Chapter 7 - The Home Study
The woman from the Department of Social Services arrived on Tuesday morning at ten o'clock sharp, driving a white state-issued sedan that had two different rust spots along the rear rocker panels.
Her name was Mrs. Albright—no relation to the judge, though she had the same sharp, suspicious nose and the habit of peering over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses like she was examining a piece of suspicious fruit at the grocery store.
She carried a black leather portfolio that was four inches thick, stuffed with state compliance forms, home inspection checklists, and a three-page criminal background report that had been run on me three times by different agencies in Raleigh.
I met her on the front porch of my house on Old Mill Road.
The house was not a modern colonial. It was an eighty-year-old farmhouse with heart-pine siding that had been painted white three times since the Eisenhower administration, a standing-seam tin roof that turned blue in the rain, and a wraparound porch supported by cedar posts that I had turned myself on the lathe in seventy-four.
Inside, the house smelled of fried apples, bacon grease, and the dry, sweet scent of the woodstove burning seasoned red oak in the living room.
"Mr. Vance," Mrs. Albright said, stepping into the hall and wiping her low-heeled shoes twice on the coir mat. "I have to inform you that this is an unannounced preliminary evaluation pursuant to the emergency dependency petition filed by the county attorney."
"It's not unannounced, Mrs. Albright," I said, taking her heavy wool coat and hanging it on the brass pegs by the door. "Martha Higgins saw your car leave the county building twenty minutes ago and called me from her landline. The coffee is fresh. It's chicory blend. Carol liked it strong."
She blinked, her pencil pausing over the first page of her clipboard. "I see. And the children?"
"In the kitchen," I told her. "Eating buttermilk biscuits that were in the oven twenty minutes ago. You're welcome to inspect the flour if you think it's out of code."
She didn't smile, but the hard, administrative line of her mouth softened by half an inch as she followed me down the center hall.
The kitchen was the heart of the place.
It had an eight-foot trestle table made of three-inch oak planks, four heavy ladder-back chairs with split-bottom hickory seats, and a cast-iron wood range that had been converted to gas back when the grandchildren were born so there wouldn't be hot iron within reach of small fingers.
Lily was sitting at the end of the table, her legs swinging over the edge of a wooden bench that had been smoothed by fifty years of denim trousers. She was wearing an old flannel shirt of mine that had been cut down to fit her, the sleeves rolled four times at the wrists, her hair combed into two clean, neat braids that Martha had tied with yellow yarn.
Mason sat across from her, his fingers covered in blackberry jam, working his way through his third biscuit while an old battery-operated Zenith radio on the refrigerator played low, gentle bluegrass from the station in Mount Airy.
When Mrs. Albright stepped into the room, both of them stopped chewing.
Mason’s eyes went instantly to her clipboard—that sharp, defensive look of an animal that had seen a net before—and his right hand dropped under the table, his fingers finding Lily’s knee and pressing down with a protective, desperate grip.
"Good morning, Mason," Mrs. Albright said, her voice dropping into that practiced, neutral cadence that social workers use in intake rooms. "Good morning, Lily. My name is Rachel."
Neither of them spoke.
Lily looked at me. Her small, hazel eyes—so like Carol’s that every time she looked at me it felt like an old key turning in an iron lock—asked the question before her mouth could form it.
"She's a friend of Detective Henderson's, Lily," I said, pulling out the heavy chair at the head of the table and sitting down. "She came to see if the roof leaks. Tell her about the squirrels in the attic."
Lily looked at the woman with the glasses, swallowed a bite of biscuit, and wiped her chin with the back of her sleeve.
"The squirrels don't come in the house," Lily said, her voice small, clear, and steady. "Grandpa put the wire over the eaves. He used the galvanized kind with the little squares so their noses don't fit."
Mrs. Albright looked at the girl's wrists.
The purple bruises from the haloperidol reaction had faded into a dull, yellow-green shadow that looked like old grease under the skin, but the skin around her mouth had healed clean, leaving only a thin, pale line where the tape had pulled the lip.
She looked at Mason's forearms.
The boy had rolled his sleeves down to his wrists, hiding the dark rings where the zip-ties had bitten, but his posture was upright. His spine was straight. He sat with his heels planted flat on the heart-pine floorboards, not huddled in the corner of a boot tray, not waiting for the deadbolt to turn from the outside.
"Mr. Vance," Mrs. Albright said, setting her clipboard on the corner of the oak table without looking at the checklist. "Where do they sleep?"
"Come look," I said.
We walked up the wide, uncarpeted stairs.
The risers didn't squeak; I had re-screwed the stringers with three-inch ceramic deck screws the winter Carol got sick so the sound of my boots wouldn't wake her when I came in from the barn at midnight.
The east bedroom had two iron twin beds with feather mattresses that Carol had aired every spring on the clotheslines behind the smokehouse.
Between them sat a small cedar chest—not the one from Brian's attic with the broken lock, but an old blanket box with brass corners that had belonged to my father when he was a boy in the logging camps on the Blue Ridge.
On top of the chest sat Lily’s drawing pad, a glass of water, and an old brass kerosene lamp that had been converted to a seven-watt nightlight with a soft, amber bulb that threw a warm circle of light across the floorboards.
The door had no lock.
The brass passage latch had been removed forty years ago when Brian was three and had locked himself in the bathroom during a thunderstorm; in its place was a simple magnetic catch that gave way with three ounces of pressure from a child's finger.
Mrs. Albright walked into the room. She didn't look at the baseboards. She didn't measure the distance between the beds with the wooden ruler in her bag.
She walked to the window, looked out over the three hundred acres of river bottom land where the water oaks were dropping their acorns into the dry grass, and then turned to look at the bedside table.
Beside the amber lamp lay a small, framed photograph.
It showed Carol sitting on the tailgate of my old pickup truck in nineteen-eighty-four, holding a four-year-old Brian on her lap, both of them laughing into the camera while the dust from the harvest settled behind them like gold powder in the evening sun.
"He was a beautiful boy, Mr. Vance," the social worker said quietly.
"He was," I replied, standing in the doorway with my thumbs hooked into my belt loops. "And he had everything a boy could need in this county. He had good boots, clear water, and a mother who would have walked through fire to keep the frost off his bed."
"What happened to him?"
I looked at the photograph. The glass had a tiny crack across the corner where it had fallen off the mantle during the earthquake in ninety-two, but the faces beneath were clean, bright, and untouched by what was coming.
"I don't know, Mrs. Albright," I told her. "I’ve spent forty-eight hours asking God that very question, and the only answer that comes back is the sound of the wind through the rafters. Some wood just takes the rot from the inside, and there isn't enough linseed oil in the state to keep it from failing when the load hits."
She closed her portfolio with a sharp, leather-on-leather slap that sounded like a small gate latching shut.
"The temporary custody order will be made permanent at the hearing on Friday, Arthur," she said, walking toward the stairs. "I’m recommending full legal guardianship with no visitation rights for the parents pending the outcome of the criminal trial."
"Thank you, ma'am," I said.
She stopped on the landing, looking back at me over her shoulder.
May you like
"Don't thank me, Mr. Vance," she said. "Thank your wife. She set the trust up so tight that the state couldn't have pried those children out of this house with an eight-foot crowbar. She knew what she was doing."
"She usually did," I said.
