“Not at all,” I said inanely and was then passed on to his family, a rough-looking couple who seemed uncomfortable in this formal setting, and a self-conscious youth who looked so much like Edward Barefoot that I figured he was the youngest brother. He and his parents just nodded glumly when Aunt Zell and I expressed our sympathy.
As we worked our way back through the crowd, both of us were aware of a different pitch to the usual quiet funeral home murmur. I spotted a friend out on the porch and several people stopped Aunt Zell for a word. It was nearly half an hour before we got back to my car and both of us had heard the same stories. The middle Barefoot brother had been slipping around with Chastity and he hadn’t been seen since she was killed.
“Wonder if Dwight knows?” asked Aunt Zell.
“Yeah, we heard,” said Dwight when I called him that evening. “George Barefoot. He’s been living at home since he got out of jail and—”
“Jail?” I asked.
“Yeah. He ran a stop sign back last November and hit a Toyota. Totaled both cars and nearly killed the other driver. He blew a ten and since he already had one DWI and a string of speeding tickets, Judge Longmire gave him some jail time, too. According to his mother, he hasn’t been home since Sunday night. He and the youngest brother are rough carpenters on that new subdivision over off Highway Forty-eight, but the crew chief says he hasn’t seen George since quitting time Friday evening. The two brothers claim not to know where he is either.”
“Are they lying?”
I could almost hear Dwight’s shrug over the phone. “Who knows?”
“You put out an APB on his vehicle?”
“He doesn’t have one. Longmire pulled his license. Wouldn’t even give him driving privileges during work hours. That’s why he’s been living at home. So he could ride to work with his brother Paul.”
“The husband’s alibi hold up?”
“Solid as a tent pole. It’s a forty-mile roundtrip to his house. Tracy says he answered the calendar call around nine-thirty — that’s when his wife was dropping their kid off at the day care — and you entered his prayer for judgment between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty. Lucky for him, he kept his Bojangles receipt. It’s the one out on the bypass, and the time on it says twelve-oh-five. It’s another forty minutes to his work, and they say he was there before one o’clock and didn’t leave till after five, so it looks like he’s clear.”
More than anybody could say for his brother George.
Poor Edward Barefoot. From what I now knew about that bunch of Barefoots, he was the only motivated member of his family. The only one to finish high school, he’d even earned an associate degree at the community college. Here was somebody who could be the poster child for bootstrapping, a man who’d worked hard and played by the rules, and what happens? Bad enough to lose the wife you adore, but then to find out she’s been cheating with your sorry brother who probably shot her and took off?
Well, it wasn’t for me to condemn Chass Barefoot’s taste in men. I’ve danced with the devil enough times myself to know the attraction of no-’count charmers.
Aunt Zell went to the funeral the next day and described it for Uncle Ash and me at supper.
“That boy looked like he was strung out on the rack. And his precious little baby! Her hair’s blond like her mama’s, but she’s been out in her wading pool so much this summer, Retha said, that she’s brown as a pecan.” She put a hot and fluffy biscuit on my plate. “It just broke my heart to see the way she kept her arms wrapped around her daddy’s neck as if she knew her mama was gone forever. But she’s only two, way too young to understand something like that.”
From my experience with children who come to family court having suffered enormous loss and trauma, I knew that a two-year-old was indeed too young to understand or remember, yet something about Aunt Zell’s description of the little girl kept troubling me.
For her sake, I hoped that George Barefoot would be arrested and quickly brought to trial so that her family could find closure and healing.
Unfortunately, it didn’t happen quite that way.
Two days later, George Barefoot’s body was found when some county workers were cleaning up an illegal trash dump on one side of the back roads just north of Dobbs. He was lying on an old sofa someone had thrown into the underbrush, and the high back had concealed him from the road.
The handgun he’d stuck in his mouth had landed on some dirt and leaves beside the sofa. It was the same gun that had killed Chastity Barefoot, a gun she’d bought to protect herself from intruders. There was a note in his pocket addressed to his brother:
E — God, I’m so sorry about
Chass. I never meant
to hurt you. You know
how much you mean
to me.
Love always,
A rainy night and several hot humid days had mildewed the note and blurred the time of death, but the M.E. thought he could have shot himself either the day Chastity Barefoot was killed or no later than the day after.
“That road’s miles from his mother’s house,” I told Dwight. “Wonder why he picked it? And how did he get there?”
Dwight shrugged. “It’s just a few hundred feet from where Highway 70 crosses the bypass. Maybe he was hitchhiking out of the county and that’s where his ride put him out. Maybe he got to feeling remorse and knew he couldn’t run forever. Who knows?”
I was in Dwight’s office that noonday, waiting for him to finish reading over the file so that he could send it on to our District Attorney, official notification that the two deaths could be closed out. A copy of the suicide note lay on his desk and I’m as curious as any cat.
“Can I see that?”
“Sure.”
The original was locked up of course, but this was such a clear photocopy that I could see every spot of mildew and the ragged edge of where Barefoot must have torn the page from a notepad.
“Was there a notepad on his body?” I asked idly.
“No, and no pencil either,” said Dwight. “He must have written it before leaving wherever he was holed up.”
I made a doubtful noise and he looked at me in exasperation.
“Don’t go trying to make a mystery out of this, Deb’rah. He was bonking his sister-in-law, things got messy, so he shot her and then he shot himself. Nobody else has a motive, nobody else could’ve done it.”
“The husband had motive.”
“The husband was in your court at the time, remember?” He stuck the suicide note back in the file and stood up. “Let’s go eat.”
“Bonking?” I asked as we walked across the street to the Soup ’n’ Sandwich Shop.
He gave a rueful smile. “Cal’s starting to pick up language. I promised Jonna I’d clean up my vocabulary.”
Jonna is Dwight’s ex-wife and a real priss-pot.
“You don’t talk dirty,” I protested, but he wouldn’t argue the point. When our waitress brought us our barbecue sandwiches, I noticed that her ring finger was conspicuously bare. Instead of a gaudy engagement ring, there was now only a thin circle of white skin.
“Don’t tell me you and Conrad have broken up again?” I said.
Angry sparks flashed from her big blue eyes. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Dwight grinned at me when she was gone. “Want to bet how long before she’s wearing his ring again?”
I shook my head. It would be a sucker bet.
Instead, I found myself looking at Dwight’s hands as he bit into his sandwich. He had given up wearing a wedding band as soon as Jonna walked out on him, so his fingers were evenly tanned by the summer sun. Despite all the paperwork in his job, he still got out of the office a few hours every day. I reached across and pulled on the expansion band of his watch.