Magnolia Moon

by JoAnn Ross

  “Maybe she’d been tied up,” Regan considered.

  “Dad would have put that in his report. And even if whoever’d killed her had stuck around to untie her after she was dead, she would have been left with rope burns. The medical examiner back then might not have been the sharpest tack in the box, but I think even he would have spotted them.”

  “The wife could have knocked her out. That would explain the contusion on her skull.”

  “I’m no expert, but could a woman actually slug a person hard enough to raise a knot?”

  “That depends upon the woman. I could.”

  He slanted her a look. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Regan tapped her fingers on her knee. “She could have used a weapon.”

  “Sure. She could have gone in with a baseball bat and started swinging. She could have hit her with a lamp. Or a telephone. Anything’s possible.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “Doesn’t matter much what I think. You’re the detective.”

  “True. But I never in a million years could have imagined I’d be investigating a murder in my own family.” The idea was still incomprehensible. Even more than the fact that her life had been a sham. Which brought up another thought. “When your dad died, did people make fun of you?”

  He thought about that a minute. “No,” he decided. “But they did treat me a lot like some folks treat Homer Fouchet when they first meet him. He’s this guy who takes the classified ads down at the paper. He lost both his legs in ’Nam and came home with really bad burns on his face and hands. He doesn’t have any facial hair or eyebrows or lashes, and although he’s a nice enough guy, there are still people who have trouble looking at him, because he makes them uncomfortable, you know?”

  “There but for the grace of God go I,” she murmured, having experienced the same behavior from some of the well-meaning cops who’d visited her at the hospital after her near-fatal accident.

  “I think that’s probably it,” he agreed. “Anyway, that’s how they treated me. Nobody at school knew what to say, and that made them uncomfortable, so they mostly stayed their distance. And couldn’t look me in the eye.”

  “At least you had your brothers.”

  “Yeah. Life was pretty rocky then for all of us, but it would have been a helluva lot harder without Jack and Finn.”

  “Kids can be so mean.”

  “You won’t get any argument there.” He thought some more. “There was this girl in school, Luanne Jackson, who had an alcoholic mother and a no-good father. Jack found out later that her father had been raping her and nearly killed the guy, but none of the kids even knew about stuff like that back in grade school, and if any adults knew, they sure as hell didn’t tell Dad.

  “Anyway, her mama used to spend a lot of time down at the No Name whenever her husband was out shrimpin’, which was most of the time, and she’d leave with men she’d pick up there. Kids would hear their parents talking about her at home and rag Luanne somethin’ awful. She got suspended a lot for fighting.” He smiled at a memory. “If we were anywhere in the vicinity, Jack and I tended to get into it with her. Which usually ended up with us gettin’ grounded.”

  “But you stood up for her.”

  “Mais yeah.” He made it sound as if there’d been no other choice. Which, she was beginning to suspect, there hadn’t been.

  “Sounds like you were close friends.”

  “We were. Not as close as Jack, though.”

  “Let me guess. Luanne and Jack had a ‘thing.’”

  “Now, I wouldn’t be one to spread tales, but they were close for a while. But that was before Dani.”

  “Sounds as if your brother’s life is divided into two periods. Before Dani and after.”

  “I guess it pretty much is. I never would have thought it possible, but she’s got him downright domesticated.”

  “You make it sound as if he’s been neutered.”

  Nate laughed at that. “When you meet Jack, you’ll realize that there’s not a woman on earth who could do that. But he’s pretty much settled down these days and seems real satisfied with his life.”

  She guessed, from his slightly incredulous tone, that he wouldn’t be satisfied to settle into domestic bliss. Which she honestly doubted she would be, either. Having had no role model of husband-and-wife behavior to observe while growing up, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to be a wife.

  “Other than the accusation that Linda Dale was having an affair with Jarrett Boyce, did the judge have any other information about them?”

  “Not much. Like I said, the case was dropped. Shortly after that, Dale was found dead, so I guess they just sort of faded back into a normal life that kept them out of courtrooms.”

  They fell silent for a time. Clouds rolled across the sky as they drove past flooded stands of leafless trees the color of elephant hide. Under ordinary circumstances, Regan would have enjoyed the drive. But these were far from ordinary circumstances.

  The house was small and narrow with a deep front porch. The white paint had faded, but an explosion of orange honeysuckle covered a white trellis at one side of the porch. A red-and-white Caddy with fins harkening back to Detroit’s 1960s glory days was parked on a white crushed-shell driveway. A brown-and-black hound dozed in a sunbeam on the porch amid a green array of house-plants.

  “It looks cozy,” Regan murmured, wondering if this was her father’s house. And if so, how her life would have been different if she’d grown up here in Blue Bayou, rather than L.A.

  “It’s a shotgun house,” Nate said. “There are literally thousands of them scattered all over south Louisiana. Freed blacks brought the style here from Haiti. They’re called shotgun because all the rooms are lined up behind one another, so if you fired a gun from the front door, it’d go right out the back door.”

  “Not a shotgun, unless you were shooting a slug. When a shotgun’s fired using a multiple-pellet shotshell, the pellets spread out into a pattern that increases in diameter as the distance increases between the pellets and the barrel. Depending on the size of the shot, the mass starts to break up somewhere between five and ten feet.”

  “Anyone ever tell you that you’re damn sexy when you’re talking like a cop?”

  “No.” She shot him a warning look that would have had most men cowering in their boots. The problem was, Nate Callahan wasn’t most men.

  “What’s the matter with the men in L.A., anyway? They all must be either blind or gay.”

  “Perhaps they know enough not to hit on a police officer.”

  “Maybe someone who met you while you’re armed and investigating a murder might want to be a bit cautious about bein’ too forward,” he allowed. “But you can’t spend all your time chasing down bad guys.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong. Being a cop isn’t just what I do. It’s what I am. My life pretty much is my work, and the only men in it tend to fit into three categories.” She held up a finger. “Suspects.” A second finger. “Cops.” A third. “And lawyers.”

  “Maybe you need to expand your circle of acquaintances.” He brushed his thumb along her jaw.

  She shoved his hand away. “What I need,” she said as she unfastened her seat belt, “is for you to back off and give me some space.”

  He climbed out of the SUV and caught up with her on the way to the porch. The rain had lightened to mist. “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, I’ll give you all the space you need.”

  That stopped her. “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Maybe ’cause you’re a skeptic all the way to the bone. But that’s okay. It’s sort of an interesting change for me. I can just see you, a sober-eyed, serious four-year-old, sitting on St. Nick’s knee in some glitzy L.A. department store, giving him the third degree.”

  He made her sound grim and humorless. Worse yet was the realization that she actually cared what he thought.

  “I never sat on Santa’s knee
.” She started walking toward the house again. “My mother never encouraged me to buy into the myth.” Or the tooth fairy or Easter bunny, for that matter.

  “Now that’s about the most pitiful thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Then you’ve been blissfully sheltered.” Despite the car parked outside, no one seemed to be home. The dog obviously hadn’t been bought for his watchdog skills, since he was snoring, blithely unaware of their presence. “Let’s check around back.”

  They found Boyce in a small cemetery surrounded by a low cast-iron fence. Some of the standing stones were so old the carving had been worn down, making it impossible to know who’d been buried there. He was planting roses into a raised bed beside a small stone angel.

  When Nate called his name, he turned, then dropped the shovel. “Hey, Nate. I figured you’d be showin’ up sooner or later.” His rugged face, with its lines and furrows, suggested years of hard living. His age could have been anywhere from fifty-five to seventy.

  He pulled off a pair of canvas gardening gloves as he studied Regan’s face. “The judge was right,” he said, revealing that Judge Dupree had called ahead. “You do take after Linda some, around the eyes.” He skimmed a look over her. “I predicted her little girl was going to be a heartbreaker when she grew up, and it looks like I was right.”

  He glanced toward Nate, who’d leaned down and was scratching the hound, who’d belatedly awakened and ambled over, behind his ear. “It’s also going ’round that you hired this little lady to take on the job of sheriff.”

  “That’s a misunderstanding,” Regan said, one she was getting weary of correcting. “The mayor only gave me the badge so I could help out at an accident scene.”

  “Heard about that, too. Sounds like you two did a bang-up job. Maybe you might want to stay on.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. I already have a job in Los Angeles.”

  “Too bad. The town really needs a sheriff. Last one we had was purely pitiful and a crook besides.” He cocked his head and gave her another long look. “Damned if you don’t remind me of Linda when you talk.”

  “She didn’t have a local accent?”

  “No, which wasn’t real surprising, since she wasn’t a local girl.”

  “Do you know where she was from?”

  “She didn’t talk much about her past. I got the feeling that she wasn’t really happy growing up, but it seems she was from someplace in California.” He rubbed a stubbled chin. “Modesto, maybe Fresno, somethin’ like that. Not the places you usually think of, like Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

  “Could it have been Bakersfield?” The woman she’d always believed to be her mother had been born in the San Joaquin Valley city.

  His eyes brightened as if she’d just given him the answer to the million-dollar question. “That was it. I remember because she said the Mandrell sisters were from there, and she’d always wanted to grow up to be rich and famous like them.” The light faded from his gaze. “She could have made it, too, if things had worked out differently. Your mama was a real pretty woman. Talented, too.”

  “I haven’t yet determined that Linda Dale was my mother.” Her tone was cool and professional and gave nothing away.

  “Regan here’s a detective,” Nate volunteered. “She likes to get all the evidence in before she makes a decision.”

  “A detective.” His tone was gravelly from years of smoking too many of those cigarettes she could see in his plaid shirt pocket. “Don’t that beat all. Never met a lady detective before.”

  A little silence fell over them.

  “Roses are lookin’ real nice, Jarrett,” Nate said.

  The man swept the raised beds with a satisfied look. “They’re comin’ along. I got some antique bushes from a plantation down in Houma that’s crumbling away. The new owner’s razing the place to build some weekend getaway, and when I went over there with the idea of buying them off him, he just told me to take the lot.”

  “That sure is a lot, all right,” Nate said, looking at all the burlap-wrapped bushes. Bees were buzzing from flower to flower.

  “Marybeth has always liked her roses,” he said. “This autumn damask is her new favorite. She’s been hankerin’ for one ’cause it’s supposed to be real good for making oil. Me, I’m sorta partial to the color of this General Jack. You don’t get many old garden roses that are such a dark red.”

  “Your garden’s lovely.” Having found herself in a discussion about flowers when she just wanted to solve the mystery of her birth, Regan was beginning to understand Finn’s impatience with detours. “Marybeth’s your wife?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll have been hitched forty years this March.”

  “That’s a long time.” And obviously not all of it had been married bliss, according to Judge Dupree. Regan decided to take a different tack. “How did you meet her? Linda Dale, not Marybeth.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You’re here about that alienation-of-affection suit Marybeth filed against her,” he guessed.

  “I am interested in the circumstances behind that, yes.”

  He let out a long, slow breath.

  “Thought I’d put that foolishness behind me a long time ago.” He stretched, took a red-checked handkerchief from the pocket of his overalls, and wiped his brow. “Digging holes is thirsty business. Marybeth made a pitcher of sweet tea this morning. Let’s go sit on the porch, and I’ll fetch you some.”

  15

  We’re not going to get out of here anytime soon, are we?” Regan asked Nate as they sat on the porch in rocking chairs, while Jarrett Boyce went inside to get the tea.

  “Nope. But the truth, whatever it is, has been waiting this long to come out. Won’t hurt to sip a little sweet tea, chat a bit about some roses. You’ll find out what you need to know.”

  “Eventually.”

  “Things move a little slower down here,” he said, telling her nothing she didn’t already know. “You gotta learn to go with the flow.”

  She’d never gone with the flow in her life. As she watched a hummingbird dipping its long beak into the red bloom of a potted plant by the porch steps, Regan wasn’t sure she knew how.

  “Here you go.” The screen door opened, and Boyce came out carrying three canning jars filled with a dark liquid.

  Nate took a long drink. “That just hits the spot, Jarrett,” he said with a flash of that smile that seemed to disarm everyone. She watched Boyce’s shoulders relax ever so slightly, and decided that she’d love to have Nate Callahan in an interrogation room playing good cop.

  She murmured her thanks and studied the opaque liquid, which didn’t look like any iced tea she’d ever seen. It was as dark and murky as the brown bayou water, and there were little black specks floating around in it that she dearly hoped were tea leaves. A green sprig of mint floated on top.

  She took a tentative sip. Surprise nearly had her spitting it back out. “It’s certainly sweet,” she managed as she felt her tooth enamel being eaten away.

  “Lots of folks don’t take the time to do it right, these days. Marybeth boils the five cups of sugar right into the water she brews the tea into.”

  “Five cups,” she murmured. She could feel Nate looking at her with amusement and refused to look back. “That much.” She imagined dentists must have a thriving practice here in the South.

  “That’s why they call it sweet tea.” He leaned back in the rocker, crossed his legs, and said, “It wasn’t true. Those stories about me and Linda.”

  “Your wife seemed to think so,” Regan said carefully.

  “Marybeth wasn’t quite right in the head back then.” He frowned and stared down into the canning jar as if he were viewing the past in the murky brown depths. “On account of what happened to Little J.”

  “Your son?”

  “Yeah.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, and lighted it with a kitchen match he scraped on the bottom of his boot. “He was two when we lost him.” It
still hurt—Regan could see it in his eyes, hear it in the roughened tone of his voice. “He drowned.”

  “I’m sorry.” She’d seen it more times than she cared to think about when she’d been a patrol cop.

  “So were we.” He sighed, and suddenly looked a hundred years old. “Marybeth was hanging laundry, right over there.” He pointed to a clothesline about ten yards away. “Little J was playing with his toy trucks right here on the porch. She heard the phone and went into the house to answer it. It was her mama, checking on some detail for the church supper.”

  He paused. The silence lengthened.

  “Mr. Boyce?” she prompted quietly.

  He shook off the thought that had seemed to fixate him. “Sorry. I jus’ realized that I never knew exactly what the detail was that was so damned important it couldn’t wait for some other time.” She sensed the obviously repressed anger was directed more toward whatever fate had caused his mother-in-law to call at exactly that moment than at either of the two women. “Carla, that’s Marybeth’s mama, can talk the ears off a deaf man. Marybeth used to be the same way.” The pain in his gaze was, even after three decades, almost too terrible to bear. “She never would talk on the phone again after that day. In fact, she made me rip out the line the day of the funeral.”

  A funeral for a toddler. Could there be anything more tragic? “You don’t have to talk about it,” she said.

  “You wanted to know what was goin’ on between me and your mama, you got to know the circumstances behind it.” He squared his shoulders, blinked away the moisture that had begun to sheen his gaze. “We had a puppy back then. A blue-tick hound name of Elvis. I’d bought it the month before, ’cause every kid needs a dog, right?”

  “Right,” she agreed. She’d never had one; whenever she’d asked, her mother had said they’d shed and bring fleas and ticks into the house.

  “The sheriff—your daddy”—he said to Nate, who nodded—“figured that Little J must’ve gotten bored with playing cars and decided to play fetch with Elvis. ’Course he couldn’t toss real good, and this old tennis ball was floating on the water, so it seems that’s what happened.” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if to block off the memory. Then he swallowed the tea in long gulps, looking like a man who wished it was something stronger.