Winter's Child

by Margaret Maron

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

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

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

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

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

  No birth control pills, no man’s razor.

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

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

  “Did she let Cal come home with you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “She must have changed.”

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

  “Nothing yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  C H A P T E R

  6

  Fabulous tales are not composed without reason.

  —Theophrastus

  Friday afternoon, 21 January

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Anybody in particular?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But his wife is Mexican,” said Jamison.

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

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

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

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

  There was a sour note in his voice.

  “You see him yesterday?”

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

  “What happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

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

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

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

  What’s he done?”

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

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

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

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

  “Name two,” his sister muttered.

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

  “I said, especially you, Ma.”

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

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

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

  She gave a crooked smile. “Happened last weekend.

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

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

  “Did he say who he thought did it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I doubt it. Sheriff Poole around?”

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

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

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

  C H A P T E R

  7

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

  —Theophrastus

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

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

  But to do it without a word to Dwight?

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

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

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

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

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

  Cal he would always talk about.

  Current entanglements? He didn’t kiss and tell.

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

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

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

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

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