Designated Daughters (25 page)

I suddenly remembered that he’d shoplifted a couple of preteen dresses from the local Walmart.

“So you want me to do that for you?”

He took my credit card and after a few deft movements, the knob turned in his hand and the door opened. I could have hugged him.

“I’ll keep a watch out for y’all,” he said.

Before I could tell him not to bother and send him on his way, Aunt Zell said, “Thank you, Marcus. That’s very kind of you.”

“They turned the lights off day before yesterday, but I guess the bank told you that.”

I gave him a sharp look. “Have you been in this house before?”

“Well, sure, Judge. Miss Jones used to watch my sisters. Their school lets out about an hour before mine does.”

“No, I mean since Miss Jones left.”

“Well…I might’ve walked through. Just to see if they forgot anything,” he said sheepishly.

It took Aunt Zell a few minutes to orient herself. “Everything’s so different without furniture.”

I gave her the flashlight and she set it shining around the walls and windows. I immediately grabbed it back. “Not the windows, Aunt Zell!”

“Oops!” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. This was the dining room, I believe, and across the hall should be the living room.”

It was. She went straight to the fireplace and pressed one of the carved rosettes in the surround. Immediately, I heard a click and a little door popped open. She shined the light into the cavity. “Empty. Now as best I recall…”

She put her hand inside and a moment later exclaimed, “Oh, my stars! There
is
something here. Hold the light, honey.”

While I watched, she pulled out several small velvet pouches.

“You take a look, Deborah. Make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

Even shining the light directly into that second cavity, I couldn’t see anything else.

“
Psssst!
” Marcus was signaling us from the hallway. “Hey, Judge! A police car just pulled up out front!”

“Oh dear,” said Aunt Zell and rushed toward the side door. “Hurry, Deborah!”

I gave one final sweep with my hand and my fingers closed around two small heavy objects. I quickly shut both little openings and followed Aunt Zell and Marcus into the dining room just as a strong flashlight beam at those French doors lit up the hall from the portico. Another half second and I’d have been caught in that light.

“Hurry, hurry!” Marcus urged. He shoved me through the side door and locked it behind him before pushing us past the overgrown shrubbery into the next yard and on into the yard after that. Somewhere a dog barked and I heard the crackle of the cruiser’s radio.

“Bet it was old man Walker called them on us,” Marcus said when he felt it was safe to talk. “He’s scared of his own shadow.”

Two minutes later, we cut through his backyard and out to my car.

“Thank you, Marcus,” I said. “That could have been awkward.”

He grinned. “And you a judge? With permission to be there?”

“Oh dear!” said Aunt Zell. “Ash’s crowbar! I left it inside.”

“I’ll buy you another one,” I told her.

“But he’ll know!” she protested. “It’ll be the wrong size or a different brand.”

“Well, if you really want me to go back and get it,” I said.

Marcus was laughing so hard even Aunt Zell saw the humor.

“No, no,” she said. “I’ll just pretend I don’t have a clue. Maybe he’ll think he misplaced it himself.”

We were halfway back to her house and she had just said for the second time what a nice young man Marcus was when it finally struck me. “Oh,
shit
!”

“Deborah?”

“Sorry, Aunt Zell. I just remembered that Marcus didn’t give me back my credit card.”

“Never mind, dear. Wait until tomorrow to cancel it and I’ll take care of any charges he puts on it. A workman is worthy of his hire, don’t you think?”

Next day, I tapped at Aunt Zell’s kitchen door about five minutes after I recessed at noon. She had called Sally and invited her and the current Designated Daughters to come for lunch and I wanted to be there for the presentation. Unfortunately, Marillyn Mulholland’s mother-in-law had taken a turn for the worse and she was unable to attend, but the others arrived on schedule. I helped Aunt Zell serve lunch in the garden, which was wheelchair-accessible, something the house itself wasn’t.

“So far, the stairs and steps aren’t a problem,” she said, “but Ash and I will have to think about adding ramps if we stay here, and they can be so ugly.”

Sally knew something was up but she hadn’t figured out what it was. The others were unsuspicious and thought Aunt Zell had invited them because she was one of the earlier Daughters herself. Frances Jones remembered her from her mother’s UDC days and felt compelled to tell her how she’d lost the Georgian tea service.

“But Deborah tells me that you-all managed to avenge it with a duck decoy.”

“Yes, but I can’t really justify spending that money to get the set back.”

Aunt Zell smiled. “Deborah?”

I laid two gold coins on the table. “Maybe these will help?”

Wide-eyed, Frances reached out a timid finger. “Are these my grandfather’s twenty-dollar gold coins? Where on earth—?”

Aunt Zell handed her the little velvet bags.

“Mama’s ring?” Frances whispered. “Mama’s earrings?” Crying now, she opened the last bag and the ornate necklace slid onto the tablecloth. Sunlight caught the facets of emeralds and diamonds with gleaming pearls. “Where were they? We looked everywhere.”

Aunt Zell explained about the second secret compartment. No one thought to question how she got into the house and retrieved them, but Sally’s Botoxed lips stretched into an evil grin. “Well, damn!” she said to me. “Not so tight-assed after all.”

Back at the courthouse, I zipped up my robe and hurried into the courtroom.

“All rise,” said the bailiff. “This court is now back in session, the Honorable Deborah Knott present and presiding.”

As I took my seat, I saw a crowbar on the bench before me.

“Mr. Overby?” I said.

“Some kid came by with it, ma’am,” said the bailiff. “Said for me to give you this, too.”

He handed me a return envelope for some charity or other. The charity’s name and address had been crossed out and my name printed above it. Inside was my credit card and a note: “
You owe me one Not Guilty.
”

I
took pains with my makeup and dressed more carefully than usual on Thursday morning, because I was taking a day of personal leave. I’d been invited to speak in Raleigh at a luncheon sponsored by an association of local trial lawyers. I spoke the truth when I told Jim Collins that I was happy in district court, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to keep my options open, not to mention build a few bridges I might want to cross someday.

Aiming for a look that was professional but not uptight, I settled on a cropped green jacket with three-quarter sleeves over a dark blue sleeveless shift. Navy heels and a shiny yellow clutch bag just big enough to hold the essentials and the notes for my talk. While hunting for a particular lipstick, I upended one of the purses I’d used last week and when I did, a pearl fell out, the one I’d found in the bathroom when Amanda Collins’s necklace broke. I had totally forgotten about it.

Jim Collins had said that she was in summer school at Meredith College, which was very near where I’d be speaking. Why not run by and return it to her after lunch? I tucked it into the little pocket of my purse so that I could find it again, reviewed my notes, then headed for Raleigh an hour earlier than I really needed to. Nothing said I couldn’t check out the shoe sale the Belk store in Garner was holding, since it was right on my way.

And a very nice sale it was. I found a perfect pair of taupe sandals to go with some of my summer outfits. Leather straps, cork wedge heels, and only thirty dollars.

Lunch was chicken salad with fresh fruit slices, washed down with iced tea. My talk—“10 Things a Defense Attorney Can Do to Annoy a District Court Judge”—was meant to be funny, and the laughter and applause it got were quite gratifying. I didn’t realize, though, that Chief Justice Sarah Parker was in the room until I was halfway through my talk.

(Yikes! Do I sound snarky or is she amused?)

To my relief, her laughter at number six seemed genuine and I could breathe again.

Meredith is a liberal-arts women’s college on the west side of Raleigh just inside the Beltline. Originally chartered by the Southern Baptist Convention, it shed those historic ties when the Convention turned more conservative back in the nineties and began to emphasize male supremacy. A lot of students did not take kindly to an injunction to “submit graciously” to a husband and they did not want to keep silent in church.

A helpful clerk in the administration building told me that Amanda Collins lived in Stringfield, a residence hall across from the library. A student leaving the building held the door for me and no one asked to see my ID, so I went on up to the first floor and knocked on the open door.

From the boxes stacked on the second bed, I gathered that she must have just moved in and hadn’t yet unpacked everything.

Wearing white shorts and a maroon T-shirt, she sat cross-legged on one of the beds with a thick textbook on her lap and earphones plugged into the iPod on her desk. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was barefooted. Until I knocked again, louder this time, she didn’t realize I was there. Upon seeing me, she gave a friendly smile as she pulled off the earphones. “Can I help you? If you’re looking for Laurel, she won’t get here till Sunday.”

“No, I was looking for you,” I said, opening my purse. “I’m Deborah Knott and I have one of your pearls.”

I held it out to her and she was both surprised and pleased. “Of course! You’re the one who helped me pick them up. Thank you! As soon as I got to the car and counted them, I realized one was missing. I went back up to that room and looked everywhere but I couldn’t find it. Where was it?”

“It bounced into the bathroom. Behind the wastebasket,” I said. “I tried to catch you, but you’d already gone.”

She seemed so happy to get it back that I said, “Didn’t you say they were your mother’s?”

Amanda nodded. “It was an add-a-pearl necklace from her grandmother. She started it when Mom was born so that she’d have pearls to wear on her wedding day. I can’t tell you how much it means to have them all. I may go and get them restrung tomorrow.”

As I turned to go, her words suddenly registered.

“You came back to the third floor?”

“Yes, I—”

I watched her eyes fill with horror as she realized what I was asking and all the color drained from her face.

“
You?
” I was stunned. “
You
killed Aunt Rachel?”

“No! No, I didn’t. I
didn’t
!” Her textbook fell to the floor as she scooted further away from me until her back was against the headboard next to the wall. “I
didn’t
!”

But we both knew she did.

“
Why?
” I asked. “What did she ever do to you?”

She was crying now, huge racking sobs that seemed to come from a deep well of shame and grief. “She kept talking about it and I didn’t want Dad to know.”

“To know what?”

“That he’s not my real father,” she sobbed. “That Mom had an affair with some damn cowbird.”

“What?”

“My brother. My
half
brother,” she said bitterly. “Before he left for Scotland. Something he said made me take a good look at us. Mom was dead, but her pictures…And Dad. All of them have dark hair, and just look at mine.”

She gave her head an angry jerk and that blonde ponytail brushed her fair cheek as more tears spilled from those blue eyes. “We were studying DNA in my science class and I sent samples from Dad and me to a lab I found online. No kinship. It would just kill him to think Mom had an affair. They loved each other so much. I don’t know what happened. Maybe she was raped or something. But Miss Rachel…she was already off life support. She was going to die any minute anyhow. Wasn’t she? Everybody said so.”

She was sniffling through her sobs and patting her pockets. I spotted a box of tissues and handed them to her. She blew her nose and looked at me helplessly.

“But what if she didn’t? What if she woke up and started talking about me again? Then everyone would know and Dad—!”

There was such a heaviness in my chest that I had to take deep breaths before I could speak.

“He knows, Amanda. He’s known from the beginning.”

“He
knows
?”

“Your mother made him promise not to tell you.”

It was too much for the girl to bear. She rolled over onto her stomach and buried her head in the pillows, her whole body wracked with hopeless grief.

I walked out into the hall and called Dwight.

And I stayed with Amanda until he came.

W
e told the family immediately, of course.

By the end of the week, their surprise and anger was somewhat tempered by sympathy for Jim Collins, who was devastated and heartbroken over what Amanda had done. When talking to Dwight the night she was arrested, Collins castigated himself over and over for not breaking his promise to his late wife. “It’s my fault. All my fault. If only I’d told her. Why didn’t I
tell
her? She knew I loved her. Telling her the truth wouldn’t have changed that.”

While waiting with her for Dwight to come, Amanda had told me everything.

“I was worried about Dad,” she said, her face blotched from crying, “but honest, the reason I went back upstairs—the
only
reason—was to try and find that last pearl. I came up through the new part of the hospital because I didn’t want to run into any of the others and there must have been some sort of emergency going on because the third-floor hallway was full of people. But when I got to the hospice hall, it was empty.”

She had gone into the room across from Aunt Rachel’s and searched the floor, all the time thinking how devastated her dad would be if Aunt Rachel woke up and started harping on goldfinches and cowbirds again, perhaps this time with details that everyone, including him, would recognize.

“I kept hoping she would just go on and die and never wake up again. Then I saw her aide leave the room and go down the hall to the elevator. She didn’t see me and I thought if I could just…just…you know, help her stop breathing? But as soon as I put the pillow over her face and mashed down, it felt so awful—
I
felt so awful—that I stopped. It was too late, though. She was gone that quick.”

Shivering with shock, still tearful and scared, Amanda told me how she’d stuck the blood-spotted pillow case in her purse and pushed the pillow itself under the lowered bed, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed. After that, she’d scurried back downstairs, dumping the pillow case on the way, then out to the car before Collins returned.

“I thought she was cleared,” said Dwight, who had eliminated her as a suspect early on. “You told me she left and others saw her waiting in the car. And there was Ray and Tub trying to see if poor old Furman Snaveley, eighty-seven years old, could get upstairs and back again when all the time it was a teenager racing up and down.”

Upon advice of the criminal attorney Collins had retained, Amanda was going to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and throw herself on the mercy of the court. If the court accepts her plea, there will be an active prison sentence, but she’ll have plenty of time to get her life back on track. Hell, she may even wind up running Mediway a few years from now as Collins had hoped.

Jay-Jay was saddened by the whole situation but Sally, who has her own record of youthful rashness, was taking it more in stride. “I hate like the devil that she broke Mama’s nose, Deborah. I really hate that, even though Dr. Singh says she probably didn’t suffer. If she’d done it for money or out of spite…? But she didn’t, did she? She did it because she loved her parents. If I’ve learned anything from the Daughters, it’s how much you’ll do for people you love.

“Look at little Katie Lancaster. She bitches about ol’ Spencer, but she’s the only one in the whole damn family who puts up with him. She bathes him and cooks for him, cuts his toenails, and gets him clean underwear if he doesn’t make it to the bathroom in time. She sees that he takes his meds and listens when he tells her the same story for the fifty-third time. Oh, they’ll pay her for his care, but don’t ask them to come take Spencer off her hands for an afternoon or evening.”

While I did not feel compelled to share with her the time I stabbed Allen Stancil, I did tell about Valerie Rhodes, who was so upset over her sister’s humiliated misery that she’d smashed into the car where her brother-in-law and his girlfriend were getting it on.

“There you go,” Sally said.

A couple of mornings later, I was enjoying a few quiet moments on our back porch with Bandit snoozing at my feet. Dwight and Cal had already left and I had gone out with a cup of coffee to skim through the paper and see what new rollbacks our current legislature had enacted in its determination to undo all the progress the state’s made in the last fifty years. Not too long ago, we led the area in education, jobs, civil rights, and quality of life. Now we seem to be competing with Alabama and Mississippi to see who can dive to the bottom first. Voting rights curtailed, social programs cut, oversight authorities with no power, our aquifers threatened by undisclosed fracking chemicals, women told what they can or can’t do with their bodies. Our safety nets have been shredded and we’ve become the butt of jokes on talk shows.

Depressing.

I was ready to chuck the paper when Bandit suddenly roused up and started wagging his tail. A moment later, I heard the rattle of Daddy’s old truck and watched as he pulled up in the drive and got out.

“Maidie sent you some bushes,” he said, taking several potted plants out of the back.

His housekeeper had rooted us a couple of snowball bushes, a purple hydrangea, and a gardenia from bushes Mother had first planted around the homeplace. Maidie has the greenest thumb of anyone on the farm and over the years, cuttings from Mother’s original plantings have flourished in the dooryards of all my brothers, including Adam’s. Karen takes rooted cuttings back to California every time she’s here.

He set the pots on the back steps and came on up on the porch when I opened the screen door and offered him coffee. I even brought him an ashtray. He’s cut back a lot on the cigarettes, but he’ll never quit completely and we’ve all stopped nagging him. “If they ain’t killed him by now,” says Doris, another smoker who’ll reach for a cigarette on her deathbed, “quitting at his age ain’t gonna help.”

“You not working today?” he asked as he lit up, using one of the wooden kitchen matches he tucks into his cigarette packs. That whiff of sulfur always carries me right back to childhood. Some of my earliest, sweetest memories have the smell of sulfur and cigarette smoke embedded in them.

“I don’t have to be there till later this morning.” I sensed something was on his mind, but I knew he’d tell me in his own good time.

For a while, we sat and watched the bluebirds go in and out of the box on the other side of the screen. A pair of wrens had nested in one of my hanging baskets and every time one of the adults flew up to perch on the rim with a beakful of insects, we could hear the nestlings’ loud peeps.

“Sounds like they’ll be flying in a couple of days,” Daddy said.

We couldn’t see the towhee that was scratching in the mulch beneath the birdhouse, but we could hear his low distinctive call. Out among the pines, jays and crows were going at it in a loud, raucous slinging match. Both will rob eggs from other nests, so it’s an ongoing battle. It’s never completely quiet in the country. No, we don’t have taxis, buses, or endless sirens. Our background noises are more subdued, but they’re there. Birds, frogs, cicadas, crickets, the wind through the trees, an occasional rooster crow, or the distant lovesick shriek of Zach’s solitary peacock. Somewhere on the far side of the farm, I could hear a tractor working the fields.

For a few minutes, we sat and listened without talking, then Daddy said, “What’s gonna happen with that girl?”

“Amanda Collins?”

He nodded.

“No trial,” I said. “She’ll plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and go straight to sentencing.”

“How much time’s she likely to get?”

“Voluntary manslaughter? No priors, no aggravating circumstances? At least three years, but no more than four. I guess that doesn’t seem like much to you, balanced against Aunt Rachel’s life?”

He didn’t answer, just took another drag on his cigarette and looked out across the yard to where it slopes to the pond. We sat in silence for several minutes as the wrens came and went and the towhee continued to scratch for insects.

“Rachel won’t never mean-minded,” he said at last. “I reckon she’d say that’s about right.”

He stood to go.

“What about you, Daddy?” I asked as he opened the screen door and started down the steps to his truck.

“I know what prison’s like, shug. Remember? But it ain’t gonna bring Rachel back, is it?”