Winter's Child Read online

  A state trooper’s car sat in front of the house and I saw lights on inside, but I had promised to get back to the hospital quickly, so I didn’t stop to see if there were any new developments.

  By the time I got to Jonna’s house, the eastern sky was a bright pink and gold as the sun edged up to the horizon.

  Once inside, I realized that the bag Dwight had packed for Cal on Friday probably held everything he would need this morning.

  Friday. Only three days ago.

  A weekend.

  Normally, I would be walking into the courthouse this Monday morning, greeting clerks and attorneys—

  “So, hey, how was your weekend?”

  “Get much done this weekend?”

  “ Y’all go away for the weekend?”

  —the casual chatter as another workweek begins.

  Three days ago, I was a bride of one month, still adjusting to a husband, still learning not to say, “Oh, sure, I’ll be there, sounds like fun” before I checked to see if his idea of a fun weekend was the same as mine.

  From now on, there would be a child to consider as well. And not just any child, but one whose mother had been brutally murdered, who would be grieving, who would probably resent the hell out of me because I was alive and she wasn’t.

  “Two days ago, you stood in this very house and promisedthat if Cal was safely returned, you’d do whatever neededdoing,” my internal preacher reminded me.

  “Your mother took on eight sons when she married theirdaddy,” said his pragmatic roommate. “Are you eighttimes less the woman?”

  I straightened my shoulders, put my makeup kit in a tote bag, and added Dwight’s toiletry bag and a complete change of clothes for Cal.

  As I locked the door and started down the walk, I saw Jonna’s neighbor peering from the window and went over to tell him that we’d found Cal.

  “Now, I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “It’s real bad about his mother, though. I reckon the funeral will be tomorrow?”

  I told him we’d let him know as soon as we knew for sure.

  On the way back to the hospital, I swung past a fast-food window to pick up two cups of steaming hot coffee and some sausage biscuits and was back in Cal’s room before he’d finished his breakfast.

  His eyes were red and I knew he’d been crying again.

  When he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, Dwight uncapped his coffee and drank deeply. “I needed that.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “He wanted to know exactly how Jonna died and I told him. Not about the note or how she must have known what was going to happen, just that she couldn’t have felt any pain or—”

  He broke off as Cal stuck his head out of the bathroom. “Is it okay if I take a shower? I feel dirty.”

  “Sure,” Dwight told him. “But you can’t get dressed till after the doctor’s seen you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I unwrapped a biscuit and handed it to him. It was still warm and fragrant, the sausage nicely flavored with sage.

  As he took a bite, I said, “What’s on the agenda today?”

  “Cal wants to see her. What do you think?”

  I shook my head. “That’s a tough call. Has he ever seen a death?”

  “Just dogs or cats.” He took another bite. “No, I take that back. One of his classmates was in a bad car wreck right after school started. The whole class went to the funeral, but I don’t know if the casket was open.”

  “If he really wants to see her, then I think you ought to take him. But go this afternoon or tomorrow morning when the two of you can be there alone.”

  “What if he wants to touch her?”

  I remembered standing in front of Mother’s coffin. In-tellectually, I knew she was dead, but it wasn’t till I touched the hands lying neatly folded that the permanence of her death sank in. From my earliest memories, her hands had danced across the piano keys when Daddy played his fiddle. They had shelled peas and butter beans, patted out biscuit dough, scrubbed bathtubs, plucked chickens, spanked disobedient sons and a willful daugh- ter, cupped a flame to her cigarette, dealt out poker hands, and helped me hold the hymnal on Sunday morning so that I could follow the words. And always, always those hands had flashed in the air before her as she talked, enhancing her conversation and vividly depicting her emotions.

  Daddy used to say, “Cut off your mama’s hands and she couldn’t talk,” and to tease her, he’d catch her hands in his and hold them motionless till she laughed and pulled away.

  But there in that casket, those hands had been cold and forever stilled.

  “Deb’rah?” Dwight looked at me worriedly. “Shug?”

  “Sorry.” I shook my head and blinked away the tears.

  “I was thinking about Mother. You have to let Cal do what he wants, Dwight. Just give him enough time to do it. Don’t hurry him.”

  We finished eating and Cal came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around him. His brown hair was damp and tousled and drops of water clung to his shoulder blades. At eight, his sense of modesty was in its most rudimentary stage of development, and when his towel slipped as he crawled back onto the bed, he didn’t seem to notice or care.

  The doctor, Cal’s regular pediatrician, came in soon after, looked at his chart, and gave it as his opinion that Cal had not been seriously harmed by the cough syrup. “He had taken three or four doses by the time Mrs. Bryant called to report his sensitivity to the codeine. There couldn’t have been all that much left in the bottle.”

  “So can I go home now?” asked Cal.

  “Well, if it was me, cold as it is, I believe I’d put on a 30 coat and some shoes first,” the doctor said and Cal laughed.

  I handed Dwight the tote bag and followed the doctor out to the nurses’ station to get his address and phone number so that we could send for Cal’s records once we’d found a pediatrician down in Raleigh.

  “Nice kid,” said the doctor as he scribbled his e-mail address on a prescription pad.

  “Any advice for his new stepmom?” I asked.

  “Treat him kindly and respect what he’s going through,” he said promptly, “but don’t let him use it to con you. Set the rules and hold him to them. Eight-year-olds are resilient and Cal’s absolutely normal, so he’s going to laugh and you’ll think he’s over it, then he’s going to cry and you’ll know he’s not. Just relax and enjoy him. One good thing—you’ve got a couple or three years before he hits puberty. I suggest you make the most of them. Once the hormones kick in, all bets are off till he hits twenty.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said dryly.

  “That’s right. I heard you were a judge.”

  “I’m also the aunt of several teenagers,” I told him.

  He laughed. “Even better.”

  As we said good-bye, the elevator pinged and Paul Radcliff stepped off, carrying a Thermos of coffee that Sandy had sent over.

  “We’ve both had the hospital’s coffee,” he said, following me into Cal’s room. “Thought y’all might could use something stronger to get a jump-start on the day.”

  A second cup was welcome to both of us.

  “Hey, Cal,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” the boy said. He was fully dressed now except for tying his sneakers.

  “Everybody’s real sorry about your mother, son.”

  Cal concentrated on his shoelaces.

  “Jimmy’s gonna skip school today and Miss Sandy wants you stay with them this morning.”

  Cal raised stricken eyes to his father. “Dad?”

  “I’m sorry, buddy, but there are things I need to see to.”

  “Okay,” he said in a small voice, but then he looked at me.

  Hoping that I wasn’t misinterpreting that look, I said,

  “That’s awfully kind of Sandy, but I thought maybe Cal could help me this morning. We need to figure out what to take back to North Carolina with us tomorrow. Is that all right with you, Cal?”

  “Ye
s, ma’am,” he said gratefully.

  C H A P T E R

  33

  Perhaps my name, too, will be joined to theirs.

  —Ovid

  The grocery store was open as Cal and I drove down the hill, so we turned in and I picked up some empty cardboard boxes and a roll of strapping tape.

  “Could we go and get Bandit now, too?” he asked.

  “Good idea,” I said. “He’ll be really happy to see you.

  Did your dad tell you how he was the one who found us last night? That was pretty amazing.”

  “He’s the smartest dog I ever knew,” Cal said complacently.

  Our stop at the Radcliff house was brief. Sandy was just back from dropping Jimmy off at school and she was deliberately matter-of-fact when she spoke with Cal about how well-behaved Bandit had been. When we were leaving, though, there were tears in her eyes as she hugged him.

  With the dog in the car as our buffer, it was easier to talk to each other, and once we were at the house, it became easier still.

  Cal already had a room of his own at the farm and he had stayed on after the wedding to spend Christmas with us, so he knew what was there and what he wanted to take with him. By the time Dwight arrived around noon, we had filled several boxes with his books and toys and most of his clothes. We left out his Sunday suit and the leather shoes that were almost too tight. “Mother said we could probably get one more month out of them,” he said, “but I don’t know about that.”

  I made sandwiches for lunch, then while they went to the funeral home, I cleaned out the refrigerator and started a load of laundry.

  It was nearly two hours before they returned and Cal’s freckled face was so pinched and drained that he didn’t argue when I suggested he take a book and go lie down with Bandit for a while.

  Once we were alone, Dwight told me that it had been a little rough. “He cried when he touched her face and he told her he was sorry she got killed, but I think he’s handling it pretty good, overall.”

  “It was awful that Pam took him and scared the hell out of him and us, too, but in a weird way, going in and out of sleep for two days might have had one benefit,” I said. “Don’t you think it might have given his subcon-scious time to get used to the idea in a less traumatic way than if he’d been awake and scared the whole time?”

  “Maybe. We stopped back by Mrs. Shay’s so she could see for herself that he’s all right.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  He shrugged. “It’s still all about her. She can’t deal 30 with Pam, but she wanted me to know that the family portraits and most of the antiques here in the house were just loans to Jonna, and she wants them back. Thank God for Eleanor. She got there as we were leaving. Said for us not to worry about anything. She and her daughters will come over and take care of things over the next few months, dispose of the clothes and empty out the refrigerator and cupboards. There’s no furniture here we want, is there?”

  I shook my head. “You might want to sign an informal note that will allow Eleanor to act as your limited agent for now, then you and Cal can come back in the spring after he’s settled at the farm. If it turns out that there’s something he’s really attached to, we’ll find space for it down there. There are photo albums in Jonna’s room that will mean a lot to him someday, so we should take those with us tomorrow.”

  He went up to check on Cal and came back to report that he was sound asleep.

  “Any news about Benton?”

  Dwight yawned and said, “He’s got an attorney that’s going to try to get him a first appearance today or tomorrow in the hopes of getting out on bail. Unless the guns and jewelry are found before he gets out, though, we can kiss a murder conviction good-bye. He’ll deep-six any incriminating stuff as soon as he has a chance.”

  He yawned again and I said, “Why don’t you lie down a while, too? You can’t have slept much last night.”

  “What about you?”

  “I had the cot, remember? Besides I thought I’d go over and pick up my phone unless you brought it back?”

  “Sorry, shug. Didn’t know it was there.” He yawned a third time and gave me a sheepish grin. “Well, maybe I will stretch out a few minutes till Cal wakes up.”

  The Morrow house was still swarming with police when I got there, and according to Agent Lewes, there were more officers going over Benton’s house with a metal detector to try and locate the guns they presumed he’d hidden.

  The trustees were also out in full force and so were members of the Shaysville Historical and Genealogical Society. Having decided that Nathan Benton was a thief and a murderer, they were now on the trail of something even larger in their eyes.

  “That little company he was supposed to have sold before he retired here?” said Suzanne Angelo. “My husband made a few phone calls. He was the manager, not the owner.”

  “And we think he falsified his ancestry papers,” Frederick Mayhew said darkly. “We don’t think he’s related to Bartholomew Benton at all.”

  “Now why would he lie about something like that?” I asked.

  “For the same reason he stole things to give to the house,” said Betty Ramos, who seemed to have a kind heart. “He’s such a Civil War buff, I think he wanted to claim a part of that history as his own. He probably came across Bartholomew Benton’s name when he was re-searching his family tree and decided that sounded like a more interesting background than his own Bentons. Or maybe he couldn’t trace his own line very far back and since there were no more Bentons over here in Shaysville, 31 thought he could get away with saying our Bentons were his. Certainly today is the first time anyone’s questioned the lineage he presented. Why would we? Unless someone claims to be related to Robert E. Lee or Washington or Lincoln, who would bother to go look up all the deeds and wills and census records he cited?”

  I’ve never quite understood why some people brag about their family being here since the Revolution. I mean, so have mine, so have a ton of others. The way Americans intermarry, almost anybody who’s been here three or four generations has at least one line that goes back that far. Maybe if I had more statesmen and officers perched in my family tree, I’d brag, too, but with so many bootleggers and dirt farmers and ancestors who did their best to avoid becoming cannon fodder no matter who was issuing the call to arms, it’s hard for me to work up much pride about it.

  Pride.

  Pride kept Mrs. Shay from getting Pam the help she needed.

  Pride had probably spurred Jonna to blackmail because she couldn’t bring herself to tell her friends she didn’t have five thousand for a class gift.

  And then there was the dangerous pride of Nathan Benton, who had fashioned himself into a blue-blooded big fish in a very small pond.

  Not that anyone connected with the Morrow House suspected blackmail. No, their assumptions made Jonna an innocent victim.

  “It’s too bad she didn’t turn him in as soon as she realized what he’d done,” said Suzanne Angelo. “She was probably going to let him withdraw his donations and return them to their rightful owners.”

  “Or else she caught him stealing the guns, too,” said one of the other trustees. “Remember how he didn’t want to invite Hamilton Erdman to come and address Sunday’s meeting? We thought he was jealous of Erdman’s reputation as a small arms expert, but I bet he took all three guns because he was afraid that the two he’d donated might be recognized.”

  In the office, a state police officer was going through Jonna’s computer files one by one to see if there was anything else to incriminate Benton, but she obligingly printed out another copy of Cal’s records for me as I found my phone and tucked it in my coat pocket.

  “Glad to see you’re okay today, Judge,” said Agent Lewes, who was in the main hall when I came out to leave. Dwight and I agreed that he reminded us both of one of Daddy’s droopy-faced hounds, and today more than ever when he admitted that it didn’t look as if they were going to be able to charge Benton with Jonna’s murder. But whi
le we stood talking in the entry hall, his phone buzzed and a big smile lit up those baggy eyes.

  “Got him!” he said when the call ended. “There was a second spare in the trunk of his car—so old and beat up, it looked like something he was taking to the dump, but when Clark took it out to lift up the mat, he felt something rattle. There’s a slit in the tread just long enough to let him pull it apart and slide stuff inside. Long as they were just shifting the tire from one side of the trunk to the other, nobody noticed. We’ve got the guns, the cartridges, and the jewelry, too. Let’s see the bastard talk his way out of this!”

  C H A P T E R

  34

  So far as it goes, a small thing may give analogy of greatthings.

  —Lucretius

  Jonna’s funeral was at ten o’clock Tuesday morn-

  ing. Pam was still too out of it to attend, even though Dwight had spoken privately with Paul and the state agents and asked that she not be charged for abducting Cal. Dwight and Cal entered and sat with the family. I sat inconspicuously at the back of the church and watched as Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards, both elegant in black designer suits, spoke of their grief at losing their third musketeer. There was a huge wreath from her classmates.

  Mrs. Shay wanted Cal to come back to the house afterwards, but Dwight stood firm and, to Cal’s barely concealed relief (not to mention mine), told her that we needed to get on the road.

  While I went by Cal’s school to get his records and turn in his books, he and Dwight picked up some plastic sheeting at the hardware store to wrap the boxes we’d packed in case the weather turned messy again. They wedged them in the back of Dwight’s truck, alongside Cal’s bike and Bandit’s wire crate, then covered everything with a well-secured tarp. Bandit rode in the cab of the truck with Dwight and Cal. There were more boxes in the backseat of my car, and our bags were in my trunk.

  I led the way as we caravanned south. I agreed to keep my cruise control set smack on the speed limit and not a single mile over. Dwight agreed to keep up. Even stopping for lunch in Greensboro, we were home by mid-afternoon.