“Actually,” said Cathy King, “I got the feeling he meant to scare Gayle Whitehead.”

Which insured, of course, that Monday’s paper carried a complete rehash of Janie Whitehead’s death.

Gayle immediately went to earth at her grandmother Whitehead’s house.

“I don’t want to talk to any reporters,” she said when I called to see how she was, “but you know, Deborah, this may not be such a bad thing. Not Michael Vickery getting killed-that part’s so terrible! I still can’t believe we were just talking to him and now he’s dead-but if it gets people remembering about my mother… You reckon maybe he did know something more than he ever told? Something he told Denn and Denn was maybe going to tell you?”

“If that’s the case, why would Denn kill him?” I asked, trying to assess the situation logically. “If it was incriminating, you’d think Michael would have tried to stop Denn, not the other way around. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Gayle said promptly.

Oh yeah? With a campaign to salvage?

“Look, honey,” I began, but she interrupted with a wail of protest.

“You can’t stop now, Deborah. Everything’s so stirred up, somebody’s bound to let something slip if you just ask the right questions. Please?”

Sighing, I agreed at least to listen if anyone should stop me in the street and want to unburden a secret.

Back in the real world, reading the morning papers began to cut into work time at Lee, Stephenson and Knott. Clients can make the news, attorneys aren’t supposed to; yet my name was in print so many times that the pained expression seemed to have settled permanently on John Claude’s fine thin features.

On Tuesday Reid brought a couple of interesting tidbits to our morning coffee.

Ambrose Daughtridge had been Michael and Denn’s attorney, and he’d let slip that Michael had begun looking into the legal ramifications of untangling their financial assets. Indeed, Michael had made an appointment for yesterday afternoon to rewrite his will.

“They had a joint checking account,” said Reid, “but the Pot Shot itself and all the real property belonged to Michael. Or rather to Mrs. Vickery. It was Dancy land that she inherited.”

“Michael never had title?” John Claude was horrified. He would never have let a client put capital improvements into property that another family member could sell out from under him, even if that family member was the client’s mother.

Reid grinned. “It wasn’t quite that bad. Mrs. Vickery gave him a ninety-nine-year lease-one of those nominal fifty-dollars-a-year things-so he couldn’t be forced off.”

“Oh?” said John Claude, who sniffed the makings of a pretty little legal problem, one that any attorney would enjoy arguing, especially if-?

“Yep,” said Reid. “Ambrose told me that Michael Vickery and Denn McCloy had mutually beneficial wills.”

“Ah,” said John Claude.

“So if Michael had lived to keep his appointment with Ambrose yesterday, Denn might have wound up with nothing.”

I mused. “Instead, he now gets everything, including a ninety-nine-year lease on Dancy property.”

“Not if I’d handled the wording on the lease,” said John Claude.

Unspoken was the knowledge that Ambrose Daughtridge relied rather heavily on the one-size-fits-all standard forms found in forms books. Would he have remembered (or even known at the time) that Michael Vickery was more likely to have “heirs and/or successors and assigns” than “heirs of his body”?

“It’s all academic. Murderers don’t inherit from their victims,” John Claude reminded us as Sherry brought in the morning mail and began sorting it at the end of the long table so she wouldn’t miss anything.

“Guilty till proven innocent?” I said.

The little alert bell over the front door tinkled and Sherry went out to greet old Mrs. Cunningham, who comes in every month to fiddle with the codicils in her will.

After she left, I interviewed a couple of women. One of our sparkplug clerks had married abruptly and moved to New Hampshire, and we’d filled in with enough temporaries to have seen it was going to take two to replace the one we’d lost. Our clerks have to be efficient enough for John Claude and me, homely or married enough so that Reid won’t try to bed them, and biddable enough to take orders from Sherry. I was beginning to think such creatures didn’t exist, but a new crop of paralegals was due to graduate soon from Colleton Tech. Maybe we’d get lucky.

When I returned from a very late lunch, Sherry said, “Dwight Bryant’s in your office. I think it’s something official.”

“Really?”

He was standing by my desk when I got there.

“Do you mind?” I said.

“What?”

“Well, how would you like it,” I fumed, “if I came in your office and started nosing through your papers?”

“Hey, I wasn’t looking at papers,” he protested. “I just didn’t remember seeing that picture of Miz Sue and Mr. Kezzie.”

I’d left the photograph propped against my pencil holder and he took it over to the window for a closer look in better light. It was only a snapshot that I’d taken with the camera they’d given me for my ninth birthday. Mother was sitting on the swing on our front porch, Daddy was propped against a nearby post, hat in his hand, hand on his hip. Both of them smiled into the camera, but the way her slender body was half-turned towards him, the way his lean height curved toward her, you could tell that they’d been talking when I came along and called, “Say cheese!”

It was only a snapshot I hadn’t valued back then. Now I saw that I’d captured the electricity that had always flowed between them.

“Daddy gave it to me Friday night,” I said as he handed it back.

Dwight picked up the ten-by-thirteen manila envelope he’d laid on the edge of my desk and took a chair. “Yeah, I heard y’all made up.”

Normally, I’d have taken exception to his words, but he looked too bone weary to banter. Instead I let it go with a mild, “We made a start anyhow. What’ve you got there?”

He opened the flap and slipped out two flat plastic bags, each of which contained a single sheet of paper. It only took a glance to see that these had to be the original pasteups of those two flyers on mine and Luther Parker’s letterheads. Both were smudged with what I could only assume to be graphite fingerprint powder.

“Where’d you get those?” I asked.

“We got a search warrant for the Pot Shot and the barn. Did a quick and dirty Saturday night to make sure McCloy wasn’t out there, then went back a little more thoroughly yesterday. Interesting. Most of his clothes and personal things seem to be missing, but these were hidden under a pile of papers in McCloy’s desk. They had their own copier in that little office behind the sales shop. Same kind of paper. His fingerprints were all over these two sheets. He’s the one who put them together, no doubt about it.”

I was floored. “Denn? He’s about as political as Julia Lee’s poodle, for God’s sake. Why would he do something like that?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.” He cocked his big sandy-haired head at me. “To make you stop poking into Janie Whitehead’s death?”

“He never even met Janie,” I protested.

“No, but Michael had.”

“Barely. Even if they knew each other well, so what? Michael had no reason to kill Janie.”

“That we know of.” Dwight pushed himself to his feet. “If I know you, you’re going to keep on poking around. You hear anything I ought to know about-”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

He grinned at the exasperated tone of my voice, and for about half a minute, I almost had the feeling he was going to reach out and tousle my hair, as if I were a little girl again and he the lanky teenager who was always over to play ball or hang out with my brothers. Our eyes met, locked, and inexplicably, we were both suddenly trapped by a startled awareness that turned our casual ease into clumsy confusion.