enough suspect to get a search warrant.”
“Only you never did.”
“Only we never did,” he echoed grimly. “Not for lack of trying. We zeroed in on a few right away: the husband, your brothers-because they’d been out to the mill on Thursday, all the old boyfriends, Michael Vickery. You.” He gave a tired smile. “Even those two blacks that found her. We just couldn’t make the times fit. Take Jed Whitehead. He was a salesman with a Raleigh firm back then, out on the road all day Wednesday, but once it was known that his wife was missing, someone was constantly with him. Same with the rest of her family. Any of them could have bopped her over the head and hid her somewhere, but when did they have time to move her car or, for that matter, move her to the millhouse and then go back and shoot her?”
I hadn’t realized those were separate times.
“Yeah,” he answered. “Something about two different kinds of bloodstains. They figured the wound opened up again when she was put in the loft. I forget the details, but forensics determined that she’d bled onto the floorstones for several hours before the shot finished her off instantly. She actually died between five and ten P.M. on Friday evening, according to Dr. Hudson.”
“Too bad Michael Vickery hadn’t moved into the barn yet,” I sighed.
“Might have been rough on him if he had. As it was, he was lucky he could prove he was in Chapel Hill from noon till nearly midnight on Friday because he was out there by himself all day Wednesday.”
Scotty shrugged. “It was like that with every man we looked at. Your brothers: both free to come and go without punching time cards or anybody keeping tabs on them. They alibied each other for Wednesday, which we might could question, but your brother Seth helped barbecue chickens all afternoon for a church supper Friday night while your brother Will was umpiring a Little League baseball game.”
“Neither of my brothers had a reason to hurt Janie,” I said hotly.
“So who did?” he asked reasonably.
“Nobody! Anybody. Oh, God, I don’t know!” An impatient sweep of my hand upset my empty cup. No one in the place noticed. They were too busy watching three miniskirted secretaries over by the jukebox who were demonstrating some aerobic movements and lip-synching “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” along with Deniece Williams. Morgan was in tight conversation with someone I didn’t recognize. “Didn’t you guys turn up any motives?”
“Not really.”
“Not really,” I mimicked nastily. “You told Terry and me you didn’t find a hell of a lot more the second time through. What does that mean? Or aren’t you going to trust me?”
“We checked out Dinah Jean Raynor when we heard she was going to marry Janie’s husband,” he answered slowly. “Eight months wasn’t much of a mourning period. Made us wonder if they’d had anything going before.”
“Dinah Jean?” I was scornful. “He might have dated her in high school, but he’d dropped her long before he started seeing Janie.” I hesitated. Jed had always treated Dinah Jean pleasantly in my presence, the surface between them as placid and unruffled as Possum Creek. But I remembered the yearning on her face at times when he drew away from her or didn’t seem to notice her outstretched hand. During the years between their brief high school fling and Janie’s death, could Dinah Jean have carried a torch for Jed even bigger than mine?
“She was still in nursing then,” said Scotty. “Working the four-to-midnights at Rex Hospital. But one thing we did learn when we went over Janie’s girlfriends: she and your sister-in-law-sorry, your ex-sister-in-law-and Kay Saunders had been really close right up to a couple of months after the baby was born. Then, bang. Overnight, a few weeks before she died, Janie quite seeing them. Quit shopping with them, quit having them over to her house, quite going to theirs.”
Startled, I realized he was right. Janie, Trish, and Kay had graduated from Dobbs High School together and had then married Cotton Grove boys within two years of each other, which brought them back into the same social orbit where two incomes weren’t a necessity quite yet. The “Donna Reed” syndrome lasted a bit longer in the South than elsewhere, and none of the three had held down real jobs back then. All that most young wives like them had to do till the children started arriving was keep the house clean and be there in a frilly apron with supper on the table when their husbands came home from work. The rest of the time they were free to shop, socialize, or volunteer their services to community projects if they chose.
Thinking out loud, I said, “Well, maybe motherhood slowed her down too much. So far as I know, Kay never had kids, and Trish and Will were divorced before they had any. With her sister there in town, maybe she thought it was time to settle into family life.”
Except that even as I said it, I was remembering that she hadn’t really settled. Marylee’s kids were both in school and Janie had been out running around with her those last couple of weeks almost as much as with Trish and Kay.
“Well, it probably didn’t mean anything,” Scotty said. “The only reason I gave it a second thought was because there was nothing else. You girls are all alike, though. One day you’re best friends, the next day you can’t stand the sight of each other.”
I bristled and he started grinning. For a minute his tiredness seemed to dissipate. “You look just like my oldest daughter. She hates it when I say things like that, even if I’m only kidding.” His grin faded. “Just the same, that’s the explanation Marylee Strickland gave me. What your ex-sister-in-law said, too, as a matter of fact.”
“Did you believe them?” I asked.
“Let’s put it this way. I never could verify their movements for that Wednesday afternoon, but I do know that Trish Knott and Kay Saunders spent Friday evening playing cards with some friends over in Makely.”
“Makely?” Appalled, I looked at my watch. “Oh Lord! I’m supposed to be at a meeting in Makely in exactly twelve minutes.”
Babbling my thanks for his time, I grabbed for his bill and he let me take it. “Two things though, Your Honor-if you learn anything, I expect you to share it.”
I nodded. “And the other?”
“Just keep in mind that someone’s got away with murder once already.”
6 there’s something for everyone in america
I’d warned Gayle that my campaign was going to come first, a good thing because the next few days were so jammed I hardly had time to shower and change clothes. It was the last weekend before the primary, my last chance to shake new hands in other parts of the district where I was less well-known to voters.
On Saturday morning, I got up early and drove over to Widdington in the next county. My first stop was at a Newcomers Club breakfast followed by a midmorning bake sale for the Widdington High School Marching Band Uniform Fund, where I bought an obscenely rich carrot cake with cream cheese icing that I immediately donated to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving at their lunch meeting in Hilltop, thirty miles further east from Widdington.
“If this is a bribe, I’m easy,” laughed a plump young mother.
While our hostess sliced the moist cake into seventeen equally fattening pieces, I described the number of drunk-driving cases I’d prosecuted when I’d worked as an assistant in the DA’s office.
One smartass Republican-looking mother asked if I hadn’t spent the last few years in private practice frequently defending drunk drivers. I took the high ground-“As long as the United States remains a democracy, even the sorriest hound’s entitled to a defense”-and kept the rest of the women on my side by confessing with pretty ruefulness that I’d lost over ninety percent of the DWI cases I’d tried to defend in court. (No point mentioning that most lawyers have an even worse conviction rate. If our DA doesn’t think the facts are incontrovertible, he doesn’t prosecute. Marginal cases simply don’t come to trial all that often, and I’m pretty good at getting pretrial dismissals; but that’s not something I like to brag about. Certainly not at a MADD meeting.)
“Win or lose,” I told them truthfully, “any time a client of Lee, Stephenson and Knott is charged with driving while impaired, we require them to sign up for a substance abuse program before we’ll accept the case.”
(Okay-yes, it does usually help mitigate a guilty verdict if you can say to the judge that your client’s already entered such a program voluntarily, but again that’s not something attorneys go around telling MADD groups. Especially if said attorney’s running for judge.)
“Of course, when we’re appointed to represent indigent defendants, we don’t have the option of turning them
