Christmas Mourning

To

Nancy and Jim Olson,

for thirty years of friendship and support

DEBORAH KNOTT’S FAMILY TREE

CHAPTER 1

Marley was dead to begin with.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

“—which means I can usually adjourn around five o’clock. After that, I may have to sign some judgments or search warrants or other documents, but most days I’m done by five or five-thirty.” I made a show of looking at my watch. Although I had ninety seconds left of the five minutes I’d been allotted, it was chilly here in the gym and my toes felt frozen. I smiled at the high school freshmen, who sat on tiered benches beneath secular swags of fake evergreens tied with red plastic ribbons, and gestured to the tables over by the far wall. “So I’ll adjourn for now and be back there if you have any questions.”

There was polite applause as I yielded the microphone to a nurse-practitioner from the new walk-in clinic that had recently opened up in a shopping center that sprawled around one of I-40’s exits here in the county.

It was Thursday afternoon, the day before the beginning of their Christmas—oops! Winter—break.

(Political correctness has finally, begrudgingly, arrived in Colleton County. Forty percent of our population call themselves Christian, and at least sixty percent of those write alarmist letters to the editor every year claiming that Christ is being dissed by the ten percent who check off “other” when polled about religious beliefs.)

Today was Career Day at West Colleton High, and I was the sixth of seven speakers that the principal, who’s also my mother-in-law, hoped would inspire these way-too-cool-to-look-interested students. My name card—District Court Judge Deborah Knott—was on one of the long tables that lined the end wall, and I sat down beside my husband, whose own name card read Major Dwight Bryant, Chief Deputy, Colleton County Sheriff’s Department.

He can’t say no to his mother either.

My only props were a brass-bound wooden gavel, a thick law book, some gavel-headed personalized pencils left over from my last campaign, a summary of the education needed to become an attorney before running for the bench, and a list of the more common infractions of the law that a district court judge might rule on.

Dwight’s array was much more impressive: a pair of handcuffs, a nightstick, a gold badge, a Kevlar vest, and an empty pistol with a locked trigger guard just to be on the safe side. He also had a stack of flyers that outlined requirements for joining the sheriff’s department.

“The way the county’s growing, we keep needing new recruits,” he said when Miss Emily asked us to do this shortly after Thanksgiving.

That sneaky lady had invited us over for Sunday dinner and then softened us up with fried chicken, tender flaky biscuits, and a melt-in-your-mouth coconut cream pie. I don’t know what she had to do to get the chief of the West Colleton Volunteer Fire Department to come, but it’s a good thing that my handouts take up a minimal amount of space. Between his hazmat suit and fire axe and Dwight’s show-and-tell, there was no room for anything else.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see one of my eleven older brothers. Zach is next to me in age, the second-born of the “little twins” and five down from the “big twins” produced in Daddy’s first marriage. Zach is also an assistant principal here at West Colleton.

“Good job,” he said, handing me a welcome cup of steaming hot coffee. “Thanks for coming.”

“No problem,” I said.

Dwight had already emptied his own coffee cup, but he took a swallow of mine when offered. Sometimes I think he should just open a vein and mainline his caffeine. “I sure hope some of these kids will fill out an application form for us in three or four years,” he told Zach.

“I got dibs on the Turner boy,” said the fire chief. His big hand almost hid a clear plastic bottle of water and he drained it in two gulps. “His brother Donny’s unit left for Iraq last week, but little Jeb there’s already turning out with us on weekends.”

I remembered Donny Turner from the church burnings summer before last and said a silent prayer for all the kids who have gone to the Middle East these past few years. One glance at Dwight’s face and I knew he was thinking of the young deputy who’d signed on for a tour with one of the private security companies there. To lighten the moment, I said, “I guess I’ll get nothing but bad jokes if I say that some of them could wind up going to law school.”

Zach grinned. “Adam e’d me a good one this morning.”

Adam’s his twin out in California and I was sure he’d emailed me the same joke. I sighed and rolled my eyes, but there was no stopping Zach.

“A lawyer telephones the governor’s mansion just after midnight and says he’s got to talk to the governor right away. So the aide wakes up the governor, who says, ‘What’s so damn urgent it can’t wait till morning?’

“ ‘Judge Smith just died,’ says the attorney, ‘and I’d like to take his place.’

“The governor yawns and says—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, stomping on his punch line. “ ‘If it’s okay with the undertaker, it’s okay with me.’ ”

Zach’s grin widened; Dwight and the chief tried to keep their laughs down in deference to the last speaker at the front of the gym, but it was a struggle for both of them.

Rednecks, lawyers, and blondes. The only safe butts left. My hair is more light brown than dandelion gold (thank you, Jesus!), so I don’t have to wince at all the dumb-blonde lawyer jokes. You’d be surprised how many there are.

“Did I tell you, Dwight?” said the fire chief. “That warm spell last week? We got a call from one of them new houses out your way about hazardous fumes.”

Hazardous fumes in our neighborhood? My head came up on that one.

“Yeah,” said the chief. “We suited up and went rolling out. Thing is, that’s the first time the wind had blown from that particular direction since them new folks moved in.”

“Jeeter Langdon’s hog farm?” Dwight asked.

The chief chuckled. “You got it.”

Back at the podium, the nurse-practitioner finished her spiel and headed for her spot at the next table. The school’s guidance counselor took the mike and instructed the students to use the rest of the period to learn more about our varied professions.

The kids streamed off the bleachers. All were on the right side of the dress code, but just barely. The boys’ jeans were loose and baggy; the girls’ had not an extra millimeter of denim, although today’s icy December chill had put them all in hoodies and fleecy sweatshirts or sweaters.

My brother Andrew’s daughter Ruth and her cousin Richard, Seth and Minnie’s youngest child, were both in the stands and both had given me a thumbs-up when our eyes met earlier in the period, but neither of them would be over to our tables for career suggestions. Last year when the family met to discuss the future of the land we owned, Richard had announced that he for one was going to stay right there and farm, while Ruth planned to open a stable with Richard’s sister Jessica. Both girls have been crazy about horses since they were lifted into a saddle as toddlers.

The first to reach us was a white boy with spiked hair and clear plastic retainers where his forbidden eyebrow and nose rings would normally ride. “Were you ever on Court TV?”

I shook my head and started to explain the difference between reality shows and reality, but he had already moved on to Dwight.

Picking up the handgun and hefting it with more familiarity than you like to see in a boy that age, he said, “So like how many guys have you shot?”

A tattooed green viper circled his wrist and stretched its triangular head across the back of his hand. Judging by his stubbly chin, he was probably closer to sixteen than the average freshman and had probably been left back a time or two. With a better haircut and no facial piercings, he would have been a good-looking kid—clear green eyes and smooth, acne-free skin most teenage girls would kill for.

“What’s your name, son?” Dwight asked mildly as he reached out to reclaim the weapon.

The boy clearly wanted to wise off, but with Zach looking on, he released his hold on the gun and muttered, “Matt Wentworth.”

Dwight lifted an eyebrow at that name. “Any kin to Tig Wentworth?”

“My uncle,” he admitted, realizing that we must know Tig Wentworth was currently over in Central Prison, serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder of his stepfather-in-law.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

Here in Colleton County, apples still don’t roll very far from the tree, and among Cotton Grove natives the Wentworths were well known as a violent family, root and stock, for several generations back. Hux Wentworth, this boy’s oldest brother, had been killed in a home invasion, and now that I was reminded, I was pretty sure that another brother—Jack? Jay? No, Jason. That was his name.

Our little weekly, the Cotton Grove Clarion, had used his arrest and conviction as a lead-in to an article on violations of hunting regulations. Jason Wentworth had been brought up before me back around Halloween for jacklighting deer, i.e., illegally hunting them at night with a powerful spotlight that would temporarily blind them and keep them immobile long enough to get off a shot. I had fined him and, as the law requires, made him forfeit both his rifle and his hunting license. The odds were three to one that I’d be seeing this kid in court before he graduated.

If he graduated.

Just before the bell rang to end the period, Miss Emily came bustling through the gym doors and paused to answer her pager. I’m always amazed that this small wiry woman who barely tops five feet is the mother of Dwight and his sister Nancy Faye, who are both built like their tall, big-boned daddy, a farmer who was killed in a tractor accident when they were children. Dwight’s brother Rob and their other sister Beth got Miss Emily’s slender build along with her red hair and green eyes. Normally, Miss Emily’s a force of nature, and there was no hesitation on the part of the school board to make her principal of West Colleton and its two thousand-plus students when this shiny new complex replaced rickety old Zachary Taylor High, where Dwight and I had gone to school.

But as she clipped the pager back in its case, she looked suddenly tired and drained and, for the first time, almost old. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears by the time she reached our table and looked at Dwight with anguish.

“They just called,” she told him. “The Johnson girl died.”

CHAPTER 2

… he was still incredulous and fought against his senses.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

The double doors of the gym had been propped open, and from the hallway the normal end-of-the-school-day chatter abruptly changed to murmurs of disbelief. With new cell phone applications being invented every other month, relevant news spreads through the ether at warp speed. Several kids burst into the gym, teetering between grief and drama, eyes wide. Some of the girls were already sobbing as they reached Zach.

“Is it true, Mr. Knott?” they cried. “Is Mallory dead?”

Zach’s daughter Emma was among them. “Daddy?” she moaned, sounding like a little girl again instead of a high school sophomore who normally tries to pretend that the school’s assistant principal is no kin. She was dressed in her red-and-gold cheerleader’s outfit for tonight’s away game over in Dobbs. “What’s happening to us?”

I looked at Dwight, who had put out a comforting arm to his mother. Mallory Johnson would be the county’s eighth teenage traffic death since summer; the third in this school alone.

“I swear to God I wish they’d pass a law that kids couldn’t drive till they’re thirty-five,” I heard him mutter.

All around us, girls were openly crying, and even some of the boys had eyes that were suspiciously moist.

“Do you want me to make the announcement?” Zach asked Miss Emily.

She took a deep, shuddering breath as she pulled herself free of Dwight’s arm, and I watched the steel flow back into her spine.

“Thank you, Mr. Knott,” she said formally, “but I’ll do it.”

A few minutes later, her calm voice came over the intercom to report the death of yet another classmate. “Tonight’s game is cancelled and grief counselors will be in the gym all afternoon for anyone who wants to speak to them.” She closed by saying, “If you drove to school today, please drive carefully on your way home. Pay attention to the road, turn off your cell phones, and no drinking. West Colleton can not bear to lose any more of you.”

Useless to pretend that none of the kids listening to her words would leave this afternoon and go straight to whatever convenience store would sell them beer or fortified wine, texting or talking on their phones as they went. This latest death would give them all the excuse they needed.

The state of North Carolina prohibits speeding. It prohibits driving with a blood alcohol level above .08, and it prohibits all alcoholic beverages for kids under the age of twenty-one. Unless you are eighteen and have driven without any violations for at least six months, you are also banned from using cell phones while behind the wheel and from having more than one other unrelated person under the age of twenty-one in the car with you, although that last is seldom enforced or adhered to, especially where there are several siblings or, as with my nieces and nephews, several cousins who carpool.

Unfortunately, the state can’t prohibit teenagers from thinking they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof.

I didn’t know any details about Tuesday night’s accident, but when Stacy Loring, another West Colleton senior, crashed his car into a tree shortly before Halloween, he would have blown a .12. There were six kids in that car. Stacy and another boy were killed instantly. Two walked away from the wreck with only superficial scratches, one remains in a coma with brain damage, and one—Stacy’s girlfriend Joy Medlin—is still on crutches. According to my nieces, her surgeon says she will probably walk with a limp the rest of her life.

Because Joy could no longer do the moves, Emma had been moved up to the varsity cheerleading squad. Mallory Johnson had been the varsity head cheerleader, and now the newly depleted squad, all dressed in their red-and-gold uniforms, were helplessly weeping on each other’s shoulders, Joy and Emma among them.

I knew that three of my nieces carpooled, as did their brothers, but the girls would be in no shape to drive after this emotional outpouring. I had ridden over from the courthouse this afternoon with Dwight, and now I told him to go on without me. “I’ll drive the girls home.”

“Thanks, Deborah,” Zach said. “It’s going to be a while before I can leave.”

The gym emptied out slowly. Some students lingered because they wanted to talk to the two grief counselors who had arrived almost instantly; others stayed because they were simply reluctant to leave their friends until they had wrung every bit of news and comments from each other. Eventually though, my nieces and nephews zipped or buttoned their jackets and trailed me out to the parking lot. This close to the winter solstice, the sun was low in the west and I could feel the temperature dropping as Jessica handed me the keys to her candy apple red car. The boy cousins piled into the pickup that my eighteen-year-old nephew A.K. drives and the girls got in with me.

I knew who Mallory Johnson was, of course. Her mom had graduated from high school a few years ahead of me and her dad even earlier. We were never close; but enough of the old community remains that we all have a loose idea of each other’s lives. They had contributed to my last campaign and Malcolm Johnson, now a partner in his father’s insurance company, occasionally shows up in my courtroom as a character witness for some of his clients or their wayward children. I knew that Mallory was a senior in high school, the younger of two children, and that her older brother was enrolled at our local community college.

On the drive back to the farm, though, I gained an even clearer picture of her from the things my nieces said. Even taking it all with a grain of salt and allowing for the shock of her sudden death, I heard that Mallory Johnson had evidently been one of the golden ones—enormously popular, a bubbly personality, bright, pretty, and musically talented. No ego and genuinely nice, despite her dad’s attempts to spoil the hell out of her.

Although a junior, Seth’s daughter Jessica had taken an occasional class with her. “We sit next to each other in Spanish class,” she said, choking back her tears. “We were collecting Spanish-language children’s books for the homeless shelter in Dobbs.”

“I might have been one of the last ones she texted before the crash,” Emma sniffled. “She reminded us to wear our uniforms today for a yearbook picture.”

I bit down hard on my tongue for that one. No way was I going to suggest that Mallory might still be alive if she had cut off her phone and concentrated on the road.

“Poor Joy,” said Emma, who still felt guilty for how she had moved up to the varsity squad. “First Stacy and now Mallory. They’ve been best friends since first grade, and even though she can’t do the moves, she still comes to all the practices and she’s really good at choreographing. Mallory kept pushing her to come up with new routines. She thought it was helping Joy get past Stacy’s death.”

As a lowly freshman, Ruth had barely known the dead girl, but that didn’t stop her from remembering that Mallory had come to her brother’s eighteenth birthday party back in the fall and how pretty she was. “I think A.K. thought she was hot.”

“Tell me a single guy in this school who didn’t think that,” Jess said tartly.

Even as the girls talked, their thumbs were busy on the keypads of their phones, the ubiquitous clickety-click that forms the soundtrack of a teenager’s life like never-silent crickets or cicadas.

“Did you get a message from Kaitlyn?” asked Emma. “Everybody’s going to bring red or gold flowers to where Mallory crashed. They’re making a cross with her name on it.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning at seven-thirty.”

As I approached a sharp curve, they suddenly went mute. There on the ditchbank, amid a tangle of dead weeds and dried leaves, were three small dilapidated wooden crosses embellished with plastic flowers. The roses had been bright red when placed there almost two years ago. Now they had faded to a pale grayish pink. The once-yellow daisies were discolored and dirty-looking. The white ribbons had almost rotted way, the lettering on the cross was illegible, and the toy football at the base had lost its air and faded almost beyond recognition.

“We need to do new crosses for Rosie and Ben and Doug,” Jess said, her voice breaking.

She wiped fresh tears from her eyes, and from the backseat I heard Ruth and Emma softly crying.

And then the clickety-click-click of their keypads.

CHAPTER 3

They said it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it was!

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Instead of cutting through one of the farm lanes directly to my house, I turned onto our hardtop and swung past Zach’s house to drop Emma off first. A.K. was right behind me in his truck and he stopped at the edge of the road to let Lee out before driving on to Seth’s house to take Richard home. My sister-in-law Barbara had just pulled into the yard when we got there. Zach must have called her from school, for she immediately got out of her car without putting on her coat and held out her arms to Emma, who had begun to cry again as she scrambled out of the backseat and hurried to her mother.

“I could have come for my children,” Barbara said tightly when I lowered the window to speak to her. Her tone was as frosty as the air that flowed in over the glass.

“I know,” I said. “But I was right there and—”

The front of her black cardigan was embroidered with clusters of red-berried holly. White snowflakes were scattered across the back. I found myself talking to the snowflakes as she abruptly turned and led Emma into the house. Lee gave an awkward wave and trailed them inside.

I put the car into reverse and headed back onto the road. I did not jerk it into drive. I did not dig off. All the same, Ruth asked, “How come you and Aunt Barbara don’t get along?”

“I get along with your Aunt Barbara just fine,” I told her.

I could almost hear her eyeballs rolling, but nothing more was said until I drove up to her house. A.K. was waiting for her in the carport and he put a protective arm around his younger sister before holding the side door open for her. There was no sign of April, their mother, who teaches sixth grade at the local middle school, and Andrew’s own pickup was not under the shelter.

I continued on through the yard, past the shelters and barns, and down the rutted lane that led to my own house.

“No you don’t,” Jessica said quietly from the seat beside me.

“No I don’t what?” I asked.

“Get along with Aunt Barbara. I mean, you don’t snarl at each other or talk ugly, but it’s like y’all’s hackles rise every time you get around each other.”

She was right. Not that I had ever sat down and given it serious thought.

“You two are like oil and water.”

“Nothing wrong with oil or water,” I said.

“No, but you sure don’t mix.”

“Objection,” I said, trying to keep it light.

“Sustained,” she said agreeably. “Actually, Aunt Barbara’s the one that doesn’t do much mixing, does she? Why?”

When I was silent, she said, “I’m not still a child, you know.”

I reached over to pat her leg and said, “I know,” even though it seemed like only yesterday that she was a kid more interested in horses and dogs than intrafamily relationships. Now she was seventeen, not a full-grown adult, but certainly cresting the hill. Like her mother, Minnie, she was growing into a steady, sensible woman. She would never be conventionally beautiful, not with Seth’s square face and Minnie’s sturdy build, but she had the Knott family’s clear blue eyes, open smile, and sandy blond hair, and she had her share of interested boys even though her heart still belonged to Dollar, her old white horse.

“Maybe it’s because she was raised in town,” Jess mused aloud.

“Your Aunt Amy was raised in town,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but she and Uncle Will live in Dobbs. Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe Aunt Barbara doesn’t really like living on the farm.”

“Can you see Uncle Zach anywhere else?” I asked.

She smiled, but then her tone turned thoughtful. “Actually, I could. He might mess around with his bees, but he’d rather read a book than sit on a tractor, and he doesn’t raise any animals. Yeah, he likes to hunt and fish like Dad and the others, but he doesn’t have to live out here to do that. He could keep bees in town and drive out like Uncle Will does or like Uncle Herman.”

“True,” I said as I turned into my own yard and coasted to a stop by the back porch, “but Aunt Barbara knew when she married him that she’d never get him to live anywhere else. He loves being part of the family’s daily life too much to leave it.”

I shifted into park and opened the door. The icy wind slashed at my face and made my eyes water.

Jessica came around the car with my robe in one hand and her phone in the other, then held the door for me while I fished my purse out from beneath the seat.

“You okay to drive home?” I asked, giving her a big hug. A wisp of her hair blew in my face. It smelled like baby shampoo, sweet and innocent.

“Yeah.” She sighed. “You’d think we’d be used to it by now. I feel so sorry for Mallory’s mom and dad. Mr. Johnson thought she hung the moon. He was so proud that she got into Carolina that he was going to throw this huge graduation party for her, then they were going to go to Spain for a week. Mallory said he already bought their plane tickets and made reservations. This is going to kill him. Christmas is never going to be the same for them, is it?”

“Probably not,” I said.

She sighed again as she slid under the wheel of her car. “Well, at least Mrs. Johnson still has Charlie, but poor Mr. Johnson. He’s so upset, I heard he was out yesterday morning walking up and down the road where Mallory crashed, trying to understand how it could have happened.” She gave me a watery smile and said, “See you Saturday,” before closing the door and putting the car in gear.

She was halfway down the lane, her phone clamped to her ear, and I was inside my warm kitchen stuffing my gloves in my coat pocket and still thinking about Zach and Barbara, before Jessica’s words fully registered. I had almost forgotten that Sarah Johnson had eloped before she finished high school and that she was pregnant when she graduated. Six months later, her young husband had died in some sort of bad fall—while pruning some tree limbs? Roofing the house? Malcolm Johnson had been his best friend and everyone thought it was wonderful that he was there for Sarah.

Although…

I tried to remember the gossip. I’m pretty sure there was some. But that was around the time Mother was first diagnosed with cancer and everyone else’s troubles seemed insignificant compared to mine.

I vaguely remembered that he had adopted the boy and given him his name, yet his daughter had been headed to Chapel Hill? While his adopted stepson made do with Colleton Community College?

“Poor Mr. Johnson,” but “at least Mrs. Johnson still has Charlie.” Now what was that about?

Curiosity is an itch I have to scratch right away. I tried Jess, but her phone was busy, of course, so I ran a mental finger down the list of people who might remember.

Isabel’s name jumped right to the top of the list. Haywood’s wife is a gregarious, opinionated gossip. Whatever talk was going around back when Sarah and Malcolm married, Isabel would surely have heard it, and what’s even better, she’s always ready to repeat every detail, both the real and the speculative.

“Oh, hey, Deborah,” Isabel said cheerfully when she answered the phone on the first ring. “I was just about to call you. Haywood stopped by Miss Zell’s this morning to take her some of Mr. Kezzie’s peach brandy, and she sent you a fruitcake.”

Momentarily diverted, I said, “Tell me the truth, Isabel. Is Daddy still running moonshine these days?”

“Now, honey, you know I don’t know a thing about where his good stuff comes from. All I can say is that he sends your Aunt Zell about a gallon every winter, but he was a little short this year, so he had to poke around and find her another quart to finish off her cakes. And don’t you know that brother of yours had to go and cut hisself off a slice of ours before he could get it here? I’ve had to hide it under the bed in the guest room or there won’t be a crumb left for Stevie and Jane Ann when they get home tomorrow.”

Mother’s sister makes the best fruitcakes in Colleton County—easy on the citron and candied cherries and heavy on the fat meaty pecans. Early in November, she bakes about twenty, then wraps them in cheesecloth, gives them a periodic drenching with some of Daddy’s homebrew to keep them moist, and ages them till Christmas.

Daddy swears that the brandy is left over from the time he used to finance a few stills around this part of the state. He also swears that he quit doing that forty years ago. Swears it with a straight face, too. Yet every year, for over forty years, he’s sent Aunt Zell a gallon for her fruitcakes.

In half-gallon Mason jars with shiny new lids.

I’ve stopped telling him how embarrassing and politically damaging it would be for me if he’s arrested for moonshining, and Dwight keeps threatening to run him in if he catches him in possession of untaxed liquor. (Happily for me, Dwight turns a blind eye to the pint jar in our own pantry. I mean, I can’t let the fruitcake Aunt Zell always sends me dry out before Christmas, now can I?)

“You hear that Malcolm and Sarah Johnson’s daughter died?” Isabel asked. “That’s just going to tear their hearts out, ain’t it? And right here at Christmas, too. Not that it don’t ever not hurt to lose a child, but to have to think about it fresh every Christmas? That’s double hard. Poor Sarah. Jeff died at Christmas, too, you know.”

“Jeff?”

“Jeff Barefoot. Her first husband. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “They were both a little older than me. I remember that he died, but I don’t remember how. Didn’t he fall or something?”

“They were renting that little yellow house there on the left as you go into Cotton Grove. Right behind the Burger Barn? Cute little house but it has a real steep roof. He was stringing up Christmas lights in the dark, trying to put a Santa Claus on the ridgepole when his feet got tangled in the light cords and down he went. Banged his head on a rock and the ladder fell on top of him. Sarah was putting the baby to bed and by the time she missed him and went out to look, he was flat dead. Broke her heart. Malcolm’s, too. Or so we heard.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, him and Jeff? They were best friends all through school even after Sarah chose Jeff over him.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, they both courted her hot and heavy, but Malcolm went off to Carolina and Jeff stayed here and went to work in his daddy’s roofing business, so he got the inside track with her. Got her pregnant and that was that till he died.”

“I sort of remember people talking about how fast Sarah married Malcolm after that,” I said.

“Less than a year,” Isabel agreed. “Eight months in fact. His daddy won’t too happy about it neither. Taking on another man’s baby and him still two years from finishing up at Carolina? But Malcolm said he won’t gonna let her get away again, and if Mr. Johnson didn’t help them, he’d quit school right then and there. Jeff’s mama won’t happy about it neither. She was in my Sunday school class back then before the church split last time and—no, wait a minute. It was time before last when that preacher—what was that man’s name?”

Isabel’s church seems to split up every five or six years with great drama and many hard feelings, so it’s no wonder she can’t keep track. Before she could go wandering down that interesting track, I said, “So Mrs. Barefoot was in your Sunday school class?”

“Yes, and it really hurt her when Sarah let Malcolm adopt Charlie and give him the Johnson name. She said Malcolm had Jeff’s wife and Jeff’s baby, and he was living the life Jeff was supposed to live.” Isabel heaved a great sigh. “And now he’s lost both of the kids.”

“Huh?”

“Well, that’s what it sounds like. I heard that him and Charlie don’t get along so good and Charlie changed his name back to Barefoot last spring. Whoops! There goes the dinger on my oven, honey. Now what was it you called about?”

CHAPTER 4

“I don’t know much about it either way. I only know he’s dead.”

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

After hanging up from talking to Isabel, I let Bandit out of his crate and opened the back door so the little dog could go outside, then I cut through the living area, circled past our ceiling-high Christmas tree, and headed into the bedroom, where I changed out of my dark green wool suit with its sassy cropped jacket and formfitting slacks into jeans and a warm red Hurricanes sweatshirt.

The tree made me smile every time I looked at it.

Like every other farm family around, my brothers used to go out with Daddy and cut a bushy cedar from the few still left on the farm. By the time I came along, nicely shaped ones had dwindled into virtual extinction, so that Mother would send the boys to town to buy a fir or spruce grown on tree farms up in the mountains. Between bought trees and artificial ones, cedars have made a nice comeback along our hedgerows and back pastures, but Dwight likes to re-create the pines he cobbled together after his dad died when cedars were few and money was too tight to waste on buying a tree.

A freshly cut young pine is as scrawny and pitiful-looking as Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, but Dwight thickens it up with extra branches until it’s as full and bushy as any other.

Last year, the week had been crowded with parties and festive dinners to celebrate our wedding. Dwight’s ex-wife had allowed him to have Cal over the holidays for the first time since the divorce, and we had gladly dispensed with a honeymoon so that Dwight wouldn’t have to miss a moment of the visit. Watching his face while he watched Cal tear into his presents was worth any number of moonlight cruises.

Then Jonna died and Cal came to live with us. Some memories of her death are blessedly beginning to fade for him, but not the memory of last year’s celebration down here on the farm. He started bugging Dwight to go cut a tree right after Thanksgiving, the minute that twinkling lights first began appearing on rooftops and doorways and the warm glow of decorated trees radiated from windows through the winter darkness.

Dwight’s sister-in-law Kate keeps Cal after school during the week, and once their tree was up, the pressure was really on for ours. Rob’s an attorney with a large law firm in Cameron Village and he does not share his brother’s nostalgia for those pinch-penny times. The first Christmas after he and Kate were married, he bought an expensive fully wired artificial fir tree and they fastened all the ornaments on so securely that it takes less than a half hour to bring the tree in from one of the outbuildings, carefully remove its protective dustcloth, and plug it in.

Instant Christmas on the fifteenth of December.

No muss. No fuss.

“No real pine smell either,” Dwight mutters.

I switched on the tree lights, added water to the stand, and breathed in the woodsy fragrance. Kate burns pine-scented candles, but Dwight’s right. It’s not the same.

It’s like the difference between our fireplace and their remote-controlled gas logs, I thought, as I opened the damper, folded back the glass doors, and struck a match to paper and kindling. The bright flames danced up and caught the dry oak logs cut from last year’s windfalls around the farm.

I heard Bandit scratch at the door, but by the time I opened it, Dwight’s truck rolled up and the dog had changed his mind about coming in right then. Instead, he danced around the passenger side till Cal got out and petted him.

“Guess what?” Cal called to me, pulling a sheet of paper from a side pocket of his bookbag. “I only missed one on my spelling test!”

“Don’t tell me you messed up on ‘disease’?”

He laughed and shook his head. “No. ‘Despite.’ ”

He showed me his paper and I had to laugh, too. He usually does his homework over at Kate’s, but last night I had worked with him on his word list because he kept wanting to spell “disease” d-e-s. We had tried so hard to implant d-i-s that it had carried over to “despite,” which he had spelled d-i-s, too.

I took his bookbag and he went to help his dad load the cart with an evening’s supply of logs.

Not that we were going to be here throwing logs on the fire all evening. Tonight was the last home game for the Carolina Hurricanes till after Christmas and we had tickets, which meant junk food at the RBC Center in Raleigh instead of a nutritionally sound supper.

Ice hockey is a relatively recent import in the South. I grew up on basketball and baseball, with an occasional high school football game thrown in whenever some of my brothers were playing. I had heard about hockey, but the televised games never grabbed me. I couldn’t relate to ice skating, and the puck zipped around the ice too quickly for me to follow, but winters were colder up in the foothills of the Virginia mountains and Cal loved the game. When he came to live with us last winter, I remembered that a former client worked for the Canes. Karen was able to come up with a pair of decent seats for the second half of the season and I thought that the drive back and forth to Raleigh would let Dwight help Cal get a handle on all the changes in his life.

Then came the night that Dwight was called out on a murder case just as they were about to walk out the door. Cal tried so hard not to show his disappointment that I said I’d take him if he would get me up to speed on the rules by the time we got to the game.

It was an amazing evening—the blaring horns and the eye-blinding lights that chased themselves around the rims of the upper levels whenever the Canes scored, the enthusiasm of the crowd, the sheer grace of the skaters, and the clash of hockey sticks almost put me in sensory overload. I discovered that I could actually follow the puck, and by the time the Canes played the whole game, went into overtime, then won in a shootout, I had yelled myself hoarse and was thoroughly hooked.

This year, we had squeezed tickets for twelve games out of our budget, and tonight the Carolina Hurricanes were going up against the Florida Panthers. As soon as our most pressing chores were done, Cal put on his own red sweatshirt with the autographs on the shoulder, and the three of us headed back out to the truck. Dwight does not wear any shirts or sweaters with messages—“I got enough of that in the Army,” he says—and he only allows one tiny Hurricanes bumper sticker on his truck. As a concession to us, though, he did let Cal clamp our red flags to the windows and we flapped our way over to Raleigh.

At the RBC Center, we munched on burgers and fries and watched the Storm Squad—skimpily dressed cheerleaders in fur-trimmed red Santa hats—pump up the crowd.

I couldn’t help flashing on Mallory Johnson, who would never again cheer a team to victory. Dead at eighteen. At least Joy Medlin had limped away from the crash that killed her boyfriend. Even if she couldn’t do the moves, she could still be part of the squad, contribute choreography and moral support.

While the Storm Squad urged the crowd to roars of welcome as the players skated onto the ice, I said a prayer to whoever might be listening to please, please keep my nieces and nephews safe in their cars; then I too was swept up in the excitement.

The game was another nail-biter. Our team scored in the first period and fended off the Panthers till the third period, when they got off a strong shot that goalie Cam Ward stopped. Unfortunately, he then slid back into the net with the puck, and the score was tied 1–1 at the end of regulation play. After an agonizing four minutes into overtime, Joe Corvo slapped a high backhander over their goalie and into the net.

Hurricanes 2, Panthers 1!

All evening, Dwight and I had avoided talking about Mallory Johnson’s death in front of Cal, but when Cal fell asleep against my shoulder on the way home, I kept my voice low and asked, “Were you and Malcolm Johnson in the same class?”

“No, he was a year behind me. Jeff, too.”

“I’d almost forgotten about Jeff Barefoot,” I admitted. “What was he like?”

Dwight shrugged. “Nice guy. Good free-throw shooter.”

“Y’all played ball together?”

“Yeah. Or rather Malcolm and I did. Jeff was second-string.” He flashed the oncoming driver a reminder to dim the lights as he looked for words to describe the two friends. “The thing was, Malcolm worked harder, but Jeff probably had more natural talent. Easygoing. Better-looking, too. Guess that’s how he wound up getting Sarah.”

“Isabel said it was because he got her pregnant.”

“Yeah, I did hear that.”

“Were you surprised when she married Malcolm so quickly after Jeff died?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isabel told me that Jeff died the Christmas after they were married and that Sarah remarried only eight months later. You don’t remember?”

“I was in the Army then,” he reminded me. “Down in Panama. Waiting for you to grow up. And it wasn’t like I was real close to them. Mama or somebody probably mentioned it the next time I was home on leave, but by then it was old news and I guess I wasn’t paying much attention. Besides, the way she played those two boys against each other all through school? Once Malcolm went off to college, Jeff probably had the inside track with her. She was a cheerleader, too, you know.”

“Yeah, I was a freshman then and there was a lot of talk before she finally admitted she was pregnant and had to quit the squad.”

He turned off the paved road onto our long dirt and gravel driveway and eased the truck wheels over the low dikes so as not to wake Cal. “I do remember thinking it was ironic that a roofer would break his neck falling off his own roof.”

“Not his neck,” I said, as we parked by the back door and I gently unbuckled Cal’s seat belt. “His head. He hit his head on a rock when he fell.”

“Whatever,” Dwight said and carried our sleeping boy into the house.

CHAPTER 5

It fell to Puritan Reformers to put a stop to the unholy merriment.

—Christmas in America, Penne L. Restad

Friday dawned cold and dreary with a raw, bone-chilling dampness in the air. The sky was gray and heavy with wet clouds. Instead of depressing our spirits, though, the weather seemed to heighten the holiday mood.

“Maybe it’ll snow,” Cal said hopefully when he and Dwight left to meet the school bus.

Up in Shaysville, at the edge of the Virginia mountains, there had been snow on the ground for most of his Christmases. I myself could remember only two or three late December snowfalls here in eastern North Carolina, so he wasn’t likely to get his wish, but at least it was cold enough to keep the seasonal pictures of icicles and reindeer and fur-wrapped elves from looking too totally illogical.

Not that Cal was the true believer he’d been last year. More wink-wink/nudge-nudgers in third grade than second, not to mention what he must hear on the bus. Ever since Thanksgiving, he had made so many elliptical remarks about the Santa myth that I was not surprised when he looked up from his breakfast cereal this morning and came out with it bluntly.

“Mary Pat says you guys are Santa Claus.”

“Me?” Dwight managed to look astonished. “You see any reindeer out back? You think my truck can fly?”

“C’mon, Dad. You know what I mean.” He looked at me. “It’s you and Dad, isn’t it?”

I immediately hopped up to get the coffee pot, unsure whether he wanted confirmation or denial. “What do you think?” I asked him.

“I think she’s probably right. That it’s everybody’s parents. There’s no way one guy—even if he is magic—could get to that many houses in one night.” He finished his cereal and took a final swallow of milk. “Besides, a lot of houses don’t even have chimneys.”

“He’s got a point,” Dwight told me, holding out his mug for a refill.

“True,” I agreed. “If it was me, though, I’d still hang up my stocking.”

“Yeah, that’s what Mary Pat said.”

“Just in case?” Dwight teased.

“And ’cause Jake’ll notice if we don’t and it might spoil his Christmas ’cause he’s too little to understand. Besides, Mary Pat said we’d probably—”

He broke off, his brown eyes dancing with mischief.

“Probably what?” I asked.

He laughed. “Probably get more presents if we have stockings.”

* * *

Driving over to the Dobbs courthouse an hour or so later with the radio belting out an uptempo country version of “Up on the Housetop,” I was still smiling. Mary Pat certainly had Kate and Rob pegged. No way could they let it appear that Santa had brought her less than he brought Jake and R.W. But she was sweet to enlist Cal in a conspiracy to keep the younger boys from catching on too soon. Up on the housetop, click-click-click!Down through the chimney with a good Saint Nick!

I’ve heard that there are people who were so traumatized by learning the truth about Santa Claus that they would never allow their own kids to believe in him. My friends and I figured it out about Cal’s age and none of us were bothered by it any more than Cal seemed to be. Like Mary Pat, we had also agreed that it might be to our material advantage to keep up the fiction since the grown-ups seemed to enjoy it so much.

As I topped the last small hill before the highway leveled off for the straight run into Dobbs, my smile was erased by another of those sad roadside memorials. A fresh new wreath of shiny green plastic holly, decorated with miniature toys and tied with a bright red bow, had replaced the orange pumpkins and yellow chrysanthemums of Thanksgiving. Come February, there would be valentines and red roses, then white lilies and purple ribbons for Easter.

Five or six years ago, a young woman and her two children had died here in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. She had been an only child, her children the family’s only grandchildren. No wonder the grieving grandmother kept their memory green by placing new wreaths here every holiday of the year. I drove on past, wondering if Sarah Johnson would soon be doing the same for Mallory.

At the courthouse, I parked in my reserved space and hoisted a tote bag full of canned goods from the backseat. Ellis Glover, our clerk of court, had placed two large, brightly decorated barrels next to the tree in the atrium lobby, one for donations to the county food bank and the other for needy children. Adding my cans to the overflow gave me a brief glow of feel-good sanctity, a feeling that was immediately replaced by guilt that it wasn’t more considering how much I am lucky enough to have—the old push/pull of conscience.

(And yeah, everyone agrees that a Christmas tree in a courthouse atrium is totally non-PC, but all the ornaments are secular and Ellis calls them Yule bushes. He says he’s going to keep putting them up until people start objecting. So far, no one has.)

As I headed toward the marble steps, I saw my childhood friend Portland Brewer on her way down. “You’re still coming for lunch, right?” she called.

“Right, but it might be closer to one than noon,” I warned her.

“Sounds like you’re hoping to be done for the day by then,” she said as she drew nearer.

“If the prosecution’s prepared,” I said. “Only five cases on the calendar.”

She rolled her eyes in sympathy, knowing exactly what I was talking about. I never thought I would miss Doug Woodall, our DA who ran for governor (and lost), but in retrospect the current DA makes him seem like a combination of Clarence Darrow and that efficiency expert in Cheaper by the Dozen. The only reason Chester Nance, a tubby little mediocre attorney from Black Creek, got the Democratic nomination was because no one expected the Democratic coattails to reach all the way down to the district level, especially when the Republican candidate was a well-respected and competent attorney.

As DA, Doug prosecuted most of the major crime cases in superior court himself, and he had made sure that no backlog of cases built up in district court. “Trust ’em or bust ’em” was his philosophy, and his staff worked a full eight-hour day to keep up with the work. Cases were efficiently calendared and defendants who didn’t come to court when they were scheduled had to show him a compelling reason for missing their court date or there would be warrants for their arrest. As a result, add-ons were kept to a minimum.

Chester Nance is way more laissez-faire. His staff is poorly prepared, he gets a half day’s work out of them at best, and he himself hasn’t prosecuted a single case since he was sworn in.

Judges and lawyers both were grumbling over the backlog. “Who knew there was such a steep learning curve?”

Today was no different. In the old Doug Woodall days, I could count on finishing five calendared cases in ninety minutes tops, fifty if they all pled guilty. As soon as I took my place on the bench, though, I was handed up a list of twelve add-ons by the day’s ADA, a newly minted attorney who looked too young to shave, much less pass the bar exam.

Even then we were not ready to go. He spent another twenty minutes thumbing through the shucks, getting facts straight with the officers who were to testify, and even working out a couple of plea bargains—things that should have been taken care of earlier.

I tried not to drum my fingers or look impatient. The defendants and their companions, mostly black or Latino, seemed equally bored. They unzipped their heavy jackets or pushed back the hoods on their dark sweatshirts and waited stoically to be called. Off to one side was a middle-aged white woman with early flecks of silver at the temples of her lacquered black hair. She wore a cream-colored turtleneck jersey beneath a red boiled wool jacket appliquéd at the hem and cuffs with Christmas ornaments and crisp silver braid. Sharp-pointed silver snowflakes dangled from her earlobes and I caught an icy flash of diamonds when she picked a stray piece of lint from the jacket, examined it between her fingertips, then flicked it to the floor.

Ellen Englert Hamilton. She gave me a frosty half-smile when our eyes met, a smile I returned with exaggerated (and equally hypocritical) warmth. Englerts and Hamiltons have been intermarrying for so many generations that it’s a wonder they aren’t all congenital idiots. As a rule, both families are fanatically opposed to alcohol in any form except as an antiseptic; but every rule has an exception and every Englert/Hamilton generation throws up at least one drunkard, which is enough to fan the flames of righteousness in the rest of the clan.

I had once dated Ellen’s younger brother Rudolph until their mother decreed that a bootlegger’s daughter was no fit consort for an Englert. Once I got over my indignation, I had to admit that Mrs. Englert had cause. Her late husband had evidently been one of my daddy’s good customers; and when a sheriff’s deputy found a jar of white lightning in the basement after Mr. Englert died, it was Mrs. Englert who was charged with possession of untaxed liquor. Ironically, Rudolph has turned into this generation’s lush and I’ve heard that it’s all my fault for dumping him.

Go figure.

There was no way Ellen would be in this DWI court as a defendant, and I couldn’t see her there as a character witness for any of the others, so what—?

And then it dawned on me.

Of course.

Ellen is president of Colleton County’s MADD chapter. Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I had heard that they were going to start monitoring judges so that they could point well-publicized fingers if any DWI charges were dismissed.

Yes, there are judges who drink and drive and who base their judgments on the old there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I principle, but I’m not one of them. Nevertheless, the state has to prove its case before I’ll take someone’s license or give them active jail time and no MADD watchdog could make me rule differently.

The ADA finally rose to say that he was ready to begin with the State versus Salvador Garcia, an illegal alien who had started the day with five DWIs pending against him. The ADA explained that he had dismissed two of them as part of a plea bargain, which was not what I would have done, but I could understand his reasoning.

Immigration had put a hold on Garcia and he was going to be deported to Honduras anyway, so the ADA wanted to clear up all his outstanding cases here in Colleton County. Garcia seemed to speak and understand English fairly well, but because he had pled guilty to the three remaining charges and because I would be imposing jail time, I appointed an interpreter so that he couldn’t later appeal on the grounds that he hadn’t understood.

I could have ordered probation of the first charge, but I knew he’d be getting active time on the other two because of several aggravating factors—he had blown a .22 on one and a .21 on the other, and he had a prior conviction. Therefore I ordered five-to-sixty days for the first charge, six months on the second, and twelve months on the third. I also ordered alcohol treatment while he was incarcerated here.

When he and his court-appointed attorney stood to hear me pass sentence, I added, “Mr. Garcia, I’m going to remain silent on these convictions, which means that they will run concurrent with each other. Had you not been subject to deportation, I would have let them run consecutively, but I’m sure ICE is very likely to send you back to your home within a couple of months.”

I leaned forward until his brown eyes met mine and I was sure I had his attention. “As we all know, drinking is not a crime.”

Ellen Hamilton gave an audible sniff and a flounce of her head at that comment, a reminder that if it were up to Hamiltons and Englerts, Prohibition would still be on the books.

“Drinking is not a crime,” I repeated, “and being an alcoholic is not a crime. But driving drunk is a crime. You have a serious alcohol problem, Mr. Garcia, and whether you’re here in the United States or Honduras or any other country on this planet, you need to address that before you kill yourself or someone else, which is why I’ve ordered alcohol treatment while you’re still here.”

When the interpreter finished his flow of Spanish, Garcia gave a disheartened “Gracias” before the bailiff led him away. I couldn’t tell if he was down because he would soon be deported or because he knew he was in for a long dry month at least.

Next up was a very remorseful black man who had been stopped after a few drinks at a sports bar. He had a spotless driving record and no prior convictions. He also had a wife sitting two rows back who had made it clear that she would leave him if it ever happened again.

Because he barely registered a .09 on the Breathalyzer and there were no grossly aggravating factors, I sentenced him to a Level Five: sixty days in the custody of our county jail. I then suspended the sentence and placed him on supervised probation for six months on condition that he pay a hundred-dollar fine and court costs, obtain a substance abuse assessment, do community service, and surrender his license until he qualified for limited driving privileges.

I had a feeling he would not be back in court again, a feeling I did not have with the next eight defendants—three Hispanic males, one white female, and four black males—even though they were all Level Fives, too.

They were followed by several Level Ones, the highest level for misdemeanor DWI, and all received active time along with my hope that they would take advantage of the alcohol treatments and change their ways. One of them—Jackson Dwayne McHenry, white, twenty-six—gave me the finger as he was being led away. I could have found him in contempt and given him more time, but I let it pass.

When all the plea bargains were out of the way, there were two trials wherein the defendants pled not guilty. I found the first one guilty but the second dodged the bullet.

He had refused to take the Breathalyzer test, “Which was his constitutional right,” his attorney, Zack Young, reminded me. “The state has to prove that he was appreciably impaired beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The officer who stopped him testified that the defendant had passed the field sobriety tests. “Not perfectly, Your Honor, but all right.”

It was the same with his driving. Under Zack’s pointed questioning, the officer had to admit that he wasn’t all over the road, only weaving a bit inside the lines of his lane.

When both sides rested, I said, “Sir, I suspect you had more than the two beers you told us about, but that’s not the evidence before me, and the law requires me to rule on the evidence, not on what I suspect. You were probably impaired and you shouldn’t have been driving, but under the law, you were not appreciably impaired, so I find you not guilty. You are free to go.”

The man immediately turned to Zack and vigorously shook his hand.

Zack’s probably the best defense attorney in the district even though he likes to play the shambling good ol’ boy who probably thinks a tort is a kind of turtle. His fee was going to prove an expensive lesson in the cost of drunk driving for this defendant.

Throughout the session, Ellen Hamilton had taken extensive notes in a black leatherbound notebook, and there was a look of disapproval on her face when I pronounced the last man not guilty.

She caught up with me out in the hall. “How do you know it wasn’t someone weaving all over the road that caused poor little Mallory Johnson to wreck her car?” she demanded.

“I don’t,” I said. “Do you?”

“No, but why else would she have crashed on a straight stretch of road? She wasn’t speeding and she sure wasn’t drinking.”

“I guess we’ll never know, will we?”

“Don’t be too sure. And if it turns out to be somebody you bleeding hearts let slide by—”

“Gosh, Ellen,” I said, glancing pointedly at my watch. “I’d love to stay and talk to you about it, but I’m already late for an appointment.”

No way was I going to tell her my appointment was with a baby girl who would turn one year old next Tuesday. Carolyn Deborah Brewer was bright-eyed and intelligent, but she hadn’t quite grasped the concept of clocks yet.

CHAPTER 6

“That they are what they are, do not blame me!”

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Lunch was a steaming cup of tomato soup with slices of spinach quiche for Portland and me. The baby had strained carrots and spinach for her entrée and pureed peaches for dessert. Throughout the meal, we played peekaboo with my napkin and her bib till Portland threatened to send us from the table before we knocked something over.

She and Avery are both attorneys and their home is only a few short blocks from the courthouse, so I get to see little Carolyn often enough that she’s not shy with me. She was born about eighteen hours after her mother walked down the aisle in a red velvet matron of honor dress last December—my brothers had a pool going as to whether or not the baby would arrive in the middle of our wedding. Like most babies, she was more interested in the paper and bow on the brightly wrapped birthday gift I had brought than in the adorable plaid taffeta dress inside the box.

I cleared away our lunch dishes while Portland put Carolyn down for a nap, then we carried our tea glasses out to the sunroom, where we could kick back and put our feet up on the large wrought iron table that was surrounded by mismatched white wicker chairs with their comfy red-and-white cushions. Trays of crisp red geraniums lined the wide low ledges beneath the windows that formed two walls of the room. Funky pots of greenery were clustered in the corners—ferns, dieffenbachia, schefflera, and a snake plant that had belonged to her mother and was now about six feet tall. Strings of small clear lights twinkled amid the plants and cinnamon scented candles gave a Christmassy smell to the air.

Table, wicker chairs, and funky pots had all been picked up at flea markets or garage sales and had been refurbished to make this comfortable room uniquely Portland’s. I knew for a fact that one of those pots had come from the landfill outside town. To Avery’s deep embarrassment, his wife would rather go Dumpster diving than shop in a regular store. After all these years, he still doesn’t get it that Portland’s junking expeditions are the equivalent of his fly-fishing—the thrill of the chase, never knowing if you’re going to snag an old boot or a nice rainbow trout.

“Where has the time gone?” Portland moaned as she sank into one of the chairs and leaned her head back against the colorful cushion. Her thick dark curly hair could use a trim and her bright red nails were due a manicure, two bits of grooming that were never neglected in the pre-baby days.

“I can’t believe she’s going to be a year old next Tuesday. Did you see the way she pulls up now? She’ll be walking by her birthday. At the rate time’s flying, I’m gonna turn around next week and she’ll be off to kindergarten.”

I toasted my namesake’s pulling-up with my glass of iced tea. “And begging for her driver’s license about six weeks after that.”

“Well, she can beg till she’s blue in the face. Avery says she’s not getting the keys to any car till she’s twenty-five.” Her face darkened. “Wasn’t it awful about Sarah and Malcolm Johnson’s daughter? Have you heard anything about funeral arrangements?”

“Not yet. I haven’t even heard how it actually happened. You?”

“Not really. At the office, someone said that she’d been to a Christmas party and left early because she was getting a cold.”

“Emma’s on the cheerleading team and said Mallory texted them a reminder about a photography session for the yearbook on Thursday. Probably one of the last things she did before she crashed.”

“Cell phones!” Portland exclaimed. “There ought to be a governor or something that would keep them from working while the car’s moving.”

“You invent one the kids can’t disconnect or override and I’ll invest in it,” I told her, and added wryly, “You could put it on the same circuit as the seat belt alarm.”

She smiled, knowing how much I dislike the way mine starts its annoying ding-ding-ding the instant the car moves. I always put it on before I get up to speed, but there are times when I can’t click it right away and the damn thing gets increasingly louder, like an angry teacher shaking her finger at me for ditching school or talking back. I tried to get my mechanic to disable it, but he just laughed at me and shook his head. “Sorry, Deborah. It’s connected to stuff you need to keep the motor running.”

“So how are you going to celebrate?” I asked. “You’re not giving her a birthday party, are you?”

Portland shook her head. “Aunt Zell invited Mom and Dad for Sunday dinner and Avery and I are bringing the cake and ice cream. Avery’s parents are driving up from Wilmington on Tuesday morning to spend Christmas with us and they’ll babysit that night so we can go to the dinner dance out at the country club. What about you and Dwight?”

“What about us?”

“C’mon, Deborah!” she said impatiently. “Monday’s your first anniversary. Don’t tell me you’re skipping that, too?”

The “too” referred to the fact that Dwight and I still hadn’t had a proper honeymoon. We didn’t plan not to have one, but between Jonna’s death, his job, my work, and Cal’s school, there just hadn’t been a convenient time to get away.

“If you aren’t going to celebrate on Monday, why don’t you come out to the club with us on Tuesday?”

Dwight’s so good on a dance floor that I was immediately tempted. “But won’t they be sold out by now?”

“Probably, but I’ll call the manager and ask him to pull up two more chairs to our table. He owes me one. Do it, girlfriend. It’ll be like old times. Fun.”

I reached for my purse. “Okay. We said we weren’t giving each other anniversary presents, but we haven’t been dancing in ages. Take a check?”

“I know where you live, don’t I?”

She told me how much the tickets would be, I wrote the check, and talk turned to Christmas plans, crowded calendars, the cards we’d sent, and the old friends we’d heard from. It was the usual lazy give-and-take of a friendship that went back to childhood.

My Aunt Zell is married to her Uncle Ash, and we both smiled when she asked if I’d received a fruitcake yet. “I cut a piece for supper last night and the fumes almost knocked me over. I thought you said Mr. Kezzie had quit making the stuff.”

“That’s what he tells me, but Mother once said that whiskey-making was the only thing he ever lied to her about.” I shook my head. “So who knows? If he’d lie to her, he wouldn’t think twice about me.”

But one mention of Daddy’s illicit activities led to another, and she giggled when I told her about Ellen Englert Hamilton being in my courtroom this morning. She knew about Mrs. Englert’s run-in with the law over that jar of white lightning that had been found in the Englert basement, and she had been present when I dumped a full glass of cold water, ice cubes and all, in Rudolph Englert’s lap after he told me his mother wanted us to cool it.

She hooted with remembered glee. “And then Dwight and Reid gave you a package of those little frozen sausages the next day.”

“All the same,” I said, “she thinks the Johnson girl could have been run off the road by a drunk driver. She said it happened on a straightaway. Wonder what caused her to flip over like that?”

Portland shook her curly head. “Could’ve been a deer or possum or something and she swerved to miss it, then overcorrected. What does Dwight say?”

“He hasn’t. He’ll probably get the trooper’s report today, so I’ll ask him tonight.”

“Poor Malcolm and Sarah,” Portland said, unconsciously echoing my nieces.

I was surprised to realize that she knew them fairly well since they had been older than us back in school.

“Not Malcolm so much,” she admitted, “but I got to know Sarah better when her son wanted to change his name back to Barefoot. I drew up the petition for him last spring and did all the official notifications.”

I was curious. “Why? What was that about?”

“The usual. Two mule-stubborn males butting heads. He was jealous of Mallory—claimed that Malcolm had never really treated him equally. And it didn’t help that his Barefoot grandparents had been wanting him to do it and come live with them ever since he turned eighteen. Not that he needed much urging for the name change. I don’t know what finally pushed his buttons, but he really turned against his dad. And he wasn’t too happy with his mom either. He thought Mallory was spoiled. That Malcolm gave her more and let her get away with more than he ever got.”

“Was he right?”

“Probably. She was daddy’s little girl all right. Anything she ever wanted, he’d bust his britches to get it for her. All she had to do is look wistful, Sarah said. Just between you and me, I think she was a little bit jealous herself.”

“Nobody speaks ill of the dead,” I said, “but that’s the first negative thing I’ve heard anyone say about her.”

“I’m not speaking negatively of Mallory,” Portland protested. “Just because Malcolm doted on her and wanted to give her the moon and a few stars doesn’t mean she was spoiled. She seemed like a sweet kid and she tried like hell to talk Charlie out of changing his name, but he’d made up his mind and wouldn’t back down.”

She glanced at my empty glass and emptied her own in one swallow. “Let me get you some more tea.”

I glanced at my watch. As always when we get together like this, I had stayed longer than I planned.

“Gotta run,” I said.

Before she could urge me to stay, the baby woke up from her nap and began to cry.

“Call me,” I said and let myself out.

CHAPTER 7

Chill December brings the sleet,

Blazing fire and Christmas treat.

—Traditional rhyme

While I may—

Okay, correction: while I do grumble about the new NutriGood store that has taken over a corner of a crossroads less than five miles from the farm, I have to admit that I like being able to stop off on my way home. Dwight likes it because he doesn’t have to drive into Raleigh for the coffee beans, cheeses, and store-baked breads that can’t be found in Dobbs.

Unlike me, he doesn’t mind shopping for groceries. In fact, when he first proposed, one of the reasons he gave for wanting to get married was that he was tired of buying single-serving packages. I’m perfectly happy to let him be the one who keeps the pantry and freezer stocked, yet there I was that Friday afternoon, roaming the endless aisles, hunting for the stuff we don’t normally keep on hand—confectioners’ sugar, candy dots, little cinnamon red-hots, and a four-pack of food coloring. Ever since they were old enough to dump sugar into flour and use a cutter on the flattened dough, my nieces and I have spent the Saturday before Christmas making fancy cookies together.

As long as I was in the candy aisle, I picked up a package of old-fashioned hard candies for the brilliant-cut glass candy dish Aunt Sister gave us for a wedding gift. Mother had given it to her several Christmases before I was born, “but now that I’ve got the sugar diabetes, I ain’t got no use for it anymore and I thought you might like to have it, honey,” she had told me when I unwrapped it last December.

One way or another, I managed to fill a basket, and as I loaded the groceries in the trunk of my car, Dwight called to say he was running a little late. “Can you pick up Cal?”

“No problem,” I said, but I thought I heard something odd in his voice. “Anything wrong?”

“I’ll tell you about it tonight,” he hedged.

“You will be home for supper, won’t you?” I asked.

“There by six-thirty,” he promised.

The big round table in the playroom at Kate’s house was littered with bits of lace, satin ribbons, colorful scraps of fabric, and sprinkles of gold and silver glitter. A cake box full of craftsy odds and ends had been upended. While Mary Pat rummaged for a second white feather, little R.W. gnawed on a set of plastic keys and watched the action from his high chair. (I’ve already promised him that I’ll put in a good word with Carolyn when they’re both a little older.)

“You’re just in time to make a tree ornament,” Kate said as she ushered me in.

“So I see,” I said, smiling at the young woman across the table who seemed to be in charge of the scissors.

Erin Gladstone is the live-in nanny that Kate hired when she realized that she was hovering too closely over her variegated brood instead of getting back to work designing the fabrics for which she had made a name for herself in the fashion industry. In addition to Mary Pat, her orphaned young cousin who’s six months older than Cal, there’s Jake, her son from her first marriage, and R.W., her almost one-year-old son with Rob. This past summer, she and Rob obtained legal adoptions for Mary Pat and Jake so that all three kids now have the same last name and the older two can legitimately call them Mom and Dad, something the children had already begun to do before the adoption.

“See my wooden soldier,” Cal said, proudly holding out a peg-type clothespin he had painted blue and topped with a red chenille ball above a tiny face he had inked on with a fine-pointed Sharpie. “It doesn’t need a hanger ’cause his legs will let him sit on a branch.”

He demonstrated on the tree that stood nearby, another artificial one somewhat smaller in scale than the large one out in the living room. This one was decorated with wood and plastic ornaments sturdy enough to survive if a ball crashed into it.

“Look at my angel, Aunt Deborah!” Mary Pat said. Her clothes peg had flowing yellow yarn hair, a tinsel halo, and a robe of white lace.

“How can it be an angel if it doesn’t have wings?” five-year-old Jake asked scornfully.

“It’ll have wings just as soon as I find some more white feathers,” Mary Pat told him, plucking one from the pile

“So what are you making?” I asked Jake.

He had inserted a strip of green cardstock with rounded tips into the slot of the clothespin and was gluing a second one in place above the first so that it looked vaguely like an old biplane.

“A dragonfly,” he told me earnestly. “These are its wings.”

Kate had used red wool to make a skinny Santa Claus with a white cotton beard, and it took me right back to childhood when Portland and I had spent a whole summer making clothespin dolls. My fingers itched to dive in, but I had planned to make a beef stew for supper and I knew I’d lose track of time if I ever took the clothespin Kate held out to me.

“Sorry,” I told her, “but we need to go let Bandit out and get started on supper.” I smiled at Cal. “Bookbag? Jacket?”

While he gathered up his things, Kate said, “Rob and I plan to take the children to the light show over in Garner tomorrow night. Okay if Cal comes?”

“Sure,” I said. “Call me and one of us will run him over.”

Back at the house, Cal helped me carry in the groceries, then took Bandit out for a romp around the yard while I browned chunks of chuck with a large chopped onion. I poured off the excess grease, stirred in some flour until it was nice and brown, then whisked in enough water to cover the meat. When it came to a boil, I dropped in a bay leaf, put the lid on, and turned the heat down low. Once the meat was tender enough, I would add carrots, peas, and potatoes.

By the time Dwight got home and hung his jacket on a peg beside the door, the kitchen was redolent with those homey aromas. I stirred up some dough for dumplings, dropped them onto the surface of the stew, and put the lid back on to let them steam while I set the table and started a load of laundry.

“Erin’s going to take us to Raleigh to see Santa Claus on Monday,” Cal said when we sat down to eat.

“Yeah?” said his dad. “You gonna sit on his lap? Get your picture taken?”

“Maybe.” His eyes sparkled with mischief.

“What’ll you say when he asks what you want him to bring you?” I asked suspiciously.

“Mary Pat and me, we’re gonna ask him for cell phones.”

“Good luck with that,” Dwight told him. “He’ll bring you a cell phone about the same time he brings you a Lamborghini.”

“What’s a Lamborghini?” Cal asked.

“Something else you’re never gonna get,” Dwight said, tousling his hair.

He went back to the stove for a second helping of stew and Cal leaned in close to whisper, “So can we? Please?”

When he’d asked me earlier, I had said that we’d see, thinking it was really too early.

“Presents are for Christmas morning,” decreed the starchy conformist preacher who lives in the back of my head.

“But Dwight will enjoy playing with it more before Christmas than after,” argued the rule-breaking pragmatist who shares their housekeeping duties.

“Pleeeeze?” said Cal.

“Okay,” I relented. “After supper.”

By the time Dwight finished eating, Cal had carried his own plate and mine out to the dishwasher.

Dwight raised an eyebrow at so much unsolicited helpfulness. “What’s happening? We expecting company or something?”

“Not that I know of,” I said innocently.

“You finished, Dad?” Cal asked, reaching for his plate.

“Looks like I am whether I want to be or not,” he said with a puzzled smile.

There was a metallic clash from the kitchen as tableware hit the dishwasher basket, then Cal darted back past us and into the living room. “Come sit here, Dad,” he said, patting a place on the couch.

I cleared everything off the coffee table while Cal ran down the hall to retrieve the huge flat box he and I had stashed under his bed last weekend.

“Hey, what’s this?” Dwight said when the brightly wrapped gift with its big red bow was placed on the low table before him. “Santa Claus come already?”

“Yeah,” Cal said, nearly bursting with anticipation. “Open it! Open it!”

Happily for Cal and me, Dwight’s not one of those methodical types who has to untie every ribbon or undo every strip of tape. He found a loose edge and ripped the paper away with both hands. I’m sure that he was prepared to fake pleasure no matter what it was, but his prepared smile turned to genuine delight as the picture on the box registered. It’s not that Dwight had a deprived, poverty-stricken childhood by any means, but his father never made much money, and after his death, during the years that Miss Emily was finishing college and getting her master’s degree, her budget had been too tight to stretch to the train set he had yearned for.

How long he would have sat there just grinning at the box is something I’ll never know, because Cal was already trying to pull the lid off and show him all the wonders within. “The headlight really works, Dad, and the engine puffs smoke and we got extra tracks so it’ll go all the way around the tree. We could’ve gotten a passenger train, but we thought you’d like a freight train better. She and I went in on it together. Do you like it? Were you surprised?”

“I like it lots, buddy,” he said and swept the boy up in a huge bear hug.

Two minutes later, he and Cal were on the floor, fitting the tracks together to encircle the tree.

Several packages had accumulated beneath the drooping branches, but when I went to move them out of the way, Dwight grabbed a small flat one about the size of a paperback book that hadn’t been there earlier.

“No shaking till Christmas morning,” he warned me. “Especially not this one.”

He and Cal shared a conspiratorial grin.

“Hey, no fair!” I protested. “I let y’all shake mine.”

“Yeah, right,” said Cal, who last year had rattled every present with his or Dwight’s name on it till I thought he’d wear the bells and holly off the wrapping paper. “That’s ’cause you cheat and put in rocks and marbles and BBs.”

“All’s fair in love and Christmas presents,” I told him and went out to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and check to see if the laundry was dry yet.

There was a knock at the door and Haywood stuck his head in before I could answer it.

Haywood’s one of the “big twins” from Daddy’s first marriage, and even though they’re not identical, he and Herman are both tall and wide. (The younger set, Zach and Adam, are identical and are referred to as the “little twins” even though they’re both a full inch taller.) Haywood’s never been one to stand on ceremony and I’d have to lock the doors to keep him from walking in on us as the mood takes him.

“Hey, shug. Y’all busy?” Without waiting for an answer, he set his porkpie hat on the counter and handed me a well-wrapped package that must have weighed three or four pounds. “Aunt Zell sent y’all a fruitcake. Um, boy, that coffee sure smells fitten to drink!” He unzipped his heavy jacket. “Bet a slice of this cake would go real good with it.”

I laughed. “So how many slices of Aunt Zell’s cakes have you already had today?”

He grinned. “Not a crumb today.” The grin grew sheepish. “ ’Course now, I got to say that the two slices I had yesterday were right hefty, and Bel won’t let me have any more till both the children are home, and Jane Ann can’t come till tomorrow.”

He gave me a hopeful look.

What the hell? Another serving of fruitcake wasn’t going to affect that fifty-inch waistline any more than cutting two million out of the federal budget was going to affect the national deficit. I took his jacket and sent him on into the living room.

“Lord have mercy!” I heard him say. “What you boys got there?”

A gleeful toooot-tooot answered him.

It was almost nine-thirty before Haywood reluctantly left. By then I had folded and put away two loads of laundry and the train was circling the tree, headlight shining, whistle blowing, smoke puffing. A pile of pine twigs had been tossed on the fire, sacrificed to give better clearance for the locomotive. Cal turned the controls over to Dwight, let Bandit outside for a final time, then went off to brush his teeth and get into bed. Bandit had already settled in beside him when I went to check on them.

I’m not sure if he was getting less self-conscious about accepting affection, but he had quit shying away from my touch. When I leaned over to kiss his forehead that night after tucking the blanket around him, he actually hugged me back and said, “Dad really likes that we got him that train, doesn’t he?”

“He really does,” I agreed, remembering how solemnly he’d handed me the twenty dollars he had saved up to help pay for it.

He reminds me of a young horse that’s not quite saddle-broke. Enough sugar cubes, enough unsudden movements, and one of these days he’s going to trot right over to me without any coaxing.

Or so I kept telling myself.

On the other hand, he had almost quit calling me by name, referring to me as “she” or “her” or “you” unless there was absolutely no way to avoid saying “Deborah.” Dwight hadn’t noticed and I wasn’t going to call attention to it, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt a little.

When I came back to the living room, Dwight had put a CD of soft carols on the player and turned off all the lights except for the tree itself. The last log of the evening burned low on the hearth. I slipped off my shoes to join him on the couch, lying down across his chest with his arms around me and my head on his shoulder.

Snuggling myself more deeply into his arms, I said, “You don’t have any plans for our anniversary, do you?”

“Dinner at Las Margaritas, then back here for champagne,” he said promptly. “Mama’s already said Cal can spend the night there.”

I was touched. Dinner at that Mexican restaurant in Garner had led to his unexpected proposal.

“Sounds wonderful,” I told him. “And then can we go dancing Tuesday night with Portland and Avery?”

He nodded, then murmured, “Thank you for my train.” He tipped my face up for a long sweet kiss and we held each other quietly, savoring the moment. Nowhere to go, nowhere to be, just here and now, together, both aware of where this would lead but without any urgency to rush.

Eventually, he slipped his hand up under my sweater and chuckled to realize that I’d shucked my bra sometime earlier.

The log had burned down to embers before we finally pulled ourselves up, unplugged the tree, and got ready for bed.

While brushing my teeth, I remembered that odd quality in Dwight’s voice when he called me before; and when I joined him under the covers, I asked what had kept him at work.

“You know how the hospitals always draw a vial of blood when car wreck victims are brought in and how they test for alcohol?”

I nodded.

“Well, when they drew Mallory Johnson’s, it registered point-oh-three.”

“Really?” Even though I didn’t know the girl, that surprised me. “Nothing my nieces said indicated she did alcohol.”

“Yeah, that’s what Malcolm said, too, when he and Sarah came in yesterday to hear our findings on the wreck.” Dwight reached up to switch off the lamp above his head. “When I told them her alcohol level, he went ballistic. Swore that Mallory never drank anything stronger than Coke and that somebody must have slipped it into whatever she drank at a party she went to after the game Tuesday night. Not just a little alcohol, but maybe crack or meth, too. Sarah did say that she was taking Benadryl for her cold and even a little whiskey could have intensified the effects of Benadryl, slowed her reflexes, maybe left her disoriented. That might explain why she’d go off a straight stretch of highway. I’ve got a deputy checking it out, getting a list of who was there and if anyone saw her add a shot of something to her Coke.”

“The girls are coming over tomorrow morning to make cookies,” I said slowly. “Want me to ask if they’ve heard anything?”

“Yeah. Won’t hurt, and it might make Malcolm and Sarah feel better to know. Right now, he’s pushing us to run a tox screen on her blood sample even though that would take at least six weeks. I didn’t want to tell him we don’t have the budget for that. Not for a one-car accident.”

CHAPTER 8

We are not daily beggars who beg from door to door,

But we are neighbours’ children whom you have seen before…

—“Here We Come A-Wassailing” (Traditional English)

When my nieces were younger and I still lived in Dobbs with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash, the girls would converge on Aunt Zell’s kitchen the Saturday before Christmas the instant they could persuade a parent to drive them into town. More than once I had groggily answered a six a.m. phone call to hear a small voice ask, “Can I come now, Aunt Deb’rah?”

Annie Sue, Herman’s youngest child, was nine the chilly December morning that Uncle Ash opened the door to get his newspaper and found her huddled on the front step nearly blue with cold. She had ridden her bicycle the few short blocks over from their house at dawn to make sure she wouldn’t miss anything.

These days, the other girls don’t climb out of bed much before midmorning, and Annie Sue is still the first one here even though she now has the longest drive. Her new white electrician’s truck rolled into the yard as Dwight was pouring himself a third cup of coffee.

“Actually, I’m going to do some work today,” she said with a grin when Dwight teased her that she just wanted to show off the truck’s redesigned logo. “Reese is coming over later to help me install your new aff-sees.”

“The what-sees?” I looked at Dwight.

He shrugged.

Annie Sue spelled it out for us. “A-F-C-I’s. Short for arc fault circuit interrupters. Circuit breakers.”

“Why do we need new circuit breakers? This house is only three years old.”

“Because they weren’t required when Dad wired you up. These babies will trip the breaker if there’s a frayed or exposed wire and maybe keep your house from catching fire. I’m putting them in all the bedrooms here on the farm. The state requires them in new construction even though the Home Builders Association bitched and yelled about the extra cost.”

“So how much is this going to cost us?” Dwight asked.

“No more than sixty or eighty dollars.”

I was surprised. “That’s all? Then why’s the Builders Association fighting it?”

“Beats me,” Annie Sue said. “They’re a lot cheaper than the granite counters and designer upgrades the builders are always pushing, and those don’t save lives. That’s why come Reese and I are doing it at cost for all the family. I’ll get started here this afternoon but we have to fit it in around the rest of our work and deer season.”

Dwight raised his eyebrows at that. “What’s deer season got to do with it?”

She shook her head with a rueful smile. “You know Reese. He said he saw the tracks of a big buck down at Uncle Haywood’s end of the long pond last weekend, so it’s hard to keep him focused.”

“Tell him we’ll take the tenderloin off his hands,” Dwight said as he picked up his keys and put on his jacket.

“Anyhow, I’ll need a key so we can finish up on Monday or Tuesday when we’re out this way. A lot of people are getting electrical appliances for Christmas, so we’re real busy.”

Annie Sue began taking courses at Colleton Community long before she graduated from high school last spring. When she passed the state test and earned her electrician’s license back in the summer, Herman officially changed the name of his electrical contracting business to Knott and Family. He actually wanted to make it Knott and Daughter as a slap at Reese, who could not be shamed into buckling down and acquiring his own license, but Annie Sue wouldn’t let him. Reese can pull wire as competently as most other electricians, but he’s never had his little sister’s flair for it nor the discipline to jump through the educational hoops, and it doesn’t seem to bother him one bit to work off her license or their dad’s.

Or to take off and go hunting when he’s supposed to be on the clock.

Even though she’s now holding down an adult job and drawing adult wages, Annie Sue wasn’t quite ready to give up making Christmas cookies, and she helped me clear away the breakfast things and get out the baking utensils while Dwight and Cal went to pick up Mary Pat and Jake.

Because Kate lets Cal go there after school on the weekdays, we try to give her a break by taking the two older children on Saturdays.

They trooped into the kitchen, red-cheeked and ready to measure and mix while Dwight took our weekly accumulation of trash and recyclables to the neighborhood disposal center a few miles away. All three of them wanted to crack an egg and I tried not to wince when flecks of shell went into the bowl or when Jake’s egg slipped out of his hands and splatted on the floor. After they cut out and decorated several gingerbread men, I showed them how to use drinking straws to punch holes in the stiff dough so that they could later add a loop of red yarn after baking and hang their creations on the Christmas tree.

When the cookies had cooled enough, Annie Sue helped each boy pipe his name in white icing across the fragrant chest of his best effort. Mary Pat insisted on doing hers by herself. Eventually, there would be a personalized gingerbread man for every member of the family, and these would act as place cards for our big Christmas dinner at the homeplace. This was something Mother had done when I was a child, and when I came back to Colleton County I claimed it as my own contribution to the family feasts.

By the time Seth’s daughter Jess, Andrew’s Ruth, and Zach’s Emma arrived, the kitchen was fragrant with cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. They quickly shed their jackets, washed their hands, and plunged in.

Once there were no more eggs to crack, Cal and Jake soon grew bored and wandered outside to help Dwight unload the empty trash cans and recycling bins and put them back in the garage, but Mary Pat decided she wanted to hang with the girls, especially since they had brought along Melissa, my brother Robert’s eleven-year-old granddaughter.

Ruth was all around the kitchen with her digital camera, documenting our baking session for a “Christmas on the Farm” album she planned to make for Daddy. He refuses to have anything to do with computers and misses out on the uploaded photos the rest of us share back and forth. He wants color prints he can hold in his hands. Emma’s our computer whiz and she and Ruth keep saying that one of these days they’re going to take all the old photo albums that are cornflaking on a shelf at the homeplace and put them on a DVD.

We had finished with the gingerbread men and moved on to Mexican wedding cakes rolled in powdered sugar and heavily decorated sugar cookies when Haywood’s Jane Ann walked into the kitchen lugging a large navy duffel bag with a navy, gold, and white UNCG logo on the side.

“I’m not too late for the bourbon balls, am I?” she cried as the others rushed to hug her. “I got here quick as I could.” There were dark circles under her sleepy blue eyes.

“You’re just now getting home?” I asked, eyeing her duffel bag. “I thought you guys were due in last night.”

“Yeah, well, Stevie made it, but today was the absolute deadline for one of my term papers,” she confessed. “I pulled an all-nighter and almost missed my ride.”

“So what else is new?” Jessica asked.

Annie Sue shook her head, but the rest of us just laughed.

Jane Ann is the family’s biggest procrastinator. She’s bright. She’s observant. She can and will do whatever’s required. But she never finishes anything until the very last minute, and too often that last minute is five minutes too late because she never allows for any unexpected delays. She spent her whole high school years doing extra work to compensate for overdue assignments, and it would appear that college had not changed her.

“Where’s your car?” Ruth asked, clicking a picture of her cousin, who looked perfectly beautiful, even in a UNCG hoodie, no makeup, and her hair skinned back from her face.

“I left it in Greensboro. Something’s wrong with the brakes and I didn’t have time to take it in to get it fixed.”

This got her more snickers from her cousins.

“Come on, y’all. Quit laughing. It’s no biggie. I got a ride with some friends from Makely and they let me sleep all the way over. Besides, tired as I was, Mom and Dad ought to be happy I didn’t try to drive myself after what happened to Mallory. Oh, God! I couldn’t believe it when I started getting all the messages. Do they know why yet?”

Being rather golden herself, Jane Ann would of course have known a golden girl like Mallory Johnson, despite being a year ahead of her. Listening to the girls, I realized that Mallory had been part of the court when Jane Ann was named homecoming queen last year. No surprise that Mallory had been this year’s queen.

As we rolled and cut, and shuttled pans of cookies in and out of the oven, my high school nieces brought Jane Ann and Annie Sue up to date—the last time each of them had spoken to Mallory, whom she’d last dated, their speculations as to why she had wrecked her car on a straight stretch of road, and whether she’d been buckled up, thrown out of the car, or crushed behind the wheel.

They described the memorial they had helped construct and place at the crash site yesterday morning and Ruth brought up pictures of the cross and wreath on her camera. “I’ll upload them and send y’all the link,” she promised.

“What’s with the beer cans and Bojangles’ box?” Jane Ann asked.

“Oh, that’s just the trash that was in the ditch across from where she crashed. I picked up a bunch of it while they were doing the wreath so it’d look nice along there. People are such slobs.”

Jane Ann squinted at a picture of gray with black streaks across it. “And what’s this?”

“Her skid marks. She only laid down rubber for a few feet,” said Ruth. “I guess she was trying to keep from hitting a rabbit or possum or something at the last minute.”

“No,” Jane Ann said. “It would have to be a lot bigger. At least the size of a deer or a really big dog.”

She sounded so sure of herself that I was curious. “Why do you say that?”

“Because her dad hammered it into her that you never swerve for an animal in your lane. Never. He told Mallory that too many kids flip over trying not to kill something. That they cut the wheel and then overcorrect. Before he let her get her license, he took her out on the road a few times till they found a squirrel or a rabbit or something in her lane and he made her run over it. Can you believe that? Told her not to brake and not to turn the wheel. She could take her foot off the gas, but that’s all.”

“Hey, that’s right,” Jess said. “In Spanish class this fall, she was real down about hitting a turtle that she didn’t notice till the very last minute and she said the same thing. How she had promised her dad that she absolutely would not swerve around any animal in her lane. And she loved turtles.”

“Must have been a deer, then,” Annie Sue speculated.

Emma told of how shattered Joy Medlin was by this latest death. “She had a voice mail from Mallory right before the game and she says she’s never going to delete it. She’s got Stacy’s last voice-mail message, too. It’s so sad.”

When all this talk started, I had briefly considered Mary Pat and Melissa’s tender ages and whether I ought to send them outdoors to play, but they had immediately let me know that they knew all about this latest tragedy, and they were not shy about voicing their own thoughts and opinions.

“Mom told Erin that she has to turn her phone off when she’s driving us,” said Mary Pat.

“I’m never gonna turn mine on in the car,” Melissa said.

Mary Pat looked at her enviously. “You have a phone already?”

“No, but I’m hoping they’ll break down and get me one for Christmas. It’s all I really want.”

“Me, too.” Mary Pat sighed.

(I knew for a fact that they had better chances of getting a blizzard for Christmas than their own cell phones.)

“Mallory probably did have hers on,” Emma said quietly. “She texted the whole squad from the party Tuesday night.”

“Were you at that party?” I asked, knowing what a tight leash Barbara keeps her two kids on.

Jessica glanced up from putting cinnamon drops on some sugar cookie stars. “What party?” She made a face. “You don’t mean Kevin Crowder’s party, do you?”

Emma hesitated. “All the other cheerleaders were going, but you know Mother. She always makes Lee bring me straight home after a game.”

“Who’s Kevin Crowder?” Annie Sue asked. She and Jane Ann were the same age, but she had attended Dobbs Senior High, not West Colleton as had the others.

“He’s a shooting guard on the basketball team. Has a wicked three-pointer but he’s a real assh—” Jess caught herself, whether out of deference to her elderly aunt’s ears or the ears of the two little ones, and changed it to “Real jerk.”

“I remember him,” Jane Ann said, nibbling on a broken cookie. “You’ve seen him around too, Annie Sue. He was at A.K.’s birthday party. Tall blond guy? Blue convertible?”

Her cousin reached for the other part of the cookie. “Acted like he was God’s gift to women?”

“He’s a senior this year and even more stuck on himself than last year,” Jess assured them.

“Be fair,” Emma protested. “He’s really nice when you get to know him.”

They stared at her and she flushed a bright red.

All the Knott kids have blue eyes, relatively fair skin, and hair that ranges from light brown to blond, but Emma had inherited Barbara’s delicate pink complexion and her long hair was the color of spring dandelions.

“Please tell me you are not getting to know Kevin Crowder,” Jane Ann said sternly.

The flush on Emma’s cheeks spread across her whole face and up into her hairline.

“Oops!” I cried, reaching for a potholder. “Anybody remember when that last pan of cookies went in?”

Someone had left a nearly empty glass of milk beside the potholder right on the edge of the counter. A tiny imperceptible nudge as I picked up the potholder was enough to send it careening toward the floor.

Jess and Annie Sue both lunged for it. Spraying milk on their sweaters, it bounced off their hands toward Mary Pat, whose misjudged grab swatted it across the room where it shattered against the edge of the refrigerator.

More of a mess than I had intended, but by the time all the milk and glass were cleaned up, the sweaters sponged off, and the last sheets of cookies were out of the oven, conversation had moved on to other topics less interesting to Melissa and Mary Pat. When I brought out the bottle of bourbon to mix up those sinfully delicious bourbon balls, they wrinkled up their little noses and decided to go see what the boys were up to.

I made a fresh pot of coffee and Ruth and Emma used my food processor to turn several cups of toasted pecans into tiny bits. Jane Ann and Jessica pounded vanilla wafers into crumbs and Annie Sue measured out butter and powdered sugar.

For a wedding gift last year, the local bar association gave Dwight and me a huge ceramic bowl they had commissioned from the Jugtown Pottery over in Seagrove. The bowl is big enough to serve coleslaw to the whole family at a pig-picking, and it’s also perfect for mixing up a family-size batch of bourbon balls. I drizzled melted butter over all the dry ingredients, then poured in the bourbon. A big wooden spoon passed from hand to hand as we each stirred the stiff mixture till our arms gave out.

I may have been a little too lavish with the bourbon, because when Annie Sue took her turn with the wooden spoon, she immediately began to warble: The birds in the sky get so drunk they cain’t flyFrom that good ol’ mountain dew.

When everything was thoroughly mixed and the coffee was ready, we carried our mugs to the dining table and set the big bowl in the middle so everyone could reach in, pinch off some dough, and shape it into one-inch balls. As soon as one cake box was filled, it was carried out to a workbench in the garage to chill and another took its place.

With so many hands dipping in and out of the bowl, I knew it wouldn’t take long to finish, so while there were no loose-lipped little kids in the room, I said, “So, Emma. Can we assume that Kevin Crowder’s house is on a straight line between South Colleton and your house?”

She stared at me, stricken, then whispered, “Who told you?”

I wasn’t about to say that it was her own evasion of my first question that tipped me off, and now her guilty look confirmed my suspicions.

“Please,” she said, imploring the others as much as me. “Don’t tell Mother. She’ll blame Lee, too, and it’s not his fault. Laurie Evans broke up with her boyfriend and asked if we could drop her at the party ’cause she didn’t want to ride with him and she knew we’d be going right past Kevin’s house. I talked Lee into it. See, Kevin sits next to me in study hall. That’s how I know him. I told him I couldn’t go, but everybody was so pumped about beating South we didn’t want the night to end—it really was only for a few minutes. But his parents weren’t home and there were some older kids there that we didn’t know and one of them was high on something, so Lee made me leave before I could even take off my jacket, but Mother will kill us if she finds out. The only reason she let me join the varsity squad was because I promised I wouldn’t try to act like I was a junior or senior.”

The words tumbled out in such a rush that she was almost crying, and Jessica reached out to pat her arm. “It’s okay, Em. We won’t tell. None of us will, will we?”

The girls all shook their heads and looked at me.

“I won’t tell either,” I said slowly, “but the boy that was high? Were there drugs at the party?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I wasn’t there long enough to even drink a Coke.”

“But Mallory was there?”

“We all were. The whole squad and most of the varsity players.”

“Was she okay at the game?”

“Sure. She was starting to get a cold and her voice sounded a little raspy. She did take a pill, but it was just a Benadryl tablet. And she was drinking lots of liquids to try and flush the cold out of her system.”

“What about at the party?”

Emma shrugged. “She had a Coke can in her hand when we got there, and there was booze on one of the counters, but I’m sure she didn’t put any in her drink if that’s what you mean. Bridget’s the only—”

She clapped a sticky guilty hand to her mouth as if to block the words we’d already heard her say.

Jane Ann pounced on them in disapproving surprise. “Bridget Honeycutt drinks?”

I suppose I should have appreciated the irony of the situation. Here we sat, up to our wrists in bourbon-saturated dough, and my nieces were expressing disbelief that a “nice” girl like Bridget Honeycutt had a drinking problem?

The difference, of course, was that by the time these calorie-laden little balls had ripened in cake boxes out in the cold garage for several days and I had drizzled chocolate over them, most of the alcohol would have evaporated, leaving only the flavor behind.

Some of my brothers—their dads—had abused alcohol in their younger days, A.K. was known to sneak an occasional beer, and Reese had a DWI on his driving record, but bourbon balls had never led any member of my family down the primrose path to alcoholism any more than Aunt Zell’s fruitcakes had.

“Bridget’s no drunk,” Emma said hotly. “She couldn’t drink much and still keep up with the rest of us, but she says that it helps take the edges off things.”

She would not elaborate on why Bridget needed some edges blurred, but I got the impression that Jess and Ruth probably knew.

“You said you saw booze,” I said. “What about drugs?”

“No!” Emma cried. “Why do you keep asking me? I told you. I wasn’t there long enough to see who was doing what.”

My nieces aren’t dummies and it was sweet levelheaded Jessica who said, “You know something, don’t you, Aunt Deborah?”

I nodded. “But you absolutely can’t talk about it right now. It’ll come out soon enough. Mallory had alcohol in her system when she died, and her dad seems to think someone spiked her drink or maybe even added drugs to it to make her so disoriented that she would run off a straight road on a clear night. Who at that party would do that to her, Emma?”

But Emma had immediately realized that there would be an inquiry into that party and she had leapfrogged to what was, for her, the larger issue. “I’m dead,” she moaned. “Mother will make me quit the squad. She’ll take Lee’s car keys and he’ll hate me forever.”

“Not necessarily,” Jane Ann said soothingly. “If you were only there for a minute, chances are that no one really registered it.”

Emma shook her head and golden hair swirled around her anguished face. “Laurie knows and so does Kevin. As soon as Uncle Dwight starts asking for names, mine’s going to pop out.”

Annie Sue had continued to roll bourbon balls through all this, but now she paused and said, “So here’s what you do. You’re going to the visitation tonight, right?”

Emma nodded tearfully.

“It’ll be perfectly normal to talk about the last time you saw Mallory. You will probably cry. That’s when you tell your mom how good she was at the game and how your last memory of her will be taking a sip of her Coke at Kevin Crowder’s party.”

“Annie Sue! I can’t. She’ll go ballistic!”

“No she won’t,” Annie Sue said calmly, “because when she asks what you were doing there when you were supposed to come straight home, you’ll explain about this Laurie kid and how the only reason you and Lee stepped inside was to make sure that Laurie had a way home. You got home around your usual time, right? So clearly you didn’t stay. Don’t make a big deal out of it and Aunt Barbara will think you did the proper thing. That she’s raised two very considerate and responsible kids.”

There was more cynicism in her voice than I wanted to hear, but I had to admit that she really did have Barbara pegged.

From the sudden look of relief on her face, Emma knew it, too.

Two minutes later, Jane Ann was the one in trouble with her mother when her cell phone rang and she had to admit that she had come here first instead of going straight home.

I could hear Isabel’s outraged voice from the other side of the table. “Your daddy’s out there pacing a rut in the yard, worried to death that you ain’t come, and you’re over yonder making cookies?”

“I’m coming right now,” Jane Ann assured her. She clicked off and hurried to the sink to wash her hands.

Annie Sue was right behind her. “I’ll drive you,” she said, “but I’m not coming in to find out if you’re okay.”

CHAPTER 9

“Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.”

—“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Arthur Conan Doyle

I took Mary Pat and Jake home shortly before sunset and left Cal there, too, to spend the night. Kate and Rob planned to treat the children to pizza and then to a Christmas lights theme park near Raleigh while Dwight and I went to the funeral home in Cotton Grove where Mallory Johnson’s visitation was being held.

As a sitting judge who has to run for office every four years, I get invited to a lot of weddings and I attend a lot of funerals. My inner pragmatist knows that it’s a chance to shake hands and remind the voters that I’m in and of the community. My inner preacher worries about taking advantage of a family’s emotional state.

Weddings are usually fun and I don’t mind funerals for the terminally sick or nursing home elderly. These can turn into a celebration of the person’s life, with more smiles than tears. Anecdotes and good memories can surface again and the survivors talk about their loved one’s release from suffering or dementia. You often sense their own release from grief and exhaustion, a relief tinged with guilt for being glad that the deathwatch is over.

Funerals for adults cut down in their prime are usually sad, but they are laugh riots compared to the rituals for a well-loved child. Those are hard, hard, hard, and I knew that the evening would be a tortured ordeal for Sarah and Malcolm Johnson as they touched the hands of Mallory’s classmates and were reminded over and over again that those kids were going to move on into bright futures that their own child would never see.

The visitation was scheduled for six to eight, so Dwight and I had supper first at my cousin’s barbecue house, which is only four miles away.

We had to wait a few minutes to get a table and then had to share it with a couple of friends. We spent the meal catching up with them—new house, new job, new baby—and it wasn’t until we were driving over to Cotton Grove that I had a chance to tell Dwight the meager facts I had picked up from my nieces.

He was sorry that Emma and Lee hadn’t stayed longer at the party, “but I’ve put Mayleen on it,” he said, naming one of the more capable deputies on his squad. “She’ll get a list of everyone who stepped through the Crowder door that night. I’m pretty sure we’ll wind up identifying whoever spiked her drink if the DA wants to prosecute for contributing to the girl’s death. Which I doubt.”

His opinion of our new DA wasn’t much higher than mine. “Any good attorney can argue that it was Mallory’s inexperience and the Benadryl that made her swerve for something and flip the car, not a shot of whiskey.”

“Did the troopers find any dead animals at the site?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Did they look?”

“They always look. She must have missed whatever it was.”

I described Jane Ann and Jess’s insistence that Malcolm had drilled it into her not to brake and swerve for any small animal.

“A deer then,” he said dismissively. “Or a big dog, because she certainly braked to avoid hitting something.”

“And not another car?” I persisted.

“No skid marks in the other lane and only a short one in hers.”

I knew that meant she hadn’t seen whatever she braked and swerved for till the last minute.

We got to Aldcroft’s Funeral Home a little before seven and the spacious parking lot was completely filled. Cars lined both sides of the street.

“You dressed warm enough to walk a couple of blocks,” Dwight asked, “or you want me to let you out in front?”

I told him I was fine to walk, but I was wishing for fur-lined boots instead of thin heels by the time we reached the entrance. At most large funerals, the line is out the door and down the sidewalk, but tonight’s temperature hovered in the thirties and everyone had squeezed inside. The line began in the front lobby, stretched all the way to the far reaches of the building, and doubled back on itself.

From experience, we knew that it would be at least ninety minutes before we could work our way to the parlor where Sarah and Malcolm would be standing next to their daughter’s open casket.

Aldcroft’s is the nicest of the local funeral homes. Outside, it looks like Tara, with fluted columns that sit on the stone terrace and rise to a classic pediment, all painted a dazzling white that glowed in the floodlights artfully hidden among the boxwood foundation plantings. Inside was hushed elegance, from the crystal chandelier eight feet above our heads to the thick pearl gray carpet beneath our feet. Gilt-framed portraits of three generations of Aldcroft morticians looked out from walls covered in pale pink silk.

Large floor pots of bright red poinsettias swathed in gold foil acknowledged the season, and tall white electric candles rose from sprays of holly that looked so real I had to touch a leaf to realize it wasn’t. Despite the crush of bodies, there was no laughter or light talk, and the décor did nothing to disperse the funeral home smell, a mixture of air freshener and a vague aroma that I always associate with refrigerated flowers and greenery. We paused to speak in solemn tones with several people on line there in the lobby, to hug old friends or shake hands depending on the degree of kin or friendship.

Dwight’s mother and his two sisters came in right behind us. Nancy Faye and Beth had both been in school with Malcolm and Sarah. Miss Emily, of course, had been Mallory’s principal, and she had also taught Sarah when she was in the eighth grade. Tonight she looked a bit drawn and tired from dealing with another student’s death on top of the usual end-of-semester red tape.

Nancy Faye immediately asked Dwight to try and convince Miss Emily to go out for something to eat instead of standing for so long. “She won’t listen to us.”

That indomitable woman shook her head. “Stop fussing, Nancy Faye. I’m not hungry.”

Dwight’s sisters are dears, but they do tend to cluck over Miss Emily like mother hens at times, almost as if in competition for who can show the most concern.

Duck Aldcroft, courtly and solicitous, offered her one of the couches that lined the lobby. “Why don’t you just sit down there, Mrs. Bryant, and wait for your girls to come back by?”

“Why, thank you, Duck. It’s been a long day. I believe I will sit for a while.”

She may have been a bit tired, but I had a feeling that she accepted his offer so she could get away from too much clucking. Either that or she wanted to take the pulse of the community, because no sooner had she crossed to the couch than several people stepped out of line to speak to her.

“She’ll be worn out by the time we get back to her,” said Beth as several newcomers took their places behind her and the line shuffled forward toward the back halls.

“Are you sure you don’t want to have supper first?” I asked Miss Emily. “We can go and be back long before Nancy Faye and Beth come through.”

“Don’t listen to those girls,” she said, her voice crisp with exasperation. “They think everything can be made better with food. I’m not hungry. Just heartsick for the children we keep losing.”

I stopped to speak to some of my own high school friends whose children were now at West Colleton, then joined Dwight and his sisters.

As our line turned the first corner, we met Zach and Barbara inching forward with Lee and Emma. Emma’s eyes were red from crying, but Barbara had an arm around her waist, so I gathered that Annie Sue’s advice had worked and there would be no repercussions for stopping by that party Tuesday night.

I got a warm hug from Zach and an air kiss from Barbara, which made me glad when they turned the corner and we no longer had to make small talk.

Much of West Colleton’s student body seemed to be there with their somber-faced parents, who had to be thinking that there but for the grace of God they could be the ones standing in Sarah and Malcolm’s shoes.

In the next half hour, we met and passed several of my nieces and nephews and their friends, and yes, at least half of those little thumbs were texting away on the keys.

“Emma’s freaking,” Jessica said. “She’s at the entrance of the room and she can see Mallory’s casket and she doesn’t want to go on in.”

“She should have stayed back here with us,” said Jane Ann.

“Like Aunt Barbara was gonna let her do that,” said Ruth.

“Did she confess about the party?” I asked, as the line moved forward.

They nodded and Jess said, “And it went just like Annie Sue said it would.”

Another corner turned and there was Ellen Englert Hamilton in full rant mode. She had her back to me and spoke in tones that were clearly meant to be heard by all around her. The teenage boy beside her must have recognized me, for he gave her a nudge, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“—and then just turned him loose without even the slap on the wrist she’d given the others. Just let him go with nothing but a mealymouthed little lecture after the trooper testified that he was weaving and staggering and—”

“Mo-ther!” the boy said, turning beet red.

“Ah, Deborah,” she said, looking not a bit embarrassed. “I was just comparing notes with some of my friends. They’re MADD, too.”

It took a moment to realize she meant Mothers Against Drunk Driving and not that the women behind her were angry, although from the sharp looks and frowns they were giving me, she might well have meant that, too.

“I was telling them how you dismissed all the charges against a drunk driver yesterday,” she said coolly.

“And did you explain that the state hadn’t proved he was over the limit?”

“Since when does a judge take the word of a drunk against the word of a state trooper?” asked one of the Englert-Hamilton clones.

“Ever since our Constitution said that someone’s innocent until proven guilty,” I said sweetly. “That’s what it means to be a judge. To decide if there’s enough proof to determine guilt. Did Ellen tell you about the other dozen or so that I did find guilty?”

“But then you turned around and gave suspended sentences and probation to more than half of them,” Ellen snapped back. “The only way people who abuse alcohol are going to get the message is to give them jail time every time they’re charged.”

“You honestly think a judge should always rule for the officer even when the evidence doesn’t support him?”

“Absolutely! If there’s enough for a charge, there’s enough for a conviction. And a conviction should carry jail time.”

“Oh dear,” I said with mock chagrin. “Does that mean I was derelict because I didn’t send your mother to jail when she was charged with possession of untaxed liquor?”

Except for the MADD women, everyone within earshot, including Ellen’s son, grinned.

“That was different and you know it!” Ellen cried, but her cheeks were burning and she seemed only too glad to turn the next corner.

The MADD women quickly followed.

Dwight shook his head at the others, who were still smiling. “Can’t take her anywhere,” he told them.

Before I could pat myself on the back for my smart-alecky putdown of that sanctimonious prisspot, Patsy Denning, my fifth grade teacher, who had listened to the exchange without comment, now drew even with Dwight and me and she put a firm hand on my arm. In her low sweet voice, she said, “Don’t let the messenger sour you on the message, Deborah. Even though Ellen doesn’t want anybody to drink anything alcoholic ever, the organization itself has helped save a lot of lives.”

She was right.

I sighed. “All the same.”

“I know.” Mrs. Denning’s eyes shone with mischief behind her polished glasses and she squeezed my arm before the line moved on. “All the same, she’s certainly her mother’s daughter, isn’t she?”

CHAPTER 10

Christmas is not just a time for festivity and merrymaking. It is more than that. It is a time for the contemplation of eternal things.

—J. C. Penney

Eight o’clock had come and gone before we worked our way back to the front lobby, and a good fifty people had entered after us. It would be well after nine before poor Sarah and Malcolm shook the last hand, hugged the last friend, thanked the last person for the words of sympathy.

We found Miss Emily still surrounded by a cluster of neighbors, former students, and the parents of current students.

Nancy Faye and Beth had worried that speaking to so many people would have exhausted their mother, but I thought she seemed reenergized when she stood up to join us.

As we moved through the lobby, the modest wreaths and floral sprays from Mallory’s friends gave way to more elaborate offerings and the chilly smell of refrigerated carnations and greenery grew stronger the closer we got to the main room. Malcolm Johnson and his older brother worked with their father, who owned Triple J, one of the largest insurance companies in the county. The company had been started by Malcolm’s grandfather back when this was a sleepy, sparsely inhabited rural area devoted to small family farms and modest mercantile stores. With so much growth these past thirty years, business had boomed and the Johnsons were now a family of wealth and influence. Between them, Malcolm and his family belonged to most of the civic organizations and they had a large circle of friends, relatives, and important customers.

All had sent impressive arrangements.

Interspersed among the flowers were monitor screens set at eye level, and soft, solemn music issued from a single speaker. Eighteen years of Mallory Johnson’s life played out in endless loops of still photographs, from her infancy to just a few weeks ago. One screen was devoted to a silent DVD of Mallory as she arrived at the homecoming game with her court, smiling and waving. Her tiara sparkled beneath the floodlights and she was breathtakingly beautiful and alive.

Beside us, Miss Emily caught her breath and sudden tears filled her eyes. “Do not do this when y’all bury me,” she whispered urgently. She clasped her daughters’ hands. “You girls hear me? The pictures are sad enough, but this! To see her moving and laughing? Promise me you won’t.”

We signed the visitors’ book and entered the parlor that was so crowded that it was impossible at first to see the casket. The reception line began with Sarah’s family—her sister and brother, their spouses and children, and then her parents.

Next came Mallory’s brother Charlie, an awkward young man who seemed to be going through the motions mechanically as I took his hand and murmured my sympathy. He appeared to be about six-three with small, closely set hazel eyes in a long narrow face. It was a pleasant enough face, but clearly Mallory had inherited all the beauty in that family. When his eyes met Dwight’s, he seemed to focus, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something more than “Thank you” to Dwight’s own words of sympathy, but the moment passed and we moved on to Sarah and Malcolm.

Both seemed emotionally and physically drained. Someone had brought a chair for Malcolm, who sat with hunched shoulders and responded dully to those who tried to console him. Sarah was still on her feet and she teared up again when Miss Emily reached out to hug her. I wondered how she could possibly have any tears left.

“Bless you for coming,” she murmured as Miss Emily moved on to Malcolm and our turn came to speak. She took Dwight’s hand. “Is there anything more you can tell us, Dwight?”

He shook his head and his words included Malcolm. “I wish there was, Sarah. Malcolm.”

“You don’t get it, Dwight. She never touched liquor,” Malcolm said, his voice ragged with pain as he stood to face his old teammate and plead for an answer. “So how did it get in her system? How? Answer me that. Whoever did that to her is as much to blame as the person who made her run off the road, and if I ever find out who—Look at her, man! Is that the face of a drunk?”

He wrenched Dwight’s arm in an angry explosive gesture that put him close enough to Mallory to touch her. They had dressed her in her homecoming gown and tiara, and whatever injuries had caused her death, her lovely face had been unharmed. Malcolm cupped that ivory-smooth cheek in his hand and his anger dissolved into despair again. “My little girl. My baby. She shouldn’t be lying here. She shouldn’t, Dwight.” He was sobbing now. “She shouldn’t. Oh, God, she shouldn’t!”

Sarah stepped forward to put her arms around him, her own face crumpled with grief, and Malcolm’s stern-faced father came from the other side. Together they calmed him down and the line moved grimly forward again. Soon we were past Malcolm’s parents, his brother, and the brother’s wife and adult children, then mercifully out of the parlor and back into the lobby.

Again, there were people we had to speak to as we headed for the door, but we didn’t linger. Outside on the front terrace, the temperature was so near freezing that we quickly said good night to Dwight’s sisters and mother and were turning onto the sidewalk when we realized that Miss Emily had followed us.

“Mama?” Dwight said.

“I’ll ride home with you and Deborah,” she said, giving him a meaningful look.

He was as instantly curious as I was, but she gave us both a warning shake of her head as a cluster of people passed us and murmured, “Good night, Miss Emily. ’Night, Deborah.”

“Why don’t you two wait here and I’ll go get the car,” he said.

“I can walk,” she said sharply. “After all that sitting, it feels good to move my legs.”

Despite her protests, I insisted that Miss Emily ride in front with Dwight, and I think she was glad to be closer to the heat vents. Dwight always grumbles because my car isn’t as roomy as his truck, and with his seat pushed back as far as it would go to accommodate his long legs, I was squeezed in behind his mother.

As soon as we pulled out onto the street, she turned to Dwight and said, “Was Vicodin in Mallory’s bloodstream when she died?”

“Where on earth did you get that notion?” he countered.

“Something I heard tonight,” she said, confirming my earlier suspicion that she had deliberately chosen to sit where everyone would pass. “Whatever one child knows these days, they all seem to know. It’s almost like one of those old Star Trek plots, where every mind is linked together like bees in a hive. I suppose you also know that Mallory went to a party Tuesday night after the game with South Colleton? Kevin Crowder’s house? And that his parents were away?”

“And?”

“Kevin’s not a bad kid. Not really. He pushes the boundaries and he gets away with it because he’s nice-looking and has a glib tongue on him. He can make his parents laugh so they don’t rein him in as much as they ought to.” She sighed and loosened the scarf around her neck.

“Too hot?” Dwight reached for the controls.

“Not yet. What about you, Deborah?” she asked. “You getting any of this heat?”

“I can feel my toes again,” I said, “so y’all make it comfortable for yourselves.”

“The party,” Dwight prodded.

“The party. Yes. Kevin’s parents had gone over to Greensboro for the night to attend a Christmas concert. His sister’s in the college chorus and she had a solo part. His mother had knee surgery back in the summer and Vicodin was what they gave her for pain. She had pretty much quit taking it, but the drive up and back bothered her knee, and when she got home Wednesday afternoon and went looking for the prescription bottle in her medicine cabinet, it was gone. It had been there Tuesday morning, because she almost took it with her and then decided that Tylenol would probably be all that she’d need. So she asked Kevin and he had to confess to the party. When they heard about Mallory, they were afraid that she might have been drinking there and that they would be liable, but he swore she hadn’t and all the children I’ve talked to say the same. Mallory didn’t drink, but if someone spiked her drink, then that same someone could have slipped her a Vicodin. They were all over the house, so any of them could have taken the pills. Kevin immediately texted everybody there and let them know what he thought of someone who would steal his mother’s pills. You warm enough now, Deborah?”

I said I was and she switched off the heater fan and lowered the thermostat. “Remember, Mallory was still in a coma on Wednesday. Nobody had any idea that she’d taken anything except one of those over-the-counter cold medicines.”

“Benadryl,” Dwight said. “And alcohol would have enhanced its effects.”

“The thing is, son, that no one’s admitted spiking her Coke while she was still alive. Now that they know it might have slowed her reflexes and helped cause her to wreck the car, they certainly aren’t going to come forward and confess about any pills.”

She leaned her head back against the seat. “The funeral’s tomorrow at three. Y’all going?”

“I probably will,” I said. “You want to ride with me?”

“That would be nice. What about you, Dwight?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I promised Cal we’d take my .22 over to the woods back of Seth’s house and see if we could shoot us down some mistletoe. If we have any luck, you want some?”

“Only if you haven’t shot all the berries off.” There was almost a hint of her old humor in her voice.

“I’ll send Cal up the tree myself if you promise to tell me whatever else you pick up from the hive mind, okay?”

“Deal,” she said.

CHAPTER 11

I do not know a grander effect of music on the moral feelings than to hear the full choir and the pealing organ performing a Christmas anthem in a cathedral, and filling every part of the vast pile with triumphant harmony.

—The Sketch Book, Washington Irving

Most Sundays, if we get moving early enough to go to church, it’s to nearby Sweetwater Missionary Baptist, the church I grew up in. The minister is earnest and not too hard-shelled, and the choir does the best it can with the talent available.

When I lived with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash and was still in private practice, though, I moved my membership to the First Baptist Church of Dobbs for purely pragmatic reasons. Not only was it easier to get to on Sunday mornings after a late Saturday night, but this was also where many of Colleton County’s movers and shakers went, and one never knew when sharing a hymnal to sing “Bringing in the Sheaves” might lead to bringing in a new client.

(What? I’m the only one who ever chose a church for other than purely religious reasons?)

The minister, Dr. Carlyle Yelvington, is a progressive liberal whose sermons don’t insult one’s intellect and who exhorts us to live the words, not just mouth them. But he’s not the only reason I rousted Dwight out of bed to go fetch Cal early enough that both could put on white shirts and ties in time to make the eleven o’clock service. I wanted some Christmas spirit, and the late-nineteenth-century stateliness of First Baptist was my provider of choice with its carved oak pews, its stained glass windows, the ribbed vaulting overhead, the richly embroidered altar cloths and choir robes, the massed greenery around the pulpit, the tall white candles, the polished brass crosses. Add in an organist and a choir who are all trained musicians, and by the time the final amen is sung I’m ready to hang up a stocking or stuff a goose.

Cal was still hopped up about the festival of bright lights he and his cousins had seen last night, especially the animated displays, and as we were getting into the car, he turned and gave the house a long consideration. “We ought to put up some more lights, Dad. Wouldn’t it be really cool to have some of those tube strips like at the RBC Center, only in red and green? Or how ’bout we get one of those reindeer that the legs flash on and off like it’s prancing on the roof?”

“Nothing on the roof,” I said. “I don’t want y’all falling off.”

Cal laughed and settled into the backseat with his Game Boy and iPod, but my offhand remark must have triggered something because Dwight said, “Last night was the first time I ever saw Charlie Johnson to know who I was looking at. He really favors Jeff, doesn’t he?”

“I really don’t remember Jeff very well,” I said, fastening my seat belt. “Anyhow, it’s not Charlie Johnson anymore. He changed his name back to Barefoot.”

“Yeah? When?”

“Last spring, I think. Portland handled the paperwork for him.”

“She say why?”

I shrugged. “All the usual, I gather, plus he thought Malcolm made it clear which was his true child. Mallory tried to talk him out of it, so I don’t think the resentment went both ways.”

“All the same, maybe I’ll have a talk with Charlie,” Dwight said. “See if he was one of the older kids at that party.”

Congregants were streaming into the church when we arrived, and Portland, Avery, and Carolyn were among them. The baby wore the lace-trimmed red plaid dress I’d given her and looked as adorable as I’d expected.

“I’ll probably have to take her out before the first prayer,” Portland said, “but it wouldn’t be Christmas without this, would it?”

We followed them into a pew and Carolyn immediately put out her arms to me. I was flattered until I realized that she was doing it to get nearer to Cal, who was sitting on my other side between Dwight and me. Babies always home in on the children and she was no exception.

“It’s okay,” he whispered when the baby indicated that she wanted Cal to hold her. He’s had a year of practical experience with Kate and Rob’s baby and he let her balance on his knees as the rest of us stood to sing the opening hymn, “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

She was quiet while the choir sang an arrangement of “Adeste Fideles” in glorious harmony, but began to squirm and fuss a little when Dr. Yelvington took the pulpit. We passed her back to Portland, who calmed her with a bottle; ten minutes later, she was sound asleep.

Cal started to take out his Game Boy, but Dwight gave a negative headshake and he put it away again and tried to look interested in what Dr. Yelvington was saying about the true spirit of Christmas.

Afterward, we sought out Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash to wish them a merry Christmas and to thank her for the fruitcake. Portland and Avery and Portland’s parents were going to have Sunday dinner with them to celebrate the baby’s birthday, and Aunt Zell assured me that there was enough for three more, but I had left a ham in the oven with a sweet potato casserole and we needed to get back before everything turned to charcoal.

As soon as lunch was cleared away, though, Cal began to pester Dwight to go for the mistletoe.

Mistletoe’s a parasite on deciduous trees. It’s spread by birds who eat the gummy white berries and then perch in the twigs at the end of a branch to clean their beaks, so it’s not easy to harvest. You can’t just shinny up a tree and break some off because it’s usually growing out at the tips of branches too thin to support even a boy’s weight. But if you have a good eye and a steady aim, you can shoot through the thick green stems and bring home enough to kiss half the county.

We’re not particularly gun-crazy in my family. You’ll never see an AK-47 in our houses, but most of my friends and I did grow up with utility guns. Farmers liked to keep a loaded rifle hanging on pegs over their bedroom doors where they could easily grab it if needed in the middle of the night. If any child ever touched his father’s gun without permission, I never heard about it.

Daddy gave each of the boys a simple bolt-action .22 as soon as he thought they could handle the responsibility. Seth got his at ten; Will was fifteen. He taught us to respect both the gun’s danger and the life of whatever animal we killed. That last was rammed home to me the day Adam and Zach shot a couple of brown thrashers down at the edge of the woods when they were eleven.

“I ain’t gonna give you the licking you deserve,” Daddy told them when he found the little corpses and brought them up to the house. “Not this time. But you boys ever kill another songbird, you’re gonna clean it and cook it and eat every last bite of it. You hear me?”

All through my teen years, I enjoyed trailing along behind my brothers and their dogs on a frosty moonlit night to hunt for coons and possums with my own little single-shot .22, and I got pretty good at plinking cans and shooting the paper targets the boys pinned onto hay bales, but when Dwight unlocked the gun case in our bedroom that afternoon, I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fired it. My brothers don’t hunt much anymore and their children don’t seem very interested either. Reese is about the only one in the next generation who wants to bag a couple of deer every fall.

Dwight and Cal had changed their suits and ties for jeans and flannel shirts as soon as we got home. Even though I was going out again, I hadn’t wanted to get ham grease on my red wool suit, so I had changed into a long blue zip-up robe. Now I sat cross-legged on the edge of the bed to watch as Dwight tucked a box of cartridges in his jacket pocket and took out his .22 Remington with its 3x scope. Although Cal had lived with us for almost a full year, this was the first time he had seen the gun case unlocked and he was surprised to learn that the second, smaller .22 belonged to me. I gathered that Jonna hadn’t approved of guns and wouldn’t have them in the house. He hadn’t even been allowed cap pistols or a BB gun. As so often happens when something is forbidden, his fingers clearly itched to hold one.

“If you want to start teaching him how to shoot,” I told Dwight, “take mine. It’ll fit him better.”

Cal’s eyes widened with excitement. “Can we, Dad? Please. Can we?”

“You sure?” Dwight asked, and I knew he was asking about more than the use of my gun.

“Nine’s about when Daddy started you boys, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “I guess it was.”

I reached over and took Cal’s arm and turned him to me until we were face-to-face and our eyes were level. With my hands on his shoulder, I said, “This is serious, Cal. A gun is not a toy. You’ve got to listen to your dad, pay attention to what he tells you, and do exactly what he says, okay?”

Instead of pulling away from me, he nodded solemnly. “Yes, ma’am. I will. I promise.”

“Good. If you keep that promise, then when Dad says you’re ready, you can have my gun to keep.”

“Honest?” In his sudden excitement, he gave me such an exuberant hug that I fell back on the bed and he fell on top of me, which struck us both as hilariously funny. Especially when Bandit jumped up on the bed and started licking our faces.

As we untangled ourselves, I realized that for once, he wasn’t self-conscious about having hugged me in broad open daylight, and I doubted that I’d get a better present this whole Christmas season.

Laughing and chattering in anticipation, he ran to get his own jacket, Bandit dancing at his heels.

Dwight shook his head at me. “I hope you’re right about him being old enough.”

I lay back on the pillows. “It’s like the birds and the bees,” I teased him. “If you don’t teach him at home, he’s going to pick it up on the school bus or on the street.”

He leaned down to kiss me just as Cal reappeared in the doorway.

“Oh, jeez,” he said. “Y’all aren’t going to get mushy now, are you?”

Dwight gave him a scowl that didn’t fool either of us. “Aren’t you supposed to knock first?”

“Not if the door’s open. She said only if it’s closed.”

So I was back to being “she”?

Perplexed, I kicked them both out so I could get dressed for Mallory Johnson’s funeral.

CHAPTER 12

The grasp, though gentle as a woman’s hand, was not to be resisted.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Although attendance was considerably less than at the funeral home the night before, the church in Cotton Grove was standing room only by the time services started. Fortunately, Miss Emily and I had arrived early enough to get seats on the aisle.

The front left pew was occupied by the honorary pallbearers, the school’s cheerleading squad dressed in their red-and-gold winter uniforms—long-sleeved jerseys, short skirts, and flesh-colored tights. Joy Medlin led them in on crutches, her pretty face so pinched with pain that I found myself thinking that this is what she would look like at forty when the first flush of youth was gone for good. Her face was a reminder of how narrowly she herself had escaped death only two months ago.

“Lucky to be alive,” everyone said of the four teens who had not died in that car wreck. I wondered if the parents of the brain-damaged child still in a coma felt that way.

At three o’clock precisely, Duck Aldcroft and his assistant entered and closed the lid on Mallory’s coffin. There were audible sniffs and sobs from the girls.

Moments later, the minister gave us the signal and we all rose as her parents and family were escorted down the aisle and seated in the right front pews. They were still somber-faced and grieving, but time had begun to do its work. Sarah looked resigned today and Malcolm’s shoulders were straight as he sat down beside her and put his arm around her. Of the three of them, Charlie was now the one who seemed to be suffering most, as if it had only just fully sunk in that his sister was gone for good. I noticed that he left a small space between himself and Malcolm. No comfort for him there.

Mercifully, the service was short and formal. No tearful tributes from her friends, no failed attempts to make us smile by recounting humorous things Mallory once said or did, no popular songs to make her parents remember how she sang along with them.

A final prayer, then the coffin began its sad journey back down the aisle to the cemetery on the edge of Cotton Grove. The cheerleaders walked two by two out to the waiting cars, and then the family, followed by a general exodus of the rest of us.

When we got outside, we did not linger to talk. A chill rain had begun to fall, a rain that froze as soon as it hit the concrete walkways. I hadn’t brought an umbrella and neither had Miss Emily.

“Do you want to go to the cemetery?” I asked.

She shook her small head decisively. “No, let’s go home.”

Once in the car with the heater running, though, we had to wait to get out of the parking lot because precedence went to those cars that would follow the slow-moving hearse out to the cemetery.

Like me, Dwight’s mother had noticed the lack of warmth between Charlie and Malcolm and she commented on it while we waited. “I wonder if it’s not because he looks so much like Jeff. There was always such a rivalry between those two boys when they were in school—over basketball, over Sarah.”

“Before my time,” I said, watching my wipers push wet ice granules off the windshield. “Dwight says that he had more natural ability than Malcolm but that Malcolm worked harder.”

“True. Malcolm was always more focused, while it was easy come, easy go with Jeff. He had a sweet personality, though, and could charm his way out of trouble, whereas poor Malcolm never got away with anything, especially with that father of his. Shelton Johnson was a bully when we were in school together and he bullied Malcolm until Malcolm finally stood up to him about marrying Sarah. Malcolm had to struggle to make Bs. Jeff could have made straight As, but Cs were enough to let him play ball. Even then, he wouldn’t work hard enough to make the starting lineup. I wasn’t one bit surprised when I heard he’d fallen off that roof and killed himself. Everything came so easy for him, I’m sure he didn’t think twice about the possible consequences of stringing lights in the dark on a steep roof. Sometimes I used to think that the only reason he went after Sarah was because he knew Malcolm wanted her so badly and he was jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“Only human if you think about it. Malcolm’s family was solid middle class. Jeff’s daddy was a roofer. Malcolm was bound for Carolina and a white-collar life; Jeff was going to have his own truck and a hammer.”

“But if they were best friends—?”

“Best friends? Certainly they hung out together, but looking back on it, I have to wonder if it wasn’t a case of ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ They may have liked each other at the start, but once Sarah came into it…”

“And she chose Jeff,” I said. “That had to’ve hurt Malcolm.”

Miss Emily shook her head. “I don’t know if it was a matter of choosing Jeff or just that he was here and Malcolm was in Chapel Hill and Jeff sure could charm a smile out of a stone statue. Couldn’t charm his way out of marriage, though, once Sarah came up pregnant.”

“Did he want to?”

“Not really. To do him credit, I think he liked being married and he was certainly proud as a peacock when Charlie was born.” She smiled. “He even gave me a cigar.”

I laughed and put the car in gear as the last of the funeral procession left the parking lot. “I bet you smoked it, too.”

She cut her bright eyes at me. “I didn’t inhale, though.”

Once out of the church parking lot, I drove a few blocks, then turned onto a street that was a shortcut over to the road home. I cornered just a little too sharply and felt the car fishtail. Luckily, there were no other cars near.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “It’s slicker than I realized.”

“I’m in no hurry,” she said mildly.

Considering that she’s gotten more than one speeding ticket the way she floors her old trademark TR, I bit back the remark I could have made and said, “Tell me about Mallory. I keep hearing how perfect she was, and yet she could have spiked her own drink or stolen the Vicodin as easily as any other kid at the party, couldn’t she?”

“In theory, I suppose,” Miss Emily said, “but I never heard that she did drugs or touched alcohol, and I do hear things, Deborah.”

If there was a touch of pride in her tone, she had earned it. From all I’ve heard from my nieces and nephews, very little goes on at West Colleton that Emily Bryant doesn’t know about in time to do something if something needs doing.

“Did you hear whether Charlie was one of the older kids at the party?”

She shook her head. “Was he?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. Or rather that’s what Dwight’s going to be asking. Somebody had to have slipped something in her drink can.”

“Surely not her own brother,” Miss Emily protested.

“He was jealous of her, wasn’t he? Sounds like she came first in that family. Jessica told me that she was set to go to Carolina in the fall and that Malcolm planned a trip to Spain as her graduation gift. Charlie goes to Colleton Community College. Wonder what his graduation gift was?”

“Not a trip to Spain,” she agreed.

“So there’s at least one person who didn’t think she was as perfect as everyone says.”

“Two persons,” my mother-in-law said quietly.

“You?”

“It sounds so awful to say this when right this very minute they’re getting ready to lower her into the grave. It’s like I’m throwing a shovelful of dirt on her coffin myself.”

“But?”

“But no, Mallory Johnson didn’t actually walk on water. She was everything you’ve heard—pretty, talented, intelligent, good student, a friendly word for everyone. Sweet and thoughtful. Polite to her elders—”

“Didn’t kick small animals or pull wings off flies?” I added cynically.

“Actually, she may have done a little bit of wing-pulling, but so subtly the poor fly didn’t realize it was happening till it dawned on her that she could no longer fly.”

“That’s too metaphorical for me,” I said. “Plain English, please?”

The windows were as fogged up as her words and I switched on the defroster. As the windows cleared, so did her meaning.

“Mallory could have had anyone she wanted, but she didn’t want a steady boyfriend, which is not unusual these days. The kids don’t pair off the way they still did when you and Dwight were teenagers. That doesn’t mean there can’t be some rather intense relationships within the group, and Mallory liked to mess with those. She was very open about it. Claimed she was just a little ol’ tease who couldn’t stop herself from flirting with every boy around, like it was all a joke. And because she didn’t take it seriously, nobody else was supposed to. But sometimes the boys would be so dazzled, it spoiled them for whatever more ordinary girl they’d been perfectly happy with before.”

I suddenly remembered Jess’s quiet “Tell me a single guy in this school who didn’t think she was hot.”

“I think she enjoyed being Little Miss Wonderful just a little too much,” Miss Emily said. “She worked hard at it and I daresay most everyone thought she was wonderful, but every once in a while I would catch a sense of… I don’t know. Smugness? No, that’s not the right word.”

“Egotism?” I suggested.

“No.” She was silent as the windshield wipers swept back and forth in front of us. “Complacency,” she said at last. “That’s what it was. Complacency.”

When I got home, before taking off my coat and barely saying hey to Dwight, who was on the phone, I went straight to the dictionary on my desk: “complacency: self-satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.”

CHAPTER 13

“Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?”

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

When I walked back into the living room, unbuttoning my coat and fluffing my damp hair, Cal was lying on his stomach beside the tree to read a book and watch the train go around. Dwight was still on the phone, getting his Sunday afternoon update from the various divisions within the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. Learning who spiked Mallory Johnson’s Coke was only one item on a very long list.

I knew that the narcotics squad was hoping to find and bust up a meth lab that was thought to be operating somewhere near Widdington, a little town east of Dobbs, but so far that hadn’t come off. A routine traffic stop on the interstate had netted an embezzler wanted in New Jersey, and New Jersey was sending the paperwork down to begin the extradition process. Last week, a fire had destroyed one of those McMansions in an upscale housing development near Pleasants Crossroads. At first, everyone blamed a shorted-out plug on a Christmas tree. Now the experts were calling it arson, so ATF would be poking around in the ashes.

The owner had recently lost his job and was behind on his mortgage payments. The house was well insured.

“We’re probably gonna see a lot more of this if the economy doesn’t pick up,” Dwight said.

Due to the icy roads, there were the usual number of fender benders. Three wise men had been stolen from the Christmas display in someone’s yard, eight mailboxes had been smashed along a backcountry road down near Makely, and a chain-link fence had been cut open at the rear of Welcome Home, a building supply store outside Cotton Grove. There not being much call for lawn and garden items in the dead of winter, the owner could not say for sure exactly when it happened, but he was missing three push mowers, four one-hundred-foot garden hoses, a generator, and a concrete statue of Jesus.

Dwight shook his head in amusement as he repeated that last to me. “Who steals Jesus?”

“Any luck with the mistletoe?” I asked, pausing in the archway between the living room and dining area.

Cal giggled as Dwight put away his phone and stood to give me an exaggerated kiss. I looked up and there hanging from the arch was a healthy sprig of green. It still had a few glistening berries on it. You’re supposed to pull one off every time someone gets kissed, and when all the berries are gone, no more kissing.

I left those berries right where they were.

“Dad was awesome,” Cal reported. “We got enough for Grandma and everybody else. Lots of berries, too.”

“How’d you do?” I asked.

“Pretty good. I hit the can the first time.”

“He’s got a good eye,” Dwight said, smiling at his son. “We dug some cans out of Seth’s barrels for target practice. Too bad I took all our trash to the dump yesterday.”

As Cal chattered on about how amazing the whole experience had been, I made a mental note to buy a pad of paper targets for an extra Christmas gift. And maybe I’d get Robert or Andrew to sell us a few bales of hay and deliver them to the far side of the pond. When Daddy was teaching us to shoot, he always made a point of setting up our targets on a downward slope so that there was no danger of the bullets traveling anywhere but into the ground. I figured Dwight would want to do the same with Cal.

And that reminded me: maybe Dwight would appreciate finding a box or two of extra cartridges under the tree if his own were going to be digging themselves into hay or dirt. Something else to add to that mental list.

Outside, that mixture of sleet and freezing rain continued to fall as twilight faded into darkness. Supper was a salad and toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, and I diced a little ham over some greens to take for my lunch tomorrow so that I could go shopping during my lunch recess.

“Long as you’re making lunches,” Dwight said, “how about fixing me a sandwich? Tomorrow’s shaping up to be real busy.”

“And both of you do remember what tomorrow is, don’t you?” I asked.

“Tomorrow? December twenty-second?” He tried to look as clueless as Cal, who was shaking his head. “Is there a Hurricanes game? An eclipse of the moon?”

I laughed. “No, and it’s not the opening of snipe season either.”

“There’s no such thing as snipes,” Cal said. He got up to check the calendar that hung on the side of the refrigerator. “Hey, winter begins today? I thought that was before Thanksgiving.” His finger moved to the next square. “What’s Ha-NOO-ka?”

“Hanukkah? The Jewish festival of lights,” I explained and gave him an encapsulated version of the Maccabees, the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days, and the symbolism of the menorah.

“We’re going to celebrate that tomorrow?”

“No,” Dwight said. “Think about it, buddy. What were you doing this time last year?”

A sudden grin lit his freckled face. “Oh yeah. Y’all got married!” He paused and looked at us. “I guess I’m spending the night at Grandma’s again?”

“You got it,” his father said.

Because there was no school for him the next day, we put another log on the fire and watched a Christmas special that lasted till ten. Eyelids drooping, Cal didn’t argue about going to bed, and I was ready for pajamas myself.

But Dwight was worried about his young trees, so we bundled up and went out with flashlights and hiking sticks to knock ice off the tender new twigs of the dogwoods and crepe myrtles he’d planted the length of our driveway before the weight of the ice could bow them down and snap the branches.

Pine branches at the edge of the woods were sagging almost to the ground. It’s like dipping candles. Rain coats the needles, then freezes. More rain, another coat of ice. If the rain continued, by morning each pine needle could be glazed in a quarter-inch thickness of ice. Multiply that by the number of needles on a pine tree and their combined weight would leave the ground littered with snapped branches.

We walked along the drive, gently tapping the trunk of each small tree, and shards of ice tumbled down like broken glass. The wind and rain tore at our exposed faces and I was glad when Dwight’s phone rang a few minutes after we got outside, so that I could retreat to the house before I was chilled to the bone.

I headed straight to our bathroom, shed my clothes, and stood under the hot shower till my circulation returned to normal. I had expected Dwight to join me, but when I walked back into our bedroom, he was still wearing his hat as he took his pistol out of the gun safe in his closet and buckled it on. His badge was clipped to his jacket.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“Trouble with one of the Wentworths again. Two bodies out at a trailer on Massengill Road. No ID yet. Don’t wait up for me.”

CHAPTER 14

Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—SUNDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 21

Dwight reached the end of his long driveway and turned onto the hardtop that ran past the farm. A dark and stormy night, he told himself with grim humor.

Literally.

It was the dark of the moon so there was nothing to lighten the sky behind the solid gray cloud cover overhead. Rain mixed with sleet beat against the cab of his truck. Tree limbs sagged out over the narrow two-lane road, and the road itself was coated with ice. He was thankful for four-wheel drive, but mindful that even four-wheel drive is not much help if all four wheels are on ice.

Massengill Road was less than seven miles from the farm, but it took him almost fifteen minutes to get there without sliding into a ditch whenever the truck fishtailed on a curve. Fortunately, it was all back roads and he met less than half a dozen vehicles on the way. They too were inching along cautiously.

There was no real need to look for a street address once he was in the vicinity. He could have followed the glow of blue and red lights that bounced off the low-hanging clouds, but the faded numbers on a rusty, dilapidated mailbox confirmed that this was indeed the dirt lane that would lead up to the house trailer occupied by one of the Wentworths.

The lane was rutted and almost washed out in places, but his tires grabbed the dirt with confidence and he easily reached the top of the rise, where he circled past two prowl cars and pulled in beside Detective Mayleen Richards’s truck, which was parked next to Deputy Percy Denning’s crime scene van. A red two-door Honda Civic and a black Ford F-150 pickup were nosed in next to the right side of the trailer.

Floodlights had been set up around the front of the mobile home and they illuminated the two forms covered in plastic sheeting that lay on the bare ground.

With her flaming red hair tucked inside the hood of her dark blue parka, Richards squatted off to one side and just beyond the yellow tape to watch while Denning sheltered under an umbrella and videotaped the whole area. She held a powerful flashlight in her gloved hands and played the beam at an angle as she slowly swept the yard. The ice-coated dirt sparkled in the rain and made it hard for her to distinguish what was there.

“On your left!” she called to Denning. “Is that anything?”

Being careful where he stepped, Denning moved over to the small brass object pinpointed by her torch and said, “Good eyes, Mayleen. Our first shell casing.”

It lay just inside the cordoned-off area and Denning documented it in relation to the sheeted bodies a few feet away, then leaned in for a close-up. Deputy Raeford McLamb placed a marker on the dirt and carefully bagged and tagged the casing.

“Only one casing?” Dwight asked Richards when he was near enough to be heard.

She continued to sweep the area inch by inch with the angled beam. “Only one so far, sir. We’re beginning to think the shooter cleaned up after himself.” She paused. “Or herself. Seems to have missed that one, though.”

“Who called it in?”

In the cold night air, their breath sent out little puffs of steam when they spoke.

Richards stood and pointed her torch toward a light blue pickup parked beyond the floodlights on the edge of the scruffy yard. “His name’s Willie Faison. He blew a point-ten when the responding trooper got here to check out his story. Says that Jason Wentworth owed him some money and he came by to collect it and found him lying there on the ground near his brother.”

“He make a positive ID?”

“Sounded positive to me. Jason and Matt Wentworth.”

Denning had finished with the exterior and had moved on toward the trailer itself. Dwight noted that the dwelling was dark and that the door was ajar. A cheap plastic wreath of white holly leaves sprinkled with silver glitter hung on the door. Denning seemed to be paying particular attention to the steps and the floor of the entryway.

“What are you seeing, Denning?” Dwight called.

“Not sure, Major, but it looks like someone tracked dirt in after it started raining.”

Dwight lifted the yellow tape and ducked underneath. He, too, watched where he was walking and took care to step in the tracks already made by his deputies. Richards followed. He turned back the sheeting on the nearer body. The youth had fallen on his back and his right hand rested on a large bloodstain over his heart. A thin layer of ice had crusted over his face and clothes. Between the icy rain and the floodlights, the eyes of the green viper tattooed on the back of his hand seemed to glisten with life.

Dwight remembered that tattooed hand reaching for his pistol only a few days ago at West Colleton’s Career Day. Afterward, Deborah had remarked that it was probably only a matter of time before this kid showed up in her court, just like his brothers before him.

No chance of that now.

He pulled the sheet back over the boy and turned to the second body. This one lay facedown on the frozen ground and had apparently been shot twice in the back. He, too, had been lying exposed long enough to be covered in ice.

“Looks like he was trying to run away,” Mayleen Richards said.

Both victims were dressed in boots, jeans, flannel shirts, and pullover sweatshirts. Neither wore jackets.

“I’m guessing someone pulled up in front here, honked the horn, waited for them to come out, and then gunned them down.”

“Tire tracks?” Dwight asked. “Shoe tracks?”

“Far as we can tell, just Faison’s,” she said, illustrating with her torch where tires had circled close to Matt Wentworth’s body. “He says he saw them lying there when he drove up and he got as near as he could without getting out of his truck. Soon as he realized they were both dead, he pulled up over there, then went inside to call 911 because his cell phone died on him yesterday. Or so he says. And of course, the trooper drove in over Faison’s tracks.”

A wisp of red hair had escaped from her hood and was now glazed with ice. She hunched deeper into her parka and shook her head pessimistically.

“It’s too soon to tell when they were shot. If it happened this afternoon, the rain probably washed away any tire marks.”

“Rigor?”

“Hard to say,” she replied. “They’re well on their way to being frozen like a side of deer meat.”

“Well, let’s see what Faison’s got to add to all this.”

By now, the rain had finished changing over into sleet and the wind had picked up so that icy granules stung their faces as Dwight led the way over to the Toyota pickup truck. There was a dent in the door on the driver’s side and the rear bumper sagged as if held on by baling wire. He rapped on the door, but there was no response from the man inside. He pulled open the door and saw Faison seated upright with his head back against two rifles that rested on the truck’s gun rack. Loud snores reverberated off the cab’s hard surfaces and the smell of beer hit them in the face. Three empty cans lay on the floor by Faison’s feet and his hands clutched a fourth can even though it emptied itself across the man’s jacket and pant legs.

“I’m guessing that no one thought to check whether he had more beer with him,” Dwight said mildly.

“No, sir,” Mayleen said.

From the embarrassment in her tone, Dwight knew that her face was probably flame-red.

“Not your fault,” he said kindly. “That was the trooper’s job.”

He summoned that officer over and showed him the results of his sloppiness. To the young officer’s credit, he didn’t try to make excuses.

“I understand he blew a point-ten?” Dwight asked.

“Yessir.”

“So you’ll be charging him with a DWI?”

“Yessir. I got here fifteen minutes after it was called in. He was here by himself, behind the wheel, with his keys in the ignition and the motor running to keep the heater going. No reason to think he hadn’t driven himself here. And even if he’d drunk something else after calling, I didn’t think he had time to get that drunk. I did flash my light over the interior, but I didn’t see any cans, empty or full.”

“You do a field sobriety test?”

“No, sir. Those bodies were my primary concern.”

“What about his truck box?”

Embarrassed, the officer admitted he hadn’t checked.

Dwight reached over and pressed the catch on the metal box clamped onto the truck bed directly beneath the cab’s rear window. Inside were an assortment of plumber’s tools—wrenches, pipe putty, a rusty plumbing snake, a heavy-duty flashlight with a broken lens, pipe clamps, and several elbow joints in various diameters. On top of those lay a billed cap in fluorescent orange, and an empty twelve-can beer carton.

“Your first homicide scene?”

“Yessir.”

“Don’t worry, son,” Dwight told him. “I’m not going to write you up on this. You were probably concerned with securing the scene and calling in your report.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Just take him in, book him, and see that he’s sober by the time I get there in the morning.”

“Yessir!”

It took three officers to pry Willie Faison out of the truck and into the backseat of the patrol car. As the trooper headed back down the lane, he had to pull aside for the EMS truck that had arrived to transport the bodies to the morgue.

Before they were loaded onto the truck, the contents of their pockets were bagged. Both had died with their wallets and car keys in their pockets.

“So robbery wasn’t the motive,” Dwight said, stating the obvious.

A strong odor of cigarette smoke was the first thing they noticed when they stepped inside the trailer. Next was the way at least one piece of clothing seemed to be draped over every chair. Neatness did not seem to be a virtue of the Wentworth brothers, which made it hard to tell if the place had been tossed or not. In the living room, a wastebasket overflowed with beer cans, cigarette butts, and fast-food cartons, and the coffee table in front of the television was covered in more of the same.

The television was on and tuned to one of the outdoor hunting and fishing channels, and the ceramic gas bricks of a wall unit glowed red hot to compensate for the open door, but no lamps were lit, which probably meant that the shooting took place before dark.

“Let’s have some light,” Dwight said and flipped a switch.

The place seemed to have been furnished in castoffs. It reminded Dwight of the trailer where Deborah’s nephew Reese lived: same mismatched flea-market furniture, same La-Z-Boy recliner, same big-screen plasma television. To be fair, though, Reese kept his place a lot cleaner and slightly less cluttered.

“Both brothers live here?” Dwight wondered aloud.

“Only one bedroom with one double bed,” Denning reported from the rear of the trailer.

“Somebody get me an address for the parents. I know they live in Cotton Grove, but where?”

Richards opened the younger boy’s wallet and read off the address on his driver’s license.

“That sounds about right,” Dwight said, heading out to the kitchen that was as cluttered as the rest of the trailer.

If anything was missing, it wasn’t instantly apparent, and just as he reentered the living room, the television screen went black, as did the lights.

They waited a few minutes to see if the electricity would come back on, then Raeford McLamb shook his head pessimistically. “A tree’s probably down across the power line.”

Except for their flashlights and the portable floodlights, they would have been in total darkness, so they went back outside. As they passed the Honda and the pickup, Dwight said, “Y’all check out the vehicles yet?”

Upon receiving negatives from McLamb and Richards, he opened the door of the Honda. The door was frozen to the frame and he had to brace one foot against the car to wrench it open. A rabbit’s foot and a pair of fuzzy green dice hung from the rearview mirror and schoolbooks were piled on the front passenger seat.

“Must be the younger kid’s,” said McLamb.

They found a flat plastic baggie with about an ounce of marijuana under the floor mat. Other than that, the car yielded nothing immediately useful.

Same with the truck, but Dwight noted a gun rack. “Anybody see a gun inside?”

“I’ll take another look,” Mayleen Richards said.

The truck box on the pickup was locked and Dwight called for Jason Wentworth’s keys. A half-inch sheet of ice went flying when the lid was lifted. Inside were some ropes, a tow chain, a bottle of motor oil, another of washer fluid, a nail apron with an assortment of rusty nails in the pockets, a hammer, a crowbar, a large monkey wrench, a bolt-cutter, a new-looking three-foot aluminum level, and a set of Allen wrenches in a shrink-wrapped orange plastic box that had never been opened. If these were the tools of the victim’s trade, they were hard-pressed to decide what that trade might be.

“A jackleg handyman?” McLamb hazarded, stamping his feet to get some feeling back in his toes.

Richards came back and reported that there was no long gun in the trailer, but she had found a handgun in a drawer in the bedroom—a .38 special, fully loaded. “Lying there in plain sight if anyone opened the drawer.”

They all knew that guns and televisions are the most commonly stolen items when a house is burglarized. This was looking less and less like a burglary gone wrong and more and more like deliberate murder where the only things taken were two lives.

“There’s a little shed out back,” McLamb said. “Why don’t I take a quick look?”

He disappeared around the corner of the trailer and Dwight said, “I guess we’re about through here for the night.” He told Denning to take the two rifles from Faison’s truck and process them. “Make sure one of them’s not our murder weapon.”

He turned to Richards and said, “Station one of the uniforms here. Tell him he can sack out on the couch inside if he wants as long as the doors are locked. No one’s to come in except on my say-so.”

Mayleen started to go, then hesitated. “Sir, you want me to notify his people?”

He gave her a tired smile. “Yeah, I’d love to hand it off to you, but I’d better do it myself. You go on home and thaw out.”

At that moment, they heard McLamb call, “Hey, Major! Back here.”

They followed the sound of his voice to a ten-by-ten utility shed backed up against the rear of the trailer.

“Look what I found!” he crowed and flashed his light across three brand-new push mowers, several garden hoses, a small generator, and an array of power tools still in their original boxes. “I guess we know now what sort of work Wentworth did.”

Dwight shook his head. “Wonder what he did with the Jesus statue?”

CHAPTER 15

At Christmastide, we must, directly or even by omission,… square our hopes with reality.

—Christmas in America, Penne L. Restad

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—SUNDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 21 (CONTINUED)

Midnight and Dwight was a mile down the road before he began to see lights in the houses he was passing.

Bound to be more power outages tonight, though, he thought.

The sleet seemed to be lessening, but the accumulations on the ditchbanks glittered when his headlights lit them up, and more tree limbs would be falling, if not some trees themselves.

Cotton Grove sprawls along the banks of Possum Creek, a few miles north of the Knott farm and twenty-five minutes due south of Raleigh. The four-block-long mercantile center almost dried up before the state’s population surge encouraged the town to turn the creek frontage into a park and bill itself as a place of small-town values (whatever those were) within easy reach of big-city attractions. Stores were restored to their 1920s look, ornamental iron streetlights were installed, and fast-growing crepe myrtles were planted along the sidewalks. The original oaks and maples that once nearly met overhead had been cut down forty years earlier when the streets were widened in the town’s first attempt at revitalization.

These days, Main Street was one-way so that more nose-in parking slots could be created for shoppers drawn to the new businesses. During the early evening hours, tasteful wreaths trimmed in clear twinkle lights hung from each lamppost. A tall Christmas tree sat in the center of the park and kaleidoscopic reflections of its multicolored lights shimmered on the surface of the slow-moving creek. To save on energy costs, both sets of lights were turned off at ten when the last restaurants closed.

The old modest Craftsman bungalows that filled in around the business section had been snatched up and restored. Leafless wisteria or rambling roses now climbed the porch railings. In summertime they would flower and their hip new owners would brave the heat and sit out on the porches in their wicker rocking chairs to sip iced tea and try to look like natives. Here on this wintry night, a few houses had left their decorative lights on, and more than one roofline dripped with a fringe of electric icicles that were now coated with real ones.

Further out from the center of town, Craftsman gave way to cheap clapboard and asbestos siding, and although the yards were marginally larger, they lay along narrow side streets that were nothing more than clay and gravel. The address listed on Matt Wentworth’s license proved to be a small board-and-batten ranch-style house in no worse condition than its neighbors. In fact, it struck Dwight as being a little neater, a little better cared for. A bush beside the front door sported multicolored Christmas lights, but the house itself was dark.

This was the worst part of his job, waking survivors out of a sound sleep to tell them bad news. Victor Wentworth had served a couple of prison terms for armed robbery and deadly assault, but even jail-hardened criminals can have parental feelings.

There was a doorbell and it actually worked for he could hear it pealing somewhere inside.

A narrow slit in the curtains drawn over the front windows let him see that someone had switched on a light. A moment later, a light over the windowless front door came on and a woman pushed back the curtain and looked out at him.

“Who is it?” she called.

“Colleton County Sheriff’s Department,” he said, holding his badge so that she could see it.

“What do you want?”

“Ma’am, if you could open the door?”

She motioned for him to hold his ID closer, and after she had studied it carefully, she let the curtain fall back into place and he heard the door being unlocked.

“Mrs. Wentworth?” he asked.

“Yes. If you’re looking for Victor, though, he’s not here.”

The door led directly into the living room and she gestured him toward a chair, then picked up a half-smoked cigarette from a nearby ashtray that was otherwise immaculate, lit it, and inhaled deeply. A hint of air freshener covered up the smell of smoke and he couldn’t help noticing how tidy the room was. A small artificial tree stood in the corner and a few wrapped gifts were piled around the base.

“I’ve not seen him since the week before Thanksgiving and all I want for Christmas is to hear that you’ve found him and put him under the jailhouse.”

She was barefooted and wore an oversized Duke sweatshirt that came down to mid-thigh. Rather shapely thighs, actually. Mid-forties, he guessed, with shoulder-length brown hair that was streaked with gray. Her face had the worn quality of someone who had smoked too many cigarettes and stayed out in the sun too long.

“Why would we do that, ma’am?”

She sat down on the blue couch across from him. “Aren’t you here about those checks he stole?”

She did not speak with a Southern accent and her diction was better than any of the Wentworths he’d dealt with in the past eight years since coming back to Colleton County to be Sheriff Bo Poole’s second in command.

“Sorry, ma’am. I don’t know anything about stolen checks.”

“You’re not working with the Raleigh police?”

“No, ma’am. I’m here about your sons Jason and Matt.”

“Stepsons,” she said. “What’ve they done now?”

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but they’ve both been killed.”

All the color drained from her face, leaving it a pasty gray.

“How?”

He didn’t sugarcoat it.

She crushed the cigarette out in the ashtray and leaned her head back against the couch to listen silently. When he finished, she said, “Those poor little bastards. I hope to hell he’s satisfied.”

“Ma’am?”

“Victor. I knew his first wife died, but he didn’t mention any kids till after I married him. He’d already kicked Hux out of the house, but Jason was thirteen and Matt was eleven. All three of those boys were wild as turkeys and Hux was just plain mean. Had a nasty temper, but Jason and Matt could’ve been saved. I wanted to be a mother to them, but Victor wouldn’t back me up. He let them get away with murder and just laughed at me when I tried to give them some discipline. He disrespected me and let the boys diss me, too.”

She opened a drawer in the coffee table, took out a crumpled pack of menthol cigarettes, and lit one. “Of course, it didn’t help that I was still drinking back then. I know I’m partly to blame, but I found Jesus and I’ve been sober for three years now. I tried, Major Bryant. I really tried. It was probably too late for Jason, but I thought I was starting to get through to Matt. He wanted to quit school and I talked him out of it.”

She glanced at the slender little tree in the corner. “I got him some new clothes and that cell phone he’s been dying for. The one with a slide-out keyboard.” Tears leaked from her eyes and glistened on her cheekbones. “And he put something under the tree for me last week. First time ever. Oh, damn you, Victor Wentworth! All three of your sons killed? I hope you fry in hell!”

A box of tissues sat on one of the end tables and Dwight got up and brought it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I’m okay now.”

She wiped away the tears, pushed her hair back away from her gaunt face, and stood up. “I’m going to make a pot of coffee. You want some?”

“Yes, please. And I wonder if I could look at Matt’s room?”

“Down the hall, on the left,” she said, gesturing with her chin. She set the tissues back in place and went out to the kitchen.

Dwight opened the door she had indicated and found a perfectly normal teenage room—unmade bed, clothes piled on the chair and dresser top, posters of rock groups that had appeared at local concerts taped to the walls. On the single bookshelf over a cluttered desk were a paperback dictionary, a West Colleton yearbook, some comic books, a cigar box that held a handful of arrowheads, a go-cup half full of pennies, and a Little League trophy with his oldest brother’s name engraved on the brass strip.

The only time Dwight had seen Hux Wentworth was when that young man lay dead on a bathroom floor, shot down by the kid he had terrified when he crashed through the locked door.

He took down the yearbook and found Matt Wentworth’s picture among last year’s freshman class. As he had suspected, the kid had flunked his first attempt at freshman year. When he started to put it back on the shelf, a newspaper clipping fell out. It was a picture of Mallory Johnson and her court from a feature story about West Colleton’s homecoming game that had run last month in the Clarion, Cotton Grove’s little weekly newspaper.

The desk had two drawers and Dwight found more comic books, a comb, pencils and pens, a deck of playing cards, some dice, old school papers marked in red, some snapshots of the boy standing proudly by his Honda, and, at the very back of the second drawer, an unopened package of condoms.

The package was crumpled, as if it’d been kicking around in that drawer for at least a year, and Dwight wondered if the kid had ever gotten lucky before he died.

A bedside table held an alarm clock, a lamp, and a radio that played tapes and CDs. Inside the drawer were a stack of CDs, all rap except for a surprising one of traditional Christmas carols. Underneath lay a small plastic folder. He opened it and frowned. One side held the boy’s picture, the other a picture of Mallory Johnson. Both were head shots and appeared to be last year’s school pictures.

He carried the pictures and the newspaper clipping out to the kitchen, where Mrs. Wentworth sat at the table, stirring sugar into her coffee. A second mug awaited him.

He thanked her, took a sip of the strong black brew, and said, “Can you think of anyone who would do this to the boys?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen much of Jason this winter. He came for Thanksgiving. I tried to make it nice for them. With Victor gone, it was a good day. He was working for a roofing company, but Matt said he got fired right after Thanksgiving. They accused him of stealing copper pipes out of some of the houses they worked on, but they couldn’t prove it. Matt said he was drawing unemployment.”

“Matt say if he or Jason had any enemies?”

Again, that shake of her head.

“What about friends?”

“There was a Barbour boy that came here once in a while. Nate Barbour. That’s the only one I ever knew. And he had a girlfriend, but I never met her.”

Dwight spread the pictures on the table between them.

“Were they friends?” he asked.

“Friends?” Mrs. Wentworth smiled indulgently. “That’s Matt’s girlfriend. They’ve been going together since October.”

Dwight tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice. “Mallory Johnson was your stepson’s girlfriend?”

“Is that her name? He wouldn’t tell me.” She pulled the news clipping closer and frowned in concentration as she read it. “She was homecoming queen?”

With her finger, she traced the words beneath the picture. “ ‘… daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Johnson.’ That the same Malcolm Johnson that has the insurance company?”

Before Dwight could nod, she said, “No wonder he didn’t want me to know her name. He said her parents didn’t like him and—Omigod! That’s the same girl that wrecked her car last week and died a couple of days later!”

“Yes.”

“I saw her picture in the paper, but I never connected it to this picture. Of course, I only saw it that once before he put it away.” Tears filled her eyes again. “So that’s why he was so torn up these last few days. Those poor, poor kids.”

Dwight cradled the mug in his hands and said, “Tell me about them.”

“I don’t really know anything. Matt didn’t talk about her much. It was a couple of months ago. I went into his room to ask him something and he was sitting on the edge of the bed putting her picture in this folder. I asked him who she was and first he told me it was none of my business, but I asked was she his girlfriend and he said yes, but she hadn’t finished breaking up with her old boyfriend yet and they had to keep it a secret.”

“You say he was upset these last few days?”

She nodded. “And Thursday night, he didn’t go to work. He was in his room when I got home, and when he came out to use the bathroom, his eyes were red. I thought he was coming down with something, but he yelled at me to leave him alone, so I did. He wouldn’t say what was bothering him and I never put it together that the Johnson girl who died was the girl in that picture.”

“Did he go to school last Tuesday?”

She nodded. “And then he went to his job at the Food Lion. He spent the night at Jason’s so they could get up early Wednesday morning to go deer hunting. Jason has a friend that has a deer stand over in Johnston County—Willie Somebody-or-other—and they needed to be in it before the sun came up.” Her smile was rueful as she drained the last of her coffee and got up to top off their mugs. “Only thing you can get a teenage boy up that early for.”

Dwight covered his mug with his hand. Any more and he’d never get to sleep tonight. “So Matt ditched school on Wednesday?”

She shrugged. “I know, I know. But he said they never really did anything the last few days before Christmas and he promised to go on Thursday and Friday, so I didn’t fuss. You have to pick your battles.”

“Do you know where he was Tuesday night?”

“I told you. He would’ve worked till nine, then spent the night at Jason’s.”

“He didn’t go to a party with Mallory Johnson?”

She looked uncertain. “I don’t know. No, probably not, because she was alone in her own car, right? If they were together that night, they would have been in his car. Unless they were trying to keep her family from knowing?”

“Mrs. Wentworth, are you absolutely sure they really were seeing each other?”

She looked at him indignantly. “Why? Because she was a rich Johnson and he was a Wentworth? Matt was a nice-looking kid, Major Bryant, and he could be real sweet when he wasn’t trying to out-tough his brothers.”

“He was sixteen. A freshman. She was eighteen and a senior. She was an honor-roll student headed for Carolina. He wasn’t.”

“We didn’t talk a lot,” she said slowly. “Heck, we didn’t even see each other a lot. I get home from work around five-thirty. He worked from five to eight or nine, depending on how busy they were, and he didn’t always come straight home. Weekends, he’d be out with her or Jason. I did ask him last Saturday if he was still seeing her and he said yes. It was her birthday and he’d given her a necklace and took her to see the new Tom Cruise movie.”

“Which night was that?”

“Friday. Friday, a week ago.”

Dwight wrote down the date, the name of his friend, and the location of the grocery store where Matt Wentworth worked as a bagger several nights a week.

“When did you last see him, ma’am?”

“Friday morning when I left for work. He was getting dressed for school.”

“What about Jason?”

She frowned and knitted her brows in an effort to remember. “Sorry. I know he came by one evening since Thanksgiving, but I can’t think exactly when.”

“I don’t suppose you remember who it was that Jason worked for?”

Her answer surprised him. “Barefoot Roofing here in Cotton Grove.”

A few further questions added nothing to his picture of either boy. Dwight stood up to go, but Mrs. Wentworth sat there numbly as the ramifications of the murders sank in. “I guess it’ll be up to me to bury them,” she said.

CHAPTER 16

It was a clear morning with the sun not yet high over the horizon… everywhere around was an unbroken carpet of thick snow. The world looked very pure and white and beautiful.

—“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” Agatha Christie

I had been asleep almost three hours when I awoke to realize that Dwight was trying to ease himself into bed without disturbing me.

I turned over and reached for his hand. “It’s okay, love, I’m awake.”

“Sorry,” he said, and put out his arm to draw me nearer.

“What happened tonight?” I asked.

“Remember the kid at school the other day? The one with the snake tattooed on his hand? Matt Wentworth. He and his brother were the victims.”

“Jason Wentworth,” I murmured.

“That’s right. I forgot you said you had him up on a hunting violation this fall. You confiscated his gun, didn’t you? That’s why we didn’t find one tonight.”

“You expected one?”

“His stepmother said he went hunting Wednesday.”

“Without a license?” I could remember the case, I could remember that the young man was angry at losing his gun and his license. What I couldn’t remember was his face, and that made me sad.

He described the deaths of the Wentworth boys, their stepmother’s reaction to their thrown-away lives, and Matt’s claim that he had been hooked up with Mallory Johnson. When he finished, he was silent for a moment, then said, “On the way home, I got to thinking about what I was doing at that precise time last year.”

“At one-thirty in the morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Weren’t you asleep?”

“No. Cal and I were bunking at Mama’s. In the room Rob and I used to share. He was asleep, but I was wide awake, thinking about you. Us. Wondering what our life was going to be like. Wondering if Jonna would let me have Cal more and if that really was going to be okay with you.”

I started to protest, but he tightened his arm around me.

“You don’t have to say it, Deb’rah. I know you love him. It isn’t how we wanted to get him, but this hasn’t been a bad year, has it?”

“Bad? Oh, Dwight, do you really have to ask?” I hugged him hard. “It’s been the best year of my life.”

“And we’ve been on the same page with Cal, haven’t we? I mean, he doesn’t sass you, does he? Or disrespect you?”

“Of course not.”

“And you do know I’ll always back you up?”

I pulled away from him and propped myself up on one elbow so that I could look him in the eye. “Listen to me, Dwight Bryant. Cal is no Matt or Jason Wentworth and you are certainly no Victor Wentworth, okay? He may answer me back once in a while, but it’s no more disrespectful than when he answers you back. It’s totally normal and I don’t take it any more personally than you take it when I bitch at you.”

He smiled. “You don’t bitch at me.”

“Yes I do,” I told him. “You just don’t notice.”

Next morning, I awoke at dawn to blue skies and a rising temperature. As we feared, some of the new little trees were bent double and pine limbs at the edge of the woods were touching the ground. But the icicles hanging from the eaves of the house were melting fast, and according to the radio, our forecast was for temperatures in the high fifties by Christmas Day.

I put the coffee on, then drove Dwight’s truck down to the mailbox for the newspaper. I should have worn sunglasses. Once the sun hit all that ice, it was eye-dazzling. A warm west wind was blowing and every gust that hit the trees sent a shower of ice tinkling down like slivers of broken crystal. I found myself trying to remember a Navaho chant I once read in a Tony Hillerman book: Beauty before me.Beauty behind me.With beauty all around me, I walk.