Winter's Child

by Margaret Maron

  Once that door was opened, he threw himself against the far closet wall, barking and whining and looking back as if to beg Dwight to open yet another door.

  With the help of Lewes’s penlight, Dwight soon found the inconspicuous latch that looked almost like just another clothes hook. When he pulled on it, a low door opened outward.

  There was only darkness beyond, but Bandit charged in, yipping happily. Dwight stooped to follow.

  As he flashed the light around the small room with its vivid wall paintings, he first saw Deborah sprawled on the floor almost at his feet. Beyond, a woman was huddled in the corner. Her short dark hair swirled wildly around her face as she squinted from the sudden light and tried to push the dog away.

  “Bloodhounds!” she shrieked. “No! You can’t take him!”

  In her arms was the limp body of his son.

  C H A P T E R

  31

  Love, unconquerable . . .

  Keeper of warm lights and all-night vigil . . .

  —Sophocles

  When I came to, I could not at first remember where I was nor how I had come to be in this shadowy space full of loud male voices while a woman’s shrieks faded away in the distance.

  “Don’t get up,” someone said as I attempted to push myself into a sitting position. I felt a hand on my shoulder, holding me down. “There’s an ambulance coming.”

  “Dwight?”

  “I’m here, shug. Lie still.”

  My head hurt like hell, and when I touched it, I felt a knob the size of Grandfather Mountain. “Cal!” I said, as memory returned.

  Gingerly, I turned my head and pain shot through every nerve. Dwight was sitting on the floor beside me with Cal cradled in one arm while his other hand cupped my face. Bandit was curled up between us with his head resting soulfully on Cal’s leg.

  “Is he—? He’s not—?”

  “He’s been drugged. We found a bottle of cough syrup. That’s what Pam took from the medicine cabinet Friday night. She must have given it to him to keep him quiet.”

  “Was that her screaming?”

  “Yeah. They’re taking her to the hospital. She thought we were slave-catchers.”

  “Slave-catchers?”

  “Yeah. Know what this room is?”

  I tried to shake my head and flinched with the pain.

  “Mrs. Ramos thinks it was a station on the Under-ground Railroad.”

  I lay motionless and let my mind connect the dots.

  “That’s what Pam was raving about? The trains to freedom? Bloodhounds?”

  “You got it.”

  “And these pictures of Jesus?”

  “Yeah.”

  The ambulance arrived and, despite my protests, I was lifted onto a gurney, strapped in, and wheeled out through a closet into the Rose Bedroom.

  “This isn’t the way I came in,” I said. “There are secret stairs under the real stairs.”

  “We know that now. How did you find them?” asked Dwight, who walked beside me, still carrying Cal.

  “She left the closet door open, and when I looked in, I heard Cal crying and— Ouch!”

  The rescue team carried my gurney down as carefully as they could, but pain arced through my head with every little bounce. As they lifted me into the ambulance and Dwight crawled in with Cal, I suddenly remembered his records! “I left them on the desk.”

  “Everything’s fine,” Dwight soothed. “Just lie still.”

  “No!” I said, struggling to sit up and held by the straps. “Where’s Paul? Where are those explorers?”

  “We’re here,” an amused voice said from outside the ambulance.

  “Look on the desk beside the computer,” I called.

  “There are pictures beneath Cal’s records. Make Betty Ramos talk to you.”

  “Here we go,” someone said, then the doors closed and we were moving.

  I shut my eyes as the tires hit a pothole.

  “Stay with us, ma’am,” said the nurse or whoever she was, lifting one of my eyelids and shining a light into my pupil.

  “I’m fine,” I said, swatting the light away. “I’m not going to pass out again so would you please undo these damn straps?”

  “Ma’am—”

  “Do it,” said Dwight and a moment later I was free again.

  “Thanks,” I said. “How’s Cal?”

  I was speaking to Dwight, but the nurse answered.

  “His blood pressure’s a little low but not in the danger zone.”

  I reached for Dwight’s hand. “How did you find us?”

  “Bandit. He caught Cal’s scent as soon as I brought him inside and went straight up the stairs to that hidden door in the closet.”

  “He’s going to do just fine down on the farm, isn’t he?”

  He squeezed my hand tightly. “Soon as we get home, I’m buying him the biggest steak I can find. God, Deborah! When you disappeared on me, too—”

  He broke off as Cal stirred. “Daddy?”

  “Right here, buddy.”

  “Good,” he murmured and snuggled deeper into Dwight’s arms.

  As I expected, the emergency room doctor took a good look at the lump on my head, looked into my eyes with his light, asked lots of questions about whether I was confused or dizzy, then told me to take aspirin for my headache and call him in the morning. He grinned when he said it, so I figured there was no permanent damage.

  Cal’s doctor ordered an IV drip to help flush his blood-stream of the codeine-laced cough syrup and wanted to keep him at the hospital overnight for observation.

  Dwight and I could have gone back to Jonna’s house for the night, but no way were we going to let him out of our sight. There was a recliner in the room and they rolled in a cot so that we could take turns stretching out if we wanted. Extra pillows and blankets were ours for the asking.

  We dimmed the lights and moved away from the bed to the window that looked out over the town. The moon was three nights from full and it starkly silhouetted the skeletal limbs of the oaks that would shade the building in summer. We stood with our arms interlaced and talked quietly.

  “Where’s Bandit?” I asked.

  “Paul said he’d take care of him tonight.”

  “Can we go home now?”

  “Soon as the funeral’s over.”

  Funeral. It wasn’t that I had forgotten that Jonna was 29 dead or who probably killed her and why, but I had forgotten that there would be a ceremony to get through.

  The rituals of death.

  “When?”

  “Probably Tuesday morning. I called Mrs. Shay while they were checking out your head.”

  I looked at the sleeping child. “You’ll have to tell him.”

  He nodded.

  “And help him talk about all of it, including this night-mare with Pam. We can’t let him bottle it up.”

  “I know.”

  “And your mother! I promised we’d call her this evening.”

  “I already did. She’ll pass the word on to Mr. Kezzie and Minnie. She said to tell you that Kate and the baby will come home tomorrow.”

  “A new baby.” One life ended, another begun. “Another first cousin for Cal.”

  “This is going to be so damn hard on him,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “On you, too.”

  “Oh, Dwight—”

  “We’ve both read the magazine articles, seen the pop psychologists on all those talk shows. Hell, we’ve seen it in your courtroom and my jail.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s going to be sad and angry and he’ll probably take it out on you more than me.”

  “Like Andrew,” I said.

  “Andrew?”

  “Didn’t you ever hear about that? When Daddy’s first wife died, they say it was a neighborhood scandal how quickly he married Mother. The younger boys were too young to hold on to Annie Ruth’s memory, and Robert and Frank were old enough to be reasoned with, but Andrew was old enough to remember and too youn
g to understand. He resented the hell out of her for years.”

  “But he loved Miss Sue,” Dwight protested.

  “Took him till he was twenty-five to come around’s what I always heard. I just hope it won’t take Cal that long.”

  He held me closer. “We’ll work it out. I promise you we’ll work it out.”

  I laid my head against his chest and was comforted by the strong steady beat of his heart. We stood there in the moonlight for several long moments until Paul Radcliff discreetly cleared his throat from the doorway. He carried my coat and purse and Cal’s teddy bear and he also came bearing news of an arrest.

  “Those pictures you found let us get a search warrant for Nathan Benton’s house,” he said. “Soon as Betty Ramos saw them, she recognized that every one of those items were things Benton had given the Morrow House.

  She’s one pissed-off lady right now. Kept saying, ‘Well, no wonder he found treasures every time he turned around. I could find treasures, too, if I shopped in museums and used a five-finger discount.’ Turns out he has his own private museum down in his basement.”

  “Does he say why he killed Jonna?” I asked.

  “Swears he had nothing to do with her death and is admitting nothing. Claims he bought everything at flea markets or antiques stores. Knows nothing about the pictures on Jonna’s computer and was shocked—absolutely shocked, I tell you—to hear that they were stolen. In fact, 2 he’s claiming that it’s all a bunch of coincidences because none of the items are one-of-a-kind. He says they were manufactured by the thousands. Once we find the guns we’ll nail him on them if nothing else, though, because they’ll have serial numbers. And Lewes thinks that when the lab goes over the stuff microscopically, they’ll find ID

  marks from some of the true owners. Clark did a quick computer search for reported thefts, and in a couple of cases, a man who fits Benton’s description was the last visitor before the things went missing. There are places like the Morrow House all over the country with non-existent security and display cases that wouldn’t stop a two-year-old.”

  “But Jonna?”

  “I’m afraid it’s all going to be circumstantial if we can’t find some eyewitnesses besides Pam.”

  Dwight frowned. “Pam?”

  “We tried to question her, but it’s hard to separate reality from delusion. Best we can tell, she was watching from the upper landing of the Morrow House Thursday morning when Benton came out of the library with a gun and forced Jonna from the house. She heard him threaten to find Cal and kill him if Jonna didn’t come quietly.

  Somehow all this got mixed up in her head that Benton was a slave-catcher, so when Jonna didn’t come back by next day, she thought she had to save Cal from being sent back into slavery, too. I don’t have to tell y’all what a defense lawyer would do with her testimony, right? For right now, the only thing he’s charged with is theft.”

  He gave a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders.

  Dwight insisted that I take the cot and I didn’t fight him. After swallowing more aspirins, I drifted into restless sleep. Sometime after midnight, I became aware of low voices and lay motionless as I heard Dwight say, “—it’s to help you get all that cough syrup out of your system. The codeine’s what’s made you so groggy.”

  “But I quit taking that last week. Mother said it was too strong.”

  “Aunt Pam gave you a drink, though, didn’t she?”

  “She put it in my Pepsi?”

  “Probably.”

  “So that’s why she kept telling me I had to drink plenty of fluids. Every time I woke up she made me drink more.

  She could’ve killed me,” he said indignantly. “That stuff’s like poison if you take too much.”

  “I don’t think she meant to hurt you, Cal. I think she just wanted to make sure you’d stay quiet.”

  I almost smiled at his skeptical “Humpf!” but then his voice came small and tentative.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Aunt Pam said a lot of awful crazy stuff while we were hiding.”

  “Like what?”

  But Cal wasn’t quite ready to go there. “Is Miss Deborah okay? Aunt Pam hit her really hard.”

  “She’s got a big lump on her head, but nothing serious.”

  “Good. I was afraid Aunt Pam killed her. When we were looking for Mother . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Aunt Pam said Mother was in trouble. I wanted to go 29 back and get you, only she said Mother said for me to go with her and not to let anybody know or she’d be hurt, but then she kept driving around and around till it was almost dark because she said somebody was following us, then we sneaked in the Morrow House while Mr. Mayhew was back in the office. I thought Mother was going to be there, but she wasn’t. We went upstairs to that secret room with the Jesus pictures and she said we’d be safe there. She said a bad guy took Mother and wanted to take me, too, and we’d have to stay there for a while. I kept telling her you’d take care of any bad men, but she wouldn’t listen. She said they had bloodhounds and could track us down.”

  “Sounds scary,” said Dwight.

  “Well actually, it was a little bit,” Cal admitted. “Especially when I woke up and Aunt Pam was gone, but then she came back and everything she said was just flat-out crazy because she said Mother was dead and I’d have to stay really quiet or they’d get me, too. I tried to make her tell me what happened to Mother, but she didn’t make any sense and then I kept being so sleepy I couldn’t stay awake.”

  There was a long silence, then Cal said, “Dad? Is Mother actually dead like Aunt Pam said?”

  “I’m afraid so, son.”

  Cal began to cry and I opened my eyes a narrow slit to see Dwight lie down beside his son and hold him till we both fell asleep again.

  C H A P T E R

  32

  It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

  —Publius

  Night’s dark sky was a dirty gray when the three of us were awakened by a nurse with strawberry blond hair who came in to check Cal’s vitals and to remove the IV needle from his wrist. We could hear the clatter of the stainless steel food cart working its way down the hall.

  “Looks like this room’s going to be empty real soon,”

  she said cheerfully.

  I could never deal with the life-and-death traumas of medicine, so whenever I come across someone like—I looked at her nametag—like Stephanye Sanderson, RN, I am always grateful that such women are there for the rest of us.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  She smiled at me, but addressed Cal with a formality that left him gravely pleased. “Your blood pressure’s back in the normal range, Mr. Bryant, and your breakfast tray will be here in a little bit. What about you, Judge Knott?

  How’s your head?”

  “Much better,” I told her. “It’s still tender, but I don’t have a headache anymore.”

  “Good. The doctor usually makes rounds by eight, so this young man can probably get dressed as soon as he’s been examined.”

  I had caught a whiff of Cal’s clothes in the ambulance last night and knew he’d be embarrassed to realize that he’d wet himself during one of the long sleeps of his cap-tivity.

  “Tell you what,” I said, after I’d splashed water on my face, combed my hair, and put on lipstick. “How about I go pick up our toothbrushes and bring you some fresh clothes?”

  “I can do that,” said Dwight.

  Cal put out an involuntary hand to hold him there, but I didn’t take it as a slight. After what he’d been through, of course he wanted his dad there.

  “No, you stay with Cal.” I picked up the plastic bag with Cal’s dirty clothes and slung my purse over my shoulder. “I won’t be long.”

  “Okay. I’ll walk you out.” He handed Cal the TV re-mote. “Be right back, buddy.”

  As we walked down to the elevator, he thumbed his phone and called Paul’s office. It was too early for the chief to be there, but
when one of his officers answered, Dwight identified himself. “Any chance of getting a car over to the hospital to take my wife to the Morrow House?”

  By the time we walked outside, a patrol car had pulled up to the curb. It was freezing cold and I was glad for my coat and gloves. Dwight gave me the key to the house and I promised to be back within the hour with coffee.

  “No chasing up any more secret staircases,” he told me as he opened the car door.

  “You got it,” I said, sliding in next to a young patrol officer.

  Our lips touched, then Dwight closed the door.

  “I appreciate the ride,” I told the officer as we drove down the hill to the center of town.

  “No problem, ma’am. Things are usually pretty quiet on a Monday morning.” He looked barely old enough to drive, much less carry a gun. I can’t decide if I’m getting older or recruits are getting younger. “Heard y’all had a lot of excitement last night.”

  “We did,” I agreed. “Were you there?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m pulling eleven-to-sevens this month, but man! I must’ve been in that Morrow House a half-dozen times since I was a little kid in the Cub Scouts and nobody ever said a word about secret passages and hidden rooms. That’s awesome.”

  “Sounds like something out of a movie, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I can’t wait to see it. You reckon they’ll open it to the public?”

  “Probably,” I said, thinking they’d be dumb not to. It would be a terrific drawing card and surely Betty Ramos had to be happy to see her suspicions confirmed. This was going to make everyone reevaluate old Peter Morrow and his reputation for playing both ends against the middle. No wonder his wife protested the closets under the main staircase. Had they been caught, the house would have been torched and he would have been shot or lynched as a traitor to the cause. Blood ran hot out in these hills during the Civil War. And not just during, but 30 long after. Even now, I was willing to bet there would be plenty who would feel he had slimed the Morrow name.

  On the other hand, he might have been genuinely conflicted—hating slavery, but loving the South? After all, he’d lost a son to that war. A daughter, too, if the ro-mantic tales of a young girl’s broken heart were true.

  At the Morrow House, I thanked my driver again.

  Chivalry is not totally dead. Before driving off, he waited until I’d cranked my car and had actually backed out of the parking space.