Rituals of the Season

by Margaret Maron

  “That’s okay.” I quickly filled the bowls and she carried them over to the table. “I think everything’s pretty much under control.”

  “That reminds me,” Dwight said, pointing to a small box on the counter. “Is that what you’ve been waiting for?”

  I examined the return address and tore it open as soon as I saw that it was from California. “Finally!”

  Inside was the cake topper I’d ordered off the Internet, and I immediately excused myself to go call Dwight’s sister-in-law and tell her to get out her brown paint.

  “Oh, good,” Kate said. “Bring it with you tomorrow night.”

  She must have heard my mental wheels spinning. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

  “Of course not,” I lied, belatedly remembering that she and Dwight’s two sisters were throwing a shower for me tomorrow night. “I was trying to think if I gave you a snippet of my dress so you could match the color.”

  “You did. And don’t worry. I won’t let anyone else see it.”

  When I returned to the dining area, the others were already transferring slices of pizza to their plates and I joined in after opening the tin of anchovies Dwight had picked up at the grocery for me. To his chagrin, both of the budding attorneys accepted my offer to share.

  Conversation was general at first—schools, mutual acquaintances—but it soon got down to specifics about Martha Hurst. Nolan told Dwight about his mother’s connection to the condemned woman and how he’d wheedled a promise out of Tracy to look up the case.

  “She took you seriously enough to speak to an SBI agent,” I said, and told them what Terry Wilson had told me last night about the phone call he’d gotten from her. “But he didn’t really work the case except for interviewing a couple of the witnesses for the prosecution. Agent Scott Underhill was their lead investigator in conjunction with Sheriff Poole’s department.”

  I had met Underhill four years ago when my nephew Stevie’s girlfriend asked me to look into the unsolved murder of her mother. He seemed like a nice man, ethical and honest. “I don’t know that he’s necessarily the most effective investigator in the Bureau, though.”

  Dwight frowned. It’s not that he’s naive about the possibility of sloppy or unethical officers, but he thinks the public’s too eager to blame the law whenever something goes wrong.

  Kayra delicately lifted an anchovy filet from the flat tin and laid it across her slice of pizza. “You think he might have overlooked something?”

  “Something that would prove who really did kill Roy Hurst and the killer shot Ms. Johnson to keep her from telling?” Nolan asked.

  “Whoa, now,” said Dwight. “That’s a real stretch from your mama thinking Martha Hurst is innocent to Tracy Johnson fitting somebody else in the picture after all this time.”

  Kayra bit into the pointed end of her pizza slice and sighed. “I just wish we had more than your mother’s intuition.”

  “It is more than intuition,” Nolan protested. “He was killed with her good bat.”

  A collective “Huh?” went up from the other three of us.

  “Maybe it’s in the files Mr. Stephenson said we could look at.”

  Dwight looked at me. “Deb’rah?”

  I licked tomato sauce from my fingers. “There was a list of items removed from the trailer in Brix Junior’s discovery,” I said, and went to see if I could find the file I remembered.

  I had to rummage through two boxes before I found the right one. “Here it is.” I ran my finger down the list. “A DeMarini aluminum softball bat.”

  Another item further down caught my eye—an Easton softball bat.

  “Easton,” I told Dwight. “Isn’t that the brand your softball team uses?”

  He nodded. “DeMarinis are way too expensive for us.”

  “That’s what I mean.” Nolan’s dark face was eager and expressive and he gestured so forcibly with his slice of pizza that a mushroom went flying across the table. “If Martha Hurst was like Mom, she had at least two or three bats, but the others would only be practice bats. The DeMarini would be her game bat. Mom said that Martha’s had a monster sweet spot—it was the perfect length, the perfect weight, and had a sweet spot to die for. Everybody was jealous of it. I don’t know what fastpitch DeMarinis cost back then—the company hadn’t been in business very long—but two years ago I went in with my brother and sister to buy Mom a slowpitch DeMarini for Christmas and it was over two hundred dollars.”

  “Two hundred dollars!” I was incredulous. I hadn’t bought a bat since Stevie was in Little League, but it never occurred to me that a bat of any description could cost more than forty or fifty.

  “And you better believe that Mom would use a fence post before she’d take batting practice with that good bat and risk a dent.”

  Didn’t seem like much of an argument to me, and Dwight was looking as skeptical as I felt. “Maybe not if she was thinking clearly,” I said, “but Martha Hurst had a history of impulsive violence and I seriously doubt that she would’ve stopped to think about which bat she was going to smash somebody with. She would’ve just grabbed up the first one that came to hand.”

  “Mom wouldn’t,” Nolan said stubbornly. “She absolutely would not and she says Ms. Hurst wouldn’t either.”

  He argued that this was proof enough for him, but finally had to admit that the choice of bats was a slender thread from which to try to weave a lifeline. While Dwight and I changed into old work clothes, he and Kayra cleared the table, stacked the dishwasher, and then spread Brix Junior’s files on the table to read through everything themselves.

  I brushed my teeth and rinsed away all traces of anchovies before joining Dwight in our new bedroom. April and the others had really knocked themselves out today. The bathroom was technically finished, although one of them had left a note warning us not to use the shower for two more days. In fact, all the construction work was finished. They had painted the walls a deep forest green like my old bedroom and the trim already had one coat of white enamel. The only thing lacking was the second coat, which Dwight and I eventually got around to. Being latex, the enamel dried so quickly that we got Nolan and Kayra to help us move in the bed and dresser so that we could begin refurbishing my old room for Cal.

  I remade the bed while they brought in lamps and a blanket chest that doubled as a bench under the window. “What about her husband?” I asked.

  “Gene Hurst? He had a stroke last year,” said Nolan.

  Kayra nodded. “Now he’s in a nursing home over in Angier. We went to see him yesterday, but it was a waste of time. His mind’s totally gone.”

  “But Mom says he stuck by Martha all through the trial. Never believed she did it.”

  “We’re going to canvass the trailer park tomorrow,” said Kayra. “See if anybody remembers the murder. In our law clinic, we learned that sometimes people will talk more freely after a few years have passed. They’ll give up details and facts they wouldn’t tell investigators the first time around.”

  The printer for my laptop doubles as a copier and they made copies of the witness lists and of the items removed from the Hurst trailer. I repeated my observation that none of the items seemed to include bloodstained clothing or footwear and they immediately made the obvious speculations I had made to Dwight earlier. No bloody clothes was a talking point and their optimism wasn’t dimmed by Dwight’s suggestion that she could have stepped out of the shower and then went ballistic when she found her stepson/former lover there again after she’d already thrown him out.

  I made a pot of coffee and we kicked it around another half-hour till Dwight muffled a yawn and Kayra announced that it was time for them to leave.

  “But could you let us look through any of the records in your office?” she asked him as they zipped up their jackets and pulled on gloves.

  “Sure, although everything that was presented at the trial will be in the clerk of court’s office,” he replied.

  “But wouldn’t you have stuff that was
n’t used at the trial? Like a statement about her bats?” asked Nolan, clinging to his theory.

  “Not that I know of, but I’ll take a look for you.”

  We walked out on the porch with them. A frigid wind bit at our unprotected faces. The rain had stopped and there were even a few stars peeking through the broken clouds, but the steps were so icy that Nolan’s feet went out from under him and he would have fallen if Dwight hadn’t grabbed him.

  “You’re not going to try to drive back to Widdington tonight, are you?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry,” said Kayra. “Grandma’s expecting us to spend the night with them.”

  We gave them directions for driving across the farm by back lanes and then on dirt roads so as to avoid most of the dangerously slick paved roads that lay between our farm and the Bryant farm.

  Dwight made sure that they had our phone number in case they slid into a ditch along the way, but Nolan assured me they’d be fine. “I’ve got four-wheel drive on my Jeep.”

  “Four-wheel drive doesn’t do a thing if all four wheels are on ice,” I told him.

  Kayra laughed and gave Dwight a good-bye hug. I got one, too.

  “Nice kids,” I said, leaning into Dwight’s bulk for a windbreak as we watched the taillights from both cars disappear down the lane.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Too bad they’re wasting their Christmas holidays on a wild-goose chase.”

  While he went to take a hot shower in the old bathroom, I gathered up spoons and coffee mugs and started the dishwasher. When I put Brix Junior’s files back in the boxes, I noticed a scrap of paper on the floor under the table where it had fallen out of one of the folders. It was a short list of case law citations that Brix Junior probably intended to read up on. In the margin, he had scribbled a name followed by three question marks: “Deenie Gates???”

  Deenie Gates.

  Now why did that name sound familiar? It might have been a name out of the case law citings, but somehow I doubted it.

  Then Dwight called to me from the bedroom. I slid the paper into the end folder and never gave it another thought that night.

  CHAPTER 15

  Never question the veracity of any statement made in general conversation.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14

  When Mayleen Richards walked into the DA’s suite of offices that morning, she learned that an SBI agent had been there the afternoon before and that Tracy Johnson’s CPU tower was now at their Garner facility, undergoing a full lobotomy. Officially, the two agencies were cooperating fully, but Richards was competitive enough to want the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department to get credit for bringing the killer to justice. And if she could be the one to actually crack the case, all the better. It would prove to Major Bryant that he’d been right in keeping her on the job.

  “Not to worry,” said Julie Walsh, who had blown in right behind her with an ornate Christmas wreath on her arm. Pink-cheeked from the icy December wind that whipped through the open parking lot on the north side of the courthouse, the young ADA hung her red wool coat and plaid scarf on the office coatrack and gave the detective a reassuring smile as she positioned the wreath on the wall above her desk, where its silver tinsel glittered with every stray current of air from the heating vents below. “Tracy was a suspenders-and-belt person. She backed up everything.”

  “Yeah, I noticed her box of floppies,” Richards said glumly, looking at a now empty space on the desk, “but they must have taken those, too.”

  “I’m not talking about computer backups.” Walsh opened the bottom two drawers of a four-drawer gray metal file cabinet that separated her desk from her murdered colleague’s. “These were Tracy’s. She preferred paper to a screen whenever she worked on something complicated.”

  “You show these to the state agents?”

  “I wasn’t here and I don’t think they asked any of the others.”

  Richards quickly scanned the tabs on the manila folders tucked neatly into hanging files and pulled out random sheets. They seemed to be the personal notes and worksheets from past cases that Tracy Johnson had prosecuted during her time with Doug Woodall. The clerk of court’s office said that Johnson had borrowed the trial documents on Martha Hurst, but she did not appear to have filed any notes on it here.

  “What about her current cases?”

  “Mr. Woodall’s spreading them around to the rest of us till he can hire a replacement for her. Brandon Frazier and I are trying to reconstruct the game plan for a drug case coming up on Thursday, but if y’all can’t find Don Whitley . . .”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Richards.

  “Where you reckon he’s gone?”

  “Dammit all, Sheriff,” said Doug Woodall.

  The DA had found Dwight Bryant and Bowman Poole conferring in Poole’s office and he was out for blood, waving aside their genial invitation to pull up a chair and how about a cup of coffee?

  “We’re pushing the limit now on the rules about speedy trials. Tracy already got three continuances and Judge O’Donnell says he won’t grant another. We don’t take this Ruiz to trial day after tomorrow, we’re going to have to cut him loose. Let him walk. It’s bad enough we have to proceed without her, but there’s no point even starting without that deputy. We don’t have him, we don’t have linkage. So where the hell is he?”

  Sheriff Poole paused on his way to refill his mug from the carafe atop a corner bookcase and drew himself up to his full five foot seven. Despite their difference in height, he somehow managed to make the taller man feel two inches shorter.

  “You think we’re waiting for him to phone in, Mr. Woodall? We put out an APB on him yesterday. We talked to his mama over in Widdington. We’ve got somebody watching his place here in Dobbs and we’ve just sent someone over there to search it. You got a suggestion what else we need to be doing, let’s hear it.”

  “Now, Bo, don’t get your back up,” the DA said placatingly. Bo Poole’s power base in the county was even stronger than his. Only a fool would alienate someone who could make the party give more than lip service when he ran for governor, and Doug Woodall was no fool. “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but it’s sure playing hell with mine.”

  “What about it, Dwight?” asked the sheriff. “What do the troopers say?”

  “Wherever he is, he’s not driving one of our units,” said Dwight Bryant. “Ours are all accounted for. Nobody’s seen him since he drove off alone from Jerry’s night before last.”

  He raised a nearly imperceptible eyebrow to Bo Poole, who nodded and fixed their visitor with a stern look. “Dwight’ll tell you what we’ve got, but it stays in this office for now,” he warned as he stirred sugar into his mug and returned to the swivel chair behind the wide desk. “Agreed?”

  “Your call,” said Doug Woodall and leaned back against the doorjamb.

  “Tracy Johnson was about six weeks pregnant,” Dwight said tersely. “We’re waiting on a DNA sample to see if Whitley’s the father.”

  Woodall jerked upright. “The hell you say!”

  “He was sucking down the beer at Jerry’s pretty heavy, and when Deb’rah heard he’d gone missing, she remembered he seemed pretty cut up about Tracy. She thinks it’s because they worked together on some recent cases and because Tracy had encouraged him to go for his associate degree.”

  “She know Whitley was balling her?”

  “Not from me, she doesn’t.”

  Bo Poole grinned and Woodall said, “Oh yeah, right. She told me about y’all’s separation of powers.”

  “Anyhow, we don’t know for a fact that he was. All we have are Tracy’s cell phone records that show they talked to each other at least once a day and sometimes more. Best we can tell, the personal calls started last spring. End of May. That’s when they spent a lot of time working together.”

  “End of May?” Woodall frowned and they could almost see the calendar pages turning in his head. “O
h yeah, that’s when we went to trial on the Carson hit-and-run, right?”

  “Right,” said Dwight. “Whitley’s testimony was key on that one, too. He was the arresting officer, the one who spotted the broken headlight before Carson could get off the interstate. When we first heard about Tracy Friday night, I did ask Deb’rah who she was with these days.”

  “I thought you said she doesn’t know about Whitley.”

  “She doesn’t. But Tracy dropped a hint that she was seeing somebody. Somebody she’d found—and I quote—right under her nose.”

  Woodall walked over to the coffee urn. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that coffee now.”

  He inspected the inside of the extra mug on the bookcase, blew a speck of dust out of it and filled it with steaming hot coffee, then set it on the front corner of Bo’s desk as he took one of the empty chairs.

  “So you’re thinking Whitley shot her Friday night?”

  “Not necessarily. He was on duty then, though,” Dwight said. “Supposedly working the south side of Makely, but there’s nothing to show where he actually was.”

  “And his motive would be what? The baby?”

  Dwight gave a palms-up gesture. “We’re not that far along.”

  “What do the state guys say?”

  “Well, now, Doug,” said Bo, “we haven’t exactly talked to them about this yet. Whitley’s one of mine and I’m not gonna jump to any conclusions till I hear what he has to say.”

  Dwight nodded in agreement. “No point limiting the investigation at this point. They’ve got better resources. Might as well see what they can turn up.”

  They discussed it a few minutes more, then Woodall sighed, drained his mug, and stood to go. “I just hope to hell Whitley turns up before Thursday.”

  As the door closed behind the DA, Dwight looked at his boss. “You didn’t tell him about Whitley’s e-mail.”

  “Did I tell him I might have a deputy who’s gone somewhere to maybe kill himself? No.” He set his mug on the shelf behind his desk. “Which is it, Dwight? A love affair gone sour or something to do with the job?”