I went to the single hall closet—the linen closet—and retrieved the table linens—a cloth with lace edging and embroidered bluebells and a set of ten matching napkins, which I also handed to Humbolt. He carefully balanced both fabric and jewelry.
“And do you have an idea where the tool box would be?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I remember it being out in the barn.” I looked over at him. “Do you need to leave soon?” I remembered him saying he was squeezing this in between two other meetings.
“I should go soon, yes,” the lawyer replied, his tone apologetic. “But you two can stay here as long as you like.”
I didn’t want to stay here, but now that wewerehere, I felt obligated to go through the house. To remind myself of all the things I’d blocked out or forgotten I knew, to check to see if there was any evidence that the Augusta Sheriff’s Office had missed. Any clue as to why my father had decided to kill my mother. And check on the goats and chickens.
“Okay,” is what I said out loud to Humbolt. “Then let’s start in the barn.”
I led the way outside, feeling oddly disconnected from myself. As though the feet walking across the gravel weren’t mine, the shoulders being baked by the sun not mine, the nostrils inhaling the scents of loblolly pine and heated dirt not mine.
Somewhere in my head, there was screaming, but I was doing a very good job of ignoring it. Compartmentalization was absolutely necessary when you worked homicide scenes. You couldn’t let your emotions come to the surface when you were staring down at incontrovertible evidence of the horrific things people were capable of doing to one another. It was the only way I was going to be able to handle any of this—by shoving itback and down and hoping it stayed there until I got somewhere private and could properly melt down about it.
As we approached the barn, something let out a loud bleat, and I jumped.
“Hi, goat!” Elliot immediately went straight to the fence, a split-rail with chicken wire behind them to keep the goats safely in the pen. Goats, plural, as two more were trotting across the chewed-down grass in the pen to come see what was so interesting. One of them lookedveryfat, which I was assuming meant there were soon to be more than three goats. Elliot kept talking to them and scritching them, clearly delighted by them.
Maybe I was going to end up with goats.
I shrugged, leaving Elliot to make friends with the goats, and tugged the sliding door to the barn open. The goats had a wide stall inside that opened to the pen—I assumed that door had been left open to allow them to go in and out. There were several more stalls that held various equipment and gardening supplies, as well as a massive work bench covered in tools that were at least a generation old.
Momma had always kept her father’s tool box with the gardening supplies, since the gardens and the chickens were her primary responsibility. I walked to the second stall, pulled open the door, and surveyed the carefully organized tools, bins, containers of compost, coffee grounds, manure… all the things she used to fertilize the plants or shift the pH of the soil.
The tool box was exactly where I remembered it being.
“And here it is,” I said to Humbolt.
He nodded. “Yes, that matches the description.” He smiled at me, then. “That one is yours to take with you, as well, of course.”
“Thank you, Mr. Humbolt,” I said politely.
“You’re quite welcome,” he replied cheerfully. “I… would recommend going through the house, if you have the time,” hesaid, then. “Make lists of things you would like or things you think have resale value. Just in case.”
Just in case I’m wrong and my father actually is dead.
I wondered what the law was regarding property rights if the inheritor of property was a murderer. I was fairly sure that anything that was my mother’s probably couldn’t be inherited by her killer, but I wasn’t sure what it meant for the rest of the property if he were convicted.
“What happens to the farm if my father is found guilty of killing my mother?” I asked Humbolt, even though I knew he needed to leave.
“Well, anything that washiswould still be his,” he replied. “Virginia doesn’t have a statute of civil death, which would cause his property to revert to next of kin. He would be able to designate power of attorney to someone else to continue managing it.”
I nodded.
“Would that be you?” he asked.
I couldn’t help the laugh that barked out of me. “Oh, God, no. My father hated me. Hates me, assuming he’s still alive.”
Humbolt looked a little alarmed. “Do you have a sense of who he might name, in that case?” he asked.
I shrugged. “The Community, or one of its Elders, I assume.”
“Community?”
I looked up at him. “The Community of the Divine Transformation,” I replied.
Humbolt’s eyebrows went up. “I’m not familiar.”
