Winter's Child

by Margaret Maron

  “Is Mrs. Shay receiving callers?” one of them asked.

  “We’re old friends of Jonna’s. I’m Lou Cannady.”

  “And I’m Jill Edwards,” said the other.

  It would appear that church was over.

  C H A P T E R

  24

  It is better to be envied than pitied.

  —Herodotus

  “Come in,” I told the two women. I took the plant and, after making sure the bottom was completely dry, set it on the hall table beside the funeral home’s guest register. “Mrs. Shay hasn’t come down yet, but I’m sure she would want to know you’re here.”

  “Are you one of the Anson cousins?” asked Lou Cannady as she signed the register. She automatically peeled off the numbered tab beside her name and stuck it on the dish garden so that next week sometime, Mrs. Shay would know exactly who should be sent a graceful little handwritten note of thanks for it.

  “No, I’m Deborah Knott, Cal’s stepmother.”

  “Really?” said Jill Edwards. “Is there any news? Everybody’s so worried.”

  “Nothing official,” I said.

  Her small china blue eyes swept over me, and I knew she was cataloging my clothes, my hair, and my looks, which was okay since I was doing the same with both of them. The Three Musketeers had not been three of a 22 kind. Jonna had been a brunette and easily the prettiest of the three. Jill was a natural blonde with a square face, while Lou Cannady had a long thin face and dark red hair. Both women had the ease and confidence of those born to privilege. And yes, it might be the small-town version, but it was no less real than what I’d seen drifting in and out of chic stores in midtown Manhattan after Mother died and I tried to run away from school, from family, and, most of all, from a world she no longer inhabited.

  In a demonstration of long familiarity, these two hung their coats in the hall closet before I could offer to take them and moved into the living room, almost as if they were the hostesses.

  “How’s she doing today?” Lou asked.

  “Between Jonna’s death and Cal’s disappearance, that poor woman looked as if she was about to collapse yesterday,” said Jill, taking a seat on the couch.

  Her straight blond hair was asymmetrically cut and had a tendency to fall over one eye so that she had to keep pushing it back. Would’ve driven me crazy, but it did help disguise the squareness of her face. It wasn’t just her hair that occupied her restless hands, though. She was someone who constantly straightened her collar, rearranged the folds of her skirt, touched her earrings, and fiddled with her rings (obligatory large diamond solitaire and a really nice emerald about half the size of Ireland).

  Usually redheads are stereotyped as volatile and flighty, but Lou Cannady was much more composed than her friend. She sat gracefully in one of the period side chairs and she didn’t fidget, but her hazel eyes were watchful as we discussed Mrs. Shay’s losses.

  They were both still in shock that Jonna had been shot in what appeared to be a deliberate, cold-blooded murder, and they were dismayed to hear that I had no inside information on why anyone would want her dead.

  “I believe Cal’s dad is a sheriff’s deputy?” she asked, moving on to the other aspects of this situation. “Is he involved with the investigation?”

  I nodded. “We’re both doing everything we can.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Jill, brushing blond hair from her eyes. “You’re a judge, aren’t you?”

  Again I nodded. Well, it was natural that Jonna would have spoken of us to her closest friends. Portland Brewer and I certainly would have.

  “I saw the yearbooks in Jonna’s house,” I said. “The Three Musketeers. You three have been tight forever, haven’t you?”

  “Since Miss Sophie’s Playschool,” Lou said sadly.

  “Grade school, high school, college. It was such a shock when she went off to visit a friend in Germany and wound up marrying an Army officer instead of someone here in town. Of course, he was very good-looking.”

  “Still is,” I said, smiling.

  “And really, Lou, who was left here?” asked Jill, adjusting the gold loop in her earlobe. “You and I got the best of her leavings and she was too picky for anyone else.”

  I like to think I have a poker face but that catty remark must have registered because Lou smiled and said,

  “You’ll have to excuse Jill. She never got over the fact that Forrest proposed to Jonna first and Jonna turned him down.”

  “Oh, and like Dale wasn’t in love with her first, too.”

  “Every boy in our crowd was in love with Jonna first,”

  Lou agreed calmly, as she tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear, “but not all of them got down on bended knee with a ring.”

  Jill Edwards had a blonde’s fair skin and she flushed in annoyance. “I’m sure Judge Knott isn’t interested in all this ancient history.”

  Lou gave a wicked grin. “I bet she is. I certainly would be.”

  I laughed outright and Jill gave a grudging smile.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I can’t help feeling that the more I know about Jonna’s life here in Shaysville, the better I’ll understand Cal.”

  Sudden tears pooled in Jill’s blue eyes. “Poor kid.”

  “How can we help?” asked Lou. “What do you want to know?”

  I told them to call me Deborah, and at first I just listened to what they had to say about their murdered friend, the shock of it, their sense of loss. It wasn’t that no one had ever been murdered in Shaysville, rather that no one they knew had. They were warm in their praise of Jonna and had funny stories about the mischief they had gotten into as kids. I gathered that she had been their leader since the Miss Sophie days. She was the prettiest, her people had founded the town and had produced its most illustrious sons, so her blood was the bluest. She had the best sense of style and she was acknowledged to be the smartest of the three. Maybe not academically, although her grades had been decent enough in school, but she was savvy about people and situations, which was probably the real reason why she had married so far outside their crowd, Lou said candidly, as if realizing for the first time how claustrophobic “our crowd” could be.

  They had not been surprised, though, that the marriage had failed “because after all,” Jill said, “this is where her roots were and what would a lawman like Dwight Bryant do here?”

  Not that there was anything wrong with being a lawman, they quickly assured me, but the opportunities here were so limited that they didn’t really blame him for has-tening the end of the marriage by not wanting to come to Shaysville with Jonna.

  I didn’t bother to explain that coming to Shaysville had never been an option so far as I knew. Evidently Jonna had given them a slightly different version of the divorce from the one Dwight had told me.

  “Who are you going to believe?” asked the preacher. “Theman you’ve known all your life or the secondhand reports ofher partisan friends?”

  The pragmatist remained silent, withholding judgment.

  “What about her sister?” I asked. “Was she part of your crowd?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Jill as she removed a stray thread from her skirt. “She was a year ahead of us in school, but in some ways it was as if Jonna were older. Pam seemed to look up to her instead of the other way around. But she was popular in her own way, very cute and funny. She and Jonna used to be really close.”

  “Used to be?”

  “You don’t know?”

  They exchanged glances, then Lou said, “Maybe she didn’t talk about it with Dwight.”

  “Probably not. She didn’t like to talk about it even 23 with us,” Jill said earnestly. “See, Pam always liked to party, but when she went off to UVA, she got into alcohol pretty heavy. Turned into a real lush. Flunked out of school. Maybe even did drugs for a while. Totally freaked Jonna out. She didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She wouldn’t even apply to UVA, which is how we wound up going to Hollins.”

 
“Which may have been another reason she left Shaysville, now that you think about it,” said Lou.

  Evidently neither woman had ever connected the two.

  “But it’s true that even though Pam hadn’t lived here since high school, Jonna didn’t come home to stay till Pam was safely married to someone out in Tennessee. We haven’t seen Pam in . . . when was the last time?” Jill asked her friend.

  “Three or four years ago?” Lou hazarded. “Poor Jonna was so embarrassed. She thought Pam had totally dried out, but all she had done was switch to vodka so you couldn’t smell it on her breath. Remember how crazy she acted that day?”

  Jill nodded. “It was sad. They had to call her husband to come get her.”

  Crazy, I thought. Dress it up with all the politically correct terms: “unstable,” “schizophrenic,” “psychotic.”

  The world would still call it crazy and people like Jonna would still prefer that people think she had an alcoholic sister rather than one who heard voices in her head.

  “Who were Pam’s friends?” I asked. “Who would she turn to here?”

  They both looked blank. “I don’t think she has any friends left here. She and Missy Collins were pretty close during high school, but Missy married someone in the State Department and they live in Italy, the last I heard.”

  “Why are you asking about Pam?” asked Jill. “Hasn’t she come yet?”

  “She’s been in town almost two weeks,” I told them.

  They were not as surprised as I’d expected.

  “Ah,” said Lou. “That’s why Jonna canceled the meeting. I wondered what the real reason was. She must have been dealing with Pam. Is she drinking again?”

  “Meeting?” I asked, sidestepping the question of Pam’s problems.

  “Our twenty-fifth high school reunion’s coming up this spring,” said Jill.

  I remembered the list of names and addresses in Jonna’s files and that she had chaired the class gift committee.

  “It’s not official yet, but we’re pretty sure that Pam’s the one who took Cal,” I said.

  Jill’s face lit up in relieved delight. “Oh, thank heavens!

  I’ve been so worried about him. Afraid that it was Jonna’s killer or some pervert that had taken him. But if it’s Pam . . . I mean even if she is back on the bottle, she would never hurt him.”

  Lou agreed. “But why would Pam take Cal? Unless—?”

  “Unless what?”

  “I know it sounds irrational, but could she be thinking of trying to get custody? Keep Dwight from taking him back to North Carolina? She can’t have children of her own and she was always sending him books and toys.”

  “Have both motels been checked?”

  “Chief Radcliff put out the word as soon as they realized Cal really was gone,” I said.

  “By now she could already be back in Tennessee with him,” said Jill.

  Lou shook her head. “She wouldn’t leave before the funeral.”

  The custody theory was something they could easily believe and I didn’t see the point of disabusing them.

  “Was Jonna seeing anyone?” I asked.

  “Boyfriends? I don’t think she’s gone out with anyone in a couple of years,” said Jill.

  “No,” said Lou. “Remember that guy last fall? What was his name? Selby?”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten Jim Selby. But he was so not our crowd that she dropped him after two dates.”

  The doorbell rang again, and this time the room did fill up with law. Dwight and Eleanor Prentice came downstairs, but Mrs. Shay refused to leave her room, so Jill and Lou went up to see her while Dwight and I told the two state agents about finding Pam’s parka, how Pam had visited her mother alone last night, and how she must have been the one to sneak back in the house for Cal’s teddy bear.

  “Like a ghost,” I said, repeating what she had told Mrs. Shay.

  “The car’s a Honda Accord, same model as the victim’s, only white. Tennessee plate.” Agent Clark rattled off the number and Dwight jotted it down on one of the cards in his wallet. (I had given him a proper leather-bound notepad and pencil as a stocking stuffer at Christmas, but does he remember to carry it? File under

  “Rhetorical Questions.”)

  Dwight told them about Pam’s mental condition, I elaborated on how her friends had been told she was al- coholic, not psychotic, but that they agreed with Mrs.

  Shay that Pam was truly fond of Cal. “They think she took him because she hopes to get custody of him.”

  Dwight was outraged by that until I reminded him that this was a woman listening to inner voices about bloodhounds and ghosts and trains that no longer ran.

  All five of us were at a loss to think of where Pam could be. No friends, Jonna dead. “Are you sure she’s not here in the house?” asked Lewes.

  “I checked every room upstairs,” said Dwight.

  “And I checked the basement before I found the parka,” I confessed. “Eleanor?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t imagine. Unless the Anson cousins are hiding her? I’m her only other relative here and you’re welcome to search my house if you like.”

  “You’re just around the corner, right?” asked Clark.

  “No offense, ma’am, but if you’re sure you don’t mind, maybe I could just take a quick look?”

  Eleanor was understandably offended. “Of course,”

  she said frostily. “Let me get my coat.”

  As the two of them left, I remembered that the only reason I was downstairs alone long enough to search the place was so that Dwight could question Mrs. Shay about the money.

  “Did you tell Agent Lewes about Cal’s teacher?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Something new?” Lewes asked.

  Dwight explained how we had run into Cal’s teacher at breakfast this morning. “On Tuesday, Cal told her that someone was going to smash his mother’s face in if she didn’t come up with five thousand and that she was crying because his grandmother wouldn’t give it to her.”

  “Someone threatened her?” asked Lewes. “Who?”

  “I don’t know and Mrs. Shay completely denies that it ever happened. She keeps insisting that Cal must have misunderstood.” He threw up his hands in exasperation.

  “Who knows? Maybe he did. In any event, his teacher says that on Wednesday Cal was okay again, said that his mother had told him she had plenty of money and for him not to give it any more thought.”

  Lewes frowned. “Maybe I’d better have a talk with Mrs. Shay.”

  “Good luck,” Dwight said sourly. “She’ll just start crying.”

  “How about I try after Jonna’s friends are gone?” I offered. Even as I spoke, I was struck by a sudden thought.

  “Is there any chance that Pam could be hiding somewhere in the Morrow House?”

  “Huh?” they both said.

  “Well, think about it, Dwight. Mrs. Shay says she kept talking about Jonna being a ghost too, and the only other ghost we know about is the one there. Paul Radcliff’s boy says that Cal told him his mother had played in the house as a child, so wouldn’t Pam have played there as well? I gather they don’t show any of the bedrooms on the third floor except for Elizabeth Morrow’s, the one who’s supposed to be the ghost.”

  “I don’t know,” Dwight said doubtfully.

  “Won’t hurt to turn that place inside out,” Lewes said.

  “I get the feeling that Mayhew guy may know more than he’s telling.”

  “And while you’re there, see if you can see Mrs. Shay’s bedroom window from there. It’s awfully coincidental that she showed up in the wee hours just when Mrs. Shay was up and about, don’t you think?”

  Eleanor returned with Clark, and Dwight offered to leave me his truck keys while he rode over to the Morrow House with the two state agents, but I told him I could certainly walk the block or two.

  When Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards came back downstairs, I asked Eleanor if I could make us a cup of tea.r />
  “Of course you may,” she said as she went up to see if Mrs. Shay wanted her.

  Lou and Jill made noises about needing to get home, but when I said I had a few more questions, they came along to the kitchen with me. Despite their genuine sense of loss, I also sensed some of the repressed excitement I had seen before when tragedy jolts people out of their commonplace lives.

  “Did Jonna talk much about her work?” I asked when we were settled around the table with steaming cups.

  “Any conflicts there? Anyone she didn’t get along with?”

  Not at all, they told me. Jonna loved being at the Morrow House. After all, it was her family. And wasn’t it fitting that the last Morrow in town married the last Shay?

  That made Pam and Jonna the last to bear the Shay name.

  “Jonna felt like it was her duty to help out over there as much as she could,” said Lou. “She was very civic-minded.”

  “And she treated it like a real job, too,” said Jill.

  “A real job?” I was puzzled.

  “She was conscientious about keeping regular hours 23 and everything. She never ditched it even when it conflicted with something we wanted her to do.”

  “But it was a real job,” I said. “She got paid.”

  They both laughed at that. “Honey, she’s a Shay. Even though Mrs. Shay doesn’t own Shay Furniture, whatever Jonna got paid was just pin money for her.”

  Still smiling, Jill pushed the swoop of hair back from her face and looped it behind her ear. “Of course, Jonna was something of a tightwad, so I’m sure she cashed every paycheck.”

  “Tightwad?” Their bright chatter made me feel thick-tongued as I felt my way toward an unwelcome growing comprehension.

  “Not to speak ill of the dead, but she almost never picked up the check if she could help it. She wouldn’t treat herself to shopping trips to New York unless one of us paid for the hotel, and even then, she would limit herself to one or two good pieces instead of buying something trendy just for the fun of it.”