herself, whether out of deference to her elderly aunt’s ears or the ears of the two little ones, and changed it to “Real jerk.”
“I remember him,” Jane Ann said, nibbling on a broken cookie. “You’ve seen him around too, Annie Sue. He was at A.K.’s birthday party. Tall blond guy? Blue convertible?”
Her cousin reached for the other part of the cookie. “Acted like he was God’s gift to women?”
“He’s a senior this year and even more stuck on himself than last year,” Jess assured them.
“Be fair,” Emma protested. “He’s really nice when you get to know him.”
They stared at her and she flushed a bright red.
All the Knott kids have blue eyes, relatively fair skin, and hair that ranges from light brown to blond, but Emma had inherited Barbara’s delicate pink complexion and her long hair was the color of spring dandelions.
“Please tell me you are not getting to know Kevin Crowder,” Jane Ann said sternly.
The flush on Emma’s cheeks spread across her whole face and up into her hairline.
“Oops!” I cried, reaching for a potholder. “Anybody remember when that last pan of cookies went in?”
Someone had left a nearly empty glass of milk beside the potholder right on the edge of the counter. A tiny imperceptible nudge as I picked up the potholder was enough to send it careening toward the floor.
Jess and Annie Sue both lunged for it. Spraying milk on their sweaters, it bounced off their hands toward Mary Pat, whose misjudged grab swatted it across the room where it shattered against the edge of the refrigerator.
More of a mess than I had intended, but by the time all the milk and glass were cleaned up, the sweaters sponged off, and the last sheets of cookies were out of the oven, conversation had moved on to other topics less interesting to Melissa and Mary Pat. When I brought out the bottle of bourbon to mix up those sinfully delicious bourbon balls, they wrinkled up their little noses and decided to go see what the boys were up to.
I made a fresh pot of coffee and Ruth and Emma used my food processor to turn several cups of toasted pecans into tiny bits. Jane Ann and Jessica pounded vanilla wafers into crumbs and Annie Sue measured out butter and powdered sugar.
For a wedding gift last year, the local bar association gave Dwight and me a huge ceramic bowl they had commissioned from the Jugtown Pottery over in Seagrove. The bowl is big enough to serve coleslaw to the whole family at a pig-picking, and it’s also perfect for mixing up a family-size batch of bourbon balls. I drizzled melted butter over all the dry ingredients, then poured in the bourbon. A big wooden spoon passed from hand to hand as we each stirred the stiff mixture till our arms gave out.
I may have been a little too lavish with the bourbon, because when Annie Sue took her turn with the wooden spoon, she immediately began to warble:
When everything was thoroughly mixed and the coffee was ready, we carried our mugs to the dining table and set the big bowl in the middle so everyone could reach in, pinch off some dough, and shape it into one-inch balls. As soon as one cake box was filled, it was carried out to a workbench in the garage to chill and another took its place.
With so many hands dipping in and out of the bowl, I knew it wouldn’t take long to finish, so while there were no loose-lipped little kids in the room, I said, “So, Emma. Can we assume that Kevin Crowder’s house is on a straight line between South Colleton and your house?”
She stared at me, stricken, then whispered, “Who told you?”
I wasn’t about to say that it was her own evasion of my first question that tipped me off, and now her guilty look confirmed my suspicions.
“Please,” she said, imploring the others as much as me. “Don’t tell Mother. She’ll blame Lee, too, and it’s not his fault. Laurie Evans broke up with her boyfriend and asked if we could drop her at the party ’cause she didn’t want to ride with him and she knew we’d be going right past Kevin’s house. I talked Lee into it. See, Kevin sits next to me in study hall. That’s how I know him. I told him I couldn’t go, but everybody was so pumped about beating South we didn’t want the night to end—it really was only for a few minutes. But his parents weren’t home and there were some older kids there that we didn’t know and one of them was high on something, so Lee made me leave before I could even take off my jacket, but Mother will kill us if she finds out. The only reason she let me join the varsity squad was because I promised I wouldn’t try to act like I was a junior or senior.”
The words tumbled out in such a rush that she was almost crying, and Jessica reached out to pat her arm. “It’s okay, Em. We won’t tell. None of us will, will we?”
The girls all shook their heads and looked at me.
“I won’t tell either,” I said slowly, “but the boy that was high? Were there drugs at the party?”
“I don’t
“But Mallory was there?”
“We all were. The whole squad and most of the varsity players.”
“Was she okay at the game?”
“Sure. She was starting to get a cold and her voice sounded a little raspy. She did take a pill, but it was just a Benadryl tablet. And she was drinking lots of liquids to try and flush the cold out of her system.”
“What about at the party?”
Emma shrugged. “She had a Coke can in her hand when we got there, and there was booze on one of the counters, but I’m sure she didn’t put any in her drink if that’s what you mean. Bridget’s the only—”
She clapped a sticky guilty hand to her mouth as if to block the words we’d already heard her say.
Jane Ann pounced on them in disapproving surprise. “Bridget Honeycutt drinks?”
I suppose I should have appreciated the irony of the situation. Here we sat, up to our wrists in bourbon-
