Free Southern Fried by Cathy Pickens

ritual of slamming me against the bathroom wall, a sort of exercise regimen for her through most of elementary school. She’d given that up for more mature pursuits, like sneaking cigarettes behind the gym and sneaking glass-pack mufflers past the Highway Patrol. Lucinda Jane had grown up—and I mean up, to about six feet—and become sheriff of Camden County. That thought frequently frightens me.
    “Guess L.J. hasn’t changed a lot since I last saw her,” I mused.
    “You know Peters?”
    I nodded.
    “I forget what it’s like to live in a town where you expect everybody to know everybody else. And everything.”
    That last comment was loaded. He fixed me with his steady blue-flecked gaze, as if trying to read how much I knew. And trying to decide how much he wanted me to know.
    He decided quickly. “Avery, thank you so much for your time.” He pulled a slip of paper from his pants pocket. “My brother’s address. You may bill me there.”
    “I really didn’t do anything,” I said, as I accepted the proffered slip of paper. “But if I can be of assistance, please give me a call.”
    We did the handshake thing, and he left without causing any discernible ripples among the groupwaiting to see Carlton. Lou Wray stayed out of sight.
    I needed to consider more permanent arrangements for my life, make some calls. Network, as they say. This arrangement with Carlton and the Dragon Lady would serve temporarily—but, thanks to the Dragon Lady, only temporarily.
    What that meeting with Melvin Bertram had been about, I couldn’t tell. He obviously hadn’t learned anything he hadn’t already known. I shrugged mentally. Might as well call it a day. And a busy one it had been, meeting with both my clients in one day.
    I went to retrieve Mom’s van from Aunt Letha’s house. As I covered the handful of blocks up Main Street, Dacus’s version of rush hour—which lasted all of five minutes—moved past on both sides of the crape myrtle-filled median. Daylight faded fast and no one else walked the sidewalks.
    Past the central business district, which filled only three or four blocks, Main Street became a hodgepodge of houses. The newest one probably dated to 1950. A few were stately and multistoried, a couple boasted wide verandas. Most were nondescript clapboard or brick.
    Dacus claimed no special architectural heritage. No grand, glorious past. No landed gentry with elegant town homes. Downstate South Carolina claimed that pride, where the plantation owners—or the modern version, the sharecropper leaseholders—kept their families in town and away from the grubbiness of actual work.
    Dacus, nestled into the foothills of the BlueRidge, had first been settled by Germans searching for some place that looked like home. And it had attracted an independent, almost asocial cast of characters over the decades. But they all knew work. And didn’t much revel in hollow neighborliness. I hadn’t understood the difference until my exile downstate. For such a small state, South Carolina maintained a rare diversity, in accents, work ethic, social proprieties. And temperatures.
    The crispness in the air invigorated me. The weather statistics always show a five- or ten-degree difference over the 150-mile distance to Columbia. But the cheek-chilling bite of fall never shows up accurately in those numbers. I loved the way the air felt here.
    I bent to unlock the van door just as Aunt Hattie nosed the 1980 LeSabre onto the sidewalk, peeking around the driveway shrubs before she pulled into the street. I waved and walked to the passenger window, on Vinnia’s side.
    “Avery,” she called over the top of the window as she cranked it down. “Come go with us.”
    “Where you off to?” I leaned against the car door.
    Hattie, the older of the two by eighteen months, grasped the steering wheel in both hands. Tall and angular, she had no trouble seeing over the car hood’s acreage, and she commanded it with the same authority she’d