Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

If you don’t, you’ll lose the million, and once you lose the million, you stand to lose the land as well.”

“Did you explain this to my husband?”

“Harlan understands it. But to lift them into a prosperity that, however modest, he considers undeserved galls him more than the thought of ruining himself, and you.”

“I find that hard to credit, Jarry,” she says, with a trace of coolness.

“Do you? I think his view is fairly common. If it weren’t, slavery could have been ended in this country long ago according to the principle I’ve laid out. But it’s a rare man who’ll voluntarily surrender power over another, even when it’s in his ultimate best interest. Harlan, whatever his qualities, isn’t such a man.”

It’s true! It’s true! thinks Addie with despair. Everything that Jarry says is true. So what is this strange compunction she feels stealing over her, the one that makes her stiffen and inquire, “And you thought I would consent to what my husband has expressly forbidden?”

Jarry weighs her tone and answers quietly. “I thought you might recognize that preserving the privileges you have, which are considerable, would be preferable to losing them.”

“I think you know,” she says, “I think you full well know I can’t make changes, radical changes, on my husband’s property without seeking his consent.”

“I see,” he says. “I would have thought that you, as mistress, in his absence, could do pretty much what you have a mind to do.”

“Then we disagree on this. I see no point in continuing in this vein.”

“I agree,” says Jarry, sitting straight now, backing away from her. “This conversation is a waste of breath.”

“Will you read to me?”

“I have no stomach for it now. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He gets up and walks away from her, and she is on the verge, on the very cusp, of saying to him, “I should like it very much if you would read.”

She doesn’t, though.

Later, sitting at her dressing table mirror, she’ll reflect on how close she came to doing this, to giving him an order, in effect, that he’d have been in no position to refuse.

And what if I’m like that, too? she wonders, staring at her image in the glass. What if I’m like Harlan in this way? Isn’t this, at bottom, why she hasn’t surrendered the secret of the will? Because it gives her power over Jarry? Isn’t she as reluctant to surrender that as Harlan would be to give away the profit on a half million pounds of rice? Yet her secret power also has a poisoned quality that makes her queasy. Or is the queasiness something else?

Suddenly Addie notices her eyes. Her pupils have dilated to the size of dimes. And there’s something else. Leaning close, she sees, at her temple, where her hair is fairest—almost colorless, like fronds of dandelion—a coarse black hair. Was it there before? How could she have never noticed it? And as she reaches up to touch it, to spread it between her fingers for a closer look, Addie startles when she sees it twitch.

THIRTY-FOUR

This lady here, Ms. Johns,” said the blue-clad female representative of the PD, “says you offered her a hundred bucks to take your kids.”

The officer, Alberta, Tildy, Della, and Hope—yes, Hope as well—representing a pretty fair cross section of female Charleston, Southern womanhood, das Ewig-Weibliche itself, regarded Ran with unanimously grim looks, a hanging jury itching to convict.

“To watch them,” Ransom qualified. “To watch them for fifteen. What’s the big deal? They’re okay, aren’t they? Aren’t you okay, guys?” He addressed the children now.

“Charlie has a poopy diaper, Dad,” Hope said, in an accusing tone she’d heretofore reserved for Claire.

“I wet, Doddy,” said Charlie, with eyes like rain-sheeted windowpanes. His bottom lip—which was full, like Claire’s (somehow Ran had never noticed this till now)—was trembling.

“Okay, buddy,” Ran said, stricken. “Okay, we’ll get you changed.”

Ransom!

“Shut up,” he said under his breath, smiling at his posse of accusers—who clearly heard him speak—like the honoree at a black-tie benefit who’s farted, loudly, in the middle of his speech. Belatedly, Ran realized the tinny voice he heard was Claire’s.

“Hello?” he said into the phone.

“Ransom, what the hell is going on?” she said. “Why are you in Charleston?”

“They found the bodies, Claire.”

“What?” she said. “What bodies? Who found them? What are you talking about?”

“Harlan and Adelaide.”

Dead air, a sound like distant surf.

“Let me speak to Aunt Tildy,” Claire said, measured now. “No, never mind. Tell her I’m coming down there. Don’t move. I’ll be there in an hour, forty-five.”

“It isn’t necessary, Claire,” he said. “I’m on the case. We’ve got it under control, don’t we, kids?”

Hope and Charlie looked at him with tombstone eyes.

“We’ll be home by suppertime,” he said.

“Don’t move,” said Claire. “Don’t you fucking move an inch. You hear me, Ransom Hill?”

“Sure, sweetie, absolutely. Understood.” Like a harried first executive in the presidential bunker, Ran contemplated the red button and then pressed it, inviting unknown consequences—the end of civilization as we know it, of life on earth. “Call ended,” said the LCD. A little check mark wrote and then erased itself. Ran turned back to the hanging jury with a smile. “Okay, dutes, Mommy’s on her way. She’ll be here in an hour. Everything’s copacetic. Come on, bud….” When he reached for Charlie’s hand, however, the officer stepped between.

“What? I can’t take my own son to the bathroom?” He allowed a note of parental righteousness into his tone. “You’re welcome to come with us.”

The policewoman frowned. “When you’re done, there’s some things we need to straighten out.”

“Absolutely. I’d like to straighten out a couple things myself. We’ll have a straightening convention.” He hoisted Charlie with one arm and cut a glance toward Alberta. “You could’ve cut me a bit more slack, Bert.”

“It ain’t about you. It’s about these babies. You take care of ’em, hear me? Remember what we said.” She gripped him, and Ransom, with a thickening in his throat,