Chapter 27

Even Cecelia, whose picture appears in the dictionary to illustrate morning person, slept in that day. We both got up around noon, and were still tired. Both of us are in pretty good shape – though saying that Cecelia's in pretty good shape is like saying the Hope diamond is a chunk of carbon – but we're neither of us as young as we were when we got married, and the same things take a greater toll than they used to.

I slouched on the sofa reading – by then I'd moved on to Robert B. Parker's The Widening Gyre – while Cecelia puttered around, dusting and straightening in a desultory fashion. I could hear Daddy's tractor as he did something in the field, the sound faint because it was coming from beyond the other side of the house.

Finally I dogeared the page I was on and pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. I could have fired up my laptop, but the Leanna doesn't have any wi-fi capability and I didn't want to mess around with the crippled turtle speed of a dialup connection. And I can certainly afford a big cell phone bill once in a while – it's been several years since Cecelia told me how much we're worth, but at the time we were each individually multimillionaires, not counting the money we've got jointly. I already had some money when we met, and her financial genius grew it until we both decided we had as much as we wanted. But there is one good side of having tons of money – we can give tons of it away. Just try getting a large donation for your charity from a poor person, and you'll maybe rethink the theory that we need to tax the rich into poverty.

But I set all those thoughts aside as I got online. I went to the site of an online reverse phone book I use – these days a PI doesn't need to have his desk drawers full of such things – and plugged in the address that Cecelia gave me from her memory, not needing to consult her notebook. It turned out to be, as I'd thought, a racist publishing company. I went to the company's site, and realized I was lucky they were on the Web at all – it was one of the most amateurish sites I'd ever seen. Whoever had written the text needed to learn to use a spell checker ... for that matter, he needed to go back to school and learn basic English. There may be some intelligent, educated racists in the world, but mostly they make me think they flunked kindergarten 12 years running.

I looked over the site, making the occasional note in a Word document I'd pulled up on my laptop – that didn't require getting online. It appeared that the company didn't restrict itself to publishing – apparently they sponsored the occasional meeting to spread the word about the evils of "race mixing" and other such vile practices. I thought of Darlia – her brains, her physical strength, her glorious beauty – and figured that if it's evil for a white man to marry a black woman, the results were worth the sin. Of course I don't believe it is evil. Originally there was no such thing as black or white or brown. Adam and Eve were just people, and we're all descended from those two, and again we're all descended from Noah and his wife. By now it might be hard to prove, but I'm related by blood to every other human being on earth, however distantly.

I grinned at that thought. Cecelia and I were, if you wanted to push the definition to the most ridiculous point, committing incest, for we both have the same two couples as our ultimate ancestors. Never mind "race mixing" – what about that?

But the company's Web site mostly didn't lend itself to smiles. There's not much more disgusting than racism. As far as I'm concerned, those people are only a step above child molesters – and it's not a very big step. Anyone who would condemn me, my wife, or my daughter because Cecelia's black doesn't get any sympathy from me.

Finally I'd learned all I could from the Web site, and I shut down the browser. I could remember when the Web was a new thing, and you'd hear commercials saying you should "point your browser to" this or that site. That was back in the days when Excite was the biggest search engine there was, and Internet Explorer had serious competition from Netscape.

I scanned my notes, and then hollered for Cecelia. In a moment she was there, saying, "You bellowed?"

I laughed at that one. "You remember Carter Country?" I asked her.

"The situation comedy about a small town government in the south?"

"That's the one."

"I do."

"Well, there's this one episode where the chief hollers for Baker, and Baker comes in and says something pretty close to what you said."

She smiled, and I knew that they were launching billions of ships all across the galaxy. "You do have a mustache, as Victor French did in the role of the police chief."

"Yeah, but I'm much more—"

"You are much more you, beloved, and I recommend you accept that as a compliment."

"Okay, I will." I grinned back at her. "You wanted to be in on the phone call, an' it's that time."

"Very well," she said, and sat on a chair across from me.

I refreshed my memory of the notes once more, and then closed that down and dialed the number. It rang twice, and then a voice said, "Central Alabama Publishing Company."

I put on my best Oklahoma accent, one so good that I can fool natives of the state into thinking I'm one of them. "Yeah, my name's Joe Foster, an' I found y'all's site online. I'm up here in Oklahoma, but business is gonna take me down to Alabama next week an' I thought I'd give y'all a call an' see if there was any way I could get a tour or see what y'all got or something."

The voice was now eager. "We don't have tours, but we've got a meeting down in southern Alabama next week, and you'd be welcome to be there with us."

I raised my eyebrows. This was better than I'd expected, and I could feel a plan forming even as we spoke. "Where at in southern Alabama?"