There were at least three dark blue Ford sedans in Cotton Grove, including one that belonged to my brother Will; and Howard said he’d taken a good look because rumors were going around town about then that Will’s wife, Trish, was having an affair with somebody and he wanted to see who. (Not that the Ledger or the N amp;O printed Will or Trish’s names. But everyone involved knew who he was talking about.)
“I hadn’t heard nothing before about Jed Whitehead’s wife having round heels,” he was quoted as saying. “But the windows were too fogged up for me to see who he was. Saw her plain enough though.”
Howard’s account had kept the police from getting into it too heavily for the first twenty-four hours. For all they knew, little Janie Whitehead might well have gone off for an extramarital fling. Jed wouldn’t be the first husband, the Popes wouldn’t be the first parents, to say she’d never do something like that.
But then Janie’s sedan was discovered the next morning in the parking lot behind the Whitehead Real Estate Agency. It had not been there the evening before when old Mr. Whitehead closed early upon hearing that Janie and Gayle were missing. Street parking was plentiful, so the lot, shared by three other abutting offices, was not one used by the general public. Access in from Broad Street and out to Railroad was through narrow alleys screened by azaleas and high camellia bushes, not readily apparent and certainly not a place a stranger would stumble into on a dark foggy night.
“That’s why you tried to have a hypnotist take you back?”
“It didn’t work, though.” Lingering disappointment shadowed her voice. “I was really hoping maybe I’d remember her.”
My own mother died the summer I turned eighteen, and trying to imagine never having known her made it easier to understand why everybody could get sentimental and maudlin about Gayle’s semi-orphaned status. Gayle’s next words, however, made it clear that something else was going on in her head.
“What was her tragic flaw, Deborah?”
I looked at her blankly. Okay, we all knew Gayle was bright. They don’t give out full four-year scholarships to the university just because someone’s mother got killed. But was she brains or book learning?
“I took an interdisciplinary honors course last fell,” she said. “Hamlet, Edward the Eighth, Richard Nixon. We discussed their tragic flaws, and I couldn’t help applying it to my mother. Not who killed her, but why? What was her tragic flaw?” She leaned forward. “Everybody says she was good and sweet and beautiful and that I’m just like her. Well, nobody’s that damn sweet and good. I’m not and I bet she wasn’t either.”
Brains, then?
There had been a million unanswered questions when Janie Whitehead was killed, but every question was predicated on the belief that innocence and purity had been cruelly slaughtered that chilly May afternoon. Yet, in the months before, lust for Jed Whitehead had made me acutely aware of Janie’s flaws and, yes, she had her human share. I had collected them secretly and gloated over them like a miser polishing his coins. God knows I’d been wracked with guilt when I saw her cold stiff body lying in that coffin, her shining black hair spread across the pink satin pillow, her luminous brown eyes closed for all eternity; but remorse and guilt and prayers to God for forgiveness had not washed away the question with which Gayle now struggled.
“They say everybody carries within themselves the seeds of their own destruction,” she said.
“Sounds like another way to blame the victim for the crime,” I hedged starchily, as if I were already a judge.
“She was only twenty-two,” said Gayle, her voice passionate. “Four years older than I am right now. What if I really am like her?”
“Nobody’s going to kill you,” I told her.
Again it was the wrong comment and she waved me off impatiently.
“I’ve almost quit wondering about who killed her, Deborah. Now I think if I just find out why, that might be enough. People either pat me on the head when I ask what she was like or else they tell me another bedtime story. You knew her and you know everybody in Cotton Grove. And I’m not asking you to do it for nothing either. I’ve got Grampa Poole’s trust fund, and I’ll spend every last cent if that’s what it takes to find out what she was really like that somebody felt she needed killing.”
Jed didn’t like it when I called to tell him that Gayle was determined to go through with it one way or another. Not one little bit did he like it.
“She’s as headstrong as her mother,” he said finally, but his voice got softer. “Janie always had to have her way, too, didn’t she?”
“Just tell me what you want me to do, Jed,” I said impatiently. “I’ve got enough on my plate right now. I don’t need this. You want me to tell her no, I will.”
He sighed. “No, I reckon we’ll have to do what she wants.” He sighed again. “Better you than some real detective.”
4 all my rowdy friends have settled down
North Carolina houses our State Bureau of Investigation in what used to be a school for the blind on Old Garner Road south of Raleigh. Some of us don’t let the agents forget it either.
When I showed up in his office without an appointment just before five that Friday afternoon, Special Agent Terry Wilson leaned back in his swivel chair, put that canary-feathered grin on his big ugly face and drawled, “Well, looky who’s here! You want to hear something funny? Somebody said you was running for judge.”
“Naah. Dogcatcher.” I tried to look serious, but a matching grin spread over my own face. Terry does that to me every time. Even when I used to get furious with him, I couldn’t stay furious. He’d cut those hazel eyes at me, the tip of his long nose would twitch and I’d laugh before I could help it.
There was a moment about six years ago when I seriously considered marrying Terry just because life with him could have been so damn much fun. The moment passed, since three things stood between us and the altar at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist: one, he was working narcotics undercover at the time and, as his first two wives had already learned, undercover agents don’t make good husbands; two, he’d made it clear that his son, Stanton, would always come first; and three, I’d made it just as clear I wouldn’t take second place for anybody or anything- not to Stanton, whom I actually liked, and certainly not to his job.
So we stayed buddies, and though we no longer partied together, we did still go fishing occasionally. In fact, the large-mouth bass mounted on the wall opposite his desk came out of one of my Daddy’s lakes. Stanton and I were both in the boat the day Terry pulled it in. Only eight pounds, but he was using ten-pound test, so it’d been a classic battle between man and fish. There’d been other, bigger bass, but that was the day we acknowledged our moment had passed and I sometimes wondered if that was the real reason he’d mounted this particular fish. Of course, at the time, he said it was because its big mouth reminded him of me.
Looking at him now, I suddenly realized it’d been over a year since we’d gone fishing together. His flat brown hair had thinned a little more, his crisp white shirt didn’t quite conceal the faint beginning of a paunch, and laugh lines were just a shade deeper around his hooded eyes. He was checking me for changes, too. I wore my sandy blonde hair a little shorter these days, and though I’d taken a few pains with makeup and clothes, time hadn’t exactly stood still for me either.
“How far’d you have to chase him for those ugly suspenders?” I teased even though they matched his maroon tie and actually looked rather sharp against the white cotton.
“He was right behind the good-looking gal you took that raggedy old blouse off of,” Terry grinned, maligning the beautiful turquoise silk shirt that I was wearing with a soft paisley skirt. He propped his feet on the open top drawer of his desk and leaned all the way back in his chair till his long body was lying almost horizontal beneath a large blue-and-gold plaque depicting the great seal of North Carolina. Esse quam videri with Liberty and Plenty for all.
I helped myself to the chair in front of his executive-size desk.
Except for one or two papers, the broad top itself was quite tidy for someone in charge of MUST, the SBI’s Murder Unsolved Task Force. In fact, the whole office was strangely bare of excess books and papers, as if the real work must surely be done elsewhere, not in this roomy, stripped-down office with spring sunlight blazing through the two tall windows onto the clean white rug. Nothing was piled on the two matching sand-colored file cabinets. A narrow white Parsons table beside Terry’s desk held a laptop and a printer and nothing else. The bulletin board over
