Winter's Child Page 16

  Then I fell asleep, too.

  Sometime later, I felt Bandit jump off the bed. I had a vague awareness that Dwight was moving around in the doorway—probably checking to see where I was—but I was too far under to do more than mumble sleepily, “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

  I heard him brush against the papers on Cal’s desk, and then I was gone again, dragged down and down, back into a dream in which Dwight and Cal and I were walking through a summer garden full of flowering bushes. . . .

  We aren’t running but we do have a destination in mindand we are anxious to get there, yet Cal keeps stopping tosmell the gardenias. “Stay up with us, buddy,” Dwight says,but Cal stops again to break off one of the creamy white blossoms. “Smell, Daddy,” he says. He gives me a big handful.

  “Smell, Miss Deborah.” And all around us, the air is heavywith the sweet, sweet fragrance of summer . . .

  C H A P T E R

  20

  Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by anymeans money.

  —Horace

  When next I woke, the sun had not yet risen.

  Looking up through the bare limbs outside Cal’s window, I knew it soon would, though, because I could see faint stars in a cloudless sky. I glanced at my watch—6:05—then pushed back the covers, visited the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. And yes, there were faint circles under my eyes. Not enough to scare the horses, though.

  Downstairs, Dwight was still stretched out on the couch, but he opened his eyes and smiled when I came into the room.

  “I was just about to come looking you,” he said.

  “Like you didn’t know where I was,” I said, sliding in beside him to feel his scratchy face against mine as we kissed. “Were you able to get back to sleep okay?”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “After you checked up on me sometime this morning.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t been upstairs since we got back last night.”

  “Sure you did. I heard you . . . didn’t I?”

  We looked at each other in dawning comprehension and I suddenly remembered my dream.

  “Gardenias! She was here again!”

  It took only a moment at the front door to confirm that someone else had indeed been here.

  “Unlocked,” said Dwight, “and I know I locked it when we came in.”

  “What was she after?” I wondered aloud as we headed upstairs.

  I wasn’t familiar enough with the house to spot what, if anything, was missing. Jonna’s room looked the same as I’d left it and so did the bathroom. The sliding mirror doors of the medicine cabinet were completely closed.

  “I distinctly heard the papers on Cal’s desk move,” I told him, “and I smelled her perfume, so she must have come into the room. But why? What was worth the risk?”

  Dwight looked around the room and shrugged. He started to turn away, then stopped in his tracks, his attention riveted on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. “Carson!”

  “Carson?”

  “Cal’s old teddy bear. I noticed it yesterday morning, and now it’s gone. You didn’t move it, did you?”

  I shook my head. “It was there last night before we went to Paul’s.”

  “Cal used to sleep with it when he was little. He’s too old for it now, but Jonna told me that he still wants it when he’s sick or unhappy about things.”

  “It has to be the same woman who took Cal!” I said, feeling an unwarranted rush of optimism. “She knows it will comfort him. Wherever he is, he has to be okay or why would she come for it?”

  “Because he’s sick?” asked Dwight. “Because he’s hurt?”

  He went back down for his phone to call Paul, and it startled us both by ringing in his hand before he could dial.

  “Bryant here,” he said. “Oh, hey, Mama . . . No, still no word . . .”

  As he listened, a smile softened his grim face. “That’s great! How’s Kate? . . . And how’s Rob holding up?”

  By which I knew that his brother’s baby boy had been born.

  In the midst of death, we are in life.

  With his hand over the mouthpiece, he said, “Seven pounds, two ounces,” then gave me the phone so that Miss Emily could tell me all the details while he used my phone to call Paul and leave a message for Agents Lewes and Clark about our nocturnal visitor.

  Despite our overriding concern for Cal, it was impossible not to feel happy for the safe arrival of Robert Wallace Bryant Junior, and I gladly listened as Miss Emily described the long night, how the labor pains completely stopped at one point as if the baby had lost interest in getting himself born, but then, as the doctor was about to send Kate home, around three this morning, he’d changed his mind and popped out at four.

  “I waited as long as I could to call you,” she apologized.

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. “We were awake. Do they know what they’re going to call him?”

  “At the moment, it’s a toss-up between Bobby and R.W.”

  I sent our love to them and promised we’d call that night even if there was nothing new to report. As long as I had a phone in my hand, I decided to call the farm.

  Daddy hates talking on the phone, so I knew I could give him the facts and get off and that he’d spread the word to the rest of the family.

  “I’ll tell ’em,” he said. “And Deb’rah?”

  “Sir?”

  “You and Dwight, y’all don’t need to take no chances, you hear?”

  “We’ll be careful,” I promised.

  At the time, I really meant it.

  There didn’t seem to be any coffee in Jonna’s kitchen and Dwight confirmed that she was a tea drinker, so we finished dressing and found a pancake house that was open for breakfast.

  The waitress offered coffee before she even handed us a menu, then brought it immediately and left the carafe.

  My kind of waitress.

  Over sausage and scrambled eggs, we planned the day.

  I was torn. I wanted to tackle Jonna’s two best friends right away, but we also needed to check out her work-space at the Morrow House.

  “Should we split up?”

  “Not right away,” said Dwight, slathering grape jelly on his biscuit. “It’s Sunday, remember?”

  “So?”

  “So where do proper ladies spend their Sunday mornings?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. And me without a single pair of dress gloves in my suitcase.”

  He grinned. “I said proper ladies.”

  It was almost like our normal banter, but I heard the worry beneath.

  “Sunday’s also one of the days the Morrow House is open during the winter,” he said, pulling out his phone.

  “Let me see if I can get the director to open it up early.”

  From Dwight’s side of the conversation, I gathered that Mr. Mayhew wasn’t thrilled to have been awakened before eight on a Sunday morning. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet us there at nine.

  I gave Dwight my biscuit and half my grits and we lin-gered over a third cup of coffee while the restaurant became busier with the pre-church breakfast crowd. As three women passed our booth on their way to a table at the back, one of them paused.

  “Major Bryant?”

  She was an attractive woman, late forties or maybe early fifties, with soft brown hair that was beginning to go lightly gray.

  Dwight automatically came to his feet even though she kept saying, “No, no, please don’t get up,” as if that would stop a son raised by Emily Bryant.

  Her face was concerned and she held out her hand to him. “I don’t want to interrupt your meal, but I heard about Mrs. Bryant and I’m so worried about Cal. Is there any word?”

  “Nothing yet,” he said.

  Her hazel eyes went to me and Dwight said, “This is 19 my wife, Miss Jackson. Deborah, Miss Jackson is Cal’s teacher.”

  The woman’s smile widened in genuine warmth.

  “You’re Cal’s Miss Deborah?
A judge, right? I’m so pleased to meet you. Cal’s had such nice things to say about you.”

  “Really?” I was absurdly pleased to hear her say that because I so want him to like me and you never really know what’s going on in an eight-year-old’s head. Her two friends were already seated in a booth on the far side of the restaurant and had begun taking off their heavy winter coats but I scooted over on the seat. “Won’t you join us for a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Oh, no. I’m—” She gestured toward the others, then hesitated. “On the other hand, I did plan to get in touch with you, Major Bryant. It’s probably nothing, but still—”

  “Please,” I said, and Dwight signaled to the waitress for another cup.

  “Okay. Just let me tell them what to order for me.”

  Unbuttoning her gray wool car coat as she went, she left it with her friends and soon rejoined us. Yet once she was there, with a cup of steaming coffee before her, she seemed unsure how to begin. “I hope you won’t think I’m gossiping. But if the children trust you, they’ll sometimes tell you things that I’m sure their parents would be embarrassed about if they knew.”

  Again the hesitation.

  “Was Cal worried about something?” I asked.

  “He’s such a conscientious little guy,” she said. “Caring and kind.” She looked at Dwight. “They say that his mother was killed on Thursday. Before school was out.

  That Cal was left alone in the house all night. Is that true?”

  Dwight nodded grimly. “That’s why he called me. Why I came up yesterday. Not that I knew she was gone. He just said that he had promised you I would come, nothing about his mother.”

  “No,” she said, stirring her coffee thoughtfully. “He wouldn’t. He’s very loyal to her, even when—”

  “Even when what, Miss Jackson?” I prompted

  “Please. Call me Jean.” Her smile was bittersweet. “It’s not as if we’re going to have much of a parent-teacher relationship, are we? You’ll be taking him back to North Carolina, won’t you?”

  Dwight nodded.

  “But we’ll need his school records,” I said, determined to keep thinking positively, to assume that in the end our only worries would be mundane things like reading and math levels and whether we had all his transcripts.

  She took a deep breath. “When I heard that Mrs.

  Bryant had been killed, I couldn’t help wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that she had been worried about money.”

  “Money?”

  “This past Tuesday, Cal stayed after school to ask me if there was anything a boy like him could do to earn a lot of money. I suggested that maybe his mother might let him do extra chores around the house and he said no, that he needed the money for her. He told me that he heard her talking on the phone with his grandmother one night and she was crying because she really, really needed five thousand dollars and his grandmother wasn’t going 19 to give it to her. He was afraid something bad was going to happen if she didn’t get the money.”

  “Something bad?” Dwight asked sharply.

  Jean Jackson nodded. “He said that her face was going to get hurt if she couldn’t get five thousand dollars by the end of the month.”

  I was shocked. Someone threatened to wreck her beautiful face if she didn’t pay up?

  “Did he say who was going to do that to her?”

  “He didn’t know, but he was genuinely upset. I told him I thought he ought to talk it over with his mother, make sure he hadn’t misunderstood or something. I mean, Mrs. Bryant and her friends, they’re all very well-to-do, aren’t they? I couldn’t understand how she could be crying over five thousand dollars. It would make a difference to me—I live on a teacher’s salary—but she’s a Shay, for heaven’s sake. And sure enough, Cal was okay on Wednesday. He said his mother told him she had all the money she needed and everything was fine. Only now she’s dead . . .” Her voice trailed off in doubt. “I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the two are connected?”

  C H A P T E R

  21

  Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for moneyis the most chilling and havoc-wreaking.

  —Gustave Flaubert

  Cal’s teacher left us to join her friends and Dwight asked me if I had seen Jonna’s bank records when I was looking through her papers last night.

  “No. Those state agents must have taken them.”

  “Well, I saw them and I don’t know where Miss Jackson’s coming from, because Jonna certainly wasn’t rich.

  In fact, she was living right up to the edge of her re-sources. There was less than seven hundred in her checking account and about five hundred in savings. She was basically working at the Morrow House to pay for medical insurance.”

  “You mean she lived on what you sent for child support?”

  “Not entirely. I think there’s a small family trust fund that her mother controls, because she was getting a five-hundred-dollar draft from Mrs. Shay’s bank every month.

  No credit card debt, though. In fact, no debt at all except for her mortgage. Remember that speech W.C. Fields makes in David Copperfield?”

  “Mr. Micawber?”

  “Yeah. How the difference between happiness and mis-ery is whether you spent sixpence under your income or sixpence over?”

  I nodded. As a boy, Dwight hung out at the farm so much that I grew up thinking of him as just another brother, so when we wound up in Dobbs, both of us single, we used to make popcorn and watch old videos together whenever we were both at loose ends.

  “First time you and I watched that movie, I flashed on Jonna. She always knew exactly how much she had to spend and she’d spend to the limit, but she never went a dollar over. She wanted Cal’s support raised, but that was for him, not for herself. When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing how well she managed on practically nothing.”

  I was instantly and painfully aware that Dwight and I are still working out our own finances and that he’s not particularly impressed with the way I handle money, but I bit my tongue before I said something bitchy, like, if money was so damn tight, why didn’t she get a real job?

  “This is not the time to tell him that Cal’s support payments were based on his old D.C. salary,” whispered the preacher.

  “Especially not when he’s in the middle of measuringJonna’s head for a halo,” said the pragmatist with spiteful jealousy.

  “If Cal heard what he thought he heard and if Jonna really did need a quick five thousand, I don’t know where she would get it. Especially if Mrs. Shay wouldn’t give it to her. She left a message on Jonna’s machine yesterday morning. Wanted to know if Jonna was still mad at her.”

  “Because of the money?”

  “Maybe. When I asked her about it, though, she claimed she didn’t remember saying it.”

  “So what about her two best friends? Sandy Radcliff says they both have wealthy husbands. If I suddenly needed money, Portland would get it for me in a heart-beat, so wouldn’t they?”

  He shrugged. “But five thousand or she’d get her face smashed in? What the hell is that all about and what does it have to do with Cal?”

  The heaviness had settled back in his voice, and I was out of suggestions. All I could do was reach across the table and clasp his hand and try to keep the optimism flowing.

  “We’ll get him back,” I said briskly. “And at least he has Carson to hang on to for right now, so let’s go do the Morrow House, get that out of the way, and then talk to her friends.”

  The Morrow House anchored what Shaysville was pleased to call History on the Square, the square itself consisting of a small town commons complete with massive old oaks and a bandstand of filigreed ironwork painted white. The house and grounds originally took up the whole block across from the commons. After passenger service was discontinued here, the town’s nineteenth-century railroad station had been moved onto the south end of the grounds and turned into a combination senior center and craft workshop. The two structu
res were separated by a commodious parking lot.

  Directly across the street, on the other side of the 19 square, was the old Shaysville High where Jonna must have gone to school. Set back from the street, it boasted a wide flagstone terrace with benches and a rather ugly central fountain that I later learned had been a gift of the last class to graduate from there. The front looked out of balance to my untrained eye, what with its fairly ornate main entrance on one side and a plain blank windowless wall on the other. Built around 1920 from native stone that matched the Morrow House, it still looked like a school on the outside.

  Dwight gamely tried to play tour guide. “The old classrooms are subsidized apartments for the elderly,” he said as we circled the square. “And its auditorium is a community theater now.”

  This early on a chilly Sunday morning, the sidewalks bordering the square were empty of pedestrians, and only a few cars were about. Despite the bright sun, last night’s ice had only grudgingly begun to melt from the parking lot and walkways, and I was glad for my boots, not to mention Dwight’s strong arm, when I almost lost my footing.

  The Morrow House surprised me. For some reason, I’d been expecting one of those antebellum Taras so prevalent in tidewater Virginia and the lower South. Instead, as I soon came to hear from the Morrow House’s unquenchably informative director, the first Shaysville Morrow had erected a stone version of his grandfather’s brick house back in Philadelphia: “a foursquare, three-story Federalist that was gracefully elegant within its chaste constraints,” according to Mr. Mayhew, a thin, stooped-shouldered man with rimless glasses that kept sliding down on his nose.

  Dwight went straight to Jonna’s desk, but Mayhew was clearly eager to show the house to new eyes and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get to know the man Jonna had worked with. I also thought it might be helpful to get an overview of the place where she had spent so much time. Unfortunately, Mayhew was one of those single-minded enthusiasts who miss the woods because they’re too busy documenting every leaf on every tree.

  He wanted to discuss the finer points of each object his eyes lit upon and he proudly caressed a cut-glass syrup pitcher on the dining room sideboard that he himself had donated to the house. To my eyes, it looked like something you could buy in any flea market or antiques mall, but for Mayhew it was his personal link to this house because it had originally belonged to a female ancestor of his, “the sister of Peter Morrow’s daughter-in-law.” It seemed to be a lifelong regret that he was only collater-ally related to the Morrows and that none of his own people were in the direct line.