I didn’t know until then how much I had cared, how much I wanted to deliver to Martin Malloy what he had requested. I acted without thinking. First, I saw the tracing paper on the floor with new eyes, with eyes that were looking at a mirror, then I took in the writing on the desk, and then I acted. I quickly moved behind her and wrenched open a drawer. She was too surprised to prevent me, and we both watched as it tumbled to the floor, spilling its contents. She flung herself on them, but too late to stop me from confirming what I had already guessed.
“Fraud,” I said. “That’s what it is.”
From the floor she looked up at me, surrounded by small pieces of plastic, her eyes flashing anger. I remembered the social worker’s bag, and the visit that she had just paid, and I remembered the goods in the kitchen. It made sense.
“Credit card fraud,” I said, thinking out loud. “The tracing paper is how you copy the signatures.”
She was down but not out, no longer vulnerable, in a way. She glared up at me. “So what are you going to do about it?” she shot.
I didn’t answer and she didn’t need me to.
“Nothing,” she said, “You’re the do-gooder type, aren’t you? I should know, I’ve tried that game. It gets you nowhere.”
“Except the occasional thanks,” I commented.
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “Thanks never buttered any bread. I’ve met enough Martin Malloys in my time, I don’t need to meet any more. A casualty of the system, that’s all he is, a well-meaning idiot without a chance. He even gave me tips on how to forge signatures, until he realized that my interest was more than academic. Then he had the cheek to lecture me, as if I was the one who had been jailed. Well, I’ve served my own kind of time, I’m free now. I don’t owe anybody anything; I don’t owe Martin Malloy the time of day. I can tell you …”
I knew she was right; she could have told me. She looked set to go on for a good few hours. I didn’t need to listen. I walked out of the room, through the hall, opened the front door, and stepped into the bright sunshine. I left the door open, hoping that some of the air would flow in. I wasn’t optimistic.
Martin Malloy turned up two days later. I was in my office waiting for him. I had nothing else to do but wait, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling of uselessness that had settled on me ever since I’d met Thelma.
I’d left the door open and he didn’t bother to ring the bell this time. He just arrived in my office, a huge man with a surprisingly light tread.
“Did you find her?” he asked.
I nodded.
When he smiled, his face opened up like an exotic flower that the scar did nothing to spoil. “When can we meet?” he asked.
I stood up. “She doesn’t want to see you,” I said.
I don’t know what I expected-fury, sorrow, violence even, but all I got was a vague look of disappointment. He nodded and made as if he were about to go. But then he changed his mind.
“Is Thelma all right?” he asked.
Wrong-footed, I didn’t know how to answer. I looked into those warm brown eyes and I shivered. I remembered the sight of that smile, and I knew that I didn’t want to disappoint it
“She’s fine,” I lied. “Just busy.”
I should have known better: Malloy was no fool.
“Don’t try and kid me,” he said, and his voice was as hard as his body. “Don’t treat me like a child.”
I sat down. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have pretended. Thelma is far from fine. She’s involved in some kind of credit card fiddle,” I paused. “And I’m not sure she’s doing too well.” I finished quickly, feeling somehow that I had betrayed someone. I looked away, out the window and at the faultless blue sky.
“Anything I could do to help?” he asked. “She helped me, you know.” His voice was sad.
I shook my head and looked at him again. “I’m not sure-” I started.
But he was lost in his own thoughts, and he spoke them out loud. “I knew it was something stupid,” he said. “I tried to tell her that people like us just don’t win. I thought if I was no longer behind bars, she would listen to me.”
I remembered what Thelma had said about him, and I couldn’t help myself. “She’s a bitch,” I snapped. “Beyond saving.”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “She’s just confused. Nobody’s beyond saving.”
I nodded in recognition of sentiment rather than in agreement with the meaning. I reached into my desk and pulled out his money, the money that I had not yet touched.
“It didn’t take me long,” I said, “You’re due some back.”
He looked at me and smiled, but his smile was no longer open. “Keep it,” he said airily. “There’s plenty more where that came from. Payment for keeping my trap shut. Guilt money for doing hard time.” His face softened. “I knew Thelma was desperate,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to thank her. I thought if somebody, anybody, told her how much she’d done for them, it might give her hope. I guess I was too late.”
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?
He hadn’t finished.
“Did you get somebody to look for me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“My landlord chucked me out,” he said. “You should have known nobody wants to house a convict. Especially one who looks like me. Why did you do it?”
I felt I owed him the truth and so I gave it to him. “Because I wasn’t sure you really existed,” I said.
He nodded, to himself rather than me. “I feel sorry for your type, you know,” he said, again almost as if to himself. “I came to literature late, but there’s one thing I can do that you can’t. I can distinguish between fact and fiction.”
I shrugged and I looked at him, at this huge man, dressed this time in gold threads that shimmered when he moved. I smiled. “It’s not always easy,” I said.
He saw my look and he returned my smile. He strode over to me, enfolded one of my hands in his big paws, and clasped it, “Nice to have met you, Kate Baeier,” he said. He let go of my hand. “Can I give you one last piece of advice?”
“How can I refuse?”
“Open the windows,” he said. “Let the sun shine in. Breathe the air.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged and looked at me, “A balance sheet isn’t everything,” he said. “I should know, I’m good at numbers. Business will pick up. You’re good at your job-you found Thelma, didn’t you?”
He left the room as quietly as he had arrived. I climbed on my chair so I could watch him in the street, but somehow I missed his exit.
I was in the right position, so I took his advice.
I opened the windows.
It was difficult, but I managed.
MARGARET MARON’s books featuring the New York Police Department’s Sigrid Harald are both complex mysteries and intense character studies. Harald appears in over half a dozen books to date, including such notable works as Corpus Christmas and One Coffee With. Ms. Maron lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT
Margaret Maron
“And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”
An inaudible ripple of cognizance swept through the congregation as the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church paused in his reading of the text and beamed down at us.
I was seated on the aisle near the front of the church, and when Barry Blackman’s eyes met mine, I put a modest smile on my face, then tilted my head in ladylike acknowledgment of the pretty compliment he was paying me by his choice of subject for this morning’s sermon. A nice man but hardly Christianity’s most original preacher. I’d announced my candidacy back in December, so this wasn’t the first time I’d heard that particular text, and my response had become almost automatic.
He lowered his eyes to the huge Bible and continued to read aloud, “And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment.”
/> From your mouth to God’s ear, Barry, I thought.
Eight years of courtroom experience let me listen to the sermon with an outward show of close attention while inwardly my mind jumped on and off a dozen trains of thought. I wondered, without really caring, if Barry was still the terrific kisser he’d been the summer after ninth grade when we both drove tractors for my oldest brother during tobacco-barning season.
There was an S curve between the barns and the back fields where the lane dipped past a stream and cut through a stand of tulip poplars and sweetgum trees. Our timing wasn’t good enough to hit every trip, but at least two or three times a day it’d work out that we passed each other there in the shady coolness, one on the way out to the field with empty drags, the other headed back to the barn with drags full of heavy green tobacco leaves.
Nobody seemed to notice that I occasionally returned to the barn more flushed beneath the bill of my baseball cap than even the August sun would merit, although I did have to endure some teasing one day when a smear of tobacco tar appeared on my pink T-shirt right over my left breast. “Looks like somebody tried to grab a handful,” my sister-in-law grinned.
I muttered something about the tractor’s tar-gummy steering wheel, but I changed shirts at lunchtime and for the rest of the summer I wore the darkest T-shirts in my dresser drawer.
Now Barry Blackman was a preacher man running to fat, the father of two little boys and a new baby girl, while Deborah Knott was a still-single attorney running for a seat on the court bench, a seat being vacated against his will by old Harrison Hobart, who occasionally fell asleep these days while charging his own juries.
As Barry drew parallels between Old Testament Israel and modem Colleton County, I plotted election strategy. After the service, I’d do a little schmoozing among the congregation-
Strike “schmoozing,” my subconscious stipulated sternly, and I was stricken myself to realize that Lev Schuster’s Yiddish phrases continued to infect my vocabulary. Here in rural North Carolina schmoozing’s still called socializing, and I’d better not forget it before the primary. I pushed away errant thoughts of Lev and concentrated on lunch at Beulah’s. For that matter, where was Beulah and why weren’t she and J.C. seated there beside me?
Beulah had been my mother’s dearest friend, and her daughter-in-law, Helen, is president of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They were sponsoring a meet-the-candidates reception at four o’clock in the fellowship hall of a nearby Presbyterian church, and three of the four men running for Hobart’s seat would be there too. (The fourth was finishing up the community service old Hobart had imposed in lieu of a fine for driving while impaired, but he really didn’t expect to win many MADD votes anyhow.)
Barry’s sermon drew to an end just a hair short of equating a vote for Deborah Knott as a vote for Jesus Christ. The piano swung into the opening chords of “Just as I Am,” and the congregation stood to sing all five verses. Happily, no one accepted the hymn’s invitation to be saved that morning, and after a short closing prayer we were dismissed.
I’m not a member at Bethel, but I’d been a frequent visitor from the month I was born; so I got lots of hugs and howdies and promises of loyal support when the primary rolled around. I hugged and howdied right back and thanked them kindly, all the time edging toward my car.
It was starting to bother me that neither Beulah nor J.C. had come to church. Then Miss Callie Ogburn hailed me from the side door, talking sixty to the yard as she bustled across the grass.
“Beulah called me up first thing this morning and said tell you about J.C. and for you to come on anyhow. She phoned all over creation last night trying to let you know she’s still expecting you to come for dinner.”
That explained all those abortive clicks on my answering machine. Beulah was another of my parents’ generation who wouldn’t talk to a tape. I waited till Miss Callie ran out of breath, then asked her what it was Beulah wanted to tell me about J.C.
“He fell off the tractor and broke his leg yesterday, and he’s not used to the crutches yet, so Beulah didn’t feel like she ought to leave him this morning. You know how she spoils him.”
I did. J.C. was Beulah’s older brother, and he’d lived with her and her husband Sam almost from the day they were married more than forty years ago. J.C. was a born bachelor, and except for the war years when he worked as a carpenter’s helper at an air base over in Goldsboro, he’d never had much ambition beyond helping Sam farm. Sam always said J.C. wasn’t much of a leader but he was a damn good follower and earned every penny of his share of the crop profits.
Although I’d called them Cousin Beulah and Cousin Sam till I was old enough to drop the courtesy title, strictly speaking, only Sam Johnson was blood kin. But Beulah and my mother had been close friends since childhood, and Beulah’s two children fit into the age spaces around my older brothers, which was why we’d spent so many Sundays at Bethel Baptist.
When Sam died seven or eight years ago, Sammy Junior took over, and J.C. still helped out even though he’d slowed down right much. At least, J.C. called it right much. I could only hope I’d feel like working half days on a tractor when I reached seventy-two.
* * *
Five minutes after saying good-bye to Miss Callie, I was turning off the paved road into the sandy lane that ran past the Johnson home place. The doors there were closed and none of their three cars were in the yard, but Helen’s Methodist and I’d heard Beulah mention the long-winded new preacher at her daughter-in-law’s church.
Helen and Sammy Junior had remodeled and painted the shabby old two-story wooden farmhouse after old Mrs. Johnson died, and it was a handsome place these days: gleaming white aluminum siding and dark blue shutters, sitting in a shady grove of hundred-year-old white oaks.
Beulah’s brick house-even after forty years, everyone in the family still calls it the “new house”-was farther down the lane and couldn’t be seen from the road or the home place.
My car topped the low ridge that gave both generations their privacy, then swooped down toward a sluggish creek that had been dredged out into a nice-size irrigation pond beyond the house. As newlyweds, Sam and Beulah had planted pecans on each side of the lane, and mature nut trees now met in a tall arch.
The house itself was rooted in its own grove of pecans and oaks, with underplantings of dogwoods, crepe myrtles, red-buds, and flowering pears. Pink and white azaleas lined the foundation all around. On this warm day in late April, the place was a color illustration out of Southern Living. I pulled up under a chinaball tree by the back porch and tapped my horn, expecting to see Beulah appear at the screen door with her hands full of biscuit dough and an ample print apron protecting her Sunday dress against flour smudges.
A smell of burning paper registered oddly as I stepped from the car. It wasn’t cool enough for a fire, and no one on this farm would break the fourth commandment by burning trash on the Sabbath.
There was no sign of Beulah when I crossed the wide planks of the wooden porch and called through the screen, but the kitchen was redolent of baking ham. J.C.’s old hound dog crawled out from under the back steps and wagged his tail at me hopefully. The screen door was unhooked, and the inner door stood wide.
“Beulah?” I called again, “J.C.?”
No answer. Yet her Buick and J.C.’s Ford pickup were both parked under the barn shelter at the rear of the yard.
The kitchen, dining room, and den ran together in one large L-shaped space, and when a quick glance into the formal, seldom-used living room revealed no one there either, I crossed to the stairs in the center hall. Through an open door at the far end of the hall, I could see into Donna Sue’s old bedroom, now the guest room.
The covers on the guest bed had been straightened, but the spread was folded down neatly and pillows were piled on top of the rumpled quilt as if J.C. had rested there after Beulah made the bed. He wouldn’t be able to use the stairs until his leg mended, so he’d probably moved in here for the duration
. A stack of Field and Stream magazines and an open pack of his menthol cigarettes on the nightstand supported my hypothesis.
The house remained silent as I mounted the stairs.
“Anybody home?”
Beulah’s bedroom was deserted and as immaculate as downstairs except for the desk. She and Sam had devoted a corner of their bedroom to the paper work connected with the farm, Although Sammy Junior did most of the farm records now on a computer over at his house, Beulah had kept the oak desk. One of my own document binders lay on its otherwise bare top. I’d drawn up her new will less than a month ago and had brought it out to her myself in this very same binder, I lifted the cover. The holographic distribution of small personal keepsakes she had insisted on was still there, but the will itself was missing.
For the first time since I’d entered this quiet house, I felt a small chill of foreboding,
Sammy Junior’s old bedroom had been turned into a sewing room, and it was as empty as the bathroom. Ditto J.C.’s. As a child I’d had the run of every room in the house except this one, so I’d never entered it alone.
From the doorway, it looked like a rerun of the others: everything vacuumed and polished and tidy; but when I stepped inside, I saw the bottom drawer of the wide mahogany dresser open. Inside were various folders secured by brown cords, bundles of tax returns, account ledgers, bank statements, and two large flat candy boxes, which I knew held old family snapshots. More papers and folders were loosely stacked on the floor beside a low footstool, as if someone had sat there to sort through the drawer and had then been interrupted before the task was finished. Beulah would never leave a clutter like that.
Thoroughly puzzled, I went back down to the kitchen. The ham had been in the oven at least a half hour too long, so I turned it off and left the door cracked. The top burners were off, but each held a pot of cooked vegetables, still quite hot. Wherever Beulah was, she hadn’t been gone very long.
Year round, she and J.C. and Sam, too, when he was alive, loved to walk the land, and if they weren’t expecting company, it wasn’t unusual to find them out at the pond or down in the woods. But with me invited for Sunday dinner along with Sammy Junior and Helen and their three teenagers? And with J.C.’s broken leg?
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