“Do you know where he was Tuesday night?”
“I told you. He would’ve worked till nine, then spent the night at Jason’s.”
“He didn’t go to a party with Mallory Johnson?”
She looked uncertain. “I don’t know. No, probably not, because she was alone in her own car, right? If they were together that night, they would have been in his car. Unless they were trying to keep her family from knowing?”
“Mrs. Wentworth, are you absolutely sure they really were seeing each other?”
She looked at him indignantly. “Why? Because she was a rich Johnson and he was a Wentworth? Matt was a nice-looking kid, Major Bryant, and he could be real sweet when he wasn’t trying to out-tough his brothers.”
“He was sixteen. A freshman. She was eighteen and a senior. She was an honor-roll student headed for Carolina. He wasn’t.”
“We didn’t talk a lot,” she said slowly. “Heck, we didn’t even see each other a lot. I get home from work around five-thirty. He worked from five to eight or nine, depending on how busy they were, and he didn’t always come straight home. Weekends, he’d be out with her or Jason. I did ask him last Saturday if he was still seeing her and he said yes. It was her birthday and he’d given her a necklace and took her to see the new Tom Cruise movie.”
“Which night was that?”
“Friday. Friday, a week ago.”
Dwight wrote down the date, the name of his friend, and the location of the grocery store where Matt Wentworth worked as a bagger several nights a week.
“When did you last see him, ma’am?”
“Friday morning when I left for work. He was getting dressed for school.”
“What about Jason?”
She frowned and knitted her brows in an effort to remember. “Sorry. I know he came by one evening since Thanksgiving, but I can’t think exactly when.”
“I don’t suppose you remember who it was that Jason worked for?”
Her answer surprised him. “Barefoot Roofing here in Cotton Grove.”
A few further questions added nothing to his picture of either boy. Dwight stood up to go, but Mrs. Wentworth sat there numbly as the ramifications of the murders sank in. “I guess it’ll be up to me to bury them,” she said.
CHAPTER 16
—“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” Agatha Christie
I had been asleep almost three hours when I awoke to realize that Dwight was trying to ease himself into bed without disturbing me.
I turned over and reached for his hand. “It’s okay, love, I’m awake.”
“Sorry,” he said, and put out his arm to draw me nearer.
“What happened tonight?” I asked.
“Remember the kid at school the other day? The one with the snake tattooed on his hand? Matt Wentworth. He and his brother were the victims.”
“Jason Wentworth,” I murmured.
“That’s right. I forgot you said you had him up on a hunting violation this fall. You confiscated his gun, didn’t you? That’s why we didn’t find one tonight.”
“You expected one?”
“His stepmother said he went hunting Wednesday.”
“Without a license?” I could remember the case, I could remember that the young man was angry at losing his gun and his license. What I couldn’t remember was his face, and that made me sad.
He described the deaths of the Wentworth boys, their stepmother’s reaction to their thrown-away lives, and Matt’s claim that he had been hooked up with Mallory Johnson. When he finished, he was silent for a moment, then said, “On the way home, I got to thinking about what I was doing at that precise time last year.”
“At one-thirty in the morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Weren’t you asleep?”
“No. Cal and I were bunking at Mama’s. In the room Rob and I used to share. He was asleep, but I was wide awake, thinking about you. Us. Wondering what our life was going to be like. Wondering if Jonna would let me have Cal more and if that really was going to be okay with you.”
I started to protest, but he tightened his arm around me.
“You don’t have to say it, Deb’rah. I know you love him. It isn’t how we wanted to get him, but this hasn’t been a bad year, has it?”
“
“And we’ve been on the same page with Cal, haven’t we? I mean, he doesn’t sass you, does he? Or disrespect you?”
