Storm Track dk-7

by Margaret Maron

  * * *

  Jason Bullock hefted his athletic bag over his shoulder and paused in the doorway to watch his wife brush her long blonde hair. She had a trick of bending over and brushing it upside down so that it almost touched the floor, then she’d sit up and flip her head back so that her hair fell around her pretty heart-shaped face with a natural fluffiness.

  “See you later, then, hon. I’ll grab a hot dog at the field and be home around eight, eight-thirty.”

  “For the love of God, Jase! Don’t I mean any thing to you?” Lynn asked impatiently, speaking to his reflection in her mirror. She pushed her hair into the artfully tangled shape she wanted and set it in place with a cloud of perfumed hair spray. “I won’t be here later, remember? Antiquing with my sister? Her and me spending the night in a motel up around Danville? I can’t believe you—”

  “Only kidding,” he said. “You don’t think I’d really forget that I’m a bachelor on the prowl tonight, do you?” With his free hand, he stroked a mock mustache and gave her a wicked leer.

  “And don’t try to call me because we’re going to ramble till we get tired and then stop at the first motel we come to.”

  It pleased her when his leer was replaced by a proper expression of husbandly concern.

  “You’ll be careful, won’t you, honey? Don’t let Lurleen talk you into staying somewhere that’s not safe just because it’s cheap, okay?”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be safe. And I’ll call you soon as I’m checked in.”

  In the mirror, Lynn watched her husband leave. Not for the first time she wondered why she bothered to try and keep this marriage going. Except that Jason was going to be somebody in this state someday and she was going to be right there by his side. No way was she planning to wind up like her mother (after three husbands and five affairs, she was living on social security in a trailer park in Wake County) or Lurleen (only one husband but God alone knew how many lovers, one of which had left her with herpes and she was just lucky it wasn’t AIDS). Besides, she’d busted her buns working double shifts at the hospital while Jase got his law degree so they wouldn’t have a bunch of debt hanging over them when he started practicing. Now that the long grind was finally over, now that they could start thinking about a fancier house, a winter cruise, maybe even a trip to Hawaii, she wasn’t about to blow it.

  But that doesn’t mean I’ve got to keep putting my needs on hold, Lynn thought, absently caressing her smooth cheek. Jase used to be such a tiger in bed. This summer, between long hours at the firm and weekends at the ball field or volunteer fire department—“building contacts” was how he justified so much time away—all he wanted to do in bed most nights was sleep.

  Not her.

  She took a dainty black lace garter belt from her lingerie drawer and put it in her overnight case. Black hose and a push-up bra followed. She dug out a pair of strappy heels from the back of her closet and put those in, too. Panties? Why bother? You won’t have them on long enough to matter, she told herself with a little shiver of anticipation.

  She thought about calling Lurleen, but her sister was going to Norfolk this weekend and wouldn’t be home to answer the phone anyhow if Jase should call. Not that he would. He wasn’t imaginative enough to play the suspicious husband. And no point giving Lurleen another hold over her. She already knew too much.

  CHAPTER | 2

  The origin of a hurricane is not fully settled. Its accompanying phenomena, however, are significant to even the casual observer.

  “C’mon, Deb’rah, we’re one man short and what else you got to do this evening?” Dwight wheedled. “What’s-his-face didn’t change his mind and decide to come, did he?”

  Sometimes Dwight can be even more exasperating than one of my eleven brothers. At least they like Kidd and Kidd seems to like all of them. Dwight’s been the same as a brother my whole life—one of my bossier brothers, I might add—and he knows Kidd’s name as well as he knows mine, but he’ll never come right out and use it if he can help it. Don’t ask me why.

  Kidd Chapin’s a game warden down east, Dwight Bryant is Sheriff Bo Poole’s right-hand man and heads up Colleton County’s detective squad here in central North Carolina, so they’re both law enforcement agents and they both like to hunt and fish and tromp around in the woods. There’s no reason for them not to be friends. Nevertheless, even though they both deny any animosity, the two of them walk around each other as warily as two strange tomcats.

  “No, he hasn’t changed his mind,” I said, with just the right amount of resigned regret.

  Dwight would worry me like a dog at a rat hole if I gave him the least little suspicion of how sorry I’d been feeling for myself ever since Kidd called yesterday morning to say he couldn’t come spend this Labor Day weekend with me as we’d planned. Kidd lives in New Bern, a hundred miles away, and we’ve been lovers for over a year now. But let his teenage daughter Amber crook her little finger and he drops everything—including me—to run see what she wants.

  I know all about non-custodial angst. Not only do I see a lot of it when I sit domestic court, I’ve watched my own brothers struggle with their guilt. Hell, I even watch Dwight. Let Jonna call and say he can have Cal a day early, and what happens? Ten minutes after she hangs up, he’s rearranged the whole department’s schedule so he can head up I-85 to Virginia.

  All the same, knowing about something in theory and liking it in practice are two entirely different things, and I was getting awfully tired of watching Amber jerk the chain of the man who says he loves me, who says he wants to be with me.

  I brushed a strand of sandy blonde hair back from my face. It had bleached out this summer and felt like straw here under the torrid afternoon sun. When Dwight drove up in his truck, I’d been standing in the yard of my new house with a twenty-foot length of old zinc pipe in my hands.

  “Here,” I said, handing him the pipe. “Hold this and move back a couple of feet, would you?”

  “Why?” he asked, as he held it erect and moved to where I’d pointed. “What are you doing?”

  “Planning my landscape and I think I want a maple right about—stop!” I cast a critical eye on how the pipe’s shadow fell across my porch. “Right where you’re standing would be good. It’ll shade the whole porch in August.”

  Dwight snorted. “It’ll be twenty years before any tree’s tall as this pipe. Unless you buy one with some size on it ’stead of digging a sprout out of the woods?”

  Until the spring, my yard had been an open pasture with only a couple of widely scattered oaks and sycamores to shade a few of my daddy’s cows. None of those trees shaded the two-bedroom house I’d had built on a slight rise overlooking the long pond. (A house, I might add, that was supposed to give Kidd and me some privacy. A supposition, I might add, we’ve had too frigging few weekends to test out, thank you very much, Amber.)

  “I’ve already root-pruned six or eight waist-high dogwoods, three oaks and two ten-foot maples,” I told him as I marked the spot where he stood with a cement block left over from laying the foundation. “Robert’s going to take his front-end loader this fall and move them here for me. Want to come help me dig some five-dollar holes?”

  He smiled at that mention of my daddy’s favorite piece of planting advice: “Better to put a fifty-cent tree in a five-dollar hole than a five-dollar tree in a fifty-cent hole.”

  “Tell you what,” Dwight bargained. “You play second base for me this evening and I’ll come help you dig.”

  “Deal!” I said, before he could figure out that he’d just swapped half a Saturday of my time for at least two full Saturdays of his. “Give me ten minutes to wash my face and change into clean shorts. Make any difference what color shirt I wear?”

  Back when I was playing regularly, the closest we came to uniforms was trying to wear the same color tops.

  He turned around so that I could see JAILHOUSE GANG stencilled on the back of the red T-shirt that stretched tightly across his broad shoulders. (And yeah, long as
I was checking out his back, I took a good look at the way his white shorts fit his backside.) Dwight’s six three and built tall and solid like most of my brothers. Not bad-looking either. I can’t understand why some pretty woman hasn’t clicked on him and moved him on over to her home page before now. My sisters-in-law and I keep offering suggestions and he keeps sidestepping us.

  “I brought you a shirt,” he said, reaching into his truck for one like his.

  I had to laugh as I took it from him. “Pretty sure I’d come, weren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “Been a couple of years since you played. Thought you might enjoy it for a change.”

  “So who’re we playing?” I asked as I headed up the steps, already unbuttoning my sweat-drenched shirt as I went inside.

  “Your old team.” Dwight followed me as far as the kitchen, where he helped himself to a glass of iced tea from my refrigerator.

  “The Civil Suits?” I asked through my open bedroom door as I stepped out of my dirty shorts and pulled a pair of clean white ones from my dresser drawer. There were enough law firms clustered around the courthouse in Dobbs to field a fairly decent team and I’d been right out there with them till I was appointed to the district court bench and decided I probably ought to step back from too much fraternization with attorneys I’d have to be ruling on. “They as good as they used to be?”

  “Tied with us for third place,” he drawled. “Today’s the playoff. You still got your glove or do we need to borrow one?”

  “I not only have it, I can even tell you where it is,” I bragged. My sports gear was in one of the last boxes I’d hauled over to my new garage from Aunt Zell’s house, where I’d lived from the time I graduated law school till this summer.

  I found myself a red ribbon, and while I tied my hair in a ponytail to get it up off my neck, Dwight spent a few minutes rubbing neat’s-foot oil into my glove. The leather wasn’t very stiff. Half the time when they come over to swim in the pond, my teenage nieces and nephews wind up dragging out balls and bats. Just like their daddies—any excuse to play whatever ball’s in season—so my glove stays soft and supple.

  * * *

  I poured myself a plastic cup of iced tea and sipped on it as we drove over to Dobbs in Dwight’s pickup. He was going to spend the night at his mother’s house out from Cotton Grove and since neither of us had plans for later that night, there was no point taking two vehicles.

  Our county softball league’s a pretty loosey-goosey operation: slow pitch, a tenth player at short field, flexible substitutions. It’s played more for laughs and bragging rights than diehard competition because the season sort of peters out at the end of summer when so many people take off for one last weekend at the mountains or the coast. Instead of a regulation field, we play on the new middle school’s little league field where baselines are shorter.

  For once, Colleton County’s planners had tipped a hat to environmental concerns and hadn’t bulldozed off all the trees and bushes when they built the new school. They’d left a thick buffer between the school grounds and a commercial zone on the bypass that lies north of the running track. Mature oaks flourished amid the parking spaces and a bushy stand of cedars separated the parking lot from the playing field.

  Dwight’s team, the Jailhouse Gang, are members of the Sheriff’s Department, a couple of town police officers, a magistrate and some of the clerks from the Register of Deeds’s office.

  The Civil Suits are all attorneys with a couple of athletic paralegals thrown in, and sure enough, Portland Brewer called to me as I was getting out of Dwight’s truck.

  “Hey, Deborah! Whatcha doing in that ugly red shirt?”

  Portland’s my height, a little thinner, and her wiry black hair is so curly she has to wear it in a poodle cut that makes her look remarkably like Julia Lee’s CoCo. We’ve been good friends ever since we got kicked out of the Sweetwater Junior Girls Sunday School Class one Sunday a million years ago when we were eight. Her Uncle Ash is married to my Aunt Zell, which also makes us first cousins by marriage.

  Back when I was on the verge of messing up my life for good, I noticed that Portland was the only one of the old gang who seemed to be loving her work. It wasn’t that I had this huge burning desire to practice law. No, it was more like deciding that if she could ace law school, so could I. She snorts at the idea of being my role model, but I laugh and tell her I’m just grateful she wasn’t happily dealing dope back then or no telling where we’d’ve both wound up.

  “Cool shirts,” I said when Dwight and I caught up with her and her husband Avery, who’s also her partner in their own law firm.

  Their T-shirts didn’t have the team’s name on the back, but they were printed to look like black-tie dinner jackets, if you can picture dinner jackets with short sleeves. Black shorts completed an appearance of wacky formality that was a little disconcerting when they joined us down the sidelines for throwing and catching practice while a team from the fire department and faculty members from the county schools battled it out on the field.

  I was rusty with my first few throws, but it’s like riding a bicycle. Before long, I was zinging them into Dwight’s glove just like old times when I was a tagalong tomboy and he’d drop by to play ball with my brothers.

  I was soon just as hot and sweaty as back then, too, and more than ready to take a break when someone showed up with the team’s drink cooler.

  Quite a few people had come to play and were either waiting to start or still hanging around after their own games. There were also forty or fifty legitimate spectators in the stands, and among the kids who stood with their noses to the wire behind home plate, I recognized Ralph Freeman’s son Stan.

  Ralph was called to preach at one of the black churches this past spring, but Balm of Gilead is in the midst of a major building program and membership drive and they can’t afford to pay him a full-time minister’s salary yet. In addition to his pastoral duties, he was going to be teaching here at the Dobbs middle school, and I wasn’t surprised to see him out on the field with other Colleton County teachers.

  “Who’s ahead?” I asked Stan. “And what inning is it anyhow?”

  “Dad’s team’s up by six,” he said with a smile as wide as Ralph’s. “Bottom of the fifth.”

  So it’d be another two innings before our game started, and the way both pitchers were getting hammered, it could be six or six-thirty.

  By now, the westering sun sat on a line of thin gray heat clouds like a fat red tomato on a shelf, a swollen overripe tomato going soft around the edges. All this heat and humidity made it look three times larger than usual against a gunmetal gray sky. The air was saturated with a warm dampness. Any more and it’d be raining. A typical summer evening in North Carolina.

  Portland’s team and ours clustered loosely on the bleachers near third base and we sounded like a PBS fund-raiser the way all the pagers and cell phones kept going off. I hadn’t brought either with me since I had no underlings and was no longer subject to the calls of clients, but Dwight had to borrow Portland’s phone twice to respond to his beeper. Both were minor procedural matters.

  Jason Bullock was on the row behind me and his phone went off almost in my ear. Nice-looking guy in an average sort of way. Mid-twenties. Brown hair with an unruly cowlick on the crown. He’s so new to the bar that the ink on his license is barely dry. He’s only argued in front of me four or five times. Seems pretty sharp. Certainly sharp enough that Portland and Avery had taken him on as a junior associate. I didn’t know his marital status, but I figured he was talking to either his wife or live-in.

  I heard him say, “Hey, honey. Yanceyville? Already? You must’ve made good time. Didn’t pick up another speeding ticket, did you? . . . No, looks like our game’s going to run late. We haven’t even started yet, so I’ll be here at least another two hours. . . . Okay, honey. Any idea what time you’ll be home tomorrow? . . . Yeah, okay. Love you, too. . . . Lynn? Lynn?”

  Beside me, Portland turned around to ask, “Somet
hing wrong?”

  “Not really. She hung up before I thought to ask her what motel she’s at. She and her sister have gone antiquing up near the Virginia border.”

  “I didn’t realize Lynn was interested in antiques,” said Portland, who’d rather poke through junk stores and flea markets than eat.

  “Yeah, she’d go every weekend if she could. She loves pretty things and God knows she’s earned the right to have them. Not that she buys much yet. But she says she’s educating her eye for when we can afford the real things.”

  “Take more than a few antique stores to educate that eye,” Portland murmured in my ear when Bullock got up to stretch his legs.

  I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, but for once Portland looked immediately sorry she’d been catty.

  “Jason’s smart and works hard,” she said. “Lynn, too, for that matter. He’ll probably be a full partner someday.”

  In other words, it’s not nice to be snide about a potential partner’s wife.

  “Why are all the cute ones already married?” sighed one of the Deeds clerks on the row in front of us as she watched Bullock walk toward the concession stand.

  “Because they get snagged early by the trashy girls who put out,” said her friend.

  “Trashy?” I silently mouthed to Portland, but she just shook her head and said, “So where’s Kidd? I thought he was coming this weekend.”

  “Me, too.”

  She immediately picked up on my tone. “Y’all didn’t have a fight, did you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on, sugar. Tell momma.”

  So we moved up and back a few bleacher rows away from the others where we wouldn’t be overheard and I spent the next half-hour unloading about Amber and how she seemed to be trying to sabotage my relationship with Kidd.

  “Well, of course she is,” Portland said. “You’re a threat to the status quo. She’s what—sixteen? Seventeen?”

  “Sixteen in October.”

  “Give her till Christmas. Once she gets her driver’s license and a taste of freedom, she’ll be more interested in boys than her father.”