Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(52)

“This is where Kay Willingham, queen of the DC socialites, is buried?” I said.





CHAPTER 57





WE DROVE TOWARD THE DECREPIT plantation house and saw that a road had been cleared and maintained beyond it. Mahoney continued down the road through more overgrown fields and pine thickets. We were well out of sight of the mansion when I spotted headstones up on a knoll ahead.

“Stop there,” I said.

Mahoney pulled over by a stone path leading up to the knoll. I got out, felt a breeze for the first time all day, and began to climb, Mahoney right behind me.

I don’t know what I expected, but with each step higher, I was surprised to see more and more headstones on the knoll and more and more of the remarkable scenery spread out below and beyond the Sutter family cemetery. There had to be at least three hundred and fifty headstones there. Below them, at the bottom of a gentle slope, a mature oak forest grew on a flat that ran out to several arms jutting into a large lake. The sun was behind us, throwing golden light on the timbered points and the water.

“Beautiful spot,” Mahoney said.

“Spectacular,” I said. “No wonder Kay wanted to be buried here.”

I tore my attention from the lake and looked around at the headstones nearby. I found the graves of Kay’s parents, Beth and Roy Sutter, her paternal grandparents, and various other Sutter relatives.

But there was no immediate sign of Kay’s grave. Finally I looked way to the back of the family cemetery and spotted freshly disturbed earth.

I walked in that direction, scanning the older headstones as I passed, seeing earlier generations of the Sutter family and their kin, people who’d died in the late 1800s.

Eight rows from the back of the cemetery, something changed. Every other headstone I’d looked at so far had the person’s name, his or her relationship to a Sutter if the individual had married into the clan, and the birth and death dates.

But then I saw a worn headstone that said simply DAPHNE, 1799–1857.

Beside Daphne was BIG GEORGE, 1802–1861. There were more one-named headstones in that row and all the others behind it. LADY BIRD, 1772–1821. LUCAS, 1706–1794. MIRIAM, 1698–1766.

“What’s with the single names?” Mahoney said behind me.

I looked around and felt a turbulence of emotions. “They’re the plantation’s slaves. Almost two hundred years of them.”

As I said, my emotions were all over the place, but they swiftly moved toward reverence as I walked through the last of the headstones to the mound of overturned earth and the polished-granite headstone behind the slaves’ graveyard.





KAY SUTTER WILLINGHAM


1968–2020

I’LL SLEEP HERE, THANK YOU. THEY’RE MORE MY KIND.





CHAPTER 58





CLIMBING BACK DOWN TO THE vehicle, Mahoney and I veered between smiling at the first part of the inscription — I’ll sleep here, thank you — and trying to understand what she meant by They’re more my kind.

“Slaves?” Mahoney said as we got in the car.

“Certainly one interpretation.”

“Any others come to mind?”

“African-Americans? The road keeps going, doesn’t it? Let’s go to the end and turn around.”

“I’ve got nowhere to be. Except in a shower and then a rib joint. There has to be a stellar rib joint in Montgomery.”

“Humor me,” I said. “The road ahead looks newer than the one behind us.”

“Fine,” he said. “But if I get this thing stuck, you’re hiking back to the highway.”

“Deal. It looks freshly graded to me.”

Mahoney put the car in gear and drove past the cemetery down into the oak forest. The road was smooth and newly graveled. I looked out through big mature trees, catching sight of what looked like the mossy ruins of stacked stone foundations scattered here and there through the forest. More than a few of the oaks had been girdled with fluorescent surveyors’ tape.

“Someone’s been marking trees for cutting,” I said.

“Look at them all ahead of us!”

Indeed, for two hundred yards and as far as we could see to our left and right, the majority of the trees were marked with fluorescent tape. This part of the old-growth forest was about to be leveled.

“I can’t see a state park authority doing this,” I said.

“Unless Kay decided to take timber off it before giving it to the state.”

Beyond the grove of trees marked for the sawmill, the road ended in a turnaround by the rocky shores of a large, empty, and pristine cove cradled in those big timbered arms of land jutting out into the larger lake. We got out of the car to get a better look.

“I never knew places like this existed in Alabama,” I said. “And the water makes me want to take off my clothes and dive in.”

“You see anyone around to stop you?”

“That’s true. And I think Kay would actually approve.”

“I’m sure she skinny-dipped here a time or two in her life,” Mahoney said, kicking off his shoes and unbuckling his trousers.

A few moments later we waded out and shallow-dived into water that was a good ten degrees cooler than the air. I felt the entire day of travel and work and sweat wash away and surfaced in about twelve feet of clear water feeling thoroughly refreshed.