. Though he came from money, he was the upstart in that marriage—not unlike yourself.”

“You aren’t going to give up, are you?” Ransom said. “You’re hell-bent and determined to get a rise from me.”

“I’m determined to say what I believe,” she answered. “If I were a man, and younger, I’d rise out of this chair right now and thrash you within an inch of your life for what you’ve done to Claire and those poor children. I’d send you back to North Carolina with your tail between your legs and make you crawl back under whatever ill-favored rock it was that you were spawned beneath. So help me God, if I were a man, and young, I would.”

“If you were a man, and young,” said Ran, his shirtfront rising and falling, as he panted shallowly, “I guess we’d see.”

She got him, though, with the allusion to the kids. Pulling back the paper cambric sheer, he checked again. The man with the remote was loading a suitcase into the Benz. A Charleston type, in his midthirties, he had thick, dark hair, perfectly groomed, with a first distinguished touch of frost at the temples, and wore a black cashmere sweater with gray flannel pants and shoes of some gleaming, welted skin. They were tassel-loafers—Ran had always hated tassel-loafers. That’s who they wanted, Ransom thought, that’s who they wanted for Miss Claire. This guy was supposed to be Hope and Charlie’s father.

“Why?” he asked, and then he turned. “Why would he have killed her, Tildy?”

“Why?” she fumed. “Why do husbands ever terrorize and kill their wives? Since when was an excuse required? They do so because they poison the well from which love springs and then expect the water to be pure. They expect women to love them like their mamas did—or didn’t—then test that love with outrageous behavior till they succeed in driving it away; when they have, they then set out to wreak vengeance on their ‘betrayal’—isn’t that the way of it? You, I should think, would have consid’able insight into the phenomenon.”

An ominous calm stole over Ransom. “I know you never approved our marriage, Tildy.”

“I made no secret of the fact.”

“You never thought I was good enough for Claire.”

“In a word, no, I did not. And do not now.”

Ran stared and began to nod. “You know what, Tildy? At my worst, when I was sick, I’ve feared that, too. Standing here right now, I fear it still. But at my best, and not even that—when I was just my normal weekday self—I’ve always believed I was good enough for Claire, and, in fact, I