As a little “Thank You!” to all of you who read Amazing Grace in its serial form, and offered encouragement as I wrote it, I gave you a little present –
This is the recorded Prologue to the novel, in my own voice, because I enjoy doing this piece at readings and thought y’all might like to hear what it sounds like to me.
You can buy Amazing Grace in your favorite ebook format here – books2read.com/u/4DoRWQ. Print copies are releasing 10/17/17, in softcover and hardcover.
Well, it’s done. Amazing Grace is complete at 29 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The whole thing is off to my editor now, actually has been for a month or two, honestly. I’ve enjoyed having all of you along with me for this ride. It’s been a fun change of pace for me to serialize something, and to work in a longer format than the novellas I do every month. I also found myself loving Lila Grace and the Dead Old Ladies Detectives.
Don’t worry, there will be more.
Yeah, there will be more Lila Grace, more Dead Old Lady Detectives, and more of this fictionalized Lockhart, SC. Lockhart is a real place, and John D. Long Lake is where Susan Smith drowned her children. There was a guy who lived there named Johnny Thomas, but he wasn’t a sheriff, he was a barber, and my dad’s cousin. The Lockhart in Amazing Grace is a blend of the real Lockhart, plus York and Sharon, all tossed into a blender and mixed until chunky. The cemetery where Lila Grace walks is the cemetery where my mother is buried, and she is one of the Dead Old Lady Detectives, along with her best friends Faye Russell (nee Comer) and Helen (Tot) Good. Miss Faye is still alive, but Miss Tot left us earlier this year, right about the time I started this book. I couldn’t think of a better way to memorialize her than to put her in this book with Mama and Miss Faye, because the three of them did form the Western York County grapevine for a long time.
So there’s a lot of truth in this book, despite the fact that none of the ghosts I talk to have ever talked back. And I’m good with that. So I hope you’ve enjoyed Amazing Grace, and sometime in 2018 I’ll start giving you chapters of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the next Lila Grace Carter Mystery. The book will be on sale in ebook and print next month, most likely, unless I decide to submit it for publication elsewhere, in which case it will take longer. But I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, next week we’ll start something COMPLETELY different. Like, more different than you can even imagine. Starting next week, we’ll have a near-future cyborg adventure called TECH Ops kicking off. I hope you enjoy it as much as you’ve enjoyed Amazing Grace.
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
Epilogue
There were only three of us at the graveside for Jeff’s funeral. Me, Willis, and Reverend Turner. The rest of the deputies disavowed any connection with the murderer, and I couldn’t really blame them. The town tried its best to forget they ever knew the man, too, because to claim him would be to claim their part in making him what he was, to claim their tiny piece of guilt. His family was long dead, the only person in the world who depend on him was a sweet little Corgi named Butch, who I had on a leash next to me at the funeral.
Reverend Turner spoke kind words about the man, ignoring his end and focusing on the parts of his life he spent in service. He kept it short, though, not needing to embellish for his audience of two. When he was done, I knelt beside the casket for a moment and prayed for him. I knew full well he wasn’t in a better place, I’d seen him go, but maybe my prayers could lessen his sentence a little bit. The things he did were terrible, and he deserved to pay for them, but he was, in the end, a pitiful, scared little man, and that deserved a little leniency.
Reverend Turned stepped over to me and extended his hand. “Lila Grace, I feel I may have wronged you,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.
I stood up, brushed the dirt off my knees, and shook his hand. “All is forgiven, Reverend. I appreciate you speaking here today.”
“If I don’t minister to the lost, what kind of shepherd would I be?” He asked with a gentle smile. “I don’t understand what you do, but I believe now that there is no malice in you, and no touch of evil in your gifts.”
“Thank you, Reverend. I might not ever turn Baptist, but I reckon we can at least sit next to each other at the church softball games,” I said, smiling back at him.
He shook hands with Willis and turned to walk into the church. Willis raised an eyebrow at me. “That was unexpected.”
“Not really. We had a talk a little while ago. I think he learned a thing or two.”
“Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks,” Willis said with a grin.
“Maybe,” I said, grinning back “As long as one of those tricks is putting the toilet seat down, we’ll be fine.”
We laughed as we walked back to the patrol car. I stopped at the door and looked back at the grave, where three filmy images of old woman wavered in the wind. The Dead Old Ladies Detective Agency had helped solve their first case, and even if it didn’t end happily for everyone, it did end, and we did put Jenny Miller to her heavenly rest. I had to count that as a win, I decided.
Then I slid into the passenger seat of the sheriff’s car and let my boyfriend drive me home, the first time that had happened in my fifty-seven years. I guess that was another win, this one for the Living Old Lady.
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
29
I was stuck in a ramshackle trailer in the middle of the woods in a makeshift fishing camp nobody knew about, with a crazy as a loon deputy turned murderer pointing a pistol at my head. My only living backup was shot and unconscious on the floor across the room, and I, being a genius hostage negotiator who’s seen way too much Law and Order, had disarmed myself. So all I had to save me was my wits and a couple of ghosts.
This was not how I thought I would die, let me just be clear about this. Like everybody, I’ve imagined my own death on more than one occasion. When I was younger, I assumed I would die at home, surrounded by a passel of grand- and great-grandchildren, my descendants all dutifully weeping in the parlor while I passed my last breath in some lavender-scented dignity that in no way involves messing my bed or any other bodily fluids.
As I grew older, and my lack of descendants became more pronounced, I realized that if I was lucky I would be able to shuffle off my mortal coil in a decently appointed rest home somewhere, but if the cost of things continued to do what they inevitably do, I would most likely be relegated to some state-run old folks’ home with last week’s sheets and and yesterday’s Depends.
At no point did I envision myself getting shot in a trailer while trying to save a woman who despised me from a former student who once idolized me while my brand new boyfriend lie perforated on the floor and two dead people watched the whole sideshow unfold like a tawdry hillbilly episode of Murder, She Wrote.
“Jeff,” I switched into my “teacher voice,” and his head snapped up. It was good to see I still had it, at least a little. I managed to hold my voice steady and my expression severe. “This has gotten ridiculous. Put that gun down, untie that woman, and turn yourself in immediately. You are not going to shoot me, and you are not going to hurt anyone else tonight. What Karen and her friends did to you back then was awful, but it did not ruin your life. It ruined your prom, but anything that happened after that night was your responsibility.”
“I couldn’t go back to school!” He wailed. “I couldn’t take them laughing at me in the halls. Every time I saw somebody from school, I knew that was all they were talking about.”
“For a few days, yes,” I agreed. “You were a laughingstock. For a little while. But you know as well as I do that children can’t keep a thought in their head longer than five minutes. You would have had a bad week, maybe two, but by the time school was out it would have all blown over. But you didn’t let it, did you?” I poured it on. I knew the only way I was walking out of that trailer was to get him to move off his plan of killing us all, and this was the only thing I could think of to do that.
“No,” he said, his voice wavering. “You don’t know what it’s like to have everybody whisper about you.”
“I don’t? Boy, have you even lived in this town? Who do you think you’re talking to? Why, the woman in that chair right there wouldn’t even eat my casserole because Reverend Turner convinced her that Satan helped me bake it. Like the devil himself would help me snap green beans,” I said with a laugh.
My voice softened, and I took a step closer. “Jeff, sweetie, I’ve been the one they talk about behind their hands for fifty years, and I’m still here. My front yard has had more toilet paper in the trees than the principal’s house, and I’ve been thrown out of more Bible study groups than the Whore of Babylon. I know exactly what it’s like to have the whole town staring at you, and talk about you, and that’s how I know that it don’t hurt. All you have to do is hold your head up and walk on by. If you don’t acknowledge the fools, they can’t touch you.”
He looked up at me, his eyes full. “But I let them. I let them, and they just kept going, and going. That’s why I didn’t get the sheriff’s job, because I wasn’t strong enough. It’s why I never got married, because I was too weak. Well, I’m not weak now! I’m strong! I’m strong, and everybody’s going to know how strong I am!”
His gun, which had drifted to point toward the ground while I spoke, snapped up and pointed at Karen Miller’s head from less than three feet away. There was nothing I could do, no way I could get there in time. He was going to kill that woman, and all I could do was watch.
But Jenny didn’t. Jenny, sweet, dead Jenny, who helped start all this in motion by picking at Jeff with her stupid little pretty girl teasing, summoned up enough energy somehow to smack his wrist away and send the bullet slamming through the side of the trailer. Jeff looked down at his hand, then looked to where Jenny was standing right in front of him.
She looked more solid than any ghost I’d ever seen, and the way the color ran out of his face, I knew Jeff saw her, too. He staggered back, raising his gun and firing into her face three times. The bullets passed right through her, barely making the girl’s image flicker, and he backed up more until he slammed into the small bar separating the kitchen and living room.
“Jenny?” Karen’s voice was soft, thready, a timid little thing that might escape at any moment.
Jenny turned to her mother, and Jeff did at the same time. He raised his pistol again, but before Jenny could whirl back to strike his hand, another shot rang out, followed by two more. Jeff’s eyes went wide, and his legs went rubbery as he collapsed straight down, blood pouring out onto the carpet.
I looked to Willis, who sat on the floor holding his pistol, smoke wafting from the barrel. “You’re alive!” I said, thrilled and surprised in equal measure.
“This is one of those nights I’m glad I bought new vests for the department when I started. I reckon I’m also glad not everybody decided to wear them.” He nodded to Jeff, who lay on the floor, his eyes open and glassy.
Before my eyes, his spirit peeled up from his body, looked around the room, and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.” Then he vanished, a small dark hole opening up in the air around him and taking him to wherever he was destined to spend eternity.
“Apology not accepted, asshole,” Jenny replied, and my head whipped over to where she stood by her mother’s chair. A bright white light appeared behind her, and she looked up at me with a wistful smile. “I guess it’s time for me to go, huh?”
“Yes, sweetie, it’s time for you to go,” I said.
“What’s happening?” Jenny’s mother said, her head whipping around.
“There’s a white light opening up right past that wall over there, and Jenny is supposed to go to it. She’s done what she stayed here to do, and now it’s time for her to go.” Karen smiled at my words, but one tear slid down her cheek all the same.
“Time for me, too,” came a gravelly voice from the kitchen as Sheriff Johnny walked through the bar and headed to the light. “I think my town will be in fine hands. But tell that boy to take care of my people, or he won’t like it when I come back to pay him a visit.”
“Will do, Sheriff,” I said with a smile.
Jenny and the sheriff walked into the light, which blossomed to blinding brilliance before fading to just water-stained paneling once more. “They’re gone,” I said. I felt a strange wetness on my own face, and reached up to find tears on my cheeks. I didn’t even know I was crying, and I certainly wasn’t sad, but it was a night full of emotions, that’s for certain.
I helped Willis up off the floor, and we untied Mrs. Miller, then we waited outside for the ambulance and coroner and crime scene unit to arrive. I scrounged up a blanket from behind the seat of my truck to put around Karen, since she was in her pajamas, and then Willis went down to pull my truck up into the yard beside Jeff’s Bronco. We told our story more times than we cared to, leaving out any mention of dead sheriffs or daughters, and the sun was peeking over the horizon before we finally pulled back onto the highway and headed back to my house.
We didn’t speak as we walked in the front door, I just reached back and took his hand. I led Willis through the house to my bedroom, undressed him, and laid beside him, feeling his solid masculinity next to me as I drifted off to sleep. There would be more to come, I was sure, but there was plenty of time for that.
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
28
I pulled my truck off to the side of the dirt road as soon as I saw the lights of the trailer up ahead. It looked to be about a quarter mile away yet, but my big old Bessie made enough noise that if Jeff was paying any kind of attention he already knew we were there. Willis got out of the passenger side and made some kind of gesture to me like he expected me to wait in the car.
I hate to disappoint people, really I do. Except it seems like my whole life has been one long string of disappointments to somebody. I disappointed my daddy by not being a boy he could teach to play baseball. I disappointed my mama by not being the normal little lady she wanted to raise and marry off. I disappointed more than a few boys in high school by keeping my knees together a lot longer than they hoped, and now I was about to disappoint Sheriff Willis Dunleavy, because there was no way on God’s green earth I was staying in that truck.
I opened the driver’s door and got out, leaving the door hanging open behind me. The dome light in old Bessie burned out about seven or eight years ago, and I never bothered replacing it. I left the keys in the ignition in case we needed to get out of there quick, and besides, the number of grand theft auto cases in the woods of Union County are about even with the number of votes George Wallace got in Harlem when he ran for President.
“Get back in the truck,” Willis hissed at me. “I am not taking a civilian into what might an active hostage scene.”
“Then you should have thought about that before you let the civilian use her truck to drive you to the scene. I’m going up there. Jeff and I have always had a good relationship. I might be able to help the situation.”
He glared at me, and I could see the wheels turning behind his blue eyes. I know he was weighing his chances of getting me to do what he wanted, and after a few seconds he came to the right decision – his chances were slim and none. And Slim just left town. I relaxed a little bit when I saw that acceptance come over him, because the last thing I wanted to do was waste time and energy arguing with Willis in the middle of the woods while Jeff was a couple hundred yards away maybe hurting Jenny’s mama.
“Come on, but stay behind me,” he grumbled, starting back toward the house.
I nodded, and reached back inside the truck for the double-barrel 12-gauge behind the seat. I was willing to go into the house, but I wasn’t going in there without a little backup of my own. Just because I wasn’t the son Daddy hoped for didn’t mean he wasn’t willing to teach me how to hunt, fish, and shoot. That old gun hadn’t been fired in months, but I took it out to behind Karen Montgomery’s house a couple times a year and shot up some tin cans to make sure I still knew which end to point toward the target. I cracked the gun open to make sure it was loaded, then slung it over my shoulder and caught up to Willis.
“I thought you told me you kept the shells in the glove compartment,” he said, his voice low.
“I keep the extra shells in the glove box,” I said. “Out here in the country we’ve got a name for an unloaded shotgun.”
“What’s that?”
“A bat.”
He snorted a little laugh, then sobered as we stepped into the clearing around the trailed. It was a single-wide that had seen better days. And better decades. It started life as white with a wide blue stripe around it, but most of that was replaced with rust. The underpinning, if there’s ever been any, was long gone, and what passed for steps was just a half dozen cinderblocks with nothing resembling a handrail. A couple of the windows were gone, and yellow lamp light shone from what I assumed was the living room. I saw a figure moving inside, waving his arms and pacing, and from where we were it looked enough like Jeff for me to decide we were in the right place.
Jenny appeared at my elbow, rising up out of the ground with Sheriff Johnny at her side. “Dad’s okay. He doesn’t have a concussion, so they’re sending him home. Is she in there?”
“We don’t know yet,” I whispered. Willis’ head whipped around at my voice, and I pointed to where Jenny stood, invisible to him. He nodded, then put his finger to his lips. I nodded, and fell silent.
Jenny walked up to the trailer, then through the door. It always strikes me funny, how long it takes for the dead to shake their hold on habits from life. She didn’t need to go through the door, she could have walked through any wall just as easily, but the habit of years had her use the door, even if she was passing through it. I made a mental note to myself to ask Johnny about that when we finished up here. Of course, he was less than half a year dead himself, so he probably still had quite a few hangups from his time walking the earth.
Willis started forward, and I put a hand on his shoulder. I leaned down close to his ear, so there was no chance of my words traveling, and said, “Jenny’s inside. She can tell us what’s going on in there.”
“I hope her mother is still alive,” Willis said.
“Me too,” I agreed. “The poor child doesn’t need to see that.”
Jenny returned seconds later, a worried look on her face. “She’s alive. He hasn’t hurt her, but he’s got her tied to a chair. The place is all made up with candles and flowers, like he’s trying to make it romantic. He keeps yelling at her, telling her how she ruined his life at the prom, how he couldn’t help it when Shelly and me said that to him about going out with him, how he’s sorry, but she’s got to see how much he loves her. He’s crazy. Y’all have got to get in there.”
I kept my face next to Willis’ and relayed everything just as it came out of Jenny’s mouth. He nodded, then turned to me. “He’s devolving. We don’t have much time. If we don’t get in there in the next couple of minutes, he’s going to kill her. I’ll go in the front door, you go around to the back. If he draws on me, shoot him.”
“Give me thirty seconds to get back there. It’s dark as the bottom of a well out here,” I said. I took a deep breath, steadied my nerves, and peeled off to the right to creep around the trailer as best I could. I felt like I stepped on every branch and dry leaf in the county walking that fifty yards, and froze in my tracks three times waiting on Jeff to shoot me from a window, but I made it to the back door and up the rickety cinderblocks. The knob turned under my hand and I pulled the door open, sticking my head in a foot or so above floor level. I looked down the fake wood-paneled hallway toward the living room and saw Karen Miller’s back to me. She was tied to a ladder back wooden chair, the kind found in countless dining room sets all across the south.
I didn’t see Jeff at first, but he came into my view a second later, pacing and shaking his head. He was muttering something I couldn’t hear, but to be honest, all my attention was on the pistol in his hand. It was a boxy black thing that I guessed was his department-issued gun, and it looked like a handful of deadly in the light of the small lamp on the end table. Jeff’s head whipped around, and he trained his gun off to his left toward something I couldn’t see, then I heard Willis’ voice cut through the night like the crack of a whip.
“Drop the gun, son. This has to end right now.”
The second Willis spoke, I pulled the back door wide open and stepped up into the hallway. The top step wobbled as my weight shifted, and it threw me off balance. I stumbled forward and crashed into the wall. Jeff spun in my direction and fired his gun, missing my head by inches. The bullet dug into the wall behind me, and I dove onto my belly. My shotgun hit the brown shag carpet and tumbled away from me, leaving me unarmed and sprawled on my face less than twenty feet away from a murderer that I still remembered as a cherubic little boy in my Sunday School class.
I heard another shot boom through the enclosed trailer, and Jeff whirled around, firing his gun three times. There was a crash from somewhere in the living room that I couldn’t see, then Jeff was back in my line of sight, standing right in front of Karen Miller with his gun aimed at her face.
He looked down the hall at me, and as I got to my feet and picked up my shotgun, he got a confused look on his face. “Ms. Carter? What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to end this, Jeff. You need to let Mrs. Miller go and put the gun down,” I said, walking down the hall toward him.
He pointed the pistol at me, but I saw his hand shaking even as far away as I was. I didn’t stop. “You’re not going to shoot me, Jeff. You always liked me in Sunday School, and I always liked you. Now put that gun away and let’s talk about this.”
“I can’t talk about nothing no more, Ms. Carter. I done killed the sheriff, and I killed them two girls, and now I’m going to kill this bitch here. Then I’m going to shoot myself and go to Hell for all eternity where I belong.” Tears ran down his face, and rage mixed with terror at what he had done.
“Jeff, this isn’t you,” I said. “Tell me what happened. We can work it out. We can get you help. You—“
“There’s no help for this bastard!” Karen Miller screamed from the chair. She’d been so quiet to this point I thought he had her gagged, but evidently not. “Don’t you lie to him. You tell him the truth. That he needs to just blow his damn brains out and rot in hell until the end of time for what he did to my baby girl.”
“Mrs. Miller, that isn’t helping,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm while wanting to smack her upside the head with the butt of my shotgun. I looked over at Jenny, who shrugged as if to say “what can I do?”
I stepped into the living room and leaned the shotgun against the wall. “There, Jeff. See? I put my gun down. Now I’m not going to hurt you, and I know you don’t want to hurt me. So let’s talk about this, and see what we can figure out.” I looked past the distraught deputy, sweat stains soaking the armpits and neck of his uniform shirt, his normally neat brown hair disheveled, and tears streaking his cheeks.
Willis lay slumped against the far wall of the trailer, half on the threadbare carpet by the door, half on the worn linoleum of the kitchenette area. His gun was loose in his grip and his eyes were closed. I couldn’t see enough to tell if he was breathing, and the dark shirt he wore hid any signs of blood, but he didn’t even move an eyelid at my voice.
“I told you, there’s no helping me now, Ms. Carter,” Jeff wailed. “It’s just like high school, only worse! I should have never trusted her then, and I should have never spoke to her kid now. These damn women have ruined my life, and now I’m going to kill the last one, and be done with it. I’m real sorry, but since you’re here, I’m going to have to kill you, too.”
He raised the pistol to aim it at my face, and this time his hand was rock steady.
This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE.
PS – It’s my birthday – buy me something pretty. Or just buy something I wrote. Either one.
27
Willis and I left the Miller house not long after, after Willis directed Larry to take Jenny’s dad to the hospital and left Chuck at the house in case any calls came in about ransom or anything else. We didn’t expect the phone to ring; we both knew exactly what was going on here. I sat in the passenger seat of the sheriff’s patrol car while he got on the radio and ordered dispatch to call in the auxiliary deputies. There were half a dozen or so men and women that were deputized in case of missing children or elderly folks, lost hikers, or any large-scale emergencies. Jenny rode along to the hospital with her dad, unseen and unheard, but there to see he was taken care of.
Willis opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. “Everybody will meet us here in a few minutes. I’m going to station two of them in the house, probably Gene and Clyde. They’re old enough and trustworthy enough to babysit the place while Mr. Miller is getting checked out. I’ll have Chuck start the canvass in one direction, and get Ernest McKnight to head down the other side of the street.”
“You think that’s gonna work out okay? This is still South Carolina, Willis. Some people see a black man knocking on their door in the middle of the night, they’re going to answer with a twelve-gauge before they ever look to see if they know him.” Ernest McKnight was a respectable businessman, one of the best mechanics I’d ever seen, and about six and a half feet tall and blacker than the ace of spades. I did not want to see that gentle giant killed by some nervous homeowner while trying to help the police.
“I’ll send Irene Middleton out with him. Make sure she does the knocking, and Ernest can ask the questions. He’s been an auxiliary deputy for a long time, and was an MP in the army, too. He knows what kind of things to look for.”
“You know they ain’t going to find anything,” I said.
“I know we have to try everything we can think of,” he growled.
“I’m not arguing that, Willis,” I said. “I’m just saying that…well, I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I can’t help none with the living.”
“You’re helping me, Lila Grace. This is my first real case in this town, with these people. I need somebody to be my touchstone, to keep me grounded. That’s why you’re here – because I trust you, and because everybody here trusts you.”
“Everybody here is scared shitless that I might really be able to talk to their dead relatives and find out all the dirt on them.” I was grumbling, but Willis’ words made me feel good, like I was useful.
“Well, there’s probably a little of that, too,” he agreed, and I slapped him on the arm. We both laughed, then headlights appeared and he was out of the car to give instruction to the new arrivals.
I waited patiently for about three seconds, then started to fidget. I got out of the car, knowing full well that if I sat there much longer I was going to start messing with the switches and buttons on the dash. The last thing any of us needed was me firing up the siren on Church Street in the middle of the night. Not that anybody within a mile of us was asleep. If there’s one sure way to wake up small-town folk in the middle of the night, it’s turn on some police lights.
I felt a chill on my arm and looked to my left, starting a little as Sheriff Johnny looked at me, his hand on my shoulder and a worried expression on his face. “Good Lord, Johnny, you scared the fire out of me!” I said. “What’s wrong? I mean, more than what I already know about, that is.”
Johnny didn’t speak. Johnny never spoke, except for that one time a couple days ago. He was a quiet man in life, and death hadn’t loosened his tongue any. Some ghosts are just barely different from when they were living, but some are mere shades of their former selves, no pun intended. Johnny seemed to be fading the longer he was around. I had a fleeting worry that he needed to cross over soon, or there wouldn’t be anything left to pass on to the other side.
I don’t know what that means, what waits for anyone after they leave our world for the next, but my faith tells me that even though some souls wander the earth for a time after their bodies die, eventually they move on to a better place. Well, not all. Young Jeffrey was very quickly getting relegated to the list of people I wanted to see go to a much worse place.
“What is it, Johnny? Did you find something?” He nodded, and motioned for me to follow him. I did, walking down the sidewalk several houses to the Terrance house. I knew that Jackie and Mike Terrance were in Michigan for a month, visiting their new grandbaby, so I wasn’t sure what Johnny wanted me to see there. He stopped at the mouth of the driveway and pointed down, but of course O couldn’t see anything. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight app, shining the bright LED beam down at the ground. There, in the mud built up in the dip between their driveway and the street, was a set of fresh tire tracks. There was no reason for anyone to be at the Terrance house with them gone, and it had just rained a few days ago, so these tracks were almost certainly from tonight. Which meant they were Jeff’s.
“Well, what about it, Johnny? We know he drove here. Are you telling me there’s something about these tracks that Willis needs to know?” He nodded. “Alright, then. Let me text him, and we’ll see what we can figure out.” I took a photo of the tracks with my phone and texted it to Willis, telling him that Johnny pointed them out at the Terrance house.
“Stay there. Don’t touch the tracks. Be there in 5.” Was the reply I got, so I went over and sat down on the retaining wall Mike Terrance built out of rocks he picked up out of the Broad River last summer. A few minutes later, Willis came walking up, his own flashlight cutting a narrow beam through the dark night.
I got up and walked over to the tire prints. “Here you go. I don’t know what good this does us. We knew he drive here. It ain’t like he was going to carry Mrs. Miller off over his shoulders.”
“It tells us he ain’t in his squad car,” Willis said. “The treads don’t match the department-issue tires. And these are big tires, not like the car I’ve seen Jeff drive around town. These are from a pickup, or an SUV. Maybe something with four-wheel drive. From that, I’d guess he had to do some off-roading to get to wherever he’s holding Mrs. Miller, or at the very least, down some rough dirt roads.”
Johnny was nodding so hard I thought his head would pop off. Obviously Willis was saying what Johnny was thinking, I just couldn’t figure out all the connections. I wracked my brain, trying to remember anything from Jeff’s childhood about hunting cabins, or favorite spots in the woods, or…
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s got to be where he took her.”
“Where?” Willis asked.
“I’m not real sure, we should probably ask Cracker, but I seem to recall there being something about Jeff’s daddy having a little piece of property over on John D. Long Lake, with a trailer or a fishing cabin, or something like that. I think his daddy called it his quiet place. Jeff talked one time in Sunday School about going with his daddy to the quiet place, and how much he liked it there.”
“That sounds like the perfect place to take somebody if you don’t want to be seen,” Willis said.
“And it’s not far from where he dumped Shelly’s body. Do you think he might have…”
“I don’t know,” Willis interrupted me before my thoughts went too far down that path. “Her body was in the water too long to know if there was any kind of sexual assault, so don’t think about that right now. Just think that if he’s got some kind of deranged fantasy playing out in his head, that Mrs. Miller might still be alive.”
“As long as we can find that place and get to her fast enough,” I said.
“Welcome to the wonders of the internet,” Willis said. “Let’s get back to the car.” We can look up property records online with the computer in the car.”
I followed him back to the car and slid into the passenger seat. He tapped a few buttons and looked annoyed.
“Nothing under his name. I know he rents the house he lives in from Clint Maxwell, but whatever other place he’s got oughta show up in the tax records.”
“Maybe it’s under his daddy’s name still?” I half-asked, half-suggested. “Try Richard Walker.”
He tapped the keys, then grimaced, shaking his head. “What’s his mother’s name?”
“Serinda Walker. Her maiden name was Cowen. Try that, too.”
A few more taps, more head shaking, then more tapping and more scowling. “Nothing. How does a person as transparent as Jeff keeps something like property hidden. I wouldn’t think he was somebody that would think like that.”
“I wouldn’t think he was somebody that would kill two teenagers and kidnap a woman, either,” I said.
“We don’t know that he did, Lila Grace,” Willis said, a cautious tone to his voice.
“Don’t use that policeman tone of voice with me, Willis Dunleavy,” I snapped. “You know as well as I do that boy is our best and only suspect, and if he don’t have that woman in his fishing trailer, wherever the hell it is, we ain’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting her back. I looked into that man’s eyes and I promised him we would bring his wife home. He’s already lost his little girl. That woman is the only thing left keeping him in this world, so if we can’t do that, we might as well put a bullet in his head when we give him the news.”
Willis’ eyes were haunted, and he wore the face of a man who had told too many families their loved ones weren’t coming home. “I know, Lila. I know.”
I felt a little twinge in my chest. “Nobody calls me just Lila,” I said.
“I do.” Those two little words, in the middle of the night, sitting in a police car hunting down a murderer and trying to bring Karen Miller home safely, rang deep inside me. This was not a man who planned on just visiting in my life. He was part of me to stay. I took a deep breath, realizing I liked that feeling, then turned my attention back to the task at hand.
“Try Dargin Feemster,” I said.
“What the hell is a Dargin Feemster?”
“That’s Jeff’s granddaddy. He’s liable to have never switched the deed over when his Pap died, just kept paying the tax bill every year. The county wouldn’t care, as long as they got their little piece of money, and Jeff probably never thought anything about it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Willis muttered. “There it is. A little six-acre plot on the lake, a couple miles from the main road. Ain’t no way to get there in a car, but I reckon that old Bronco of Jeff’s would do just fine. It’s got about fifty yards of frontage onto the lake, just enough for a little dock to fish off of.”
“If he’s anywhere, that’s where he’ll be,” I said. “We ain’t getting there in this Chevrolet, though. We’ll take my pickup. It’ll get us through about anything.”
“Then let’s go bring her home.” Willis said, putting the car in gear and tearing off on a ghost-fueled rescue mission.
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