Asked what the Collins boys had testified at their uncle’s trial, the women made clear by their silence that this newcomer of doubtful antecedents was not entitled to such knowledge. But his question had caused discomfort in the room, like a woodland bird flown in through the window and fluttering distractingly behind the curtains. To put him in his place, Ellie changed the subject, reminding everyone that Samuel Tolen had lived alone with the aging Aunt Tabitha for at least ten years. “He terrorized that poor old soul! Alone in the house with that dirty brute, dependent on him for her very food and water. He might have forced her to rewrite the will, then starved her to death to get his hands on the property a little quicker.”
Had Great-Aunt Tabitha, in a last-minute gesture to keep the peace, promised Edna and Edgar that wedding present of the piano and silver mentioned by Dr. Herlong, which apparently Sam Tolen had withheld?
“We heard there was some problem over cows.” Ellie scowled when her niece laughed aloud at this cow theory.
“There was bad blood long before them cows,” Edmunds said darkly.
“Sam Tolen kept those presents for himself? That would cause trouble!”
“Might cause trouble but not murder,” Edmunds said. “It’s land that causes murder in this part of the country—land and women. What caused the killings was Sam Tolen selling off what Watson thought was rightfully Watson land.”
Lucius had to agree. A plantation owned by an elderly Watson aunt who had no heirs had seemed to Papa his great chance to restore the family fortunes. To see it usurped, mismanaged, and exploited by the Tolens could only have maddened him beyond all sense, all the more so after the bitter loss of his family property at Clouds Creek, in Carolina.
“My mama liked to recollect the day Sam Tolen died,” Paul Edmunds said. “She remembered it good because them shots rung out off to the northwest of our store, on that old road that run from Tolen’s through the woods and on out across the back of Watson’s fields. That road’s all growed over now, ain’t nothing down along that way no more at all.”
“Except your store,” said April. “I told you I could take you to it any time you wanted. Got a nice tree growing right up through the roof.”
“That’s cause you know I’m too darned old to go.” The old man kept his gaze fastened on Lucius.
“After Mike Tolen’s death,” Ellie said, “Uncle Edgar went straight to the Collins boys and asked them to back him up with a good alibi, and he also tried that on their friend, Jim Delaney Lowe. Well, those young men knew he must be guilty if he was so anxious for an alibi, and they refused to stand up and tell lies when he went to trial. And Julian’s Laura, though fond of Uncle Edgar, had no choice but to stand beside her husband.”
Lucius mentioned that another man besides Edgar Watson had been indicted for Mike Tolen’s murder. When they turned toward him in disbelief, he told them that a black man named Frank Reese had been arrested in both Tolen cases. “That never came down in our family,” Ellie warned him. Paul Edmunds agitated in impatience as if a black man didn’t count, not even a black man charged with murder. Then Lucius said he supposed they knew that Julian and Willie Collins had been charged as accessories-after-the-fact in the Mike Tolen case and jailed on one thousand dollars bail.
“Jailed?”
As the person responsible for introducing this viper to their hearth, Ellie Collins drew herself up to stare him down. The family knew no such thing, she said, in tones suggesting it could not be true and that in grubbing through court documents, this self-styled Professor Collins had crossed the line into dishonorable behavior.
“Perhaps they were only … detained,” Hettie said carefully.
There had been no question of Collins complicity or guilt, Lucius explained, speaking formally and even pompously in the hope that academic formality might help remove him from his own petard. Indeed, he said, court documents suggested that the state’s attorney, learning that Mr. Watson had sought an alibi from the Collins brothers, had had the nephews detained as accessories-after-the-fact until such time as they agreed to testify that they had been wrongfully solicited. Presumably the boys’ arrest was only the state’s attorney’s tactic for eliminating Watson’s alibi and extorting damaging testimony for the prosecution. And in the end, the strategy had worked, since both Collins boys had testified against their uncle. Edgar Watson’s solicitation of an alibi—tantamount to a confession, claimed the prosecution—turned out to be the most damaging evidence against him.