Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 16

Amongst well-bred persons, every conversation is considered in a measure confidential. A lady or gentleman tacitly confides in you when he (or she) tells you an incident which may cause trouble if repeated, and you violate a confidence as much in such a repetition, as if you were bound over to secrecy.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Tuesday morning found me back in a courtroom in Dobbs for juvenile court, where I listened to a drugstore manager tell me how this was the second time this year that these two white teenage girls had shoplifted nail polish and lipsticks.

“The first time, they cried and said they’d done it on a dare. I gave them a good talking-to and they swore they’d never do it again, so I didn’t press charges. Now here they are back and, Your Honor, you know they know better. They’re in the school honor society. When I was in school, that meant something. We held ourselves to a higher standard.”

The parents wanted to make restitution, but I wasn’t having it. I fined the girls three times the value of what they stole and gave them suspended sentences on condition that they repay the store with money that came out of their own pockets, not their parents’. In addition, they were never again to enter that particular drugstore, and I gave them each twenty hours of community service. Finally, just so there was no misunderstanding on their part or their parents’, I explained that “suspended” meant that failure to live up to any of the conditions I’d imposed could mean time in a juvenile facility.

After that, I dealt with two cases of truancy, three cases of vandalism, and a thirteen-year-old boy charged for the second time with being a Peeping Tom. The boy’s father and I had known each other since grade school and my heart ached for him, but that didn’t stop me from sending the kid for a mental evaluation before I passed final judgment.

By then it was heading for noon, so after signing all the necessary documents to set my rulings in motion, I recessed a little early for lunch. Portland Brewer had begun maternity leave this week, and to inaugurate her new leisure, she’d invited me over for soup and salad.

Not that I could see any sign of leisure when I got out of my car. A shiny white Chevy pickup sat in her driveway. It towed a familiar bright red trailer filled with ladders, paint buckets, and a tarp bin. Brack Johnson had been painting for my daddy for forty years and he painted my house when it was first built. He’s choosy about who he paints for and he doesn’t usually travel too far from Cotton Grove, but Portland’s parents were old customers, too, so I guess he was willing to make an exception for her.

“What’s up?” I asked when she opened the door.

“I’m having the nursery repainted. Peach. With lemon and orange trim.”

“What was wrong with the—what was it? Key lime?”

“Lime was fine back in August, but it looks so cold now. And besides—” Her sudden smile was so bright it almost blinded me. “It’s a girl!”

“A girl? That’s wonderful!” I squeezed her hands. “But I thought you didn’t want to know.”

“I didn’t, but you know how I was scheduled for a final sonogram yesterday? Well, the tech slipped and said ‘she,’ and then was so got away with herself that she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t said it.”

“Does Avery know?”

“He was sitting right there. He never said anything before, but now he says he’s sorta thought all along that it was a girl. He says he kept watching the screen the other two times and he didn’t see any little peanut, so he was pretty sure.”

I took off my coat and hung it over the bannister. “Are y’all pleased?”

“Thrilled. Want to know what we’re naming her? Carolyn after my mother, Deborah after you.”

As soon as she said Carolyn, I’d started to burble, but the Deborah so surprised me that for once I was speechless. I felt my eyes fill up with tears.

“Oh, Por,” I whispered.

Her eyes were glistening, too. “Yeah, well don’t get too sentimental about it, and you better hope she’s more like my mother than you because we’re going to expect lots of free babysitting out of you and Dwight.”

“Anytime,” I promised and cupped her swollen abdomen with my two hands. “Carolyn Deborah Brewer . . . Hey, did she just kick?”

“Knows her name already,” Por laughed.

We went upstairs to see the fruit-colored nursery next to their bedroom. Brack had already capped the paint and was wrapping up his roller so it wouldn’t dry out while he went to lunch. Although he’d been painting all morning, there wasn’t a speck of peach-colored paint on the elderly painter’s immaculate bib overalls.

“Looks good,” I told him.

“Yeah, well, hit looked real good in that there green, too,” he said, “but I reckon this color does look more like a little girl, don’t you think? When I get this yellow and orange on the trimwork, hit’ll really shine. Be so bright she won’t have to cut on no lights till atter the sun goes down.”

I love to listen to how country people of Brack’s age talk. He sounds exactly like Daddy and Aunt Sister with their old-timey Colleton County accents and pronunciations that aren’t going to last another generation.

We chatted a few minutes more. He asked about Daddy, I asked about his collards; then he left for lunch—“Reckon I’d better go git me some dinner ’fore they sell out of today’s special”—and Por and I went down to her sunlit kitchen for canned lentil soup and salad-in-a-bag. Por’s even less adept in a kitchen than me, but with us, talk has always come before food.

“What’s this about a deputy gone missing?” she asked as she turned the burner on under the soup and pulled out bottles of dressing from the refrigerator.

“What’ve you heard?” I asked cautiously, trying to keep separate in my mind what was public knowledge and what Dwight might have confided. Not that he really had. Just mentioned that Don Whitley hadn’t been seen since Sunday night.

“One of the troopers told Avery that there’s an APB out on him. Is this anything to do with Tracy’s death?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “And Dwight didn’t say when I asked him, but he was at Jerry’s night before last at the dinner Bo’s department gave for us and he seemed to be taking her shooting sort of personally.”

I had said something along these same lines to Dwight yesterday when he told me about Whitley, but saying it again now to Por was like seeing an eye chart pop into focus the instant the optometrist slips the correct lens into the viewer. Once again I heard Tracy’s words to me after court last week, but this time in the exact intonation she had used: “I guess you’ve never worried about public opinion anyhow, have you?”

Emphasis on the you.

As in, “you don’t, but I do”?

“What?” asked Portland, who could always read me like a brief she’d just written. “You’ve thought of something. What?”

I told her of Tracy’s last remarks. “What if she was talking about herself, not me? What if Don Whitley was the somebody right under her nose? He’s sort of cute and nice and he’s generated several drug cases for Doug’s office this year, so they’ve been thrown together a lot, preparing for court.”

“But didn’t you say she made some snide remark about Dwight? About the disparity between an attorney with a law degree and a deputy with only a high school education?”

“That could’ve been about herself and Don Whitley, too.”

I described Whitley’s beery gloom at Jerry’s, the last place he’d been seen. “He said that Tracy was the reason he was taking courses out at the community college. Maybe he was trying to improve himself for her.”

Por snorted. “Like an associate degree in criminal justice would be enough for Tracy? I’m sorry she’s dead and it’s horrible that she was shot, but let’s not forget that she could be a real snob at times.”

“I know, but young as Whitley still is, he could go on for a regular BA. Hell, he could even go over to Eastern for a law degree. Hector Woodlief was almost fifty when he passed the bar.”

“So if he was doing all that for her, would he’ve killed her?”

“Maybe she dumped him.”

Unspoken came the thought that if he really was her lover and the father of her baby, maybe that’s what they’d fought about. Maybe he wanted it and she didn’t.

Or vice versa.

A lot of pregnant women have been killed by their husbands or mates these past few years.

I was dying to tell Por about Tracy’s pregnancy so that we could thrash it out together. We’ve always bounced ideas and theories off each other, shared the good gossip, or asked for the other’s take on something. It felt like a betrayal not to confide in her now the way I usually did, but a promise is a promise. To avoid temptation, I switched the subject to Cyl DeGraffenried and we spent the rest of our time together dishing about Cyl’s sudden engagement, my wedding, and if Carolyn Deborah would arrive on her twenty-eighth due date in time to qualify as a tax deduction.

I left as Brack drove into Por’s driveway and went straight back to the courthouse. If I couldn’t talk to Portland, I could certainly talk to Dwight, right?

Wrong.

“Sorry, Judge, honey,” said Bo Poole, who will never let me forget that someone once called me that my first year on the bench, “but he went to have lunch with Terry Wilson. Want to leave him a message?”

“That’s okay. I’ll see him tonight.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said with a knowing grin. “I bet you will.”

Everybody’s a comedian.

In a special hearing that afternoon, I was asked to terminate visitation rights for an allegedly abusive mother. What made it weird is that this wasn’t an uneducated woman stressed out by a dead-end life with no options. This was the daughter of a fairly wealthy family with lots of resources. Indeed, it was the grandparents who were actually fighting the termination because the little three-year-old boy was their only grandbaby and they didn’t want to be dependent on the goodwill of their former son-in-law for access to him. They had hired the best civil attorney in town, my cousin John Claude Lee, to defend against Millard King, attorney for the plaintiff.

Most times, small-town life can be as comforting as a woolly blanket on a cold winter night, the way it lets you snuggle down with people and places you’ve known forever.

It can also be as smothering as waking up with that blanket tangled around your restless body.

Whether personal or professional, I was beginning to feel as if every time I turned around these days, I was faced with a conflict of interest. It wasn’t just the judgment I’d made this morning about a friend’s son that troubled me. No, it was the way I had been less open with my oldest, dearest friend because of my promise to Dwight. It was having to deny my usual need to satisfy my admittedly nosy curiosity because of this new commitment to him. For the last two months, as old loyalties and old priorities shifted and realigned to accommodate the new, it felt to me like I was trying to cross the moving floor of a carnival funhouse.

And now here I was being asked once again to walk that tricky line between judicial objectivity and family ties.

I offered to recuse myself, but Millard King professed himself satisfied with my ability to judge fairly on the merits of the facts.

The father accused the mother of neglect and physical abuse and of putting the child in harm’s way every time she was left alone with him.

While not specifically denying those allegations, John Claude argued that the grandparents would make sure their daughter was never alone with him and that any future visitations would take place in their home.

The father, an earnest young executive for Progress Energy, did not have his ex-in-laws’ deep pockets, but he did have Dr. David Merten, a well-respected pediatric radiologist, whose show-and-tell consisted of a series of X-rays that documented at least three, and possibly five, separate fractures of the young child’s bones. Dr. Merten had a well-timbred speaking voice and his vivid blue eyes flashed expressively as he laid out the dates for these X-rays and explained how unusual it was that an otherwise normal and healthy child should have so many greenstick fractures.

Pointing to faint shadows that may or may not have been earlier fractures and speaking in layman’s terms, he said, “Children of this age heal so quickly that it’s impossible to say for sure that some of these were indeed fractures, but here, here, and here, there can be no question that the bones were cracked. Fortunately, none of the boy’s growth plates have yet been damaged, but should that occur, the bone might well stop growing so that the arm or leg would be shorter or would grow crookedly.”

The X-rays of each undeniable fracture had been taken at the time the child suffered the “accidents,” and those accidents corresponded to dates he had been in the custody of the sulky-looking woman who now sat beside John Claude at the defendant’s table.

Despite my ties to John Claude, it was a no-brainer. The mother gave a “whatever” shrug when I ruled to terminate her visitation rights, but her parents, seated behind her, looked devastated.

I told the plaintiff, “I cannot order you to let your son’s grandparents maintain contact with him, but I would strongly urge you to be compassionate to them. No child can have too many people loving him.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” said John Claude, and I thought I heard a faint trace of genuine appreciation in his pro forma words. Not that he hadn’t argued eloquently and diligently for his client. All the same, a little boy’s well-being had been up for grabs here and John Claude Lee was a grandfather, too.

The rest of the afternoon session was filled by another truancy, a child who had taken his father’s handgun to threaten another child who was bullying him, and a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to go live with her father now that her mother had remarried.

Blessedly, I had no personal connection to a single one of the combatants.