The Underground Lady (2 page)

When I first bought this farm and the building was complete, I felt like a plantation owner, wealthy and powerful. It was a new and uncertain land, and the cottage set inside the woods like a reflection in an imperfect mirror. There is a grandeur of life as seen from the porch of this cottage. It is interesting to contemplate the small scope of woods out front, teeming with many kinds of plants, with birds singing in the trees, thousands of different species of insects crawling about, all elaborately constructed, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, and fixed by the laws of gravity to continue evolving into forms most beautiful and most wonderful – all under the watchful eye of God.

Something nudged my ankle. Looking down, I see that it was B.W., the big black and white Siamese my neighbor Rose English insisted I take after my German Shepherd died. I disliked cats and she knew it. B.W. was a six-week-old kitten when I got him and he has taught me much over the last four years. B.W. is a powerful and cunning hunter, and I knew that if he weighed four hundred pounds he would not accede to my existence for a single moment and would kill me without conscience to fulfill his immediate desire. Scratching him behind the ear brought that purring sound that I love so much and understand so little. He looked at me with those cat eyes. "Well, old boy, you do not weigh four hundred pounds and I can still kick your ass." He did not smile, but licked himself.

 Inside the cottage, I poured another cup of the honey-laced coffee and went back out on the porch, this time sitting in a chair on the south corner, propping my feet up on a cedar post. B.W. jumped into my lap and curled up. The fog was thickening, but I could still see out to the tree line, though the gravel road, another hundred yards further out, was hidden. To the south, the deep valley was filled with fog and looked smooth like the surface of a pond. It was in this little valley where I found the buck, badly wounded by some idiot hunter too stupid to track an animal he'd shot, but let wander off and suffer. It was lying on the ground too weak to move, its hind leg broken by a bullet, another in its belly, blood dripping onto the dark earth. The look in that buck's eye as it watched me coming to slit its throat made me swear never to kill another living thing.

There was a dead quiet over the countryside. I suddenly felt B.W. tense, jerk in my lap, ears erect, neck stretched forward. He looked toward the tree line through the scope of woods. I followed his line of sight. There was a figure moving as silently as a cottonmouth slithering along an overhanging oak limb. At this moment I wished B.W. weighed four hundred pounds.

Easing out of the chair, I reached inside the door, retrieved a pair of binoculars and focused on the figure. It was not a ghostly, smoky apparition; it was a person walking along the drive leading to the cottage. B.W. began to growl, a sound I had heard only on rare occasions. It was not a happy sound. Laying the binoculars down, I put my hands in the pockets of the leather jacket, fingering the magnum that is always there. "Calm down, old boy. We have things under control. Let's not panic, yet."

The figure kept coming, but stopped forty yards away when spotting me on the porch. He seemed unsure whether to continue or turn and run. I made the decision for him. Pulling the magnum out and holding it by my side, I said, “State your business."

"Are you Jay Leicester? Rose English sent me." It was a female voice. I put the magnum back in my pocket. Rose, I might have known.

The fog had thickened and it was as quiet as a Robert Frost snowfall. B.W. watched the woman with the same alertness as I, his ears slanted forward, tail moving in erratic jerks.

She came stealthily on, stopped a few feet away and tried to smile. There were lines around her mouth like cracks in old china, but her eyes were bright. B.W. went and smelled around her feet. She bent down and picked him up. He snuggled into her arms as if they were old friends. "You must be B.W.," she said, rubbing his head. "Rose said you were your keeper's protector." She walked closer. "I'm sorry. My name is Sunny Pfeiffer. I need your help. Rose told me all about you, said you were just the person to solve my problem."

"What else did Rose tell you about me?"

"She said that you were a lonely man."

Her voice was light and quick with a slight twist in the sound. It was a way of speaking I had not heard before. It sounded as if she were from somewhere far away. Her voice was full of intimate portraits, expectations, and somewhere at the heart of it, a kind of dark inflection that only she knew or understood. Then it seemed to disperse like a wispy layer of the fog that surrounded us, leaving no meaning.

"Come inside, Sunny Pfeiffer. There is fresh coffee. You can tell me why you are wandering around in my woods on a cold winter's morning."

She started through the door, stopped, looked down at B.W. who seemed contented in her arms. "Is he allowed in the house?"

"He has the run of the place."

She took her coffee black and sat on the couch. B.W. assumed a formal pose on her knees like a guardian temple lion. Through half-closed eyes he stared directly at me with a Siamese expression that bordered on implied criticism.

Building a fire in the stone hearth, I sat in a recliner across from her. "It is not B.W.'s habit to accept strangers. This guileless gesture may hold profound and fortuitous significance. If that cat, who is closer to the gods of insight and fortune than humans, can accept you, then perhaps it would be wise to hear why you want to employ me."

A radiant smile suddenly appeared, transfiguring her features into an intimidating siren. She had green eyes of astonishing clarity, as bright and sparkling as ice, but much warmer. She was attractive in other ways too, and I found my own gaze returning to her both for this reason and because I wanted a close look at this woman who suddenly materialized out of the cold fog of an early morning at my cottage in the woods.

She appeared to be somewhere around thirty years of age. And tall – I guessed just under six feet. Her hair was long and soft and the color of a Blue Bird's breast. Looking closely at her face, its severe aspects were strong, gaunt, and almost classical. Her features seemed to be aquiline and sensitive, except for her heavy passionate mouth. She wore an expensive-looking wool turtleneck sweater and designer jeans with a pair of tennis shoes that probably cost as much as my first car. She worried her fingernails as if they were some hard inflexible part of her psyche that people could cut into and she would not feel pain.

"Miss or Mrs.?"

"Miss."

"Ever been?"

"No, you?"

"No."

She looked into my eyes and I had an uneasy feeling that she knew things about me, things so deep inside that even I had not figured them out, and every time I blinked she knew more.

"How did you get here?"

"I walked from Rose's house."

"That's over two miles."
"It's beautiful country, even in the cold and fog. The hills and valleys remind me of scenes from the
Deer Hunter,
the one with Robert DeNiro. I would have loved to live in this country before it was invented."

"I'm not much into movies."

"Too bad."

B.W. watched me and flicked the tip of his tail every so often as a display of implied irritation. He and the woman wore identical expressions, and one could almost believe that they were related by blood. Out the window behind where the woman sat two crows as big and sleek as black cats were strutting and cawing under the bird feeder attached to the post oak.

"Well, Miss Sunny Pfeiffer, what is it that you and Rose English think I can do for you?"

"I want you to help me find my mother."

"Then there has been a huge mistake. I'm an aviation consultant, not a private investigator. I don't do people searches."

"I know what you are, Mr. Leicester. I have researched your background thoroughly. When you hear me out, I think you will be more than willing to help."

She was an intelligent lady. I could imagine men being afflicted by her very presence; not by what she said, but what she seemed to be thinking behind her smile. Then there was the way she spoke, slowly pronouncing each syllable, her green eyes fixed on yours, as if she fathomed all your secrets.

"I'm listening."

"You know, Mr. Leicester. You remind me of a man I knew in Alaska who hunted grizzly bear with a spear."

"Yeah. What happened to him? He get eaten by a bear?"

"No, he just got to looking like he'd seen too many of 'em."

"Tell me why I would help you look for your mother."

"This land where you have built this lovely little cabin once belonged to my mother, along with eight hundred acres of land. I inherited it after she disappeared."

"I only have two hundred acres, and there was no Pfeiffer on the deed."

"No, I divested myself of the farm many years ago. I was only six years old when my mother went missing. My grandparents lived in Arkansas. I was spending the summer with them when it happened."

"You want me to help you find someone who's been missing over what – twenty something years?"

"Twenty-five to be exact."

"Look, even if I…"

"You know that level piece of land along that fence row just to the south of this cabin?"

"What about it?"

"Did you know it was used as a landing strip for my mother's airplane?"

"I did not."
"My mother took off from that grass runway one morning twenty-five years ago and was never heard from again. She and her little Piper Cub vanished into thin air as if they never existed."

At least now she had my attention. I had never heard this story. Rose never mentioned any of this, even though she knew all about my business. We will have to have a talk, Rose and I. It has always amazed me how time makes people forget history. My great grandparents owned a ten thousand-acre plantation with a three-story mansion in south Mississippi near the town of Osyka. They died; the land was divided between ten children. Eventually the house burned, the kids sold off the land, and they themselves died. When I drive by that location today it is as if nothing was ever there. The place is fenced for cattle grazing and the only thing left to say that the land belonged to my family is the mineral rights to five hundred acres that I own. Though virtually worthless, I vowed never to sell them.

"No crash site? No body recovered?"

"Nothing. She just vanished. I have an old newspaper clipping that tells about a search for the airplane. Nothing else."

"Why now, after all these years?"

"I have my reasons. Here is a check for five thousand dollars as a retainer. You can bill me at your usual aviation consultant rate. Here is the newspaper clipping." She handed me the check and a yellowed piece of paper. "I want you to find out what happened to that airplane and my mother."

"You realize the odds are…"

"I don't care about odds. I want to know what happened."

"You'll have to give me some time to think about this."

"Very well. I will be staying with Rose for the next two days. Let me know what you decide, and soon." She brushed B.W. off her lap like a piece of lint, stood, and headed for the door.

"Would you like for me to drive you back to Rose's house?"

"I want you to decide whether or not to find my mother." She walked out the door and disappeared into the fog.

Chapter two

Picking up the phone, I dialed Rose English's number. "I am not a lonely man."

"Sunny made it to your cottage. Are you going to help her find out what happened to her mother?"

"Do not be telling people, especially strangers, that I am lonely. I am not."

"You've been mopping around them woods like an old bull with his testicles lopped off ever since that woman dumped you and ran off to the northwest with that loan shark. So don't tell me what you are or are not. I know you better than your own mother, who I assume was a wonderful woman except for that one terrible mistake she made forty-four years ago."

This was Rose English, my neighbor, and for the last ten years, my trusted friend. There are few people in this world that I can truly depend on. She is one of them. The others, I can count on one hand. The second time I saw Rose, she was holding a bloody kitten that had been viciously attacked by a male cat. As she watched life ebb away from the small animal, she said, “I hate the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature." Tears rolled down her face, and I knew then that we would be friends.

Somewhere in her sixties, Rose has lived on her farm all of her life and, I suspect – though I have never asked – that she was born in the house she lives in. Highly intelligent, she is stocky built with no fat on her body. Never married, she claims not to have family in the area, and few friends, though friendly to all. She welcomed me as a neighbor, and I think the common thread that forged our friendship is that we are both loners by nature and prefer to be left alone. She is well read and has a vast and remarkable library in her home, of which I avail myself often. There is a collection of Zane Gray and Louis L'Amour, surpassed only by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. She prefers Faulkner to Hemingway, disdains Fitzgerald, and tolerates Steinbeck and Welty. She loves a contemporary writer named Jim Harrison, and thinks John Grisham should be shot at dawn, not because he is an evil man, but because he wasted a God-given talent for the almighty dollar. Who am I to argue with her literary suppositions?