1 A Small Case of Murder

A Small Case of Murder

A Joshua Thornton Mystery

By

Lauren Carr

Copyright Information

A Small Case of Murder

All Rights Reserved © 2004 by Lauren Carr

Published by Acorn Book Services

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author.

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or Email: [email protected]

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Published in the United States of America 

Epigraph

Be on your guard against false prophets;

they come to you looking like sheep on the outside,

but on the inside they are really like wild wolves.

You will know them by what they do.

Thorn bushes do not bear grapes, and briers do not bear figs.

Matthew 7:15-16

Prologue

Spring, 1970

Lulu didn’t hide her amusement about the kid’s fascination with her breasts. It must have been the first time he had ever seen a bra-less woman in a see-through top.

The postal clerk had been so rattled by Lulu Jefferson’s fashion statement that he had almost forgotten to stick the stamp she had bought onto her envelope before tossing it into the bin for local mail. 

The bra-less look was all the sensation in California. It had yet to reach Chester, West Virginia. With its cobblestone streets and churches on every corner, some people would think the small town was stuck in the fifties.

Keeping up with the latest fads were essential in Lulu Jefferson’s line of work. On her way to being the next Nancy Sinatra, Lulu wore her sun-bleached hair down past her waist and her skirts above the middle thigh. Her bare feet were more of a statement of her generation than her country roots. She preferred the Rolling Stones to Hank Williams.

The singer hummed her next would-be hit, if it ever reached the ears of the right people, while strolling up Second Street Hill to her rented room over the Langley’s garage nestled under an old maple tree.

Sometimes Lulu thought Chester was surrounded by a force shield, like something out of Star Trek, which kept the rest of the world out. The small town was selective about the influences it let inside: like marijuana that tunes you in, miniskirts and hot pants that threaten to show more than thigh, and see-through tops that make postal clerks swallow their chewing gum.

Not that that was all bad.

Somebody had to stay sane in the midst of the chaos created by the changing times.

Chester’s way of life suited Lulu’s best friends, Claire and Johnny Thornton. Marriage and a kid worked for them. They were so into it that they ran off to the Grand Canyon to make another kid.

That Ozzie and Harriet Nelson stuff isn’t for me. Hollywood, here I come!

She paused to admire the green on the trees. The blossoms were gone. Spring was over. When did that happen? she wondered while crossing Indiana Avenue.

Time sure does fly.

The bus for her gig in Philadelphia was leaving at five in the morning, and she still had to pack.

Hurrying up the shady street to her apartment, Lulu made a list for the first time in her life, even if only in her mind, of what she had left to do before leaving town. Mentally, she checked off her meeting with Reverend Orville Rawlings to go over the music for the wedding.

Lulu reminded herself that she had to take all of her miniskirts and halter-tops. Her long legs and breasts were her biggest assets, a fact to which the kid in the post office would testify. She wanted to believe that she would make it to the top on her talent, but she couldn’t deny that sex sells. Good thing she enjoyed it as much as the next guy did.

Chester was still getting used to the “open sexuality” thing, Lulu observed, when she caught her landlady’s disapproving gape at her bare legs accentuated by her bright purple hot pants.

The mature woman shook her head at Lulu’s attire and made a “tsk, tsk” noise with her tongue before resuming the chore of weeding her flowerbed.

Lulu ran up the steps to her apartment.

Wishing she could be around to see their excitement, she checked off writing and mailing that letter to Claire.

She opened the door and stepped into her apartment. She didn’t bother digging out her key because people didn’t lock their doors in Chester. She tossed her bag to the floor and slammed the door to make sure it latched.

That was the last thing Lulu did before the hand clamped the handkerchief over her face.

Lulu’s guitar hit a sour note when her bare feet struck the strings in her struggle to break free from the arms that had seized her. The instrument made an odd musical sound when it tumbled to the floor from where she had set it up against the wall.

The chloroform rushed up her nostrils, down into her lungs, through her bloodstream, and hit her brain.

In her unconscious state, Lulu Jefferson wasn’t able to enjoy the trip on which the hottest recreational drug—all the rage in California—took her.

Chapter One

Thirty-Five Years Later

The moose head pushed Joshua Thornton over the edge.

A commander who had convicted an admiral of murder against all odds, Joshua believed that he could hold it together through thick and thin—until he was greeted by a moose head when he walked through the front door of his new office.

“So this is a fixer-upper?” His sixteen-year-old son tried to lighten the mood by using a Brooklyn accent.

Joshua failed to see any humor in the Murphy’s accent or the situation. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”

For the past week, Joshua had been trapped in a van with five kids and a dog the size of a small pony. The entrapment was necessary for his family’s move from San Francisco to Chester, West Virginia, nestled along the bank of the Ohio River. Their journey ended at a three-story stone house on the corner of Rock Springs Boulevard and Fifth Street, where his grandmother used to serve him cookies hot out of the oven and fresh milk from his uncle’s dairy farm when he came home from school.

Sometimes you need more than comfort food. You need a comfort move.

Almost two decades earlier, Joshua had left Chester to go to the Naval Academy. Since that time, he had seen the world. The Thorntons had lived in Spain, Hawaii, London, Naples, Washington, and most recently, San Francisco.

It was time for Joshua to bring his family home.

The Thorntons returned to Chester so late in the night that everyone slept in sleeping bags on the floor. The next morning, Joshua took his son Murphy into town to survey the building he had bought in which to start his legal practice

The late Dr. Russell Wilson’s practice had occupied the office building on Carolina Avenue, Chester’s main drag, for over seventy years. During his prime, Doc Wilson had two examination rooms and a waiting area on the ground floor.

His private office and lab, which Joshua planned to convert into a break room, were on the second floor.

Doc Wilson used to be an institution in the small town. When Joshua had been in high school, the doctor had shown his patient a yellowed medical school diploma dated 1928.

In his later years, the doctor had suffered so badly from arthritis that he gave Joshua his physical for the Naval Academy application from a desk chair. Despite the breaking down of his body, his mind had remained sharp. He could recall every detail about his patients, down to their ancestors’ medical history, without checking any files.

Only after leaving Annapolis did Joshua realize that not all doctors were stout men smelling of a mixture of schnapps and cigars that made house calls in the middle of the night.

His sentimental feeling toward the building and its late owner dissipated when Joshua saw it twenty years later. The siding was discolored and weather-beaten beyond repair. The windows were caked with so much filth accumulated over the decades of neglect that they had become opaque.

In the foyer, a moose head greeted Joshua and his son. A bookcase with a broken glass front rested in the middle of the bare, splintered, hardwood floors in the reception area. Murphy counted three roll-top desks overflowing with stacks of folders and papers.

The teenager watched his father from over the junk piled up between them.

The former naval officer had on the same rumpled clothes he had slept in on a hardwood floor. The day’s growth of beard was evidence that he couldn’t find his shaving kit. Despite his unkempt appearance, Joshua Thornton was as handsome as he had been the day he graduated valedictorian from Oak Glen High School. There were a couple of crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes and strands of gray hair at his temples; but he had the same features that made the girls’ hearts skip a beat when he smiled in their direction.

Murphy had inherited his father’s wavy brown hair, blue eyes, and fair complexion. Joshua Thornton’s genes also showed in the boy’s lean, athletic build.

Joshua ground his teeth in an effort to control his frustration over what had been an unwise investment made from across the country during what had to be the most traumatic year in his and his family’s life. He responded to his son’s quip about a fixer-upper by turning around in a circle while he took in the task that lay before him to make the building suitable for his legal business.

Murphy picked up a ceiling lamp resting on top of a scarred examination table, which caused an avalanche of junk.

“Leave it.” Joshua ordered when Murphy attempted to re-stack it. “Damn it. George must have seen me coming from a mile away.”

“Betcha didn’t know Mrs. Wilson was a pack rat.”

Not recognizing the jovial voice that had interrupted his father’s curse, Murphy sought to see who had joined them.

A man dressed in jeans and an oversized tee shirt had come through the open door behind them. He strolled around the office while picking up files and studying their contents like a patron perusing a shop open for business.

Except for additional smile lines and a few extra strands of gray hair that added character to a handsome face, the visitor resembled Joshua. The most notable difference was that while Joshua was muscular from a lifetime of athletics, their visitor was a full head shorter and slightly built. Whoever the stranger was, Murphy sensed by the smile that came to his father’s lips that he was friend rather than foe.

“I’ve been dying to see what was in here.” He petted the moose head.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” There was a note of affection in Joshua’s curt question.

The visitor reached out and patted Joshua on the cheek. “Because if you bought it; lock, stock, and barrel, then I could get my hands on these files.” He indicated the paperwork overflowing from the desks, boxes, and crates scattered around the room.

“What do these old files mean to you?” Murphy asked.

“Most of these patients, the living ones that is, are mine.”

Joshua turned to his son. “You don’t know who this is, do you?” In response to the shake of Murphy’s head, he said, “This is the guy I’ve been exchanging e-mails with for the last six months. Tad MacMillan, my cousin, your second cousin. He’s been the town doctor since Doc Wilson died.”

From where he was studying the moose head, Tad winked at the teenager. “I’m the only doctor who has an office here in town and will lower himself to make house calls.”

Murphy said, “I remember you. You were at our great-grandmother’s funeral. You had long hair then, and gave me and J.J. rides on your motorcycle.”

“The bike I have now is even bigger and badder than the one I had back then.” Tad held up a file he had picked up from one of the desks and turned his attention back to Joshua. “Can I relieve you of these old files?”

“Why didn’t you have your patients request them after Doc died?” Joshua replied. “His office would have had to send them over.”

“I did that, but Mrs. Wilson refused to send them. She was very eccentric.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Josh, come on. She washed her hands every five minutes, if not more.”

“She was a nurse.”

Tad said, “She was a compulsive personality and she never forgot about the sins of my youth.”

“One of the curses of being a legend,” Joshua replied.

“Are you a legend?” Murphy interjected to ask Tad. He had never met a living legend before.

“You’re too young to know,” Joshua answered. “I’ll tell you about the infamous Tad MacMillan when you’re thirty-six.”

Tad rolled his eyes. “I’m a good guy now. Anyway, Mrs. Wilson never let me forget about my wild days. After Doc died and I told my patients to request their files be sent over, Mrs. Wilson claimed in every case that she couldn’t find them. Then, after she died, her daughter—Do you remember Paula?”

Joshua answered with a nod of his head.

“Paula had moved to Baltimore. She came back home for the funeral, had taken one look inside that house, which Mrs. Wilson never let anyone in after Doc died, and about fainted. That was when she discovered that her mother was a pack rat.” Tad gestured with a wave of his hand at the contents of the room as proof of his statement.

“So I see.”

“Paula had hired a professional cleaning crew to clean out all the junk at their house and had them bring all the stuff they didn’t take to the landfill down here. When they were done, she sold it to George.”

“Who unloaded it on me—on your recommendation.” Joshua pointed a finger of blame at Tad. “I trusted you.”

Murphy and his siblings would be intimidated into compliance by the glare Joshua aimed at his cousin. They called it “the look.”

Instead of backing down, Tad MacMillan responded to the glare with a smile that lit up the dingy room. “Josh,” he purred, “have I ever let you down?”

Murphy could see why his second cousin was a legend. Tad MacMillan was one of the most charismatic men he had ever met. He could even charm Joshua Thornton.