Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 10

A courteous manner, and graceful offer of service are valued highly when offered, and the giver loses nothing by her civility.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Dwight and I had driven over to Dobbs separately, and since I would be holding court in Makely again the next day, that meant we also had to drive back to the farm separately. For once, I didn’t mind. Dwight drives so slowly, I figured I could be halfway through the files that we’d put in the trunk of my car before he turned in to the yard.

I could have, too, if I hadn’t found April there, sitting cross-legged on the floor as she put a second coat of white enamel on the beer tap’s cabinet doors. The clean cool smell of latex paint filled the room.

“You didn’t have to do that today.” I set the first of the storage boxes on the dining table. Although Andrew’s nine brothers up from me, April is his third wife and halfway between us in age. In addition to keeping Andrew and their kids in line, she’s also a sixth grade teacher with lesson plans to fill out and theme papers to grade before school recessed for the holidays next week. “It’s Sunday. You should be home with your feet up.”

Her face was dotted with tiny flecks of white enamel. “No problem. The others will be over tomorrow to put up the rest of the molding, then all that’s left is finishing up the bathroom and painting.” Her tone was innocent but she was having trouble suppressing a grin. “You haven’t heard from Nadine or Doris today, have you?”

“No, why? What’s going on?”

Mischief danced in her hazel eyes. “Promise not to tell anyone?”

“I promise.”

“Doris got some books from the library yesterday on wedding etiquette.”

“Oh no,” I groaned.

She laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s not about you this time. I mean, okay, it might’ve started out that way because Doris wanted to be able to cite chapter and verse if you tried to do something Miss Manners might not approve of.” She stroked her brush across the final door panel and rose gracefully to her feet. “You’re safe, though. She’s been sandbagged by a section on wedding symbols.”

“Which ones?”

“Veils.”

“I’m not wearing a veil.”

“Good! You know what it symbolizes?”

I shook my head. “More fairytale princess nonsense? I never gave it much thought.”

“Well, think about this,” April said. “According to the book, the veil’s supposed to cover the bride’s face until after the vows, when the groom is told he may then kiss his bride. And, of course, he has to first lift off the veil.”

I followed that train of thought to where it naturally led and then started laughing, too. No wonder April said it was good I didn’t plan to wear one. “You’re kidding,” I said.

April was shaking her head gleefully. “No, I’m not.”

“Lifting the veil is symbolic of taking the bride’s virginity?”

“You got it, sweetie! It’s a stand-in for the hymen. Nadine was mortified when Doris read her that.”

And then I realized why she was so amused.

When Nadine’s older daughter got married, Nadine had dressed that—and I quote—“pure white angel” in a full veil and Herman had escorted her down the aisle—this was before he needed a wheelchair. Upon being asked, “Who gives this woman to be married?” he had, as coached by Nadine, replied, “Her mother and I do.” Then he carefully lifted Denise’s veil and folded it back across her head like a halo, kissed her cheek, gave her hand to the groom, and took his place in the front pew next to Nadine, just as they’d rehearsed it all week.

“So symbolically speaking, Doris made my brother deflower their own daughter right there in church?”

“Don’t you love it?”

“Can I please murmur ‘incest’ the next time Nadine gets on my case?”

“Only if you don’t tell them I was the one told you. Doris swore me to secrecy.” April put the lid back on the paint can and gathered up the newspapers she’d put down to catch any drips. One of her short brown curls was feathered white where it had brushed against the door. “She’s almost as embarrassed as Nadine, because remember when Betsy got married six months later? Doris thought Denise and Herman looked so sweet that she tried her best to talk Betsy and Robert into doing it, too, only Betsy didn’t want to walk down the aisle with a veil covering her face and Robert said he was sure his rough hands would get caught in it and he’d wind up pulling it off her head.”

We were still giggling when Dwight came through the door, carrying the other file box, the ends of his tie trailing from his jacket pocket.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said.

“No, you won’t,” said April. “You promised.”

“I thought it doesn’t count if you tell secrets to your mate.”

“He’s not officially your mate. Not till the veil is pushed away,” she said, which only set us off again.

Dwight just shook his head at us and hung his jacket on the back of one of the ladderback chairs.

“Y’all want to come for supper?” April said as she slipped on her coat and pulled car keys from the pocket. “Andrew and A.K. are cooking a fresh ham on the gas grill.”

“Thanks, but we’ve got another dinner at Jerry’s tonight,” I told her.

As she started out the door, April remembered that she’d stopped by the mailbox yesterday and picked up my mail, but had then forgotten to give it to me, so I walked out to the car with her. She slid into the driver’s seat and handed me a stack of envelopes, junk mail, and catalogs through the open window.

“You’re getting circles under your eyes,” she said, giving me a critical look. “Don’t let yourself get so tired you wind up at the altar too exhausted to give a straight answer.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“You and Dwight need to get to bed early tonight.” She thought about what she was saying and grinned. “Or is that part of the problem?”

I drew myself up in mock indignation. “Why, Miz April, I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, and if we believe that, Denise has a veil she’ll lend you.”

Back in the house, Dwight had lit a fire in the hearth and was now stretched out on the couch to watch the end of a ball game. Suffused with happiness and feeling domestic as hell, I sat down on a nearby lounge chair to open my mail. Among the Christmas cards was one from Judge Bill Neely and his wife, Anne-Kemp, from over in Asheboro. Across the bottom of the card, he’d written, “I hear the Barrister Boys got to play at one of the parties for you. I demand equal time. How about I pipe you down the aisle?”

The Barrister Boys (a.k.a. “Fast Eddie and the Scumbags”) are a band of attorneys in Bill’s district. I’m very fond of Bill and I’m told he’s actually as competent on the Irish pipes as his friends are on guitar and banjo, but the only time I want to hear bagpipes is outdoors.

From a distance.

Like maybe two or three miles.

Dwight smiled sleepily when I read him Bill’s mock offer. “I want to be there when you run that one past Nadine and Doris.”

There were cards from friends I hadn’t seen since law school, and cards from my West Coast brothers, who had promised to come east for the wedding and stay on for Christmas.

“It’ll be good to see the whole family together again,” Frank’s wife Mae wrote. She enclosed pictures of their grandchildren.

One card showered a cascade of silver confetti in my lap when I opened it. It was from my carny niece, who was sorry their schedule wouldn’t permit them to come up from Florida in time, “but we’re playing a Shriner’s Christmas festival then.”

I slit open another envelope and caught my breath when I saw the picture inside. Mei Johnson was dressed in a red velvet dress, white tights, and a fur-trimmed Santa hat, and she held a white plush dog in her pudgy little hands. “Hope you and Dwight have a good one, too,” Tracy had written.

Too?

I studied the picture through a glaze of tears. Here I was with my life still opening up before me like a stocking full of Christmas surprises while Mei’s and Tracy’s were both finished. No more surprises. No more Christmases.

The envelope was postmarked Thursday. I turned to show it to Dwight, but he was sound asleep.

I hadn’t yet found a casual way to ask him what his detectives found in Tracy’s house, but if it was evidence of a lover, where was he? Why wasn’t he camped out in Dwight’s office demanding action and results?

“More women are killed by their mates than by strangers,” said the worldly pragmatist who lurks in the back of my head and always sees the dark lining of every silver cloud.

“Maybe he’s out of town and doesn’t yet know,” soothed the preacher who shares head space and believes in the power of positive thinking.

I left Dwight sleeping and went out to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine. Brix Junior’s file boxes were on the counter where Dwight had put them. Why had Tracy asked to see them? And what exactly had been going on in her head these last few days?

I lifted the lids and looked at the notations on the file tabs. They were in roughly chronological order, so I took the earliest box over to the kitchen table, got out a legal pad and pen for making notes, took a sip of wine, and began reading.

As is often the case, a lot of the papers were duplicates. Nevertheless, it took me nearly two hours and a second glass of wine to skim through Brix Junior’s preliminary notes, the warrant for Martha Hurst’s arrest, her first appearance and probable cause hearing, and all the witness statements, search warrants, ME’s report, investigating officers’ reports, etc., etc.

In clear English, it boiled down to a simple set of facts. On a hot Friday in August, sheriff’s deputies had been summoned to the Sandy Grove Mobile Estates, lot #81. It was not their first visit to this particular house trailer. This time, however, it wasn’t to put an end to a loud three-way domestic argument between husband and wife and the husband’s adult son. This visit was triggered by an anonymous call—“Somebody’s got hisself kilt,” said an indeterminate female voice.

When deputies arrived, the somebody proved to be Roy Hurst, a white male, age twenty-six. From the smells percolating through the trailers when they opened the unlocked door, he had been dead for at least a day and probably longer. Beside the body lay a bloody aluminum softball bat, its handle wiped clean of fingerprints.

According to the medical examiner’s straightforward report, death came from massive trauma to the victim’s skull with a blunt instrument consistent with the bat. The first blow had probably come from the front while he was either sitting or standing. The others were to the back of his head after he was prone. He had then been turned over and his genitals pounded to a pulp, probably immediately postmortem and probably with the end of the same blunt instrument. Based on the ambient temperature as recorded by the detectives who arrived soon after the first responding officer and on the deterioration of the body, death had occurred three to six days earlier. In other words, sometime between the preceding Saturday and Tuesday.

The trailer belonged to a Gene and Martha Hurst. Gene Hurst, age forty-nine, was a long-distance van driver for a national moving company. Although family members are the usual suspects, he was meticulously alibied. He had left Raleigh on Friday morning, picked up the rest of his load in Nashville on Saturday morning, and headed west for Tucson and Phoenix.

I studied photocopies of the time-stamped tickets that plotted Gene Hurst’s drive from one weigh station to another across the width of the country. They showed that he’d pulled out of Nashville around the time his son was last seen on Saturday morning.

Martha Hurst was a different matter. A thirty-four-year-old hospital aide, she claimed that she had only briefly seen her stepson that morning and never again. Okay, yes, they’d had a violent argument and she’d threatened to break his head, but that was because he’d come over and let himself in while she was taking a shower after he swore he’d given back all the keys from when he used to share the trailer with his dad before they were married.

“How would you feel if you walked out of the shower buck naked and there was a man standing in your bedroom?” she’d asked Brix Junior.

When Brix Junior delicately reminded her that she and the younger Hurst had been lovers before she married his father and that he might possibly have seen her buck naked before, Martha Hurst had said yes, and that was all the more reason for him to get the hell out of her house and out of her life.

As for the rest of Saturday, she had come home from her ball game around six, stood her bats and glove in a rack by the front door, and then taken another shower before going out to celebrate the win. And yes, she might’ve had too much to drink, especially after she discovered that the rings she’d left on her dresser before the game had gone missing; and yes, she might have told her teammates that she wanted to bust his head like a ripe watermelon, but she certainly hadn’t gone home and done it, because he wasn’t there and she couldn’t run him down by telephone. Next morning, she had left for a week at the beach with friends.

No, she had most certainly not left him to rot on her living room floor. “I’d have my rings on my fingers right now if I’d done that.”

That was one bit of evidence in her favor, and I added it to the notes on my legal pad because Martha Hurst certainly sounded like a woman who wouldn’t hesitate to go through a man’s pockets looking for her missing rings. The rings weren’t there, but a pawn ticket was.

The photos of the crime scene were extremely detailed. Every angle of the room had been covered and the body was so well-documented that I could see the maggots on his head and pants and almost read the pawn ticket. There was even a clear print of a bloody dent in the wall, beneath the light switch and thermostat, where the bat had evidently glanced off Hurst’s head on the first swing.

With such an uncertain time of death—Saturday till Tuesday—it was hard for everyone to prove conclusively where they were, but of the other two strong candidates, one was in jail from Friday night till noon on Monday, when he was conveyed to Buxton for a full mental health evaluation, and the other could prove he was in Charlotte from Saturday morning till Wednesday.

It was hard to think of killing your stepson and ex-lover and then going blithely off to the beach for a week, but murderers have done weirder things and Martha Hurst did have a history of violence. She had quit high school when she punched out a teacher she said was hassling her; and after completing a GED, she’d lost her first job at a private nursing home because she’d hit her supervisor over the head with a metal bedpan.

A full metal bedpan.

From all the reports and witness statements, it would appear that Martha Hurst had been accused because of her angry threats against her stepson, even though she swore she hadn’t seen him again after her admitted run-in with him around midday on that Saturday.

I was leafing through a final sheaf of Brix Junior’s handwritten notes when Dwight came into the kitchen, rumpled and yawning.

“Couldn’t resist it, could you, shug?” he said.

I smiled up at him. “If you really didn’t want me to read these files, you wouldn’t have brought them in the house, would you?”

He gave me a quizzical glance. “I thought we agreed that we were going to keep our work separate?”

“We are,” I promised. “You know well and good that nothing about Tracy’s death is ever going to come up in district court.”

He took a pilsner glass from the cabinet. “So you can meddle in my work, but I can’t meddle in yours?”

“That’s different,” I said. “Your department generates a lot of my cases.”

Taking care not to touch where April had so recently painted, Dwight opened the armoire doors to the beer tap Daddy had given him, drew himself a foaming glassful, and held it up to the light in critical appraisal as he always does. Dwight takes the craft of beer-making seriously and keeps a notebook filled with observations about each batch. Some of the recipes he’s developed are as complicated as any chemical formula, with their eighth of an ounce of this and a half-teaspoon of that. The color on this one was a dark golden brown and the head was so thick and creamy that after his first swallow, the rim of the glass was edged in an inch-wide band of foam.

“Brussels lace?” I asked, having picked up some of the terminology.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” he said with a touch of pride as he pulled out a chair opposite me. A sweet malty aroma drifted across the table. He took another swallow of the ale and leaned back in his chair so that his muscular, six-three body was almost horizontal and only the back legs touched the floor.

“So tell me about Martha Hurst.”

“Could I first tell you how much I love you?” I asked softly.

The chair came down with a bang and he leaned across with his big hands braced on the table to steady himself so our lips could meet. Barley malt, shaving cream, and soap mingled together with something indefinable that could only be the essence of his skin. His kisses are as slow and deliberate as his driving and I never want them to end.

“Okay,” he said at last, settling back in his chair again. “Tell me about Martha Hurst.”

When I finished telling Dwight all I’d gleaned from the files about Martha Hurst’s arrest and trial, he said, “Sounds pretty open and shut to me. Any idea why Tracy would want to take another look at it?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “The only thing I can think of in Martha Hurst’s favor besides the pawn ticket still in his pocket is that I don’t see anything about bloody clothes in the list of items that the deputies removed from the trailer.”

“Who worked the case?” Dwight asked.

I looked at the signature on the report. “Silas Lee Jones.”

Dwight made a face. I’d heard his opinion on Jones before. Not sloppy enough to fire for cause, not one to bust his bustle either.

“Look at these pictures,” I said. “See all that blood? Whoever did this, you know they had to have blood on their hands, their shoes, their clothes, and yet there’s nothing here about it or those items.”

“Well, there wouldn’t be if he came in on her again while she was still buck naked from her second shower,” said Dwight. “Did that point come up at the trial?”

“Who knows? This isn’t a transcript, only Brix Junior’s notes. He did put her on the stand, though.”

“So?”

“Against his will. Which means he really did think she was guilty. But she insisted on testifying and he let her. According to his notes—not to mention the verdict—she didn’t make a very good impression on the jury. I gather that Doug Woodall got her to contradict herself about her whereabouts at the time of death, but I’d have to read the transcript to see exactly how she screwed up.”

“You got time to do that?” he asked.

I sighed. “Probably not, but I’ll make time if you want me to.”

“That’s okay. I’ll get one of my detectives to do it if we don’t find out why Tracy was interested in Hurst by the time we finish questioning everyone in Woodall’s office.”

I was dying to know what they’d found at Tracy’s house, but a pact is a pact and I’d already pushed it with the files.