The Colleton County Sheriff’s Department is located in the courthouse basement and as soon as I’d adjourned court and stashed my robe, I went downstairs to give Dwight the swim trunks he’d left at my house on Sunday and which I’d forgotten to give him when he was out yesterday.
The shifts had just changed and he sat at his desk in short sleeves, his tie loosened and his seersucker jacket hanging on the coatrack. Labor Day might be the official end of white shoes for women, but Dwight never puts away his summer clothes till the weather starts getting serious about colder temperatures.
“Any luck with that man in the room next to Lynn Bullock’s?” I asked idly. “The New Jersey license plate?”
We’ve known each other for so long and he’s so used to me asking nosy questions about things that are technically none of my business that half the time he’ll just go ahead and answer.
“Connecticut,” he said now, distracted by a report he was reading. “No help at all. Turns out the guy’s a sales rep for a drug company, on his way home from a sales conference in Florida. Got in around ten, left the next morning before nine. Says he didn’t see or hear anything and probably didn’t.”
Dwight signed the paper he was reading, closed the folder, tossed it into his out-basket, then leaned back in his chair and propped his big feet on the edge of his desk.
“We got the ME’s report. He says Lynn Bullock bought the farm sometime between five and eight, although we know she called her husband at five and someone called her at five-ten. That means she was dead before Connecticut ever checked in.”
“What about John Claude’s pens? Reid and Sherry show you theirs?”
“Yeah. But the store had five to start with. I’ve got Mayleen Richards working on it.”
“There must be hundreds of them like that around,” I speculated.
“Not as many as you’d think.” He gestured toward the yellow legal pad that lay just beyond his reach. It was covered with doodles and notes that he’d taken when Deputy Richards gave her report. “The national distributor swears that he imported a hundred and fifty and only five of those were sent to this area. ’Course, the way people are moving in from all over, who knows? The whole hundred and fifty could’ve worked their way back east by now.”
I smiled. “Good thing we still had ours.”
“Good for Reid, anyhow.”
Even though I hadn’t
“You’re just going through the motions,” I said. “You know you don’t think Reid could do a thing like that.”
“I quit saying what a person could or couldn’t do a long time ago.”
Dwight’s only a few years older, but sometimes he acts as if those years confer a superior insight into human motivations. He gave a big yawn, stretched full length, then sat upright and opened another folder. “If we don’t get a viable suspect in the next twenty-four hours though, I’m going to start looking at all her old boyfriends a little closer. Millard King says he was jogging. Brandon Frazier says he went fishing. Alone. And Reid didn’t get to the ball field till after six. Remember?”
I wondered whose reputation would go in the toilet if Reid had to tell what bed he’d been in that afternoon.
Speak of the devil and up he jumps.
Thunder rumbled overhead and rain sprinkled the sidewalks as I hurried toward the parking lot before the heavens opened all the way and drenched my dark red rayon blouse. It isn’t that I mind the wet so much, but that particular blouse starts to shrink the minute water touches it—rather like the wicked witch when Dorothy empties the water bucket on her—and I was supposed to attend an official function that evening.
I slid into my car just as the rain started in earnest and there was Reid’s car parked by mine, nose to tail, so that we were facing each other. Reid powered down his window. With the rain slanting into his window instead of mine, I did the same.
“Feel like going to Steve’s for supper?” he said.
“Not particularly.”
My cousin Steve runs a barbecue house down Highway 48, a little ways past the farm, and it’s the best barbecue in Colleton County, but I was pigged out at the moment. During election season, that’s all they seem to serve at fund-raisers. “Why?”
“No reason. Just thought it might be fun to go by for the singing. Y’all still do that every week?”
“Yes, but that’s on Wednesdays.”
I almost had to smile. My brothers and cousins and anybody else that’s interested get together informally at Steve’s after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to sing and play bluegrass and gospel. It’s so country and Reid’s so town. He doesn’t play an instrument, he doesn’t know the words and he’s never dropped in when we were jamming except by accident.
“Well, maybe tomorrow night then?”
Rain pelted his face. His tan shirt and brown-striped tie were getting wet, yet he didn’t raise his window as he waited for my answer.
It was after five o’clock and I had plans for the evening, so I quit trying to figure out what he really wanted and said, “Sure.”
Maybe he’d hit me with it before I had to watch him make a fool of himself at Steve’s.
* * *
A month earlier, Cyl DeGraffenried and I had been asked to participate in a “Women in Law” forum at Kirkland
