on a fence post, but I didn’t get a chance to call Dwight
till after I’d adjourned at five-fifteen and I was afraid I
might interrupt the talk he planned to have with Cal.
Satisfying my curiosity could wait. That head wasn’t
going anywhere.
Except maybe over to the ME’s office in Chapel Hill.
“You’re not making Dwight take sides, are you?”
Portland asked when we were finally in the car and I had
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told her a little about the situation with Cal. She was
totally thrilled when I married Dwight, and she worries
that I’m going to mess up if I’m not careful.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Because he may be crazy about you, but Cal’s his
son.”
“Like I need a lecture on this? After four years of
family court? After watching Kidd Chapin’s daughter
make him choose between her and me? Hell, Por! I may
be dumb, but I’m not stupid. Cal and I got along just
fine before Jonna died. I’m pretty sure he liked me back
then and he’ll probably like me again once he settles
in. It’s a rough time for him, a lot of adjustments, but
I don’t think he wants to split Dwight and me up. He’s
not a conniver like Amber. Besides, boys don’t usually
think like that. My brothers and their sons have always
been pretty easy to read, even when they were getting
ready to bend the rules or break the law. Unlike my
nieces. Girls are out there plotting three moves ahead.
Remember?”
“Oh, sugar!” she said with a grin, and I knew she
was recalling some of the stuff we used to get into, the
way we could manipulate teachers and boyfriends from
kindergarten on.
She pulled out a pack of Life Savers, the latest weapon
in her diet arsenal and offered me one. The clean smell
of peppermint filled the car.
“Have you talked to your friend Flame since Buck
Harris’s body was identified?” I asked.
“Yeah, she stopped by for coffee this afternoon on her
way back to Wilmington. She said there was no reason
for her to stay, that his ex-wife and daughter certainly
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wouldn’t save her a seat at any memorial service and she
didn’t want to add to his daughter’s grief.”
“She okay herself?”
“Not right now, but she will be. I’m not going to
say she didn’t really love him, but I’m sure his bank ac-
count helped, so I doubt if her heart’s completely bro-
ken. Besides, Flame’s always known when to cut her
losses.”
“Not a total loss, though, is it?” I said as I dimmed
my lights for an oncoming car.
“Reid told her she was in the will. She didn’t say for
how much though.”
“Dwight kicked me out of his office before I could
get Reid to tell me, but remember when he took your
umbrella this morning?”
“And did not leave it at the office, the bastard.”
“Well, just before you got there, when he was trying
to borrow one from me, he said she was down for half
a million.”
“Interesting. We had lunch last week and she was
worried about the mortgage on her B-and-B. A half-
million sure makes a nice consolation prize.”
“Also makes a motive for murder.”
“No way!” Portland protested. But she mulled it over
as I pulled out to pass a slow-moving pickup. “Dwight
got her in his range finder?”
“Probably. Along with Mrs. Harris and everybody on
the farm, I should think. Not that he tells me every-
thing.”
“Yeah, right,” she jeered. “I don’t suppose he’s said
anything about Karen Braswell’s place getting shot
up?”
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“Nope. But I haven’t really talked to him since this
morning and that only happened last night, right?”
“Well, when you do, would you please stress that this
guy’s gone over the edge? Bo promised to tell his peo-
ple to be on the lookout in her neighborhood and so
did Lonnie Revell, for what that’s worth.”
Lonnie Revell is Dobbs’s chief of police. Nice guy but
not the brightest star in the town’s constellation.
I repeated what Dwight had said about hurricanes
and the need to head for high ground when you know
one’s on the way.
“Moving in with her mother’s not really high ground,
but with a little luck, he’ll do something to get himself
arrested again before he finds out that’s where she is. I
just hope you’ll give him a couple of years next time.”
“Hey, no ex parte talk here, okay?”
“What’s ex parte? You’ve already heard his case and
if there is a next time, there’s not a judge in the district
who could possibly be unaware of the situation unless
it’s Harrison Hobart and isn’t that old dinosaur ever
going to turn seventy-two?”
Seventy-two’s the mandatory retirement age and
it looked like he was going to hang on till the end.
Hobart’s a throwback to an earlier age when men were
men and their women kept silent. Not only in church
but everywhere else if he’d had his way. He had tried to
keep female attorneys from wearing slacks in his court-
room, and whenever I had to argue a case before him,
he never failed to lecture me that skirts were the only
attire proper for the courtroom.
“If that’s true,” I had said sweetly, gesturing to our
district attorney who sat at the prosecution’s table and
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MARGARET MARON
tried not to grin, “then the day Mr. Woodall comes to
court in a skirt, I’ll wear one, too.”
Hobart had threatened me with contempt, but the
next day every woman in the courthouse showed up in
pants, even the clerks who didn’t particularly like me
but who liked being lectured on dress and decorum
even less. He had been censured more than once and
his last one came when he informed the jury that the
defendant might not be sitting there if her husband had
taken a strap to her backside once in a while.
“I think his birthday’s this spring,” Portland said as
I parked in front of the restaurant on the north edge of
Makely.
Because of our late start, most of the tables were
filled by the time we paid our money and looked for
seats. And wouldn’t you know it? The only table with
two empty chairs had Harrison Hobart at it. It was a
no-brainer.
We split up.
Portland caught a ride back to Dobbs with Reid, so
I headed straight home after the dinner and got there a
little before ten. Both my guys were in bed, but only Cal
was asleep. Dwight was watching the early news, but he
turned it off and came out to the kitchen for a glass of
milk and the last of the chocolate chip cookies while I
reheated a cup
of coffee left over from the morning.
I told him about the dinner and Portland’s comments
about Flame Smith. “Is she a suspect?”
“Probably not. She gave me the names of people who
saw her down in Wilmington during the three days after
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Harris was last seen. I’ve got a query in with the sheriff
down there. He said he’d check her statement for me.”
“I hear you finally found the head?”
“Yeah. Stuck on a fence post at the back of one of the
fields out there, so it’s definitely someone familiar with
the place.”
“Get anything out of that migrant who knew Harris
was dead?” I asked.
“He says he stumbled into that empty shed by mis-
take, and seeing all that blood and gore’s what made
him go looking for a quick high on Saturday.”
“But?” I asked, hearing something more in his
voice.
“Oh hell, Deb’rah. I don’t know. I got the feeling that
he was holding something back, but if he ever had any
real dealings with Harris, no one seems to know about
it. The only other worker still there that had much to
do with him is Sanaugustin’s buddy Juan Santos. Both
of ’em are married. Both have kids. The farm manager,
Sid Lomax, thinks Santos and Harris might have had a
run-in last spring when he had to fly out to California
and Harris came in to run things. But that was almost a
year ago. Besides, it sounds like Harris’s real run-in was
with his wife.”
“Was he maybe trying to exercise his droit de seigneur
with one of the migrant women?”
“What’s that?”
“The privilege of ownership.”
“Like a plantation owner with his female slaves?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, his housekeeper did say he slept with the wife
of a different worker, but they moved to the farm below
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MARGARET MARON
Kinston months ago. I suppose he could have tried it
with one of the other women, although the housekeeper
says he was pretty much saving it for Flame Smith these
last few months.” He broke a cookie in half, dunked it
in his milk, then savored the soft sweetness. “You make
a mean cookie, Mrs. Bryant.”
“Why thank you, Major.” Then, just to make sure, I
said, “You really don’t mind that I haven’t changed my
name professionally, do you?”
He smiled and glanced at my left hand. “Not as long
as that ring stays on your finger.”
“What about Mrs. Harris?” I asked since he was in a
talkative mood. “Is she still wearing a ring?”
“Who knows? If we can’t pin down the time of death,
she may claim she’s a widow and not an ex. She’s sched-
uled to come in tomorrow morning.” He told me about
the tumble she supposedly took in a mud puddle the
Monday after Harris was last seen. “Only nobody actu-
ally saw her do it and the housekeeper says she bundled
her clothes up in a garbage bag and borrowed some of
his things to wear back to New Bern.”
“Whoa!” I said. “She came in the house and took
a shower and no one saw if it really was mud on her
clothes?”
“Mrs. Samuelson says there was no blood on her
sneakers, just a little mud. If she was going to lie for the
bosslady, why stop at sneakers?”
“Unless . . .” I said slowly.
“Unless what?”
“I keep a second pair of old shoes in the trunk of my
car,” I reminded him. “To save my good ones if it’s
mucky or I have to walk on soft dirt.”
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“I’ll keep that in mind when I talk to her tomor-
row.”
“Speaking of talks, how did it go with Cal tonight?”
He shook his head. “It didn’t. First Haywood was
here to drop off a load of firewood to get us through
April. Then Mr. Kezzie came by for a few minutes with
some extra cabbage plants for our garden—”
“We have a garden?” I teased.
“We do now. I mentioned to Seth that it’d be nice to
grow tomatoes, so he plowed us a few short rows beside
the blueberry bushes and somebody must’ve told Doris
you were out tonight because she called up and insisted
that Cal and I had to go over there and eat with her and
Robert. That woman never takes no for an answer, does
she?”
He sounded so exasperated, I had to laugh.
“Then coming home in the truck, I was just fixing
to start and damned if McLamb didn’t pick that time
to call and report his conversation with Mitchiner’s
daughter and grandson. By the time we got back to the
house, it was bedtime and when I went in to say good
night, he had his head under his pillow, trying not to let
me hear him crying.”
“Over Jonna?” I said sympathetically.
Dwight nodded. “I just didn’t have the heart to lay
anything else on him right then.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.” I ached for Cal. For Dwight,
too, who has to watch his son grieve for something that
can never be made right.
He drained his glass and carried it over to the dish-
washer, along with my now-empty coffee cup. I switched
off the kitchen light and followed him to our bedroom.
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MARGARET MARON
“I don’t suppose McLamb got much out of the
Mitchiner family?”
“Not really,” he said as we undressed and got ready
for bed. “One interesting thing though. He said that the
daughter and the grandson sort of got into it for a min-
ute about the lawsuit. The boy wants her to drop it.”
“Really?”
“McLamb said he all but accused her of wanting to
profit by his grandfather’s death and that she got pretty
defensive.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he’s going to check out her alibi tomorrow.
She was supposed to be working and the kid had her car
until it was time to pick her up after work, but since we
don’t know precisely when Mitchiner went missing, it’s
possible that she dropped the boy off somewhere and
went on to the nursing home. Here, need some help
with that?”
I had pulled my sweater over my head and a lock of
hair was caught in the back zipper.
He gently worked it free and then one thing led to
another.
As it usually does.
(Ping!)
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C H A P T E R
28
For us, it has truly seemed that each day dawned upon a
change.
—Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890
% Cal’s emotional meltdown the night before must
have cleared his system because he was in a cheer-
ful mood the next morning and no longer seemed to be
resentful about missing Monday night’s game. He let
Bandit out for his morning run without being asked
and only ha
d to be reminded once to take off his Canes
cap at the table. He laid a pad and pencil beside his ce-
real bowl and asked me to tell him the names of all my
brothers, beginning with Robert—“He said I could call
them Uncle Robert and Aunt Doris”—so that he could
write them down and start getting them straight.
“They could be a whole baseball team with two relief
pitchers,” he marveled and was intrigued to hear that
one of the little twins—Adam—lived in California. “Is
he near Disneyland? Could we go visit him sometime?”
It was sunshine after rain.
I was due for an oil change, so I left when he and
Dwight went to meet the schoolbus and drove over to
leave my car at Jimmy White’s. Jimmy’s been my mechanic
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MARGARET MARON
ever since I took the curve in front of his garage too fast
shortly after getting my driver’s license a million years
ago. He pulled it out of the ditch, replaced the front
fender, and let me pay him on time without telling my
parents, although he did threaten to tell his uncle who
was a state trooper if I didn’t take my foot off the gas
pedal once in a while. Gray-haired now and starting to
slow down a little, he’s turning more and more of the
heavy work over to his son James. Back then, it was
just Jimmy and one bay. Today it was Jimmy, James,
and two employees and the one bay had become three.
Instead of the old oil-stained denim coveralls they used
to wear, all four of them sported crisp blue shirts that
they put on fresh each morning and sent out to be laun-
dered every week.
After so much rain, the air was washed clean and
fluffy white clouds drifted across a clear blue sky. A soft
spring breeze ruffled my hair as we stood in the sunlit
yard waiting for Dwight to pick me up. I accepted their
offer of a cup of coffee and we talked about the changes
in the neighborhood and of all the new people that had
moved in and wanted him to service their cars with-
out trying to build a relationship. “Like, just because
they got the cash money, they think they’re gonna get
moved to the front of the line ahead of people that’s
been here all along.”
James, who had graduated from high school a couple
of years behind me, said, “What gets me hot though’s
when they don’t trust us. They’ll want us to give the
car a tune-up and if we say we had to replace one of the
belts, they’ll want to see it and half the time they act
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