Rituals of the Season Page 3

  “Good dumplings,” said Dwight, helping himself to another one.

  “Dotty made a beef stew you wouldn’t believe,” Reid said wistfully.

  “Dotty never made a beef stew in her whole life. It’s boeuf bourguignonne,” I reminded him, exaggerating the French pronunciation. I like Reid’s ex-wife, but even her cookouts are haute cuisine. Everything has to be marinated in wine and fines herbes.

  “Cassoulet,” Reid mourned. “Coq au vin.” He picked at a carrot but not much was getting to his mouth and he still seemed queasy. “Wish I never had to see another pizza or take-out box. Hate fast food.”

  “So quit complaining and get Aunt Zell to give you some cooking lessons.” Over the last few years, I’ve learned that a touch of commonsense bitchiness can stave off the maudlin self-pity that overtakes Reid whenever he drinks too much and starts remembering what his philandering’s cost him. Dotty was the love of his life and he’s crazy about their son Tip, but she finally had enough. He came home early one morning to find all his personal belongings boxed up on the front porch. When she remarried last year, he disappeared down a Jameson bottle for a solid week.

  As Reid stared moodily at his plate, I glanced over at Dwight, who had kept up his end of amiable table talk despite what he must have seen in the last few hours.

  For their own mental stability, EMTs, trauma nurses and doctors, police officers, social workers, and yes, judges, too, learn how to compartmentalize. I haven’t experienced half the things Dwight has, but in my four years on the bench, I’ve seen men and women with eyes swollen shut in faces pounded into raw meat. I’ve seen infants whose tender little bodies have been used as ashtrays. I’ve seen children whose backs and buttocks are so scarred they look as if they’ve been flogged with barbed wire.

  You do what you can to alleviate the suffering and to punish those responsible, and all the time you know you’re just shoveling sand against the tide. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the pessimist of Ecclesiastes. “What profit hath a man of all his labor? . . . That which is crooked cannot be made straight.”

  And yet, what’s the alternative? To sit above the fray and do nothing but wring our hands? Or to wade in and keep shoveling?

  At the end of the day, though, we have to lay our shovels down and come back to friends and families who not only don’t understand, but don’t want to understand. So we try very hard to distance ourselves from the emotional assaults of our work and we tell ourselves that we’ve left it at the courthouse or hospital. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, that’s almost true.

  Nevertheless, it helps to have someone you can share it with. Long before he became my lover, Dwight was my friend, my sounding board, my safety valve for venting; and whatever other changes marriage may bring, I’m hoping that this part won’t change for either of us.

  “She called me this morning,” Reid said abruptly. “Wants to come by the office Monday.”

  “Dotty?” I asked.

  “Tracy.”

  “Why?”

  He stared at me blankly and I patiently rephrased the question. “Why was Tracy coming to the office, Reid?”

  “Martha Hurst. See Dad’s file.”

  “Who’s Martha Hurst?” asked Dwight, who was still in the Army back then.

  Truth to tell, the name wasn’t much more familiar to me because Martha Hurst’s trial took place the summer I was cramming for my bar exam. Except for the brutality of the crime and that a woman had killed a man instead of the other way around, it wasn’t all that different from a dozen more where domestic disputes play out in violence. Brix Junior—Brixton Stephenson Senior died before I was born, but my family still can’t remember to drop the “Junior” from Reid’s dad’s name—was Hurst’s court-appointed attorney. I assume he mounted the best defense possible. What I mainly remembered is that a jury found Hurst guilty and a judge sentenced her to death, and that’s what I told Dwight.

  “Gonna strap her on that gurney in January,” Reid said plaintively. “Give ’er the big needle. Tracy said so.”

  Which must mean that all of Hurst’s appeals had finally been exhausted.

  “What was Tracy’s interest?” I asked. “She wasn’t around when that woman was tried and sentenced.”

  He shrugged. “S’posed to explain Monday.” He yawned deeply and his eyes unfocused. He pushed his plate away, propped his elbows on the table, and leaned his head on his hands.

  “Come on, bo,” Dwight said. “Time to get you home. Deb’rah?”

  I was already digging through my cousin’s pockets for his car keys.

  Dwight half carried him downstairs and put him in the truck and I followed them to Reid’s place, where we put him to bed.

  I tried again to get him to speculate as to why Tracy wanted to see Brix Junior’s file on Martha Hurst, but it was useless. He just kept moaning, “Poor Tracy,” so we pulled the covers up around him and left him to sleep it off.

  On the drive back to Dwight’s, with the heater warming my cold feet, I asked why he thought Tracy’s death was personal and deliberate.

  “And it wasn’t any random sniper either, if that’s what you’re asking. Whoever pulled the trigger probably knew who he was shooting.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “For starters, think how cold it is. Tracy wasn’t wearing her coat or her gloves and she had a baby with an ear infection in the backseat, yet the passenger-side window was down.”

  “She was talking to whoever shot her?” For some reason, that made it more horrible. “I guess you won’t know what kind of gun it was till you get the bullet back from the ME.”

  “No bullet,” he said gloomily. “The shot came from such close range that it tore through her throat and smashed through the window on her side of the car. I’ve got guys out walking the median with metal detectors, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  I told him about the death threat Portland said Tracy had received recently. Like me, he thought it unlikely that someone convicted for domestic manslaughter could have arranged Tracy’s death, “but we’ll certainly check it out.”

  “Want me to call John Claude? Ask him to let me look at Brix Junior’s files on Martha Hurst?”

  “I’ll get up with John Claude,” he said. “You concentrate on the wedding and let me handle this investigation.”

  “Just trying to be a good helpmeet,” I said innocently.

  He looked down at me with a grin. “Oh yeah?”

  “I won’t meddle,” I promised, “but I do know more legalese than you do and I might could pick up on something in the files that you’d miss.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Besides, Tracy’s death probably doesn’t have a thing to do with Hurst’s execution.”

  I meant it when I said I wouldn’t meddle. On the other hand, Doug Woodall was bound to be at the bar association’s dinner for us the next night. What could it hurt to ask Tracy’s boss if he knew why she was interested in Martha Hurst?

  CHAPTER 4

  Sisters ought never to receive any little attention from their brothers without thanking them for it, never to ask a favor of them but in courteous terms.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  Although some of my farm-bred brothers are better than others at reading a blueprint, every one of them has building skills; and back in October, as soon as they heard I was marrying their lifelong buddy, they put their heads together and decided that their wedding gift would be the new bedroom and bath we planned to add onto my house. If Dwight and I would buy the materials, they would do the work, and they’d get it finished well before the wedding.

  Or so they promised.

  The house had been torn up for two months now, and when I was there earlier in the week, it looked to be another full month before we could begin using the new space.

  The good thing about family is that you can call up and yell at them if they get behind schedule. The bad thing about family is that they don’t pay you one dab of atte
ntion, not when king mackerel and blues are running down at the coast or when deer season’s in full swing. On a farm, there’s always something that needs picking or baling or plowing, or else it’s a big green piece of machinery that breaks down and takes five trips to the John Deere place before all the right parts can be found. To my pointed questions of when they planned to finish, it was, “Hey, chill, little sister. You ain’t getting married till almost Christmas. Why you so antsy? It’ll get done.”

  With their freezers now full of fish and venison and farm chores at low winter ebb, my brothers swore they really would have the additions finished before the twenty-second. Dwight and I had planned to spend Saturday working alongside them, but I wound up driving out alone because Sheriff Bo Poole had called a meeting about Tracy’s death and Dwight wanted to check on the lines of investigation he’d set in motion the night before.

  I got there expecting to sand Sheetrock. Instead, I found Robert just pulling off his face mask as he unplugged the sander after smoothing the final joint. His hair, forehead, and green denim coveralls were white with spackle dust.

  “Herman and Nadine are coming over this morning to finish wiring all the boxes, so we might could be ready to start painting this evening iffn them boys can ever figure out how to cut the trim,” he said.

  Out in the two-car garage, someone had brought over a space heater so that they could work without the hindrance of heavy winter jackets. Will, Seth, and Andrew had lined up lengths of molding and baseboards on the sawhorses and were now arguing over how to set the angles on Andrew’s miter box.

  Will and Seth threw me welcoming grins, but Andrew had an exasperated look on his face. “I suppose you got an opinion on how we ought to be cutting ’em, too.”

  “Not me,” I said. Spatial calculations always fox me. I can do verbal problems, but those visual problems where you’re supposed to look at a figure and then match it to one rotated two turns? No way. “Last time I tried to cut some forty-five-degree angles for a doorway, I wound up with twenty feet of trim for firewood, so I’ve got no dog in y’all’s fight.”

  “Humph,” Will snorted. “That’d be a first.”

  “Hey, shug,” said Seth, the least critical of my brothers. “You see what we fixed Dwight?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t been out since Tuesday and for all I knew they could’ve ripped off half the walls and added an indoor pool.

  “Was April’s idea,” said Andrew, with a touch of husbandly pride.

  That didn’t surprise me. April keeps coming up with new suggestions. She loves to move walls and windows and is the only one of my sisters-in-law to own her own table saw.

  I looked around the garage and saw nothing different.

  “No, it’s in the house,” said Seth.

  They followed me in to watch my reaction and Robert came through the living room to join us. All four brothers beamed in anticipation.

  When I first planned the house, I never expected to do much formal entertaining, so the kitchen and dining room are a single large space divided by a work counter. On the dining room side, one whole wall is nothing but a floor-to-ceiling china cabinet. Below are drawers and closed shelves that serve as a long buffet. Above are more closed shelves. Everything’s painted white enamel with brass fittings. Together they hold all the china, silver, crystal, and table linens that my town-bred mother gave me before she died. The first time I came through the kitchen, I hadn’t noticed April’s new addition because it had been built into a corner wall and already had its first coat of matching white enamel. It looked like an armoire and they had boxed it in so that I was now missing about two feet of counter space. When I opened the armoire doors, I had to laugh. There sat a professional-looking beer tap. Opening the lower doors revealed a small refrigerator unit big enough to hold two five-gallon aluminum kegs.

  “Daddy was over here the other night,” said Will, “and he saw Dwight’s beer-making stuff out in the garage.”

  “We got to talking ’bout how Dwight’s always saying the worst part about making it is the bottling,” said Seth.

  “—so Daddy said he’d buy a tap for the kegs if we could figure out where to put it,” Robert said.

  “And you know April,” Andrew finished.

  “Dwight will love it,” I told them. “You guys are wonderful.”

  They put their aw-shucks faces on, but I hugged each of them anyhow. I couldn’t wait for Dwight to see it. While stationed in Germany, he developed a taste for premium beers that his wallet couldn’t afford once he was back in the States, and particularly not after he had to start paying hefty child support. A friend had suggested that he pick up some hops and malt at the American Brewmaster in Raleigh and try making his own. I’m more into bourbon and tequila than beers and ales, but I have to admit he gets delicious results, everything from heavy winter stouts to light summer lagers. I’ve helped him bottle a couple of five-gallon batches, though, and yes, it’s tedious as hell siphoning the beer into individual bottles and then working that capper. This refrigerated tap would really please him, especially since it was a gift from Daddy.

  After Dwight’s own father was killed in a tractor accident, Daddy had treated him like another one of his boys, loading them up on the back of the pickup to go for ice cream in the summer, using a tractor to pull a train of their homemade sleds around icy lanes in the winter. If Will and the little twins got a switching for some over-the-top piece of mischief and Dwight was involved, his legs got switched, too. At report card time, he got a dime for every A, just like the others.

  But what would tickle Dwight even more is that Daddy also used to be in the business of making his own drinking supply. Unfortunately, his recipes were never as legal as Dwight’s.

  While the boys went back to figuring out miter angles, I took the shop vac Seth had brought over and began to vacuum up the Sheetrock dust and small stuff that littered the floors. When I got to the new bathroom, I was delighted to see that the fixtures were fully plumbed in now. The shower stall itself still needed some tiles, as did parts of the floor and countertop, but the toilet and sink had water and things were looking good.

  Seth’s wife Minnie, Andrew’s April, and Robert’s Doris arrived while I was admiring the slope of the oversize walk-in stall. I thanked April again for suggesting that we build it like that so that no shower curtain would be needed. “And the beer tap’s fantastic.”

  Herman’s deep voice suddenly boomed from the living room. Everybody else usually comes in through the back porch into the kitchen, but he has to use the front door, which is flush with the ground and easier for his wheelchair.

  His wife Nadine immediately came to find us, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Did your dress come in yet?”

  For some reason, she and Doris were worried that I had ordered something totally inappropriate, and they had appointed themselves arbiters of family values. I know they mean well, but I can’t resist teasing them. In truth, no one had seen what I planned to wear except Aunt Zell and Portland and they were pretending to be as worried as the others that I’d have to walk down the aisle in my judge’s robe if the dress didn’t come soon.

  “I don’t know why you can’t at least tell us what color it is,” Doris grumbled.

  “Because if you say you hate it before you see it, I’ll feel awful.”

  “Long as you don’t get pure white, it’ll be fine,” Nadine said. “I mean, everybody in Colleton County knows Dwight’s not the one that picked your cherry, though I do think you could be a little more careful about letting folks know y’all two are already keeping house. I remember how proud I was when Denise walked down the aisle dressed like a pure angel in that white silk dress. Didn’t she look like an angel, Minnie?”

  “She certainly did,” Minnie agreed with a perfectly straight face. Not by the flicker of an eyelash would she nor April nor I ever hint that Nadine’s older daughter had no more right to pure white than I did, even though Denise’s baby weighed a full eight pounds
when it was born “prematurely” seven months later.

  “All the same, I have to say that I looked really good in the white satin version I tried on,” I said innocently.

  Doris pounced. “So it’s satin?”

  “There was also a red satin version.”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  I laughed. “You’re always acting like I’m a scarlet woman. Wouldn’t a scarlet dress be appropriate?”

  “She’s just teasing us,” Nadine said. “Even Deb’rah wouldn’t wear red satin when her own matron of honor’s wearing red velvet.”

  “White velvet?” April asked, getting into the game.

  “Maybe,” I told her.

  “Off-white velvet?” Doris considered off-white velvet and nodded approvingly. “What about the veil?”

  “Well, I did see one with a twelve-foot train but then I’d’ve had to have trainbearers and I thought that’d be a little much.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Nadine. “There’s enough grandbabies in the family. That might’ve looked real cute.”

  Before she could get into just how cute the little ones would be pulling on a long veil, Will and Seth came in with lengths of cut molding and began nailing them in place. I was impressed by the precision with which Andrew’s forty-five-degree angles met each other snugly at the corners.

  Nadine and Doris went to help Herman finish wiring the wall switches and outlets, while April recruited Minnie and me to lay tile in the bathroom. For the first time, I began to feel optimistic that we might just bring it in on schedule.