Christmas Mourning

by Margaret Maron

  I immediately gave her my credit card number. Even with postage and tax, it was under the family’s twenty-five dollar limit. And it arrived gift-wrapped.

  Theoretically, we can’t exceed that, and we are not supposed to gift anyone else, but of course there are always exceptions to any rule. Every year, Daddy sits with a pile of presents heaped up around his chair, and every year he says, “Now I know y’all didn’t all draw my name.”

  And there’s no way that Zach and Haywood aren’t going to exchange little tokens with Adam and Herman. Twinship trumps ordinary siblings, but those are the only family-sanctioned exceptions.

  Up until last year, though, I had no spouse and no child, so nothing was said when I gave my nieces and nephews funny Christmas cards with money tucked inside—a single bill whose value depended on their ages. Cal and Dwight’s names had both gone into the hat last year, but I still sneaked and gave the kids their cards. Happily, my brothers and sisters-in-law were so accustomed to my ritual that only Barbara called me on it.

  “If you must give them something, just give them the cards,” she’d said, and then added somewhat sourly, “They get a bigger kick out of your cards than the money anyhow.”

  That was nice to hear, because I don’t give one-size-fits-all cards. I aim for a funny zinger geared to each kid’s personality or interest and then doctor them up. Reese, for instance. He found a wounded buck by the side of the road one year, someone else’s trophy animal, and tried to hide it in the van of his truck. The buck revived and tore Reese and the interior of his truck to bloody shreds. I got him a card that featured an inebriated stag with an eight-point rack that read, “Buck up, deer! It’s Christmas!” and glued a tiny strip of his tattered upholstery to one of the antlers.

  I can waste as much time on picking out the perfect card as I would on picking out something more conventional. I still didn’t have one to celebrate Annie Sue’s new electrician’s license or Jackson’s athletic scholarship, but for Robert’s grandson Bert, whose incisors hadn’t grown back in yet, I lucked into a musical card that played “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”

  With forty minutes of my lunch recess gone, I spotted a card that featured an elaborately decorated Christmas tree. I pressed on a little bulge at the base of the tree and tiny LEDs began to twinkle. Perfect for Annie Sue.

  Still nothing for Jackson, though. I finally gave up and bought a baseball-themed birthday card that had potential if nothing else presented itself in the next couple of days.

  Precious time was eaten up waiting in line to pay and then more waiting in the sporting goods store, where I bought paper targets for Cal and a box of cartridges for Dwight. When I hiked back to my car, my watch read 1:18.

  Lunch was a hasty forkful of my ham salad whenever I had to stop at a traffic light on my way back through town.

  “Isn’t eating a salad with a fork while you drive just as dangerous as texting on a cell phone?” asked my internal preacher.

  “Give it a rest,” said the pragmatist, who hates getting lectured. “She’s doing twenty-five miles an hour, not fifty-five or sixty.”

  “All the same,” said the preacher.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  I convened the afternoon session at exactly 1:33. Not too bad considering that I’d had to freshen my lipstick and got stopped in the hallway to accept congratulations from Judge Luther Parker for making it through a full year of marriage.

  “You do know, don’t you, that some people here were betting it wouldn’t last that long?”

  “So how much did you win?” I asked.

  He grinned. “Lucky for me, betting’s against my religion. I’d’ve lost big-time.”

  Between last-minute settlements and plea arrangements, I had finished everything on the day’s calendar by four o’clock and was ready to call it a day when I was asked to sign a final document. After twenty-three years of marriage, Marian Louise Bledsoe-Jernigan and Frederick Spencer Bledsoe-Jernigan had decided to give each other a divorce for Christmas.

  All the paperwork had been completed. The division of marital property had already taken place. No alimony was requested and their children were grown, so there was no question of child support.

  “Your Honor,” said Mrs. Bledsoe-Jernigan, “please note that I am asking to legally resume my maiden name.”

  I read through her application to change her name back to Marian Louise Bledsoe.

  “Granted,” I said.

  “Hey!” said Mr. Bledsoe-Jernigan. “What about my maiden name? I mean, my birth name?”

  To his relief, I told him that he had the right to resume his former surname, too, and that I would incorporate the changes in the decree.

  When I first came to the bench, the state did not provide for this circumstance. Until the General Assembly rewrote the law, a man was allowed only one legal name change per lifetime. In taking a hyphen, he would use up his one change. I still remember the bemused smile on the face of an ex-wife when her cheating husband realized that her name was legally linked to his in perpetuity, and that if the new wife-in-waiting wanted to take his name, it would have to be the hyphenated name.

  I’m fairly sure that he was one of those who pushed for the change in Section 1 of G.S. 50-12.

  Phyllis Raynor had clerked for me that afternoon. After we finished with the Bledsoe-Jernigan papers, we waited around for another half hour in case anyone else showed up needing a judge’s signature.

  “Y’all get many requests for name changes?” I asked her as we kicked back in our chairs.

  Except in divorce cases, they are normally handled by the clerk of court’s office and it’s considerably more complicated. In addition to a hefty filing fee and filling out a two-page form, the petitioner has to submit a copy of his birth certificate, a valid photo ID, and a notarized criminal history record check for every county or state he’s lived in within the past ten years. Changing one’s name is not something to be entered into lightly.

  “Several,” Phyllis said. “My first was right after I started working for Mr. Glover. He had a weird Polish name—like eight consonants and only one vowel—and he was tired of nobody being able to spell or pronounce it. These last few years we’ve had a run by young men who want to change their names for religious reasons. Mr. Glover tries to talk them out of it because so many have come back and wanted to take up their original names again and he can’t let them. And just this past spring, we had a young man who’d been adopted by his stepfather when he was a baby and he wanted to take back his birth name. Mrs. Brewer did the paperwork on it for him.”

  I nodded. “Charlie Barefoot.”

  “You know him?”

  “Not really. Portland mentioned it to me when we were talking about his sister—his half sister, that is. She’s the girl who was killed in a car wreck last week.”

  “Really? Too bad right here at Christmas.” She did not speak callously, merely as someone who had no personal connection. “What’s his legal standing right now? I mean, if both parents suddenly dropped dead without a will?”

  “His mother and his stepfather?”

  “But it’s not his stepfather, is it? Technically, I mean. Wasn’t he legally adopted? Changing your name doesn’t cancel out your adoption, does it?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “You’re right. And without a will, he would be legally entitled to everything a natural child would.”

  “And now he’s the only child left,” said Phyllis as she began to gather up her files and close down the computer. “Are they rich?”

  “Certainly comfortable, I think. The father’s a partner in Triple J Insurance.”

  “Well, yes, then,” she said with a laugh. “I’d say that’s pretty darn comfortable.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “I don’t know what they’re doing out there. Playing some game or other, I suppose. I’ve always been so afraid, you know, that these young people would be bored by our Christmas here. But not at all, it’s just
the opposite.”

  —“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” Agatha Christie

  MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT—MONDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 22

  As long as he was almost in the neighborhood, Dwight decided that he might as well swing past the house and make himself another ham sandwich to replace the one he’d left back in the office. Besides, even warmed-over breakfast coffee would taste better than the weak dishwater he could get at any Cotton Grove fast-food joint.

  Two white trucks were parked by his back door when he got there and Bandit was out of his crate, wagging his docked tail happily from the top step. Inside, he found Reese and Annie Sue at the kitchen table with half-eaten sandwiches on paper towels in lieu of plates. The decimated ham sat on the counter with bread, mayo, and lettuce they had pulled from the refrigerator.

  “Oh, hey, Uncle Dwight!” Annie Sue said brightly when Dwight walked in on them. “Want me to make you a sandwich?”

  “You sure there’s enough left?” he asked. He noted that the coffeemaker was now empty, that the door of the microwave was ajar, and that two steaming mugs sat beside their paper plates.

  “No problem,” said Reese. He jumped up and flourished a sharp knife while Annie Sue slathered mayonnaise on the bread. “In fact, I think I’ll have another one, too, if that’s okay.”

  “Help yourself,” Dwight said, amused. He should have known that the labor for upgrading their circuit breakers wouldn’t come totally free and hoped Deborah didn’t have plans for the leftover ham because there clearly weren’t going to be any leftovers once Reese got through. He washed up at the kitchen sink and started a fresh pot of coffee.

  “So how’s it going?” he asked them when they were all seated around the table and the smell of newly made coffee filled the kitchen.

  “Fine,” Annie Sue said. “We decided to install another box to accommodate the new breakers and give you some extra space if you ever want to wire another room or add a shed or something out back.”

  In retrospect, Dwight would realize that he should have been suspicious of her innocent-sounding remark, but it sounded logical, so he just said thanks and turned to Reese. “I hear you saw a big buck down in one of the back fields the other day?”

  “I didn’t actually see him. Just his tracks. The dewlaps left such a deep mark, though, that I’m sure it was a buck. If I get him, I’ll bring y’all some of the meat.”

  “So,” said Annie Sue with what he would later recall as studied casualness. “You working in the area today?”

  “No, I’m on my way back to Dobbs. Just had some people in Cotton Grove I needed to talk to.”

  “Anything to do with the Wentworth brothers getting shot yesterday?” Reese asked.

  “You heard about that?”

  “Matt was in the same class as Ruth and Richard,” Annie Sue said. “They were texting back and forth when we were over at Uncle Seth’s just now, finishing up on his circuit breakers.”

  Dwight got up to pour himself more coffee. “They have anything to say about why he might’ve been shot?”

  Reese, his mouth full of ham and lettuce, shook his head and held out his cup for a refill.

  “What about the older boy? Jason? Y’all know him?”

  He saw Reese glance at Annie Sue, who immediately turned brick red.

  “Stop it, Reese!” she said. “It wasn’t funny then and it’s certainly not funny now that he’s dead.”

  “What?” asked Dwight.

  Reese grinned. “She thought he thought she was hot.”

  “I did not!” that sturdy young woman snapped.

  As Dwight continued to look at her inquiringly, she gave a what-the-hell? shrug.

  “Don’t listen to Reese. See what happened was, you know the Huckabees? Live over on Forty-eight?”

  Dwight nodded.

  “Last summer they added on a couple of rooms so her mother could come live with them, and we got the job to wire it. Jason Wentworth was one of the roofers, and yes, he did come on to me a little, but I’d heard about his reputation and I kept it light. He knew it wasn’t going anywhere, but he still kept hanging around.”

  “And then a reel of copper wiring went missing,” Reese said.

  “We’re not saying he took it,” Annie Sue said, “but after that, we kept the truck boxes locked even though it was a pain in the neck to have to unlock them every time we needed something.”

  Dwight started to tell them how Nelson Barefoot had fired the older Wentworth boy for stealing, but at that moment the door from the garage opened and he saw the startled faces of Ruth and A.K., his brother-in-law Andrew’s kids, with their cousins Richard and Jessica, two of Seth’s. Haywood’s sons, Stevie and John, were right behind them and they, too, seemed surprised that Dwight was there.

  “We were passing by and saw the trucks,” Steve said smoothly.

  “We’re thinking about taking in a movie in Garner,” Jess said

  Dwight didn’t give their story a second thought. Dirt lanes spiderwebbed the farm and everyone used them as shortcuts. Besides, this gave him an opportunity to ask the kids still in high school about Matt Wentworth on an informal basis. Despite his Army years, he had gotten back home often enough that he had known all of these children from babyhood. The family resemblance between them—blue eyes, hair ranging from blond to light brown—was so strong that they could have been siblings as easily as cousins; and after he married their fathers’ baby sister, they had segued smoothly from calling him Mr. Dwight to saying Uncle Dwight.

  In answer to his questions, they told him that, yes, the shooting was a cause of much texting within the West Colleton student body, but none of the cousins had really known the dead boy beyond sharing one class or another with him this past fall.

  “He was actually a little older than us,” said Richard, “but he got left back in grade school and again last year.”

  “Any of y’all ever hear that he was hooked up with Mallory Johnson?”

  They hooted at the idea.

  “In the first place, Mallory didn’t hook up with anybody,” said A.K., a gangling eighteen-year-old with a perpetual appetite, as he spread a slice of bread with mayo and folded it around some lettuce leafs.

  Fourteen-year-old Richard looked up from nibbling at the shreds of ham left on the bone. “And even if she did, it wouldn’t have been a loser like Matt Wentworth. Her dad would’ve had a fit.”

  Ruth, a freshman like Richard, nodded. “Emma said Mallory told the cheerleaders that she wasn’t going to let herself get interested in anybody until she was off at Carolina where her dad wouldn’t be hovering every minute. I don’t think Mr. Johnson missed a single game that she ever cheered at.”

  “Yeah? Was he at Tuesday’s game?”

  “I guess. We didn’t go,” they told Dwight.

  “Jess and I went,” said A.K., “but I didn’t notice.”

  Jessica shook her head. “Me either.”

  “Who were his friends?” he asked.

  They shrugged and then came up with the names of a couple of kids who might have sat at the same table in the cafeteria. One of them was the name Mrs. Wentworth had mentioned, Nate Barbour. On the whole, though, they thought he was a loner, which pretty much squared with Dwight’s impression.

  “What about the alcohol that Mallory had in her system?” he asked. “What’re people saying about that?”

  More shrugs. “Nobody’s saying anything. Mallory didn’t drink and she didn’t take drugs. Not that anybody knew about anyhow. If someone slipped her something else at Kevin’s party, it was probably Vicodin. Joy said none of hers were missing from her purse, but Kevin says someone took his mom’s pills out of her medicine cabinet.”

  “Who’s Joy and why is she on Vicodin?” Dwight asked.

  “Joy Medlin. One of the cheerleaders,” said Ruth.

  “She was in that bad wreck right before Halloween,” Jessica reminded him. “The one that killed Ted Burke and Stacy Loring. And Dana Owens is still in a coma.
They say she’s been flatlined from the beginning and her dad thinks it’s time to pull the plug, but her mom’s not ready for that yet.”

  A momentary pall settled over the cousins as the lingering effects of that tragedy hit them anew.

  “And Joy Medlin’s taking Vicodin?” asked Dwight.

  Jessica nodded. “She’s had a couple of operations on her ankle, but she’s still on crutches and she’s still in pain. She says she’s going to wean herself off over the holidays even though there are times when it hurts too much.”

  “And she was at the party?”

  “All the cheerleaders were except for Emma, and even she was there for a few minutes.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that,” Dwight said with a grin for Annie Sue.

  He filled a go-cup with coffee, told the kids to be sure and put Bandit in his crate before they left, and headed back to Dobbs. He did not see the purposeful looks they shared as the door closed behind him, nor did he hear Stevie say, “We brought extra shovels. Where’re you planning to run the line?”

  As he walked down the hall to his office a half hour later, Dwight met Raeford McLamb, who had spent the morning over in Chapel Hill. “Oh, hey, boss. I was just coming to report on the Wentworth autopsies.” He held up a couple of neatly labeled plastic bags. “Thirty-twos, just like we thought. Two in the older boy, one in the younger one. No surprises except that the shooting took place earlier than we thought. A lot earlier. Richards tell you?”

  Dwight shook his head.

  “Friday morning.”

  “What?”

  “Honest to god, Major. The kid had a time-stamped receipt from a breakfast place on the edge of town. Nine forty-eight Friday morning. Blueberry pancake special with bacon and eggs. Eaten there, not take-out. The diener ran the gut and says he died about an hour later. Between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty at the very latest. Too bad he didn’t take a little longer to eat breakfast, huh?”

  “Or go to school like his stepmother thought he did,” Dwight said grimly.

  They walked on into the detective unit together, where they found Deputy Mayleen Richards working on the sheets of phone records Mallory Johnson’s service provider had sent them. McLamb had called her an hour earlier from Chapel Hill and she had immediately passed that updated information along to officers who were out questioning Jason Wentworth’s neighbors.