The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

5


Vultures have excellent eyesight, but, like most other birds, they have poor vision in the dark.

—The Turkey Vulture Society




Sigrid Harald—Tuesday night

Anne Harald came back downstairs to find Sigrid tidying up the wet bar in the corner of the living room. While they were at dinner, Martha had washed and dried their drink glasses and they now sat on a tray waiting to be put away.

Sigrid took one look at her mother’s face then filled two of the glasses with ice cubes from the silver bucket that had been in the Lattimore family for at least four generations and poured them each a stiff bourbon, no water.

“Thanks, honey,” Anne said. She sat down in the wing chair by the fireplace and took a deep swallow.

Sigrid sat in the chair across from her and said, “How’s Grandmother?”

“Chloe gave her a shot and it put her out pretty fast.” Anne drank again, a smaller sip this time. “She was really hurting by the time we got her into bed, though. We shouldn’t have let her sit so long at the table.”

“Try telling her,” Sigrid said dryly. “You know she doesn’t want us to baby her.” She lifted her own drink and let the sweet smoky scent fill her nose.

Her grandmother did not economize when it came to providing drinks for her guests, and the bourbon was almost half as old as she was. “Sippin’ whiskey,” Oscar Nauman had called it when he contributed this particular brand to her liquor cabinet shortly before his death, “so don’t you-all go addin’ any mixers to it.”

Her lover’s attempted drawl was nothing like the soft Southern accents that had flowed around her since she and Anne had arrived a few days earlier. It wasn’t that Southerners talked slower, she had long ago decided; it was that they added extra syllables and stressed those syllables so differently that she had to keep mentally processing what she was hearing in order to understand and keep up. It was like wading in honey. Back in New York, Anne’s accent was only slightly noticeable. After three days here, she had almost totally reverted.

“Why have I never known you had an aunt and a cousin?” Sigrid asked.

“Frankly, I had almost forgotten myself,” Anne said. “It’s not as if Mother ever talked much about her sister. You heard her. Ferrabee took herself out of the family when Dad dumped her and proposed to Mother. She died young and Dad died when I was still a child, so who else would keep her memory green?”

“Quite a coincidence that you two should both become professional photographers.”

“And wind up in Peru at the same time…if that’s where it was.” Anne drained her glass and went over to the bar to pour herself another.

“Does it really matter?”

Anne stared into the flames that flickered from the gas log. “I suppose not,” she said, but Sigrid could see that it was clearly going to bother her till she remembered.



The ancient gas range was fueled by a tank of propane gas that sat outside the kitchen window. When the kettle began to whistle, Martin Crawford poured part of the boiling water into the teapot on the counter and wrapped a towel around the pot to keep it hot while the tea leaves steeped. The rest of the water went into a basin in the sink and he tempered it with a dipperful of cool water from the nearby bucket. The sink itself was a homemade tin tray and fresh water came from a hand pump. A kerosene lantern gave enough light to see himself in the cloudy mirror over the sink.

While rain hammered on the tin roof overhead, he made a mental note to pick up a can of shaving cream the next time he passed a store. Wetting his beard, he made a lather with a bar of hand soap. Fortunately, he still had a razor in his toiletries kit. He had not intended to shave off his beard until he got back to London, but he could not risk having Anne remember where she’d seen his bearded face before.

Stupid of me not to realize she’d looked at us with a photographer’s eye, he thought as his strong chin emerged from the underbrush.

With a little luck, maybe this beardless face would soon blur her memory of the old one. He just hoped that the vultures would accept his new look.



When they first married, real estate prices were so insane that Ginger and Wesley Todd could not touch any house on this side of town, much less a house in this neighborhood; but by the time the floundering economy had sent this 2,200-square-foot dream house into foreclosure, their pest control business was doing well enough to let them put in a serious offer. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a master suite with a huge walk-in closet, finished basement, and a two-car garage on a large lot thick with trees and bushes, and not too far from her parents’ more modest neighborhood.

The only hitch was that the agent who first showed them the property had gone missing. Fortunately the agency owner had stepped in and was proving just as helpful.

“So if your daughter’s bed doesn’t fit in that dormer room, it’s going to be a deal-breaker?” Paula Coyne asked as she unlocked the front door for them shortly before 10:30 that evening.

They left their wet umbrellas dripping outside the door and wiped their shoes on the welcome mat.

Ginger Todd knew that she was being silly, but Ms. Coyne’s tone was teasing so she smiled back. “It’s really nice of you to come out this late, in the rain and all, so we can take one last look, but this is such a huge step for us, and when we remembered the ceiling…”

“It’s a lot of money,” the Realtor agreed, flipping on the light switches. “I don’t blame you a bit for wanting to be sure. That’s what we’re here for.”

The house had been minimally staged: a couch and some chairs in the living room on the right, a table and four side chairs in the dining room on the left. “They’ll get the furniture out of your way as soon as you close on Thursday,” Ms. Coyne said, moving briskly to the staircase.

The younger woman started to follow, but her husband fumbled for the light switches on the interior living room wall.

“You know, hon, I really do like that couch. It’s long enough to stretch out on when I watch TV.” He looked up at Ms. Coyne, who was already halfway up the stairs. “Is there any chance you could get them to leave it?”

“We can certainly ask,” she said.

“But that color,” his wife said. “Will it go with the rest of our things?” She moved past him to consider the couch’s potential. She rather liked the pattern—large dramatic bunches of red roses and green leaves on a white background. “I don’t think our red chair will match this red, though.”

“Sure it will,” Wes Todd said confidently. In contrast to his wife’s habit of dithering and second-guessing herself, he usually knew his own mind and made snap decisions. “Besides, it’s really more green-and-white than red.” He whipped off the bright red afghan that had been draped over one end of the couch. “See?”

His wife started to agree, then made a face. “Forget it, Wes. Look at that yucky stain.”

“Stain?” Ms. Coyne frowned and came back down to join them. Selling houses in this economy was hard enough with fresh paint and pristine décor. Stained furniture was unacceptable in the listings she handled. She remembered admiring the couch when she did her walk-through yesterday, so the afghan must have hidden the stain because no way would she not have noticed this ugly—

“Oh, dear Lord!” she said. “Is that blood?”