Rituals of the Season

CHAPTER 25

A lady who has children, or one accustomed to perform for herself light household duties, will soon find the advantage of wearing materials that will wash.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Told by an impatient Mary Pat that he needed to choose between dinosaurs and footballs now!, Cal picked a dark blue set printed in stars and planets, only to learn that kid prints didn’t come queen size. Happily, almost as soon as we got to the larger sizes, he spotted white wolves howling to a midnight Arctic sky. “Look at the paw prints on the sheets,” he told Jake and Mary Pat.

We bought sheets, pillowcases, and comforter and a couple of goose-down pillows for Cal, and as we passed a machine on the way out of the store, I gave them quarters for jawbreaker bubble gum.

After linens came toys. We crossed the half-mile-long parking lot to the other side of the outlet mall and descended upon Mertz’s, one of those big-box chain stores that sell everything from shoes and clothes to upholstered furniture and garden supplies. The kids looked at bicycles and skateboards and I made mental notes of the things that seemed to interest Cal so that I could tell Dwight.

When she turns twenty-five, Mary Pat is due to inherit an enormous trust fund, but for now, she was anxiously worried that her allowance wouldn’t stretch to cover a stuffed dog she wanted to get for Kate’s new baby next month.

“Everybody have all your Christmas presents wrapped and hidden?” I asked.

“I don’t,” said Cal. “I don’t know what to get you and Dad.”

“Me? I’m easy. Anything chocolate works for me. When I was a little girl, Santa Claus always brought me a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The dark ones. Not milk chocolate. It hasn’t felt like a real Christmas since I grew up because nobody ever gives them to me anymore and I can’t buy them for myself.”

“You can’t?” They were intrigued by the notion of forbidden sweets.

“Well, I could, I suppose, but that would be like cheating. No, I guess I’ll have to spend the rest of my Christmases without them. Besides, they probably don’t even make the bittersweet kind these days.” I gave a dramatic sigh as Mary Pat and Cal exchanged significant glances. “But for your dad? He’s really hard. Let me think.”

“Not clothes.”

“Not clothes,” I agreed, thinking of the beautiful brown sweater I’d bought Dwight when I held court up in the mountains in October. Normally I wait till the last minute to go Christmas shopping. I love the crowds, the decorated stores, the sales. This year, though, as soon as I knew what our Christmas was going to entail, I’d begun picking up gifts. Now they were squirreled away in my garage like a stash of acorns against a winter storm. “So how much were you thinking to spend?”

“Well, I have twenty-seven dollars and eighty-nine cents, but I still need to get something for Grandma.” Cal looked up at me in hopeful earnestness and I wanted so badly to hug him. He was going to be built like Dwight and he had Dwight’s brown eyes, with a light sprinkle of Rob and Beth’s freckles across his little nose.

“I know! How about something for his beer-making? When he was moving the other night, somebody stepped on his measuring scale, so he certainly does need another one and there’s a kitchen supply store just two doors down from here.”

Soon we were discussing the merits of the different scales for weighing quarter-ounces of hops or flavorings and settled on one that had a small removable aluminum pan.

Best of all, it cost less than fifteen dollars.

By now it was lunchtime, as Jake had reminded us ever since we left the toy department at Mertz’s, so it was back over to the food court over beside the linen store for egg rolls all around and a communal carton of shrimp fried rice. The place featured stainless steel tables and chairs and was jammed with Christmas shoppers. At the next table, two young women were showing each other their finds while their toddlers played around their feet.

“I’ve been wanting linen napkins forever,” I heard one of them say. “And these were such a good buy, I decided the hell with it.”

“Good for you. You know, I’ve never regretted the things I’ve bought for myself,” the other one said solemnly. “Only the things I didn’t buy.”

At that moment, the first woman’s little girl tripped and fell and split her lip on the edge of the stroller.

Blood streamed from the cut. The mother instantly scooped up the wailing child and started to dip one of her new napkins into her cup of ice water. At the last second, though, she pushed the cloth napkins aside, grabbed one of the used paper ones littering the table, and held it to the child’s mouth while she darted to the counter for more. The other woman brought another handful back to the table and they applied ice and cold wet napkins until the bleeding stopped, all the time worrying aloud whether or not the child would need stitches. The young mother was almost in tears herself. By the time they’d decided it should be looked at, I had heard enough to realize they were sisters, wayfarers off the interstate, who hadn’t a clue as to where the nearest emergency room was.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but if you’re wanting a hospital, you’re only about two minutes away.”

“Oh, thank you,” they said, gathering up their belongings.

I gave them directions and they hurried out.

“I hate stitches,” Cal said darkly and the other two nodded in total agreement.

As they compared their various scars and told one another horror stories about hospital emergency rooms, I started thinking about the implications of what I’d just seen. That was a distraught protective mother, no question of her maternal concern, yet she had unconsciously rejected the option of using one of her new linen napkins to stop the blood, had even wasted a precious extra second or two to go fetch paper ones.

I remembered Herman bitching at us the other day for using his good screwdriver to open a paint can.

So why, given her choice of three softball bats, would Martha Hurst have smashed her stepson/ex-lover with her good game bat?

Maybe Nolan’s mother was right after all. Maybe she really hadn’t.

But Roy Hurst had died in her trailer on the only day Martha could have killed him.

Or did he?

I thought about all the literature I’d read on forensic entomology and the graphic discussion Kayra and Nolan and I had about blowfly larvae at the Taos Tacos. No way would the ME have made a mistake about counting the stages.

Unless—? What was it that old woman at the trailer park had told them?

Kayra and Nolan had struck out with Deenie Gates, but I was a judge. And what’s the good of having the office if you can’t take advantage of it once in a while?

“Come on,” I told the children. “Let’s go visit Miss Amy.”

“Who’s Miss Amy?” they asked.

“My brother Will’s wife.”

“You have an awful lot of brothers, don’t you?” asked Cal.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “There won’t be a test till next Christmas.”

I called ahead and gave Amy a sketchy idea of what I wanted without going into too much detail—too many little big-eared pitchers in the car with me—and when we got to the hospital, she pointed me to a meeting room off the lobby where Deenie Gates was waiting and whisked the three kids off to check out the games in the children’s lounge on the third floor.

I had expected the same sullen reaction that Kayra and Nolan said they’d received from the woman and had thought I might have to trick her into talking. Instead, I got a shy smile of genuine warmth when I sat down at the table across from her. Now that I saw her again, I began to remember. Lank blond hair, the muddy skin tones of a recovering alcoholic, and eyes that kept glancing away, unable to maintain steady contact. She was still prematurely stoop-shouldered as if expecting a blow, but there were no visible bruises today.

“How’s it going, Ms. Gates?”

“Going good, Judge Knott. Real good,” she said. “I been doing what you told me to—making up my own mind, not waiting for some man to make it up for me. You were right. I won’t really getting nothing from none of ’em ’cepting their fists and more stuff on my charge cards. I’m the one going out to work every day while they lay around and watch the sports channel and drink my beer. I’m the one putting food on the table. How come I need to take their shit? That talking-to you give me was the best thing ever happened to me. I mean, I know some of the others tried to tell me, but something about seeing you were there in that black robe? I only come up before men judges before and you talked to me like you knew I could do it.”

I was profoundly surprised. I had evidently given Deenie Gates my standard battered-woman talk, but for once it hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. I barely remembered her, yet she remembered me and what I’d said to her.

“Ms. Gates—”

“No, call me Deenie. It’s okay.”

“Deenie, then. You know that Mrs. Knott in human resources is my sister-in-law, right?”

“She is? No, ma’am, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, she is. And she tells me you’re one of her best workers.”

“I am,” she said, pride in her voice. “You could eat off’n my floors.”

“She also told me that Martha Hurst was once a good friend to you back before she went to prison.”

“Yes.” Her eyes met mine with less frequency.

“She’s going to die for something she didn’t do, Deenie, unless you speak up to help her.”

Silence. Her shoulders hunched in on themselves more than ever.

“I know she didn’t kill Roy, Deenie, and you do, too.”

“You do?” Her head was down but she didn’t sound belligerent, only curious.

“I do. But I can’t prove it. You can, though, can’t you? Roy was your boyfriend. You were seeing him. You saw him after that Sunday, didn’t you?”

“No, ma’am!” Her head came up and her eyes met mine. “No, ma’am, I didn’t. Honest.”

“But you know who did, don’t you?”

Her head went down again.

I waited quietly and she shifted uneasily in her chair.

At last she said, “I’m not saying I know anything about how Roy got hisself killed, but if I did know, I’d get in trouble, wouldn’t I? ’Cause I didn’t tell before? Maybe go to jail myself?”

“For telling the truth and saving Martha’s life? Oh, no, Deenie. Nothing like that would happen. Not if you didn’t have anything to do with Roy’s death. Did you?”

She shook her head vigorously and her hair swung back and forth like a curtain in front of her lowered face.

Again I waited quietly until she couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

“You gotta promise he won’t hurt me.”

“He who, Deenie?”

“I don’t know why he had to go and get so mad about it. I was growed. I was sixteen. Already working here. Mom won’t but fourteen when I was born. He ain’t my real daddy anyhow.”

“Who?” I asked again.

“Pa. He’s the one killed Roy ’cause Roy got me pregnant and won’t going to marry me like he promised. He come home that night with blood all over his shirt. On the front of his pants. On his shoes. He throwed the shirt away and made Mom wash his pants. She liked to never got all the blood out of ’em. He said I’d brought shame on him and Mom, and after they went to bed, I sneaked out and got the shirt out of the garbage bag. I thought I was going to keep the baby and I thought that would be all he’d ever have of his daddy. His daddy’s blood. But then later, everybody said so much, and with Martha and all? So I got the doctor to take it.”

“What night did this happen, Deenie?”

“It was a Monday. Pa’d worked late and was coming home and he seen Roy’s car and followed him out to Martha’s trailer. I think he just walked in behind him, grabbed up one of Martha’s bats, and never even gave him a chance to talk. He said he smashed his privates to mashed potatoes so he couldn’t never do to another girl what he done to me. And he said he’d do the same to Mom and me if we told anybody. Well, Mom’s dead now and he’s took up with another woman and I ain’t seen him in I reckon two years. Good riddance, I say.”

Even after all her emotional outpouring, it still took me several minutes to convince Deenie to come with me to the sheriff’s department. “No charges will be filed against you,” I said. “You’ll even be a hero for getting Martha out of prison.”

A split second after she agreed, Dwight called.

“You ready to go home?”

“I’m at the hospital,” I told him.

“Huh?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody’s hurt, but see if you can find Kayra and Nolan and tell them to meet us in your office. His mother was right. Martha Hurst didn’t kill her stepson.”

“I can’t go now,” said Deenie when I ended the call. “My shift’s not over.”

“That’s okay, Mrs. Knott will make it right with your supervisor.”

“Well, let me go get my coat and pocketbook out of my locker.”

We went out into the hallway and I told her I’d meet her in the front lobby as soon as I found Amy and the children.

As we parted at the elevator, she hesitated. “Should I bring the shirt?”

“Shirt?”

“Pa’s shirt with the blood. Should I bring it?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You still have it after all these years?”

She shrugged her rounded shoulders. “I couldn’t leave it at home. Mom would’ve found it. So I brought it here and stuck it up on the top shelf in my locker and then I didn’t know what else to do with it, so I just left it there. Should I bring it?”

“Oh, yes, indeed!” I said.