overhead. At the end of the street was Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash’s whitewashed brick.
Role model?
Did he know how old that made me feel?
Jed drove through the opening in the white brick wall and pulled up at the far end of the long low veranda, in front of the door that led directly to my rooms.
“I think I have a clear hour tomorrow afternoon,” I sighed. “Tell her to call Sherry and set it up.”
3 do you know what it’s like to be lonesome?
Lee, Stephenson and Knott, Attorneys at Law, occupies a neat wood-frame story-and-a-half that was built right after the Civil War across the street and half a block down from the courthouse. The county did an architectural survey a few years back and our place is described as a “charming example of tasteful vernacular,” a phrase I take to mean that some local builder had heard about Victorian styles but didn’t have a millwright who could turn out yards of rococo gingerbread trim without a pattern to go by. John Claude’s wife, Julia, keeps wanting to paint the narrow clapboards pale green and pick out the moldings and porch trim in white, but so far we’ve headed her off and kept it plain white with black shutters.
John Claude’s grandfather, Robert Claudius Lee (no relation to Robert E.), was born there and so was Robert’s brother, my maternal grandmother’s father-which, if you’re trying to work it out on your fingers, makes John Claude my second cousin once removed. Although I’m related to both my partners, they’re no blood kin to each other.
The historical society put a plaque on the front porch, but the only thing historically authentic about the house is its outside. Lees and Stephensons have been practicing law here since the twenties, when John Claude’s father and Reid’s grandfather (my great-grandfather) set up the partnership, and the inside’s no longer a monument to nineteenth-century sensibilities. Most of the woodwork’s original, but when the ceilings were dropped in the seventies to allow for new wiring and modern plumbing and lighting, they didn’t try to save the crumbly old plaster decorations.
The central staircase was relocated to make a reception area for Sherry Cobb’s predecessor.
(Reid’s mother and Julia had a tiff over who was going to get the walnut banisters. Julia won. Julia’s what people here call a right strong-minded lady. If she’d been born five years later, she’d probably have gone to State and majored in architecture or design. Instead, they sent her to a girl’s school-and I use the term deliberately-for a “Father Knows Best” insurance policy: a degree in elementary education, “so she’ll always have teaching to fall back on, just in case.” Just in case her husband ran off with another woman or turned out to be too shiftless to support a family. Half my grade school teachers were women whose husbands had fulfilled their fathers’ direst premonitions. It did not make for happy classrooms. Fortunately, Julia’s children were the only ones who ever had to cower from her.)
As our current senior partner, John Claude has his daddy’s old office, the double parlor on the front left. I have Brixton Senior’s original office on the front right, and Reid has what used to be the dining room behind me. It’s the same office his daddy had. Brix Junior keeps his license current, but the month Reid came into the firm was the month he quit practicing law and moved to Southern Pines to start practicing his golf swings.
(My daddy isn’t a lawyer, of course, but Brix Junior and John Claude never held that against me-especially since he’s generated a lot of the firm’s business over the last fifty years.)
Upstairs, two small bedrooms were opened to make a single large one, with a modern bath and roomy storage cupboards under the eaves. In theory, the bedroom’s for putting up out-of-town expert witnesses if we need to, but when Dotty kicked him out of the house and filed for divorce, Reid crashed there for so long John Claude and I were ready to start charging him rent. He still uses it at least once a month for what he thinks are sub rosa assignations-as if anything half a block from the courthouse could be sub rosa, but men in rut have a way of rationalizing what they want to be true.
So for we’ve kept the carpenters out of our personal offices, but Julia redid half the downstairs about four years ago. She ripped out partitions and turned the old kitchen into a computerized work area for the three clerks who help Sherry. The sunporch across the back acquired a tiny modern galley that can disappear behind louvered doors when we use the big sunny room for official conferences. There’s a long deal table that looks official enough, but Julia also brought in some comfortable chintz chairs and ottomans that were too good to throw away the last time she remodeled their house. All in all, the old sunporch has devolved into a pleasant place to lounge over a cup of coffee after court and catch up on the News and. Observer.
That’s what I was doing when Gayle Whitehead arrived promptly at 3:30, carrying a flat white cardboard box. Instead of putting her in my office and telling me she was there, Sherry brought her straight back to the sunporch. Sherry’s not all that much older than Gayle, but she kept clucking around like somebody’s mama hostessing a tea party.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “There’s drinks and ice tea in the icebox.”
“That’s okay,” Gayle said politely as she took a chair opposite mine. She held the white box on her lap-it was about the size of a shirt box-and centered her purple purse on top of it.
“What about something to eat? We’ve got Nabs and stuff.”
“No, thank you.”
Gayle’s spine was a straight line that remained three inches from the chair’s cushioned back. Aunt Zell’s always trying to get me to sit like that. I think my grandmother Stephenson must have had a thing about a lady’s back never touching the back of chairs because Mother used to tell me to sit up, too.
Who had nagged Gayle? Dinah Jean?
I knew I had a soft spot in my heart for Gayle, but looking at her sitting there so poised and mature, a young woman now and no longer a child, I wondered how I could have been the role model Jed claimed. It’d been years since we’d had more than passing conversation at church or ball games or run-ins around the county. She was six and I was in my first year of law school the last time I baby-sat her. It’s true that we’d been thrown together again when I was seeing Jed last spring, but we’d both been too self-conscious about the circumstances to do anything except chatter about surface stuff.
Sherry’s hovering was making her even more uptight.
“Let’s go back to my office,” I said, and Gayle rose from the chair with the quickness of a coiled spring.
We walked up the hall, Sherry leading the way, and I was struck afresh by how fully grown Gayle suddenly seemed to be. She was small boned and dark haired just like I remembered Janie being, only Janie’s hair had been long and straight and, except for an occasional beehive, she’d worn it flowing over her shoulders like everybody else in the early seventies. Gayle’s was french braided, but where stray tendrils escaped, they were curly like Jed’s hair. A white knitted top and short purple skirt set off her cute little figure without being obvious about it.
Even after we were in my office with the door closed on Sherry’s curious face, Gayle still seemed stiff. Daddy always said I could talk the ears off a mule, but it was several minutes before I got a smile out of her and she relaxed enough to set the box on the floor beside her and actually settle into the green velvet wingback in front of my desk.
I congratulated her on the Beaufort Scholarship. “Your dad’s mighty proud of you winning.”
Her smile turned wry. “I don’t know about that. I don’t think he’s happy with what I want to do with the trust fund Grampa Poole left me.”
“Well, you can’t really blame him, can you? It’s been eighteen years, and after all this time, what’s a private detective going to dig up that the police and SBI haven’t already found?”
“Maybe nothing,” she said calmly. “All I know is that I can’t go off to college with all this stuff hanging on me.”
“All what stuff?” I asked.
The placid adult surface wavered and I was suddenly face-to-face with the seething adolescent below.
“You saw how Sherry was out there? That’s the way it’s been my whole stupid life. As soon as anybody hears my name, it’s like there’s a neon sign hanging around my neck.” Her small hands sketched a flashing signboard-“THE JANIE WHITEHEAD MURDER!”-and her voice dripped scorn as she mimicked, “Oh my God, it’s that poor little thang that nearly parched to death when somebody shot her mother and left them both to die at Ridley’s Mill.”
