A Murder In Passing (11 page)

“Really? A woman's got no say in a marriage proposal?”

I witnessed one of those rare events—like an eclipse or double rainbow. Hewitt Donaldson blushed.

“Of course she does,” he said.

“And to go into a marriage with no income and a five-year-old child to feed was not my idea of a marriage that could endure. Folks would look the other way if a white man was dallying with a black woman on the side. That's been going on since before Mr. Jefferson and Sally Hemings. But to desecrate their holy ideal of the racial purity of marriage? Well, that wasn't crossing the color line, Mr. Donaldson, that was blowing it up.”

Lucille's words rang true but I wasn't sure how they fit with what John Lang said about his brother. Maybe that's why Jimmy pulled ten-thousand dollars out of the bank and left his job. To show Lucille he couldn't lose what he no longer had. If that were the case, how angry would she have been? Her explanation was far from exonerating.

Hewitt saw the same problem with her story. “Miss Montgomery, I have no doubt as to the truth of what you're telling me, but you know people, how they like to gossip and think the worst.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Then did Jimmy Lang tell you he was leaving town? That he was taking his money and going away?”

“No, sir.”

“You loved each other, but he didn't even say goodbye?”

Tears spilled down the old woman's cheeks. “He didn't. It pains me to this day. Maybe it pained him too. That's why he couldn't bear to tell me.”

“Who did tell you?”

“His brother John.”

“And if that skeleton belongs to Jimmy?”

“Then he didn't leave me. That's why I want to know.”

Hewitt shook his head. “Not now. I can't advise you to do anything that would jeopardize your defense. After we get through the trial and you're acquitted, then we'll do everything we can to help identify those remains.” He stated those final words to Marsha and kept staring at her until she nodded her agreement.

Lucille had brought a small black clutch purse with her. She unsnapped it and pulled out a folded piece of paper. The white color had yellowed with age. She passed it over to Hewitt.

“The day Jimmy disappeared, he was supposed to pick me up when I got off work at the cafeteria.”

“Was that his normal routine?” Hewitt asked.

“No. I usually rode with a co-worker and paid her something each week for the gasoline. Both of us had a child in a church daycare which made it convenient. But this day Jimmy said he would be by because he had some place special to take me.”

“Did he say where?”

“No. Just that it was time for a new beginning.”

“A new beginning,” Hewitt repeated. “Was he going to tell you he was leaving?”

“I didn't think so at the time, but then he never showed. At the end of the day, I had to get a ride home.”

“And what's this?” Hewitt unfolded the paper.

“A letter to my grandmother from Miss Julia Peterkin. It came with a copy of the photograph Miss Ulmann took on the site of the Kingdom of the Happy Land. Miss Peterkin and my grandmother were friends. They'd made arrangements for us to have our picture made.”

“The one that was stolen?”

“Yes.”

Hewitt read the letter silently and then aloud. “Lang Syne Plantation, Fort Motte, South Carolina, November 3, 1932. Dear Loretta, I hope this finds you, your daughter, and your granddaughter well. Enclosed is a framed print of the photograph of descendants of the Kingdom. Doris Ulmann was determined to see that you received a copy. She is quite pleased with it and with the stories you shared. She is a dear friend but I am very worried about her. She continues to suffer from the stomach ailments that plagued her last summer. And she is still under the spell of that insufferable gigolo John Jacob Niles. I tell you that man is aiming to take her for every penny. He knows the value of her work and I'm convinced he'd sell every last photograph if it meant liquor money. Doris will hear nothing against him. I only tell you because you met him that day. I'm sure you quickly sized him up for the no good leech he is. It pains me that he has separated her from me for I am concerned not only for her health but for her safety. The man will be her ruin, if not her death. Sorry to trouble you with my concerns. If I ever decide to pick up the pen again, I'd like to set a story in the Kingdom. I hope you will grant me the opportunity to be inspired through your memory of those days. With gratitude, Julia Peterkin.”

Hewitt scanned the letter one more time and then handed it back to Lucille. “You brought this to show me that the Ulmann photograph existed?”

“Yes, sir. And prove it has value. And that this John Jacob Niles knew it.”

“Okay,” Hewitt said. “But I don't see the relevance.”

“Miss Ulmann died in the summer of 1934 after she took sick in Asheville. Miss Julia said John Jacob Niles tried to steal her estate. Miss Julia said he could have even caused her death.”

“How does that relate to 1967?”

“Not just 1967, Mr. Donaldson, but Friday, July 14, 1967. That's the day Jimmy disappeared. And when I finally got home that evening, Miss Ulmann's photograph was gone. John Jacob Niles was the only one still alive outside the family who knew about it. If he killed Miss Ulmann, he wouldn't think twice about killing my Jimmy.”

Hewitt nodded. “Then Sam and Nakayla will look into it.”

“We certainly will,” I said. I looked to Nakayla for confirmation but she turned sideways in her chair and scrutinized Lucille like she thought the woman might be carrying explosives.

“July 14th,” Nakayla said skeptically. “Jimmy was picking you up at the school cafeteria?”

Lucille smiled. “I see nothing gets past you. Not the school cafeteria. The camp cafeteria. During the summer break, I worked at Camp Quail Cove. They served the boys three meals a day and I worked the breakfast through lunch shift.”

“Where is it?” Nakayla asked.

“Between Flat Rock and Tuxedo, but it stopped operating in the eighties. I think it's now a gated community.”

“Quail Cove Estates,” Marsha added. “It borders the Kingdom of the Happy Land.”

“That's right,” Lucille said. “The Bell family let the camp use their trails for hiking and horseback riding.”

“How about hunting?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Lucille replied. “The only weapons allowed in the camp were bows and arrows and they were only used under strict supervision.”

“What time were the meals served?” Nakayla asked.

“Breakfast was from eight to nine, lunch noon to one, and dinner from five to six.”

Nakayla looked back to Hewitt, satisfied with Lucille's explanation.

The lawyer gave Nakayla an appreciative nod. Her catch of the summer date was something both he and I should have noticed.

“You mentioned John and Jimmy were expanding their business,” Hewitt said. “Was there anyone who stood to lose if they were successful?”

Lucille grimaced as if she'd just bitten into a rotten apple. “Mr. Earl Lee Emory. He was also bidding for the contract.”

“What contract?”

“The county school board was going to consolidate garbage collection for all the schools. Jimmy and John would have doubled their business.”

“They had the east side of the county?”

“Yes, sir. And Earl Lee Emory had the west.”

“So, it wasn't simply a matter of expanding. One company was going to lose business.” Hewitt pulled his legal pad closer and jotted down Emory's name. “Did Jimmy and Emory have any dealings with each other?”

“No. Jimmy couldn't stand the man. He was bad to drink and everybody knew he beat his wife. Jimmy and John had a much better reputation for never missing a pick up.”

“Did the dislike go both ways?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did Emory ever express animosity for either Jimmy or his brother?”

Lucille sat quietly, not answering for a moment.

“Miss Montgomery, it could be important if we can show there was bad blood over business.”

“They had words after they made their proposals to the school board.”

“Was this in public?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Emory presented first while Jimmy and John waited in the lobby of the education building. Then, when they came out after their turn, Mr. Emory was waiting for them. He asked Jimmy if he told the school board he was sleeping with a…” She halted, unable to complete the sentence.

“He used the N word,” Hewitt said.

Lucille blinked back tears. She took a deep breath. “Mr. Emory said a man like Jimmy wasn't fit to set foot on school property let alone pick up children's garbage.”

“Jimmy told you this?”

“John did. He had to hold Jimmy back from punching Mr. Emory. Jimmy didn't deny it.”

Nakayla and I looked at each other.

Hewitt then stated what had become clear to all three of us. “So, you refused to marry Jimmy because you knew there was no way that school board would give him the contract if he married a black woman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did this confrontation with Emory occur?”

“Two weeks before Jimmy disappeared.”

“And had the school board made a decision before he disappeared?”

“No. That would be announced at their August meeting. By then, everyone knew Jimmy had left.”

“John got the contract?”

“Yes, sir. And the company's grown ever since.”

Hewitt caught my eye and we read each other's thoughts. Earl Lee Emory might be a suspect with a grudge, but Jimmy's disappearance erased the main obstacle standing in the way of his brother John's path to becoming a very wealthy man.

Pursuing that line of inquiry would need to be done with extreme subtlety. And by me.

Chapter Eleven

At three in the afternoon, I pulled into the meadow where Nakayla and I had met the mushroom club on the previous Saturday. Now she was in the Pack Library in Asheville researching photographer Doris Ulmann, her companion John Jacob Niles, and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Julia Peterkin.

In the passenger seat beside me rode my fellow veteran and amputee Jason Fretwell. He wore the only clean non-hospital garb he had, fatigues that fit his lean frame too loosely. With his good left hand, he clutched the printout of my Internet research on the specifications and characteristics of the Remington fourteen and a half. The young sniper was the closest thing to an expert I knew, and I figured the afternoon release from the V.A. hospital would be welcome physical and psychological therapy.

We saw the slim form of Ed Bell leaning against the hood of his muddy Jeep. He gave a wave and I parked the CR-V alongside him.

My vehicle had barely stopped before Jason hopped out, tucked the papers under his right arm and extended his left hand. “Hi, Mr. Bell. I'm Jason Fretwell. A pleasure to meet you.”

Without so much as a glance at Jason's prothesis, Bell grasped the young man's hand. “Welcome to the Kingdom of the Happy Land.”

The introductions were done and I had yet to unfasten my seatbelt. I sat a moment, marveling at the transformation of the soldier I'd seen sulking in the cafeteria the day before. Then I took a point-and-shoot digital camera from the glovebox and got out to begin the hunt for indisputable evidence that Lucille Montgomery couldn't have shot our log-entombed victim.

“What would you like to see first?” Bell asked.

I looked to Jason but he only shrugged.

“Let's start at the log and work back toward spots where he might have left a vehicle,” I said.

“No abandoned vehicle ever turned up,” Bell said.

“I know. But there were no keys found with the skeleton, so he might have hiked in, or ridden with the person who killed him, or simply left his keys in the ignition. Would that have been common back in the sixties?”

Bell smiled. “Considering we never locked our houses? Definitely.”

His answer raised another question. “How much of this area has changed since then?”

“What do you mean?”

I swept my arm across the field. “Was this meadow here? Were there more of them? Are there roads that no longer exist or new ones that weren't here then?”

Ed Bell surveyed the landscape as if trying to see more than forty-five years back in time. “This is pretty much it. The land was logged in the thirties, but the basic footprint of the acreage is the same.”

Jason took a few steps forward. He turned, shielded his eyes with his left hand, and looked at the afternoon sun behind me. “Did you bring a compass?”

“No. I should have thought of that.”

Bell pointed over my left shoulder. “That's due west.” He swung his arm almost a hundred and eighty degrees. “The spot where the skeleton was found is east-southeast of here.”

“Are we considering a certain season of the year?” Jason asked.

“Yes. Summer. Friday, July 14, 1967 to be exact.”

“They worked that out just from the bones?” Bell asked.

“No. That's the day Jimmy Lang disappeared.”

“The trash guy?”

“Yes.” I realized Bell hadn't heard the news of Lucille Montgomery's arrest. I gave him a brief update. “Did you know Jimmy and Lucille?”

“I knew Lucille in passing. Her family went back to the Kingdom days. I didn't know the Lang brothers. I think they came here from South Carolina.” He paused, trying to be more specific. “I believe during the late forties.”

“Do you know any reason why Jimmy Lang would have been on the property?”

Bell shook his head. “No. Unless he was just hiking. We took care of getting our own trash to the dump.”

Jason Fretwell rotated slowly in the meadow, examining the tree line and particularly the ridge to the north. “Do you happen to have a time of day?”

I thought about Lucille Montgomery being stranded at Camp Quail Cove, waiting for Jimmy to pick her up. “Probably before two in the afternoon. Maybe between noon and one or even eight to nine in the morning.”

“Why those times?” Bell asked.

“Camp Quail Cove meal times. I'm not saying it had to be during those periods, but if someone wanted to be on the property unseen, there was less likelihood of being spotted.”

“You are a detective,” Bell said.

I didn't tell him Nakayla had been the one to make the connection.

“So, the remains were found in that direction.” Jason pointed toward the spot Bell had indicated. “The bullet didn't penetrate the body which means there had to be some distance between the shooter and the target. From the information you gave me on the muzzle velocity of the Remington Fourteen and a Half, I'd estimate at least over a hundred yards.” Jason looked at the sky. “The date was about three weeks after the summer solstice so the sun would have risen early, but between eight and nine the angle could still have impaired an eastwardly shot.” He looked back at the western edge of the meadow. “I'd want the higher ground with cover. If the victim were shot from across the meadow, then I'd say you're looking at the noon to one time slot. It would make sense that a wounded man would run in the opposite direction. He would figure that out from the impact of the bullet.”

“If he were shot in this meadow,” I said.

“Yes. So, let's see how far he would have had to run and if there are any other areas with a clear enough sight line to give us the necessary distance.” Jason walked back to the CR-V. “I'll leave these papers in the car.”

We followed Bell into the woods. He kept to an old logging road, a route that was faster than my meandering mushroom search. Jason would stop now and then to estimate line of sight, but the road twisted too frequently to give him the distance he wanted.

We walked about three hundred yards before Bell veered to the right and headed across a fern-covered rise. “This is the little knoll where the king's cabin stood. Up ahead is the South Carolina line.”

I saw the swarth cut through the trees and the red paint on the trunks.

“The queen's cabin was just across the state line,” Bell said.

“Coincidence?” I asked.

Bell laughed. “No. They knew exactly what they were doing. Supposedly, one of their enterprises was distilling corn liquor. If they got wind of a raid coming from one state, they'd quickly move everything across the line. The states never made a coordinated attack. Of course, if the Kingdom had lasted into Prohibition, that little scheme wouldn't have survived the federal revenuers and their government axes.”

Bell turned right on the boundary and we headed down the hill. Approaching the hollow log from the upper slope, we first saw strands of yellow crime scene tape twisting in the breeze. The perimeter was still marked and within the enclosed area leaves had been carefully raked clear of the soil. Scratch marks approximately six inches apart scarred the bare dirt where some implement had dug several inches into the ground looking for any object that might have been deposited. The log had been dissected so that the bottom half of the shell was completely exposed. If anything in addition to the skeleton and mangled bullet had been uncovered, the police report hadn't mentioned it.

Jason stared at the site. “He was in that log all these years?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We figure he crawled in there to hide. If he'd been running after taking the bullet, his heart rate would have accelerated the bleeding. Probably passed out and then bled out.”

Jason shook his head. “Man, what a way to die.”

“Not much different than being enclosed in a wooden coffin,” Bell said. “It's the anonymity that's most disturbing. To think you can disappear and it makes no difference.”

Jimmy Lang's disappearance did make a difference to Lucille, I thought. And Marsha.

“So, what do you think, Jason? Any possibilities other than the meadow?”

“Not so far.” He looked at Bell. “Is there any other stretch of open road or a clearing?”

“Only the first hundred yards coming off the highway.”

“He would have had to run uphill all the way,” I said. “That's at least half a mile from here.”

“You mentioned those cabins,” Jason said to Bell. “Were any of them still standing in 1967?”

“No. All the cabins had been gone for years. There's a storage shed and a picnic shelter, but those were built after the Kingdom. The only remnants that survived into the mid-twentieth century were the cabins' stone chimneys, and by 1967 all but one had been destroyed.”

“To reuse the rocks?” I asked.

“To look for treasure.”

“Treasure?” Jason's face lit up, showing a kid's excitement over a possible adventure worthy of the Hardy Boys. “What kind of treasure?”

“The kind that exists only in the imagination. Or in the hopes of desperate people.”

I looked at the disassembled log. “We're talking about desperate people. Desperate people who murder.”

“I guess we are.” Bell stuck his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and leaned against an oak. “Well, any time you have a king and a queen you have rumors of treasure. A story circulated in the forties that the founding king had brought his plantation valuables from Mississippi. Not just household silver but the hard currency his wealthy white father had amassed. The rumor was fueled by the tale of a workman on this property.”

“Someone you knew?” I asked.

“No. I was just a kid. As the story goes, my family had given permission for one of the stone chimneys to be demolished for a friend to rebuild for a cabin a few miles away. The worker and his assistant dynamited the chimney because the masonry was too tight to disassemble by hand. When the younger assistant showed up on the construction site of the new cabin the next day with the load of rocks, he asked the owner if his boss told him what happened the day before. The owner hadn't seen the assistant's boss. The apprentice said after the small charge of dynamite exploded, gold coins poured out of the chimney.”

“Like a slot machine?” Jason asked.

“Maybe. If you blew up a slot machine. Anyway, the boss never returned to the project and word was he left suddenly for a northern city, maybe New York, maybe Chicago. For the next few years we had trouble with vandals destroying the chimneys. Usually teenagers, but on occasion a couple of adults would get liquored up and come seeking their fortune. No one ever found so much as a penny. Today only one chimney remains and that's because it wasn't part of the cluster around the king and queen.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“To the right of the road you drove in on. About two hundred yards above the meadow.”

“Do you believe there were gold coins, Mr. Bell?” Jason's eyes had grown wider during the course of the man's story.

Bell laughed. “Sure. Somewhere. Sometime. But no one in my family has any such knowledge. I've heard the same tale about a cabin in Georgia. It makes the rounds, being customized for each location. The man who allegedly made off with the loot returned a few years later. Turns out he came back after the husband of the wife he'd been caught cheating with died. If he found any gold, he'd spent every last cent.”

I nodded to the log. “That wouldn't have been the aggrieved husband?”

“No. I'm told he had a fatal heart attack. In the throes of ecstasy with another man's wife.” Bell looked to Jason. “Probably saw nothing hypocritical about threatening one man's life for doing what he was doing himself.”

“Mountain justice,” I said. “To spite his own wife.”

“Yes, there's that,” Bell agreed. “Mountain folk have their own way of settling scores.”

We were silent a moment, staring at the site where a score had been so violently settled.

I turned to Bell. “I'd like to see that last remaining chimney. Is it a tough hike?”

“No. Just off a trail where you can't see it. That's why it's survived so long.”

We walked in single file, skirting the meadow and veering up the northern slope. Then Bell led us into the underbrush. The dry leaves crackled underfoot and we spaced ourselves to avoid the backlash of branches. After about fifty yards, we emerged into a small clearing of ferns ringed by white pines. In the middle stood a partially toppled stone chimney, a silent sentinel watching over the ghosts of a bygone era.

“There it is,” Bell said. “The last vestige of the Kingdom of the Happy Land.”

“Not a gold coin to be seen,” Jason said.

“No,” Bell agreed. “If there was any treasure in the Kingdom, it was the communal spirit that bound them together after the hardships of slavery and the war.”

I looked above the chimney to the afternoon sun. Marsha Montgomery's voice broke into my thoughts. “The light streamed through the pine boughs like beams from the Kingdom above.” Her words to describe the Doris Ulmann photograph of her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother.

“Do you keep this little clearing cut?” I asked.

“No. There's only a thin layer of soil covering the granite under this knoll. No tree of any size can put down roots.”

“So, it's always been this way?”

“Depends upon what you mean by always. Not in geological time, but certainly since the cabin was erected. The bedrock made a great foundation.”

I stepped back a few yards. The afternoon sun streamed through the pine needles in visible rays, peppering the chimney with hot spots and shadows. I felt certain that over eighty years ago, a world-renowned photographer would have found that scene worth shooting. But where was her photograph? And, more importantly, was the missing picture worth another kind of shooting?

When we returned to the meadow, I thanked Bell and drove Jason back to the V.A. hospital. I stopped short of the front door to avoid any questions of where we had been.