Sycamore Row

criminal lawyer gets the coke thrown out. You’ll walk.”
    They had talked about Seth Hubbard, with Lucien throwing in all the facts, gossip, fabrications, speculations, and rumors that had been roaring through Clanton during the past six months. Lonny claimed to be only mildly curious, but he seemed to enjoy listening. Lucien did not mention the handwritten will, nor the black housekeeper. Expansively,he recounted Seth’s amazing ten-year run from a man broken by his second nasty divorce to a high-flying risk taker who parlayed his own mortgaged property into a fortune. He described Seth’s zeal for secrecy, his offshore bank accounts and maze of corporations. He told the amazing historical anecdote of Seth’s father, Cleon, hiring Lucien’s grandfather Robert E. Lee Wilbanks to handle a land dispute in 1928. And they lost!
    Lucien talked almost nonstop in an effort to gain Lonny’s trust, to convince him there was no harm in telling secrets from the past. If Lucien could open up so completely, then Lonny could too. On two occasions during the morning, Lucien had gently poked into the business of Lonny knowing anything about Ancil, but neither punch had landed. Lonny seemed to have no interest in that subject. They talked and played throughout the morning. By noon, Lonny was fatigued and needed rest. The nurse enjoyed telling Lucien to leave.
    He did so but was back two hours later to check on his new friend. Lonny now wanted to play blackjack, at a dime a hand. After half an hour or so, Lucien said, “I called Jake Brigance, the lawyer I work for in Mississippi, and I asked him to check out this Sylvester Rinds guy you mentioned. He found something.”
    Lonny put his cards down and gave Lucien a curious look. Deliberately, he said, “What?”
    “Well, according to the land records in Ford County, Sylvester Rinds owned eighty acres of land in the northeast part of the county, land he had inherited from his father, a man named Solomon Rinds, who was born about the time the Civil War started. Though the records are not clear, there’s a good chance the Rinds family came to own the land just after the war, during Reconstruction, when freed slaves were able to obtain land with the help of carpetbaggers and federal governors and other scum that flooded our land back then. It looks as though this eighty acres was in dispute for some time. The Hubbard family owned another eighty acres that adjoined the Rinds property, and evidently they contested this property. The lawsuit I mentioned this morning, the one filed in 1928 by Cleon Hubbard, was a dispute over the Rinds property. My grandfather, who was the finest lawyer in the county and well connected, lost the case for Cleon. I gotta figure that if my grandfather lost the case then the Rinds family must have had a pretty strong claim to the land. So Sylvester managed to hang on to his property for a few more years,but then he died in 1930. After he died, Cleon Hubbard obtained the land from Sylvester’s widow.”
    Lonny had picked up his cards and he studied them without seeing them. He was listening and recalling images from another lifetime.
    “Pretty interesting, huh?” Lucien said.
    “It was a long time ago,” Lonny said, grimacing as pain rippled through his skull.
    Lucien plowed ahead. With nothing to lose, he was not about to relax. “The strangest part of this entire story is that there is no record of Sylvester’s death. There’s not a single Rinds now living in Ford County, and it appears as though they all left about the time Cleon Hubbard got his hands on the property. They all vanished; most fled to the North, to Chicago, where they found jobs, but this was not uncommon in the Depression. A lot of starving blacks fled the Deep South. According to Mr. Brigance, they found a distant relative over in Alabama, a man named Boaz Rinds, who claims that some white men took Sylvester and killed him.”
    “What does this have to do with anything?” Lonny asked.
    Lucien stood and walked to the window where he gazed at a parking lot below. He debated telling the truth now, telling Lonny about the will and Lettie Lang and her ancestry: that she was almost certainly a Rinds instead of a Tayber; that her people were from Ford County and had once lived on the land owned by Sylvester; that it was highly probable Sylvester was in fact her grandfather.
    But he sat back down and said, “Nothing really. Just some old history involving my kinfolks, Seth