Margaret Maron - Bootlegger’s Daughter

Max waved to me on his way out and his place at the big round table was taken by two women I vaguely recognized from the attorney general’s office. On the jukebox, Tina Turner was belligerently demanding to know what love had to do with it-Spot’s jukebox has always been a comfortable five years behind the hits-and the strident beat muffled words, bursts of laughter, and the tinkle of bottles and glasses as Miss Molly’s geared up for Friday night. Above the music, Morgan gave me a what’s doing? look, and when I gestured that I’d be a little longer, she lit another cigarette and turned back to the conversation at her own table while I got on with mine.

“Who else did you look at?” I asked tightly.

“The husband, his parents, her parents, neighbors, friends, old boyfriends. You name it, we did it.”

He stirred his tomato juice with a straw, sipped, added a sprinkle of pepper and stirred again.

“You probably know as much how she died as I do.”

“I doubt it.”

“Okay, let’s see. She disappeared on the first Wednesday in May.” He looked surprised to realize the calendar was back to May again. “Day before yesterday, eighteen years ago.”

Unlike this year, that May had begun unseasonably cool and rainy, and I remembered there’d been a heavy fog that never completely lifted.

He nodded. “A morning that kept people indoors with the heat turned back on. No fit weather to take a new baby out in, but there was nobody to stay with her. Not her parents. Not you. You were in school till three-thirty.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, but it gave me a weird feeling to realize how thoroughly my movements, too, had been documented back then.

Janie’s mother and father had driven over to Durham early that morning to attend the funeral of Mrs. Poole’s cousin, Scotty continued, and her sister was down with some sort of spring virus that made it risky to expose the baby. In fact, it was her sister’s illness that took Janie out that day in the first place. Marylee Poole Strickland was room mother for her second-grader, and she’d promised to take cupcakes for a class party immediately after lunch. The cupcakes had been baked and decorated the night before, but when she awoke too sick to take them over, she’d called on Janie.

According to Marylee, everything was absolutely normal when Janie ran in at 11:45 to get the cupcakes, leaving Gayle in the car. At Cotton Grove Elementary, the second-grade teacher didn’t know Janie well enough to confirm Marylee’s assessment, but she did think that the only thing on Janie’s mind was not leaving her baby daughter in the car by herself too long. She’d stayed just long enough to bring in the tray of cupcakes and the quart-size bottles of Pepsi, and to pass along Marylee’s apologies, before hurrying from the classroom.

A fifth-grade teacher on the second floor of the school had been standing at the window overlooking the parking lot, trying to judge if the rain had slacked off enough for her to take her class out for a breath of fresh air before their lunch period. She had known Janie since childhood and was able to state quite definitely that she saw the young mother in her chic red vinyl raincoat cut across the schoolyard to her dark blue sedan. Janie had adjusted the blanket around the infant in the portable crib on the backseat, then driven off alone back toward the center of town. The time was exactly 12:17.

“And that was the last time anyone was positive that they’d seen Janie Poole Whitehead alive,” said Scotty.

“Except for Howard Grimes?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We could never be sure whether he really saw her or whether he just wanted us to give him the time of day.”

“Did you? Give him the time of day, I mean?”

“I told you we listened to whoever’d talk. Trouble is, ol’ Howard quit talking before we got to him.”

I didn’t remember it like that and protested. “He told anybody who’d listen that it was Janie he’d seen parked with some man in front of the old Dixie Motel. That it was raining too hard and the windows were too fogged up for him to make out who, though.”

“Yeah, I know, and that story went around Cotton Grove so quick there were people who still thought she’d run off with another man right up till the minute they found her body, but I’m telling you straight: when we tried to pin him down after she was found, he started saying maybe it was somebody else’s wife he’d seen. There were two other young women in Cotton Grove driving dark blue Ford sedans.”

“Kay Saunders and my ex-sister-in-law,” I said, meeting it head on.

“Not yet ex,” he corrected.

“Doesn’t matter. Trish and Kay were good friends of Janie’s. They used to run around together in high school. Anyhow, Howard said the woman was wearing shiny red, and neither Trish nor Kay owned a mod red slicker, just Janie.”

Scotty’s head came up and for the first time I saw a beagle-hunting gleam flicker down in those weary spaniel eyes. “You sure he described the raincoat?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Yet even as I spoke, I wondered if I’d confused his remarks with the schoolyard description widely repeated by the teachers. Janie had been clothes-proud, and I remembered the day she bought that coat, the day she modeled it for Jed and me. It was a teacher workday, a week before her death, so I was off from school. I’d kept Gayle and Marylee’s little boy, too, so the two sisters could go shopping together at Crabtree Valley, Raleigh ’s biggest and newest mall.

I’d already fed the kids and Jed had just gotten home a few minutes earlier when Marylee and Janie pulled into the driveway, the backseat of the car loaded down with packages. With her dark hair piled up in a bouffant beehive, high-heeled white boots, and that lipstick red vinyl slicker, she matched my unsophisticated idea of Carnaby Street, and I watched, pea green with jealousy, as she sweet-talked Jed out of being mad because she’d spent so much money. “But, sugar darlin’, you don’t think I can keep on wearing all those old things from before the baby was born?”

So was that why the red raincoat remained with me for eighteen years? I concentrated and retrieved a sudden mental image of Howard standing in darkness on the sidewalk in front of Jed and Janie’s house. Red and blue lights atop the emergency vehicles were refracted by water droplets. People milled about in the misty fog. I was there, some of my brothers, too, and their wives. Will and Trish. Mother was inside with the older women of the community, trying to reassure Mrs. Poole and Mrs. Whitehead that Janie and Gayle were going to be all right. Blue lights from the wet patrol cars flashed across Howard’s broad, self-important face.

“He said he couldn’t make out the woman because she was turned toward the man beside her, but her back was pressed against the window and he saw her shiny red coat.”

Scotty twirled his straw between his fingers. It was clear plastic and coated with dull red tomato juice. “That little detail would have made us take him more seriously. Wonder why he left it out when we talked with him?”

“Did he?”

“This is the first time I’ve heard it.”

“What about when you reworked the case?”

“We didn’t get a chance. We’d just started when he dropped dead.”

I’d been living with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash in Dobbs by then and had forgotten-if I’d even noticed-that the two things occurred simultaneously. After all, Howard Grimes wasn’t someone important to me, and the SBI had kept their heads down so low when they returned to Cotton Grove seven years ago that I’d barely been aware they were there before they were gone again, leaving some uneasy talk that soon faded. Still, for Howard to have died so abruptly?