Winter's Child

by Margaret Maron

  As we passed from room to room, I soon realized that he had an ulterior motive for trying to infect me with his own enthusiasm. With Jonna dead, he knew that if Cal was found—not if, I mentally protested, but when!—we would be taking him back to North Carolina and he wanted to make sure I fully understood what Cal would be leaving behind, “because you do see that this is young Cal’s heritage, too?”

  “Heritage” was one of the man’s favorite words, and he used it when alluding to the two portraits that Jonna had hanging in her living room. Nothing so crass as “pro-bate” or “trust” passed his thin lips that morning, but I 20 was given the distinct impression that he rather thought Jonna’s will would include a bequest to the house.

  A sizable bequest. Not just the portraits but money, too.

  Evidently, Mr. Mayhew labored under the same mis-conception as Cal’s teacher. I wasn’t sure if Jonna had actually made a will. I certainly hadn’t seen a copy in her papers, and it suddenly occurred to me that unless there was a legal document saying otherwise, then her house and everything else she possessed would automatically go to Cal, which meant that Dwight—and by extension, I as his wife—would decide what to keep and what to let go, including those portraits and any other Morrow heirlooms. I was repelled by the man’s single-mindedness, because he had surely worked it out that if anything did happen to Cal, then as the boy’s next of kin, Dwight would be in line to inherit whatever estate Jonna had left.

  This was such a disturbing thought that when we got to the library, I almost didn’t connect Peter Morrow’s missing presentation gun with the gun Jonna’s killer had used.

  “I was rearranging things when you rang the bell.

  Chief Radcliff kept this room locked until closing time last night so I wasn’t able to get in here to move this,”

  Mayhew said, touching the display case on the center table in the library.

  “Must have been an awfully big handgun,” I said, looking at the shape left on the velvet by the gun that had shot Jonna.

  “It was an early Colt revolver,” said Mayhew. “One of the first postwar models. Post– Civil War,” he elucidated.

  “And yes, it’s big. Weighs over two pounds. The original presentation case seems to have been lost, but the gun itself is a beauty. Silver plate over brass and quite elaborately engraved. Have you seen it yet?”

  I shook my head. “A forty-four?”

  “Actually, I believe Nathan Benton—he’s the chair of our board of trustees and very knowledgeable about guns—he says it’s a thirty-six caliber.”

  “Tell me again why this Peter Morrow was presented with the gun?”

  “For all that he did for Shaysville after the war. He was a judge, too, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. A true politician in the best sense of the word. Even though he didn’t own any slaves and thought it was an abomination on the South, he was a Reb through and through. Nevertheless, he had Yankee relatives and he was very careful not to burn all his bridges to the North. He had been a representative in Congress and this part of the state had a lot in common with what became West Virginia, so he had good friends in high places in Washington. That’s how he got appointed to a seat on the western court here. That position enabled him to use his Philadelphia connections to lighten Shaysville’s bur-dens of Reconstruction. As Shelby Foote was fond of saying, there was no Marshall Plan for the South, but Judge Morrow used the law to keep the worst of the carpetbag-gers out, then he used his influence to get the railroads up and running again. He helped Thomas Shay secure contracts to ship furniture-grade oak and maple all over the Northeast. That’s where the Shays first made their fortune. In the lumberyards here. A little later, they went into the furniture business themselves and made even 20 more. That created so many jobs that Shaysville was quite a prosperous place for the time and its citizens were grateful to the man who had made it possible.”

  He lifted the case and slid it under the table, where it was hidden by the green felt cloth that hung down almost to the floor.

  “Such a shame that all three guns were taken. Our guest speaker was looking forward to examining them. I don’t suppose there’s a chance that Chief Radcliff will let us have the presentation piece back today?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” I said, chilled by such insensitivity. I found it hard to believe he would actually want to display so quickly a gun that had killed his colleague, I don’t care how historical the damn thing is. Was he that cold-bloodedly obsessed with this house?

  “It’s just that today was supposed to be so special.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Shaysville Historical and Genealogical Society usually meets here on the fourth Sunday of each month at five o’clock. But the January meeting is always at four with an opening reception for the public at three. As chairman of the board, Mr. Benton thought perhaps we ought to cancel in consideration of Jonna, but as Mrs.

  Ramos pointed out, we’ve already announced it in the paper and on the radio that someone is coming over from the Smithsonian to talk about family treasures, so we’re expecting quite a large crowd. Thirty-five people, maybe even fifty if it stays sunny.”

  “How many members in your local group?” I asked.

  “Technically, we have forty-five on the rolls, but many are too elderly to participate any longer and some live out of the state. Our core group of actives is around twent.

  yJonna was so looking forward to today. She was to take office as president of SHGS and I’m sure she would have wanted us to go ahead as planned. We will have a tribute to her, then the presentations.”

  “Presentations?”

  “That’s what makes today so special. Mrs. Ramos is donating a set of drapes and a counterpane for Elizabeth Morrow’s bedroom that she had made up in High Point, and Mr. Benton is giving us a perfectly exquisite perfume bottle of cameo glass such as Elizabeth might have used.

  He found it in a yard sale down in Winston-Salem, if you can believe it. The man has the most amazing eye! He’s picked up at least a dozen bibelots for us these last few years since he moved to Shaysville. But Mrs. Santos is closing in on him. Not that it’s a contest, but every item helps. Except for two of the bedrooms, the upstairs is rather bare. We’ve acquired enough major pieces from the mid- to late eighteen-hundreds to furnish them sparsely, but very few of the grace notes that finish a house.” He gestured to the period mirror over the man-telpiece and to the ornate matched vases that sat on the mantel. “So much was sold before the house came to us.”

  He looked around as Dwight stuck his head in and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but where is Judge Morrow’s office?”

  “Through that door. Is there something I can help you with?”

  At that moment, the doorbell rang. Mayhew automatically looked at his watch and muttered, “It’s much too early for them,” as he went to answer the door.

  “Found something?” I asked, noting the papers in Dwight’s hand.

  “Yeah,” he said grimly. “I was skimming through these old inventory sheets and—” He broke off as Agents Lewes and Clark followed Mayhew into the library.

  Here in daylight, I was struck anew by what a similar type so many lawmen can be. Like Dwight, these two agents were muscular six-footers, and, like him, they were casually dressed in jeans and leather jackets. Dwight had more hair than both of them put together, though.

  Clark’s hair was thinning rapidly across the crown and Lewes’s had retreated well behind the crest of his forehead.

  “Major Bryant,” said Clark. He nodded to me.

  “Judge. I had a feeling we’d find you here.”

  “Any news of my son?” Dwight asked.

  “Sorry, Major. You know how it is. A flurry of false alarms that turn out to be nothing, but we’ll still check out every one of them. What about you?”

  Dwight handed Lewes the inventory and pointed to an item down near the bottom of the page. “According to this, a box containing five thirty-s
ix-caliber cartridges is stored in the safe in Judge Morrow’s office.”

  “Bullets?” Mayhew looked shocked.

  “Show us the safe,” said Lewes.

  The director obediently opened a door in the far wall.

  There were very few books in the library, but Peter Morrow’s office was a grander version of my own and the shelves here were packed with law books of every description.

  While we watched, he moved aside a set of Black-stone’s Commentaries to reveal a small wall safe with a combination lock.

  “Now let me think.” Mayhew went over to the huge mahogany desk that dominated the room. He hesitated and looked at each of us with a nervous laugh. “I suppose all of you can be trusted not to speak of this?” It was less a question for us than a reassurance to himself. He pulled out a side drawer, turned it over, gave an annoyed click of his tongue, and tried the adjacent drawer. There on the bottom was the combination. “In Judge Morrow’s own writing,” he told us.

  Agent Clark took a penlight from his jacket pocket and carefully examined the exterior of the safe before touching it. I heard him mutter, “Hell. Knob and handle both too grooved to hold prints.”

  His partner held the drawer up so that he could read off the numbers while he twirled the dial. Clark tugged on the handle and the door of the safe opened smoothly.

  The diameter was only about eight inches yet surprisingly deep. He aimed his penlight inside. “Empty.”

  “Empty? That’s impossible!” Mayhew exclaimed, almost elbowing the two bigger men aside so that he could look in.

  “Don’t touch,” Clark said sharply as Mayhew put out his hand to the safe.

  “Peter Morrow’s signet ring,” Mayhew moaned. “Elizabeth’s gold locket. Catherine’s mourning parure.”

  “What’s a parure?” asked Clark.

  “A matched set of jewelry. In this case, a necklace, bracelet, and earrings of onyx and braided hair.”

  Clark frowned. “Hair?”

  “It was her daughter Elizabeth’s hair. I know it sounds morbid, but people used to take comfort from wearing the hair of a loved one.”

  “Is the set valuable?”

  “To the Morrow House, it’s priceless. On the open market? It’s a matched set of known provenance and the glass cases of the bracelet and necklace are set in twenty-four-carat gold with intact hinges, so perhaps two thousand dollars. The hairwork is incredibly fine.”

  “And those other pieces? The signet ring? And gold locket?”

  “No more than five or six hundred. We kept them in the safe simply because we have no secure way to exhibit jewelry yet.”

  “Is this the ring?” asked Clark. He held out a small domed box that had once been red velvet but was rubbed down almost to the cardboard backing. Inside was a heavy gold ring inset with an onyx signet.

  “Yes! Where on earth did you find it?”

  “In Jonna Bryant’s pocketbook,” said Lewes.

  “In her purse? I don’t understand. And what about the locket? The mourning jewelry?”

  “Sorry. This was it.”

  C H A P T E R

  22

  Every plant, animal, or inanimate thing that has an odorhas one peculiar to itself.

  —Theophrastus

  It was only 9:45 when we left the Morrow House that morning, pointedly invited by Lewes and Clark to take ourselves elsewhere while they gave Jonna’s desk and computer a thorough examination. They had also called for their evidence truck to process the wall safe on the off chance that Jonna or someone else had left prints.

  Mr. Mayhew had feebly denied that Jonna would have stolen from the safe, yet insisted that only the two of them knew that the combination was written on the underside of that drawer.

  “He said the same thing about the keys to the locked key cabinet, too,” Dwight told me, turning his own key in the truck’s ignition, “and he’s only been there eight or ten years, so somebody had to show him. One of the board members or someone in that Historical Society, maybe.”

  “Did she take them to sell?” I wondered aloud. “Raise the five thousand that way?”

  “Never happened.” He sounded angry at me for even suggesting such a thing. “I don’t care how desperate Jonna was for money. It would never cross her mind to steal. Period.”

  I knew better than to argue, but that didn’t stop my re-bellious thoughts. Only last week, he had arrested one of his mother’s most trusted employees. Miss Emily was the principal at Zachary Taylor High School and it turned out that the manager of the school’s cafeteria had embezzled almost thirty thousand over the last two years.

  Both of us have put too many pillars of the community behind bars to say for sure who would or wouldn’t break the law, but if Dwight was on his white horse and riding in defense of his lady wife’s reputation, anything I said could and probably would be used against me, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “The shooter must have put that ring in her purse to make us think it was a falling-out of thieves in case the suicide note didn’t work,” he said as we drove out of the communal parking lot.

  “What about the other pieces? And the guns?”

  “Probably kept them to sell somewhere out of the area.

  The signet ring and guns would be too easy to identify, but it sounds as if those weird hair things are pretty common and gold lockets must be a dime a dozen. Could be she caught the thief in action and threatened to tell.

  Maybe that’s why she was killed.”

  And maybe she offered to meet her killer in an out-of-the-way place so she could sell him the things she herself hadstolen, I thought, but did not say. Nor did I say, Or whatif they were the first installment on that five thousand sheneeded so urgently?

  What I did say was, “We forgot to tell them about Jonna needing money.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not like we won’t be seeing them again,” he said grimly.

  “So where are we going now?”

  Dwight glanced at his watch. “It’s still too early for church to be over. You mind coming with me to talk to her mother so I can ask her about the money again? She’ll always be Cal’s grandmother, so you probably ought to meet her.”

  “Sure,” I said gamely, even though I had a feeling that this was going to be really awkward.

  Mrs. Shay lived in the older and wealthier part of town, only a block or two from the Morrow House, and close enough that Cal had probably been allowed to walk back and forth if he wanted. Hundred-year-old oaks and maples towered above the rooftops in this neighborhood and there was a lot of elbow room between the houses.

  According to Dwight, Jonna said that they had moved to this smaller house after her father’s death. Smaller? It looked plenty big to me, almost as big as the old farmhouse I had grown up in, and our house had held fourteen of us. Mrs. Shay and her two daughters must have rattled around here, and now it was just Mrs. Shay.

  Dwight said the house had been full of people yesterday afternoon. Only one woman was there this morning.

  She looked to be mid-sixties, with short salt-and-pepper hair that waved softly over her head, and she wore tailored black pants and a black silk turtleneck accented by an unusual silver pin on the upturned collar. I myself 21 seldom use perfume except for dress-up occasions, so I immediately noticed the light, spicy scent she wore. Her strong face was somber when she first opened the door in response to our ring, but then she smiled and said, “Oh, Dwight! Come in. Any news?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve brought my wife to meet y’all.

  Deb’rah, this is Mrs. Shay’s cousin, Eleanor Prentice.”

  We said the usual things and she led us out to the kitchen. “I was just making tea and toast for Laura.

  She insisted on staying alone last night, but I knew she wouldn’t eat a thing this morning if I didn’t come around and fix it for her.”

  She put the plates and cups on a large silver serving tray and hesitated when Dwight offered to carry it up for her.

  “Well . . .
only to the top of the stairs, though,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll want to put on a pretty dressing gown and fix her face before seeing you. If you like, Deborah, do make you and Dwight a cup of tea, too. The cups are in that cupboard and you’ll find tea and sugar in those caddies beside the stove. There’s milk and lemon in the refrigerator. If you don’t see what you need, just root around.”

  Left alone, I did exactly that. I opened drawers and doors and looked inside. It was clear where Jonna got her tidiness. Even the gadget drawer was neat. Silverware, both sterling and stainless, occupied their own sections in separate drawers. In the pantry, one shelf held soup, another canned tuna and salmon, another pickles and relish, etc. etc. No mixing of soups with pickles. Yet she was also a doting grandmother if the Christmas picture that Cal had drawn for her meant anything. Here it was almost a month past Christmas and the picture still hung on her refrigerator door. The one he made for Dwight and me still hangs on our refrigerator, too, I thought sadly.

  I added more water to the kettle and turned on the flame, then set out porcelain cups and saucers for Dwight and me when it became clear that there were no mugs in this kitchen. No tea bags either and Eleanor Prentice had taken the teapot with her, but a flameproof measuring cup made a serviceable substitute. By the time Dwight came back down, the loose tea leaves had steeped enough to strain into the cups.

  He sighed as he retrieved a rubber baseball from the bowl of fruit on the counter and sat down at the table, where he absently tossed the ball from hand to hand. I sensed that he was wondering if he would ever again play catch with Cal. Nothing I might say could change that.