Winter's Child

by Margaret Maron

  C H A P T E R

  18

  It is always possible to find a [local] observer, and the signslearnt from such persons are the most trustworthy.

  —Theophrastus

  “You must be Paul,” I said, when I finally untan-

  gled myself from Dwight’s welcoming arms.

  Chief Radcliff had a grin as big as Virginia on his broad face as he shook my hand. “And I’m guessing you’re Deborah?”

  “Any word about Cal?” I asked.

  His smile disappeared and a quick glance at Dwight’s face gave me the answer.

  “What about Jonna’s killer?”

  “Not yet,” the police chief said grimly.

  “Driving up, I kept thinking that Cal wouldn’t have gone with just anyone, would he, Dwight? Is it possible that Jonna felt threatened? She didn’t know you were coming up, so did she maybe send someone he trusted—someone she trusted—to take him and keep him safe?”

  “Would—could—might—we just don’t know!” he said, worry and frustration in every breath he took.

  “That’s what’s driving me nuts. I want to think whoever has him believes they’re doing what Jonna would want, but who the hell would it be? And why wait so long to take him? Jonna disappeared Thursday morning. Cal wasn’t taken till yesterday afternoon around two-thirty.”

  As he spoke, he glanced up at the clock over Paul Radcliff’s door. It was a couple of minutes before five, which gave him something less serious to worry about. “I thought you were driving, not flying.”

  “Flying’s a waste of time,” I said, happy to distract him, even if it meant getting growled at. “If I’d tried to fly, I’d probably be touching down at the Roanoke air-port about now and it’d be another two hours to rent a car and drive back down here. Don’t fuss, Dwight. The roads were in good shape.”

  In truth, the interstates had been just fine. Icy second-ary roads had probably produced enough fender benders to keep the commonwealth’s troopers too busy to worry about free-flowing traffic, so I hadn’t had to lose time wheedling my way out of any tickets. It wasn’t until I took the Shaysville exit that things got a little hairy, and even then I only fishtailed once. Okay, twice if you count sliding in beside Dwight’s truck, but that was because I was almost past before I recognized it and I’d braked too sharply.

  “I don’t suppose you stopped for food,” he said, offering me the rest of his sandwich.

  “Or anything else,” I admitted. “So point me to a restroom first.”

  When I came back, refreshed, I wasn’t hungry but I welcomed the mug of hot coffee Paul had poured for me.

  “I called Sandy,” he said, “and she told me that if I didn’t bring both of y’all home with me, I didn’t need to come either.”

  They brought me up to speed on everything they’d learned since I’d spoken to Dwight earlier, including the unexpected news that Jonna occasionally took antidepressants, which may have been what last night’s intruder was after.

  Shortly before six, as I turned to ask Dwight what our plans were, Paul’s phone rang. He listened intently, but with his hand over the receiver, mouthed, “Nick Lewes.”

  I looked at Dwight and he murmured, “Special agent, Virginia state police.”

  “What about the boy?” Paul asked.

  A moment later, he replaced the phone on the hook and gave us a regretful look. “No word on Cal, but they’ve had a call about the ME’s preliminary findings. Jonna’s body was pretty much frozen solid, so the usual indica-tors don’t help. What did help was that you could tell them when and what she had for breakfast Thursday, because that was her last meal. They’re thinking she was shot no more than four to six hours later and that death would have been instantaneous.”

  “While I was at work down home,” Dwight said.

  I squeezed his hand. We could tell each other forever that he wasn’t really a suspect, but it was good to have it proved.

  “Also, what lividity there is would indicate that she hasn’t been moved.”

  “Probably talked her into meeting somewhere close to the junkyard and forced her to drive there, then walked out,” Dwight speculated.

  “Lewes said they were questioning the owner again.”

  “Good.” Dwight stood and pulled me to my feet.

  “We’ll get settled in and be over around seven, okay?”

  “You’re staying at the house?” Paul asked with a side-long glance at me.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Deb’rah?” Clearly he hadn’t given this much thought and I had assumed we’d go to a motel. “If Cal did get away, that’s where he’d run.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” I lied.

  I seemed to be doing a lot of that today.

  “Great. Just let me check in with Bo and we’ll be on our way.”

  Checking in with Bo proved to be more complicated than he’d expected. No sooner did Dwight identify himself than he fell silent, absorbed by whatever Sheriff Bowman Poole had to tell him.

  “Jesus H, Bo!” he exclaimed at last. “Is she okay? . . .

  Good. Did they find the forty-five? . . . Tell her to call as soon as they know more . . . Yeah, thanks, Bo.”

  “What?” I asked as soon as he hung up.

  “They got Rouse’s killer,” he said. “He’s the guy that was shot in his pickup Thursday night that I told you about,” he reminded Paul, who nodded. “Some soldier out of Fort Bragg, just back from Iraq. He found out that his wife and Rouse were getting it on while he was gone.

  My people went down to Makely to question her—

  Richards and McLamb,” he told me in an aside. “Soon as the guy spotted them, he went ballistic. Literally. Started shooting at them. Killed two neighbors who tried to break it up. They called in reinforcements. A SWAT team.

  SBI. The works. By the time the smoke cleared, the soldier was dead, Richards was winged, and they found the wife’s body on the living room couch. Dead at least twelve hours.”

  “Damn!” said Paul.

  “What about Richards?” I asked.

  “Bo says the bullet just nicked her in the side. She’s a gutsy woman. Wasn’t going to go get it stitched till Bo ordered her to.”

  “Well, at least that’s one thing off your plate,” Paul said.

  The slushy mix of rain and snow had finally quit falling, but the wet streets were starting to freeze when I followed Dwight’s truck through Shaysville, which looked to be somewhere between Cotton Grove and Dobbs in size. In the residential section, streetlights on alternate corners shone through the leafless trees. Jonna’s house was a story-and-a-half bungalow, probably built in the late fifties or early sixties. The evergreen foundation plantings were precisely clipped into green balls and tri-angles. Two dogwoods and a maple stood in the small front yard. The porch was narrow, yet deep enough to shelter three or four people.

  We parked on the street out front because a Virginia crime scene van (they call theirs an evidence truck) was parked in the side driveway in front of an unmarked cruiser with permanent Virginia plates, and it looked as if the four agents were about to leave when we arrived.

  “Don’t crack wise on their names,” Dwight muttered as two of the men approached us; and yes, Lewes and Clark was an amusing combo, but I was too brain-dead from the drive to think of an original comment when he introduced me, and I was sure they’d probably heard all the dumb ones.

  We made polite noises at each other, then Lewes looked at us with small sharp eyes. “You heard about the probable time of death?”

  Dwight nodded. “But what about my son? Any sightings? Any calls?”

  “Sorry, Bryant. Nothing substantial yet.”

  “Turn up any leads in the house?”

  “Not really,” they said vaguely. “What about you?”

  He told them about Jonna’s bouts of depression and that her cousin suggested that she might have been taking antidepressants. “But that’s probably what her doctor told you, right?”

  “W
rong,” Clark said. “He hasn’t prescribed anything like that in over five years.” He moved away toward his car.

  “See you tomorrow?” asked Dwight.

  “Probably,” said Lewes, following his partner. “Good night, Judge.”

  “How does he know I’m a judge?” I asked as we carried our suitcases into the house. Dwight had introduced me merely as “my wife.”

  “Probably the same way you figured out how to get to Shaysville,” he said wearily.

  “He Googled you?”

  “Quicker than going through channels.”

  We set our bags in the entryway and I looked around while Dwight switched on lights and turned up the heat.

  Jonna’s taste seemed to have run to genteel Old South: drop-leaf side tables, brass candlesticks, an old hand-pieced patchwork quilt used as a wall hanging, lots of polished mahogany. Most were reproductions of antique pieces, though no doubt some of them would turn out to 16 be authentic. Old but still beautiful oriental area rugs lay atop wall-to-wall carpeting.

  A framed sampler hung opposite the quilt. The linen was tattered and badly foxed and the embroidery was so faded that I had trouble reading that it had been made in 1856 by “Eliz. Morrow. Age 10 yrs. 7 mos.”

  “That’s new since my time,” said Dwight, reading over my shoulder. “I bet she’s the ghost.”

  “Ghost?”

  “At the Morrow House, where Jonna worked. It’s supposed to have the ghost of one of the Morrow daughters, who died of a broken heart during the Civil War.” He put his arms around me and, in an effort to ease our fear and tension over Cal, said, “Would you die of a broken heart if I got shot?”

  I didn’t want to joke about something like that. Instead, I turned in his arms and let my lips meet his. His jacket was unzipped and I slid my arms inside to feel the warmth of his body as we kissed again. Only thirty-six hours since he left yesterday morning, yet it felt as if we’d been apart for weeks.

  He kissed me again and said, “I’m glad you came.”

  Before we could get into the specifics of just how glad we were to see each other, I heard a sharp bark from deeper in the house.

  “Bandit,” Dwight said. “I’d better let him out.”

  I tagged along past the dining room (Sheraton table, centerpiece of artificial fruit, lyre-back chairs, glass-fronted china cabinet, two oil portraits), through the kitchen (corner breakfast table, dated oak cabinets, standard appliances), out to the utility room (usual coat hooks, washer, dryer, closed cabinets). The dog was cute—a small terrier with brown eye patches that did look a bit like a bandit’s mask. Dwight told me that he was only a year old and lived in this large wire crate whenever Jonna and Cal were both away. He barked at me a couple of times, then wiggled his little docked tail to show he really didn’t mean it.

  Dwight let him out into the fenced backyard and kept the door open for me. “Come meet one of the neighbors.”

  We walked across the frozen ground and I saw a white-haired man sitting at the window of the house next door with a dim reading lamp over his shoulder. Dwight gestured for him to open the window. “Mr. Carlton, this is my wife. She came up to help us look for Cal.”

  “A pleasure, ma’am,” he said with old-fashioned cour-tesy. “Although a sad occasion.”

  “Mr. Carlton’s keeping an eye on the house in case Cal comes back or anything odd happens.”

  “That’s very kind,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “No bother. This is where I usually sit to read anyhow.”

  It was too cold for an extended chat through an open window so we followed Bandit back inside, where Dwight discovered that his hands were black from the fingerprint powder left on the doorknob. He picked up the duffel bag I’d packed for him and announced that he was going to take a shower and change into fresh clothes.

  There was a powder room off the entry hall and a full bath that serviced both bedrooms above.

  I followed him upstairs to Cal’s room with its single twin bed, and that’s when Dwight finally realized that yes, Houston, we did have a problem.

  “I guess you’re not going to want us to sleep in Jonna’s room, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s okay. You can have Cal’s bed and I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “I don’t suppose it opens up?”

  He gave me a blank look.

  “You take your shower. I’ll check.”

  While Bandit sat outside the bathroom door, I went down to lift one of the sofa cushions and discovered that we were in luck. There were sheets and extra blankets in the linen closet upstairs. Only one extra pillow, though, so I grabbed Cal’s as well.

  I tried not to let myself dwell on his room—the boyish treasures, the books, the posters, the school papers on his desk, the once loved, outgrown teddy bear on a bottom shelf. My heart turned over, though, when I caught sight of a champagne cork on his nightstand and realized he had kept a souvenir from our wedding last month.

  Unlike many children of divorce, Cal had no illusions that his parents would ever get back together. They had separated before he was a year old, so he had no memory of Dwight as part of a threesome. With his base in Virginia secure with Jonna, he had been okay with our marriage and seemed ready to fit me into his North Carolina family. But now that Jonna was gone? Just let us get himback safely and I’ll do whatever has to be done, I promised.

  Pushing down my fears, I busied myself with the task at hand. The coffee table and a couple of chairs had to be shifted before I could open up the couch. Oddly enough, it already had sheets and a blanket in place, and I saw a short dark hair where the white sheet had been folded back over the top of the blanket. I knew Jonna had worn her hair long. Had her guest been a man or a woman? I pulled the sheet back and saw another short dark hair.

  And pulling back the sheet also revealed that whoever slept here last had used a musky perfume with floral over-tones. Something sweet. Not magnolia or roses. Honeysuckle? Gardenias? It was too faint to be certain.

  So, Jonna, I thought. You don’t change the sheets afteran overnight guest? And here I’d been under the impression that she was a neat freak.

  I stripped the mattress, stuck the used sheets in the washer, and by the time Dwight came downstairs, had made it up with fresh sheets and blankets, ready for us to crawl into when we got back from Paul’s.

  From what I had seen so far, Jonna’s taste in decor was unadventurous and a little too girly, but the overall effect was attractive enough, and certainly in keeping with someone whose ancestors had founded the town.

  Nevertheless, the whole house made me uncomfortable as hell. Its owner was dead and I had no right to be here, looking at her things, making judgment calls on her taste and intelligence or level of cleanliness. Dwight is a good detective, but men simply do not look at houses the same way women do. I want our marriage to work and I didn’t want to start comparing what his marriage to her must have been like. And although I believe him when he says he didn’t love her at the end, he must have loved her at the beginning, so what sort of woman had she actually been?

  No way would I ever ask Dwight. Not when there were others I could question.

  “Have you spoken to any of Jonna’s friends yet?” I asked as we drove over to Paul Radcliff’s house.

  “I haven’t, but Paul’s office did a quick-and-dirty call around. Maybe you could talk to some of her closest friends tomorrow? See if they know more than they’ve told?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Sometimes it’s too easy.

  Like Paul, Sandy Radcliff’s brown hair was going white early and she wore rimless bifocals instead of the usual contact lenses. Dressed in dark blue sweats over a green turtleneck, she was generously built and equally generous in her welcome. Even before we took off our coats that evening, I knew that I was going to like her, especially since she was obviously fond of Dwight. I soon learned that they’d all known one another in Washington.

  Their youngest son, Jimmy,
was a grade level ahead of Cal although they were only a few months apart in age.

  Their daughter, Michelle, was fifteen and son Nick was thirteen.

  When we got there, Nick and Jimmy were watching a DVD and Michelle was messaging back and forth to her friends on the computer, which sat in the family room with its screen visible to whoever passed by, a policy sub-scribed to by all my kin with kids in the house. (“Putting an online computer in a child’s room is like giving him a big bowl of candy bars and expecting him to eat only one a day,” says April, my sister-in-law who teaches sixth grade. “No matter how much they promise, they can’t resist going where they shouldn’t, bless their sneaky little hearts.”)

  All three responded politely as I was introduced, but before returning to her computer, Michelle said, “We’re really sorry about Cal, Mr. Dwight. All my friends are keeping an eye out for him.”

  “Mine, too,” Jimmy chimed in.

  “At the mall today,” said Nick, “my friend and me?

  There was a kid with this woman in a blue parka. We were sure it was going to be Cal, but it wasn’t.”

  “Thanks, guys,” said Dwight. “I hope you’ll keep it up.”

  We went on through to the big eat-in kitchen, where we sat down at the round oak table. “I fed the children early so we could hear ourselves talk,” Sandy said.

  She took a lasagna out of the oven and let it sit a few minutes to firm up, while Paul poured red wine and she passed bread and olive oil to go with our salads. Although the talk kept circling back to Cal and Jonna, we also compared backgrounds, exchanged anecdotes from earlier years, and engaged in the usual small talk that lets close friends open their circle to a stranger.

  Sandy was a good cook but neither of us had much ap-petite and we turned down dessert. So did Michelle, but both boys pulled up chairs as Paul put on the coffee and Sandy brought out the chocolate cream pie she’d baked that afternoon.

  “Either of y’all tour the Morrow House with a scout troop last month?” Dwight asked.

  “That was me,” said Jimmy.

  “Our class did it last year when we were studying the Civil War,” said Nick, who wavered between being too 17 cool to evince interest while still kid enough to want to be included.