Bootlegger’s Daughter

He waited for me to make the co

“She hadn’t fought or been tied up, so why hadn’t she taken care of Gayle?”

He nodded. “Page Hudson was still ME back then. He put it in medical terms, but what it boiled down to was that she’d sustained a really bad head wound-probably on Wednesday- that left her unconscious till someone put a bullet in her brain sometime late Friday. There was no need to tie her hands. She would never have moved again on her own. The bullet just speeded things up.”

The bottom abruptly fell out of my stomach. “Somebody put her out of her misery? Like putting down a horse or an old dog when they get tired of watching it suffer?”

“ ’Bout what it amounts to,” he agreed, crumpling up the empty packets of sweetener. He stirred his coffee and drank up as I tried to fit the new facts over my old concepts.

We had all heard about Janie’s head wound as soon as she was found, but I guess its seriousness hadn’t registered. The sensationalism of how she was shot overshadowed a mundane blow on the head. Fa

“I always assumed she was briefly knocked unconscious and then lived two fall days scared out of her mind before she was finally killed.”

“She wasn’t molested,” Scotty reminded me.

“Her head wound-did Dr. Hudson say what caused it?”

“Nope. The bullet track kinda messed things up too much to say if she took a bad fall or was hit.”

I sat silently as he described in more detail than the papers had carried exactly how Janie had been found. I’d heard most of it, but hearing Scotty’s version gave me a different perspective.

After three days with bloodhounds and aerial reco

Ridley’s Mill fell in that category. It was only three miles from the edge of Cotton Grove as the crow flies, but more like six miles because of the way Old Forty-Eight followed the twists and bends of Possum Creek. Once a small and inefficient gristmill, it had fallen into disrepair back around the thirties when the main millstone broke and electricity proved more reliable than the broad sluggish creek. There were no more Ridleys either, for that matter, and the property had changed hands several times.

Twenty years ago, a Raleigh banker bought it, thinking it might be remodeled into a rustic weekend fishing lodge. He died before he could draw up any plans, and his widow has sat on the estate ever since.

The land’s posted, but nobody’s ever let a few No Trespassing signs keep them from where they want to go, and the mill’s always been used by fishermen, hunters, and teenage kids skipping school. The rutted overgrown lane leading in through the woods from Old Forty-Eight is probably still a lovers’ lane. It was back then.

When it became generally known that Janie and Gayle were missing, said Scotty, someone living nearby had driven his pickup through the lane on Thursday afternoon. The man and his older brother had checked the millhouse from top to bottom. Both were on record that the place was empty, nothing out of the ordinary.

Scotty paused. “Your brothers, I believe?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Will and Seth. Possum Creek borders our land, too, and all of us have fished from the top of the millhouse at one time or another.”

No point adding that while Will might lie about anything that crossed his mind, Seth never would.

“Will’s wife’s the one who had a blue sedan, too?”

“My brothers checked Ridley’s Mill simply because they knew it was there and they thought somebody ought to take a look,” I said and heard a defensive tone in my own voice.

“Of course,” he said neutrally. “So you know all about how two black hands were clearing underbrush for Michael Vickery on the opposite bank upstream and heard the baby crying?”

“Where the Pot Shot is now,” I nodded. “Michael had gone to get drinks or pick up a load of bricks or something and they forded the creek and found Janie and Gayle in the mill loft. Janie still wearing the jeans and- Wait a minute. What happened to her raincoat?”

Scotty sat back in the booth while music and people and blue cigarette haze swirled around us, then leaned across the table so that I was the only one who could possibly hear his words above the noise. “I’m trusting Terry on you, but it doesn’t leave this table,” he warned.

“Okay,” I promised.

“No raincoat. The family was too torn up to notice and the news media never picked up on it either-probably because it’d turned off so hot and su

“Only you never did.”

“Only we never did,” he echoed grimly. “Not for lack of trying. We zeroed in on a few right away: the husband, your brothers-because they’d been out to the mill on Thursday, all the old boyfriends, Michael Vickery. You.” He gave a tired smile. “Even those two blacks that found her. We just couldn’t make the times fit. Take Jed Whitehead. He was a salesman with a Raleigh firm back then, out on the road all day Wednesday, but once it was known that his wife was missing, someone was constantly with him. Same with the rest of her family. Any of them could have bopped her over the head and hid her somewhere, but when did they have time to move her car or, for that matter, move her to the millhouse and then go back and shoot her?”

I hadn’t realized those were separate times.

“Yeah,” he answered. “Something about two different kinds of bloodstains. They figured the wound opened up again when she was put in the loft. I forget the details, but forensics determined that she’d bled onto the floorstones for several hours before the shot finished her off instantly. She actually died between five and ten P.M. on Friday evening, according to Dr. Hudson.”

“Too bad Michael Vickery hadn’t moved into the barn yet,” I sighed.

“Might have been rough on him if he had. As it was, he was lucky he could prove he was in Chapel Hill from noon till nearly midnight on Friday because he was out there by himself all day Wednesday.”

Scotty shrugged. “It was like that with every man we looked at. Your brothers: both free to come and go without punching time cards or anybody keeping tabs on them. They alibied each other for Wednesday, which we might could question, but your brother Seth helped barbecue chickens all afternoon for a church supper Friday night while your brother Will was umpiring a Little League baseball game.”

“Neither of my brothers had a reason to hurt Janie,” I said hotly.

“So who did?” he asked reasonably.

“Nobody! Anybody. Oh, God, I don’t know!” An impatient sweep of my hand upset my empty cup. No one in the place noticed. They were too busy watching three miniskirted secretaries over by the jukebox who were demonstrating some aerobic movements and lip-synching “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” along with Deniece Williams. Morgan was in tight conversation with someone I didn’t recognize. “Didn’t you guys turn up any motives?”

“Not really.”

“Not really,” I mimicked nastily. “You told Terry and me you didn’t find a hell of a lot more the second time through. What does that mean? Or aren’t you going to trust me?”

“We checked out Dinah Jean Raynor when we heard she was going to marry Janie’s husband,” he answered slowly. “Eight months wasn’t much of a mourning period. Made us wonder if they’d had anything going before.”

“Dinah Jean?” I was scornful. “He might have dated her in high school, but he’d dropped her long before he started seeing Janie.” I hesitated. Jed had always treated Dinah Jean pleasantly in my presence, the surface between them as placid and unruffled as Possum Creek. But I remembered the yearning on her face at times when he drew away from her or didn’t seem to notice her outstretched hand. During the years between their brief high school fling and Janie’s death, could Dinah Jean have carried a torch for Jed even bigger than mine?