The house was old and small, about nine hundred square feet, and directly behind it was a two-story barn topped by a hayloft. It was set on twenty mostly treed acres, though the Robies had raised their own vegetables in a large kitchen garden, grew some corn for sale, and also kept a few horses and cows. And of course chickens.
The front yard was dirt; the bushes and other minimal landscaping had gone to seed. The front porch was sagging. And if that wasn’t enough evidence for Robie that his ramrod-straight father no longer called this place home, three little shirtless black boys were running in circles in the front yard, while their twenty-something mother in cutoff jean shorts and a white tank top hustled after them.
The woman stopped running when Robie pulled up and got out of the car. The three children crowded next to their mother’s broad hips and warily watched his approach, their eyes big as bottle caps.
“Can I help you?” asked the woman, taking a step back and drawing her kids with her. “My husband’s right inside cleanin’ his gun,” she added, in the form of a clear warning. “He just done him some huntin’,” she added. “Kilt him some things.”
Robie looked over her shoulder. “I used to live here a long time ago. My father Dan Robie owned the place. How long have you been here?”
She looked a bit confused and then, as he expected, realization spread over her features. “Robie? Dan Robie is your daddy?”
Robie nodded and again looked toward the house. “So did you buy this place from him?”
“Uh-uh. We moved in two years ago, but we bought it from the Harpers. They headed on up to Chattanooga.”
Robie nodded. “Okay, thanks.” He turned and walked back to his car.
The woman called after him, “Your daddy done kilt a man.”
He turned back around. “So I heard.”
He drove off in a swirl of dust. In the rearview he saw the woman hustle inside, no doubt to tell her hunter husband all about it.
He headed back to Cantrell thinking that he should have asked the woman if she knew where his father now lived. But he hadn’t, so he would have to gain that information some other way. He could ask people in town. It was small enough that someone would know. But he didn’t want to do that, either. After Taggert and then the young mom, he had grown weary of seeing the looks on people’s faces when he identified himself as the son of a murderer.
Alleged murderer, he mentally corrected.
He got back to the main street that cut Cantrell proper into two roughly equal halves and spied what he had earlier. An old phone booth. Through the dirty glass he could see the phone book dangling on the end of a chain.
He parked at the curb, stepped inside the booth, gripped the slender phone book, and flipped through its few pages until he got to the right section.
Dan Robie. He now lived at Willow Hall.
The Willows, as everyone in Cantrell had always called it.
Robie read through this line twice more to make sure he was seeing right.
It wasn’t a street name. It was the name of the house. He knew the place well. He had once dated a girl who lived there with her family.
Laura Barksdale’s father could trace his roots all the way back to when Mississippi was first settled. The Willows had once been a classic southern plantation complete with an army of slaves. The Barksdales’ ancestors had commanded Confederate troops in the Civil War. They had led Citizens’ Councils to keep blacks in their place when the civil rights movement came to Mississippi. They were prominent and wealthy and…
And now his father owned the place?
He left the phone booth to find two black men staring at him from a few feet away. One was big and bulky, wearing faded jeans, white sneakers, and a gray T-shirt.
The other man was smallish but wiry, with sculpted shoulders and thick forearms shown off because he had on a wife beater along with baggy black corduroys.
Robie nodded at them both and then started to walk past.
“Will Robie?” said the bigger man.
Robie turned to look at him. He was maybe twenty, not even born when Robie had left this place.
“Yeah?”
“You know my daddy?”
“I don’t know. Who’s your daddy?”
“Billy Faulconer.”
The image of a huge teenager with enormous shoulders, beefy arms, and a hearty laugh, which he used often, seeped into Robie’s brain.
Robie said, “We were on the football team together. He was a helluva left tackle. Protected my blind side really well.”
“Y’all were state champs your senior year. Got yourselves a parade and everythin’. Daddy still talks ’bout it.”
Billy Faulconer must’ve had kids young, Robie calculated. Pretty much right after high school. But in Cantrell that was not so unusual. There was no mad rush off to college for the high school graduates. There was only one sudden, panicked thought, really:
Now what the hell do I do?
He said, “It was a nice ride. Good for the town. No team from here had ever beaten a team from Jackson.”
“He talked ’bout you, too. Said you just upped and left one night after you finished high school. Nobody heard from you no mo’.”
Robie was not about to get into all that. “So how’s Billy doing?”
“Not so good. He got the cancer in his lungs. Ain’t long for this world.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that.”
The tall young man looked at him appraisingly. “You here ’bout your daddy, ain’t you? What got you back here, right?”
“What’s your name?”
“Named after my daddy. But folks just call me Little Bill.”
“You’re pretty big for that name.”
“My daddy’s bigger. Least he used to be before the cancer got him.”
“So what do you know about Sherman Clancy dying? And my father being arrested for the murder?”
Little Bill shrugged. “Not much. Bad blood twixt the two.”
“Based on what?”
The smaller man said, “Jury ain’t convict old Clancy and that got your daddy all riled, I reckon.”
“Convict him of what?”
“Killin’ that gal,” said Little Bill. “Janet Chisum. Nice gal. Till someone did what they done to her.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I never heard of the Chisums.”
“They moved here a while back. She was a pretty white gal. One of three gals in the family. She done went out one night and never come back. Found her in the damn Pearl River the next day hooked on a tree. Shot in the head. Gator had taken a bite outta her, too.”
“And Clancy was arrested for the murder? Why?”
The smaller man said, “Somebody done seen him with the gal. That part of the Pearl is near his house. Other stuff cops know about.”
“But the jury acquitted him?”
“Yes they did,” said the smaller man.
“Why?”
The smaller man was about to say something but Billy broke in, “Clancy’s got himself a lot of friends hereabouts.” He rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “And he got him money.”
His friend gave Little Bill a funny look but said nothing.
Robie looked confused. “Money! The Clancys were dirt-poor farmers when I was here.”
Little Bill shook his head. “That all changed. They done found gas or oil on his land. And then he took that money and got in early with some of the casino boys. Made himself a lotta cash. A lot. Got him a big old place down by the Pearl.”
“Had,” said his friend. “He ain’t got nothin’ no mo’.”
Robie said, “Okay, but why would my father be so angry that he was acquitted that he would kill him?”
“’Cause he be the judge,” said Little Bill.
Robie stared at him. When he’d left Cantrell his father had a small law practice that barely kept the roof over their heads. Most of his fees were paid in barter.