and traded for some store-boughten stuff Mammy’d been needing. Thanks to ol’ Maude, it was a real fine Christmas.”
My brothers began to recall some childhood Christmases and my nieces and nephews chimed in with their own memories. How long we would have sat out there talking and laughing, I don’t know, but the wind shifted and the temperature started to drop. Cal’s eyelids were at half mast and Herman told Will he was about ready to get on back to Dobbs if he and Amy were ready to go, too.
Seth and Richard gathered up the tarps, Reese turned off the fountain, and Daddy gave the fire a final poke that shot glowing sparks up into the starry sky.
We trudged reluctantly back up to the house. There were good-night hugs all around and “See y’all on Christmas Day,” then Cal went to bed and we were alone except for Jess and Ruth, who stayed to help clean up.
“Looks like I’ll need to make a garbage run tomorrow afternoon,” Dwight said as the girls carried another bag of dirty paper plates and napkins out to the garage. “If I wait till Saturday, all the barrels will be overflowing.”
I don’t know if it was his remark or because Ruth was standing there, but the combination triggered my memory.
“Hey, wait a minute, Dwight!” I said. “Saturday? Annie Sue and the little ones were here before you left for the dump, but Ruth and Jess didn’t come till after you got back.”
“So?”
“So whatever Ruth threw in the barrel Saturday morning should still be there!”
“Huh?” said Ruth.
“Come on,” I told her, hurrying out to the garage, where the five barrels were neatly lined along the wall: one for glass, one for aluminum, one for plastic, and two for general household trash. “You said you picked up trash when y’all were doing that memorial for Mallory Johnson, remember?”
She nodded.
“Where did you toss it?”
She pointed to the barrel nearest the outer door.
By now Dwight realized what this meant and he said, “Wait a minute, Deb’rah. Let Ruth find it. No coaching. Stand over here, Jess, honey, so you can see. This probably won’t come to anything, but if it does result in somebody going to trial, y’all might be called as witnesses.”
Both girls were wide-eyed as Ruth lifted out the bags that had been brought out from the kitchen waste container since Saturday. There on the bottom was a blue plastic bag from one of the local drugstores.
“That’s the one,” Ruth said.
She fished it out, unknotted the handles she had tied together, and held it open so we could peer inside.
I saw crumpled napkins, greasy papers, a yellow box, three beer cans, a stained drink cup, and a dirty beer bottle.
“What about that receipt?” I asked.
She started to reach inside, but Dwight stopped her.
“Whoever dumped this probably didn’t see a thing worth knowing. All the same, there’s no point in adding more prints before I can get my crime scene deputy to take a look.”
He carefully reknotted the bag and herded the girls back inside, where he found a clean sheet of paper, smeared some graphite on Ruth’s fingertips, and rolled her prints to her awed astonishment.
Jess tried to insist that she would have spent the evening there anyhow, but a deal’s a deal. I made her take the money we owed her for watching Cal and sent them home.
“Don’t worry about the rest of the mess. We’ll take care of it,” I said, even though I knew it was all going to have to wait till the next day, tired as we both suddenly were. While I hung up the finery we’d tossed on the bed when Seth made us change clothes, Dwight printed out a search warrant form that would let him seize Charlie Barefoot’s phone and computer.
I signed it, and twenty minutes after the girls left, we were both sound asleep.
CHAPTER 27
—“The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding,” Agatha Christie
MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT— WEDNESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 24
7:25 in the morning and Nelson Barefoot’s truck was still in the driveway when Dwight parked his truck in front of the Barefoot home. Charlie Barefoot’s white Hyundai was there, too.
With the search warrant Deborah had signed for him the night before tucked in the inner breast pocket of his khaki windbreaker, he walked up to the front door and rang the bell.
He and his detectives had come to a temporary dead end on the Wentworth murders, but while Deputy Raeford McLamb tried to dig up some more leads, Dwight hoped to wrap up their investigation of Mallory Johnson’s death and get it out of their way, clear the decks for an all-out push to find the Wentworth shooter.
At first glance, Joy Medlin’s confession would seem to explain the wreck, but Mallory’s voice had not sounded slurred or disjointed to him. If a low-dose pill and a shot of vodka had been slipped into a soda ten or fifteen minutes before she left the party, as Joy claimed, it was possible that there had not been enough time for the concoction to take effect, even with the Benadryl.
Instead, maybe it was the fault of an oncoming vehicle, although with such a long straight stretch of highway,
