He accepted a chair, refused wine, and pronounced himself pleased to meet the Ragsdales.
“I’m real sorry about your brother,” he told Millie, “but we’re going to do everything we can to—”
Dixie turned to Millie in wordless communication.
“Come on, honey,” she said to Lynnette. “Let’s get you some milk and then back to bed, okay?”
“Okay,” the little girl said sleepily and allowed herself to be led back to my bed where her cousin slept undisturbed.
“Sorry,” said Detective Underwood when they had gone inside. “Guess I wasn’t thinking. It’s been a long day.”
“Do you know who fed my brother penicillin?” Millie asked bluntly.
“Not yet, ma’am. But don’t you worry. We’ve got the newspaper, radio and television asking folks to get in touch with us if they know anything. As many people as were in that building last night, somebody’s bound to’ve seen him.”
Underwood was good. Despite the deep shadows here on the porch, I could see him becoming folksier and warmer by the minute and the Ragsdales were responding in kind.
“If there’s anything we can do,” said Millie.
“Well, now, you were real close to him, weren’t you?” Underwood paused to let her nod vigorously. “Y’all see each other much?”
“He and Lynnie drove up every couple of months and we talked on the phone every week. Before Evelyn died, we’d come here for Thanksgiving and they’d come to us for Christmas, or vice versa. We wanted Shirley Jane and Lynnie to love each other and be friends. I can’t have any more children and he didn’t plan to either after Evelyn died, so we wanted them to grow up like sisters.”
“I see. And did he talk to you about his work? The people he worked with?”
“Not really. Just that he loved it and made a good living from it.”
“So he never mentioned any enemies?” asked Underwood as Dixie reappeared in the doorway.
“Never. He got along good with everyone, so far as I know.”
Neither Pell nor Dixie was rude enough to snort at that, but I saw Millie looking at me suspiciously, as if she could hear my eyebrows lift in the darkness.
“Of course, there might have been girlfriends. Before he married Evelyn, he used to have three or four at a time fighting over him.” She said it admiringly, as if vicariously proud of her brother’s affairs.
“So he was one of those,” sniffed my internal preacher. “A man who bragged about his sexual conquests.”
The pragmatist shrugged. “Human nature, and what else is new?”
“Since Evelyn died—”
She broke off abruptly and stared at me with wide eyes. “Deborah Knott! Now I remember. You’re Miss Barbara’s niece. Well, I’ll be darned. I always used to wonder and of course, I couldn’t ask her.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“About the baby. Did you have it or did you get an abortion?”
15
« ^ » “Banks are but one of the complex series of organizations in which the morality, the knowledge, and the activity of the times are expressed.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
I was so stunned I could only sit there in the half-darkness looking as guilty as a yard dog slinking out of the henhouse.
“What baby?” I asked dumbly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”
“Aren’t you the same Deborah Knott that’s Miss Barbara Peabody’s niece?”
“Well, yes.” No point in denying something so easily checked.
“Chan told me all about you that summer,” said Millie Ragsdale. “And he told me why you left when you did:—because he got you pregnant.”
“There’s only been one immaculate conception,” I said hotly, “and I wasn’t there for that one, either. I don’t know why he’d tell you such a thing, but he was lying.”
“He said you wouldn’t leave him alone. Couldn’t keep your hands off him.”
“Oh, please. Your brother was a horny teenager with over-active glands and what was obviously an overactive imagination. He was at least two years younger than me and I certainly didn’t go to bed with him.”
This was the truth, technically speaking, but only because Aunt Barbara had walked up on us in the gazebo at the crucial moment and I had split for New York soon afterwards. However, this was not something I felt compelled to say with everyone—including Detective David Underwood—staring at me as if my nose was growing longer with every word I spoke.
“When I introduced you,” Dixie said suddenly, “Chan did say y’all had met before.”
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “Hey, wait a minute here. This is getting blown way out of proportion. Yes, I met a kid named Chandler Nolan a hundred years ago and yes, I went with him to a couple of movies and let him kiss me a few times and maybe there was even some heavy breathing. But that was all. I don’t care what kind of bragging he did, Mrs. Ragsdale, that was all. And as for me leaving because I was pregnant? In his dreams.”
“Wet, no doubt,” Pell murmured wickedly from the shadows beside me.
Millie Ragsdale glared at him.
“I left because he was a ruddy nuisance. He was supposed to be there to cut my aunt’s grass and weed her rose garden. Instead, I couldn’t step out the door without him being all over me like flypaper.”
“You were after him,” his sister insisted.
“He was a kid,” I told her gently. “A pimply-faced, gangly kid with too much imagination. Think back to when you were nineteen. Think about the enormous gulf between a nineteen-year-old woman and a seventeen-year-old boy. At that age, would you have had sex with a boy two years younger than you?”
At first, I thought she was going to deny the thought of sex with anyone before marriage. Instead, she said stubbornly, “Chan was never pimply-faced.”
For some reason, Quentin Ragsdale couldn’t let that pass. “Yes, he was, Mill. I remember how he always had Noxzema and Clearasil in his gym bag. And he did like to brag about girls he never really had.”
Millie looked at him, suddenly tearful. “Whose side are you on, Quentin?”
He reached out and touched her hand. “There aren’t any sides here, hon, and you’re tired.”
His words seemed to diffuse the tension that hers had built up and there was a general stirring as everyone suddenly realized that yes, it was getting late. Long day today. And longer tomorrow, no doubt.
It was quickly decided that the Ragsdales and Shirley Jane would drive on over to Lexington, that Lynnette would finish the night in my bed and that I could move into Dixie’s guest room.
As the others went inside the house, David Underwood drew me to one side.
“You got anything planned for tomorrow morning, Judge?”
“Not really,” I answered. “Why?”
“Then how about you come down to my office around ten o’clock?”
The invitation did not sound optional, so I smiled a smile of as much pure innocence as I could muster and told him I’d be happy to meet him then.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” Dixie asked later as I was making up her guest bed with clean sheets.
She had packed Chan’s overnight case, zipped his extra shirts and jackets into his garment bag, and was now clearing his toiletries from the half bath next door.
“When did I have a chance?”
“At the hospital?”
“Right. While you were worried and feeling guilty because you weren’t there when Chan got to your floor, I was supposed to say ‘And by the way, your son-in-law tried to get in my pants when I was going through a rough time in my life’? I wasn’t being secretive, Dixie. Honest. It just seemed so irrelevant”
She paused with Chan’s toothbrush, dental floss and razor in her hand. “But after he died—?”