“It didn’t take me long,” I said, “You’re due some back.”
He looked at me and smiled, but his smile was no longer open. “Keep it,” he said airily. “There’s plenty more where that came from. Payment for keeping my trap shut. Guilt money for doing hard time.” His face softened. “I knew Thelma was desperate,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to thank her. I thought if somebody, anybody, told her how much she’d done for them, it might give her hope. I guess I was too late.”
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?
He hadn’t finished.
“Did you get somebody to look for me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“My landlord chucked me out,” he said. “You should have known nobody wants to house a convict. Especially one who looks like me. Why did you do it?”
I felt I owed him the truth and so I gave it to him. “Because I wasn’t sure you really existed,” I said.
He nodded, to himself rather than me. “I feel sorry for your type, you know,” he said, again almost as if to himself. “I came to literature late, but there’s one thing I can do that you can’t. I can distinguish between fact and fiction.”
I shrugged and I looked at him, at this huge man, dressed this time in gold threads that shimmered when he moved. I smiled. “It’s not always easy,” I said.
He saw my look and he returned my smile. He strode over to me, enfolded one of my hands in his big paws, and clasped it, “Nice to have met you, Kate Baeier,” he said. He let go of my hand. “Can I give you one last piece of advice?”
“How can I refuse?”
“Open the windows,” he said. “Let the sun shine in. Breathe the air.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged and looked at me, “A balance sheet isn’t everything,” he said. “I should know, I’m good at numbers. Business will pick up. You’re good at your job-you found Thelma, didn’t you?”
He left the room as quietly as he had arrived. I climbed on my chair so I could watch him in the street, but somehow I missed his exit.
I was in the right position, so I took his advice.
I opened the windows.
It was difficult, but I managed.
DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT by Margaret Maron
MARGARET MARON’s books featuring the New York Police Department’s Sigrid Harald are both complex mysteries and intense character studies. Harald appears in over half a dozen books to date, including such notable works as Corpus Christmas and One Coffee With. Ms. Maron lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”
An inaudible ripple of cognizance swept through the congregation as the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church paused in his reading of the text and beamed down at us.
I was seated on the aisle near the front of the church, and when Barry Blackman’s eyes met mine, I put a modest smile on my face, then tilted my head in ladylike acknowledgment of the pretty compliment he was paying me by his choice of subject for this morning’s sermon. A nice man but hardly Christianity’s most original preacher. I’d announced my candidacy back in December, so this wasn’t the first time I’d heard that particular text, and my response had become almost automatic.
He lowered his eyes to the huge Bible and continued to read aloud, “And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment.”
From your mouth to God’s ear, Barry, I thought.
Eight years of courtroom experience let me listen to the sermon with an outward show of close attention while inwardly my mind jumped on and off a dozen trains of thought. I wondered, without really caring, if Barry was still the terrific kisser he’d been the summer after ninth grade when we both drove tractors for my oldest brother during tobacco-barning season.
There was an S curve between the barns and the back fields where the lane dipped past a stream and cut through a stand of tulip poplars and sweetgum trees. Our timing wasn’t good enough to hit every trip, but at least two or three times a day it’d work out that we passed each other there in the shady coolness, one on the way out to the field with empty drags, the other headed back to the barn with drags full of heavy green tobacco leaves.
Nobody seemed to notice that I occasionally returned to the barn more flushed beneath the bill of my baseball cap than even the August sun would merit, although I did have to endure some teasing one day when a smear of tobacco tar appeared on my pink T-shirt right over my left breast. “Looks like somebody tried to grab a handful,” my sister-in-law grinned.
I muttered something about the tractor’s tar-gummy steering wheel, but I changed shirts at lunchtime and for the rest of the summer I wore the darkest T-shirts in my dresser drawer.
Now Barry Blackman was a preacher man running to fat, the father of two little boys and a new baby girl, while Deborah Knott was a still-single attorney running for a seat on the court bench, a seat being vacated against his will by old Harrison Hobart, who occasionally fell asleep these days while charging his own juries.
As Barry drew parallels between Old Testament Israel and modem Colleton County, I plotted election strategy. After the service, I’d do a little schmoozing among the congregation-
Strike “schmoozing,” my subconscious stipulated sternly, and I was stricken myself to realize that Lev Schuster’s Yiddish phrases continued to infect my vocabulary. Here in rural North Carolina schmoozing’s still called socializing, and I’d better not forget it before the primary. I pushed away errant thoughts of Lev and concentrated on lunch at Beulah’s. For that matter, where was Beulah and why weren’t she and J.C. seated there beside me?
Beulah had been my mother’s dearest friend, and her daughter-in-law, Helen, is president of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They were sponsoring a meet-the-candidates reception at four o’clock in the fellowship hall of a nearby Presbyterian church, and three of the four men running for Hobart’s seat would be there too. (The fourth was finishing up the community service old Hobart had imposed in lieu of a fine for driving while impaired, but he really didn’t expect to win many MADD votes anyhow.)
Barry’s sermon drew to an end just a hair short of equating a vote for Deborah Knott as a vote for Jesus Christ. The piano swung into the opening chords of “Just as I Am,” and the congregation stood to sing all five verses. Happily, no one accepted the hymn’s invitation to be saved that morning, and after a short closing prayer we were dismissed.
I’m not a member at Bethel, but I’d been a frequent visitor from the month I was born; so I got lots of hugs and howdies and promises of loyal support when the primary rolled around. I hugged and howdied right back and thanked them kindly, all the time edging toward my car.
It was starting to bother me that neither Beulah nor J.C. had come to church. Then Miss Callie Ogburn hailed me from the side door, talking sixty to the yard as she bustled across the grass.
“Beulah called me up first thing this morning and said tell you about J.C. and for you to come on anyhow. She phoned all over creation last night trying to let you know she’s still expecting you to come for dinner.”
That explained all those abortive clicks on my answering machine. Beulah was another of my parents’ generation who wouldn’t talk to a tape. I waited till Miss Callie ran out of breath, then asked her what it was Beulah wanted to tell me about J.C.
“He fell off the tractor and broke his leg yesterday, and he’s not used to the crutches yet, so Beulah didn’t feel like she ought to leave him this morning. You know how she spoils him.”
I did. J.C. was Beulah’s older brother, and he’d lived with her and her husband Sam almost from the day they were married more than forty years ago. J.C. was a born bachelor, and except for the war years when he worked as a carpenter’s helper at an air base over in Goldsboro, he’d never had much ambition beyond helping Sam farm. Sam always said J.C. wasn’t much of a leader but he was a damn good follower and earned every penny of his share of the crop profits.