After lecturing the kids about respect for private property, I turned to their parents.
“Your houses sit on quarter-acre lots,” I said. “When you bought your sons these four-wheelers, where did you think they were going to ride them? It’s illegal for them to be on the road and you don’t have any land. What were you thinking?”
All I got were indifferent shrugs.
“I see by their records that this is the second time these three boys have been cited, which means that you had notice of their prior misuse of the ATVs.”
Again, looks of indifference.
“In other words, Mom and Dad, your failure to supervise is negligence and makes you liable for all the damages and leaves you open to the possibility of being prosecuted for contributing to their delinquency.”
Now I had their attention.
I leafed through their case folders and read over Luther Parker’s notes. It took me a few minutes to process what he’d planned to do and when I next glanced up, two of the parents appeared distinctly worried.
“Last time, your sons got a very light slap on the wrist and there was no inconvenience to you. This time, I’m ordering that they be sent for a mental health evaluation, for which you will be billed.”
I glanced over at the farmer whose beans had been destroyed. “Mr. Bell estimates the damage at fifteen hundred dollars, which is extremely reasonable, if not downright generous of him.”
I then put the boys under the supervision of a juvenile court counselor, and ordered them to pay damages, to stay off Mr. Bell’s property, and not to ride their ATVs anywhere that wasn’t legally sanctioned.
Some of the parents were huffing by this time, but I warned them that if their sons came back to court again for misuse of their ATVs, they themselves would also face charges. “And penalties in adult courts are a lot tougher than here.”
“Don’t worry, Your Honor,” said one of the mothers. “His four-wheeling days are over. There’s going to be a FOR SALE sign on it this afternoon.”
“Aw, Mo-om!” the twelve-year-old whined.
“You heard her,” his father said sternly. “And your part of that fifteen hundred is coming out of your savings account, not ours.”
Juvenile court can be a real downer at times and that afternoon, I dealt with a bully who’s well on his way to spending his life in prison if someone doesn’t shoot him first. I signed an order that would return a rebellious fourteen-year-old runaway to her family in Virginia, sent three repeat teenagers to a minimum security youth center, and arranged protective custody for two little girls whose foster dad was waiting trial for raping them.
At least I hoped I was giving them protection.
When Luther signed the papers that put those girls in that last foster home, he must surely have thought they would be safer there than where they were. I suppose you could say he was right if you call being raped safer than being beaten to a bloody pulp by their birth father, who’s now serving life for killing their baby brother.
By the end of the session, I was totally drained. As I sat down at the defense table to read over a search warrant a Dobbs police officer wanted me to sign, a pair of familiar hands began to massage the muscles that had knotted in my neck. For once, the search warrant was properly filled out and I signed it without a murmur.
When we were alone in the courtroom, I looked up into Dwight’s warm brown eyes. “Ummm. If I were a cat, I’d be purring about now.”
“Rough day?” he asked as he kneaded the tension from my neck.
“Just this last half. How come you’re still here? Where’s Cal?”
“Kate called me. He’s over at the farm with Jake and Mary Pat, helping to set out those tuberoses the kids are gonna grow.”
Seth, Daddy, and I had given some of my nieces and nephews a twenty-acre field to try to grow an economically feasible organic crop. They planned to put five acres in tuberoses and sunflowers, and the rest in soybeans.
I glanced at my watch. Almost five-thirty. “Will someone give them supper?”
“Supper and a sleepover at Seth and Minnie’s. Tomorrow’s a teacher work day, so the kids’re gonna pick up a couple of pizzas and watch one of Jess’s favorite horse movies.”
His eyes twinkled and a bolt of happy anticipation shot through me. I do love Dwight’s son, but hey! Dwight and I have been married only four months.
“You mean we have the whole evening to ourselves?”
“Want to drive into Raleigh? Drinks at Miss Molly’s, then dinner or a movie?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I want to pick up something on our way home, then make popcorn and watch an old video the way we used to before I knew you loved me.”
His smile turned into a mock leer. “Exactly the way we used to?”
I leered right back at him, remembering how chaste those evenings had been. “Only this time you can show me what was actually on your mind back then.”
CHAPTER 9
. . . and if there is
a fly nearby, or dust, a blowing curtain,
the sun coming in through the glass, watch it:
that is yours to keep.
—Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson
FRIDAY MORNING
Walking down the hallway to his office next morning, Dwight eventually realized that all the smiles he was getting probably meant that he had a sappy one pasted on his face.
“Good morning, sir,” one of the deputies said as he passed the squad room.
If he only knew, Dwight thought to himself, savoring the memory of Deborah when he had taken her a cup of coffee an hour or so earlier. No sooner had he handed her the mug than she had carefully placed it on the shelf of their headboard, then pulled him down next to her for a repeat of last night when she had disappeared into their bedroom, ostensibly to pick out a video.
“Need some help deciding which one?” he had called when she didn’t return right away.
“That’s okay. I’ve got it.” A few minutes later, she appeared in the doorway. “Men in Black, or me in this?” she asked with a perfectly straight face.
As he felt himself begin to harden, he had laughed and said, “No contest. Men in Black, of course.”
“You’re in a good mood this morning,” Bo Poole said. “You and Wilson come up with specifics on Candace Bradshaw yesterday?”
“Nothing worth talking about,” he said. “If she wrote anything down, we haven’t found it yet. Her assistant claims she kept her board membership pretty much separate from Bradshaw Management and says if she took money for her favors, she would’ve considered it more like a perfectly legitimate thank-you gift than a kickback. Richards came up empty on her home computer, too. The Ginsburg twins are going file by file on both computers just to see if she got cute and hid something under an innocuous label, and I’ve asked Danny Creedmore to come in this morning, but I don’t expect to get much out of him until we have something to pry him open with.”
They were still talking when Dwight’s phone rang and a doctor in the medical examiner’s office over in Chapel Hill handed him a crowbar. Because Candace Bradshaw’s death had been tagged a probable suicide, there had been no huge rush to do the postmortem.
“Good thing that whoever found her tore that bag open without disturbing the drawstrings,” the doctor told him. “Soon as I cut the bag away from her neck, it was clear that it didn’t line up with the original marks on her neck. She didn’t die from asphyxia, Bryant. She was strangled first with a thin ligament and then the bag put on.”