She was wailing like a child and we turned to see what the trouble was.
Tears streamed down her cheeks and her hands trembled so badly that the phone slipped to the ground. She stood there too shaken to pick it up.
“Mom’s killed herself!”
CHAPTER 6
A scraping gentles an air of oak and mimosa
and I hear sounds of boys playing basketball in the barnyard.
—Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson
When I got back from Will’s, it was all over the courthouse. As a prominent business owner and chair of the county commissioners, Candace Bradshaw had enjoyed a degree of power that affected a lot of lives, so her death was major news. A cat’s-paw for the building trades and land developers, she was less liked by those of us who wanted to slow growth until a thoughtful plan was in place; but both sides generally conceded that however ill-equipped she might be to run the county, she was thoroughly conscientious in her ownership of Bradshaw Management. Not only did she provide benefits and health insurance, she also paid her menial employees more than the minimum wages required by law—the result, it was said, of her own humble start.
In return, she expected to get full value for every dollar. The janitorial branch of Bradshaw Management had contracts to clean offices all around the county and it was well known that she could suddenly appear in the middle of the evening to be sure that her people were doing a satisfactory job and not simply going through the motions with their mops and buckets and dusting cloths. One uncleaned sink or toilet got a warning; two and the careless worker would be fired on the spot.
By the time I reconvened court, courthouse regulars agreed that Candace Bradshaw had died sometime after her daughter stormed out of the house and well before noon that day, when her cleaning woman let herself in. They also agreed that she had been found in her bedroom with a white plastic trash bag over her head. After that, the real truth was up for grabs.
“I hear she was in bed buck naked, so she’d probably been with a man.”
“I heard she was made up to go out.”
“Drunk as a skunk.”
“Sober as an owl.”
“Her face and arms were covered in bruises and somebody’d given her a black eye.”
“No, there wasn’t a mark on her.”
“It was murder/suicide/an accident—”
“Bet you a nickel it was one of them . . . whadda-you-call-it? Something nasty. Auto-rotic something?”
“Autoerotic asphyxiation?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t getting it from any man these days, was she? Well, there you go.”
I suppose I could’ve slipped down to Dwight’s office during my afternoon break and tried to wheedle the facts out of him, but we have a separation-of-powers agreement: I don’t ask him about any of his cases that might come before me and he doesn’t comment on any of mine until after I’ve ruled on them and signed off.
In truth, it’s worked out better than you’d think, given my natural curiosity and his natural tendency to tell me what I ought to be doing, something he got in the habit of back when we were kids and he tried to boss me around like one of my brothers. Lucky for both of us, he doesn’t have time to keep track of all the minor felonies that show up in my court these days, and as a district court judge, I’ll never hear any of his homicide cases or major felonies. Too, he knows I’ll be discreet if he does discuss a murder with me.
Even though this was a suicide, I put my curiosity on hold and despite all the speculations flying around, I managed to keep my mind on assault and forgery and the endless he-said/she-said that make up the bulk of a district court calendar. Between cases, my clerk kept me updated on each and every new assertion and by the end of the day, enough of the note Candace Bradshaw left had seeped out that people were starting to say she had seriously misused her office as chair of the board of commissioners and that she had killed herself rather than face the shame of exposure.
Not to mention the humiliation of probable jail time.
My clerk had an in with the dispatcher and whispered some of the details to me. It was a small trash bag, the kind with drawstrings, and Candace had snugged it around her neck and tied it off with a neat bow.
It appeared that she had made the bag airtight and then laid herself calmly down to die by gentle suffocation. Not the worst way to kill yourself, I suppose. I’m told that you pass out from asphyxia first and then you pass on.
Her body had been sent to Chapel Hill for the automatic autopsy required by the circumstances, but there were no marks or bruises on her body, no broken fingernails or any signs of a struggle, so the autopsy would be pro forma with no expected surprises. Word came up that Deanna Bradshaw was pitching a fit all over the sheriff’s department downstairs, insisting that never in a million years would her mother kill herself. “And she never wrote that note either. Okay, maybe Mom cut a few corners, did a few favors she maybe hadn’t ought to’ve, but, hell, that’s the way things work if you want to get anything done. No way would she have gone to jail for such little stuff. She knew where too many bodies are buried for anybody to try to prosecute her. Besides, Mom would never, ever kill herself without leaving me a note, too.”
“Hmpf,” my clerk sniffed. “I heard she and Candace had a huge fight yesterday. The kid’s feeling guilty.”
Normally Dwight leaves Dobbs at least an hour earlier than I do, but we had ridden in together that morning because his truck needed a new taillight where someone had backed into him in the parking lot, and our mechanic had said he’d work it in if Dwight could leave it there all day.
When I got downstairs Melanie Ashworth, the department’s recently hired spokesperson, was patiently answering questions from the two reporters who were still there. One of them was Ruby Dixon herself, although she was slurring her questions and her pencil kept slipping off the lines of her reporter’s tablet as she tried to record Melanie’s comments.
I found myself remembering how Linsey Thomas would have handled this. He would’ve sent someone sober to question Melanie, while he himself would be on the phone, running down Candace Bradshaw’s cleaning woman, questioning the other commissioners, interviewing staff members at Bradshaw Management, talking to Candace’s daughter and maybe her former husband. By now, he might even have the contents of the note she’d left behind and a definite answer as to whether or not it was in her handwriting.
I found Dwight in his office, so absorbed in some reports that he wasn’t immediately aware of me. He had loosened the knot on the tie that I’d bought him the week before and the cuffs of his blue shirt were turned back.
Dwight doesn’t consider himself the least bit handsome and always says he looks like the Durham Bull in a pea jacket, muscle-bound and ungainly. Believe me. No.
He’s taller than most of my brothers and okay, he’s built a little more like a football player than the skinny basketball hotshot he was in high school, but there’s nothing muscle-bound about him at all. Solid, yes, with big hands and feet, brown hair and eyes, and an honest, open face.
When he realized I was there in the doorway and looked up with that warm smile, my heart turned over. “Hey there,” he said. “I was just about to go see how near done you were.”
“You can leave now?” I asked.
“Sure. Why not? Oh, you mean because of Candace Bradshaw?” He shrugged. “I’ve got Richards and Dalton out going through the motions, taking statements.”
“So what was in the note she left?”
“Now you know I’m not going to talk about that right now.”
“But she really did break the law?”
He shook his head at me and buttoned the cuffs of his sleeves. “Give it up, shug.”