be sleeping on the couch?”
“Sorry, Dwight,” Reid Stephenson said when told why he’d been invited to stop by the sheriff’s department. “I was in Southern Pines Saturday night. A command performance with the parents.”
Deborah’s cousin and former law partner was the firm’s current Stephenson, but his father, Brix Junior, remained a powerful entity even though he was retired and had technically handed his share of the partnership over to Reid. His mother sat on the boards of a half dozen charities.
“They’ve found another debutante for me,” Reid said with a grimace. “This one breeds hunters. Tally-ho, y’all.”
Dwight grinned. “All the same, ol’ son, Rebecca Jowett’s calendar for Saturday night says ‘Reid S’ with an exclamation mark beside it.”
“Yeah, well, she did call and ask me if I’d like to have a drink with her. Her husband was going to be out of town and she wanted to celebrate her first sale in over two weeks. Sounded fine to me. We hadn’t gotten together in a few months and she was always good for a few laughs. Then Mother called and played the guilt card, so I asked for a rain check.” He shook his head. “I’ve felt really bad about it ever since I heard she disappeared Saturday evening. If I hadn’t canceled, you reckon she’d still be alive?”
“I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Larry Sokoloff, a pudgy thirtysomething. “You don’t expect somebody you know to get murdered, do you?”
Newly divorced and looking for a small house with enough land to let his two goldens romp freely, he had met Rebecca Jowett for the first time last week when he walked into Coyne Realty and asked about a listing in the local newspaper. “My ex-wife got the house back in Wisconsin, I got the dogs and no alimony payments. Becca was supposed to show me a place on Sunday, but she never called. I thought she’d blown me off.”
He was a cardiac nurse out at the hospital and had spent Saturday night working the four-to-midnight shift in the intensive care unit. When asked about his relationship with Becca Jowett, he’d frowned. “What relationship? It was all business.”
Well, yes, he admitted, she might have flirted with him a bit, “but I’m not ready to get back in the game yet. Besides, I thought she was just being Southern.”
Cubby Lee Honeycutt had an exclusive for the house on East Cleveland Street, “but the damn thing may never sell after this,” he said gloomily as he jotted down the name of the last real estate agent to show it before the Todds put in an offer.
When questioned, that agent said, “Yes, I showed it to a couple who were moving down from New Jersey, but they wanted to add on a wing for a mother-in-law suite and the neighborhood covenants won’t allow that.
“Rebecca Jowett? Sure, I knew her. Knew who she was anyhow. We weren’t really friends. Just business associates. Makes you think about showing a house to strangers, doesn’t it? I’ve never had a bad experience, but a friend of mine down in Atlanta was almost raped.” She held up the cell phone in her hand and clicked the deputy’s picture. “Before I go inside a house alone, I always send a picture of the client back to my office, and I make sure they know it.”
A canvass of the houses that backed up to the berm separating Grayson Village from the Ferrabee tract and the old dump where the body was found had turned up nothing. No headlights shining through the thick pine trees, no sightings of people.
“A few teenagers used to ride their four-wheelers over there when the weather was nice,” one homeowner told them, “but as cold and wet as it’s been, I haven’t seen or heard any of them since that warm weekend back in January.”
They had located some of the teenagers in question. The kids knew about the dump and had picked through it. “I got the glass door off a real old washer,” one of them said. “Made me a neat picture frame.” But except for a cranky Englishman who’d chased them away and threatened them with trespassing, they had never seen anyone else on the deserted land.
When she returned from interviewing the dead woman’s family, Mayleen Richards reported that the parents were too grief-stricken to be of much help. “They’re sure the whole world loved her, that her marriage was perfect, and that no one could possibly have a reason to hurt her.”
“So what