Christmas Mourning

by Margaret Maron

“I left it in Greensboro. Something’s wrong with the brakes and I didn’t have time to take it in to get it fixed.”

  This got her more snickers from her cousins.

  “Come on, y’all. Quit laughing. It’s no biggie. I got a ride with some friends from Makely and they let me sleep all the way over. Besides, tired as I was, Mom and Dad ought to be happy I didn’t try to drive myself after what happened to Mallory. Oh, God! I couldn’t believe it when I started getting all the messages. Do they know why yet?”

  Being rather golden herself, Jane Ann would of course have known a golden girl like Mallory Johnson, despite being a year ahead of her. Listening to the girls, I realized that Mallory had been part of the court when Jane Ann was named homecoming queen last year. No surprise that Mallory had been this year’s queen.

  As we rolled and cut, and shuttled pans of cookies in and out of the oven, my high school nieces brought Jane Ann and Annie Sue up to date—the last time each of them had spoken to Mallory, whom she’d last dated, their speculations as to why she had wrecked her car on a straight stretch of road, and whether she’d been buckled up, thrown out of the car, or crushed behind the wheel.

  They described the memorial they had helped construct and place at the crash site yesterday morning and Ruth brought up pictures of the cross and wreath on her camera. “I’ll upload them and send y’all the link,” she promised.

  “What’s with the beer cans and Bojangles’ box?” Jane Ann asked.

  “Oh, that’s just the trash that was in the ditch across from where she crashed. I picked up a bunch of it while they were doing the wreath so it’d look nice along there. People are such slobs.”

  Jane Ann squinted at a picture of gray with black streaks across it. “And what’s this?”

  “Her skid marks. She only laid down rubber for a few feet,” said Ruth. “I guess she was trying to keep from hitting a rabbit or possum or something at the last minute.”

  “No,” Jane Ann said. “It would have to be a lot bigger. At least the size of a deer or a really big dog.”

  She sounded so sure of herself that I was curious. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because her dad hammered it into her that you never swerve for an animal in your lane. Never. He told Mallory that too many kids flip over trying not to kill something. That they cut the wheel and then overcorrect. Before he let her get her license, he took her out on the road a few times till they found a squirrel or a rabbit or something in her lane and he made her run over it. Can you believe that? Told her not to brake and not to turn the wheel. She could take her foot off the gas, but that’s all.”

  “Hey, that’s right,” Jess said. “In Spanish class this fall, she was real down about hitting a turtle that she didn’t notice till the very last minute and she said the same thing. How she had promised her dad that she absolutely would not swerve around any animal in her lane. And she loved turtles.”

  “Must have been a deer, then,” Annie Sue speculated.

  Emma told of how shattered Joy Medlin was by this latest death. “She had a voice mail from Mallory right before the game and she says she’s never going to delete it. She’s got Stacy’s last voice-mail message, too. It’s so sad.”

  When all this talk started, I had briefly considered Mary Pat and Melissa’s tender ages and whether I ought to send them outdoors to play, but they had immediately let me know that they knew all about this latest tragedy, and they were not shy about voicing their own thoughts and opinions.

  “Mom told Erin that she has to turn her phone off when she’s driving us,” said Mary Pat.

  “I’m never gonna turn mine on in the car,” Melissa said.

  Mary Pat looked at her enviously. “You have a phone already?”

  “No, but I’m hoping they’ll break down and get me one for Christmas. It’s all I really want.”

  “Me, too.” Mary Pat sighed.

  (I knew for a fact that they had better chances of getting a blizzard for Christmas than their own cell phones.)

  “Mallory probably did have hers on,” Emma said quietly. “She texted the whole squad from the party Tuesday night.”

  “Were you at that party?” I asked, knowing what a tight leash Barbara keeps her two kids on.

  Jessica glanced up from putting cinnamon drops on some sugar cookie stars. “What party?” She made a face. “You don’t mean Kevin Crowder’s party, do you?”

  Emma hesitated. “All the other cheerleaders were going, but you know Mother. She always makes Lee bring me straight home after a game.”

  “Who’s Kevin Crowder?” Annie Sue asked. She and Jane Ann were the same age, but she had attended Dobbs Senior High, not West Colleton as had the others.

  “He’s a shooting guard on the basketball team. Has a wicked three-pointer but he’s a real assh—” Jess caught herself, whether out of deference to her elderly aunt’s ears or the ears of the two little ones, and changed it to “Real jerk.”

  “I remember him,” Jane Ann said, nibbling on a broken cookie. “You’ve seen him around too, Annie Sue. He was at A.K.’s birthday party. Tall blond guy? Blue convertible?”

  Her cousin reached for the other part of the cookie. “Acted like he was God’s gift to women?”

  “He’s a senior this year and even more stuck on himself than last year,” Jess assured them.

  “Be fair,” Emma protested. “He’s really nice when you get to know him.”

  They stared at her and she flushed a bright red.

  All the Knott kids have blue eyes, relatively fair skin, and hair that ranges from light brown to blond, but Emma had inherited Barbara’s delicate pink complexion and her long hair was the color of spring dandelions.

  “Please tell me you are not getting to know Kevin Crowder,” Jane Ann said sternly.

  The flush on Emma’s cheeks spread across her whole face and up into her hairline.

  “Oops!” I cried, reaching for a potholder. “Anybody remember when that last pan of cookies went in?”

  Someone had left a nearly empty glass of milk beside the potholder right on the edge of the counter. A tiny imperceptible nudge as I picked up the potholder was enough to send it careening toward the floor.

  Jess and Annie Sue both lunged for it. Spraying milk on their sweaters, it bounced off their hands toward Mary Pat, whose misjudged grab swatted it across the room where it shattered against the edge of the refrigerator.

  More of a mess than I had intended, but by the time all the milk and glass were cleaned up, the sweaters sponged off, and the last sheets of cookies were out of the oven, conversation had moved on to other topics less interesting to Melissa and Mary Pat. When I brought out the bottle of bourbon to mix up those sinfully delicious bourbon balls, they wrinkled up their little noses and decided to go see what the boys were up to.

  I made a fresh pot of coffee and Ruth and Emma used my food processor to turn several cups of toasted pecans into tiny bits. Jane Ann and Jessica pounded vanilla wafers into crumbs and Annie Sue measured out butter and powdered sugar.

  For a wedding gift last year, the local bar association gave Dwight and me a huge ceramic bowl they had commissioned from the Jugtown Pottery over in Seagrove. The bowl is big enough to serve coleslaw to the whole family at a pig-picking, and it’s also perfect for mixing up a family-size batch of bourbon balls. I drizzled melted butter over all the dry ingredients, then poured in the bourbon. A big wooden spoon passed from hand to hand as we each stirred the stiff mixture till our arms gave out.

  I may have been a little too lavish with the bourbon, because when Annie Sue took her turn with the wooden spoon, she immediately began to warble:

  The birds in the sky get so drunk they cain’t fly

  From that good ol’ mountain dew.

  When everything was thoroughly mixed and the coffee was ready, we carried our mugs to the dining table and set the big bowl in the middle so everyone could reach in, pinch off some dough, and shape it into one-inch balls. As soon as one cake box was filled,
it was carried out to a workbench in the garage to chill and another took its place.

  With so many hands dipping in and out of the bowl, I knew it wouldn’t take long to finish, so while there were no loose-lipped little kids in the room, I said, “So, Emma. Can we assume that Kevin Crowder’s house is on a straight line between South Colleton and your house?”

  She stared at me, stricken, then whispered, “Who told you?”

  I wasn’t about to say that it was her own evasion of my first question that tipped me off, and now her guilty look confirmed my suspicions.

  “Please,” she said, imploring the others as much as me. “Don’t tell Mother. She’ll blame Lee, too, and it’s not his fault. Laurie Evans broke up with her boyfriend and asked if we could drop her at the party ’cause she didn’t want to ride with him and she knew we’d be going right past Kevin’s house. I talked Lee into it. See, Kevin sits next to me in study hall. That’s how I know him. I told him I couldn’t go, but everybody was so pumped about beating South we didn’t want the night to end—it really was only for a few minutes. But his parents weren’t home and there were some older kids there that we didn’t know and one of them was high on something, so Lee made me leave before I could even take off my jacket, but Mother will kill us if she finds out. The only reason she let me join the varsity squad was because I promised I wouldn’t try to act like I was a junior or senior.”

  The words tumbled out in such a rush that she was almost crying, and Jessica reached out to pat her arm. “It’s okay, Em. We won’t tell. None of us will, will we?”

  The girls all shook their heads and looked at me.

  “I won’t tell either,” I said slowly, “but the boy that was high? Were there drugs at the party?”

  “I don’t know,” she wailed. “I wasn’t there long enough to even drink a Coke.”

  “But Mallory was there?”

  “We all were. The whole squad and most of the varsity players.”

  “Was she okay at the game?”

  “Sure. She was starting to get a cold and her voice sounded a little raspy. She did take a pill, but it was just a Benadryl tablet. And she was drinking lots of liquids to try and flush the cold out of her system.”

  “What about at the party?”

  Emma shrugged. “She had a Coke can in her hand when we got there, and there was booze on one of the counters, but I’m sure she didn’t put any in her drink if that’s what you mean. Bridget’s the only—”

  She clapped a sticky guilty hand to her mouth as if to block the words we’d already heard her say.

  Jane Ann pounced on them in disapproving surprise. “Bridget Honeycutt drinks?”

  I suppose I should have appreciated the irony of the situation. Here we sat, up to our wrists in bourbon-saturated dough, and my nieces were expressing disbelief that a “nice” girl like Bridget Honeycutt had a drinking problem?

  The difference, of course, was that by the time these calorie-laden little balls had ripened in cake boxes out in the cold garage for several days and I had drizzled chocolate over them, most of the alcohol would have evaporated, leaving only the flavor behind.

  Some of my brothers—their dads—had abused alcohol in their younger days, A.K. was known to sneak an occasional beer, and Reese had a DWI on his driving record, but bourbon balls had never led any member of my family down the primrose path to alcoholism any more than Aunt Zell’s fruitcakes had.

  “Bridget’s no drunk,” Emma said hotly. “She couldn’t drink much and still keep up with the rest of us, but she says that it helps take the edges off things.”

  She would not elaborate on why Bridget needed some edges blurred, but I got the impression that Jess and Ruth probably knew.

  “You said you saw booze,” I said. “What about drugs?”

  “No!” Emma cried. “Why do you keep asking me? I told you. I wasn’t there long enough to see who was doing what.”

  My nieces aren’t dummies and it was sweet levelheaded Jessica who said, “You know something, don’t you, Aunt Deborah?”

  I nodded. “But you absolutely can’t talk about it right now. It’ll come out soon enough. Mallory had alcohol in her system when she died, and her dad seems to think someone spiked her drink or maybe even added drugs to it to make her so disoriented that she would run off a straight road on a clear night. Who at that party would do that to her, Emma?”

  But Emma had immediately realized that there would be an inquiry into that party and she had leapfrogged to what was, for her, the larger issue. “I’m dead,” she moaned. “Mother will make me quit the squad. She’ll take Lee’s car keys and he’ll hate me forever.”

  “Not necessarily,” Jane Ann said soothingly. “If you were only there for a minute, chances are that no one really registered it.”

  Emma shook her head and golden hair swirled around her anguished face. “Laurie knows and so does Kevin. As soon as Uncle Dwight starts asking for names, mine’s going to pop out.”

  Annie Sue had continued to roll bourbon balls through all this, but now she paused and said, “So here’s what you do. You’re going to the visitation tonight, right?”

  Emma nodded tearfully.

  “It’ll be perfectly normal to talk about the last time you saw Mallory. You will probably cry. That’s when you tell your mom how good she was at the game and how your last memory of her will be taking a sip of her Coke at Kevin Crowder’s party.”

  “Annie Sue! I can’t. She’ll go ballistic!”

  “No she won’t,” Annie Sue said calmly, “because when she asks what you were doing there when you were supposed to come straight home, you’ll explain about this Laurie kid and how the only reason you and Lee stepped inside was to make sure that Laurie had a way home. You got home around your usual time, right? So clearly you didn’t stay. Don’t make a big deal out of it and Aunt Barbara will think you did the proper thing. That she’s raised two very considerate and responsible kids.”

  There was more cynicism in her voice than I wanted to hear, but I had to admit that she really did have Barbara pegged.

  From the sudden look of relief on her face, Emma knew it, too.

  Two minutes later, Jane Ann was the one in trouble with her mother when her cell phone rang and she had to admit that she had come here first instead of going straight home.

  I could hear Isabel’s outraged voice from the other side of the table. “Your daddy’s out there pacing a rut in the yard, worried to death that you ain’t come, and you’re over yonder making cookies?”

  “I’m coming right now,” Jane Ann assured her. She clicked off and hurried to the sink to wash her hands.

  Annie Sue was right behind her. “I’ll drive you,” she said, “but I’m not coming in to find out if you’re okay.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.”

  —“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” Arthur Conan Doyle

  I took Mary Pat and Jake home shortly before sunset and left Cal there, too, to spend the night. Kate and Rob planned to treat the children to pizza and then to a Christmas lights theme park near Raleigh while Dwight and I went to the funeral home in Cotton Grove where Mallory Johnson’s visitation was being held.

  As a sitting judge who has to run for office every four years, I get invited to a lot of weddings and I attend a lot of funerals. My inner pragmatist knows that it’s a chance to shake hands and remind the voters that I’m in and of the community. My inner preacher worries about taking advantage of a family’s emotional state.

  Weddings are usually fun and I don’t mind funerals for the terminally sick or nursing home elderly. These can turn into a celebration of the person’s life, with more smiles than tears. Anecdotes and good memories can surface again and the survivors talk about their loved one’s release from suffering or dementia. You often sense their own release from grief and exhaustion, a relief tinged with guilt for being glad that the deathwatc
h is over.

  Funerals for adults cut down in their prime are usually sad, but they are laugh riots compared to the rituals for a well-loved child. Those are hard, hard, hard, and I knew that the evening would be a tortured ordeal for Sarah and Malcolm Johnson as they touched the hands of Mallory’s classmates and were reminded over and over again that those kids were going to move on into bright futures that their own child would never see.

  The visitation was scheduled for six to eight, so Dwight and I had supper first at my cousin’s barbecue house, which is only four miles away.

  We had to wait a few minutes to get a table and then had to share it with a couple of friends. We spent the meal catching up with them—new house, new job, new baby—and it wasn’t until we were driving over to Cotton Grove that I had a chance to tell Dwight the meager facts I had picked up from my nieces.

  He was sorry that Emma and Lee hadn’t stayed longer at the party, “but I’ve put Mayleen on it,” he said, naming one of the more capable deputies on his squad. “She’ll get a list of everyone who stepped through the Crowder door that night. I’m pretty sure we’ll wind up identifying whoever spiked her drink if the DA wants to prosecute for contributing to the girl’s death. Which I doubt.”

  His opinion of our new DA wasn’t much higher than mine. “Any good attorney can argue that it was Mallory’s inexperience and the Benadryl that made her swerve for something and flip the car, not a shot of whiskey.”

  “Did the troopers find any dead animals at the site?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Did they look?”

  “They always look. She must have missed whatever it was.”

  I described Jane Ann and Jess’s insistence that Malcolm had drilled it into her not to brake and swerve for any small animal.

  “A deer then,” he said dismissively. “Or a big dog, because she certainly braked to avoid hitting something.”

  “And not another car?” I persisted.

  “No skid marks in the other lane and only a short one in hers.”