Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online

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