Winter's Child

The rituals of death.

“When?”

“Probably Tuesday morning. I called Mrs. Shay while they were checking out your head.”

I looked at the sleeping child. “You’ll have to tell him.”

He nodded.

“And help him talk about all of it, including this night-mare with Pam. We can’t let him bottle it up.”

“I know.”

“And your mother! I promised we’d call her this evening.”

“I already did. She’ll pass the word on to Mr. Kezzie and Minnie. She said to tell you that Kate and the baby will come home tomorrow.”

“A new baby.” One life ended, another begun. “Another first cousin for Cal.”

“This is going to be so damn hard on him,” he said.

I nodded.

“On you, too.”

“Oh, Dwight—”

“We’ve both read the magazine articles, seen the pop psychologists on all those talk shows. Hell, we’ve seen it in your courtroom and my jail.”

“Yes.”

“He’s going to be sad and angry and he’ll probably take it out on you more than me.”

“Like Andrew,” I said.

“Andrew?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about that? When Daddy’s first wife died, they say it was a neighborhood scandal how quickly he married Mother. The younger boys were too young to hold on to Annie Ruth’s memory, and Robert and Frank were old enough to be reasoned with, but Andrew was old enough to remember and too young to understand. He resented the hell out of her for years.”

“But he loved Miss Sue,” Dwight protested.

“Took him till he was twenty-five to come around’s what I always heard. I just hope it won’t take Cal that long.”

He held me closer. “We’ll work it out. I promise you we’ll work it out.”

I laid my head against his chest and was comforted by the strong steady beat of his heart. We stood there in the moonlight for several long moments until Paul Radcliff discreetly cleared his throat from the doorway. He carried my coat and purse and Cal’s teddy bear and he also came bearing news of an arrest.

“Those pictures you found let us get a search warrant for Nathan Benton’s house,” he said. “Soon as Betty Ramos saw them, she recognized that every one of those items were things Benton had given the Morrow House.

She’s one pissed-off lady right now. Kept saying, ‘Well, no wonder he found treasures every time he turned around. I could find treasures, too, if I shopped in museums and used a five-finger discount.’ Turns out he has his own private museum down in his basement.”

“Does he say why he killed Jonna?” I asked.

“Swears he had nothing to do with her death and is admitting nothing. Claims he bought everything at flea markets or antiques stores. Knows nothing about the pictures on Jonna’s computer and was shocked—absolutely shocked, I tell you—to hear that they were stolen. In fact, 2 he’s claiming that it’s all a bunch of coincidences because none of the items are one-of-a-kind. He says they were manufactured by the thousands. Once we find the guns we’ll nail him on them if nothing else, though, because they’ll have serial numbers. And Lewes thinks that when the lab goes over the stuff microscopically, they’ll find ID

marks from some of the true owners. Clark did a quick computer search for reported thefts, and in a couple of cases, a man who fits Benton’s description was the last visitor before the things went missing. There are places like the Morrow House all over the country with non-existent security and display cases that wouldn’t stop a two-year- old.”

“But Jonna?”

“I’m afraid it’s all going to be circumstantial if we can’t find some eyewitnesses besides Pam.”

Dwight frowned. “Pam?”

“We tried to question her, but it’s hard to separate reality from delusion. Best we can tell, she was watching from the upper landing of the Morrow House Thursday morning when Benton came out of the library with a gun and forced Jonna from the house. She heard him threaten to find Cal and kill him if Jonna didn’t come quietly.

Somehow all this got mixed up in her head that Benton was a slave-catcher, so when Jonna didn’t come back by next day, she thought she had to save Cal from being sent back into slavery, too. I don’t have to tell y’all what a defense lawyer would do with her testimony, right? For right now, the only thing he’s charged with is theft.”

He gave a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders.

Dwight insisted that I take the cot and I didn’t fight him. After swallowing more aspirins, I drifted into restless sleep. Sometime after midnight, I became aware of low voices and lay motionless as I heard Dwight say, “—it’s to help you get all that cough syrup out of your system. The codeine’s what’s made you so groggy.”

“But I quit taking that last week. Mother said it was too strong.”