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  DEBORAH KNOTT

  THURSDAY EVENING, MARCH 2

  I did not repeat what Dwight had told me, but at adjournment, I asked my clerk if she’d heard anything more about that first set of body parts, figuring that if fresh rumors were circulating through the courthouse about another hand, she would mention it. Instead, she shook her head.

  “And Faye’s off today, so I wouldn’t anyhow. Lavon’s on duty and he never talks.”

  As I left the parking lot behind the courthouse, I didn’t spot Dwight’s truck, but there seemed to be no more activity than the usual coming and going of patrol cars. A second hand though? Where were the bodies? I thought of that crematorium down in Georgia that stashed bodies all over its grounds rather than committing them to the fire, and a gruesome image filled my head of a pickup truck bumping around the county, strewing body parts as it went. Careless drivers are forever hauling unsecured loads of trash that blow off and litter our roadsides. Was this another example?

  I switched my car radio to a local news station, but heard nothing on this latest development.

  After picking up Bandit’s heartworm pills at the vet’s, I swung by Kate and Rob’s to collect Cal. The new baby was fussing and Kate had dark circles under her eyes.

  “He got me up four times last night,” she said, jiggling little R.W. on her shoulder with soothing pats as Cal went upstairs with Mary Pat to retrieve his backpack. Through the archway to the den, I saw young Jake watch them go, then he settled back on the couch and turned his eyes to the video playing on the TV.

  “I thought he was sleeping six hours at a stretch now.”

  “So did I,” she said wearily. “I was wrong.”

  A middle-aged Hispanic woman came down the hall. Kate’s cleaning woman, María, whose last name I can never remember. She wore a heavy winter coat and drew on a pair of thick knitted gloves. She gave me a shy smile of greeting and said to Kate, “I go now, señora.”

  “Thanks, María. See you on Monday?”

  “Monday, sí.”

  She let herself out the kitchen door and Kate said, “I don’t know how I’d manage without her.”

  She transferred the fretful baby to her other shoulder. “Before this one, I only needed her every other week and still put in a twenty-five-hour week in my studio.” Kate was a freelance fabric designer and had remodeled the farm’s old packhouse into a modern studio. “Now she’s here twice a week and I still haven’t done a lick of drawing since R.W. was born.”

  “Slacker,” I said.

  She gave me a wan smile.

  “Kate, he’s not even two months old. Give yourself a break. Are you sure it’s not too much to have Cal here every afternoon?”

  “He’s no real extra trouble.”

  “But?” I asked, hearing something in her voice.

  “It’s only the usual bickering,” she sighed. “The four-year age difference. And it’s probably Mary Pat’s fault more than Cal’s. She’s just not as patient with Jake now that she has Cal to play with. He’s so happy when they get home from school and it really hurts his feelings when they exclude him. I had to give her a time-out this afternoon and we’re going to have a serious sit-down tonight after Jake goes to bed, so maybe you could speak to Cal?”

  “I’ll tell Dwight,” I said.

  Kate shook her head in disapproval. “Come on, Deborah. I’m not asking you to beat him with a stick or send him to bed without supper. I’m just asking you to reinforce the scolding I gave him and Mary Pat.”

  “But Dwight’s the one to speak to him. He’s his father,” I protested weakly.

  “And you’re his stepmother. In loco maternis or whatever the Latin phrase would be. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to help with discipline and you might as well get started now. Besides, if you think Cal’s going to resent your talking to him about something this minor, imagine how he’s going to feel if you tattle to Dwight and it gets blown out of proportion.”

  I knew she was right. Nevertheless, I was so apprehensive about this aspect of parenting, that we were almost to the turn-in at the long drive that leads from the road to the house before I got up enough nerve to say, “Aunt Kate tells me that you and Mary Pat are having a problem with Jake.”

  Cal gave me a wary glance. “Not really.”

  “That’s not what she says.”

  “I’ll get the mail,” he said, reaching for the door handle as I slowed to a stop by the mailbox. I waited till he was back in the car with our magazines and first of the month bills, then drove on down the lane, easing over the low dikes that keep the lane from washing away.

  “She says that you and Mary Pat aren’t treating him very nicely. That you don’t want him to play with you.”

  “He can play, but he doesn’t know how. He’s a baby.”

  “He’s four years old,” I said gently. “If he doesn’t know how, then you should take the time to teach him.”

  “But he can’t even read yet.”

  “I know it’s hard to be patient when he can’t keep up, Cal, but think how you’d feel if you went over there and he and Mary Pat wouldn’t play with you. Think how it makes Aunt Kate feel. This is a stressful time for her with a fussy new baby. If you won’t do it for Jake, do it for Aunt Kate.”

  He was quiet as he flicked the remote to open the garage door for us.

  “Are you going to tell Dad?”

  “Not if you and Mary Pat start cutting Jake some slack, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, visibly relieved.

  Inside the house, he hurried down to the utility room to let Bandit out for a short run in the early evening twilight and I let out the breath I’d been metaphorically holding.

  “See? That wasn’t bad,” said my internal preacher.

  “Piece of cake,” crowed the pragmatist.

  By the time Dwight got home, smothered pork chops and sweet potatoes were baking in the oven, string beans awaited a quick steaming in a saucepan, the rolls were ready to brown and I was checking over Cal’s math homework while he finished studying for tomorrow’s spelling test.

  I was dying to hear about the latest developments, but I kept my curiosity in hand until after supper when Cal went to take his shower and get into his pajamas before the Hurricanes game came on. Tonight was an away game and Cal didn’t want to miss a single minute before his nine o’clock bedtime.

  “The thing is,” Dwight said as he got up to pour us a second cup of coffee, “are you likely to be the judge for a half-million civil lawsuit?”

  “Probably not,” I said, my curiosity really piqued now. “Something that big usually goes to superior court. Unless both parties agree to it, most of our judgments are capped at ten thousand.”

  “Okay then,” he said and settled back to tell me how Bo Poole started thinking about his teenage years when he used to run a trapline along the creeks in the southern part of the county, especially Black Creek.

  “He wasn’t the only one and it dawned on him that Fred Mitchiner used to trap animals and sell the pelts, too.”

  “Who’s Fred Mitchiner?”

  “That eighty-year-old with Alzheimer’s who wandered away from the nursing home right before Christmas, remember?”

  I shook my head. “That whole week was a haze. Except for our wedding and Christmas itself, about all I remember is that you took two weeks off and Bo wouldn’t let you come into work.”

  Dwight cut his eyes at me. “That’s all you remember?”

  I couldn’t repress my own smile as his big hand covered mine and his thumb gently stroked the inside of my wrist.

  “Don’t change the subject,” I said, with a glance into the living room where Cal seemed absorbed by the game. “Fred Mitchiner.”

  “Once Mitchiner slipped away from the nursing home, it would have been a long walk for him, but they do say Alzheimer’s patients often try to find their way back to where they were happy. Bo figures the old guy probably thought he’d go check his traps, fell in the water, and either dro
wned or died of exposure. High water and animals did the rest. It wasn’t murder.”

  “But it does sound like negligence,” I said. “Is that what his family feel?”

  He shrugged. “We haven’t told them yet. Bo wants to wait till we get an official ID; but yeah, that’s the talk.”

  CHAPTER 10

  There is something always preying on something, and nothing is free from disaster in this sublunary world.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  Friday’s criminal court is usually a catchall day for me—the minor felonies and misdemeanors that don’t fit in elsewhere. Sometimes I think Doug Woodall, our current DA, goes out of his way to see that the weird ones wind up on my Friday docket. On the other hand, sometimes his sense of humor matches mine and when I entered the courtroom that morning and saw Dr. Linda Allred seated in the center aisle, it was hard not to smile.

  “All rise,” said Cleve Overby, the most punctilious of the bailiffs, and before she’d finished giving him a rueful hands-up motion from her motorized wheelchair, he grinned and added, “all except Dr. Allred. Oyez, oyez, oyez. This honorable court for the County of Colleton is now open and sitting for the dispatch of its business. God save the State and this honorable court, the Honorable Judge Deborah Knott presiding. Be seated.”

  I ran my finger down the calendar and found the case she was probably there for, then sat back and listened as ADA Kevin Foster pulled the first shuck on Anthony Barkley, a nineteen-year-old black kid who had ridden through a parking lot on his bicycle and tried to snatch a woman’s purse. Before the shoulder strap fully left her arm, she gave it a sharp yank, which sent him sprawling into the path of a slow-moving car. The car immediately flattened his bike and the man who jumped out to see what was going on had proceeded to flatten the youthful thief.

  “Fifteen days suspended, forty hours of community service,” I said.

  Next came a Latino migrant, one Ernesto Palmeiro, age thirty, who had gotten drunk, “borrowed” a tractor, and headed east, plowing a half-mile-long furrow across several semi-rural lawns before the highway patrol could head him off.

  “He deeply regrets his actions,” said the translator, “but he went a little loco when his wife left him and went home to Mexico. He’s already repaired most of the damage and throws himself on the mercy of the court.”

  I rather doubted if that was what he’d said, but what the hell? “Fifteen days suspended on condition that he finishes putting all the yards back the way they were, including any plantings that he might have destroyed.”

  I looked at his boss, a Latino landscaper, who’d spoken on his behalf. “And I’d suggest, sir, that you teach him how to lift the plows before you let him near another tractor.”

  I sent the exhibitionist for a mental health evaluation and gave the guy who’d tried to steal an antique lamppost from the town commons ten days of jail time.

  The woman who bopped her boyfriend over the head with the Christmas turkey while it was still on the serving platter? Ten days suspended if she completed an anger management course.

  Finally, Kevin called, “Raymond Alito, illegally parked in a handicap space in violation of G.S. 20–37.6(e).”

  A heavyset white man of early middle age rose and came forward. He was neatly dressed in black slacks and a gray nylon windbreaker worn over a red plaid shirt. His black hair was thinning over the crown and there were flecks of gray in his short black beard. He did not look familiar to me, but if Linda Allred was here, then he’d probably been cited for at least one earlier infraction of the code.

  “I see you have chosen not to use an attorney, Mr. Alito. How do you plead?”

  “Your Honor, could I just tell you what happened?”

  “Certainly, sir, as soon as you tell me whether you’re pleading guilty or not guilty.”

  “Not guilty then, ma’am.”

  “Mr. Foster?”

  “Your Honor, we will show that on December twenty-third of last year, Mr. Alito illegally parked in a space reserved for the handicapped at the outlet mall here in Dobbs. Mr. Alito is not physically disabled and he does not possess a handicap permit. The ticketing officer called for a tow truck, which impounded his car. This is Mr. Alito’s second ticket for this infraction.”

  With appropriate gravity, I asked, “And is the ticketing officer in court?”

  “She is, Your Honor. I call Dr. Linda Allred to the stand.”

  “Huh?” said Alito as Allred steered her motorized chair over to a position in front of the witness seat, which was one step above floor level. “She’s the one who gave me a ticket? She’s no police officer.”

  “You’ll have your chance to speak, Mr. Alito,” I told him. “The witness may swear from her own seat.”

  The bailiff handed her the Bible and my clerk swore her in.

  Dr. Allred is a dumpling of a woman with short straight gray hair parted high on the left and piercing eyes that usually cast jaundiced looks over the top of her glasses. Although her doctorate is in psychology and she teaches statistical analysis on the college level, she lives in Dobbs and in her heart of hearts, she’s Dirty Harry. Or maybe I should say Betty Friedan because a lot of her work is rooted in women’s issues.

  Her particular pet peeve, however, is able-bodied drivers who park in spaces reserved for those with impaired mobility. Any time she spots one, she writes up a ticket, something that she’s officially allowed to do, as Kevin’s next question made clear.

  “Dr. Allred, are you a sworn law officer?”

  “No, Mr. Foster, but I was made a special deputy and given ticket-writing authority by Sheriff Bowman Poole and I try not to abuse it.”

  “Would you describe what happened on the twenty-third of December?”

  “Certainly.” She took a small laptop computer from a pocket on the side of her chair and opened it to a screen full of photographs. “On the afternoon of December twenty-third, a friend and I were finishing up our Christmas shopping at the outlet mall. I was just getting out of my van when Mr. Alito pulled into the only empty slot. It was directly in front of ours. I immediately noticed that his car did not display a handicap tag on the rearview mirror, so I took out my camera and snapped the first picture.”

  The bailiff handed me her laptop. There, in glorious color was a view of Alito in his late-model black Honda with the edge of the blue warning sign just visible. His rearview mirror was dead center. Nothing dangled from it except a set of rosary beads.

  “Mr. Alito then got out of his car and had no trouble walking into the Gifts and Glass Warehouse. That’s the second picture on the screen, Your Honor. Now if you’ll click to the third picture?”

  I clicked as directed.

  “My friend helped me with my wheelchair and I went around to the rear of his car and took a third picture of his license plate. As you see, it is a standard North Carolina plate, not one issued to the disabled. At that point, I called for a tow truck and wrote out the citation.”

  I signaled for the bailiff to show the laptop to Mr. Alito, who looked at the pictures with a distinctly sour expression.

  “What did you do next, Dr. Allred?” Kevin asked.

  “The parking lot was quite crowded. There were regular spaces way off to the side, but all the other nearby handicap spaces were legally taken. An elderly couple with a tag asked us if we were coming or going so they could have my spot, but I told them just to wait a few minutes and that the one in front of me would be opening up as soon as the tow truck got there. Then my friend and I went inside and finished our Christmas shopping. When we came out, Mr. Alito’s car was gone and the other car was parked there.”

  “No further questions,” Kevin said.

  “Your turn, Mr. Alito,” I said. “Do you wish to question the witness?”

  He blustered a moment, then said, “I’d just like to ask her if she followed me in the store and saw what I bought?”

  “No, sir,” Dr. Allred responded promptly.

  “
Well, if you had, you’d’ve seen me buy a Christmas present for my eighty-nine-year-old mother and she does have a handicap tag. Her heart’s so bad she couldn’t walk across this room without her oxygen tank.”

  Dr. Allred looked at him over the top of her glasses. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir, but she wasn’t in the car with you, was she?”

  Alito turned to me. “Ma’am, can I just explain what happened in my own words?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “But first, I have a question for Dr. Allred.”

  She looked at me expectantly.

  “Dr. Allred, you say you try not to abuse the authority Sheriff Poole gave you. It’s my understanding that you usually just write a ticket. Could you tell me why you called a tow truck for Mr. Alito’s car?”

  “Because this is the second time I’ve caught him in a handicap space.” Her fingers played over the keyboard. “According to my records, I ticketed him on the fourth of September in front of a grocery store.”

  Alito’s mouth dropped open when he heard that.

  “Thank you, Dr. Allred. No further questions. You may come up and take the witness stand, Mr. Alito.”

  They passed in the space before my bench and I heard Alito mutter, “Bitch!”

  “Did you say something, sir?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am. Just clearing my throat.” He took the Bible and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  “Yeah, I know I shouldn’t have parked there, but I really was just going in to buy a present for my poor old mother. I bet I wasn’t in there ten minutes. Well, twenty if you count the time I had to wait in line to check out.”

  “One present?” I said. “That was all?”

  “Well, maybe I did pick up a couple of little things on my way back to the front, but my mother’s present was really all I went in for. I got back outside, I almost had a heart attack myself. I thought my car’d been stolen, but when I called the police and they saw where I’d been parked, they told me to call the county’s towing service. Cost me a hundred-fifty to get it back, and what I don’t understand is how come this ticket’s for two-fifty, when the first one was only fifty.”