Rituals of the Season Page 2

  After Dwight left, I changed into jeans, pulled one of his old sweatshirts over my red silk turtleneck, and tuned the radio to a station playing Christmas carols. While the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang of peace on earth, good will to men, I browned the chuck that I had picked up at a grocery store in Makely. I’ll never be a gourmet cook, but I do okay with the basics and Dwight’s not likely to starve to death, no matter what some people think.

  The smells of well-browned onions and carrots soon filled the efficiency apartment. Beef stew is good cold-weather comfort food, and if Dwight was going to be late, prolonged simmering would only enhance the flavors.

  The simple act of cooking usually mellows me out. Not tonight, though. Not even with the seasonal music and the stiff Jack Daniel’s I had poured myself. As I sliced and browned and stirred, I kept picturing Tracy slumped over her steering wheel on some frozen stretch of I-95.

  Not a hunting accident, the first officers on the scene had told Dwight. So who?

  And why?

  Back before I ran for the bench, Tracy and I had been natural antagonists—I as a defense attorney, she a brand-new prosecutor with a something-to-prove chip on her shoulder and the preponderance of the law on her side. But we hung with the same crowd, saw some of the same guys, and occasionally reached for the same pair of shoes when Fancy Footwork held their seasonal sales. She was way too tall for the high heels we both adored and she grumbled about how some male judges will subconsciously let their judgments be colored if a woman towers over them, but when three-inch apple green slingbacks call to you in the spring, it’s hard to react logically.

  A boy soprano sang “O Holy Night” in a high pure voice, and memories of Tracy crowded my mind: evenings at Miss Molly’s on South Wilmington Street in Raleigh before she adopted Mei and quit dropping by smoke-filled cop bars on Friday nights. Trading war stories, the drinks, the laughter. I remembered how she’d bought a round for the house the first time she got a death threat from a felon she’d sent to prison. We’d even gone to a concert over in Greensboro together with a couple of SBI agents we’d met at Miss Molly’s. She went out with the good-looking one several times and then he dropped her for a little five-foot-nothing blonde who made him feel big and strong in a way Tracy never could. In fact, now that I thought about it, he was probably the last straw before she decided to adopt.

  Back in the spring, after I broke up with a game warden from down east, we sat next to each other at our local district bar association dinner and I was moaning to her about the dearth of good men. She had smiled and said, “But you know what? When you quit looking, suddenly they’re right under your nose.”

  “Tell! Tell!” I’d demanded, but she’d just smiled again and kept her own counsel, which made me pretty certain that she was seeing someone. Mutual friends seemed to have the same impression, but since no one had a name and since Tracy always started talking about Mei the minute anybody asked about her love life, I hadn’t pursued it.

  Now I wondered. More women are killed by husbands or lovers than total strangers. Could this be a love affair gone horribly wrong? If she’d been in a relationship, though, why keep it secret?

  Because he was married?

  Not hardly likely, as my Aunt Sister would say. Yes, propinquity can sneak up on you and clobber you over the head when you’re not looking, make you do things you never thought you would, but Tracy had been a levelheaded realist and I’d heard her speak scornfully of such couplings too many times to think she wouldn’t have made propinquity zip its pants the minute it started breathing heavily.

  On the other hand, between work and Mei, when would she have had time to get involved with a complete stranger? I thought of the other men in Doug Woodall’s office. Chubby little Chester Nance, who’d run against me my first campaign? He’s at least two inches shorter than Tracy and appears to be happily married.

  Certainly not Doug himself. Even though he just turned forty, our DA has a no-nonsense wife who is famous for advising newlywed paralegals, “Sugar, you want to keep him on the straight and narrow, you keep him too dick-sore to even think about getting it up for another woman.”

  (Around the courthouse, it’s a given that Mary Jess Woodall effectively practices what she preaches.)

  Which brought us to Brandon Frazier. He left a mediocre private practice to work for Doug after Cyl DeGraffenried resigned. Now, he could be a possibility: divorced, no children, lean, intense, dark hair, smoldering navy blue eyes. Hairy as a shag rug, though, judging by his wrists and the back of his hands. Not my taste—except for a few stray hairs in the middle, Dwight’s chest is fairly smooth—but maybe the caveman look was a turn-on for Tracy.

  Or was her death something to do with her work as a prosecutor? Doug rotates his staff through both courts, the DWIs and the felony homicides. He’s a political animal—it’s an open secret that he has his eye on the governor’s mansion in Raleigh—and it’s his name on the ballot every four years, but he’s comfortable sharing the spotlight as long as everyone remembers who the star is. Although Tracy often worked district court, she really shone in superior court’s serious criminal cases, and after Cyl went to Washington, Tracy moved up from second chair and handled some of the big cases when Doug was stretched too thin. She enjoyed demolishing the defense and procuring stiff sentences for career felons.

  The house phone rang.

  “Deborah? How come you’re not answering your cell? I’ve been calling all over for you.”

  “Hey, Portland,” I said. Portland Brewer’s an attorney here in Dobbs and we’ve been best friends since childhood. I explained about leaving my phone in the pocket of my robe, “and you don’t have to yell at me about it. Dwight already did.”

  But Portland didn’t want to natter about my absentmindedness. “You hear about Tracy Johnson?”

  “I was here when Dwight got the call,” I said. “You know anything more?”

  “Other than that she and the baby were both killed?”

  “No, Mei’s still alive. They’re airlifting her over to Chapel Hill.”

  “Really? I heard she died, too. And that Tracy crashed because someone shot her.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Avery. Is it true?”

  Avery is Portland’s husband and an attorney, too. A tax attorney. If he’d already heard that Tracy had been shot then it was all over the courthouse.

  “It’s true, but I don’t know any details. Dwight doesn’t think it’s a hunter’s stray bullet, though. I just hope we haven’t suddenly acquired our own interstate sniper.”

  “A random shooter? Oh Lord! I drive back and forth on that stretch two or three times a week.”

  “Me too. But if it isn’t random, who could she have angered so badly, Por?”

  “Well, she did get another death threat a couple of weeks ago.”

  “She did? Who?”

  “That manslaughter case over in Widdington, where the guy shot his girlfriend’s brother and claimed self-defense.”

  I only vaguely remembered it. “Last year? Where the brother tried to stop him from beating up his sister?”

  “That’s the one. It came to trial right before Thanksgiving and Tracy went for the maximum because he had a history of domestic violence.”

  “Wife-beaters don’t usually have friends willing to kill for them,” I said.

  “No, but somebody else could maybe think she’s the reason their man or woman’s in prison.”

  “True.”

  Portland has more contact with the major violent felony cases than I do these days, but she couldn’t think of any others that had generated a desire for revenge on Tracy. Most defendants pour their venom over prosecuting witnesses, not the prosecutors themselves.

  Changing directions, I asked, “You ever hear who she was seeing these days?”

  “Nope, but you know what a clam she could be. Getting disclosures out of her was like pulling stumps with a mule. She’d give you what you asked for, but you had to ask fo
r every specific thing by its name, rank, and serial number. Wasn’t she ADA down in Makely today?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She left early, though. Mei had a doctor’s appointment late this afternoon or she’d have been at daycare.”

  We talked about how unreal it was that Tracy should be dead so abruptly when everything had been so normal today. We kept going over the last times we’d seen her, which triggered a couple of odd memories. “Remember last week when you and she came in to see me about your motion to suppress some evidence against your client?” It was a motion I had denied.

  “The Puckett business? I still think your reasoning was jesuitical on that.”

  “Give it a rest,” I told her. “If anybody was arguing from arcane precedents, it was you.”

  Portland gave an unladylike snort. “So what happened?”

  “After we dealt with your motion and you flounced off, she—”

  “Hey! I did not flounce,” Portland protested. “Waddled maybe, but big as this baby is, my flouncing days are over.”

  “You flounced,” I told her firmly. “Anyhow, Tracy stayed behind a few minutes.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  It was only a few days ago, but between the wedding, Christmas, and having my house torn up six ways to Sunday, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything else outside my courtroom unless someone practically grabs me by the shoulder and pushes my nose in it. And Tracy hadn’t been that direct. Now that I thought about it, I realized that she might have been working herself up to discuss something important, but at the time, she’d been too circuitous for me to pursue it.

  “She wondered if I thought the ends ever justified the means, then she looked at my ring and said something about the wedding, and one thing led to another till I almost forgot why she’d stayed. As she was leaving, though, I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to talk about and she said it was nothing important.”

  “So?” I could almost hear Portland’s shrug.

  “So here’s the kicker, Por. She wanted to know if marrying Bo Poole’s chief deputy wasn’t going to compromise my impartiality, make me more inclined to believe police testimony over a defendant’s witnesses. She’s not the first one to ask that, but for some reason it really ticked me off this time. I told her that I’d just ruled against you and you were going to be my matron of honor. Anyhow, now that I look back on it, I can’t help wondering if she decided not to ask me what she’d started to because of Dwight.”

  “If ends justify means?” Portland mused. “Are there any big cases coming up? Dwight arrested anybody that she was going to prosecute?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Just the usual run-of-the-mill stuff.”

  Major criminal cases don’t wind up in my court. Oh, I might do an occasional probable cause hearing, but Dwight hadn’t testified before me anytime recently and I really didn’t have a clue as to the makeup of his caseload these days.

  This is not due to a lack of communication on his side or a lack of interest on mine. No, it’s part of the evolving ground rules we set up back in October. I’ve already told our clerk of court and my chief judge that I’d be recusing myself from any case that might require Dwight’s testimony and that we’ve agreed not to discuss any district court cases arising from his department’s investigations until after the case has been tried. Privately, Dwight and I had further agreed that I wouldn’t bitch about frivolous charges and flimsy evidence if he wouldn’t second-guess my rulings. The agreement’s been in force for only two months, but so far it seems to be working.

  Portland and I kicked it around some more before the baby kicked so hard that she couldn’t concentrate. “See you tomorrow night,” she said as we hung up.

  Tomorrow night?

  For a minute, my mind blanked; then I looked at the calendar hanging over Dwight’s phone. There in the square for Saturday night was “Jerry’s. 7 pm. Bar Ass’n,” a reminder in my very own handwriting that our local bar association was hosting a dinner for Dwight and me. Almost every other square from now till Christmas had something scrawled on it. Amusingly, Sunday night was also “Jerry’s. 7 pm. Bo.” I had laughed when Dwight told me that Sheriff Bo Poole wanted to give us a dinner party at Jerry’s, too.

  “Want me to tell him to pick another place or time?” Dwight had asked.

  “Not on my account,” I’d said. Jerry’s specialized in steak and catfish and I figured we could have steak one night and catfish the next. It was sweet that so many people wanted to celebrate our wedding, but I was beginning to feel as if we were running a marathon, with the twenty-second as our finish line. The day before the wedding, the twenty-first, was simply marked “Cal” and “rehearsal dinner.” That’s when we hoped to spend a quiet afternoon with Dwight’s son. I’d seen him only once since the engagement and that was the last time he was down, back in late October. He seemed pretty cool with the situation, but it’s hard to know what’s going on in an eight-year-old’s head.

  Dwight’s brother Rob had volunteered to drive up to Virginia to bring the child back as soon as his school let out for the holidays. For reasons still unknown, Dwight’s ex-wife was actually cooperating with our plans and had agreed to let Cal spend Christmas with Dwight for the first time since their divorce.

  Some of my sisters-in-law think it’s weird that we’re going to stay home after the wedding and celebrate Christmas out on the farm with the usual family get-

  togethers instead of taking an elaborate honeymoon trip somewhere, but Dwight and I both feel it’s important to demonstrate to Cal as soon as possible that he’s a welcome part of our new life.

  I gave the stew another stir. It needed salt and a bay leaf. Salt was easy, but the only spices in Dwight’s cabinets were pepper, a bottle of Texas Pete, a box of celery seeds, and a jar of garlic powder.

  With the wedding less than two weeks away, his cupboards were getting downright bare. Moving him out to the farm wasn’t going to take much more than a couple of pickup trucks, his and maybe one of my brothers’. Cartons filled with CDs, videotapes, DVDs, books, and summer clothes lined one wall. He didn’t want to dismantle his sound system or pack up his large flat-screen television until the last minute, but all his beer-making equipment—carboys, kegs, and four cartons of empty bottles—was already taking up a corner of my garage.

  Dwight called shortly after ten to say he was on his way.

  “Any word on Mei?” I asked.

  His silence and then the long intake of breath told me all I needed to know.

  “Oh no,” I whispered.

  “Looks like the impact bounced a heavy Christmas present off her head. Probably internal bleeding.” In the background, I could hear staticky bursts from various car radios.

  “Was the shooting really deliberate?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Come on home,” I said.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he promised.

  With tears streaming down my cheeks, I finished making up the dough for dumplings while children sang of Santa Claus and jingle bells. What kind of monster would deliberately shoot a woman with a sick child in her car? And why there and then—on the interstate where the speed limit was seventy miles an hour? Why not wait till she was alone, walking across a parking lot, say, or unloading groceries from her car?

  I had just spooned the dumplings over the top of the stew and put the lid back on to steam them when there was a knock at the door.

  “Dwight?” I hurried to unlock it, assuming that he’d left his keys in the truck.

  “It’s me,” a familiar voice said. “Let me in.”

  I opened the door and there was my cousin Reid. Despite the raw December night, his overcoat was unbuttoned, his shirt had come untucked, and the odor of sourmash almost knocked me over. He was totally hammered.

  “God, Deb’rah!” He swayed in the burst of cold air and his words were slurred. “I jus’ heard. Tracy Johnson. Shot dead. And her li’l baby, too.”

&n
bsp; “Love and joy come to you . . .” sang the radio.

  CHAPTER 3

  Be careful in conversation to avoid topics which may be supposed to have any direct reference to events or circumstances which may be painful for your companion to hear discussed.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  Reid took two steps toward the couch, then the smell of beef and onions hit his nose and he made an abrupt detour for the bathroom.

  He was still pounding the porcelain when Dwight returned.

  Dwight’s lips were cold, but his kisses weren’t.

  When I could breathe again, I said, “You okay?”

  “Now I am.” He buried his face in my hair. “You smell good enough to eat.”

  “You’re just hungry,” I said, turning toward the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” he said and pulled me back to him.

  His chilled hands were busy warming themselves under my sweater when the sound of flushing stopped him. His eyebrows arched a question.

  “Reid,” I said. “Too much bourbon.”

  My cousin and former law partner swayed unsteadily in the doorway of the bathroom. His handsome face was a pasty green and his hair was still disheveled, but he’d tucked his white shirt back in and his speech was marginally clearer.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Client’s Christmas party an’ then somebody came in that’d heard— God! Tracy Johnson?” He caught himself on the doorjamb and looked at us in glassy-eyed confusion. “Don’ know why I came here. I’ll get out of y’all’s way.”

  He patted his pockets for his car keys and started for the door, but Dwight put out a hand. “Not like this, ol’ buddy. You can’t drive off from here ready to blow a twelve.”

  I poured him a glass of tomato juice. “Drink this. You need food.”

  He protested and almost gagged again, yet he let me lead him to the table, and once he’d swallowed some juice, his color improved.

  Reid’s a few years younger, but between my late start in law school and a year in the DA’s office back before Doug Woodall was elected, we both joined the law firm about the same time. He became the current Stephenson of Lee and Stephenson, Attorneys at Law, when his father, Brix Junior, retired to play golf in Southern Pines. The current Lee is John Claude Lee, my mother’s second cousin; Brix Junior was her first cousin on the Stephenson side. People new to the region (and still unfamiliar with our continuing penchant for genealogical linkage) tend to glaze over when I try to spell out how I’m related to both of my ex-partners even though they’re no blood kin to each other, but old-timers nod sagely and work it out immediately that Reid’s my second cousin.