Bootlegger’s Daughter

by Margaret Maron

  I hadn’t realized those were separate times.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Something about two different kinds of bloodstains. They figured the wound opened up again when she was put in the loft. I forget the details, but forensics determined that she’d bled onto the floorstones for several hours before the shot finished her off instantly. She actually died between five and ten P.M. on Friday evening, according to Dr. Hudson.”

  “Too bad Michael Vickery hadn’t moved into the barn yet,” I sighed.

  “Might have been rough on him if he had. As it was, he was lucky he could prove he was in Chapel Hill from noon till nearly midnight on Friday because he was out there by himself all day Wednesday.”

  Scotty shrugged. “It was like that with every man we looked at. Your brothers: both free to come and go without punching time cards or anybody keeping tabs on them. They alibied each other for Wednesday, which we might could question, but your brother Seth helped barbecue chickens all afternoon for a church supper Friday night while your brother Will was umpiring a Little League baseball game.”

  “Neither of my brothers had a reason to hurt Janie,” I said hotly.

  “So who did?” he asked reasonably.

  “Nobody! Anybody. Oh, God, I don’t know!” An impatient sweep of my hand upset my empty cup. No one in the place noticed. They were too busy watching three miniskirted secretaries over by the jukebox who were demonstrating some aerobic movements and lip-synching “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” along with Deniece Williams. Morgan was in tight conversation with someone I didn’t recognize. “Didn’t you guys turn up any motives?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really,” I mimicked nastily. “You told Terry and me you didn’t find a hell of a lot more the second time through. What does that mean? Or aren’t you going to trust me?”

  “We checked out Dinah Jean Raynor when we heard she was going to marry Janie’s husband,” he answered slowly. “Eight months wasn’t much of a mourning period. Made us wonder if they’d had anything going before.”

  “Dinah Jean?” I was scornful. “He might have dated her in high school, but he’d dropped her long before he started seeing Janie.” I hesitated. Jed had always treated Dinah Jean pleasantly in my presence, the surface between them as placid and unruffled as Possum Creek. But I remembered the yearning on her face at times when he drew away from her or didn’t seem to notice her outstretched hand. During the years between their brief high school fling and Janie’s death, could Dinah Jean have carried a torch for Jed even bigger than mine?

  “She was still in nursing then,” said Scotty. “Working the four-to-midnights at Rex Hospital. But one thing we did learn when we went over Janie’s girlfriends: she and your sister-in-law-sorry, your ex-sister-in-law-and Kay Saunders had been really close right up to a couple of months after the baby was born. Then, bang. Overnight, a few weeks before she died, Janie quite seeing them. Quit shopping with them, quit having them over to her house, quite going to theirs.”

  Startled, I realized he was right. Janie, Trish, and Kay had graduated from Dobbs High School together and had then married Cotton Grove boys within two years of each other, which brought them back into the same social orbit where two incomes weren’t a necessity quite yet. The “Donna Reed” syndrome lasted a bit longer in the South than elsewhere, and none of the three had held down real jobs back then. All that most young wives like them had to do till the children started arriving was keep the house clean and be there in a frilly apron with supper on the table when their husbands came home from work. The rest of the time they were free to shop, socialize, or volunteer their services to community projects if they chose.

  Thinking out loud, I said, “Well, maybe motherhood slowed her down too much. So far as I know, Kay never had kids, and Trish and Will were divorced before they had any. With her sister there in town, maybe she thought it was time to settle into family life.”

  Except that even as I said it, I was remembering that she hadn’t really settled. Marylee’s kids were both in school and Janie had been out running around with her those last couple of weeks almost as much as with Trish and Kay.

  “Well, it probably didn’t mean anything,” Scotty said. “The only reason I gave it a second thought was because there was nothing else. You girls are all alike, though. One day you’re best friends, the next day you can’t stand the sight of each other.”

  I bristled and he started grinning. For a minute his tiredness seemed to dissipate. “You look just like my oldest daughter. She hates it when I say things like that, even if I’m only kidding.” His grin faded. “Just the same, that’s the explanation Marylee Strickland gave me. What your ex-sister-in-law said, too, as a matter of fact.”

  “Did you believe them?” I asked.

  “Let’s put it this way. I never could verify their movements for that Wednesday afternoon, but I do know that Trish Knott and Kay Saunders spent Friday evening playing cards with some friends over in Makely.”

  “Makely?” Appalled, I looked at my watch. “Oh Lord! I’m supposed to be at a meeting in Makely in exactly twelve minutes.”

  Babbling my thanks for his time, I grabbed for his bill and he let me take it. “Two things though, Your Honor-if you learn anything, I expect you to share it.”

  I nodded. “And the other?”

  “Just keep in mind that someone’s got away with murder once already.”

  6 there’s something for everyone in america

  I’d warned Gayle that my campaign was going to come first, a good thing because the next few days were so jammed I hardly had time to shower and change clothes. It was the last weekend before the primary, my last chance to shake new hands in other parts of the district where I was less well-known to voters.

  On Saturday morning, I got up early and drove over to Widdington in the next county. My first stop was at a Newcomers Club breakfast followed by a midmorning bake sale for the Widdington High School Marching Band Uniform Fund, where I bought an obscenely rich carrot cake with cream cheese icing that I immediately donated to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving at their lunch meeting in Hilltop, thirty miles further east from Widdington.

  “If this is a bribe, I’m easy,” laughed a plump young mother.

  While our hostess sliced the moist cake into seventeen equally fattening pieces, I described the number of drunk-driving cases I’d prosecuted when I’d worked as an assistant in the DA’s office.

  One smartass Republican-looking mother asked if I hadn’t spent the last few years in private practice frequently defending drunk drivers. I took the high ground-“As long as the United States remains a democracy, even the sorriest hound’s entitled to a defense”-and kept the rest of the women on my side by confessing with pretty ruefulness that I’d lost over ninety percent of the DWI cases I’d tried to defend in court. (No point mentioning that most lawyers have an even worse conviction rate. If our DA doesn’t think the facts are incontrovertible, he doesn’t prosecute. Marginal cases simply don’t come to trial all that often, and I’m pretty good at getting pretrial dismissals; but that’s not something I like to brag about. Certainly not at a MADD meeting.)

  “Win or lose,” I told them truthfully, “any time a client of Lee, Stephenson and Knott is charged with driving while impaired, we require them to sign up for a substance abuse program before we’ll accept the case.”

  (Okay-yes, it does usually help mitigate a guilty verdict if you can say to the judge that your client’s already entered such a program voluntarily, but again that’s not something attorneys go around telling MADD groups. Especially if said attorney’s running for judge.)

  “Of course, when we’re appointed to represent indigent defendants, we don’t have the option of turning them down if they refuse.” I smiled apologetically at the Republican. “I’m afraid that goes back to their Sixth Amendment rights again-the right to counsel, whether or not they take the counsel’s advice.”

  The luncheon concluded in time for me to put
in a quick appearance at the end of a noontime fish fry to benefit the hospital in Hilltop. I got to pull a raffle ticket out of a gallon jar, and the white-haired gentleman who won the VCR donated by the Hilltop Radio Shack fancied himself a roguish charmer. “I claim the right to kiss the prettiest candidate in the whole damn election!” he said as he came up to collect his prize.

  I smiled-God, how candidates have to smile!-proffered my cheek and mentally put a big red asterisk beside his name. He’d be grinning out the other side of his mouth if he ever showed up in my court.

  Midafternoon was Joplin ’s Crossroads. The volunteer fire department there was sponsoring an auction of surplus farm equipment, and my brother Will was auctioneer. Will is three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four, and a bit of a rounder. Everybody likes Will as long as they don’t have to pick up behind him and clean up his messes. He’s a fine auctioneer though and makes good money on the circuit. The crowds get to laughing at his fast-talking patter and hardly notice how high the bid’s gotten. He’d phoned me the week before. “Long as you’re going to be in the neighborhood, you ought to come on by and say hey to everybody. That firehouse is a polling place, and a lot of those men’ll vote for you if you smile at ’em pretty.”

  So I climbed up onto the flatbed of a two-ton truck that he was using as a platform, flashed as genuine a smile as I could muster, and used his microphone to make a dignified appeal for their votes. Then, while some announcements were made and another consignment of machinery was rolled into place, Will took a break and I asked him if he remembered Howard Grimes.

  “That old busybody? Oh, hell, yeah. Why?”

  We were sitting on the far side of the flatbed away from the crowd with out legs dangling over the edge. I popped the top on a can of Diet Pepsi someone had brought us and took a sip. “I was remembering how he said he looked hard at the man in Janie Whitehead’s car that afternoon she disappeared because he thought at first she was Trish and he wanted to see who she was cheating on you with, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said sourly. His and Trish’s divorce had not been amicable. They fought over every single thing they’d acquired together-furniture, appliances, and the dogs; but the major sticking point, and one that almost unglued the settlement, was who was going to keep the album of wedding pictures. Even though she understood the psychological significance of the impasse, Mother wound up paying their photographer to duplicate the whole damn thing right down to the album’s white taffeta cover just so she wouldn’t have to keep listening to Will mouth about it.

  “You dated Janie before she married Jed, didn’t you?”

  He set his Pepsi down between us, pushed his gray poplin hat on the back on his head, and fumbled in the pocket of his windbreaker for a cigarette. “So?”

  “So was Janie cheating, too? Is that why she and Trish quit being friends?”

  Will put the cigarette between his lips and cupped his big hands around a Zippo so old and battered that its square corners were rounded off. It was Mother’s originally, a souvenir she’d brought home from the Seymour Johnson Airfield after World War II.

  The lighter is burly and masculine-looking, made of stainless steel and engraved with the insignia of the Army Air Forces Technical Training School where she’d worked. It always looked so incongruous in her lovely smooth hands with those long pink fingernails, yet she was never without it. When she died and her things were divided, there were the usual two- and three-way battles, and some of those battles went all the way to skinned knuckles and bloody noses; but that beat-up Zippo was the only item all the boys fought over-not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Even the ones that didn’t smoke. Yet I was the only one who knew who’d given her the lighter and why she kept it. None of them had ever thought to ask.

  Or maybe they had and she just hadn’t answered them.

  Like Will wasn’t answering?

  I waited till his cigarette was going good. “Was she?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me as a mild spring breeze blew the cigarette smoke back in his face. “How come you asking something like that after all these years?”

  “Gayle wants me to help her find out why Janie was killed,” I said.

  “Should you ought to be doing that while you’re running for judge?” he asked.

  Before I could answer, we were interrupted by calls for the auction to resume. He poured the rest of his Pepsi on the ground, crushed the can in his hands, then swung himself back upright on the flatbed and picked up the mike again.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to take him longer than usual to work back into his patter and get that first laugh. I smiled my way back to my car, shaking hands as I went, but faces and hands were blurred by the sudden memory I had of Will kissing Janie.

  For the life of me I couldn’t remember whether it was before she married Jed or after.

  Back in Dobbs, I showered, changed clothes, and collected Aunt Zell for a Democratic rally down in Black Creek.

  Aunt Zell’s my mother without the wild streak-one of those good people that help hold the world together. They pick up the pieces, clean up the messes, and try to make sure nobody goes to bed hungry. If that makes her sound trivial, try running the world without women like her in it.

  All her babies died before they walked, but that doesn’t mean she took me to raise when I moved in on her and Uncle Ash during college. Still, I think I’m a comfort to her. Anyhow, I try to remember to be.

  Not a large turnout in Black Creek, but when you’re running for a local office, wherever one or two be gathered in your name, that’s where you go. The Women’s Missionary Union from Harrison Hobart’s church was well represented and gave me a warm welcome. I’d like to think it was because they approved of me personally, but I had a feeling it was because Aunt Zell was with me. She’s been active in the WMU all her adult life, even holding district office. Everybody respects her, and some of that respect rubs off on me, a distinct asset for a single woman in a society that still gets a bit uneasy when a halfway attractive woman doesn’t marry and settle into monogamy by the time she’s twenty-five; thirty if she was ever divorced.

  I’m thirty-four and no man’s ring is on my finger at the moment.

  On Sunday, Aunt Zell and I visited all three of the churches I’d grown up in. The morning began with Sunday school at Fresh Hope, then a quick fifteen-mile drive to Bethel Baptist for morning preaching by Barry Blackman, an old high school boyfriend long married now and the father of three. For dinner afterwards, Aunt Zell and I had been invited to the Bryant-Avery family reunion there in the neighborhood.

  The spring day was gloriously warm and sunny. Azaleas and dogwoods were almost finished, just scattered blossoms here and there; but wisteria still draped soft purple ribbons up and down the tall trunks of longleaf pines, and wild cherries had already made me re-memorize Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.”

  Aunt Zell and I drove through a lush green landscape perfumed with wild crabapples and Carolina jasmine. Pears were fully leafed, but I could still see some of the limb structure of the huge oaks when we turned into the yard at Kate and Rob Bryant’s house.

  At least a hundred Bryants and Averys had gathered under the trees behind the old white wooden farmhouse to spread a picnic dinner on one long table made of planks and sawhorses and draped in white sheets.

  Rob’s a Raleigh attorney. His brother is Dwight Avery Bryant, head of the detective unit at the Colleton County sheriff’s department, and their mother, Emily Wallace Bryant, is principal at nearby Zach Taylor High School. She’s a catbird: bright orange hair, bossy, talks ninety miles a minute, asks the most astonishingly personal questions, and is a yellow dog Democrat of the first water.

  As our nominal hostess, Miss Emily perched her infant step-grandson on her hip-at nine months old, Kate’s son Jake was currently the youngest member of the clan-and welcomed everybody, “especially Bo Poole, who, as y’all know, is running for sheriff again; and Deborah Knott, who�
�s going to make us a mighty fine judge if all y’all get out and vote as you should on Tuesday. Now neither one of them’s a Bryant or an Avery, but they are Democrats and that makes them kin in my book!”

  Barry Blackman asked the blessing, then the younger mothers in their flowery spring dresses moved in on the table to fix plates for. their children.

  I love family reunions, even when they’re somebody else’s family. I love listening to the old-timers reminisce about people dead fifty or a hundred years. I love watching flirty teenagers discover a cute third cousin whose voice has changed since the last time they saw him. And I particularly love it when the eight- to ten-year-olds stand in front of the family tree chart and find themselves down on the crowded bottom row, as if all those births and deaths and marriages took place all those long years ago just so the multiple branches could lead inexorably to their own names.

  Every family had brought a hamper of favorite food, and every square inch of the communal table was filled with heaping platters: fried chicken and pork chops, chicken pastry, and country ham; hot rolls and biscuits; corn, butterbeans, and tender new garden peas; a dozen different cakes and desserts, including pecan pie and chocolate seven-layer cake. Two wooden tubs sat at the end of the long table. One held sweet iced tea, the other homemade lemonade.

  I wanted some of everything.

  “Now you’ve got to win,” Dwight Bryant teased when I went back for a helping of fresh strawberry shortcake smothered in heavy cream. “You keep on eating like that and a judge’s loose gray robe’s going to be the only thing’ll fit you.”

  “Not that anybody’s counting or anything,” I said, “but didn’t I see four of Aunt Zell’s angel rolls on your plate? They may taste like air, but I’ve watched her make them. A whole pound of butter, my friend.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve had help,” he said, smiling at a sandy-haired little kid who grinned back and snitched another roll from Dwight’s plate.