According to Marylee, everything was absolutely normal when Janie ran in at 11:45 to get the cupcakes, leaving Gayle in the car. At Cotton Grove Elementary, the second-grade teacher didn’t know Janie well enough to confirm Marylee’s assessment, but she did think that the only thing on Janie’s mind was not leaving her baby daughter in the car by herself too long. She’d stayed just long enough to bring in the tray of cupcakes and the quart-size bottles of Pepsi, and to pass along Marylee’s apologies, before hurrying from the classroom.
A fifth-grade teacher on the second floor of the school had been standing at the window overlooking the parking lot, trying to judge if the rain had slacked off enough for her to take her class out for a breath of fresh air before their lunch period. She had known Janie since childhood and was able to state quite definitely that she saw the young mother in her chic red vinyl raincoat cut across the schoolyard to her dark blue sedan. Janie had adjusted the blanket around the infant in the portable crib on the backseat, then driven off alone back toward the center of town. The time was exactly 12:17.
“And that was the last time anyone was positive that they’d seen Janie Poole Whitehead alive,” said Scotty.
“Except for Howard Grimes?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We could never be sure whether he really saw her or whether he just wanted us to give him the time of day.”
“Did you? Give him the time of day, I mean?”
“I told you we listened to whoever’d talk. Trouble is, ol’ Howard quit talking before we got to him.”
I didn’t remember it like that and protested. “He told anybody who’d listen that it was Janie he’d seen parked with some man in front of the old Dixie Motel. That it was raining too hard and the windows were too fogged up for him to make out who, though.”
“Yeah, I know, and that story went around Cotton Grove so quick there were people who still thought she’d run off with another man right up till the minute they found her body, but I’m telling you straight: when we tried to pin him down after she was found, he started saying maybe it was somebody else’s wife he’d seen. There were two other young women in Cotton Grove driving dark blue Ford sedans.”
“Kay Saunders and my ex-sister-in-law,” I said, meeting it head on.
“Not yet ex,” he corrected.
“Doesn’t matter. Trish and Kay were good friends of Janie’s. They used to run around together in high school. Anyhow, Howard said the woman was wearing shiny red, and neither Trish nor Kay owned a mod red slicker, just Janie.”
Scotty’s head came up and for the first time I saw a beagle-hunting gleam flicker down in those weary spaniel eyes. “You sure he described the raincoat?”
“Of course I’m sure.” Yet even as I spoke, I wondered if I’d confused his remarks with the schoolyard description widely repeated by the teachers. Janie had been clothes-proud, and I remembered the day she bought that coat, the day she modeled it for Jed and me. It was a teacher workday, a week before her death, so I was off from school. I’d kept Gayle and Marylee’s little boy, too, so the two sisters could go shopping together at Crabtree Valley, Raleigh ’s biggest and newest mall.
I’d already fed the kids and Jed had just gotten home a few minutes earlier when Marylee and Janie pulled into the driveway, the backseat of the car loaded down with packages. With her dark hair piled up in a bouffant beehive, high-heeled white boots, and that lipstick red vinyl slicker, she matched my unsophisticated idea of Carnaby Street, and I watched, pea green with jealousy, as she sweet-talked Jed out of being mad because she’d spent so much money. “But, sugar darlin’, you don’t think I can keep on wearing all those old things from before the baby was born?”
So was that why the red raincoat remained with me for eighteen years? I concentrated and retrieved a sudden mental image of Howard standing in darkness on the sidewalk in front of Jed and Janie’s house. Red and blue lights atop the emergency vehicles were refracted by water droplets. People milled about in the misty fog. I was there, some of my brothers, too, and their wives. Will and Trish. Mother was inside with the older women of the community, trying to reassure Mrs. Poole and Mrs. Whitehead that Janie and Gayle were going to be all right. Blue lights from the wet patrol cars flashed across Howard’s broad, self-important face.
“He said he couldn’t make out the woman because she was turned toward the man beside her, but her back was pressed against the window and he saw her shiny red coat.”
Scotty twirled his straw between his fingers. It was clear plastic and coated with dull red tomato juice. “That little detail would have made us take him more seriously. Wonder why he left it out when we talked with him?”
“Did he?”
“This is the first time I’ve heard it.”
“What about when you reworked the case?”
“We didn’t get a chance. We’d just started when he dropped dead.”
I’d been living with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash in Dobbs by then and had forgotten-if I’d even noticed-that the two things occurred simultaneously. After all, Howard Grimes wasn’t someone important to me, and the SBI had kept their heads down so low when they returned to Cotton Grove seven years ago that I’d barely been aware they were there before they were gone again, leaving some uneasy talk that soon faded. Still, for Howard to have died so abruptly?
I stared at Scotty and he gave an ironic grin. “Yeah, but we had him autopsied and it really was his heart. His doctor said he’d had a bad one for years. Just our luck it picked that week to give out on him. Wish I’d heard about the red raincoat, though. We might have leaned on him a little harder the first go-round instead of thinking he was just the town busybody.”
“He was that, too,” I said and nodded to the waitress who’d come over to refill my coffee cup.
She glanced inquiringly at Scotty’s empty glass, but he shook his head. “I’ll have a cup of brewed decaf if you’ve got it.”
As she snaked her way back through the TGIF crowd gathered noisily around the bar for happy hour, he said, “Except for Janie’s parents, nobody had much of an alibi. You know that?”
“Yes. Gayle brought over a box of newspaper clippings yesterday and I spent last night going over them.”
The beagle look was still there. “Law school makes a difference, doesn’t it?”
It did. I’d found myself studying bland and equivocal statements with a jaundiced eye, wishing whoever’d reported the stories for the county papers had been less solicitous of family feelings and had asked harder questions. The News and Observer and the now defunct Raleigh Times had both covered Janie’s death once she’d been found; but even though her murder had made a brief sensation, they’d merely rehashed what was already known.
Janie and Gayle had vanished on a Wednesday. By Thursday morning, when her car reappeared, some five hundred people were out actively looking for them: rescue squads, a local unit of the National Guard, town and county police, state troopers, and at least four aircraft, including the traffic helicopter from one of the Raleigh TV stations.
“That’s when we got into it,” said Scotty. He thanked the waitress as she set coffee before him, then briefly encapsulated their investigation.
“We coordinated the search but there were a lot of loose cannons rolling through Cotton Grove that week. Later, when we tried to chart everyone’s movements from Wednesday noon through Friday midnight, it was like documenting an anthill.”
“And Friday night was when she was actually killed,” I murmured, taking a deep swallow of coffee.
“Friday night was when she actually died,” he corrected, shaking out the pink paper packet of artificial sweetener.
“We didn’t publicize it, but after the autopsy report came back that she’d been dead considerably less than twenty-four hours by the time we found her, we took a closer look. No marks on her hands or wrists, yet the baby hadn’t been fed or changed.”