She took a deep breath and tried to pull the surface back into place. It didn’t quite work. “So they fuss over me and they sweet-talk and part of it’s that they’re just so, so sorry for me and the other part’s that they’re dying to know what it’s like to have a murdered mother and not know who did it.”
“What is it like?” I asked.
She started to glare, then realized I wasn’t being cute. Despair replaced her anger.
“I don’t know. It’s like-like having a loose hair tickling on the back of your neck,” she said bleakly. “You keep brushing at your collar, but you never quite get it and just about the time you forget about it, there it is worrying you again. I just want it gone!” __
I shook my head. “Sorry, honey, but I don’t see how some strange detective’s going to-”
“Not some stranger,” she interrupted. “You, Deb’rah.”
Before I could start shaking my head, she plunged on. “I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it and Dad’s about to freak because I’ve been looking in all the phone books and the nearest private detectives are in Raleigh and you’re right. Nobody’s going to tell a stranger anything Sheriff Poole hasn’t already heard, probably; but you could do it, Deb’rah, I know you could. Soon as Dad came home last night and said he wanted me to talk to you, it was like the answer to everything. That’s the only reason I came today. You know everybody and everybody knows you and they’d trust you and-”
“Now wait a minute,” I protested. “I’m a lawyer, not a detective.”
“Oh, please!”
Gayle’s eyes beseeched with such intensity that for a brief instant of deja vu, I was a pudgy, lank-haired sixteen again, wondering why I had been stuck with ordinary run-of-the-mill blue eyes when other people got luscious melting brown. I already envied Janie’s size eight bell-bottoms, her long black hair, her town-bred sophistication and, most of all, her husband. Now, there I was, jealous of even her eyes, damn her!
“Besides,” I added. “I really, honest to God, don’t have time. I’ve got a campaign to run and the primary’s next week.”
“Please,” Gayle repeated earnestly. “You’re going to be campaigning in Cotton Grove; too, aren’t you? So you’ll be seeing most everybody anyhow, won’t you? Besides, judges have to know whether people are telling the truth, don’t they? It’ll be practice for you.”
Well, I’d already sat in enough courtrooms to know when I wasn’t hearing the whole story.
“Who do you think’s not told the truth?” I asked.
Her eyes fell and she began twisting the zipper tassel on her purple clutch.
“All my life, everybody’s said the killer was some sorry tramp or migrant that’s probably been killed himself in New York City or Mexico by now.” She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “How come you quit seeing Dad?”
A shock of acknowledgment went through me and I could only stare at her, appalled.
“I’ve never said this to a single soul before.” Her level brown eyes glanced off mine and immediately dropped to her purse again. “Dad couldn’t have been the one who physically carried us out to Ridley’s Mill. He was in Raleigh all day. Everybody says so. But he could have hired somebody to do it. I’m not saying I think he did, but…”
“No, no, no,” I told her. “Of course, he didn’t.”
The hopeful look told me she wanted to believe. Well, who wants to think her own daddy’s capable of killing? I sure as hell never found it a barrel of laughs.
“Anybody could have hired someone, but he loved your mother, honey. He really did.” Into my mind unbidden came the thought each man kills the thing he loves, and I knew it must have been lying just beneath the surface of consciousness last spring.
“He married Mom-Dinah Jean-eight months later,” Gayle countered.
Dinah Jean was the only mother Gayle had ever known, and they’d seemed as close as any mother and daughter till Dinah Jean let her drinking get totally out of hand a couple of years ago. When. the divorce came, I heard Gayle had trouble choosing who to go with. Jed won out, not only because he was her natural parent and she was still underage, but also because Dinah Jean’s people had put her someplace out in the mountains to dry out.
“He was a young man,” I reminded Gayle, “and he had a baby daughter to take care of. In fact, a lot of people said he was thinking more about you than himself when he married her. He never looked twice at another woman while your mother was living and I’m sure he never loved Dinah Jean half as much.”
That was certainly how I’d consoled myself for months after Jed married Dinah Jean: that if he didn’t love me, neither did he really love her. A few weeks after Janie’s funeral, Jed and Gayle moved in with his parents so his mother could keep Gayle during the day. I still got asked to mind her occasionally; and from where I sat, a sixteen- year-old bundle of raging hormones, consumed with yearning frustration, it was no whirlwind romance. Even on the night before their wedding, when I brought Gayle home early from the rehearsal party, I’d seen none of the sexual tension that once flowed between Jed and Janie. And that wasn’t just wishful thinking either. He and Dinah Jean turned into an old married couple almost before the ink was dry on their marriage certificate.
It was the first time I’d thought about it from Dinah Jean’s viewpoint. No wonder she’d eventually crawled into a bottle and tried to pull the cork in after her.
Nevertheless, it wasn’t Dinah Jean’s ghost that had stood between Jed and me when he finally got around to noticing that I was grown up.
“Let the dead past bury its dead,” I murmured.
“Shakespeare?” asked Gayle.
I couldn’t remember the source, but it seemed like good advice and I told her so.
“I’ve tried that,” she said impatiently. “It doesn’t work. You’re just as bad as Gramma and Dad. They keep telling me not to think about it, too.”
She stood abruptly and smoothed the wrinkles from her purple skirt. “I’m sorry I wasted your time. Do I pay you or Sherry?”
“Sit down,” I said. “You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Even though the man who did this probably is long gone to his own reward in New York or California?”
“It was somebody she knew,” said Gayle.
As she perched back on the edge of the chair and began laying out theories, I realized that this was probably the first time she’d ever spoken freely to an adult about Janie’s death since becoming an adult herself.
“They never kept it a big secret from me, ”she said. “It was sort of like being adopted. You know the way they start telling babies they’re adopted as soon as they bring them home so it never comes as a shock?”
I nodded.
“Well, I always knew that Mother and I were kidnapped and she was killed and it was three days before they found us-but it was almost like a bedtime story. Something with all the edges taken off. I hated the way people oozed over me, but I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean it was like you don’t give a lot of thought to why grass is green or water’s wet. It just is, you know? Then the Christmas right before I was sixteen, I was sleeping over at Gramma Pope’s and I found this box of newspaper clippings.”
She put the box on my desk and lifted the lid. It wis crammed with yellowed news articles jumbled in with no particular order. I saw pictures of Janie and Jed, the mill, even Janie’s abandoned car.
“Grampa cut out everything the Ledger and the News and Observer wrote about it from the day we disappeared till it stopped being news.”
She gave a wobbly little grin that almost broke my heart. “That’s when it quit being a bedtime story, Deborah. Reading it like that put the sharp edges back on, made me start thinking it must have been somebody she knew.”
“Because she gave someone in a raincoat a lift?” I shook my head. “It didn’t have to be someone she knew. Back then it wasn’t automatically a foolhardy thing to give a stranger a ride.”
“But if he was a stranger, how’d he know where to leave her car?”
That was one of many questions that had puzzled everyone else at the time. Weather conditions had been rainy and foggy on the May afternoon that Janie and Gayle disappeared. Her car had been seen in the deserted parking lot beside the old abandoned Dixie Motel. There’d been someone else in the front seat with her, someone wearing a beige or light tan raincoat and thought to be male by the one eyewitness who saw them.
If indeed old Howard Grimes had actually seen them.
