Free Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron Page B

in the mill loft. Janie still wearing the jeans and- Wait a minute. What happened to her raincoat?”
    Scotty sat back in the booth while music and people and blue cigarette haze swirled around us, then leaned across the table so that I was the only one who could possibly hear his words above the noise. “I’m trusting Terry on you, but it doesn’t leave this table,” he warned.
    “Okay,” I promised.
    “No raincoat. The family was too torn up to notice and the news media never picked up on it either-probably because it’d turned off so hot and sunny by then nobody thought about coats. We made sure it really was missing and then we shut up about it because I thought we stood a good chance of finding it if we ever developed a strong enough suspect to get a search warrant.”
    “Only you never did.”
    “Only we never did,” he echoed grimly. “Not for lack of trying. We zeroed in on a few right away: the husband, your brothers-because they’d been out to the mill on Thursday, all the old boyfriends, Michael Vickery. You.” He gave a tired smile. “Even those two blacks that found her. We just couldn’t make the times fit. Take Jed Whitehead. He was a salesman with a Raleigh firm back then, out on the road all day Wednesday, but once it was known that his wife was missing, someone was constantly with him. Same with the rest of her family. Any of them could have bopped her over the head and hid her somewhere, but when did they have time to move her car or, for that matter, move her to the millhouse and then go back and shoot her?”
    I hadn’t realized those were separate times.
    “Yeah,” he answered. “Something about two different kinds of bloodstains. They figured the wound opened up again when she was put in the loft. I forget the details, but forensics determined that she’d bled onto the floorstones for several hours before the shot finished her off instantly. She actually died between five and ten P.M. on Friday evening, according to Dr. Hudson.”
    “Too bad Michael Vickery hadn’t moved into the barn yet,” I sighed.
    “Might have been rough on him if he had. As it was, he was lucky he could prove he was in Chapel Hill from noon till nearly midnight on Friday because he was out there by himself all day Wednesday.”
    Scotty shrugged. “It was like that with every man we looked at. Your brothers: both free to come and go without punching time cards or anybody keeping tabs on them. They alibied each other for Wednesday, which we might could question, but your brother Seth helped barbecue chickens all afternoon for a church supper Friday night while your brother Will was umpiring a Little League baseball game.”
    “Neither of my brothers had a reason to hurt Janie,” I said hotly.
    “So who did?” he asked reasonably.
    “Nobody! Anybody. Oh, God, I don’t know!” An impatient sweep of my hand upset my empty cup. No one in the place noticed. They were too busy watching three miniskirted secretaries over by the jukebox who were demonstrating some aerobic movements and lip-synching “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” along with Deniece Williams. Morgan was in tight conversation with someone I didn’t recognize. “Didn’t you guys turn up any motives?”
    “Not really.”
    “Not really,” I mimicked nastily. “You told Terry and me you didn’t find a hell of a lot more the second time through. What does that mean? Or aren’t you going to trust me?”
    “We checked out Dinah Jean Raynor when we heard she was going to marry Janie’s husband,” he answered slowly. “Eight months wasn’t much of a mourning period. Made us wonder if they’d had anything going before.”
    “Dinah Jean?” I was scornful. “He might have dated her in high school, but he’d dropped her long before he started seeing Janie.” I hesitated. Jed had always treated Dinah Jean pleasantly in my presence, the surface between them as placid and unruffled as Possum Creek. But I remembered the yearning on her