Rituals of the Season

by Margaret Maron

  I was profoundly surprised. I had evidently given Deenie Gates my standard battered-woman talk, but for once it hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. I barely remembered her, yet she remembered me and what I’d said to her.

  “Ms. Gates—”

  “No, call me Deenie. It’s okay.”

  “Deenie, then. You know that Mrs. Knott in human resources is my sister-in-law, right?”

  “She is? No, ma’am, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, she is. And she tells me you’re one of her best workers.”

  “I am,” she said, pride in her voice. “You could eat off’n my floors.”

  “She also told me that Martha Hurst was once a good friend to you back before she went to prison.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes met mine with less frequency.

  “She’s going to die for something she didn’t do, Deenie, unless you speak up to help her.”

  Silence. Her shoulders hunched in on themselves more than ever.

  “I know she didn’t kill Roy, Deenie, and you do, too.”

  “You do?” Her head was down but she didn’t sound belligerent, only curious.

  “I do. But I can’t prove it. You can, though, can’t you? Roy was your boyfriend. You were seeing him. You saw him after that Sunday, didn’t you?”

  “No, ma’am!” Her head came up and her eyes met mine. “No, ma’am, I didn’t. Honest.”

  “But you know who did, don’t you?”

  Her head went down again.

  I waited quietly and she shifted uneasily in her chair.

  At last she said, “I’m not saying I know anything about how Roy got hisself killed, but if I did know, I’d get in trouble, wouldn’t I? ’Cause I didn’t tell before? Maybe go to jail myself?”

  “For telling the truth and saving Martha’s life? Oh, no, Deenie. Nothing like that would happen. Not if you didn’t have anything to do with Roy’s death. Did you?”

  She shook her head vigorously and her hair swung back and forth like a curtain in front of her lowered face.

  Again I waited quietly until she couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

  “You gotta promise he won’t hurt me.”

  “He who, Deenie?”

  “I don’t know why he had to go and get so mad about it. I was growed. I was sixteen. Already working here. Mom won’t but fourteen when I was born. He ain’t my real daddy anyhow.”

  “Who?” I asked again.

  “Pa. He’s the one killed Roy ’cause Roy got me pregnant and won’t going to marry me like he promised. He come home that night with blood all over his shirt. On the front of his pants. On his shoes. He throwed the shirt away and made Mom wash his pants. She liked to never got all the blood out of ’em. He said I’d brought shame on him and Mom, and after they went to bed, I sneaked out and got the shirt out of the garbage bag. I thought I was going to keep the baby and I thought that would be all he’d ever have of his daddy. His daddy’s blood. But then later, everybody said so much, and with Martha and all? So I got the doctor to take it.”

  “What night did this happen, Deenie?”

  “It was a Monday. Pa’d worked late and was coming home and he seen Roy’s car and followed him out to Martha’s trailer. I think he just walked in behind him, grabbed up one of Martha’s bats, and never even gave him a chance to talk. He said he smashed his privates to mashed potatoes so he couldn’t never do to another girl what he done to me. And he said he’d do the same to Mom and me if we told anybody. Well, Mom’s dead now and he’s took up with another woman and I ain’t seen him in I reckon two years. Good riddance, I say.”

  Even after all her emotional outpouring, it still took me several minutes to convince Deenie to come with me to the sheriff’s department. “No charges will be filed against you,” I said. “You’ll even be a hero for getting Martha out of prison.”

  A split second after she agreed, Dwight called.

  “You ready to go home?”

  “I’m at the hospital,” I told him.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody’s hurt, but see if you can find Kayra and Nolan and tell them to meet us in your office. His mother was right. Martha Hurst didn’t kill her stepson.”

  “I can’t go now,” said Deenie when I ended the call. “My shift’s not over.”

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Knott will make it right with your supervisor.”

  “Well, let me go get my coat and pocketbook out of my locker.”

  We went out into the hallway and I told her I’d meet her in the front lobby as soon as I found Amy and the children.

  As we parted at the elevator, she hesitated. “Should I bring the shirt?”

  “Shirt?”

  “Pa’s shirt with the blood. Should I bring it?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You still have it after all these years?”

  She shrugged her rounded shoulders. “I couldn’t leave it at home. Mom would’ve found it. So I brought it here and stuck it up on the top shelf in my locker and then I didn’t know what else to do with it, so I just left it there. Should I bring it?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed!” I said.

  CHAPTER 26

  I know not a more cruel situation than that when the heart is bestowed on one whom the judgment could not approve. I would impress on every young lady how much she may prove the best guardian of her own happiness.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  Things got a little hectic after that.

  Dwight met us at the courthouse door and sent the children home to his mother in a prowl car. Kayra and Nolan pulled up as they were getting into it and Mary Pat immediately clamored to stay. Kayra had often babysat Kate’s two, and they looked upon her as just another kid. If she could stay, why couldn’t they?

  “Get in the car,” Dwight said mildly.

  Mary Pat’s bottom lip was out, but she followed the boys into the backseat and even helped Jake with his seat-belt buckle.

  Dwight leaned in at the open window. “This is Deputy Maynes. If you’re good, when you get outside of town, he’ll put on his blue lights and siren for you.”

  As we walked down to Dwight’s office, he hit the high spots of his last three hours for me. I was stunned to hear that it was actually Mike Castleman who had killed Tracy and Mei and then staged a phony suicide for Don Whitley.

  He didn’t give me time to dwell on it, though, because Bo Poole and Doug Woodall were waiting for Deenie Gates’s show-and-tell.

  That her stepfather’s bloody shirt had been in her locker all these years astounded everyone, but, as Percy Denning later said, what better place to store it? “And thank God she put it in a paper bag rather than plastic. It got enough air to dry out instead of rotting or molding.”

  The summer shirt was one issued by a local bakery to their deliverymen. It was a light gray cotton blend, and although at first it simply looked like a gory mess, Denning read it like a child’s primer and pointed out the sequence of details: “See this spurt of blood? That happened with the first blow to the head. This area here is splashback from when he was pounding the victim on the floor. Here’s where he wiped off his hands and here’s where he pulled out his shirttail and wiped down the bat.”

  He folded it up lovingly. “It’s a petri dish of DNA. There’ll probably be hairs, and look at those beautiful sweat stains under the arms. If the guy’s a secreter, we’ll have him nailed six ways to Sunday.”

  Doug Woodall wasn’t looking at all happy. He had prosecuted Martha Hurst originally and he was already thinking of how this was going to impact on his race for governor. A human witness could be mistaken or lying. A bloody shirt was irrefutable.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Maybe this is how it went down and maybe it isn’t, but how did the ME miss the time of death by two whole days?”

  “I think I can answer that,” I said. “You still have Brix Junior’s files here, Dwight?”

  He did and I pulled out the packe
t of photos taken in the trailer that Friday morning all those years ago. “Just this past week, I knew I wasn’t going to be out at the farm for a few days, so I turned down the thermostat when I left to save energy, and the place was chilly when I got back.” I turned to our two law students. “Kayra, you said the former neighbor told you and Nolan that one of the reasons they snooped around Martha Hurst’s trailer after they realized Roy’s car had been parked there for several days was because the air-conditioning unit wasn’t running even though the windows were closed and it was very hot that week.”

  “Hey, that’s right!” said Nolan. “I bet Martha turned it off when she left for the beach.”

  “But look at this picture,” I told them. It was as I’d remembered even though the significance hadn’t registered on me at the time. The picture was a close-up of a bloody dent in the wall. It was also a close-up of the light switch and the thermostat. “See? The lever’s been pushed down to its coldest setting.”

  Percy Denning immediately caught the implications. “The blowflies would have started laying eggs on the body almost immediately,” he said. “If the trailer was warm—and without air-conditioning, those things heat up quick in the summer—you’d start seeing successive larval stages pretty quick.”

  “But if the trailer then became cold?” Doug asked.

  “If the ME was given the colder temperature as what the body had experienced since death, it would make it appear as if the maggots had begun growing sooner in order for that many stages to have developed, so that would push back the supposed time of death.”

  Bo gave a long-suffering sigh of exasperation. “We didn’t have a crime scene van back then. Silas Lee Jones was the lead detective on this case. He’d have been one of the first ones out there, right behind the responding officers. And Silas Lee has never liked summer heat and humidity.”

  “Shit!” said Doug.

  To do Doug credit, he had learned from the mistakes of other DAs around the state. He did not stonewall, he did not try to cover it up. Once the DNA tests came back proving exactly what Percy Denning had postulated, Deenie Gates’s stepfather was arrested and Doug petitioned the governor for a stay of Martha Hurst’s execution and either an unconditional pardon or a new trial. He took full responsibility for the flawed evidence that had convicted her, although he took it in such a way that voters could assume that he was being noble and that his zeal for capital punishment had nothing to do with it. He even gave generous credit to Kayra and Nolan for their “selfless dedication to truth, thus proving yet again that there is no need to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina because the system does work.”

  With an ADA, her child, and one of his own deputies murdered by another deputy, Bo Poole had a harder row to hoe, but he’s political to his toenails and the whole tragic episode with Mike Castleman was structured as an example of how rigorously the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department policed itself.

  Buried somewhere near the bottom of the story was the announcement that Deputy Detective Silas Lee Jones would be retiring, effective January the first.

  CHAPTER 27

  It requires the exercise of some judgment to decide how far an individual may follow the dictates of fashion, in order to avoid the appearance of eccentricity, and yet wear what is peculiarly becoming to her own face and figure.

  Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

  Doug’s press conference didn’t take place till the day after Christmas, four days after our wedding. Nevertheless, there was so much fallout from Monday that it made our wedding on Wednesday feel almost anticlimactic.

  For a while, that was all anyone could talk about at Daddy’s Monday night, but the novelty of being together soon took over.

  Most of our family dinners are big, sprawling, multigenerational affairs and Christmas dinner would certainly be that, but for Monday night, Daddy had asked that it be only his eleven sons and their wives, Dwight, and me. Any grandchild who wanted to come help Maidie would be welcomed, but they were to keep quiet while serving and otherwise stay in the kitchen until supper was over.

  All the leaves were added to the big dining room table and the doors to the front parlor were folded back so that a second table could be added, yet even then it was a tight squeeze to get twenty-five of us seated.

  It was the first time in years that all of us had sat down together under the same roof at the same time. Adam, Frank, Benjamin, and Jack and their families had flown in yesterday or today and were bedded down in spare rooms all around the farm. The deaths of people they didn’t know could not hold their attention long, and dinner soon turned into a rowdy retelling of old family stories.

  “Hey, Frank, remember when you figured out how to coil a piece of copper tubing without crimping it?”

  “Y’all remember the licking we got when we parachuted Deborah off the packhouse and tore a big hole in Mother’s brand-new umbrella?”

  “What was the name of that sexy little cheerleader you and Haywood got in a fight over in high school?”

  “Smokey Johnson’s a granddaddy now? You know not! He’s younger than me.”

  “—and believe it or not, I’ve still got them antlers! Where are they, honey? She’s always putting my stuff out in the barn and I keep bringing it back in just like that cat we had, remember? Kept bringing Mama Sue lizards and mice, like we’d bring her birds and rabbits.”

  “Hey, Ben? You recall the time you and Andrew and Robert tried to teach that last mule how to jump fences?”

  “’Course you don’t remember, Deb’rah, but Mama Sue thought you won’t never gonna learn to walk because one of us was always toting you on our shoulders. For about six months there, every time she turned around, she’d say, ‘Put that child down and let her walk.’ Remember, Dwight?”

  And Dwight was right there with us, laughing and remembering and not having to be brought up to speed because he knew the punch lines and the in-jokes and the subtexts.

  “What I remember,” I said, “is how y’all used to tease me that Mother and Daddy were going to trade me in when my five-year warranty expired. That was you, Will! You and Adam told me not to say anything to them about it and maybe they’d forget. I couldn’t talk about turning five and going to kindergarten until Seth finally told me the truth because I was afraid they’d trade me in.”

  Taking his prerogative as my oldest brother, Robert lifted his glass to propose the first toast. “And now you’re marrying ol’ Dwight. Here’s luck to you both, honey.”

  All down the table, glasses were raised to our health and happiness.

  “Speech! Speech!” they called.

  I shook my head. “Dwight can make a speech if he wants to. All I can say is how much it’s meant to me to be a part of this family, to know that you were always here for me. And not just you brothers, but you sisters-in-law, too.”

  “Your turn, Dwight,” they said.

  “I’m not going to get sloppy,” he said. “But I do thank you for everything, especially for Deb’rah, and I promise that I’ll do my best to make her happy.”

  “I gotta be honest with you, son,” Daddy said as a mischievous smile twitched his lips. “You marry her on Wednesday and it’s a ‘as is’ deal. She don’t come with no warranties this time around.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Dwight said. “I know the manufacturer.”

  Tuesday was so busy for all of us that Dwight and I didn’t get to have the quiet time with Cal that we had planned. DNA tests confirmed that Whitley was the father of Tracy’s unborn child and Dwight had to go into work to check up on the details. Minnie called first thing to say that she had phoned a fabric shop in the edge of Cary and they were holding several bolts of white cheesecloth for me to pick up this morning. “And what about rice bags?”

  I confessed that I had totally forgotten about them. I hadn’t realized that Nadine was on an extension till I heard her say, “Rice isn’t good for birds. People use birdseeds these days.”

  �
��I thought rice was for fertility,” I said innocently. “What do you get with birdseeds, Nadine? Eggs?”

  “You laugh, but Nadine’s right,” said Doris, who had found Minnie’s third extension. “People are going to want to throw something at you and Dwight when y’all leave. It’s traditional. Get some extra-fine netting and a few yards of narrow white ribbon and a five-pound bag of birdseeds. Cal and Mary Pat and Jake can help you tie them up in little pouches. I’ve got a big white wicker basket I’ll send over to put them in. It’ll be real pretty.”

  The children thought that making rice bags would be fun so I took them with me to Cary, and after we dropped off the bolts of cheesecloth at April’s house, we went back to mine and started an assembly line. I cut the white netting into five-inch squares, and laid them out on the table. Using a measuring spoon, Jake carefully put a tablespoon of birdseeds in the center of each, Cal gathered up the edges and twisted it to make a little pouch, then Mary Pat tied them shut with a bow.

  They told me I didn’t really need to pay them for their help, but I explained that I was an officer of the court and I had to be careful about violating child labor laws. We agreed that ten bucks apiece was a fair price. It took us till lunchtime, but in the end we had over two hundred “rice” bags finished when Haywood and Isabel’s daughter Jane Ann came to collect them with Doris’s white wicker basket.

  “Wait till you see what we’ve done with the potato house,” she said happily.

  “I can take a break now,” I said, reaching for my car keys.

  “No!” she exclaimed. “Aunt Minnie and Aunt April said to tell you to stay away. They want to surprise you.”