Christmas Mourning Read online

  A strong odor of cigarette smoke was the first thing they noticed when they stepped inside the trailer. Next was the way at least one piece of clothing seemed to be draped over every chair. Neatness did not seem to be a virtue of the Wentworth brothers, which made it hard to tell if the place had been tossed or not. In the living room, a wastebasket overflowed with beer cans, cigarette butts, and fast-food cartons, and the coffee table in front of the television was covered in more of the same.

  The television was on and tuned to one of the outdoor hunting and fishing channels, and the ceramic gas bricks of a wall unit glowed red hot to compensate for the open door, but no lamps were lit, which probably meant that the shooting took place before dark.

  “Let’s have some light,” Dwight said and flipped a switch.

  The place seemed to have been furnished in castoffs. It reminded Dwight of the trailer where Deborah’s nephew Reese lived: same mismatched flea-market furniture, same La-Z-Boy recliner, same big-screen plasma television. To be fair, though, Reese kept his place a lot cleaner and slightly less cluttered.

  “Both brothers live here?” Dwight wondered aloud.

  “Only one bedroom with one double bed,” Denning reported from the rear of the trailer.

  “Somebody get me an address for the parents. I know they live in Cotton Grove, but where?”

  Richards opened the younger boy’s wallet and read off the address on his driver’s license.

  “That sounds about right,” Dwight said, heading out to the kitchen that was as cluttered as the rest of the trailer.

  If anything was missing, it wasn’t instantly apparent, and just as he reentered the living room, the television screen went black, as did the lights.

  They waited a few minutes to see if the electricity would come back on, then Raeford McLamb shook his head pessimistically. “A tree’s probably down across the power line.”

  Except for their flashlights and the portable floodlights, they would have been in total darkness, so they went back outside. As they passed the Honda and the pickup, Dwight said, “Y’all check out the vehicles yet?”

  Upon receiving negatives from McLamb and Richards, he opened the door of the Honda. The door was frozen to the frame and he had to brace one foot against the car to wrench it open. A rabbit’s foot and a pair of fuzzy green dice hung from the rearview mirror and schoolbooks were piled on the front passenger seat.

  “Must be the younger kid’s,” said McLamb.

  They found a flat plastic baggie with about an ounce of marijuana under the floor mat. Other than that, the car yielded nothing immediately useful.

  Same with the truck, but Dwight noted a gun rack. “Anybody see a gun inside?”

  “I’ll take another look,” Mayleen Richards said.

  The truck box on the pickup was locked and Dwight called for Jason Wentworth’s keys. A half-inch sheet of ice went flying when the lid was lifted. Inside were some ropes, a tow chain, a bottle of motor oil, another of washer fluid, a nail apron with an assortment of rusty nails in the pockets, a hammer, a crowbar, a large monkey wrench, a bolt-cutter, a new-looking three-foot aluminum level, and a set of Allen wrenches in a shrink-wrapped orange plastic box that had never been opened. If these were the tools of the victim’s trade, they were hard-pressed to decide what that trade might be.

  “A jackleg handyman?” McLamb hazarded, stamping his feet to get some feeling back in his toes.

  Richards came back and reported that there was no long gun in the trailer, but she had found a handgun in a drawer in the bedroom—a .38 special, fully loaded. “Lying there in plain sight if anyone opened the drawer.”

  They all knew that guns and televisions are the most commonly stolen items when a house is burglarized. This was looking less and less like a burglary gone wrong and more and more like deliberate murder where the only things taken were two lives.

  “There’s a little shed out back,” McLamb said. “Why don’t I take a quick look?”

  He disappeared around the corner of the trailer and Dwight said, “I guess we’re about through here for the night.” He told Denning to take the two rifles from Faison’s truck and process them. “Make sure one of them’s not our murder weapon.”

  He turned to Richards and said, “Station one of the uniforms here. Tell him he can sack out on the couch inside if he wants as long as the doors are locked. No one’s to come in except on my say-so.”

  Mayleen started to go, then hesitated. “Sir, you want me to notify his people?”

  He gave her a tired smile. “Yeah, I’d love to hand it off to you, but I’d better do it myself. You go on home and thaw out.”

  At that moment, they heard McLamb call, “Hey, Major! Back here.”

  They followed the sound of his voice to a ten-by-ten utility shed backed up against the rear of the trailer.

  “Look what I found!” he crowed and flashed his light across three brand-new push mowers, several garden hoses, a small generator, and an array of power tools still in their original boxes. “I guess we know now what sort of work Wentworth did.”

  Dwight shook his head. “Wonder what he did with the Jesus statue?”

  CHAPTER 15

  At Christmastide, we must, directly or even by omission,… square our hopes with reality.

  —Christmas in America, Penne L. Restad

  MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—SUNDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 21 (CONTINUED)

  Midnight and Dwight was a mile down the road before he began to see lights in the houses he was passing.

  Bound to be more power outages tonight, though, he thought.

  The sleet seemed to be lessening, but the accumulations on the ditchbanks glittered when his headlights lit them up, and more tree limbs would be falling, if not some trees themselves.

  Cotton Grove sprawls along the banks of Possum Creek, a few miles north of the Knott farm and twenty-five minutes due south of Raleigh. The four-block-long mercantile center almost dried up before the state’s population surge encouraged the town to turn the creek frontage into a park and bill itself as a place of small-town values (whatever those were) within easy reach of big-city attractions. Stores were restored to their 1920s look, ornamental iron streetlights were installed, and fast-growing crepe myrtles were planted along the sidewalks. The original oaks and maples that once nearly met overhead had been cut down forty years earlier when the streets were widened in the town’s first attempt at revitalization.

  These days, Main Street was one-way so that more nose-in parking slots could be created for shoppers drawn to the new businesses. During the early evening hours, tasteful wreaths trimmed in clear twinkle lights hung from each lamppost. A tall Christmas tree sat in the center of the park and kaleidoscopic reflections of its multicolored lights shimmered on the surface of the slow-moving creek. To save on energy costs, both sets of lights were turned off at ten when the last restaurants closed.

  The old modest Craftsman bungalows that filled in around the business section had been snatched up and restored. Leafless wisteria or rambling roses now climbed the porch railings. In summertime they would flower and their hip new owners would brave the heat and sit out on the porches in their wicker rocking chairs to sip iced tea and try to look like natives. Here on this wintry night, a few houses had left their decorative lights on, and more than one roofline dripped with a fringe of electric icicles that were now coated with real ones.

  Further out from the center of town, Craftsman gave way to cheap clapboard and asbestos siding, and although the yards were marginally larger, they lay along narrow side streets that were nothing more than clay and gravel. The address listed on Matt Wentworth’s license proved to be a small board-and-batten ranch-style house in no worse condition than its neighbors. In fact, it struck Dwight as being a little neater, a little better cared for. A bush beside the front door sported multicolored Christmas lights, but the house itself was dark.

  This was the worst part of his job, waking survivors out of a sound sleep to tell them bad news. Vic
tor Wentworth had served a couple of prison terms for armed robbery and deadly assault, but even jail-hardened criminals can have parental feelings.

  There was a doorbell and it actually worked for he could hear it pealing somewhere inside.

  A narrow slit in the curtains drawn over the front windows let him see that someone had switched on a light. A moment later, a light over the windowless front door came on and a woman pushed back the curtain and looked out at him.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  “Colleton County Sheriff’s Department,” he said, holding his badge so that she could see it.

  “What do you want?”

  “Ma’am, if you could open the door?”

  She motioned for him to hold his ID closer, and after she had studied it carefully, she let the curtain fall back into place and he heard the door being unlocked.

  “Mrs. Wentworth?” he asked.

  “Yes. If you’re looking for Victor, though, he’s not here.”

  The door led directly into the living room and she gestured him toward a chair, then picked up a half-smoked cigarette from a nearby ashtray that was otherwise immaculate, lit it, and inhaled deeply. A hint of air freshener covered up the smell of smoke and he couldn’t help noticing how tidy the room was. A small artificial tree stood in the corner and a few wrapped gifts were piled around the base.

  “I’ve not seen him since the week before Thanksgiving and all I want for Christmas is to hear that you’ve found him and put him under the jailhouse.”

  She was barefooted and wore an oversized Duke sweatshirt that came down to mid-thigh. Rather shapely thighs, actually. Mid-forties, he guessed, with shoulder-length brown hair that was streaked with gray. Her face had the worn quality of someone who had smoked too many cigarettes and stayed out in the sun too long.

  “Why would we do that, ma’am?”

  She sat down on the blue couch across from him. “Aren’t you here about those checks he stole?”

  She did not speak with a Southern accent and her diction was better than any of the Wentworths he’d dealt with in the past eight years since coming back to Colleton County to be Sheriff Bo Poole’s second in command.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I don’t know anything about stolen checks.”

  “You’re not working with the Raleigh police?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m here about your sons Jason and Matt.”

  “Stepsons,” she said. “What’ve they done now?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but they’ve both been killed.”

  All the color drained from her face, leaving it a pasty gray.

  “How?”

  He didn’t sugarcoat it.

  She crushed the cigarette out in the ashtray and leaned her head back against the couch to listen silently. When he finished, she said, “Those poor little bastards. I hope to hell he’s satisfied.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Victor. I knew his first wife died, but he didn’t mention any kids till after I married him. He’d already kicked Hux out of the house, but Jason was thirteen and Matt was eleven. All three of those boys were wild as turkeys and Hux was just plain mean. Had a nasty temper, but Jason and Matt could’ve been saved. I wanted to be a mother to them, but Victor wouldn’t back me up. He let them get away with murder and just laughed at me when I tried to give them some discipline. He disrespected me and let the boys diss me, too.”

  She opened a drawer in the coffee table, took out a crumpled pack of menthol cigarettes, and lit one. “Of course, it didn’t help that I was still drinking back then. I know I’m partly to blame, but I found Jesus and I’ve been sober for three years now. I tried, Major Bryant. I really tried. It was probably too late for Jason, but I thought I was starting to get through to Matt. He wanted to quit school and I talked him out of it.”

  She glanced at the slender little tree in the corner. “I got him some new clothes and that cell phone he’s been dying for. The one with a slide-out keyboard.” Tears leaked from her eyes and glistened on her cheekbones. “And he put something under the tree for me last week. First time ever. Oh, damn you, Victor Wentworth! All three of your sons killed? I hope you fry in hell!”

  A box of tissues sat on one of the end tables and Dwight got up and brought it to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m okay now.”

  She wiped away the tears, pushed her hair back away from her gaunt face, and stood up. “I’m going to make a pot of coffee. You want some?”

  “Yes, please. And I wonder if I could look at Matt’s room?”

  “Down the hall, on the left,” she said, gesturing with her chin. She set the tissues back in place and went out to the kitchen.

  Dwight opened the door she had indicated and found a perfectly normal teenage room—unmade bed, clothes piled on the chair and dresser top, posters of rock groups that had appeared at local concerts taped to the walls. On the single bookshelf over a cluttered desk were a paperback dictionary, a West Colleton yearbook, some comic books, a cigar box that held a handful of arrowheads, a go-cup half full of pennies, and a Little League trophy with his oldest brother’s name engraved on the brass strip.

  The only time Dwight had seen Hux Wentworth was when that young man lay dead on a bathroom floor, shot down by the kid he had terrified when he crashed through the locked door.

  He took down the yearbook and found Matt Wentworth’s picture among last year’s freshman class. As he had suspected, the kid had flunked his first attempt at freshman year. When he started to put it back on the shelf, a newspaper clipping fell out. It was a picture of Mallory Johnson and her court from a feature story about West Colleton’s homecoming game that had run last month in the Clarion, Cotton Grove’s little weekly newspaper.

  The desk had two drawers and Dwight found more comic books, a comb, pencils and pens, a deck of playing cards, some dice, old school papers marked in red, some snapshots of the boy standing proudly by his Honda, and, at the very back of the second drawer, an unopened package of condoms.

  The package was crumpled, as if it’d been kicking around in that drawer for at least a year, and Dwight wondered if the kid had ever gotten lucky before he died.

  A bedside table held an alarm clock, a lamp, and a radio that played tapes and CDs. Inside the drawer were a stack of CDs, all rap except for a surprising one of traditional Christmas carols. Underneath lay a small plastic folder. He opened it and frowned. One side held the boy’s picture, the other a picture of Mallory Johnson. Both were head shots and appeared to be last year’s school pictures.

  He carried the pictures and the newspaper clipping out to the kitchen, where Mrs. Wentworth sat at the table, stirring sugar into her coffee. A second mug awaited him.

  He thanked her, took a sip of the strong black brew, and said, “Can you think of anyone who would do this to the boys?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t seen much of Jason this winter. He came for Thanksgiving. I tried to make it nice for them. With Victor gone, it was a good day. He was working for a roofing company, but Matt said he got fired right after Thanksgiving. They accused him of stealing copper pipes out of some of the houses they worked on, but they couldn’t prove it. Matt said he was drawing unemployment.”

  “Matt say if he or Jason had any enemies?”

  Again, that shake of her head.

  “What about friends?”

  “There was a Barbour boy that came here once in a while. Nate Barbour. That’s the only one I ever knew. And he had a girlfriend, but I never met her.”

  Dwight spread the pictures on the table between them.

  “Were they friends?” he asked.

  “Friends?” Mrs. Wentworth smiled indulgently. “That’s Matt’s girlfriend. They’ve been going together since October.”

  Dwight tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice. “Mallory Johnson was your stepson’s girlfriend?”

  “Is that her name? He wouldn’t tell me.” She pulled the news clipping closer and frowned in con
centration as she read it. “She was homecoming queen?”

  With her finger, she traced the words beneath the picture. “ ‘… daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Johnson.’ That the same Malcolm Johnson that has the insurance company?”

  Before Dwight could nod, she said, “No wonder he didn’t want me to know her name. He said her parents didn’t like him and—Omigod! That’s the same girl that wrecked her car last week and died a couple of days later!”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw her picture in the paper, but I never connected it to this picture. Of course, I only saw it that once before he put it away.” Tears filled her eyes again. “So that’s why he was so torn up these last few days. Those poor, poor kids.”

  Dwight cradled the mug in his hands and said, “Tell me about them.”

  “I don’t really know anything. Matt didn’t talk about her much. It was a couple of months ago. I went into his room to ask him something and he was sitting on the edge of the bed putting her picture in this folder. I asked him who she was and first he told me it was none of my business, but I asked was she his girlfriend and he said yes, but she hadn’t finished breaking up with her old boyfriend yet and they had to keep it a secret.”

  “You say he was upset these last few days?”

  She nodded. “And Thursday night, he didn’t go to work. He was in his room when I got home, and when he came out to use the bathroom, his eyes were red. I thought he was coming down with something, but he yelled at me to leave him alone, so I did. He wouldn’t say what was bothering him and I never put it together that the Johnson girl who died was the girl in that picture.”

  “Did he go to school last Tuesday?”

  She nodded. “And then he went to his job at the Food Lion. He spent the night at Jason’s so they could get up early Wednesday morning to go deer hunting. Jason has a friend that has a deer stand over in Johnston County—Willie Somebody-or-other—and they needed to be in it before the sun came up.” Her smile was rueful as she drained the last of her coffee and got up to top off their mugs. “Only thing you can get a teenage boy up that early for.”