Bootlegger’s Daughter

3 do you know what it’s like to be lonesome?

Lee, Stephenson and Knott, Attorneys at Law, occupies a neat wood-frame story-and-a-half that was built right after the Civil War across the street and half a block down from the courthouse. The county did an architectural survey a few years back and our place is described as a “charming example of tasteful vernacular,” a phrase I take to mean that some local builder had heard about Victorian styles but didn’t have a millwright who could turn out yards of rococo gingerbread trim without a pattern to go by. John Claude’s wife, Julia, keeps wanting to paint the narrow clapboards pale green and pick out the moldings and porch trim in white, but so far we’ve headed her off and kept it plain white with black shutters.

John Claude’s grandfather, Robert Claudius Lee (no relation to Robert E.), was born there and so was Robert’s brother, my maternal grandmother’s father-which, if you’re trying to work it out on your fingers, makes John Claude my second cousin once removed. Although I’m related to both my partners, they’re no blood kin to each other.

The historical society put a plaque on the front porch, but the only thing historically authentic about the house is its outside. Lees and Stephensons have been practicing law here since the twenties, when John Claude’s father and Reid’s grandfather (my great-grandfather) set up the partnership, and the inside’s no longer a monument to nineteenth-century sensibilities. Most of the woodwork’s original, but when the ceilings were dropped in the seventies to allow for new wiring and modern plumbing and lighting, they didn’t try to save the crumbly old plaster decorations.

The central staircase was relocated to make a reception area for Sherry Cobb’s predecessor.

(Reid’s mother and Julia had a tiff over who was going to get the walnut banisters. Julia won. Julia’s what people here call a right strong-minded lady. If she’d been born five years later, she’d probably have gone to State and majored in architecture or design. Instead, they sent her to a girl’s school-and I use the term deliberately-for a “Father Knows Best” insurance policy: a degree in elementary education, “so she’ll always have teaching to fall back on, just in case.” Just in case her husband ran off with another woman or turned out to be too shiftless to support a family. Half my grade school teachers were women whose husbands had fulfilled their fathers’ direst premonitions. It did not make for happy classrooms. Fortunately, Julia’s children were the only ones who ever had to cower from her.)

As our current senior partner, John Claude has his daddy’s old office, the double parlor on the front left. I have Brixton Senior’s original office on the front right, and Reid has what used to be the dining room behind me. It’s the same office his daddy had. Brix Junior keeps his license current, but the month Reid came into the firm was the month he quit practicing law and moved to Southern Pines to start practicing his golf swings.

(My daddy isn’t a lawyer, of course, but Brix Junior and John Claude never held that against me-especially since he’s generated a lot of the firm’s business over the last fifty years.)

Upstairs, two small bedrooms were opened to make a single large one, with a modern bath and roomy storage cupboards under the eaves. In theory, the bedroom’s for putting up out-of-town expert witnesses if we need to, but when Dotty kicked him out of the house and filed for divorce, Reid crashed there for so long John Claude and I were ready to start charging him rent. He still uses it at least once a month for what he thinks are sub rosa assignations-as if anything half a block from the courthouse could be sub rosa, but men in rut have a way of rationalizing what they want to be true.

So for we’ve kept the carpenters out of our personal offices, but Julia redid half the downstairs about four years ago. She ripped out partitions and turned the old kitchen into a computerized work area for the three clerks who help Sherry. The sunporch across the back acquired a tiny modern galley that can disappear behind louvered doors when we use the big sunny room for official conferences. There’s a long deal table that looks official enough, but Julia also brought in some comfortable chintz chairs and ottomans that were too good to throw away the last time she remodeled their house. All in all, the old sunporch has devolved into a pleasant place to lounge over a cup of coffee after court and catch up on the News and. Observer.

That’s what I was doing when Gayle Whitehead arrived promptly at 3:30, carrying a flat white cardboard box. Instead of putting her in my office and telling me she was there, Sherry brought her straight back to the sunporch. Sherry’s not all that much older than Gayle, but she kept clucking around like somebody’s mama hostessing a tea party.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “There’s drinks and ice tea in the icebox.”

“That’s okay,” Gayle said politely as she took a chair opposite mine. She held the white box on her lap-it was about the size of a shirt box-and centered her purple purse on top of it.

“What about something to eat? We’ve got Nabs and stuff.”

“No, thank you.”

Gayle’s spine was a straight line that remained three inches from the chair’s cushioned back. Aunt Zell’s always trying to get me to sit like that. I think my grandmother Stephenson must have had a thing about a lady’s back never touching the back of chairs because Mother used to tell me to sit up, too.

Who had nagged Gayle? Dinah Jean?

I knew I had a soft spot in my heart for Gayle, but looking at her sitting there so poised and mature, a young woman now and no longer a child, I wondered how I could have been the role model Jed claimed. It’d been years since we’d had more than passing conversation at church or ball games or run-ins around the county. She was six and I was in my first year of law school the last time I baby-sat her. It’s true that we’d been thrown together again when I was seeing Jed last spring, but we’d both been too self-conscious about the circumstances to do anything except chatter about surface stuff.

Sherry’s hovering was making her even more uptight.

“Let’s go back to my office,” I said, and Gayle rose from the chair with the quickness of a coiled spring.

We walked up the hall, Sherry leading the way, and I was struck afresh by how fully grown Gayle suddenly seemed to be. She was small boned and dark haired just like I remembered Janie being, only Janie’s hair had been long and straight and, except for an occasional beehive, she’d worn it flowing over her shoulders like everybody else in the early seventies. Gayle’s was french braided, but where stray tendrils escaped, they were curly like Jed’s hair. A white knitted top and short purple skirt set off her cute little figure without being obvious about it.

Even after we were in my office with the door closed on Sherry’s curious face, Gayle still seemed stiff. Daddy always said I could talk the ears off a mule, but it was several minutes before I got a smile out of her and she relaxed enough to set the box on the floor beside her and actually settle into the green velvet wingback in front of my desk.

I congratulated her on the Beaufort Scholarship. “Your dad’s mighty proud of you winning.”

Her smile turned wry. “I don’t know about that. I don’t think he’s happy with what I want to do with the trust fund Grampa Poole left me.”

“Well, you can’t really blame him, can you? It’s been eighteen years, and after all this time, what’s a private detective going to dig up that the police and SBI haven’t already found?”

“Maybe nothing,” she said calmly. “All I know is that I can’t go off to college with all this stuff hanging on me.”

“All what stuff?” I asked.

The placid adult surface wavered and I was suddenly face-to-face with the seething adolescent below.

“You saw how Sherry was out there? That’s the way it’s been my whole stupid life. As soon as anybody hears my name, it’s like there’s a neon sign hanging around my neck.” Her small hands sketched a flashing signboard-“THE JANIE WHITEHEAD MURDER!”-and her voice dripped scorn as she mimicked, “Oh my God, it’s that poor little thang that nearly parched to death when somebody shot her mother and left them both to die at Ridley’s Mill.”

She took a deep breath and tried to pull the surface back into place. It didn’t quite work. “So they fuss over me and they sweet-talk and part of it’s that they’re just so, so sorry for me and the other part’s that they’re dying to know what it’s like to have a murdered mother and not know who did it.”

“What is it like?” I asked.

She started to glare, then realized I wasn’t being cute. Despair replaced her anger.

“I don’t know. It’s like-like having a loose hair tickling on the back of your neck,” she said bleakly. “You keep brushing at your collar, but you never quite get it and just about the time you forget about it, there it is worrying you again. I just want it gone!” __

I shook my head. “Sorry, honey, but I don’t see how some strange detective’s going to-”

“Not some stranger,” she interrupted. “You, Deb’rah.”

Before I could start shaking my head, she plunged on. “I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it and Dad’s about to freak because I’ve been looking in all the phone books and the nearest private detectives are in Raleigh and you’re right. Nobody’s going to tell a stranger anything Sheriff Poole hasn’t already heard, probably; but you could do it, Deb’rah, I know you could. Soon as Dad came home last night and said he wanted me to talk to you, it was like the answer to everything. That’s the only reason I came today. You know everybody and everybody knows you and they’d trust you and-”

“Now wait a minute,” I protested. “I’m a lawyer, not a detective.”

“Oh, please!”

Gayle’s eyes beseeched with such intensity that for a brief instant of déjà vu, I was a pudgy, lank-haired sixteen again, wondering why I had been stuck with ordinary run-of-the-mill blue eyes when other people got luscious melting brown. I already envied Janie’s size eight bell-bottoms, her long black hair, her town-bred sophistication and, most of all, her husband. Now, there I was, jealous of even her eyes, damn her!

“Besides,” I added. “I really, honest to God, don’t have time. I’ve got a campaign to run and the primary’s next week.”

“Please,” Gayle repeated earnestly. “You’re going to be campaigning in Cotton Grove; too, aren’t you? So you’ll be seeing most everybody anyhow, won’t you? Besides, judges have to know whether people are telling the truth, don’t they? It’ll be practice for you.”

Well, I’d already sat in enough courtrooms to know when I wasn’t hearing the whole story.

“Who do you think’s not told the truth?” I asked.

Her eyes fell and she began twisting the zipper tassel on her purple clutch.

“All my life, everybody’s said the killer was some sorry tramp or migrant that’s probably been killed himself in New York City or Mexico by now.” She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “How come you quit seeing Dad?”

A shock of acknowledgment went through me and I could only stare at her, appalled.

“I’ve never said this to a single soul before.” Her level brown eyes glanced off mine and immediately dropped to her purse again. “Dad couldn’t have been the one who physically carried us out to Ridley’s Mill. He was in Raleigh all day. Everybody says so. But he could have hired somebody to do it. I’m not saying I think he did, but…”

“No, no, no,” I told her. “Of course, he didn’t.”

The hopeful look told me she wanted to believe. Well, who wants to think her own daddy’s capable of killing? I sure as hell never found it a barrel of laughs.

“Anybody could have hired someone, but he loved your mother, honey. He really did.” Into my mind unbidden came the thought each man kills the thing he loves, and I knew it must have been lying just beneath the surface of consciousness last spring.

“He married Mom-Dinah Jean-eight months later,” Gayle countered.

Dinah Jean was the only mother Gayle had ever known, and they’d seemed as close as any mother and daughter till Dinah Jean let her drinking get totally out of hand a couple of years ago. When. the divorce came, I heard Gayle had trouble choosing who to go with. Jed won out, not only because he was her natural parent and she was still underage, but also because Dinah Jean’s people had put her someplace out in the mountains to dry out.

“He was a young man,” I reminded Gayle, “and he had a baby daughter to take care of. In fact, a lot of people said he was thinking more about you than himself when he married her. He never looked twice at another woman while your mother was living and I’m sure he never loved Dinah Jean half as much.”

That was certainly how I’d consoled myself for months after Jed married Dinah Jean: that if he didn’t love me, neither did he really love her. A few weeks after Janie’s funeral, Jed and Gayle moved in with his parents so his mother could keep Gayle during the day. I still got asked to mind her occasionally; and from where I sat, a sixteen-year-old bundle of raging hormones, consumed with yearning frustration, it was no whirlwind romance. Even on the night before their wedding, when I brought Gayle home early from the rehearsal party, I’d seen none of the sexual tension that once flowed between Jed and Janie. And that wasn’t just wishful thinking either. He and Dinah Jean turned into an old married couple almost before the ink was dry on their marriage certificate.

It was the first time I’d thought about it from Dinah Jean’s viewpoint. No wonder she’d eventually crawled into a bottle and tried to pull the cork in after her.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t Dinah Jean’s ghost that had stood between Jed and me when he finally got around to noticing that I was grown up.

“Let the dead past bury its dead,” I murmured.

“Shakespeare?” asked Gayle.

I couldn’t remember the source, but it seemed like good advice and I told her so.

“I’ve tried that,” she said impatiently. “It doesn’t work. You’re just as bad as Gramma and Dad. They keep telling me not to think about it, too.”

She stood abruptly and smoothed the wrinkles from her purple skirt. “I’m sorry I wasted your time. Do I pay you or Sherry?”

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“Even though the man who did this probably is long gone to his own reward in New York or California?”

“It was somebody she knew,” said Gayle.

As she perched back on the edge of the chair and began laying out theories, I realized that this was probably the first time she’d ever spoken freely to an adult about Janie’s death since becoming an adult herself.

“They never kept it a big secret from me, ”she said. “It was sort of like being adopted. You know the way they start telling babies they’re adopted as soon as they bring them home so it never comes as a shock?”

I nodded.

“Well, I always knew that Mother and I were kidnapped and she was killed and it was three days before they found us-but it was almost like a bedtime story. Something with all the edges taken off. I hated the way people oozed over me, but I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean it was like you don’t give a lot of thought to why grass is green or water’s wet. It just is, you know? Then the Christmas right before I was sixteen, I was sleeping over at Gramma Pope’s and I found this box of newspaper clippings.”

She put the box on my desk and lifted the lid. It wis crammed with yellowed news articles jumbled in with no particular order. I saw pictures of Janie and Jed, the mill, even Janie’s abandoned car.

“Grampa cut out everything the Ledger and the News and Observer wrote about it from the day we disappeared till it stopped being news.”

She gave a wobbly little grin that almost broke my heart. “That’s when it quit being a bedtime story, Deborah. Reading it like that put the sharp edges back on, made me start thinking it must have been somebody she knew.”

“Because she gave someone in a raincoat a lift?” I shook my head. “It didn’t have to be someone she knew. Back then it wasn’t automatically a foolhardy thing to give a stranger a ride.”

“But if he was a stranger, how’d he know where to leave her car?”

That was one of many questions that had puzzled everyone else at the time. Weather conditions had been rainy and foggy on the May afternoon that Janie and Gayle disappeared. Her car had been seen in the deserted parking lot beside the old abandoned Dixie Motel. There’d been someone else in the front seat with her, someone wearing a beige or light tan raincoat and thought to be male by the one eyewitness who saw them.

If indeed old Howard Grimes had actually seen them.

There were at least three dark blue Ford sedans in Cotton Grove, including one that belonged to my brother Will; and Howard said he’d taken a good look because rumors were going around town about then that Will’s wife, Trish, was having an affair with somebody and he wanted to see who. (Not that the Ledger or the N amp;O printed Will or Trish’s names. But everyone involved knew who he was talking about.)

“I hadn’t heard nothing before about Jed Whitehead’s wife having round heels,” he was quoted as saying. “But the windows were too fogged up for me to see who he was. Saw her plain enough though.”

Howard’s account had kept the police from getting into it too heavily for the first twenty-four hours. For all they knew, little Janie Whitehead might well have gone off for an extramarital fling. Jed wouldn’t be the first husband, the Popes wouldn’t be the first parents, to say she’d never do something like that.

But then Janie’s sedan was discovered the next morning in the parking lot behind the Whitehead Real Estate Agency. It had not been there the evening before when old Mr. Whitehead closed early upon hearing that Janie and Gayle were missing. Street parking was plentiful, so the lot, shared by three other abutting offices, was not one used by the general public. Access in from Broad Street and out to Railroad was through narrow alleys screened by azaleas and high camellia bushes, not readily apparent and certainly not a place a stranger would stumble into on a dark foggy night.

“That’s why you tried to have a hypnotist take you back?”

“It didn’t work, though.” Lingering disappointment shadowed her voice. “I was really hoping maybe I’d remember her.”

My own mother died the summer I turned eighteen, and trying to imagine never having known her made it easier to understand why everybody could get sentimental and maudlin about Gayle’s semi-orphaned status. Gayle’s next words, however, made it clear that something else was going on in her head.

“What was her tragic flaw, Deborah?”

I looked at her blankly. Okay, we all knew Gayle was bright. They don’t give out full four-year scholarships to the university just because someone’s mother got killed. But was she brains or book learning?

“I took an interdisciplinary honors course last fell,” she said. “Hamlet, Edward the Eighth, Richard Nixon. We discussed their tragic flaws, and I couldn’t help applying it to my mother. Not who killed her, but why? What was her tragic flaw?” She leaned forward. “Everybody says she was good and sweet and beautiful and that I’m just like her. Well, nobody’s that damn sweet and good. I’m not and I bet she wasn’t either.”

Brains, then?

There had been a million unanswered questions when Janie Whitehead was killed, but every question was predicated on the belief that innocence and purity had been cruelly slaughtered that chilly May afternoon. Yet, in the months before, lust for Jed Whitehead had made me acutely aware of Janie’s flaws and, yes, she had her human share. I had collected them secretly and gloated over them like a miser polishing his coins. God knows I’d been wracked with guilt when I saw her cold stiff body lying in that coffin, her shining black hair spread across the pink satin pillow, her luminous brown eyes closed for all eternity; but remorse and guilt and prayers to God for forgiveness had not washed away the question with which Gayle now struggled.

“They say everybody carries within themselves the seeds of their own destruction,” she said.

“Sounds like another way to blame the victim for the crime,” I hedged starchily, as if I were already a judge.

“She was only twenty-two,” said Gayle, her voice passionate. “Four years older than I am right now. What if I really am like her?”

“Nobody’s going to kill you,” I told her.

Again it was the wrong comment and she waved me off impatiently.

“I’ve almost quit wondering about who killed her, Deborah. Now I think if I just find out why, that might be enough. People either pat me on the head when I ask what she was like or else they tell me another bedtime story. You knew her and you know everybody in Cotton Grove. And I’m not asking you to do it for nothing either. I’ve got Grampa Poole’s trust fund, and I’ll spend every last cent if that’s what it takes to find out what she was really like that somebody felt she needed killing.”

Jed didn’t like it when I called to tell him that Gayle was determined to go through with it one way or another. Not one little bit did he like it.

“She’s as headstrong as her mother,” he said finally, but his voice got softer. “Janie always had to have her way, too, didn’t she?”

“Just tell me what you want me to do, Jed,” I said impatiently. “I’ve got enough on my plate right now. I don’t need this. You want me to tell her no, I will.”

He sighed. “No, I reckon we’ll have to do what she wants.” He sighed again. “Better you than some real detective.”