Using the empty shotgun for a cane, Carver limped out of the swamp.
Margaret Maron
Prayer for Judgment
from Shoveling Smoke
Certain smells take you back in time as quickly as any period song. One whiff of Evening in Paris and I am a child again, watching my mother get dressed up. The smell of woodsmoke, bacon, newly turned dirt, a damp kitten, shoe polish, Krispy Kreme doughnuts — each evokes anew its own long sequence of memories… like gardenias on a summer night.
The late June evening was so hot and humid, and the air was so still, that the heavy fragrance of gardenias was held close to the earth like layers of sweet-scented chiffon. I floated on my back at the end of the pool and breathed in the rich sensuous aroma of Aunt Zell’s forty-year-old bushes.
More than magnolias, gardenias are the smell of summer in central North Carolina and their scent unlocks memories and images we never think of when the weather’s cool and crisp.
Blurred stars twinkled in the hazy night sky, an occasional plane passed far overhead and lightning bugs drifted lazily through the evening stillness. Drifting with them, unshackled by gravity, I seemed to float not on water but on the thick sweet air itself, half of my senses disoriented, the other half too wholly relaxed to care whether a particular point of light was insect, human or extraterrestrial.
The house is only a few blocks from the center of Dobbs, but our sidewalks roll up at nine on a week night, and there was nothing to break the small town silence except light traffic or the occasional bark of a dog. When I heard the back screen door slam, I assumed it was Aunt Zell or Uncle Ash coming out to say goodnight, but the man silhouetted against the house lights was too big and bulky. One of my brothers?
“Deb’rah?” Dwight Bryant moved cautiously down the path and along the edge of the pool, as if his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the darkness.
“Watch out you don’t fall in,” I told him. “Unless you mean to.”
I didn’t reckon he did because my night vision was good enough to see that he had on his new sports jacket. As chief of detectives for the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, Dwight seldom wears a uniform unless he wants to look particularly official.
He followed my voice and came over to squat down on the coping and dip a hand in the water.
“Not very cool, is it?”
“Feels good though. Come on in.”
“No suit,” he said regretfully, “and Mr. Ash is so skinny, I couldn’t get into one of his.”
“Oh, you don’t need a bathing suit,” I teased. “Not dark as it is tonight. Besides, we’re just home folks here.”
Dwight snorted. Growing up, he was in and out of our farmhouse so much that he really could have been one more brother, but my brothers never went skinny-dipping if I were around. (Correction: not if they knew I was around. Kid sisters don’t always announce their presence.)
“You’re working late,” I said. “What’s up?”
“A young woman over in Black Creek got herself shot dead this morning. They didn’t find her till nearly six this evening.”
“Shot? You mean murdered?”
“Looks like it.”
“Someone we know?”
“Chastity Barefoot? Everybody called her Chass.”
Rang no bells with me.
“She and her husband both grew up in Harnett County. His name’s Edward Barefoot.”
“Now that sounds familiar for some reason.” I stood up — the lap pool’s only four feet deep — and Dwight reached down his big hand to haul me out beside him. I came up dripping and wrapped a towel around me as I tried to think where I’d heard that name recently. “They any kin to the Cotton Grove Barefoots?”
“Not that he said.”
I finished drying off and slipped on my flip-flops and an oversized tee-shirt and we walked back to the patio to sit and talk. Aunt Zell came out with a pitcher of iced tea and said she and Uncle Ash were going upstairs to watch the news in bed so if I’d lock up after Dwight left, she’d tell us goodnight now.
I gave her a hug and Dwight did, too, and after she’d gone inside and we were sipping the strong cold tea, I said, “This Edward Barefoot. He do the shooting?”
“Don’t see how he could’ve,” said Dwight. “Specially since you’re his alibi.”
“Come again?”
“He says he spent all morning in your courtroom. Says you let him off with a prayer for judgment.”
“I did?”
Monday morning traffic court is such a cattle call that it’s easy for the faces to blur and if Dwight had waited a week to ask me, I might not have remembered. As it was, it took me a minute to sort out which one had been Edward Barefoot.
As a district court judge, I had been presented with minor assaults, drug possession, worthless checks and a dozen other misdemeanor categories; but on the whole, traffic violations had made up the bulk of the day’s calendar. Seated on the side benches had been uniformed state troopers and officers from both the town’s police department and the county sheriff’s department, each prepared to testify why he had ticketed and/or arrested his share of the two hundred and five individuals named on my docket today. Tracy Johnson, the prosecuting ADA, had efficiently whittled at least thirty-five names from that docket and she spent the midmorning break period processing the rest of those who planned to plead guilty without an attorney.
At least 85 percent were male and younger than thirty. There doesn’t seem to be a sexual pattern on who will come up with phony registrations, improper plates or expired inspection stickers, but most sessions have one young lead-footed female and one older female alcoholic who’s blown more than the legal point-oh-eight. Yeah, and every week I get at least one middle-aged man who thinks it’s his God-given right to keep driving even though his license has been so thoroughly revoked that for the rest of his life it’ll barely be legal for him to get behind the steering wheel of a bumper car at the State Fair.
As I poured Dwight a second glass of tea, I remembered seeing Edward Barefoot come up to the defense table. I had wondered whether he was a first-time speeder or someone on the edge of getting his license revoked. His preppie haircut was so fresh that there was a half-inch band of white around the back edges where his hair had kept his neck from tanning, and his neat charcoal gray suit bespoke a young businessman somewhat embarrassed at finding himself in traffic court and eager to make a good impression. His pin-striped shirt and sober tie said, “I’m an upstanding taxpayer and solid citizen of the community,” but his edgy good looks would have been more appropriate on one of our tight-jeaned speed jockeys.
Tracy had withdrawn the charge of driving without a valid license, but Barefoot was still left with a 78 in a 65 speed zone.
I nodded to the spit-polished highway patrolman and said, “Tell me about it.”
It was the same old same old with a slight variation. Late one evening, about a week earlier, defendant got himself pulled for excessive speed on the interstate that bisects Colleton County. According to the trooper, Mr. Barefoot had been cooperative when asked to step out of the car, but there was an odor of an impairing substance about him and he didn’t have his wallet or license.
“Mr. Barefoot stated that his wife was usually their designated driver, so he often left his wallet at home when they went out like that. Just put some cash in his pocket. Mrs. Barefoot was in the vehicle and she did possess a valid license, but she stated that they’d been to a party over in Raleigh and she got into the piña coladas right heavy so they felt like it’d be safer for him to drive.”