Winter's Child Read online

  “Did you see the guns?”

  Both boys nodded. “Swords, too,” said Nick.

  “Is there really a ghost?” I asked.

  “Nah,” said Nick.

  “Is too!” Jimmy said. “Cal showed me.” His face reddened in instant guilt.

  “Showed you what?” Nick challenged as he dug into his pie.

  “Nothing,” said Jimmy, scrunching down in his chair.

  “Is this about you and Cal sneaking off from the rest of the Cubs?” Sandy asked, eyeing him sternly over the top of her glasses.

  Paul frowned at his youngest, who looked as if he would gladly slide under the table.

  “Cal must know the house really well,” I said, “since his mom worked there.”

  Encouraged, Jimmy nodded. “And his grandma used to stay there when she was little, and his mom played there, too, Cal said. She lets him go anywhere he wants to as long as he doesn’t mess with anything, so when Mrs.

  Hightower wasn’t looking, we went all the way up to the third floor and he showed me her bedroom.”

  “Whose bedroom?” asked Nick scornfully.

  “The ghost’s. Elizabeth Morrow’s. That was her name and she was sixteen when she died. Cal said she would’ve been his great-great-great-great-aunt or something like that, only she went and died because her boyfriend got shot and killed. And he told me to smell and I did and it really was gardenias, Mom. Cal said that was her favorite flower and every time she walks, people can smell them, even in the middle of winter, and that was a little before Christmas.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. “Oh, right.”

  The others laughed, but when the boys had returned to their movie, I said, “Did Jonna use gardenia perfume?”

  Dwight looked blank and Sandy shrugged.

  “You think she pretended to be Cal’s ghost?” asked Paul.

  “Or brought the ghost home with her.” I told them about opening up the couch and finding used sheets that smelled faintly of either honeysuckle or gardenia. “Gardenia must be a fairly common scent though. Maybe a docent at the Morrow House? Assuming it has docents?”

  “Only in the summertime, I think,” Sandy said doubtfully, looking at Paul for confirmation.

  “Something else to check out tomorrow,” Dwight told me.

  “Not you, hon?” asked Sandy.

  “I’ve been told officially that this case belongs to the state guys,” Paul told her. “But Cal’s his son, so they can’t really shut Dwight down.”

  We moved on to other topics, but later, when I helped Sandy clean up the kitchen, I asked about Jonna. Not directly of course. I didn’t have to. Sandy knew what I was angling for and she spoke candidly as she moved back and forth from the table to the refrigerator, putting away the food.

  “Dwight and Paul were assigned to the D.C. area about the same time,” she said, “and we all wound up living on the same side of Arlington. We had them over to the house for cookouts and stuff, and we’d go there oc-17 casionally or to the O Club, but Michelle and Nick were little, so it was hard to get out much, and frankly, she made me uncomfortable. She was beautiful, but beautiful in a way that made me feel frumpy, and she was very class conscious, if you know what I mean? Very proper. One of those people who clobber you over the head with their own good manners? I always felt as if she was watching to catch me using the wrong fork or something, so I didn’t try very hard to make her my best friend even though Paul and Dwight clicked. Besides, from the first time we all got together, I could see that their marriage was with-ering on the vine. Especially after Dwight left the Army and joined the D.C. police.”

  She began rearranging things in the dishwasher so as to fit in a final bowl, and I added a stray fork and serving spoon to the utensil basket.

  “What about when she got pregnant with Cal?” I asked.

  “Could’ve knocked me over with a feather,” Sandy said. “Frankly, I was surprised they were even sleeping together. I was still carrying Jimmy, and Dwight asked me to visit her. He was worried because she was having terrible morning sickness and she didn’t seem to have any friends. The day I dropped in, she was feeling so miserable that she was almost human. Her breasts were sore, her skin was blotchy, she felt bloated, she was throwing up every morning, yet she was so happy about being pregnant that for the first time I could understand why Dwight married her. It was a good visit and I felt as if we’d really connected. We went shopping for baby things a time or two and the four of us even got together for dinner about a week before Jimmy was born. Afterwards?

  I don’t know. Maybe it was my fault for not trying harder, but with two kids and a new baby, I just didn’t have much time or energy to give to the friendship, and by the time I could put my head up and look around, she was gone. I never saw her again till Paul took this job and we moved to Shaysville. Even though Jimmy and Cal are Cubs together and they play on the same Pop Warner team, she ran in a different circle from mine—the town’s old money and old blood, women she was in playschool with.”

  “No male friends?”

  “Boyfriends? I wouldn’t know about that. Haven’t heard any gossip.”

  She closed the dishwasher door and pushed the on button. “I’ll tell you one thing for sure, though: if there was anything going on in Jonna’s life that led to this, you can bet that Jill Edwards or Lou Cannady knew about it.”

  C H A P T E R

  19

  Dreams are difficult, confusing, and not everything inthem is brought to pass.

  —Homer

  Although we were tired and emotionally drained, sleep did not come easily. Part of it was sharing the couch with Bandit, who seemed bewildered by Cal’s absence; but an even bigger part was our fear and dread.

  The night revived old memories of my eighteenth summer when I would wake from troubled dreams with a heart that was heavy even though my mind had tem-porarily forgotten why. There would be a two- or three-second disconnect between effect and cause and then the cause would come rushing back.

  Back then, it was Mother’s dying; tonight, it was Cal’smissing.

  Being together helped. We were too distraught to make love, but just holding on to each other was a comfort, and eventually we did drift off. We slept so lightly, though, that each time one of us stirred, the other would wake. Around two a.m., Dwight finally fell into a deeper sleep. At that point, I eased off the couch, thinking that he might continue to sleep for a couple of hours if I wasn’t there tossing and turning beside him. Bandit followed me out to the kitchen, where I switched on a light over the stove and poured myself a glass of orange juice.

  Weird to know that Jonna had bought this juice only a few days ago. Had bought the eggs and butter and everything else in this refrigerator.

  “Mooning over groceries isn’t going to find her killer orget Cal back,” said the pragmatist who lives in my head.

  “You need to find something useful to do,” agreed the preacher who shares the same quarters.

  I looked around the kitchen. Except for a bowl and spoon in the sink, it was completely tidy. I opened drawers: utensils neatly compartmentalized. Cupboards, ditto.

  She probably ran the dishwasher only once a day because Thursday’s dirty breakfast dishes were still there, but no pots and pans.

  Over the phone was a calendar with squares for each day. Today was supposed to have been a playdate with someone named Jason. There had been a PTA meeting earlier in the month. A notation about choir robes last Sunday. A dental appointment next Tuesday. “Lunch w/L&J” was penciled in for the coming Wednesday.

  What really stood out on the calendar, though, was a line drawn through this weekend from Thursday to Monday, a line Jonna had labeled “MH.” Saturday and Sunday, yes. Those were the winter opening days for the Morrow House, according to Dwight. And the director had told him they usually worked a third day, either Friday or Monday. So why would Jonna have five days marked off like this?

  Out in the utility room, all the laundry products were stored accordin
g to their function, with dog care items 18 on their own shelf. No jackets or scarves on the coat pegs, but a pair of little-boy boots stood on a mud tray beside the door, and the sight of them tore at my heart. The temperature was below freezing. Was Cal out there somewhere this bitter winter night, shivering with cold and fear? Surely no woman that he trusted would be so cruel?

  I finished drinking my juice and put the glass in the dishwasher. Then, with Bandit at my heels, I crept back through the living room and up the stairs, grateful for the carpeted steps. Between the reflective snow that covered the ground outside and the streetlight down the block, I had no trouble finding my way without switching on extra lights. Dwight and Paul had made a lot out of the fact that someone had entered the house and gone up to the bathroom without stumbling over furniture, but once my eyes adjusted, it was no problem.

  I went on down the hall to Jonna’s room and felt along the inner wall till I located a switch. A lamp came on beside the double bed, a perfectly made double bed. Despite the evidence of the couch, my first impression wasn’t wrong. She had been a neat freak. No rumpled coverlet, no gown or pajama top hanging from the bed-post, no slippers kicked off in the corner. And yeah, yeah, I know the theory that tidying up as you go is the secret of an orderly home, but damn! This wasn’t just orderly, it was downright military. I looked around and wondered if maybe this is one area where Dwight actually does compare me to her.

  “You work full-time,” the preacher comforted me, making excuses.

  “Get real,” said the pragmatist. “Living in a bandbox 182

  WINTER’S CHILD

  couldn’t be important to Dwight or he wouldn’t have married you. He knew he wasn’t getting Martha Stewart.”

  Martha could have decorated this room, though.

  There were more frills here than downstairs—ruffles on the floral bedskirt and pillow shams, ruffles on the curtains—and the furniture was of the same style: four-poster mahogany bed and matching chest and dresser.

  No computer on the corner desk or, now that I thought about it, anywhere in the house. Luddite or too frugal to buy one?

  The desk had clearly been examined by the state police and I wondered what they had taken. One of the desk drawers was for hanging files. The one labeled “Bank”

  was empty and I didn’t see a checkbook either. It might have been in her purse, though. Had her purse been in the car with her?

  Something else to check on.

  A diary would have been helpful, but who keeps one these days? If Jonna had, it was no longer here, and from the things her house was telling me, I doubted she was the type. A quick thumb-through of the hanging files in her desk drawer showed little of the sentimental. Cal’s folder contained his medical records, his school reports, group pictures from kindergarten and first grade, and one funny Mother’s Day card. Unless those two state agents had taken them, she did not seem to have saved personal letters from friends or family either.

  On the other hand, there were several photo albums on the long shelf above the desk. No boxes stuffed with unlabeled snapshots for Jonna. Each picture was carefully dated and the people identified. No denying it: she had been a beautiful bride, and the picture of her and Dwight 18 on their wedding day took my breath away. I had forgotten how skinny he’d been back then. And that regulation haircut! Her dark hair had been much longer then, and in their picture, one strand had fallen over the front of her white satin gown almost to her waist. She was looking down at her flowers and presumably at her new wedding band, too. He was looking at her.

  With love in his eyes.

  “It was their wedding day. Of course he loved her,” said the preacher.

  “She left him ,” whispered the pragmatist. “He didn’tleave her. The divorce was her idea.”

  Despising myself for the ugly jealous thoughts that coursed through my head, I quickly returned that album to the shelf and took down a later one. Ah! Pictures of Cal shortly after his birth, a tiny infant held by a man’s big hands. Dwight’s hands. But blessedly, no head shots of Dwight in this album. It covered the first five years of Cal’s life even though there were other occasions. Birthdays. Christmases.

  I thought of my brothers’ wives. Most of them could produce a foot-high stack of pictures to document their firstborn’s first year. No way would a whole year fit in one album, much less five. Which is not to say Jonna didn’t dote on Cal as much as they doted on my nieces and nephews. He has the sunny good nature of a child who is loved and his room was cheerfully messy, which would indicate that she had not too rigidly imposed her own standards on him. Tidiness might have been instinctive to her and not necessarily a conscious choice.

  As I flipped through the pictures, two faces kept reappearing: Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards. At a lake, at a luncheon, at a baby shower. There was a studio picture of Jonna with an older woman—Cal’s other grandmother?

  And another of those two with a third woman who had the same family features. Probably Jonna’s sister.

  Also on the shelf were four high school yearbooks that had been looked at so often that they were almost falling apart. I took down the last one and flipped to the back.

  Guess who had been homecoming queen twenty-five years ago?

  And part of her court? Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards.

  Only back then, they were Lou Freeman and Jill Booker.

  The Three Musketeers.

  To my amusement, her junior year annual fell open to a picture of the girls and damned if it wasn’t labeled “The Three Musketeers of Shaysville High.”

  A sheet of paper slipped from the yearbook. It was an alphabetized list of over a hundred names and seemed to be the kids who had graduated in Jonna’s class. She had methodically drawn lines through four of the names and written “dead” beside them. For the rest, she had entered married names and current addresses, highlighting those whose addresses included “S’ville.” It would appear that a twenty-fifth reunion was in the offing and that she was chair of the class gift committee.

  Soon someone else would be chairing that committee. A line would be drawn through Jonna’s name, and sometime during the reunion evening there would be a moment of silence for the classmates no longer there. Then the laugh-ter and chatter and remember-whens would resume with nothing more than a brief shadow over the gathering.

  I sighed and turned back to the file drawer in Jonna’s desk.

  A Morrow House file contained a sheaf of faded Xerox copies that had started to cornflake around the edges.

  The top sheet identified it as the bicentennial inventory of the Morrow House, and it appeared to list every teacup, law book, or artifact in the historic house. Different hands had added items since 1976 and I recognized Jonna’s writing in a few places. Within the past six months, a Nathan Benton had given a CSA brass belt buckle, circa 1863; a Catherine D. Schmerner had donated a lady’s hand mirror; and a Betty Coates Ramos had given a letter written in April of 1893 to one J.

  Coates from P. Morrow. There was a question mark beside the hand mirror, then, in a different-colored ink, but still Jonna’s writing, she had added, “Ebony, inlaid with silver, ca. 1840.” All four items had been entered under the proper room, along with a dated accession number. I seemed to remember some mention that Jonna was taking inventory. Maybe that was why she had scheduled extra days at the Morrow House?

  Another folder held the paperwork to her divorce from Dwight. No way was I going to look at those, although clearly the police had, judging from the way the papers were jammed in so crookedly.

  It was none of my business. It was old news, over and done with before Dwight came back to Colleton County.

  It was—oh, well. What the hell?

  She had saved the ED pages, and as I had suspected, they showed that she had royally screwed Dwight. The valuations on her share of their marital possessions were much lower than the ones on his. She got all the furniture and the car; he got his clothes, a lawn mower, some books and tapes, the smaller of their two tele
visions, and the truck he’d owned back then. That was basically it.

  Nevertheless, he somehow wound up having to pay her a few thousand extra to attain what the presiding judge had deemed “equitable.”

  Well, I’d known all along that he hadn’t fought the settlement. His reasoning was that anything she got would make life better for Cal, and who can fault a father for that?

  Digging deeper in the file, I realized that Dwight was still paying child support based on his D.C. salary, which seven years later was still a little higher than what he currently earns with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. Now, that I hadn’t known, and it made me angry to think how he had occasionally taken on extra work so as to afford something Jonna said Cal needed.

  But Jonna had known about the salary difference because here was a printout of the base salaries for Colleton County employees. Public records. And damn! Here was the salary range for district court judges with an approxi-mation of my salary circled and added to Dwight’s. More question marks in the margin. Dollars to doughnuts, she was planning to go back to court and ask that Cal’s child support be raised on the strength of Dwight’s increased household earnings. I wasn’t clear on Virginia law, but good luck with that, I thought. Wait’ll Portland hears.

  And then, abruptly, it hit me anew that Jonna was dead. This was never going to come to court.

  Clipped to the salary sheet was an account of our wedding that had appeared in the Ledger, Dobbs’s biweekly paper. A couple of papers later, I found a printout of the write-up the Raleigh News & Observer had carried.

  It occurred to me that Jonna either had someone looking stuff up for her on the Internet or that she used a 18 computer at work and was no babe-in-the-woods Luddite. This would also explain how Agents Lewes and Clark knew I was a judge.

  There was a hanging file labeled “Medical Records.”

  An empty hanging file. They must have taken those to discuss with her doctor.

  By now it was almost three-thirty, so I switched off the light and, rather than disturb Dwight, crawled into Cal’s bed. Bandit curled up at my feet and promptly went to sleep. I lay there with my eyes wide open trying to understand why such a thoroughly normal—even rather dull—small-town mother should have been killed.