Death's Half Acre Read Online Free PDF

tobacco fields, and a couple of dilapidated clapboard buildings on diagonal corners facing each other across the two-lane hardtop. One building was a little general store and single-pump service station that old Max Pleasant owned back when my daddy was running white lightning all up and down the coast and needed a safe source of sugar. It’s been closed for years. Daddy’s name was never on the deed to that store, but everyone knew who bankrolled it and who paid the bills. The other was a barbershop run by one of Max’s Yadkin cousins. That’s where Daddy and those of my eleven brothers who live out this way used to get their hair cut every four or five weeks until Baldy Yadkin abruptly hung up his scissors, sold out to a commercial builder, and bought himself a place on the Pamlico Sound, where he can fish and crab three hundred days a year.
    Bulldozers had already torn out and removed Max’s old gas and kerosene tanks and thrown up a berm around that corner so as to provide privacy for a secluded high-end “village” developed and owned by G. Hooks Talbert, one of the movers and shakers in the state’s Republican party and a descendant of the original Pleasant who held a land grant from the Lords Proprietor. Talbert’s older son used to run a wholesale nursery out there on the other side of Possum Creek from us. In fact, that nursery was responsible for my becoming a district court judge five years ago.
    It’s a long story, but all you need to know is that it gave Daddy the opportunity to pressure G. Hooks—
    “
Pressure?
” asked the preacher who lurks at the edge of my consciousness and tries to keep me honest.
    “
I believe the word you’re looking for is
blackmail,” said the pragmatist who usually approves of euphemisms.
    Okay, okay. Technically speaking, that nursery gave Daddy the ammunition to
blackmail
G. Hooks Talbert into asking the governor to appoint me after I lost my first race. Until then, Talbert was famous in our family for saying he didn’t care to deal with any ignorant bootlegger. Nobody’s heard him say that recently and now it’s gotten personal.
    To even the score, and knowing how it would gall Daddy to have any kind of a development—even an upscale one—so close to his borders, G. Hooks quietly bought up all the land on the south side of Possum Creek and, even more quietly, got the county commissioners to rubber-stamp his plans to build creekside houses and a tiny village centered around a café and a gift shop that stocked designer jewelry and local pottery. The first thing he did was dredge out a lake on a bend of the creek and put up a picturesque country inn with a gourmet restaurant suitable for formal weddings.
    Unfortunately for him, he underestimated the Kezzie Knott grapevine. Someone at the register of deeds office had given Daddy a heads-up before the ink was dry on the first property transfers. Daddy waited until the inn was finished and the lake was already stocked with bass and perch before it was brought to G. Hooks’s attention that our line ran along the south bank of the creek and not down the middle of the creek itself as was usual. Daddy could have made G. Hooks tear down his new million-dollar inn and fill the lake back in.
    We’ve heard that several of G. Hooks’s attorneys were fired after he was sent a copy of our deeds with the relevant parts highlighted in yellow.
    The agreement that our family hammered out with the Talbert Corporation provided that the rest of the creek and the new lake would become a managed greenway. No houses on the creek itself. Instead, there would be hiking trails and bicycle paths on both sides. We don’t have to look at the McMansions that are still going up, and in return, we allow hikers and picnickers on our side of the creek, which, according to Talbert’s site manager, is proving to be a big plus in the eyes of potential buyers who have moved to the country because they want to see a little country.
    Except for the