But neither Isabel nor Doris had heard her. They were facing the doorway and both of them had their mouths hanging open as Nadine and I became aware that a sudden silence had fallen over the parlor.
I turned and there was Billy Wall’s wife.
This afternoon, she’d been dressed in baggy jersey warm-up pants, old sneakers, and a jacket that didn’t meet across her bulging abdomen. Tonight, she wore formfitting black stretch pants, shiny black high-heeled boots, and a tunic-length black knit top with a pink-and-gold scarf tucked into the neckline. Her long brown hair was done up in a becoming twist and she had put on eye shadow and bright red lipstick. She might have used rouge, too, but it was hard to tell because she had flushed such a deep pink from her neck to her brow.
Little Jenny Wall marched across that pale gray carpet with her chin up and her eyes snapping. She could have been Hester Prynne striding the streets of Boston, only instead of a gold-embroidered scarlet A on her breast, she proudly carried Billy’s unborn child.
The silence was so complete that we could hear her every word when she reached Merrilee.
“Billy told me to come, Miz Grimes. We were coming together, but they—” She gulped and almost lost it, then her chin came up again. “Billy loved Mr. Stancil. He was good to us. Billy would never! He couldn’t!”
Blindly, her hand went out to Mr. Jap’s casket. “If he could sit up and talk one more time, he’d tell you that himself. Billy never harmed a hair on his head. He didn’t!”
“Of course he didn’t, honey,” said Merrilee and gathered Jenny Wall in her arms.
Pete rumbled something encouraging and Allen, who’d gone out for a quick cigarette and had stopped to speak to someone on his way back in, looked grateful not to be up there at the front.
Talk quickly resumed in a self-conscious attempt to smooth away the rip in the social fabric by politely pretending that nothing had happened.
“You don’t reckon she’s by herself, do you?” worried Isabel.
“This far along?” said Nadine. “To be sure not. Why, when I was having Reese, my doctor quit letting me drive after I was seven months gone.”
Merrilee was evidently worried about that point herself because she walked Jenny Wall back across the long room. As they moved out into the hall toward the front door, we heard Jenny say that a friend was with her, that they were going back to Dobbs to see what was happening with Billy.
Now that she had faced down the community and paid their respects to Mr. Jap as Billy had asked, we could see her composure slipping again in the face of the unknown.
It was none of my businesss, of course, but I caught up with her on the front walk. “Do y’all have a family attorney?”
She shook her head. “No, ma’am. We never had the need of one before.”
“If you want me to, I could call Zack Young and ask him to meet you at the Sheriff’s Department. He’s real good.”
I didn’t know if Billy was innocent or guilty, but if anybody could give Jenny’s courage another shot of confidence, surely Zack could.
Jenny thanked me and after she’d driven off with her friend, I went into Duck Aldcroft’s office and called Zack, who agreed to meet her at the courthouse.
Back outside, November was doing its thing again. A low front was pushing in directly from the south and the night air was already warmer here at eight-thirty in the evening than it had been even an hour ago. Mid-sixties were predicted by Thanksgiving day. As people crossed Aldcroft’s wide veranda and headed for their cars, they marveled at the heavy fog rising up from the damp earth. It muffled noises, blotted out the stars, and put halos around every streetlight.
“It’s pretty all right,” said Doris, “but it just doesn’t feel healthy.”
25
« ^ » Merchants in the town, and considerable planters in the country, are now beginning to have a taste for living, and some gay equipages may be seen…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
The fog was even thicker next morning and when I carried my garment bag and overnight case out to the car, I wasn’t aware of Reese’s truck until he pulled into the drive behind me and powered down the window.
“Ma says Dwight’s arrested Billy Wall for killing Mr. Jap?”
“Yes?”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
“Don’t you ever watch Matlock or Law and Order?” I arranged my bags in the trunk so that things wouldn’t wrinkle and closed the lid. “He’ll be arraigned, the DA will present evidence to a grand jury and if they find probable cause, he’ll go to trial. Depending on how the DA decides, he could be tried for anything from involuntary manslaughter right on up to murder in the first degree.”
“But if they don’t have any real evidence, the grand jury’ll let him off, right?”
“Who knows?” I looked at him closely in the damp foggy light. “And why are you asking? I didn’t know you and Billy were particular friends.”
“We’re not. I just hate to see somebody stuck in jail for something he didn’t do.”
“Now see here, Reese.” I went around to the driver’s side so I could look straight up into his worried blue eyes. “Was there something about Saturday morning you didn’t tell me?”
“Jesus! You never quit, do you?”
He slammed the truck into reverse and roared out into the street so fast that he almost clipped Miss Sallie Anderson, who was there walking her dog, one of Hambone’s litter-mates.
The young dog gave a startled woof and Miss Sallie said, “My goodness. He must really be late for work.”
“Telephone, Deborah,” Aunt Zell called from the doorway. “It’s Isabel.” Hambone scooted past her feet and rushed over in hopes of a frolic with his sister.
Aunt Zell handed me the phone and went out to collect her dog and exchange a few words with Miss Sallie.
“Deb’rah?” came Isabel’s voice. “Now if it’s not convenient, just say so and we’ll do something else, but the fog’s so bad and the weatherman says it’s just going to get worse and I hate for Haywood to drive in it and you did say you were going to New Bern this afternoon, didn’t you? And Kinston’s right on the way, so if it’s all right with you—”
“Sure,” I said. “I have half a day of court, but I planned to leave around twelve-thirty or one o’clock if that suits you.”
“Oh good! That’ll get us there in plenty of time. Stevie can drive us over to Dobbs.”
We settled on a meeting place and as Aunt Zell and Hambone came back into the kitchen, I told her I’d be back sometime Friday, depending on when Haywood and Isabel’s plane got in. She and Uncle Ash were going to spend Thanksgiving morning picking up pecans out at his sister’s farm near Cotton Grove, then come back to Portland and Avery’s for a full-blown turkey dinner.
For some reason the zaniest cases seem to show up in pre-holiday court sessions. Wednesday started out normally enough, but shortly after morning recess, we got Marcus Sanders, black, sixty-nine, bone skinny and still spry.
Mr. Sanders was not a stranger to my court because he was bad for augmenting his small pension with shoplifted steaks and chickens from the Harris Teeter store at the north end of Main Street, about two blocks from his house.
More than once the same Harris Teeter security guard had sat in this same witness box and testified as to how he had stopped and searched Mr. Sanders “immediately outside the store” whereupon he had discovered the stolen meats “upon the suspect’s person.”
“This time, when I tried to stop Mr. Sanders, he took off like a rabbit and when I caught up to him, he was setting on his porch swing.”
(Let the record show that while the witness is at least twenty years younger, he is also quite corpulent and probably does not run like a rabbit.)