Rituals of the Season

“I’ll tell you later,” I said.

“No, you won’t,” said April. “You promised.”

“I thought it doesn’t count if you tell secrets to your mate.”

“He’s not officially your mate. Not till the veil is pushed away,” she said, which only set us off again.

Dwight just shook his head at us and hung his jacket on the back of one of the ladderback chairs.

“Y’all want to come for supper?” April said as she slipped on her coat and pulled car keys from the pocket. “Andrew and A.K. are cooking a fresh ham on the gas grill.”

“Thanks, but we’ve got another dinner at Jerry’s tonight,” I told her.

As she started out the door, April remembered that she’d stopped by the mailbox yesterday and picked up my mail, but had then forgotten to give it to me, so I walked out to the car with her. She slid into the driver’s seat and handed me a stack of envelopes, junk mail, and catalogs through the open window.

“You’re getting circles under your eyes,” she said, giving me a critical look. “Don’t let yourself get so tired you wind up at the altar too exhausted to give a straight answer.”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“You and Dwight need to get to bed early tonight.” She thought about what she was saying and grinned. “Or is that part of the problem?”

I drew myself up in mock indignation. “Why, Miz April, I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, and if we believe that, Denise has a veil she’ll lend you.”

Back in the house, Dwight had lit a fire in the hearth and was now stretched out on the couch to watch the end of a ball game. Suffused with happiness and feeling domestic as hell, I sat down on a nearby lounge chair to open my mail. Among the Christmas cards was one from Judge Bill Neely and his wife, Anne-Kemp, from over in Asheboro. Across the bottom of the card, he’d written, “I hear the Barrister Boys got to play at one of the parties for you. I demand equal time. How about I pipe you down the aisle?”

The Barrister Boys (a.k.a. “Fast Eddie and the Scumbags”) are a band of attorneys in Bill’s district. I’m very fond of Bill and I’m told he’s actually as competent on the Irish pipes as his friends are on guitar and banjo, but the only time I want to hear bagpipes is outdoors.

From a distance.

Like maybe two or three miles.

Dwight smiled sleepily when I read him Bill’s mock offer. “I want to be there when you run that one past Nadine and Doris.”

There were cards from friends I hadn’t seen since law school, and cards from my West Coast brothers, who had promised to come east for the wedding and stay on for Christmas.

“It’ll be good to see the whole family together again,” Frank’s wife Mae wrote. She enclosed pictures of their grandchildren.

One card showered a cascade of silver confetti in my lap when I opened it. It was from my carny niece, who was sorry their schedule wouldn’t permit them to come up from Florida in time, “but we’re playing a Shriner’s Christmas festival then.”

I slit open another envelope and caught my breath when I saw the picture inside. Mei Johnson was dressed in a red velvet dress, white tights, and a fur-trimmed Santa hat, and she held a white plush dog in her pudgy little hands. “Hope you and Dwight have a good one, too,” Tracy had written.

Too?

I studied the picture through a glaze of tears. Here I was with my life still opening up before me like a stocking full of Christmas surprises while Mei’s and Tracy’s were both finished. No more surprises. No more Christmases.

The envelope was postmarked Thursday. I turned to show it to Dwight, but he was sound asleep.

I hadn’t yet found a casual way to ask him what his detectives found in Tracy’s house, but if it was evidence of a lover, where was he? Why wasn’t he camped out in Dwight’s office demanding action and results?

“More women are killed by their mates than by strangers,” said the worldly pragmatist who lurks in the back of my head and always sees the dark lining of every silver cloud.

“Maybe he’s out of town and doesn’t yet know,” soothed the preacher who shares head space and believes in the power of positive thinking.

I left Dwight sleeping and went out to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine. Brix Junior’s file boxes were on the counter where Dwight had put them. Why had Tracy asked to see them? And what exactly had been going on in her head these last few days?

I lifted the lids and looked at the notations on the file tabs. They were in roughly chronological order, so I took the earliest box over to the kitchen table, got out a legal pad and pen for making notes, took a sip of wine, and began reading.

As is often the case, a lot of the papers were duplicates. Nevertheless, it took me nearly two hours and a second glass of wine to skim through Brix Junior’s preliminary notes, the warrant for Martha Hurst’s arrest, her first appearance and probable cause hearing, and all the witness statements, search warrants, ME’s report, investigating officers’ reports, etc., etc.

In clear English, it boiled down to a simple set of facts. On a hot Friday in August, sheriff’s deputies had been summoned to the Sandy Grove Mobile Estates, lot #81. It was not their first visit to this particular house trailer. This time, however, it wasn’t to put an end to a loud three-way domestic argument between husband and wife and the husband’s adult son. This visit was triggered by an anonymous call—“Somebody’s got hisself kilt,” said an indeterminate female voice.

When deputies arrived, the somebody proved to be Roy Hurst, a white male, age twenty-six. From the smells