Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 3

Be careful in conversation to avoid topics which may be supposed to have any direct reference to events or circumstances which may be painful for your companion to hear discussed.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Reid took two steps toward the couch, then the smell of beef and onions hit his nose and he made an abrupt detour for the bathroom.

He was still pounding the porcelain when Dwight returned.

Dwight’s lips were cold, but his kisses weren’t.

When I could breathe again, I said, “You okay?”

“Now I am.” He buried his face in my hair. “You smell good enough to eat.”

“You’re just hungry,” I said, turning toward the kitchen.

“Yeah,” he said and pulled me back to him.

His chilled hands were busy warming themselves under my sweater when the sound of flushing stopped him. His eyebrows arched a question.

“Reid,” I said. “Too much bourbon.”

My cousin and former law partner swayed unsteadily in the doorway of the bathroom. His handsome face was a pasty green and his hair was still disheveled, but he’d tucked his white shirt back in and his speech was marginally clearer.

“Sorry,” he said. “Client’s Christmas party an’ then somebody came in that’d heard— God! Tracy Johnson?” He caught himself on the doorjamb and looked at us in glassy-eyed confusion. “Don’ know why I came here. I’ll get out of y’all’s way.”

He patted his pockets for his car keys and started for the door, but Dwight put out a hand. “Not like this, ol’ buddy. You can’t drive off from here ready to blow a twelve.”

I poured him a glass of tomato juice. “Drink this. You need food.”

He protested and almost gagged again, yet he let me lead him to the table, and once he’d swallowed some juice, his color improved.

Reid’s a few years younger, but between my late start in law school and a year in the DA’s office back before Doug Woodall was elected, we both joined the law firm about the same time. He became the current Stephenson of Lee and Stephenson, Attorneys at Law, when his father, Brix Junior, retired to play golf in Southern Pines. The current Lee is John Claude Lee, my mother’s second cousin; Brix Junior was her first cousin on the Stephenson side. People new to the region (and still unfamiliar with our continuing penchant for genealogical linkage) tend to glaze over when I try to spell out how I’m related to both of my ex-partners even though they’re no blood kin to each other, but old-timers nod sagely and work it out immediately that Reid’s my second cousin.

“Good dumplings,” said Dwight, helping himself to another one.

“Dotty made a beef stew you wouldn’t believe,” Reid said wistfully.

“Dotty never made a beef stew in her whole life. It’s boeuf bourguignonne,” I reminded him, exaggerating the French pronunciation. I like Reid’s ex-wife, but even her cookouts are haute cuisine. Everything has to be marinated in wine and fines herbes.

“Cassoulet,” Reid mourned. “Coq au vin.” He picked at a carrot but not much was getting to his mouth and he still seemed queasy. “Wish I never had to see another pizza or take-out box. Hate fast food.”

“So quit complaining and get Aunt Zell to give you some cooking lessons.” Over the last few years, I’ve learned that a touch of commonsense bitchiness can stave off the maudlin self-pity that overtakes Reid whenever he drinks too much and starts remembering what his philandering’s cost him. Dotty was the love of his life and he’s crazy about their son Tip, but she finally had enough. He came home early one morning to find all his personal belongings boxed up on the front porch. When she remarried last year, he disappeared down a Jameson bottle for a solid week.

As Reid stared moodily at his plate, I glanced over at Dwight, who had kept up his end of amiable table talk despite what he must have seen in the last few hours.

For their own mental stability, EMTs, trauma nurses and doctors, police officers, social workers, and yes, judges, too, learn how to compartmentalize. I haven’t experienced half the things Dwight has, but in my four years on the bench, I’ve seen men and women with eyes swollen shut in faces pounded into raw meat. I’ve seen infants whose tender little bodies have been used as ashtrays. I’ve seen children whose backs and buttocks are so scarred they look as if they’ve been flogged with barbed wire.

You do what you can to alleviate the suffering and to punish those responsible, and all the time you know you’re just shoveling sand against the tide. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the pessimist of Ecclesiastes. “What profit hath a man of all his labor? . . . That which is crooked cannot be made straight.”

And yet, what’s the alternative? To sit above the fray and do nothing but wring our hands? Or to wade in and keep shoveling?

At the end of the day, though, we have to lay our shovels down and come back to friends and families who not only don’t understand, but don’t want to understand. So we try very hard to distance ourselves from the emotional assaults of our work and we tell ourselves that we’ve left it at the courthouse or hospital. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, that’s almost true.

Nevertheless, it helps to have someone you can share it with. Long before he became my lover, Dwight was my friend, my sounding board, my safety valve for venting; and whatever other changes marriage may bring, I’m hoping that this part won’t change for either of us.

“She called me this morning,” Reid said abruptly. “Wants to come by the office Monday.”

“Dotty?” I asked.

“Tracy.”

“Why?”

He stared at me blankly and I patiently rephrased the question. “Why was Tracy coming to the office, Reid?”

“Martha Hurst. See Dad’s file.”

“Who’s Martha Hurst?” asked Dwight, who was still in the Army back then.

Truth to tell, the name wasn’t much more familiar to me because Martha Hurst’s trial took place the summer I was cramming for my bar exam. Except for the brutality of the crime and that a woman had killed a man instead of the other way around, it wasn’t all that different from a dozen more where domestic disputes play out in violence. Brix Junior—Brixton Stephenson Senior died before I was born, but my family still can’t remember to drop the “Junior” from Reid’s dad’s name—was Hurst’s court-appointed attorney. I assume he mounted the best defense possible. What I mainly remembered is that a jury found Hurst guilty and a judge sentenced her to death, and that’s what I told Dwight.

“Gonna strap her on that gurney in January,” Reid said plaintively. “Give ’er the big needle. Tracy said so.”

Which must mean that all of Hurst’s appeals had finally been exhausted.

“What was Tracy’s interest?” I asked. “She wasn’t around when that woman was tried and sentenced.”

He shrugged. “S’posed to explain Monday.” He yawned deeply and his eyes unfocused. He pushed his plate away, propped his elbows on the table, and leaned his head on his hands.

“Come on, bo,” Dwight said. “Time to get you home. Deb’rah?”

I was already digging through my cousin’s pockets for his car keys.

Dwight half carried him downstairs and put him in the truck and I followed them to Reid’s place, where we put him to bed.

I tried again to get him to speculate as to why Tracy wanted to see Brix Junior’s file on Martha Hurst, but it was useless. He just kept moaning, “Poor Tracy,” so we pulled the covers up around him and left him to sleep it off.

On the drive back to Dwight’s, with the heater warming my cold feet, I asked why he thought Tracy’s death was personal and deliberate.

“And it wasn’t any random sniper either, if that’s what you’re asking. Whoever pulled the trigger probably knew who he was shooting.”

“How can you tell?”

“For starters, think how cold it is. Tracy wasn’t wearing her coat or her gloves and she had a baby with an ear infection in the backseat, yet the passenger-side window was down.”

“She was talking to whoever shot her?” For some reason, that made it more horrible. “I guess you won’t know what kind of gun it was till you get the bullet back from the ME.”

“No bullet,” he said gloomily. “The shot came from such close range that it tore through her throat and smashed through the window on her side of the car. I’ve got guys out walking the median with metal detectors, but I’m not holding my breath.”

I told him about the death threat Portland said Tracy had received recently. Like me, he thought it unlikely that someone convicted for domestic manslaughter could have arranged Tracy’s death, “but we’ll certainly check it out.”

“Want me to call John Claude? Ask him to let me look at Brix Junior’s files on Martha Hurst?”

“I’ll get up with John Claude,” he said. “You concentrate on the wedding and let me handle this investigation.”

“Just trying to be a good helpmeet,” I said innocently.

He looked down at me with a grin. “Oh yeah?”

“I won’t meddle,” I promised, “but I do know more legalese than you do and I might could pick up on something in the files that you’d miss.”

“Don’t bet on it. Besides, Tracy’s death probably doesn’t have a thing to do with Hurst’s execution.”

I meant it when I said I wouldn’t meddle. On the other hand, Doug Woodall was bound to be at the bar association’s dinner for us the next night. What could it hurt to ask Tracy’s boss if he knew why she was interested in Martha Hurst?