Winter's Child Read online

  “You think he was shot by someone in his wife’s family?”

  “Well, he did beat her up pretty bad this time,” Dwight told me as he ladled hot chicken over his toast and helped 2 himself to salad. “Her brother took her to the emergency room last night and she and the kids are staying with him right now.”

  “How’d she take the news?”

  “Started crying as soon as we told her. Hard to say if she was crying for herself or the kids.” He added some bread-and-butter pickles to his plate and passed the jar to me. “The brother and sister-in-law weren’t shedding any tears, though. Richards couldn’t understand everything they said, but the gist seemed to be that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving dog. They started right in planning the wife’s new life, how she would move in with them and take care of all the children while her sister-in-law goes to work in the brother’s lawn care business.”

  “The brother have an alibi?” I asked, nibbling at a slice of pickle myself. Their crisp sweetness was made for hot chicken sandwiches.

  “Said he was on the job till full dark. Richards will check it out tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” That reminded me. “Portland asked if we could babysit tomorrow night so she and Avery can go to a movie. It’ll be the first time they’ve both left the baby.”

  “And they’re going to trust us?”

  “Who better? You’ve practiced on Cal and I’ve been babysitting nieces and nephews since I was twelve. Besides, they figure that if there’s an emergency, you could get help faster than anybody else in the county.”

  “On one condition. Avery got a boxed set of early Marx Brothers movies for Christmas.”

  I groaned. He knows I hate slapstick as much as he hates chick flicks, yet he keeps trying to get me to sit through endless reruns of Laurel and Hardy or FawltyTowers.

  “Did he tell you that Portland’s mother gave her the original Love Affair ?” I asked sweetly. “The 1939 version with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunn?”

  “They shot that damn thing twice?”

  “Four times, if you count Sleepless in Seattle,” I said.

  “I’ll make you a deal. If you can watch Duck Soup without laughing, I’ll watch Irene Dunn fall under a taxi.

  Hell, I’ll even get you your own box of Kleenex.”

  We were clearing the table and loading the dishwasher when Dwight’s cell phone rang. He frowned at the number displayed on the little screen.

  “Shaysville,” he muttered.

  I glanced at the clock. Shaysville, Virginia? Nine-fifteen on a school night? It could be only Jonna, his ex-wife and mother of his eight-year-old son, Cal.

  Dwight’s voice was carefully neutral when he answered, but it immediately turned warm. “Hey, buddy,”

  he said. “What’s up? And how come you’re still up?”

  He listened intently and I saw a frown begin. “Where’s your mom, son? . . . Did she say when she’d be back? . . .

  Is Nana there? . . . Okay, but— . . . Tomorrow? Sorry, buddy, but— . . . No, I’m just saying that if you’d told me earlier, maybe we could have worked something out.”

  There was another long pause, then his shoulders stiffened in resolution and his voice became reassuring. “No, it’s fine. I can do it. How are the roads? It snowed up there last night, didn’t it? . . . What’s your teacher’s name 2 again? . . . Ten o’clock? . . . I’ll be there. I promise. Now you scoot on into bed, you hear?”

  He laid the phone down with a sigh.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “Not really. Jonna’s out somewhere and her mother came over to sit with Cal, but she fell asleep on the couch so he took advantage of the situation to stay up later than usual and to call me even though Jonna told him not to.”

  “Not to call you?” I started to get indignant on his behalf.

  “He wants me to come to his school tomorrow morning. Says he promised his teacher I’d be there. Jonna told him he couldn’t expect me to come running up without any notice, but—” He shook his head ruefully.

  “But he knows his dad,” I said. “I’ll set the clock for four-thirty, okay?”

  “Better make it four,” Dwight said.

  C H A P T E R

  3

  Trees which have been frost-bitten, when they are not completely destroyed, soon shoot again, so that they immediatelybear fruit.

  —Theophrastus

  Friday, 21 January

  Even though they had gone to bed at ten-thirty, it had been a heavy week and Dwight felt as if he had barely closed his eyes when the alarm rang at four the next morning. He cut it off at the first sharp trill, but Deborah gave a drowsy groan as he pushed himself out from under the heavy covers. They both preferred a cold room for sleeping and the icy floor was a jolt to his bare feet. The bathroom was warm, though, and the hot shower left him feeling he could face a day that would probably include facing his ex-wife. He had told Deborah the night before that there was no need for her to get up, but when he came back into the bedroom to dress in a dark red wool shirt, black slacks, and a red-and-gray-striped tie, their bed was empty and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee drifted down the hall from the kitchen.

  He was tying his shoelaces when she returned with a steaming mug. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I know.” She used her own mug to cover another yawn. Standing there in an old blue sweatshirt with tangled hair tucked back behind her ears, she was sleepy-eyed and so utterly desirable that without the long drive in front of him, he would have pulled her back beneath the covers. Instead, he took the Thermos of coffee she had filled to help him through the drive, put on his black leather jacket, and promised to be back that night before Portland and Avery got home from their movie.

  By the time Dwight reached Greensboro, there were patches of snow in the shady spots, and after he crossed the state line into Virginia, more of the landscape was blanketed with Wednesday night’s four-inch snowfall.

  Plows and scrapers had left thick banks of snow alongside the highway, but the January sun shone brightly in a cold blue sky and the road itself was dry. Stifling a yawn, he turned the heater off so that the chill would help keep him alert.

  When he tired of NPR’s bleak recital of world news, he fumbled through a handful of CDs Deborah had given him for Christmas. One three-disk set held more than seventy Johnny Cash songs, but he’d already listened to the whole set twice, so he popped an Alabama collection into the player instead. As the gentle harmonies of “Feels So Right” filled the truck, he found himself contrasting the two women he had married.

  At thirteen, Deborah had been a headstrong kid, already full of the sass and vinegar she would possess as a woman, and the six years between them seemed so insur-mountable that he had joined the Army to avoid tempta- tion. Yet every time he came home on leave and hooked up with her brothers, there she was, more tempting than ever. He put in for special training and was reassigned to Germany, where he thought he was over his infatuation.

  He told himself it had been a matter of forbidden fruit, an aberration; and when he met Jonna Shay, who was visiting an Army friend in Wiesbaden, he was taken in by her soft Southern voice, her beautiful face, and her slightly patrician air.

  “But she didn’t fall into your bed right away, did she?”

  his mother had said the one time he discussed it with her after the divorce. “And there you were, ripe for marriage.

  Any reasonably compatible woman will do when a man’s ready.”

  And yes, he’d been ready. And no, it wasn’t all bad. She had thought he could be molded into an officer and a gentleman, and he was willing to try. He took enough college equivalences to almost qualify for officer training, and with some strong recommendations from his commanding officers and a few bent rules, he made it into OCS through the back door. It was only later, when he was commissioned and his workload eased off a little, that he fully comprehended just how much Jonna felt she had lowered herself by marrying an enlisted man.<
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  After her stint as Mrs. Sergeant Bryant, she was delighted to be Mrs. Lieutenant Bryant, to lunch regularly at the officers’ club, and to play bridge with the wives of majors and colonels. In the Army’s rigid caste system, enlisted and commissioned seldom socialize, but when she used that as an excuse not to hold a farewell cookout when the friend who had introduced them was being 2 transferred, he realized that she had quietly dropped every enlisted friend still assigned to the base.

  Well before they were posted to the D.C. area, he knew the marriage was a mistake. A quick visit home for his mother’s birthday only confirmed the seriousness of that mistake. One glimpse of Deborah, newly admitted to the bar, lusty and vital and more desirable than ever, and he knew that what he had felt was not youthful infatuation, that he really did love her. Would love her forever. But she was involved with a state representative at the time and he was married, which meant that she was doubly off-limits. He had made his bed and he would keep sleeping there even though he found no joy in it. He spent long hours at his job with Army intelligence while Jonna kept a serene house and played bridge twice a week. There were no fights, no friction. From the outside, it looked like a good marriage.

  Then the political climate changed. A couple of incidents grated on him so strongly that he abruptly resigned his commission and joined the D.C. police. Jonna was quietly furious. Not only did she lose her O Club privileges, she felt as if he had deliberately put her back on the enlisted side of the fence.

  After that, they seemed to be simply going through the motions. It surprised the hell out of him when he learned that she had quit taking her birth control pills; but he was willing to try harder for the sake of the baby she had conceived.

  With Cal’s birth, she quit pretending to like sex, and when she asked for a divorce, he did not fight it.

  Nor did he try to stop her when she took Cal and moved back to the small town in western Virginia that had been named for her early nineteenth-century ancestor, even though the distance made it harder for him to see his son as often as he wanted. Shaysville, on the edge of the Great Smokies, was whitebread America—small enough that most of its middle-class citizens felt they knew everything worth knowing about one another, yet big enough to support a shopping center and a couple of furniture factories. Meth labs were gaining a toehold up in the hollows, but so far there were no gangs, and crime was pretty much limited to petty larceny and occasional drunken brawls.

  Jonna’s sister, Pamela—“my nutty sister Pam” was how Jonna always prefaced remarks about her—was married and lived in Tennessee and Dwight had never met her; but Mrs. Shay, their elderly mother, was there to babysit and help out in emergencies.

  Shay was still a big name in the furniture industry and the factory had not yet moved offshore, but Shays no longer owned it. Shays no longer owned sawmills or lumberyards either. Jonna’s father had been the last male Shay, and he died while Jonna and her sister were mere infants, leaving behind a wife who could read French ro-mances, could instruct a servant how to make quiche, and knew the difference between a takeout double and a double for penalties, but Mrs. Shay “enjoyed poor health,” as the saying goes, and her husband had carefully shielded her from “boring old business talk.” Jonna thought her mother had received a tidy fortune when she sold the last remnants of the family businesses, even though they had soon moved to a smaller house and the live-in housekeeper became daily, then weekly help.

  Nevertheless, the Shay name remained high in the 2 town’s social pecking order, and Shaysville was not the worst place for his son to grow up.

  After the divorce became final, he realized that the distance between Washington and Shaysville was about the same as the distance between Shaysville and Colleton County, and there was Sheriff Bowman Poole looking for a good right-hand man.

  “. . . take me down and love me all night long . . .”

  When the words of that song floated through the truck’s cab, memories of Jonna’s cool propriety were crowded out by images of Deborah’s impulsive warmth and propriety be damned.

  As if conjured up by those images, his phone rang and her number appeared on its screen.

  “Where are you?” she asked. “Still in North Carolina?

  Just passing Durham?”

  He grinned. Her foot was always on the accelerator and she loved to needle him about cruise control and slow driving. “Actually, I’m a little less than an hour from Shaysville. Where are you?”

  “In Dobbs. At the courthouse. Getting ready to go do some justice.”

  “Did you get any sleep after I left?” he asked, muffling a yawn.

  “I did. How are you holding up?”

  “Not too bad.”

  They talked a moment or two longer, then she rang off and he called his boss to explain where he was and why he was taking a day of personal leave. “I should be back before dark,” he said, and filled the sheriff in on last night’s homicide.

  “Yeah,” said Bo Poole. “Richards was just telling me.”

  “Let me talk to her a minute,” Dwight said, and when Richards came on the line, he told her that she was now his lead detective on the Rouse investigation. “It means you’ll have to call over to Chapel Hill and attend the autopsy,” he warned.

  She took the assignment in stride. “And then I’ll check out the brother-in-law’s whereabouts, see if we can find anyone else with motive.”

  This was their only active homicide at the moment, and before ending the conversation he asked her to pass on some instructions on other pending felony cases. “I’ll be back this evening, but you can call me if there are problems.”

  “Yessir.”

  Shaysville’s elementary school lay on the west side of town and was close enough to the house Jonna had bought with her share of the divorce settlement that Cal could ride his bike to school in good weather. It was a one-level brick sprawl with a couple of mobile classrooms parked alongside the main building.

  He was still not exactly clear on why his son wanted him here this morning—all Cal had said was, “And could you please wear your gun and stuff?”—but before he left town today, he planned to find out if Jonna was making a habit of leaving Cal alone with her mother at night.

  Mrs. Shay was in her seventies now and clearly too old to keep tabs on an active eight-year-old if she fell asleep before he did.

  The parking lot had big piles of snow at either end and there were patches of ice where the holly hedges cast their 3 shadows. Dwight parked his truck in one of the visitor’s slots a few minutes before ten, and he did not know if he was pleased or dismayed that the only security on view was a gray-haired secretary at the front desk who smiled and said, “May I help you?”

  “I’m Cal Bryant’s dad. Here to see Miss Jackson. I believe she’s expecting me.”

  “Which Jackson? Chris or Jean?”

  Dwight shrugged. “Whichever teaches third grade?”

  “That would be Jean Jackson. If you’ll follow me?”

  She led him through a maze of hallways decorated with colorful posters and student drawings to a door marked

  “Miss Jean Jackson’s Third Grade,” stuck her head inside, and said cheerfully, “Company, Miss Jackson.”

  Halfway down the third row of desk chairs, he spotted his son. The instant Cal recognized him, his little face lit up with such happiness that Dwight immediately forgot how tired he was.

  A girl dressed as Snow White stood in front of a map of the United States with a pointer and she stopped talking to stare at Dwight.

  The pleasant-faced teacher who came over to greet him wore gray slacks and a blue sweater that sported white snowflakes and a border of snowmen. She told the little girl, “Wait just a minute, Ellie. Major Bryant? If you’ll take this chair, we’ll be ready for you after Ellie finishes.

  Go ahead, Ellie.”

  Dwight sat as he was directed and gave his attention to the girl, who carefully pointed to Florida and explained how she and her parents and her two sisters
had driven all the way down to Disney World from Shaysville over the Christmas holidays. She traced the route with her pointer and named each state in turn, then held up some of the souvenirs she had bought with her allowance.

  “Thank you, Ellie,” said the teacher. “Cal? You want to be next?”

  The boy nodded shyly and walked over to Dwight, took him by the hand, and led him to the front of the room.

  “My name is Calvin Shay Bryant and this is my father.

  His name is Major Dwight Avery Bryant. He’s the chief deputy for the sheriff of Colleton County down in North Carolina. Show ’em your badge, Dad.”

  Before Dwight could move, Cal flipped back the left side of his jacket to show the badge on his belt.

  “Show ’em your gun, Dad.” He pulled back the right side of Dwight’s jacket to reveal the gun holstered there.

  “Show ’em your handcuffs, Dad.” He gave Dwight a half-turn and flipped up his jacket. “That’s what he uses when he arrests somebody.”

  Another half-turn and “Show ’em your Kubaton, Dad.”

  Dwight kept his face perfectly straight as his son twirled him around, pointing out each piece of equipment and explaining what it was for. When Cal finished, he turned to his teacher. “My name is Calvin Shay Bryant and this is my show-and-tell.” His brown eyes shone as he looked up at Dwight.

  “Thanks, Dad,” he said and returned to his seat.

  Miss Jackson said, “Jeremy, you’re up next, so be thinking what you want to say.”

  She held open the door for Dwight and followed him out into the hall. “What a nice surprise it was when Cal told me this morning that you were coming today, Major Bryant. I know this meant a lot to him.”

  Puzzled, Dwight said, “He didn’t mention me till this morning?”

  “Oh, he talks about you all the time, Major, but not that you were going to be his show-and-tell.” She smiled and easy laugh lines crinkled around her hazel eyes. “This is a first for us. We never had a parent as our topic before.”