“We got the ME’s report. He says Lynn Bullock bought the farm sometime between five and eight, although we know she called her husband at five and someone called her at five-ten. That means she was dead before Connecticut ever checked in.”
“What about John Claude’s pens? Reid and Sherry show you theirs?”
“Yeah. But the store had five to start with. I’ve got Mayleen Richards working on it.”
“There must be hundreds of them like that around,” I speculated.
“Not as many as you’d think.” He gestured toward the yellow legal pad that lay just beyond his reach. It was covered with doodles and notes that he’d taken when Deputy Richards gave her report. “The national distributor swears that he imported a hundred and fifty and only five of those were sent to this area. ’Course, the way people are moving in from all over, who knows? The whole hundred and fifty could’ve worked their way back east by now.”
I smiled. “Good thing we still had ours.”
“Good for Reid, anyhow.”
Even though I hadn’t really been worried about my cousin, I did feel a little relieved that the pen wasn’t his.
“You’re just going through the motions,” I said. “You know you don’t think Reid could do a thing like that.”
“I quit saying what a person could or couldn’t do a long time ago.”
Dwight’s only a few years older, but sometimes he acts as if those years confer a superior insight into human motivations. He gave a big yawn, stretched full length, then sat upright and opened another folder. “If we don’t get a viable suspect in the next twenty-four hours though, I’m going to start looking at all her old boyfriends a little closer. Millard King says he was jogging. Brandon Frazier says he went fishing. Alone. And Reid didn’t get to the ball field till after six. Remember?”
I wondered whose reputation would go in the toilet if Reid had to tell what bed he’d been in that afternoon.
Speak of the devil and up he jumps.
Thunder rumbled overhead and rain sprinkled the sidewalks as I hurried toward the parking lot before the heavens opened all the way and drenched my dark red rayon blouse. It isn’t that I mind the wet so much, but that particular blouse starts to shrink the minute water touches it—rather like the wicked witch when Dorothy empties the water bucket on her—and I was supposed to attend an official function that evening.
I slid into my car just as the rain started in earnest and there was Reid’s car parked by mine, nose to tail, so that we were facing each other. Reid powered down his window. With the rain slanting into his window instead of mine, I did the same.
“Feel like going to Steve’s for supper?” he said.
“Not particularly.”
My cousin Steve runs a barbecue house down Highway 48, a little ways past the farm, and it’s the best barbecue in Colleton County, but I was pigged out at the moment. During election season, that’s all they seem to serve at fund-raisers. “Why?”
“No reason. Just thought it might be fun to go by for the singing. Y’all still do that every week?”
“Yes, but that’s on Wednesdays.”
I almost had to smile. My brothers and cousins and anybody else that’s interested get together informally at Steve’s after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to sing and play bluegrass and gospel. It’s so country and Reid’s so town. He doesn’t play an instrument, he doesn’t know the words and he’s never dropped in when we were jamming except by accident.
“Well, maybe tomorrow night then?”
Rain pelted his face. His tan shirt and brown-striped tie were getting wet, yet he didn’t raise his window as he waited for my answer.
It was after five o’clock and I had plans for the evening, so I quit trying to figure out what he really wanted and said, “Sure.”
Maybe he’d hit me with it before I had to watch him make a fool of himself at Steve’s.
* * *
A month earlier, Cyl DeGraffenried and I had been asked to participate in a “Women in Law” forum at Kirkland Prep, an all-female school on the southwest edge of Raleigh. Since Cyl’s apartment is on the way, we’d agreed that I’d pick her up early and we’d stop for supper somewhere first.
Cyl and I aren’t best friends but we’re working on it. Chronologically, she’s five years younger. Psychologically, she acts five years older. She thinks my moral standards are too flexible, I think hers are overly rigid. When we argue politics and religion, she accuses me of being a flaming liberal. I know she’s a social conservative. She’s better read and more intellectual than I am, but she also has a dry, self-deprecating wit that keeps me off balance. Most true conservatives can’t laugh at themselves—they’re too busy pointing a sour finger at the rest of us—so Cyl’s mordant sense of humor gives me hope that I’ll convert her yet.
I hadn’t seen her around the courthouse during the day, but that wasn’t unusual. She prosecutes cases all over the district, wherever Doug Woodall sends her, and I’d left a message on her voice mail that I’d be by her place around six.
Her apartment’s in one of the new suburban developments that have popped up like dandelions between Garner and Raleigh. A swimming pool and fitness center surrounded by interlocking two-story duplexes that look more like yuppie townhouses than boxy apartments. Attractive low-maintenance landscaping. Tall spindly sticks that will eventually grow into towering shade trees if the whole place isn’t first leveled for another mall.
It was still raining when I drove into the parking area in front of Cyl’s ground-floor unit. The wind had died, and rain fell straight down from the sodden gray skies with a steady, almost sullen persistence, as if prepared to go on all night long. We’d had so much in the last few weeks that the ground was saturated, the creeks and rivers were swollen and it didn’t seem possible that there was any more water left in the clouds.
I did the umbrella maneuver—the one where you crack the car door, cautiously stick the umbrella up into the air and try to get it completely open so you won’t get drenched when you step out of the car? I managed to save my blouse, but when I reached back inside the car for my purse, I tipped the umbrella and dumped a gallon of water on my skirt.
One thing about platform shoes though: they do help you walk through shallow puddles without getting your feet wet.
I splashed over to Cyl’s door and stood beneath its mini-portico to ring the bell.
No answer.
I rang again, then scanned the parking area as I waited. Yes, there was her car, two spaces over from mine. She was probably on the phone or in the shower.
This time I leaned on the button a full thirty seconds.
Nada.
The curtains were half open but I couldn’t see any movement or much else inside the dark interior. On such a dreary late afternoon, her lights should have been on. Was the power out? Maybe the doorbell didn’t work? I pounded on the wooden panel, then put my ear close to the door and mashed the doorbell again till I heard endless chimes echo around the rooms inside.
This wasn’t like Cyl at all. She’s not only punctual, she’s usually punctilious.
I darted back to my car and used my flip phone to dial her number. The answering machine kicked in after the first ring and I said, “Cyl? Are you there? Pick up!”
I finally decided that maybe I’d gotten our signals crossed and that she’d probably gone on ahead with someone else.
Instead of a leisurely gossipy supper, I hit the drive-through at Hardee’s and ate a chicken sandwich in my car while the rain drummed on the roof and the windows fogged over.
At Kirkland Prep, I joined Judge Frances Tripp, the appeals court judge who administered my oath of office when I was first appointed to the bench, and Lou Ferncliff, one of the highest-paid personal injury attorneys in Raleigh. But no Cyl. The facilitator was head of the social studies department and very p.c. In addition to enlightening the student body with our female insights into the field of law, we were also supposed to be a visual civics lesson: two white women and two African-Americans, colleagues in law and equals under the law.