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Authors: Margaret Maron

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BOOK: Designated Daughters
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If Thornton had all his marbles
, thought Dwight,
I could arrest
him.
Now, though?

He sighed, switched off the music, and reached for the photograph.

Thornton snatched it away and pulled back his fist. Dwight ducked, but not before a surprisingly hard blow landed on his shoulder.

“Get the hell off my porch!” the old man yelled in such a loud voice that Mrs. Sterling came rushing out.

“Dad? What’s wrong?”

Flushed with rage, Thornton struggled to his feet, clearly intending to slug it out.


Dad!
” Mrs. Sterling cried, and as abruptly as the anger had come, it was already ebbing away and the old man looked at her in confusion. Without protest, he let her help him sit down on the swing. The chain creaked as he began to rock back and forth, soothed by the falling rain.

“Mamie?” he said. “Is it suppertime yet?”

“Not yet, Dad.”

The picture had landed under the swing and Mrs. Sterling picked it up.

“Is this that Letha you were asking about?” She handed it to Dwight. “She looks like one of those old movie stars from back when I was a kid. What was her name? Betty Grable? Was she his girlfriend?”

“He thought so.” Unbidden, came a line one of his Army Intelligence colleagues always quoted when he was in his cups: “
But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

He did not realize he’d spoken aloud until Mrs. Sterling looked at him curiously.

“Major Bryant?”

“Sorry,” he said and slid the photograph back into his folder. Mr. Thornton did not seem to notice.

“Was he able to tell you anything useful?”

“Yes, ma’am. I got what I came for and I won’t be bothering you again.”

“No bother,” she said brightly. “Dad and I are always happy to have company. Breaks up the day.”

CHAPTER
24

Old men who are moderate in their desires, and are neither testy nor morose, find old age endurable.

— Cicero

Wednesday afternoon (continued)

C
ameron Longview was one of Raleigh’s older continuous-care retirement communities. Located inside the Beltline on the west side of town, the campus consisted of several two- and three-story gray stone buildings set in a grove of huge live oaks.

And here on a rainy spring afternoon, it did indeed look more like a university campus than a modern retirement village, thought Ray McLamb. Duke, maybe. Or Oxford.

Although his wife seldom watched supposedly true-to-life cop shows set in New York or LA, she had been addicted to the Inspector Morse series and she always watched the reruns, as much for the architecture of Oxford as for the stories. They lived in a comfortable brick house with all the modern conveniences, yet she yearned for multi-paned leaded windows set deeply into thick stone walls.

Lillie would like this place
, he thought.

The buildings were connected by covered walkways and their graceful wrought-iron columns were corded with wisteria vines that dripped huge purple clusters. Sturdy teak benches offered comfortable seating sheltered from spring rain or summer sun.

According to the brochure the deputies had picked up at the main office, Cameron Longview offered one- and two-bedroom garden apartments for independent living, efficiency apartments for assisted living, and hospital rooms for skilled nursing care when the need arose. As Ray navigated the drive that wound between the buildings, Tub read aloud from the brochure.

“Sumptuous cuisine. Evening cocktails on the terrace overlooking the garden. Cultural events. Aquatic and fitness center. On-site hospital facility. Adult day care.”

“If you have to get old, this is the place to do it.” With a touch of sadness, he thought,
Sorry, Lillie
.
Our retirement fund’ll never stretch this far.

“Bet it costs a fortune,” Tub Greene said, echoing Ray’s thoughts. “Where does a retired preacher get the money for a place like this? Don’t you have to buy your apartment and then pay a monthly charge?”

“Maybe he has a wealthy son or something.”

  

The curving roadways widened in various places, permitting those who could still drive to park near the entrances of their quarters. Ray eased the cruiser to a stop beneath tall rain-drenched oaks next to a small porch where an old man with stooped shoulders waited for them, alerted by the staff member who had given them directions.

“Come in, come in!” he called, urging them out of the rain as they splashed across the wet grass. “You’d be surprised how many people get lost trying to find me. But here you are!”

His long narrow face was made longer by a hairline that had receded to the crown of his head. The white hair across the top was so thin that his scalp shone through and he wore round rimless bifocals. Ray noticed a slight tremor in his hands when they shook.

Once inside and the introductions were over, he said, “I just made a fresh pitcher of lemonade. Let me get y’all some.”

As Snaveley pottered with glasses, napkins, and a plate of oatmeal cookies—“They bake them fresh for us every day,” he said—Ray reflected that the small room did have the cozy ambience of an Oxford don’s study: oak desk and sturdy captain’s chairs, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a couch and wing chair upholstered in soft mellow colors. The rain that beat against the leaded panes of the tall mullioned windows only added to the coziness.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” he told Ray, “but what about you, Deputy Greene? Any of your people ever attend Bethany?”

Tub shook his head.

Ray did not take offense. Things were slowly changing, but as Martin Luther King once observed: “The most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.” All those years and it was still true. If any of his family had sat in the Bethany congregation back when Snaveley was pastor, the old man would surely have remembered.

“Now how can I help you young fellows?” Snaveley asked.

Ray took a bite of the cookie. It was moist and chewy, studded with plump raisins. “We’re trying to get a fix on who was in Rachel Morton’s room last Wednesday and when they left.”

“Our alibis?” The word seemed to amuse him.

“Well, take you, for instance,” Ray said. “Mrs. Byrd says you and some others walked out of the hospital together?”

He nodded.

“So that alibis them, but then you went back into the hospital?”

“To use the restroom. Yes.”

“Did you see anyone you knew when you came back out?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. At the next urinal. Marvin Galloway. We served on a church council together about twenty years ago. His granddaughter had just had a baby boy and he and his wife were on their way up to see her.”

Tub jotted down Galloway’s name. Snaveley thought he lived in Dobbs, but wasn’t sure.

“Did you see anyone from Mrs. Morton’s room when you went out to your car?”

“No, I’m sorry. Galloway’s the only one I saw. Shocking to think that Rachel Morton was smothered like that so near to the natural end of her life.”

“Can you think of any reason she was?” Ray asked.

“Not a thing. She was a fine woman. Of course, I hadn’t seen much of her these last few years. Weddings and funerals, I’m afraid.”

“We’re thinking that perhaps someone was afraid she was going to say something damaging.”

Snaveley frowned. “I doubt that. As I recall, Rachel loved to talk and tell stories, but never mean ones, and if there was anything embarrassing about her stories, she never gave enough details for you to figure out who she meant.”

“We’ve heard that, too,” Ray said, “but some of the things she talked about last week were things her family didn’t recognize. I’ve got a list of them here. Maybe you could help us with them. How long were you there?”

“Twenty-six years.”

“Not her church,” said Ray. “In her room.”

“Oh, sorry. I arrived a little after five and was there until the drink got spilled on the bed and we all left. Perhaps six thirty?”

Ray smoothed out one of the sheets Mayleen had given them. “She said that someone had signed what sounds like a promissory note, but that he never paid the debt. She mentioned that two or three times.”

“A promissory note? No, that doesn’t ring a bell.”

“What about a cowbird egg?”

Snaveley’s long face lit up with a gentle smile. “Human nature being what it is, that could apply to at least half a dozen families I’ve known over the years, but please don’t ask me for names.”

“Were any of them in Mrs. Morton’s room that afternoon?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not that I know of, but a lot of the people were strangers to me.”

“She kept going back to that fire,” Ray said.

“And the drowning,” Tub added as he reached for a third cookie.

“Rachel’s brothers? Yes, that happened before she married and moved her membership to Bethany, so I never knew those boys, but it did prey on her mind at times.”

“Like the house that caught fire?”

“Such a tragedy. And so hard on Rachel because she had been over just that morning to take Jannie some tangerines. It was her family custom to buy a crate of them every Christmas and share them out. And then to look out her back window and see the house on fire? By the time she and her husband and the other neighbors got there, it was too late. Nobody could get through those flames. Heart pine, you know. Lightwood. Fat with resin. Might as well’ve been drenched in kerosene. Once heart pine starts burning, you can’t put it out, and the nearest fire department was seven miles away.”

Using both hands to steady the glass, the old man took a sip of his lemonade and carefully set it back on the tray. “Nearly killed her brother, too. Richard Howell. Rachel was the one called him. He blamed himself something awful that she was living in that firetrap. Kept saying he should have forgotten about medical school. Should have dropped out and got a job that would’ve helped Jannie and the girls live in a safe house. Thought he’d been selfish.”

“Why?” asked Tub. “He didn’t have anything to do with her husband leaving her, did he?”

“No, but people aren’t always logical.”

“What about the man who hit a woman?” asked Ray.

“Excuse me?”

“She said that some deacons put the fear of God in a man for hitting his wife.”

Blank-faced, Snaveley said, “I didn’t hear her say that, but then there were so many people in the room, I must have missed a lot. Did she give more details?”

“That was all. Did anything like that happen when you were her preacher? Did the deacons ever take someone to task for beating up on his wife?”

“You must remember that I left Bethany years ago. Have you spoken to her current minister? He was there, I believe.”

“Not yet,” said Ray.

The old man carefully lifted the glass pitcher with trembling hands and turned to Tub. “More lemonade, young man?”

As he poured, Ray put the first paper back in his pocket and took out the form Mayleen had devised.

“Sir, if you would, just put a check mark next to all the people you’re sure were there when you were.”

Snaveley set the pitcher back on the tray and wiped his damp hands on a napkin before taking the form. Minutes later, he handed it back with only four non-family names checked off.

“Like I said, I really didn’t know many of them. Her minister, Richard Howell, and the Byrds, of course. Sam and Kitty. Hadn’t seen them in a while so I mostly talked to them.” His eyes went to the picture of a white-haired woman on his desk. “Kitty Byrd became a very dear friend of my late wife. Like us, they never had children either.”

“No kids?” Tub was surprised. “But how—?” He broke off in confusion.

Snaveley looked at him over the top of his glasses. “How what, young man?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be nosy, but this looks like an expensive place to live and if you were a preacher and you don’t have kids—”

He looked to Ray for help, but the older deputy kept a bland face and waited to see how Tub was going to get out of it.

Fortunately, Furman Snaveley chose to be amused. “You’re wondering how I could possibly afford Cameron Longview?”

Embarrassed, Tub nodded.

“Simple, Deputy Greene. I can’t. It’s by the generosity of Dr. Howell.”

He leaned back in his chair, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose where they seemed to pinch him. “Richard credits me with keeping him sane in those dark days after the fire. I did nothing more than my pastoral duties, really, but I made him stay with my wife and me that Christmas. We took long walks together and I let him talk all the poison out of his system. Richard had always been a rather self-centered young man up until then. He wanted what he wanted and didn’t seem to care who got hurt in the process. He felt entitled and I’m afraid his grandmother spoiled him after his parents died. Doted on him, in fact. Not that she didn’t love Jannie, too, but he was the male. He was bright and he was ambitious and in her eyes he could do no wrong, an opinion he fully shared, and he didn’t hide his light under a bushel either. If he made all A’s in his high-school classes, he’d be sure you heard about it. Same with his scholarships and academic honors. He did the work, so he wanted the glory, and his grandmother certainly gave it to him. After the fire, he blamed himself for that, too. Thought that was why Jannie married so young, that she got tired of the comparisons.”

He held his glasses up to the light, polished away a smudge, and put them back on. “His grief was so deep, he was ready to chuck it all and go dig ditches in Africa or something, but I was able to help him see how much good he could do in the world if he applied his talents to serving others, and you see how he’s done that—the burn unit at the hospital, the pediatric wing, the scholarships he’s funded, all in their memory. ‘I’m like King Midas,’ he told me once. ‘I used to worship money. Now everything I touch turns to gold, but when it might have saved Jannie and her babies, I had nothing.’

“After I retired, my wife needed a couple of expensive operations and they wiped out our savings.” He shook his head sadly. “Wouldn’t it be the Christian thing to make medical care affordable for everyone?” He sighed. “She died anyhow and I was living on Social Security in a little apartment over in Boylan Heights, back of the prison. Richard came to see me. He’d heard about her death. When he saw that apartment…well, two weeks later, he brought me here. Wouldn’t let me say no. Jannie’s death was a tragedy, but at least some good came of it. It changed a selfish, self-centered boy into a generous philanthropist.”

He smiled. “Not that he’s a complete saint, mind you. He still likes recognition and praise, but he’s certainly earned it, don’t you think?”

And yet—?
Furman Snaveley pushed aside the small troubling aspect that had suddenly occurred to him and said, “I’m sorry there aren’t more cookies, but what about another glass of lemonade?”

  

“Thanks for coming in, Miss Collins,” Mayleen said.

She had seen Amanda Collins when assembling the DVD from videos and snapshots taken last Wednesday, but the eighteen-year-old freshman was even prettier in person. Only five two, but her petite blonde beauty filled the room. Major Bryant and the others kept referring to cowbird eggs and she got the analogy, but Mayleen was country born and bred and she knew that cowbirds are plain and nondescript. This girl, with her long blonde hair, was like a small neat canary.

“No problem,” Amanda said as she took the chair next to Mayleen’s desk. “I was coming home today anyhow. My last exam was at ten o’clock this morning, so I’m finished until summer school starts next week.”

She touched the screen of her phone and read the message that popped up. “Oops! My roommate says I left a pair of sandals in our room. Let me just tell her to keep them or toss them. Oh, and I need to let my dad know I’m running a little late.”

She tapped the screen a few more times, then put the phone on mute and slid it into her purse, an expensive little green leather case with a long narrow strap. It matched the simple green-striped knit top she wore over plain white cotton slacks. They were equally expensive and equally understated.

BOOK: Designated Daughters
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