Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 14

Never, when advancing an opinion, assert positively that a thing “is so,” but give your opinion as an opinion . . . your companion may be better informed upon the subject under discussion.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

I expected Dwight to be annoyed when I called to say I was bringing a law student home with me, but I hadn’t factored in his affection for Bessie Stewart. Not only was he not annoyed, he was actually pleased because Bessie had called him earlier that afternoon and asked him to help her granddaughter and “her young gentleman friend.”

“Kayra’s over at Bessie’s right now,” he said, “so I’ll tell her to meet us at the house and I’ll pick up an extra pizza.”

“Don’t forget my anchovies.”

“How you can eat those disgusting things, I’ll never understand.”

That’s what he says every time I ask for them. “Yours not to reason why,” I said.

“Yeah, well mine not to kiss you either.”

“Hey, what about for better or for worse and all that?”

“In sickness and in health, yes. In anchovies, no.”

I laughed, told him what landmark I was passing at the moment, and clicked off. Rain fell in slower, thicker drops, but so far the interstate was ice-free and I was able to keep it up to the speed limit. Nolan Capps’s headlights stayed right with me.

We passed the cutoff I’d taken Friday evening to get away from the backed-up traffic and, a few miles later, the overpass where Tracy had crashed. The lights from the cars around me picked up shards of broken glass, which twinkled briefly in the darkness. By the time we got to my usual exit, the wipers were clearing icy slush from the windshield. Driving became more iffy on the back roads and there was a definite fishtail effect when I cornered too sharply at Possum Creek. It was a relief to turn off the hardtop into the dirt lane that led to the house.

An unfamiliar car sat next to Dwight’s truck and both were sheeted with a thin glaze of ice. Dwight met us in the doorway. There might not be any post-anchovy kisses in my immediate future, but the pre-one would hold me for the moment.

I introduced Nolan Capps and he, in turn, introduced me to the young woman seated at the table in front of two large flat boxes that had filled the dining area with the entrancing aroma of tomato sauce, cheese, and oregano.

Kayra Stewart appeared to be in her early twenties. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she had good bones that would probably age well. I looked for a resemblance to Bessie but couldn’t see any beyond her yardstick-straight posture and her level appraisal of me as we shook hands. Her smooth skin was the color of mellow oak, her dark eyes were widely spaced and flashed with good-humored intelligence when she greeted Nolan. Her hair curled even more tightly than my friend Portland’s and she wore it clipped short like Portland, so that her shapely head sat elegantly on a long slender neck. She was dressed in formfitting jeans and a slouchy old red crewneck sweater over a white jersey turtleneck. No jewelry beyond a mannish-looking square-faced wristwatch with a black leather band.

Nolan Capps hung his hooded jacket on the back of a chair and tried to look casual when he sat down beside her, but it was clear that he could eat her with a spoon.

I divested myself of coat and scarf and Kayra got up to help me put together salads.

“It’s really nice of you and Dwight to talk to us,” she said as I set out a bag of mixed greens and some bottled dressings. “This has to be a busy time for y’all. Grandma says the wedding’s next Wednesday week?”

“That’s okay.” I quickly filled the bowls and she carried them over to the table. “I think everything’s pretty much under control.”

“That reminds me,” Dwight said, pointing to a small box on the counter. “Is that what you’ve been waiting for?”

I examined the return address and tore it open as soon as I saw that it was from California. “Finally!”

Inside was the cake topper I’d ordered off the Internet, and I immediately excused myself to go call Dwight’s sister-in-law and tell her to get out her brown paint.

“Oh, good,” Kate said. “Bring it with you tomorrow night.”

She must have heard my mental wheels spinning. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

“Of course not,” I lied, belatedly remembering that she and Dwight’s two sisters were throwing a shower for me tomorrow night. “I was trying to think if I gave you a snippet of my dress so you could match the color.”

“You did. And don’t worry. I won’t let anyone else see it.”

When I returned to the dining area, the others were already transferring slices of pizza to their plates and I joined in after opening the tin of anchovies Dwight had picked up at the grocery for me. To his chagrin, both of the budding attorneys accepted my offer to share.

Conversation was general at first—schools, mutual acquaintances—but it soon got down to specifics about Martha Hurst. Nolan told Dwight about his mother’s connection to the condemned woman and how he’d wheedled a promise out of Tracy to look up the case.

“She took you seriously enough to speak to an SBI agent,” I said, and told them what Terry Wilson had told me last night about the phone call he’d gotten from her. “But he didn’t really work the case except for interviewing a couple of the witnesses for the prosecution. Agent Scott Underhill was their lead investigator in conjunction with Sheriff Poole’s department.”

I had met Underhill four years ago when my nephew Stevie’s girlfriend asked me to look into the unsolved murder of her mother. He seemed like a nice man, ethical and honest. “I don’t know that he’s necessarily the most effective investigator in the Bureau, though.”

Dwight frowned. It’s not that he’s naive about the possibility of sloppy or unethical officers, but he thinks the public’s too eager to blame the law whenever something goes wrong.

Kayra delicately lifted an anchovy filet from the flat tin and laid it across her slice of pizza. “You think he might have overlooked something?”

“Something that would prove who really did kill Roy Hurst and the killer shot Ms. Johnson to keep her from telling?” Nolan asked.

“Whoa, now,” said Dwight. “That’s a real stretch from your mama thinking Martha Hurst is innocent to Tracy Johnson fitting somebody else in the picture after all this time.”

Kayra bit into the pointed end of her pizza slice and sighed. “I just wish we had more than your mother’s intuition.”

“It is more than intuition,” Nolan protested. “He was killed with her good bat.”

A collective “Huh?” went up from the other three of us.

“Maybe it’s in the files Mr. Stephenson said we could look at.”

Dwight looked at me. “Deb’rah?”

I licked tomato sauce from my fingers. “There was a list of items removed from the trailer in Brix Junior’s discovery,” I said, and went to see if I could find the file I remembered.

I had to rummage through two boxes before I found the right one. “Here it is.” I ran my finger down the list. “A DeMarini aluminum softball bat.”

Another item further down caught my eye—an Easton softball bat.

“Easton,” I told Dwight. “Isn’t that the brand your softball team uses?”

He nodded. “DeMarinis are way too expensive for us.”

“That’s what I mean.” Nolan’s dark face was eager and expressive and he gestured so forcibly with his slice of pizza that a mushroom went flying across the table. “If Martha Hurst was like Mom, she had at least two or three bats, but the others would only be practice bats. The DeMarini would be her game bat. Mom said that Martha’s had a monster sweet spot—it was the perfect length, the perfect weight, and had a sweet spot to die for. Everybody was jealous of it. I don’t know what fastpitch DeMarinis cost back then—the company hadn’t been in business very long—but two years ago I went in with my brother and sister to buy Mom a slowpitch DeMarini for Christmas and it was over two hundred dollars.”

“Two hundred dollars!” I was incredulous. I hadn’t bought a bat since Stevie was in Little League, but it never occurred to me that a bat of any description could cost more than forty or fifty.

“And you better believe that Mom would use a fence post before she’d take batting practice with that good bat and risk a dent.”

Didn’t seem like much of an argument to me, and Dwight was looking as skeptical as I felt. “Maybe not if she was thinking clearly,” I said, “but Martha Hurst had a history of impulsive violence and I seriously doubt that she would’ve stopped to think about which bat she was going to smash somebody with. She would’ve just grabbed up the first one that came to hand.”

“Mom wouldn’t,” Nolan said stubbornly. “She absolutely would not and she says Ms. Hurst wouldn’t either.”

He argued that this was proof enough for him, but finally had to admit that the choice of bats was a slender thread from which to try to weave a lifeline. While Dwight and I changed into old work clothes, he and Kayra cleared the table, stacked the dishwasher, and then spread Brix Junior’s files on the table to read through everything themselves.

I brushed my teeth and rinsed away all traces of anchovies before joining Dwight in our new bedroom. April and the others had really knocked themselves out today. The bathroom was technically finished, although one of them had left a note warning us not to use the shower for two more days. In fact, all the construction work was finished. They had painted the walls a deep forest green like my old bedroom and the trim already had one coat of white enamel. The only thing lacking was the second coat, which Dwight and I eventually got around to. Being latex, the enamel dried so quickly that we got Nolan and Kayra to help us move in the bed and dresser so that we could begin refurbishing my old room for Cal.

I remade the bed while they brought in lamps and a blanket chest that doubled as a bench under the window. “What about her husband?” I asked.

“Gene Hurst? He had a stroke last year,” said Nolan.

Kayra nodded. “Now he’s in a nursing home over in Angier. We went to see him yesterday, but it was a waste of time. His mind’s totally gone.”

“But Mom says he stuck by Martha all through the trial. Never believed she did it.”

“We’re going to canvass the trailer park tomorrow,” said Kayra. “See if anybody remembers the murder. In our law clinic, we learned that sometimes people will talk more freely after a few years have passed. They’ll give up details and facts they wouldn’t tell investigators the first time around.”

The printer for my laptop doubles as a copier and they made copies of the witness lists and of the items removed from the Hurst trailer. I repeated my observation that none of the items seemed to include bloodstained clothing or footwear and they immediately made the obvious speculations I had made to Dwight earlier. No bloody clothes was a talking point and their optimism wasn’t dimmed by Dwight’s suggestion that she could have stepped out of the shower and then went ballistic when she found her stepson/former lover there again after she’d already thrown him out.

I made a pot of coffee and we kicked it around another half-hour till Dwight muffled a yawn and Kayra announced that it was time for them to leave.

“But could you let us look through any of the records in your office?” she asked him as they zipped up their jackets and pulled on gloves.

“Sure, although everything that was presented at the trial will be in the clerk of court’s office,” he replied.

“But wouldn’t you have stuff that wasn’t used at the trial? Like a statement about her bats?” asked Nolan, clinging to his theory.

“Not that I know of, but I’ll take a look for you.”

We walked out on the porch with them. A frigid wind bit at our unprotected faces. The rain had stopped and there were even a few stars peeking through the broken clouds, but the steps were so icy that Nolan’s feet went out from under him and he would have fallen if Dwight hadn’t grabbed him.

“You’re not going to try to drive back to Widdington tonight, are you?” he asked.

“Don’t worry,” said Kayra. “Grandma’s expecting us to spend the night with them.”

We gave them directions for driving across the farm by back lanes and then on dirt roads so as to avoid most of the dangerously slick paved roads that lay between our farm and the Bryant farm.

Dwight made sure that they had our phone number in case they slid into a ditch along the way, but Nolan assured me they’d be fine. “I’ve got four-wheel drive on my Jeep.”

“Four-wheel drive doesn’t do a thing if all four wheels are on ice,” I told him.

Kayra laughed and gave Dwight a good-bye hug. I got one, too.

“Nice kids,” I said, leaning into Dwight’s bulk for a windbreak as we watched the taillights from both cars disappear down the lane.

“Yeah,” he said. “Too bad they’re wasting their Christmas holidays on a wild-goose chase.”

While he went to take a hot shower in the old bathroom, I gathered up spoons and coffee mugs and started the dishwasher. When I put Brix Junior’s files back in the boxes, I noticed a scrap of paper on the floor under the table where it had fallen out of one of the folders. It was a short list of case law citations that Brix Junior probably intended to read up on. In the margin, he had scribbled a name followed by three question marks: “Deenie Gates???”

Deenie Gates.

Now why did that name sound familiar? It might have been a name out of the case law citings, but somehow I doubted it.

Then Dwight called to me from the bedroom. I slid the paper into the end folder and never gave it another thought that night.