“Well, most people don’t recall anything like that!” Lucius protested.
“Julian Collins would tell about one night when he was going down Herlong Lane with his uncle Edgar in the horse and buggy,” Hettie said. “Uncle Edgar never went anywhere without a weapon, and he would rein in before every clump of woods and peer and listen, using the moonlight to silhouette the trees, hunting for bushwhackers before whipping the horse past. That was just after the turn of the century, when he first came back here from the Islands! Someone must have been gunning for him even then.”
“Could have been Tolens,” Edmunds said. “Sam was starting to sell off the plantation, and maybe Edgar got riled up and said something about Watson land that made Sam think Edgar might kill him if Tolens didn’t kill him first. That made for a very dangerous situation.”
After a few years in Fort White, Edgar Watson paid occasional visits to the Islands to maintain his sugarcane plantation, which in his absence had gone back to jungle. The women recalled that in 1906, when Julian Collins was twenty, he and his Laura had accompanied Uncle Edgar to the Islands. Lucius, who was seventeen that summer, remembered his cousins rather vaguely, but he recalled that Papa had forbidden them to swim in Chatham River, saying that inland people did not swim well. Winking at Lucius, he would exaggerate the dangers of big sharks hunting upriver on the tide and the huge alligators which came downstream from the Glades during the summer rains, and the great solitary crocodile that hauled out on the bank across the river.
“In their six months in the Islands, those young Collinses heard some ugly stories about how Uncle Edgar hired loners for the harvest, people with nobody waiting for ’em back home—darkies mostly, but some outlaws, too, and drunks and drifters—and how these people would just disappear when payday came. It was true, they told us, that some of his harvest hands were drunks and drifters, but the Collinses noticed nothing wrong about how those harvest workers were paid off. They didn’t know what to make of all those rumors.”
“Oh, rumors went around, all right,” Lucius admitted, “but I have never come across one bit of evidence that he killed his help.”
Hettie Collins was silent a few moments, gazing down at her clenched hands. “My father-in-law was close to Uncle Edgar in those days,” she said finally. “He would not have passed along such awful gossip.”
As Lucius recalled, Julian’s young wife had liked Papa very much. Laura always said he was the kindest man she ever met, kind to his own family and oh so hospitable to his young relatives at Chatham Bend. And Hettie remembered how grateful Laura was that Uncle Edgar had sat all night at her bedside when she miscarried her baby boy down in the Islands. Papa and Lucius buried the child because Julian was simply too upset. Lucius remembered that when Papa wasn’t looking, he had said good-bye to that little boy by touching two fingers to the cool blue forehead. Poor Laura had been so small and frail—a dark-haired pretty little thing, with such sad eyes!
“When they came back to Fort White in early 1907, Julian and Laura moved into Uncle Edgar’s house, so it doesn’t look like they learned anything too terrible. They were hardly home when Grandpa Billy died, that was February of 1907, and Edgar and Edna came back north to be with the family. Edna’s little Addison and Laura’s little boy, who became my husband, were born in Uncle Edgar’s house that same October, so those dear friends had their babies right together.”
“Which means they were all in Uncle Edgar’s house when Sam Tolen was killed right down the road,” Lucius said, checking his own notes. “Would they have stayed if they suspected him?”
“Oh, I imagine they were worried,” Hettie murmured. “I mean, there was so much talk all around the county! But Uncle Edgar was close family, so they would not believe anything said against him. At one time Julian had deeply admired his uncle, and in later years he always made Cousin Ed feel welcome. But Julian was straitlaced even then, and detested loose talk that might harm the family name. Eventually, of course, he and his brother felt obliged to repudiate their uncle for disgracing our good reputation, and they cast him out. Julian Collins is dead, and his son, too, but my brother-in-law is still adamant, up in Lake City. I wouldn’t dare let on to him what we’re discussing!”
“Certainly not!” Ellie’s grave frown affirmed the Collins Code, as if she herself, against all odds, were its last defender. Hettie and Lucius exchanged a delicious smile.
“Julian Collins was always pretty quiet,” Mr. Edmunds recalled. “You never caught Julian in too much of a conversation, he never used two words where one would do. When anybody got to talking about E. J. Watson, neither of those Collins boys would say one word.”