Winter's Child

“How’s she doing today?” Lou asked.

“Between Jonna’s death and Cal’s disappearance, that poor woman looked as if she was about to collapse yesterday,” said Jill, taking a seat on the couch.

Her straight blond hair was asymmetrically cut and had a tendency to fall over one eye so that she had to keep pushing it back. Would’ve driven me crazy, but it did help disguise the squareness of her face. It wasn’t just her hair that occupied her restless hands, though. She was someone who constantly straightened her collar, rearranged the folds of her skirt, touched her earrings, and fiddled with her rings (obligatory large diamond solitaire and a really nice emerald about half the size of Ireland).

Usually redheads are stereotyped as volatile and flighty, but Lou Cannady was much more composed than her friend. She sat gracefully in one of the period side chairs and she didn’t fidget, but her hazel eyes were watchful as we discussed Mrs. Shay’s losses.

They were both still in shock that Jonna had been shot in what appeared to be a deliberate, cold-blooded murder, and they were dismayed to hear that I had no inside information on why anyone would want her dead.

“I believe Cal’s dad is a sheriff’s deputy?” she asked, moving on to the other aspects of this situation. “Is he involved with the investigation?”

I nodded. “We’re both doing everything we can.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Jill, brushing blond hair from her eyes. “You’re a judge, aren’t you?”

Again I nodded. Well, it was natural that Jonna would have spoken of us to her closest friends. Portland Brewer and I certainly would have.

“I saw the yearbooks in Jonna’s house,” I said. “The Three Musketeers. You three have been tight forever, haven’t you?”

“Since Miss Sophie’s Playschool,” Lou said sadly.

“Grade school, high school, college. It was such a shock when she went off to visit a friend in Germany and wound up marrying an Army officer instead of someone here in town. Of course, he was very good-looking.”

“Still is,” I said, smiling.

“And really, Lou, who was left here?” asked Jill, adjusting the gold loop in her earlobe. “You and I got the best of her leavings and she was too picky for anyone else.”

I like to think I have a poker face but that catty remark must have registered because Lou smiled and said,

“You’ll have to excuse Jill. She never got over the fact that Forrest proposed to Jonna first and Jonna turned him down.”

“Oh, and like Dale wasn’t in love with her first, too.”

“Every boy in our crowd was in love with Jonna first,”

Lou agreed calmly, as she tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear, “but not all of them got down on bended knee with a ring.”

Jill Edwards had a blonde’s fair skin and she flushed in annoyance. “I’m sure Judge Knott isn’t interested in all this ancient history.”

Lou gave a wicked grin. “I bet she is. I certainly would be.”

I laughed outright and Jill gave a grudging smile.

“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t help feeling that the more I know about Jonna’s life here in Shaysville, the better I’ll understand Cal.”

Sudden tears pooled in Jill’s blue eyes. “Poor kid.”

“How can we help?” asked Lou. “What do you want to know?”

I told them to call me Deborah, and at first I just listened to what they had to say about their murdered friend, the shock of it, their sense of loss. It wasn’t that no one had ever been murdered in Shaysville, rather that no one they knew had. They were warm in their praise of Jonna and had funny stories about the mischief they had gotten into as kids. I gathered that she had been their leader since the Miss Sophie days. She was the prettiest, her people had founded the town and had produced its most illustrious sons, so her blood was the bluest. She had the best sense of style and she was acknowledged to be the smartest of the three. Maybe not academically, although her grades had been decent enough in school, but she was savvy about people and situations, which was probably the real reason why she had married so far outside their crowd, Lou said candidly, as if realizing for the first time how claustrophobic “our crowd” could be.

They had not been surprised, though, that the marriage had failed “because after all,” Jill said, “this is where her roots were and what would a lawman like Dwight Bryant do here?”

Not that there was anything wrong with being a lawman, they quickly assured me, but the opportunities here were so limited that they didn’t really blame him for has-tening the end of the marriage by not wanting to come to Shaysville with Jonna.

I didn’t bother to explain that coming to Shaysville had never been an option so far as I knew. Evidently Jonna had given them a slightly different version of the divorce from the one Dwight had told me.

“Who are you going to believe?” asked the preacher. “Theman you’ve known all your life or the secondhand reports ofher partisan friends?”

The pragmatist remained silent, withholding judgment.

“What about her sister?” I asked. “Was she part of your crowd?”

“Oh, sure,” said Jill as she removed a stray thread from her skirt. “She was a year ahead of us in school, but in some ways it was as if Jonna were older. Pam seemed to look up to her instead of the other way around. But she was popular in her own way, very cute and funny. She and Jonna used to be really close.”