Hiding Gladys (A Cleo Cooper Mystery) (4 page)

SIX

It was after three
o’ clock Wednesday afternoon before I’d caught up with my paperwork on other jobs and had time to call Statewide Engineering and Testing, the firm I’d hired to test Gladys’s property. Just as I hoped, they were able to move my job up and start on Monday. Then, because I’d tossed and turned all night reliving the past two days and going over what I’d learned, what I didn’t, what I understood, and so on, I looked up the number for the Onslow County Sheriff’s Department. Waiting to be connected, I searched my tired brain for his name, beyond “Sheriff.” I’d given him my card, but he hadn’t given me his.

I got lucky when a deep voice said, “Sheriff Evans.”

“Hi, this is Cleo Cooper. I’m the geologist who, er, found the body yesterday.”

“Yes, Miz Cooper. What can I do for you?”

“First, I was wondering if you’ve been able to get in touch with Miss Walton yet, and second, I thought of something I’d like to pass along to you. I don’t know if it will be of any help, but I’d feel better if I shared it.”

“Good. I can use all the help I can get. As to Miz Walton … no, I wasn’t able to speak to her yesterday. I did talk to her son and daughter this morning. Woke them up … at nine o’ clock.” I detected disdain in his voice. “They say they don’t know where she is. According to them, she’s been gone about two weeks. They don’t seem concerned. Said she does this sort of thing often.”

“Huh,” I said. “Well, I’ve known her a little over a year, and during that time, she’s never just taken off. Anyway, I think she’d say something to me if she was leaving town. She knew I was getting ready to start testing.”

“Seems logical.”

“What did her kids say about me finding a body on their property?”

He chuckled. “They sure don’t think much of you. They seemed shocked about the body, but neither one acted like they thought it could be their mother.”

“Did you know that Gladys Walton has a housekeeper? Her cousin … Irene Mizzell.”

“No, I didn’t. You’re the first person to mention her.”

“Well, she’s the other reason I called, to tell you about her. She lives in one of the tenant houses on the farm—down the first path on the left after you pass Gladys’s driveway—and I wasn’t able to find her while I was in town either.”

“Huh,” he said. “That’s kinda hopeful. I mean, could be they’re off together somewhere. I’ll check that out right away, Miz Cooper, ’preciate your call.”

After I hung up, I called my lawyer to ask if I could take her to lunch and run a few questions by her. She said she and Penny, her paralegal, were dieting but that I could meet them in the backyard of her house where they planned to split a grapefruit and get a little sun. I took that to mean they were also taking off early. They probably worked late last night. I told her I’d see her there.

I had hired Sharon Peele for my divorce. She was one of a rare, (indeed, near-extinct) species of lawyers: a non-greedy one. Afterward, both she and Penny turned into good friends, even though, unlike me, they were young, single, and constantly on the prowl.

As I headed over to join them an hour later, I stopped at Jersey Mike’s and snagged a sub-to-go for lunch. On the way to my lunch date, I mulled over once again the timetable and details of what had happened since Gladys Walton had disappeared off the radar.

“Wow. You’ve had some amazing things happen to you while prospecting, but a dead body in a well, jeez, that’s a first,” Sharon said, when I finished my tale.

“Yeah. Good times,” I said dryly. I wasn’t sure if they had paid as close attention as they might have. Penny’s eyes were wide. Was it the story or my roast beef sub?

“I know we’ve got a strong document,” I said, “but what if the body does turn out to be Gladys? Could I run into any problems? Up till now, all I’ve invested is my time, but once I start testing, I’ll be sinking a ton of money into this project.”

“You’re right to be considering all contingencies,” Sharon said. “But I suggest you carry on with your plans until you actually do hit a snag because so far nothing’s really changed. Even if the body does turn out to be the landowner, you’re covered. Someone could try to stop you with an injunction, but since you have an ironclad option to test as part of an ironclad lease agreement prepared by the best in the business,
moi
, we’d probably come out on top of any legal challenge.”

Probably?

“And,” Sharon added, “soon as you finish testing and exercise your option, I’ve got your Memorandum of Lease all ready to be filed in the Onslow County Courthouse.”

I nodded, rubbing my finger across my bottom lip.

“Stop frowning,” Sharon said. “It causes wrinkles. Just keep moving ahead. Everything will be fine and if it’s not, you have a good lawyer.”

Easy for you to say
, I couldn’t help but think. This little venture could cost as much as three million dollars, not to mention a million dollars to exercise the option once the discovery was confirmed. My plan was to acquire a term loan and secure an operating line of credit. The note and deed of trust would be in my name and even though my banker was a long-time friend who believed in me, the bank he worked for was a very conservative one, the kind that requires proof you can repay what you borrow. Therefore the need for additional cash to cover the initial testing that would prove the deposit existed. That would come from my personal retirement account, the entire half million of it.

A small piece of consulting work concerning a fault underlying a proposed industrial site in the Triassic Basin near the town of Merry Oaks kept me busy through the week and into the weekend, but Monday morning I was back at Gladys’s farm.

Heavy gray clouds scudded overhead as I held the gate to the field open and waved the drill crew through. Two tattered Ford pickups, the drill foreman in the first and a crew member in the second, rumbled through. They were followed by a gargantuan drill rig. A soaking overnight rain had made the ground soft. While a good thing for drilling, it was bad for supporting a 25,000-pound drill rig, so I was a bit on edge.

The guys who make up a drill crew are known as doodlebugs, and nicknames are usually the rule. Jimmy Ray Boswell was called Mule, for example, and Pete Willis was Stick, short for Dipstick.

Since Pete was the crew member charged with on-the-road maintenance of the vehicles, I could understand his moniker, but Mule … Either Jimmy Ray was real stubborn or let me just say it, the nickname often made him the subject of some prurient thoughts during long, hot workdays. Though neither of them could expect a casting call from a Hollywood agent looking for a pretty face, both could pass as plausible body models. More important to me, each was a well-seasoned professional.

I’d really lucked out in the experience department with Statewide’s foreman for this job, Lewis Winkler. Wink had been drilling holes all over the world for nearly forty years. But unlike his crew, he actually showed the wear and tear from those four decades. He had a lazy eye and skin like a leather jacket someone had left near a radiator too long.

“Hey Wink,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Ready to go?” He said, unfolding his field map and orienting it to the acres of little orange flags stretching out before us.

“Yup,” I said. “I paced ’em as far apart as I could since you guys charge like you’re using solid-gold drill bits.”

He chuckled. “Well, you’ll have to take that up with the big wheels at the home office. I’m just a little cog.” He turned to the crew and made like a boss. “What are you two knuckleheads doing? Why ain’t you drilling?”

They grinned at him.

“Mr. Boswell. Mr. Willis,” I said, nodding at each one in turn.

“Miss Cleo,” they replied practically in unison.

“Where you want us to start, Wink?” Mule asked.

“How about hole number one? That make sense?” He pointed to the southwest corner.

“Yessir,” Mule said, at which signal he and Stick politely tipped their hard hats toward me. Wink folded his field map and got in his pickup to follow them. I brought up the rear, my heart in my throat.

Simply put, at about thirty dollars a foot for every hole I drilled, depending on the depth to the top of the rock and the number of holes we got in every day, I figured to be going about thirty-five grand a day in order to prove the existence of the vast granite deposit I was sure lay under my feet. And these were just the holes to see how deep the rock lay; we would still have to come back and take core samples to be sure what
kind
of rock it was.

I visualized my underground granite mountain as somewhat like Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, only smaller and still covered by millions of years of accumulated dirt, or overburden. Pilot Mountain is an enormous dome of metamorphic quartzite that covers over thirty-five hundred acres. By my estimations, the granite mountain below Gladys’s farm would cover about four hundred acres and extend below ground every bit as far as Pilot Mountain was high: twenty-four hundred feet. That, boys and girls, is a lot of rock.

A similar structure was being mined in Fountain, North Carolina, but that’s about fifty miles back to the west. Up until now, it was the easternmost occurrence of crystalline rock past the fall line—that boundary between the foothills, where water drops abruptly enough to create a fall, and the coastal plain—on the East Coast. But that granite had been exposed in a flat expanse covering about three acres. Easy to see.

In fact, that granite had been part of the recorded geologic history of the state since the 1930s. My rock, on the other hand, wasn’t well exposed anywhere. I was relying on pie-in-the-sky evidence: a few crumbling, weathered boulders I’d found in a creek and differences in vegetation I’d noticed when comparing aerial photos pulled from the Onslow County GIS office with the woods as they actually existed on Gladys’s farm. From a rented plane, I was able to see that although the farm had been allowed to reseed naturally after being clear-cut, the trees were stunted in a large elliptical area covering about three hundred acres in the middle. The surrounding woods were denser and the trees themselves larger and more robust.

Since I often worked with timber cruisers while consulting, I’d learned that during the first twenty-five years of growth, trees rooted in shallow soil on top of granite grow slower than trees with hundreds of feet of soil below them. The field I planned to drill lay at the southwest edge of where I hoped my granite mountain came close to the surface of the earth.

Therefore, the granite—if it existed—would lie somewhat deeper here. I felt the panic rising and reminded myself of the basics I already knew.

Mule and Stick set about leveling the rig with four enormous hydraulic pads that dropped down from the undercarriage. After the bit dropped through the sandy soil like a straw through a Wendy’s shake, Stick started handing Mule the corkscrew auger flights, which were pinned together, one after another, to push the bit deeper and deeper into the ground, until it hit something too hard to drill through.

We zipped through the first thirty feet. Sweat had already begun to bead on my upper lip, and it wasn’t from my hard hat holding in heat. Forty feet. Forty-five, and the bit made a few little chirps. At fifty-eight feet, it made a screeching noise as the bit’s teeth ground into an impenetrable layer. The flights bucked, vibrating the drill apparatus that towered above us.

“Top of the rock!” Mule shouted to me over the throbbing of the big diesel engine. I gave him a thumbs up and watched as he flipped the reverse switch to bring the flights above ground. Dirt spiraled off them, creating what looked like a huge ant hill around the hole. As each flight came up, the crew stopped, knocked out the auger pin, unhooked the flight, then placed it back on the rig.

“Maybe it’ll get better,” Wink muttered to me. He marked the depth to the top of rock on his field map in red ink.

I nodded and said, “
Better
is a relative word. It all depends on what kind of rock you’re looking for.” For example, removing fifty-eight feet of overburden isn’t cost-effective if you’re mining a band of limestone thirty feet thick. If, however, after fifty-eight feet you hit hard, valuable rock hundreds of feet thick, then it becomes profitable.

Wink looked at me curiously. “We’re looking for limestone, aren’t we? The Castle Hayne Formation?”

I didn’t want to show my hand yet. Might as well just wait and let the evidence speak for itself after the first core—if there was to be one.

I moved away from the rig and Wink followed. “I’ll be in the woods, flagging,” I told him. “Meet you guys at twelve and we’ll go into town for lunch.”

“Okay. See you then,” Wink said and headed back to the rig. The crew was still stacking the auger flights in preparation to move on to drill hole number two.

I drove across the field, pulled out of the gate, and turned left, as if pulled by some magnetic force. At the old house by the well I gave an involuntary shudder at the sight of all the yellow crime scene tape, and not just in memory of what I’d found in the well.

The tape presented two problems: one involved the length of time the area would be cordoned off—we’d need access to the water in the well when we started drilling core samples; second, I didn’t know why the house had been marked out of bounds too. I got out of the Jeep for a look-see. At the tree where the tape was wrapped and tied in a knot, I noticed a gap of about twenty feet before it started again. I looked at the end of the tape, which was dangling there. Obviously, the cops had run out and simply not bothered to close the gap.

To me, it resembled a welcoming entrance. Who’d know if I just walked around a little? After all, I was the one who discovered the crime scene in the first place.

I quickly covered the distance to the old house and stepped onto the sagging porch. I had to duck to pass through the front door. People must have been shorter back then. Once inside, it was apparent the place still served a useful purpose. Each room was filled with freshly cut bales of Coastal Bermuda hay—it gave off a rich, comforting aroma that reminded me of childhood summers and the hum of my dad’s lawn mower.