Winter's Child

And another of those two with a third woman who had the same family features. Probably Jonna’s sister.

Also on the shelf were four high school yearbooks that had been looked at so often that they were almost falling apart. I took down the last one and flipped to the back.

Guess who had been homecoming queen twenty-five years ago?

And part of her court? Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards.

Only back then, they were Lou Freeman and Jill Booker.

The Three Musketeers.

To my amusement, her junior year annual fell open to a picture of the girls and damned if it wasn’t labeled “The Three Musketeers of Shaysville High.”

A sheet of paper slipped from the yearbook. It was an alphabetized list of over a hundred names and seemed to be the kids who had graduated in Jonna’s class. She had methodically drawn lines through four of the names and written “dead” beside them. For the rest, she had entered married names and current addresses, highlighting those whose addresses included “S’ville.” It would appear that a twenty-fifth reunion was in the offing and that she was chair of the class gift committee.

Soon someone else would be chairing that committee. A line would be drawn through Jonna’s name, and sometime during the reunion evening there would be a moment of silence for the classmates no longer there. Then the laugh-ter and chatter and remember-whens would resume with nothing more than a brief shadow over the gathering.

I sighed and turned back to the file drawer in Jonna’s desk.

A Morrow House file contained a sheaf of faded Xerox copies that had started to cornflake around the edges.

The top sheet identified it as the bicentennial inventory of the Morrow House, and it appeared to list every teacup, law book, or artifact in the historic house. Different hands had added items since 1976 and I recognized Jonna’s writing in a few places. Within the past six months, a Nathan Benton had given a CSA brass belt buckle, circa 1863; a Catherine D. Schmerner had donated a lady’s hand mirror; and a Betty Coates Ramos had given a letter written in April of 1893 to one J.

Coates from P. Morrow. There was a question mark beside the hand mirror, then, in a different-colored ink, but still Jonna’s writing, she had added, “Ebony, inlaid with silver, ca. 1840.” All four items had been entered under the proper room, along with a dated accession number. I seemed to remember some mention that Jonna was taking inventory. Maybe that was why she had scheduled extra days at the Morrow House?

Another folder held the paperwork to her divorce from Dwight. No way was I going to look at those, although clearly the police had, judging from the way the papers were jammed in so crookedly.

It was none of my business. It was old news, over and done with before Dwight came back to Colleton County.

It was—oh, well. What the hell?

She had saved the ED pages, and as I had suspected, they showed that she had royally screwed Dwight. The valuations on her share of their marital possessions were much lower than the ones on his. She got all the furniture and the car; he got his clothes, a lawn mower, some books and tapes, the smaller of their two televisions, and the truck he’d owned back then. That was basically it.

Nevertheless, he somehow wound up having to pay her a few thousand extra to attain what the presiding judge had deemed “equitable.”

Well, I’d known all along that he hadn’t fought the settlement. His reasoning was that anything she got would make life better for Cal, and who can fault a father for that?

Digging deeper in the file, I realized that Dwight was still paying child support based on his D.C. salary, which seven years later was still a little higher than what he currently earns with the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. Now, that I hadn’t known, and it made me angry to think how he had occasionally taken on extra work so as to afford something Jonna said Cal needed.

But Jonna had known about the salary difference because here was a printout of the base salaries for Colleton County employees. Public records. And damn! Here was the salary range for district court judges with an approxi- mation of my salary circled and added to Dwight’s. More question marks in the margin. Dollars to doughnuts, she was planning to go back to court and ask that Cal’s child support be raised on the strength of Dwight’s increased household earnings. I wasn’t clear on Virginia law, but good luck with that, I thought. Wait’ll Portland hears.

And then, abruptly, it hit me anew that Jonna was dead. This was never going to come to court.

Clipped to the salary sheet was an account of our wedding that had appeared in the Ledger, Dobbs’s biweekly paper. A couple of papers later, I found a printout of the write- up the Raleigh News & Observer had carried.

It occurred to me that Jonna either had someone looking stuff up for her on the Internet or that she used a 18 computer at work and was no babe-in-the-woods Luddite. This would also explain how Agents Lewes and Clark knew I was a judge.

There was a hanging file labeled “Medical Records.”

An empty hanging file. They must have taken those to discuss with her doctor.

By now it was almost three-thirty, so I switched off the light and, rather than disturb Dwight, crawled into Cal’s bed. Bandit curled up at my feet and promptly went to sleep. I lay there with my eyes wide open trying to understand why such a thoroughly normal—even rather dull—small-town mother should have been killed.

Then I fell asleep, too.

Sometime later, I felt Bandit jump off the bed. I had a vague awareness that Dwight was moving around in the doorway—probably checking to see where I was—but I was too far under to do more than mumble sleepily, “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”