BEWREATHED

  By Margaret Maron

  Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Maron. All rights reserved. First published in Murder Most Crafty, 2005. All of the characters in this story are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  INTRODUCTION

  Chronologically, this story takes place between Rituals of the Season and Winter’s Child. Marilyn Wallace, writing as Maggie Bruce, asked if I would contribute a story that featured some sort of craft for her anthology Murder Most Crafty. I thought perhaps Deborah could manage a grapevine wreath with a little help from her new sisters-in-law. The story itself was inspired by a real New Year’s Eve bonfire here on the farm when a cousin tried to burn some overly wet wood. I was tickled when my brother said, “Never saw gasoline so wet it wouldn’t burn,” and knew I’d use that sentence in a story sometime. They really did try to chase some lovers out of that lane and yes, they really did get mired down to the axle.

  — Margaret Maron

  BEWREATHED

  Okay, so I wasn’t freezing in Times Square waiting for the big apple fall at the stroke of midnight. Nor was I in Raleigh waiting for the brass acorn to fall and listening to Dwight Bryant grumble about it being cold enough to freeze similar objects off brass monkeys.

  Instead, I was standing on a rise overlooking my brother Robert’s back fields watching Robert try to get a pile of stumps and scrap lumber—soggy scrap lumber I might add—to burn while four of my other brothers made helpful remarks like “Ain’t you got no kerosene, Robert?” or “Didn’t I see a can of gas under your tractor shelter last week?”

  It wasn’t even all that cold. The night air was cool and damp, invigorating without winter’s usual raw chill.

  All the same, this wasn’t how I’d visualized spending my first New Year’s Eve with Dwight. We had talked about going to Raleigh’s First Night celebration with some friends and I’d even bought tickets back before Christmas, then Dwight, who heads up Sheriff Bo Poole’s detective squad, got caught short-handed with two deputies in bed with flu and a rash of break-ins across the county.

  As a district court judge, I know first hand that crime doesn’t take a holiday, but court does and I’ve always packed a lot of playtime in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so I was disappointed that Dwight couldn’t come play, too. I gave the tickets to one of my nieces and was prepared to throw myself a solitary pity party when April called to see if they could borrow a suitcase. April teaches sixth grade and she and my brother Andrew were taking their kids to Disney World over the school break next week. As soon as she heard Dwight had to work, she insisted I come along with them to Robert’s.

  “You want a wreath, don’t you?”

  “So?”

  “So Robert pruned his grapevines today and saved the cuttings for me.” My sister-in-law is so creative she could probably knit a tree if she’d only slow down long enough to find the right yarn. “We’ll build a bonfire, roast hot dogs, start you a wreath and see the New Year in together, all at the same time. Minnie and Seth are coming, Haywood and Isabel, Zach and Barbara, too,” she said, naming others of my brothers and their wives who still live out here on the family farm along with her and Andrew. “Robert says Doris has even bought a bottle of champagne.” (Despite France’s battle to keep Champagne from becoming a generic term, here in Colleton County, any white wine that sparkles is automatically called champagne.)

  I had to smile. “One bottle for a dozen people?”

  “Well, you know Doris.”

  I did. Robert’s the oldest of my daddy’s eleven sons and his wife is one of the most conflicted hostesses I’ve ever seen. She truly wants to be generous but she can’t help counting the cost—the heart of a bon vivant housed in the body of a miser.

  “We’re going to do a loaves and fishes on her,” April said, laughter bubbling in her throat. “You got anything fizzy in your refrigerator?”

  “Two bottles,” I told her. “Count me in.”

  “Andrew says we’ll pick you up around nine.”

  I called Dwight to let him know where I’d be in case he could get away before midnight. He was in and out of our house so much when we were growing up that he knows Robert and Doris about as well as I do and is equally amused by them. “At least I won’t have to worry about you getting too much to drink,” he said.

  “Don’t count on it,” I said. “How’s the surveillance going? Any sightings?”

  “Nothing so far. I’ve got patrol units out all around Cotton Grove, but hell, Deb’rah, we’re probably not going to hear about any break-ins till the owners get home to tell us.”

  With its easy commute to the Research Triangle, Colleton County’s experienced such a population boom in the last few years that we now have our share of the usual misdemeanors, petty felonies, and yes, the burglars who would rather steal for a living than work.

  From sitting in court, I’ve learned that their victims will often have a pretty good idea of who’s ripped them off. It will be the friends of their teenage children, itinerant repairmen, or a pickup laborer who cased the place while cutting grass for the homeowner’s lawn service.

  Beginning at Thanksgiving though, there had been a systematic looting of eight or ten homes over the past few weeks and nobody had a clue. At each house, the owners were away for at least three or four days, either on vacation or traveling for business or pleasure during this holiday season. All were within the same five mile radius of where we live. All were without burglar alarms, in middle-class neighborhoods, and entry was always by breaking through a rear door or window. The only items taken were money, jewelry and small electronics that were easily fenced. So far there were no fingerprints and nothing to indicate whether it was the work of a single person or a whole gang. Trying to figure out how the perps knew which houses would be empty was driving Dwight crazy.

  At first, he thought that dogs might be the link since the first four houses did shelter canine pets and all four had boarded their dogs in the same kennel. That theory went bust when the next three break-ins were at dogless homes.

  Now people are often careless about the little things that will let a thief know if a house is empty. Mail will pile up in the mailbox, newspapers will litter the driveway once the box is too full to hold more. In summer, the grass will go uncut. Winter’s a little harder to read since we seldom get enough snow to bother with shoveling the drives. But these latest victims had taken all the sensible precautions. They had stopped delivery of mail and newspapers, they used timers to turn lamps on and off at normal hours, they even alerted nearby neighbors to keep an eye out. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to be working.

  “Could it be loose lips at the post office?” I had asked. “A mail carrier would know as soon as someone on the route suspends their mail.”

  Dwight reminded me that our area is serviced by two separate postal zones.

  “Well, what about newspapers?”

  “Same thing. Billy says that the News and Observer has at least three different carriers out in this part of the county.” (Billy Yost is a neighborhood kid who’s been delivering papers to the farm ever since he got his driver’s license.) “Plus separate carriers for the local weeklies. He thinks that all told, we’re looking at six or seven carriers at least. In fact, one of them’s his grandmother’s friend, Miss Baby Anderson; and you know good as me there’s no way Miss Baby is part of any burglary ring.”

  “Good lord! Is she still delivering the Cotton Grove Clarion?” Miss Baby Anderson is a scrappy 82-year-old poor but proud grandmother who has always lived near poverty level.

  “Every Tuesday afternoon,” Dwight said. “I guess she needs to supplement her Social Security.”

  The Sheriff’s Department had issued warnings through all the little weekly papers but Dwight fully expected to hear of several more incidents when people got back from their Christmas travels, and he wasn’t looking forward to their unhappy complaints about poor crime control.

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky tonight,” I told him.

  “I certainly hope so,” he said; and from the leer in his voice, I realized that we were no longer talking about his work.

  “I’ll save you some champagne,” I promised.

  So here I was on New Year’s Eve at the edge of Robert’s small vineyard, watching Robert try to get his bonfire started while Doris set out hotdogs, buns, chili and coleslaw on an ancient picnic table Robert had hauled out to the site. We’d had a rainy autumn, but these logs and boards looked as if they’d been dredged from a swamp the day before.

  “Where the hell did you get this wood?” asked Zach, one of the “little twins” next up from me in age.

  “Part of it’s the old strip house the last hurricane knocked down, the rest are stumps out of that bottom land I drained this fall,” Robert admitted.

  He sloshed gasoline over the pile and lit another match. There was a brief splutter of flame, then nothing.

  “First time I ever seen even gas too wet to burn,” muttered Haywood, one of the “big twins.”

  My brother Seth dangled his truck keys out to Haywood’s son Stevie, the only nephew to elect to see the New Year in with us rather than drive into Raleigh. “How ’bout you run fetch me my blowtorch?”

  “I’ll ride over with you,” I said. Stevie’s my favorite nephew and I hadn’t seen much of him over the holidays. His girlfriend was off somewhere with her family and he was at loose ends this weekend, so this gave me a chance to ask how life was treating him.

  “Pretty fine,” he said as we navigated the back lanes from Robert’s part of the farm through a shortcut to Seth’s workshop. Stevie and Gayle had been together since high school and would probably marry after they finished college.

  “What about you? What’s monogamy like?”

  “You ought to know,” I told him. “You’ve been monogamous a lot longer than I have.”

  He grinned. “That good, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said happily as we rooted around in Seth’s shop for his hand torch.

  “So how come Dwight’s not here tonight?”

  I described the break-ins and how the sheriff’s department was stretched thin with two deputies out sick. Like me, Stevie immediately suggested that Dwight should look at the people delivering the mail or the newspapers.

  “‘Way ahead of you,” I said. “Some of the burglaries were committed in the Cotton Grove postal zone, the others in the Dobbs zone. And Billy says there are several paper routes in this area.”

  “Billy Yost?”

  “That’s right, you and he were in school together, weren’t you?”

  “Before he flunked out. Life’s not fair, is it, Deborah?”

  “Never has been,” I agreed.

  “I mean, here I am, halfway through college and he’s still delivering papers.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  “Yeah, but Billy’s smart. Smarter than me. He shouldn’t’ve had to work so hard that he couldn’t stay awake in class.”

  We both spotted Seth’s blowtorch at the same time, hanging from a nail on the side wall. When we were back in the truck, I said, “So if Billy was that smart, why didn’t he just ride the school bus?”

  “You think the only reason he worked three jobs was to support a car?”

  “A lot of kids do.”

  “Not Billy. His grandmother raised him and she didn’t have anything but Social Security to live on. He felt like he owed her. He used to say there wasn’t enough money in the world to pay back the old women who step in and take over when their sorry children can’t hold it together.”

  I remembered the details now—no father, abused by a mother on crack and whoever she was sleeping with at the moment—no wonder he’d want to repay his grandmother for taking him out of all that when he was six or seven.

  “Speaking of old women, Dwight says Miss Baby’s still delivering the Clarion,” I said and Stevie shook his head as he maneuvered the truck around a fallen tree.

  “North Carolina lets her drive? Isn’t she about a hundred and ten now?”

  Back at Robert’s, a lopsided moon had risen over the treetops that rimmed his lower fields. It was a week past full but still cast a cold blue light across the landscape. Through the far trees, a good quarter-mile away, we could see the streetlights of yet another new housing development. A light breeze blew up from the bottom, bringing a clean smell of damp earth and the promise of a new seedtime and new beginnings.

  Using Seth’s blowtorch and the rest of the gas in Robert’s can, my brothers finally got the bonfire going and Doris kept urging us to take another little sip of her ersatz champagne. “My, these bottles hold a lot, don’t they?” she marveled.

  By then, we had topped her bottle off at least twice without her noticing. She also hadn’t tasted any difference between her $2.69 Food Lion bubbly, April’s Corbel, or my Roederer Estate.

  April had piled the grapevines on the back of their pickup and she sat on the tailgate to start coiling a wreath while the men scrounged for fallen limbs out in Robert’s wood lot. My other sisters-in-law came over to watch.

  “If these weren’t freshly cut, I’d have to soak them overnight in warm water,” April said as she gathered up several vines and began bending them into a circle. When the circle was as thick as her slender arm, she deftly wove the loose ends back onto themselves and soon had a nice tight wreath. I’m not into cutesy, but I thought a rustic grapevine wreath on our back door might get me a few points for domesticity, maybe keep people from feeling so sorry for Dwight. Securing the vine ends was harder than it looked and my wreath was nowhere near as tight as April’s when I’d finished.

  “If it starts to fall apart, you can just wire it back together or hit it with some hot glue,” April said reassuringly. “What sort of theme you want?”

  “Theme?”

  “You know—winter? Spring?”

  “Valentines,” Doris teased; and Isabel said, “How about a pair of little turtledoves for you lovebirds?”

  “Oh, please,” I said.

  Barbara laughed. “I have some wooden hearts and a can of red paint.”

  The bonfire was burning brightly now and they’d all had enough sips of sparkling wine to begin feeling a New Year’s glow.

  “Little gold cupids!”

  “Lace and red foil!”

  “Shiny packs of Trojans!”

  “Forget it,” I said firmly as the suggestions grew raunchier.

  From beyond the fire, Robert suddenly called, “Hey! Who you reckon that is?”

  We looked down the hillside to where he pointed. Off in the distance, car headlights swept through a cut in the woods that led from the road to his back lower fields. The lights shone straight across the bare land, then suddenly went dark. The moon wasn’t quite bright enough to let us see the car, although we could hear the engine as it continued on course as if the driver knew exactly where he was going and the moon was all the light he needed.

  Robert and Haywood immediately reverted to form. Ask a farmer for permission and he’ll let you dig dogwoods and willow oaks out of his woods. He’ll let you hunt rabbits or doves. He’ll keep you in watermelons and sweet corn all summer, let you cut Christmas greenery in winter. But pick a single wildflower, shoot a single rabbit without asking, and he’ll bristle up and invite you to get the hell off his land, often at the end of his shotgun.

  “Come on, Haywood,” Robert said, lumbering toward his Chevy pickup. “Let’s go down and chase ’em!”

  “Aw, now, honey,” Doris protested. “What are they hurting?” Every one of us had parked down at the end of deserted farm paths in our time, and we murmured in agreement when Isabel said, “Oh, let ’em celebrate in peace.”

  Robert and Haywood were too bullheaded to listen though and they roared off together in Robert’s pickup. Andrew, Seth and Zach just shook their heads and piled more limbs on the bonfire.

  From our vantage point, we watched Robert’s lurching headlights leave the lane and strike a diagonal across the field.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Zach.

  “It’s okay,” said Doris. “He’s got four-wheel drive.”

  “Yeah, but the land’s real low back there,” said Seth.

  Zach turned to Andrew. “Didn’t one of the tractors bog down there last winter?”

  Andrew nodded. “Took three others to pull it out.”

  I crawled up on top of the cab of Seth’s truck and perched there cross-legged to enjoy the show. Sure enough, it wasn’t long till we heard the high-pitched rrrr-rrhrr-rrrhrrr of spinning tires going nowhere fast, then the slamming of truck doors. A flashlight bobbled across the field as Haywood and Robert made their long muddy way back up the rise to us.

  “I reckon we gave ’em a good scare though,” Robert said smugly.

  Haywood stomped the mud from his boots. “They probably slipped out while we was driving down there.”

  “I think they were further back,” I called from atop Seth’s cab.

  “Naw, shug,” said Robert. “I got four-wheel drive on my truck, and if I got stuck up to the axle, ain’t no car could’ve gone further.”

  “Uh, Robert?” I pointed down behind him.

  He whirled in time to see a glow in the far field resolve into car lights as it zoomed straight along the field’s bottom lane, back through the woods and out toward the safety of the road.

  “Well damn!” Robert said. Then he shrugged. “All the same, I bet that was the shortest loving he ever got.”

  “Spoilsport,” said April.

  “Never mind about them,” said Doris. “That fire looks about ready, don’t y’all think?”

  We threaded bright red hot dogs on wire coat hangers that Robert had straightened out, and we held them in the bonfire till they were charred on the outside and warmed through the middle, then popped them into buns and spooned on the onions, chili and coleslaw. Even though Doris had bought the cheapest brand sold, everything combined to make those hot dogs taste like gourmet sausages.

 

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