Winter's Child

right-handed? No blowback blood spatter on either hand and none on the interior window glass?”

Radcliff was right there with him. “The shooter probably held the gun on her through the window while she wrote the note, then shot her, put the gun in her hand so it’ll have her prints, rolled up the window, and was on his way.”

“Or her way,” said Dwight.

“Or her way,” Radcliff agreed. “I have to wait for the state guys, but there’s no reason you can’t go talk with Jonna’s neighbor again, see if you can get a better description of the woman.”

Leonard Carlton was dismayed to hear that Jonna was dead and indignant to think that Dwight felt he’d misled them by saying it was she who took Cal the day before.

“I told you. She had on those big wraparound sunglasses and her hood was up, so it never occurred to me that it was anybody else. Same build, same looks. You sure it wasn’t her?” He gestured to the side door clearly visible through his large window. “She came out of that door right behind the boy and he went off with her like I’ve seen them do a hundred times.”

“I don’t suppose you happened to glance over last night about the time someone let themselves into the house?”

“I don’t mind other people’s business,” said Carlton in frosty denial. Then curiosity cut the high ground out from under him. “A burglar? I thought you stayed over there last night.”

“I did. Somebody slipped in while I was asleep.”

“And you call yourself a police officer?”

“Hell of a note, isn’t it?” Dwight said wearily.

Carlton shook his white head and, to Dwight’s surprise, pulled a Palm Pilot out of the pocket of his impec-cably tailored trousers. “Perhaps it’s time I did start taking notice.” With stylus held firmly in his wrinkled hand, he looked at Dwight expectantly. “Give me your cell number. If I see your boy or that woman or anybody else going in, I’ll call you.”

After thanking the man, Dwight walked back to the front of Jonna’s house, unlocked the door, and walked through to see if last night’s intruder had returned. The light was blinking on the answering machine by the kitchen door, and he pushed the play button to listen to the new messages.

First came Mrs. Shay’s voice: “Jonna, sweetie, where are you? Why haven’t you called? You’re not still mad at me, are you? I need a few things from the grocery store and it’s too icy for me to go out. Besides, I think I’m catching a cold. Call me right back. You hear?”

That message was followed by an unfamiliar woman’s voice. She sounded slightly annoyed: “Hey, Jonna, it’s Lou. Did you forget that Cal and Jason had a playdate this morning? Call me.”

In the utility room, Bandit was whining to be let out.

Dwight knelt and petted the little dog, who seemed hungry for attention, then he turned the dog into the yard for a brief run. While he waited for Bandit to return, Dwight began to have second thoughts. Until an ME

gave them the time of death, it was theoretically possible that the woman in the blue parka had indeed been Jonna; that she had taken Cal somewhere yesterday afternoon, changed into her red jacket, then driven to meet her killer.

But where would she have taken him?

There was only one place that seemed logical. He called Paul Radcliff. “I’m going around to Jonna’s mother again. See if she’s got Cal. You got a problem with me telling her about Jonna?”

“I don’t,” came his friend’s guarded reply, “but the state guys might. They’ve officially bumped me off the case and they want to talk to you.”

“Me? Hell, Paul, I’ve been chasing my own tail since I got to town yesterday. I don’t know what was going on in her life or who— Oh,” he said, finally thinking like a cop instead of a distracted and apprehensive father.

“Yeah. Of course. Ex-husband. Fighting over the kid. No alibi for last night. Right.”

“I gotta go now, but listen.” Paul’s voice dropped another level. “Do what you want about telling Mrs. Shay, but I promised ’em that you’d meet us at the station at one o’clock.”

“I’ll be there,” Dwight said.

A thin mixture of rain and snow began to fall as he drove over to his former mother-in-law’s house. It suddenly seemed so reasonable that Jonna would have brought Cal to her mother’s that Dwight half expected his son to answer the doorbell when he rang.

Instead, it was Mrs. Shay. “Oh, Dwight! I’m so glad to see you! Did you find Jonna? She’s not answering her phone.”

“Cal’s not here?” asked Dwight.

“No, I told you. I haven’t heard from them since Thursday morning and I’m beginning to get quite worried. Have you eaten lunch? I made a pot of soup in case they do come by. On these cold days, don’t you think a nice hot bowl of soup is the perfect meal? Warms you right up, doesn’t it? My stomach hasn’t been right all week, and soup is the only thing that would agree with me today. Come on back to the kitchen. I’m embarrassed to admit that I sometimes don’t go to the trouble of carrying everything into the dining room when it’s just me.”

Dwight knew that for Mrs. Shay, “embarrassed” was not a mere figure of speech. She was a woman who clung to the standards by which she had been raised. Only the live-in housekeeper and yardman ate in the kitchen of her childhood, never her parents; and even though her own housekeeper and yardman had dwindled to a weekly cleaning woman, old habits died hard. She brought out a second linen placemat, a fine china bowl and silver soup spoon, then went to a cupboard for more crackers, which she placed on their own bread plate. For Mrs. Shay, setting the box on the table would have been “declasse,” a term Jonna had murmured more than once when offended by some of his country ways, until he was driven to find a French dictionary. “You saying I’m common?”