she could have spiked her own drink or stolen the Vicodin as easily as any other kid at the party, couldn’t she?”
“In theory, I suppose,” Miss Emily said, “but I never heard that she did drugs or touched alcohol, and I do hear things, Deborah.”
If there was a touch of pride in her tone, she had earned it. From all I’ve heard from my nieces and nephews, very little goes on at West Colleton that Emily Bryant doesn’t know about in time to do something if something needs doing.
“Did you hear whether Charlie was one of the older kids at the party?”
She shook her head. “Was he?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. Or rather that’s what Dwight’s going to be asking. Somebody had to have slipped something in her drink can.”
“Surely not her own brother,” Miss Emily protested.
“He was jealous of her, wasn’t he? Sounds like she came first in that family. Jessica told me that she was set to go to Carolina in the fall and that Malcolm planned a trip to Spain as her graduation gift. Charlie goes to Colleton Community College. Wonder what his graduation gift was?”
“Not a trip to Spain,” she agreed.
“So there’s at least one person who didn’t think she was as perfect as everyone says.”
“Two persons,” my mother-in-law said quietly.
“You?”
“It sounds so awful to say this when right this very minute they’re getting ready to lower her into the grave. It’s like I’m throwing a shovelful of dirt on her coffin myself.”
“But?”
“But no, Mallory Johnson didn’t actually walk on water. She was everything you’ve heard—pretty, talented, intelligent, good student, a friendly word for everyone. Sweet and thoughtful. Polite to her elders—”
“Didn’t kick small animals or pull wings off flies?” I added cynically.
“Actually, she may have done a little bit of wing-pulling, but so subtly the poor fly didn’t realize it was happening till it dawned on her that she could no longer fly.”
“That’s too metaphorical for me,” I said. “Plain English, please?”
The windows were as fogged up as her words and I switched on the defroster. As the windows cleared, so did her meaning.
“Mallory could have had anyone she wanted, but she didn’t want a steady boyfriend, which is not unusual these days. The kids don’t pair off the way they still did when you and Dwight were teenagers. That doesn’t mean there can’t be some rather intense relationships within the group, and Mallory liked to mess with those. She was very open about it. Claimed she was just a little ol’ tease who couldn’t stop herself from flirting with every boy around, like it was all a joke. And because she didn’t take it seriously, nobody else was supposed to. But sometimes the boys would be so dazzled, it spoiled them for whatever more ordinary girl they’d been perfectly happy with before.”
I suddenly remembered Jess’s quiet “Tell me a single guy in this school who
“I think she enjoyed being Little Miss Wonderful just a little too much,” Miss Emily said. “She worked hard at it and I daresay most everyone thought she
“Egotism?” I suggested.
“No.” She was silent as the windshield wipers swept back and forth in front of us. “Complacency,” she said at last. “That’s what it was. Complacency.”
When I got home, before taking off my coat and barely saying hey to Dwight, who was on the phone, I went straight to the dictionary on my desk:
CHAPTER 13
—
When I walked back into the living room, unbuttoning my coat and fluffing my damp hair, Cal was lying on his stomach beside the tree to read a book and watch the train go around. Dwight was still on the phone, getting his Sunday afternoon update from the various divisions within the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. Learning who spiked Mallory Johnson’s Coke was only one item on a very long list.
I knew that the narcotics squad was hoping to find and bust up a meth lab that was thought to be operating somewhere near Widdington, a little town east of Dobbs, but so far that hadn’t come off. A routine traffic stop on the interstate had netted an embezzler wanted in New Jersey, and New Jersey was sending the paperwork down to begin the extradition process. Last week, a fire had destroyed one of those McMansions in an upscale housing development near Pleasants Crossroads. At first, everyone blamed a shorted-out plug on a Christmas tree. Now the experts were calling it arson, so ATF would be poking around in the ashes.
The owner had recently lost his job and was behind on his mortgage payments. The house was well insured.
“We’re probably gonna see a lot more of this if the economy doesn’t pick up,” Dwight said.
Due to the icy roads, there were the usual number of fender benders. Three wise men had been stolen from the Christmas display in someone’s yard, eight mailboxes had been smashed along a backcountry road down near Makely, and a chain-link fence had been cut open at the rear of Welcome Home, a building supply store outside Cotton Grove. There not being much call for lawn and garden items in the dead of winter, the owner could not say for sure exactly when it happened, but he was missing three push mowers, four one-hundred-foot garden hoses, a
