"Come here a minute," he said and took me off to the far side of the small house, out of earshot of his officers. His brown eyes were troubled as he looked deeply into mine. "Now listen, Deb'rah, and don't mouth off at me, 'cause this is for real. You sure this is the way you want to tell it?"

"What?"

"Well, think about it. If Annie Sue was the one who bashed his head in, it seems to me it'd be a clear-cut case of self-defense. The doctor can attest to her bruises and that blow on her head. She might not even have realized what she was doing. Fighting him off and all, what if she just grabbed the hammer and flailed away?"

"And then carried the hammer out to the living room for me to trip over and came back in here to pa.s.s out close to his body?"

"People with concussions do crazy things," he said stubbornly.

"True. But then wouldn't her hand be even bloodier than mine was?" I asked.

"Did she wash or-"

I was shaking my head. "No, no, and no. That's why I took her straight to the hospital instead of home. I wanted every sc.r.a.p of physical evidence to remain on her body until it was doc.u.mented. You and I both know that the first thing rape victims want to do is take a long hot shower, get clean again."

He nodded.

"I didn't want her near a bathroom till a nurse with a rape kit had gone over her body with a fine tooth comb." I winced at the cliche, suddenly remembering that it wasn't a trite figure of speech: Annie Sue's pubic area would indeed have been combed for foreign hairs.

"Bambi probably took fingernail sc.r.a.pings, too," I said. "Even if Annie Sue'd rinsed her hands in the rain, his blood would still be there."

"I'll check," said Dwight. "But if Annie Sue didn't do it..." His voice trailed off and his face got even gloomier.

I was incredulous.

"You think I killed him?"

"Your fingerprints will be on the hammer. That's probably his blood on your skirt," Dwight said. "Say you came back and found Bannerman in the act of raping your niece. Say you had a hammer in your hand. Wouldn't you have smacked him over the head with it?"

"d.a.m.n straight!" I agreed. "But it didn't happen that way."

"You're sure."

"Dwight!"

"Okay, okay. If you say you didn't, you didn't. One more thing though." He seemed to be picking his words carefully. "You hear where they found Herman?"

My heart started to sink. "No."

"On Troop Road."

That was less than a mile from here and not on any beeline between his office and his house. "Going which direction?"

"Toward his house," said Dwight. "Away from here. It was like he wasn't going too fast when he pa.s.sed out. The truck sort of coasted to a stop on the sidewalk, but he did bang his head. His face was b.l.o.o.d.y. And the time's about right."

Dwight thrust a big hand into his off-duty jeans and rattled his pocket change as he gazed at me speculatively. "So if you're sure that hammer was already sticky when you picked it up, guess I'd better have my techs take samples of the bloodstains in Herman's truck."

"I'm sure." I hated this scenario just as much as Dwight's first two, but if it were true...

"No jury in Colleton County ever convicted a man who killed his daughter's rapist."

"Even if he ran away and left his daughter behind, half-naked?"

"If he did that, it's because he was sick," I argued. "Not thinking clearly."

"Well, we'll worry about that down the road," Dwight said. "Right now, I want you to let Richards drive you first to Annie Sue's and then take you home."

"I'm perfectly capable of driving myself and- He huffed at me in exasperation, just like one of my brothers. "You always got to argue, don't you? I swear I don't know why you gave up being a lawyer and took up the one job where you're supposed to listen to what people say and not fly off the handle before they finish talking."

"So finish," I snapped.

"I want Richards to collect the clothes Annie Sue was wearing tonight and I want that skirt and blouse you have on, too."

Before I could bristle, he gave me a sardonic look. "Preacher's wife, okay?"

He was right. And if I hadn't been so tired, he wouldn't have had to spell it out for me. As a judge, I not only had to appear above suspicion, I had to be able to prove it, too. Better to let them run my clothes through the system and verify that the bloodstains were wipes, not splatters, than to have awkward questions raised after the garments were cleaned.

Deputy Mayleen Richards and I got to Annie Sue's clothes just seconds before Seth's Jessica tossed them in the washer. The whole house seemed to swarm with energetic young women and every single one of them had grown up watching their mothers so they knew how southern women were supposed to behave in a crisis.

Some were in the kitchen to load the dishwasher and put away the food Nadine had cooked before she'd rushed off to the hospital. Others had tidied the house, including cleaning up the bathroom behind Annie Sue. In fact, Jessica was only waiting for the last damp towel before starting the washer. Had I stayed to argue with Dwight, we'd have been too late.

The girls hadn't heard about Bannerman's death until we arrived, and they were wide-eyed as Richards scooped the clothes from Jessica's hands and put them in a brown paper sack.

"Carver Bannerman got his head smashed in?"

Some of my eye-for-an-eye nieces immediately declared he got what he deserved. Andrew's Ruth looked apprehensive though. When Reese rushed out of the hospital to look for Bannerman with violence in his eyes, her brother A. K. had gone with him. I squeezed her hand and told her not to worry, that Bannerman was probably dead before I carried Annie Sue to the hospital.

Paige Byrd and Cindy McGee were also there at the house. Paige kept saying, "If only we hadn't left when we did!"

Cindy's face was splotched and her eyes were red and swollen. When she heard that Bannerman was dead, fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, but at least she didn't moan and shriek and overdramatize like some of my nieces would have.

Amazingly, they didn't seem to notice, and Annie Sue had loyally kept her mouth shut about Cindy.

Knowing what I did, Cindy's misery seemed palpable, but I honestly couldn't tell whether it was (1) because her erstwhile lover was dead, (2) because he'd tried to rape her best friend, or (3) because, like Paige, she was blaming herself for leaving Annie Sue when Herman's tongue-lashing made them too uncomfortable.

Maybe it was (4)-all of the above.

Despite all the evening's shocks and a mild concussion that would have me in bed sound asleep by now, Annie Sue seemed to be bouncing back okay. As soon as she'd realized that all her injuries were external, she'd become giddy with relief. Before she'd had time to come down from that, she'd been sucker-punched with her father's collapse, which sent her into a crying jag, terrified that Herman might die.

Now, just as abruptly, her attacker was dead.

"It's so weird," she told Jessica and me as we helped her pack Nadine's cosmetics and night clothes. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry or just throw my head back and simply howl. It's like that time when I was little out at the farm, remember? When I almost stepped on a copperhead and started screaming and Granddaddy came and chopped his head off?"

Jess and I nodded. More of Annie Sue's dramatics, but it had become family lore. First she'd screamed from fright and then she'd bawled for an hour because the snake, though poisonous, had been killed.

Driving to Chapel Hill with Jess and a couple of the others would help. If she didn't fall asleep driving over, by the time they got there, they would have hashed and rehashed every detail of the whole evening. "I said- Then he- So what did you do? And then?"

Telling and retelling ought to blunt the knife edge of trauma before it could cut her too deeply.

Annie Sue had already packed her overnight bag and now she closed Nadine's.

"Wait a minute, honey," I said as the others picked up the bags and headed down the hall with them to Jessica's car.

Mayleen Richards didn't want to let me-or rather my clothes-out of her sight, but I asked her to wait down the hall and I stood in the open doorway so that she could watch without hearing.

Annie Sue's eyes grew large, but she sat down on the white hobnail spread that covered her parents' bed. She had changed into a pink floral jumpsuit and her shining chestnut hair was caught up in pink hair clips. Except for the sc.r.a.pes on her elbows and chin, there were no outward signs of the mauling she'd taken.

"Dwight Bryant'll probably talk to you sometime tomorrow," I said, "and I'm sure he'll ask you if you were aware of anyone else in the house when Carver Bannerman jumped you?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Think carefully, honey. Could someone have been waiting for him out in his car?"

"Maybe," she answered slowly. "I didn't see. He didn't act like anybody was there to walk in on us. Not the way he grabbed me."

"And after he threw you down?"

"Honest, Deb'rah, I can't remember. I must have been unconscious. But when I was starting to come out of it . . .

"Yes?"

"Something... a noise? Something fell? And then... yes! A car! I heard a car start up and drive away. I guess I sort of thought it was him. Driving away in the rain. Because I remember feeling like maybe everything was going to be all right. And then I guess I must have gone under again because I don't remember anything else till I heard you calling me."

"Did you recognize the sound of the motor?" I asked cautiously. Herman's new truck was only a few months old. Maybe it had no distinctive sounds yet.

She looked at me blankly. "Nope. It was just a car. Or a truck, I suppose."

"No loud rattles, no shriek when the gears changed?" She smiled. "Like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang or something?"

I smiled back, not wanting to put ideas in her head. "Or something."

She smoothed the lace collar of her jumpsuit as she considered. I could tell that she was replaying the sound of the engine in her head. A shadow flicked across her face and was instantly gone.

"It was just an ordinary car motor," she said and looked me straight in the eye as she said it.

CHAPTER 12.

HANDSCREW AND C-CLAMPS.

"The wooden handscrew is relatively limited with regard to both scope and pressure... When a metal C-clamp is used for wood, the wood must be protected against damage from the metal jaw and the screw swivel on the clamp."

I probably could have borrowed a change of clothes from Annie Sue, but I'd still have to hitch a ride back with Deputy Richards to pick up my car; so I had her drive me home. She came upstairs with me, a stolid young woman who grew up in the tobacco fields near Fayetteville and who was not inclined to be too chatty with a judge that her immediate boss treated like a younger sister. After a few of her yes-ma'am, no-ma'am answers, I quit trying to put her at ease.

She took my bloodstained skirt and my soiled but unsplattered shirt and put them in a brown paper bag separate from Annie Sue's things.

"I'll just wait out in the car for you, ma'am."

"Be right with you," I promised. Stripped down to a white silk teddy, I stood barefoot in front of my closet and flipped through the hangers for fresh clothes. What's appropriate for a murder scene? I slipped a scoop-necked black cotton knit over my head and pulled a pair of old jeans over my hips. This time I meant to be ready for mud or blood.

Aunt Zell came in as I finished tying the laces on my raggedyest pair of sneakers. She had the puppy in her arms and was feeding it with its nursing bottle. "Ash wants to know how come there's a sheriff's car parked in our drive."

"We're just leaving," I said lightly. "She's going to drop me off to pick up my car."

After Mother died and Daddy went back to the farm, I moved into these two rooms that once belonged to Uncle Ash's father. Daddy and I weren't getting along too well then, and Uncle Ash was on the road even more in those days, so it seemed a sensible solution all around.

No kitchen, but otherwise it's like a self-contained apartment: sitting room, bath, and a large bedroom that opens onto the upstairs back veranda. There's even a side entrance and a second staircase, so I can come and go in private if I wish.

I've lived here off and on ever since that eighteenth summer, so Aunt Zell knows me about as well as anybody. Normally she's enough like my mother to enjoy stringing me along just to see how far I'll go before I tell the whole truth. Tonight she wasn't playing, and the lines in her face were deeper than I'd seen them in a long time, as the puppy nursed with little snorts and grunts.

"How'd you hear?" I asked. "The family tom-toms been working overtime?"

She shifted the puppy to a more comfortable position so that he could drain the bottle. "Ruth called Andrew from Herman's house. That odious creature's dead?"

I nodded.

"Are A.K. and Reese involved?"

"Is that what Andrew's afraid of? He doesn't have to worry. Honest. If any of us are in trouble, it's probably me."

In twenty-five words or less, I hastily explained how Dwight was pretty sure Bannerman was already dead when I found Annie Sue, and how we expected to find my fingerprints on the hammer that killed him, and how it'd all happened at least an hour before Reese and A.K. even heard about the incident.

She pushed my pillows up on the headboard and leaned back against them. The puppy, his fat little tummy thoroughly full again, nuzzled into the sleeve of her robe and went sound to sleep. As I talked, Aunt Zell stroked the pup's silky hair and relief smoothed away some of the tension between her eyes.

"Would you please call your brother and tell him that?"

Like Mother, she always did have a tender heart for him.

Andrew was one of the wild ones who came along during the Depression years when things got a touch rough around here. I've never known all the details of that period. Somehow it seemed a little disloyal to Mother to ask too many questions about Daddy's first wife. She was from that swampy area where Possum Creek runs into the Neuse River, much more of a backwoods in those days than now, but the land was just as sorry-"no good for nothing 'cept keeping the world stuck together right yonder"-and the people there just as suspicious of outsiders and revenuers.

Her people were dirt poor and nearly illiterate and they made her quit school in the sixth grade and set her running trot lines and boiling mash when she wasn't picking cotton for two cents a pound like the rest of her family. No wonder she married Daddy when she was fifteen and started kicking out baby boys every two years regular as clockwork. A man who owns his own land never has to let his family go hungry long as seeds sprout and hogs can be fattened, but fresh vegetables and cured hams couldn't always be traded for boys' shoes or a widowed mother's medicine. I expect that's why Daddy kept on running his own shine. It was his only dependable source of cash money.

Was it a good marriage?

I don't know.

They say she was certainly a good helpmeet. When the revenuers came sniffing around local stores to see who was buying up lots of sugar, they say it was her idea to visit every grocery store in Raleigh, Wilson, Goldsboro and Fayetteville three or four times a summer, never buying more than twenty-five or thirty pounds of sugar at a time. "And better let me have some of them big canning jars. Looks like it's gonna be a good summer for blackberries/cherries/peaches/pears. These young'uns sh.o.r.e do love my [insert one] preserves."