Rituals of the Season

“Whoa, now,” said Dwight. “That’s a real stretch from your mama thinking Martha Hurst is innocent to Tracy Johnson fitting somebody else in the picture after all this time.”

Kayra bit into the pointed end of her pizza slice and sighed. “I just wish we had more than your mother’s intuition.”

“It is more than intuition,” Nolan protested. “He was killed with her good bat.”

A collective “Huh?” went up from the other three of us.

“Maybe it’s in the files Mr. Stephenson said we could look at.”

Dwight looked at me. “Deb’rah?”

I licked tomato sauce from my fingers. “There was a list of items removed from the trailer in Brix Junior’s discovery,” I said, and went to see if I could find the file I remembered.

I had to rummage through two boxes before I found the right one. “Here it is.” I ran my finger down the list. “A DeMarini aluminum softball bat.”

Another item further down caught my eye—an Easton softball bat.

“Easton,” I told Dwight. “Isn’t that the brand your softball team uses?”

He nodded. “DeMarinis are way too expensive for us.”

“That’s what I mean.” Nolan’s dark face was eager and expressive and he gestured so forcibly with his slice of pizza that a mushroom went flying across the table. “If Martha Hurst was like Mom, she had at least two or three bats, but the others would only be practice bats. The DeMarini would be her game bat. Mom said that Martha’s had a monster sweet spot—it was the perfect length, the perfect weight, and had a sweet spot to die for. Everybody was jealous of it. I don’t know what fastpitch DeMarinis cost back then—the company hadn’t been in business very long—but two years ago I went in with my brother and sister to buy Mom a slowpitch DeMarini for Christmas and it was over two hundred dollars.”

“Two hundred dollars!” I was incredulous. I hadn’t bought a bat since Stevie was in Little League, but it never occurred to me that a bat of any description could cost more than forty or fifty.

“And you better believe that Mom would use a fence post before she’d take batting practice with that good bat and risk a dent.”

Didn’t seem like much of an argument to me, and Dwight was looking as skeptical as I felt. “Maybe not if she was thinking clearly,” I said, “but Martha Hurst had a history of impulsive violence and I seriously doubt that she would’ve stopped to think about which bat she was going to smash somebody with. She would’ve just grabbed up the first one that came to hand.”

“Mom wouldn’t,” Nolan said stubbornly. “She absolutely would not and she says Ms. Hurst wouldn’t either.”

He argued that this was proof enough for him, but finally had to admit that the choice of bats was a slender thread from which to try to weave a lifeline. While Dwight and I changed into old work clothes, he and Kayra cleared the table, stacked the dishwasher, and then spread Brix Junior’s files on the table to read through everything themselves.

I brushed my teeth and rinsed away all traces of anchovies before joining Dwight in our new bedroom. April and the others had really knocked themselves out today. The bathroom was technically finished, although one of them had left a note warning us not to use the shower for two more days. In fact, all the construction work was finished. They had painted the walls a deep forest green like my old bedroom and the trim already had one coat of white enamel. The only thing lacking was the second coat, which Dwight and I eventually got around to. Being latex, the enamel dried so quickly that we got Nolan and Kayra to help us move in the bed and dresser so that we could begin refurbishing my old room for Cal.

I remade the bed while they brought in lamps and a blanket chest that doubled as a bench under the window. “What about her husband?” I asked.

“Gene Hurst? He had a stroke last year,” said Nolan.

Kayra nodded. “Now he’s in a nursing home over in Angier. We went to see him yesterday, but it was a waste of time. His mind’s totally gone.”

“But Mom says he stuck by Martha all through the trial. Never believed she did it.”

“We’re going to canvass the trailer park tomorrow,” said Kayra. “See if anybody remembers the murder. In our law clinic, we learned that sometimes people will talk more freely after a few years have passed. They’ll give up details and facts they wouldn’t tell investigators the first time around.”

The printer for my laptop doubles as a copier and they made copies of the witness lists and of the items removed from the Hurst trailer. I repeated my observation that none of the items seemed to include bloodstained clothing or footwear and they immediately made the obvious speculations I had made to Dwight earlier. No bloody clothes was a talking point and their optimism wasn’t dimmed by Dwight’s suggestion that she could have stepped out of the shower and then went ballistic when she found her stepson/former lover there again after she’d already thrown him out.

I made a pot of coffee and we kicked it around another half-hour till Dwight muffled a yawn and Kayra announced that it was time for them to leave.

“But could you let us look through any of the records in your office?” she asked him as they zipped up their jackets and pulled on gloves.

“Sure, although everything that was presented at the trial will be in the clerk of court’s office,” he replied.

“But wouldn’t you have stuff that wasn’t used at the trial? Like a statement about her bats?” asked Nolan, clinging to his theory.

“Not that I know of, but I’ll take a look for you.”

We walked out on the porch with them. A frigid wind bit at our unprotected faces. The rain had stopped and there were even a few stars peeking through the broken clouds, but the steps were so icy that Nolan’s feet went out from under him and he would have fallen if Dwight hadn’t grabbed him.