Winter's Child Read online

  “Yeah. Of course. Ex-husband. Fighting over the kid. No alibi for last night. Right.”

  “I gotta go now, but listen.” Paul’s voice dropped another level. “Do what you want about telling Mrs. Shay, but I promised ’em that you’d meet us at the station at one o’clock.”

  “I’ll be there,” Dwight said.

  A thin mixture of rain and snow began to fall as he drove over to his former mother-in-law’s house. It suddenly seemed so reasonable that Jonna would have brought Cal to her mother’s that Dwight half expected his son to answer the doorbell when he rang.

  Instead, it was Mrs. Shay. “Oh, Dwight! I’m so glad to see you! Did you find Jonna? She’s not answering her phone.”

  “Cal’s not here?” asked Dwight.

  “No, I told you. I haven’t heard from them since Thursday morning and I’m beginning to get quite worried. Have you eaten lunch? I made a pot of soup in case they do come by. On these cold days, don’t you think a nice hot bowl of soup is the perfect meal? Warms you right up, doesn’t it? My stomach hasn’t been right all week, and soup is the only thing that would agree with me today. Come on back to the kitchen. I’m embarrassed to admit that I sometimes don’t go to the trouble of carrying everything into the dining room when it’s just me.”

  Dwight knew that for Mrs. Shay, “embarrassed” was not a mere figure of speech. She was a woman who clung to the standards by which she had been raised. Only the live-in housekeeper and yardman ate in the kitchen of her childhood, never her parents; and even though her own housekeeper and yardman had dwindled to a weekly cleaning woman, old habits died hard. She brought out a second linen placemat, a fine china bowl and silver soup spoon, then went to a cupboard for more crackers, which she placed on their own bread plate. For Mrs. Shay, setting the box on the table would have been “déclassé,” a term Jonna had murmured more than once when offended by some of his country ways, until he was driven to find a French dictionary. “You saying I’m common?”

  he had asked.

  While Mrs. Shay bustled around reheating the soup, chattering about her health, the weather, and where on earth Jonna could have gotten herself to, Dwight examined the kitchen for some sign of Cal. A rubber baseball sat amid oranges and apples in the fruit bowl on a side counter and there was a colorful picture on the refrigerator of an ornately decorated tree and wobbly cursive let- ters that spelled out “Merry Christmas to Nana—Love Cal.” But there was no jacket or gloves; and, most tellingly, there was no place set for him at this table.

  Mrs. Shay filled his bowl and seated herself in the chair opposite his, clearly prepared to continue making polite conversation. Knowing that he would get no more information out of her the moment he told her Jonna was dead, he said, “When you talked to Jonna Thursday morning, what exactly did she say?”

  “Exactly?” Mrs. Shay frowned. “Well, let me think. We talked about the snow. The boy who usually shovels my walk has the flu. He was supposed to send his brother, but he never came and I almost slipped going down my steps that night. The brother finally came this morning and now here it is snowing again. I’ll be so glad when Cal is old enough to do it for me. He’s such a nice child. And so mannerly. Don’t you think Jonna’s doing a good job with him?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Never mind that she had tried to turn Cal against him for remarrying. “Did she say what her plans were for the day?”

  “She was going over to the Morrow House to work on the inventory. There hasn’t been one in twenty years and so much has been donated to the house since then. It was my grandparents’ home, you know. I don’t remember my grandfather, but I was well in my teens when my grandmother died so I spent many a night there before we closed the house and the Historical and Genealogical Society took it over. Did you know she’s their new president? She’s really looking forward to tomorrow. You haven’t touched your soup, Dwight. Don’t you like it?”

  He looked down at the steaming bowl. He had not felt 11 hungry before, but now the aroma of creamed vegetables and smoked ham made him suddenly ravenous.

  Gratified by his evident enjoyment, Mrs. Shay rattled on about how she used to take the girls over when she was helping the SHGS document the original furnishings that had been there during her own girlhood, especially those that had belonged to the pre–Civil War Morrows.

  “They loved to run around and hear their little voices echo in those big empty rooms.” She crumbled a half cracker over her soup and dipped her spoon in.

  “Grandmother sold quite a few of the later things, but she had a firm sense of history and she wouldn’t part with any of Peter Morrow’s possessions, not even the ivory toothpick he brought with him from Philadelphia back in eighteen-twenty-three,” she said proudly. “I plan to leave my great-grandmother’s rocker to the house and Jonna is going to return the portrait. We may not have as much money as some of the new donors, but our pieces are originals, not period replacements.”

  Dwight tried to draw her out about Jonna’s friends and whether there was anyone she would have left Cal with.

  “No, dear. If she’s gone away for a couple of days, she’s surely taken Cal with her. Otherwise, he would be here with me. Not that she does go away without him very often. And not that she would go away this weekend with her big day coming up tomorrow. I keep telling her she should get out more, meet new people. I understand that you’ve remarried?”

  Dwight nodded.

  Mrs. Shay pursed her lips. “I was younger than Jonna when my husband died and left me with two difficult little girls to raise. It was too much to ask of another man, although there were two or three who professed themselves willing.” She gave a coy smile. “Jonna only has the one and Cal’s so easy. But she doesn’t want to hear me talk about it.”

  “So she isn’t seeing anyone?”

  “I didn’t say that and it’s hardly proper for you to ask, is it?”

  “Cal’s my son, too, Mrs. Shay,” he reminded her. “And I need to find him.”

  “I shall certainly have Jonna call you as soon as they return.” She pushed back from the table and stood up.

  “Now, are you sure I can’t offer you dessert or something to drink?”

  Dwight knew that this was his cue to excuse himself and leave and there was nothing he would have liked better. He looked down at his watch.

  12:20. Less than forty-five minutes before he was due to turn up at Paul’s office. It was now or never. He took a deep breath. There was never an easy way to say what she had to be told.

  “Are you all right?” she asked when he continued to sit there.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid I have bad news.”

  As he spoke, her eyes grew wide, then filled with tears.

  She sank back down in her chair and shook her head in disbelief and denial.

  “No,” she whimpered. “Not Jonna. Oh, please, not Jonna.”

  “Is there someone I can call for you?” he asked. “Your other daughter?”

  Knowing that Jonna considered her sister, Pamela, a 11 total flake, he wasn’t sure how much comfort she could be to Mrs. Shay or how quickly she could get here from—where was it? Tennessee?—but she, too, would have to be told and surely she would come.

  “Not Pam,” said Mrs. Shay, trying to choke back the sobs that nearly strangled her. “My cousin Eleanor. She’s right around the corner.”

  She managed to give him the number. The cousin was shocked and said she would come immediately. True to her word, she was there within minutes, a sturdy woman with salt-and-pepper hair who folded Mrs. Shay in her arms and rocked her back and forth. Mrs. Shay lifted her ravaged face to Dwight.

  “Cal,” she said. “Oh dear God, where is he?”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as we find him,” Dwight promised.

  He wrote down his numbers again. Mrs. Shay’s cousin matched his promise to call if there was any news and then she raised him one. “My husband owns the local radio station. We’ll have everyone in the va
lley keeping an eye out for him.”

  C H A P T E R

  12

  However these informants were guilty of a further important piece of ignorance.

  —Theophrastus

  Saturday morning, 22 January

  While Jack Jamison headed back to Cotton Grove to question some of the people known to have had run-ins with J.D. Rouse, Mayleen Richards asked Raeford McLamb to go with her to interview Nita Rouse again. “They might talk to you quicker than to me alone,” she said.

  McLamb arched an eyebrow. “Because I’m black?”

  “I doubt if that’ll help,” she said with a grin. “I was thinking more because you’re a man and her brother struck me as pretty macho when we talked to him Thursday night.”

  “So you’re gonna let me do all the talking?”

  “Heck, I’ll even let you drive,” she told him.

  A small neat sign on the shoulder of the road modestly announced that this was Diaz y Garcia, Landscape Design 11 and Lawn Service. When she was there before, it had been quite dark and Richards had been so aware of Major Bryant that she had not paid much attention to the Garcia family setup. Now, in the morning light, she was rather impressed by the compound they had created.

  Two double-wide mobile homes were separated by a driveway wide enough for larger trucks. Both homes backed up to a pleasant variety of hollies and tall evergreens, interspersed with accents of golden cypresses, that completely screened them from the road. The shrubbery continued all around the lot so that the head-high chain-link security fence was almost indiscernible. Across the courtyard were equipment sheds for some trucks, a couple of low trailers, a midsize tractor, and several riding lawn mowers. More esoteric bits of equipment stood along the back walls. Four or five little dark-haired children were clambering over the machines, pretending to drive. They ducked down out of sight as soon as they saw the unfamiliar car.

  An older, single-wide trailer abutted the sheds, probably a bunkhouse for seasonal workers; and judging by the curtains in an upper window, Richards guessed there was an apartment over one of the sheds. Tucked into the remaining corner of the open lot was a henhouse. The run was split in half so that as soon as the chickens finished off the winter oats on one side, the new oats in the other half would be big enough to feed them. Eight or ten Rhode Island Reds pecked away at the greens beneath their feet and their combs were a bright healthy red in the thin win-try sunlight.

  Through the closed chain-link gate at the rear of the yard Richards could see their tree nursery. In all, she esti- mated that the compound and nursery occupied slightly less than six acres.

  “Nice,” said McLamb as he parked in front of the double-wide on the left. “Boy, I’d love to have me a dozen of their eggs. I bet the yolks aren’t that pitiful pale yellow you get in the grocery store. Your folks still keep chickens?”

  Richards shook her head. “Nobody wanted to shovel out a henhouse anymore.”

  He laughed. “No pain, no gain.”

  She laughed, too. She loved her job and had no desire to ever again mess with gummy green tobacco or to deal with the backaches and heartbreaks a subsistence farm could generate. Nevertheless, the sight of those glossy brown hens made her suddenly homesick for the life of her childhood, chicken droppings and all.

  Before they had the car doors fully open, two men emerged from the house. Both were dressed in heavy red plaid wool jackets and both wore black leather cowboy hats. Richards recognized the shorter man from two nights earlier.

  “Señor Garcia,” she said, extending her hand. In halting Spanish, she reminded him of her name and that she had been there before with Major Bryant.

  He nodded acknowledgment and she introduced Detective McLamb, then moved back a half-step as if in deference.

  In turn, Garcia nodded to the taller man beside him.

  “Miguel Diaz, mi cuñado.”

  With absolutely no idea what cuñado signified, Richards and McLamb smiled politely.

  Diaz grinned at them. “I’m his brother-in-law,” he ex-11 plained in lightly accented English. “His wife is my sister.

  Have you come to tell us who killed his other cuñado?”

  “Wish we could,” said McLamb. “We were hoping to talk to Mrs. Rouse again and we have a few questions for Mr. Garcia here, too. I’d sure appreciate it if you could translate for us.”

  “Of course.” He turned and spoke rapidly to Garcia, who hesitated, then gestured to the concrete table and wooden benches that sat under the bare branches of a nearby oak. While Diaz led the way, Garcia went back inside, presumably to fetch his sister. At least that was what Richards thought she understood as she followed the other two men over to the picnic area. In summer, this would be a pleasantly shady place to sit and talk. Today, the sun shone through the bare limbs and kept them from being uncomfortably cold.

  As they sat down, McLamb laid a yellow legal pad on the table and wrote the time and place at the top before asking, “How well did you know J. D. Rouse?”

  “Only so well as he would let us, which means not well.

  You have seen where they lived?”

  His question was aimed at Richards and she shook her head.

  “They live in a field. No flowers. No bushes. One ugly tree. When he married the sister of mi cuñado, we wanted to landscape the yard for their wedding gift. He would not allow it.”

  “Why?” asked McLamb.

  Diaz shrugged. “For that you must ask another.”

  The morning was warming up rapidly and Mayleen Richards slipped back the hood of her coat. Her shoulder- length cinnamon-colored hair blazed in the sunlight and Miguel Diaz’s dark brown eyes widened in appreciation.

  “Muy hermosa,” he murmured.

  Her hair? Beautiful? Richards flushed a bright red, which made him smile beneath the brim of his hat.

  Fortunately McLamb missed the byplay because his eyes were on the door of the double-wide as Gerardo Garcia escorted his sister out to them.

  Juanita Rouse was dressed in black from the scarf on her head to the boots on her feet. Her eyes were sad and there was a deep purple bruise on her left cheek; and yes, she told them, clearly ashamed of the bruise, J.D. had gotten violent with her once or twice, but only once or twice. All right, yes, maybe three or four times. He was not a bad man, though. Nor a bad husband. Not really.

  Only when he drank too much beer or when things had gone badly at work. She turned to Diaz and spoke rapidly in Spanish with hand gestures to illustrate vocabulary words Richards had barely read, much less heard pro-nounced.

  “She says that these things happen between a man and wife before the man settles down into marriage, when he still fights himself because he is not young and free.”

  Diaz’s tone was completely neutral. “She wants you to know that he was a good father to their daughters.”

  At that, Garcia growled and spat on the ground in dis-gust, which would indicate that he knew more English than they realized.

  Mrs. Rouse’s dark eyes flashed. “Never once does he hit them, Gerardo. Not even when he have much beer. He brings candy, he plays with them, he makes them laugh.”

  Garcia’s words were scornful and Diaz translated them, 12 too. “A good father does not hit the mother of his children.”

  “What about his own fight with Rouse?” asked McLamb.

  Back came the reply through Diaz: “A man does what he must for the honor of his family.”

  “Would that include killing the man he feels has dis-honored the family?”

  “It could. But not like that. He says it was a coward who shot him, not a man of honor.”

  “All the same, we have to know where he was Thursday evening.”

  “He was with me,” Diaz answered directly. “We have the contract for Orchard Range. You know where that is?”

  McLamb nodded.

  “We are planting around the entrance sign and the berms. You can speak to our men. They will tell you the same.”

  “I’m sure the
y will,” said McLamb. “Anybody else who could vouch for him? Besides those in your employment?”

  “Will the Anglo who employs us do for this? He came by around five to talk to us about using more holly instead of cypress.”

  McLamb asked for the developer’s name and telephone number and jotted it down on the yellow legal pad, then turned back to Nita Rouse. “Do you yourself know of anyone who would want your husband dead?”

  “No,” she said, but as McLamb continued to look at her steadily, her eyes fell. As if it were too painful to try to say it in English, she spoke through Diaz.

  “There is a woman,” he told them. “Her name is Darla. This is why they fight so much now. She is married, too. Her husband has been in the war. Now he is home again. Maybe if he knew?”

  His name?

  Nita Rouse denied knowing it.

  McLamb had been watching Diaz as he translated, but Mayleen Richards had watched the woman and had seen the small twitch of satisfaction at the edge of her lips. As they drove out of the compound back onto the highway, she said, “If that soldier does know about Rouse and his wife, guess who got word to him?”

  “You think?”

  “Five’ll get you ten.”

  “No bet.” The car’s interior had warmed up while standing in the sun and he reached over to turn the heater down a couple of degrees.

  As McLamb drove, Richards called Jamison and told him to ask about a Darla-last-name-unknown.

  “Long as we’re out this way, let’s stop by the Harper woman’s house and see if she’s remembered anything else.”

  In Cotton Grove, Jack Jamison felt as if he were batting 0 for 3. The first suspect seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would think he’d shot a man simply because of a barroom brawl that happened over a month ago.

  “Hell, it was Christmas. The holidays. Everybody was drinking too much. Yeah, me and J.D. mixed it up a little out in the parking lot, but we was both so drunk, falling on our faces did more damage than our fists. I chipped a tooth when I hit the concrete. Cost me four 12 hundred dollars by the time the dentist got through with me.”