“He’s such a conscientious little guy,” she said. “Caring and kind.” She looked at Dwight. “They say that his mother was killed on Thursday. Before school was out.
That Cal was left alone in the house all night. Is that true?”
Dwight nodded grimly. “That’s why he called me. Why I came up yesterday. Not that I knew she was gone. He just said that he had promised you I would come, nothing about his mother.”
“No,” she said, stirring her coffee thoughtfully. “He wouldn’t. He’s very loyal to her, even when—”
“Even when what, Miss Jackson?” I prompted
“Please. Call me Jean.” Her smile was bittersweet. “It’s not as if we’re going to have much of a parent-teacher relationship, are we? You’ll be taking him back to North Carolina, won’t you?”
Dwight nodded.
“But we’ll need his school records,” I said, determined to keep thinking positively, to assume that in the end our only worries would be mundane things like reading and math levels and whether we had all his transcripts.
She took a deep breath. “When I heard that Mrs.
Bryant had been killed, I couldn’t help wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that she had been worried about money.”
“Money?”
“This past Tuesday, Cal stayed after school to ask me if there was anything a boy like him could do to earn a lot of money. I suggested that maybe his mother might let him do extra chores around the house and he said no, that he needed the money for her. He told me that he heard her talking on the phone with his grandmother one night and she was crying because she really, really needed five thousand dollars and his grandmother wasn’t going 19 to give it to her. He was afraid something bad was going to happen if she didn’t get the money.”
“Something bad?” Dwight asked sharply.
Jean Jackson nodded. “He said that her face was going to get hurt if she couldn’t get five thousand dollars by the end of the month.”
I was shocked. Someone threatened to wreck her beautiful face if she didn’t pay up?
“Did he say who was going to do that to her?”
“He didn’t know, but he was genuinely upset. I told him I thought he ought to talk it over with his mother, make sure he hadn’t misunderstood or something. I mean, Mrs. Bryant and her friends, they’re all very well-to-do, aren’t they? I couldn’t understand how she could be crying over five thousand dollars. It would make a difference to me—I live on a teacher’s salary—but she’s a Shay, for heaven’s sake. And sure enough, Cal was okay on Wednesday. He said his mother told him she had all the money she needed and everything was fine. Only now she’s dead . . .” Her voice trailed off in doubt. “I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the two are connected?”
C H A P T E R
21
Cal’s teacher left us to join her friends and Dwight asked me if I had seen Jonna’s bank records when I was looking through her papers last night.
“No. Those state agents must have taken them.”
“Well,
In fact, she was living right up to the edge of her re-sources. There was less than seven hundred in her checking account and about five hundred in savings. She was basically working at the Morrow House to pay for medical insurance.”
“You mean she lived on what you sent for child support?”
“Not entirely. I think there’s a small family trust fund that her mother controls, because she was getting a five-hundred-dollar draft from Mrs. Shay’s bank every month.
No credit card debt, though. In fact, no debt at all except for her mortgage. Remember that speech W.C. Fields makes in
“Mr. Micawber?”
“Yeah. How the difference between happiness and mis-ery is whether you spent sixpence under your income or sixpence over?”
I nodded. As a boy, Dwight hung out at the farm so much that I grew up thinking of him as just another brother, so when we wound up in Dobbs, both of us single, we used to make popcorn and watch old videos together whenever we were both at loose ends.
“First time you and I watched that movie, I flashed on Jonna. She always knew exactly how much she had to spend and she’d spend to the limit, but she never went a dollar over. She wanted Cal’s support raised, but that was for him, not for herself. When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing how well she managed on practically nothing.”
I was instantly and painfully aware that Dwight and I are still working out our own finances and that he’s not particularly impressed with the way I handle money, but I bit my tongue before I said something bitchy, like, if money was so damn tight, why didn’t she get a real job?
