Margaret Maron - Bootlegger’s Daughter

“What about something to eat? We’ve got Nabs and stuff.”

“No, thank you.”

Gayle’s spine was a straight line that remained three inches from the chair’s cushioned back. Aunt Zell’s always trying to get me to sit like that. I think my grandmother Stephenson must have had a thing about a lady’s back never touching the back of chairs because Mother used to tell me to sit up, too.

Who had nagged Gayle? Dinah Jean?

I knew I had a soft spot in my heart for Gayle, but looking at her sitting there so poised and mature, a young woman now and no longer a child, I wondered how I could have been the role model Jed claimed. It’d been years since we’d had more than passing conversation at church or ball games or run-ins around the county. She was six and I was in my first year of law school the last time I baby-sat her. It’s true that we’d been thrown together again when I was seeing Jed last spring, but we’d both been too self-conscious about the circumstances to do anything except chatter about surface stuff.

Sherry’s hovering was making her even more uptight.

“Let’s go back to my office,” I said, and Gayle rose from the chair with the quickness of a coiled spring.

We walked up the hall, Sherry leading the way, and I was struck afresh by how fully grown Gayle suddenly seemed to be. She was small boned and dark haired just like I remembered Janie being, only Janie’s hair had been long and straight and, except for an occasional beehive, she’d worn it flowing over her shoulders like everybody else in the early seventies. Gayle’s was french braided, but where stray tendrils escaped, they were curly like Jed’s hair. A white knitted top and short purple skirt set off her cute little figure without being obvious about it.

Even after we were in my office with the door closed on Sherry’s curious face, Gayle still seemed stiff. Daddy always said I could talk the ears off a mule, but it was several minutes before I got a smile out of her and she relaxed enough to set the box on the floor beside her and actually settle into the green velvet wingback in front of my desk.

I congratulated her on the Beaufort Scholarship. “Your dad’s mighty proud of you winning.”

Her smile turned wry. “I don’t know about that. I don’t think he’s happy with what I want to do with the trust fund Grampa Poole left me.”

“Well, you can’t really blame him, can you? It’s been eighteen years, and after all this time, what’s a private detective going to dig up that the police and SBI haven’t already found?”

“Maybe nothing,” she said calmly. “All I know is that I can’t go off to college with all this stuff hanging on me.”

“All what stuff?” I asked.

The placid adult surface wavered and I was suddenly face-to-face with the seething adolescent below.

“You saw how Sherry was out there? That’s the way it’s been my whole stupid life. As soon as anybody hears my name, it’s like there’s a neon sign hanging around my neck.” Her small hands sketched a flashing signboard-“THE JANIE WHITEHEAD MURDER!”-and her voice dripped scorn as she mimicked, “Oh my God, it’s that poor little thang that nearly parched to death when somebody shot her mother and left them both to die at Ridley’s Mill.”

She took a deep breath and tried to pull the surface back into place. It didn’t quite work. “So they fuss over me and they sweet-talk and part of it’s that they’re just so, so sorry for me and the other part’s that they’re dying to know what it’s like to have a murdered mother and not know who did it.”

“What is it like?” I asked.

She started to glare, then realized I wasn’t being cute. Despair replaced her anger.

“I don’t know. It’s like-like having a loose hair tickling on the back of your neck,” she said bleakly. “You keep brushing at your collar, but you never quite get it and just about the time you forget about it, there it is worrying you again. I just want it gone!” __

I shook my head. “Sorry, honey, but I don’t see how some strange detective’s going to-”

“Not some stranger,” she interrupted. “You, Deb’rah.”

Before I could start shaking my head, she plunged on. “I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it and Dad’s about to freak because I’ve been looking in all the phone books and the nearest private detectives are in Raleigh and you’re right. Nobody’s going to tell a stranger anything Sheriff Poole hasn’t already heard, probably; but you could do it, Deb’rah, I know you could. Soon as Dad came home last night and said he wanted me to talk to you, it was like the answer to everything. That’s the only reason I came today. You know everybody and everybody knows you and they’d trust you and-”

“Now wait a minute,” I protested. “I’m a lawyer, not a detective.”

“Oh, please!”

Gayle’s eyes beseeched with such intensity that for a brief instant of déjà vu, I was a pudgy, lank-haired sixteen again, wondering why I had been stuck with ordinary run-of-the-mill blue eyes when other people got luscious melting brown. I already envied Janie’s size eight bell-bottoms, her long black hair, her town-bred sophistication and, most of all, her husband. Now, there I was, jealous of even her eyes, damn her!

“Besides,” I added. “I really, honest to God, don’t have time. I’ve got a campaign to run and the primary’s next week.”

“Please,” Gayle repeated earnestly. “You’re going to be campaigning in Cotton Grove; too, aren’t you? So you’ll be seeing most everybody anyhow, won’t you? Besides, judges have to know whether people are telling the truth, don’t they? It’ll be practice for you.”

Well, I’d already sat in enough courtrooms to know when I wasn’t hearing the whole story.

“Who do you think’s not told the truth?” I asked.

Her eyes fell and she began twisting the zipper tassel on her purple clutch.

“All my life, everybody’s said the killer was some sorry tramp or migrant that’s probably been killed himself in New York City or Mexico by now.” She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “How come you quit seeing Dad?”

A shock of acknowledgment went through me and I could only stare at her, appalled.

“I’ve never said this to a single soul before.” Her level brown eyes glanced off mine and immediately dropped to her purse again. “Dad couldn’t have been the one who physically carried us out to Ridley’s Mill. He was in Raleigh all day. Everybody says so. But he could have hired somebody to do it. I’m not saying I think he did, but…”

“No, no, no,” I told her. “Of course, he didn’t.”

The hopeful look told me she wanted to believe. Well, who wants to think her own daddy’s capable of killing? I sure as hell never found it a barrel of laughs.

“Anybody could have hired someone, but he loved your mother, honey. He really did.” Into my mind unbidden came the thought each man kills the thing he loves, and I knew it must have been lying just beneath the surface of consciousness last spring.

“He married Mom-Dinah Jean-eight months later,” Gayle countered.

Dinah Jean was the only mother Gayle had ever known, and they’d seemed as close as any mother and daughter till Dinah Jean let her drinking get totally out of hand a couple of years ago. When. the divorce came, I heard Gayle had trouble choosing who to go with. Jed won out, not only because he was her natural parent and she was still underage, but also because Dinah Jean’s people had put her someplace out in the mountains to dry out.

“He was a young man,” I reminded Gayle, “and he had a baby daughter to take care of. In fact, a lot of people said he was thinking more about you than himself when he married her. He never looked twice at another woman while your mother was living and I’m sure he never loved Dinah Jean half as much.”