Christmas Stalkings (31 page)

Marnolla followed me onto the porch and shut the door. “Lynette’s why you can’t let them put me in jail,” she said. “She’s just a baby her own self and she’s got nobody else, so I need to be here,
Deb’rah
. You hear?”

“I hear,” I sighed and drove home in the darkness
,
through side streets still festive with Santa Claus sleds and wooden reindeer, although the Rudolph spotlighted on a neighbor’s roof was beginning to look a bit jaded.

Aunt Zell had made chicken pastry for dinner and she was pleased to hear Miss Sallie’s pretty words about her fruitcake, but worried over Marnolla.

“Maybe Billy Tyson’s right,” I said as she passed the spinach salad. “Maybe it
is
going to take a few days in jail to get her to quit taking stuff out of his store.”

“But if there’s a baby coming—”

Aunt Zell paused and shook her head over a situation with no easy solutions. “I’ll pray on it for you.”

“That’ll be nice,” I said.

While I did care about
Marnolla’s
problems, she was only one client among many, and none of them blighted my holiday season.

Court didn’t sit the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so we kept bankers’ hours at the law office. I made duty calls on “most of my brothers and their wives during the day, did some serious partying with friends over in Raleigh by night, and, since I was getting low on clean blouses and lingerie, skipped church on Sunday morning so I could sneak in a quick load of wash while Aunt Zell was out of the house.

She swears she isn’t superstitious; all the same, if I want to wash clothes between new Christmas and old Christmas, she starts fussing about having to wash shrouds for a corpse in the coming year. I’ve tried to tell her it’s only if you wash bedclothes, but she won’t run the risk. Or the washer.

Rather than argue about it every year, I just wait till she’s gone.

She came home from church rather put out with Billy Tyson. “I entreated him in the spirit of Christian fellowship to turn the cheek one more time and give Marnolla another chance, but he kept asking whether the laborer wasn’t worthy of his hire.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Well, it sort of made sense when he was saying it.” She grinned and for a moment looked so like my mother that I had to hug her.

On New Year’s Eve; I ran into Tracy Johnson at Fancy Footwork’s year-end clearance sale. She’s one of the D.A.’s sharpest assistants, tall and willowy with short blond hair and gorgeous eyes, which she downplays in court with oversized glasses. I caught her wistfully trying on a pair of black patent pumps with four-inch stiletto heels.

Regretfully, she handed the shoes back to the clerk and slipped into a pair with low French heels. They were okay, but nothing dazzling. Tracy walked back and forth in front of the mirror and sighed. “When I was at Duke, I almost married a basketball player.”

I tried to imagine life without high heels. “It might have been worth it,” I said. “Most of Duke’s players at least graduate, don’t they?”

“Eventually. Or so they say. Wouldn’t matter. Judges aren’t crazy about tall women either.”

Her eyes narrowed as I tried on the shoes she’d relinquished and I instantly knew I’d made a tactless mistake.

“I see Marnolla Faison’s going to be back with us next week,” she said sweetly. “Third-time lucky?”

Hastily, I abandoned the patent leathers. It was not a good sign that the D.A.’s office remembered Marnolla.

“Woodall plans to ask for ninety days.”

Three months!
My heart sank. I could only hope that Judge O’Donnell would be hearing the case.

As if she’d read my mind, Tracy gave the clerk her credit card for the low-heeled shoes and said, “Perry Byrd’s due to sit then.”

Layers of pink and gold clouds streaked the eastern sky as a designated driver delivered me back to the house on New Year’s Day. I forget who designated him. The carload of friends that came back to Dobbs weren’t all the same ones I’d left Dobbs with and I couldn’t quite remember where the changeovers had come because we hit at least five parties during the night I recall kissing Randolph
Englert
in Durham just as the ball dropped in Times Square, and I know Davis Reed and I had an intimate champagne breakfast with grits and red-eye gravy around 3
a.m.
somewhere between Pittsboro and Chapel Hill. Further, deponent
sayeth
not

I’d been asleep about four hours when the phone rang beside my bed. A smell of black-eyed peas and hog jowl had drifted up from the kitchen to worry ray queasy stomach, and Billy Tyson’s loud angry voice did nothing to help the throbbing in my temples.

“If this is your idea of a joke to make the Merchants’ Association look shabby,” he roared, “we’ll just—”

Before he could complete his sentence, I heard Aunt Zell’s voice in the background. “You give me that phone, Billy Tyson! I told you she had nothing to do with this baby.
Deb’rah
? You better come on over here, honey. I need you to help pound some sense in his head.”

It took a moment till my own head quit pounding for me to realize that Aunt Zell wasn’t downstairs tending to her traditional pot of black-eyed peas.

“Where are you?” I croaked.

“At the hospital, of course. The first baby was born and it’s that Lynette’s that’s staying with Marnolla and Billy’s saying they’re going to disqualify it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s”—her voice dropped to a whisper— “illegitimate.”

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Despite headache and queasy stomach, I stepped into the shower with a whistle on my lips. Sometimes God does have a sense of humor.

Every January, amid much local publicity, the Merchants’ Association welcomes Dobbs’s first baby of the New Year with a Santa Claus bagful of goodies: clothes and diapers from
Bigg
Shopp
or K mart, a case of formula or nursing bottles from our two drugstores, a pewter cup from the Jewel Chest, birth announcements from The Print Place, a nightlight from Webster’s Hardware, several pounds of assorted pork sausages from the Dixie Dew Packing Company.

Integration had officially arrived in North Carolina before I was born, but I was twelve before Colleton County finally agreed that separate wasn’t equal and started closing down all the shabby black schools. I was driving legally before a black infant qualified as Dobbs’s first baby of the year.

I had a hard time believing this was the first
illegitimate first baby the stork had ever dropped on Dobbs Memorial Hospital, but this was Aunt Zell’s first year as president of the Women’s Auxiliary and she has a strong sense of fair play.

She’d make Billy do the right thing and then maybe I could pressure him to drop the charges against Marnolla.

“Forget it,” Billy snarled. “She’s not getting so much as a diaper pin from us.”

We three were seated at a conference table in the Women’s Auxiliary meeting room just off the main lobby. A coffee urn and some cups stood on a tray in the middle and Aunt Zell pushed a plate of her sliced fruitcake toward me. I hadn’t stopped for any hair of the dog before coming over and I wondered if my stomach would find fruitcake soaked with applejack an acceptable substitute.

Billy bit into a fresh slice as if it were nothing more than dry bread. “Anyhow, what do we even know about this girl? What if she’s a prostitute or a drug addict? What if the baby was born with AIDS? It could be dead in three months.”

“It won’t,” Aunt Zell said. “I sneaked a look at her charts. Lynette tested out healthy when they worked up her blood here at our prenatal clinic.”

“I don’t care. The Merchants’ Association stands for good Christian values, and mere’s no way we’re going to reward immorality and sinful behavior by giving presents to an illegitimate baby.”

“Why, Billy Tyson,” my aunt scolded. “What if the Magi had taken that attitude about the Christ Child? Strictly speaking, by man’s laws anyhow, He was illegitimate, wasn’t He?”

“With all due respect, Miss Zell, that’s not the same as this and you know it,” said Billy. “Anyhow, Mary was married to Joseph.”

“But Joseph wasn’t the daddy,” she reminded him softly.

“Bet the
Ledger l\
have fun with this.” I poured myself a steaming cup of coffee and drank it thirstily. “Talk about visiting the sins of the father on the child! And then there’s that motor mouth out at the radio station. Just his meat.”

“Damn it,
Deb’rah
, the girl’s not even from here!” Billy howled. “You can’t tell
me
Lynette
DiLaurenzio’s
a good old Colleton County name.”

“Jesus wasn’t from Bethlehem, either,” murmured Aunt Zell.

I can quote the Bible, too, but I decided maybe it was time for a little legal Latin. Like ex post facto.

“What’s that?” asked Billy.

“It means that laws can’t be changed retroactively. In this case, unless you can show me where the Merchants’ Association ever wrote it down that the first baby has to be born in wedlock, then I’d say no matter where Lynette
DiLaurenzio
is from, her baby’s legally entitled to all the goods and services any first baby usually gets. And if there’s too much name-calling on this, it might even slop over into a defamation of character lawsuit.”

“Oh, Christ!” Billy groaned.

“Exactly,” said my aunt

As long as we had him backed to the wall, I put in another plea for Marnolla. “After all,” I said, “how’s it going to look when you give that girl all those things in the name of the Merchants’ Association and then jail the woman who took her in?”

“Okay, okay!’ said Billy, who knew when he was licked. “But this time,
you’re
paying the court costs.”

Aunt Zell leaned across the table and patted his hand. “I’d be honored if you’d let me do that, Billy.”

The three of us trooped upstairs to the obstetrics ward to tell Marnolla and the new mother the good news.

Lynette was asleep, so Marnolla walked down the hall with us to the nursery to peer through the glass at the brand-new baby girl. Red-faced and squalling lustily, she kicked at her pink blanket and flailed the air with her tiny hands. Billy’s spontaneous smile was as foolish as Aunt Zell’s, and I knew an equally foolish smile was on my own face. What is it about newborn babies? Looking over
Marnolla’s
.shoulder, I found myself remembering that long-ago wonder when she first let me hold Avis. For one smug moment I felt almost as holy as one of the Magi, figuring I’d helped smooth this little girl’s welcome into the world.

Nobody had told Marnolla that the baby had won the annual derby, and her initial surprise turned to a deep frown when Billy said he’d call the newspaper and radio station and arrange for coverage of the presentation ceremony sometime that afternoon.

“It’s going to be in the paper
and
on the radio?” she asked.

“And that’s not all,” I caroled. “Since it’d sound weird if people heard you were going to be punished for trying to provide some of those very same things for the baby, Billy’s very kindly agreed to drop the charges.” I tried not to gloat in front of him.

“No,” said Marnolla.

“No?” asked Billy.

“What do you mean, ‘No’?” I said.

“Just no. N-o, no. We don’t want nothing from the Merchants’ Association.” Marnolla turned to Billy earnestly. “I mean, it’s real nice of ya’ll, but let somebody else’s be first baby. You were right in the first place, Billy. What I done was wrong and I’m ready to go to jail for it”

I found myself wondering if the Magi would have felt this dumbfounded if Joseph had told them thanks and all that, but he’d just as soon they keep their frankincense and myrrh.

“What about Lynette?” asked Aunt Zell. “Shouldn’t she have some say in this? You’re asking that young mother to give up an honor worth at least three hundred dollars.”

“More like five hundred,” Billy said indignantly.

For a moment, Marnolla wavered; then she drew herself up sharply. “She’ll be all right without it. I’ll take care of her and the baby, too. So ya’ll just keep those reporters away from her, you hear?”

I grabbed her by the arm. “Marnolla, I want to speak to you.”

She tried to pull away, but I said, “Privately. As your lawyer.”