Margaret Maron: Bootlegger’s Daughter

“You didn’t do it, did you?” I knew Gayle had a little red Toyota that couldn’t be more than two years old.

“Eight hundred dollars it cost me,” he answered wryly as two more headlights flashed by in the darkness. “On top of her car.”

Well, he’d always been foolish over Gayle from the minute she was born.

“What happened?”

“He got her back to that time she was so sick with a strep throat. You remember?”

I was impressed. “She couldn’t have been much more than what? Eighteen months?”

“Sixteen months and still in her crib,” he confirmed. “But that was as far as he could get her.”

“You going to let her hire the detective?”

“It’s not a matter of letting,” he said. “Now that she’s turned eighteen, she has the trust fund Janie’s dad set up when she was born.”

“But that’s for college-” I started to protest, and then I remembered. “Oh. The scholarship.”

“Yeah.”

We rode in silence for several minutes through the mild spring evening. Stars were bright pinpoints that faded as we approached the outer limits of Dobbs, and soon we were passing tobacco warehouses, the cinder block factory, and several fast-food places illuminated by neon and streetlights.

Like many small towns across eastern North Carolina, Dobbs is having its troubles keeping downtown vital. Strip malls dot the four lanes leading in and out of town and there’s a huge outlets mall nearby on I-95. Everybody’s just holding their breath, hoping that the last major department store on Main Street won’t move out. So far we’ve kept ahead of store closings by bulldozing the abandoned buildings and turning the sites into convenient little parking lots made almost parklike with benches set under shady crepe myrtles. But most people think that if it weren’t for its being the county seat of government, downtown would be one vast parking lot around the churches and the courthouse.

“Would you talk to her?” Jed asked as he turned off Main Street. “You’ve always been Gayle’s role model. She’ll listen to you.”

The storefronts gave way to large brick, stone, and wooden houses set among masses of flowering azaleas. Like all the residential streets of Dobbs, ours was lined with huge mature oaks and maples that nearly met overhead. At the end of the street was Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash’s whitewashed brick.

Role model?

Did he know how old that made me feel?

Jed drove through the opening in the white brick wall and pulled up at the far end of the long low veranda, in front of the door that led directly to my rooms.

“I think I have a clear hour tomorrow afternoon,” I sighed. “Tell her to call Sherry and set it up.”

Lee, Stephenson and Knott, Attorneys at Law, occupies a neat wood-frame story-and-a-half that was built right after the Civil War across the street and half a block down from the courthouse. The county did an architectural survey a few years back and our place is described as a “charming example of tasteful vernacular,” a phrase I take to mean that some local builder had heard about Victorian styles but didn’t have a millwright who could turn out yards of rococo gingerbread trim without a pattern to go by. John Claude’s wife, Julia, keeps wanting to paint the narrow clapboards pale green and pick out the moldings and porch trim in white, but so far we’ve headed her off and kept it plain white with black shutters.

John Claude’s grandfather, Robert Claudius Lee (no relation to Robert E.), was born there and so was Robert’s brother, my maternal grandmother’s father-which, if you’re trying to work it out on your fingers, makes John Claude my second cousin once removed. Although I’m related to both my partners, they’re no blood kin to each other.

The historical society put a plaque on the front porch, but the only thing historically authentic about the house is its outside. Lees and Stephensons have been practicing law here since the twenties, when John Claude’s father and Reid’s grandfather (my great-grandfather) set up the partnership, and the inside’s no longer a monument to nineteenth-century sensibilities. Most of the woodwork’s original, but when the ceilings were dropped in the seventies to allow for new wiring and modern plumbing and lighting, they didn’t try to save the crumbly old plaster decorations.

The central staircase was relocated to make a reception area for Sherry Cobb’s predecessor.

(Reid’s mother and Julia had a tiff over who was going to get the walnut banisters. Julia won. Julia’s what people here call a right strong-minded lady. If she’d been born five years later, she’d probably have gone to State and majored in architecture or design. Instead, they sent her to a girl’s school-and I use the term deliberately-for a “Father Knows Best” insurance policy: a degree in elementary education, “so she’ll always have teaching to fall back on, just in case.” Just in case her husband ran off with another woman or turned out to be too shiftless to support a family. Half my grade school teachers were women whose husbands had fulfilled their fathers’ direst premonitions. It did not make for happy classrooms. Fortunately, Julia’s children were the only ones who ever had to cower from her.)

As our current senior partner, John Claude has his daddy’s old office, the double parlor on the front left. I have Brixton Senior’s original office on the front right, and Reid has what used to be the dining room behind me. It’s the same office his daddy had. Brix Junior keeps his license current, but the month Reid came into the firm was the month he quit practicing law and moved to Southern Pines to start practicing his golf swings.

(My daddy isn’t a lawyer, of course, but Brix Junior and John Claude never held that against me-especially since he’s generated a lot of the firm’s business over the last fifty years.)

Upstairs, two small bedrooms were opened to make a single large one, with a modern bath and roomy storage cupboards under the eaves. In theory, the bedroom’s for putting up out-of-town expert witnesses if we need to, but when Dotty kicked him out of the house and filed for divorce, Reid crashed there for so long John Claude and I were ready to start charging him rent. He still uses it at least once a month for what he thinks are sub rosa assignations-as if anything half a block from the courthouse could be sub rosa, but men in rut have a way of rationalizing what they want to be true.

So for we’ve kept the carpenters out of our personal offices, but Julia redid half the downstairs about four years ago. She ripped out partitions and turned the old kitchen into a computerized work area for the three clerks who help Sherry. The sunporch across the back acquired a tiny modern galley that can disappear behind louvered doors when we use the big sunny room for official conferences. There’s a long deal table that looks official enough, but Julia also brought in some comfortable chintz chairs and ottomans that were too good to throw away the last time she remodeled their house. All in all, the old sunporch has devolved into a pleasant place to lounge over a cup of coffee after court and catch up on the News and. Observer.

That’s what I was doing when Gayle Whitehead arrived promptly at 3:30, carrying a flat white cardboard box. Instead of putting her in my office and telling me she was there, Sherry brought her straight back to the sunporch. Sherry’s not all that much older than Gayle, but she kept clucking around like somebody’s mama hostessing a tea party.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “There’s drinks and ice tea in the icebox.”

“That’s okay,” Gayle said politely as she took a chair opposite mine. She held the white box on her lap-it was about the size of a shirt box-and centered her purple purse on top of it.