Bootlegger’s Daughter (4 page)

Actual qualifications would count for damn little, but then they never do in any other election, so why should judgeships be any different?

After five verses of “Democrats Are on the Move,” a unity song set to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” the evening broke up in a burst of enthusiastic optimism. November was a long way off.

My two white opponents tried to work the room, but most of the blacks were clustered around Luther Parker or Gantt’s representative; and, as I said before, I had graduated from West Colleton High so I was on home ground among folks who acted tickled to see me running for judge.

I was passed from one familiar bear hug to another, scolded for not coming home more often, told I was getting prettier every day and asked when I was going to quit breaking hearts and settle down.

Some things will never change. Not in eighteen million years.

I gave a mental shrug, said the things they wanted to hear, and hugged everyone back till I suddenly fetched up in the arms of a tall, good-looking man with silver flecks in his thick black hair.

Jed Whitehead.

“Little Debbie,” he grinned, the laugh lines falling into easy crinkles around his eyes and lips. He never lets me forget when I was a chubby teenager who used to pig out on those cream-filled cupcakes Dinah Jean kept in their refrigerator for when I baby-sat for them. “I wanted to tell you how much I liked your talk yesterday, but you got away too quick.”

Yesterday I’d given a speech to the Civitans and it’d gone well. Especially the question and answer session.

“I had to get back to court,” I said.

True.

I disentangled myself and smiled politely as someone else claimed my attention. “Sorry I missed you.”

Lie.

I’d seen Jed in the audience and I’d also seen him purposefully working his way over to me, which was why I cut out a little more abruptly than was strictly necessary.

Here in the cafeteria, the party was winding down. There was barely enough fading daylight to see by as people began to wander out to their cars. I did the courtesies with the organizers and party officials and moved toward the doorway myself, where my brother Seth stood talking with some neighbors. He put out his arm and gave my shoulder a squeeze as he drew me to his side. “You did good, honey,” he said.

Suddenly feeling tired, I leaned against his comfortable bulk. Seth’s five brothers up from me, but we’ve always been close.

“Hey, congratulations, Jed,” he said.

I hadn’t realized that Jed was right behind me.

“Know you’re real proud of her,” said Seth’s wife, Minnie, beaming at him.

“Oh, I am, I am,” Jed agreed.

I finally remembered what they were talking about. “Hard to believe Gayle’s old enough to be winning college scholarships,” I said.

“Tempus sure keeps on fugiting,” someone observed. “Seems like it was just Christmas and now I’ve already cut my grass three times.”

“We’ve got bluebirds nesting in three boxes,” Minnie offered, but the men were off on crops, allotments, and the prospects of rain before the weekend, so she and I spent a few minutes talking strategy. Minnie’s always been active in the Colleton County Democratic Women and was my closest thing to a campaign manager.

Sherry and her boyfriend passed by in the deepening twilight. “We’ll be at the car when you’re ready to go,” she told me.

I promised to visit Seth and Minnie real soon and started to follow Sherry across the crowded parking lot when Jed fell into step with me.

“Let me drive you back to Dobbs,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”

I frowned.

“About Gayle,” he said. “She’s got a crazy bee in her bonnet and you’re just the person to smash it for me.”

For Gayle was a different story. I told Sherry that I had a ride home and to go on without me. Seeing Jed waiting over by his car, she winked at me. Probably thinking Jed and I ought to get back together.

Not that we ever really were together.

I couldn’t say what it was that kept it from happening. God knows I’d had a heavy enough crush on him when I was a kid and he’d been one of that gang of teenage boys that dropped by the farm every weekend to tussle with my brothers over whatever ball was in season.

I was a teenager myself, though still much too young for him, when his first wife was killed; but the gap had narrowed by the time he and Dinah Jean were divorced a year or so ago. We’d had a mild flurry of dates-dinners, movies, a couple of dances at the American Legion Hut-but I’d let them dwindle out to nothing.

“There is a tide…” said Shakespeare. If so, it must have crested years earlier because being with Jed never quite loosed the floodgates of adult passion. He certainly made all the right moves. There’d even been some heavy breathing after one of Reid’s parties, but that turned out to be the full moon and three of Reid’s Orange Blossom Specials. Sunlight and black coffee soon lowered my pulse rate. I told myself it’d been a case of forbidden fruit, and to test my hypothesis, I let a week pass, then met him for a movie; two weeks, then a concert to show there were no hard feelings. After that, I told Aunt Zell and Sherry to make excuses if he called. He only called once more.

Nobody ever had to draw Jed a diagram.

But I kept a soft spot for Gayle. I was the first sitter Janie had trusted outside her own family, and I’d continued to sit for Gayle after Dinah Jean and Jed were married. There hadn’t been much real contact in the last few years though until Jed and I began seeing each other. I think Gayle wanted me to be stepmother number two, but when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, she gradually stopped finding excuses to phone.

Actually, I still felt a little guilty about that.

“So what kind of bee’s bugging Gayle?” I asked, when we were in the car and buckling up.

Jed clicked my seat belt into place and switched on the ignition. It was finally full dark and headlights from other cars swept the school parking lot as he pulled out onto the highway and turned the car toward Dobbs.

“She wants to hire a private detective to find out who killed Janie,” he said.

“What?”

“Right.” His handsome face was illuminated by the pale green lights of the dashboard and a worried frown crumpled his eyebrows.

Eighteen years ago, when Gayle was less than three months old, she and Janie had disappeared one rainy gray afternoon in May. It was three days before some field hands heard a baby crying in the loft of an old abandoned gristmill. Gayle was dehydrated and raw bottomed from going all that time with no milk or water and no change of diapers, but an overnight stay in the hospital for observation showed no lasting injuries. Janie’s body was lying on the cold stone floor, her limbs straightened, her hands by her side. She’d been hit over the head and there was a bullet hole behind her right ear.

Jed’s hands clenched the steering wheel. “She says she has to know once and for all who killed her mother, so she can finally put it behind her.”

“But what exactly is there to put behind her?” I asked as cars flashed past us in the opposite lane. “She wasn’t even crawling, for God’s sake. There’s no way she could remember Janie or a thing that happened then.”

“Tell me about it.” He flicked the high beams impatiently as an oncoming car with badly set high beams nearly blinded us. Half the time, these back roads drivers never dim their lights unless you remind them three or four times.

“When she turned sixteen, she said she didn’t want a new car; she wanted me to pay a psychiatrist to hypnotize her and try to regress her back to when it happened.”

“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.