Storm Track

Claude gave them as Christmas presents three or four years ago.”

Mine was in a pencil cup by the telephone in my bedroom and I brought it out to show Dwight. “I don’t carry it in my purse because I’m afraid I’ll put it down somewhere and walk off without it.”

Dwight smiled as he compared the two. He knows my theory that there are probably only about fourteen ballpoint pens in Colleton County and everybody keeps picking them up at one business counter and putting them down at another counter somewhere down the road.

These pens were sterling silver—John Claude doesn’t give cheap presents—and were distinctively chased with tendrils of ivy that twined along the length of the barrel.

“Any fingerprints?”

“Just smudges. Who else got one besides you?”

“I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask John Claude.” I didn’t like where this was going. “Reid got one and Sherry Cobb.”

Sherry is the firm’s small, bossy office manager and Reid, of course, is the current generation’s Stephenson.

Lees and Stephensons have been law partners since John Claude’s father (a cousin from my Lee side) began the firm with Reid’s grandfather (my great-grandfather) back in the early twenties. Southerners sometimes exaggerate the ties of kinship, yet family loyalties do exist and most of us will always give a cousin the benefit of doubt, even a first cousin once removed, as Reid was. His sexual development may have stopped when he was in junior high, but that doesn’t make him a killer.

I didn’t care if Will and Amy had once seen them together, there was no way Reid could be involved in Lynn Bullock’s death, and I wasn’t going to offer him up as a candidate to Dwight.

“I think John Claude bought them at a jewelry store at Crabtree Valley,” I said. “Dozens of them are probably floating around the Triangle.”

“We’ll check,” Dwight said mildly. “Long as Reid has his, no problem, right?”

I keep forgetting how well he knows me.

CHAPTER | 8

Ordinarily, men and women have enough to do in attending to their own affairs, expecting others, of course, to do the same, and consequently they pay small attention to what is going on around them.

After Dwight left, I finished reading the paper. Polls showed Jesse Helms with his usual slim lead over Harvey Gantt in the senate race—what else was new?—and NASCAR champion Richard Petty was several points ahead of Elaine Marshall for Secretary of State, though that gap had closed a little since the last poll. Nothing to get our hopes up about though.

The Ledger’s front-page story carried a studio portrait of Lynn Bullock. Even in black and white, her makeup looked overdone and her long blonde hair was definitely overteased. More Hollywood than Colleton County.

(“Meow,” scolded my internal preacher.)

Sheriff Bo Poole reported that his department was following up several important leads and he appealed to the public to come forward if anyone had seen Mrs. Bullock or anything suspicious at the Orchid Motel between five p.m. and midnight on Saturday.

In true Ledger fashion, the story ended by listing Lynn Bullock’s survivors: her husband, Jason Bullock “of the home”; her sister, Lurleen Adams of Roxboro; her mother, Vara Fernandez of Fuquay-Varina; and her father, Cody Benton of Jacksonville, Florida.

I was mildly bemused to see Dr. Jeremy Potts pictured at the bottom of the same page, along with another white-jacketed doctor. They flanked a piece of diagnostic equipment that was evidently state-of-the-art. The story was about the machine, not the doctors, so I turned to the sports pages to check out the softball pictures.

Linsey’s new photographer might have been slow with names, but he was expert with the camera. White or black, all our faces were crisp and clear. I never push, but I do make sure I’m always on the front row. Every bit of public notice, no matter how tiny, has to help subliminally at the polling booth.

Putting the plates and mugs Dwight and I had used in the dishwasher, I wiped down the countertops, then swept the kitchen and porch floor clean of crumbs and sand from last night. It’ll be next spring before my centipede grass is thick enough to make a difference with tracked-in sand. In the meantime, no matter how many doormats I scatter around, I live with the sound of grit underfoot. It’s almost as bad as a beach house.

At Aunt Zell’s, I kept my two rooms picked up and I chipped in on her twice-a-month cleaning woman, but that was about the extent of my domestic labors. Now I’m doing it all myself and part of me is amused to watch the surfacing of a heretofore latent pleasure in housework, while the other part is horrified to see myself slipping into such a stereotypical gender role.

“Long as you don’t start crocheting potholders or make people take off their shoes before they come in,” soothes my mental pragmatist.

By noon I had changed the linens on my bed and had just thrown sheets and towels in the washer when my friend Dixie called from High Point. She said she’d get me a visitor’s badge if I wanted to come over at the end of next month’s wholesale furniture market to pick up a few floor samples at dirt-cheap prices.

“Should I keep my eye out for anything in particular?” she offered.

Standing in the middle of my house and looking around at all the bare spots that surrounded a handful of shabby family castoffs, I hardly knew where to start. “A couch?” I said. “And maybe a really great coffee table? That’s all I can afford right now.”

We talked about styles and colors and whether her love life was as stalled as mine seemed to be at the moment.

Yet, as if to give lie to all my grumbling, the phone rang the instant I hung up and it was Kidd, who did a lot of grumbling on his own about having to work time and a half to compensate for his wounded colleague when he’d