Winter's Child Page 8

  That part was supported by other workers in the office.

  They did not support her assertion that he had been laughing and joking about early retirement and how he was 8 planning to spend his first week of freedom fishing for bass out at the lake. When asked if suicide was a possibility, however, the others had apparently more or less shrugged, while the secretary was adamant that “Mr. Shay would never do that to his wife and those sweet baby girls.”

  Jonna’s mother had agreed. Yes, her husband had been upset about business but she certainly did not think he was that upset. The gun? A family heirloom that her husband had enjoyed displaying. “I’m sure we never realized it was loaded.”

  Dwight closed the folder. “Interesting, but I don’t—”

  “Did you see the gun he used?”

  Dwight flipped back through the reports. “An old Colt revolver?”

  “Not just any old Colt revolver. It was a silver-plated, engraved presentation piece given to Peter Morrow for using his influence to spare Shaysville the worst of Reconstruction. It’s also the same gun Edward Morrow used to kill himself in 1931.”

  “Huh?”

  “My clerk says that her dad and the guy who was police chief back then managed to keep that little fact out of the papers because they didn’t want to sensationalize things. As soon as I heard that, I called the Morrow House director at his house.”

  “Mayhew? Jonna’s boss?”

  Radcliff nodded. “That’s where the gun is now. According to Mayhew, Jonna’s mother inherited it from her father and she was real proud of it even though her own granddaddy had shot himself with it. After Mr. Shay’s death, she decided it was cursed and wanted to destroy it.

  Mayhew says it took a lot of talking, but the Historical So- ciety eventually persuaded her to give it to the Morrow House. It’s on display out there now, but of course there’s nothing on the card to tell that the gun was ever fired.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Dwight asked his friend.

  Radcliff’s eyes dropped and he hesitated for a moment.

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, Dwight, but my clerk says her dad used to say there was talk that Eustace Shay was a little unstable even before he accidentally-maybe-on-purpose shot himself. His mother was reputed to be a little bit odd herself, used to wander around talking to people who weren’t there. And some say Jonna’s sister’s not all that tightly wired either. ’Course, that may be because she’s something of an alcoholic.”

  Dwight immediately saw where Radcliff was heading and shook his head. “And you’re thinking Jonna’s come unglued, too?”

  His friend shrugged. “Well, she’s sure not acting normal, is she?”

  Before Dwight could argue that he’d never seen any signs of mental instability in his ex-wife, Radcliff’s phone rang. The chief had barely identified himself when Dwight heard a loud excited voice practically screaming through the earpiece.

  “Slow down!” Radcliff said. “You’re not making sense.” He listened intently, then said, “Stay put. We’ll be right out.”

  He pushed himself up from the desk. “You’d better come, too. That was Mayhew. That damn gun and two others have gone missing from their display case.”

  C H A P T E R

  9

  The constant statements by the older people, that the winterswere colder or the summers hotter than now, are due to thetendency to magnify and remember the unusual while theordinary is forgotten.

  —Willis Isbister Milham

  The Saturday morning air nipped at my face as I left home to go pick up road litter with my family, but the sun had already begun to warm up the day. I wore my oldest boots, jeans, and two layers of ratty sweatshirts beneath a light jacket so that I could peel down if the temperature really did get into the high fifties. It took me a while to find an old pair of work gloves, but I still made it to Minnie and Seth’s before all the sausage biscuits disappeared.

  Their kitchen was full of brothers and sisters-in-law who live out here on the farm as well as those of their children who are still at home. Daddy sat at the table beaming. He likes it when the family comes together on a project.

  “Us Knotts, we’ve been keeping up this road for over a hundred years,” he said, waving away the extra biscuit Doris tried to press on him. “My granddaddy was a road captain back ’fore nineteen-hundred.”

  “What was that?” asked Seth’s daughter Jessica.

  “Means being in charge of a stretch of road. When my pa was a boy, he used to go help Grampa lay off his mile.”

  He smiled down at young Bert, grandson of Robert, my oldest brother. “How you reckon they measured it, little man?”

  “Drove his car down it?”

  “Naw, won’t no cars out here back then.”

  The child was old enough to know about odometers but too young to conceive of a world without cars, and his brow furrowed with the concept.

  “What they done,” said Daddy, “was measure around the rim of his wagon wheel and tie a white rag on it. Pa kept count and when that rag come up five hundred times, that was one mile.”

  “There couldn’t have been plastic bags back then either,” said Jess, “so what did they pick up the trash in?

  Bushel baskets?”

  “Won’t no trash,” said Daddy. “Won’t nothing much to throw away ’cause stuff didn’t come in paper wrappers like today and they won’t no hamburger places anyhow.

  Folks using this road was all farmers who ate at their own tables and growed most of their food. You’d give your table scraps to the dogs or the pigs and you’d burn your trash in a barrel. What couldn’t be burned, you put on your own trash pile back in the woods. You surely didn’t go flinging it in your neighbor’s front ditch.”

  “So why’d they need a road captain?” asked A.K., Andrew and April’s teenage son.

  “ ’Cause the road won’t nothing but dirt. Soon as Grampa got his section marked, he’d call out all the neighbor men and boys to help. They’d come with their mules and plows and hoes and shovels and they’d work 8 all day cleaning out the ditches so the water would drain.

  Then they’d smooth out the roadbed and fill in the holes.

  ’Course it never lasted long. Three or four good hard rains and it was a pigmire again.”

  “Our road won’t paved till I was in high school,”

  Robert chimed in. “Many a winter morning the bus would get stuck and we’d have to slog up the hill from the creek in mud higher’n the laces on our brogans.”

  “That little hill?” scoffed Jess.

  “That was before they graded it down and built the high bridge that’s there now,” Seth told her. “The road used to run right down to creek level and up again.”

  “Everybody got enough bags?” asked Minnie, clearing away the last of breakfast. “Quicker we get started, the quicker we’ll be finished.”

  Someone had dumped an old couch in the ravine by the creek, so A.K. and Reese volunteered to start with that. There was a time when Reese was so truck proud you had to wash your hands and wipe your shoes before he’d let you get in the cab. Now it’s just an old work-horse, and I rode with them down to where our road begins at Possum Creek. A small green-and-white sign noted that this road had been adopted by the Kezzie Knott family.

  While my nephews wrestled the couch up the bank and into the back of the truck, I picked cans and broken beer and wine bottles off the rocks beneath the bridge. We filled two garbage bags out of the creek alone and slung them in beside the couch. Our efforts netted us two pieces of junk mail and a telephone bill with the names and addresses still intact, and those we saved in a smaller bag so that Minnie or Doris could report them to the county zoning department, who would call the offenders with the warning that a second call might mean a thousand-dollar fine and community service.

  We found every kind of trash imaginable, from dirty disposable diapers and three hubcaps to a bag of wadded-up Christmas wrapping paper and a strip of chrome that Re
ese thought had fallen off a friend’s motorcycle. While we worked, I told them about the sackful of marijuana someone had found behind a tree on a ditchbank a few counties over.

  “Better’n that dead dog I found in a box last summer,”

  said A.K. “Remember?”

  They had heard about J.D. Rouse getting shot in front of a woman picking up road litter Thursday evening and wanted to know if Dwight had found the shooter yet.

  I was standing down in the ditch when they asked, and I glanced over my right shoulder to where young pines fringed the woods that bordered the road there. My head was barely level with the upper bank.

  “Run up yonder in the trees,” I told Reese.

  “Huh?”

  “I just want to get a feel for why the killer shot past somebody. Get far enough back in the pines so that you can see the truck but you’re mostly hidden.”

  “Dwight deputize you or something?” Reese grumbled, but he climbed the bank and did as I’d asked. A minute later, he called, “Here, okay?”

  “Can you see the truck?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t see you.”

  From my position in the ditch, I couldn’t see him either.

  “I bet the guy didn’t think anybody was anywhere 9 around,” said A.K., who’d watched with interest. “If I didn’t know Reese was back there, I would never’ve noticed him till he moved, and this is with the sun shining.

  Been getting on for dark and he stood still, wouldn’t anybody see him.”

  My theory exactly and, despite Reese’s smart-mouthing, one I’d share with Dwight when he got home because I drive past the Johnson farm all the time and know its layout. If the shooter had been in the pasture, he and the Harper woman would have surely seen each other.

  I took a fresh bag and they drove on down to the others to pick up some of the filled bags and take a first load to the county dumpsters at Pleasant’s Crossroads, about four miles away.

  Our road connects Old Forty-Eight to a shortcut that leads to Fuquay and eventually to Chapel Hill, so we get our share of traffic. All the same, it was appalling to see how much trash had been thrown out, most of it from fast-food places. As I picked up yet another paper clamshell from Wendy’s and retrieved a bunch of unused napkins with the McDonald’s logo, I kept remembering Cedar Gap, the pretty little mountain resort town where I’d held court last fall.

  “I thought they were just being prissy to ban all fast-food chains,” I told Minnie and Doris when I caught up with them. “Now I see their point. Seems like there’s a lot more today than the last time we did this.”

  “It’s that new shopping center,” said Doris as she stooped for a cardboard Bojangles’ tray. “Fast food’s not to blame. It’s the trashy people who won’t keep a litter bag in their car.”

  With so many of us working, we finished well before noon and gathered at the barbecue house for lunch, Daddy’s treat.

  “We don’t need to wait so long to do this again,” said Doris. “I was getting right ashamed to have our name on that sign.”

  Now that the job was over, it was easy to agree with her.

  As we rode back to Seth’s for me to pick up my car, a silver Acura zipped around us. Just as it entered the rising curve ahead, we saw a telltale yellow-and-red bag go flying out the window onto the shoulder and bounce down into the ditch.

  “What the hell?” cried Reese.

  Enraged, he floored the accelerator, flashing his lights and blowing his horn.

  “Write down their license number,” he yelled, reading it off to us.

  “No pencil,” said A.K., who was also cursing the driver ahead.

  I was equally furious. Less than an hour after we’d cleaned our road and somebody was already trashing it?

  “If I catch him, can we make a citizen’s arrest?” Reese asked.

  “Go for it, Gomer,” I said. All I had in my pocket was a lipstick, but I used it to write the number on my hand in case the car got away.

  That wasn’t necessary, though. Bewildered by the lights and horn, the Acura slowed and pulled to a stop in front of Doris and Robert’s drive.

  Reese was out of the truck before it quit rolling and I made A.K. put down the window on that side.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the teenaged driver.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, you jerk!” Reese shouted as he approached the car. “What the hell kind of slob are you to dump your fu—fricking garbage out the window?”

  I admired his restraint. Angry as he was, he’d realized at the last minute that the driver was a shorthaired girl instead of a guy.

  “Huh?” The girl looked past Reese and recognized my other nephew. “A.K.?”

  “Sorry, Angie,” he said, “but we just spent the whole morning cleaning up the road and the first time we drive back down it, we see you trashing it.”

  The girl had the grace to look embarrassed. She apologized and offered to go back and pick up the Bojangles’

  bag.

  Mollified but still steamed, Reese pulled his truck forward so that she could turn around and then he sat there with his engine running till he saw her get out of her car and retrieve the bag.

  A.K. was also watching in the side-view mirror. “Okay, she’s got it, so let’s go,” he said. He seemed almost as embarrassed by the incident as the girl.

  Reese grinned at his discomfort, but drove on down to Seth and Minnie’s, where he came to a stop beside my car. “Girlfriend of yours?”

  “A friend, not a girlfriend. I mean, a friend who happens to be a girl.”

  Reese and I were both laughing by then.

  “Oh, the hell with both of you!” He jumped out of the truck and headed for his own wheels.

  “She was cute,” said Reese. “All the same, I bet she thinks twice before she shoves her trash out a window again.”

  C H A P T E R

  10

  They are honest in their dealings with one another. Where-fore no one keeps watch.

  —Theophrastus

  Saturday morning, 22 January

  Despite the cold, the director of the Morrow House was pacing the flagstone terrace out front in his shirtsleeves when Dwight and Paul Radcliff arrived, followed by a couple of Radcliff’s officers.

  “Thank goodness you’re here!” said Frederick Mayhew. His teeth were chattering, but whether from anxiety or the frosty air was hard to say. “I simply don’t know what to think. Everything was locked and I’m sure the alarm system was set when I left. We’ve never had a rob-bery before. Oh, some of the children might pick something up—we did lose a doll bonnet once but the child’s mother made her bring it back—but this!”

  He opened the door for them so vigorously that it banged hard against the wrought-iron stop and Dwight almost expected the beveled glass to shatter.

  “We keep them in the library,” Mayhew told them and led the way through the spacious entrance hall and large front parlor to a smaller room lined with bookcases.

  “There!”

  On a rectangular oak library table that stood in the center of the room sat a glass-topped display case. An empty glass-topped display case.

  Indentations in the crushed red velvet marked the places where a small derringer, a dueling pistol, and a long-barreled revolver, each neatly labeled, once lay. The case was closed but not locked, as Mayhew quickly demonstrated, yet there appeared to be no scratches on the lock itself.

  “Who else knows how to work the alarm system?”

  asked Radcliff.

  “Just Jonna.”

  “And when’s the last time you saw the gun?”

  Mayhew pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose and frowned. His pale blond hair stood up in disordered tufts.

  “I can’t honestly say. Definitely during Christmas week because a troop of Boy Scouts visited, and boys are always interested in firearms.”

  “The case is normally locked?”

  “Oh, absolutely. We couldn’t have anyone handling them, tarnishing the silver pl
ating. The temptation to touch is such a human foible, isn’t it? Taken together, the three guns are valued at nearly half a million dollars, and the presentation gun is one-of-a-kind. Irreplaceable.”

  “Half a million!” Radcliff exclaimed. “And you kept them out like this?”

  Mayhew gave a fatalistic shrug. “My hands are tied. It’s a condition of the donors. They quite naturally like to see their names on the display cards. Besides, they are well 9 documented and the insurance company had them laser-tagged with our own ID code. No one could sell them.”

  “Who has the key to this case?”

  “There are only two. They hang with the rest of the keys on a board in a locked cupboard, and before you ask, both keys are still there.”

  “Then who has access to that cupboard?” Radcliff asked patiently.

  “Well, I do, of course, and Jonna. And there’s a spare key that we keep in a vase on the mantel in our office.”

  “Who knows about the spare?”

  “Only Jonna and I.”

  “What about a cleaning woman?”

  “Cleaning man,” he corrected, shaking his head. “Dix Lunsford may have noticed it when he dusts, but I doubt if he knows what it’s for. Besides, he’s never in the office alone. Not that we don’t trust him, heavens no. He and his wife used to work for Jonna’s mother and he’s devoted to Jonna. He wouldn’t take a straight pin that didn’t belong to him.”

  “Does he have keys to the house itself?”

  “Certainly not! There are only five. One for Jonna, one for me, and one for each of the three officers on our board of trustees.” He paused and pushed up his glasses and sheepishly admitted that perhaps they knew the alarm code as well.

  A gust of cold air announced the opening of the front door.

  “I called our chairman. Perhaps that’s he now,” he said pedantically as he peered over his glasses toward the doorwa.

  yAn officer stationed at the door called down the hall,

  “Futrell’s here, Chief.”

  A youthful-looking plainclothes officer entered the library, carrying a case with the basic tools of an investigation. For anything more complicated, they would have to send for the division’s crime scene van, which was centrally manned by the state police.