Bootlegger’s Daughter

“I’ve tried that,” she said impatiently. “It doesn’t work. You’re just as bad as Gramma and Dad. They keep telling me not to think about it, too.”

She stood abruptly and smoothed the wrinkles from her purple skirt. “I’m sorry I wasted your time. Do I pay you or Sherry?”

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re really going through with this, aren’t you?”

She nodded.

“Even though the man who did this probably is long gone to his own reward in New York or California?”

“It was somebody she knew,” said Gayle.

As she perched back on the edge of the chair and began laying out theories, I realized that this was probably the first time she’d ever spoken freely to an adult about Janie’s death since becoming an adult herself.

“They never kept it a big secret from me, ”she said. “It was sort of like being adopted. You know the way they start telling babies they’re adopted as soon as they bring them home so it never comes as a shock?”

I nodded.

“Well, I always knew that Mother and I were kidnapped and she was killed and it was three days before they found us-but it was almost like a bedtime story. Something with all the edges taken off. I hated the way people oozed over me, but I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean it was like you don’t give a lot of thought to why grass is green or water’s wet. It just is, you know? Then the Christmas right before I was sixteen, I was sleeping over at Gramma Pope’s and I found this box of newspaper clippings.”

She put the box on my desk and lifted the lid. It wis crammed with yellowed news articles jumbled in with no particular order. I saw pictures of Janie and Jed, the mill, even Janie’s abandoned car.

“Grampa cut out everything the Ledger and the News and Observer wrote about it from the day we disappeared till it stopped being news.”

She gave a wobbly little grin that almost broke my heart. “That’s when it quit being a bedtime story, Deborah. Reading it like that put the sharp edges back on, made me start thinking it must have been somebody she knew.”

“Because she gave someone in a raincoat a lift?” I shook my head. “It didn’t have to be someone she knew. Back then it wasn’t automatically a foolhardy thing to give a stranger a ride.”

“But if he was a stranger, how’d he know where to leave her car?”

That was one of many questions that had puzzled everyone else at the time. Weather conditions had been rainy and foggy on the May afternoon that Janie and Gayle disappeared. Her car had been seen in the deserted parking lot beside the old abandoned Dixie Motel. There’d been someone else in the front seat with her, someone wearing a beige or light tan raincoat and thought to be male by the one eyewitness who saw them.

If indeed old Howard Grimes had actually seen them.

There were at least three dark blue Ford sedans in Cotton Grove, including one that belonged to my brother Will; and Howard said he’d taken a good look because rumors were going around town about then that Will’s wife, Trish, was having an affair with somebody and he wanted to see who. (Not that the Ledger or the N amp;O printed Will or Trish’s names. But everyone involved knew who he was talking about.)

“I hadn’t heard nothing before about Jed Whitehead’s wife having round heels,” he was quoted as saying. “But the windows were too fogged up for me to see who he was. Saw her plain enough though.”

Howard’s account had kept the police from getting into it too heavily for the first twenty-four hours. For all they knew, little Janie Whitehead might well have gone off for an extramarital fling. Jed wouldn’t be the first husband, the Popes wouldn’t be the first parents, to say she’d never do something like that.

But then Janie’s sedan was discovered the next morning in the parking lot behind the Whitehead Real Estate Agency. It had not been there the evening before when old Mr. Whitehead closed early upon hearing that Janie and Gayle were missing. Street parking was plentiful, so the lot, shared by three other abutting offices, was not one used by the general public. Access in from Broad Street and out to Railroad was through narrow alleys screened by azaleas and high camellia bushes, not readily apparent and certainly not a place a stranger would stumble into on a dark foggy night.

“That’s why you tried to have a hypnotist take you back?”

“It didn’t work, though.” Lingering disappointment shadowed her voice. “I was really hoping maybe I’d remember her.”

My own mother died the summer I turned eighteen, and trying to imagine never having known her made it easier to understand why everybody could get sentimental and maudlin about Gayle’s semi-orphaned status. Gayle’s next words, however, made it clear that something else was going on in her head.

“What was her tragic flaw, Deborah?”

I looked at her blankly. Okay, we all knew Gayle was bright. They don’t give out full four-year scholarships to the university just because someone’s mother got killed. But was she brains or book learning?

“I took an interdisciplinary honors course last fell,” she said. “Hamlet, Edward the Eighth, Richard Nixon. We discussed their tragic flaws, and I couldn’t help applying it to my mother. Not who killed her, but why? What was her tragic flaw?” She leaned forward. “Everybody says she was good and sweet and beautiful and that I’m just like her. Well, nobody’s that damn sweet and good. I’m not and I bet she wasn’t either.”

Brains, then?

There had been a million unanswered questions when Janie Whitehead was killed, but every question was predicated on the belief that i

“They say everybody carries within themselves the seeds of their own destruction,” she said.

“Sounds like another way to blame the victim for the crime,” I hedged starchily, as if I were already a judge.

“She was only twenty-two,” said Gayle, her voice passionate. “Four years older than I am right now. What if I really am like her?”

“Nobody’s going to kill you,” I told her.

Again it was the wrong comment and she waved me off impatiently.

“I’ve almost quit wondering about who killed her, Deborah. Now I think if I just find out why, that might be enough. People either pat me on the head when I ask what she was like or else they tell me another bedtime story. You knew her and you know everybody in Cotton Grove. And I’m not asking you to do it for nothing either. I’ve got Grampa Poole’s trust fund, and I’ll spend every last cent if that’s what it takes to find out what she was really like that somebody felt she needed killing.”

Jed didn’t like it when I called to tell him that Gayle was determined to go through with it one way or another. Not one little bit did he like it.

“She’s as headstrong as her mother,” he said finally, but his voice got softer. “Janie always had to have her way, too, didn’t she?”

“Just tell me what you want me to do, Jed,” I said impatiently. “I’ve got enough on my plate right now. I don’t need this. You want me to tell her no, I will.”

He sighed. “No, I reckon we’ll have to do what she wants.” He sighed again. “Better you than some real detective.”