A Woman’s Eye

DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT by Margaret Maron

MARGARET MARON’s books featuring the New York Police Department’s Sigrid Harald are both complex mysteries and intense character studies. Harald appears in over half a dozen books to date, including such notable works as Corpus Christmas and One Coffee With. Ms. Maron lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”

An inaudible ripple of cognizance swept through the congregation as the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church paused in his reading of the text and beamed down at us.

I was seated on the aisle near the front of the church, and when Barry Blackman’s eyes met mine, I put a modest smile on my face, then tilted my head in ladylike acknowledgment of the pretty compliment he was paying me by his choice of subject for this morning’s sermon. A nice man but hardly Christianity’s most original preacher. I’d announced my candidacy back in December, so this wasn’t the first time I’d heard that particular text, and my response had become almost automatic.

He lowered his eyes to the huge Bible and continued to read aloud, “And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment.”

From your mouth to God’s ear, Barry, I thought.

Eight years of courtroom experience let me listen to the sermon with an outward show of close attention while inwardly my mind jumped on and off a dozen trains of thought. I wondered, without really caring, if Barry was still the terrific kisser he’d been the summer after ninth grade when we both drove tractors for my oldest brother during tobacco-barning season.

There was an S curve between the barns and the back fields where the lane dipped past a stream and cut through a stand of tulip poplars and sweetgum trees. Our timing wasn’t good enough to hit every trip, but at least two or three times a day it’d work out that we passed each other there in the shady coolness, one on the way out to the field with empty drags, the other headed back to the barn with drags full of heavy green tobacco leaves.

Nobody seemed to notice that I occasionally returned to the barn more flushed beneath the bill of my baseball cap than even the August sun would merit, although I did have to endure some teasing one day when a smear of tobacco tar appeared on my pink T-shirt right over my left breast. “Looks like somebody tried to grab a handful,” my sister-in-law grinned.

I muttered something about the tractor’s tar-gummy steering wheel, but I changed shirts at lunchtime and for the rest of the summer I wore the darkest T-shirts in my dresser drawer.

Now Barry Blackman was a preacher man running to fat, the father of two little boys and a new baby girl, while Deborah Knott was a still-single attorney running for a seat on the court bench, a seat being vacated against his will by old Harrison Hobart, who occasionally fell asleep these days while charging his own juries.

As Barry drew parallels between Old Testament Israel and modem Colleton County, I plotted election strategy. After the service, I’d do a little schmoozing among the congregation-

Strike “schmoozing,” my subconscious stipulated sternly, and I was stricken myself to realize that Lev Schuster’s Yiddish phrases continued to infect my vocabulary. Here in rural North Carolina schmoozing’s still called socializing, and I’d better not forget it before the primary. I pushed away errant thoughts of Lev and concentrated on lunch at Beulah’s. For that matter, where was Beulah and why weren’t she and J.C. seated there beside me?

Beulah had been my mother’s dearest friend, and her daughter-in-law, Helen, is president of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They were sponsoring a meet-the-candidates reception at four o’clock in the fellowship hall of a nearby Presbyterian church, and three of the four men running for Hobart’s seat would be there too. (The fourth was finishing up the community service old Hobart had imposed in lieu of a fine for driving while impaired, but he really didn’t expect to win many MADD votes anyhow.)

Barry’s sermon drew to an end just a hair short of equating a vote for Deborah Knott as a vote for Jesus Christ. The piano swung into the opening chords of “Just as I Am,” and the congregation stood to sing all five verses. Happily, no one accepted the hymn’s invitation to be saved that morning, and after a short closing prayer we were dismissed.

I’m not a member at Bethel, but I’d been a frequent visitor from the month I was born; so I got lots of hugs and howdies and promises of loyal support when the primary rolled around. I hugged and howdied right back and thanked them kindly, all the time edging toward my car.

It was starting to bother me that neither Beulah nor J.C. had come to church. Then Miss Callie Ogburn hailed me from the side door, talking sixty to the yard as she bustled across the grass.

“Beulah called me up first thing this morning and said tell you about J.C. and for you to come on anyhow. She phoned all over creation last night trying to let you know she’s still expecting you to come for dinner.”

That explained all those abortive clicks on my answering machine. Beulah was another of my parents’ generation who wouldn’t talk to a tape. I waited till Miss Callie ran out of breath, then asked her what it was Beulah wanted to tell me about J.C.

“He fell off the tractor and broke his leg yesterday, and he’s not used to the crutches yet, so Beulah didn’t feel like she ought to leave him this morning. You know how she spoils him.”

I did. J.C. was Beulah’s older brother, and he’d lived with her and her husband Sam almost from the day they were married more than forty years ago. J.C. was a born bachelor, and except for the war years when he worked as a carpenter’s helper at an air base over in Goldsboro, he’d never had much ambition beyond helping Sam farm. Sam always said J.C. wasn’t much of a leader but he was a damn good follower and earned every penny of his share of the crop profits.

Although I’d called them Cousin Beulah and Cousin Sam till I was old enough to drop the courtesy title, strictly speaking, only Sam Johnson was blood kin. But Beulah and my mother had been close friends since childhood, and Beulah’s two children fit into the age spaces around my older brothers, which was why we’d spent so many Sundays at Bethel Baptist.

When Sam died seven or eight years ago, Sammy Junior took over, and J.C. still helped out even though he’d slowed down right much. At least, J.C. called it right much. I could only hope I’d feel like working half days on a tractor when I reached seventy-two.

Five minutes after saying good-bye to Miss Callie, I was turning off the paved road into the sandy lane that ran past the Johnson home place. The doors there were closed and none of their three cars were in the yard, but Helen’s Methodist and I’d heard Beulah mention the long-winded new preacher at her daughter-in-law’s church.

Helen and Sammy Junior had remodeled and painted the shabby old two-story wooden farmhouse after old Mrs. Johnson died, and it was a handsome place these days: gleaming white aluminum siding and dark blue shutters, sitting in a shady grove of hundred-year-old white oaks.

Beulah’s brick house-even after forty years, everyone in the family still calls it the “new house”-was farther down the lane and couldn’t be seen from the road or the home place.

My car topped the low ridge that gave both generations their privacy, then swooped down toward a sluggish creek that had been dredged out into a nice-size irrigation pond beyond the house. As newlyweds, Sam and Beulah had planted pecans on each side of the lane, and mature nut trees now met in a tall arch.

The house itself was rooted in its own grove of pecans and oaks, with underplantings of dogwoods, crepe myrtles, red-buds, and flowering pears. Pink and white azaleas lined the foundation all around. On this warm day in late April, the place was a color illustration out of Southern Living. I pulled up under a chinaball tree by the back porch and tapped my horn, expecting to see Beulah appear at the screen door with her hands full of biscuit dough and an ample print apron protecting her Sunday dress against flour smudges.

A smell of burning paper registered oddly as I stepped from the car. It wasn’t cool enough for a fire, and no one on this farm would break the fourth commandment by burning trash on the Sabbath.

There was no sign of Beulah when I crossed the wide planks of the wooden porch and called through the screen, but the kitchen was redolent of baking ham. J.C.’s old hound dog crawled out from under the back steps and wagged his tail at me hopefully. The screen door was unhooked, and the inner door stood wide.

“Beulah?” I called again, “J.C.?”

No answer. Yet her Buick and J.C.’s Ford pickup were both parked under the barn shelter at the rear of the yard.

The kitchen, dining room, and den ran together in one large L-shaped space, and when a quick glance into the formal, seldom-used living room revealed no one there either, I crossed to the stairs in the center hall. Through an open door at the far end of the hall, I could see into Donna Sue’s old bedroom, now the guest room.

The covers on the guest bed had been straightened, but the spread was folded down neatly and pillows were piled on top of the rumpled quilt as if J.C. had rested there after Beulah made the bed. He wouldn’t be able to use the stairs until his leg mended, so he’d probably moved in here for the duration. A stack of Field and Stream magazines and an open pack of his menthol cigarettes on the nightstand supported my hypothesis.

The house remained silent as I mounted the stairs.

“Anybody home?”

Beulah’s bedroom was deserted and as immaculate as downstairs except for the desk. She and Sam had devoted a corner of their bedroom to the paper work connected with the farm, Although Sammy Junior did most of the farm records now on a computer over at his house, Beulah had kept the oak desk. One of my own document binders lay on its otherwise bare top. I’d drawn up her new will less than a month ago and had brought it out to her myself in this very same binder, I lifted the cover. The holographic distribution of small personal keepsakes she had insisted on was still there, but the will itself was missing.

For the first time since I’d entered this quiet house, I felt a small chill of foreboding,

Sammy Junior’s old bedroom had been turned into a sewing room, and it was as empty as the bathroom. Ditto J.C.’s. As a child I’d had the run of every room in the house except this one, so I’d never entered it alone.

From the doorway, it looked like a rerun of the others: everything vacuumed and polished and tidy; but when I stepped inside, I saw the bottom drawer of the wide mahogany dresser open. Inside were various folders secured by brown cords, bundles of tax returns, account ledgers, bank statements, and two large flat candy boxes, which I knew held old family snapshots. More papers and folders were loosely stacked on the floor beside a low footstool, as if someone had sat there to sort through the drawer and had then been interrupted before the task was finished. Beulah would never leave a clutter like that.

Thoroughly puzzled, I went back down to the kitchen. The ham had been in the oven at least a half hour too long, so I turned it off and left the door cracked. The top burners were off, but each held a pot of cooked vegetables, still quite hot. Wherever Beulah was, she hadn’t been gone very long.

Year round, she and J.C. and Sam, too, when he was alive, loved to walk the land, and if they weren’t expecting company, it wasn’t unusual to find them out at the pond or down in the woods. But with me invited for Sunday dinner along with Sammy Junior and Helen and their three teenagers? And with J.C.’s broken leg?

Not hardly likely, as my daddy would say.

Nevertheless, I went out to my car and blew the horn long and loud.

Buster, the old hound, nuzzled my hand as I stood beside the car indecisively. And that was another thing. If J.C. were out stumping across the farm on crutches, Buster wouldn’t be hanging around the back door. He’d be right out there with J.C.

It didn’t make sense, yet if there’s one thing the law has taught me, it’s that it doesn’t pay to formulate a theory without all the facts. I headed back inside to phone and see if Helen and Sammy Junior were home yet, and as I lifted the receiver from the kitchen wall, I saw something I’d missed before.

At the far end of the den, beyond the high-backed couch, the fireplace screen had been moved to one side of the hearth, and there were scraps of charred paper in the grate.

I remembered the smell of burning paper that had hung in the air when I first arrived, I started toward the fireplace, and now I could see the coffee table strewn with the Sunday edition of the Raleigh News and Observer.

As I rounded the high couch, I nearly tripped on a pair of crutches, but they barely registered, so startled was I by seeing J.C. lying there motionless, his eyes closed.

“Glory, J.C.!” I exclaimed. “You asleep? That must be some painkiller the doctor-”

I suddenly realized that the brightly colored sheet of Sunday comics over his chest was drenched in his own bright blood.

I knelt beside the old man and clutched his callused, work-worn hand. It was still warm. His faded blue eyes opened, rolled back in his head, then focused on me.

“Deb’rah?” His voice was faint and came from far, far away. “I swear I plumb forgot…”

He gave a long sigh and his eyes closed again.

Dwight Bryant is detective chief of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. After calling the nearest rescue squad, I’d dialed his mother’s phone number on the off chance that he’d be there in the neighborhood and not twenty-two miles away at Dobbs, the county seat.

Four minutes flat after I hung up the phone, I saw his Chevy pickup zoom over the crest of the lane and tear through the arch of pecan trees. He was followed by a bright purple TR, and even in this ghastly situation, I had to smile at his exasperation as Miss Emily Bryant bounded from the car and hurried up the steps ahead of him.

“Damn it all, Mother, if you set the first foot inside that house, I’m gonna arrest you, and I mean it!”

She turned on him, a feisty little carrottop Chihuahua facing down a sandy-brown Saint Bernard. “If you think I’m going to stay out here when one of my oldest and dearest friends may be lying in there-”

“She’s not, Miss Emily,” I said tremulously. J.C.’s blood was under my fingernails from where I’d stanched his chest wound. “I promise you. I looked in every room.”

“And under all the beds and in every closet?” She stamped her small foot imperiously on the porch floor. “I won’t touch a thing, Dwight, but I’ve got to look.”

“No.” That was the law talking, not her son; and she huffed but quit arguing.

“Okay, Deborah,” said Dwight, holding the screen door open for me. “Show me,”

Forty-five minutes later we knew no more than before. The rescue squad had arrived and departed again with J.C., who was still unconscious and barely clinging to life.

Sammy Junior and Helen were nearly frantic over Beulah’s disappearance and were torn between following the ambulance and staying put till there was word of her. Eventually they thought to call Donna Sue, who said she’d meet the ambulance at the hospital and stay with J.C. till they heard more.

A general APB had been issued for Beulah, but since nobody knew how she left, there wasn’t much besides her physical appearance to put on the wire.

Dwight’s deputies processed the den and J.C.’s room like a crime scene. After they finished, Dwight and I walked through the house with Sammy Junior and Helen; but they, too, saw nothing out of the ordinary except for the papers strewn in front of J.C.’s bedroom dresser.

Sammy Junior’s impression was the same as mine. “It’s like Mama was interrupted.”

“Doing what?” asked Dwight.

“Probably getting Uncle J.C.’s insurance papers together for him. I said I’d take ’em over to the hospital tomorrow. In all the excitement yesterday when he broke his leg, we didn’t think about ’em.”

He started to leave the room, then hesitated. “Y’all find his gun?”

“Gun?” said Dwight.

Sammy Junior pointed to a pair of empty rifle brackets over the bedroom door. “That’s where he keeps his.22.”

Much as we’d all like to believe this is still God’s country, everything peaceful and nice, most people now latch their doors at night, and they do keep loaded guns around for more than rats and snakes and wild dogs.

Helen shivered and instinctively moved closer to Sammy Junior. “The back door’s always open, Dwight. I’ll bet you anything some burglar or rapist caught her by surprise and forced her to go with him. And then J.C. probably rared up on the couch and they shot him like you’d swat a fly.”

I turned away from the pain on Sammy Junior’s face and stared through the bedroom window as Dwight said, “Been too many cars down the lane and through the yard for us to find any tread marks.”

Any lawyer knows how easily the lives of good decent people can be shattered, but I’ll never get used to the abruptness of it. Trouble seldom comes creeping up gently, giving a person time to prepare or get out of the way. It’s always the freakish bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, the jerk of a steering wheel, the collapse of something rock solid only a second ago.

From the window I saw puffy white clouds floating serenely over the farm. The sun shone as brightly as ever on flowering trees and new-planted corn, warming the earth for another round of seedtime and harvest. A soft wind smoothed the field where J.C. had been disking before his accident yesterday, and in the distance the pond gleamed silver-green before a stand of willows.

My eye was snagged by what looked like a red-and-white cloth several yards into the newly disked field. Probably something Buster had pulled off the clothesline, I thought, and was suddenly aware that the others were waiting for my answer to a question I’d barely heard.

“No,” I replied, “I’d have noticed another car or truck coming out of the lane. Couldn’t have missed them by much, though, because the vegetables on the stove were still hot. Beulah must have turned them off just before going upstairs,”

“It’s a habit with her,” Sammy Junior said. He had his arm around Helen and was kneading her shoulder convulsively. It would probably be bruised tomorrow, but Helen didn’t seem to notice.

“Mama burned so many pots when we were kids that she got to where she wouldn’t leave the kitchen without turning off the vegetables. She’d mean to come right back, but then there was always something that needed doing, and you know how Mama is,”

We did. We surely did, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do” must have been written with Beulah in mind. She always reacted impulsively and couldn’t pass a dusty surface or a dirty windowpane or anything out of place without cleaning it or taking it back to its rightful spot in the house.

Maybe that’s why that scrap of red-and-white cloth out in the field bothered me. If I could see it, so would Beulah. She wouldn’t let it lie out there ten minutes if she could help it, and it was with a need to restore some of her order that I slipped away from the others.

Downstairs, the crime scene crew had finished with the kitchen; and for lack of anything more useful to do, Miss Emily had decided that everybody’d fare better on a full stomach. She’d put bowls of vegetables on the counter, sliced the ham, and set out glasses and a jug of sweet iced tea. At this returning semblance of the ordinary, Helen and Sammy Junior’s three anxious teenagers obediently filled their plates and went outside under the trees to eat. Their parents and Dwight weren’t enthusiastic about food at the moment, but Miss Emily bullied them into going through the motions. Even Dwight’s men had to stop and fix a plate.

No one noticed as I passed through the kitchen and down the back steps, past the Johnson grandchildren, who were feeding ham scraps to Buster and talking in low worried tones.

The lane cut through the yard, skirted the end of the field, then wound circuitously around the edge of the woods and on down to the pond; but the red-and-white rag lay on a beeline from the back door to the pond and I hesitated about stepping off the grass. My shoes were two-inch sling-back pumps, and they’d be wrecked if I walked out into the soft dirt of the newly disked field.

As I dithered, I saw that someone else had recently crossed the field on foot.

A single set of tracks.

With growing horror I remembered the red-and-white hostess aprons my aunt Zell had sewed for all her friends last Christmas.

I ran back to my car, grabbed the sneakers I keep in the

trunk, and then rushed to call Dwight.

It was done strictly by the book.

Dwight’s crime scene crew would later methodically photograph and measure and take pains not to disturb a single clod till every mark Beulah had left on the soft dirt was thoroughly documented; but the rest of us hurried through the turned field, paralleling the footprints from a ten-foot distance and filled with foreboding by the steady, unwavering direction those footsteps had taken.

Beulah’s apron lay about two hundred feet from the edge of the yard, She must have untied the strings and just let it fall as she walked away from it.

The rifle, though, had been deliberately pitched. We could see where she stopped, the depth of her footprints where she heaved it away from her as if it were something suddenly and terribly abhorrent.

After that, there was nothing to show that she’d hesitated a single second. Her footprints went like bullets, straight down to the pond and into the silent, silver-green water,

As with most farm ponds dredged for irrigation, the bottom dropped off steeply from the edge to discourage mosquito larvae.

“How deep is it there?” Dwight asked when we arrived breathless and panting.

“Twelve feet,” said Sammy Junior. “And she never learned how to swim.”

His voice didn’t break, but his chest was heaving, his face got red, and tears streamed from his eyes. “Why? In God’s name, why, Dwight? Helen? Deb’rah? You all know Uncle J.C. near ’bout worships Mama, And we’ve always teased her that J.C. stood for Jesus Christ the way she’s catered to him.”

It was almost dark before they found Beulah’s body.

No one tolled the heavy iron bell at the home place. The old way of alerting the neighborhood to fire or death has long since been replaced by the telephone, but the reaction hasn’t changed much in two hundred years.

By the time that second ambulance passed down the lane, this one on its way to the state’s medical examiner in Chapel Hill, cars filled the yard and lined the ditch banks on either side of the road. And there was no place in Helen’s kitchen or dining room to set another plate of food. It would have taken a full roll of tinfoil to cover all the casseroles, biscuits, pies, deviled eggs, and platters of fried chicken, sliced turkey, and roast pork that had been brought in by shocked friends and relatives.

My aunt Zell arrived, white-faced and grieving, the last of three adventuresome country girls who’d gone off to Goldsboro during World War II to work at the air base. I grew up on stories of those war years: how J.C. had been sent over by his and Beulah’s parents to keep an eye on my mother, Beulah, and Aunt Zell and protect them from the dangers of a military town, how they’d tried to fix him up with a WAC from New Jersey, the Saturday night dances, the innocent flirtations with that steady stream of young airmen who passed through the Army Air Forces Technical Training School at Seymour Johnson Field on their way to the airfields of Europe.

It wasn’t till I was eighteen, the summer between high school and college, the summer Mother was dying, that I learned it hadn’t all been lighthearted laughter.

We’d been sorting through a box of old black-and-white snapshots that Mother was determined to date and label before she died. Among the pictures of her or Aunt Zell or Beulah perched on the wing of a bomber or jitterbugging with anonymous, interchangeable airmen, there was one of Beulah and a young man. They had their arms around each other, and there was a sweet solemnity in their faces that separated this picture from the other clowning ones.

“Who’s that?” I asked, and Mother sat staring into the picture for so long that I had to ask again.

“His name was Donald,” she finally replied. Then her face took on an earnest look I’d come to know that summer, the look that meant I was to be entrusted with another secret, another scrap of her personal history that she couldn’t bear to take to her grave untold even though each tale began, “Now you mustn’t ever repeat this, but-”

“Donald Farraday came from Norwood, Nebraska,” she said. “Exactly halfway between Omaha and Lincoln on the Platte River. That’s what he always said. After he shipped out, Beulah used to look at the map and lay her finger halfway between Omaha and Lincoln and make Zell and me promise that we’d come visit her.”

“I thought Sam was the only one she ever dated seriously,” I protested.

“Beulah was the only one Sam ever dated seriously,” Mother said crisply. “He had his eye on her from the time she was in grade school and he and J.C. used to go hunting together. She wrote to him while he was fighting the Japs, but they weren’t going steady or anything. And she’d have never married Sam if Donald hadn’t died.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding the sad look that sometimes shadowed Beulah’s eyes when only minutes before she and Mother and Aunt Zell might have been giggling over some Goldsboro memory.

Donald Farraday was from a Nebraska wheat farm, Mother told me, on his way to fight in Europe. Beulah met him at a jitterbug contest put on by the canteen, and it’d been love at first sight. Deep and true and all-consuming. They had only sixteen days and fifteen nights together, but that was enough to know this wasn’t a passing wartime romance. Their values, their dreams, everything meshed.

“And they had so much fun together. You’ve never seen two people laugh so much over nothing. She didn’t even cry when he shipped out because she was so happy thinking about what marriage to him was going to be like after the war was over.”

“How did he die?”

“We never really heard,” said Mother. “She had two of the sweetest, most beautiful letters you could ever hope to read, and then nothing. That was near the end when fighting was so heavy in Italy-we knew he was in Italy though it was supposed to be secret. They weren’t married so his parents would’ve gotten the telegram, and of course, not knowing anything about Beulah, they couldn’t write her.”

“So what happened?”

“The war ended. We all came home, I married your daddy, Zell married James. Sam came back from the South Pacific and with Donald dead, Beulah didn’t care who she married.”

“Donna Sue!” I said suddenly.

“Yes,” Mother agreed. “Sue for me, Donna in memory of Donald. She doesn’t know about him, though, and don’t you ever tell her.” Her face was sad as she looked at the photograph in her hand of the boy and girl who’d be forever young, forever in love. “Beulah won’t let us mention his name, but I know she still grieves for what might have been.”

After Mother was gone, I never spoke to Beulah about what I knew. The closest I ever came was my junior year at Carolina when Jeff Creech dumped me for a psych major and I moped into the kitchen where Beulah and Aunt Zell were drinking coffee. I moaned about how my heart was broken and I couldn’t go on and Beulah had smiled at me, “You’ll go on, sugar. A woman’s body doesn’t quit just because her heart breaks.”

Sudden tears had misted Aunt Zell’s eyes-we Stephen-sons can cry over telephone commercials-and Beulah abruptly left,

“She was remembering Donald Farraday, wasn’t she?” I asked.

“Sue told you about him?”

“Yes,”

Aunt Zell had sighed then, “I don’t believe a day goes by that she doesn’t remember him.”

The endurance of Beulah’s grief had suddenly put Jeff Creech into perspective, and I realized with a small pang that losing him probably wasn’t going to blight the rest of my life.

As I put my arms around Aunt Zell, I thought of her loss: Mother gone, now Beulah. Only J.C. left to remember those giddy girlhood years. At least the doctors were cautiously optimistic that he’d recover from the shooting.

“Why did she do it?” I asked.

But Aunt Zell was as perplexed as the rest of us. The house was crowded with people who’d known and loved Beulah and J.C. all their lives, and few could recall a true cross word between older brother and younger sister.

“Oh, Mama’d get fussed once in a while when he’d try to keep her from doing something new,” said Donna Sue.

Every wake I’ve ever attended, the survivors always alternate between sudden paroxysms of tears and a need to remember and retell. For all the pained bewilderment and unanswered questions that night, Beulah’s wake was no different.

“Remember, Sammy, how Uncle J.C. didn’t want her to buy that place at the beach?”

“He never liked change,” her brother agreed. “He talked about jellyfish and sharks-”

“-and sun poisoning,” Helen said with a sad smile as she refilled his glass of iced tea. “Don’t forget the sun poisoning.”

“Changed his tune soon enough once he got down there and the fish started biting,” said a cousin as he bit into a sausage biscuit.

One of Dwight’s deputies signaled me from the hallway, and I left them talking about how J.C.’d tried to stop Beulah from touring England with one of her alumnae groups last year, and how he’d fretted the whole time she was gone, afraid her plane would crash into the Atlantic or be hijacked by terrorists.

“Dwight wants you back over there,” said the deputy and drove me through the gathering dark, down the lane to where Beulah’s house blazed with lights.

Dwight was waiting for me in the den. They’d salvaged a few scraps from the fireplace, but the ashes had been stirred with a poker and there wasn’t much left to tell what had been destroyed. Maybe a handful of papers, Dwight thought. “And this. It fell behind the grate before it fully burned.”

The sheet was crumpled and charred, but enough remained to see the words Last Will and Testament of Beulah Ogburn Johnson and the opening paragraph about revoking all earlier wills.

“You were her lawyer,” said Dwight. “Why’d she burn her will?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, honestly puzzled. “Unless-”

“Unless what?”

“I’ll have to read my copy tomorrow, but there’s really not going to be much difference between what happens if she died intestate and-” I interrupted myself, remembering. “In fact, if J.C. dies, it’ll be exactly the same, Dwight. Sammy Junior and Donna Sue still split everything.”

“And if he lives?”

“If this were still a valid instrument,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “J.C. would have a lifetime right to this house and Beulah’s share of the farm income, with everything divided equally between bar two children when he died; without the will, he’s not legally entitled to stay the night.”

“They’d never turn him out.”

I didn’t respond and Dwight looked at me thoughtfully.

“But without the will, they could if they wanted to,” he said slowly.

Dwight Bryant’s six or eight years older than I, and he’s known me all my life, yet I don’t think he’d ever looked at me as carefully as he did that night in Beulah’s den, in front of that couch soaked in her brother’s blood. “And if he’d done something bad enough to make their mother shoot him and then go drown herself…”

“They could turn him out and not a single voice in the whole community would speak against it,” I finished for him.

Was that what Beulah wanted? Dead or alive, she was still my client. But I wondered: when she shot J.C. and burned her will, had she been of sound mind?

By next morning, people were beginning to say no. There was no sane reason for Beulah’s act, they said, so it must have been a sudden burst of insanity, and wasn’t there a great-aunt on her daddy’s side that’d been a little bit queer near the end?

J.C. regained consciousness, but he was no help.

“I was resting on the couch,” he said, “and I never heard a thing till I woke up hurting and you were there, Deb’rah.”

He was still weak, but fierce denial burned in his eyes when they told him that Beulah had shot him. “She never!”

“Her fingerprints are on your rifle,” said Dwight.

“She never!” He gazed belligerently from Donna Sue to Sammy Junior. “She never. Not her own brother. Where is she? You better not’ve jailed her, Dwight!”

He went into shock when they told him Beulah was dead. Great sobbing cries of protest racked his torn and broken body. It was pitiful to watch. Donna Sue petted and hugged him, but the nurse had to inject a sedative to calm him, and she asked us to leave.

I was due in court anyhow, and afterwards there was a luncheon speech at the Jaycees and a pig-picking that evening to raise funds for the children’s hospital. I fell into bed exhausted, but instead of sleeping, my mind began to replay everything that had happened Sunday, scene by scene. Suddenly there was a freeze-frame on the moment I discovered J.C.

Next morning I was standing beside his hospital bed before anyone else got there.

“What was it you forgot?” I asked him.

The old man stared at me blankly. “Huh?”

“When I found you, you said, ‘Deborah, I swear I plumb forgot.’ Forgot what, J.C.?”

His faded blue eyes shifted to the shiny get-well balloons tethered to the foot of his bed by colorful streamers.

“I don’t remember saying that,” he lied.

From the hospital, I drove down to the town commons and walked along the banks of our muddy river. It was another beautiful spring day, but I was harking back to Sunday morning, trying to think myself into Beulah’s mind.

You’re a sixty-six-year-old widow, I thought. You’re cooking Sunday dinner for your children and for the daughter of your dead friend. (She’s running for judge, Sue. Did you ever imagine it?) And there’s J.C. calling from the den about his insurance papers. So you turn off the vegetables and go upstairs and look in his drawer for the policies and you find-

What do you find that sends you back downstairs with a rifle in your hands and papers to burn? Why bother to burn anything after you’ve shot the person who loves you best in all the world?

And why destroy a will that would have provided that person with a dignified and independent old age? Was it because the bequest had been designated “To my beloved only brother who has always looked after me,” and on this beautiful Sunday morning J.C. has suddenly stopped being beloved and has instead become someone to hurt? Maybe even to kill?

Why, why, WHY?

I shook my head impatiently. What in God’s creation could J.C. have kept in that drawer that would send Beulah over the edge?

Totally baffled, I deliberately emptied my mind and sat down on one of the stone benches and looked up into a dogwood tree in full bloom. With the sun above them, the white blossoms glowed with a paschal translucence. Mother had always loved dogwoods.

Mother. Aunt Zell, Beulah,

A spring blossoming more than forty-five years ago.

I thought of dogwoods and spring love, and into my emptied mind floated a single what if-?

I didn’t force it. I just sat and watched while it grew from possibility to certainty, a certainty reinforced as I recalled something Mother had mentioned about shift work at the airfield.

It was such a monstrous certainty that I wanted to be dissuaded, so I went to my office and called Aunt Zell and asked her to think back to the war years.

“When you ail were in Goldsboro,” I said, “did you work days or nights?”

“Days, of course,” she answered promptly.

The weight started to roll off my chest.

“Leastways, we three girls did,” she added. “J.C. worked nights. Why?”

For a moment I thought the heaviness would smother me before I could stammer out a reason and hang up.

Sherry, my secretary, came in with some papers to sign, but I waved her away. “Bring me the phone book,” I told her, “and then leave me alone unless I buzz you.”

Astonishingly, it took only one call to Information to get the number I needed. He answered on the second ring and we talked for almost an hour. I told him I was a writer doing research on the old Army Air Forces technical schools.

He didn’t seem to think it odd when my questions got personal.

He sounded nice.

He sounded lonely.

“You look like hell,” Sherry observed when I passed through the office. “You been crying?”

“Anybody wants me, I’ll be at the hospital,” I said without breaking stride.

Donna Sue and Helen were sitting beside J.C.’s bed when I got there, and it took every ounce of courtroom training for me not to burst out with it. Instead I made sympathetic conversation like a perfect Southern lady, and when they broke down again about Beulah, I said, “You all need to get out in the spring sunshine for a few minutes. Go get something with ice in it and walk around the parking lot twice. I’ll keep J.C. company till you get back.”

J.C. closed his eyes as they left, but I let him have it with both barrels.

“You bastard!” I snarled. “You filthy bastard! I just got off the phone to Donald Farraday. He still fives in Norwood, Nebraska, J.C. Halfway between Omaha and Lincoln.”

The old man groaned and clenched his eyes tighter.

“He didn’t die. He wasn’t even wounded. Except in the heart. By you.” So much anger roiled up inside me, I was almost spitting my words at him.

“He wrote her every chance he got till it finally sank in she was never going to answer. He thought she’d changed her mind, realized that she didn’t really love him. And every day Beulah must have been coming home, asking if she’d gotten any mail, and you only gave her Sam’s letters, you rotten, no-good-”

“Sam was homefolks,” J.C. burst out. “That other one, he’d have taken her way the hell away to Nebraska. She didn’t have any business in Nebraska! Sam loved her.”

“She didn’t love him,” I snapped.

“Sure, she did. Oh, it took her a bit to get over the other one, but she settled.”

“Only because she thought Farraday was dead! You had no right, you sneaking, sanctimonious Pharisee! You wrecked her whole life!”

“Her life wasn’t wrecked,” he argued. “She had Donna Sue and Sammy Junior and the farm and-”

“If it was such a star-spangled life,” I interrupted hotly, “why’d she take a gun to you the minute she knew what you’d done to her?”

The fight went out of him and he sank back into the pillow, sobbing now and holding himself where the bullet had passed through his right lung.

“Why in God’s name did you keep the letters? That’s what she found, wasn’t it?”

Still sobbing, J.C. nodded.

“I forgot they were still there. I never opened them, and she didn’t either. She said she couldn’t bear to. She just put them in the grate and put a match to them and she was crying. I tried to explain about how I’d done what was best for her, and all at once she had the rifle in her hands and she said she’d never forgive me, and then I reckon she shot me.”

He reached out a bony hand and grasped mine. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

I jerked my hand away as if it’d suddenly touched filth.

“Please, Deb’rah?”

“Donald Farraday has a daughter almost the same age as Donna Sue,” I said. “Know what he named her, J.C.? He named her Beulah.”

Dwight Bryant was waiting when I got back from court that afternoon and he followed me into my office.

“I hear you visited J.C. twice today.” “

So?” I slid off my high heels. They were wickedly expensive and matched the power red of my linen suit, I waggled my stockinged toes at him, but he didn’t smile.

“Judge not,” he said sternly,

“Is that with an N or a K?” I parried.

“Sherry tells me you never give clients the original of their will.”

“Never’s a long time, and Sherry may not know as much about my business as she thinks she does.”

“But it was a copy that Beulah burned, wasn’t it?”

“I’m prepared to go to court and swear it was the original if I have to. It won’t be necessary though. J.C. won’t contest it.”

Dwight stared at me a long level moment. “Why’re you doing this to him?”

I matched his stare with one about twenty degrees colder. “Not me, Dwight. Beulah.”

“He swears he doesn’t know why she shot him, but you know, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

He hauled himself to his feet, angry and frustrated. “If you do this, Deborah, J.C.’ll have to spend the rest of his life depending on Donna Sue and Sammy Junior’s good will. You don’t have the right. Nobody elected you judge yet.”

“Yes, they did,” I said, thinking of the summer I was eighteen and how Mother had told me all her secrets so that if I ever needed her eyewitness testimony I’d have it.

And Deborah was a judge in the land.

Damn straight.