“Maybe the fish liked it.” Rick laughed with her.
“They must have, because Mom caught more than Aunt H, and that didn’t sit well.”
“Do you know if she traveled to other places?” Cooper kept on.
“I do know, again through Mom, that Aunt Hester usually fished in Bath or Highland County in Virginia. They both swore it was the best fishing on the East Coast.”
“I’ve heard that,” Cooper said. “Do you fish?”
“No. I’m a golfer. Love being out there surrounded by such green vistas, sometimes all by myself. Other times in a foursome. Houston has some wonderful courses. Of course, Charlottesville, for such a small place, does, too.”
“Farmington?” Rick raised his voice as a question.
“Those long fairways. Keswick Club is a challenge. Glenmore. A short drive to the Country Club of Virginia. And in four hours I can drive down to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to one of the most fabled golf courses in the country.”
“Did Hester golf?” Cooper pressed on.
“No. Her interests were, as you know, varied: fishing, farming, the library, old buildings. She loved the Library of Virginia in Richmond. Loved Monument Avenue. She had a quiet, longstanding interest in the Virginia tribes.”
Cooper sat up straighter. “Why do you think she was interested in Virginia Indians?”
“Our maternal line is Sessoms, a Cherokee name,” Sarah explained. “But they adapted so well to the early colonists—I mean early as in eighteenth century—that the Sessoms farmed, wore English clothing, spoke English, and intermarried with Europeans. Over time they became so much like the English that they didn’t have the trouble the other tribes did, including the Cherokees in the more southern states. Those people went through hell. Sessoms is a common last name in the tribe, just like Adams is a common last name for the Upper Mattaponi.”
“Did you know that Josh Hill was an Upper Mattaponi?” Cooper felt that little buzz when she knew she was finding her way on a case.
Where it was going, she didn’t know.
Sarah shook her head. “I knew nothing about this fellow, but he appears to have been a fishing buddy, and if he was a member of a Virginia tribe, Aunt H would have been fascinated.”
“She never spoke to you about this? About the Cherokee connection?”
“No. It was Dad who told me about that part of our ancestry.” She thought a moment. “Once I mentioned something about a bracelet I saw that had been made by the Pueblos. Aunt H said southwestern Indians, Texas Indians, were much different from the East Coast tribes but all were fascinating to study.”
“Anything else?” Cooper persisted.
“She said—and this I do remember, because I heard it at odd times, not a lot but enough to remember, and I heard it repeated by my dad, too—the Indians never raped the land.”
Both sheriff and deputy sat quietly for a moment, then Rick asked, “Were either of your parents ever involved in environmental causes or perhaps trying to return tribal lands to their original owners?”
“They supported the Nature Conservancy. They made vacations to go on field trips, wonderful places like southern Chile, Moosehead Lake in Maine. They really pitched in with the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited. We had to live in the now. Mom and Dad wholeheartedly believed that. Dad said that he thought in some ways Aunt H lived too much in the past.”
“And Aunt Hester’s attitude?” Cooper asked.
“That we needed to make amends. We needed to preserve the past and also make amends to other peoples, to wildlife. As you see, she preserved the past in this house. Aunt H was consistent and she really did care about providing good food at her stand, about taking care of the land. Maybe that’s why she liked fishing. She could get away but still be part of nature. I suspect she threw back whatever she caught. Mom always did.”
Both interrogators smiled.
Cooper then said, “We combed her roadside stand. Lolly—you met Lolly?” When Sarah nodded yes, Cooper continued. “Showed us the back rooms, everything. She opened the cash register, lifted the tray where Hester kept notes, odd returned checks, stuff like that.”
Sarah quietly interrupted, “And you found that my aunt Hester was organized about everything but her financial records. I’ve found old bank statements in kitchen drawers, in the visor of her truck.”
Cooper smiled. “She appears to have used a system unique to herself. What interested us was a check for a thousand dollars written to Joshua Hill. Written on the bottom memo line was ‘Research.’ It had been cashed.”
Sarah registered surprise. “She wouldn’t write a check that size on a whim.”
“We don’t know what the research was, and his records are sparse,” Rick said.
“So there is a connection between the murders.” Sarah spoke lowly.
“It certainly seems possible,” Cooper answered.
“May I ask you a question?” said Sarah.
“Anything.” Rick liked her, obviously.
“Do you have any idea who would kill my aunt, or why?”
“I won’t b.s. you,” he answered. “We don’t but I promise you, Sarah, we will find out and we will bring them to justice. Your aunt was a good woman.”
Cooper looked Sarah in the eye. “I apologize for pushing you with questions, but you knew Hester as well as anyone, perhaps better. The rest of us took her at face value, and even those who had been in her home, like Mim Sanburne, only knew a fraction of who and what she was.”
“You don’t think she was involved in anything illegal, do you?” asked Sarah, distressed. “I mean, I can’t imagine her doing something illegal. Aunt H was a straight arrow.”
“No. But my hunch, and it is just a hunch, is she may have stumbled onto something someone else was doing that was illegal.”
Sarah’s hand covered her heart for a moment.
“I wonder if she knew she was in danger. She would have kept it to herself. She was so independent, had lived her whole life alone—if she did think she was in danger, she would have thought she could handle it.” Sarah swallowed. “I make her sound unrealistic but who could have foreseen something like this? Aunt H never did understand evil.”
The wind rustled through the dried cornstalks in Buddy Janss’s one hundred acres behind the three abandoned schoolhouses. Buddy walked through the fields with an insurance agent. The crop insurer, on overload thanks to the drought, worked every day but Sunday. This Friday, October 25, he had already visited three farms before noon.
The U.S. government underpinned about sixty percent of insurance premiums. Until now, the premiums farmers paid for various farming insurance had more than covered the payouts, but this year it looked as though the government payouts would be greater than the intake.
Looking down at his clipboard, Drake Stoneman, thirty-two, traced acreage numbers with his index finger. “Why do you insure some acres and not others for the same crop?”
Buddy, fifty-two, didn’t much like the tone of this younger man nor the assumption, so prevalent these days, that one must explain one’s self exhaustively. “Because for years I carted some vegetables and corn to a roadside food stand where the owner was fierce about organic foods.”
“Given the losses to fungus, birds, and insects, you must have gotten top dollar.” Stoneman looked up from his figures into Buddy’s dark brown eyes.
“I did not,” the large man replied firmly. “I did business with the lady who owned the stand and my father did business with her people. It’s just something I did.”
“Hard to farm if you don’t put profit first,” the college-educated fellow smugly said.
“You don’t have much of a life if profit is all you care about.” Buddy, feeling his anger rise, then followed with, “I make enough money elsewhere.”