Christmas Mourning

Yes!

* * *

Dwight was dressed for work and pouring himself a mug of coffee when I got back, and he poured one for me. “Happy anniversary,” he said. “What’s it like out there?”

“Glorious! Put your jacket on and grab your sunglasses and let’s go for a quick walk.”

“I really need to get moving,” he said, but he followed me outside anyhow.

We keep a selection of hiking sticks propped in a corner between the porch and the house outside, and we each took one to help us keep our footing on the ice. The coffee was strong and hot and steam rose from our mugs as we walked down the drive, following the ruts I’d broken in the ice with the truck. As I might have predicted, Dwight wanted to tap his stick against the young crepe myrtles and dogwoods, and with each gentle blow, so much ice fell that the trees slowly began to right themselves.

Before we’d gone very far, we heard Cal call, “Hey, wait for me!”

He had put boots and a jacket on over his pajamas. With Bandit racing back and forth between us, he grabbed a hiking stick and soon caught up with us. Whacking the trees and watching the ice shower down delighted him.

When we circled back around the house toward the pond, Cal ran along the side of the garage and used his stick to knock down a long line of icicles. At one point, he slipped, fell into a spirea bush, and spooked a rabbit none of us realized was there. Bandit let out an excited yelp and immediately streaked after it. The rabbit beat him to the woods and both animals disappeared into the underbrush.

The pond was frozen all around the edges, but the pier had begun to absorb the sun’s heat and a flip of a stick was enough to send long sheets of ice off the boards and into the water.

Eventually, Dwight looked at his watch and reluctantly turned back to the house.

“Yeah, me, too,” I said.

“Awwww.” Cal looked at us wistfully. “I wish y’all didn’t have to go to work.”

“Sorry, buddy,” Dwight said and whistled for Bandit.

The dog came, but he was dragging his heels, too. I knew how he felt. I wasn’t ready to go get in my crate either.

An hour later, car keys in hand, I was taking my lunch salad out of the refrigerator when the phone rang.

“Deborah?”

“Barbara?” We talk on the phone so seldom, I almost didn’t recognize her voice.

“Oh, good,” she said. “I was afraid you’d already gone, too.”

“Cal and I were just about to walk out the door,” I told her. “What’s up?”

“Has Dwight left for work yet?”

“About forty minutes ago.”

I heard a disappointed sigh. “Is there something I can do?”

“I hate to ask you,” she began, and from the tone of her voice I knew she really did hate having to ask me whatever it was, “but Zach’s already at work and Emma and Lee have gone Christmas shopping in Raleigh. I went out to start my car just now and it won’t turn over, so I’m wondering if I could ride with you to Dobbs this morning.”

“Certainly, but don’t you want to let’s see if we can jump-start it?”

“You know how to do that?”

“Sure,” I said, amused by the surprise in her voice. I mean, what’s so complicated about attaching battery cables?

“That’s all right. I’ll let Zach do it when he comes home. The thing is, I have a meeting with some of the county commissioners in less than an hour and I just can’t take the time to worry with this car.”

“No problem,” I told her. “I’ll pick you up, we’ll drop Cal at Kate’s, and be at the library in plenty of time.”

Cal had already put Bandit in his crate with a new strip of rawhide and he slung his duffel bag into the backseat of my car and crawled in after it. The children were off from school until after New Year’s, but this morning was a final work day for the teachers, so Miss Emily was going to pick him up this afternoon and keep him overnight.

Barbara was looking at her watch and pacing back and forth when we got there, and she had the door open almost before I brought the car to a full stop.

“I really appreciate this,” she said, fastening her seat belt. “Today’s my last chance to try and talk the commissioners out of cutting county funds to the library.”

She greeted Cal, who responded shyly. Of my five sisters-in-law who live out here on the farm, she’s probably the one he knows least, but she made an effort and by the time we reached Kate’s, he was chatting normally. In response to one of her questions, he even confided that while he had enjoyed the Harry Potters, he really liked the Ender books better.

Because Barbara was in a fidget, I didn’t linger at Kate’s; just dropped a kiss on Cal’s head when Kate came to the door and told him I’d see him tomorrow morning, “but call if you need us, okay?”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully.

“You and Dwight have something on for tonight?” Barbara asked, as we headed for Dobbs.

I knew she was only making polite conversation, but it beat riding in silence.

“Just dinner,” I said. “It’s our anniversary.”

For some reason, that surprised her. “Has it really been a whole year?”

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” I said lightly.

She let that pass. “Cal seems like a bright little boy. A real reader, too.”

I told myself that she didn’t mean to sound insulting. “He takes after his grandmother,” I said. “Miss Emily loves books.”

“I know. Every time the bookmobile goes out to the school, it always takes a stack that she’s requested. She probably goes through three or four a week.”

“Guess I won’t try to give her books for Christmas, then. But maybe you can help me about Cal. I bought him Old Yeller. What else do you think he’d like?”

“Old Yeller’s good. Has he read To Kill a Mockingbird yet?”

“Isn’t that too old for him?”

“Not really. Sounds as if he’s reading well above grade level.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, won’t the issues of race and lynching go over his head?”

“You’d be surprised. He’s ten, right?”

“Nine and a half.”

“Third grade?”

I nodded.

“He rides a school bus, Deborah. He has to have heard the N-word and probably a lot of worse racist language besides. Mockingbird could be a great springboard for you and Dwight to talk to him about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll add it to my shopping list. Thanks.”

The weather and the dazzling ice carried us for another mile or two, making me ever more conscious that this was about the longest one-on-one conversation Barbara and I had ever had. Lacking anything else, I said, “How’s Emma doing after yesterday?”

She sighed. “That was really hard for her. Hard for all the girls. To put on their uniforms and walk in together, and then out at the grave—? You didn’t go to the interment, did you?”

“No.”

“It was dreadful. Her parents had arranged for each girl to have a red and a yellow rosebud. They had to sing the West Colleton fight song and then lay their roses on her coffin. It was ghastly. Those girls can never again sing that song without thinking of Mallory. It really wasn’t fair of her dad to make them do that.”

“Not her mother?”

“She’s hurting, but it’s the dad who’s absolutely shattered and seems determined to wallow in his grief. I know that sounds callous, but really! To force everyone else to wallow, too? No. Maybe if they’d kept a tighter rein on her…”

“What do you mean?”

“The way she teased boys. It made me so angry.”

“Huh?”

“Lee. Didn’t he tell you?” Her surprised tone turned spiteful. “I thought the kids told you everything.”

“Oh, wait a minute. Didn’t he take her out once last spring?”

“Yes. Once.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. At least I assume it was nothing. He’s never really talked about it. He acted like it was a big joke that he was playing along with, but I think it hurt him at the time. Certainly hurt his pride anyhow.”

“What happened?” I asked again.

“It was right after Lee began seeing a perfectly darling little girl. Holly Fletcher. Then Mallory Johnson started flirting with him and texting him a couple of times a day till he finally asked her out. He took her to one of the ball games, and I guess she made sure that Holly saw them together, because Emma was furious with Lee. I gather that Holly spent the whole game crying in the ladies’ room. He told Emma it didn’t mean a thing, but I overheard him call Mallory and try to get her to go out with him again. From his end of the conversation, I think she just laughed at him. In fact, he wound up laughing back and pretending that yes, he knew all along she wasn’t into relationships, but that it was only polite to make sure. I knew it wasn’t a real laugh. He was very quiet for the next few days. And of course, he was too embarrassed to ask Holly out again.”

This was almost word for word the same scenario Miss Emily had described Saturday night. I found myself wondering how many Hollys had been at that party last week.

As if listening in on my thoughts, Barbara said, “I’ve heard that she was high on something when she crashed and that some Vicodin went missing at the party. Surely Dwight’s heard that, too?”

Because it seemed to be common knowledge, I nodded. “But he doesn’t know if Vicodin was in her system. The hospital only tests for alcohol. He’s heard from several sources that she didn’t drink, so someone may have spiked her drink at a party.”

“A party that she should have left as soon as it became clear that the parents weren’t at home. Thank goodness Lee and Emma didn’t stay a minute longer than they had to.”

“They’re nice kids,” I said as we reached the outskirts of Dobbs and turned onto the main street. “You and Zach have done a good job with them.”

“Well, thank you,” she said, sounding slightly startled by the compliment. “It’s a fine line we parents have to walk these days, isn’t it? Too easy and they have no standards. Too hard and you either crush their spirits or turn them into liars and sneaks.”

“Seems to me y’all’ve found the right balance,” I said and realized that I meant it. She might come down a little stricter than I would, but it didn’t seem to have hurt Lee or Emma. “I just hope Dwight and I can find that balance with Cal.”

“You will. You’re good with kids. The way you do things with them. The cookies. Letting them come over and swim and fish and tramp through your house to use the shower. No wonder they’re—”

She broke off abruptly.

“No wonder they’re what?”

“Fond of you,” she said quickly. “All the kids are.”

I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she had intended to say, but it still made me smile. “I’m sorta fond of them, too.”

“The nice thing is that you can show it.”

There was such a wistful note in her voice that it drew me up short. Before I could respond, she gave a rueful laugh. “I guess I’ve always been a little jealous of that.”

I didn’t know what to say. Jealous of me? When all this time I thought she was being judgmental and disapproving?

We passed the courthouse and I pulled into the narrow alley that led to the library’s parking lot. As I stopped the car at the rear entrance, she started to thank me and I put out my hand. “Good luck with your meeting.”

“Thanks. And thanks for the ride.”

“My pleasure,” I said honestly. “I’m sort of glad your car conked out on you this morning.”

She laughed. “You know something? I am, too.”

CHAPTER 17

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

COLLETON COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT—MONDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 22

Bo Poole leaned back in his black leather chair and listened as his chief deputy filled him in on the shooting deaths of the two Wentworth brothers.

There was a time when the news media would have been all over this story. An N&O reporter and a photographer would have trundled out from Raleigh, a helicopter from one of the local TV stations would have hovered over the sheeted bodies, and there would have been at least one stringer for the little county newspapers out at the site before the EMS truck got there. Whether the lack of coverage was due to layoffs in staff, the high cost of helicopter fuel, last night’s foul weather, or simply that the deaths of two petty criminals were not worth more than a few inches of newsprint and a scant thirty seconds in the roundup of local news, the department’s spokesperson reported that her online posting of the bare facts had triggered only a couple of phone calls from the media.

“Richards and Dalton are over there now to see if we missed anything last night, and McLamb’s gone to the autopsy,” Dwight Bryant told his boss, a small trim man with thinning gray hair and sharp bright eyes that missed nothing. “Someone from Welcome Home is going to meet them at the trailer with serial numbers and invoices to ID their stolen merchandise.”

“How’s Mayleen working out as a detective?” Bo asked. “Her daddy’s still mad with me for giving her a job. Thinks she wouldn’t be hooked up with that Mexican if I’d turned her down.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. She’s an asset. Good with computers, pulls her weight without grumbling”

“Her personal life doesn’t get in the way?”

“Now, Bo, you know well and good I don’t get into that unless it does get in the way. I do know it hurts her that her family won’t accept Mike Diaz, but she doesn’t talk about it unless someone asks.”

“He good to her?”

Dwight shook his head. “Tell you what. She should be back before lunch. Want me to have her stop in here and catch you up on her private business?”

Bo laughed. “Okay, okay. So what about this Victor Wentworth?”

“I’ve got a call in to Wake County to see if they have a warrant out for him. Not that he’s of concern to us on this.”

“No, but it’s always good to know,” the sheriff agreed. “Hound dogs like the Wentworths always come crawling back under the house. Wish I could find it in my heart to feel sorry about his boys, but you know good as me, Dwight, they were gonna wind up a drain on the county one way or another.”

He thumped the files he’d had his secretary pull. Both boys had records. Jason’s was longer, of course. Hunting deer illegally, two speeding tickets, a DWI, a conviction for petty theft, another for assault, and he was currently out on bail awaiting trial for yet another assault. Nineteen years old and he had already been a guest in their jail. With his record, if he had been found guilty for this second assault, he could have pulled real prison time.

At sixteen, Matt had only three citations as a non-juvenile: one for speeding, one for underage drinking, and one for an altercation in the West Colleton High School parking lot.

Bo sighed. “Maybe Miz Wentworth was right. Maybe she could’ve stopped him from walking down the same road as his brothers, but I never met a Wentworth I thought I could trust. You?”

“No,” Dwight admitted. “But they keep on getting themselves killed, we’re gonna run out of Wentworths. And whoever shot these two is just as bad, so we need to find him.”

“Any connection to the Johnson girl’s death?”

Dwight shrugged. “I’d really be surprised if he was actually hooked up with her. Mayleen’s interviewed some of the kids and got the names of everyone at the party. His wasn’t one of them. But he did tell his stepmother that she was his girlfriend, and he was as upset after her death as if she really was. Now they’re both dead. Coincidence?”

“I never much cared for coincidences,” Bo said.

“Me either. I called my mother first thing this morning. Matt was still a student there. She’s going to pull his attendance record for me. See if he was in school on Friday. I don’t see how the deaths are related, though. It’s more likely that one of them pissed off the killer and Matt was upset because he knew this was coming down the pike toward them.”

“Which one was the primary target?”

“Too soon to know,” Dwight said. “But as long as we’re talking coincidence, the older Wentworth boy, Jason? Up until Thanksgiving, he worked for Mallory’s half brother’s grandfather. Her mother’s former father-in-law.”

“Anybody talked to him yet?”

“Who? Nelson Barefoot?”

“Naw. The half brother, what’s-his-name.”

“Charlie? No. I thought I’d try to get up with him after I talk to Willie Faison. See if there was another reason Faison was at the Wentworth trailer besides what he told the trooper before he passed out.”

“Be real nice if we could get this all wrapped before Christmas,” the sheriff observed.

Dwight grinned. “And here I thought you were too old to still believe in Santa Claus.”

Downstairs, he had the duty officer bring Willie Faison to an interview room, and he looked the young man over carefully when he came in and took a seat across the table.

Twenty years old. White. No visible tattoos or piercings. Black hair, slender build, an inch or two under six feet. Unmarried. No priors. Currently employed as a plumber’s helper in a small three-man company in Cotton Grove. Despite registering a .10 on the Breathalyzer at the scene of the shooting, the only issue was his age, and even if Ellen Englert Hamilton were sitting in the courtroom, he would receive no more than a suspended sentence. If he could afford the services of a halfway competent attorney, he might even avoid that. With four empty beer cans in his truck, it could be argued that he had not drunk a thing until after finding the bodies.

Hell, it might even be true.

On the other hand, he was a full year away from the legal drinking age.

With the vitality of youth, Faison was clear-eyed and rested after his night in lockup. Dwight advised him of his Miranda rights and he immediately waived them because he was anxious to be released so that he could get to work before his boss docked his wages. He was also still reeling from finding his friend Jason and Jason’s younger brother lying dead on the frozen ground. “I’d been calling him all weekend ’cause I wanted my stuff back and—”

“Stuff?” Dwight asked him.

“I mean, my money. The money he owed me.”

“No, son,” Dwight said mildly. “You said stuff. What stuff?”

The young man shrugged. “He borrowed some stuff from me.”

Dwight waited while Faison’s unease became more apparent.

“A jacket and a pair of coveralls,” he blurted out. “I wanted ’em back.”

“What else?”

“That’s all,” he said, not quite meeting Dwight’s steady stare.

“Why didn’t you take them when you went inside the trailer to call 911?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was too freaked. I mean, they were out there on the ground in the freezing rain. For all I knew, whoever did that could have still been hanging around. I just wanted to get out of there and get back in my truck. What was so wrong about that? I could’ve just driven off, but I didn’t. I waited till the trooper got there, and what’s the first thing he does? Makes me blow in that damn Breathalyzer with Jason and Matt blown to kingdom come. Where’s my truck anyhow?”

“Calm down,” Dwight told him. “Your truck’s still out at the trailer and I can have someone drive you out to get it. First, though, I need you to answer some questions and write out a statement.”

“And who’s gonna write me an excuse for my boss?” young Faison grumbled, but in the end he was cooperative.

He described how he and Jason Wentworth had been friends since grade school. They fished and hunted together, played poker and pool with some other guys from Cotton Grove—he wrote down their names. Yes, Jason could be a horse’s ass at times, but on the whole, he was a good guy to watch your back. “Everybody liked ol’ Jase.”

“What about that assault charge?” Dwight asked him.

“The guy that swore out a warrant on him? Hell, he was the one threw the first punch. Jason was just defending himself.”

“What about the things in the shed back of the trailer?”

Faison frowned. “What things?”

“The lawn mowers and tools y’all stole from the Welcome Home store.”

“No way, man! That was nothing to do with me.”

“You knew about it, though, didn’t you?”

“Not till last week when he wanted me to help him sell it. He thought some of the guys on my crew would want to buy a cheap push mower. Look, yeah, maybe I used to do stuff like that with Jase, but not anymore. I got a good job and a girlfriend. My aunt says we can live with her till we can get a place of our own.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Monday when he came by and I loaned him that cold-weather gear.”

“Not since then?”

“Not to see. I talked to him on the phone Thursday night. He said he’d drop my things off on Friday, but he never showed or called or nothing. I kept calling, but he wouldn’t pick up.”

He finished writing out his statement about finding the bodies around ten, dated and signed it, then slid it back across the table.

“I hope y’all locked my truck and left somebody out there to guard it. It’s got my tools and my guns.”

“About those guns,” Dwight said.

Faison was instantly wary. “Yeah?” he asked cautiously.

“I had them brought in so we could examine them more closely. We’re not going to find that one of them is the gun that shot those two boys, are we?”

“Hell, no! No way in this world, man!” He pushed his chair back till he almost banged into the rear wall in an abrupt and involuntary denial.

“So tell me about them,” Dwight said.

Faison’s jaw tightened in mulish denial. “Nothing to tell.”

“Fine. We’ll just wait and see what my detective finds to tell me. I’ll let the officer know you’re ready to go back to your cell.”

“Wait a minute! Don’t I get a phone call?”

“Sure. You want to call your mama or your boss or your attorney? ’Cause it looks like you’re going to be here for a while.”

The youth slumped back in his chair. “Okay, okay. I loaned Jason one of my rifles to go deer hunting. Big damn deal. He saw a big buck last week and wanted to bag it before the season ended.”

Dwight gave a cynical shake of his head. “He was worried about the end of deer season when he shouldn’t have been hunting in the first place? He’d already lost both his own gun and his hunting license.”

“That’s why he needed to borrow mine. My gun, I mean. Not my license. I wouldn’t give him that.”

“Matt told his stepmother they were going to use his friend Willie’s deer stand over near Clayton. Your stand?”

“Huh? No, I don’t have no stand.”

“So you weren’t with them Wednesday morning?”

Faison stared at him blankly. “Wednesday morning?” he said slowly. “No, man, I was working all day Wednesday.”

Dwight had the feeling that he was missing something, but Faison had settled on that story. He had lent Jason a rifle and that’s why he was out at the trailer last night. The gun and the hunting cap were all he’d taken from the place. He hadn’t seen Jason since he borrowed the gun on Monday, honest, and now could he please make that phone call?

Dwight instructed the officer to take Faison before the magistrate on duty and get her to set his bail. “And then let him use the phone.”

With a little luck, Willie Faison could still get in half a morning’s work.

Back upstairs, Dwight stuck his head into the room that Percy Denning had fitted up as a lab so that not every single piece of evidence had to go to the SBI’s lab in Garner. “You can compare the prints on Faison’s guns with those of the two victims,” he said. “Faison says he lent one to Wentworth. And anything on the shell casing you found?”

“It’s a .32. We’ll have to wait and see what the ME finds in the bodies.”

A handgun then, and not a rifle.

“Richards called. She and Dalton just dug a slug out of the side of the trailer that’s consistent with the line of fire. Says it looks like a .32 to her, too.”

“Jason Wentworth have a cell phone?”

“I didn’t see one. Want me to call Richards and ask?”

“Yeah. And check if there’s a land line. See who called him the last few days.”

He started to leave, then paused. “What about the Johnson girl’s phone?”

“Not much on it. She must have cleared its memory earlier that evening. We’ve asked for the records, though, and the company’s promised to email them to us today.”

“When they come, see if any of the called numbers correspond to a phone connected with Matt Wentworth’s name, okay? He told his stepmother that Mallory Johnson was his girlfriend.”

Denning rolled his eyes. “In that case, there’ll be at least eight or ten calls a day to him.”

Dwight grinned. Denning had a teenage daughter.

Twenty-five minutes later, after making a few phone calls of his own, Dwight turned into one of the older neighborhoods on the edge of Cotton Grove. This street had attractive, well-maintained homes, each on a spacious landscaped lot, each surrounded by mature oaks and maples. Unfortunately, last night’s ice storm had laid one of those tall oaks across the roof of a two-story brick house and there was a gaping hole where one of the branches had broken into the attic.

Dwight pulled in behind a truck whose panel door read “Barefoot Roofing Company” and got out to join the group of people who stood watching as a man with a chainsaw cut up a tree that would easily measure two feet in diameter. He expected to recognize Nelson Barefoot from his high school years of playing basketball with Jeff Barefoot, and he was fairly certain that one of the men was an adjuster from Triple J Insurance, but he was surprised when the owners of the house turned as he approached and greeted him by name.

“Well, hey, Dwight!” Diane Hobbs called above the ear-piercing whine of the chainsaw. “You come to watch the fun?”

Her husband, Randy, an older man and a former magistrate, stepped forward to shake his hand. “Haven’t seen you since my retirement party, young man,” he said loudly. “How’s life at the courthouse these days?”

“Not half as exciting as this,” Dwight told him, gesturing toward the roof and the tree that was rapidly becoming a pile of firewood and sawdust. The clean acrid smell of freshly cut oak drifted on the morning air.

“Did you ever see such a mess?” asked Diane, who had a closer acquaintance with the tall deputy.

Abruptly, the chainsaw went silent as the workman paused to stack the logs he had cut from the branches and to roll the larger rounds out of his way.

Petite and bubbly with brown hair and snapping brown eyes, Diane Hobbs was the hygienist at Dwight’s dentist. Twice a year, he leaned back in that padded chair and opened wide so that she could poke around with a pickax and jackhammer and scold him for not flossing twice a day. “And don’t think I can’t tell, mister.”

Up on the roof, one of Barefoot’s men was clearing away the fast-melting ice while another used a broom to sweep aside the water before it could drip into the attic and soak through the ceiling below.

“That’s our bedroom there on the corner,” Diane said, loosening the buttons of her bright red jacket as the sun warmed up the morning air. “When that tree hit in the middle of the night, I thought we’d been bombed or something. Thank goodness the weather’s supposed to stay mild and sunny through the weekend. It won’t feel much like Christmas, but at least our bedroom won’t get soaked. And this nice man’s going to make it all good as new by Christmas morning, aren’t you?”

She gave Nelson Barefoot a winning smile, but he was not willing to commit to her agenda.

“Now, honey,” said Randy Hobbs. “You know that Carl here’s got to give us an insurance estimate first.”

“I do know that,” she said sweetly, “but you know it’s got to be done no matter what Carl’s estimate and you also know Mr. Barefoot’s the best roofer in the county, and we don’t want to mess around with second best, now do we?”

Amused, Dwight watched Diane finish wrapping her husband and Nelson Barefoot around her little finger and heard the big gruff man allow as how he reckoned he could get on it tomorrow or the next day.

“We’ll let the sun finish drying it good today,” he said, “and I’ll send one of my boys over this afternoon to put a tarp over it from the ridgepole down so y’all won’t have to look at the stars tonight.”

“Stars?” Diane glanced at her husband. Her face was serious, but her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Long as the hole’s already there, honey, why don’t we let’s put in a great big skylight so we can lie in bed and watch the moon?”

“Moon?” Randy yelped. “Skylight?”

“Oh, no, now, Miz Hobbs,” Barefoot said, tilting his brown felt hat back on his head. “There’s no way I can put you in a skylight before the first of the year and you’re not gonna want to live with that hole that long, are you?”

“I guess you’re right,” she said, feigning reluctance to give up the idea. “So you’ll definitely be here tomorrow to fix it back the way it was?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As Barefoot moved away to speak to his men, Hobbs said, “You wanted to ask me about something, Dwight?”

“Actually, I’m here to talk to Mr. Barefoot,” Dwight said, turning to follow the roofer, “but it’s been good to see you again. Hope y’all have a nice Christmas.”

“You, too,” they said and went to help the woodcutter clear away some of the smaller branches.

“Did you say you wanted to see me?” the roofer asked, pausing until Dwight caught up with him.

Before Dwight could reply, the shriek of the chainsaw split the air again and Barefoot motioned for Dwight to follow him around to the back of the house where they could hear each other’s words.

They sat down on a low brick wall that edged the rear terrace. Barefoot pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered it to Dwight, who shook his head.

“Never picked up the habit?” the older man asked. “Good for you. I’ve tried to quit a hundred times and just can’t seem to do it.”

He took his time lighting the cigarette with an old-fashioned kitchen match. As the smell of sulphur and tobacco smoke drifted between them, he looked Dwight up and down. “I heard you were back and working for the sheriff.”

“Eight years now,” Dwight agreed.

“That long?” He inhaled deeply and let out a thin stream of smoke. “Heard, too, that you married Kezzie Knott’s daughter.”

“Yes, sir.”

Barefoot took another slow drag on his cigarette. “Been a long time since you and Jeff played ball together. You still have that hook shot?”

Dwight smiled and shook his head. “Don’t have much time for that anymore.”

“Too bad. I guess you know about Jeff?”

“Yes, sir. I was real sorry. Must have been rough on you and Mrs. Barefoot.”

“And Sarah. Been thinking about her a lot this week. Losing Jeff and now losing her daughter like that.”

“They say her son’s changed his name back to Barefoot.”

“Yeah, that made Edie and me real happy. Lots of Barefoots in the county but I’m the only son of an only son and our line of Barefoots would’ve died out if Charlie had stayed a Johnson. What’s particularly good is that Sarah didn’t try to talk him out of it. I think she knows she made a mistake all those years ago when she let Malcolm Johnson have his way.”

“Sounds like you don’t care much for Malcolm,” Dwight said mildly. “Wasn’t he good to Charlie?”

“He didn’t beat the boy or let him go hungry or naked,” Nelson Barefoot said. “All the same, Charlie’s living with Edie and me now till he finishes school.” He sat with his arms on his knees and watched the ash on his cigarette grow until it fell to the ground. “But you didn’t come here to talk about Charlie or Malcolm either, did you?”

“No, sir. I was wondering what you could tell me about one of your workers. Jason Wentworth?”

“Wentworth?” Barefoot gave a scornful snort. “He doesn’t work for me. I fired his ass a month ago. Lazy, shiftless, and a thief. Lucky for me, I’m bonded and insured for dishonest employees. I knew he’d been in a little trouble, but he shot me a line about wanting to stay on the straight and narrow, learn a good trade. You might not know it, but Jeff went through a stretch when he did some stupid things right after high school, but he straightened up once he and Sarah were married and the baby came along. I’m always willing to give boys like Wentworth a second chance, but if they need a third or fourth chance, they’ll have to go find it with somebody else. Fool me twice? I don’t think so. So what’s he done now to get you asking questions about him?”

When Dwight told him, Nelson Barefoot shook his head grimly. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe if I’d got him a little earlier…? It didn’t have to be like that, did it, Dwight?”

“I guess we all make choices, sir. Can you think why anyone would shoot him down?”

Barefoot frowned, stubbed out his cigarette, dug a shallow hole with the heel of his work boot, and carefully buried the butt. “Sorry, son, but I never get into the personal lives of my men unless I’m invited, and Jason Wentworth didn’t send out any invitations. I didn’t even know he had a brother. Least not a younger one.”

Dwight thanked him and walked past the dismembered oak tree to his truck. As he reached for the door, he heard Diane Hobbs call to him above the noisy chainsaw. “Dwight! Wait a minute!”

She carried a clear plastic pint-sized box tied with silver ribbons. “Am I not right in thinking today or tomorrow’s your anniversary?”

He nodded. “Today, actually.”

The Hobbses had come to the dinner party Bo Poole had thrown for them last December and to the wedding as well.

She thrust the box into his hands. “These are some of my chocolate-covered fried pecans. I was going to say merry Christmas, but happy anniversary’s even better. I hope you’re taking Deborah somewhere fancy tonight?”

“Tomorrow’s our fancy night,” he said. “There’s a dinner dance out at the country club.”

She beamed. “Y’all’re going to that? We are, too! Now you be sure and save a dance for me.”

Although it was now heading for lunchtime, another quick call to Spivey’s Plumbing confirmed that Mr. Spivey was still working on some busted water lines out at the nursery where Dwight had bought twenty crepe myrtles back last spring.

He spotted the plumber’s truck parked beside an empty greenhouse and pulled his own truck up next to it. Inside, he found two men repairing a network of thin black plastic pipes that lay on the ground in an inch or so of muddy water.

“My stupidity,” Herman Forrest told Dwight. “The main water supply comes in here and then feeds to the other greenhouses. I’ve never insulated the pipes here because I’ve never let the temperature drop below fifty, but with the slowdown in the building trade and fewer big landscaping orders, I left these two houses empty and never once thought about them freezing till I noticed that the sprinklers and misters in the other houses weren’t working.”

Dwight commiserated with him, but before he could explain why he was there, the nurseryman said, “So. You here to start redeeming your gift certificate?”

“My what?”

Consternation flooded the man’s face like the water on the dirt floor of this greenhouse. “Oh, Lord! Please, Major Bryant. Forget you heard me say that.”

With a broad smile, Dwight said, “I’m getting a gift certificate for Christmas?”

“When I saw you drive up, I was sure that your wife gave it to you already and that you were here to pick out another tree or something.”

Still smiling, Dwight shook his head.

“Look, promise you won’t tell her I shot off my big mouth, please?”

“She’ll never hear it from me.”

“So how can I help you? I don’t suppose you came to get her a gift certificate?”

“No, I want to talk to Mr. Spivey, but as long as I’m here, maybe I’ll take a look around later and see what you’ve got blooming besides poinsettias.”

“Sorry, Major. This time of year, it’s all poinsettias.”

Although he had continued to work while Dwight and the nurseryman talked, the plumber, a short burly man of late middle age, had obviously been listening; and when Forrest walked away, he stood up and wiped his hands on a muddy rag. “Oren Spivey,” he said. “I’d offer to shake hands but then you’d have to go wash yours.”

“Major Bryant, Mr. Spivey. Sheriff’s department. Sorry to interrupt your work.”

“ ’Sokay.” He turned and gave his assistant some instructions, then led the way through the greenhouse and out into the sunshine. “You’d never know it was freezing last night, would you? This is what I love about North Carolina.”

“You’re not from here?” Dwight asked politely even though the man’s accent had given him away as soon as he opened his mouth to speak.

“Michigan. Been here twelve years and I’m never going back.” He gestured toward the mess of mud and pipes visible through the open door. “In there’s a piece of cake compared to crawling under houses in minus-five-degree weather, using blowtorches to thaw a line that’s buried a foot deep in frozen mud. So how can I help you, Major?”

“I was wondering what you could tell me about one of your workers. Willie Faison?”

“Willie? He’s been with me about a year now. Hard worker. Reliable. At least he was reliable till this morning. First time he’s missed without calling in.”

“Part of that’s my fault,” Dwight said and told him how Faison had discovered the bodies of the two Wentworths and then wound up drinking himself into oblivion. “See, the thing is, their stepmother thought they went hunting with Faison one day last week. You remember what day that was?”

Spivey frowned. Sunshine fell full of his broad square face and he squinted when he looked up at Dwight. “Sorry, Major Bryant. Somebody’s got their times mixed up. Willie put in a full eight hours every day last week.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Dwight thanked him and walked slowly back to his truck, trying to reason it out. It would appear that Faison had told the truth when he said he did not go hunting with the Wentworths on Wednesday. Dwight had interviewed enough young men like Faison to have a pretty good sense of when they were lying. He was quite certain that something about that Wednesday deer hunt was a lie.

But what?

The deer stand?

Trespassing to hunt on posted land?

CHAPTER 18

“We’d a deal of work to finish up last night… and had to clear away this morning.”

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Court for me that Monday morning meant handling first appearances for those who had been arrested over the weekend. State law requires that they be brought before a district court judge within ninety-six hours. The jury box held today’s first group of orange jumpsuits. All of them male. All charged with felonies.

I smiled at them pleasantly.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I said. “My name is Judge Knott. If this is your first time here, let me explain that this is not a trial court. You have the right to silence, and it’s not in your interest to talk about the facts right now with the DA sitting there. If you go to trial, that’s when you’ll get a chance to be heard. This session is designed to review your bond, to tell you what you’re charged with, and to inform you as to what your punishment can be. This does not mean that’s the punishment you’ll actually receive. That will be determined if you do wind up going to trial after talking to your attorney and if you are found guilty there. When your name is called, please step forward. I’ll read the charges against you, tell you the maximum penalties, and ask if you’re going to hire your own attorney or need the court to appoint one for you.”

Most felons know to keep their mouths shut until they’ve spoken to an attorney, although someone will occasionally insist on trying to plead guilty then and there. I review their bonds and set a court date, usually about fifteen days out, depending on the arresting officer’s next regularly scheduled court date. The whole transaction takes about three minutes.

When the felonies were disposed of, the jury box filled again with misdemeanors and minor charges and I went through my spiel once more, something I would do each time a new group was brought up from the jail below.

Repeat offenders know the drill, of course. And for misdemeanors, they’ll step right up and plead guilty without the benefit of an attorney, but first-timers are less confident about the outcome.

Like today.

I looked at the defendant who was next in line. White. Male. Twenty-nine. Brown hair. A good haircut now growing out, which would indicate that he was in the early downward slide toward losing his personal pride. Half defiant, half sheepish. The shuck I held in my hand—the envelope that held his record and that I would not look at until I’d reached the disposition stage—was so thin that this was probably his first offense.

“Mr. Anderson, you’re here today charged with public intoxication,” I said. “I see that you were arrested Friday night, but you appear to have sobered up now. Do you intend to plead guilty or not guilty?”

He hesitated. “Not guilty?”

In a whisper that was clearly audible to everyone in the courtroom, the young black man standing behind him said, “Fool! You wanna get out today? Say guilty.”

He was right. The usual penalty for a minor charge like this is three days in jail plus court costs. If I give credit for time served, it saves taxpayer dollars and frees up space in the jail.

Anderson shrugged. “Guilty, ma’am.”

“I sentence you to three days in jail,” I said, “and give you credit for time.”

During the morning break, I ran into superior court judge Ned O’Donnell at the drink machine.

“How’s it going?” I asked. I knew he was presiding over a jury case, vehicular homicide by someone who had lost his license in a DWI case a few months before he smashed into another car and killed the mother of two small children. “You look harried,” I told him.

“Thanks,” he said dryly as he popped the tab on a Dr Pepper. “I have Ellen Hamilton sitting on the front row as close as she can get to the jury box. I’ve already had to warn her twice about huffing out loud every time Zack Young tries to make a point for the defense, but I can’t stop her from rolling her eyes and making faces.”

Young is one of the best attorneys in this part of the state and I’m sure Ellen is well aware of his win record in juried DWI cases.

“Better your court than mine,” I said and returned to my own in a lighter mood, ready for the next group of prisoners.

With the holidays upon us, many were there because they had started celebrating a little too early and a little too well. Several had used their five-finger discount to go Christmas shopping, while others had cut, shot at, or punched out a fellow citizen, but most of them limited their words to “Guilty” or “Not guilty” when asked for a plea and to a simple “Yes” or “No” on the question of an attorney, and things moved along at a fast clip.

When I first announced that I was going to run for the bench, Daddy was so opposed that it added another row of bricks to the wall that had grown up between us since my mother died. He hadn’t wanted me to study law in the first place. He thought there were too many unsavory characters wandering in and out of law offices, as he well knew, having wandered in and out of them many times himself back before I was born, when he was actively running a large bootlegging operation.

If he’d had his way, I would have stayed under his protective wing, teaching Sunday school or kindergarten, until he delivered me virginal and innocent into holy matrimony with someone who would be equally protective. It was bad enough that I was an attorney, representing clients who might or might not be innocent, but at least they were men and women who could afford my services and who could technically claim to be upstanding pillars of the community. As far as he was concerned, district court handled the dregs of humanity, and he did not want his baby girl mucking around in a cesspool.

Eventually, we reconciled enough that I could tell him about the miscarriage of justice that motivated me to run, and he even wound up using a combination of influence and blackmail to help me onto the bench. He’s still not happy about it, though; and I haven’t been able to convince him that trying to give justice to people who may never have had their fair share is the most satisfying career I could imagine.

Which is why doing first appearances never bores me.

I read through the charges, asked my questions, set court dates, and made sure the paperwork was in order so that there would be no holdup on my part that would prevent any eligible prisoners from a chance to be back in their own clothes by Christmas morning.

When the last paper slipper had shuffled out of the courtroom and I had signed the last document, both hands of the clock over the rear door stood straight up on twelve.

I tapped my gavel. “Court is adjourned till one-thirty,” I said and scooted out before anyone could grab the sleeve of my robe and hold me up.

Three minutes later, I was in my car, headed for the sprawling outlet center near the interstate just south of Dobbs.

The parking lot out there covers three or four acres and finding a space is not normally a problem. We’re about halfway between New York and Miami, though, so the place was jammed today with out-of-state license plates attached to huge RVs. Christmas week is when the whole East Coast seems to play fruit basket, and this is a logical place to stop for lunch and grab some last-minute presents at discount prices.

A loudspeaker was booming out “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” but here at midday, the air was so mild when I opened the door that I left my heavy coat in the car so it wouldn’t slow me down and hurried over to the card shop, where I immediately picked out another roll of wrapping paper and a bag of stick-on bows. With everything else that was starting to pile up, I’m grateful that Santa Claus leaves all his presents unwrapped, but Dwight and I still needed to wrap the odds and ends that we’re giving Cal.

My family is so large that everyone’s name—children and adults alike—goes into a hat and we draw them out at Thanksgiving amid much secrecy. If you draw the name of someone in your own immediate family, you put it back or exchange with someone else.

I had drawn Will’s name this year. For years, he’s run his auction and antiques business by the seat of his pants, aided by nothing more than an eye for quality and some avaricious common sense, and yeah, okay, maybe a few cut corners. His shabby old building, a former tobacco warehouse, burned down last year. He used the insurance money to replace it with a slightly smaller, slightly nicer place, and he’s become more interested in learning to identify what passes through his hands. Will is never going to go so upscale that other dealers quit coming around, hoping to find unexpected bargains, but his wife Amy told me that he’d actually started reading up on some of his finds. I called a bookstore in Raleigh and a clerk recommended an encyclopedia of silver manufacturers with detailed illustrations of hallmarks, reduced to $19.99.

I immediately gave her my credit card number. Even with postage and tax, it was under the family’s twenty-five dollar limit. And it arrived gift-wrapped.

Theoretically, we can’t exceed that, and we are not supposed to gift anyone else, but of course there are always exceptions to any rule. Every year, Daddy sits with a pile of presents heaped up around his chair, and every year he says, “Now I know y’all didn’t all draw my name.”

And there’s no way that Zach and Haywood aren’t going to exchange little tokens with Adam and Herman. Twinship trumps ordinary siblings, but those are the only family-sanctioned exceptions.

Up until last year, though, I had no spouse and no child, so nothing was said when I gave my nieces and nephews funny Christmas cards with money tucked inside—a single bill whose value depended on their ages. Cal and Dwight’s names had both gone into the hat last year, but I still sneaked and gave the kids their cards. Happily, my brothers and sisters-in-law were so accustomed to my ritual that only Barbara called me on it.

“If you must give them something, just give them the cards,” she’d said, and then added somewhat sourly, “They get a bigger kick out of your cards than the money anyhow.”

That was nice to hear, because I don’t give one-size-fits-all cards. I aim for a funny zinger geared to each kid’s personality or interest and then doctor them up. Reese, for instance. He found a wounded buck by the side of the road one year, someone else’s trophy animal, and tried to hide it in the van of his truck. The buck revived and tore Reese and the interior of his truck to bloody shreds. I got him a card that featured an inebriated stag with an eight-point rack that read, “Buck up, deer! It’s Christmas!” and glued a tiny strip of his tattered upholstery to one of the antlers.

I can waste as much time on picking out the perfect card as I would on picking out something more conventional. I still didn’t have one to celebrate Annie Sue’s new electrician’s license or Jackson’s athletic scholarship, but for Robert’s grandson Bert, whose incisors hadn’t grown back in yet, I lucked into a musical card that played “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”

With forty minutes of my lunch recess gone, I spotted a card that featured an elaborately decorated Christmas tree. I pressed on a little bulge at the base of the tree and tiny LEDs began to twinkle. Perfect for Annie Sue.

Still nothing for Jackson, though. I finally gave up and bought a baseball-themed birthday card that had potential if nothing else presented itself in the next couple of days.

Precious time was eaten up waiting in line to pay and then more waiting in the sporting goods store, where I bought paper targets for Cal and a box of cartridges for Dwight. When I hiked back to my car, my watch read 1:18.

Lunch was a hasty forkful of my ham salad whenever I had to stop at a traffic light on my way back through town.

“Isn’t eating a salad with a fork while you drive just as dangerous as texting on a cell phone?” asked my internal preacher.

“Give it a rest,” said the pragmatist, who hates getting lectured. “She’s doing twenty-five miles an hour, not fifty-five or sixty.”

“All the same,” said the preacher.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

I convened the afternoon session at exactly 1:33. Not too bad considering that I’d had to freshen my lipstick and got stopped in the hallway to accept congratulations from Judge Luther Parker for making it through a full year of marriage.

“You do know, don’t you, that some people here were betting it wouldn’t last that long?”

“So how much did you win?” I asked.

He grinned. “Lucky for me, betting’s against my religion. I’d’ve lost big-time.”

Between last-minute settlements and plea arrangements, I had finished everything on the day’s calendar by four o’clock and was ready to call it a day when I was asked to sign a final document. After twenty-three years of marriage, Marian Louise Bledsoe-Jernigan and Frederick Spencer Bledsoe-Jernigan had decided to give each other a divorce for Christmas.

All the paperwork had been completed. The division of marital property had already taken place. No alimony was requested and their children were grown, so there was no question of child support.

“Your Honor,” said Mrs. Bledsoe-Jernigan, “please note that I am asking to legally resume my maiden name.”

I read through her application to change her name back to Marian Louise Bledsoe.

“Granted,” I said.

“Hey!” said Mr. Bledsoe-Jernigan. “What about my maiden name? I mean, my birth name?”

To his relief, I told him that he had the right to resume his former surname, too, and that I would incorporate the changes in the decree.

When I first came to the bench, the state did not provide for this circumstance. Until the General Assembly rewrote the law, a man was allowed only one legal name change per lifetime. In taking a hyphen, he would use up his one change. I still remember the bemused smile on the face of an ex-wife when her cheating husband realized that her name was legally linked to his in perpetuity, and that if the new wife-in-waiting wanted to take his name, it would have to be the hyphenated name.

I’m fairly sure that he was one of those who pushed for the change in Section 1 of G.S. 50-12.

Phyllis Raynor had clerked for me that afternoon. After we finished with the Bledsoe-Jernigan papers, we waited around for another half hour in case anyone else showed up needing a judge’s signature.

“Y’all get many requests for name changes?” I asked her as we kicked back in our chairs.

Except in divorce cases, they are normally handled by the clerk of court’s office and it’s considerably more complicated. In addition to a hefty filing fee and filling out a two-page form, the petitioner has to submit a copy of his birth certificate, a valid photo ID, and a notarized criminal history record check for every county or state he’s lived in within the past ten years. Changing one’s name is not something to be entered into lightly.

“Several,” Phyllis said. “My first was right after I started working for Mr. Glover. He had a weird Polish name—like eight consonants and only one vowel—and he was tired of nobody being able to spell or pronounce it. These last few years we’ve had a run by young men who want to change their names for religious reasons. Mr. Glover tries to talk them out of it because so many have come back and wanted to take up their original names again and he can’t let them. And just this past spring, we had a young man who’d been adopted by his stepfather when he was a baby and he wanted to take back his birth name. Mrs. Brewer did the paperwork on it for him.”

I nodded. “Charlie Barefoot.”

“You know him?”

“Not really. Portland mentioned it to me when we were talking about his sister—his half sister, that is. She’s the girl who was killed in a car wreck last week.”

“Really? Too bad right here at Christmas.” She did not speak callously, merely as someone who had no personal connection. “What’s his legal standing right now? I mean, if both parents suddenly dropped dead without a will?”

“His mother and his stepfather?”

“But it’s not his stepfather, is it? Technically, I mean. Wasn’t he legally adopted? Changing your name doesn’t cancel out your adoption, does it?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “You’re right. And without a will, he would be legally entitled to everything a natural child would.”

“And now he’s the only child left,” said Phyllis as she began to gather up her files and close down the computer. “Are they rich?”

“Certainly comfortable, I think. The father’s a partner in Triple J Insurance.”

“Well, yes, then,” she said with a laugh. “I’d say that’s pretty darn comfortable.”

CHAPTER 19

“I don’t know what they’re doing out there. Playing some game or other, I suppose. I’ve always been so afraid, you know, that these young people would be bored by our Christmas here. But not at all, it’s just the opposite.”

—“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” Agatha Christie

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—MONDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 22

As long as he was almost in the neighborhood, Dwight decided that he might as well swing past the house and make himself another ham sandwich to replace the one he’d left back in the office. Besides, even warmed-over breakfast coffee would taste better than the weak dishwater he could get at any Cotton Grove fast-food joint.

Two white trucks were parked by his back door when he got there and Bandit was out of his crate, wagging his docked tail happily from the top step. Inside, he found Reese and Annie Sue at the kitchen table with half-eaten sandwiches on paper towels in lieu of plates. The decimated ham sat on the counter with bread, mayo, and lettuce they had pulled from the refrigerator.

“Oh, hey, Uncle Dwight!” Annie Sue said brightly when Dwight walked in on them. “Want me to make you a sandwich?”

“You sure there’s enough left?” he asked. He noted that the coffeemaker was now empty, that the door of the microwave was ajar, and that two steaming mugs sat beside their paper plates.

“No problem,” said Reese. He jumped up and flourished a sharp knife while Annie Sue slathered mayonnaise on the bread. “In fact, I think I’ll have another one, too, if that’s okay.”

“Help yourself,” Dwight said, amused. He should have known that the labor for upgrading their circuit breakers wouldn’t come totally free and hoped Deborah didn’t have plans for the leftover ham because there clearly weren’t going to be any leftovers once Reese got through. He washed up at the kitchen sink and started a fresh pot of coffee.

“So how’s it going?” he asked them when they were all seated around the table and the smell of newly made coffee filled the kitchen.

“Fine,” Annie Sue said. “We decided to install another box to accommodate the new breakers and give you some extra space if you ever want to wire another room or add a shed or something out back.”

In retrospect, Dwight would realize that he should have been suspicious of her innocent-sounding remark, but it sounded logical, so he just said thanks and turned to Reese. “I hear you saw a big buck down in one of the back fields the other day?”

“I didn’t actually see him. Just his tracks. The dewlaps left such a deep mark, though, that I’m sure it was a buck. If I get him, I’ll bring y’all some of the meat.”

“So,” said Annie Sue with what he would later recall as studied casualness. “You working in the area today?”

“No, I’m on my way back to Dobbs. Just had some people in Cotton Grove I needed to talk to.”

“Anything to do with the Wentworth brothers getting shot yesterday?” Reese asked.

“You heard about that?”

“Matt was in the same class as Ruth and Richard,” Annie Sue said. “They were texting back and forth when we were over at Uncle Seth’s just now, finishing up on his circuit breakers.”

Dwight got up to pour himself more coffee. “They have anything to say about why he might’ve been shot?”

Reese, his mouth full of ham and lettuce, shook his head and held out his cup for a refill.

“What about the older boy? Jason? Y’all know him?”

He saw Reese glance at Annie Sue, who immediately turned brick red.

“Stop it, Reese!” she said. “It wasn’t funny then and it’s certainly not funny now that he’s dead.”

“What?” asked Dwight.

Reese grinned. “She thought he thought she was hot.”

“I did not!” that sturdy young woman snapped.

As Dwight continued to look at her inquiringly, she gave a what-the-hell? shrug.

“Don’t listen to Reese. See what happened was, you know the Huckabees? Live over on Forty-eight?”

Dwight nodded.

“Last summer they added on a couple of rooms so her mother could come live with them, and we got the job to wire it. Jason Wentworth was one of the roofers, and yes, he did come on to me a little, but I’d heard about his reputation and I kept it light. He knew it wasn’t going anywhere, but he still kept hanging around.”

“And then a reel of copper wiring went missing,” Reese said.

“We’re not saying he took it,” Annie Sue said, “but after that, we kept the truck boxes locked even though it was a pain in the neck to have to unlock them every time we needed something.”

Dwight started to tell them how Nelson Barefoot had fired the older Wentworth boy for stealing, but at that moment the door from the garage opened and he saw the startled faces of Ruth and A.K., his brother-in-law Andrew’s kids, with their cousins Richard and Jessica, two of Seth’s. Haywood’s sons, Stevie and John, were right behind them and they, too, seemed surprised that Dwight was there.

“We were passing by and saw the trucks,” Steve said smoothly.

“We’re thinking about taking in a movie in Garner,” Jess said

Dwight didn’t give their story a second thought. Dirt lanes spiderwebbed the farm and everyone used them as shortcuts. Besides, this gave him an opportunity to ask the kids still in high school about Matt Wentworth on an informal basis. Despite his Army years, he had gotten back home often enough that he had known all of these children from babyhood. The family resemblance between them—blue eyes, hair ranging from blond to light brown—was so strong that they could have been siblings as easily as cousins; and after he married their fathers’ baby sister, they had segued smoothly from calling him Mr. Dwight to saying Uncle Dwight.

In answer to his questions, they told him that, yes, the shooting was a cause of much texting within the West Colleton student body, but none of the cousins had really known the dead boy beyond sharing one class or another with him this past fall.

“He was actually a little older than us,” said Richard, “but he got left back in grade school and again last year.”

“Any of y’all ever hear that he was hooked up with Mallory Johnson?”

They hooted at the idea.

“In the first place, Mallory didn’t hook up with anybody,” said A.K., a gangling eighteen-year-old with a perpetual appetite, as he spread a slice of bread with mayo and folded it around some lettuce leafs.

Fourteen-year-old Richard looked up from nibbling at the shreds of ham left on the bone. “And even if she did, it wouldn’t have been a loser like Matt Wentworth. Her dad would’ve had a fit.”

Ruth, a freshman like Richard, nodded. “Emma said Mallory told the cheerleaders that she wasn’t going to let herself get interested in anybody until she was off at Carolina where her dad wouldn’t be hovering every minute. I don’t think Mr. Johnson missed a single game that she ever cheered at.”

“Yeah? Was he at Tuesday’s game?”

“I guess. We didn’t go,” they told Dwight.

“Jess and I went,” said A.K., “but I didn’t notice.”

Jessica shook her head. “Me either.”

“Who were his friends?” he asked.

They shrugged and then came up with the names of a couple of kids who might have sat at the same table in the cafeteria. One of them was the name Mrs. Wentworth had mentioned, Nate Barbour. On the whole, though, they thought he was a loner, which pretty much squared with Dwight’s impression.

“What about the alcohol that Mallory had in her system?” he asked. “What’re people saying about that?”

More shrugs. “Nobody’s saying anything. Mallory didn’t drink and she didn’t take drugs. Not that anybody knew about anyhow. If someone slipped her something else at Kevin’s party, it was probably Vicodin. Joy said none of hers were missing from her purse, but Kevin says someone took his mom’s pills out of her medicine cabinet.”

“Who’s Joy and why is she on Vicodin?” Dwight asked.

“Joy Medlin. One of the cheerleaders,” said Ruth.

“She was in that bad wreck right before Halloween,” Jessica reminded him. “The one that killed Ted Burke and Stacy Loring. And Dana Owens is still in a coma. They say she’s been flatlined from the beginning and her dad thinks it’s time to pull the plug, but her mom’s not ready for that yet.”

A momentary pall settled over the cousins as the lingering effects of that tragedy hit them anew.

“And Joy Medlin’s taking Vicodin?” asked Dwight.

Jessica nodded. “She’s had a couple of operations on her ankle, but she’s still on crutches and she’s still in pain. She says she’s going to wean herself off over the holidays even though there are times when it hurts too much.”

“And she was at the party?”

“All the cheerleaders were except for Emma, and even she was there for a few minutes.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Dwight said with a grin for Annie Sue.

He filled a go-cup with coffee, told the kids to be sure and put Bandit in his crate before they left, and headed back to Dobbs. He did not see the purposeful looks they shared as the door closed behind him, nor did he hear Stevie say, “We brought extra shovels. Where’re you planning to run the line?”

As he walked down the hall to his office a half hour later, Dwight met Raeford McLamb, who had spent the morning over in Chapel Hill. “Oh, hey, boss. I was just coming to report on the Wentworth autopsies.” He held up a couple of neatly labeled plastic bags. “Thirty-twos, just like we thought. Two in the older boy, one in the younger one. No surprises except that the shooting took place earlier than we thought. A lot earlier. Richards tell you?”

Dwight shook his head.

“Friday morning.”

“What?”

“Honest to god, Major. The kid had a time-stamped receipt from a breakfast place on the edge of town. Nine forty-eight Friday morning. Blueberry pancake special with bacon and eggs. Eaten there, not take-out. The diener ran the gut and says he died about an hour later. Between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty at the very latest. Too bad he didn’t take a little longer to eat breakfast, huh?”

“Or go to school like his stepmother thought he did,” Dwight said grimly.

They walked on into the detective unit together, where they found Deputy Mayleen Richards working on the sheets of phone records Mallory Johnson’s service provider had sent them. McLamb had called her an hour earlier from Chapel Hill and she had immediately passed that updated information along to officers who were out questioning Jason Wentworth’s neighbors.

Brushing a strand of red hair from her eyes, she thumped the papers on her desk and said, “I tell you, Major, it’s getting a little scary how much information these phone companies keep on you. I wonder if people would be so indiscreet if they knew their text messages were being saved?”

Technology was always a trade-off between convenience and privacy, thought Dwight, as he looked at the printouts of phone numbers that Richards was trying to put names to. Good when they needed to track someone’s activities; bad to think yours could be tracked just as easily if someone wanted to attach spyware to your phone number.

Every time Mallory Johnson had used her cell phone in the last few months, there it was. Documented in date, time, minutes used, the numbers she had dialed, the numbers that had called her, even the general location of where she was when the call was made.

“My wife says this is why she doesn’t leave her phone switched on,” Dwight said.

My wife.

Even as he concentrated on what his deputy was saying, a small corner of his mind savored those words. They still awed him. After so many years of thinking she would never be his, here they were: ready to celebrate a full year of marriage.

“Any of these numbers connected to the Wentworth boy?” McLamb asked.

“Nope. Neither outgoing or incoming. At least not that we can tell. If he had one of those disposable phones with a prepaid card, there’s no way to know. There’s no land line at that trailer, just Jason Wentworth’s cell phone, and when we found it this morning, it does show the 911 call that the Faison guy made. That number’s not on the girl’s records, though.” She pointed to the last incoming number. “That’s her dad’s number right at ten-thirty. She didn’t answer and it went into her voice mail.”

Richards picked up the girl’s phone and pressed some buttons and Dwight heard Malcolm Johnson’s voice say, “Mallory? I hope you’re on your way home, honey. It’s ten-thirty and tomorrow’s still a school day.”

“What about her last outgoing?”

“It’s her brother’s number. The call lasted about three minutes, but Denning says her phone was switched on and the battery was drained.”

Richards pointed to the time: 10:37. “The kids at the party say she left the Crowder house around ten-thirty. She must have talked to him right before she crashed.”

She thumbed the stack of pages piled up on her desk. “Is there really any point to reading all these text messages?”

“Probably not.” As much as he felt sorry for Sarah and Malcolm, their daughter’s death was a lower priority than the Wentworth killings. “Why don’t you start on the day of her death and skim back through a week or so? I don’t expect anything to jump up about the Wentworths, but you never know. Let me have the brother’s phone number, though. I’ll see if she mentioned either of them to him.”

As McLamb went on to his desk to write up his report, Dwight paused in the doorway. “What about calls to and from Wentworth?”

“Matt called him a little before nine Friday morning from his stepmother’s house and there were several calls from Faison. One on Thursday evening, and after that, Faison’s calls were sent right to voice mail, so I guess they were dead by then.”

“Faison say anything useful?”

“Just that he wanted his gun and stuff. And he was pissed that Jason wasn’t picking up the phone. Finally, on Sunday, he said that he was going to come over that night after he took his aunt to a movie.” She smiled and added parenthetically, “Faison’s lived with his aunt in Cotton Grove since he was twelve.”

“Hello?”

“Charlie Barefoot?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Major Dwight Bryant with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. I was wondering if you could stop by my office this afternoon? I’d like to clear up a few things and—Hello? Mr. Barefoot?”

Dwight realized that he was talking to dead air and pushed the redial button. After five rings, Charlie Barefoot’s voice said, “Here comes the beep. You know what to do.”

“We seem to have been disconnected,” Dwight said sternly. “Please call me.” He carefully enunciated his number, then hung up and sat back in his seat.

Now wasn’t that interesting?

Before he could decide what to make of the boy’s action, Deputy Sam Dalton, CCSD’s newest detective, rapped on the frame of his open door. Dalton had been put in charge of the patrol officers sent to canvass the Massengill Road area surrounding the Wentworth single-wide.

For a moment, Dwight was irresistibly reminded of Bandit when the terrier thought there was a big juicy bone in his immediate future. If Dalton had possessed a stubby little tail, it would be wagging in excitement.

“Sir,” he said, “I believe we’ve got us a witness in the Wentworth shootings.”

CHAPTER 20

An hour later, to the accompaniment of Bing’s voice singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” McMurtrie rang the doorbell of No. 3. The door was opened finally by a white-faced woman with burning black eyes and raven hair.

—“Silent Night,” Baynard Kendrick

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—MONDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 22

Mrs. Alma Higgins had short white hair that feathered softly around a heart-shaped face, bright china blue eyes, and very fair complexion that was now finely wrinkled with age. At first glance, she looked like an old-fashioned pink-and-white porcelain doll that someone had slipped inside a green velvet pouch and then pulled the drawstrings up tight around her neck. A second glance showed that the green velvet tunic that she wore over matching green slacks had a stand-up ruffled neckband of the same material and that the drawstring was actually a thick gold necklace. Either the holiday outfit was a hand-me-down from a heavier woman or she had lost weight since she first acquired it.

Someone had rolled an armchair in from the conference room and seated her beside Mayleen Richards’s desk. When Dwight joined them, he almost bumped into Raeford McLamb, who was on his way back from the break room with a cup of instant hot chocolate.

“Now isn’t that so sweet of you!” the elderly woman exclaimed in a soft voice halfway between a girlish flutter and the cooing of doves.

“Mrs. Higgins,” said Deputy Sam Dalton, “this is Major Bryant.”

Her blue eyes widened as she looked up. “Oh, my goodness! You must be Calvin Bryant’s son.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, trying to remember if he had ever met this woman before.

“Oh, honey,” she cooed. “You’re the spitting image of your daddy. He’s been gone—How long is it now? Almost forty years? But it’s like he just walked into the room. He and my second husband were in the Grange together, and I always notice the handsome men.” Her laughter was a cascade of soft flute notes. “Not that Harold wasn’t nice-looking, too, but nothing like your daddy. Or like my first husband either, for that matter. Or—oh, but you don’t want to hear about them. You want me to talk about Friday morning, don’t you?”

“If you would, ma’am.” He pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down. “Do you mind if Deputy Denning records this?”

“Not a bit.” She watched with bright interest as that detective took up a position with his camera, and immediately began to fuss with her hair and to straighten her gold necklace. “I must look a sight.” She turned to Mayleen Richards. “Do I still have any lipstick on?”

That young woman gave an encouraging smile. “You look just beautiful, Mrs. Higgins. Why don’t you start by saying your name and where you live?”

Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, Mrs. Higgins repeated her full last name, which seemed to consist of several surnames, followed by an address out on Massengill Road. “After I divorced my second husband, I gave my daughter and her husband the farm and just kept an acre for myself in case I ever wanted to come back here to live.”

She mentioned her daughter’s name and it was vaguely familiar to Dwight. “Well, after James died—he was my fourth—I decided to move back up here from Florida to be near Mary and her children. We built me a little house on my acre even though Mary said there was plenty of room with her now that the children are grown, but I didn’t want to be a bother.”

She paused to lift the hot cocoa to her lips that were painted the same pale pink as her nails, and Dwight immediately said, “If you could tell us about yesterday morning, ma’am?”

“Oh, I am sorry. I do keep running on, don’t I?” She laughed again, the tinkling laugh of a woman who has always known that most men were enchanted by both her laughter and her tendency to “run on.”

Dwight glanced at Richards, expecting signs of impatience. Instead, Mayleen appeared to be fascinated by this preserved-in-amber example of pre-ERA femininity.

“You said you were on your way to get your hair done?” Dalton prompted.

“That’s right. Every Friday morning, as soon as I hear the bells of the little Methodist church down the road begin to chime the half hour, I know it’s time to leave for my standing appointment at eleven o’clock. They’re not real bells, of course, just a recording, and I don’t know that I’d like to live right next door to them, but it sounds so pretty from a distance. Anyhow, I was driving down Massengill Road at about a quarter to eleven when a car came whipping out of a driveway on my right. The trees and bushes are so thick there that he probably couldn’t see me, but I’m sure he never even slowed down to look. Just shot out and made a left-hand turn right in front of me. I was doing about fifty, and before I could put on my brakes I felt my car brush the rear end of his. Well, I immediately stopped, but he didn’t. I got out and looked at my front bumper. You could see where it was scraped, but it wasn’t enough to call it any real damage, and I must say I was relieved about that, because if he had stopped and we’d called the highway patrol to come out and take a look, I knew they would say it was my fault. After you pass seventy, they just assume your reflexes are poor and that any accident is always your fault. Down in Florida—”

Mayleen interrupted. “Excuse me, ma’am, but do you mind if I ask just how old you are?”

Mrs. Higgins cocked her head archly. “Oh now, honey, you know a lady never tells her age, but you lean your pretty little head a little closer and I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

The deputy did as she was instructed and her eyes widened in surprise at what she heard.

“So you see why I was just as happy not to have a trooper come out, although I do think that this was one time they would have taken the word of a somewhat older woman over some young man. I mean, I couldn’t have scraped his car if he wasn’t in my lane when I had the right-of-way, now could I?”

“No, ma’am. You say he was a young man? Black or white?”

“White, but I’m afraid that’s all I can say. It all happened so fast that I really didn’t have time to see him.”

“But you think he was a young man?” Dwight persisted.

“That was my impression. Not white-headed, anyhow, or bald. I would have noticed that.”

Dwight smiled, willing to accept that a woman who’d had four husbands would indeed have noticed. “What about the car itself, ma’am?”

“White,” she said promptly. “And either a Honda or a Toyota. Fairly new, too. Mine’s a silver Prius, and I looked at both makes very carefully when I was trying to decide which to buy last summer. My grandson thought the Prius would hold its value best, so that’s what I got. You menfolks always know about cars.”

“Two-door or four?”

“Four.”

“Did you notice what the driver was wearing?”

“I’m so sorry, honey, but I didn’t. Do you really think he’s the one who shot those two young men?”

“We won’t know until we find him,” Dwight told her. “But it certainly sounds as if he was there at the right time.”

They took her back over it again, and when it was clear that she could add nothing more, Percy Denning volunteered to drive her home and see if he could lift any paint samples from her bumper.

Dalton reported that someone on the other side of the woods from the Wentworth trailer told them that he’d heard four gunshots around ten-thirty or eleven, but he had not paid much attention. He assumed that Jason Wentworth was shooting at squirrels or rabbits again.

As Dalton swiveled around to his desk to begin writing up his report, Dwight paused and said, “So how old is Mrs. Higgins?”

Mayleen Richards grinned. “Would you believe ninety-two?”

* * *

Shaking his head, Dwight returned to his own office and tried calling Charlie Barefoot again. Again, he was shunted into voice mail.

3:30. A half hour till his shift was technically over. With everything quiet for the moment, he decided that he would drive back to Cotton Grove and see if he could get up with that evasive young man before going home to shower and shave for dinner out with Deborah that night.

Accordingly, he arrived at the modest home of Nelson and Edie Barefoot a few minutes past four. He found Mrs. Barefoot outside, busily plugging in the Christmas lights that dripped from the eaves and adorned the bushes along the porch. She was pleased to see him, “But Charlie’s not here right now, Dwight. He’s gone over to see Sarah about something. Can I give him a message?”

“That’s all right,” he told her. “I’ll catch up with him there.”

Built at the crest of an acre lot that sloped off to the rear, the Johnson house was an imposing brick two-story with the multilevel roofline, peaks, and dormers that had come to dominate the landscape these past few years. Tasteful evergreen wreaths tied with red velvet bows adorned every window. A circular concrete drive led to a lower three-car garage and side door before continuing up the slope to the front. An older-model white Hyundai was parked by the garage. Charlie Barefoot’s, Dwight assumed, and quite a contrast to the sporty red Miata that his sister had wrecked last week.

He slowed to a stop and, even though there was no reason to think that Charlie’d had anything to do with the Wentworth killings, he found himself automatically checking the left rear fender for a recent scrape. He did see a ding in the same approximate area as Mrs. Higgins had described, but even from several feet away, he realized that this one had a skin of rust that was too old to have formed since yesterday. He took his foot off the brake and continued on up the slope to the front door, where he got out and rang the bell.

No one immediately answered, so he rang again.

Just as he was reaching for the bell a third time, Sarah Johnson opened the door. She wore black slacks and a black V-neck sweater over a white cotton shirt with french cuffs. Her pretty face was ravaged and even thinner than when he’d seen her at the funeral home on Saturday. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she had a ball of tissues in her hand as if she had been crying, but she managed a watery smile as she invited Dwight in and ushered him past an enormous Christmas tree in the foyer into an informal sunroom at the back that overlooked a winterized swimming pool on a lower level and the woods beyond.

“Malcolm’s not here right now, but do you have news for us?” she asked when they were seated and he had refused her offer of something to drink.

“News?”

“Who put the liquor in Mallory’s drink,” she reminded him. “Malcolm’s convinced that she would still be alive if she’d had her normal reflexes.”

“You don’t?” he asked, hearing something different in her voice.

She leaned her head back against the couch with a tired sigh. “I don’t know, Dwight. I’ve quit trying to understand any of this. It’s not going to bring her back to know, so what difference does it make in the end? First Charlie and now Mallory. I’ve lost them both.”

“Actually, it was Charlie I came to see,” he told her. “Mrs. Barefoot said he was here.”

She sat upright and her expressive eyes were suddenly frightened. “Why do you want him? What have you heard, Dwight?”

“Is there something I should have heard?” he asked gently.

“No, of course not! Everybody’s upset. Nobody’s making sense. Malcolm’s raging around like a wild man and Charlie—”

She broke off and stood up. “He’s downstairs getting some of his things. He’s moved over to Jeff’s parents’ house, and I guess you’ve heard that he took back Jeff’s name?”

Dwight nodded.

“Malcolm’s been good to him, Dwight.” She led the way to a carpeted staircase that curved down into a walk-out lower level. The railing was trimmed in cedar and ivy interlaced with red velvet ribbons. “There’s no reason for Charlie to act like this. Yes, Malcolm spoiled Mallory, but that didn’t mean he never loved Charlie. All daddies spoil their daughters, don’t they? Mine did. I bet Deborah’s did, too.”

Her words sounded to Dwight like an argument she had made so many times that even she no longer believed it.

At the bottom of the stairs lay a pleasant space furnished like a casual den with several couches that faced a large flat-screen television recessed into one wall. A granite-topped wet bar was tucked under the stairs and wide french doors led out to the pool and terrace.

On the wall opposite the stairs were several closed doors.

“Charlie,” Sarah called. “Honey?”

She crossed to one of the doors, gave a light knock, then opened it. “Charlie?”

Through the open doorway, Dwight could see a bedroom furnished in masculine colors and a full bath beyond that. The closet door stood wide and several drawers in the chest were half open. The lights were off, but another set of wide french doors let in enough December daylight to let them see that the rooms were empty.

Back in the den area, Dwight oriented himself and gestured to a door in the corner. “Does that go outside?”

Sarah nodded and Dwight quickly crossed to it. To the left lay the three-bay garage. To the right was the outer door he had noticed when he drove in. It was slightly ajar, and when he stepped outside, he was not surprised to see that the white Hyundai was gone.

CHAPTER 21

Well, I say, I do not see where we are going to get any beautiful gifts at this time of night, what with all the stores being closed, unless we dash into an all-night drug store and buy a few bottles of perfume and a bum toilet set as guys always do when they forget about their ever-loving wives until after store hours on Christmas Eve.

—“Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” Damon Runyon

I drove home in a pleasant state of anticipation that was further heightened when I hung my coat by the kitchen door and Dwight emerged from our bedroom in a fresh dark brown shirt, brown tweed slacks, and a crisply knotted tie in shades of gold and brown. His hair was neatly combed and even his cowlick was temporarily lying flat. He had shaved again and the smell of his aftershave lotion made me weak-kneed as our arms went around each other and our lips met.

He chuckled and looked down at me. “Nothing ol’ married lady about that kiss.”

“A year of practice makes perfect,” I said, kicking off my shoes and unbuttoning my shirt. “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be ready to roll.”

Tomorrow night would be more formal, but I wanted to look soft and alluring tonight. We had reservations at the Mexican restaurant that had led to Dwight’s proposal. Back then, I had shoved the candle on our table aside because it had never crossed my mind that I might have a romantic relationship with this man I had known my whole lifetime. Candlelight would be welcome this time, though. I changed into a dark red blouse with a ruffled plunging neckline, and added dangly earrings that would sparkle in the flickering flame. My hair was loose, my skirt was tight, and my red patent leather heels were as high as I planned to be by the end of the evening.

I had just slipped the second one on when I heard Dwight say, “Yeah, okay. I’ll call Sheriff Poole and we’ll rendezvous there in thirty-five minutes.”

A moment later: “Bo? Looks like we’ve got ’em!… Yeah, the truck and three of the crew, and they’re heading in… Okay, I’ll meet you at Tinker’s Crossroads in fifteen minutes.”

He had already hung his tie on the back of a chair, and when he saw me standing in the doorway, his face mirrored excitement and regret.

“I’m so damn sorry, Deb’rah, but I’ve got to go. The drug squad’s finally located that panel truck and it’s leading them right back to the area we suspected. If we catch these guys tonight, we can—” He groaned as he took in how I looked. “I wish I could wrap you in cellophane till I get back.”

“Too bad, Major Bryant,” I said, trying to keep it light. “Next time you see me, I’ll be in flannel pajamas.”

Disappointed though I was, I nevertheless reached for the shirt he was shucking off and hung it and his slacks back in his closet while he changed into jeans, pulled on a long-sleeved dark jersey, and fastened his Kevlar vest over that.

There was no point in pouting or stomping my foot. I knew what I was getting when I married him, and this was a case the narcotics squad had been trying to nail down for over a month. They had a tip that the dealers were using a panel truck as a mobile lab to cook up methamphetamine, but so far, the truck had roamed the area undetected.

“Tucker says they’ve been stealing license plates and magnetic signs off other truck doors every few weeks,” Dwight said as he strapped on his gun. “No wonder we couldn’t get a fix on them. Though how they can cook it up in a van and still be able to breathe and drive beats me.”

He shook his head again as he looked at me. “I wish…”

“Yeah,” I said softly, more than mollified by his regret. “Me, too.”

“Don’t wait up. God knows when I’ll get home.”

“Don’t worry about me, darling. I’ll fix myself a ham sandwich and—”

He was shaking his head with a rueful smile.

“What?”

“Good luck on that one. Reese and Annie Sue put a hurting on that ham at lunch, and some of the other kids showed up to polish it off. They did leave the bone if you want to make pea soup.”

He grabbed the navy windbreaker with large white lettering that ID’d him as an officer of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, gave me a long hard kiss, promised he’d be careful, and then he was gone.

Hey! Happy anniversary, Deborah!

* * *

Twenty-five minutes later, dressed now in jeans, a UNC sweatshirt, and ratty old house slippers, I was rummaging in the refrigerator, trying to decide what I was in the mood for, when Bandit yipped and trotted over to the door that led into the garage. A moment later, I heard voices inside the garage itself. None were deep enough to be Haywood’s rumbling bass tones, but I half expected to open the door and see him there. Instead, I found myself looking into the surprised faces of Annie Sue, Reese, and several other nieces and nephews clustered around the fuse box. Or rather, around the fuse boxes. I hadn’t noticed that we now had two boxes where before there had been only one. The second one was open.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Aunt Deborah?” Annie Sue whirled on her cousin Stevie. “I thought you said you saw Uncle Dwight’s truck go by.”

“I did!” He gave me an accusing look. “He said y’all were going out to dinner tonight to celebrate your anniversary.”

“He got called in to work at the last minute,” I said. “So why are y’all here?”

They looked at Annie Sue, who said glibly, “We were on our way for pizza and I got them to stop by and help me test the new circuit breakers. I knew it would go faster if I could have someone flip the wall switches in each room.”

With that, she briskly deployed the kids throughout the house and had them call out their locations to her as they switched the lights on and off while she kept watch on the fuse boxes. For some reason, they seemed to find the exercise highly amusing.

By the time she pronounced that everything was in order, they had talked me into going out for pizza with them even though I offered to order in.

“Why don’t we stay here and watch A Christmas Story?” I said, something we’d been doing ever since enough of them were old enough to drive.

“We can do that after,” Jessica said. “You don’t want us spilling pepperoni or tomato sauce on your couch. C’mon, Aunt Deborah. It’ll be fun.”

I knew that the fun part would be getting me to pay for their pizza, but what the hell?

“I get to pick where we go, though,” I told them and they didn’t argue when I chose Big Ed’s New York Slice, one of the new cafés that has opened up in the same nearby shopping center as the NutriGood grocery store. Big Ed’s is a little more expensive than the pizza chains, but the taste is exponentially better. I might mourn for the farm that this shopping center has replaced, but when one of those incredible pizzas is set down on the table before me, it feels almost like an equal trade.

Heading for eight o’clock on a Monday night this close to Christmas, we had the place to ourselves except for a few people in and out to pick up orders to go. We pushed two tables together and were debating toppings when I realized that Annie Sue, Reese, and Stevie were missing. Counting Zach and Barbara’s daughter Emma, who seemed to have heard about the impromptu party through osmosis, there were only eight of us.

“Oh, they said to start without them,” said Seth and Minnie’s son John. “Stevie’s riding with Annie Sue and Reese and she wanted to drop off the new boxes at Uncle Zach’s and Uncle Robert’s. You know how he and Aunt Doris love to talk. They said if they don’t get here in time, just to bring them one back.”

The pizza maker on duty was a muscular middle-aged transplant from New Jersey—“Ed usually takes Monday nights off”—who was willing to pile a full pie’s worth of anchovies on the three slices that Jane Ann and I planned to split.

“Just make sure none of that rotten fish juice gets on our slices,” said A.K.

For some reason, Jane Ann and I are the only ones in the whole family who like them. Even Dwight, who eats everything from raw oysters to calamari, thinks they’re an abomination.

“Don’t worry, I’ll serve them separately,” said the chef, who admitted he couldn’t stand them either.

Ruth said she could tolerate their smell as long as she didn’t have to eat any, and she took a chair on the other side of me. “I uploaded pictures of us making cookies Saturday, Aunt Deborah, and I sent you the link. Did you see them? There’s a real cute one of you and Cal.”

“I got the link,” I told her, “but I haven’t had a chance to look at the pictures yet.”

Carols sung in Italian formed a seasonal backdrop to the happy chatter of my nieces and nephews as the ones who’d been away at college caught up with the kids still in high school. Suggestions were batted back and forth for get-togethers that would include girl-and boyfriends after Christmas, but for tonight they seemed to enjoy just being with each other, part of the close-knit clan we’ve all known since infancy. I know that some of them will eventually scatter to the four corners of the country, like Adam, Frank, Ben, and Jack, who come home so infrequently that their children are like strangers to us. Haywood and Isabel are mildly worried that Jane Ann seems interested in a classmate from Oregon, and who knows where Will and Amy’s Jackson will wind up if he does make it to the major leagues after college?

My bittersweet musings were interrupted by an Italian version of “Jingle Bells” that made everyone laugh.

Our pizzas came, hot and crispy and fragrant with oregano and basil. I went ahead and ordered a final large pie to take home if the others didn’t get there in time. At the rate the slices were disappearing, that would be in about fifteen minutes. A.K. sat on the other side of his sister and could almost eat a whole one by himself. Ruth had to snake a slice of the mushrooms and sausage he was working on before it was all gone. I paid with my credit card, and when my copy of the receipt arrived, she picked it up and said, “I wish whoever threw out that trash last week had paid with a credit card.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my mouth full of hot melted mozzarella and salty anchovies.

“I told you about it. Remember? When the others were fixing the memorial where Mallory crashed? I picked up all the trash I saw along both sides of the road so it’d look nice. One of the things on the opposite shoulder of the road was a Bojangles’ box, and a receipt had blown a little further down the road in the ditch. When we pick up the trash on our road, I always look to see if there’s any way to tell who dumped it, don’t you?”

I swallowed and nodded. It’s amazing how many people will litter without realizing they might be tossing stuff with their names and addresses on it: credit card receipts, sales slips, old bills, junk mail. Our family has adopted the main road past the farm, and one or another of us is out there a couple of times a month to clean the shoulders and ditches. Haywood’s occasionally taken garbage over to the address of the people who dumped it and politely asked them to quit littering on our road. Haywood’s six feet tall and built like a Hummer, so most folks don’t argue with him. Especially when he waves a soiled envelope with their name on it in their face.

Ruth took another bite of her pizza and caught a mushroom that threatened to drop onto her shirt. “The thing is, it was from that Bojangles’ at the edge of Cotton Grove and it was time-stamped ten-something the same night Mallory died. I was thinking that since Mallory crashed around ten-thirty, maybe they were driving past and saw something, but they paid cash, so there was no name on the receipt.”

“Too bad you didn’t save it,” I said.

“I almost did. Along with all the other garbage. I stuck the bag in the trunk of Jess’s car and then forgot about it till we were at your house Saturday morning. I guess I should have mentioned it to Uncle Dwight instead of just dumping it in y’all’s garbage pail.”

Which meant that it was gone, because Dwight always takes our garbage to the dump on Saturday mornings.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told Ruth as Jane Ann slid my half of the third pizza slice onto my plate. “The troopers probably would have picked it up if they’d thought it had any use.”

When we got back to the house around nine-thirty, I saw flashlights bobbing around down by the pond.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pausing on the porch to squint out into the darkness.

“Just Reese and Stevie,” said Annie Sue, who had come out on the porch when she heard all the cars pull up. “Bandit got out and we heard him barking down there so they went to see if it was a deer or something.”

“I hope Reese didn’t have his rifle with him,” I said. “He knows better than to jacklight a deer.”

“Oh, Aunt Deborah!” Ruth said. “You know Reese wouldn’t do something like that.”

The others laughed and I just shook my head at her innocence.

Bandit came bounding up, his paws wet and muddy. I grabbed his collar and reached for the old towel I keep hanging on a nail so that I could wipe him down before he tracked mud into the house.

“What was it?” I called when the two boys were within hearing distance.

“What was what?” asked Reese as he and Stevie came up on the porch.

“What Bandit was barking at,” Annie Sue said quickly. “I told her y’all went to see if it was a deer that got him so excited.”

“Oh.” Reese switched off his flashlight. He carried a screwdriver in his other hand.

I laughed. “What were you going to do? Stab it with that?”

“No telling what spooked him,” Stevie said. “Is that pizza I smell? I’m starving.”

We went inside and unboxed the food. In addition to a whole pizza, we had brought back several uneaten slices from our supper. Emma’s brother Lee had turned up while we were gone and he dug in, too. Some of the kids played with Dwight’s train while I made fresh coffee and brought out the jug of iced tea I keep in the refrigerator. A.K. and Lee asked to microwave some popcorn. When everyone had a beverage of choice and a bowl of popcorn within easy reach, I slid the DVD of Jean Shepherd’s sweet tale of boyhood Christmas yearning into the player and we settled down to watch, some on the couches and chairs, others stretched out on the floor with cushions under their chins. We know all the best lines and a running obbligato echoed the soundtrack—“You’ll shoot your eye out” and “You stay away from that turkey.” It still cracks us up when Ralphie comes downstairs in those bunny pajamas.

At the final fade-out, there were yawns and stretches and a general movement toward the door with thanks for the pizza and hugs all around.

When the last car and truck had left the yard, I whistled for Bandit and began stacking the dishwasher with the glasses and mugs.

Dwight came home as I sat at the coffee table with my laptop to download the pictures Ruth had posted on one of the photo sites. He noted the cushions all over the floor and sniffed the air. “Popcorn and pizza? The kids must’ve been over again.”

“Hey, you should’ve been a detective,” I teased.

“Hope you saved me a slice.”

“Actually, there’s one with pepperoni and meatballs and one with pepper and onions,” I told him. “How it escaped A.K.’s notice is beyond me. That boy’s got hollow legs. How’d it go tonight?”

“Six arrests, several grams of crank, and we confiscated some unregistered guns and a van that’s got to be decontaminated. Guess how they sealed off the front seat from the fumes in the back of the van.”

“Duct tape?” I asked.

He laughed. “How’d you guess?”

“Oh come on, Dwight! You know perfectly well that my brothers would have to give up farming if they ever quit making duct tape. That and baling wire’s the only thing holding half their equipment together.”

I set my laptop on the dining table, then stuck the pizza in the toaster oven to reheat while he drew a glass of his homemade beer from the tap Daddy had given him last year so that he could keg his brew instead of bottling it.

“What’s that you’re looking at?” he asked, peering over my shoulder at the computer screen.

“Pictures that Ruth posted from Saturday. Awww. Look at Cal and Mary Pat!”

He pulled up a chair beside me to eat his supper and watched while I flipped through the thirty or so pictures from this year’s cookie-baking session. Dwight wanted to linger on the one of Cal and me that Ruth had mentioned. She had snapped the shutter at the exact moment that Cal was cracking an egg while I watched in amusement.

“Get her to make me a copy of that one, okay?” he said.

As I moved the cursor up to click off the album, he stayed my hand. “What’s that?”

“That?” I clicked to begin again in full-screen mode the slide show I had downloaded from Ruth’s site. “This was the other morning when the cheerleader team and some of Mallory’s friends went out to the crash site and put up their memorial to her.”

Ruth had documented every aspect of the morning: the cars parked along the shoulder, the plastic flowers and little wooden cross being taken out of the car trunks, and the girls as they arranged it all on the ditchbank where Mallory’s car had gouged out raw hunks of earth when it flipped. There was a picture of the short skid marks and then a long view of the whole scene from further back.

As everyone had commented, the road there was straight and level. Woods rose up on one side, the trees draped in dead kudzu vines. On the side where the car had flipped lay a fallow field.

“Why’d she take a picture of that stuff?” Dwight asked when we came to the one of some beer cans and a yellow Bojangles’ box.

I explained Ruth’s decision to clean up the litter and described how she had found a receipt that was time-stamped within a half hour or so of the wreck.

“Yeah? Too bad she didn’t bring it to me,” he said.

“That’s what I told her. And she almost did. The bag was still in the trunk of Jess’s car when they got here Saturday morning, but she threw it in one of our garbage cans.”

I closed the file and turned off my laptop.

Dwight carried his plate and glass back to the sink and went on into the bedroom. I picked up the cushions and a few stray pieces of popcorn, then switched off the lights and followed.

When I got there, Dwight was already in bed and he propped himself up on one elbow to watch as I slipped off my jeans. “I’m really sorry about tonight, Deb’rah. I wanted this to be special. Make you think you were right to marry me.”

“Oh, darling, do you really think a date on the calendar is going to make a difference in how I feel about you?”

“And I was too damn busy to stop in somewhere and get you a present.”

I shook my head at him. “We agreed we weren’t going to give each other anything, remember?”

“No,” he said. “You agreed. I didn’t. I guess you’ll just have to make do with that.”

He lifted my pillow and there sat a small flat velvet box.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Happy anniversary, Mrs. Bryant.”

I lifted the lid. Nestled on a velvet bed was a narrow gold circlet etched in tiny leaves and flowers. As I lifted it out to slide it onto my wrist, I saw that it had been engraved inside with today’s date and the words One year, but who’s counting?

“Oh, Dwight, it’s beautiful!” I threw myself down beside him so that I could hug him properly.

“I thought it would go with the bracelet Miss Sue left you.”

“It will,” I agreed, lifting my arm in the air to admire the way it looked and imagining how it would look when paired with the blue forget-me-nots of that other bracelet. “I just wish I had something for you.”

“Actually, you do.” He grinned and tugged at the waistband of my Carolina sweatshirt. “But first we need to get rid of these flannel pajamas.”

(Ping!)

CHAPTER 22

There was a startled stillness, and then the colonel said slowly, “Please say seriously what all this means.”

—“The Flying Stars,” G. K. Chesterton

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—TUESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 23

Good job, everybody,” Dwight said next morning as his briefing with the CCSD drug squad wound down.

While most drug users claimed they were hurting no one but themselves, meth labs with their volatile chemicals were serious health hazards to everyone living at the site, especially any children; and decontamination was a growing drain on EPA resources. Sometimes the only solution was complete demolition, which was the probable fate of the van they had seized last night.

“Wish we had some good news for you, too, Major,” Deputy Mayleen Richards said glumly when he asked for a progress report on the Wentworth shootings.

“It’s like we’ve hit a brick wall on this case,” Raeford McLamb said. “No leads. Just dead ends. We’ve talked to every name that’s come up. Jason had pissed off the usual number of people for someone like him and so had the younger kid, but as for what motivated someone to gun them down?” He gave a frustrated display of empty hands. “He was drawing unemployment, but Employment Security Commission’s pretty overwhelmed these days and all they could say is that his paperwork was in order. No help there.”

“What about Mrs. Higgins’s bumper?” he asked Denning.

“I brushed along the place where she made contact, but I don’t know if there’s enough there—one really tiny chip and some paint dust. We did get lucky in that the car’s been in her garage since Friday. She doesn’t drive in ice and her daughter took her to church on Sunday, but I don’t know, boss. White on silver?”

“Did that Barbour kid the stepmother mentioned give you anything?”

“Nothing we didn’t already know. He last saw Matt at school on Thursday, right after they announced that the Johnson girl had died. He says the same as everyone else—that if Matt claimed they were an item, he was lying, but he did say that Matt seemed pretty shaken up about her death. Nate Barbour made a smart-ass remark and Matt started cussing him. They mouthed off to each other some more in the parking lot, then Matt drove off alone. Our boy Nate’s been caught with some pot. He’s out on bail right now for shoplifting two cameras from Target, and I gather there was an assault charge that got dismissed. Turns out he worked part-time at the Welcome Home store last summer, but he denies all knowledge of how the store’s stuff wound up in Jason’s shed and was all innocent wide eyes when I asked him about it. I expect we’ll be seeing more of him down the road.”

“What about the grocery store where Matt worked?”

McLamb gave a sour laugh. “Nothing missing, if that’s what you mean. And the manager had no complaints. In fact, he said Matt was pretty reliable. His hours were five till eight, nine if they were really busy or shorthanded, and he usually showed up on time. Did what was expected of him. Thursday night was the first time he’d missed without first calling.”

“Anything from the bullets that killed them?” Dwight asked Denning.

That deputy shook his head. “Sorry, boss. All the slugs show the same characteristic marks, but until we get a gun to match them to, it’s another dead end.”

“What about the rifles you took from Faison’s truck Sunday night? He’s asking for them back.”

“He can have ’em far as we’re concerned. Both guns were dirty so it’s hard to know when they were last fired. Faison’s fingerprints were on both and the victims’ on just one. Nobody else’s. And, of course, they aren’t the murder weapons.” Almost as an afterthought, he said, “One odd thing. I found a piece of plastic wedged into the top of the rifle barrel that Jason borrowed.”

“Plastic?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

Denning handed him a small baggie with a shard of clear rigid plastic inside. There was nothing distinctive about it, so far as he could see. Thinner than window glass. Flat. No discernible curvature.

“There were new scratches on the outside of the barrel tip. Like somebody’d smashed the rifle through a sheet of this plastic. Want me to send it to the SBI lab? See if they can ID it?”

“As backed up as they are? It’ll be six months before they could get around to this.”

“I saw bits of plastic like that on the floor of the trailer when Dalton and I were there yesterday morning,” said Richards, glancing up from her paperwork. “Looked like something got broke and no one got up all the pieces. Want me to go back and get them?”

“No, I have Joy Medlin coming in this afternoon and I’d like you to sit in on the interview.”

“I’ll go,” said Dalton. “It was there at the end of the couch, right, Mayleen?”

She nodded.

“Probably a waste of time,” Dwight said, “but if we do eventually wind up sending it to Garner, might as well send them enough to work with.”

Dwight stopped by the break room, refilled his coffee mug, and went on down to his own office to dig into some of the paperwork that had accumulated on his desk. This was his least favorite part of the job, but he learned long ago that if he did not keep up with the stuff as it came in, disposing of it would take even more time because he would have to go back and refresh his memory. Years ago, while still in the Army, he seemed to remember predictions that computers would eventually do away with paper. So much for predictions.

By 10:30, he was reaching for the last file when his desk phone rang and the duty officer at the front desk said, “Major Bryant? There’s a Charlie Barefoot here to see you.”

“Send him on back,” Dwight said. He signed a final paper, put the file in his out-box, and walked over to the open door.

Watching his onetime teammate’s son walk down the hall was almost like seeing Jeff Barefoot in the halls of their old high school. Same shambling, loose-knit walk, same shock of straw-colored hair, same narrow-set hazel eyes in a long face. Except for some minor updating, he could have been wearing the same uniform: jeans, sneakers, a dark blue Duke hoodie that was unzipped and the hood pushed back on this mild December day. There seemed to be nothing of Sarah in that face. The young man was all Jeff until he gave a sheepish smile and held out his hand, and then it was his mother’s smile.

“Major Bryant? Charlie Barefoot. Sorry I hung up on you like that yesterday. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“No problem.” Dwight gestured to the chair beside his desk. “You’re here now.” He sat down in his own chair and pulled a notepad toward him.

Barefoot sat with his elbows on the arms of the chair and tented his long fingers in front of him. “Mom says you and my real dad played ball together in high school.”

Dwight nodded.

“So you knew all three of them back then?”

For a moment Dwight wondered who was interviewing whom here, then decided to go with the flow for a while. See where it led.

“I was a year ahead of them, but yes, I played with Jeff and Malcolm both. And your mother was a cheerleader. You play?”

“No. I’m as tall as my dad was, but I’m a klutz. What was he like?”

“I didn’t really know him outside the gym. Back in those days, town and country didn’t mix all that much. I was country. Rode the school bus. He and Malcolm were town. And he wasn’t a starter till their senior year, after I graduated.”

“He wasn’t as good?”

Dwight shrugged.

“My granddad says he was better than Dad—Malcolm—my stepfather.”

“He could have been,” Dwight agreed. “He just didn’t want it as badly.”

“And Malcolm always gets what he really wants.” His voice was bitter.

“What he’s willing to work for, Mr. Barefoot.”

“Call me Charlie.”

“Charlie, then. Look, son, I don’t know what your problems are with your dad, but—”

“He’s not my dad.” He glared at Dwight across the desk. “He’s only my stepdad.”

Dwight shook his head. “He may not be your biological father, but he did become your legal parent when he adopted you, and changing your name doesn’t change that.”

“Maybe not legally, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re done. I moved in with my grandparents a few weeks ago. I’m living in my real dad’s old room now and I’ve learned more about him these last few weeks than I knew in my whole life.”

No surprise there, Dwight thought. Remembering the rivalry between Jeff and Malcolm, he doubted if Sarah would have spoken much about her first husband to this boy, and certainly not in front of Malcolm, whereas there would be no brakes on Mrs. Barefoot’s tongue now that she and her husband had him to themselves.

“I’m glad that’s working out for you,” Dwight said. “But I want to ask you about Tuesday night.”

“What about it?”

“Your sister went to a party at Kevin Crowder’s house. Were you there, too?”

The boy shook his head.

“According to your sister’s phone records, she was talking to you when she crashed.”

“No!” He almost strangled on the word and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his thin throat. He tried to meet Dwight’s eyes but his own eyes were filling with tears and he dropped his head. “She called but I didn’t pick up.”

“Why?

“I don’t know. I was driving back to my grandparents’ house.”

“Back from where?”

“Somewhere between Cotton Grove and Garner. I went to see a movie.”

“Go with anyone?”

“No, I wanted to be alone.”

“See anybody you knew?”

“No, I told you. I wanted to be alone.”

“Did you know your sister was going to Kevin Crowder’s party?”

“When we talked earlier that day, she said she might stop in at a party after the game, but she didn’t say where. We didn’t hang out together, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t know the guy, and even if I did, it would’ve been high school kids. Mostly jocks and their crowd.”

“So you wouldn’t know if she was seeing Matt Wentworth?”

“Who?

“Matt Wentworth. He was shot this weekend.”

“Oh yeah, I heard about him and Jason. Mal with a Wentworth? No way!”

“You and Mallory didn’t get along?”

“Look, if you’re asking me if I loved my sister, yes, I did. If you’re asking me if I thought she walked on water like everybody else did, then no, okay?”

“Is that why you didn’t pick up when you saw her name on the screen?”

He shrugged and Dwight sat silently, letting the awkward pause stretch out until Charlie Barefoot blinked first.

“We had a fight when we talked that morning and I was still mad at her,” he admitted, shame and sorrow in his downcast eyes.

“What about, Charlie?”

“N-nothing important. She thought I was being unfair to Da—” He caught himself. “To Malcolm. She didn’t like some of the things I said. She didn’t want me to change my name last spring and she didn’t want me to move out. She said it was a slap in Mom’s face, too. So we fought.”

“Did she leave a message?”

He nodded.

“I’d like to hear it, if you don’t mind.”

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a DVD in a cardboard sleeve. “I downloaded it from my voice mail to my computer so I could save it, and I made a copy.”

Dwight reached for it, but Charlie seemed reluctant to let him have it.

“I didn’t listen to it till I was driving to the hospital after Mom called and told me about the accident. I let her listen to it at the hospital while Malcolm was charging around making sure everybody in the emergency room knew who he was and what he expected of them, then I made them a copy the next day. Wednesday.”

He laid the disc on the desktop and stood up. “I can’t stand to listen to it again, so I’m going to go now. If you want to ask me anything else, call me. And leave my mother out of it, okay? She doesn’t answer for me anymore.”

“One final question, Charlie. Was your sister into drugs?”

“Because of what Malcolm’s saying? No way, Major Bryant. As far as she was concerned, drugs—all drugs—were for losers. She wouldn’t even try pot or alcohol. Not because she was so pure and righteous, but because they didn’t fit her image.”

Dwight gave a wry smile. “Too bad more of your generation doesn’t feel that way.”

“Our generation learned it from yours,” the boy said.

When Charlie Barefoot had gone, Dwight took the disc into the detective squad room, explained what it was, and called for a player.

Richards pointed to one atop a file cabinet and as soon as Dwight inserted the disc and pushed PLAY, the room filled with the sound of a car engine, Christmas music from the radio, and the dead girl’s voice.

“Charlie? Damn you, Charlie, why won’t you pick up? You can’t do this to us. To me. To Dad and Mom. Not here at Christmas. You don’t—Omigod! Where did that—? Dim your stupid—Get over! I can’t see! I—oh, shit! No!”

There was a horrendous scream that seemed to go on forever above the music, interspersed by the thumps and bangs of the crash itself. For a moment or two all was quiet except for low whimpers and a half-whispered “Mommy?” that trailed off into silence.

Dwight started to push the eject button, but Richards said, “What was that?”

They listened to the ending again with the volume turned up to maximum.

“Is that a car engine starting up?” asked McLamb.

“And going away,” said Dalton. “Not passing.”

CHAPTER 23

“I wear the chain I forged in life… I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—TUESDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 23

When Dalton returned well before lunch, he brought enough of those plastic pieces that they could fit it together like a jigsaw puzzle. Although most of the edges were missing, enough remained that they could tell it had begun as a six-by-six-inch square with rounded corners. Obviously it had fit onto or over something, but what?

Just as clearly, someone—Jason Wentworth?—had smashed it with the barrel of Willie Faison’s rifle, which was how a shard got wedged inside.

“I went by where Faison was working and asked him if he knew anything about it since he was the one who took the rifle out of that trailer,” said Dalton. “He looked a little freaked, but he didn’t say anything.”

“Well, damn!” As he suddenly recognized what this plastic had once covered, Dwight slapped the table so hard that the pieces slid apart. “Of course! Go haul Faison’s sorry ass in here.”

“Huh?”

In a few terse words, Dwight told Dalton why. “And get a search warrant for his truck.”

Grinning, Dalton hurried off to do as he was told, and in less than two hours he was back with a very apprehensive Willie Faison. Dalton had also retrieved the broken flashlight Dwight had remembered seeing in Faison’s truck box Sunday night and had bagged it up along with a few more shards of the rigid plastic lens, which he had found on the bottom of the box.

“It’s yours, right?” Dwight asked him when they were seated in the interview room with the flashlight on the table between them.

“Yessir.” The slender young man wore muddy jeans, scuffed leather high-tops, and a red plaid wool work shirt over a red tee. His dark eyes were wary as he searched the big deputy’s face for a hint of what was coming.

“Part of the stuff you wanted back from Jason Wentworth?”

“And he went and broke it,” Faison said indignantly. “You know how much them things cost?”

“I can imagine,” Dwight said. “Halogen bulb? That’s a real powerful light for crawling around under houses looking for busted water pipes. What was Jason going to use it for?”

Faison shrugged his thin shoulders. His hands were large and work-stained and already well callused. When he nervously brushed back a lank of dark hair from his forehead, Dwight saw skinned knuckles where the young man had evidently lost a struggle with a rusty pipe joint.

“There was no deer stand and no Wednesday morning deer hunt, was there, Willie? We know why Jason borrowed your gun and this flashlight. He was going to show his little brother how to hunt deer at night, wasn’t he? Did you go along to hold the light?”

“No! I didn’t go. I told you—I quit doing dumb stuff like that. He already lost his own gun for doing that and I told him if he wound up with the law taking mine, I was gonna take it out of his hide with a pipe wrench.”

“So who did go on that hunt with them?”

“Guy named Jack McBane was supposed to go with Jase. It was just gonna be the two of them, but they had a falling-out, so he said the hell with it, he’d take his brother instead.”

“What was the falling-out about?”

“Something to do with Jack’s girlfriend. That’s all I know. Honest.”

“Jackson Dwayne McHenry, aka Henry Jackson, aka Dwayne Jackson,” said McLamb, reading McBane’s adult record off the computer screen. It was a record of escalating violence. He had punched out a store clerk at the age of sixteen, torn off part of someone’s ear in a bar fight at eighteen, was arrested for shooting up a car at twenty.

As the list grew, they were beginning to think this could be their man, until McLamb uttered an involuntary expletive.

“He was tried in district court here last Friday. Found guilty of a misdemeanor DWI, Level One, and was immediately taken into custody. Damn! Talk about an ironclad alibi.”

“McHenry’s probably not the only violent guy Jason Wentworth ran with,” Dwight said. “Maybe the flashlight got smashed in a fight. Keep digging.”

Joy Medlin showed up at 1:30 right on schedule. To Dwight’s surprise, however, she had been driven there not by her mother or father but by Jessica Knott, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Deborah’s brother Seth.

Dressed in a dark blue warm-up suit, the injured cheerleader maneuvered into the interview room on crutches. The room was bare except for a metal table and four chairs. As Mayleen pulled out one of the chairs and reminded her that they had met before, Dwight shot an inquiring glance at his niece by marriage. Tall and sturdily built, with her grandfather’s clear blue eyes, she wore black stretch pants and a red cardigan over a white turtleneck jersey. Her earrings were small gold bells that gave a tiny jingle when she moved her head.

Giving him a don’t-blame-me shrug, she murmured, “Sorry, Uncle Dwight. She seems to think you won’t be as rough on her if I’m here.”

“And why would I be rough on her?” he asked.

She did not answer, but moved on into the room to take her friend’s crutches and prop them in a corner.

He and Mayleen sat down at the table across from the two girls. When introductions had been made all around and the girls had asked to be called by their first names, Dwight said, “Joy, I’m told that you and Mallory Johnson were best friends since first grade?”

The girl nodded, her eyes wide and frightened.

Of what? Dwight wondered. Taking a second, harder look at her, he could see that she was basically a pretty young woman. Or had been. Today her face was gray and pinched. There were deep shadows, almost like bruises, under her eyes, and her jaw was tight, as if she were clenching her teeth.

Why?

And then he remembered that Jessica had told him at lunch yesterday that Joy planned to wean herself off all painkillers over the holidays.

“Are you sure you feel up to this?” he asked.

She nodded. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not trying to quit your pain medication cold turkey, are you?”

“No, sir. My doctor told me I could keep gradually increasing the time between doses. I’m due for another at three. I can make it.” Her smile was probably a ghost of what it once was. “In fact, being here takes my mind off the clock.”

“Did you know Matt Wentworth?”

“No, sir. I mean, I know he got killed this weekend, but he was a freshman and…” She hesitated. “Not to say something ugly about someone that just died, but he really wasn’t anybody who…”

She looked to Jessica for help.

“He ran with a different crowd,” Jessica said smoothly.

“Yes.”

“What about Mallory? Did she ever go out with him?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. He told his stepmother that she was his girlfriend and that he gave her a necklace for her birthday last weekend and took her to a movie.”

“Mallory? Not in a million years, Major Bryant. She wouldn’t be seen dead with—”

Her eyes filled with tears as she realized what she had said. She brushed them away impatiently. “Besides, her birthday’s in June, not December.”

“How old are you, Joy?” Dwight asked abruptly.

“Eighteen. Why?”

“Legally you’re an adult now, but before I go further, I need to tell you that you have the right to counsel.”

“A lawyer?” Her eyes widened even more. “Do I need one?”

“I don’t know and I can’t advise you on that.”

“Anything I say can and will be used against me?” In a wry voice, she said, “Isn’t that what they say on all the cop shows?”

He did not return the smile. “That part’s accurate.”

“Uncle Dwight!” Jessica protested.

“I’m sorry, Jess, but this may be a murder investigation and she has to be warned.”

“Murder?” said Jessica. “It was an accident. She swerved off the road and wrecked her car. How could that be murder?”

“Jess, honey, I think you ought to wait outside.”

“No, please, let her stay,” said Joy.

Until then, Mayleen Richards had been silent. Now she placed a calming hand on the girl, who was becoming increasingly distraught. “He’s right, Joy.”

“But shouldn’t I be here as her witness or something?” Jessica asked, reluctant to abandon her friend.

“Not unless you’ve suddenly acquired a law degree, Jess. There’s a bench out there in the hall. Go sit on it, please, and close the door when you leave.”

Half angry, half scared, Jessica did as she was told.

Once the door was closed, Dwight again reminded Joy that she was entitled to an attorney.

“I don’t want a lawyer,” Joy said. “I want to get this over with.”

“As you wish. Do you see that camera over the door?”

She nodded.

“We’re going to record your statement. Richards?”

In a quiet voice, the deputy recited the date and time, the people present, then gave the girl a formal reading of her rights. “Do you understand that, Miss Medlin?”

“Yes.”

“And you waive your right to an attorney of your own free will?”

“I do.”

“Do you wish to make a statement at this time?” Dwight asked.

“Yes, please.” She took a deep breath. “I want to confess to causing Mallory’s death.”

“How did you do that?”

“I put a Vicodin tablet and some vodka in a Coke and switched cans with her when she wasn’t looking.”

“When was that?”

“About ten or fifteen minutes before she left the party.”

“Was it your pill or Mrs. Crowder’s?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was mine, but I lost count when they got mixed up.”

“So you were the one who stole Mrs. Crowder’s pills?”

Joy nodded. “Everybody knows I’ve been taking Vicodin for my ankle and Kevin said his mother was taking them, too, and that they seemed to be pretty strong and she was trying to do without them. I figured that meant they would be in her medicine cabinet. Our friends were all over the house, so I used the master bathroom and found them in the medicine cabinet.”

“Why?” asked Dwight.

“Because I was hurting and my doctor wouldn’t give me anything stronger. I still had five days to go before I could get a refill and I was down to just three days. So I poured Mrs. Crowder’s pills into my prescription bottle. Only I didn’t realize that hers were twice as strong as mine till after I got home and looked at them more closely.”

“And that’s what you gave Mallory?”

“I thought it was mine, but it must have been Mrs. Crowder’s. Why else would she run off the road like that?” Tears rolled down her cheeks and she fumbled in her purse for tissues so that she could blow her nose. “I mean, I heard afterwards that she was taking Benadryl for her cold, but even with that and the vodka, one of my regular pills shouldn’t have made her so groggy that she would crash. I didn’t mean for her to die, Major Bryant,” she sobbed. “Honest. I thought maybe she might sideswipe a mailbox or go in the ditch. Like being drunk or something. So that for once everyone wouldn’t think she was perfect—that she could mess up, too.”

“Is that why you’re taking yourself off the Vicodin?”

She nodded, shamefaced. “I don’t care how much it hurts anymore. At least I can still hurt and Mallory can’t. And it’s all my fault.”

“Were you jealous of her, Joy?”

“I hated her!” the girl said vehemently.

That surprised both officers. “I thought she was your best friend.”

“No. That’s what she said. That I was her best friend.”

Dwight glanced at Mayleen for help.

“Why did you hate her, honey?” the deputy asked.

“Stacy and Ted are dead because of her. Dana might as well be dead, and I’m going to limp the rest of my life. All because she wanted to mess up what Stacy and I had.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’d been putting the moves on him for over a week, pretending like it was all in fun, that coming on to him was just playing. I told him that, too, but he was, like, flattered. She was so pretty and so hot, he didn’t care if it was a game with her or not. I told her to quit it, but she wouldn’t. She kept texting him sexy messages. He thought she was going to put out for him when she’d never done it with anybody. That night—okay, I know he’d had a couple of beers too many and maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly, but all the same…”

She shook her head angrily. “See, she suddenly quit texting him. That was part of her game. Go after them till they respond and then quit cold like she was going to drop them. Bang! She wouldn’t answer her phone if they called and she wouldn’t text them back. It drove guys crazy. It drove Stacy crazy. He kept checking his phone even though I was sitting right there beside him. Then finally, while we were driving home after a game, she texted him. Told him that if he dropped me off early, he could call her when he was alone and they could have phone sex. Oh, that’s not what she wrote, but that’s what she meant, and he got so excited, he just stomped on the gas. Two minutes later, he was dead and my ankle was shattered in a million pieces.”

She pulled more tissues from her purse and blew her nose and wiped her eyes, but the tears kept coming.

“So, yes, I hated her for that, but I swear I never meant to kill her. I didn’t!”

At that, she turned to Mayleen.

“What’s going to happen to me? Will I have to go to prison? Oh, God! Mama and Daddy! This is going to wreck their lives.”

“I don’t know,” Dwight told her honestly. “It will be up to the district attorney. We still don’t have all the details of that night.” He pushed a legal pad over to her side of the desk. “For now, though, I want you to write out what you just told us about taking Mrs. Crowder’s pills and how you put a pill and some vodka in a Coke and gave it to Mallory. Then sign and date it.”

“And then I can go home?”

“And then you can go home. Just promise me you won’t do something stupid.”

“Like kill myself?” She gave a bitter laugh. “I thought about it. I felt so bad, I almost took all of Mrs. Crowder’s pills. But then I knew I couldn’t do that to my parents. Seeing how torn up Mallory’s folks are?” She shook her head. “This is going to hurt them when they find out what I’ve done, but not like it would if I killed myself.”

CHAPTER 24

The southern colonies, largely rural and unhampered by Quaker and Puritan dissenters… cultivated Christmases of a very different sort.

—Christmas in America, Penne L. Restad

With Christmas bearing down upon us, I could understand why the DA’s office wanted to reduce the backlog of cases that had built up under Chester Nance’s poor management, but when ADA Julie Walsh handed me yet another batch of miscellaneous add-ons that various attorneys had pushed to be heard that Tuesday afternoon, I guess I let my exasperation show.

Although it goes against my grain to badmouth a Democrat, in my heart of hearts, I really wish Nance’s moderate and extremely efficient Republican opponent had won.

“Sorry, Your Honor,” Walsh apologized. “I’m pretty sure these are the last of the day.”

Julie Walsh looks like a sweet little schoolteacher with her sandy blond hair in a loose braid, sensible pumps, and a businesslike tweed jacket over a black turtleneck and black slacks, but she has the persistence of a dog worrying a bone when she’s pushing for a conviction, so I listened to the plea bargains she had worked out with the accused and their attorneys and agreed with most of them, although I did increase a couple of the penalties and lowered some of the others depending on the aggravating or mitigating circumstances of each case.

Not everything was serious that afternoon and a certain holiday lightheartedness permeated the proceedings once a twelve-year-old child took the witness stand to testify that yes, indeed, she certainly did see the defendant pick up a two-by-four and smack her uncle on the head. With the face of an angel, blond curls, bright blue eyes, and a ruffled white blouse, she could have stepped off a Christmas card. She placed her small hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Because of her age, I leaned forward and said, “Do you understand what you just said, Taylor?”

Taylor nodded her curly blond head. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And do you know what will happen if you don’t tell the truth?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” she said earnestly. “I’ll go to hell and the devil’s fiery furnace.”

Suppressing a smile, I told Ms. Walsh she could proceed. I thought it was safe to assume that we’d hear nothing but truthful answers to her questions.

In the late afternoon, I looked up and saw my niece Jessica enter the courtroom. There was a lull in the proceedings as Walsh conferred with an attorney who wanted to change his client’s plea, and I motioned Jess forward.

“What’s up?” I asked in a low voice, seeing the unhappiness on her face.

“Uncle Dwight wanted to talk to Joy—Joy Medlin—and she asked me to come with her. But now he won’t let me stay in the room. She said she didn’t want a lawyer, but I’m afraid she’s going to say something she’ll wish she hadn’t and shouldn’t she have somebody in there with her? Somebody on her side?”

“How old is she, honey?”

“Eighteen. And yes, I do know that means she’s an adult and can speak for herself, but she’s hurting so bad, she can’t be thinking clearly.”

“Did you call her parents?”

“No. She didn’t want them to know where we were going.” Her eyes were troubled as she confessed, “They think we’re Christmas shopping.”

Joy Medlin had been at that party, so if she was now spilling her soul to Dwight, it wasn’t much of a stretch to wonder if she was responsible for the alcohol in Mallory’s bloodstream.

“I’m sorry she didn’t wait and get an attorney,” I told Jess, “but your Uncle Dwight’s not going to put thumbscrews on her. He’ll go by the book.”

“But—”

“Don’t worry, Jess. For what it’s worth, if she tells him anything that’s self-incriminating—if—I imagine an attorney will find a way to get it tossed out.”

It was Job’s comfort, but the best I could offer under the circumstances, and she accepted it glumly.

“Now I’ve really got to get back to work. Are you still sitting with Cal tonight?”

She nodded and I watched her leave as unhappy as when she came. I couldn’t fathom why Joy would spike her best friend’s Coke, if indeed that’s what she’d done, but I’ve had enough teens in my courtroom—hell! I’ve watched enough of my own teenage nieces and nephews mess up—to know that they can do stupid and impulsive things without considering the consequences.

Like Frederick Arnold Hallman, seventeen, white, brand-new short haircut, and dressed in a gray suit he had outgrown. He rose to plead guilty to setting off a string of firecrackers inside a local movie house. An elderly black man had thought a trigger-happy gunman was firing randomly and promptly had a heart attack. The man had recovered and the boy had been so genuinely remorseful that he had mowed the man’s grass all summer and they had become friends. With the older man there to speak on his behalf, I gave an appropriate fine, added some community service, and put the boy on unsupervised probation for six months.

My last case for the day was a middle-aged black man who had violated his probation so that he was not only on the hook now for his original suspended sentence, but was about to get an additional three months’ prison time.

This was not the first time he’d faced lockup, and his attorney had come prepared. “Your Honor, my client hopes that in view of the season, you’ll let his two sentences run concurrently rather than consecutively.”

Her client was nodding vigorously and I fixed the man with a stern look. “And why should I do that, Mr. Adams?”

“ ’Cause of all my hardships, ma’am. See, I’ve got a lot of people depending on me. My mama’s got the sugar, my wife’s real poorly, and now my daughter’s got the smiling mighty Jesus.”

“The what?” I asked.

“The smiling mighty Jesus,” he repeated.

I looked at his attorney, who with a perfectly straight face said, “I believe his daughter has spinal meningitis, Your Honor.”

“In the spirit of the season, hmm?” I said, matching her deadpan face. “Very well, then, Mr. Adams. Both sentences to run concurrently. And I hope your daughter recovers soon.”

Bridesmaids are always being told that those long Cinderella-type gowns they’re required to buy can be worn again to cocktail parties and formal occasions.

Not true.

And the three short dresses I’ve walked down various aisles in? One was a sickly shade of brown for an autumn wedding, one was stiff satin in Pepto-Bismol pink for Valentine’s Day, and the third had a lime green bodice, a wide coral waistband, and a turquoise flared skirt. (I believe that wedding was supposed to evoke the beach.)

So when I picked out my wedding dress, I really did plan to wear it again. The strapless silk brocade sheath had a side slit to make dancing easier and was the color of pale champagne. A matching fitted jacket had kept it ladylike for the wedding, but tonight I substituted a silky soft stole woven in subtle stripes that merged from pale beige to deep gold. I had put my hair up in a modified french twist, and added gold earrings, my new gold bracelet, and a necklace that lay like a flat gold collar. When I emerged from our bedroom, the look on Dwight’s face was worth all the trouble I had taken with my makeup.

“Oh, wow, Aunt Deborah!” said Jess.

Cal beamed at us. “You and Dad look really nice.”

I curtsied and Dwight, who looked more than nice in his dark suit, gave a formal half bow, then held my coat for me. As he opened the door and I was giving last-minute instructions, car lights swept across the yard.

“Emma and Ruth and some of the others are coming over, if that’s okay,” Jessica said. “We want to work on our party piece. We’re doing something special this year.”

Every year, we gather at Daddy’s for a big communal Christmas dinner in the potato house where we held our reception last year. After the food is cleared away and gifts have been opened, everyone’s encouraged to step up to the front and perform—to play or sing, recite a funny poem, act out an original skit, or collaborate on something amusing. Mother started the tradition the year she married Daddy as a way to help her young stepsons develop self-confidence. From the conspiratorial grins Jess shared with Cal, this year’s performance might top last year’s. That one had a heavenly choir that swooshed around overhead on swings hung from the rafters while Richard flew down from the back on a cable slide, waving sparklers that almost set the tree on fire.

“No sparklers inside,” Dwight said sternly as the kids trooped past.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Dwight,” Stevie said with a laugh. “It’s warm enough tonight that we can set up on the porch.”

“Set what up?” Dwight asked suspiciously.

“Ask us no questions, we’ll tell you no lies,” chanted Jess, who seemed to have bounced back from the heavy load she was carrying earlier. “Just remember that you promised to call when you’re leaving Dobbs, so we can get all our props cleared away before you get home.”

“And give us time to put out all the fires and sweep up the glass,” Richard added with a mischievous glance at the others.

Delighted to be included in the merriment, Cal straddled the back of the leather couch as if he were riding a horse and called to us that he’d keep an eye on everybody.

They saw us off in high glee.

Dwight and I had both gotten home late and this was the first quiet moment we’d had together. At the end of the drive, before he turned onto the hardtop, Dwight looked over at me and smiled. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey, yourself,” I said and leaned in for a kiss.

“How ’bout we just skip the dance and go check in at the Dik-a-Doo Motel?”

I drew myself up in indignation. “Why, Major Bryant. Just what sort of woman do you think I am?”

“Not think, Judge Knott. Know.”

The moon, now in its last quarter, would not rise until well after midnight, but zillions of stars were crisp sharp points of silver and the air was so clean and clear that the Milky Way swirled with more brilliance than I had noticed in months.

As we drove, I asked him about his interview with Joy Medlin. “Did she admit that she was the one who put booze in Mallory’s Coke?”

“Where on earth did Jess find time to tell you that?”

“She didn’t. She did come up to my courtroom after you kicked her out of your interview with Joy, though. She was worried because Joy was talking to you without an attorney present.”

“Joy Medlin was reminded of her rights,” Dwight said. “More than once.”

“I’m sure she was, darling. I’m not accusing you of anything wrong. But if she was on edge because of taking herself off painkillers, I can just imagine someone like Zack Young arguing about the admissibility of whatever she told you.”

“I’ve been in the burn box before,” he reminded me.

Between Jess, Dwight, and needing to satisfy my own curiosity, I realized I’d have to recuse myself if Joy were charged with a crime and came up before me, so I went ahead and said, “But she did spike Mallory’s drink, right?”

“With more than vodka,” he said grimly. “She threw in a Vicodin for good measure.”

“But why?”

“Remember what Mama told you about how Mallory liked to flirt with other girls’ boyfriends?”

I nodded.

“She was pulling the same thing with the Loring boy. Joy says Mallory texted him just before he wrecked the car and offered to give him good phone sex once he was alone.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Joy blamed Mallory for the wreck and she’s probably right. Mayleen’s going to get the phone company to pull that message. If it’s as raw as Joy says it was, there’s no question it would have excited a horny teenage boy who’d had too much to drink and was hot to dump his passengers and get home.”

“Oh, Lord.” I sighed.

“Yeah.” He pulled a DVD from his jacket pocket. “Look, I don’t want to spoil the whole evening, but would you mind if I play a disc that Charlie Barefoot made of Mallory’s last voice mail? She was leaving him a message when she crashed. It’s pretty hard to take, but we’ve all listened to it several times and we can’t quite agree.”

“Agree about what?”

“Listen to it first. I don’t want to influence your interpretation.”

I took the disc and slipped it into the player. A moment later, I heard Christmas music and Mallory’s voice scolding her brother for not picking up and for wrecking the holidays for her and their parents. There was an annoyed injunction to an oncoming car to dim its lights, then the sound of the crash. Her moans and her call for her mother broke my heart and I wondered if Sarah and Malcolm had heard it. When all was silent, I reached out to replay it, but Dwight turned up the volume and said, “No. Listen.”

Very faintly as if from a distance, I heard a motor catch and then fade away.

He gave a nod that I could turn it off and said, “So what’s your take?”

“I need to hear it again,” I said and pressed the play button.

Once again the Christmas music, Mallory’s voice, the crash, and another car engine.

“You hear it?”

“I did,” I told him. “Did you ask Charlie about it?”

He looked puzzled. “Ask him about that other car?”

Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “No, about what he cut out of the message.”

“Huh?”

“Isn’t that what you meant?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll play it again. This time, try not to listen to Mallory’s voice. Listen to the music.”

I pressed PLAY again and a syrupy sweet version of “Silent Night” performed on bells could be heard beneath the dead girl’s voice. This time, because he was listening for it, Dwight could clearly hear that the music skipped a few bars. Had there been singing, it would have been the equivalent of several words missing between “holy infant” and “sleep in heavenly peace.”

“Well, damn!” said Dwight.

CHAPTER 25

It is a fair, even-handed, even noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Have Sarah and Malcolm heard this?” I asked, when Dwight had listened to the disc twice more.

Each playing took away some of the horror and heartbreak for me, but I imagined it would be progressively worse for Mallory’s parents.

“Yeah. Charlie said he let Sarah hear it at the hospital and then he made copies so she could listen to it with Malcolm the next day. I don’t get it, though. Why the hell would he cut it?”

Dwight likes to think that he can compartmentalize and keep his official life strictly separate from the personal, but he’s really not much better at it than I am. Given his druthers, I was pretty sure he’d ditch our dinner dance, drop me back at the house, and go make Charlie Barefoot shake loose an unedited version of the message Mallory had left on his voice mail.

“Look at it logically,” I said as we neared the country club. “If the deletion had anything at all to do with the wreck itself, other people on the road, a big dog or a deer, wouldn’t he leave that in?”

“I guess.”

“So I’ll bet she was probably yelling at him for something he’s either ashamed of or doesn’t want you or Malcolm to know about.”

He dimmed his lights against a steady stream of oncoming vehicles. “How do you make that assumption?”

“What you just said. He let Sarah listen to it at the hospital, so that means she heard an unedited version on his cell phone. He wouldn’t have had time to make a copy yet. I’m willing to bet that what Malcolm heard the next day was the same as this copy here. Maybe he was doing drugs or something that he knew Malcolm would hit the roof over, but that Sarah might let slide. Or maybe he said something ugly to Mallory that he didn’t want Malcolm to know about now that she’s dead. For all we know, he could’ve accused her of sleeping around or breaking up relationships like Joy said and the deletion was about that. Maybe he’d heard a rumor that she was partly to blame for Stacy Loring’s wreck and killing two kids. He’d feel pretty awful if she died upset about something like that, wouldn’t he?”

“I guess,” Dwight conceded.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “If you’ll put this out of your head for tonight and just enjoy the evening, I’ll break our separation of powers agreement this one time so you don’t have to drive all the way into Dobbs tomorrow to find another judge.”

“You’ll sign me a search warrant?”

“Well, it does sound as if he’s concealing evidence in an official investigation. If any other officer gave me this much cause, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Deal?”

He grinned. “And all it’s going to cost me is wining and dining and dancing with you for a few hours?”

“That’s all.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Your Honor.”

An enormous live Christmas tree, decorated in gold ornaments and tiny yellow lights, cast a golden glow over the vaulted entrance hall. Because the country club had been built in the mid-seventies, when new money from the Research Triangle began overflowing from Wake into Colleton County, no corners had been cut. Floor-to-ceiling windows at the rear of the hall overlooked the eighteen-hole golf course, and there were the usual tennis courts, the obligatory outdoor swimming pool, and a small gym with exercise machines.

When I was single, in private practice, and living in Dobbs with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash, I had joined because it was a good place to entertain clients and Uncle Ash was on the membership committee. Once I became a judge, however, I let my membership drop and have had no reason to regret it. Neither Dwight nor I play golf or tennis, we can swim in the pond in warm weather, and we get plenty of exercise working around our yard.

But it’s always fun to come in for special occasions like tonight, and we were greeted by so many old friends and professional acquaintances that it took us over twenty minutes to get to the main ballroom and locate Portland and Avery. Dwight had been slightly self-conscious about not owning a tux, and he was relieved to see that dark suits like his far outnumbered the more formal ones. Uncle Ash looked elegant in his tux, though, and Aunt Zell was beautiful in a rose-colored sleeveless gown with a matching rose-colored lace jacket.

Her hair had turned silver while she was still in her forties and her soft curls brushed my cheek when she greeted me with a kiss. Except for their hair, she and Mother had borne only a fleeting resemblance to each other, and it pained me to realize that Mother would be nearing eighty had she lived.

I showed her the bracelet that Dwight had given me and her smile widened. “I saw it before you did, honey.”

“You did?”

“Dwight came by the house and took lunch with us one day. Before he went and had it engraved, he wanted to know if I thought it’d go with Sue’s bracelet.”

I hugged her again. “I’m glad you said yes.”

“Now y’all be sure to save us both a dance,” said Uncle Ash as he took Aunt Zell’s hand and tucked it on his arm. “I’m gonna want a turn around the floor with the second-prettiest gal here.”

She laughed and patted Dwight’s arm. “And I’ll lower my standards for you, honey.”

We stopped at the reception table to hand in our tickets and get the drink tickets that came with our reservations, then went on into the ballroom that had all the partitions rolled back to create the largest space possible. Avery was on his way back from the bar with two full glasses and he offered to show me our table while Dwight went to fetch our own drinks—bourbon and cola for me, with branch water for him.

“I’d give you a hug,” Avery said, “if I thought I wouldn’t spill my wife’s daiquiri down your back.”

“I’ll consider myself hugged,” I told him, thinking once again how lucky it was that Portland and I genuinely liked each other’s mates. Avery’s an attorney from Wilmington, and when he and Por first hooked up, I’d been afraid it would affect our friendship, but he’s as easygoing as Dwight and has a great sense of humor. Back whenever I was between men and needed a last-minute escort, Avery had never shown any snobbery if I drafted Dwight to make up a foursome, nor had he ever acted as if there was a difference between his law degree and the way Dwight had earned his commission as an officer in the Army. In fact, Por told me later that Avery had early on asked her if I was ever going to wake up to the fact that Dwight was not my brother.

Despite saying that she would get the club manager to pull up two extra chairs to a table for two, Portland seemed to have snagged a table for four. Space between the tables was tight, but there are times when I don’t mind being jammed and squeezed and this was one of those times. The more people, the more festive, and I was smiling happily when I slid into a chair across from my childhood friend.

She just shook her head at me. “I keep forgetting that you love last-minute Christmas shopping, too. Great stole, by the way.”

There was nothing much she could do with dark hair that was so thick and curly except to keep it clipped short, but her crystal earrings flashed sparks of fire and the plunging neckline of her black halter-topped dress showed off a figure she had worked hard to return to its pre-baby slenderness.

“Big difference from last year this time,” I said.

“Oh, honey! Last year this time I was bearing down and cussing Avery and trying to tell my obstetrician I’d changed my mind about having a baby.”

Avery made a big show of looking at his watch and said, “Actually, last year at this precise time, our daughter was already twelve hours old and you were cussing me because I wouldn’t bring you a burger with double cheese and onions and a margarita on the side.”

“And hadn’t I damn well earned them?”

“Right. You’d have given the baby colic right away.”

Their affectionate bickering ended when Dwight joined us, but before he could put our drinks down, Diane Hobbs and her husband Randy appeared at his side. Randy, a recently retired magistrate, was resplendent in a tux with a red paisley cummerbund, and Diane, who works for our dentist, wore a strapless red silk gown that showed off toned upper arms that would have put Michelle Obama to shame.

I thanked her for the chocolate-covered fried pecans she had sent by Dwight. “My nieces and nephews eat anything they can get their hands on, but I think I hid them where they won’t find them. They’re too good to be devoured by kids with underdeveloped taste buds.”

She laughed and announced that she was there to claim a dance with Dwight.

The median age of the people here tonight looked to be about sixty-five and the band had probably been instructed not to play any music written after the fifties unless it was slow versions of the Beatles. That was okay with me. There’s a time and a place for everything and I was totally in the mood for the romantic music of that era.

Randy Hobbs is a dear and he never once stepped on my toes, but I was ready to change partners when “Moonlight in Vermont” came to an end and the band segued into “Moon River.”

For a man of his size and build, Dwight is surprisingly good on the dance floor. He’s not a flashy dancer, no Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly moves, but he gives the impression that he could if he wanted to, which makes it fun to follow his lead.

We found Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash, and after dancing to “Moonlight Becomes You”—“I’m sensing a theme here,” Uncle Ash said dryly—we took a turn around the floor with Luther and Louise Parker to the tune of “Blue Moon.” He’s the district’s first black judge and he was resplendent tonight in a tux with a red-and-gold cummerbund that matched Louise’s long gown.

We returned to our table a moment before Avery and Portland got back, too. Even though the ice had melted in our drinks, they still tasted good after the dancing.

The waiters began to bring out our plates and the band took a break while we ate. I chose the poached salmon and Dwight took the stuffed chicken breast so that we could eat off each other’s plate if one entrée proved less tasty than the other. Por and Avery did the same and Avery insisted on treating us to a bottle of Riesling so that they could toast our anniversary and we could toast the birthday of their daughter, who was home being spoiled by Por’s parents.

With mischief dancing in her dark eyes, Por looked up from buttering her roll and said, “I hear you got a Christmas present this morning.”

I paused with a forkful of dill-dressed salmon in midair, unsure what she meant. “I did?”

“Didn’t Dwight tell you?”

“Tell her what?” he asked.

“Don’t you get a morning report of everyone who’s been arrested overnight?”

“We get it, but I don’t always read it when we’re as busy as we’ve been these last two days,” said Dwight.

“So neither of you know that Zack Young has a new client?”

“Don’t gloat, honey,” Avery said, cutting into his breast of chicken.

“Who?” we both asked her.

“Philip Hamilton.”

“Who?”

“Ellen Englert Hamilton’s seventeen-year-old son. He got pulled last night for a DWI. Blew a point-twelve’s what Gwen told me.”

Gwen Utley’s a magistrate who keeps a jaundiced eye on everything that happens in the courthouse.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

Portland shook her head. “Gwen never kids. She says that the first thing Ellen did when she came down to bail him out early this morning was call Zack Young. The second thing she did was resign from being president of the Colleton County MADD chapter. When it comes to throwing the book at a DWI, it would appear that being a mom trumps everything else.”

Okay, it was mean of us. It was petty and uncharitable and totally callous. Nevertheless, Portland and I high-fived each other right there in the Dobbs country club and Avery had to catch the wine bottle we almost knocked over.

“We must be getting old,” I said as we drove home that night. “There was a time when I’d’ve been embarrassed to leave a dance before midnight.”

Portland had started yawning at nine-thirty, and when they decided to pack it in at ten, Dwight and I realized we were ready to head on home, too.

As promised, I called Jess to let her know we were on our way.

“Any progress in the Wentworth murders?” I asked once we had cleared town and were back in the country. I had been shocked to hear that those two bodies had lain exposed to the freezing rain and sleet for almost three days and he had amused me by describing Mrs. Alma Higgins of the four husbands.

Now I listened while Dwight described how they seemed to have hit a dead end after he realized that the brothers had probably been jacklighting deer again and that Faison confirmed it. “Faison did give us the name of a guy who had potential as our killer.”

“But?”

“But he was in your court Friday morning and you gave him jail time.”

“Oh. Sorry about that.”

“Me, too. But you know all that equipment that was missing from the Welcome Home store? I forgot to tell you. We found it in a shed back of Jason Wentworth’s trailer. And it turns out that Matt Wentworth’s friend Nate Barbour used to work at the store.”

“He say what they did with the concrete Jesus?” I asked.

“No. But then he claims not to know anything about the shed or the thefts.”

That reminded me of the defendant who wanted his jail terms to run concurrently because his daughter had the smiling mighty Jesus.

Dwight laughed out loud at that and we were in a good mood as we drove into the yard to find some eight or ten vehicles, not just the kids’ but some of their parents.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

I started to panic when I saw Seth, who’s five brothers up from me, come around the corner of the house alone. He was hatless as usual, and before he could meet us at the porch steps, I smelled smoke on his denim jacket.

“What’s wrong?” I called.

And Dwight said, “Where’s Cal?”

Seth heard the urgency in our voices and made a calming motion with his hands. “Everything’s fine. We’ve got a little bonfire going down by the pond. The children want to give you the Christmas present they’ve all chipped in for, but first you’ve got to get out of those fancy dancing clothes, though I have to say, you do look mighty pretty, honey.” He paused a couple of beats and grinned widely. “You look mighty pretty, too, Dwight.”

Both of us would trust Seth with our lives, and since he was clearly enjoying the moment, we didn’t argue, just hurried inside and changed into jeans and sweatshirts.

When we came back out, dressed for anything, Seth led us down the slope behind the house to the long pond and I saw Annie Sue’s truck parked next to Reese’s.

Several of my brothers who live locally had come with their wives, even Barbara and Zach. Herman, Annie Sue’s dad, is pretty much confined to a wheelchair these days, but he sat beside Haywood in the golf cart Isabel uses to run around the farm on.

Cal and several of the cousins were lounging on heavy canvas tarps. They had fetched lawn chairs from the garage and I saw Daddy seated on the far side of the bonfire with Ladybell, his redbone hound, at his feet.

As Dwight, Seth, and I drew near, everyone yelled, “Surprise!” and at that instant, Annie Sue must have thrown a switch because the deck and two nearby willows sprang into colorful light. The kids had run Christmas tree lights on hooks along the base of our long narrow pier, all down the railing, and up into the trees. The lights reflected in the pond so brightly that I clapped my hands in delight.

“Do you like it?” asked Annie Sue. “Are you surprised?”

“Oh yes,” said Dwight, answering for both of us. “So this is what y’all’ve been doing when you were supposed to be installing circuit breakers?”

“She done that too, ol’ son,” Haywood called.

“Come on,” said Reese, grabbing me by the hand, while Jane Ann and A.K. pulled Dwight along, too.

“To get the full effect, you need to go all the way out to the end of the pier and take a look from there.”

We didn’t argue. Once we were at the end and looked back, it really was magical—the colored lights, the bonfire, the happy faces of our family. Cal came running and squeezed in between us to grab our hands.

“Let ’er rip!” Reese called, and suddenly we became aware of light and sound behind us. We turned and there about twenty feet off the end of the pier, a jet of water shot up a good six or seven feet into the air.

“Oh—my—God!” said Dwight, as the bubbling geyser changed from blue to green to red to yellow from submerged floodlights.

“My idea,” Reese said proudly.

CHAPTER 26

And being, from the emotions he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day… much in need of repose, went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

—A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

See now, Dwight, what you gotta do next summer,” said Haywood when we were all sitting around the bonfire later, “is get the wood and some shingles and a roll of window screen and we’ll build you and Deborah a pond house here. Waist-high walls, the rest screens.”

“I’ll wire it,” said Annie Sue.

“Make the west wall solid and I’ve got some neon beer signs that would look real good hanging on it,” Reese said.

Getting into the swing of things, Will remembered that he had picked up a few himself at a going-out-of-business sale last month. “I can let you have ’em real cheap.”

Barbara rolled her eyes and Dwight tried to look stern. “I’d appreciate it if y’all would quit encouraging her.”

The whole family knows I’ve been crazy for neon ever since I was a child. There used to be a corner café on Dawson Street, on the way out of Raleigh. With windows on two sides and walls that were thickly hung with neon signs, that café was as colorful as a Christmas tree, and whoever was behind the wheel would always circle the block for me so I could look my fill. When I was sixteen and newly driving, I stole a blue guitar beer sign from a convenience store in Makely and had to spend the summer working off my crime to Daddy when he found out about it. The store owner let me keep it, though, and it’s still in my old room back at the homeplace—along with a multicolored OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT sign I came home with after a New Year’s party when I was living with Aunt Zell. I still don’t know where or how I acquired that one. I keep thinking they’d look great on the wall of our back porch, but Dwight says they’d look tacky.

“Two are tacky,” I agreed. “Eight or ten would be a collection.”

“A tacky collection,” he told me.

“I think those signs would be cool,” said Cal, who was sitting between us.

I put my arm around him and gave him a quick squeeze. “Two votes for neon over here!”

It was almost midnight, but Cal was on a sugar high from toasted marshmallows, and yes, that was probably why Haywood, Herman, and Robert were still awake, too. Between them, they’d emptied a whole bag.

The kids dumped more fallen limbs on the fire, and Dwight and I listened while they interrupted each other in their eagerness to tell how they had decided to gift us with the fountain: how close they came to being discovered when Dwight came home unexpectedly for lunch yesterday, and how they were sure I’d realize that they were there last night to finish connecting a line they had buried from the new breaker box to the outlets they had installed on the pier.

“Who was brave enough to get into that cold water to set up the floodlights and pump?” I asked.

Stevie raised one hand and pointed to Reese with the other. “A friend of mine lent us some wet suits and skin diving equipment so we could finish setting everything in place today while y’all were at work. And yeah, it was really cold.”

They showed us the switch for the recirculating pump that powered the geyser and the one for the submerged spotlights.

“And we went ahead and ran some extra wire in case you want a ceiling fan in your pond house,” said Annie Sue.

The kids seemed to take it for granted that we were going to build one so we could sit there on a summer evening and admire the fountain without being eaten by mosquitoes. In fact, they had already decided they could rig an outdoor shower and that an open-air pond house would make a cool place for summer parties. Most farm ponds, including the other five or six small ones on our land, are for irrigation and not at all pleasant to swim in—too shallow and too weedy; but this one covers about four acres and stretches across a long natural depression that was always too swampy to farm. One hot droughty summer when all the waterholes were drying up, Daddy had bulldozers come in and scoop it out so deeply all around that when they got to the center, they hit some underground springs and almost lost one of the dozers.

The pier was another cooperative effort by my nieces and nephews and extends far enough out that we can swim without coming into contact with mud or weeds.

The colored lights that shimmered on the surface of the water must have revived ancient memory, because when there was a lull in conversation, Daddy said, “I ever tell y’all about the first Christmas after my daddy passed? The tangerines?”

There was a chorus of nos from his grandchildren and calls of “Tell us” from Will, Zach, and me. Robert, being older, smiled as if he knew the story and already anticipated our reaction.

“Well,” said Daddy, “the way it was is that I was still three months shy of turning fifteen when my daddy died and left me the man of the family. There was Mammy, and Sister and Rachel and the twins…”

His voice always trails off whenever he mentions his younger twin brothers, Jacob and Jedidiah. Jacob had drowned in Possum Creek when the two were sixteen, and Jed immediately ran away, lied about his age, and joined the Army. He was killed in a training exercise at Fort Bragg before he ever got out of the state.

“Anyhow, it was getting on for Christmas and we was poor as Adam’s housecat. Mammy’d already told the little ones that Santa Claus probably won’t gonna be able to find our house, but they didn’t believe her and just kept talking about what they was gonna find in their stockings. Mammy’d made a rag doll for Rachel outten a flour sack she’d bleached white and did its hair and pigtails with tobacco string. Sister’d used pokeberries to dye a sack purple and stitched up a little doll dress and bonnet. I whittled out new slingshots and whistles for the boys and Mammy’d sent me over to the store to trade some eggs for a little poke of Christmas candy, but all the same, it was looking like a mighty thin Christmas.”

Tenderhearted Ruth, who was seated on the tarp nearest him, squeezed his wrinkled hand and said, “Oh, Granddaddy, you must’ve felt just awful.”

Cal was solemn-faced, as if trying to get his mind around a Christmas with nothing plastic or electronic under the tree.

“Now right before Christmas, there come a rain like I ain’t seen in no December before nor since. Was like a hurricane only not no wind, just a hard, hard rain coming straight down like water outten the pump in our kitchen sink. Possum Creek flooded something awful. Getting on toward nightfall the next day, a truck drove into the yard and it was a man up from Florida looking to buy a couple of jars of whiskey from my daddy. Said he had two more deliveries to make over in Cotton Grove and he needed something to keep him warm on his trip back home, ’cause he was freezing to death up here.”

Daddy paused and gave a foxy grin. “He must’ve finished off a jar of something a little earlier, though, ’cause it struck me that he was well on his way to being right warm already.

“Well, he left when we told him Daddy was gone, but it won’t thirty minutes till here he come again, walking this time. His truck’d got stuck trying to cross the creek and he wanted me to help him get it out. See, the road won’t paved back then and the bridge was down almost level with the water, so mud was up to his axles before he ever got to the bridge. He said he’d give me fifty cents if I’d help him. Back then, fifty cents was like five dollars now, so I went right out to the lot and hitched up ol’ Maude.”

“Who was ol’ Maude, Granddaddy?” Cal asked.

My heart lifted at his unconscious use of that name because it surely meant that he felt himself a part of my family.

“Best mule we ever had,” Daddy explained. “Strong as a Cub tractor and biddable as a dog.”

High praise indeed.

“When we got down to the creek, we unloaded the back of the truck to lighten it some and I seen he was carrying a pile of Florida fruit. Wood crates of oranges, tangerines, and some big yellow things I ain’t never seen before. First time I ever laid my eyes on grapefruit.

“We stacked them boxes up on the creek bank and I tied a rope from Maude’s traces to the back of the truck, then that man heaved on one side and I heaved on the other and little by little we could feel it start to pull loose.

“The thing was though that Maude was a-straining so hard that just as the truck come free, she let loose with a load of her own and the man stepped right in it. Well, sir, he jumped back, and when he did, his feet slid out from under him and he flailed back into that pile of crates. ’Fore you could say Jack Robinson, two crates of them tangerines tipped over and went tumbling down the creek bank, where they busted open on the rocks and the high water just carried ’em right away.

“That man was cussing Maude and cussing me and even though I helped him load the truck back up, when I asked him for my fifty cents, he told me I oughta be a-paying him fifty cents for them tangerines and he just drove off without a thank-you or a kiss-my—”

At this point, Daddy broke off and lit a cigarette to cover his chagrin at nearly using a crude expression in mixed company.

“So what’d you do, Granddaddy?” asked Annie Sue.

“Won’t but one thing I could do,” he told her. “I took Maude back to the mule lot and got my dip net and a gunnysack and went down to the fish trap I had rigged up a little further down the creek. Sure enough, when I got to it, there was all them shiny orange tangerines bobbling around in amongst the brush that’d got backed up from my trap. Took me almost an hour to fish them all out and lug that gunnysack back up to the barn. I give Mammy enough so everybody’s stocking got tangerines, even mine and hers. Then I lugged the rest of ’em to Cotton Grove and traded for some store-boughten stuff Mammy’d been needing. Thanks to ol’ Maude, it was a real fine Christmas.”

My brothers began to recall some childhood Christmases and my nieces and nephews chimed in with their own memories. How long we would have sat out there talking and laughing, I don’t know, but the wind shifted and the temperature started to drop. Cal’s eyelids were at half mast and Herman told Will he was about ready to get on back to Dobbs if he and Amy were ready to go, too.

Seth and Richard gathered up the tarps, Reese turned off the fountain, and Daddy gave the fire a final poke that shot glowing sparks up into the starry sky.

We trudged reluctantly back up to the house. There were good-night hugs all around and “See y’all on Christmas Day,” then Cal went to bed and we were alone except for Jess and Ruth, who stayed to help clean up.

“Looks like I’ll need to make a garbage run tomorrow afternoon,” Dwight said as the girls carried another bag of dirty paper plates and napkins out to the garage. “If I wait till Saturday, all the barrels will be overflowing.”

I don’t know if it was his remark or because Ruth was standing there, but the combination triggered my memory.

“Hey, wait a minute, Dwight!” I said. “Saturday? Annie Sue and the little ones were here before you left for the dump, but Ruth and Jess didn’t come till after you got back.”

“So?”

“So whatever Ruth threw in the barrel Saturday morning should still be there!”

“Huh?” said Ruth.

“Come on,” I told her, hurrying out to the garage, where the five barrels were neatly lined along the wall: one for glass, one for aluminum, one for plastic, and two for general household trash. “You said you picked up trash when y’all were doing that memorial for Mallory Johnson, remember?”

She nodded.

“Where did you toss it?”

She pointed to the barrel nearest the outer door.

By now Dwight realized what this meant and he said, “Wait a minute, Deb’rah. Let Ruth find it. No coaching. Stand over here, Jess, honey, so you can see. This probably won’t come to anything, but if it does result in somebody going to trial, y’all might be called as witnesses.”

Both girls were wide-eyed as Ruth lifted out the bags that had been brought out from the kitchen waste container since Saturday. There on the bottom was a blue plastic bag from one of the local drugstores.

“That’s the one,” Ruth said.

She fished it out, unknotted the handles she had tied together, and held it open so we could peer inside.

I saw crumpled napkins, greasy papers, a yellow box, three beer cans, a stained drink cup, and a dirty beer bottle.

“What about that receipt?” I asked.

She started to reach inside, but Dwight stopped her.

“Whoever dumped this probably didn’t see a thing worth knowing. All the same, there’s no point in adding more prints before I can get my crime scene deputy to take a look.”

He carefully reknotted the bag and herded the girls back inside, where he found a clean sheet of paper, smeared some graphite on Ruth’s fingertips, and rolled her prints to her awed astonishment.

Jess tried to insist that she would have spent the evening there anyhow, but a deal’s a deal. I made her take the money we owed her for watching Cal and sent them home.

“Don’t worry about the rest of the mess. We’ll take care of it,” I said, even though I knew it was all going to have to wait till the next day, tired as we both suddenly were. While I hung up the finery we’d tossed on the bed when Seth made us change clothes, Dwight printed out a search warrant form that would let him seize Charlie Barefoot’s phone and computer.

I signed it, and twenty minutes after the girls left, we were both sound asleep.

CHAPTER 27

“There are many things that are unbelievable,” said Poirot. “Especially before breakfast, is it not?”

—“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” Agatha Christie

MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—WEDNESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 24

7:25 in the morning and Nelson Barefoot’s truck was still in the driveway when Dwight parked his truck in front of the Barefoot home. Charlie Barefoot’s white Hyundai was there, too.

With the search warrant Deborah had signed for him the night before tucked in the inner breast pocket of his khaki windbreaker, he walked up to the front door and rang the bell.

He and his detectives had come to a temporary dead end on the Wentworth murders, but while Deputy Raeford McLamb tried to dig up some more leads, Dwight hoped to wrap up their investigation of Mallory Johnson’s death and get it out of their way, clear the decks for an all-out push to find the Wentworth shooter.

At first glance, Joy Medlin’s confession would seem to explain the wreck, but Mallory’s voice had not sounded slurred or disjointed to him. If a low-dose pill and a shot of vodka had been slipped into a soda ten or fifteen minutes before she left the party, as Joy claimed, it was possible that there had not been enough time for the concoction to take effect, even with the Benadryl.

Instead, maybe it was the fault of an oncoming vehicle, although with such a long straight stretch of highway, wouldn’t there have been longer skid marks? And where was the other vehicle’s skid marks?

Mallory’s fleeting “Dim your stupid—” shriek to an oncoming vehicle sounded as if someone had suddenly blinded her by flicking on their high beams. That “Get over!” would imply that the vehicle was in her lane, more than enough reason for her to brake and swerve.

Although the other driver might have stopped, he (or she?) had not rushed to help. Instead, he had calmly restarted his engine and driven away. Not a hit-and-run, but just as culpable in the eyes of the law.

Until he heard Mallory’s complete message, though, Dwight knew he was only second-guessing himself.

The inner door opened and Mrs. Barefoot immediately smiled in recognition, then pushed open the glass storm door to invite him in.

Easy to see where Jeff and now Charlie had gotten their height, Dwight thought. Tall and thin like them, she had iron gray hair tied back with a red ribbon. Her green sweatshirt, worn over black stretch pants, was imprinted with a colorful Christmas design of bells and balls and Rudolph with a wreath around his neck.

“Dwight? My goodness! You’re up and out mighty early.”

“Sorry,” he apologized, but before he could ask for her grandson, Mrs. Barefoot immediately ushered him past the formal living and dining rooms, back to the heart of the house: a large family room with a kitchen at one end, a dining table and six chairs in the middle, and a den at the other end with couches, recliners, and a large flat-screen television in a built-in niche over the fireplace. A tall thin artificial fir tree stood in the corner and presents were heaped around the bottom. Its lights were off but rays from the rising December sun caught the tinsel and sparkled on the shiny glass ornaments.

His nose was assailed by the mingled odors of a full country breakfast—country-cured ham, red-eye gravy, hot black coffee, and made-from-scratch biscuits. A carton of eggs rested on the counter beside the stove ready to be scrambled. A jar of homemade fig preserves was already on the table.

“I was just taking my biscuits out of the oven when I heard the bell,” she said, beaming at him. “Now you sit right down at that table and let me get you some coffee. This early, I bet you haven’t had a bite of breakfast.”

“Actually, I did,” he said as she handed him a mug of steaming coffee. Deborah wasn’t due in court until 9:30, so she and Cal were still asleep when he left, but he wasn’t going to admit that his breakfast had been a bowl of cornflakes.

“All the same, I bet you could find room for a ham biscuit,” she said cheerfully, brushing a smear of flour off Rudolph’s red nose.

“I thought I heard voices,” said Nelson Barefoot from the doorway. “You caught me sleeping in, son.”

He poured himself coffee and joined Dwight at the table. “Everything going okay?”

“Yes, sir, and I don’t mean to interrupt y’all’s breakfast, but I need to speak to Charlie a minute.”

The older man looked at him expectantly, but when Dwight didn’t elaborate, he said, “Well, he ought to be out in a minute. I heard him stirring around when I came down the hall.”

Dwight stood to finish his coffee. “If he’s up, maybe I could go on back? That’ll let me get out of your way quicker.”

Husband and wife exchanged glances, and although her eyes were troubled, she said, “Certainly, Dwight. It’s right down the hall.”

She led the way and tapped on a door. “Charlie? You decent?”

“Ma’am?” He opened the door, barefooted, unshaven, his hair looking like a bird’s nest, but dressed in jeans and an open-collar rugby shirt. He was clearly startled to see the big deputy behind his grandmother.

“Major Bryant’s here to see you, honey. Don’t y’all talk too long now or the biscuits will get cold.”

Charlie was clearly unhappy to see him, but he moved aside so that the deputy could come in. The room was basically tidy. The covers had been pulled up on the bed and books were piled haphazardly up on the desk, which also held a lamp and a laptop, but there were no piles of clothes or dirty dishes.

“I’ll keep it short, Charlie,” Dwight said, reaching into his breast pocket. “This is a search warrant that allows me to take your cell phone and your computer in for examination.”

“What? Why?”

“I think you know why, Charlie. Did you really think we wouldn’t notice that you had cut out part of the message your sister left on your voice mail?”

“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His eyes dropped and he glanced uneasily at his computer.

Dwight held out his hand. “Your cell phone, please.”

The youth gestured to his bedside table.

“Is her message still on this?”

Charlie nodded. “Look, if something got left off when I was trying to transfer it to my computer… I mean, I’m no geek. I don’t always know how to do things. I told you. I listened to it once, and after that, I only heard enough to know it was the disc. I couldn’t stand to keep hearing her die over and over.”

“I can understand that, son. All the same, if we’re going to get to the bottom of what happened to her, we have to know all the facts.”

“What’s to know?” His voice was suddenly angry. “Somebody spiked her Coke and she crashed. Is knowing anything else going to bring her back?”

Dwight knew there was no answer to that. He flipped open the cell phone, located Charlie’s voice mail, and flipped through the entries till he came to 16 December 10:37 p.m., keyed PLAY, and held it to his ear.

Charlie abruptly turned and walked over to the window to stare out into the backyard where cardinals and blue jays swooped in and out to the feeders and small finches jostled for their leavings.

This message was longer than the one Dwight had heard before.

“Charlie? Damn you, Charlie, why won’t you pick up? You can’t do this to us. To me. To Dad and Mom. Not here at Christmas. You don’t have one shred of proof. Gallie What’s-his-face said he dropped him off at six and his mother was mad at him for getting home so late? So what? That doesn’t prove a damn thing. Who remembers stuff like that anyhow? Besides—Omigod! Where did that—? Dim your stupid—Get over! I can’t see! I—oh, shit! No!”

When it ended, he turned it off and said, “Who’s Gallie?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said, still staring, watching the birds outside his window. “That part didn’t make sense to me.”

“He go to her school?”

“If he does, I never heard her say.”

He looked at the boy’s rigid back and said quietly, “We will find out, Charlie.”

The boy turned to face him and it was Jeff’s face. Jeff’s eyes. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I hope you do.”

Dwight put the cell phone in the pocket of his jacket.

“You still going to take my computer? I need it for school.”

Dwight hesitated. He now had Mallory’s complete last message on the phone. If he took the laptop in, Mayleen Richards could probably find evidence that Charlie had deliberately cut out a few words, but so what?

“I guess not,” he said.

“When can I get my phone back?”

Dwight scribbled his number on a notepad. “Call me around noon. Is anything on here password-protected?”

The boy nodded. Half reluctantly, half defiantly, he said, “It’s Avenger. With a capital A.”

“Avenger?”

Charlie shrugged. “They tell you to pick an unlikely word, and that one just popped into my head.”

After leaving the Barefoot home, a little after eight, Dwight stopped to fill up his gas tank. Mrs. Barefoot had insisted that he take with him a ham biscuit as big as his fist, lightly moistened with red-eye gravy, and it was testing all his willpower not to unwrap that fragrant napkin sitting on the dashboard instead of waiting for his drive over to Dobbs. He closed the door on temptation and stood beside the truck. While the gas pumped, he dialed the Johnson number and was relieved that Sarah was the one to answer. He was even more relieved to hear that Malcolm had already left for work and that, yes, he could come over.

One of the garage doors was open when he got there and Sarah waited for him with a large cardboard box that was filled with beautifully wrapped gifts. he instantly realized that these were presents meant for Mallory.

“I’m glad you came, Dwight. Isn’t there a gift barrel for needy people at the courthouse?”

He nodded.

“Would you mind taking these in for me? I didn’t want to do it in front of Malcolm. I’ve put a sticky-note on each one to say what it is. Most of them are clothes. They say when you stop believing in Santa Claus, that’s when you start getting clothes for Christmas. She did love pretty things.”

Her voice wobbled a little and her eyes grew brighter but she quickly gained control of herself and walked over to his truck. “Is there room on your front seat or do you want to put them in back? I can tape the top down if you think I ought to.”

“No, they’ll fit.” He lifted the box and Sarah opened the truck door for him. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed to wedge it in.

She was dressed today in red slacks and a heavy black shawl sweater that seemed to envelop her slender frame. “Amazing how warm it is today after all that ice, isn’t it? Y’all lose any trees? Malcolm had the yard service here most of yesterday picking up all the broken limbs.”

Dwight realized that she was chattering to delay whatever it was he wanted to say to her and that she was clearly not going to invite him inside. That was fine with him.

“Charlie tells me that you and Malcolm heard Mallory’s last message.”

She flinched, then nodded.

“Or rather that you heard all of it, while Malcolm got an edited version.”

“What are you talking about, Dwight?”

“The version he gave Malcolm left out what she said about the Gallie kid.”