Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 6

You can, in a pleasant chat with a friend at home, have more real enjoyment in her society than in a dozen meetings in large companies, with all the formality and restraint of a party thrown around you. There are many subjects of conversation which are pleasant in a parlor, tête-à-tête with a friend, which you would not care to discuss in a crowded salon, or in the street. Personal inquiries and private affairs can be cosily chatted over.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Dwight and I were so tired when we got home from Jerry’s that we just dumped the gifts we’d been given on the dining table and fell into bed, too exhausted to do more than snuggle next to each other to keep warm under the quilts before falling asleep.

Next morning, we were up by seven-thirty. I’ve never met Dwight’s ex-wife and he won’t badmouth the mother of his son, but from things his mother and sisters have let drop and from the way he’s so handy around the kitchen, it’s clear that she never waited on him. He automatically started the coffee while I cleared the table for breakfast.

Because the bar association had put Portland in charge of getting something suitable for us, we now owned a wonderful hand-thrown greenish gray bowl about eighteen inches in diameter and six inches deep. She had commissioned it from Jugtown Pottery over in Moore County and it was signed on the bottom by Vernon Owens. In the future, it would hold nuts or fruit or maybe even enough coleslaw to feed all my brothers and their families at our next pig-picking. Right now, it was piled high with Christmas ornaments.

Portland had asked each attendee to bring something for our first tree together, and my colleagues had responded so enthusiastically that the bowl couldn’t hold them all. A few of them were merely fancy glass balls; the rest were figurals that were meant to bring a laugh or to zing us. Judge Longmire had used a permanent marker on a shiny gold star so that it now looked like a deputy’s badge and was labeled “Colleton County Sheriff’s Department.” Kaye Barley, an attorney from Makely, had contributed a sleek little black sports car that was meant to evoke the Firebird I’d wrecked up in the mountains this past October, and Julie Walsh, an ADA in Doug’s office, gave us a comic Justice peeking from under her blindfold. A sorrowful-looking plastic beagle might have started life in its natural brown-and-white coat, but an ardent Republican judge had sprayed it yellow. An equally ardent Democrat gave us a donkey wearing a Santa Claus hat.

A particularly elegant gold-and-white angel came with a gift card signed by John Claude and Reid. John Claude may have chosen the angel, but I’m sure he never noticed Reid’s embellishments. At least, I assume it was Reid who had doctored the tiny open hymnal the angel was singing from. In almost microscopic lettering, the hymnal was now titled Kama Sutra and was open to pages sixty-eight and sixty-nine.

Yeah, that would definitely be Reid.

I’d about strangled on my coffee when Dwight pointed it out to me last night.

“Want me to build us a tree?” Dwight asked now, pouring us each a mug of fragrant coffee as I shifted the fragile ornaments over to the buffet counter next to his new beer tap.

“My goodness, Major Bryant.” I fluttered my eyelashes at him in my best Scarlett O’Hara manner. “You can build trees?”

“Yeah, well, I’m not crazy about those bought ones. I’d rather just go out and cut us a pine. You mind?”

“A pine?” I quit fluttering and looked at him dubiously. A thick and bushy cedar I could understand, but our scrub pines aren’t very thick and I do like a full tree.

“That’s what we used to have when I was a kid after Dad died and Mama went back to school to get her teaching certificate.”

I knew things had been tight for Miss Emily. Widowed. Four young children. Of course there wouldn’t have been money for store-bought trees, and so many people used to go out foraging for Christmas trees back then that wild cedars were just about eradicated in our area. I remember hearing my own mother complain that there were no decent-shaped ones left on the farm. Nowadays, between artificial trees from Kmart and picture-perfect fresh firs at every grocery store, cedars are making a comeback along our hedgerows.

Daddy used to grumble about the foolishness of paying good money for a tree that was going to wind up on a New Year’s Eve bonfire, but Mother could argue him down every time. Her store-bought trees always filled the front corner of the living room, nearly touching the ten-foot ceiling of the old farmhouse, ablaze with lights and shimmering with strands of silvery tinsel.

I hadn’t realized that Dwight’s childhood trees were different from mine, but if a skimpy Charlie Brown pine was what he wanted, I could certainly play Linus.

“Why don’t you wait and let Cal help you cut it?” I suggested.

His brown eyes lit up with pure happiness. “Good idea.”

“And we’ll need a stand that holds water.”

“No problem. I’ll ask Mama if she still has our old iron one. She only puts up a little artificial tree these days.”

He glanced at his watch. “What time’s Cyl coming?”

“I told her eight-thirty. That’ll give us a couple of hours before she has to make preaching services at Mount Zion.”

“I’m going to clear out for a while, then. You don’t want me here if y’all are going to do catch-up. I’ve scheduled a briefing this morning anyhow, so I’ll go in early. Start on Tracy’s office. See what they’ve got for me so far.”

I reminded him that we were due to take lunch with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash at one o’clock. “Jane and Brix Junior will be there, too.”

He scowled. “Does that mean a jacket and tie?”

“’Fraid so.”

I set a cast-iron skillet on one of the burners, turned the flame on under it, and took out several pieces of the link sausage Maidie had sent over from hog-killing the week before. Dwight went off to get dressed but came back almost immediately, wearing nothing except shorts and socks, with a dark wool shirt in one hand and two knitted ties in the other. “Which tie you like better with this shirt?”

When I hesitated, I got another scowl. “You saying I’ve got to wear a white shirt, too?”

“It doesn’t have to be white, but dress shirts are really sexy,” I murmured.

He grinned. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Too bad, shug. My only clean ones are back in my apartment.”

“Which is only a few blocks from the courthouse,” I said sweetly as I stood on tiptoes to nuzzle his ear.

“I’m still going to look like a cop,” he warned, doing a little nuzzling of his own.

“But a handsome, well-dressed cop who—”

The sausage popped before I could complete that thought.

He looked down at me with a speculative eye. “Who what?”

“Who makes me forget I’m supposed to be fixing breakfast for an old friend who’s due here any minute.” I rescued the sausages just before they began to burn and gently rolled them over without piercing their casings.

“Not for another half-hour.” He put his arms around me from behind.

I tried to concentrate on browning the sausages. “Would you like for me to wrap toast around a piece of this for you to take with you?”

“Actually,” he said huskily, “what I’d really like . . .”

Okay. I admit it. I’m easily distracted. So what else is new?

Praying that Cyl would be late, I turned off the stove.

Cyl was on time, but it turned out not to matter. By the time she drove up in her rental car, Dwight was finally dressed and walking toward his truck.

He waved to Cyl, said he’d see me at Aunt Zell’s, and then headed back out the way Cyl had come.

The mercury must have been rising all night because it was a little warmer this morning than the night before. I was comfortable enough in my dark blue zip-up cardigan and gray wool slacks, although I could feel the cold porch floor through my wool socks as I held the screen door open for Cyl.

I hadn’t seen her to actually talk to since back in early summer, three months before Dwight proposed, so even while we were busy hugging, we were also taking a quick inventory of each other. I wasn’t consciously eating less these days; nevertheless, my scale and my clothes both told me that I was thinner than I’d been in years, probably because I seemed to be riding a perpetual roller coaster of happiness and exhilaration. Being in love apparently burns up a lot of calories. I knew I looked okay, but next to Cyl?

She was drop-dead gorgeous again this Sunday morning, in a fitted tan leather jacket and a slim tan leather skirt that was topped by a russet turtleneck in silk jersey. A vaguely African-looking necklace of polished brass and beaten copper disks flashed in the thin December sunlight beneath her open jacket and echoed the radiance of her face.

“Atkins or South Beach?” I demanded.

She shook her head with smug smile. “Neither. I eat anything and everything, but nothing seems to stick to my ribs. Or my hips. And what about you, girlfriend? I was noticing last night that you’re getting downright skinny.” Her smile became a mischievous grin. “Dwight giving you plenty of exercise?”

At that instant, something else caught the sun and I grabbed her left hand. There on her third finger was a gold ring set with the largest emerald I’d ever seen outside of Fitch’s Jewelers in Raleigh.

“Wisconsin?” I asked.

She blushed. “We’re flying out to meet his parents and spend Christmas there.”

“When’s the wedding?”

“We haven’t set a date yet, but probably in the spring.”

Over sausages and blueberry pancakes—we figured we might as well enjoy our immunity while it lasted—I heard all about Taylor Hamilton Youngblood and how they’d met outside a Senate subcommittee’s chambers, both of them there to lobby for a bill to improve workplace conditions for pink-collar workers. He was Northwestern Law, followed by a fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. More important, he was also tall, good-looking, with skin as dark as hers (the rest of Cyl’s family are so light that she and her favorite uncle used to call themselves the only real Africans in the family), and totally smitten.

“Smitten’s good,” I said, passing the maple syrup.

“Smitten’s great,” she agreed. “I was so envious when you told me about you and Dwight. I thought it was never going to happen to me again, and then three weeks ago, bang!”

It had been a hard year for Cyl, getting over her doomed affair with a married minister.

“You were wasted here in Colleton County,” I said. “You’re meant for bigger things.”

“You think?” But a shadow had fallen over her lovely face. “Do you ever see Ralph and the children?”

“Occasionally. He’s always going to be a little in love with you. Oddly enough, though, I get the impression that things are better between him and his wife these days. She’ll need crutches the rest of her life, but she can drive again and she seems to have undergone something of a sea change since the wreck. She’s not as hostile to whites and Stan says they’re even allowed to watch television now. I gather she’s eased up a lot. Finally realized what she came so close to losing.”

“I hope so.” Her large brown eyes misted over for a moment. “He deserves that.”

By which I knew that she was always going to be a little bit in love with him, too.

Inevitably, talk soon wound around to Tracy Johnson’s death.

“That poor baby!” Cyl exclaimed. “It’s wicked that she had to die, too.”

I told Cyl everything I’d heard. She was appalled to realize that Tracy might have been shot while talking to her killer and could have had a split second’s awareness that she was going to die.

“Did y’all keep in touch?” I asked. “Do you know if she was seeing someone?”

“Sorry. We weren’t close at all. Never did the girl-talk thing. I didn’t even know the adoption had gone through till you told me, remember? She and I joined Doug’s staff about the same time and I think she resented it when I got to lead some big cases while she was still sitting second chair. I had the feeling that she thought it was a matter of reverse discrimination, not because I might have been more competent than she.”

I laughed and speared a stray blueberry with a tine of my fork. “Certainly not more modest.”

Cyl laughed, too. “Well you know what they say—if it’s true, it’s not bragging. I was more competent. I looked at my cases with more objectivity, and I didn’t automatically assume that everything a police officer said about a perp was necessarily true.” She cut her eyes at me. “Not even when it was Major Dwight Bryant saying it.”

“I never noticed you not going for the kill,” I objected.

“That’s because dubious cases never got to court.” She took a sip of coffee and touched her napkin to her lips. “I either cut them loose because there wasn’t enough solid evidence to support a prosecution or I let their attorneys bargain down the charges.”

“And Tracy?”

“Tracy Johnson was a middle-class white girl who grew up believing that police officers are there to serve and protect people like her and her kind.”

“Tracy was no racist,” I protested.

“I’m not saying she was. I’m just saying that her innate assumptions about police probity were shaped by a set of life experiences somewhat different from mine. Different from yours, too, probably.”

Well, yes. With a bootlegging daddy and a couple of brothers who’d sowed acres of wild oats before they finally settled down? Not to mention some nieces and nephews who have played with pot, found ways to buy beer before they were twenty-one, and been arrested for vandalism? And yes, a few cases have made the paper lately where it’s clear that if law officers or prosecutors hadn’t withheld a key piece of exonerating evidence, the nonwhite, non-middle-class defendant might have walked.

“Did you like her?” I asked.

Cyl turned her coffee cup slowly around and around in her slender brown fingers as she thought about my question. “I didn’t dislike her,” she said at last. “She tried a little too hard for Doug’s approval, and if she ever disagreed with him, I never heard it. She was too politically ambitious to get on his wrong side.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, she didn’t talk about it openly, but she was keeping tabs on Doug’s game plan. When he runs for governor, I’m pretty sure she planned to run herself—become Colleton County’s first female DA.”

“I didn’t realize,” I said, “but now that you say it . . . she never missed a political luncheon and she was active in the precinct. Always ready to speak to any civic group. She really was positioning herself, wasn’t she?”

“It wasn’t all politics,” Cyl said, trying to be fair. “I do think she was totally ethical. At least by her own lights. And I don’t believe she ever consciously cut corners, but when she was convinced that the bad guys were bad, she certainly went for the slam dunk.”

“Like Doug.”

Cyl wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I saw you checking out his row of trophy pins last night.”

“Did you ever ask for the death penalty?”

“No. Doug always took those cases.”

I realized that we’d never actually discussed the question before. “You for it or against it?”

She seemed surprised that I’d ask. “For it. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know, Cyl. It bothers me that there are guys sitting on North Carolina’s death row for murders they committed when they were seventeen. I guess I go back and forth.”

“Why? When you’ve got a mad dog ravaging through the flock, you don’t hope you can train it not to kill. You put it down. Don’t you?”

“Maybe. If you’re sure it’s really mad and that it’s the one that did the killing.”

“It’s never been shown that North Carolina’s put someone innocent to death.”

“Maybe not, but a lot of death penalties have been reversed or commuted on solid grounds.”

“Which only proves that the system works.”

“We don’t know that it’s always worked. And you’re not going to sit there and tell me it’s administered fairly.”

“I’ll give you that,” she conceded. “Money, race, and class do make a difference, but just because some killers don’t have to pay with their lives doesn’t mean that the ones who do get death don’t deserve it.”

“Reid says Tracy was looking into the Martha Hurst conviction.”

“Who’s Martha Hurst?”

“One of Doug’s little gold nooses. Before your time,” I said. “Doug prosecuted back when he was an ADA under Wendell Barham. Martha Hurst was a woman who beat her stepson to death with her own softball bat.”

“Black or white?”

“White. It was Doug’s first capital case. His first death penalty. She’s supposedly scheduled to die in January.”

Cyl frowned. “And Tracy was questioning it?”

“Who knows? Reid’s dad defended the woman and Tracy asked to see his files. She was going to say why tomorrow.”

Cyl set her coffee cup down softly on its saucer. “I told you Tracy and I weren’t close and that we didn’t talk all that much? One thing we did talk about, though—we hated those stupid pins. We both thought that asking for the death penalty and getting it was too serious to be treated like another macho contest.”

“My cock’s bigger than yours?” I murmured.

“Exactly,” she said.