DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT

  By Margaret Maron

  Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Maron. All rights reserved. First published in A Woman’s Eye, 1991. All of the characters in this story are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  INTRODUCTION

  When I first began to contemplate a new series, Sara Paretsky asked if I’d contribute a story to her anthology. I’d had the germ of this plot for years but could never seem to bring it into focus. It wasn’t a Sigrid Harald situation, but what if I gave it to a young Southern attorney? Or what if it were a district court judge? Or an attorney running for judge? Before I knew it, Deborah Knott strolled into my head and began telling this story. I shall always be grateful to Sara for giving me a chance to “test-drive” Deborah’s first-person voice before tackling Bootlegger’s Daughter.

  — Margaret Maron

  DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT

  “And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”

  An inaudible ripple of cognizance swept through the congregation as the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church paused in his reading of the text and beamed down at us.

  I was seated on the aisle near the front of the church and when Terry Blackman’s eyes met mine, I put a modest smile on my face, then tilted my head in ladylike acknowledgment of the pretty compliment he was paying me by his choice of subject for this morning’s sermon. A nice man but hardly Christianity’s most original preacher. I’d announced my candidacy back in December so this wasn’t the first time I’d heard that particular text and my response had become almost automatic.

  He lowered his eyes to the huge Bible and continued to read aloud, “And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment.”

  From your mouth to God’s ear, Terry, I thought.

  Eight years of courtroom experience let me listen to the sermon with an outward show of close attention while inwardly my mind jumped on and off a dozen trains of thought. I wondered, without really caring, if Terry was still the terrific kisser he’d been the summer after ninth grade when we both drove tractors for my oldest brother during tobacco-barning season.

  There was an S-curve between the barns and the back fields where the lane dipped past a stream and cut through a stand of tulip poplars and sweetgum trees. Our timing wasn’t good enough to hit every trip; but at least two or three times a day, it’d work out that we passed each other there in the shady coolness, one on the way out to the field with empty drags, the other headed back to the barn with drags full of heavy green tobacco leaves.

  Nobody seemed to notice that I occasionally returned to the barn more flushed beneath the bill of my baseball cap than even the August sun would merit, although I did have to endure some teasing one day when a smear of tobacco tar appeared on my pink tee shirt right over my left breast. “Looks like somebody tried to grab a handful,” my sister-in-law grinned.

  I muttered something about the tractor’s tar-gummy steering wheel; but I changed shirts at lunch time and for the rest of the summer I wore the darkest tee shirts in my dresser drawer.

  Now Terry Blackman was a preacher man running to fat, the father of two little boys and a new baby girl, while Deborah Knott was a still-single attorney running for a seat on the court bench, a seat being vacated against his will by old Harrison Hobart, who occasionally fell asleep these days while charging his own juries.

  As Terry drew parallels between Old Testament Israel and modern Colleton County, I plotted election strategy. After the service, I’d do a little schmoozing among the congregation—

  Strike schmoozing, my subconscious stipulated sternly, and I was stricken myself to realize that Lev Schuster’s Yiddish phrases continued to infect my vocabulary. Here in rural North Carolina, schmoozing’s still called socializing and I’d better not forget it before the primary. I pushed away errant thoughts of Lev and concentrated on lunch at Beulah’s. For that matter, where was Beulah and why weren’t she and J.C. seated there beside me?

  Beulah had been my mother’s dearest friend, and her daughter-in-law, Helen, is president of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They were sponsoring a meet-the-candidates reception at four o’clock in the fellowship hall of a nearby Presbyterian church and five of the six men running for Hobart’s seat would be there, too. (The sixth was finishing up the community service old Hobart had imposed in lieu of a fine for driving while impaired, but he really didn’t expect to win many MADD votes anyhow.)

  Terry’s sermon drew to an end just a hair short of equating a vote for Deborah Knott as a vote for Jesus Christ. The piano swung into the opening chords of “Just As I Am” and the congregation stood to sing all five verses. Happily, no one accepted the hymn’s invitation to be saved that morning and after a short closing prayer, we were dismissed.

  I’m not a member at Bethel, but I’d been a frequent visitor from the month I was born; so I got lots of hugs and howdies and promises of loyal support when the primary rolled around. I hugged and howdied right back and thanked them kindly, all the time edging toward my car.

  It was starting to bother me that neither Beulah nor J.C. had come to church. Then Miss Callie Ogburn hailed me from the side door, talking sixty to the yard as she bustled across the grass.

  “Beulah called me up first thing this morning and said tell you about J.C. and for you to come on anyhow. She phoned all over creation last night trying to let you know she’s still expecting you to come for dinner.”

  That explained all those abortive clicks on my answering machine. Beulah was another of my parents’ generation who wouldn’t talk to a tape. I waited till Miss Callie ran out of breath, then asked her what it was Beulah wanted to tell me about J.C.

  “He fell off the tractor and broke his leg yesterday and he’s not used to the crutches yet so Beulah didn’t feel like she ought to leave him this morning. You know how she spoils him.”

  I did. J.C. was Beulah’s older brother and he’d lived with her and her husband Sam almost from the day they were married more than forty years ago. J.C. was a born bachelor and except for the war years when he worked as a carpenter’s helper at an air base over in Goldsboro, he’d never had much ambition beyond helping Sam farm. Sam always said J.C. wasn’t much of a leader but he was a damn good follower and earned every penny of his share of the crop profits.

  Although I’d called them Cousin Beulah and Cousin Sam till I was old enough to drop the courtesy title, strictly speaking, only Sam Johnson was blood kin. But Beulah and my mother had been close friends since childhood, and Beulah’s two children fit into the age spaces around my older brothers, which was why we’d spent so many Sundays at Bethel Baptist.

  When Sam died seven or eight years ago, Sammy Junior took over and J.C. still helped out even though he’d slowed down right much. At least, J.C. called it right much. I could only hope I’d feel like working half-days on a tractor when I reached seventy-two.

  Five minutes after saying goodbye to Miss Callie, I was turning off the paved road into the sandy lane that ran past the Johnson home place. The doors there were closed and none of their three cars were in the yard, but Helen’s Methodist and I’d heard Beulah mention the long-winded new preacher at her daughter-in-law’s church.

  Helen and Sammy Junior had remodeled and painted the shabby old two-story wooden farmhouse after old Mrs. Johnson died and it was a handsome place these days: gleaming white aluminum siding and dark blue shutters, sitting in a shady grove of hundred-year-old white oaks. Beulah’s brick house—even after forty years, everyone in the family still calls it the “new house”—was on further down the lane and couldn’t be seen from the road or the home place.

  My car topped the low ridge that gave both generations their privacy, then swooped down toward a sluggish creek that had been dredged out into a nice-sized irrigation pond beyond the house. As newlyweds, Sam and Beulah had planted pecans on each side of the lane and mature nut trees now met in a tall arch.

  The house itself was rooted in its own grove of pecans and oaks, with underplantings of dogwoods, crepe myrtles, redbud and flowering pears. Pink and white azaleas lined the foundation all around. On this warm day in late April, the place was a color illustration out of Southern Living. I pulled up under a chinaball tree by the back porch and tapped my horn, expecting to see Beulah appear at the screen door with her hands full of biscuit dough and an ample print apron protecting her Sunday dress against flour smudges.

  A smell of burning paper registered oddly as I stepped from the car. It wasn’t cool enough for a fire and no one on this farm would break the fourth commandment by burning trash on the Sabbath.

  There was no sign of Beulah when I crossed the wide planks of the wooden porch and called through the screen, but the kitchen was redolent of baking ham. J.C.’s old hound dog crawled out from under the back steps and wagged his tail at me hopefully. The screen door was unhooked and the inner door stood wide.

  “Beulah?” I called again. “J.C.?”

  No answer. Yet her Buick and J.C.’s Ford pickup were both parked under the barn shelter at the rear of the yard.

  The kitchen, dining room and den ran together in one large L-shaped space and when a quick glance into the formal, seldom-used living room revealed no one there either, I crossed to the stairs in the center hall. Through an open door at the far end of the hall, I could see into Donna Sue’s old bedroom, now the guest room.

  The covers on the gu est bed had been straightened, but the spread was folded down neatly and pillows were piled on top of the rumpled quilt as if J.C. had rested there after Beulah made the bed. He wouldn’t be able to use the stairs until his leg mended, so he’d probably moved in here for the duration. A stack of Field and Stream magazines and an open pack of his menthol cigarettes on the nightstand supported my hypothesis.

  The house remained silent as I mounted the stairs.

  “Anybody home?”

  Beulah’s bedroom was deserted and as immaculate as downstairs except for the desk. She and Sam had devoted a corner of their bedroom to the paperwork connected with the farm. Although Sammy Junior did most of the farm records now on a computer over at his house, Beulah had kept the oak desk. One of my own document binders lay on its otherwise bare top. I’d drawn up her new will less than a month ago and had brought it out to her myself in this very same binder. I lifted the cover. The holographic distribution of small personal keepsakes she had insisted on was still there, but the will itself was missing.

  For the first time since I’d entered this quiet house, I felt a small chill of foreboding.

  Sammy Junior’s old bedroom had been turned into a sewing room and it was as empty as the bathroom. Ditto J.C.’s. As a child I’d had the run of every room in the house except this one so I’d never entered it alone.

  From the doorway, it looked like a rerun of the others: everything vacuumed and polished and tidy; but when I stepped inside, I saw the bottom drawer of the wide mahogany dresser open. Inside were various folders secured by brown cords, bundles of tax returns, account ledgers, bank statements, and two large flat candy boxes which I knew held old family snapshots. More papers and folders were loosely stacked on the floor beside a low footstool, as if someone had sat there to sort through the drawer and had then been interrupted before the task was finished. Beulah would never leave a clutter like that.

  Thoroughly puzzled I went back down to the kitchen. The ham had been in the oven at least a half-hour too long, so I turned it off and left the door cracked. The top burners were off, but each held a pot of cooked vegetables, still quite hot. Wherever Beulah was, she hadn’t been gone very long.

  Year ’round, she and J.C. and Sam, too, when he was alive, loved to walk the land and if they weren’t expecting company, it wasn’t unusual to find them out at the pond or down in the woods. But with me invited for Sunday dinner along with Sammy Junior and Helen and their three teenagers? And with J.C.’s broken leg?

  Not hardly likely, as my daddy would say.

  Nevertheless, I went out to my car and blew the horn long and loud.

  Buster, the old hound, nuzzled my hand as I stood beside the car indecisively. And that was another thing. If J.C. were out stumping across the farm on crutches, Buster wouldn’t be hanging around the back door. He’d be right out there with J.C.

  It didn’t make sense, yet if there’s one thing the law has taught me, it’s that it doesn’t pay to formulate a theory without all the facts. I headed back inside to phone and see if Helen and Sammy Junior were home yet and as I lifted the receiver from the kitchen wall, I saw something I’d missed before.

  At the far end of the den, beyond the high-backed couch, the fireplace screen had been moved to one side of the hearth and there were scraps of charred paper in the grate.

  I remembered the smell of burning paper that had hung in the air when I first arrived. I started toward the fireplace and now I could see the coffee table strewn with the Sunday edition of the Raleigh News & Observer.

  As I rounded the high couch, I nearly tripped on a pair of crutches, but they barely registered, so startled was I by seeing J.C. lying there motionless, his eyes closed.

  “Glory, J.C.!” I exclaimed. “You asleep? That must be some painkiller the doctor—”

  I suddenly realized that the brightly-colored sheet of Sunday comics over his chest was drenched in his own bright blood.

  I knelt beside the old man and clutched his callused, work-worn hand. It was still warm. His faded blue eyes opened, rolled back in his head, then focused on me.

  “Deb’rah?” His voice was faint and came from far, far away. “I swear I plumb forgot . . .”

  He gave a long sigh and his eyes closed again.

  Dwight Bryant is Detective Chief of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. After calling the nearest rescue squad, I’d dialed his mother’s phone number on the off chance that he’d be there in the neighborhood and not twenty-two miles away at Dobbs, the county seat.

  Four minutes flat after I hung up the phone, I saw his Chevy pickup zoom over the crest of the lane and tear through the arch of pecan trees. He was followed by a bright purple TR and even in this ghastly situation, I had to smile at his exasperation as Miss Emily Bryant bounded from the car and hurried up the steps ahead of him.

  “Damn it all, Mother, if you set the first foot inside that house, I’m gonna arrest you and I mean it!”

  She turned on him, a feisty little carrot-top chihuahua facing down a sandy brown Saint Bernard. “If you think I’m going to stay out here when one of my oldest and dearest friends may be lying in there—”

  “She’s not, Miss Emily,” I said tremulously. J.C.’s blood was under my fingernails from where I’d stanched his chest wound. “I promise you. I looked in every room.”

  “And under all the beds and in every closet?” She stamped her small foot imperiously on the porch floor. “I won’t touch a thing, Dwight, but I’ve got to look.”

  “No.” That was the law talking, not her son; and she huffed, but quit arguing.

  “Okay, Deborah,” said Dwight, holding the screen door open for me. “Show me.”

  Forty-five minutes later, we knew no more than before. The rescue squad had arrived and departed again with J.C., who was still unconscious and barely clinging to life.

  Sammy Junior and Helen were nearly frantic over Beulah’s disappearance and were torn between following the ambulance and staying put till there was word of her. Eventually they thought to call Donna Sue, who said she’d meet the ambulance at the hospital and stay with J.C. till they heard more.

  A general APB had been issued for Beulah, but since nobody knew how she left, there wasn’t much besides her physical appearance to put on the wire.

  Dwight’s deputies processed the den and J.C.’s room like a crime scene. After they finished, Dwight and I walked through the house with Sammy Junior and Helen; but they, too, saw nothing out of the ordinary except for the papers strewn in front of J.C.’s bedroom dresser.

  Sammy Junior’s impression was the same as mine. “It’s like Mama was interrupted.”

  “Doing what?” asked Dwight.

  “Probably getting Uncle J.C.’s insurance papers together for him. I said I’d take ’em over to the hospital tomorrow. In all the excitement yesterday when he broke his leg, we didn’t think about ’em.”

  He started to leave the room, then hesitated. “Y’all find his gun?”

  “Gun?” said Dwight.

  Sammy Junior pointed to a pair of empty rifle brackets over the bedroom door. “That’s where he keeps his .22.”

  Much as we’d all like to believe this is still God’s country, everything peaceful and nice, most people now latch their doors at night and they do keep loaded guns around for more than rats and snakes and wild dogs.

  Helen shivered and instinctively moved closer to Sammy Junior. “The back door’s always open, Dwight. I’ll bet you anything some burglar or rapist caught her by surprise and forced her to go with him. And then J.C. probably rared up on the couch and they shot him like you’d swat a fly.”

  I turned away from the pain on Sammy Junior’s face and stared through the bedroom window as Dwight said, “Been too many cars down the lane and through the yard for us to find any tread marks.”

  Any lawyer knows how easily the lives of good decent people can be shattered, but I’ll never get used to the abruptness of it. Trouble seldom comes creeping up gently, giving a person time to prepare or get out of the way. It’s always the freakish bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, the jerk of a steering wheel, the collapse of something rock solid only a second ago.

  From the window I saw puffy white clouds floating serenely over the farm. The sun shone as brightly as ever on flowering trees and new-planted corn, warming the earth for another round of seedtime and harvest. A soft wind smoothed the field where J.C. had been disking before his accident yesterday and in the distance, the pond gleamed silver-green before a stand of willows.

 

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