Bootlegger’s Daughter (18 page)

There were no meteors in this May sky tonight. Only an occasional plane, blinking red and green lights as it headed toward the Raleigh-Durham Airport.

Trish filled our glasses again and there was rueful amusement in her voice. “If we hadn’t been such nice, obedient daughters, we’d have had the boys out there on the quilt with us and maybe the other would never have happened.

“Anyhow, my new bra was cutting into me and I pulled up my blouse to unhook it and the hooks were too tight so Kay leaned over to help me and then… I still don’t know quite how it began. Her hand touched my breast as delicately as a flower. Then she kissed the other, so sweetly. So gently. And everything followed as if preordained. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, so much better than the way boys fumbled with my clothes or humped themselves against me when they kissed me good night. It was the first time for both of us and it was heaven. We even had meteors putting on a light show, streaking through the sky!”

She shook her head fondly at the absurdity of it all.

“Of course, next morning, we both had heads the size of basketballs and we couldn’t handle what had happened, so we tried to pretend it really hadn’t, and we made sure we didn’t have any more two-girl sleep overs. Not till we both were married. You remember how Will and Fred were such good friends? Well, about a year before Janie died, Will and I spent a long weekend at the beach with Fred and Kay. The guys had to come back Sunday night to go to work, but Kay and I stayed down there till Monday afternoon. And that time, we did know what we were doing.”

There was a long silence. I watched lightning bugs drift across her deck on the mild night air. Trish’s yard backed up on Forty-Eight’s right-of-way, and though sounds and lights were muffled or blocked by a thick stand of trees and bushes, we could still hear the sparse weeknight traffic as cars swished back and forth intermittently.

“Where did Janie fit in?” I asked.

“Kay and I used to talk about that.” Trish sipped her wine with a meditative air. “We finally decided that Janie wanted to play with fire without-not getting burned, exactly-more like not admitting it was even fire. All three of us had been cheerleaders at Dobbs Senior, but it wasn’t till after we were married and living here in Cotton Grove that she actually started hanging out with us. I don’t think she consciously knew until right at the end that Kay and I had become lovers, but she certainly sensed there was something special between us, a force field or something, and it drove her crazy because it made her feel left out and jealous. She could be so high school at times, that ‘You like her better than you like me’ sort of thing, you know?”

I nodded.

“Take the cars. You ever hear how that started?”

“Not that I remember.”

“It was sort of ironic. Will was auctioning off a fleet of company cars for some business that had gone bankrupt. I needed a new car about then, so he got Fred to bid on one for me. Well, Fred decided it was such a good deal, he bid on one for Kay. At first we were put out with them for getting us two identical cars, but later we realized that it meant people couldn’t drive by our houses and automatically know if we were in there together, maybe spending more time together than most married women did.

“Janie thought we did it on purpose and she got one as near like ours as she could find. The front bumpers were a little different, but you didn’t notice it, in a casual glance.”

“It’s hard to think of somebody as shrewd as Janie being that naïve,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Trish asked dryly. “Near the end, she was bored with Jed and out of sorts with herself and with her body. We used to give her back rubs and massages while she was pregnant, and she’d talk about wanting to nurse the baby, so she used to rub her nipples with cocoa butter to toughen them up like the book said. It must have been erotic for Janie-she was always finding a reason to take off her top, and she did have nice breasts-but Kay and I weren’t interested in a group grope, so it was all pretty platonic as for as we were concerned.”

“But it stopped being platonic a week or so before she died, right?”

“You could say that, yes.”

She filled her glass again, and the bottle gleamed in the moonlight when she held it out to me, but I shook my head.

“I’d better nurse this one if I’m going to drive back to Dobbs,” I said regretfully.

“You could stay over.”

“Thanks, but-”

“The guest room has a lock on the door.”

I laughed and she laughed, too, a slightly tipsy chuckle that seemed to bubble up from a generous heart.

“Where was I?”

“Where it stopped being platonic.”

“Right. After Gayle was born, Janie nursed her about two weeks while her uterus contracted, then decided it was too much of a drag. Now, that’s not what she told Jed and the grandparents, but that’s what it was. She felt like a cow that got milked every two hours, and she was afraid of her breasts sagging, but mostly it was that if she nursed, then she couldn’t dump Gayle on her mother or you whenever she wanted.”

Gayle must have been about three weeks old the first time Janie went out and left her with me the whole afternoon. At sixteen, being left alone with that tiny creature-Jed’s baby! -had seemed such a privilege, such a demonstration of trust. Now Trish made it clear that Janie would’ve entrusted Gayle to anybody who could warm a bottle without melting it.

“We’d been shopping and we came back here to try everything on the way we did in those days, see what really fit, what we were going to keep, what we’d probably take back. Janie started bitching again about how hard it was to get back into shape, even though it’d been almost three months. Just look at how her breasts were still swollen and look at that layer of fat around her waist. ‘Look at this, look at that,’ till Kay and I started laughing because we knew what she was really doing. Kay said, ‘Oh, the poor little fatty, fatty, two-by-four,’ and tickled her in the ribs. That set us off. We got the silly giggles, and soon we were rolling around on the rug in our underwear and we could see that Janie was getting excited, so-o…”

Moonlight bathed her soft bare shoulders in silver as she left the details to my imagination.

“We had a dog once that used to start begging every time he saw any of us with a piece of candy,” I said. “Used to worry the little twins and me to death if we didn’t give him any, and of course, he wasn’t supposed to have sugar. One day we were sitting on the back porch with a bag of those big nickel red-hots and one of the twins tossed me one, but the dog jumped up and grabbed it in midair and ran off under the house with it. He took one crunch and it burned his mouth so badly that he went flying for his water dish with his tail between his legs and you better believe he never wanted another piece of candy again.”

Trish laughed. “Yeah, that was Janie, all right. She started calling us dykes and whores till Kay pushed her down on the bed and told her to shut her mouth. ‘You wanted it,’ Kay said. ‘You’ve been wanting it for months and you still want it, only you’re too scared to admit it. Too afraid of what people would say if they knew. Well, nobody outside this room ever has to. But, honeychile, we know and so do you!’ ”

“It must have scared the hell out of her,” I mused, turning the stem of the wineglass in my fingers.

“Just like your dog,” Trish agreed as she emptied the last of the wine into her own glass. “Went yipping off to hide behind her sister’s skirts and pretend she was straight as a man’s cock. I bet Jed got some of the best loving that week that he’d had all year.”

It was nearly midnight. Most of the traffic had dwindled away to nothing out on the highway. I stretched out my legs, propped them on the deck railing, and asked, “Who killed her, Trish?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, honey, I used to wonder if it might not be some married man here in town. If Janie needed to prove to herself that she was straight through and through, she might have come on too strongly to somebody and then- just like with Kay and me-maybe tried to weasel out in the end, only he wouldn’t let her.”

Whenever a sentence starts with “to tell you the truth,” I automatically look for the underlying prevarication. “Which married man?”

“Oh, hell, Deb’rah. It could have been a dozen different men.”

“Name me some names.”

She was just tipsy enough to do it. Some of them I didn’t recognize, others were no longer in the area, the rest were all respectable middle-aged-to-elderly pillars of the community now. As I ran their faces through my memory, she drained her wineglass, then added two more names: “And of course, let us not forget my future ex-husband or Fred Saunders.”

The Ledger may be the county’s oldest continuous newspaper, but it’s housed in a modern structure, a small boxy cube that’s slightly canted on its lot next to a former tobacco warehouse that’s now a weekend flea market. The exterior’s sheathed in cedar shingles that have been stained a dark greenish gray. There are times, especially in deep summer, when the building almost disappears into its plantings of birch and fir. The illusion is further enhanced by the front sheet of glass that lets people gaze straight into a central garden planted with small deciduous trees so that it’s shady in summer yet flooded with sunlight all winter, a neat piece of passive solar planning.

Everybody goes ape over gracious old traditional houses, but I grew up in one and I’m here to tell you they cost a fortune to heat and cool, and they’re a bitch to clean. If I ever build a house of my own, I’m going to steal Linsey Thomas’s blueprints.

Luther Parker was just getting out of his car when I pulled up in front of the Ledger building shortly before eight-thirty. The paper goes to press at eleven on Fridays, and we wanted to make sure Linsey had time to put together an accurate account.

As Luther held the door for me, the receptionist, who doubled as Linsey’s secretary, looked at the phone she was holding and then at us with an air of confusion. “Miss Knott! I was just phoning you. Mr. Thomas was hoping-”

She flipped an intercom button. “Mr. Thomas? Miss Knott just walked in.”

Almost immediately, he appeared at the door of his office down at the right corner of the atrium. A tall fit man, midforties with a hairline that had receded all the way past the crown of his head, and proud possessor of the world’s ugliest moustache, Linsey Thomas had learned to talk while toddling around the press shop behind his grandmother, and his voice had never toned down to normal levels.

“Deborah!” he shouted, big brown eyes gleaming behind shiny rimless glasses. He gestured for us to hurry on down the hall. “You must have read my mind. Mr. Parker, I’m Linsey Thomas. We met at the Harvey Gantt breakfast last month.”

He thrust out his hand to a disconcerted Luther Parker, who murmured, “Yes, of course,” evidently unaware that this was one editor who honestly never expected people to remember his name, his megaphone manner of speaking, or his bushy moustache.

He swept us into his office. Half of one wall was a floor-to-ceiling window that looked directly into the heart of the atrium. Unfortunately, its tranquilizing effect was wrecked by the piles of books and papers stacked on every surface, even lining the floor along the baseboards. Before we could find empty chairs, he was waving a crumpled sheet of paper in our faces.

“I want to know whose scrofulous sphincter excreted this scurrilous piece of filth?”

(No one has ever heard Linsey Thomas actually curse, but that certainly doesn’t mean his mind is pure and virginal, merely that he learned hundreds of synonyms from the same grandmother who wrote my grandfather’s obituary.)

“That’s what we came to discuss,” I said as I tipped books out of the nearest chair and sat down. “I have no idea who sent out that garbage in my name.”

“Huh? What in all the sulfuric flames you talking about?” he boomed. “I was addressing my remarks to Mr. Parker here.”

“Wait a minute.” I reached for the paper he kept waving around. “This isn’t my letterhead.”

“Who said it was?”

Luther Parker was too polite to dump a chair full of books on the floor, but he seemed to have no scruples about reading over my shoulder. Evidently he read faster than I did, because I was only halfway through the first sentence when he began spluttering.

This one was on his letterhead and it was almost a duplicate of the one circulated in Makely the day before, only this time, the beast with seven horns that Judicial District 11-C was being warned about was me.

If one could believe everything in this open letter, Luther Parker was an upright, foursquare Christian family man who sang with the angels when he wasn’t defending Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Ms. Deborah Knott, on the other hand, was an unmarried, (a) castrating bitch, (b) promiscuous whore, or (c) closet lesbian (pick one), the daughter of the biggest bootlegger in Colleton County history, and a defender of foreign drug dealers from whom she was probably getting a cut of the profits. “If Ms. Knott is elected to the bench, it will be speedy trials and speedier acquittals for drunks, junkies, and perverts of all kinds.”

“They were on nearly every News and Observer box in Dobbs,” said Linsey in his dulcet, window-rattling tones. “Not the ones here on Main Street, but all the out-of-the-way places where there’s not much nighttime traffic.”

He sat behind his desk and twisted a few hairs of his exuberant moustache while reading the flyer with my letterhead. As soon as he’d finished, he swiveled over and flicked the intercom. “Hey, Ashley,” he shouted. “Get me Hector Woodlief, okay?”

I don’t know why he bothered with the intercom since his door was still open.

“Hold on there a minute,” Luther objected. “You don’t want to involve Woodlief. Even if he had a hand in it, you sure we want to remind voters there’s a Republican alternative?”

“Smart thinking,” Linsey agreed. “Ashley? Cancel that call.” He swiveled back to us. “But if it’s not Woodlief, who else benefits?”