Bloody Kin Read Free

FirstBreath-of-Spring because it bloomed in January, no matter what the temperature. That first day she and Jake had strolled around the farm, these unkempt branches and small white blossoms had been coated with ice. This March day, the bushes hummed with wild bees.
    She had met Jake four years ago at one of Philip and Patricia Carmichael’s penthouse parties in New York. “Honey, you’re gonna love my cousin as much as I love yours,” Patricia had promised.
    Kate was five-foot-ten and Jake was even taller, a loose-knit, lanky, sandy-haired man with lively hazel eyes and a slow southern drawl. When he spoke of his “little piece of land,” she thought it was just a quaint expression; because for all his talk about drawing strength from the soil, Jake Honeycutt seemed as much a creature of the city as she.
    His drawl had belied a tough competitive spirit which drove him up the corporate ladder. He loved the challenges New York and Wall Street threw at him. And yet, after their wedding, during the holidays and long weekends they spent on the farm, Kate began to understand that Jake was tied to the land in some mysterious way.
    It wasn’t a particularly beautiful region. Colleton County lay on the dividing line between piedmont and coastal plain, so there were no rugged hills, only gently undulating terrain that was sandy loam and easy to work. Agriculture was still the county’s main industry: tobacco, sweet potatoes, corn, and soybeans; and much of the land was personally farmed by its owners. There were few absentee landlords using their farms as tax write-offs, but some of Raleigh’s overflow was spilling into the county. Creeping suburbanism created new housing developments; clusters of mobile homes appeared on tree-rimmed fields once plowed by long-eared mules; and sons and daughters who left home to work in the Research Triangle often returned to build a house at the edge of the family farm, preferring to commute twenty-five or thirty miles rather than live in town.
    Kate, a native of New York’s congested, boxed-in streets, was amused to hear those returnees complain about Raleigh, a beautiful city of open vistas, oaks, and azaleas.
    “Raleigh’s getting too big,” they said. “You couldn’t pay me to live all crowded up like that.”
    Nevertheless, she too found herself coming under the land’s spell. Walking with Jake through quiet fields and unpaved wooded lanes, she began to notice subtle differences in leaves and twigs, to discover beetles more colorful than ladybugs, weeds more interesting than cultivated roses. Jake bought her books to identify all the insects, butterflies, and wildflowers with which she was filling her sketchbooks; and back in the city, her agent, Gina Melnick, began to sell the new fabric designs as fast as Kate could produce them.
    Once when Kate and Jake were at dinner, an enameled television celebrity passed their table wearing a dress fashioned from fabric Kate had designed. Amusing to contrast the chic New York restaurant with the mossy creek bank where those clumps of brilliant red bee balm grew, yet Kate hadn’t felt superior to the actress who wore a dress splashed with flowers she’d never seen growing wild because Kate thought she was just as dependent on concrete, neon, and doormen as the actress.
    Jake had been her common denominator between city and country, and after that dumb, stupid, senseless accident—
    “Why, why didn’t I come down with him?” she flogged herself again. “Morning sickness, the push to finish the repeats I’d promised Gina, that head cold—such trivial excuses!”
    And what if she had been here, part of her coolly asked. Even if she’d been out in the woods with him last October, she couldn’t have prevented it.
    Jake’s nonchalance with loaded guns was the only thing they really quarreled about.
    “It’s your damn machismo!” she would snap.
    “Like hell it is! I’ve been hunting since I was five,” he would answer