“No, I’m on my way back to Dobbs. Just had some people in Cotton Grove I needed to talk to.”
“Anything to do with the Wentworth brothers getting shot yesterday?” Reese asked.
“You heard about that?”
“Matt was in the same class as Ruth and Richard,” Annie Sue said. “They were texting back and forth when we were over at Uncle Seth’s just now, finishing up on his circuit breakers.”
Dwight got up to pour himself more coffee. “They have anything to say about why he might’ve been shot?”
Reese, his mouth full of ham and lettuce, shook his head and held out his cup for a refill.
“What about the older boy? Jason? Y’all know him?”
He saw Reese glance at Annie Sue, who immediately turned brick red.
“Stop it, Reese!” she said. “It wasn’t funny then and it’s certainly not funny now that he’s dead.”
“What?” asked Dwight.
Reese grinned. “She thought he thought she was hot.”
“I did not!” that sturdy young woman snapped.
As Dwight continued to look at her inquiringly, she gave a what-the-hell? shrug.
“Don’t listen to Reese. See what happened was, you know the Huckabees? Live over on Forty-eight?”
Dwight nodded.
“Last summer they added on a couple of rooms so her mother could come live with them, and we got the job to wire it. Jason Wentworth was one of the roofers, and yes, he did come on to me a little, but I’d heard about his reputation and I kept it light. He knew it wasn’t going anywhere, but he still kept hanging around.”
“And then a reel of copper wiring went missing,” Reese said.
“We’re not saying he took it,” Annie Sue said, “but after that, we kept the truck boxes locked even though it was a pain in the neck to have to unlock them every time we needed something.”
Dwight started to tell them how Nelson Barefoot had fired the older Wentworth boy for stealing, but at that moment the door from the garage opened and he saw the startled faces of Ruth and A.K., his brother-in-law Andrew’s kids, with their cousins Richard and Jessica, two of Seth’s. Haywood’s sons, Stevie and John, were right behind them and they, too, seemed surprised that Dwight was there.
“We were passing by and saw the trucks,” Steve said smoothly.
“We’re thinking about taking in a movie in Garner,” Jess said
Dwight didn’t give their story a second thought. Dirt lanes spiderwebbed the farm and everyone used them as shortcuts. Besides, this gave him an opportunity to ask the kids still in high school about Matt Wentworth on an informal basis. Despite his Army years, he had gotten back home often enough that he had known all of these children from babyhood. The family resemblance between them—blue eyes, hair ranging from blond to light brown —was so strong that they could have been siblings as easily as cousins; and after he married their fathers’ baby sister, they had segued smoothly from calling him Mr. Dwight to saying Uncle Dwight.
In answer to his questions, they told him that, yes, the shooting was a cause of much texting within the West Colleton student body, but none of the cousins had really known the dead boy beyond sharing one class or another with him this past fall.
“He was actually a little older than us,” said Richard, “but he got left back in grade school and again last year.”
“Any of y’all ever hear that he was hooked up with Mallory Johnson?”
They hooted at the idea.
“In the first place, Mallory didn’t hook up with anybody,” said A.K., a gangling eighteen-year-old with a perpetual appetite, as he spread a slice of bread with mayo and folded it around some lettuce leafs.
Fourteen-year-old Richard looked up from nibbling at the shreds of ham left on the bone. “And even if she did, it wouldn’t have been a loser like Matt Wentworth. Her dad would’ve had a fit.”
Ruth, a freshman like Richard, nodded. “Emma said Mallory told the cheerleaders that she wasn’t going to let herself get interested in anybody until she was off at Carolina where her dad wouldn’t be hovering every minute. I don’t think Mr. Johnson missed a single game that she ever cheered at.”
“Yeah? Was he at Tuesday’s game?”
“I guess. We didn’t go,” they told Dwight.
“Jess and I went,” said A.K., “but I didn’t notice.”
Jessica shook her head. “Me either.”
“Who were his friends?” he asked.
They shrugged and then came up with the names of a couple of kids who might have sat at the same table in the cafeteria. One of them was the name Mrs. Wentworth had mentioned, Nate Barbour. On the whole, though, they thought he was a loner, which pretty much squared with Dwight’s impression.
“What about the alcohol that Mallory had in her system?” he asked. “What’re people saying about that?”
More shrugs. “Nobody’s saying anything. Mallory didn’t drink and she didn’t take drugs. Not that anybody knew about anyhow. If someone slipped her something else at Kevin’s party, it was probably Vicodin. Joy said none of hers were missing from her purse, but Kevin says someone took his mom’s pills out of her medicine cabinet.”
“Who’s Joy and why is she on Vicodin?” Dwight asked.
