Margaret Maron: Bootlegger’s Daughter

That was certainly how I’d consoled myself for months after Jed married Dinah Jean: that if he didn’t love me, neither did he really love her. A few weeks after Janie’s funeral, Jed and Gayle moved in with his parents so his mother could keep Gayle during the day. I still got asked to mind her occasionally; and from where I sat, a sixteen-year-old bundle of raging hormones, consumed with yearning frustration, it was no whirlwind romance. Even on the night before their wedding, when I brought Gayle home early from the rehearsal party, I’d seen none of the sexual tension that once flowed between Jed and Janie. And that wasn’t just wishful thinking either. He and Dinah Jean turned into an old married couple almost before the ink was dry on their marriage certificate.

It was the first time I’d thought about it from Dinah Jean’s viewpoint. No wonder she’d eventually crawled into a bottle and tried to pull the cork in after her.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t Dinah Jean’s ghost that had stood between Jed and me when he finally got around to noticing that I was grown up.

“Let the dead past bury its dead,” I murmured.

“Shakespeare?” asked Gayle.

I couldn’t remember the source, but it seemed like good advice and I told her so.

“I’ve tried that,” she said impatiently. “It doesn’t work. You’re just as bad as Gramma and Dad. They keep telling me not to think about it, too.”

She stood abruptly and smoothed the wrinkles from her purple skirt. “I’m sorry I wasted your time. Do I pay you or Sherry?”

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“Even though the man who did this probably is long gone to his own reward in New York or California?”

“It was somebody she knew,” said Gayle.

As she perched back on the edge of the chair and began laying out theories, I realized that this was probably the first time she’d ever spoken freely to an adult about Janie’s death since becoming an adult herself.

“They never kept it a big secret from me, ”she said. “It was sort of like being adopted. You know the way they start telling babies they’re adopted as soon as they bring them home so it never comes as a shock?”

I nodded.

“Well, I always knew that Mother and I were kidnapped and she was killed and it was three days before they found us-but it was almost like a bedtime story. Something with all the edges taken off. I hated the way people oozed over me, but I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean it was like you don’t give a lot of thought to why grass is green or water’s wet. It just is, you know? Then the Christmas right before I was sixteen, I was sleeping over at Gramma Pope’s and I found this box of newspaper clippings.”

She put the box on my desk and lifted the lid. It wis crammed with yellowed news articles jumbled in with no particular order. I saw pictures of Janie and Jed, the mill, even Janie’s abandoned car.

“Grampa cut out everything the Ledger and the News and Observer wrote about it from the day we disappeared till it stopped being news.”

She gave a wobbly little grin that almost broke my heart. “That’s when it quit being a bedtime story, Deborah. Reading it like that put the sharp edges back on, made me start thinking it must have been somebody she knew.”

“Because she gave someone in a raincoat a lift?” I shook my head. “It didn’t have to be someone she knew. Back then it wasn’t automatically a foolhardy thing to give a stranger a ride.”

“But if he was a stranger, how’d he know where to leave her car?”

That was one of many questions that had puzzled everyone else at the time. Weather conditions had been rainy and foggy on the May afternoon that Janie and Gayle disappeared. Her car had been seen in the deserted parking lot beside the old abandoned Dixie Motel. There’d been someone else in the front seat with her, someone wearing a beige or light tan raincoat and thought to be male by the one eyewitness who saw them.

If indeed old Howard Grimes had actually seen them.

There were at least three dark blue Ford sedans in Cotton Grove, including one that belonged to my brother Will; and Howard said he’d taken a good look because rumors were going around town about then that Will’s wife, Trish, was having an affair with somebody and he wanted to see who. (Not that the Ledger or the N amp;O printed Will or Trish’s names. But everyone involved knew who he was talking about.)

“I hadn’t heard nothing before about Jed Whitehead’s wife having round heels,” he was quoted as saying. “But the windows were too fogged up for me to see who he was. Saw her plain enough though.”

Howard’s account had kept the police from getting into it too heavily for the first twenty-four hours. For all they knew, little Janie Whitehead might well have gone off for an extramarital fling. Jed wouldn’t be the first husband, the Popes wouldn’t be the first parents, to say she’d never do something like that.

But then Janie’s sedan was discovered the next morning in the parking lot behind the Whitehead Real Estate Agency. It had not been there the evening before when old Mr. Whitehead closed early upon hearing that Janie and Gayle were missing. Street parking was plentiful, so the lot, shared by three other abutting offices, was not one used by the general public. Access in from Broad Street and out to Railroad was through narrow alleys screened by azaleas and high camellia bushes, not readily apparent and certainly not a place a stranger would stumble into on a dark foggy night.

“That’s why you tried to have a hypnotist take you back?”

“It didn’t work, though.” Lingering disappointment shadowed her voice. “I was really hoping maybe I’d remember her.”

My own mother died the summer I turned eighteen, and trying to imagine never having known her made it easier to understand why everybody could get sentimental and maudlin about Gayle’s semi-orphaned status. Gayle’s next words, however, made it clear that something else was going on in her head.

“What was her tragic flaw, Deborah?”

I looked at her blankly. Okay, we all knew Gayle was bright. They don’t give out full four-year scholarships to the university just because someone’s mother got killed. But was she brains or book learning?

“I took an interdisciplinary honors course last fell,” she said. “Hamlet, Edward the Eighth, Richard Nixon. We discussed their tragic flaws, and I couldn’t help applying it to my mother. Not who killed her, but why? What was her tragic flaw?” She leaned forward. “Everybody says she was good and sweet and beautiful and that I’m just like her. Well, nobody’s that damn sweet and good. I’m not and I bet she wasn’t either.”

Brains, then?

There had been a million unanswered questions when Janie Whitehead was killed, but every question was predicated on the belief that innocence and purity had been cruelly slaughtered that chilly May afternoon. Yet, in the months before, lust for Jed Whitehead had made me acutely aware of Janie’s flaws and, yes, she had her human share. I had collected them secretly and gloated over them like a miser polishing his coins. God knows I’d been wracked with guilt when I saw her cold stiff body lying in that coffin, her shining black hair spread across the pink satin pillow, her luminous brown eyes closed for all eternity; but remorse and guilt and prayers to God for forgiveness had not washed away the question with which Gayle now struggled.

“They say everybody carries within themselves the seeds of their own destruction,” she said.

“Sounds like another way to blame the victim for the crime,” I hedged starchily, as if I were already a judge.