Winter's Child

by Margaret Maron

  I hadn’t paid much mind to her before then. I mean, yeah, I knew she was out picking up stuff, but it didn’t really sink in what a slob I was being till she came up outta that ditch and lit into me. I thought for a minute there she was going to sic her little dog on me! Well, I apologized for my beer can and she cooled off, but you better believe I’ve never so much as tossed a peanut shell since. In fact, it makes me right mad myself now when I see somebody dumping their ashtrays or cleaning out their cars by trashing up our roads, you hear what I’m saying?”

  Detective Mayleen Richards was not a happy camper.

  Part of it was coming down off of yesterday’s adrenaline high, part of it was the painful throb in her side whenever she forgot and lifted her arm too quickly, but mostly it was having to sit here and cool her heels while waiting for a lab report on the guns they had taken from Sergeant Michael Overholt’s shattered trailer.

  She had given Special Agent Terry Wilson all her contact numbers and he had promised to pass them on to the lab techs. He had also promised to move this matter to the front of the line back at SBI headquarters so that Major Bryant could stay focused on events in Virginia.

  Sheriff Bo Poole had told her to take the day off, give her gunshot wound time to start healing, but she knew she would only be calling in every five minutes to ask the guys if they had heard anything. Better to be here catching up on paperwork than to stay home pacing the floor like an anxious teenager waiting for some boy to call and ask her for a date.

  Of the two handguns in Overholt’s trailer, one was a

  .45, so how long could it take to match the slug from Rouse’s head? Unless they were also waiting till they could tell her whether the soldier had killed himself or been taken out by his neighbor across the street?

  Richards sighed and entered another report in her computer.

  There were footsteps in the hall and she looked up through the glass wall to see a uniformed officer followed by what seemed like a large hanging basket covered in pink flowers.

  “Someone to see you, Detective,” said the officer. He stepped aside and the plant entered the squad room.

  The man carrying it set it on the floor and there was a faint jingle as he stood up. It was Miguel Diaz.

  “Okay?” asked the officer.

  “Fine,” she said faintly, and he returned to the front desk.

  “Señorita Richards,” said Diaz. “They said you were hurt.

  The man that shot my cuñado’s cuñado shot you, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you are here, not at home?”

  “Yes.” She gave herself a mental shake. Who was the interrogator here anyhow? “Why are you here, Mr. Diaz?”

  “Your friends came to ask if we had seen the soldier who shot you and J.D. I said I would speak to my men, and I did. Now I am here to say that none of them saw him.”

  She looked at the plant, an extremely exuberant pink geranium. “And that?”

  “When people are hurt or sick, it’s the custom to bring flowers, sí?”

  His tone was innocent, but there was mischief in his dark eyes.

  “That’s very kind of you,” she said formally. “But I cannot accept it.”

  “It’s only a flower.” Diaz pulled a decorative hook and chain from his pocket. “Where should I hang it?”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t hang it here.”

  He glanced around the room. “You’re right. No window. No sunlight.”

  “I appreciate the thought, but I’m afraid you’ll have to take it back with you.”

  “No problem. It’ll be better at your house anyhow, sí?

  What time do you get off work?”

  “Mr. Diaz—”

  “Miguel. Or Mike, if you prefer. And you are Mayleen.”

  “No!” she said firmly. “I mean, I’m Detective Richards.”

  “Why so formal? Unless . . . perhaps there is already someone special for you, Detective Richards?”

  “This is crazy. Are you propositioning me? I’m a law officer.”

  “Is it against the law to give you flowers?”

  “Look, you’re part of a murder investigation. I can’t take your flowers.”

  “But your killer is dead. The investigation’s over.”

  “Not until we get the ballistics report.”

  He shrugged. “A formality, surely?”

  “All the same.”

  Diaz picked up the plant by its hanger and swung it onto a bare spot on her desk so that she had to look over the huge pink blossoms. “I was right,” he said, looking from the geraniums to her face. “With your beautiful hair, you should always wear pink.”

  Pink? She felt herself going brick red.

  She stood abruptly, but before she could order him to leave, her phone rang and she grabbed it up eagerly.

  “Richards here.”

  It was Terry Wilson and he delivered the bad news quickly, like ripping a piece of adhesive tape from a tender wound. “The bullets that killed Overholt and his wife came from his rifle, but the forty-five isn’t the same forty-five that killed Rouse. Sorry, Richards. We searched that trailer pretty thoroughly.”

  “Maybe he ditched it. Or what about a locker at the base?”

  “We’ll check, but it’s not likely he’d have two forty-fives, is it?”

  “Guys like Overholt, the bigger the better.”

  Wilson gave a sour laugh. “You got a point there.”

  “This Overholt. He didn’t shoot J.D.?” asked Diaz as Richards closed her phone.

  She glared at him. “Would you please take those stupid flowers and get the hell out?”

  He looked at her a long moment. Then, with a half-smile at whatever he saw in her face, he picked up the plant and left.

  Flustered and angry, she called Jamison and McLamb and gave them the bad news.

  Pink geraniums indeed!

  C H A P T E R

  27

  When the winds change, the clouds also change and take acontrary direction.

  —Theophrastus

  I was almost too late getting to the Morrow House. The only ones left were Frederick Mayhew and three of the trustees: Nathan Benton, Betty Coates Ramos, and Suzanne D. Angelo.

  Mrs. Ramos I had met earlier that day when we both wound up in the restroom together before Dwight and I left for lunch. She was late fifties, early sixties, with short curly blond hair and wore a bright red wool suit that lit up the late afternoon.

  Suzanne D. Angelo looked to be my age, dark-haired and vivacious in a white tweed pantsuit and heavy gold jewelry. When we were introduced, I nodded and said,

  “Mrs. D’Angelo,” and she corrected me with a smile.

  “I’m afraid it’s D. for Dupree. No, don’t apologize.

  Everyone makes that mistake. I married a Yankee and brought him home with me.”

  “And we’re so lucky she came back.” Mayhew stopped just short of abject fawning. “The Duprees are one of our oldest families and Mrs. Angelo has given us some wonderful family treasures.”

  Dwight had described Nathan Benton in such detail that it kept me from blurting out, “You look so familiar.

  Have we met before?” because he really did look like a British commander in some old World War Two movie, right down to his neat little mustache. He even wore an old battered tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbow and a striped regimental tie.

  “We’re all so sorry about Jonna’s son,” he said.

  “Jonna, too, of course. Bad show.”

  The others murmured in agreement and I thanked them for their concern, but couldn’t resist asking Mr.

  Benton, “Are you English?”

  He beamed. “My mother. My roots are here in Shaysville, but she was a war bride and I’m afraid she infected the whole family with her accent. I keep thinking I’ve lost every trace and then someone like you will come along and remind me that I haven’t.”

  Behind his back, I saw Mrs. Angelo roll her eyes at Mrs. Ramos
and knew that Mr. Benton probably cultivated that accent.

  The four of them were sitting around a tea table in the front parlor when I arrived, and Mayhew immediately pulled up another chair in his most courtly manner while Mrs. Angelo brought me a cup of punch and gestured to the plate of canapés on the tea table. Evidently they were enjoying that pleasant afterglow when something tricky has gone off well.

  “You were right about Erdman,” Benton told Mrs.

  Ramos. “He seems quite sound on small arms and I rather regret that he didn’t get to see the derringer.”

  Mayhew sniffed. “He may know guns but he was off by eighty years on my cut-glass syrup pitcher. Pressed glass, indeed!”

  Now it was Benton and Ramos who exchanged amused glances.

  “I take it your meeting was a success?” I asked.

  “Almost sixty people came!” Mayhew exulted, pushing his rimless glasses up on his nose. “We enrolled four new members for the Historical and Genealogical Society.”

  “And one new Friend of the Morrow House,” Betty Ramos added complacently.

  “Are you the new president now?”

  She shook her head and Suzanne Angelo said with a sigh, “No, that would be me. I was elected first vice president last month and thought I’ve have a year to learn the job. Poor Jonna.”

  “Rest assured, we’ll do everything to help you,”

  Nathan Benton promised.

  With a few casual questions, I soon learned that while Mayhew, Suzanne Angelo, and Betty Ramos were born and bred in Shaysville, Nathan Benton had been here less than four years. He had taken early retirement from a successful business in Norfolk in order to return to the town his ancestors had helped found nearly two hundred years earlier. A Benton Street just off the square and Benton Baptist Church at the edge of town were both named for his people, Mayhew told me.

  Benton and Ramos were Civil War buffs, while Angelo, as befitted someone whose husband was the current CEO of Shay Furniture, was more interested in the historical changes wrought by industrialization in the years following Reconstruction. She was lobbying to return the bathrooms that had last been updated in the 1940s to something more appropriate for 1900.

  Benton, on the other hand, cared little about architec-ture. His goal was to successfully outfit the mannequin that stood on the upper landing in the clothes that Peter Morrow’s son George would have worn as a first lieu-tenant in a company drawn from this part of western Virginia. Not replicas, I was given to understand, but the actual period pieces. He had already given a sword and the outer uniform, but had not yet located a proper pair of boots. “Most of the things are out there in antiques stores for a price,” he said, “but for me, it’s the thrill of the hunt. Can you guess what’s the hardest to locate?”

  “A Virginia canteen?” I had seen the rarity of such an object discussed on Antiques Roadshow, one of my favorite programs even though I’m no collector of antiques.

  “Very good,” he said. “But I meant in the line of clothing.”

  I shook my head.

  “Period underpants. I fear young George’s nether regions are presently covered only by his breeches.”

  Betty Ramos had begun to transcribe the extensive collection of letters archived here, a task made more difficult by Peter Morrow’s almost unreadable handwriting and by the way letters had to be written to conserve both paper and ink when both were difficult to come by near the war’s end. She pulled from her capacious purse a pho-tocopy of the letter she was currently trying to decipher.

  Even enlarged I could barely follow it. First it was written in the usual manner. Then the paper had been given a half-turn so that the original lines were now vertical and new horizontal lines crossed them. Finally, a third set of 25 lines ran diagonally across the page. Despite the fine nib of the pen, when newly dipped it had often formed fatter letters that obscured the letters beneath.

  “And I thought briefs were hard to read,” I said as I handed the copy back to her.

  Amusingly, although Mayhew and Benton were both keenly interested in reading the letters as she transcribed them, both disapproved of her reasons for doing it, because she was hoping to prove that Peter Morrow had been a secret Union sympathizer.

  “A traitor,” said Mayhew.

  “A turncoat,” said Benton.

  “A pragmatist,” Ramos said cheerfully. “Anyone with half a brain could see that the South was bound to lose in the end. You said yourself, Frederick, that he never burned his bridges to the North.”

  “ ‘Pragmatist,’ I’ll give you,” Mayhew conceded, “but I prefer ‘politician.’ ”

  “Too bad the North’s ‘copperhead’ doesn’t have a Southern equivalent,” said Ramos.

  Evidently this was an old jibe, because he merely frowned at her over the top of his rimless glasses, but Benton took her words literally and said, “That’s because there were too few here as to need such an equivalent.”

  “We’ll see,” Ramos said with a serene smile as she tugged at the hem of her red skirt that tried to ride up over her knees.

  “What did Jonna think?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid Jonna wasn’t a scholar,” said Mayhew.

  “No, but he was her ancestor. Surely family stories must have come down?”

  Betty Ramos tilted her blond head toward me. “Inter- esting that you should say that. She said she thought I might find something in the letters that would prove my point, and that if I did, she would show me something that might substantiate it.”

  “Really? What?” asked Mayhew. As he frowned, his glasses slid almost down to the tip of his nose and balanced there precariously.

  “Something in the inventory that we’ve overlooked?”

  asked Benton.

  “She wouldn’t elaborate other than to say it was something only a Morrow would know. Jonna always kept her own counsel, but I wonder if it was something she was saving for when she became president of SHGS.”

  “You all knew her well, right?” I asked.

  There were nods and affirmative murmurs.

  “Whoever killed her had to have had access to this house and the gun.” I was abruptly aware that Jonna’s killer might even be one of them, yet they all looked back at me with bland expressions of interest.

  “Well, of course,” said Mayhew, pushing his glasses up.

  “The house is open to the public. Anybody could have taken the guns.”

  “Would just anybody have access to the keys to the case, though?”

  “True,” Mayhew agreed. “But who’s to say Jonna didn’t take them herself as she took the bullets and the jewelry?”

  This appeared to be news to the others, and Frederick Mayhew quickly described how Dwight had found a listing of the gun’s bullets in the inventory and how, when the safe where they were stored had been opened, the jewelry that was supposed to be there was missing as well.

  “And Peter Morrow’s signet ring was found in her purse.”

  The three trustees were shocked. As might be expected, Benton wanted to know about the bullets while the two women questioned the jewelry. Betty Ramos said, “But surely Jonna wouldn’t—? I mean, that parure was a gift from her own mother.”

  “I know I’m showing my ignorance,” Suzanne Angelo said, “but what’s a parure?”

  Once again, I heard Frederick Mayhew explain about a matched set, only this time Betty Ramos elaborated.

  “The hairwork is absolutely fabulous. Elizabeth had dark brown hair when she died at sixteen, but as a toddler it had been quite long and golden yellow. Her mother had saved several strands from babyhood, so that when the light and dark were braided together, the result was really striking. I had almost forgotten we have it. Is someone keeping an eye on eBay?”

  Mayhew’s brow wrinkled. “eBay?”

  “To make sure they aren’t being sold online. The pieces were photographed, weren’t they?”

  “Well . . .”

  “We don’t have photographic documentation o
f all our holdings?” asked Benton. “That’s outrageous!”

  “I have a digital camera,” Angelo said briskly. “I’ll be here first thing in the morning if anyone wants to help.

  I’m no professional, but at least we could get everything onto the computer and start keying the pictures to the inventory list.”

  “The police don’t know that Jonna took those things,”

  I said, trying to herd them back to the question of her death. “Her killer could have planted the ring. And where are the rest of the bullets? They aren’t at her house, they weren’t in the car.”

  “Did anyone check her desk?” asked Benton.

  “The police were quite thorough,” Mayhew assured him.

  “Was she worried the last time you saw her?” I asked.

  “In fact, who did see her last? You, Mr. Mayhew?”

  He frowned, as he removed his glasses and began polishing them with a napkin from the tea table. Without them, he looked younger and less sure of himself. “It was last Monday, a week ago tomorrow, and she did seem a bit distracted. I had to ask her twice for last year’s attendance records.”

  “We spoke on the phone on Wednesday,” Benton said crisply. “She wanted to know how to list the perfume bottle I presented to the house today. Its provenance and maker. From the marks, I am quite certain that it’s jasperware. Wedgwood, pre-1820. Unfortunately, there’s no provenance because I bought it in a flea market in Winston-Salem from a seller who rather thought it might be an Avon bottle from the 1970s. I had no desire to disabuse him and even bartered him down from ten dollars to eight.”

  It was a story that gave him obvious satisfaction to tell, but I moved on to the two women.

  Suzanne Angelo had also spoken to her on Wednesday about today’s installation of officers and they had discussed food and drink for the public reception. “She sounded perfectly fine to me.”

  Betty Ramos was looking troubled. “Was I the last, then? I was supposed to help with the inventory on Thursday, but that morning an elderly relative slipped 26 and broke her hip and I had to drive up to Roanoke to see about her. I stopped by here around ten on my way out of town to run off a few more of the letters and to tell her I’d definitely be here the next day. I warmed up the copier while she found the letters I wanted, then we ran them off and I left.”