Winter's Child

Winter's ChildMargaret MaronSeries: Deborah Knott Mystery [12] Published: 2007 Tags: Cozy Mystery, Contemporary

Cozy Mysteryttt Contemporaryttt

SUMMARY:

Judge Deborah Knott's new marriage will be tested as she and her husband are drawn into an emotional hunt for his missing ex-wife and young son. It's one month after their wedding when a disturbing call brings Deborah's husband, Sheriffs Deputy Dwight Bryant, back to Virginia to find that his ex-wife has left their eight-year-old son alone for twenty-four hours. And when Dwight confronts her, she takes the boy and disappears.

WINTER’S

CHILD

Deborah Knott novels:

WINTER’S CHILD

RITUALS OF THE SEASON

HIGH COUNTRY FALL

SLOW DOLLAR

UNCOMMON CLAY

STORM TRACK

HOME FIRES

KILLER MARKET

UP JUMPS THE DEVIL

SHOOTING AT LOONS

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

BOOTLEGGER’S DAUGHTER

Sigrid Harald novels:

FUGITIVE COLORS

PAST IMPERFECT

CORPUS CHRISTMAS

BABY DOLL GAMES

THE RIGHT JACK

DEATH IN BLUE FOLDERS

DEATH OF A BUTTERFLY

ONE COFFEE WITH

Non-series:

LAST LESSONS OF SUMMER

BLOODY KIN

SUITABLE FOR HANGING

SHOVELING SMOKE

WINTER’S

CHILD

MARGARET

MARON

®

new york boston

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Enquiry into Plants and Minor Works on Odours and Weather Signs by Theophrastus.

Translation by Sir Arthur Hort. Loeb Classical Library, 1916.

Meteorology: A Text-book on the Weather, the Causes of Its Changes, and Weather Fore-casting, for the Student and General Reader by Willis Isbister Milham. Macmillan Company, 1918.

Copyright © 2006 by Margaret Maron All rights reserved.

Mysterious Press

Hachette Book Group USA

1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Visit our Web site at www.mysteriouspress.com.

The Mysterious Press name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.

First eBook Edition: August 2006

ISBN: 0-446-19861-7

1. Women judges—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. I. Title.

For Marilyn, Linda, Nancy, Lia, Judy, and Sue—y’all know who and y’all know why (also the when, what, where, and how).

It might seem that the turbulent squall cloud is very vigorous compared with the gentle air currents which build it,but it must be remembered that the squall cloud is near theaxis of the whirl.

—Willis Isbister Milham

WINTER’S

CHILD

D E B O R A H K N O T T ’ S

F A M I L Y T R E E

(stillborn son)

Annie Ruth

1) Ina Faye

Langdon

(1) Robert

m.

2) Doris > children (including Betsy) (1)

> grandchildren

(2) Franklin

m.

Mae > children > grandchildren 1) Carol > Olivia > Braz & Val (3) Andrew

m.

2) Lois

3) April > A.K. & Ruth

m.

(4) Herman*

m.

Nadine > *Reese, *Denise, Edward, Annie Sue

(5) Haywood* m.

Isabel > at least 3, including Valerie, Stephen, Jane Ann > g’children

(6) Benjamin

m.

Kezzie Knott

(7) Seth

m.

Minnie > at least 3, including

Jessica

(8) Jack

m.

1) Patricia (“Trish”)

(9) Will

m.

2) Kathleen

m.

3) Amy > at least 2 children

(2)

(10) Adam*

m.

Karen > 2 sons

Susan

(11) Zach*

m.

Barbara > Lee, Emma

Stephenson

(12) Deborah

m.

Dwight Bryant > stepson Cal

*Twins

C H A P T E R

1

The signs of rain, wind, storm, and fair weather we havedescribed so far as was attainable, partly from our own observation, partly from the information of persons of credit.

—Theophrastus

The call came through to the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department just after sunset on a chilly Thursday evening in mid-January. A pickup truck had crashed on a back road near Possum Creek.

From the sound of her voice the caller was an older woman and more than a little upset. “I think he’s dead.

There’s so much blood, and he’s not moving.”

The dispatcher made soothing noises and promised that help would be there very shortly. “Where are you now, ma’am?”

“Rideout Road, off Old Forty-Eight. I’m not sure of the number.”

The dispatcher heard her speak to someone, then a second woman came on the line. “Mrs. Victor Johnson here,” she said and gave the house number as a man’s excited voice could be heard in the background. “My husband just came back from looking. He says it’s J.D.

Rouse.”

“We’ll have someone there in just a few minutes,” said the dispatcher and put out calls to the nearest patrol unit and to the rescue service.

Dwight Bryant, chief deputy and head of the department’s detective division, was halfway home and had just turned on his headlights when he heard the calls. He mentally shook his head. J.D. Rouse dead from a vehicu-lar accident? Rouse had been picked up for DWI at least once that Dwight knew of, so perhaps it wasn’t totally surprising that he’d crashed his truck.

On the other hand, if he’d ever been asked how he thought Rouse might meet his maker, he would have said, “Barroom brawl. Shot by someone’s disgruntled husband. Hell, maybe even stabbed with a butcher knife by his own wife the night she finally got tired of him knocking her around—assuming he had a wife. And assuming he’d treat her the same as he seemed to treat anyone weaker than himself.”

Rideout Road was less than three miles from home. He switched on the blue lights and siren behind the grille of his truck and floored the gas pedal. It wouldn’t be out of his way to swing by, he thought, as homebound traffic moved aside for him. His wife—and it was still a thing of wonder that Deborah had really married him—had a late meeting so she wouldn’t be there for a couple of hours yet.

By the time he arrived, it was almost full dark, but the night was lit up by a patrol unit’s flashing blue lights. A thick stand of scrub pines lined one side of the road, the other side was an open pasture that adjoined a farmyard.

There, too, a thin row of pines and cedars had grown up along the right-of-way. Despite the rapidly dropping temperature, three or four cars had stopped opposite the wreck and several people had gotten out to watch and exclaim, their warm breaths blowing little clouds of steam with every word.

A bundled-up deputy was emerging from his patrol car with his torchlight as Dwight pulled in behind him.

Dwight zipped his own jacket and put on gloves before stepping out into the bone-chilling wind.

“Hey, Major. You heard the call, too, huh?”

Together they approached the white Ford pickup that lay nose down across the shallow ditch.

“Straight stretch of road,” the younger man mused.

He flashed his torch back along the pavement. “No skid marks. You reckon he had a heart attack?”

Sam Dalton was a fairly new recruit and Dwight had not yet taken his measure, but he liked it that Dalton did not jump to immediate conclusions without all the facts.

Siren wailing, a rescue truck crested the rise and its emergency lights flashed through the pickup’s front windshield. As the two deputies approached the driver’s side of the pickup, Dwight paused.

“What does that look like to you?” he asked, nodding toward the back window. The glass had shattered in a telltale spiderweb pattern that radiated out from a small hole just behind the driver’s seat.

“Well, damn!” said Dalton. “He was shot?”

A few moments later, the EMT who drove the rescue truck confirmed that J.D. Rouse was dead and yes, he had indeed been shot through the back of the head.

“No exit wound, so the bullet’s still in there,” she said.

There was an open six-pack on the seat beside the dead man. It held three cold Bud Lights. A fourth can lay on the floor in a pool of beer and blood. Otherwise the interior of the truck was uncluttered. No fast-food boxes or plastic drink cups, but the open ashtray was full of butts and there were burn marks on the vinyl seats as if hot cigarette coals had fallen on them. A smoker, thought Dwight, and a careless one at that. It went with what he knew of Rouse, who had grown up in the same community: a man who grabbed what he wanted with greedy hands and with no regard for what he might be wrecking.

“Looks like he’d just popped the top on his beer when he got hit,” said the med tech.

Rouse had worn a fleece-lined denim jacket, jeans, and heavy work boots when he died. The jacket was unzipped to reveal a blue plaid flannel shirt even though it was a cold night and the passenger-side window was open about four inches.

While Dalton secured the area, Dwight called for the crime scene van and a couple of his detectives, then he walked over to the people standing across the road.

“Which one of you reported it?”

“That was us,” said the older gray-haired man, whom Dwight immediately recognized.

Victor Johnson was a generation older and had lived on this farm all his life, so he had known Dwight’s family long enough to speak familiarly, but tonight’s circumstance made him more formal.

“Did you see it happen?” asked Dwight.

“No, sir. It was getting on for dark and my wife had just called me to the table when we heard Miz Harper banging at the door. She was the one actually called y’all.

Soon as she said a truck’d run off the road, Catherine showed her the phone and I come out here to see about it.”

“Was the motor still running?”

“Yessir. I opened the door and reached in under him to cut it off. Knowed it was J.D. soon as I seen the truck.

He lives on the other side of Old Forty-Eight and cuts through here all the time. Young man like that?” He shook his head. “And there’s that poor wife of his with two or three little ones. Somebody needs to go tell her.”

“We’ll do that,” said Dwight. “This Mrs. Harper.

Which one is she?”

“Oh, she ain’t here. She was so shook up, she wanted to go on home. I tried to get her to let me drive her, but she had her dog and her wagon with her and I couldn’t talk her into leaving the wagon here.”

“Harper?” Dwight asked, trying to place the woman.

“Eddie Harper’s mother?”

“No, I doubt you’d know her,” said Johnson. “She’s one of the new people.”

“She lives just over the rise there,” said Mrs. Johnson, stepping forward. “First little white house on the right when you turn into that Holly Ridge development. They moved here from Virginia about ten or twelve years ago.

Daughter’s remarried now and lives in Raleigh.”

The woman paused and beamed at him. “I heard you got married last month yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Kezzie Knott’s girl.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said and waited for the sly grins that usually accompanied his admission that Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief deputy had married the daughter of a man who used to run moonshine from Canada to Florida in his long-ago youth.

There was nothing sly in the older woman’s smile. “I knew her mother. One of the nicest people God ever put on this earth. I hope y’all are half as happy together as her and Mr. Kezzie were.”

“So far, so good,” said Dwight, smiling back at her.

“So this Mrs. Harper was walking along the shoulder and saw it happen?”

Husband and wife both nodded vigorously. “She’s out two or three times a week picking up trash. Said that just about the time he got even with her, she heard a big bang, like the tire blew out or something, and then the pickup slowed down and ran right off the road and into the ditch.”

Ten minutes later, Dwight stopped his truck in front of the neat little house at the corner of one of those cheaply built developments that had popped up around the county in the last few years like mildew after a summer rain. No sidewalks and the street was already pockmarked with potholes. The porch light was on and a child’s red metal wagon stood near the steps. Its carrying capacity was increased by removable wooden rails and was lined with a large black plastic garbage bag whose sides had been snugged back over the rails. The bag was half full of dirty drink cups, plastic bottles that seemed to have been run over a couple of times, beer cans, scrap paper, yellow Bojangles’ boxes, and fast-food bags. A soiled pair of thin leather driving gloves lay on top.

When he rang, a dog barked from within, then the door was opened by a wiry gray-haired woman. She wore gray warm-up pants and a blue Fair Isle sweater and Dwight put her age at somewhere on the other side of sixty.

She shushed the small brown dog, waved aside the ID

Dwight tried to show her, and held the door open wide.

“Come on in out of the cold, Major—Bryant, did you say? Such an awful thing. Mr. Johnson was right, wasn’t he? That man really is dead, isn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am. Did you know him?”

Mrs. Harper shook her head. “I’ve seen the truck lots of times, but I never met the driver. Didn’t even know his name till Mr. Johnson said it. Probably wouldn’t recognize him if he walked through the door.”

The house was small—what real estate agents call a

“starter home”—and was almost obsessively neat and orderly. Cozy, but nothing out of place. Magazines were stacked according to size on the coffee table, and a family portrait was precisely centered above the couch.

Dwight recognized a much younger Mrs. Harper. The child on her lap was probably the married daughter Mrs.

Johnson had mentioned. The older man seated next to her was no doubt her father. He wore an Army uniform, as did the younger man who stood in back, almost like an afterthought. Colonel and captain.

“My dad,” said Mrs. Harper, when she saw him looking at the picture. “I was an Army brat who went and married one.”

“They’re not with you now?”

“No. Bill and I split up about a year after that was painted, and the Colonel died three years ago this month.” Pride and love mingled in her voice as she spoke of her father. “He was a wonderful man. Would have been eighty-five if he’d lived.”

More family pictures and framed mementos hung in neat rows along a wall that led down a hallway. “Those his medals?” Dwight asked. He had similar ones stowed away somewhere from his own Army days.

Mrs. Harper nodded. “But do come and sit. May I get you something? Coffee? A nice cup of tea?”

Through the archway to the kitchen, Dwight could see a teapot and a single mug on the table. “Hot tea would be great this cold night,” he said, taking off his gloves and stuffing them in his jacket pocket.

He trailed along as Mrs. Harper went out to the kitchen stove and turned the burner on under a shiny red kettle. She put a tea bag in a second mug and laid a spoon beside it. The kettle was hot from before and began to whistle almost instantly. “I always find that a good cup of tea helps settle my nerves,” she said.

Even so, she was still so rattled that hot water splashed onto the Formica tabletop as she filled his cup. “I’m sorry. It was such a shock. The Colonel used to say—but he was in battle and war is different, isn’t it? I never . . .”

Dwight took the kettle from her shaking hands and set it back on the stove, then pulled out a chair across the table from her.

“Could you tell me what happened? Cold as it is, I’m a little surprised that you were out walking so late with night coming on. It’s not terribly safe.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said sharply, then immediately softened her sharp words with a smile toward the dog. “She doesn’t look fierce, but she’s very protective. But you’re right. It was later than usual. I always mean to go early but I’m not a morning person and, I don’t know, one thing and another, I just seem to piddle around till it’s usually four o’clock before Dixie and I set out.”

The little dog cocked an ear at hearing its name.

“The Johnsons say you were picking up trash along the roadside?”

Mrs. Harper smiled and nodded. “I adopted Rideout Road two years ago to honor my father. Maybe you saw the sign at the crossroads? Colonel James T. Frampton?”

As part of its anti-littering campaign, North Carolina allows individuals or corporations to “adopt” a road or a two-mile stretch of highway and will put up a sign to that effect if the volunteers agree to clean their stretch at least four times a year.

“My wife’s family has the road that cuts through their farms,” Dwight said, “but I don’t think they’re out picking up litter every week. And for sure not when the weather’s this cold.”

Mrs. Harper shrugged her rounded shoulders. “It’s not bad once you get to moving good. I just can’t bear to see trash build up on a road dedicated to the Colonel.

Besides, it’s good exercise for Dixie and me and neither of us is getting any younger, I’m afraid.”

This time, the corgi put a paw on her mistress’s trousered leg and she smiled down indulgently. “With all the excitement, I forgot all about your treat, didn’t I, girl?”

Dwight waited while she took a Milk-Bone from the cut-glass candy dish in the center of the table and gave it to the dog.

“Tell me about this evening,” he said.

“There’s really not much to tell.” She lifted the mug to her pale lips, then set it down again. Despite her obvious distress, though, she was able to convey a good sense of the circumstances. “It’s so cold that the wind made my eyes water. I had picked up what little there was on the eastbound side and we were on our way back down the westbound side. It was too early for what you’d call rush hour out here and the road doesn’t get all that much traffic anyhow. There’s only fourteen houses till you get to this subdivision, and most of the people who live here and work in Raleigh usually take Old Forty-Eight. It’s a little more direct, although enough do use Rideout.

Maybe because it’s still country along here? Used to be an older man who would park out of sight of any houses and have himself a couple of beers before going home and he’d just dump the evidence on the shoulder. When I called him on it, he apologized and started getting out and hiding his empties in the trunk. And another time—oh, but why am I going on like this? You don’t want to hear about litterbugs. You want to know about tonight.”

Dwight smiled encouragingly, knowing how some people have to take a running start to launch into the horror of what they have witnessed.

“Anyhow, I was fishing a McDonald’s bag out of the ditch when I heard the truck coming. About the time it got even with me, I heard a loud bang. Like a backfire or something. And then the truck just rolled on off the road. I thought maybe it’d blown a tire.”

She hesitated and looked at him. “I was wrong, though, wasn’t I? I hear enough hunters, and the Colonel was in the infantry. It was a gunshot, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Dwight. “I’m afraid so.”

Her hand shook as she tried to bring the mug to her lips again.

“Could you tell where the shot came from?” he asked.

“Which side of the road?”

“Which side?” She considered for a long moment, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Major Bryant. It happened so fast. The truck. The bang. The crash. All I know is that it came from behind me somewhere, but whether it was from the woods or the Johnson farm, I just can’t say.”

J.D. Rouse’s place of residence was a whole different experience from Mrs. Harper’s tidy home.

Three generations ago, this had been a modest farm, but dividing the land among six children, none of whom wanted to farm, had reduced the current generation’s holdings to less than two acres. A typical eastern Carolina one-story clapboard farmhouse in bad need of paint stood amid mature oaks and pecan trees at the front of the lot. Dwight seemed to recall that the house was now inhabited by Rouse’s widowed mother and older sister.

Behind it lay a dilapidated hay barn, and farther down the rutted driveway was a shabby double-wide that had been parked out in what was once a tobacco field. The mobile home was sheltered by a single pine tree that had no doubt planted itself, since his headlights revealed no other trees or shrubs in the yard to indicate an interest in landscaping.

Weather-stained and sun-faded plastic toys littered the yard along with abandoned buckets, and his lights picked up a vacant dog pen and the rusted frame of a child’s swing set. The original swings were long gone, replaced 1 with a single tire suspended by a rope. It swayed a little in the icy wind. An old Toyota sedan sat on concrete blocks off to the side, and more blocks served as makeshift steps. When he knocked on the metal door, it rattled in its frame like ice cubes in an empty glass. The place was dark inside and no one responded. He went back to his truck and tapped the horn.

Nothing.

As he started back down the rutted drive, he saw that the back-porch light had come on at the old Rouse home and a heavyset woman was standing in the open doorway, so he turned into the yard beside the back door and got out to speak to her.

It had been years since they had been in school together and he was not sure whether or not this was J.D. Rouse’s sister. The Marsha Rouse he remembered had been beanpole skinny, with long brown hair. This woman was carrying at least sixty extra pounds and her short hair was bright orange. She wore baggy gray knit pants and a thick black sweater over a bright purple turtleneck, and she hunched into her clothes with her arms folded across her ample chest as if to stay warm.

If she recognized him here in the darkness, it was not evident by the suspicious tone in her voice as he approached. “You looking for J.D.? He ain’t home yet.”

“Marsha?” he asked.

She peered at him more closely as he stepped into the light. “Dwight? Dwight Bryant? Lord, it must be a hundred years since I seen you. What brings you out here?

J.D. in trouble again?”

“I was hoping to speak to his wife, but she doesn’t seem to be at home.”

“Naw, she’s left him. Packed up the girls this morning and went to her brother’s. Is that what you’re here about? She take out papers on him this time?”

“This time?” he asked.

She shrugged. “J.D.’s got a temper. Always did. And he can have a mean streak when he gets to drinking too much. Is that why you want to see him?”

Dwight hesitated. A victim’s next of kin was usually the first one to be notified, but Marsha was his sister, while his wife was who knows where.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Marsha, but J.D.’s dead.”

“What?”

“Somebody shot him about an hour ago.”

“Shot him? Oh my God! Who?”

“We don’t know yet. He was in his truck on Rideout Road when a bullet came through the back window. We don’t even know if it was an accident or deliberate.”

An elderly woman in a blue cardigan over a print housedress appeared in the doorway behind Rouse’s sister. She was pushing an aluminum walker and shuffled along in thick woolly bedroom slippers. “Marsha? Who you talking to? And how come you’re standing out in that cold with the door wide open? You won’t raised in no barn.”

“Go back inside, Mama,” Marsha said harshly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

She pulled the door closed and shook her head at Dwight. “This is going to pure out kill her. She thinks J.D. hung the moon.”

“You don’t sound like you think he did,” said Dwight.

“Easy enough to be the favorite if you bring her a But-1 terfinger every week and sweet-talk her for two minutes and then don’t lift your finger to do a damn thing to help out the rest of the time. Nita does more for her than he ever does and she’s a Mexican.”

“Nita?”

“J.D.’s wife.”

“J.D. have anybody gunning for him that you know of?”

“Nita’s brother maybe? He cussed J.D. out in Mexican and said he’d put a beating on him if he ever hit Nita or the kids again. But that was just talk. He’s not even tall as me. J.D. punched him in the face and that was two months ago. Mexicans, they got hot tempers, too, and I don’t know as he’d wait two months and then come after him with a gun, do you? Less’n Nita got him riled up today?”

Dwight sighed and asked for directions to Nita Rouse’s brother’s house.

“What about J.D., Dwight? What’ll I tell Mama when she wants to know where he is?”

Dwight explained the need for an autopsy before the body could be released for burial and promised that someone would notify the family.

Back at the site of the wreck, more people on their way home had stopped to gawk and ask questions. The crime scene van was there now and Percy Denning had set up floodlights to facilitate taking pictures that might one day bolster the State’s case against the shooter. Assuming they could find him.

Or her, thought Dwight with a wry tip of his hat to his wife. Not that he needed Deborah’s opinionated reminder that women are just as capable of murder as men.

He watched as Rouse’s body was moved to the rescue truck to be transported to the medical examiner in Chapel Hill.

Among his officers working the scene was Deputy Mayleen Richards and he motioned to her. “You speak Spanish, don’t you?”

Tall and sturdily built with a face full of freckles inherited from her redheaded father, the younger woman nodded. “A little. I’ve been taking lessons out at Colleton Community.”

“Way the state’s going, I probably ought to join you,”

he said. “How ’bout you come with me to tell his wife she’s a widow now? I understand she’s Mexican.”

“Sure,” said Richards, grateful that darkness hid the hot flush she had felt in her cheeks when he spoke of joining her in Spanish class.

She lifted her head to the cold north wind, grateful for its bite, and started toward the patrol unit she and Jamison had driven out from Dobbs, but her boss gestured toward his truck. “Ride with me and I’ll tell you what we have so far.”

With a flaming red face, Richards did as she was told.

Stop it, she told herself as she opened the passenger door of the truck. He’s married now. To the woman everybody says he’s loved for years. She’s a judge. She’s smart andshe’s beautiful. The only thing he cares about you is whetheryou do the job right.

Nevertheless, as he turned the key in the ignition, she could not suppress the surge of happiness she felt sitting there beside him.

C H A P T E R

2

He greeted me courteously, and after he had spoke of theweather and the promise of the sky, he mentioned, incidentally, that he was going to Paris.

—Robert Neilson Stephens

After court adjourned that chilly Thursday evening, I killed time till my meeting with a quick visit to my friend Portland Brewer, who was still on ma-ternity leave from the law practice she shares with her husband, Avery.

Carolyn Deborah Brewer is about eighteen hours younger than my nearly one-month marriage to Dwight Bryant, and I was still enchanted with both of them. She’s twenty-one inches long, has fuzzy little black curls all over her tiny head, and smells of baby powder. He’s six-three, has a head of thick brown hair, and smells of Old Spice. I love kissing both, but only one kisses back, and as soon as my meeting adjourned a little after eight, I phoned to let that one know I was on my way.

“I was just about to call you,” he said. “I’m running late, too. Want me to pick up something for supper?”

“We still have half of that roast chicken and some gravy from yesterday,” I reminded him. “Hot sandwiches and a green salad?”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll be there as soon as I drop Richards off and see if Denning has anything else for us right now.”

I rang off without asking questions. Denning? That meant a crime scene. And if he had Richards with him, that meant at least one other detective on the scene with Denning.

Which all added up to something serious.

I’m as curious as the next person—“Curious?” say my brothers. “Try nosy.”—but a cell phone is not the best place to ask questions. If the incident was something Dwight could tell me about, he would be more open face-to-face over a hot meal.

I’m a district court judge, he’s chief deputy of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, which generates a large proportion of the cases that get tried in our judicial district. We had forged a separation of powers treaty shortly after our engagement back in October—he doesn’t talk about things that have a chance of showing up in my courtroom, I don’t ask questions till after they are disposed of, and everyone at the courthouse knows not to schedule me for any district court cases where he has to testify. Fortunately, most of Dwight’s work concerns major felonies that are automatically tried in supe-rior court, so we actually have more freedom of communication than we had originally expected.

We got home about the same time, and as we put together a supper of leftovers, he told me about the killing.

I was surprised, but not really shocked to hear that J.D.

Rouse had been shot. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school and his reputation was already unsavory back then. As a teenager, I may have flirted around with 1 a lot of pot-smoking, beer-drinking boys—the wild boys who drove too fast, sassed the teachers, and cared more about carburetors and carom shots than physics and phi-losophy, but they were basically good-hearted slackers, loyal to their friends.

Wild is one thing, mean is a whole ’nother ball game.

J.D. was one of those guys who would get a pal drunk and then use him for a urinal. He was a bully and a sex-ual predator who loved to brag about the girls he’d gone down on, but he had a quick tongue that his buddies found funny when it was turned on someone else and he was good-looking enough that the mirror didn’t crack every time he combed his hair.

When I wouldn’t go out with him, he tried to hassle me, but I just stared him down and he suddenly remembered whose daughter I was. With several older brothers still living at home and a father who had a reputation for taking care of those who crossed him, my firepower was a lot stronger than his. I think he managed to scrape through high school, and someone said he joined the Army. That was the last time I gave him a thought till he turned up on a speeding charge in my courtroom a couple of years ago. It was not old home week but I did grant the prayer for judgment continued he asked for.

He still wasn’t high on my radar screen until this past Thanksgiving when he was charged for beating up on his wife. Despite the bruises on her face and the testimony of the officer who had responded to the 911 call, the woman, a pretty young Mexican with almost no English, refused to testify against him. There was a time when a battered woman could be swayed by her man’s sweet talk and “take up the charges,” which meant that she would be fined court costs for her “frivolous prosecution” while he walked free.

No more. If an officer charges a man with assault on a female, that man will stand trial, and if convicted, faces a maximum sentence of 150 days in jail plus a hefty fine.

The arresting officer testified that there were two little girls in the home and that Rouse appeared to be their only support. In broken English, his wife begged me not to send him to jail, that it was all a misunderstanding.

You never know if a stern sentence and sizable fine will get someone’s attention or whether it’ll simply stress him out so that he hammers on his family even more. Because this was Rouse’s first documented offense, I lowballed it and gave him thirty days suspended for a year, fined him a hundred dollars and court costs (another hundred), and required him to complete an anger management program at the mental health clinic there in Dobbs.

“Big waste of time,” I told Dwight. “A person has to want to change for the program to do any good and I figured J.D. was going to have to piss off somebody a whole lot meaner than himself for that to happen.” I put the skin and bones of the leftover roast chicken in a pot with celery and onions to boil up for stock, and shredded the rest of the meat. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear his shooting was no accident.”

“Be awfully coincidental for a hunter’s stray bullet,”

Dwight said as he put bread into the four-slice toaster someone had given us as a wedding present. “One slice or two?”

“One,” I said virtuously.

“I’ll get people out walking along the woods and the pasture first thing tomorrow, but we’ll have to wait for 1 the ME to tell us if the track of the bullet veers to the left or right enough to indicate which side of the road the shot came from. I’m betting on the woods.”

“Because that woman picking up litter didn’t see him?”

“And he must not’ve seen her. Or else didn’t care because he was so well hidden.” He shook his head pes-simistically. “Damn good shooting if it was intentional.

Back of the head. Twilight. Moving target.”

I added the shredded chicken to the rich gravy I had heated in one of Mother’s old black iron skillets while Dwight told me that J.D.’s sister said that he was a roofer with one of the local contractors and that they usually knocked off about the same time every evening so someone who knew his habits could have been lying in wait.

“It’s almost like last month, isn’t it?” I said, recalling the death of a colleague shortly before our wedding.

“Only this time, the shooter wasn’t driving alongside, talking through their open windows. Not on that two-lane road.”

Dwight frowned. “Actually, his window was open, too.

Not all the way.” He measured four or five inches with his hands to illustrate.

“Did your witness see another vehicle?”

Friends or neighbors who meet on backcountry roads often stop and talk until the appearance of another car or pickup makes them move on.

Dwight shook his head. “Anyhow, it was his right window that was open,” he said, following my line of thought.

“Was he a smoker?”

“Yeah. Cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Stubs in the ashtray. Burn marks on the seat.”

“There you go, then.” Except that even as I said it, I thought back to my own brief fling with cigarettes. It was always my left window that I kept cracked so I could flick the ashes out and blow the smoke away, not the right one.

I started smoking about the time I got my driver’s license. It seemed to go with my sporty little white T-Bird.

I quit, cold turkey, two years later when Mother was dying from lung cancer. It was part of my attempt to bargain with God: Please let her live and I’ll never light another cigarette, never drive over fifty-five, never get in thebackseat with another boy, never skip church again, please?

Giving up cigarettes was the only part of the vow that I stuck with.

But then God didn’t keep His side of the bargain either.

The toaster dinged and the fragrance of nicely browned bread mingled with the aroma of bubbling chicken gravy.

But thinking of bargains and litter reminded me. “If it warms up some, Minnie and Doris want us all out Saturday morning to clean up our own stretch of road. It’s getting pretty messy.”

“I’d love to help y’all,” Dwight said with a grin, “but Rouse’s killing will probably eat up most of my free time unless we clear it fast.”

“You think he was shot by someone in his wife’s family?”

“Well, he did beat her up pretty bad this time,” Dwight told me as he ladled hot chicken over his toast and helped 2 himself to salad. “Her brother took her to the emergency room last night and she and the kids are staying with him right now.”

“How’d she take the news?”

“Started crying as soon as we told her. Hard to say if she was crying for herself or the kids.” He added some bread-and-butter pickles to his plate and passed the jar to me. “The brother and sister-in-law weren’t shedding any tears, though. Richards couldn’t understand everything they said, but the gist seemed to be that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving dog. They started right in planning the wife’s new life, how she would move in with them and take care of all the children while her sister-in-law goes to work in the brother’s lawn care business.”

“The brother have an alibi?” I asked, nibbling at a slice of pickle myself. Their crisp sweetness was made for hot chicken sandwiches.

“Said he was on the job till full dark. Richards will check it out tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” That reminded me. “Portland asked if we could babysit tomorrow night so she and Avery can go to a movie. It’ll be the first time they’ve both left the baby.”

“And they’re going to trust us?”

“Who better? You’ve practiced on Cal and I’ve been babysitting nieces and nephews since I was twelve. Besides, they figure that if there’s an emergency, you could get help faster than anybody else in the county.”

“On one condition. Avery got a boxed set of early Marx Brothers movies for Christmas.”

I groaned. He knows I hate slapstick as much as he hates chick flicks, yet he keeps trying to get me to sit through endless reruns of Laurel and Hardy or FawltyTowers.

“Did he tell you that Portland’s mother gave her the original Love Affair ?” I asked sweetly. “The 1939 version with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunn?”

“They shot that damn thing twice?”

“Four times, if you count Sleepless in Seattle,” I said.

“I’ll make you a deal. If you can watch Duck Soup without laughing, I’ll watch Irene Dunn fall under a taxi.

Hell, I’ll even get you your own box of Kleenex.”

We were clearing the table and loading the dishwasher when Dwight’s cell phone rang. He frowned at the number displayed on the little screen.

“Shaysville,” he muttered.

I glanced at the clock. Shaysville, Virginia? Nine-fifteen on a school night? It could be only Jonna, his ex-wife and mother of his eight-year-old son, Cal.

Dwight’s voice was carefully neutral when he answered, but it immediately turned warm. “Hey, buddy,”

he said. “What’s up? And how come you’re still up?”

He listened intently and I saw a frown begin. “Where’s your mom, son? . . . Did she say when she’d be back? . . .

Is Nana there? . . . Okay, but— . . . Tomorrow? Sorry, buddy, but— . . . No, I’m just saying that if you’d told me earlier, maybe we could have worked something out.”

There was another long pause, then his shoulders stiffened in resolution and his voice became reassuring. “No, it’s fine. I can do it. How are the roads? It snowed up there last night, didn’t it? . . . What’s your teacher’s name 2 again? . . . Ten o’clock? . . . I’ll be there. I promise. Now you scoot on into bed, you hear?”

He laid the phone down with a sigh.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Not really. Jonna’s out somewhere and her mother came over to sit with Cal, but she fell asleep on the couch so he took advantage of the situation to stay up later than usual and to call me even though Jonna told him not to.”

“Not to call you?” I started to get indignant on his behalf.

“He wants me to come to his school tomorrow morning. Says he promised his teacher I’d be there. Jonna told him he couldn’t expect me to come running up without any notice, but—” He shook his head ruefully.

“But he knows his dad,” I said. “I’ll set the clock for four-thirty, okay?”

“Better make it four,” Dwight said.

C H A P T E R

3

Trees which have been frost-bitten, when they are not completely destroyed, soon shoot again, so that they immediatelybear fruit.

—Theophrastus

Friday, 21 January

Even though they had gone to bed at ten-thirty, it had been a heavy week and Dwight felt as if he had barely closed his eyes when the alarm rang at four the next morning. He cut it off at the first sharp trill, but Deborah gave a drowsy groan as he pushed himself out from under the heavy covers. They both preferred a cold room for sleeping and the icy floor was a jolt to his bare feet. The bathroom was warm, though, and the hot shower left him feeling he could face a day that would probably include facing his ex-wife. He had told Deborah the night before that there was no need for her to get up, but when he came back into the bedroom to dress in a dark red wool shirt, black slacks, and a red-and-gray-striped tie, their bed was empty and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee drifted down the hall from the kitchen.

He was tying his shoelaces when she returned with a steaming mug. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.” She used her own mug to cover another yawn. Standing there in an old blue sweatshirt with tangled hair tucked back behind her ears, she was sleepy-eyed and so utterly desirable that without the long drive in front of him, he would have pulled her back beneath the covers. Instead, he took the Thermos of coffee she had filled to help him through the drive, put on his black leather jacket, and promised to be back that night before Portland and Avery got home from their movie.

By the time Dwight reached Greensboro, there were patches of snow in the shady spots, and after he crossed the state line into Virginia, more of the landscape was blanketed with Wednesday night’s four-inch snowfall.

Plows and scrapers had left thick banks of snow alongside the highway, but the January sun shone brightly in a cold blue sky and the road itself was dry. Stifling a yawn, he turned the heater off so that the chill would help keep him alert.

When he tired of NPR’s bleak recital of world news, he fumbled through a handful of CDs Deborah had given him for Christmas. One three-disk set held more than seventy Johnny Cash songs, but he’d already listened to the whole set twice, so he popped an Alabama collection into the player instead. As the gentle harmonies of “Feels So Right” filled the truck, he found himself contrasting the two women he had married.

At thirteen, Deborah had been a headstrong kid, already full of the sass and vinegar she would possess as a woman, and the six years between them seemed so insur-mountable that he had joined the Army to avoid tempta- tion. Yet every time he came home on leave and hooked up with her brothers, there she was, more tempting than ever. He put in for special training and was reassigned to Germany, where he thought he was over his infatuation.

He told himself it had been a matter of forbidden fruit, an aberration; and when he met Jonna Shay, who was visiting an Army friend in Wiesbaden, he was taken in by her soft Southern voice, her beautiful face, and her slightly patrician air.

“But she didn’t fall into your bed right away, did she?”

his mother had said the one time he discussed it with her after the divorce. “And there you were, ripe for marriage.

Any reasonably compatible woman will do when a man’s ready.”

And yes, he’d been ready. And no, it wasn’t all bad. She had thought he could be molded into an officer and a gentleman, and he was willing to try. He took enough college equivalences to almost qualify for officer training, and with some strong recommendations from his commanding officers and a few bent rules, he made it into OCS through the back door. It was only later, when he was commissioned and his workload eased off a little, that he fully comprehended just how much Jonna felt she had lowered herself by marrying an enlisted man.

After her stint as Mrs. Sergeant Bryant, she was delighted to be Mrs. Lieutenant Bryant, to lunch regularly at the officers’ club, and to play bridge with the wives of majors and colonels. In the Army’s rigid caste system, enlisted and commissioned seldom socialize, but when she used that as an excuse not to hold a farewell cookout when the friend who had introduced them was being 2 transferred, he realized that she had quietly dropped every enlisted friend still assigned to the base.

Well before they were posted to the D.C. area, he knew the marriage was a mistake. A quick visit home for his mother’s birthday only confirmed the seriousness of that mistake. One glimpse of Deborah, newly admitted to the bar, lusty and vital and more desirable than ever, and he knew that what he had felt was not youthful infatuation, that he really did love her. Would love her forever. But she was involved with a state representative at the time and he was married, which meant that she was doubly off-limits. He had made his bed and he would keep sleeping there even though he found no joy in it. He spent long hours at his job with Army intelligence while Jonna kept a serene house and played bridge twice a week. There were no fights, no friction. From the outside, it looked like a good marriage.

Then the political climate changed. A couple of incidents grated on him so strongly that he abruptly resigned his commission and joined the D.C. police. Jonna was quietly furious. Not only did she lose her O Club privileges, she felt as if he had deliberately put her back on the enlisted side of the fence.

After that, they seemed to be simply going through the motions. It surprised the hell out of him when he learned that she had quit taking her birth control pills; but he was willing to try harder for the sake of the baby she had conceived.

With Cal’s birth, she quit pretending to like sex, and when she asked for a divorce, he did not fight it.

Nor did he try to stop her when she took Cal and moved back to the small town in western Virginia that had been named for her early nineteenth-century ancestor, even though the distance made it harder for him to see his son as often as he wanted. Shaysville, on the edge of the Great Smokies, was whitebread America—small enough that most of its middle-class citizens felt they knew everything worth knowing about one another, yet big enough to support a shopping center and a couple of furniture factories. Meth labs were gaining a toehold up in the hollows, but so far there were no gangs, and crime was pretty much limited to petty larceny and occasional drunken brawls.

Jonna’s sister, Pamela—“my nutty sister Pam” was how Jonna always prefaced remarks about her—was married and lived in Tennessee and Dwight had never met her; but Mrs. Shay, their elderly mother, was there to babysit and help out in emergencies.

Shay was still a big name in the furniture industry and the factory had not yet moved offshore, but Shays no longer owned it. Shays no longer owned sawmills or lumberyards either. Jonna’s father had been the last male Shay, and he died while Jonna and her sister were mere infants, leaving behind a wife who could read French ro-mances, could instruct a servant how to make quiche, and knew the difference between a takeout double and a double for penalties, but Mrs. Shay “enjoyed poor health,” as the saying goes, and her husband had carefully shielded her from “boring old business talk.” Jonna thought her mother had received a tidy fortune when she sold the last remnants of the family businesses, even though they had soon moved to a smaller house and the live-in housekeeper became daily, then weekly help.

Nevertheless, the Shay name remained high in the 2 town’s social pecking order, and Shaysville was not the worst place for his son to grow up.

After the divorce became final, he realized that the distance between Washington and Shaysville was about the same as the distance between Shaysville and Colleton County, and there was Sheriff Bowman Poole looking for a good right-hand man.

“. . . take me down and love me all night long . . .”

When the words of that song floated through the truck’s cab, memories of Jonna’s cool propriety were crowded out by images of Deborah’s impulsive warmth and propriety be damned.

As if conjured up by those images, his phone rang and her number appeared on its screen.

“Where are you?” she asked. “Still in North Carolina?

Just passing Durham?”

He grinned. Her foot was always on the accelerator and she loved to needle him about cruise control and slow driving. “Actually, I’m a little less than an hour from Shaysville. Where are you?”

“In Dobbs. At the courthouse. Getting ready to go do some justice.”

“Did you get any sleep after I left?” he asked, muffling a yawn.

“I did. How are you holding up?”

“Not too bad.”

They talked a moment or two longer, then she rang off and he called his boss to explain where he was and why he was taking a day of personal leave. “I should be back before dark,” he said, and filled the sheriff in on last night’s homicide.

“Yeah,” said Bo Poole. “Richards was just telling me.”

“Let me talk to her a minute,” Dwight said, and when Richards came on the line, he told her that she was now his lead detective on the Rouse investigation. “It means you’ll have to call over to Chapel Hill and attend the autopsy,” he warned.

She took the assignment in stride. “And then I’ll check out the brother-in-law’s whereabouts, see if we can find anyone else with motive.”

This was their only active homicide at the moment, and before ending the conversation he asked her to pass on some instructions on other pending felony cases. “I’ll be back this evening, but you can call me if there are problems.”

“Yessir.”

Shaysville’s elementary school lay on the west side of town and was close enough to the house Jonna had bought with her share of the divorce settlement that Cal could ride his bike to school in good weather. It was a one-level brick sprawl with a couple of mobile classrooms parked alongside the main building.

He was still not exactly clear on why his son wanted him here this morning—all Cal had said was, “And could you please wear your gun and stuff?”—but before he left town today, he planned to find out if Jonna was making a habit of leaving Cal alone with her mother at night.

Mrs. Shay was in her seventies now and clearly too old to keep tabs on an active eight-year-old if she fell asleep before he did.

The parking lot had big piles of snow at either end and there were patches of ice where the holly hedges cast their 3 shadows. Dwight parked his truck in one of the visitor’s slots a few minutes before ten, and he did not know if he was pleased or dismayed that the only security on view was a gray-haired secretary at the front desk who smiled and said, “May I help you?”

“I’m Cal Bryant’s dad. Here to see Miss Jackson. I believe she’s expecting me.”

“Which Jackson? Chris or Jean?”

Dwight shrugged. “Whichever teaches third grade?”

“That would be Jean Jackson. If you’ll follow me?”

She led him through a maze of hallways decorated with colorful posters and student drawings to a door marked

“Miss Jean Jackson’s Third Grade,” stuck her head inside, and said cheerfully, “Company, Miss Jackson.”

Halfway down the third row of desk chairs, he spotted his son. The instant Cal recognized him, his little face lit up with such happiness that Dwight immediately forgot how tired he was.

A girl dressed as Snow White stood in front of a map of the United States with a pointer and she stopped talking to stare at Dwight.

The pleasant-faced teacher who came over to greet him wore gray slacks and a blue sweater that sported white snowflakes and a border of snowmen. She told the little girl, “Wait just a minute, Ellie. Major Bryant? If you’ll take this chair, we’ll be ready for you after Ellie finishes.

Go ahead, Ellie.”

Dwight sat as he was directed and gave his attention to the girl, who carefully pointed to Florida and explained how she and her parents and her two sisters had driven all the way down to Disney World from Shaysville over the Christmas holidays. She traced the route with her pointer and named each state in turn, then held up some of the souvenirs she had bought with her allowance.

“Thank you, Ellie,” said the teacher. “Cal? You want to be next?”

The boy nodded shyly and walked over to Dwight, took him by the hand, and led him to the front of the room.

“My name is Calvin Shay Bryant and this is my father.

His name is Major Dwight Avery Bryant. He’s the chief deputy for the sheriff of Colleton County down in North Carolina. Show ’em your badge, Dad.”

Before Dwight could move, Cal flipped back the left side of his jacket to show the badge on his belt.

“Show ’em your gun, Dad.” He pulled back the right side of Dwight’s jacket to reveal the gun holstered there.

“Show ’em your handcuffs, Dad.” He gave Dwight a half-turn and flipped up his jacket. “That’s what he uses when he arrests somebody.”

Another half-turn and “Show ’em your Kubaton, Dad.”

Dwight kept his face perfectly straight as his son twirled him around, pointing out each piece of equipment and explaining what it was for. When Cal finished, he turned to his teacher. “My name is Calvin Shay Bryant and this is my show-and-tell.” His brown eyes shone as he looked up at Dwight.

“Thanks, Dad,” he said and returned to his seat.

Miss Jackson said, “Jeremy, you’re up next, so be thinking what you want to say.”

She held open the door for Dwight and followed him out into the hall. “What a nice surprise it was when Cal told me this morning that you were coming today, Major Bryant. I know this meant a lot to him.”

Puzzled, Dwight said, “He didn’t mention me till this morning?”

“Oh, he talks about you all the time, Major, but not that you were going to be his show-and-tell.” She smiled and easy laugh lines crinkled around her hazel eyes. “This is a first for us. We never had a parent as our topic before.”

“Any chance I could speak to him a minute?” Dwight asked.

“Sure. I’ll send him right out and if you’d like to have lunch with him, we go to the cafeteria at eleven-forty-five.”

At eight, Cal was still young enough to lack self-consciousness about showing affection, and Dwight felt a primal surge of love as his son launched himself straight up into his arms for an off-the-floor hug.

With his arms laced around Dwight’s neck, he leaned back and grinned happily. “That was so cool, Dad! Did you see Jeremy’s eyes when he saw your gun? All he has is that same dumb snake he brought for show-and-tell last year.”

Dwight set him back on the floor and squatted down beside him. Every time he saw Cal, the boy seemed to have grown another inch and to have matured more in his speech and comprehension. He decided not to ask about the discrepancy between what Cal had said last night and what Miss Jackson had just told him, but damned if he wasn’t going to ask Jonna to let him have Cal for the whole summer. If she balked this year, he was ready to take her back to court and get the custody agreement amended. No way was he going to let himself be sidelined from his son’s childhood.

“You’re not going back right now, are you?” Cal asked.

“Miss Jackson said I could have lunch with you,”

Dwight said reassuringly. “So you’d better get in there and see if that snake’s learned any new tricks since last year.”

Cal giggled. “Snakes don’t do tricks,” he said, but he gave Dwight another hug and scampered back to his classroom.

To kill the next hour, Dwight drove over to the local police station. The Shaysville chief was an old Army buddy from D.C. and Dwight liked to touch base whenever he was in town.

“Hey, bo! Long time, no see,” said Paul Radcliff when Dwight appeared in the doorway of his office. Like Dwight, he was dressed in casual civvies. He was almost as tall as Dwight, but his hair was completely white and his belly strained against his gray wool shirt.

“How’s it going?” Dwight said.

“Slow as molasses. The only arrests we’ve made all week were two D-and-Ds and a woman who got in a fight with her sister over a lottery ticket. How ’bout you?

Jimmy says you gave Cal a new stepmother for Christmas.”

Radcliff’s youngest was on the same Pop Warner team as Cal.

“A judge was what I heard. That right?”

Dwight admitted that it was.

“Got a picture?”

He obligingly pulled out a snapshot Deborah’s niece had taken of them at the wedding.

“Another looker,” Paul said with an admiring shake of his head. “And this one even sounds smart. I don’t know how you keep fooling them.”

They talked trash for a while, then Radcliff said,

“Sandy’s making her cold-weather chili for lunch. Why don’t you come home with me? She’d love to see you.”

“Thanks, Paul, but Cal’s teacher said I could eat lunch with them.” He glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which, I’d better get back over to the school. See you at Easter.”

Weird, thought Dwight, the way all school cafeterias smell the same. Like the ones of his boyhood, this one smelled of overcooked broccoli with a substratum of sweet rolls or fruit cobbler even though today’s vegetables were a choice of lima beans or carrots and the dessert was chocolate pudding. He sat at a table with Cal and his classmates and answered the questions the children posed. But his son seemed a little subdued and only picked at his food.

When Miss Jackson stood, signaling the end of their lunch period, Cal hung back and Dwight said, “Okay then, buddy. I’ll try to get up again as soon as I can and we’ll—”

“Can I go back with you?” Cal blurted. “Today? For the weekend?”

“Today? But your mother—”

“She won’t care. Please, Dad.”

“What’s going on here, Cal?”

The boy shook his head. “Nothing. I just want to go home with you. See Grandma and Miss Deborah.”

“You know she did say you could drop the Miss and just call her Deborah now,” Dwight said, stalling for time to consider what lay behind Cal’s urgency.

“I know. I keep forgetting. I’m sorry.”

“Son, it’s nothing to be sorry about. Tell you what. I’ll go talk to your mother. If she says it’s okay, then sure.”

The boy’s relief was so evident that it only increased Dwight’s concern, but he let Cal rejoin his class and glanced down at his watch. Deborah should be on her own lunch break about now and he touched her speed dial number.

She answered on the first ring. “So tell me. What was so urgent that Cal wanted you there this morning?”

“Show-and-tell,” he said dryly.

“Show-and-tell what?”

“Me.”

He waited till she quit laughing and said, “He wants to come home with me for the weekend. That okay with you?”

“You know it is. I’ll call Kate and see if Mary Pat and Jake want to do a sleepover tomorrow night.”

“He’d like that,” said Dwight.

A few years earlier, his brother Rob had married Kate Honeycutt, a widow with a newborn son and the guardianship of a young cousin who was only six months older than Cal. They were expecting their first child together any day now. Although Deborah and Cal were slowly reforging the comfortable relationship that had existed before the engagement, having the other children around helped ease the residual stiffness between them.

“Maybe you should wait till I can get up with Jonna 3 and clear it with her first. I’ll call you back as soon as I see her, okay?”

“Whatever. This is going to put you home awfully late, though, isn’t it?”

“I promise I’ll keep it three miles over the speed limit the whole way.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Wow! That means you’ll be pulling in the driveway any minute now.”

He laughed and her voice was warm in his ear.

“Love you,” she said softly.

“Hold that thought,” he said. “I may even set the cruise control for four miles over the limit.”

Although Jonna had never worked for money until after the divorce, she now held a part-time job at a historic house that had been built by one of her ancestors, but her schedule was too erratic for Dwight to keep up with.

He called her home phone and got the answering machine. No luck with her cell phone number either. According to her server, “The customer you have called is not available at this time. Please try your call later,” which probably meant she had switched it off.

He frowned at that. Why would she turn it off when Cal might need to call her?

Next he tried the number at the Morrow House. A recording informed him that winter hours were only on the weekend or by appointment. “Please call between the hours of ten and four on Saturday or one to five on Sunday. Thank you.”

Rather than keep punching in numbers on the keypad, Dwight drove the short distance to the house. No sign of Jonna’s car, and she did not answer the door when he rang.

Her mother’s house was but a few blocks closer to the center of town, so he tried there next.

There were footprints through the snow that still covered the front walk and the steps were so icy as he walked up on the front porch that he grabbed for the railing to keep his balance. He had to ring several times before Mrs.

Shay answered the door. She seemed sightly disoriented and frowned as she looked up at him as if he were a complete stranger, which, considering how seldom they had seen each other, was not that far from the truth.

“Yes?”

“I’m Dwight, Mrs. Shay. Cal’s dad. Is Jonna here?”

“Here?” Mrs. Shay looked around in bewilderment. “I don’t think so.” Then her face cleared. “Dwight? Oh my goodness, come in out of this cold. What are you doing up here? Nothing’s wrong with Cal, is there?”

“No, ma’am, he’s fine. I just had lunch with him at the school, but I’m trying to find Jonna and she doesn’t seem to be answering her phone.”

“I know, dear. That’s been worrying me, too. She hasn’t called since yesterday morning and that’s just not like her. She always calls me every morning, but not today. And the young man who usually shovels my snow hasn’t come either. I’ve had a terrible time getting in and out.”

“Was everything all right when she got home last night?”

“Was she out last night?”

“Of course she was. You sat with Cal.”

His former mother-in-law was shaking her head. “No, I played bridge with my Thursday night group last night.”

“But Cal said you were there. He called me. He said you had fallen asleep.”

Mrs. Shay frowned. “Now why on earth would he tell you a story like that?”

C H A P T E R

4

At one time through love all things come together into one,at another time through strife’s hatred they are borne eachof them apart.

—Empedocles

Friday afternoon, 21 January

Angry that Jonna would have left Cal alone even for a couple of hours, Dwight drove back to her house. This was an older established neighborhood of tidy, single-family homes sheltered by tall oaks and maples. More trees lined the strip of grass between sidewalk and pavement. Their branches were bare now, but in the summer they met overhead to provide a welcome shade. It was like driving through a green tunnel.

Today, the street had been plowed and low banks of snow pushed up against the tree trunks. The sidewalks themselves were clear and cars were parked along the sunny side, but not one of them was Jonna’s. Her drive was unshoveled except where it crossed the sidewalk to the street, and he could see that her Honda had stood there during Wednesday night’s snowfall because of the car-shaped bare spot on the concrete. Her front walk and 4 step were clear of snow, though. Again, he went up on the porch to ring and then pound on the door.

This time, from far inside, he heard the bark of Cal’s dog Bandit, so named for the comical patch of brown fur over his eyes. The smooth-haired terrier was kept caged during the day whenever they were out.

Dwight walked around to the side entrance and saw that a narrow footpath had been shoveled out to the car.

He opened the gate and stepped inside. Paw prints tracked across the snowy yard to where Bandit had gone to do his business among the bushes at the rear of the yard. More paw prints mingled with those of Cal’s boots around the base of a half-finished snowman.

Dwight peered through the door window, and Bandit danced up and down in the big wire crate, whining hopefully.

“Sorry, guy,” Dwight muttered and turned to see a suspicious face looking at him from a side window in the house next door.

He and Jonna mostly limited their infrequent conversations to Cal, and if she had ever mentioned her neighbor’s name, he could not recall it; but he went up to the hedge that divided the two driveways and gestured for the older man to open his window, which he grudgingly did, if only for a narrow crack.

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Jonna Bryant. I’m Cal’s dad.”

“Yeah?”

“Could you tell me when she left?”

The man pursed his lips and glared at Dwight. “I don’t make it my business to keep tabs on my neighbors.”

“I appreciate that sir, but—”

“And I don’t stand around with my windows wide open in the middle of January either.”

“But—”

“Sorry. I can’t help you.”

And with that, the old man pulled the window firmly shut and pushed down the latch for good measure.

It took a couple of false starts, but Shaysville was not that big, and eventually Dwight fumbled his way over to the Morrow House. Indeed, as he zeroed in on it, he recognized earlier landmarks and realized that it was only a block or two from Mrs. Shay’s house. That must be convenient for Cal and Jonna both, he thought. He felt optimistic when he saw that the walks had been freshly shoveled and that the nearest slot in the half-empty parking lot held a black four-door sedan.

The main entrance of the old stone mansion was locked, but after much determined pounding, an elderly man in a shirt, tie, and gray tweed jacket emerged from somewhere behind the central staircase of the grand foyer. He was tall and thin, with white hair, and he shook his finger reprovingly at Dwight as he approached to speak through the door. “I’m sorry, but we’re closed on weekdays.”

“I know,” said Dwight. “I’m looking for Jonna Bryant.”

“She’s not here today.”

“Do you have any idea where she could be? I’m Cal’s dad and I really need to talk to her.”

The man hesitated, then opened the door.

Dwight started to unzip his jacket before realizing that 4 the entrance hall was only marginally warmer than outside. At least he was out of the wind, though.

“Oh, my,” said the man, who had caught a glimpse of Dwight’s gun beneath his jacket. “You’re a police officer, aren’t you? Isn’t that what Jonna said?” His Ben Franklin glasses had slipped down on his narrow nose and he pushed them up with his index finger.

Dwight nodded. “Have you talked with her today?”

The man shook his head and his glasses slowly began to edge back down his nose. Dwight realized that those nerdy glasses, stooped build, and head of silver-blond hair had caused him to overestimate the man’s age by at least twenty years. He was probably not much over forty.

“I’m Frederick Mayhew,” he said, offering a hand that felt boneless when Dwight shook it. “I’m the director of the Morrow House here.”

“Dwight Bryant. From down near Raleigh.”

“Yes, Jonna’s mentioned you.”

“She didn’t happen to mention where she’d be today, did she?”

Mayhew adjusted his glasses and shook his head. “Actually, she was supposed to be here today. At least I think she was. No, I’m pretty sure that’s right. I called her around ten to see if I’d misunderstood this week’s schedule—we’re quite informal here during the winter and only work three days a week. Saturday and Sunday, of course, and then either Friday or Monday so we can turn the heat down the rest of the time and save money. Isn’t it absolutely wicked how much heating oil costs these days? Anyhow, I thought we’d agreed on Friday this week, but occasionally I get it muddled and I’ll come in on a Friday only to find that we’d agreed on Monday.”

“Was she there when you called?” Dwight asked, trying to get Mayhew back on track.

“No, just her answering machine.”

“Does she usually call if she’s not coming in when she’s supposed to?”

“Oh, absolutely. She’s thoroughly reliable and conscientious. We—the board and I—we feel very lucky to have her. And of course she’s a Shay, so she knows the Morrow House intimately.”

He picked up on Dwight’s blank look and frowned.

“Her mother was a Morrow. Didn’t you know?”

“I guess it never really registered.” For a moment, Dwight felt as if he ought to apologize for his lapse.

“Oh, well, you’re not from here, are you? So it wouldn’t mean as much to you, would it?”

Mayhew’s tone was one of gentle commiseration for Dwight’s misfortune at being born elsewhere.

“The Morrows arrived here shortly after the first Shays founded the town in 1820,” he said, sliding into what must be a familiar lecture. “They had been merchants and traders in Philadelphia, but down here they were mainly lawyers, judges, and politicians. Judge Peter Morrow, who built this house, was a United States representative at the time of the Civil War. Afterwards, he became even more important as a judge during Reconstruction. It’s his youngest daughter that haunts the Rose Bedroom.”

“You have a ghost?” Dwight asked, momentarily di-verted.

“Oh, yes,” Mayhew said proudly. “She died of a broken heart when her lover was killed at Shiloh. Now, Peter’s grandson lost the family fortune during the great 4 stock market crash. Took a lot of Shay money with him, I’m afraid, which precipitated his death in 1931.”

“That’s very interesting,” Dwight said, “but Jonna—”

“Yes, of course,” said Mayhew. “I do ramble on, don’t I? Now what was it you wanted to know about Jonna?”

“When you last spoke to her?” Dwight said patiently.

“Let me see . . . Sunday? Yes, I’m almost positive it was Sunday.”

“If you speak to her again, would you tell her to call me?”

Dwight scribbled his cell number on a slip of paper and Mayhew placed it in his wallet with solemn care.

By now, it was almost two, so Dwight drove back to the school and stuck his head inside Cal’s classroom.

Miss Jackson looked up from the storybook she was reading aloud to the class and gave a smiling nod to Cal, who immediately shrugged his backpack on over his heavy jacket and joined Dwight in the hall.

“Don’t you have a hat?” Dwight asked. “Or gloves?”

“I forgot them this morning,” Cal said. The bitter January wind whipped their faces red when they walked outside and over to the bike racks.

Dwight waited for him to unlock the chain on his bike, then hoisted it on his shoulder.

“Cold as it is, I’m surprised Mother let you ride off without them.”

Normally, Dwight never spoke critically of Jonna to Cal, not wanting to try the child’s loyalties, but there was that bombshell from Mrs. Shay. As they walked over to visitor parking, he said, “Nana told me that she didn’t sit with you while your mother was out last night.”

Cal’s stricken look was all he needed. Dwight put the bike in the back of his truck and stooped to sit on his haunches at eye level with his son.

“This is serious, buddy. Why did you tell me Nana was with you last night?”

Cal’s eyes dropped. “Because I knew you’d be mad if I said I was home by myself.”

The final bell must have rung, because children began to stream from the building, some fighting against the strong gusts as they hurried for the buses, others pushed along toward the bicycle racks.

Dwight unlocked the truck, helped Cal take off his backpack and fasten the seat belt, then went around and got in the driver’s side. He put the key in the ignition and started the engine so as to warm up the frigid cab. The wind had turned Cal’s ears as red as his cheeks, and he held his small hands over the vent to let them thaw as he looked apprehensively at his father’s stony face.

A cold fury was building in Dwight’s head, but he tried to keep his tone mild. “Was she still gone when you got up this morning?”

Cal nodded mutely.

“Well, what did she say when she left last night?”

Cal’s lip quivered and his eyes began to fill with tears.

“She wasn’t there last night.”

“Not at all? Not when you got home from school?”

“No, sir,” he whispered, half fearfully.

“Son, I’m not mad at you. I’m just trying to understand.”

Tears spilled down Cal’s cheeks.

“Hey, it’s going to be okay,” Dwight said.

He unsnapped the seat belt and pulled the child close and let him cry out all his fear and bewilderment. Be-4 tween sobs, Cal told Dwight that he had not seen Jonna since she dropped him off at school the morning before.

Thursday morning.

And this was Friday.

“I didn’t tell the truth last night because I was scared you’d get mad if I told you Mother wasn’t here. I tried to call Nana, but she wasn’t home either.”

“You did right to call me, and you don’t ever have to be afraid to tell me anything.”

“But Mother said—”

He broke off.

“Mother said what?”

“That I wasn’t going to see you as much now that you married Miss Deborah. She said you’d probably have new babies and forget about me.”

Once again, his brown eyes filled, and Dwight took that small face between his big hands. “Look at me, Cal.

Have I ever lied to you?”

“No, sir.”

“I never have. I never will. So listen up. You’re my son.

You’ll always be my son and I’ll always love you. I could have a dozen more children and none of them would ever take your place or make me love you less. You got that?”

The boy gave a tremulous smile. “Yessir.”

“Good. Now tell me everything you can remember about yesterday.”

From Cal’s viewpoint, Thursday had begun as a normal day. Jonna had already shoveled the front steps and walk by the time he got up and they both ate bacon and pecan waffles for breakfast. Afterwards, she had driven him to school since Wednesday night’s snowfall had left the sidewalks too blocked for his bike. That was the last time he had seen her.

“Did she seem worried or upset?”

Again Cal shook his head.

“Okay, buddy, here’s what we’re going do,” Dwight said decisively. “First we’re going to go talk to Jimmy Radcliff’s dad. See if he knows anything. Maybe she slid off the road in the snow and forgot to charge her cell phone before she went out. Then we’re going to pack your suitcase and you’re coming home with me today.”

Cal gave him a relieved hug, settled back in his seat, and clicked his seat belt. “Could Bandit come, too?”

“The more the merrier,” he said and wondered how Deborah felt about house dogs. Mr. Kezzie gave two of his hounds the run of his house and he had never heard her speak against it. Their own house might be different, though.

At the police station, Dwight left Cal happily chattering with the desk sergeant who refereed their Pop Warner games while he went into the chief’s office.

“Jonna’s gone missing?” Paul Radcliff asked in disbelief when Dwight explained why he was back.

Dwight shrugged. “Cal says he hasn’t seen her since she drove him to school yesterday morning. Mrs. Shay hasn’t heard from her, and her boss out at the Morrow House says she didn’t come in today the way she was supposed to.”

“Still and all—”

“Look, Paul. Jonna and I may have our differences, but she’s a good mother. Cal says she’s never left him alone 4 before and you know how protective she is. Overprotec-tive at times.”

“Yeah. Jimmy said she almost didn’t sign the permission slip for him to play football. She thought it was too rough.”

“No way would she go off and leave him alone this long.”

“Okay. I’ll notify the highway patrol to be on the look-out for her car. A blue Honda, right?”

“So far as I know.” He stepped to the doorway and called to Cal. “Your mom still have that blue Accord?”

Cal nodded. He looked so anxious again that Dwight gestured for him to come join them and he laid a reassuring hand on Cal’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. Chief Radcliff’s going to find her for us.”

“Sure thing,” Radcliff said. “Bet you a nickel she had a flat tire on one of those snowy back roads that didn’t get plowed yet. We’ll check ’em all out. I’ve got your dad’s cell number and I’ll call as soon as we find her.”

Back at the house, Cal looked all around to make sure no one was watching—“Mother says to keep it secret”—then retrieved a spare house key from beneath a rock beside the front porch steps and carefully replaced it as soon as he had unlocked the door.

The house felt cool, and when Dwight automatically checked the thermostat in the hall, he found it set at sixty-five degrees.

“We turn it down during the day if we’re both gone,”

Cal said. “Saves on heating oil.” He hurried past Dwight, through the kitchen, and out to the utility room to the dog’s crate. “I better let Bandit out for a few minutes.”

More cold air swept in when he opened the door. The little dog bounded outside and immediately headed for the bushes along the back fence.

Upstairs, Cal pulled his suitcase, a bright red rollerboard, from the closet and rummaged through his dresser for the clothes he wanted to put in it.

“Pajamas, underwear, and socks,” said Dwight, opening drawers. “Your heavy blue sweater and maybe your sneakers, too, since we didn’t get any snow down there.”

“I’ll go let Bandit in and pack up some food for him,”

said Cal.

While his son went down to take care of the dog, Dwight packed the things he thought Cal would need.

“And don’t forget your backpack if you have home-work,” he called down the stairs.

As he zipped shut the red bag, he remembered toothbrush and toothpaste and went to find them in the bathroom next door.

He had no intention of snooping, but the door to Jonna’s bedroom was open and he saw an unfamiliar picture of her with Cal that must have been taken around Christmastime because they both wore red sweaters and Jonna held a sprig of red-berried holly.

He pushed the door wider to take a closer look at Cal’s snaggletoothed grin and saw that Jonna’s bed, a chaste double bed, was neatly made with nothing out of place.

Still the perfect housekeeper—unlike Deborah, who thought it was a waste of good time to do more than pull up the covers on a bed you were going to crawl back into that same night.

Not that Deborah was a slob; merely that she never worried about a little disorder. Their house was for living, not a place to be kept pristine enough to show to prospective buyers at a moment’s notice.

A second framed picture was a family snapshot of Jonna, her older sister Pamela, and their parents that had been taken when the girls were still quite young. Dwight had almost forgotten it and he looked closely at the man who had accidentally shot himself before Jonna’s second birthday.

Cal’s grandfather. There seemed to be nothing physical of Mr. Shay in either daughter. The way Jonna looked now, she could almost have posed for this old picture of her mother. Dwight set it back on the dresser, obscurely pleased that Cal took after his side of the family.

He looked around again. There was very little of the personal about this room beyond those two photographs.

Everything else was tidied away into closed drawers and closets. It could be an ad for a furniture store. Again, he thought of the snapshots that cluttered the wide ledge of the headboard on the bed that he and Deborah shared. It was a jumble of brothers and nieces and nephews, of Cal and him laughing in the rain, of her mother and Mr.

Kezzie on a long-ago summer day, of Mr. Kezzie and his own mother dancing at his and Deborah’s wedding less than a month ago.

He was pulled from those thoughts by the barking dog. Stuffing Cal’s toothbrush and comb into a side pocket of the rollerboard, Dwight went downstairs.

“Better let Bandit in,” he called. “He sounds cold.”

Cal didn’t answer.

“Hey, Cal, a little speed here, buddy. I promised Deborah we’d be home before bedtime.”

He set the suitcase down in the living room beside Cal’s backpack and went to see what was keeping the boy.

He was not in the kitchen, and Dwight followed the barks of the dog through the utility room to the side door. The instant he opened it, the terrier darted inside, shivering from the icy wind.

“Cal?”

Dwight stepped out into the snow-covered yard. There was no sign of his son. Was he still in the house?

“Cal?”

The little dog looked up at him anxiously.

Dwight went back outside and called again, roaring Cal’s name.

Beyond the snowcapped hedge, he saw the same un-friendly neighbor appear in the window. This time, the man opened the window without being asked and called,

“If you’re looking for that boy, he just left with his mother.”

C H A P T E R

5

If I cannot bend Heaven, I shall move Hell.

—Virgil

Friday afternoon, 21 January

“How many times do I have to tell it?” Leonard Carlton asked testily, his white hair standing up in tufts where he’d plunged his fingers in exasperation.

“As many times as it takes,” Paul Radcliff said, exercising his authority as Shaysville chief of police. “You told Major Bryant. Now tell me.”

“There’s nothing much to tell. The kid opened the door and let the dog out. A few minutes later, he walked out, too. Mrs. Bryant came out right behind him and took his hand. He didn’t want to go at first, but she said something to him and they both came through the side gate, closed it so the dog couldn’t get out, then walked down the drive to the street pretty fast and turned the corner, and that was it till he came out.”

“By ‘he,’ you mean Major Bryant?”

“The kid’s dad? Yeah.”

“Did they get in a car?”

Jonna’s elderly neighbor gave an indifferent shrug, and it took all of Dwight’s self-control not to pick up the sour little man by the scruff of his skinny neck and shake him till he turned loose something that would lead them to Cal.

Instead, he leaned against the doorjamb and looked through Carlton’s window, past the hedges, to the side door of Jonna’s house, where Paul, as a favor to him, had his people processing the door, the yard, the gate, and the drive where Cal and Jonna were last seen a bare two hours ago.

Virginia’s blue sky had gone a dirty gray and the air felt as if more snow was on the way, snow that could blanket all traces of his son.

What the hell was going on here? he wondered. Why would Jonna sneak around her own house and take Cal without saying a word to him?

“How come you say that he didn’t want to go with her?” Radcliff asked.

“Just at first,” said Carlton. “When she took hold of his hand, it looked to me like he was trying to pull away and go back in the house. But whatever she said, he quit arguing and it was almost like he was the one pulling her down the drive.”

“You said you didn’t see them after they turned the corner, but could they have left in a car? Did you hear one drive off?”

“Cars are back and forth all day. Can’t say as I’d’ve noticed. But they did turn to go in front of their house, like they were going over toward Main Street.”

“When did you last notice Mrs. Bryant’s car here in the drive?”

“Yesterday morning. I saw her drive off with the boy, but that’s the last time.”

“Can you describe how she was dressed?”

Leonard Carlton squinted his faded blue eyes as if trying to picture again what he had seen. “One of those puffy blue parkas. She had the hood up and it had black fur around the edges.” His wrinkled hand traced a circle around his face. “The sun was real bright on the snow and she had on a pair of those . . . what do you call ’em?

Wraparound sunglasses?”

“Was the parka dark blue or light blue?”

“More like navy, I’d say.”

“Pants or a skirt?”

“Some sort of black pants and black shoes or boots. I didn’t notice which.”

Radcliff raised an inquiring eyebrow to Dwight. “You got any more questions now?”

Dwight shook his head and Radcliff thanked the old man for his patience. For the first time, Jonna’s neighbor thawed a little. “Hope you get up with your boy, Bryant.”

“Sorry, Major,” said one of Radcliff’s officers when they had crossed the snow back to the other house.

Dwight had provided them with pictures of Cal from his wallet. “We canvassed the street two blocks in both directions. No one saw your son leave. ’Course now, there were a few places where nobody answered the door. If she doesn’t turn up, we’ll come back and ask the ones we missed.”

“We did take good close-ups of their shoe prints in the snow, though,” said a second officer. “And good prints from your wife’s hand on the doorknob, too.”

“Ex-wife,” Dwight said automatically, and for the first time since Cal’s chilling disappearance, he thought of Deborah, who must surely assume that he and Cal were halfway home to Colleton County by now.

Four o’clock.

She would still be in court with her phone turned off.

All the same, he hit his speed dial and left a message for her to call him back.

The first officer reported that a neighbor two doors down saw Jonna come home shortly before eight-thirty as he was leaving for work yesterday morning. She had parked her blue Accord on the street in front of her house and had given him a wave as she went up the front walk.

“We’ve alerted both the sheriff’s department and the highway patrol about the car,” Radcliff told him.

“What about an Amber Alert?”

His friend glanced away uneasily.

“Christ, Paul! You know the sooner that’s out, the more effective.”

“In a true kidnapping, yes, but Jonna is the custodial parent, Dwight. I know you’re worried, but face it, pal.

She’s done nothing illegal.”

Dwight balled his fists in frustration. “You don’t call sneaking my son out from under my nose illegal?”

Radcliff just looked at him. “You know the criteria for a Code Amber. Do you honestly believe Cal’s in immi-nent danger of serious bodily injury?”

Dwight groaned. “Okay, okay, so I’m acting like a civilian. But this is Cal, Paul. What if it was one of your kids?”

“I’d be ready to wring Sandy’s neck,” Radcliff agreed.

“All the same . . .”

“All the same, something’s wrong here,” Dwight insisted. “Except for a couple of neighbors, nobody’s seen Jonna since early yesterday morning. She leaves Cal alone overnight. She misses work. She doesn’t call her mother—that’s not her normal behavior.”

“No, probably not,” his friend agreed. “And you can punch me in the nose if you want, but you know I’ve got to ask. Have you done anything to make Jonna afraid of you? Afraid for Cal?”

Dwight’s jaws clenched so tightly that he could barely get the word through his teeth. “No.”

Radcliff waited for him to elaborate, then shrugged.

“Listen, pal, I’ve seen you back down a general. You can be pretty damn intimidating when you put your mind to it.”

Dwight let out the breath he’d been holding. “I don’t hit women and I don’t scare little kids. You do what you have to, Paul. Ask the questions you have to. But while you’re doing it, I’m going to take this house apart. There has to be something here to tell me why she’s gone off with Cal like this.”

They agreed to touch base if any leads turned up, then Radcliff returned to his office and Dwight reentered the house.

He let Bandit out of the crate and began in the kitchen with the wall-hung phone and answering machine, whose blinking lights indicated messages.

The first was time-dated 10:17 yesterday morning from Mrs. Shay, who complained in one long, nonstop sentence about her icy steps and walks and how nervous they made her and she wasn’t sure how she was going to get out for bridge that night and why didn’t Jonna call?

That was followed at 11:48 by a woman who was unsure of where a reunion committee was meeting.

Today’s messages started with Mrs. Shay peevishly asking why Jonna did not call and a message from Mayhew at the Morrow House.

There were dirty dishes in the dishwasher and a sticky cereal bowl in the sink where Cal had fixed himself a bowl of cereal this morning. Except for a stray cornflake and a smear of peanut butter on the table, the kitchen was otherwise spotless, which meant that she had cleaned up after yesterday’s bacon and waffles. Nothing jumped out at him to show that Thursday had been anything other than a routine morning.

Ditto for the dining room and living room, formal spaces with nine-foot-high cove ceilings and damask drapes that had hung in the house in which Jonna had been born, the house Mrs. Shay had to leave after her husband’s early death reduced the family’s finances. A large gilt-framed portrait of Jonna’s Shay great-grandparents hung over the mantel and a much smaller portrait of a solemn-faced husband and wife hung in the dining room. As Dwight recalled, that one had been a wedding gift from Mrs. Shay. Were they the famous Morrows? He had forgotten the details of how the couple were related to Jonna, but he did remember that when it arrived in Germany she had been quite pleased that her mother had sent it to her rather than giving it to her sister. She had hung it with artful casualness where it was sure to be noticed by visitors to their house—a subtle indication of status among the other military wives.

There was a desk in Jonna’s bedroom and one drawer contained hanging files. At the front were folders that related to her work at the Morrow House. One folder held a thick sheaf of papers that appeared to be a copy of an inventory of the furnishings of Morrow House that someone had typed up in 1976, according to the heading on the first page. There were interlineations and notations in Jonna’s careful hand of certain items that had been donated to the house since then, as well as a few question marks beside some of the items.

Next came her current financial records. Upon their divorce, her share of their Arlington house had almost paid for this house, and her mortgage payments were absurdly low. She seemed to be living modestly and within her means, which included a few shares of a utility company, the child support he paid for Cal, her part-time salary at the Morrow House, and a small monthly allowance from Mrs. Shay. No apparent savings, but no debt either. Well, she had always been a good manager, never exceeding their budget. Money was something they had never fought about. One of many things they had never fought about, he reminded himself. Except for the occasional cutting remark, Jonna did not fight. Any attempt slid right off her smooth and polished surface.

Personal papers came next—her birth certificate and expired passport, Cal’s birth certificate and medical records, a CV that she seemed to have drafted for a job that she never took, and, most surprisingly, a snapshot of himself the day he was commissioned.

The final group of folders held paperwork generated by their divorce settlement and another surprise: an account of his and Deborah’s wedding that had been cut out of the Dobbs Ledger. Now, who would have sent her that? Or had Cal brought it home with him? The clipping was stapled to a computer printout of the salary range for North Carolina district court judges. Natural, he supposed, for Jonna to be curious about Deborah.

If there were any men in his ex-wife’s life, there was nothing in her bedside table or bathroom to indicate it.

No birth control pills, no man’s razor.

As he and Bandit headed back downstairs, his phone rang.

“Are you back in North Carolina yet?” Deborah asked.

“Did she let Cal come home with you?”

“No,” he said and quickly brought her up to speed on what Jonna had done instead.

Deborah was instantly shocked and angry on his behalf, especially when he told her what Radcliff had asked.

“That’s awful! How could she leave Cal alone all night?

And how could she do this to you? Let me know the minute they show up, okay? I’ll be at Portland’s—she and Avery are really looking forward to their first night out—but I’ll leave my phone on.”

As Dwight clipped his phone back on his belt, Bandit cocked his head and gave him a look as if to say, “What’s next?”

“Damned if I know,” he told the little dog. “Too bad you can’t talk. And too bad you’re not a bloodhound.”

On the other hand, he told himself, Bandit did seem to understand a few basic words: Find your ball. Want towalk? and No! He knew his name; he knew Cal’s.

“Where’s Cal?” Dwight said. “Find Cal!”

The terrier immediately trotted over to the door and looked back at him with an expectant whine.

Feeling slightly foolish, Dwight got his leash, snapped it on, and opened the door. “Find Cal,” he said again, and the little dog headed straight for the gate. Without stopping for his jacket, Dwight followed, and when he opened the gate, Bandit raced down the drive and turned left along the sidewalk.

“Good dog!” he encouraged. “Find Cal!”

At the corner, Bandit sniffed around, then pulled Dwight across the street where he stopped short at a spot beside the curb. Dwight could read their shoe prints in the snow. He saw where Cal must have walked up to the car door and climbed in, then Jonna’s boot prints went around and left the curb where she had circled around to the driver’s side.

With the two of them shivering from the cold, he again said, “Find Cal!” even though they both knew it was use-less.

Back at the town police station, Paul Radcliff had only one tiny bit of news. “A neighbor across the street heard about our canvass and called us. She said that Jonna drove away around nine yesterday morning wearing a red jacket and a white toboggan.”

“Red jacket? I thought that crank next door said it was a blue parka with a hood.”

“She must have changed.”

“What about the sheriff’s department or the state troopers? They spot her car?”

“Nothing yet.”

They were interrupted by a clerk with papers that needed Radcliff’s attention.

Outside an icy rain had begun to fall and a deputy entered with reports of a three-car collision on one of the town’s main streets, which served to remind Dwight that he, too, had other responsibilities.

While Radcliff attended to business, Dwight called his own office. Mayleen Richards had just walked in from Chapel Hill. J.D. Rouse’s autopsy had been bumped back by the murder-suicide of three middle-class teenagers in a neighboring county, so it had been a fairly wasted day.

She gave him the gist of the ME’s preliminary findings.

Rouse had died from a bullet that had entered at the base of his neck and lodged against the upper front of his skull in a fairly straight line. It looked like a .45-caliber slug, but she would get it officially confirmed.

When she finished reporting on the rest of their investigation, Dwight told her that he probably would not be in the next day and asked if Sheriff Poole was around.

“Sorry, sir. I think he’s gone for the weekend. Anything I can do for you?”

His troubles with Jonna were nothing that he wanted to share with his subordinates. “That’s okay. I’ll catch up with him tomorrow.”

C H A P T E R

6

Fabulous tales are not composed without reason.

—Theophrastus

Friday afternoon, 21 January

Some of Dwight’s deputies spent Friday sifting through the life J.D. Rouse abruptly quit living when someone sent a bullet through his head on Thursday night. Before Mayleen Richards headed over to Chapel Hill for the autopsy, she had asked Jack Jamison and Raeford McLamb to backtrack on Rouse’s last day.

“Well, shit!” Red Bixley had said when they caught up with him on the job Friday morning. A pugnacious white man with a face as weathered as an unpainted fence post, he was the owner of a roofing company that was subcon-tracted to a builder in the northern part of Colleton County. “J.D.’s the fourth worker I’ve lost this week. I thought I was through climbing up on roofs, but if I don’t get lucky this weekend, that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing come Monday morning if I hope to meet the schedule.”

Six men were up on the multiangled roof of the half- built house behind him, and their hammers beat out an uneven rhythm in the frosty air. Another four men scrambled around on top of the adjacent house as a fifth and sixth man hoisted up a fresh bundle of shingles. Both houses were three stories tall and dormers sprouted from jutting angles with no apparent logic.

When asked what kind of employee Rouse had been, Bixley shrugged. “He carried his share of the load. Didn’t bust his ass, but probably did as much as any of the rest.”

“Was he liked?” Deputy Jamison persisted. “Did you like him?”

Again the shrug. “Would I have a beer with him? Sure.

More than that? No, I can’t say as I would. He could have a mean mouth on him, y’know? Not with me, but with some of the others.”

“Anybody in particular?”

As if realizing that naming names might leave him five men short instead of the current four, Bixley denied that Rouse had mixed it up with anybody in particular. “Besides,” he said, “didn’t you say he was shot on his way home? Well, he was always first off the job. In his truck and gone before the last man was down the ladder, so none of my guys could’ve done it.”

“We think he stopped to buy beer on the way,” said Jamison. “That would’ve slowed him down a little.”

They became aware that the hammering had slacked off as the workmen high above them strained to hear what was going on.

“We’re going to need to speak to your men,” McLamb told him. “Who was working with him yesterday?”

Bixley grumbled about getting further behind sched-6 ule, but signaled to one of the men hoisting shingles to come over.

Juan Lunas listened impassively when Bixley introduced the two officers and told him why they were there.

Like his boss, he denied knowing of any serious animosity between Rouse and the rest, a mix of African Americans, Anglos, and Mexicans.

McLamb tried to push him, but Lunas gave him the same shrug his boss had. “He don’ like your people and he don’ like mine. He works with us, but he don’ like us.”

“But his wife is Mexican,” said Jamison.

A wry smile flitted across the man’s face. “Yeah,” he said.

Although they had then questioned the rest of the roofers, no one would admit any serious problems with Rouse. Except for Bixley and Rouse, they rode to work together in twos and threes and could alibi one another.

“Besides,” said one of the black guys, “by the time the rest of us cranked up, he was out of sight.”

From the building site, there were two equally short routes back to Rideout Road where the shooting had occurred. They had no luck along the first route, but when they came to the first convenience store along the second route, the owner looked at the picture and said, “Yeah, I remember him.”

There was a sour note in his voice.

“You see him yesterday?”

“Naw, it was last week. He don’t stop here no more.”

“What happened?”

“Ah, guys like him piss me off. Think they own the world and like you’re gonna go broke if they quit buying from you. If he’s in trouble, you can bet he went looking for it. He comes back here again, I’ll bust his nose.”

Since the guy was at least six feet tall and built like an oak tree, they could believe he was capable of it.

He was still pretty frosted so he did not have to be urged to tell them why. He said Rouse had begun stopping in about two weeks earlier. “The first few times it was for gas, cigarettes, a loaf of bread, or a handful of Butterfingers, and always a six-pack of Bud Light. The last time—I believe it was Wednesday or Thursday a week ago, there were some people ahead of him in line. He popped the top on a beer and took a swig before he’d even paid for it. I told him nobody was allowed to drink on the premises and he told me to shove it. I was ready to come around the counter but he slammed the money down and was out the door. I might’ve let it go—people spout off all the time—then one of my customers pointed out the window. Damned if that SOB didn’t take his ashtray and dump cigarette butts all over the concrete. Not only that, when he pulled out of my drive, he slung his beer can back out the window just to jerk me off. I see that bastard again, I’ll ram a beer can right up his sorry ass.”

McLamb looked at Jamison. “So where were you last evening between five-thirty and six o’clock?” asked Jamison.

“Right here,” the man said. “Watching the plumber snake out one of my toilets. Why?”

At the very next convenience store two miles down the road, the manager remembered running Rouse’s credit card the evening before. “A tank of gas, a pack of Marl-boros, and a six-pack of Bud Light.”

“You sound pretty sure of that.”

“He’s stopped by almost every day this week,” the clerk said. “Tells me he’s working that new development on the other side of Old Stage Road.”

“Yeah? What else did he tell you?” they asked.

“That’s pretty much it. I think he said he’s a roofer?

What’s he done?”

“Got himself shot dead,” said McLamb. “You sure he didn’t have more to say?”

The man shook his head. “Sorry, he wasn’t much of a talker.”

Rouse’s sister and mother were only slightly more helpful when the two deputies questioned them later that day.

“Everybody loves J.D.,” said his mother, teary and red-eyed.

“Name two,” his sister muttered.

“What? What?” the old woman said, putting her hand to her ear.

“I said, especially you, Ma.”

“He’s a good boy,” she agreed. “Brings me a Butterfinger almost every Friday night.”

When McLamb and Jamison questioned the sister out of earshot of her mother, Marsha Rouse named a couple of men that her brother had fought with.

“We took a closer look at his truck this morning,” said McLamb. “Seems like somebody took a car key and scratched something on his door and then tried to scratch it out. New marks, too. You know anything about that?”

She gave a crooked smile. “Happened last weekend.

Probably Saturday night. He didn’t even notice it till Sunday dinner when Selena—she’s only six, but sharp as a hypodermic needle. She was looking out the window and said, ‘Aunt Marsha, what does D-I-C-K-H-E-A-D

mean?’ J.D. was mad as I’ve ever seen him. He was real particular about that truck of his. First brand-new one he ever had, but he grabbed up Ma’s sewing scissors and went out there and scratched some more till you couldn’t make out what it said.”

“Did he say who he thought did it?”

“No, but it must’ve happened at the Hub Saturday night.”

The Hub was a juke joint on the outskirts of Cotton Grove that catered to a mostly white, mostly male crowd.

It was dark and dingy inside and the sawdust and peanut shells on the floor were there not to create ambiance but to soak up spilled beer.

A few regulars were helping to hold up the bar that Friday afternoon, but neither they nor the bartender seemed to know anything about J.D. Rouse’s scratched door.

They did offer up two more names, though, of men who had invited Rouse to step outside within the last couple of months.

Checking out three of those men would have to wait till the next morning. As for the fourth, the man the others agreed was most likely to have scratched his opinion of Rouse on the truck door, he was sitting in their own 6 jail at the moment. A trooper had arrested him Wednesday night for driving drunk on a suspended license.

Deputy Mayleen Richards returned in the late afternoon as shifts changed and she was telling them the ME’s opinion about the path the .45 had taken when Major Bryant called.

He sounded a little distracted when she repeated what she had learned at the autopsy, and his only comment after she reported that Jamison and McLamb had turned up no hard suspects was, “Sometimes knowing who didn’t do it is halfway to finding who did. You might want to lean on the wife’s brother tomorrow.”

“Will you be here?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

“I doubt it. Sheriff Poole around?”

“Sorry, sir, I think he’s gone for the weekend. Anything I can do?”

“That’s okay. I’ll get up with him later.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, swallowing her disappointment.

C H A P T E R

7

Even winter produces flowers, for all that it seems to be un-productive by reason of the cold.

—Theophrastus

When Dwight called to tell me about the rotten trick Jonna had played on him after leaving Cal alone overnight—and what the hell was that all about?—

I was more annoyed than concerned. Yes, she was Cal’s custodial parent. Yes, she had the right to leave her own house and take Cal with her if she wanted to.

But to do it without a word to Dwight?

That was spiteful bitchiness pure and simple, a power play executed for no reason I could see except to rub his nose in the fact that she legally could.

Domestic court is full of vindictive parents who play the children off against their ex-spouses, who try to wedge them apart, who poison those young minds against the noncustodial parent. Male and female both, across the whole economic strata, but I didn’t think Jonna was like that.

Not that I’ve ever met the woman. In fact, the only picture I’ve even seen of her was in a stack of snapshots Cal took when someone gave him a disposable camera a 7 couple of birthdays ago. Honesty compels me to admit that she is a beautiful woman with blue-violet eyes, dark curly hair, and beautifully arched eyebrows. Happily, the only physical feature Cal seems to have inherited from her is the shape of her eyebrows. I can live with those eyebrows because everything else about Cal seems to be Dwight, from his dark brown eyes to his tall-for-his-age build.

During those years after Dwight came back to Colleton County and started pretending he was just another of my many brothers—“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”—he was a handy arm when I was without an escort, a comforting shoulder to cry on after an affair went sour, an ear for listening while I trashed the men who didn’t walk the line or live up to my expectations.

Every once in a while, though, I’d feel guilty about the imbalance and I’d ask him about his love life, about Cal, about his defunct marriage.

Cal he would always talk about.

Current entanglements? He didn’t kiss and tell.

His first marriage? All he ever said was, “Jonna just didn’t want to be married anymore. My fault probably.”

And that was it until last month, three or four nights before our wedding, in a week where we’d been given way too many parties and had way too much to drink.

Lying together beneath the quilts in the darkness of our new bedroom, I told him about my abortive marriage to a good-for-nothing car jockey and he told me about Jonna’s snobbery, how she’d decided on her own to get pregnant, and how she seemed to resent the bond between Cal and him.

“I never loved her half as much as I love you, and I didn’t love her at all when we made Cal, but the minute I saw that first sonogram? The day I first held him? I don’t know, Deb’rah. It was like she had given me this amazing gift I didn’t even know I wanted.”

A corrosive rush of jealousy swept over me that she had been there first, that she was the mother of the child he adored, that she would always be special for that reason alone. I could give him a dozen children and I knew he would love them all, but none of those hypothetical children would call up that never-to-be-duplicated primal response of holding his firstborn. This was cold hard reality and nothing could change it.

Ever.

The best I could do was swallow my jealousy and accept it. “Cal really is the best thing that’s ever happened to you, isn’t he?”

“Till now,” he’d agreed, stroking my bare shoulder as we lay entwined.

Happiness bubbled up then and washed away my jealousy. Jonna might have been Dwight’s first, but so what?

I was going to be his last, and I’d had enough bourbon to be generous with his heart. “You don’t have to rank us.”

He had laughed then, a low chuckle of drowsy contentment. “I know I don’t. That’s another reason I love you so much.”

So, yes, I was pissed at Jonna when Dwight called me that first time. The second time, when he told me that his friend—his friend, for pete’s sake!—had asked if there was a reason for Jonna to fear him, I was beyond pissed.

I was ready to drive to Shaysville and slap the entitlement right off her smug little face.

“She may not be afraid of you, but she’d better damn well be afraid of me. I’ll unleash Portland, okay? She’s great at getting custody agreements amended or set aside. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have custody of Cal now.”

“Whoa!” he said. “Slow down, shug. Let’s wait and see how this plays out first. There may be something going on that we don’t know about.”

I hate it when he’s logical.

He promised to keep me up to speed and I reluctantly let him go.

That didn’t mean I was going to let the whole situation go, though.

Portland’s been my best friend forever and we’ve always shared everything—well, most everything—from the time we were two small girls that the adults usually tried to separate because of the mischief we could get into together.

As soon as I got to her house and was settled with a glass of wine, I told her as much as I knew about what was happening in Virginia. While she nursed the baby, we ran through all the scenarios we could think of, including the possibility that Jonna had decided to run off with someone so totally messed up that any court in the country would immediately give Dwight full custody of Cal.

By the time we were finished, I was back to being angry.

After all, even though Shaysville wasn’t as big as Dobbs, Jonna probably knew all the good hiding places.

Little Carolyn Deborah made soft piglike snuffling sounds and my anger eased off as I watched her.

Avery came home, did his daddy thing, and agreed with Portland and me that Jonna’s behavior was outrageous, but he was more concerned that I write down the numbers for both their cell phones in large numerals and keep them beside my chair. Portland handed me the baby to finish burping her and Avery gave me his now-this-is-serious-so-pay-attention look that he usually reserves for instructing juries.

“When you put her down in her crib, be sure and lay her on her back,” he said, and Portland paused in the doorway to tell me how to warm the bottle of breast milk in the refrigerator should their daughter not be able to hold out the whole three hours they planned to be gone.

“Will you people just go?” I said. “We’ll be fine. I promise you she’ll still be alive and healthy when you get back.”

After a couple of satisfactory burps, the baby gave a big yawn and fell fast asleep. I held her for nearly an hour just to watch her delicate brows arch or knit, as if her dreams alternately astonished or bewildered her.

Eventually, my arm went numb, so I carried her up to her crib and carefully eased her in without waking her.

And yes, I did put her on her back. I’m not comfortable sleeping on mine, but this is the current baby-rearing wis-dom, and who am I to argue what’s comfortable for a one-month-old with a super-cautious tax attorney for a father?

As I settled into the book I’d brought along so I could look intelligent when my book club meets next week, my phone rang and my brother Seth’s wife, Minnie, asked if she was interrupting anything.

I explained that I was babysitting for Portland and she 7 very nicely inquired about my little namesake’s progress before she came to the point of her call. “Doris says the Weather Channel’s prediction is for that cold front to pass north of us and we’re due for sunshine and mid-fifties tomorrow, so we’re calling around to see who can help us clean our road. You and Dwight free tomorrow morning?”

“I am, but Dwight’s gone up to see Cal and I’m not sure when he’s getting back.”

“Nothing’s wrong, is there?” she asked perceptively.

Minnie’s one of my favorite sisters-in-law, and she would be discreet if I asked her, but I wasn’t ready to start this story around the family. Instead, I told her how Cal had persuaded Dwight to drive up and be his show-and-tell. She laughed and invited me to come for breakfast. “If we get started by nine, we should be done before noon. Remember to bring a pair of old gloves.”

I promised I’d be there.

I roamed the house, poured myself a second glass of wine, and tried to settle back into the book, but it was a pompous tome full of coming-of-age angst, and when my phone rang again I snatched it up eagerly.

“Still no word,” Dwight said. He sounded drained and exhausted, and after hearing the nonproductive details of how and why there was no word, I asked him if he’d had any supper.

“Paul brought me home with him,” he said.

I heard a woman’s voice in the background.

“Sandy says tell you hey. They want you to come up next time so they can meet you.”

“Tell her hey back and anytime. Are you spending the night there?”

“No, I’ll go back to Jonna’s house and crash on the couch in case they come back tonight.”

I told him that the family would be picking up road litter the next morning, which reminded me of J.D.’s death. “Did the autopsy tell anything?”

“Nothing useful. I spoke to Richards about an hour ago and she says there wasn’t enough deviation to tell which side of the road it came from. The bullet entered almost at the center of the nape of his neck and lodged in his skull just below the hairline of his forehead. The ME

thinks he might have been looking down a little, but hell, Deb’rah. He could have had his head turned to either side just as easy. They’re checking the alibis of all his known enemies. Sounds like there’s a line of ’em.”

“I miss you,” I said.

“Yeah, me too. Our first night apart.”

“Bound to happen sooner or later.”

“I guess. But let’s not make a habit of it, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

C H A P T E R

8

There is time for many words, and there is also a time forsleep.

—Homer

Friday night, 21 January

“You sure you don’t want to stay over with us tonight?” Sandy Radcliff asked when the last biscuit had been eaten and Dwight had refused the offer of dessert. “Jimmy can bunk in with Nick and you could have his room.”

“Thanks, Sandy, but I ought to check on Cal’s dog.

Besides, if there’s any chance at all that Jonna might bring him home tonight . . .”

It was only eight-thirty and Sandy and Paul were good friends, but Dwight was too beat to spend the evening making small talk.

“You go and get a good night’s rest,” Sandy said.

“Things will look better in the morning, right, hon?”

“Sure thing,” said Paul. “I’ll call if we hear anything.”

“Thanks, pal,” he said and trudged out through the freezing rain to his truck for the short drive over to Jonna’s house, which was still dark and empty when he got there.

The stone with the door key beneath it was frozen to the ground. He pried it up, then nearly slipped going up the ice-glazed steps. All the same, when he had unlocked the front door, he went back into the rain and sleet to replace the key in the weary hope that Cal might find his way back and need it.

Inside, Cal’s rollerboard and backpack lay at the foot of the stairs just where they had left them. Only hours ago.

It seemed more like a week.

Bandit gave a welcoming bark from his crate in the utility room and Dwight let him out into the backyard for a few minutes, then dumped dog food into an empty bowl. As soon as the terrier finished eating, he trotted through the house and up the stairs to Cal’s room.

Dwight followed.

The thermostat was still set at sixty-five, and he didn’t bother turning it up because he never slept well in a warm room.

He had intended to find pillows and blankets and bed down on the couch, but there was Cal’s unmade bed with Bandit curled up at the foot in what must be his usual place, so after using the bathroom, Dwight shucked off his jacket, pants, and shirt, checked that the safety was on before he put his gun under the pillow, then switched off the light and crawled in beneath the comforter.

It felt so good to lie down and stretch out that he let his mind go blank with sheer exhaustion while frozen raindrops beat against the window outside.

He was almost asleep when he remembered the conflicting reports of how Jonna was dressed today. A neigh-7 bor down the street had said she was wearing a red jacket and a white toboggan when she left home in midmorning on Thursday. The next-door neighbor said she had on a blue hooded parka when she took Cal this afternoon.

Despite his protesting muscles, he heaved himself out of bed, switched on lights, and went into Jonna’s room.

There was no red jacket in her closet.

With Bandit at his heels, he went back downstairs and checked out both the front closet and the coat hooks in the utility room.

No red jacket. No blue parka either.

So where had she changed coats? At her work?

Too tired to keep worrying at the puzzle, he went back to Cal’s room. Within minutes he was sound asleep.

He awoke at first light the next morning from troubled dreams, his T-shirt and the sheet beneath him damp with sweat. Sometime during the night, he had pushed off the comforter, but it was not enough. The room was inexpli-cably hot and stuffy. He rolled over and saw that the door was closed even though he had left it open. Hot air rushed up through the floor vent beneath the window.

And where was the dog?

Automatically, his hand went to the gun beneath his pillow. With all his senses on full alert, he slid on his pants and eased open the door. The house was silent, but a welcome rush of cooler air swept past him.

“Jonna?” he called. “Cal?”

No answer.

Bandit barked from the foot of the stairs and he hurried down, the gun still in his hand.

The front door stood slightly ajar, which explained why the heating system was working overtime. Chilled by more than the cold north wind whipping through, Dwight clearly remembered locking that door behind him when he came in last night. And something else was wrong. His eyes swept the entry area.

Cal’s backpack was still there but his wheeled suitcase was unzipped and the sweater that Dwight had packed for him was now gone.

Jonna must have come back during the night, heard him snoring, and took what she came for without waking him. Surely it was not for a sweater alone?

He walked through the house to see what else she might have taken. He had no idea what clothes she owned, but there did not seem to be any gaps in her closet. All the drawers were still closed and did not appear to have sustained a hasty rummage. After a thorough examination of the house, the only other sign that she had been there was the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

The sliding mirror was half open, and despite his exhaustion, he was almost positive that he would have noticed had it been that way when he splashed water on his face last night. There were empty spaces on the glass shelves inside, but he was clueless as to what those spaces had held.

He picked up a bottle of antihistamine and noted the name of the doctor who had prescribed it. Maybe he would know what Jonna had come back for.

It was only six-thirty, too early to call Paul.

Instead, he finished dressing, fed the dog, and put him in the wire crate before heading back through the house.

Outside, tree branches drooped to the ground under 8 the weight of the ice they carried. Every individual needle of the evergreens and each separate twig of the oaks and maples was encased in crystal. A few limbs had even snapped off. Overhead, the sky was still a dreary gray with no break in the solid cloud cover for the sun to shine through and start melting the ice.

Before locking the front door, he thought to check for the key. It was no longer under the rock.

Now, why would Jonna take that key when she had her own? Unless Cal—? No, it couldn’t have been Cal. His son would surely have waked him. But it had to be one of them because Bandit was a barker, and no matter how tired he was, Dwight was certain he would have heard barks had there been any.

When he and Jonna were still married, she used to hang their spare keys on a closet nail. A neat, methodical woman with a place for everything and everything in its place, she had done it in Germany and again in Arlington, so now?

He slid his fingers along the inner jamb of the front closet door and immediately touched the nail. Two keys, and one of them fit the front lock.

He put it on his own keyring, then slowly drove along the ice-slick streets, nearly fishtailing at a stoplight, until he found an open diner. After pancakes, sausage, and three cups of weak coffee, he stopped by a drugstore and picked up shaving gear and other toiletries. He would have liked fresh underwear and a fresh shirt, too, but nothing else was open this early on a Saturday morning.

The sand trucks were out, though, and Jonna’s street had been sanded by the time he got back to the house.

He showered and shaved and was lavish with the new stick of deodorant. It would have to do till he could get clean clothes.

8:00.

Deborah liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings, but if Minnie was expecting her for breakfast, surely she’d be up by now.

“Just got out of the shower,” she said. “I’m standing here drying off. You get any sleep last night?”

He told her what he’d found when he woke up this morning and they kicked it back and forth.

“Something else is going on with her,” Deborah said.

“There has to be. Have you talked to her girlfriends?”

“I don’t know any of her friends.”

“Then ask her mother. Ask her boss. Hell, ask Cal’s teacher. I don’t have to tell you how to do your job. But once you get a couple of names, they’ll give you some more, and sooner or later, you’ll get to whoever’s hiding them.”

“You’re right,” Dwight conceded. “I’m not thinking straight.”

“This is why they don’t let doctors operate on their own kids.”

“Yeah. I need to quit acting like a dad and start acting like a cop.”

“You’re a good dad.” Her voice softened. “And a very good cop.”

“Who let his son be taken right from under his nose,”

he said glumly.

“Don’t beat up on yourself, okay? There’s no way you could have expected Jonna to do something like this.”

After they hung up, Dwight went looking for an address book and found one beside the kitchen phone. He 8 leafed through it, trying to deduce which names were personal friends who might could offer suggestions or information about his ex-wife.

8:15.

Too early to start calling strangers. Instead, he dialed Paul’s number.

“Radcliff here.”

“Hey, Paul. Dwight.”

“I was just about to call you,” his friend said.

“You’ve got something?” Dwight asked eagerly.

“Not the way you mean. Sorry. I’m at the office reading old background reports. You want to come over?”

“Be right there.”

He grabbed up the address book and took it with him on the off chance that Paul could help him sort out the names.

At the police station, Paul handed him a mug of strong black coffee and listened attentively while Dwight told him about his nocturnal visitation.

“You know, bo, when Jonna walked away with Cal yesterday, I thought maybe she was just ticked off at you for something. And yeah, I put my people through the motions for you, but it was a slow day and there wasn’t much going on here.”

He hesitated.

“But now?” Dwight prodded.

“But now I’ve got to say, whatever Jonna’s up to, it doesn’t feel normal. My chief clerk grew up here. Her dad was coroner when she was a kid so she knows a lot of the stuff the town tries to keep quiet. She put me onto this.” He tapped the open folder that lay on the desk in front of him. “Did you know that Jonna’s daddy shot himself?”

Dwight nodded. “Yeah. She told me about it. She was just a baby when it happened, though, and I don’t think her mother ever wanted to talk about it much. He was cleaning a gun and didn’t know it was loaded, right?”

“That was the official story that got in the paper,” said Radcliff. “You might want to read between the lines of these.”

Radcliff slid the folder over to Dwight. In addition to the autopsy report, there were several written statements collected by the officers who had worked the incident nearly forty years ago, when the sudden death of one of the town’s most prominent businessmen would have been a noteworthy event. Not that there was anything suggestive in the one clipping that detailed the “tragic accident.”

The police reports were a different matter. His doctor stated that Eustace Shay had been subject to bouts of depression for years, which probably contributed to his poor business decisions, which led to losing control of Shay Furniture.

According to his secretary’s statement, he had been asked to vacate his corner office so that the new president could move in. On that day, he had overseen the packing up of his belongings, and she had stepped out to fetch someone to carry down the heavy boxes while he saw to the last of his personal items. “I had barely closed the door when I heard a gun go off and rushed back in.”

That part was supported by other workers in the office.

They did not support her assertion that he had been laughing and joking about early retirement and how he was 8 planning to spend his first week of freedom fishing for bass out at the lake. When asked if suicide was a possibility, however, the others had apparently more or less shrugged, while the secretary was adamant that “Mr. Shay would never do that to his wife and those sweet baby girls.”

Jonna’s mother had agreed. Yes, her husband had been upset about business but she certainly did not think he was that upset. The gun? A family heirloom that her husband had enjoyed displaying. “I’m sure we never realized it was loaded.”

Dwight closed the folder. “Interesting, but I don’t—”

“Did you see the gun he used?”

Dwight flipped back through the reports. “An old Colt revolver?”

“Not just any old Colt revolver. It was a silver-plated, engraved presentation piece given to Peter Morrow for using his influence to spare Shaysville the worst of Reconstruction. It’s also the same gun Edward Morrow used to kill himself in 1931.”

“Huh?”

“My clerk says that her dad and the guy who was police chief back then managed to keep that little fact out of the papers because they didn’t want to sensationalize things. As soon as I heard that, I called the Morrow House director at his house.”

“Mayhew? Jonna’s boss?”

Radcliff nodded. “That’s where the gun is now. According to Mayhew, Jonna’s mother inherited it from her father and she was real proud of it even though her own granddaddy had shot himself with it. After Mr. Shay’s death, she decided it was cursed and wanted to destroy it.

Mayhew says it took a lot of talking, but the Historical So- ciety eventually persuaded her to give it to the Morrow House. It’s on display out there now, but of course there’s nothing on the card to tell that the gun was ever fired.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Dwight asked his friend.

Radcliff’s eyes dropped and he hesitated for a moment.

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, Dwight, but my clerk says her dad used to say there was talk that Eustace Shay was a little unstable even before he accidentally-maybe-on-purpose shot himself. His mother was reputed to be a little bit odd herself, used to wander around talking to people who weren’t there. And some say Jonna’s sister’s not all that tightly wired either. ’Course, that may be because she’s something of an alcoholic.”

Dwight immediately saw where Radcliff was heading and shook his head. “And you’re thinking Jonna’s come unglued, too?”

His friend shrugged. “Well, she’s sure not acting normal, is she?”

Before Dwight could argue that he’d never seen any signs of mental instability in his ex-wife, Radcliff’s phone rang. The chief had barely identified himself when Dwight heard a loud excited voice practically screaming through the earpiece.

“Slow down!” Radcliff said. “You’re not making sense.” He listened intently, then said, “Stay put. We’ll be right out.”

He pushed himself up from the desk. “You’d better come, too. That was Mayhew. That damn gun and two others have gone missing from their display case.”

C H A P T E R

9

The constant statements by the older people, that the winterswere colder or the summers hotter than now, are due to thetendency to magnify and remember the unusual while theordinary is forgotten.

—Willis Isbister Milham

The Saturday morning air nipped at my face as I left home to go pick up road litter with my family, but the sun had already begun to warm up the day. I wore my oldest boots, jeans, and two layers of ratty sweatshirts beneath a light jacket so that I could peel down if the temperature really did get into the high fifties. It took me a while to find an old pair of work gloves, but I still made it to Minnie and Seth’s before all the sausage biscuits disappeared.

Their kitchen was full of brothers and sisters-in-law who live out here on the farm as well as those of their children who are still at home. Daddy sat at the table beaming. He likes it when the family comes together on a project.

“Us Knotts, we’ve been keeping up this road for over a hundred years,” he said, waving away the extra biscuit Doris tried to press on him. “My granddaddy was a road captain back ’fore nineteen-hundred.”

“What was that?” asked Seth’s daughter Jessica.

“Means being in charge of a stretch of road. When my pa was a boy, he used to go help Grampa lay off his mile.”

He smiled down at young Bert, grandson of Robert, my oldest brother. “How you reckon they measured it, little man?”

“Drove his car down it?”

“Naw, won’t no cars out here back then.”

The child was old enough to know about odometers but too young to conceive of a world without cars, and his brow furrowed with the concept.

“What they done,” said Daddy, “was measure around the rim of his wagon wheel and tie a white rag on it. Pa kept count and when that rag come up five hundred times, that was one mile.”

“There couldn’t have been plastic bags back then either,” said Jess, “so what did they pick up the trash in?

Bushel baskets?”

“Won’t no trash,” said Daddy. “Won’t nothing much to throw away ’cause stuff didn’t come in paper wrappers like today and they won’t no hamburger places anyhow.

Folks using this road was all farmers who ate at their own tables and growed most of their food. You’d give your table scraps to the dogs or the pigs and you’d burn your trash in a barrel. What couldn’t be burned, you put on your own trash pile back in the woods. You surely didn’t go flinging it in your neighbor’s front ditch.”

“So why’d they need a road captain?” asked A.K., Andrew and April’s teenage son.

“ ’Cause the road won’t nothing but dirt. Soon as Grampa got his section marked, he’d call out all the neighbor men and boys to help. They’d come with their mules and plows and hoes and shovels and they’d work 8 all day cleaning out the ditches so the water would drain.

Then they’d smooth out the roadbed and fill in the holes.

’Course it never lasted long. Three or four good hard rains and it was a pigmire again.”

“Our road won’t paved till I was in high school,”

Robert chimed in. “Many a winter morning the bus would get stuck and we’d have to slog up the hill from the creek in mud higher’n the laces on our brogans.”

“That little hill?” scoffed Jess.

“That was before they graded it down and built the high bridge that’s there now,” Seth told her. “The road used to run right down to creek level and up again.”

“Everybody got enough bags?” asked Minnie, clearing away the last of breakfast. “Quicker we get started, the quicker we’ll be finished.”

Someone had dumped an old couch in the ravine by the creek, so A.K. and Reese volunteered to start with that. There was a time when Reese was so truck proud you had to wash your hands and wipe your shoes before he’d let you get in the cab. Now it’s just an old work-horse, and I rode with them down to where our road begins at Possum Creek. A small green-and-white sign noted that this road had been adopted by the Kezzie Knott family.

While my nephews wrestled the couch up the bank and into the back of the truck, I picked cans and broken beer and wine bottles off the rocks beneath the bridge. We filled two garbage bags out of the creek alone and slung them in beside the couch. Our efforts netted us two pieces of junk mail and a telephone bill with the names and addresses still intact, and those we saved in a smaller bag so that Minnie or Doris could report them to the county zoning department, who would call the offenders with the warning that a second call might mean a thousand-dollar fine and community service.

We found every kind of trash imaginable, from dirty disposable diapers and three hubcaps to a bag of wadded-up Christmas wrapping paper and a strip of chrome that Reese thought had fallen off a friend’s motorcycle. While we worked, I told them about the sackful of marijuana someone had found behind a tree on a ditchbank a few counties over.

“Better’n that dead dog I found in a box last summer,”

said A.K. “Remember?”

They had heard about J.D. Rouse getting shot in front of a woman picking up road litter Thursday evening and wanted to know if Dwight had found the shooter yet.

I was standing down in the ditch when they asked, and I glanced over my right shoulder to where young pines fringed the woods that bordered the road there. My head was barely level with the upper bank.

“Run up yonder in the trees,” I told Reese.

“Huh?”

“I just want to get a feel for why the killer shot past somebody. Get far enough back in the pines so that you can see the truck but you’re mostly hidden.”

“Dwight deputize you or something?” Reese grumbled, but he climbed the bank and did as I’d asked. A minute later, he called, “Here, okay?”

“Can you see the truck?”

“Yeah, but I can’t see you.”

From my position in the ditch, I couldn’t see him either.

“I bet the guy didn’t think anybody was anywhere 9 around,” said A.K., who’d watched with interest. “If I didn’t know Reese was back there, I would never’ve noticed him till he moved, and this is with the sun shining.

Been getting on for dark and he stood still, wouldn’t anybody see him.”

My theory exactly and, despite Reese’s smart-mouthing, one I’d share with Dwight when he got home because I drive past the Johnson farm all the time and know its layout. If the shooter had been in the pasture, he and the Harper woman would have surely seen each other.

I took a fresh bag and they drove on down to the others to pick up some of the filled bags and take a first load to the county dumpsters at Pleasant’s Crossroads, about four miles away.

Our road connects Old Forty-Eight to a shortcut that leads to Fuquay and eventually to Chapel Hill, so we get our share of traffic. All the same, it was appalling to see how much trash had been thrown out, most of it from fast-food places. As I picked up yet another paper clamshell from Wendy’s and retrieved a bunch of unused napkins with the McDonald’s logo, I kept remembering Cedar Gap, the pretty little mountain resort town where I’d held court last fall.

“I thought they were just being prissy to ban all fast-food chains,” I told Minnie and Doris when I caught up with them. “Now I see their point. Seems like there’s a lot more today than the last time we did this.”

“It’s that new shopping center,” said Doris as she stooped for a cardboard Bojangles’ tray. “Fast food’s not to blame. It’s the trashy people who won’t keep a litter bag in their car.”

With so many of us working, we finished well before noon and gathered at the barbecue house for lunch, Daddy’s treat.

“We don’t need to wait so long to do this again,” said Doris. “I was getting right ashamed to have our name on that sign.”

Now that the job was over, it was easy to agree with her.

As we rode back to Seth’s for me to pick up my car, a silver Acura zipped around us. Just as it entered the rising curve ahead, we saw a telltale yellow-and-red bag go flying out the window onto the shoulder and bounce down into the ditch.

“What the hell?” cried Reese.

Enraged, he floored the accelerator, flashing his lights and blowing his horn.

“Write down their license number,” he yelled, reading it off to us.

“No pencil,” said A.K., who was also cursing the driver ahead.

I was equally furious. Less than an hour after we’d cleaned our road and somebody was already trashing it?

“If I catch him, can we make a citizen’s arrest?” Reese asked.

“Go for it, Gomer,” I said. All I had in my pocket was a lipstick, but I used it to write the number on my hand in case the car got away.

That wasn’t necessary, though. Bewildered by the lights and horn, the Acura slowed and pulled to a stop in front of Doris and Robert’s drive.

Reese was out of the truck before it quit rolling and I made A.K. put down the window on that side.

“What’s wrong?” asked the teenaged driver.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong, you jerk!” Reese shouted as he approached the car. “What the hell kind of slob are you to dump your fu—fricking garbage out the window?”

I admired his restraint. Angry as he was, he’d realized at the last minute that the driver was a shorthaired girl instead of a guy.

“Huh?” The girl looked past Reese and recognized my other nephew. “A.K.?”

“Sorry, Angie,” he said, “but we just spent the whole morning cleaning up the road and the first time we drive back down it, we see you trashing it.”

The girl had the grace to look embarrassed. She apologized and offered to go back and pick up the Bojangles’

bag.

Mollified but still steamed, Reese pulled his truck forward so that she could turn around and then he sat there with his engine running till he saw her get out of her car and retrieve the bag.

A.K. was also watching in the side-view mirror. “Okay, she’s got it, so let’s go,” he said. He seemed almost as embarrassed by the incident as the girl.

Reese grinned at his discomfort, but drove on down to Seth and Minnie’s, where he came to a stop beside my car. “Girlfriend of yours?”

“A friend, not a girlfriend. I mean, a friend who happens to be a girl.”

Reese and I were both laughing by then.

“Oh, the hell with both of you!” He jumped out of the truck and headed for his own wheels.

“She was cute,” said Reese. “All the same, I bet she thinks twice before she shoves her trash out a window again.”

C H A P T E R

10

They are honest in their dealings with one another. Where-fore no one keeps watch.

—Theophrastus

Saturday morning, 22 January

Despite the cold, the director of the Morrow House was pacing the flagstone terrace out front in his shirtsleeves when Dwight and Paul Radcliff arrived, followed by a couple of Radcliff’s officers.

“Thank goodness you’re here!” said Frederick Mayhew. His teeth were chattering, but whether from anxiety or the frosty air was hard to say. “I simply don’t know what to think. Everything was locked and I’m sure the alarm system was set when I left. We’ve never had a rob-bery before. Oh, some of the children might pick something up—we did lose a doll bonnet once but the child’s mother made her bring it back—but this!”

He opened the door for them so vigorously that it banged hard against the wrought-iron stop and Dwight almost expected the beveled glass to shatter.

“We keep them in the library,” Mayhew told them and led the way through the spacious entrance hall and large front parlor to a smaller room lined with bookcases.

“There!”

On a rectangular oak library table that stood in the center of the room sat a glass-topped display case. An empty glass-topped display case.

Indentations in the crushed red velvet marked the places where a small derringer, a dueling pistol, and a long-barreled revolver, each neatly labeled, once lay. The case was closed but not locked, as Mayhew quickly demonstrated, yet there appeared to be no scratches on the lock itself.

“Who else knows how to work the alarm system?”

asked Radcliff.

“Just Jonna.”

“And when’s the last time you saw the gun?”

Mayhew pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose and frowned. His pale blond hair stood up in disordered tufts.

“I can’t honestly say. Definitely during Christmas week because a troop of Boy Scouts visited, and boys are always interested in firearms.”

“The case is normally locked?”

“Oh, absolutely. We couldn’t have anyone handling them, tarnishing the silver plating. The temptation to touch is such a human foible, isn’t it? Taken together, the three guns are valued at nearly half a million dollars, and the presentation gun is one-of-a-kind. Irreplaceable.”

“Half a million!” Radcliff exclaimed. “And you kept them out like this?”

Mayhew gave a fatalistic shrug. “My hands are tied. It’s a condition of the donors. They quite naturally like to see their names on the display cards. Besides, they are well 9 documented and the insurance company had them laser-tagged with our own ID code. No one could sell them.”

“Who has the key to this case?”

“There are only two. They hang with the rest of the keys on a board in a locked cupboard, and before you ask, both keys are still there.”

“Then who has access to that cupboard?” Radcliff asked patiently.

“Well, I do, of course, and Jonna. And there’s a spare key that we keep in a vase on the mantel in our office.”

“Who knows about the spare?”

“Only Jonna and I.”

“What about a cleaning woman?”

“Cleaning man,” he corrected, shaking his head. “Dix Lunsford may have noticed it when he dusts, but I doubt if he knows what it’s for. Besides, he’s never in the office alone. Not that we don’t trust him, heavens no. He and his wife used to work for Jonna’s mother and he’s devoted to Jonna. He wouldn’t take a straight pin that didn’t belong to him.”

“Does he have keys to the house itself?”

“Certainly not! There are only five. One for Jonna, one for me, and one for each of the three officers on our board of trustees.” He paused and pushed up his glasses and sheepishly admitted that perhaps they knew the alarm code as well.

A gust of cold air announced the opening of the front door.

“I called our chairman. Perhaps that’s he now,” he said pedantically as he peered over his glasses toward the doorwa.

yAn officer stationed at the door called down the hall,

“Futrell’s here, Chief.”

A youthful-looking plainclothes officer entered the library, carrying a case with the basic tools of an investigation. For anything more complicated, they would have to send for the division’s crime scene van, which was centrally manned by the state police.

Radcliff explained what had happened and asked Mayhew, “Did you handle the case?”

“Not this morning,” said Mayhew. “Well, I did lift it by the corner there just to see if it was locked. Which it wasn’t. But I’ve certainly touched it in the past. Not since Christmas, though. I’m almost positive not since Christmas. Is there a way to tell how old fingerprints are?”

Futrell stooped and cast an experienced eye over the case. “Wouldn’t matter if there was. Looks like it’s been wiped clean.”

A few minutes later, his brush and powder confirmed that eyeball appraisal.

“Jonna must have taken them,” said Mayhew. “They’re gone, she’s gone, and she had access to the keys. But why? Unless—oh goodness! She’s been acting oddly lately. You don’t think she took the presentation gun for the same reason her father did?”

“Whose father?” asked a new voice.

“Ah, Nathan! Betty! I’m so glad you’re here.”

Mayhew quickly introduced Nathan Benton and Betty Coates Ramos, chairman and treasurer, respectively, of the Morrow House board of trustees. “The Bentons and the Coateses were two of Shaysville’s earliest families,” he told the lawmen. He hastily described for the new arrivals how he had entered the library to turn on the lights in 9 case there were any visitors today. “I thought I would lay the updated Morrow genealogy on the table—people always want to know the dates of our ghost—and that’s when I saw the empty case.”

Mrs. Ramos was a tall attractive blonde who appeared to be in her late fifties or early sixties. Her ski pants and leather boots were black and she wore pearls and cashmere beneath a quilted white parka. She had pushed the hood back and her short hair was a windblown tangle of loose but well-styled curls. Diamonds flashed on her fingers as she pulled off her gloves and extended her hand, first to Radcliff, whom she seemed to know already, and then to Dwight.

“Major Bryant? Are you Jonna’s—?” She hesitated, searching for the tactful term.

“Her ex?” Dwight said bluntly. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And has she really taken the guns?” asked Mr. Benton, who looked to be in his mid-sixties.

There was something so familiar about the man that Dwight almost felt as if he should salute.

He was roughly five-nine, but carried himself with the authority of someone taller. Trim of body, with piercing blue eyes, iron gray hair, and a neat gray mustache, he wore brown slacks and a brown leather jacket over a white shirt and tie. The brown clothes only added to his military air, and that was when Dwight pegged his familiar look. Nathan Benton could have stepped out of one of those old war movies that he and Deborah liked to watch, central casting’s idea of a stiff-upper-lip British colonel whose gruff, no-nonsense demeanor would in-spire his men to feats of heroism.

“We only just arrived ourselves,” said Chief Radcliff.

“It’s too soon to know who did what. Sounds as if they could have been taken anytime during the last month.”

“Nonsense,” Benton said crisply. (Dwight wondered if he heard a faint English accent.) “The cleaning man would have noticed. I would have noticed.”

“Mr. Benton donated the derringer and the World War I Colt,” Mayhew explained for those who had not made a connection between this trustee and the labels beneath two of the indentations. One read, “(L-46.3) Derringer Black-Powder Pistol, ca. 1872. Originally owned by Leti-tia Morrow Carter, daughter of Peter Morrow.” The other was simply described as “(L-46.2) Government Model Colt automatic pistol, ca. 1912.” Both labels carried the line, “Gift of Nathan Benton.”

“And I distinctly remember seeing all three guns in the case as recently as last week,” Benton told the two lawmen.

“Wait a minute,” said Dwight as he straightened from reading the label. “Black powder? Did the presentation gun use black powder cartridges, too?”

“Well . . .” Mayhew deferred to Benton, who said,

“No, it’s post–Civil War. Used .36-caliber cartridges, I believe, although that gun was never meant to be fired.”

“And yet it was,” Radcliff said grimly. “At least twice that we know of.”

“Twice?” asked the puzzled Mrs. Ramos.

“Jonna’s great-grandfather killed himself with that gun,” Mayhew said in a half-whisper, as if repeating scandalous gossip. “So did Eustace Shay.”

“Jonna’s father?”

Mayhew nodded.

“But that’s awful!” Betty Ramos looked distressed.

“How can Jonna stand its being here?”

“In the first place, she was only a baby when it happened,” said Mayhew as he repositioned his glasses. “In the second place, does she even know?”

His question was directed at Dwight, who said, “I never heard about the first death, only that her father had shot himself accidentally. She never described the gun, though.”

Benton raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Surely she must know. Someone in the Historical Society told me the gun’s history when I decided to give the derringer. It doesn’t seem to be a huge secret.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t know,” said Mrs. Ramos. “Of course, I’ve only been on the board since Thanksgiving.”

“Mrs. Ramos and her husband donated our new heating and cooling system,” Mayhew said in a parenthetical murmur. “And she’s been a supportive Friend of the Morrow House for years.”

“But it wasn’t until the children grew up and moved away that I’ve had time to become more involved. I can see that I still have a lot to learn.”

“The guns were unloaded, right?” asked Dwight, trying to get them back on track. “And there are no bullets for them?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Mayhew said.

“That’s what you were talking about when Betty and I came in, wasn’t it?” said Benton. “You’re afraid she’s going to follow the family tradition.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Mrs. Ramos. “I’ve been helping her take inventory this past month and there is nothing—absolutely nothing!—like that on her mind.”

Radcliff’s pager buzzed and he excused himself to walk out into the hall.

“When was the last time you talked to Jonna?” Dwight asked Mrs. Ramos.

“Day before yesterday.”

“Thursday?”

“Today’s Saturday?” The treasurer for the board of trustees counted back on her fingers. “Yes, Thursday morning.”

“What time?”

“Around nine-thirty. We had both planned to come in and work on the inventory while it was quiet.” She cast a brief apologetic glance at Mayhew, who stiffened slightly at the implication that he was a distraction of any sort.

“But I had to go out of town for an emergency and I came by to say I’d be in on Friday—yesterday—to help get ready for Sunday . . . tomorrow.”

“Oh my God!” Mayhew moaned. “Tomorrow! The SHGS!”

“What happens tomorrow?” asked Dwight.

“The Shaysville Historical and Genealogical Society is supposed to meet. It’s our gala reception for the installation of officers. Jonna was going to become the new president. We even have a guest speaker coming from the Smithsonian.”

“We’ll have to call him and cancel it,” Benton said firmly. “We cannot go on now.”

Mayhew looked shocked at the suggestion. “We can’t do that without consulting with the other officers. We have to—”

He broke off as Paul Radcliff returned. He moved with purpose and spoke decisively. “I’m afraid we’re going to 10 have to put this room off-limits for the time being, Mr.

Mayhew. Do you have a key for it?”

“I’m not sure, Chief.”

“There’s one in the key cupboard,” said Mrs. Ramos.

“Shall I fetch it?”

“Here,” said Mayhew, fumbling with his keyring.

“You’ll need the cupboard key.”

“That’s okay,” said the woman, already moving through the doorway. “I’ll use the one in the vase.”

Mayhew looked at her in consternation and Dwight threw an amused glance at his friend. She had only joined the board at Thanksgiving? So much for the director thinking no one knew about that spare key.

But Radcliff did not return his grin. He gave one of the uniformed officers orders to lock the room and bring him both keys and told Futrell to pack up his bag and follow his car.

“What’s up?” asked Dwight as they stepped out into a wind that seemed to be blowing straight out of the Arc-tic.

“Jonna’s car’s been found,” he answered tersely, moving rapidly toward his patrol car.

“Is she okay? What about Cal?”

“Sorry, pal. No sign of him. Just her.”

He got into the car and Dwight followed.

“Well, what does she say? What’s she done with him?”

“I’m sorry, Dwight,” Radcliff said again. “She’s dead.”

C H A P T E R

11

Let us consider the fatal effects of excessive cold.

—Theophrastus

Saturday noon, 22 January

Jonna Bryant’s blue Honda was parked in a crowded junkyard at the edge of town. It had been found by two teenage brothers who were searching the lot for a door to match the one they’d smashed to hell and gone when they slid their Mustang into a waist-high concrete gatepost during Wednesday night’s snowfall.

When they finally located a Mustang with a viable door, it was jammed in between a 1972 Pinto and a late-model Accord. Both the Pinto and the Mustang were clearly banged and scarred, but the Accord looked pristine under its sheet of ice.

“We saw the shape of something weird in the front seat, but we couldn’t tell what it was,” said one of the brothers, “so we used a screwdriver to pry loose part of the ice on the driver’s side and oh, man! We ’bout near died ourselves.”

Beneath the red of their wind-chapped cheeks, both 10 boys were pale and shaky, but nervously excited, too, as they told it over and over again to anyone who would listen.

The owner of the junkyard was wary and belligerent, afraid he was going to be blamed for this. He claimed total ignorance as to how or when the Accord had been added to his inventory. And he certainly knew nothing about the dead woman slumped stiffly over the steering wheel, her left hand dangling free, a silver-plated antique gun on the floor as if it had slipped from her lifeless hand after she put the barrel to her head and pulled the trigger.

Dwight took one look and it was like a sucker punch to the heart.

“She’s wearing a red jacket,” he said.

Paul Radcliff nodded grimly and thumbed his radio.

“Jack? Start a Code Amber on Cal Bryant. Here’s his dad. He’ll give you the details and a description of the woman who took him.” Then, much as he hated to have to turn this over to the Virginia state police, he added,

“And when you’ve finished with that, call Captain Petrie and tell him I’m officially requesting their assistance to process a crime scene.”

Dwight looked up in protest, but Radcliff shook his head. “You know I’ve got to, pal. They have the re-sources. We don’t.”

Bone-chilling winds swept down from the snow-covered hills, straight through the open lot, and those lawmen too macho to wear gloves or hats jammed their hands into their pockets and hunched deeper into their heavy jackets.

While they stamped their feet on the frozen, dirty snow in an effort to stay warm until the crime scene van ar- rived, Futrell took pictures of the car from all angles, documenting what Dwight already knew. This car had not moved and its doors had not been opened since last night’s freezing rain cemented them in place. It was unlikely that Jonna was the woman in a blue parka who took Cal yesterday. Nor could she have been the one who was in the house last night, not with ice this thick all around the door.

His own brain felt cased in ice. How would Cal handle her death? Was the woman he went off with Jonna’s killer? If not, what was their connection? There had to be one. Otherwise, it would be one hell of a coincidence that his son was taken the same day his ex-wife was murdered. But why take the boy if they were going to kill the mother? Had Cal inadvertently seen something the killer was afraid he would tell?

He bent down again to peer through the hole that the teenagers had made. Half of the window’s ice had broken away in one sheet so that the interior could be clearly seen even on this dull gray morning.

His first thoughts were of the woman who lay there on the other side of the glass, stiff and frozen and beyond the warming touch of any human hand; the woman who had been his wife, who had given birth to their son, who had walked away from their marriage. And yeah, maybe that was because she knew he did not love her or maybe it was because she had never really loved him. The reason did not matter, had not mattered for years. The mutual lack of passion had made their divorce feel like the polite dissolution of a business arrangement that no longer paid dividends. She had cared too much about appearances for Dwight’s liking, but she was not a bad or stupid woman.

He had felt guilty for not trying harder to save their marriage for the sake of their son; yet, at the same time, he had been so grateful that she wanted out that he had not fought her over the terms of the settlement. And despite their growing struggle over Cal these last few years, he was filled with deep sorrow that she had ended like this.

Then his training took over. As he read the blood-spattered note that lay in her lap, his fears and regrets were displaced by a cold rage.

“See the note?” Radcliff asked in his ear.

“Yeah.”

The spiky letters wavered, but they were in Jonna’s handwriting: He won’t divorce her and I don’t want to goon living.

“The bastard made her write her own phony suicide note,” Dwight said as he straightened up. “What did he say to her? Threaten to kill Cal? Where the hell is he, Paul?”

“We’ll find him,” Radcliff said. “I promise you we’ll find him.”

Yesterday’s canvassers had returned the pictures of Cal, so Dwight handed one of them back and Paul signaled for an officer to take it to the station and get it out on the Internet.

“I’ll ride along with him,” Dwight said. “Pick up my truck.”

“You don’t want to wait for the van?”

“What for? To watch your BCI techs try to find trace evidence that’ll take days to analyze?” He jerked his head toward the car. “You’re reading this phony setup same way I am, right? A shot to the left temple when she was right-handed? No blowback blood spatter on either hand and none on the interior window glass?”

Radcliff was right there with him. “The shooter probably held the gun on her through the window while she wrote the note, then shot her, put the gun in her hand so it’ll have her prints, rolled up the window, and was on his way.”

“Or her way,” said Dwight.

“Or her way,” Radcliff agreed. “I have to wait for the state guys, but there’s no reason you can’t go talk with Jonna’s neighbor again, see if you can get a better description of the woman.”

Leonard Carlton was dismayed to hear that Jonna was dead and indignant to think that Dwight felt he’d misled them by saying it was she who took Cal the day before.

“I told you. She had on those big wraparound sunglasses and her hood was up, so it never occurred to me that it was anybody else. Same build, same looks. You sure it wasn’t her?” He gestured to the side door clearly visible through his large window. “She came out of that door right behind the boy and he went off with her like I’ve seen them do a hundred times.”

“I don’t suppose you happened to glance over last night about the time someone let themselves into the house?”

“I don’t mind other people’s business,” said Carlton in frosty denial. Then curiosity cut the high ground out from under him. “A burglar? I thought you stayed over there last night.”

“I did. Somebody slipped in while I was asleep.”

“And you call yourself a police officer?”

“Hell of a note, isn’t it?” Dwight said wearily.

Carlton shook his white head and, to Dwight’s surprise, pulled a Palm Pilot out of the pocket of his impec-cably tailored trousers. “Perhaps it’s time I did start taking notice.” With stylus held firmly in his wrinkled hand, he looked at Dwight expectantly. “Give me your cell number. If I see your boy or that woman or anybody else going in, I’ll call you.”

After thanking the man, Dwight walked back to the front of Jonna’s house, unlocked the door, and walked through to see if last night’s intruder had returned. The light was blinking on the answering machine by the kitchen door, and he pushed the play button to listen to the new messages.

First came Mrs. Shay’s voice: “Jonna, sweetie, where are you? Why haven’t you called? You’re not still mad at me, are you? I need a few things from the grocery store and it’s too icy for me to go out. Besides, I think I’m catching a cold. Call me right back. You hear?”

That message was followed by an unfamiliar woman’s voice. She sounded slightly annoyed: “Hey, Jonna, it’s Lou. Did you forget that Cal and Jason had a playdate this morning? Call me.”

In the utility room, Bandit was whining to be let out.

Dwight knelt and petted the little dog, who seemed hungry for attention, then he turned the dog into the yard for a brief run. While he waited for Bandit to return, Dwight began to have second thoughts. Until an ME

gave them the time of death, it was theoretically possible that the woman in the blue parka had indeed been Jonna; that she had taken Cal somewhere yesterday afternoon, changed into her red jacket, then driven to meet her killer.

But where would she have taken him?

There was only one place that seemed logical. He called Paul Radcliff. “I’m going around to Jonna’s mother again. See if she’s got Cal. You got a problem with me telling her about Jonna?”

“I don’t,” came his friend’s guarded reply, “but the state guys might. They’ve officially bumped me off the case and they want to talk to you.”

“Me? Hell, Paul, I’ve been chasing my own tail since I got to town yesterday. I don’t know what was going on in her life or who— Oh,” he said, finally thinking like a cop instead of a distracted and apprehensive father.

“Yeah. Of course. Ex-husband. Fighting over the kid. No alibi for last night. Right.”

“I gotta go now, but listen.” Paul’s voice dropped another level. “Do what you want about telling Mrs. Shay, but I promised ’em that you’d meet us at the station at one o’clock.”

“I’ll be there,” Dwight said.

A thin mixture of rain and snow began to fall as he drove over to his former mother-in-law’s house. It suddenly seemed so reasonable that Jonna would have brought Cal to her mother’s that Dwight half expected his son to answer the doorbell when he rang.

Instead, it was Mrs. Shay. “Oh, Dwight! I’m so glad to see you! Did you find Jonna? She’s not answering her phone.”

“Cal’s not here?” asked Dwight.

“No, I told you. I haven’t heard from them since Thursday morning and I’m beginning to get quite worried. Have you eaten lunch? I made a pot of soup in case they do come by. On these cold days, don’t you think a nice hot bowl of soup is the perfect meal? Warms you right up, doesn’t it? My stomach hasn’t been right all week, and soup is the only thing that would agree with me today. Come on back to the kitchen. I’m embarrassed to admit that I sometimes don’t go to the trouble of carrying everything into the dining room when it’s just me.”

Dwight knew that for Mrs. Shay, “embarrassed” was not a mere figure of speech. She was a woman who clung to the standards by which she had been raised. Only the live-in housekeeper and yardman ate in the kitchen of her childhood, never her parents; and even though her own housekeeper and yardman had dwindled to a weekly cleaning woman, old habits died hard. She brought out a second linen placemat, a fine china bowl and silver soup spoon, then went to a cupboard for more crackers, which she placed on their own bread plate. For Mrs. Shay, setting the box on the table would have been “déclassé,” a term Jonna had murmured more than once when offended by some of his country ways, until he was driven to find a French dictionary. “You saying I’m common?”

he had asked.

While Mrs. Shay bustled around reheating the soup, chattering about her health, the weather, and where on earth Jonna could have gotten herself to, Dwight examined the kitchen for some sign of Cal. A rubber baseball sat amid oranges and apples in the fruit bowl on a side counter and there was a colorful picture on the refrigerator of an ornately decorated tree and wobbly cursive let- ters that spelled out “Merry Christmas to Nana—Love Cal.” But there was no jacket or gloves; and, most tellingly, there was no place set for him at this table.

Mrs. Shay filled his bowl and seated herself in the chair opposite his, clearly prepared to continue making polite conversation. Knowing that he would get no more information out of her the moment he told her Jonna was dead, he said, “When you talked to Jonna Thursday morning, what exactly did she say?”

“Exactly?” Mrs. Shay frowned. “Well, let me think. We talked about the snow. The boy who usually shovels my walk has the flu. He was supposed to send his brother, but he never came and I almost slipped going down my steps that night. The brother finally came this morning and now here it is snowing again. I’ll be so glad when Cal is old enough to do it for me. He’s such a nice child. And so mannerly. Don’t you think Jonna’s doing a good job with him?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Never mind that she had tried to turn Cal against him for remarrying. “Did she say what her plans were for the day?”

“She was going over to the Morrow House to work on the inventory. There hasn’t been one in twenty years and so much has been donated to the house since then. It was my grandparents’ home, you know. I don’t remember my grandfather, but I was well in my teens when my grandmother died so I spent many a night there before we closed the house and the Historical and Genealogical Society took it over. Did you know she’s their new president? She’s really looking forward to tomorrow. You haven’t touched your soup, Dwight. Don’t you like it?”

He looked down at the steaming bowl. He had not felt 11 hungry before, but now the aroma of creamed vegetables and smoked ham made him suddenly ravenous.

Gratified by his evident enjoyment, Mrs. Shay rattled on about how she used to take the girls over when she was helping the SHGS document the original furnishings that had been there during her own girlhood, especially those that had belonged to the pre–Civil War Morrows.

“They loved to run around and hear their little voices echo in those big empty rooms.” She crumbled a half cracker over her soup and dipped her spoon in.

“Grandmother sold quite a few of the later things, but she had a firm sense of history and she wouldn’t part with any of Peter Morrow’s possessions, not even the ivory toothpick he brought with him from Philadelphia back in eighteen-twenty-three,” she said proudly. “I plan to leave my great-grandmother’s rocker to the house and Jonna is going to return the portrait. We may not have as much money as some of the new donors, but our pieces are originals, not period replacements.”

Dwight tried to draw her out about Jonna’s friends and whether there was anyone she would have left Cal with.

“No, dear. If she’s gone away for a couple of days, she’s surely taken Cal with her. Otherwise, he would be here with me. Not that she does go away without him very often. And not that she would go away this weekend with her big day coming up tomorrow. I keep telling her she should get out more, meet new people. I understand that you’ve remarried?”

Dwight nodded.

Mrs. Shay pursed her lips. “I was younger than Jonna when my husband died and left me with two difficult little girls to raise. It was too much to ask of another man, although there were two or three who professed themselves willing.” She gave a coy smile. “Jonna only has the one and Cal’s so easy. But she doesn’t want to hear me talk about it.”

“So she isn’t seeing anyone?”

“I didn’t say that and it’s hardly proper for you to ask, is it?”

“Cal’s my son, too, Mrs. Shay,” he reminded her. “And I need to find him.”

“I shall certainly have Jonna call you as soon as they return.” She pushed back from the table and stood up.

“Now, are you sure I can’t offer you dessert or something to drink?”

Dwight knew that this was his cue to excuse himself and leave and there was nothing he would have liked better. He looked down at his watch.

12:20. Less than forty-five minutes before he was due to turn up at Paul’s office. It was now or never. He took a deep breath. There was never an easy way to say what she had to be told.

“Are you all right?” she asked when he continued to sit there.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid I have bad news.”

As he spoke, her eyes grew wide, then filled with tears.

She sank back down in her chair and shook her head in disbelief and denial.

“No,” she whimpered. “Not Jonna. Oh, please, not Jonna.”

“Is there someone I can call for you?” he asked. “Your other daughter?”

Knowing that Jonna considered her sister, Pamela, a 11 total flake, he wasn’t sure how much comfort she could be to Mrs. Shay or how quickly she could get here from—where was it? Tennessee?—but she, too, would have to be told and surely she would come.

“Not Pam,” said Mrs. Shay, trying to choke back the sobs that nearly strangled her. “My cousin Eleanor. She’s right around the corner.”

She managed to give him the number. The cousin was shocked and said she would come immediately. True to her word, she was there within minutes, a sturdy woman with salt-and-pepper hair who folded Mrs. Shay in her arms and rocked her back and forth. Mrs. Shay lifted her ravaged face to Dwight.

“Cal,” she said. “Oh dear God, where is he?”

“I’ll let you know as soon as we find him,” Dwight promised.

He wrote down his numbers again. Mrs. Shay’s cousin matched his promise to call if there was any news and then she raised him one. “My husband owns the local radio station. We’ll have everyone in the valley keeping an eye out for him.”

C H A P T E R

12

However these informants were guilty of a further important piece of ignorance.

—Theophrastus

Saturday morning, 22 January

While Jack Jamison headed back to Cotton Grove to question some of the people known to have had run-ins with J.D. Rouse, Mayleen Richards asked Raeford McLamb to go with her to interview Nita Rouse again. “They might talk to you quicker than to me alone,” she said.

McLamb arched an eyebrow. “Because I’m black?”

“I doubt if that’ll help,” she said with a grin. “I was thinking more because you’re a man and her brother struck me as pretty macho when we talked to him Thursday night.”

“So you’re gonna let me do all the talking?”

“Heck, I’ll even let you drive,” she told him.

A small neat sign on the shoulder of the road modestly announced that this was Diaz y Garcia, Landscape Design 11 and Lawn Service. When she was there before, it had been quite dark and Richards had been so aware of Major Bryant that she had not paid much attention to the Garcia family setup. Now, in the morning light, she was rather impressed by the compound they had created.

Two double-wide mobile homes were separated by a driveway wide enough for larger trucks. Both homes backed up to a pleasant variety of hollies and tall evergreens, interspersed with accents of golden cypresses, that completely screened them from the road. The shrubbery continued all around the lot so that the head-high chain-link security fence was almost indiscernible. Across the courtyard were equipment sheds for some trucks, a couple of low trailers, a midsize tractor, and several riding lawn mowers. More esoteric bits of equipment stood along the back walls. Four or five little dark-haired children were clambering over the machines, pretending to drive. They ducked down out of sight as soon as they saw the unfamiliar car.

An older, single-wide trailer abutted the sheds, probably a bunkhouse for seasonal workers; and judging by the curtains in an upper window, Richards guessed there was an apartment over one of the sheds. Tucked into the remaining corner of the open lot was a henhouse. The run was split in half so that as soon as the chickens finished off the winter oats on one side, the new oats in the other half would be big enough to feed them. Eight or ten Rhode Island Reds pecked away at the greens beneath their feet and their combs were a bright healthy red in the thin win-try sunlight.

Through the closed chain-link gate at the rear of the yard Richards could see their tree nursery. In all, she esti- mated that the compound and nursery occupied slightly less than six acres.

“Nice,” said McLamb as he parked in front of the double-wide on the left. “Boy, I’d love to have me a dozen of their eggs. I bet the yolks aren’t that pitiful pale yellow you get in the grocery store. Your folks still keep chickens?”

Richards shook her head. “Nobody wanted to shovel out a henhouse anymore.”

He laughed. “No pain, no gain.”

She laughed, too. She loved her job and had no desire to ever again mess with gummy green tobacco or to deal with the backaches and heartbreaks a subsistence farm could generate. Nevertheless, the sight of those glossy brown hens made her suddenly homesick for the life of her childhood, chicken droppings and all.

Before they had the car doors fully open, two men emerged from the house. Both were dressed in heavy red plaid wool jackets and both wore black leather cowboy hats. Richards recognized the shorter man from two nights earlier.

“Señor Garcia,” she said, extending her hand. In halting Spanish, she reminded him of her name and that she had been there before with Major Bryant.

He nodded acknowledgment and she introduced Detective McLamb, then moved back a half-step as if in deference.

In turn, Garcia nodded to the taller man beside him.

“Miguel Diaz, mi cuñado.”

With absolutely no idea what cuñado signified, Richards and McLamb smiled politely.

Diaz grinned at them. “I’m his brother-in-law,” he ex-11 plained in lightly accented English. “His wife is my sister.

Have you come to tell us who killed his other cuñado?”

“Wish we could,” said McLamb. “We were hoping to talk to Mrs. Rouse again and we have a few questions for Mr. Garcia here, too. I’d sure appreciate it if you could translate for us.”

“Of course.” He turned and spoke rapidly to Garcia, who hesitated, then gestured to the concrete table and wooden benches that sat under the bare branches of a nearby oak. While Diaz led the way, Garcia went back inside, presumably to fetch his sister. At least that was what Richards thought she understood as she followed the other two men over to the picnic area. In summer, this would be a pleasantly shady place to sit and talk. Today, the sun shone through the bare limbs and kept them from being uncomfortably cold.

As they sat down, McLamb laid a yellow legal pad on the table and wrote the time and place at the top before asking, “How well did you know J. D. Rouse?”

“Only so well as he would let us, which means not well.

You have seen where they lived?”

His question was aimed at Richards and she shook her head.

“They live in a field. No flowers. No bushes. One ugly tree. When he married the sister of mi cuñado, we wanted to landscape the yard for their wedding gift. He would not allow it.”

“Why?” asked McLamb.

Diaz shrugged. “For that you must ask another.”

The morning was warming up rapidly and Mayleen Richards slipped back the hood of her coat. Her shoulder- length cinnamon-colored hair blazed in the sunlight and Miguel Diaz’s dark brown eyes widened in appreciation.

“Muy hermosa,” he murmured.

Her hair? Beautiful? Richards flushed a bright red, which made him smile beneath the brim of his hat.

Fortunately McLamb missed the byplay because his eyes were on the door of the double-wide as Gerardo Garcia escorted his sister out to them.

Juanita Rouse was dressed in black from the scarf on her head to the boots on her feet. Her eyes were sad and there was a deep purple bruise on her left cheek; and yes, she told them, clearly ashamed of the bruise, J.D. had gotten violent with her once or twice, but only once or twice. All right, yes, maybe three or four times. He was not a bad man, though. Nor a bad husband. Not really.

Only when he drank too much beer or when things had gone badly at work. She turned to Diaz and spoke rapidly in Spanish with hand gestures to illustrate vocabulary words Richards had barely read, much less heard pro-nounced.

“She says that these things happen between a man and wife before the man settles down into marriage, when he still fights himself because he is not young and free.”

Diaz’s tone was completely neutral. “She wants you to know that he was a good father to their daughters.”

At that, Garcia growled and spat on the ground in dis-gust, which would indicate that he knew more English than they realized.

Mrs. Rouse’s dark eyes flashed. “Never once does he hit them, Gerardo. Not even when he have much beer. He brings candy, he plays with them, he makes them laugh.”

Garcia’s words were scornful and Diaz translated them, 12 too. “A good father does not hit the mother of his children.”

“What about his own fight with Rouse?” asked McLamb.

Back came the reply through Diaz: “A man does what he must for the honor of his family.”

“Would that include killing the man he feels has dis-honored the family?”

“It could. But not like that. He says it was a coward who shot him, not a man of honor.”

“All the same, we have to know where he was Thursday evening.”

“He was with me,” Diaz answered directly. “We have the contract for Orchard Range. You know where that is?”

McLamb nodded.

“We are planting around the entrance sign and the berms. You can speak to our men. They will tell you the same.”

“I’m sure they will,” said McLamb. “Anybody else who could vouch for him? Besides those in your employment?”

“Will the Anglo who employs us do for this? He came by around five to talk to us about using more holly instead of cypress.”

McLamb asked for the developer’s name and telephone number and jotted it down on the yellow legal pad, then turned back to Nita Rouse. “Do you yourself know of anyone who would want your husband dead?”

“No,” she said, but as McLamb continued to look at her steadily, her eyes fell. As if it were too painful to try to say it in English, she spoke through Diaz.

“There is a woman,” he told them. “Her name is Darla. This is why they fight so much now. She is married, too. Her husband has been in the war. Now he is home again. Maybe if he knew?”

His name?

Nita Rouse denied knowing it.

McLamb had been watching Diaz as he translated, but Mayleen Richards had watched the woman and had seen the small twitch of satisfaction at the edge of her lips. As they drove out of the compound back onto the highway, she said, “If that soldier does know about Rouse and his wife, guess who got word to him?”

“You think?”

“Five’ll get you ten.”

“No bet.” The car’s interior had warmed up while standing in the sun and he reached over to turn the heater down a couple of degrees.

As McLamb drove, Richards called Jamison and told him to ask about a Darla-last-name-unknown.

“Long as we’re out this way, let’s stop by the Harper woman’s house and see if she’s remembered anything else.”

In Cotton Grove, Jack Jamison felt as if he were batting 0 for 3. The first suspect seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would think he’d shot a man simply because of a barroom brawl that happened over a month ago.

“Hell, it was Christmas. The holidays. Everybody was drinking too much. Yeah, me and J.D. mixed it up a little out in the parking lot, but we was both so drunk, falling on our faces did more damage than our fists. I chipped a tooth when I hit the concrete. Cost me four 12 hundred dollars by the time the dentist got through with me.”

He was more interested in talking about that tooth than any grudge he might have been carrying for Rouse, but he did furnish the full name of the woman—Darla Overholt.

So where was he Thursday evening?

“Driving back from High Point with my boss. We got in around seven. Here, I’ll give you his number.”

The second suspect was helping a friend change the carburetor in his truck. He freely admitted he wasn’t sorry to hear Rouse was dead, and no, he didn’t have a real good alibi. “Darla Overholt? Yeah, she lives down near Makely. Comes up this way to do her playing. Too close to Fort Bragg the other way.”

His friend came out from under the hood with a big grin on his face. “You say Rouse was shot? From how far away? Ol’ Ken here couldn’t hit an elephant less’n it was standing close enough to squirt him in the face. Ask anybody.”

Jamison found their third suspect at a fund-raising fish fry outside the fellowship hall of a local church.

Boiling grease bubbled in one of the portable vats as the man dropped in battered catfish fillets one by one, then scooped crisp hushpuppies from an adjacent vat into a large colander. The air was redolent with the smell of fish and hot cornbread.

“I was at a planning session for today,” he told Jamison as he dumped the hushpuppies into a metal tray that one of the kitchen helpers took over to the serving line. An awed look spread over his face. “I never fried fish for a church before and I didn’t really want to do it this time, but my wife talked me into it. She said it would prove a blessing to me. Well, damned if it didn’t, right?”

As they neared Rideout Road, Richards recognized the name on a street sign as being the same as the address for Orchard Range and quickly told McLamb to turn onto it.

The development consisted of large boxy houses nearing completion. From a cursory drive through, it looked as if all that was lacking was the installation of appliances and the usual minimal landscaping. The berms that gave a semblance of privacy from passing traffic and the newly planted entranceway were both getting a thick mulch of pine straw from the Diaz y Garcia Landscaping crew. Indeed, Miguel Diaz himself had arrived and was standing by his truck when the two detectives got back to the entrance. He was talking to an older white man whose own truck bore the logo of the consortium that owned this development.

When introduced, the man confirmed that he had indeed spoken with Garcia on Thursday, although he did not think it was as late as Diaz had led them to believe.

“It was probably only around five because the sun was still up when I left,” he said. “I remember ’cause it was right in my eyes but too low for the visor to do any good.”

Richards felt Diaz’s eyes on her, challenging her. Confused, she avoided his gaze and pointed to the woods that lay on the far end of the development. “What’s on the other side of those trees?”

“Over yonder?” asked the man. “That would be Rideout Road.”

Mrs. Harper had just given her corgi a bath when the two detectives rang her bell. She met them at the door with the wet dog wrapped in a towel and invited them to come in while she finished drying it off.

They sat in the living room and she held the dog on her lap to dry between its toes.

“Are you any nearer to learning who did that awful thing?” she asked, moving on to the little dog’s ears.

“We have a few leads,” Richards told her, “but we were hoping you might have remembered something more that might help us. For instance, did any vehicles pass you going the other way just before he was shot?”

Mrs. Harper shook her head. “Not that I noticed. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I get quite single-minded when I’m out there. I’m only looking for the next bottle or can or scrap of paper.”

“It’s really nice of you to do the whole road all by yourself,” said McLamb.

She shrugged away his praise. “It’s barely a mile and it’s the least I can do to honor my father.”

“Is that him?” asked Richards, glancing at the portrait over the couch.

The older woman nodded and her face softened as she, too, looked at the man in uniform. “The Colonel was such a good person. Kind and considerate of everyone.

He was the one who actually started trying to keep the road clean. I never had his patience. ‘Why bother?’ I’d ask him. ‘You know some slob’s going to trash it again.’ He said it gave him something to do while I was at work.

Said it was giving a little something back to the world.”

“You must miss him a lot,” said Richards.

“It’ll be three years on Monday since he died,” she said simply. “As soon as I took early retirement, I knew this is what he would want me to do.”

“Getting back to Thursday night,” said McLamb, “did you happen to notice the time of the shot?”

Again the woman shook her head. “I wasn’t wearing a watch.”

The dog yawned and curled up on the towel and fell asleep in her lap. “Poor Dixie! Baths just wear her out.”

“But the sun was still up, right?” Richards persisted.

“Just barely. I could see pretty good, but it was almost completely dark when I got home, and I started back as soon as I knew you people were on the way.”

On the return drive to Dobbs, Raeford McLamb said,

“What time is sunset these days anyhow?”

Mayleen Richards logged onto the Internet and in less than a minute was able to say, “Sunset for Thursday in this area was five-twenty-nine. And twilight till five-fifty-six.”

“Wouldn’t take a person but maybe ten or fifteen minutes at the most to walk through the woods from Orchard Range to Rideout Road.”

“True,” Richards agreed. “But it’s not like Rouse was keeping to a split-second timetable. If it was Garcia, how would he know for sure that Rouse would be driving past in that short window of time?”

They were still batting scenarios back and forth when they got back to the office. Jamison came in right behind them, waving a fragrant brown bag with grease stains.

“I brought lunch,” he said. “Catfish.”

They were munching on hushpuppies and sharing their findings when one of the uniforms stuck his head in the door. “They just posted a new Amber Alert from Virginia. Eight-year-old white male. Calvin Shay Bryant.

Isn’t that Major Bryant’s boy?”

C H A P T E R

13

I have to go, whether the north wind sweeps the earth orwinter shortens the snowy day.

—Horace

I got home a little before one and was trying to decide which I least wanted to do: fold laundry or get started on an ED for a divorce I was supposed to hear next week. Equitable distributions are the most time-consuming part of modern divorces. Everything has to be evaluated, from the family silver to the family Tup-perware. Each party makes its own evaluation and then it’s up to the judge to reconcile the two. If the values are close, I can just split the difference, but sometimes they’ll vary by hundreds of dollars. That’s when I go browsing on eBay to get an idea of what’s fair and equitable.