“ ‘But he
“I told him even dead people got debts, debts him and his family ought to’ve paid, and you shoulda seen him puff up at that,” Bostrom told Richards. “He was a lot bigger’n me, but I just started cleaning my nails with my pocketknife here”—as if by magic, a wicked-looking switchblade appeared in his hands—“and he climbed back down. I told him to chill. He didn’t have to go all the way to Florida. The buyer was with a carnival right here in North Carolina. Ames Amusement.”
“So was his grandfather an artist or something?” asked Richards.
“You’d think he was Rembrandt to hear that guy run on about it, but the old man used to come over here and paint right out there in his locker. All the stuff I ever saw looked like the pictures my wife Jane puts on our refrigerator from our grandbabies.”
Bostrom showed her the deceased artist’s address. It was just over in Darkside, less than a quarter mile away.
CHAPTER 14
DEBORAH KNOTT
MIDDAY MONDAY
When I got back after lunch, I found April waiting impatiently by the rear door of my courtroom. She looked like a teacher again. Her brown curls were tidy, makeup tamed her freckles, and she wore a crisply pressed beige cotton jumper over a short-sleeved white shirt.
“Dwight’s taken her out to her place in the country,” she said as soon as I got close enough to hear her above passing clerks and several attorneys with their clients, “and her husband didn’t know when they’d be back. I called home and Andrew’s sober for the moment, so I’m going to go on now and talk to him before I pick up the children when they get out of school.” Her voice dropped. “I don’t want Ruth and A.K. hearing about this from their cousins. What I need for you to do is go out there when you’re through with court this evening and tell her that we’ll all be there for the service tomorrow. Minnie and Isabel and Doris and Mae are going to fix lunch and you know them. There’ll be enough to feed anybody she wants to come. I expect she’ll want her own friends to be there, so you be sure and tell her that, all right?”
“Okay,” I said, but I was talking to the air. She was already halfway down the hall and nearly collided with my cousin Reid, who held the door open for her.
He gave me a half-embarrassed grin as our eyes met and he saw my eyebrow arch.
“I see you heard,” he said as he came up to me.
Despite what had happened with Dwight and me last night, his behavior Friday night wasn’t very commendable.
“Pretty shabby, Reid,” I told him. “Even for you.”
“What do you mean, even for me?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. Dwight’s your friend.”
“Well, hell, Deborah, he’s had since June to take it up the next level.”
“Take it up, or take Sylvia Clayton down?” I asked snidely.
“That relationship was going nowhere,” he assured me.
I gave him a jaundiced look. “And this one is?”
“Aren’t you late for court?” he countered, holding open the door so that I automatically entered the courtroom without thinking.
Equally automatically, the bailiff jumped to his feet and said, “All rise!” and there was nothing I could do except take my seat on the bench.
Smirking, Reid sat down as everyone else sat, too, and the clerk handed me a sheet with three add-ons. Janice Needham was clerking for me today, but her chair was far enough away from mine that I was out of reach of her compulsive fingers. Once I forgot, though, and handed her a form that put the sleeve of my robe within range. She immediately picked off a piece of lint.
“Wasn’t it awful about what happened at the carnival Friday night?” she whispered to me while we waited for the DA to confer with one of the defendants and her lawyer. “He seemed like such a nice young man. For a carnival worker, I mean.”
“Nice” wasn’t the description I’d heard used by anyone except perhaps his mother.
“You met him?”
“Well, not really. But Bradley started talking to him when he got change and then while I was playing, they talked back and forth about what it was like to travel with a carnival and what he did during the winter months. From what he told Bradley, I think he was planning to leave the carnival soon and go into the antique business. I won back three of my quarters and a real cute little bracelet, see?”
She held out her wrist. It was encircled by a tennis bracelet set with pink glass stones. Probably retailed for a dollar ninety-eight at one of those teenybopper stores at the mall. I didn’t ask her how many quarters it’d cost her. Besides, it did match her pink blouse and pink headband.
“Pretty,” I said, and turned my attention to the grandmother who took the stand to explain to me woman-to- woman why it was cruel to keep a tired child belted in a car seat when all that precious little thing wanted to do was stretch out across the backseat and go to sleep in comfort.
I asked her if she’d ever seen what a precious little thing looked like after being thrown from a car when it flipped off the road doing sixty miles an hour, then gave her the stiffest fine I could and told the DA to call his next case.
