Molly: House on Fire Read online

  “Hi, Joe,” Molly had said, excited to hear from him.

  She had been standing in the den of her adoptive parents’ home. Carol and Donald Kincaid were college professors and lived a comfortable life, a much better life than Molly had known her first ten years. They smoothed her edges, corrected her grammar, softened her accent, and encouraged her love of learning. Molly, who excelled in academics and athletics, was a senior on her way to Duke University with law school to follow. Molly loved Carol and Donald and appreciated everything they did for her, but still she clung to the hope of seeing her mother again. She called Carol, Mom, not Momma, and Donald was Dad. They waited in the kitchen while Molly talked to Joe on the phone, giving her privacy. Joe kept up with her, always calling on her birthday. For eight years, he sent her Christmas presents and letters. Molly still waited anxiously for those moments when she could hear his voice. Joe was the only connection Molly had to her former life. He was the only tie to the mother she still longed for.

  “How’s the birthday girl?” He asked, but his enthusiasm sounded strained.

  “Have you heard from Momma?” It was always her first question.

  Joe cleared his throat. “Molly, your momma is…” He paused, his voice cracking when he continued, “Molly, your momma was found dead last night.”

  “What!” Molly exclaimed, loud enough to draw Carol from the kitchen.

  “Molly, your momma’s been out of the hospital and back in more times than I can count. She wasn’t a well woman. She was found in a ditch. Doc reckons the alcohol finally took her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me she was on the street? I could have helped her. Why didn’t you help her?”

  Joe tried to explain. “Honey, your momma didn’t want no help. Nothin’ could have been done, nothin’ that weren’t already tried. She’s been digging her grave since you was born. The Lord finally ended her suffering.”

  “Bull shit! Nobody cared enough. I cared and you sent me away. I hate you, Joe. Don’t ever call me again!”

  That was how Molly’s last conversation with Joe Webb ended. That was a long time ago, but the wound was still fresh. He let her momma die in a ditch on a rainy March night. Molly had to blame someone, so she blamed Joe. Now, she held the message in her hand and reached for the office phone. She did not want her private cellphone number showing up on someone’s caller ID, particularly not Joe Webb’s. Molly slammed the door on Dobbs County and Joe, as a devastated teenager. She had no desire to open it again, but the threatening email intrigued her enough to ignore the warning bells going off in her head.

  Molly picked up the phone and dialed the number. She waited through four rings and was about to hang up when a breathless woman answered the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, I’m returning a call to Joe Webb. Do I have the right number?” Molly asked, not giving away too much information.

  “Yes, is this Molly Kincaid?” The voice said excitedly. Molly detected a slight Dobbs County drawl.

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is Leslie Walker. I am a friend of Joe’s. I’m going back to his room now. I was running up the stairs and couldn’t get my phone out of my jacket.” The woman continued to breathe rapidly and spoke just as fast. “I’m so glad you called. He’s been so mysterious about you. Could you hold on a minute while I get him on the phone?”

  “His room? Where is he?” Molly asked.

  “He’s in the hospital in Waitesville. He’s been asking for you whenever he’s lucid enough. He’s not doing too well. I think your calling will ease his mind. I’m at his room now, hold on.”

  Molly could hear another woman speaking. “How was your run?”

  Leslie replied, “It was fine. Is he doing any better?”

  The other voice answered, “He’s in and out. Won’t be long now. Just trying to make him comfortable.”

  Molly heard Leslie trying to rouse Joe. “Papa Joe… Papa Joe, it’s Leslie. Can you hear me?”

  The other voice encouraged her. “Keep trying. He’s just had another dose of pain meds.”

  “Papa Joe, I have Molly Kincaid on the phone.”

  “Lord have mercy, yes, wake him up. All he goes on about is that girl Molly. Mr. Joe, wake up. Leslie’s got Molly on the phone.”

  Molly heard rustling around and then a few weak coughs. Leslie came back on the phone.

  “Ms. Kincaid, I think he’s coming around.” She spoke into the receiver, but her next words were to Joe. “Papa Joe, it’s Molly Kincaid. You asked to speak to her.”

  More coughing. Then Molly heard the phone being scraped against something and ragged gasps for air, a man’s last breaths.

  “Molly.” It was barely a whisper.

  “Yes, Joe, it’s me.”

  The next part was garbled in partial breaths, wheezed out in syllables, but Molly heard it clearly. “Sa…rah…mur…dered —” A raging storm of coughs cut him off.

  Molly was hanging up the phone when she heard Leslie’s voice. “Ms. Kincaid?”

  It was too late. Molly was up from the desk and on the way out the door by the time Leslie Walker realized she was gone.

  #

  About thirty minutes from her office, with the Dixie Chicks blaring out of the Mark Levinson, premium surround-sound system in her highly tuned sports car, Molly took the exit off Interstate 40 onto US Highway 70 East, towards Waitesville and Dobbs County. She set the cruise control on seventy-four, four miles an hour over the speed limit, in an attempt to avoid another trip to traffic school. Molly loved fast cars and the adrenalin rush that came with pushing the limits, but another ticket and back to school she would go. Dammit! She hated sitting through those boring night classes. Of course, she knew she was breaking the law. She was a lawyer, a fact she debated with the judge for fifteen minutes, until he threatened to have her attend the classes from inside the jail. Molly thought she would like to have been a NASCAR driver. She went down to Rockingham whenever she could, where a former client would allow her a little track time. The last trip, in her brand new Lexus LFA, was the most fun Molly had in years. Things were looking up.

  In August, Molly finally came to terms with the candle she had been burning for Stephanie Austin. For seventeen years that candle burned brightly. Stephanie was the only woman Molly ever loved. There had been many women, but Stephanie was what Molly thought she wanted and lost, a loss no one else could erase. After what seemed like a second chance, Molly realized Stephanie was never hers at all. She rewarded herself for ending her love affair with Stephanie’s memory, by purchasing a new car. Molly blew that candle out with the LFA’s V10 five hundred and fifty-two horsepower engine, going from zero to sixty in three-point-six seconds.

  Within two months of buying the car, Molly was in traffic court, and although she maintained that the school zone sign’s wording, “When school is in session,” was ambiguous, she surrendered her license for thirty days and went to traffic school. The judge had no leniency with repeat traffic-law offenders. If they used the three-strikes law for speed limit violators, Molly would have done serious time by now. Her insurance rates were outlandish, but still, when she was driving fast, she could forget everything. Molly had a lot to forget.

  Dutifully slowing for all the speed zones, Molly drove the next hour lost in thought, most of it in complete silence. Although she rarely drove without music playing, when Brad Paisley and Allison Krause started singing “Whiskey Lullaby,” she barked at the voice command system, “Radio off,” quieting the song but not the memories. The moon was only half-visible in its last quarter phase, casting little light, but enough for Molly to see the tall longleaf pine forests and farmlands of her youth. The inland lowlands of eastern North Carolina, a flat country of sandy bottoms laced with slow moving streams and over-flowing swamps, were the perfect place for an unwanted child to lose herself. The forest was her safe place, the fields and streams her friends. Anywhere was better than that two-room shack where she and her mother lived, whe
re he came to visit. Molly shook her head to stop the images flooding her mind. She kept those memories buried so deeply, she was surprised at how they came back in a rush. The knot in her stomach tightened, as she could now see the glow of the Waitesville city lights. The last place on earth Molly thought she would return loomed just ahead.

  Molly remembered the history lessons about the town, especially the Civil War stories her teacher proudly recounted. The town of Waitesville was formed when the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad was completed in the early 1840s, joining North Carolina’s southern coastal region to an existing web of tracks heading west. The W&W line made a stop near the Neuse River in Dobbs County. Waitesville grew up around a dirt crossroads, a general store, and a small train depot. The town played host to General Sherman’s army during the final month of the Civil War, April 1865. As his army cut a forty-mile wide swath through the heart of Dixie, the newly sprung but growing town of Waitesville lay directly in its path. If asked, most people would say the Civil War ended when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, on April 9, 1865. North Carolinians would beg to differ. Sherman’s army, more than ninety thousand strong, was tearing up the Tar Heel state long after the ink dried in Virginia. Sherman’s army kept up the heat until April twenty-sixth, when General Johnston agreed to terms at Bennett Place near Durham. The resulting surrender of the bulk of the remaining Confederate forces was the largest of the war.

  It was the habit of General Sherman and his staff to take over the nicest homes in the conquered towns their men would later burn. Most of the Waitesville houses, commandeered by the Yankee officers, were still standing, spared because Sherman had no reason to burn this little town after stripping it of everything worth taking. The war was at an end, and even the scourge of the South began to show a little mercy. Today, a drive through Waitesville’s historic district, its streets lined with restored Victorian homes, brought to mind a time of soft-spoken gentility, barbecues, fiddles singing, and chivalrous beaus dancing with hoop-skirted belles into the night. After surviving the war, Waitesville grew into a medium sized city. With new roads and destinations abundant, the area grew in leaps and bounds. By the time Molly came along in 1973, Waitesville was no longer a sleepy little settlement. Yet, like so many southern towns, it retained its clearly defined class system.

  It was in Margaret Mitchell’s classic, “Gone With the Wind,” that Molly first comprehended what it meant to be called, “White trash!” She heard it whispered under the breaths of men and women, even other children, as she and her mother walked by. She heard it shouted in anger, by the man her momma told her to call Daddy. Molly was five years old when Daddy, in a rare good mood, brought a VCR and some videotapes over to her tiny house. He hooked it to their nineteen inch TV, a cast off from Daddy’s real home, and took Molly’s momma to the other room, along with a bottle of whiskey. Molly found three videotapes, one a cartoon, and the other two a set, “Gone With the Wind.” The boxed set cover fascinated her. She instantly liked the handsome man with the woman in his arms, a hero coming to the rescue. She slid the tape in the machine and somehow managed to make it play, losing herself in the old south.

  That was when she learned what she was. Even Mamie, the house slave, could not understand why Scarlet’s mother would nurse “poor white trash.” The overseer was fired for having a baby out of wedlock, a bastard — another word Molly had heard before. The bastard child in question had done the honorable thing by “mercifully” dying, rather than live a shamed life. That was all Molly remembered about the portion of the movie she was allowed to watch. Her enlightenment on the southern class system had come to a sudden halt, when Daddy came out of the bedroom before the first tape was finished. The good mood had faded, replaced again by the angry drunk. Molly retreated outdoors, while he ripped the VCR from the TV, knocking it to the floor, breaking Molly’s only escape from that hellhole. She did not care about the TV. She just wanted him to go and never come back. It would be five more years before Daddy was no longer a threat to Molly or her mother. She never did watch all of “Gone With the Wind.”

  Molly wiped the tears she had not known were falling from her cheek. With a deep breath and a heavy sigh, she took the Memorial Hospital exit an hour and a half after hanging up the phone in Durham. Molly was born “poor white trash” in this very hospital. She left town at ten years old, a charity case taken in by kind strangers. She was returning a high-priced, extremely successful attorney, wealthy beyond her wildest dreams. The dreams that came true were not what kept her away from this place. It was the nightmarish memories and a painful secret she had been forced to keep for twenty-nine years. Molly Kincaid was back in Dobbs County, North Carolina and nothing good could come of that.

  #

  The large clock above the welcome desk read 10:08, well beyond the clearly posted visiting hours in the lobby. A petite, older woman, with a cap of soft white hair, stood behind the desk, folding a pink smock. Molly saw her taking it off as she entered through the automatic doors. The woman turned and smiled at Molly’s approach.

  “Why, you look like you have the weight of the world on you,” the woman said, with a thick southern accent. “Is there something I can do for you, hon?”

  Molly smiled. Southern hospitality was a skill and this woman surely had it. “Yes, ma’am. I just drove in from Durham. I’m an attorney. One of my clients is deathly ill and asked to see me.”

  Molly was not above using the attorney gig to her advantage. A dying client trumped hospital visiting hours by a bunch. Molly saw the older woman look her up and down. Molly was wearing jeans and tennis shoes, with a button-up cotton blouse tucked in at the waist, and a blue Duke Law windbreaker. This was far from her usual business attire of tailored designer suits. She had no briefcase or papers, just a look of desperation, and the determination to find out what Joe meant when he said, “Sarah murdered.” Molly’s success as a lawyer was due in part to her ability to charm jurors and witnesses. She called on those powers now. Molly did not want the help desk lady calling upstairs to ask if she was expected. She hung up on that woman, Leslie, and a man seemingly in the throes of death. Molly doubted she was expected or wanted.

  “Ma’am,” Molly began. “I was working late at the office when I got the call. I just dropped everything and drove down here as fast as I could. I hope I made it in time. It seemed awfully important to Joe that he see me before —”

  She dipped her head. It could have been an act, but suddenly it was not. Emotions Molly did not know she felt rushed to the surface. Joe Webb was all she had left of a childhood riddled with pain and abandonment, and he had been one of the only people who gave a damn about a little blond girl with steel-blue eyes. Those eyes filled with tears now.

  The woman stepped from the behind the desk and up to Molly’s side. She gently took her by the elbow. “It’s okay, honey. We’ll get you up to see him. What’s his name, Joe what?”

  Molly sniffled, unable to believe she was losing control. She never lost control, ever. Tears were a weakness and an indulgence in self-pity she would not allow herself, a stance she took early in life. The tears in the car were equally unexpected. They had been the first drops from the reservoir she held at bay for all these years. Why now? Why was she unable to shut it down, shut it off, seal the dam once and for all? Deep inside, Molly knew Joe’s words haunted her. “Sarah murdered.” If that were true, the dam would break, because for the last twenty-one years, Molly hated her mother for drinking herself into a stupor and dying in a ditch.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Molly regained her composure by the time the elevator reached Joe’s floor. The kind older woman had looked up his information and pointed Molly in the right direction. Before leaving her at the elevator doors, the woman said, “It’s so sad what happened. Joe is a good man.”

  The doors closed before Molly could ask what happened. When they opened again, she stepped out into the corridor and checked the first room number she saw, finding her bearings
. At the nurse’s station, a tall, stout woman wore a black scrub jacket, printed with bright pink breast cancer awareness ribbons, over pink scrubs. The nurse was reviewing paperwork with an attractive, dark-haired woman in running attire. They both looked up at Molly as she passed, but did not speak, immediately returning to the paperwork on the counter. Molly took the attitude that if she behaved as if she belonged there, her presence would not be questioned, and it worked. No one tried to stop her.

  Taking the empty hallway to her right, Molly checked the numbers on the placards adorning the doorframes. Some doors were open, with televisions casting a blue glow on the dimly lit corridor floor. The nurses were settling in the patients in hopes of a quiet night. Molly could hear machines beeping and clicking. The antiseptic smell of the hospital made her nauseous. As she approached her destination, the nausea, coupled with the tightly wound knot in her stomach, threatened to send her running to the nearest restroom. For Molly, this kind of soul wrenching anxiety was completely out of character. Attorney Kincaid was known for her unflappability, quick to recover from any setback, winning over doubters with a smile and that patented southern charm. Mistaking Molly’s drawl for ignorance had cost many a district attorney a guilty verdict.

  “Deal with it,” she whispered under her breath.

  That had been Molly’s mantra from the day she left Dobbs County. Deal with it, whatever it was, and move on. She believed she had moved on, put her childhood behind her, way behind her. Molly looked at her mother’s weaknesses and swore never to be that woman. There could be no comparison between the ten-year-old, street-smart urchin she once was, and the woman some called “the Matlock of southern female defense attorneys.” Molly used her innate intelligence and hard won self-confidence to create a life no one could have envisioned, considering her humble beginnings. She left her shame and sorrow somewhere on the road out of town twenty-nine years ago. Then why was she suddenly a scared little girl again? Why were all the carefully constructed barriers to the long buried pain of a poor white trash girl from the wrong side of tracks crumbling? Joe Webb held the key.