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“But we do love each other,” I said, knowing I was using the same arguments to convince her that I was still using to convince myself. “We always have. So it’s not thrills and chills. Big deal. That just means it’s no spills, either. No letdown after the honeymoon’s over. We’re going into this with our eyes wide open and no illusions.”

  Portland sighed. “Sugar, you’ve done some crazy things in your life, but arranging a sensible marriage probably wins the jackpot. When do you two plan on getting this business deal notarized?”

  “If you’re not going to take it seriously,” I said stiffly, “we might as well go on back to the courthouse.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. You invited me to lunch.” She waved to the waitress. “Mary? We’re ready to order now.”

  When Mary had taken our orders and gone away, Portland said, “You’re really going to do this?”

  I nodded solemnly. “I’m really going to do it. We haven’t set an exact date yet, but probably over the Christmas holidays.”

  Portland laughed and patted the little bulge beneath the jacket of her dark red suit. “My due date’s the twenty-eighth. I’ll come as the goddess of fertility.”

  “You don’t get out of it that easily, girlfriend. You’re gonna be my matron of honor. If I could wear bright pink satin for you, you can wear red velvet trimmed in white fur for me.”

  Her glee turned to horror. “I’m coming as Santa Claus?”

  CHAPTER 13

  DWIGHT BRYANT

  MONDAY MORNING

  As Dwight Bryant headed his squad car toward the carnival grounds, he caught a glimpse of Deborah’s car in the parking lot across from the courthouse and in his rearview mirror, he saw her get out and lock the door. Any other day, he might have circled the courthouse and intercepted her with a teasing remark or the offer of a cup of coffee if she had time, but not today. Not after last night. He had loved her and wanted her for so damn long that the wanting had become a permanent ache in his heart, like a limp from a badly mended broken leg or a torn muscle that wouldn’t heal, something you learned to live with but that could still leave you gasping with pain at unexpected moments. And now that ache was finally, cautiously, lifting.

  He still couldn’t believe that she’d actually said yes.

  And hadn’t changed her mind even after he made love to her.

  Twice.

  So until they both got used to the idea, he told himself, better not risk messing it up or making a fool of himself in broad daylight. Stick to business.

  Marriage to Jonna had taught him to compartmentalize his feelings, a useful trick these last few years as he watched Deborah with other men—the willpower it had taken to keep his mouth shut and his hands off when she confided in him while watching some old World War II Van Johnson movie, or that time she wept on his chest after Herman had been poisoned, or any other time when she would touch him with casual, sisterly affection. If she’d ever suspected the intensity of his feelings for her, he knew she’d shy away. Every instinct warned him to keep it light, act as if nothing had really changed between them, compartmentalize.

  He was halfway across town before he realized that he was whistling. So much for compartmentalization.

  “Boss is in a good mood today,” Raeford McLamb said to Jack Jamison as he pulled out of the Hardee’s drive-through and turned onto the highway for Raleigh.

  “Was he? I didn’t notice,” said Jamison, yawning widely as he uncapped his coffee. It was scalding hot, but the caffeine was a welcome jolt to his tired nerves.

  “Jack Junior still keeping you awake?” McLamb asked sympathetically.

  “He’s seven weeks old,” Jamison moaned, turning a plaintive face to his fellow officer. “Shouldn’t he be sleeping through by now?”

  As the voice of wisdom and experience, McLamb said, “Well, Rosy was, but it was almost three months before Jordo gave up that two A.M. feeding.”

  “Three months?” Appalled, the tubby young detective recapped the coffee and stuck it in a cup holder clipped to the dashboard, then leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “Wake me when we get to Shaw,” he said. “I need all the sleep I can get.”

  Deputy Mayleen Richards glanced again at the clipboard on the dash to confirm the address. One of the self-storage facilities on her list was right there in Dobbs, but it wouldn’t open till ten, so she’d decided to start with the one farthest away on the edge of Fuquay-Varina over in Wake County. The way the numbers seemed to be running, Six Pines Self-Storage should be—ah, yes, there it was, a gray cinderblock office with long rows of units out back, each looking like a single-car garage with a pull-down door. A high chain-link fence surrounded them all.

  She pulled into a parking slot, adjusted the tilt of her hat, and made sure the blouse of her uniform was properly tucked in as she got out of the car.

  A tall, sturdily built young woman with cinnamon brown hair and freckles across her prominent nose, Mayleen Richards had tried sitting at a desk after finishing a two-year computer course out at Colleton Community College, but she was farm bred, used to hard physical work outdoors. Another two years of trying to fit her awkward square personality into a comfortable round hole was all she could take before she quit her job in the Research Triangle and asked Sheriff Bo Poole for a job. He knew her parents, knew her, and was always glad to have another officer in the department who wasn’t afraid of computers. He’d been disappointed that she preferred patrol duty over an indoor job, but agreed to let her pull a normal rotation. Lately, Major Bryant had been giving her more detective chores, and with the county growing in population, she was hoping to get switched over permanently.

  As she entered the office building, a gray-haired woman smiled at her from behind the counter.

  “Good morning, Officer. How can I help you?”

  Richards introduced herself and explained that she was there in connection with a Brazos Hartley, who had bought the contents of a storage locker from Six Pines. “A couple of racks of negligees.”

  “How do you spell that name?”

  As Richards spelled it out, the clerk swiveled around and began tapping computer keys to bring up the record. “Oh, yes. The Lee Hamden account. Negligees? Is that all it was?”

  “Nightgowns and robes. And rather expensive looking. Didn’t you know?”

  “Honey, all I know’s what’s on this contract. They don’t have to get specific about what they’re storing, and we can’t go through their things.”

  “Even when you’re auctioning it off?” asked Richards.

  “Nope. Even the buyers don’t know what they’re getting till they’ve paid over their money. Talk about a pig in a poke. All they can do is look. They can shine a flashlight in, but they can’t touch anything and they can’t go inside till they’ve made the winning bid and paid for it. Is Ms. Hamden suing him? Her brother said she’d be furious, but you know, we did everything by the book—certified letter, advertisement in the paper, everything the law requires.”

  “You remember Hartley, then?”

  “Hartley? The man who bought the locker?” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t know him from Adam’s house cat if he walked in behind you,” she said cheerfully. “Doubt if I ever saw him. My boss is the one who helps with the auctions. I stay in here and do the paperwork. I meant the owner’s brother. Him I remember. He was here last week trying to pay his sister’s back rent and her stuff already auctioned off nine days before. He was awful upset for her, but what could I do? She only left us an accommodation box number at one of those mailing stores here in town. We ask folks to leave us the name or telephone number of a friend or relative, somebody we can get in touch with. The way people move around these days, though...”

  She shrugged helplessly. “We wind up auctioning off three or four of our lockers every month.”

  “Did he say why his sister didn’t respond to the certified letter?”

  “She never got it. It went to the mail store and bounced back here when it couldn’t be delivered. He s
aid she’s been called out of state to nurse her husband’s mother and didn’t realize she’d be gone so long. Soon as she remembered, she called him and told him to come over and pay me the back rent, late fees. I had the hardest time making him understand we really didn’t have her clothes. Clothes. That’s what he said it was. Didn’t say nothing about fancy nightgowns. Mostly, he said, she was worried about some pictures—maybe an album?—stored in her locker, too.”

  “Oh?” Deputy Richards encouraged.

  “I had to tell her brother that most people, when they buy one of these lockers? They just keep the stuff they think they can sell at flea markets and dump all the personal stuff.”

  “Dump it where? Here?”

  “If they want to pay the fee. Soon as the auction’s over, they go through the stuff right out there in the driveway and bag up what they don’t want. We charge to let ‘em use our Dumpsters. Otherwise, they have to truck it to a landfill themselves. I had to tell him that nobody goes to flea markets to buy somebody else’s pictures, so stuff like that usually gets dumped right here.”

  “I don’t suppose he went through the Dumpster?”

  “Oh, honey, after nine days?”

  “You didn’t happen to get his name, did you?”

  “Wasn’t any reason to. Although, now that you mention it, I believe I did call him Mr. Hamden and he didn’t say that wasn’t his name.”

  “But you told him who bought the contents of the locker?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a public sale. Brazos Hartley. Ames Amusement Corporation, Gibsonton, Florida. Don’t know how he found us from way down there. Anyhow, here’s his phone number and an e-mail address, and I gave Mr. Hamden the same information and wished him luck.”

  “But all you have on Ms. Hamden herself is this mailing-service box number?”

  “And this phone number. But she must have written it down wrong because I called it and the lady that answered said she’d had that number for sixteen years and nobody by that name had ever lived there.”

  The gray-haired clerk looked at Mayleen Richards in sudden interest. “So how come you’re trying to find her? Was the stuff stolen?”

  “All I can say right now is that it’s related to an investigation the sheriff’s department is conducting,” the deputy said. “Could you describe Ms. Hamden?”

  “Sorry. That locker was rented six years ago, before I came. She was on our quarterly plan and payments always arrived by check every three months. Nothing on the checks except her name.”

  “Do you remember what bank?”

  The woman shook her head. “Her brother was real cute, though,” she added, trying to be helpful. “Curly black hair and gorgeous brown eyes.”

  Richards thanked her for her time and checked her watch as she went back out to the car. Only a little past ten. Wouldn’t take but a few minutes to check out E-Z-Quik Mail.

  The lone clerk there was cooperative but he’d only worked there a few months and could add nothing. “I’ve never seen her to know who I was looking at. Most people using the boxes out there in the vestibule don’t come on inside unless they’re mailing a package or buying stamps. According to our records, she pays cash for the box a year at the time and it’s due to expire the end of the month.”

  “Is there anything in her box right now?”

  “I’m not supposed to let anybody see a client’s mail without a court order,” the clerk said virtuously, but he went into the sorting room behind the bank of rental boxes and came back a minute later. “Nope. Empty as my girlfriend’s head.”

  The phone number on the form was similar to the one on the Six Pines Self-Storage form. Same prefix, but she’d scrambled the same last four numbers. There was no North Carolina street address for Lee Hamden. The space had been left blank except for the notation “In transit—no permanent address.”

  “‘Course now, there’s a lot of that going around,” said the clerk.

  Shaw University on the south side of Raleigh had its beginning in an 1865 Bible-study class immediately after the Civil War. Despite integration during the civil rights movement, however, its student body has remained predominately black.

  Even though Deputy Jack Jamison passed the school every time he drove into Raleigh, he’d never actually set foot on the campus, and in his sleep-deprived state, he was glad to tag along after McLamb, who seemed to know his way around. They found the dorm where Lamarr Wrenn and Eric Holt shared a room, but neither was in. The kid next door thought Holt might be at his job in the library and that Wrenn was probably in his modern art–appreciation class.

  Since classes wouldn’t change for another thirty-eight minutes, they headed for the library, homed in on their prey, and were soon crowded together in one of the small soundproof study rooms deep in the stacks.

  Of medium height and sturdy build, with light brown skin, closely trimmed hair, and a small gold stud in one ear, Eric Holt was the picture of earnest helpfulness. His eyes met theirs with innocent candor. Hide something? those eyes seemed to ask. Me? Collude with my friends? Cook up a story together? Certainly not.

  “Okay, yeah, it was dumb of Steve and me not to leave our names,” he admitted forthrightly, “but hey, Lamarr’s our friend. We didn’t want to rat him out just because he lost his temper and hit that dude. Besides, the guy was fine when we pulled Lamarr away.”

  “Fine’s not the way we heard it,” McLamb growled.

  “Well, no,” Eric agreed. “He was bleeding pretty bad. I guess Lamarr might even’ve broken his nose. But he was definitely able to sit there on the top step of that game wagon and cuss us to hell and back. Nothing wrong with his lungs.”

  “And your friend Lamarr didn’t go back later and finish him off?”

  “You’ll have to ask him that,” Eric said earnestly. “He says he went home and I believe him, but the last time Steve Knott and I saw him that night, he was leaving the carnival, heading in the opposite direction from the Dozer.”

  “Why’d he pop Hartley?” asked Jamison.

  “Oh, they got into it about the game. Lamarr said it was rigged. Called the guy running it a thief. One thing led to another. You know how it goes,” he said, appealing to them man to man.

  “Yeah,” said McLamb cynically. “We know how it goes.”

  They came at him with questions from every angle, but nothing they asked made Eric Holt give up any more information. His whole attitude said that he wanted to help, wished he could help, would certainly help if there were any way in his power to do so, but everything had gone down just as he’d told them.

  Lamarr Wrenn was just as helpfully unhelpful. They caught up with him as he was leaving one classroom and heading across campus for another. Dark-skinned with a small chin beard, he was built like a concrete post, tough and solid with big muscular hands that clenched convulsively around his books and looked capable of felling a mule with one blow. He walked with a slight limp that favored his right ankle (“Twisted it playing Hacky Sack yesterday”), but it didn’t seem to slow him down.

  “Look, man, you make me late and it’ll go down as a cut. Steve and Eric already told you what happened, didn’t they?”

  “You tell us,” said McLamb as they strode along with him.

  The walks were crowded with students changing classes and they were forced to walk on the grass to keep up as Wrenn plowed his way through.

  But it was clear the young men had their stories well in hand. Lamarr Wrenn had thought the Dozer was rigged, he said. He and Hartley got into it. Accusations were made by Wrenn; slurs were spoken by Hartley.

  “So when he called me a dumb-ass jigaboo, I smashed his nose in for him. But that’s all. Anybody says different, he can talk to me.”

  McLamb said, “Your friends say you were still steamed when you left them. You sure you didn’t go back and have another go at him?”

  “Nope, I went home.”

  “Home being?”

  The address he gave was in the old Darkside section of Dobbs. The nei
ghborhood was still mostly black, yet, despite some derelict shanties, it wasn’t what you’d call a real ghetto, McLamb thought as he wrote it down. Not when those shanties stood on quarter- to half-acre lots. Not when professional and middle-class African Americans were either remodeling the old clapboard houses of their parents and grandparents or else leveling them to make way for bigger and more modern homes.

  “Any witnesses to the time you got there?”

  Wrenn shook his head, moving more slowly up the stairs of the building they’d entered, as if it hurt to climb on that ankle.

  Nobody lived in the house at the moment, he explained, because it had belonged to his grandfather who died early in the summer. His mother was the old man’s only relative and natural heir, but there was some technicality about the deed. Soon as that was straightened out, the house would be sold. In the meantime, Wrenn used it as a crash pad when he wanted to get away from school.

  “Wait a minute, though,” he said as they pulled up at the doorway of his next class. “There’s a nosy old lady lives next door. I think she might’ve still been out on her porch when I got home.”

  He gave them her name and address; then the bell rang again and he stepped inside the classroom just as the professor came over to close the door.

  The pimply faced teenager minding the desk at the Colleton U-Stor didn’t remember Brazos Hartley even though he’d taken the bid on two lockers on the thirty first of August. He was pretty sure that no one had been around about a locker belonging to a Leonard Angelopolus but Caroline Sholten? He couldn’t swear he’d ever met her, but he certainly recalled Mrs. Sholten’s angry middle-aged daughter.

  “You know how kids used to say ‘Your mama wears army boots’?” He giggled. “Well, this lady really did. I mean, she was huge. She had on these lace-up boots like a Marine or a paratrooper, and shorts that looked like bib overalls with the pant legs cut off, y’know? And her legs were like tree stumps. Man, she was one tough mama! And going on and on about how it was her furniture and her mother meant for her to have it. I told her if her mother wanted to keep the stuff, she shoulda paid the rent before it got auctioned off. I mean, we sent out the letter, advertised in the Ledger. Posted a notice at the courthouse. It was a legal sale.”