Disconcerted, I said, “I guess it didn’t occur to me back then that Dixie had kept her maiden name.”
His half-smile made me realize what else I hadn’t picked up on and I could feel myself turning red.
“Evelyn would be what now?” I asked defensively. ‘Twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five. Almost twenty-six.”
“Whatever. The point is, twenty-six years ago, nice middle-class Southern girls like Dixie didn’t openly raise a child born out of wedlock.”
“Who said we came from a nice middle-class neighborhood?” he asked sardonically as he slowed for a long white stretch limo that was hogging both lanes.
I didn’t have an answer to that one.
“Actually, it was worse than middle-class,” he said, taking pity on my embarrassment. “It was poor-white respectable, and Dix didn’t hang around to be preached at. She took off to someplace down East before anybody here knew she was pregnant.”
“What about the father?”
“He never knew. He was just someone she met down at the beach the Easter before she graduated. A gang of senior girls went down for spring break, met some guys from the Citadel. You know how it goes.”
I did. Too much Carolina moon, too much warm spring nights, too much beer and pot. Been there, done that, but only bought the T-shirt, luckily—not a baby.
“Close as we were, Dixie didn’t even tell me. Just dropped out of sight. First I knew about Evelyn was when I found her again, when she was going for that law degree.”
“At Chapel Hill?”
“Yeah. I was over there helping Savannah design and decorate a funky place on Franklin Street—the owner had more money than taste—and there was Dix, working the afternoon shift at a coffee bar next door. I hadn’t seen her since high school and even then, I don’t think she’d have told me about Evelyn except that she was pouring me an espresso when the phone call came that some drunk had plowed through a school crossing. I rushed Dix over to the hospital and I was still there when the doctors came out of surgery and said Evelyn was going to be fine. And she was, but it took a lot of nursing and physical therapy and Dix had to quit law school.”
“Surely there was insurance money?”
“From the drunk? Yeah. They got a nice settlement. Eventually. After the guy’s parents dragged it through court for two years trying to keep it off his record.”
He edged the van around the limo and took a left over to North Centennial. Several blocks ahead, the new courthouse rose white and gleaming at the top of a hill, in contrast to the huge navy-blue cluster of windowless GHFM buildings off to the right.
“She had it rough, didn’t she? I never knew how rough.” Even though Dixie and I hadn’t been particularly close, learning what she’d gone through back then made me feel callous and self-centered in retrospect.
“You were younger then,” Pell said, reading my mind. “You probably had your own problems.”
Well, yes, there was that.
He pulled up to a side door of the courthouse.
“But everything worked out great after they came to High Point.” His voice turned suddenly venomous. “Until Evelyn married that prick.”
I wanted to ask what he meant, but a uniformed guard was motioning for us to move it.
Pell handed me a house key. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but make yourself at home.”
I thanked him and hurried inside. Only ten minutes to do the professional courtesies and find the courtroom for Randy J. Verlin vs. April Ann Jenner for the custody of Travis Tritt Verlin, minor.
Which was where Detective David Underwood found me.
9
« ^ » “
“Chan Nolan’s death was a homicide?” I was bewildered as I followed Detective Underwood out to his car. “But the doctor said it was an allergic reaction. Anaphylactic shock.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He held the door open for me on a car ankle-deep in empty foam coffee cups and crumpled hamburger wrappers—“Just kick ’em out of your way,” he murmured—and we drove the short distance to police headquarters on Leonard Street “We have a little problem with how he ingested the agent.”
Here at lunchtime, the streets were clogged again with shuttle vans, cars with license plates from a dozen different states, and a couple of black limos of ordinary length.
“I can’t get over the difference,” I said, telling Detective Underwood how deserted the streets seemed the day my friend and I drove through.
“Most of the year, we’re just another Piedmont mill town. But during Market, we—oh damn and blast and expletive deleted!” he muttered as a shuttle van stopped in our lane to let someone out.
Detective David Underwood was an impatient driver and he squeezed his car through nonexistent openings and
