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  While I helped Cal unpack and settle in, Dwight checked in at the office.

  He had kept me up to date on the investigation of J.D.

  Rouse’s murder and I heard him call Terry Wilson and razz him about not finding the .45 that Sergeant Overholt used to shoot J.D. Nevertheless, Bo Poole was ready to close it out as a cleared case even though they would not have been able to convict Overholt for J.D.’s death without the gun.

  “Don’t you find one thing a little odd?” I asked as I finished unpacking our clothes and hung Dwight’s suit back in his side of our walk-in closet.

  “You mean something odder than Overholt knowing J.D. would be driving down that road? Or for that matter, how he even knew what J.D. drove, much less what he looked like when he just got back from overseas?”

  “Well, I hadn’t thought about those two points, but yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Overholt had several handguns, right?”

  “That’s what Richards and Terry say.”

  “Yet he used a rifle to shoot his wife at fairly close range 31 and a handgun to shoot a target that’s moving away from him?”

  Dwight frowned. “Good point. Maybe I’ll ask Bo to hold off on closing the file right now. Give Richards another day on it, see if she can turn up new suspects.”

  “The wife’s brother is definitely cleared?”

  “Not definitely, but he seems unlikely. The crew all vouch for him, but even more, the developer saw him about ten or fifteen minutes before the shooting. He would have had to rush to the back of the property, through the woods, and get in position just as Rouse came driving past.”

  He showered and shaved while I wrapped the gift we were giving Kate and Rob’s infant son—a jumper swing that clamps on a doorframe.

  “Isn’t he too little for that?” Cal asked dubiously as he watched me.

  “He is right now, but in just a few months he should get a kick out of it. Want to sign the card?”

  “What’s his name again?”

  “They haven’t decided whether to call him Bobby or R.W., but his full name is Robert Wallace Bryant Junior, which now makes your Uncle Rob Robert Wallace Bryant Senior. You know what the Wallace is for, don’t you?”

  Cal shook his head.

  “Before she married your grandfather, your grandma’s name was Emily Wallace.”

  “And Dad is Dwight Avery Bryant because his grandmother was an Avery, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And I’m Calvin for Dad’s father and Shay for Mother.”

  “That’s right,” I said as I tied the package with a big blue bow. “And if I’m not mistaken, her Anson grandfather might have been a John.”

  I kept my voice as casual as possible because I wanted Cal to feel comfortable talking about Jonna with us.

  “Who were you named for?”

  “Well, my mother used to say she just thought it was a nice name. There aren’t any Deborahs on either side of our family, though, and she did like family names. My middle name is Stephenson because that was her family name, so I’ve always had the feeling that there was a mystery about why she named me that.”

  “Does Mr. Kezzie know?”

  “If he does, he’s never said. If he tells you, let me know, okay?”

  “Okay.” He read through the welcome-baby card and said, “I think I’m gonna call him R.W.” Beneath where I’d signed my name and Dwight’s, he carefully wrote in newly acquired cursive, “For R.W., love, your cusin Calvin Shay Bryant.”

  The baby was adorable but he looked more like Dwight than Rob, who has Miss Emily’s red hair and slender build.

  “Takes after the good-looking side of the family,”

  Dwight said with a grin for Cal.

  When Kate read our card, she said to Cal, “Did Jake and Mary Pat put you up to this?”

  “Up to what?” he asked.

  “They want to call him R.W., too.” She gave a mock sigh of regret. “Looks like I’m outvoted.”

  “Yay!” said Mary Pat, who was six months older than Cal. Her cheer was echoed by four-year-old Jake.

  They had been a little stiff with Cal at first in deference to his new half-orphan status, but since both of Mary Pat’s parents had died before she was three, she had no memory of losing a mother, and of course, Jake couldn’t conceive of losing Kate, so they were quickly reverting to normal. By the time we were ready to go have supper with Miss Emily so that Kate could rest, they were back to teasing and shoving one another.

  As the three children followed Dwight out to the car, Kate and Rob asked for the condensed version of what had happened in Virginia.

  “We were hoping to see more of Cal as he got older, but not like this,” Rob said, shaking his red head.

  “Anything we can do to help,” Kate said, “let us know.”

  “If it gets rough, I’ll come borrow Jake and Mary Pat,”

  I told them.

  Because it was a school night, we cut the evening short.

  Cal was apprehensive about what his new teacher and classmates would be like, but Miss Emily had used her position as a principal in the school system to ensure that Cal would be in the same classroom as Mary Pat.

  “You’ll really like Mrs. Ferncliff,” she promised Cal.

  “She’s going to be my teacher when I get to third grade,” said Jake, who wasn’t even in kindergarten yet.

  When we turned onto our road that night, the headlights picked up the green-and-white sign on the shoulder that announced that it had been adopted by the Kezzie Knott famil.

  yAs Cal read it aloud, I spotted a fast-food cup lying at the base of the sign.

  “Better stop and let me get it up before Reese sees it and wants you to process it for fingerprints,” I told Dwight.

  “Why?” asked Cal when I was back in the car with the cup.

  I explained what adopting a road meant and how we’d picked up all the debris on Saturday morning. “But when we were coming back from lunch, I was riding with my nephew Reese and we saw somebody throw trash out their car window. Well, Reese went absolutely ballistic and chased down the car and—oh!”

  “What?” asked Dwight.

  “He went ballistic,” I said again. “Only he didn’t have a gun.”

  “Oh,” said Dwight.

  “What’s ballistic?” Cal asked from the backseat.

  “Means lose your temper,” Dwight said slowly. “Do crazy things.”

  “So what did Reese do when y’all caught him?” Cal asked me.

  I explained that the he was a she and that Reese had shamed her into going back and picking up the trash she’d tossed, but all the time, I was watching Dwight play with the possibilities.

  Back at the house, while Cal went on into his room to brush his teeth and get ready for bed, I said, “Is it possible?”

  “She had a bunch of her father’s marksmanship medals 31 framed on the wall,” Dwight said. “He might have hung on to his service revolver and maybe he taught her to shoot, too. She certainly was devoted to him. And Richards says she reamed a guy out for dumping an occasional beer can. The cab of J.D.’s truck had no trash in it and we know he’d drunk at least one beer.”

  “And didn’t you say his right-hand window was halfway down? What if he flung a can out right there in front of her every evening?”

  Littering seemed like a bizarre reason to shoot someone, but I remembered Reese’s rage. He’s such an impulsive hothead that I could see him try to shoot out that girl’s taillight if he’d been on foot.

  And if he’d had a gun.

  Dwight called Mayleen Richards from the kitchen phone, and when he came back, he gave a shrug to my lifted eyebrow. “She doesn’t think it’s so crazy. Wanted to know if you’d sign a search warrant or if she should ask someone else.”

  “I hope you told her someone else.”

  “I did.”

  Our separation of powers treaty was back in place.

  But both of us went in to say good n
ight to Cal. He was snuggled down under the covers and Bandit nestled at his feet as if he’d been sleeping there for years.

  I dropped a light kiss on Cal’s forehead and left so that Dwight could have a few quiet minutes alone with him.

  He was looking a little weepy-eyed and I had caught a glimpse of Carson’s plush ear sticking out from under the pillow.

  Made me feel a little weepy-eyed, too.

  C H A P T E R

  35

  It is now clear, from what has been said, how many are thecauses of death.

  —Theophrastus

  Tuesday night, 25 January

  At nine-thirty that evening, Deputies Mayleen Richards, Raeford McLamb, and Jack Jamison rang the bell at the small neat house in Holly Ridge. Immediately, they heard the sharp bark of the little corgi. A moment later, Mrs. Lydia Harper opened the door and blinked as she saw the three standing there.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Harper,” said Richards, “but we have a warrant to search your house for a forty-five-caliber revolver.”

  The older woman put her hand to her throat. “A warrant?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She held it out.

  “It’s so late. I was about to get ready for bed. Can’t you come back in the morning?”

  “I’m afraid not, ma’am.”

  “But you can’t just come in here and stomp around my 32 house and go through my things,” she said, her temper flaring. “This is America. What gives you the right?”

  “This search warrant,” Richards said, offering it to her again.

  Mrs. Harper snatched it from her hand and read it through from first sentence to last signature while the deputies waited outside in the chilled night air. It had begun to rain and the rain was predicted to turn into sleet by morning.

  “I want to call an attorney,” said Mrs. Harper.

  “Fine,” said Richards, “but we’re going to start our search now. You can make this easy or you can make it hard. It’s up to you.” Struck by sudden inspiration, she added, “Besides, what would the Colonel say? It was his gun, wasn’t it?”

  Mrs. Harper stiffened, and then, in another of the sudden mood swings they had seen before, she crumbled.

  Tears flooded her eyes. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to scare him. Make him stop throwing his beer cans on the Colonel’s road. Every day, another Bud Light can. I yelled at him once and he just gave me the finger and kept on going like he was king of the world and everybody else could clean up his mess. It got to the point that he’d wait till he saw me to toss a can because some days, if I went early, there might not be any Bud Lights. But if I was there, he’d slow down and throw out three or four cans at a time, like he’d saved them up just to spit on the Colonel’s good name. But I never meant to kill him. I just wanted to shoot out his window. Let him clean up a mess for once.”

  Mayleen Richards shook her head. Not marksmanship, after all. Just an unlucky shot. And here they’d been fig- uring trajectories and angles, trying to work out how Overholt or Miguel Diaz’s brother-in-law could have known when and where to be, when all along it was just a little old lady with a bee in her bonnet about honoring her father’s memory.

  The gun was in Colonel Frampton’s dresser drawer. It appeared to have been cleaned and oiled since its last firing, but that was not too surprising for a woman who was so obsessively neat that even her coffee-table magazines were stacked in a graduated pile with the edges precisely aligned to the edge of the table.

  As they came back down the hallway with the gun, McLamb stopped to look at the medals and commendations that were framed and hung on the wall alongside certificates for proficiency and meritorious service.

  Richards started to pass by and then her eye was snagged by the name on one of the marksmanship certificates: it was signed by a Captain John Forlines and it had been issued to Lydia Frampton Harper for scoring a 98% at a Fort Benning target range. The certificate was dated fifteen years earlier.

  They had gone to bed early themselves and were almost asleep when the call came through. Deborah gave a sleepy protest, but she rolled over to listen to Dwight’s end of the conversation. When Dwight snapped his phone back into the charger on the nightstand and said,

  “Can you believe it?” she replied, “Believe that Mrs.

  Harper shot J.D.? Sure.”

  “Not that she shot him, but that she kept her marksmanship certificate hanging on the wall.”

  “Rack another one up for pride,” Deborah murmured as she fitted herself back into the curve of his arms.

  “Pride? I’d call it arrogance.”

  “Close enough,” she said and her lips found his while the cold winter rain beat against their windows.

  Document Outline

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35