Rituals of the Season

by Margaret Maron

  Pointing to faint shadows that may or may not have been earlier fractures and speaking in layman’s terms, he said, “Children of this age heal so quickly that it’s impossible to say for sure that some of these were indeed fractures, but here, here, and here, there can be no question that the bones were cracked. Fortunately, none of the boy’s growth plates have yet been damaged, but should that occur, the bone might well stop growing so that the arm or leg would be shorter or would grow crookedly.”

  The X-rays of each undeniable fracture had been taken at the time the child suffered the “accidents,” and those accidents corresponded to dates he had been in the custody of the sulky-looking woman who now sat beside John Claude at the defendant’s table.

  Despite my ties to John Claude, it was a no-brainer. The mother gave a “whatever” shrug when I ruled to terminate her visitation rights, but her parents, seated behind her, looked devastated.

  I told the plaintiff, “I cannot order you to let your son’s grandparents maintain contact with him, but I would strongly urge you to be compassionate to them. No child can have too many people loving him.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” said John Claude, and I thought I heard a faint trace of genuine appreciation in his pro forma words. Not that he hadn’t argued eloquently and diligently for his client. All the same, a little boy’s well-being had been up for grabs here and John Claude Lee was a grandfather, too.

  The rest of the afternoon session was filled by another truancy, a child who had taken his father’s handgun to threaten another child who was bullying him, and a fourteen-year-old girl who wanted to go live with her father now that her mother had remarried.

  Blessedly, I had no personal connection to a single one of the combatants.

  CHAPTER 17

  There is much that is exhilarating in the atmosphere of a ball room. The light, the music, and the company are all conducive to high spirits; be careful that this flow of spirits does not lead you into hoydenism.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  On the way downstairs to meet Dwight shortly before five, I passed through the clerk of court’s office to drop off some papers and found Kayra Stewart and Nolan Capps trying to persuade our clerk of court to let them borrow the file on Martha Hurst’s trial.

  Ellis Glover is tall and thin and completely bald except for a tonsure of straight white hair that circles a dome as shiny as any ivory billiard ball. Give him a monk’s robe and he’d even look like one with his hooded eyes and ascetic straight lips. A kindly monk, but an implacable one who was unmoved by arguments to remove documents from his safekeeping.

  “They’re public records,” Kayra said. “We have a right to see them.”

  “A right to see them,” Ellis agreed. “Not a right to take them home with you.”

  “But you’re getting ready to close.”

  “You can come back tomorrow,” he told them firmly, reaching for the thick files they carried. “We open at eight o’clock.”

  As soon as they saw me, Nolan Capps put on that lost-puppy look he’d suckered me with last night. “Please, Judge Knott, couldn’t you sign these files out?”

  I shook my head. “No way do I want to be responsible for that much paper.”

  “Triage, then,” said Kayra briskly. She shuffled through the folders as if picking out the kings and aces from a deck of playing cards. “We’ll leave the trial transcript, the medical reports . . . take her deposition . . . take the witness statements . . . don’t need the search warrants . . . initial statements of responding officers . . .”

  Over Ellis’s objections, she quickly winnowed the files down to a fraction of what they’d started with.

  Ellis peered at me over his Ben Franklin half-glasses and his bald head gleamed in the ceiling lights. “Are you willing to be responsible for these?”

  “It would appear so,” I said and signed on his dotted line. “But they come home with me. And this time, you two can buy the pizza.”

  “Grandma and Miss Emily are making heavy hors d’oeuvres for tonight,” Kayra said guilelessly.

  “That’ll take care of me, but what about you two and Dwight?”

  “They told Nolan and me we could fix us a plate. We’ll fix him one, too. Unless you think he’d rather have pizza than Grandma’s sausage-and-rice balls or Miss Emily’s angel salad?”

  “Nobody likes a smartass,” I told her. “See you out at my place.”

  Dwight was waiting for me down in his office since I’d driven in with him that morning. His shift was technically over at four and my workday didn’t begin till nine, so each of us was inconvenienced by an hour, but somehow neither of us seemed to care.

  “I forget,” he said as we walked out to his truck. “Your place or mine?”

  “Mine,” I answered.

  The late afternoon air was milder than it’d been this morning, and predictions were that the warming trend would continue for the next few days. Jacket weather instead of heavy parkas and thick woolen scarves. As we circled the courthouse, the streetlights came on, along with the Christmas lights festooned down the length of Main Street’s business district.

  Dwight wasn’t thrilled when I told him he was in for another session with Nolan and Kayra, but the promise of Bessie’s sausage-and-rice balls mollified him a little. Even though he denigrates his mother’s party salad as girly froufrou, I notice he always takes a second helping. We swung past his apartment so he could pick up fresh clothes, and I helped carry some more cartons down to the truck. We were hoping to repaint my old bedroom by the weekend, then move Dwight’s bed in for Cal. When consulted the last time he was down, Cal had asked for “midnight blue,” which was, according to him, a cool color.

  On the drive out to the farm, I described my lunch with Portland and how the baby was a little girl who was going to carry my name.

  “What about Tracy’s baby?” I asked. “Was it Don Whitley’s?”

  “We still don’t know. We sent his toothbrush and razor to the ME, but we don’t have an answer yet.” He glanced over at me. “Did you tell Portland Tracy was pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “No?” I couldn’t fault him for being skeptical. He knows how we confide in each other and he still turns slightly red every time he realizes she’s heard how good he is in bed. “You tell her everything.”

  “Not when you specifically ask me not to. Besides, you threatened to put me on report.”

  He smiled and said, “So how come you’re sitting way over there?”

  I immediately slid over to his side of the truck and tucked myself under his arm.

  “You really didn’t tell her?”

  “I really didn’t. I wanted to, but didn’t.”

  He slid his hand inside my sweater and I laid my head on his shoulder.

  “Did Whitley shoot her, Dwight? Because of the baby?”

  “I don’t know, shug. We don’t even know he’s the father. Or that he and Tracy were hooked up.”

  “Portland doesn’t think they were. She thinks Tracy was too much of a snob to go out with a sheriff’s deputy.”

  The instant I said it, I wished I could take it back. Dwight and I had never discussed this aspect of our relationship.

  “Officers don’t fraternize with enlisted?”

  “I guess.”

  “She think you were slumming?”

  I pulled back indignantly, but his arm still curved around me.

  “Oh, c’mon, Deb’rah. You know it’s crossed a lot of minds. A college-educated judge marrying a dumb ex-Army cop?”

  I heard the confident chuckle in his voice and relaxed against him again. “So you finally admit that I’m smarter than you?” I teased.

  “Nope, just got more book learning. Take Andrew and April. She’s a teacher, he dropped out of high school at sixteen, and look how good their marriage is. Look at my dad and mom. Hell, your own dad and mom.”

  “Mother didn’t go to college.”

  “No
, but she came from a solid middle-class family full of relatives who did, yet turned around and married a man who quit school in the sixth grade. If our mothers had been hung up on college degrees, you and I wouldn’t be here.”

  Straight ahead of us, through the windshield, the new moon gleamed in the western sky like a shallow silver bowl. Dwight and I would be married before the bowl was full again.

  The Christmas moon.

  A honey-sweet moon, even if we weren’t taking a proper wedding trip.

  “Poor Tracy,” I said. “And poor Don Whitley, too, if he loved her.”

  “If,” Dwight said.

  He and Portland could have their doubts. I kept remembering Sunday night and Whitley’s sad eyes.

  “I know you always say he’s a good officer—all the arrests he’s made, all the drug money he’s confiscated—but he really doesn’t seem like a cold-blooded killer.”

  “Not every killer’s cold-blooded,” he reminded me. “He may not look the type, but he sure was out working alone Friday night. No alibi. And taking off like this doesn’t look good. We’ve searched his trailer. Doesn’t look like he packed a bag or anything. Plus he hasn’t used a credit card since Sunday morning. We’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “You think he’s gone somewhere to kill himself?”

  Dwight took a long deep breath. “He wouldn’t be the first lawman to shoot his woman and then turn the gun on himself.”

  I put my hand on his leg and patted it consolingly. “If he killed Tracy and Mei, then maybe that’s the best way out of this mess. Save the state a trial.”

  Kayra Stewart and Nolan Capps arrived as I finished freshening up for the shower. They were immediately followed by Dwight’s younger brother, Rob.

  Even looking closely, it would be hard for a stranger to tell that Rob and Dwight were related. He’s a couple of inches shorter, thin and wiry, with their mother’s bright red hair, grass green eyes, and pointed, almost foxlike features, while Dwight has their father’s solid muscular build, thick brown hair, open face, and brown eyes.

  Rob set a shopping bag filled with Tupperware boxes on the table. “Kate and Mother kicked me out, but Kayra and I managed to snitch this much food on our way out the back door.”

  “He lies,” said Kayra. “Grandma and Miss Emily fixed this for us.”

  Dwight grinned. “All lawyers are liars, honey. Look at his nose. Yours’ll start growing, too, the minute you pass the bar exam.”

  “We thought he could help us go through the files,” said Nolan.

  “I tried to tell them I know damn all about criminal law,” Rob said. His was a wills and trusts practice in Raleigh’s Cameron Village. “I haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom in four or five years.”

  As they peeled off their jackets and sweaters, Kayra and Nolan reported on their day’s activities and what they’d learned from a former neighbor of Martha Hurst’s, a Mrs. Apple.

  “You remember that anonymous phone call?”

  “What about it?” asked Dwight.

  “It came from her friend who lived next door. She noticed the guy’s car parked behind the trailer after Martha left for the beach, but hot as it was, the air-conditioning stayed off and he wasn’t in and out like usual.”

  Rob was barely listening. He lifted the lid on one of the plastic boxes and with his fingers fished out one of Bessie’s famous sausage-and-rice balls. Dwight and Nolan were right behind him, ready to follow his lead.

  “Could y’all please wait for plates and forks?” asked Kayra, who had known Dwight and Rob for most of her young life. She rolled her eyes at me. “Men! Where are your plates?”

  I pointed to the cupboard behind her.

  “Omigod!” she said when she opened the doors and saw my mother’s collection of Royal Doulton in all its service-for-twenty glory, from serving bowls and meat platters down to the bread-and-butter plates and nineteen delicate cups hanging from their little individual hooks. “Don’t you have any everyday china? Or even paper plates?”

  “Sorry.”

  Dwight paused with a pecan puff in his hand. “Want to let’s bring my kitchen stuff over tomorrow?”

  “Fine,” I said. “There’re still empty shelves in the kitchen.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention last night.” Kayra turned a saucer in her slender brown hands and read the maker’s marks. “Is this what we ate pizza off of?”

  I nodded.

  “And you let us put these in your dishwasher?” She was clearly horrified.

  “That’s what a dishwasher’s for.”

  “But they’re Royal Doulton.”

  “They’re dishes.” I pulled four plates from the shelves and handed them to her. “Dishes are meant to be used.”

  “But what if we break them?”

  I laughed. “You sound like one of my sisters-in-law. My mother used this for every holiday in a household filled with roughneck boys and the only time anything got broke was when a preacher’s wife knocked over a teacup. If it’ll make you feel better, I do have regular mugs and glasses in that cupboard by the sink. Feel free to smash as many as you like.”

  I tucked the boxed cake topper in the shopping bag Rob had dropped on a chair and left them dividing the party food Bessie and Miss Emily had probably spent the day preparing.

  Rob’s wife, Kate, was a freelance fabric designer, who had inherited the old Honeycutt farm from her first husband. Although a New Yorker by birth, she had chosen to have Jake’s posthumous baby here and then to stay on in the country to raise him. The Internet made it easy for her to work out of the farm’s original packhouse, which she had remodeled for a studio. After she and Rob fell in love and married, they restored the old farmhouse far beyond its original state of utilitarian comfort. In addition to Jake’s uncle, they had also taken in Mary Pat Carmichael, a young cousin of Kate’s, who has grown into a protective older sister for little Jake Junior.

  The Honeycutt farmhouse is only a few hundred feet down the road from the Bryant farm and actually touches at one corner, so I didn’t have far to drive. When I got there, the circular drive in front of the house was lined with cars and trucks, but they had left me a space right in front of the door. The evening was now so mild that some of the guests lingered on the porch to greet one another before going inside.

  Dwight’s sisters stood in the doorway to welcome us and they made a big fuss over me as I came up the steps. Except for similar family mannerisms, Beth and Nancy Faye look no more alike than Dwight and Rob.

  Beth took my shopping bag and promised to see that Kate got it. Then I was swept up into hugs by half a dozen of my female relatives who pulled me inside with boisterous cries of “She’s here!”

  The house could have served as an illustration of Christmas Past. Jugs of red-berried holly and nandina filled empty corners, while thick ropes of pine and cedar twined up the stair rails and filled the rooms with a woodsy aroma. Candlelight gleamed off the polished wood of antique tables and chests, and fires blazed in the hearths of the twin front parlors. A huge tree brushed the ceiling in one parlor and was decorated in dozens of old-fashioned glass ornaments and red velvet bows.

  In the other parlor, some of my teenage nieces and a couple of my sisters-in-law had brought their instruments and were playing Christmas carols. As soon as Herman and Nadine’s daughter Annie Sue spotted me, she snapped her fingers and they immediately swung into a chorus of “Here Comes the Bride.”

  Amid laughter and teasing, I was passed from hand to hand. Several of my in-state sisters-in-law and aunts were there, along with their daughters. Beth and Nancy Faye had teenage daughters, too. Aunt Zell had driven over from Dobbs with Nadine and Annie Sue, and Will’s wife, Amy. Counting Miss Emily and Bessie, there were over thirty women flowing through the rooms. Someone handed me a cup of cherry-flavored punch laced with vodka.

  And then another.

  Just as I was beginning to feel like a cork bobbing on the water at the end of a fishing line, Miss Emily and a
heavily pregnant Kate led me to a couch seat near the Christmas tree. Paper and pencils were distributed for shower games that got funnier (and raunchier) with each cup of punch.

  Eventually, it was time to open the many gifts. Minnie sat beside me with a legal pad to record who gave what—everything from one of Aunt Sister’s patchwork quilts to everyday china for twelve from Kate, Miss Emily, Beth, and Nancy Faye.

  Before refreshments were served, Kate called across the room, “Okay, Minnie. Tell us what Deborah’s going to say to Dwight on their wedding night.”

  Minnie looked down at her legal pad and began to read off some of the remarks I’d made while opening the presents—“Look how big!” “Feel how soft!”—and so on amid raucous laughter.

  Still joking, we moved into the dining room to fill our plates and refill our cups. Talk became more general as the party wound down. My nieces packed up the gifts and carried them out to April’s car. She and Ruth had offered to drop them off on their way home through the back lanes.

  Kate went up to make sure Jake and Mary Pat were properly tucked in, and when Bessie and Miss Emily declared themselves ready for bed, too, I thanked them again for their part in the party.

  “Well, now, I thank you for helping Kayra and her young man,” said Bessie. “I know you don’t really have time, but they sure do appreciate it.”

  “What are you helping them with?” Amy asked idly when I sat back down to wait for Kate to return.

  “They’ve got their own private Actual Innocence project going,” I explained. “They’re trying to get a stay of execution for a woman who’s due to die next month. Martha Hurst.”

  “Martha Hurst? Oh my Lord! I’d almost forgotten about her. Poor Martha.”

  I was surprised. “You know her?”

  “She was an aide at the hospital when she killed that guy.”

  Amy has spent her whole working life in the hospital’s human resources department. I should have remembered.

  “What was she like?”