Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron Read Free Book Online Page A

was bright. They don’t give out full four-year scholarships to the university just because someone’s mother got killed. But was she brains or book learning?
    “I took an interdisciplinary honors course last fell,” she said. “Hamlet, Edward the Eighth, Richard Nixon. We discussed their tragic flaws, and I couldn’t help applying it to my mother. Not who killed her, but why? What was her tragic flaw?” She leaned forward. “Everybody says she was good and sweet and beautiful and that I’m just like her. Well, nobody’s that damn sweet and good. I’m not and I bet she wasn’t either.”
    Brains, then?
    There had been a million unanswered questions when Janie Whitehead was killed, but every question was predicated on the belief that innocence and purity had been cruelly slaughtered that chilly May afternoon. Yet, in the months before, lust for Jed Whitehead had made me acutely aware of Janie’s flaws and, yes, she had her human share. I had collected them secretly and gloated over them like a miser polishing his coins. God knows I’d been wracked with guilt when I saw her cold stiff body lying in that coffin, her shining black hair spread across the pink satin pillow, her luminous brown eyes closed for all eternity; but remorse and guilt and prayers to God for forgiveness had not washed away the question with which Gayle now struggled.
    “They say everybody carries within themselves the seeds of their own destruction,” she said.
    “Sounds like another way to blame the victim for the crime,” I hedged starchily, as if I were already a judge.
    “She was only twenty-two,” said Gayle, her voice passionate. “Four years older than I am right now. What if I really am like her?”
    “Nobody’s going to kill you,” I told her.
    Again it was the wrong comment and she waved me off impatiently.
    “I’ve almost quit wondering about who killed her, Deborah. Now I think if I just find out why, that might be enough. People either pat me on the head when I ask what she was like or else they tell me another bedtime story. You knew her and you know everybody in Cotton Grove. And I’m not asking you to do it for nothing either. I’ve got Grampa Poole’s trust fund, and I’ll spend every last cent if that’s what it takes to find out what she was really like that somebody felt she needed killing.”
    Jed didn’t like it when I called to tell him that Gayle was determined to go through with it one way or another. Not one little bit did he like it.
    “She’s as headstrong as her mother,” he said finally, but his voice got softer. “Janie always had to have her way, too, didn’t she?”
    “Just tell me what you want me to do, Jed,” I said impatiently. “I’ve got enough on my plate right now. I don’t need this. You want me to tell her no, I will.”
    He sighed. “No, I reckon we’ll have to do what she wants.” He sighed again. “Better you than some real detective.”

4 all my rowdy friends have settled down
    North Carolina houses our State Bureau of Investigation in what used to be a school for the blind on Old Garner Road south of Raleigh. Some of us don’t let the agents forget it either.
    When I showed up in his office without an appointment just before five that Friday afternoon, Special Agent Terry Wilson leaned back in his swivel chair, put that canary-feathered grin on his big ugly face and drawled, “Well, looky who’s here! You want to hear something funny? Somebody said you was running for judge.”
    “Naah. Dogcatcher.” I tried to look serious, but a matching grin spread over my own face. Terry does that to me every time. Even when I used to get furious with him, I couldn’t stay furious. He’d cut those hazel eyes at me, the tip of his long nose would twitch and I’d laugh before I could help it.
    There was a moment about six years ago when I seriously considered marrying Terry just because life with him could have been so damn much fun. The moment passed, since three things