Bloody Kin Read Free Page A

indignantly. “And I didn’t get through eighteen months in Nam without knowing how to handle a loaded gun. You think a squirrel’s going to sit on its haunches and wait for me to load both barrels every time?”
    When Rob Bryant called that Sunday afternoon, Kate’s first reaction, before the numbness set in, had been sheer exasperation. She was so angry, she had wanted to beat her fists against Jake’s hard chest and scream, “You stupid idiot! You thick-skulled redneck! I told you so. Oh God, I told you!”
    If only he hadn’t been so pigheaded. If only she’d nagged him harder, blown her cool.
    Kate clasped her hands to keep them from shaking.
    “Hey, now, no more of that,” she warned herself sternly. “That’s what started Gina hinting for you to try her analyst. You shake like that in front of Lacy and he’ll cart you off to Dix Hill in a strait jacket.”
    Jake’s uncle thought she was the reason Jake didn’t come home to live. Lacy had kept the farm going when Jake’s father died while Jake was in high school. Lacy hadn’t hung on to his own inheritance, but he had been a good steward for Jake’s and he resented her intrusion into their cozy masculine enclave.
    “What do I have to do?” Kate had asked Jake. “Why does he treat me like Little Missy from de big house?”
    “He’s always been scared of beautiful women,” Jake had grinned. “Don’t worry, Katydid, he’ll come around.”
    “Have a baby,” Philip had advised smugly.
    Philip Carmichael was Kate’s cousin from the wealthy branch of the family and a New Yorker, too, but he and Patricia had produced Mary Pat and suddenly he seemed less an outsider.
    Even Lacy had warmed to Philip. Especially since he and Patricia had restored Gilead, the antebellum mansion which had belonged to Patricia’s family and which had been falling into ruin near the Honeycutt farm. Lacy thought Jake would have done the same if Kate hadn’t kept him in New York.
    “As if Jake had Philip’s wealth and didn’t have to work for a living!” Kate thought indignantly.
    Well, she’d worry about Lacy later, she decided. Until the baby came—the baby they’d planned for, but had only begun to suspect when Jake died—until then, she would concentrate solely on the present.
    No ice on the First-Breath-of-Spring today. The air was sweet with its fragrance. It was the eighth of March and one of those glorious springlike days which still took Kate by surprise even after four years.
    Only yesterday, in New York, she’d had to wait for a garage attendant to shovel the sidewalk before he could get her car out, and the Jersey Turnpike had been treacherous with icy patches. Here in North Carolina, though, it was a day for light sweaters and walking through newly turned fields. Fluffy clouds drifted across clear blue skies and the voice of the tractor was loud in the land.
    “I was right,” she thought, suddenly relaxing. “Despite all the memories, Gina’s forebodings, or Lacy’s hostility, I was right to come here.”
    She held her hands up to the sunlight and was pleased by their steadiness.
    The packhouse door stood half ajar and she pulled it open.
    The old barnlike building sat on a slight slope. Its large upper room, the striproom, had high exposed rafters. It was spacious and felt dry and airy, even though light entered from only one small window and the open door behind her. The walls and floor were unpainted boards milled from trees Jake’s grandfather had cut. Some of the planks were more than fifteen inches wide and still held the mellow aroma of cured tobacco.
    This was where those yellow-gold leaves had been stripped from the sticks on which they had been cured, then carefully sorted by size and color and hand-tied into small bundles before being carried to a warehouse over at Dobbs, the county seat, and auctioned to the highest bidder.
    A trapdoor at the far side of the striproom led down to the ordering pit, a sort of half-basement with solid