Winter's Child

“Really? What?” asked Mayhew. As he frowned, his glasses slid almost down to the tip of his nose and balanced there precariously.

“Something in the inventory that we’ve overlooked?”

asked Benton.

“She wouldn’t elaborate other than to say it was something only a Morrow would know. Jonna always kept her own counsel, but I wonder if it was something she was saving for when she became president of SHGS.”

“You all knew her well, right?” I asked.

There were nods and affirmative murmurs.

“Whoever killed her had to have had access to this house and the gun.” I was abruptly aware that Jonna’s killer might even be one of them, yet they all looked back at me with bland expressions of interest.

“Well, of course,” said Mayhew, pushing his glasses up.

“The house is open to the public. Anybody could have taken the guns.”

“Would just anybody have access to the keys to the case, though?”

“True,” Mayhew agreed. “But who’s to say Jonna didn’t take them herself as she took the bullets and the jewelry?”

This appeared to be news to the others, and Frederick Mayhew quickly described how Dwight had found a listing of the gun’s bullets in the inventory and how, when the safe where they were stored had been opened, the jewelry that was supposed to be there was missing as well.

“And Peter Morrow’s signet ring was found in her purse.”

The three trustees were shocked. As might be expected, Benton wanted to know about the bullets while the two women questioned the jewelry. Betty Ramos said, “But surely Jonna wouldn’t—? I mean, that parure was a gift from her own mother.”

“I know I’m showing my ignorance,” Suzanne Angelo said, “but what’s a parure?”

Once again, I heard Frederick Mayhew explain about a matched set, only this time Betty Ramos elaborated.

“The hairwork is absolutely fabulous. Elizabeth had dark brown hair when she died at sixteen, but as a toddler it had been quite long and golden yellow. Her mother had saved several strands from babyhood, so that when the light and dark were braided together, the result was really striking. I had almost forgotten we have it. Is someone keeping an eye on eBay?”

Mayhew’s brow wrinkled. “eBay?”

“To make sure they aren’t being sold online. The pieces were photographed, weren’t they?”

“Well . . .”

“We don’t have photographic documentation of all our holdings?” asked Benton. “That’s outrageous!”

“I have a digital camera,” Angelo said briskly. “I’ll be here first thing in the morning if anyone wants to help.

I’m no professional, but at least we could get everything onto the computer and start keying the pictures to the inventory list.”

“The police don’t know that Jonna took those things,”

I said, trying to herd them back to the question of her death. “Her killer could have planted the ring. And where are the rest of the bullets? They aren’t at her house, they weren’t in the car.”

“Did anyone check her desk?” asked Benton.

“The police were quite thorough,” Mayhew assured him.

“Was she worried the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“In fact, who did see her last? You, Mr. Mayhew?”

He frowned, as he removed his glasses and began polishing them with a napkin from the tea table. Without them, he looked younger and less sure of himself. “It was last Monday, a week ago tomorrow, and she did seem a bit distracted. I had to ask her twice for last year’s attendance records.”

“We spoke on the phone on Wednesday,” Benton said crisply. “She wanted to know how to list the perfume bottle I presented to the house today. Its provenance and maker. From the marks, I am quite certain that it’s jasperware. Wedgwood, pre-1820. Unfortunately, there’s no provenance because I bought it in a flea market in Winston-Salem from a seller who rather thought it might be an Avon bottle from the 1970s. I had no desire to disabuse him and even bartered him down from ten dollars to eight.”

It was a story that gave him obvious satisfaction to tell, but I moved on to the two women.

Suzanne Angelo had also spoken to her on Wednesday about today’s installation of officers and they had discussed food and drink for the public reception. “She sounded perfectly fine to me.”

Betty Ramos was looking troubled. “Was I the last, then? I was supposed to help with the inventory on Thursday, but that morning an elderly relative slipped 26 and broke her hip and I had to drive up to Roanoke to see about her. I stopped by here around ten on my way out of town to run off a few more of the letters and to tell her I’d definitely be here the next day. I warmed up the copier while she found the letters I wanted, then we ran them off and I left.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“The weather mostly. It had snowed the night before and I was a little worried about the roads. And we talked about today.” She gave a self-conscious smile. “She and Dix had already hung the drapes in the Rose Bedroom but she wanted me to wait about putting the coverlet on the bed until we’d shown it to our members. Some of them can’t climb steps anymore.”

“You really must go up and see the room,” Mayhew told me, “only I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Closing time was at five.”

“I was hoping to stay and check out Jonna’s papers and her computer,” I said. “I can’t help feeling there must be something that the men have overlooked. Besides, my husband’s meeting me here after he interviews Dix Lunsford.”

Mayhew’s eyes narrowed behind his polished glasses.

“Major Bryant’s interviewing Lunsford? Whatever for?”

“Didn’t you tell him that Lunsford was devoted to Jonna?”

“Was, Judge. They had quite an argument on Monday and he huffed around the rest of the day.”

“Argument? What about?”

“I’m sure I can’t say. They were on the third floor hanging Betty’s drapes. I could hear their voices all the way down here, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. When Jonna came down and I asked her what all that was about, she said that Dix was being stubborn about following her orders and that maybe it was time we looked for someone else to clean here.”

He paused as if struck by what he was saying. “Heavens! You don’t suppose that Dix—? I mean, he does know his way around this house. He knows where the keys are and I wouldn’t be surprised if he knows how to disarm the alarm and where the safe combination is written.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Betty Ramos. “Dix has known Jonna since she was a baby. He may take advantage of his status as an old family retainer, but he would never hurt a Shay.”

Nathan Benton looked skeptical and Suzanne D. Angelo looked at her watch. “I’m sorry to rush you, Frederick, but the Schmerners expect us for cocktails at six.”

Benton glanced at his own watch and stood. “I have a dinner engagement as well.”

“Well, I don’t,” said Betty Ramos, “so why don’t I stay a while, put away the rest of the food and punch, copy off some more letters, and keep Judge Knott company while she looks at the computer? I have my key and I’ll lock up when we leave.”

Mayhew wasn’t thrilled by her suggestion, but who was he to argue with a wealthy trustee who had just given the house a gift worth several hundreds? “You do remember how to set the alarm, don’t you?”

They went off together for a refresher course on the proper setting of the system while Benton and Angelo gathered up their coats to follow and said that they hoped we would have word of Cal by morning.

When Betty Ramos returned to the parlor alone, she said, “Before you get started, want to come upstairs? I’m dying to see how the coverlet looks on the bed.”

I hadn’t yet seen the Rose Bedroom myself, so I quickly agreed.

We climbed the curved stairs to the second floor, passed the mannequin that represented Elizabeth Morrow’s brother, then took the surprisingly narrow flight of stairs to the third floor. There were discreet light switches and concealed lights along the way. “The house was actually wired around 1920,” she explained, “but when my husband and I donated the new heating and cooling system, we upgraded the wiring as well. The electrician told us that we were probably just one power surge away from a major fire.”

“Sounds like a very generous gesture.”

She shrugged. “Well, it’s not as showy as swords and guns, perhaps . . .”

“Not that it’s a contest or anything,” I said wickedly.

“Oh dear, is that what it sounded like?” She saw my smile and gave a sheepish smile of her own. “I’m afraid Nathan Benton brings out the worst in me. He’s always finding these perfect little treasures at yard sales and flea markets and makes a big show of how clever he’s been to pay so little. As if ”—her voice slipped into a clipped British accent that perfectly mimicked Benton’s—“ ‘I say, chappies, anyone can slosh money around, but spotting authentic pieces dead on takes a discriminating eye, what?’ I mean, he’s just so bloody proud of everything he finds. And poor Frederick. It humiliates him to death that he can’t match Nathan’s generosity. He’s found a couple of nice things over in Tennessee himself, but I’m afraid his pockets aren’t as deep as he’d like.

“Now, Catherine Schmerner—did you meet her?

Short, white-haired woman? I think she was wearing a purple coat?”

I shook my head.

“Well, she and Suzanne have given the house quite a few items, too. In fact Catherine gave us an ebony-and-silver hand mirror just last month that could easily have belonged to Peter Morrow’s wife, but she would never brag about it. I was so pleased when Suzanne held it up this afternoon and Catherine got to take a bow, too.

Jonna found a picture of one just like it on an English antiques site. They were asking a hundred pounds for theirs.”

Up on the third floor, the Rose Bedroom was the one nearest the landing and it was quite charming. So named for the rose silk that lined the walls, its only furniture was a bed, a chest of drawers, a couple of chairs, and a bed table that held a hobnail milkglass lamp. I was surprised to realize that the reason the bedroom doors were re-cessed so deeply in from the hallway was because they all contained proper closets. The one in this room was at least five feet deep and of course there was no light inside.

Even with the door open, it must have been hard for Elizabeth Morrow to find her favorite dress, but it certainly beat the old freestanding wardrobes so prevalent when the house was built.

“Peter Morrow was a very practical man,” Mrs. Ramos agreed. “There’s an amazing amount of storage space in this house. Did you notice that he added closets under the main staircase? It was originally freestanding, but he 26 decided it could be more useful to close it in and use it for storage.”

I sniffed when I turned back from the empty closet to the room itself. Dwight said they had smelled the ghost’s faint gardenia perfume earlier today, but all I smelled was the sizing on the new fabric. The drapes picked up the pink of the walls for a background that was overlaid with greenery and deeper shades of pink roses. The same ma-terial was used for the coverlet, and I helped Mrs. Ramos fit it on the bed.

“It’s so pretty,” I said. “Really warms up the room.”

She seemed pleased by my praise. “I do love giving things to this house and watching it come back to life. It’s almost like a dollhouse for adults, isn’t it?”

By the time we returned to the main hall, we were on a first-name basis. As we circled the staircase to get back to the office, she pointed out how Peter Morrow had put the wasted space beneath the stairs to practical use. I had walked past this area several times without noticing because the wainscoting and decorative molding matched the rest of the house so perfectly that even when you knew the doors were there, it was hard to see them. Betty pressed on one of the rosettes and a door swung open to reveal a space crammed with cardboard boxes marked

“C’mas decorations.” Another held the folding chairs and yet another the usual odds and ends. Although the staircase was quite wide, the closets seemed comparatively shallow.

“That’s because there’s a matching set on the other side,” said Betty. “My husband thought we should’ve run the new ductwork through the cupboards under the stairs here, but Jonna pitched a fit. Said it would be criminal to put vents in this molding. It cost a little more to run it between the floor joists and up the outside walls, but she was probably right.”

We walked around and she opened a couple of the closets to show me spaces lined with shelves that held boxes of stemware and the punch bowl set.

“I hope Morrow’s wife appreciated him,” I said.

Betty closed the doors. “I’m afraid there were times when she didn’t. One of his letters to his Philadelphia cousins said she was most ‘grievously unhappy’ at the changes he had made to her grand hall, but that he hoped she would come to agree with his decision.”

While Betty tidied away the food and dishes from the reception, I fired up Jonna’s computer and went looking.

I’m no expert, but it’s like driving a car. I don’t care about what’s under the hood, I just want to turn the key and drive to Dobbs. I know how to do what I need to do—to look up case law and precedents, I can navigate around the Internet for the things that interest me, and for everything else, there’s Google. I was happy to see that Jonna had used the same word-processing program as mine, and soon I was flashing through her files and directories. Nothing jumped out at me, but then I didn’t expect it to since Agents Lewes and Clark had already checked it.

Everything seemed open to view and none of the files were password protected, which wasn’t surprising since there didn’t seem to be much of the personal or confidential. One folder was marked “Miscellaneous/House-keeping/Personal,” but the only halfway personal thing I saw was a file containing Cal’s school reports and comments from his teachers that she had scanned in, along 26 with a record of his immunizations and the dates of his physicals. There were recipes for making enough party food to serve fifty people. Recipes for summer punches and winter mulled cider. Addresses of various rental places in town from tents to folding chairs. I looked at the spreadsheets for the budget, skimmed through the monthly minutes of the board and the director’s reports that Mayhew had delivered, etc. etc.

She had methodically entered about half of the inventory that was detailed in a thick sheaf of paper, including

“Bullets—.36 caliber. Original box of 12. Seven missing.

Judge M’s safe.” She seemed to have assigned it a number that corresponded to items kept in the judge’s office so that the list could be sorted alphabetically, by code numbers or by actual rooms.

Nevertheless, if there was anything in this computer to explain why Jonna had been killed, I wasn’t seeing it.

In the meantime, Betty Ramos kept passing back and forth as she tidied the parlor and kitchen. It was after six before she switched off most of the lights and came into the office. “Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

She went over to the files that held the Morrow family papers, pulled open a file drawer, and immediately gave a small tch of annoyance.

“Something wrong?”

“I just realized that I left my notes on my desk at home and now I can’t remember where I left off. I think I’ll just run home and get them. I’m only a few blocks away. You don’t mind if I leave you alone for a few minutes, do you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Anyhow, Dwight’ll probably be here anytime now. I’m surprised he hasn’t called yet.”

“I won’t bother to lock the door, then,” she said, “so he can come right on in.”

“Fine.” The desk was against the side of the front wall, and from where I sat, I could watch as she passed down the dimly lit hall and disappeared beyond the staircase. I heard the front door close and then turned back to the desk. Again, there was nothing of a personal nature in any of the drawers that I could see and I even lifted them out one by one and checked for false bottoms or something taped to the undersides.

Nothing.

C H A P T E R

28

The blackest month in all the yearIs the month of Janiveer.

—Anonymous

Sunday afternoon, 23 January

As Dwight was snapping the leash onto Bandit’s collar, his phone rang. Agent Lewes.

“Was she there? Do her cousins know where she is?” he asked eagerly.

“Sorry, Bryant. They think she left here early Monday morning. And I hate to load any more on your plate, but they’re saying she really does need to be institutionalized this time, that she’s getting more and more detached from reality. They blame her sister and her mother for not stepping in and doing what needs to be done before now.

They don’t think she’d intentionally hurt your son, but if she’s the one who did your ex-wife—”

Dwight did not let Lewes finish that thought. “Did they have any suggestions about where she’d go? What she’d do?”

“They said the Shays own a place on a nearby lake?”

“Yeah. Cal and I go fishing out there with Radcliff and his kids, but the house burned down at least fifty years ago. Nothing there but trees and bushes now.”

“What about a boathouse? Anson says that’s where they found Pam a couple of summers ago.”

“Boathouse? It’s nothing but a caved-in roof and some old siding.”

“All the same, they say that’s where she was.”

“That’s crazy,” said Dwight and realized that, well, yes, this was exactly how everyone characterized Pam’s mental state. So what else was new? “Thanks, Lewes. It’s only about six or eight miles out of town. I’ll swing over there right now while it’s still light.”

He started to leave Bandit at the house, then decided that the little dog might prove useful if Pam had taken Cal there. He had half convinced himself that if Bandit got anywhere within sniffing distance of Cal, he would home in on him like one of those bloodhounds that had entrenched themselves in Pam’s delusional mind.

The lake was less than fifteen minutes away, but it took another ten minutes to hike in from the rutted lane where he had parked the truck. Patches of snow still dotted the landscape on the north side of the bushes. Today’s sun had helped melt the worst, but the sun was rapidly setting and the wind bit at his face and stung his eyes. Bandit was on a retractable leash and Dwight kept it fairly short so as not to get tangled in the scrub. There had been no sign of tire tracks in the lane, and so far they hadn’t crossed any trail marks either. Eventually, they came to the rotting pile of lumber that had once been a boathouse for the rustic lakeside lodge. Part of the roof had come down in one section and had landed on a couple of uprights, so that it now resembled a rough lean-to. He supposed that 27 in the summer, Pam could have sheltered under it from the sun and rain. Here in dead winter, though? With the sides open to chilling winds and icy sleet? He saw some faded fast-food cartons and an empty plastic water bottle but nothing recent.

Even though he was now almost positive Pam and Cal could not be here, he called several times, then let Bandit off the lead. “Where’s Cal?” he said. “Find Cal!”

The dog raced around the area from the shoreline to the collapsed boathouse and back again without notice-able interest in any one spot until he suddenly lunged toward a bush that overhung the water, barking excitedly.

Dwight hurried over just in time to watch a pair of startled wood ducks take flight across the lake in the darkening twilight. The bleak landscape mirrored the bleakness he felt as yet another possibility came to nothing.

“That’s it,” he told the dog. “Let’s go.”

On his way back to town, Dwight phoned the Colleton County Sheriff ’s Department and got Detective Richards, who gave him a negative update. The discouraged note he heard in her voice sounded like an echo of his own feelings. They had both been chasing down dead-end roads all weekend and she had even taken a bullet for her troubles. Nevertheless, she was probably closer to winding up the Rouse shooting than he was to finding Cal. And at least she’d found a solid motive for that murder, while Jonna’s was still a mystery.

“Just because no one’s come forward to say they saw Overholt doesn’t mean he wasn’t the shooter,” he told Richards. “The Army that taught him how to use a hand- gun with that much accuracy also trained him how to am-bush an enemy, so don’t worry about the gun. If it’s there, Wilson will find it. There’s bound to be a buddy or someone who’ll know what guns he had. Give the investigation time to play itself out.”

“Yessir. But what about your son? Any news? Agent Wilson was asking.”

“Nothing concrete, but we still have a few people to interview. I’ll call if anything breaks. And for right now, go home, Richards. You’ve got nothing to prove to me or Sheriff Poole, okay?”

He called Deborah to tell her that he might be a little longer getting there than he’d intended.

“Have you talked to Dix Lunsford yet?” she asked.

“Just turning down their street,” he said. “Why?”

“Mayhew said he heard Jonna quarreling with him on Monday. He doesn’t know what it was about, but she was angry enough to tell Mayhew they ought to think about firing him.”

“I’ll ask him,” Dwight said. “See you in a half hour or so.”

With that, he parked his truck in front of the Lunsford house. Bandit begged to come in with him, but Dwight figured he would be back out before the cab of the truck became too cold for the little dog.

C H A P T E R

29

When a wolf approaches or enters cultivated ground in theseason of winter, it indicates that a storm will come immediately.

—Theophrastus

Dwight called to say he was running late. I told him about the fight Mayhew said Jonna and Lunsford had on Monday and returned to my fruitless search.

I had forgotten to ask if Mrs. Shay’s house could be seen from the third floor of this one, and yes, I could have run upstairs to see for myself, but the house was dark and I didn’t know where the light switches were. I told myself that it certainly wasn’t because I was nervous here alone.

Besides, all old houses creaked and groaned.

Nevertheless, I found myself tensing at every tiny sound.

To distract myself while waiting for Betty Ramos to return, I contemplated the six four-drawer filing cabinets that lined one wall of this office that Jonna and Mayhew had shared. Twenty-four drawers packed tightly with hanging files. If one of them held the reason Jonna had been killed or a clue as to where Pam had taken Cal, find- ing that specific piece of paper would be sheer luck. As I thumbed aimlessly through the inventory, it struck me how very peaceful Shaysville was on a Sunday evening.

Two blocks off of Main Street and I heard no cars. Of course, that might be because the house was so well built.

I hadn’t heard Betty’s car leave the parking lot either.

Not that I sat in complete and utter silence. Following an afternoon with sixty extra people walking around here, the old house snapped and clicked as the floorboards readjusted themselves. All the same, it was so quiet that I jumped when the grandfather clock out in the hall struck the quarter hour.

Deciding that I might as well print out Cal’s records as long as they were on the hard drive, I pulled up the document again, set the printer for fast draft, pressed print, and sat back to wait for the pages.

The printer coughed into life and quickly began to turn out sheets. It was set so that the last sheet printed first.

To my surprise, instead of printing the last page of Cal’s records, it printed a picture and the page was numbered twenty-six.

Huh?

I quickly scrolled down the computer’s screen. Pages five to twenty-two were blank. The second picture was emerging from the printer when I hit page twenty-three.

Why, Jonna, I thought. You sneaky little devil.

I instantly flashed on the testimony of a woman in a divorce action that had come before me. She and her husband shared a home computer and she had discovered the whole e-mail correspondence between him and his mistress. He had tucked it away at the bottom of their tax records, figuring she would never bother to look there.

Unfortunately for him, printing out a copy of one’s joint tax return is one of the first things a wife is advised to do when her marriage is coming apart. Divorce attorneys know that cheating husbands may lie to their wives, but that they seldom tell significant lies to the IRS.

The pictures puzzled me. From what was said earlier, I didn’t think any of the Morrow House treasures had been photographed, yet here were the digital prints for four of them. I looked closer and realized that these had been saved from the Internet. One bore the name of an unfamiliar town in Tennessee and read “ca. 1853. Missing since 2003.” Another was labeled “Faison House, Roanoke, Virginia. Disappeared May 1999.”

The printer finished with Cal’s records and went silent.

I closed the file on Jonna’s computer, lifted the sheets from the printer tray, and after discarding the superfluous blank pages, leaned back in her chair to contemplate the significance of what I was seeing. Unless I was very mistaken, this was why Jonna had been so willing to work overtime on the inventory when the house was usually closed and she could search the Internet unobserved.

This must also be why she was killed.

Was it blackmail? Did she say, “Give me five thousand and I’ll let you steal back the things you gave, so that you can return them to their rightful owners?”

Dwight was so sure of her honesty, but if this wasn’t evidence of blackmail, why hadn’t she taken these pictures straight to the board?

Or was I misreading the situation? Had she kept quiet out of compassion? Because she recognized someone whose needy pride was so similar to her own? Another case of—

My eyes were focused on the pictures, yet I was abruptly aware of a faint sound in the hall and my pe-ripheral vision registered a movement that had been so fleeting, I could almost think I’d imagined it.

“Betty?” I called. “Dwight?”

Cold air swirled through the room and sent chill bumps down my spine. I slid the pictures under Cal’s records and laid them down beside the computer, then walked over to the doorway. “Hello? Somebody there?

“Hello?” I called again.

No answer.

An outside light was on, but Betty had turned off the main lights before she left and I didn’t know where that switch was either. I moved cautiously out into the shadowy hall and found the source of my chill bumps. She hadn’t closed the front door properly, and it was the icy air blowing in around the crack that had creeped me out.

I shut it firmly and started back to the office, jeering at myself for letting the house unnerve me.

That’s when I noticed that the end closet door was also slightly ajar. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe it wasn’t Betty who had left the door unlatched. Had someone been hiding in the closet, thinking that everyone had left and that it was now safe to sneak out and escape? The thief that had stolen the guns and the jewelry from the safe? Jonna’s killer?

Holding my breath, I opened the door wider and peered in. All was dark, and yet, despite the darkness, there was something odd here. For a moment, I couldn’t think what it was until it hit me that the closet was now deeper than it had seemed when Betty first showed it to me. I needed better light, though. Where were the damn switches? I re-27 membered moving a flashlight in one of the drawers of Jonna’s desk and I quickly retrieved it, then played the light over the interior of the closet, past the stacked chairs, and into an empty space behind them that had definitely not been there before. There was just enough room between the stacks for me to slide through. The whole back panel had been pushed aside, and when I stuck the flashlight inside, I was dumbfounded to see that steep, narrow steps had been sandwiched between the back-to-back closets, steps that were only wide enough for one person.

One short person. If I went up, I’d have to stoop.

Not that I had any intention of going up. Not without someone to watch my back. I’m no gothic heroine to go flitting around a castle’s ominous dark turrets in a wispy nightgown.

Besides, I’d left all my wispy nightgowns at home.

As I turned to go find my phone and call Dwight, I heard the one thing that could make me forget common sense—somewhere a child began to cry.

Cal?

I flashed the light up the steps that seemed to dead-end at a blank wall.

“Cal? Is that you?”

Crouching, I hurried up the steps, which were nothing more than sloped boards with horizontal strips of wood to offer a foothold. When I got to the top, there was a turn and a proper set of narrow steps. The ceiling here was tall enough to walk upright and I realized that they paralleled the staircase I’d walked up earlier with Betty.

Indeed, these steps seemed to be part of the original treads with only a thin wall between them. Part of my mind was having an Aha! moment of realization as to 280

WINTER’S CHILD

why those other stairs had struck me as less spacious than expected. The rest was focused on the heartbroken sobs of the child up above me.

At the top of this flight, a shallow landing made a sharp turn to the left and ended about four feet away. There, the flashlight revealed a simple latch, and when I lifted it and pushed, the panel slid smoothly to one side with no squeaks or scrapes and I was in a space that measured roughly five by fifteen feet. A battery-powered lantern cast a dim glow over the secret room. Painted on the walls in lurid colors was a vision of the peaceable king-dom, where black lions lay down with snow-white lambs in green pastures and a black Jesus shepherded them all.

I saw empty soft drink cans and some cups from the kitchen downstairs. I smelled urine and an overly ripe banana, but what tore at my heart was the soft, hopeless crying that came from the small form curled up on a rough pallet in the corner with a teddy bear beside him.

“Oh, Cal!”

I rushed over, set my flashlight on the floor, and knelt down to gather him up in my arms. He seemed groggy and only half-alert, but he began to wail louder as he recognized me and put his arms around my neck. “Miss Deborah! Is Daddy with you? I want my daddy! Please?”

“He’s coming, sweetheart,” I promised, stroking his small head and making automatic soothing noises.

I no sooner registered the smell of gardenias than he stiffened and tried to jerk back. I heard him cry, “No!”

then someone dropped a piano on my head.

C H A P T E R

30

A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.

—Aristotle

Sunday evening, 23 January

Dwight knocked on the door and the black man who opened it was just under six feet, with short curly hair that was more salt than pepper. If he and his wife had been working for Mrs. Shay at the time of Eustace Shay’s death, then Lunsford had to be at least sixty, yet his erect frame showed no signs of coming frailty. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt that was open at the neck, no tie, and black dress pants; and he had answered the door in his stocking feet. Ordinary Sunday night comfort.

“Mr. Lunsford? Dix Lunsford?”

“Yes?”

The wary caution in the man’s face was familiar to Dwight. He knew he had cop stamped all over him.

There was nothing he could do about his looks. All the same, at times like this, he could wish that strangers did not see flashing blue lights the moment they met him.

“I’m Dwight Bryant.”

“Yes?”

“Jonna’s ex-husband.”

Nothing in his expression changed. “Yes?”

“May I come in and ask you a few questions about Jonna and Pam?”

That did get a reaction. “Pam? What you asking about Pam for?”

A querulous voice from inside said, “If you’d let the poor man in, Dix, maybe he’d tell you.”

Lunsford stepped back and gestured for Dwight to enter.

The house was warm and cozy after the biting wind outside. Two recliners faced a flat-screen television set.

Golfers walked across perfect greens under golden sunshine. A sturdily built woman, Mrs. Lunsford had her coarse gray hair pulled back in a neat bun. She wore gold-rimmed glasses and a wine red pantsuit; and as Dwight entered the room, she brought her recliner to its upright position and muted the sound on the television.

“You find your boy yet?”

“No, ma’am. That’s why I’m here. I was hoping y’all could help me. Mrs. Prentice—you know her?”

Mrs. Lunsford nodded.

“She says you two have known Jonna and Pam since they were babies.”

Again the affirmative nod.

“We think Pam’s the one that took Cal Friday afternoon.”

She shot an inquiring look at her husband, who shook his head. “Every time I’ve seen her, she was by herself.”

“But you’ve seen her?” asked Dwight. “Where?

When?”

“At the Morrow House. She showed up Monday while I was working.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” said his wife.

“ ’Cause you always take Jonna’s part and Jonna didn’t want her there, but where was she gonna go? Her husband didn’t want her, Miss Laura didn’t want her, Jonna didn’t want her. It was coming on for cold weather and that big house all empty upstairs? What did it hurt?”

“Is that what you and Jonna fought about on Monday?” Dwight asked.

A mulish look came into the older man’s face, one that must have been familiar to his wife, for she said sharply,

“Dixon Lunsford, Jonna’s laying dead in her coffin, her little boy’s missing, and his daddy’s a policeman. You don’t tell him where Pam is, he’s gonna think you got something to do with it.”

“All I did was bring her some of our old blankets so she could make a pallet and sleep up in one of them empty rooms for a couple of nights. Poor little thing’s not herself right now.”

“Where is she now?”

“Still at the house, I reckon. Leastways that’s where she was Thursday morning.”

“You were at the house that day?”

“Didn’t think it’d hurt to stop by on my way to the schoolhouse, maybe take her a sandwich.”

Mrs. Lunsford rolled her eyes in exasperation and explained that one of her husband’s odd jobs was to buff and polish the floor tiles of the main lobby of the high school once a week.

“The old school across from the Morrow House?”

They both nodded. “Only now it’s a retirement home.”

“Wait a minute,” Dwight said. “Let me get this straight. You were in the Morrow House with Pam Thursday morning?”

“Jonna, too.”

“What time was that?”

“Well, I usually do the floors about ten-thirty, so it was before that. I didn’t stay but long enough to give Pam the food because she and Jonna were getting into it pretty heavy. Jonna wanted to take her to the hospital and Pam didn’t want to go, so she ran off upstairs.”

“You didn’t follow her?”

“Wasn’t any use to. Ever since they were two smarty-pants little girls, they knew how to hide so nobody could find them. You’d swear they were on the third floor, and next time you turned around, they were all the way downstairs. They used to say Elizabeth Morrow’s ghost taught them how to disappear. Anyhow, Jonna told me to go on. That she’d take care of Pam and—”

Dwight’s phone began to ring. “Excuse me a minute.”

It was Paul Radcliff. “Hey, bo, where are you?”

“I’m here talking to Mr. and Mrs. Lunsford, why?”

“Well, get your ass over to the old high school. One of my men just found Pam Shay’s car parked around back with the residents’ cars. I called Lewes. He and Clark are going to meet us there.”

The white Honda Accord with Tennessee plates was surrounded by several prowl cars and officers. Residents of the converted school peered down from their win-28 dows, curious and alarmed by the flashing blue lights.

Radcliff already had officers going door-to-door inside, questioning them as to what they had seen and to ask if any were harboring Pamela Shay Morgan and her nephew.

The state agents had sent for their evidence truck to come and process the car, and while they waited Dwight told them of his fruitless trip out to the lake and of his interview with the Lunsfords. They were interested to hear that Pam and Jonna knew of places to hide in the Morrow House, and when he drove around to it, Paul Radcliff and Nick Lewes followed.

“We never checked the attic,” Dwight said. “Are there stairs?”

Radcliff shrugged. “Bound to be, wouldn’t you think?”

“Usually are,” Lewes agreed.

As they came up the front walk, they saw someone peering out at them with anxiety evident in every syllable of her body language.

“Oh, Chief Radcliff, Major Bryant!” said Betty Ramos.

“Is Judge Knott with you?”

“No,” said Dwight. “Isn’t she here?”

Mrs. Ramos shook her head. “I was wondering if she had to leave for some reason.”

“Her car’s still here. Why?”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know. She was going through the files on Jonna’s computer when I left. I was only away a few minutes, and when I came back she was gone. Her purse is still there on the desk and so is her phone, but—”

She shook her blond head in bewilderment. “I’ve looked all over the house and there’s no sign of her, so I thought maybe she had to leave in a hurry, but then why would she leave her things?”

“She wouldn’t,” Dwight said decisively. The sight of Deborah’s red car coat on the back of the office chair chilled him with its implications.

“Are there steps to the attic?” Lewes asked. “We didn’t see any this afternoon.”

“That’s because they’re concealed up on the third floor,” said Mrs. Ramos. “I’ll show you.”

As she led the way upstairs, she described how she and Judge Knott had come up earlier to put the new coverlet on the bed in the Rose Room. “And when we went back downstairs, I cleared away the rest of the food and tidied up the kitchen while she got started with the computer.”

At the top of the second flight of stairs, she paused to catch her breath and explained how she had gone home to fetch some notes she had forgotten. “I wasn’t gone more than fifteen minutes.”

Dwight glanced at his watch. “And I talked to her myself about twenty-five minutes ago.”

Mrs. Ramos continued down the hall. Halfway to the end, she paused in front of a blank wall. Like the rest of the walls of this house, it was embellished with elegant carved garlands and swags and other details of the Federalist period. She pushed one of the rosettes and a flush door swung open to reveal a staircase.

“Does Dix Lunsford know about this door?” Dwight asked.

“I should think so,” she said, “but I really don’t know.

We haven’t needed to store things up there yet with so many empty rooms available down here.”

Cold dead air met them as they climbed, and soon they 28 were up in a cavernous space that appeared to be completely empty. There were no electric lights up here but their pocket flashes showed nothing of interest. Nothing to hide behind, no dormer alcoves to crouch in, only a low hip roof that almost touched their heads when they stood.

They spread out over the house then, from the basement back to the third floor and down again, opening every door into every room, closet, or cupboard.

When Lewes tried to suggest that Deborah might have left for a perfectly logical reason, Dwight cut him off in midsentence. “Without her coat? Without her phone and purse? If she’s not here, then someone took her. There’s no sign of a struggle, no—oh shit! Where’s my god-damned head?”

“What?” said Radcliff.

“Bandit!”

“Huh?”

“Cal’s dog. Maybe he can find her.”

He hurried out to the truck and returned moments later with the little terrier trotting along in front of him.

Once inside, Dwight turned toward the office to let Bandit sniff Deborah’s coat, but the dog immediately strained for the stairs, whining with excitement. Dwight let the leash out to its full sixteen feet and ran to keep up with him, the others following.

With absolutely no hesitation, Bandit rounded the landing and headed up to the third floor. He scratched at the door of the Rose Room and Dwight felt a moment of despair. He himself had already searched this room thoroughly. Nevertheless, he opened the door before Bandit could take all the paint off the bottom, and the dog bounded through and over to the closet where he repeated his anxious scratching, the stub of his small tail wagging like a flag on the Fourth of July.

Once that door was opened, he threw himself against the far closet wall, barking and whining and looking back as if to beg Dwight to open yet another door.

With the help of Lewes’s penlight, Dwight soon found the inconspicuous latch that looked almost like just another clothes hook. When he pulled on it, a low door opened outward.

There was only darkness beyond, but Bandit charged in, yipping happily. Dwight stooped to follow.

As he flashed the light around the small room with its vivid wall paintings, he first saw Deborah sprawled on the floor almost at his feet. Beyond, a woman was huddled in the corner. Her short dark hair swirled wildly around her face as she squinted from the sudden light and tried to push the dog away.

“Bloodhounds!” she shrieked. “No! You can’t take him!”

In her arms was the limp body of his son.

C H A P T E R

31

Love, unconquerable . . .

Keeper of warm lights and all-night vigil . . .

—Sophocles

When I came to, I could not at first remember where I was nor how I had come to be in this shadowy space full of loud male voices while a woman’s shrieks faded away in the distance.

“Don’t get up,” someone said as I attempted to push myself into a sitting position. I felt a hand on my shoulder, holding me down. “There’s an ambulance coming.”

“Dwight?”

“I’m here, shug. Lie still.”

My head hurt like hell, and when I touched it, I felt a knob the size of Grandfather Mountain. “Cal!” I said, as memory returned.

Gingerly, I turned my head and pain shot through every nerve. Dwight was sitting on the floor beside me with Cal cradled in one arm while his other hand cupped my face. Bandit was curled up between us with his head resting soulfully on Cal’s leg.

“Is he—? He’s not—?”

“He’s been drugged. We found a bottle of cough syrup. That’s what Pam took from the medicine cabinet Friday night. She must have given it to him to keep him quiet.”

“Was that her screaming?”

“Yeah. They’re taking her to the hospital. She thought we were slave-catchers.”

“Slave-catchers?”

“Yeah. Know what this room is?”

I tried to shake my head and flinched with the pain.

“Mrs. Ramos thinks it was a station on the Under-ground Railroad.”

I lay motionless and let my mind connect the dots.

“That’s what Pam was raving about? The trains to freedom? Bloodhounds?”

“You got it.”

“And these pictures of Jesus?”

“Yeah.”

The ambulance arrived and, despite my protests, I was lifted onto a gurney, strapped in, and wheeled out through a closet into the Rose Bedroom.

“This isn’t the way I came in,” I said. “There are secret stairs under the real stairs.”

“We know that now. How did you find them?” asked Dwight, who walked beside me, still carrying Cal.

“She left the closet door open, and when I looked in, I heard Cal crying and— Ouch!”

The rescue team carried my gurney down as carefully as they could, but pain arced through my head with every little bounce. As they lifted me into the ambulance and Dwight crawled in with Cal, I suddenly remembered his records! “I left them on the desk.”

“Everything’s fine,” Dwight soothed. “Just lie still.”

“No!” I said, struggling to sit up and held by the straps. “Where’s Paul? Where are those explorers?”

“We’re here,” an amused voice said from outside the ambulance.

“Look on the desk beside the computer,” I called.

“There are pictures beneath Cal’s records. Make Betty Ramos talk to you.”

“Here we go,” someone said, then the doors closed and we were moving.

I shut my eyes as the tires hit a pothole.

“Stay with us, ma’am,” said the nurse or whoever she was, lifting one of my eyelids and shining a light into my pupil.

“I’m fine,” I said, swatting the light away. “I’m not going to pass out again so would you please undo these damn straps?”

“Ma’am—”

“Do it,” said Dwight and a moment later I was free again.

“Thanks,” I said. “How’s Cal?”

I was speaking to Dwight, but the nurse answered.

“His blood pressure’s a little low but not in the danger zone.”

I reached for Dwight’s hand. “How did you find us?”

“Bandit. He caught Cal’s scent as soon as I brought him inside and went straight up the stairs to that hidden door in the closet.”

“He’s going to do just fine down on the farm, isn’t he?”

He squeezed my hand tightly. “Soon as we get home, I’m buying him the biggest steak I can find. God, Deborah! When you disappeared on me, too—”

He broke off as Cal stirred. “Daddy?”

“Right here, buddy.”

“Good,” he murmured and snuggled deeper into Dwight’s arms.

As I expected, the emergency room doctor took a good look at the lump on my head, looked into my eyes with his light, asked lots of questions about whether I was confused or dizzy, then told me to take aspirin for my headache and call him in the morning. He grinned when he said it, so I figured there was no permanent damage.

Cal’s doctor ordered an IV drip to help flush his blood-stream of the codeine-laced cough syrup and wanted to keep him at the hospital overnight for observation.

Dwight and I could have gone back to Jonna’s house for the night, but no way were we going to let him out of our sight. There was a recliner in the room and they rolled in a cot so that we could take turns stretching out if we wanted. Extra pillows and blankets were ours for the asking.

We dimmed the lights and moved away from the bed to the window that looked out over the town. The moon was three nights from full and it starkly silhouetted the skeletal limbs of the oaks that would shade the building in summer. We stood with our arms interlaced and talked quietly.

“Where’s Bandit?” I asked.

“Paul said he’d take care of him tonight.”

“Can we go home now?”

“Soon as the funeral’s over.”

Funeral. It wasn’t that I had forgotten that Jonna was 29 dead or who probably killed her and why, but I had forgotten that there would be a ceremony to get through.

The rituals of death.

“When?”

“Probably Tuesday morning. I called Mrs. Shay while they were checking out your head.”

I looked at the sleeping child. “You’ll have to tell him.”

He nodded.

“And help him talk about all of it, including this night-mare with Pam. We can’t let him bottle it up.”

“I know.”

“And your mother! I promised we’d call her this evening.”

“I already did. She’ll pass the word on to Mr. Kezzie and Minnie. She said to tell you that Kate and the baby will come home tomorrow.”

“A new baby.” One life ended, another begun. “Another first cousin for Cal.”

“This is going to be so damn hard on him,” he said.

I nodded.

“On you, too.”

“Oh, Dwight—”

“We’ve both read the magazine articles, seen the pop psychologists on all those talk shows. Hell, we’ve seen it in your courtroom and my jail.”

“Yes.”

“He’s going to be sad and angry and he’ll probably take it out on you more than me.”

“Like Andrew,” I said.

“Andrew?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about that? When Daddy’s first wife died, they say it was a neighborhood scandal how quickly he married Mother. The younger boys were too young to hold on to Annie Ruth’s memory, and Robert and Frank were old enough to be reasoned with, but Andrew was old enough to remember and too young to understand. He resented the hell out of her for years.”

“But he loved Miss Sue,” Dwight protested.

“Took him till he was twenty-five to come around’s what I always heard. I just hope it won’t take Cal that long.”

He held me closer. “We’ll work it out. I promise you we’ll work it out.”

I laid my head against his chest and was comforted by the strong steady beat of his heart. We stood there in the moonlight for several long moments until Paul Radcliff discreetly cleared his throat from the doorway. He carried my coat and purse and Cal’s teddy bear and he also came bearing news of an arrest.

“Those pictures you found let us get a search warrant for Nathan Benton’s house,” he said. “Soon as Betty Ramos saw them, she recognized that every one of those items were things Benton had given the Morrow House.

She’s one pissed-off lady right now. Kept saying, ‘Well, no wonder he found treasures every time he turned around. I could find treasures, too, if I shopped in museums and used a five-finger discount.’ Turns out he has his own private museum down in his basement.”

“Does he say why he killed Jonna?” I asked.

“Swears he had nothing to do with her death and is admitting nothing. Claims he bought everything at flea markets or antiques stores. Knows nothing about the pictures on Jonna’s computer and was shocked—absolutely shocked, I tell you—to hear that they were stolen. In fact, 2 he’s claiming that it’s all a bunch of coincidences because none of the items are one-of-a-kind. He says they were manufactured by the thousands. Once we find the guns we’ll nail him on them if nothing else, though, because they’ll have serial numbers. And Lewes thinks that when the lab goes over the stuff microscopically, they’ll find ID

marks from some of the true owners. Clark did a quick computer search for reported thefts, and in a couple of cases, a man who fits Benton’s description was the last visitor before the things went missing. There are places like the Morrow House all over the country with non-existent security and display cases that wouldn’t stop a two-year-old.”

“But Jonna?”

“I’m afraid it’s all going to be circumstantial if we can’t find some eyewitnesses besides Pam.”

Dwight frowned. “Pam?”

“We tried to question her, but it’s hard to separate reality from delusion. Best we can tell, she was watching from the upper landing of the Morrow House Thursday morning when Benton came out of the library with a gun and forced Jonna from the house. She heard him threaten to find Cal and kill him if Jonna didn’t come quietly.

Somehow all this got mixed up in her head that Benton was a slave-catcher, so when Jonna didn’t come back by next day, she thought she had to save Cal from being sent back into slavery, too. I don’t have to tell y’all what a defense lawyer would do with her testimony, right? For right now, the only thing he’s charged with is theft.”

He gave a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders.

Dwight insisted that I take the cot and I didn’t fight him. After swallowing more aspirins, I drifted into restless sleep. Sometime after midnight, I became aware of low voices and lay motionless as I heard Dwight say, “—it’s to help you get all that cough syrup out of your system. The codeine’s what’s made you so groggy.”

“But I quit taking that last week. Mother said it was too strong.”

“Aunt Pam gave you a drink, though, didn’t she?”

“She put it in my Pepsi?”

“Probably.”

“So that’s why she kept telling me I had to drink plenty of fluids. Every time I woke up she made me drink more.

She could’ve killed me,” he said indignantly. “That stuff’s like poison if you take too much.”

“I don’t think she meant to hurt you, Cal. I think she just wanted to make sure you’d stay quiet.”

I almost smiled at his skeptical “Humpf!” but then his voice came small and tentative.

“Dad?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Aunt Pam said a lot of awful crazy stuff while we were hiding.”

“Like what?”

But Cal wasn’t quite ready to go there. “Is Miss Deborah okay? Aunt Pam hit her really hard.”

“She’s got a big lump on her head, but nothing serious.”

“Good. I was afraid Aunt Pam killed her. When we were looking for Mother . . .”

“Yes?”

“Aunt Pam said Mother was in trouble. I wanted to go 29 back and get you, only she said Mother said for me to go with her and not to let anybody know or she’d be hurt, but then she kept driving around and around till it was almost dark because she said somebody was following us, then we sneaked in the Morrow House while Mr. Mayhew was back in the office. I thought Mother was going to be there, but she wasn’t. We went upstairs to that secret room with the Jesus pictures and she said we’d be safe there. She said a bad guy took Mother and wanted to take me, too, and we’d have to stay there for a while. I kept telling her you’d take care of any bad men, but she wouldn’t listen. She said they had bloodhounds and could track us down.”

“Sounds scary,” said Dwight.

“Well actually, it was a little bit,” Cal admitted. “Especially when I woke up and Aunt Pam was gone, but then she came back and everything she said was just flat-out crazy because she said Mother was dead and I’d have to stay really quiet or they’d get me, too. I tried to make her tell me what happened to Mother, but she didn’t make any sense and then I kept being so sleepy I couldn’t stay awake.”

There was a long silence, then Cal said, “Dad? Is Mother actually dead like Aunt Pam said?”

“I’m afraid so, son.”

Cal began to cry and I opened my eyes a narrow slit to see Dwight lie down beside his son and hold him till we both fell asleep again.

C H A P T E R

32

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

—Publius

Night’s dark sky was a dirty gray when the three of us were awakened by a nurse with strawberry blond hair who came in to check Cal’s vitals and to remove the IV needle from his wrist. We could hear the clatter of the stainless steel food cart working its way down the hall.

“Looks like this room’s going to be empty real soon,”

she said cheerfully.

I could never deal with the life-and-death traumas of medicine, so whenever I come across someone like—I looked at her nametag—like Stephanye Sanderson, RN, I am always grateful that such women are there for the rest of us.

“How is he?” I asked.

She smiled at me, but addressed Cal with a formality that left him gravely pleased. “Your blood pressure’s back in the normal range, Mr. Bryant, and your breakfast tray will be here in a little bit. What about you, Judge Knott?

How’s your head?”

“Much better,” I told her. “It’s still tender, but I don’t have a headache anymore.”

“Good. The doctor usually makes rounds by eight, so this young man can probably get dressed as soon as he’s been examined.”

I had caught a whiff of Cal’s clothes in the ambulance last night and knew he’d be embarrassed to realize that he’d wet himself during one of the long sleeps of his cap-tivity.

“Tell you what,” I said, after I’d splashed water on my face, combed my hair, and put on lipstick. “How about I go pick up our toothbrushes and bring you some fresh clothes?”

“I can do that,” said Dwight.

Cal put out an involuntary hand to hold him there, but I didn’t take it as a slight. After what he’d been through, of course he wanted his dad there.

“No, you stay with Cal.” I picked up the plastic bag with Cal’s dirty clothes and slung my purse over my shoulder. “I won’t be long.”

“Okay. I’ll walk you out.” He handed Cal the TV re-mote. “Be right back, buddy.”

As we walked down to the elevator, he thumbed his phone and called Paul’s office. It was too early for the chief to be there, but when one of his officers answered, Dwight identified himself. “Any chance of getting a car over to the hospital to take my wife to the Morrow House?”

By the time we walked outside, a patrol car had pulled up to the curb. It was freezing cold and I was glad for my coat and gloves. Dwight gave me the key to the house and I promised to be back within the hour with coffee.

“No chasing up any more secret staircases,” he told me as he opened the car door.

“You got it,” I said, sliding in next to a young patrol officer.

Our lips touched, then Dwight closed the door.

“I appreciate the ride,” I told the officer as we drove down the hill to the center of town.

“No problem, ma’am. Things are usually pretty quiet on a Monday morning.” He looked barely old enough to drive, much less carry a gun. I can’t decide if I’m getting older or recruits are getting younger. “Heard y’all had a lot of excitement last night.”

“We did,” I agreed. “Were you there?”

“No, ma’am. I’m pulling eleven-to-sevens this month, but man! I must’ve been in that Morrow House a half-dozen times since I was a little kid in the Cub Scouts and nobody ever said a word about secret passages and hidden rooms. That’s awesome.”

“Sounds like something out of a movie, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. I can’t wait to see it. You reckon they’ll open it to the public?”

“Probably,” I said, thinking they’d be dumb not to. It would be a terrific drawing card and surely Betty Ramos had to be happy to see her suspicions confirmed. This was going to make everyone reevaluate old Peter Morrow and his reputation for playing both ends against the middle. No wonder his wife protested the closets under the main staircase. Had they been caught, the house would have been torched and he would have been shot or lynched as a traitor to the cause. Blood ran hot out in these hills during the Civil War. And not just during, but 30 long after. Even now, I was willing to bet there would be plenty who would feel he had slimed the Morrow name.

On the other hand, he might have been genuinely conflicted—hating slavery, but loving the South? After all, he’d lost a son to that war. A daughter, too, if the ro-mantic tales of a young girl’s broken heart were true.

At the Morrow House, I thanked my driver again.

Chivalry is not totally dead. Before driving off, he waited until I’d cranked my car and had actually backed out of the parking space.

A state trooper’s car sat in front of the house and I saw lights on inside, but I had promised to get back to the hospital quickly, so I didn’t stop to see if there were any new developments.

By the time I got to Jonna’s house, the eastern sky was a bright pink and gold as the sun edged up to the horizon.

Once inside, I realized that the bag Dwight had packed for Cal on Friday probably held everything he would need this morning.

Friday. Only three days ago.

A weekend.

Normally, I would be walking into the courthouse this Monday morning, greeting clerks and attorneys—

“So, hey, how was your weekend?”

“Get much done this weekend?”

“ Y’all go away for the weekend?”

—the casual chatter as another workweek begins.

Three days ago, I was a bride of one month, still adjusting to a husband, still learning not to say, “Oh, sure, I’ll be there, sounds like fun” before I checked to see if his idea of a fun weekend was the same as mine.

From now on, there would be a child to consider as well. And not just any child, but one whose mother had been brutally murdered, who would be grieving, who would probably resent the hell out of me because I was alive and she wasn’t.

“Two days ago, you stood in this very house and promisedthat if Cal was safely returned, you’d do whatever neededdoing,” my internal preacher reminded me.

“Your mother took on eight sons when she married theirdaddy,” said his pragmatic roommate. “Are you eighttimes less the woman?”

I straightened my shoulders, put my makeup kit in a tote bag, and added Dwight’s toiletry bag and a complete change of clothes for Cal.

As I locked the door and started down the walk, I saw Jonna’s neighbor peering from the window and went over to tell him that we’d found Cal.

“Now, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “It’s real bad about his mother, though. I reckon the funeral will be tomorrow?”

I told him we’d let him know as soon as we knew for sure.

On the way back to the hospital, I swung past a fast-food window to pick up two cups of steaming hot coffee and some sausage biscuits and was back in Cal’s room before he’d finished his breakfast.

His eyes were red and I knew he’d been crying again.

When he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, Dwight uncapped his coffee and drank deeply. “I needed that.”

“Is everything okay?”

“He wanted to know exactly how Jonna died and I told him. Not about the note or how she must have known what was going to happen, just that she couldn’t have felt any pain or—”

He broke off as Cal stuck his head out of the bathroom. “Is it okay if I take a shower? I feel dirty.”

“Sure,” Dwight told him. “But you can’t get dressed till after the doctor’s seen you, okay?”

“Okay.”

I unwrapped a biscuit and handed it to him. It was still warm and fragrant, the sausage nicely flavored with sage.

As he took a bite, I said, “What’s on the agenda today?”

“Cal wants to see her. What do you think?”

I shook my head. “That’s a tough call. Has he ever seen a death?”

“Just dogs or cats.” He took another bite. “No, I take that back. One of his classmates was in a bad car wreck right after school started. The whole class went to the funeral, but I don’t know if the casket was open.”

“If he really wants to see her, then I think you ought to take him. But go this afternoon or tomorrow morning when the two of you can be there alone.”

“What if he wants to touch her?”

I remembered standing in front of Mother’s coffin. In-tellectually, I knew she was dead, but it wasn’t till I touched the hands lying neatly folded that the permanence of her death sank in. From my earliest memories, her hands had danced across the piano keys when Daddy played his fiddle. They had shelled peas and butter beans, patted out biscuit dough, scrubbed bathtubs, plucked chickens, spanked disobedient sons and a willful daugh- ter, cupped a flame to her cigarette, dealt out poker hands, and helped me hold the hymnal on Sunday morning so that I could follow the words. And always, always those hands had flashed in the air before her as she talked, enhancing her conversation and vividly depicting her emotions.

Daddy used to say, “Cut off your mama’s hands and she couldn’t talk,” and to tease her, he’d catch her hands in his and hold them motionless till she laughed and pulled away.

But there in that casket, those hands had been cold and forever stilled.

“Deb’rah?” Dwight looked at me worriedly. “Shug?”

“Sorry.” I shook my head and blinked away the tears.

“I was thinking about Mother. You have to let Cal do what he wants, Dwight. Just give him enough time to do it. Don’t hurry him.”

We finished eating and Cal came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around him. His brown hair was damp and tousled and drops of water clung to his shoulder blades. At eight, his sense of modesty was in its most rudimentary stage of development, and when his towel slipped as he crawled back onto the bed, he didn’t seem to notice or care.

The doctor, Cal’s regular pediatrician, came in soon after, looked at his chart, and gave it as his opinion that Cal had not been seriously harmed by the cough syrup. “He had taken three or four doses by the time Mrs. Bryant called to report his sensitivity to the codeine. There couldn’t have been all that much left in the bottle.”

“So can I go home now?” asked Cal.

“Well, if it was me, cold as it is, I believe I’d put on a 30 coat and some shoes first,” the doctor said and Cal laughed.

I handed Dwight the tote bag and followed the doctor out to the nurses’ station to get his address and phone number so that we could send for Cal’s records once we’d found a pediatrician down in Raleigh.

“Nice kid,” said the doctor as he scribbled his e-mail address on a prescription pad.

“Any advice for his new stepmom?” I asked.

“Treat him kindly and respect what he’s going through,” he said promptly, “but don’t let him use it to con you. Set the rules and hold him to them. Eight-year-olds are resilient and Cal’s absolutely normal, so he’s going to laugh and you’ll think he’s over it, then he’s going to cry and you’ll know he’s not. Just relax and enjoy him. One good thing—you’ve got a couple or three years before he hits puberty. I suggest you make the most of them. Once the hormones kick in, all bets are off till he hits twenty.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said dryly.

“That’s right. I heard you were a judge.”

“I’m also the aunt of several teenagers,” I told him.

He laughed. “Even better.”

As we said good-bye, the elevator pinged and Paul Radcliff stepped off, carrying a Thermos of coffee that Sandy had sent over.

“We’ve both had the hospital’s coffee,” he said, following me into Cal’s room. “Thought y’all might could use something stronger to get a jump-start on the day.”

A second cup was welcome to both of us.

“Hey, Cal,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Okay,” the boy said. He was fully dressed now except for tying his sneakers.

“Everybody’s real sorry about your mother, son.”

Cal concentrated on his shoelaces.

“Jimmy’s gonna skip school today and Miss Sandy wants you stay with them this morning.”

Cal raised stricken eyes to his father. “Dad?”

“I’m sorry, buddy, but there are things I need to see to.”

“Okay,” he said in a small voice, but then he looked at me.

Hoping that I wasn’t misinterpreting that look, I said,

“That’s awfully kind of Sandy, but I thought maybe Cal could help me this morning. We need to figure out what to take back to North Carolina with us tomorrow. Is that all right with you, Cal?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said gratefully.

C H A P T E R

33

Perhaps my name, too, will be joined to theirs.

—Ovid

The grocery store was open as Cal and I drove down the hill, so we turned in and I picked up some empty cardboard boxes and a roll of strapping tape.

“Could we go and get Bandit now, too?” he asked.

“Good idea,” I said. “He’ll be really happy to see you.

Did your dad tell you how he was the one who found us last night? That was pretty amazing.”

“He’s the smartest dog I ever knew,” Cal said complacently.

Our stop at the Radcliff house was brief. Sandy was just back from dropping Jimmy off at school and she was deliberately matter-of-fact when she spoke with Cal about how well-behaved Bandit had been. When we were leaving, though, there were tears in her eyes as she hugged him.

With the dog in the car as our buffer, it was easier to talk to each other, and once we were at the house, it became easier still.

Cal already had a room of his own at the farm and he had stayed on after the wedding to spend Christmas with us, so he knew what was there and what he wanted to take with him. By the time Dwight arrived around noon, we had filled several boxes with his books and toys and most of his clothes. We left out his Sunday suit and the leather shoes that were almost too tight. “Mother said we could probably get one more month out of them,” he said, “but I don’t know about that.”

I made sandwiches for lunch, then while they went to the funeral home, I cleaned out the refrigerator and started a load of laundry.

It was nearly two hours before they returned and Cal’s freckled face was so pinched and drained that he didn’t argue when I suggested he take a book and go lie down with Bandit for a while.

Once we were alone, Dwight told me that it had been a little rough. “He cried when he touched her face and he told her he was sorry she got killed, but I think he’s handling it pretty good, overall.”

“It was awful that Pam took him and scared the hell out of him and us, too, but in a weird way, going in and out of sleep for two days might have had one benefit,” I said. “Don’t you think it might have given his subcon-scious time to get used to the idea in a less traumatic way than if he’d been awake and scared the whole time?”

“Maybe. We stopped back by Mrs. Shay’s so she could see for herself that he’s all right.”

“How’s she doing?”

He shrugged. “It’s still all about her. She can’t deal 30 with Pam, but she wanted me to know that the family portraits and most of the antiques here in the house were just loans to Jonna, and she wants them back. Thank God for Eleanor. She got there as we were leaving. Said for us not to worry about anything. She and her daughters will come over and take care of things over the next few months, dispose of the clothes and empty out the refrigerator and cupboards. There’s no furniture here we want, is there?”

I shook my head. “You might want to sign an informal note that will allow Eleanor to act as your limited agent for now, then you and Cal can come back in the spring after he’s settled at the farm. If it turns out that there’s something he’s really attached to, we’ll find space for it down there. There are photo albums in Jonna’s room that will mean a lot to him someday, so we should take those with us tomorrow.”

He went up to check on Cal and came back to report that he was sound asleep.

“Any news about Benton?”

Dwight yawned and said, “He’s got an attorney that’s going to try to get him a first appearance today or tomorrow in the hopes of getting out on bail. Unless the guns and jewelry are found before he gets out, though, we can kiss a murder conviction good-bye. He’ll deep-six any incriminating stuff as soon as he has a chance.”

He yawned again and I said, “Why don’t you lie down a while, too? You can’t have slept much last night.”

“What about you?”

“I had the cot, remember? Besides I thought I’d go over and pick up my phone unless you brought it back?”

“Sorry, shug. Didn’t know it was there.” He yawned a third time and gave me a sheepish grin. “Well, maybe I will stretch out a few minutes till Cal wakes up.”

The Morrow house was still swarming with police when I got there, and according to Agent Lewes, there were more officers going over Benton’s house with a metal detector to try and locate the guns they presumed he’d hidden.

The trustees were also out in full force and so were members of the Shaysville Historical and Genealogical Society. Having decided that Nathan Benton was a thief and a murderer, they were now on the trail of something even larger in their eyes.

“That little company he was supposed to have sold before he retired here?” said Suzanne Angelo. “My husband made a few phone calls. He was the manager, not the owner.”

“And we think he falsified his ancestry papers,” Frederick Mayhew said darkly. “We don’t think he’s related to Bartholomew Benton at all.”

“Now why would he lie about something like that?” I asked.

“For the same reason he stole things to give to the house,” said Betty Ramos, who seemed to have a kind heart. “He’s such a Civil War buff, I think he wanted to claim a part of that history as his own. He probably came across Bartholomew Benton’s name when he was re-searching his family tree and decided that sounded like a more interesting background than his own Bentons. Or maybe he couldn’t trace his own line very far back and since there were no more Bentons over here in Shaysville, 31 thought he could get away with saying our Bentons were his. Certainly today is the first time anyone’s questioned the lineage he presented. Why would we? Unless someone claims to be related to Robert E. Lee or Washington or Lincoln, who would bother to go look up all the deeds and wills and census records he cited?”

I’ve never quite understood why some people brag about their family being here since the Revolution. I mean, so have mine, so have a ton of others. The way Americans intermarry, almost anybody who’s been here three or four generations has at least one line that goes back that far. Maybe if I had more statesmen and officers perched in my family tree, I’d brag, too, but with so many bootleggers and dirt farmers and ancestors who did their best to avoid becoming cannon fodder no matter who was issuing the call to arms, it’s hard for me to work up much pride about it.

Pride.

Pride kept Mrs. Shay from getting Pam the help she needed.

Pride had probably spurred Jonna to blackmail because she couldn’t bring herself to tell her friends she didn’t have five thousand for a class gift.

And then there was the dangerous pride of Nathan Benton, who had fashioned himself into a blue-blooded big fish in a very small pond.

Not that anyone connected with the Morrow House suspected blackmail. No, their assumptions made Jonna an innocent victim.

“It’s too bad she didn’t turn him in as soon as she realized what he’d done,” said Suzanne Angelo. “She was probably going to let him withdraw his donations and return them to their rightful owners.”

“Or else she caught him stealing the guns, too,” said one of the other trustees. “Remember how he didn’t want to invite Hamilton Erdman to come and address Sunday’s meeting? We thought he was jealous of Erdman’s reputation as a small arms expert, but I bet he took all three guns because he was afraid that the two he’d donated might be recognized.”

In the office, a state police officer was going through Jonna’s computer files one by one to see if there was anything else to incriminate Benton, but she obligingly printed out another copy of Cal’s records for me as I found my phone and tucked it in my coat pocket.

“Glad to see you’re okay today, Judge,” said Agent Lewes, who was in the main hall when I came out to leave. Dwight and I agreed that he reminded us both of one of Daddy’s droopy-faced hounds, and today more than ever when he admitted that it didn’t look as if they were going to be able to charge Benton with Jonna’s murder. But while we stood talking in the entry hall, his phone buzzed and a big smile lit up those baggy eyes.

“Got him!” he said when the call ended. “There was a second spare in the trunk of his car—so old and beat up, it looked like something he was taking to the dump, but when Clark took it out to lift up the mat, he felt something rattle. There’s a slit in the tread just long enough to let him pull it apart and slide stuff inside. Long as they were just shifting the tire from one side of the trunk to the other, nobody noticed. We’ve got the guns, the cartridges, and the jewelry, too. Let’s see the bastard talk his way out of this!”

C H A P T E R

34

So far as it goes, a small thing may give analogy of greatthings.

—Lucretius

Jonna’s funeral was at ten o’clock Tuesday morn-

ing. Pam was still too out of it to attend, even though Dwight had spoken privately with Paul and the state agents and asked that she not be charged for abducting Cal. Dwight and Cal entered and sat with the family. I sat inconspicuously at the back of the church and watched as Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards, both elegant in black designer suits, spoke of their grief at losing their third musketeer. There was a huge wreath from her classmates.

Mrs. Shay wanted Cal to come back to the house afterwards, but Dwight stood firm and, to Cal’s barely concealed relief (not to mention mine), told her that we needed to get on the road.

While I went by Cal’s school to get his records and turn in his books, he and Dwight picked up some plastic sheeting at the hardware store to wrap the boxes we’d packed in case the weather turned messy again. They wedged them in the back of Dwight’s truck, alongside Cal’s bike and Bandit’s wire crate, then covered everything with a well-secured tarp. Bandit rode in the cab of the truck with Dwight and Cal. There were more boxes in the backseat of my car, and our bags were in my trunk.

I led the way as we caravanned south. I agreed to keep my cruise control set smack on the speed limit and not a single mile over. Dwight agreed to keep up. Even stopping for lunch in Greensboro, we were home by mid-afternoon.

While I helped Cal unpack and settle in, Dwight checked in at the office.

He had kept me up to date on the investigation of J.D.

Rouse’s murder and I heard him call Terry Wilson and razz him about not finding the .45 that Sergeant Overholt used to shoot J.D. Nevertheless, Bo Poole was ready to close it out as a cleared case even though they would not have been able to convict Overholt for J.D.’s death without the gun.

“Don’t you find one thing a little odd?” I asked as I finished unpacking our clothes and hung Dwight’s suit back in his side of our walk-in closet.

“You mean something odder than Overholt knowing J.D. would be driving down that road? Or for that matter, how he even knew what J.D. drove, much less what he looked like when he just got back from overseas?”

“Well, I hadn’t thought about those two points, but yes.”

“What else?”

“Overholt had several handguns, right?”

“That’s what Richards and Terry say.”

“Yet he used a rifle to shoot his wife at fairly close range 31 and a handgun to shoot a target that’s moving away from him?”

Dwight frowned. “Good point. Maybe I’ll ask Bo to hold off on closing the file right now. Give Richards another day on it, see if she can turn up new suspects.”

“The wife’s brother is definitely cleared?”

“Not definitely, but he seems unlikely. The crew all vouch for him, but even more, the developer saw him about ten or fifteen minutes before the shooting. He would have had to rush to the back of the property, through the woods, and get in position just as Rouse came driving past.”

He showered and shaved while I wrapped the gift we were giving Kate and Rob’s infant son—a jumper swing that clamps on a doorframe.

“Isn’t he too little for that?” Cal asked dubiously as he watched me.

“He is right now, but in just a few months he should get a kick out of it. Want to sign the card?”

“What’s his name again?”

“They haven’t decided whether to call him Bobby or R.W., but his full name is Robert Wallace Bryant Junior, which now makes your Uncle Rob Robert Wallace Bryant Senior. You know what the Wallace is for, don’t you?”

Cal shook his head.

“Before she married your grandfather, your grandma’s name was Emily Wallace.”

“And Dad is Dwight Avery Bryant because his grandmother was an Avery, right?”

“Right.”

“And I’m Calvin for Dad’s father and Shay for Mother.”

“That’s right,” I said as I tied the package with a big blue bow. “And if I’m not mistaken, her Anson grandfather might have been a John.”

I kept my voice as casual as possible because I wanted Cal to feel comfortable talking about Jonna with us.

“Who were you named for?”

“Well, my mother used to say she just thought it was a nice name. There aren’t any Deborahs on either side of our family, though, and she did like family names. My middle name is Stephenson because that was her family name, so I’ve always had the feeling that there was a mystery about why she named me that.”

“Does Mr. Kezzie know?”

“If he does, he’s never said. If he tells you, let me know, okay?”

“Okay.” He read through the welcome-baby card and said, “I think I’m gonna call him R.W.” Beneath where I’d signed my name and Dwight’s, he carefully wrote in newly acquired cursive, “For R.W., love, your cusin Calvin Shay Bryant.”

The baby was adorable but he looked more like Dwight than Rob, who has Miss Emily’s red hair and slender build.

“Takes after the good-looking side of the family,”

Dwight said with a grin for Cal.

When Kate read our card, she said to Cal, “Did Jake and Mary Pat put you up to this?”

“Up to what?” he asked.

“They want to call him R.W., too.” She gave a mock sigh of regret. “Looks like I’m outvoted.”

“Yay!” said Mary Pat, who was six months older than Cal. Her cheer was echoed by four-year-old Jake.

They had been a little stiff with Cal at first in deference to his new half-orphan status, but since both of Mary Pat’s parents had died before she was three, she had no memory of losing a mother, and of course, Jake couldn’t conceive of losing Kate, so they were quickly reverting to normal. By the time we were ready to go have supper with Miss Emily so that Kate could rest, they were back to teasing and shoving one another.

As the three children followed Dwight out to the car, Kate and Rob asked for the condensed version of what had happened in Virginia.

“We were hoping to see more of Cal as he got older, but not like this,” Rob said, shaking his red head.

“Anything we can do to help,” Kate said, “let us know.”

“If it gets rough, I’ll come borrow Jake and Mary Pat,”

I told them.

Because it was a school night, we cut the evening short.

Cal was apprehensive about what his new teacher and classmates would be like, but Miss Emily had used her position as a principal in the school system to ensure that Cal would be in the same classroom as Mary Pat.

“You’ll really like Mrs. Ferncliff,” she promised Cal.

“She’s going to be my teacher when I get to third grade,” said Jake, who wasn’t even in kindergarten yet.

When we turned onto our road that night, the headlights picked up the green-and-white sign on the shoulder that announced that it had been adopted by the Kezzie Knott famil.

yAs Cal read it aloud, I spotted a fast-food cup lying at the base of the sign.

“Better stop and let me get it up before Reese sees it and wants you to process it for fingerprints,” I told Dwight.

“Why?” asked Cal when I was back in the car with the cup.

I explained what adopting a road meant and how we’d picked up all the debris on Saturday morning. “But when we were coming back from lunch, I was riding with my nephew Reese and we saw somebody throw trash out their car window. Well, Reese went absolutely ballistic and chased down the car and—oh!”

“What?” asked Dwight.

“He went ballistic,” I said again. “Only he didn’t have a gun.”

“Oh,” said Dwight.

“What’s ballistic?” Cal asked from the backseat.

“Means lose your temper,” Dwight said slowly. “Do crazy things.”

“So what did Reese do when y’all caught him?” Cal asked me.

I explained that the he was a she and that Reese had shamed her into going back and picking up the trash she’d tossed, but all the time, I was watching Dwight play with the possibilities.

Back at the house, while Cal went on into his room to brush his teeth and get ready for bed, I said, “Is it possible?”

“She had a bunch of her father’s marksmanship medals 31 framed on the wall,” Dwight said. “He might have hung on to his service revolver and maybe he taught her to shoot, too. She certainly was devoted to him. And Richards says she reamed a guy out for dumping an occasional beer can. The cab of J.D.’s truck had no trash in it and we know he’d drunk at least one beer.”

“And didn’t you say his right-hand window was halfway down? What if he flung a can out right there in front of her every evening?”

Littering seemed like a bizarre reason to shoot someone, but I remembered Reese’s rage. He’s such an impulsive hothead that I could see him try to shoot out that girl’s taillight if he’d been on foot.

And if he’d had a gun.

Dwight called Mayleen Richards from the kitchen phone, and when he came back, he gave a shrug to my lifted eyebrow. “She doesn’t think it’s so crazy. Wanted to know if you’d sign a search warrant or if she should ask someone else.”

“I hope you told her someone else.”

“I did.”

Our separation of powers treaty was back in place.

But both of us went in to say good night to Cal. He was snuggled down under the covers and Bandit nestled at his feet as if he’d been sleeping there for years.

I dropped a light kiss on Cal’s forehead and left so that Dwight could have a few quiet minutes alone with him.

He was looking a little weepy-eyed and I had caught a glimpse of Carson’s plush ear sticking out from under the pillow.

Made me feel a little weepy-eyed, too.

C H A P T E R

35

It is now clear, from what has been said, how many are thecauses of death.

—Theophrastus

Tuesday night, 25 January

At nine-thirty that evening, Deputies Mayleen Richards, Raeford McLamb, and Jack Jamison rang the bell at the small neat house in Holly Ridge. Immediately, they heard the sharp bark of the little corgi. A moment later, Mrs. Lydia Harper opened the door and blinked as she saw the three standing there.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Harper,” said Richards, “but we have a warrant to search your house for a forty-five-caliber revolver.”

The older woman put her hand to her throat. “A warrant?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She held it out.

“It’s so late. I was about to get ready for bed. Can’t you come back in the morning?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am.”

“But you can’t just come in here and stomp around my 32 house and go through my things,” she said, her temper flaring. “This is America. What gives you the right?”

“This search warrant,” Richards said, offering it to her again.

Mrs. Harper snatched it from her hand and read it through from first sentence to last signature while the deputies waited outside in the chilled night air. It had begun to rain and the rain was predicted to turn into sleet by morning.

“I want to call an attorney,” said Mrs. Harper.

“Fine,” said Richards, “but we’re going to start our search now. You can make this easy or you can make it hard. It’s up to you.” Struck by sudden inspiration, she added, “Besides, what would the Colonel say? It was his gun, wasn’t it?”

Mrs. Harper stiffened, and then, in another of the sudden mood swings they had seen before, she crumbled.

Tears flooded her eyes. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to scare him. Make him stop throwing his beer cans on the Colonel’s road. Every day, another Bud Light can. I yelled at him once and he just gave me the finger and kept on going like he was king of the world and everybody else could clean up his mess. It got to the point that he’d wait till he saw me to toss a can because some days, if I went early, there might not be any Bud Lights. But if I was there, he’d slow down and throw out three or four cans at a time, like he’d saved them up just to spit on the Colonel’s good name. But I never meant to kill him. I just wanted to shoot out his window. Let him clean up a mess for once.”

Mayleen Richards shook her head. Not marksmanship, after all. Just an unlucky shot. And here they’d been fig- uring trajectories and angles, trying to work out how Overholt or Miguel Diaz’s brother-in-law could have known when and where to be, when all along it was just a little old lady with a bee in her bonnet about honoring her father’s memory.

The gun was in Colonel Frampton’s dresser drawer. It appeared to have been cleaned and oiled since its last firing, but that was not too surprising for a woman who was so obsessively neat that even her coffee-table magazines were stacked in a graduated pile with the edges precisely aligned to the edge of the table.

As they came back down the hallway with the gun, McLamb stopped to look at the medals and commendations that were framed and hung on the wall alongside certificates for proficiency and meritorious service.

Richards started to pass by and then her eye was snagged by the name on one of the marksmanship certificates: it was signed by a Captain John Forlines and it had been issued to Lydia Frampton Harper for scoring a 98% at a Fort Benning target range. The certificate was dated fifteen years earlier.

They had gone to bed early themselves and were almost asleep when the call came through. Deborah gave a sleepy protest, but she rolled over to listen to Dwight’s end of the conversation. When Dwight snapped his phone back into the charger on the nightstand and said,

“Can you believe it?” she replied, “Believe that Mrs.

Harper shot J.D.? Sure.”

“Not that she shot him, but that she kept her marksmanship certificate hanging on the wall.”

“Rack another one up for pride,” Deborah murmured as she fitted herself back into the curve of his arms.

“Pride? I’d call it arrogance.”

“Close enough,” she said and her lips found his while the cold winter rain beat against their windows.

Document Outline

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35