And at the moment, she looked more self-conscious than usual and had flushed until her fair skin was the same shade as her freckles. As I joined them, she took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and said, “Good to see you, ma’am. I’d like you to meet my friend Mike Diaz. Mike, this is Judge Knott, Major Bryant’s wife.”
“We’ve met before, I believe,” I said, shaking the hand he held out to me. He had once come to court to speak for one of his compatriots.
“Si,” said Diaz, “but this time is better. Mayleen says I must learn baseball if I want to be a true American.”
“But surely you’ve seen baseball in Mexico,” I said.
“Oh yes. Half the major league teams here have Mexican players, but she says I have to see it like a native.” He lifted his hot dog and made a wry face. “Tacos are better, but when in Rome . . .”
We all laughed and Mayleen’s face was almost its natural shade by the time we parted for separate sections of the field.
“I like him,” I told Dwight when we returned to the family with drinks and dogs for everyone. “Does this mean Mayleen’s going to go against her family for him?”
He had told me about how conflicted she was over this relationship and how her family had threatened to disown her if she did not break it off.
“Don’t know, honey,” Dwight said. “But if she’s coming out in public with him around town here and introducing him to folks, it must mean something.”
We distributed the food and drinks. Cal took his and immediately joined some younger kids standing down by the fence behind home plate.
At the end of the first inning, the score was one–zip in favor of the visitors and that’s the way it stayed till the bottom of the ninth when Jackson reached first for the third time in the game and a teammate smashed one over the fence.
2–1 Dobbs!
On the drive home, Dwight said that they had come up with a name for Candace’s cousin and that someone would probably be eyeballing her old car tomorrow if the cousin still owned it.
I told him about going to her house with Will. “Did you see that bathroom?”
“Pretty fancy, huh? Mirrors on a bedroom ceiling’s one thing. I’m not real sure I’d want that many in the bathroom.”
“Bradshaw told Will that Dee’s laptop was stolen?”
“Yeah. Sort of confirms that the two deaths are linked. The Ginsburg twins think that Dee might have found the flash drive that Candace used and that’s why she was killed.”
“Really?” I was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded that the flash drive everyone was so anxious to find was probably the one in my purse.
Cal had fallen asleep in the backseat. Overhead, the stars blazed down from a cloudless sky. Very romantic. Dwight smiled over at me. “Remember when all cars had bench seats instead of buckets?”
I smiled back. Unfortunately, there was a console and a gearshift between us.
But he was in a talkative mood and told me about the phone calls Dee Bradshaw had made the evening she was killed: two to Gracie Farmer about the dollhouse and Farmer’s umbrella, one to her boyfriend, who was too drunk to talk, one to Will to ask him to come out and make her an offer, one to Roger Flackman about the possibility that her mother had been skimming the company’s take, and one to Danny Creedmore, who claimed that she had ended the conversation shortly after eight because someone was at the door.
“And Greg Turner says she left a three-minute message on his answering machine, but he swears she said nothing important and he immediately erased it.”
“You think one of them killed her?” I asked.
“Still up in the air,” he said. “I don’t know how the office manager would benefit unless she was in on some skimming, but Flackman says the books are in perfect order and we’re welcome to audit them.”
“Are you?”
“Hell, yes.”
“What about the others?”
“Well, we don’t think Will had a reason to do it,” he teased. “And Danny Creedmore’s been pretty open about the relationship. Oh, he doesn’t admit in so many words that he put her in place and has told her what to do from the beginning, but we’ve never heard a word of disagreement between them and he seems to have eased her over to Woody Galloway.”
“To take his body or take his seat?”
He laughed. “I don’t think he cared which. Woody’s a pretty empty suit as far as the county’s benefited, but he doesn’t take orders from Danny, so maybe backing her for the state senate wasn’t just going to be a holding action.”
“If Woody gets knocked out of the governor’s race, will he still keep his seat now?”
“I expect so, don’t you?”
“Yeah. He’s not totally dumb. If we’ve heard rumors that Candace wanted to run for real, he must have, too. Sounds like a decent enough reason for murder.”
“Except that he was in conference in Raleigh with a half-dozen senators when Candace was killed.”
“Greg Turner wasn’t in their pocket,” I said. “He’s a Democrat and often voted against the others. He and Jamie Jacobson both.”
“Yeah, but you read what Linsey Thomas wrote about him. Maybe Candace and Danny helped keep it quiet about him dipping into a client’s funds.” He hit the steering wheel in frustration. “I just wish to hell we could find her flash drive.”
“It’s bound to turn up sooner or later,” I said soothingly.
“You think?” He slowed to turn in to our drive. “If the killer took it, it’s probably been smashed with a hammer and thrown in Possum Creek.”
Now there was a thought.
CHAPTER 23
I don’t know what’s happening,
and I don’t know how to say it.
—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson
Weekday mornings are normally harried and a rush to get Dwight off to work and Cal off to school, but Wednesday morning seemed to move on snail legs. Cal’s backpack was sitting by the kitchen door at least twenty minutes before he needed to leave with Dwight to catch the bus at the end of our long drive and he had already bicycled down and back with the morning paper.
There was plenty of time for him to show us the new trick he had taught Bandit. I’ve always liked dogs, but I became particularly fond of this one after he helped get me out of a very tight spot last winter.
“Watch, y’all!” said Cal.
He told the little dog to sit, then gave an upward swoop of his hand.
Immediately, Bandit rose on his hind feet and bobbled across the kitchen floor.
Dwight laughed and I shook my head. “All that dog needs is an opposable thumb and he could be people.”
Cal beamed and gave Bandit a small morsel of food as a reward.
He performed twice more, then it was finally time for them to go meet the bus.
“Lunch?” I asked Dwight as they headed out to the truck.
“Buzz me,” he said. “I don’t know what the day’s going to be like.”
Once I was sure they were really gone, I rushed to my computer and popped the flash drive into one of the side ports.
To my total chagrin, the thing was password-protected. Who the hell protects a flash drive?
“Someone with something juicy to hide,” said the pragmatist, looking up from the morning paper.
“So give it to Dwight and take your punishment,” said the preacher. “You’re never going to get into it.”
“Oh, don’t be such a pessimist,” said the pragmatist, laying aside the paper. “You like puzzles. Maybe you can solve this one yourself. It’s worth a try.”
I started with the obvious things—variations of her name and the company’s name, her daughter’s name, Danny Creedmore’s, Woody Galloway’s, the Colleton Board of Commissioners, with A-B-C or 1-2-3 before and after each one. Nothing.