“Here’s where the skeleton must have been buried,” Nakayla said. “The driver of the earthmover must have noticed the bones right away. I suspect the site would be larger if they’d been scattered.”
I looked down at the Visitors Center. “This is the least visible spot from the main building. If you buried someone here at night, not only the darkness but also the angle from the windows would keep you concealed.”
Nakayla turned and stared at the gouged dirt. “You’d think the murderer would have buried the body deeper. This was so shallow, I’m surprised some animal didn’t dig up the remains back then.”
I remembered an army lecture by an archaeologist when I was a chief warrant officer. I’d never had a chance to use his information in an investigation, but his words had stuck with me.
“Frost heaves,” I said. “They put pressure on objects. Over time, things like bones can be pushed upward and shifted in their orientation. This grave could have been deep enough to avoid animal detection, but frost heaves below and erosion above may have combined to bring the skeleton closer to the surface.”
“Maybe this grass hasn’t always been here,” Nakayla suggested. “If the woods extended closer to the building in 1971, the killer could have used fallen leaves or pine needles to mask what clearly would have been a disturbed patch of sod.”
I looked farther up the hill to the scorched trees on the crest of the ridge marking where the flames had been thwarted by the wind. “Without the forest fire, this patch of sod might have kept Frank DeMille a mystery forever.”
“And now that fire’s left us with a bigger mystery,” Nakayla said. “Who killed him?”
I looked up and waved at the hazy blue sky. “I wonder if the Russians saw anything?”
Chapter 5
Saturday morning, the four of us traveled in my Honda CR-V from Asheville to Roanoke. Yes, the four of us—Cory, Nakayla, me, and Blue. Cory would hear nothing of us leaving the coonhound behind, claiming that her aunt loved dogs and would be more excited about seeing Blue than seeing her only niece.
The drive lasted close to four hours, which meant we arrived shortly before noon. Nakayla and I suggested we stop for lunch beforehand, but Cory insisted her aunt expected us to eat with her.
“Besides, it’s too hot to have Blue stay in the car,” Cory argued. “Roanoke’s not Asheville where he could sit at the table with us and no one would bat an eye.”
So at ten till noon, we pulled behind a blue Buick sedan and parked in the driveway of a modest brick ranch on a hill above the Roanoke rail yards.
Immediately, the front door of the home opened, and a thin, gray-haired woman in a light-green dress stepped out onto the porch and began waving furiously.
“That’s Aunt Nancy.” Cory hopped from the back seat and ran up the sidewalk. Blue followed close on her heels.
Nakayla and I watched from the car as aunt and niece embraced. Then Nancy knelt to hug Blue. The coonhound licked her face like it was ice cream.
Nakayla laughed. “Do you think they’d notice if we left?”
Ten minutes later, we sat around Nancy Gilmore’s dining room table. I eyed a platter of home-cooked Southern fried chicken flanked by bowls of green beans, wild rice, and a plate of biscuits still steaming from the oven.
“You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” Nakayla said.
“No trouble at all. It’s the least I can do after y’all made the trip up here. But be warned. Save room for pecan pie.”
I ate like I was coming off a hunger strike.
We used our lunch conversation to bring Nancy Gilmore up to date on the investigation.
Twenty minutes and two thousand calories later, we moved to Nancy Gilmore’s small living room. Nakayla and I shared a tartan upholstered sofa, Cory took a matching wingback chair, and Blue flopped down on a loop rug in front of the fireplace. The grate had been replaced for the summer by an overflowing fern.
Nancy Gilmore walked to a corner of the mantel and retrieved a stack of letters and a framed photograph. I hoped what she was about to show us would prove to be useful information.
“I thought you might like to see a picture of Frank.” Nancy handed the photograph to Nakayla, who held it between us. “My brother’s on the right. My husband’s on the left. Eddie.”
A smiling woman wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and bell-bottom jeans stood between two men. I glanced at Nancy and saw an older face but the same smile. Her husband looked like he must have topped six feet. He had his left arm around Nancy’s shoulders. His right gave a mock salute. The rugged build of his body suggested the conditioning of active duty.
Frank, on the other hand, was closer in height to his sister. Probably no more than five eight. His thick glasses and pudgy frame screamed “geek” as loudly as his brother-in-law’s proclaimed soldier.
The three posed at the base of a waterfall, and the camera shutter had frozen the spray and beads of mist churned up by the tumbling torrent.
“Looking Glass Falls?” I asked.
“Yes. Eddie was on leave, and we went to see Frank for a long weekend.”
Looking Glass Falls was a popular spot in Pisgah National Forest near Brevard. It was right off the road and required no hiking.
Nancy reached out for the picture with one hand and handed Nakayla the letters with the other. “Eddie was killed somewhere in Vietnam. No one’s ever told me where. They said it was classified.” She returned the photograph to the mantel and eased into a rocker beside Cory. “That was two months later.”
“And Frank disappeared the end of July?” Nakayla asked.
She nodded. “The month after our visit. Eddie was already back in Vietnam.”
“Your husband was in the army?” I asked.
“Yes. He was a lieutenant.”
“Did he lead a platoon?”
“If he did, he never told me. Eddie didn’t talk about the war. At least not to me.”
“Who else?”
“If anyone, it would have been Frank. He once teased Eddie about being an oxymoron, whatever that means.”
Nakayla looked at me as if I should have the answer. I did.
“Army intelligence. It’s an old joke. That would explain the vagueness of the information the army provided you. Eddie might have been on the ground with contacts whose identities and location needed protection.”
“That’s why it was classified?” Nancy asked.
“Yes. That’s my take. Did your brother Frank ever say anything about your husband’s military duties?”
“No, not really.” Then a ghost of a smile appeared.
“What?” Cory prompted.
“Once during that weekend in North Carolina, my brother teased Eddie that if they told each other what they did, they’d have to kill each other.”
“So Frank’s work was also classified,” I said.
“He told me he was stepping into another world. One being created in a space all its own.”
“Cyberspace,” Nakayla whispered.
She had to be right. Fifty years ago, as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, scientists and engineers like Frank DeMille were uncovering a virtual world that would change us more radically than that trip to the moon. I thought how the smartphone in my pocket contained more computing power than what Frank used to track the astronauts. Probably more than what calculated the massive Saturn rocket’s launch and the Apollo capsule’s reentry. But Frank had been a pioneer, and I realized his work was probably as much a guarded secret as whatever special ops his brother-in-law executed in Southeast Asia. And both men would be dead before the end of that summer.
“Should we divide up these letters?” Nakayla asked. “Then we can swap so each of us reads all of them.”
“That’s fine with me,” Nancy said. “But I don’t know how they’ll help.”
Nakayla spread them out on her lap. “Cory, why don’t you take the unopened ones from Frank’s girlfriend. Sam and I’ll split the letters to Nancy.”
Nakayla handed me five letters addressed to Nancy Gilmore with a return address of an apartment in Asheville.
The envelopes had been opened, and the letters inside consisted of one or two pages of minute, precise printing. The style conveyed the authorship of someone for whom clarity and detail were paramount.
The deep creases in the aged, yellowed paper showed the letters had been reread many times. They were the unfinished conversation with a brother who never returned.
I examined the postmarks and read the oldest first. The content was mundane. Frank talked about the weather, the excitement of a new job, and its perfect fit for his computer science degree. He asked for any news from Eddie and how he wished the war would soon be over. He invited his sister to come for a visit, especially when Eddie came home on leave. He promised to take them up on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a picnic.
The fourth and fifth letters shifted to more personal reflections on his job. Although he explained he couldn’t say much about his actual responsibility and she would find it incredibly boring, he believed he was making a real contribution to the space program. One paragraph in the fifth letter read, “I’m making some breakthroughs that have earned me the nickname Slew Meister. Sounds like a medieval knight, doesn’t it? I’d put it on a T-shirt, but I’d have to do too much explaining that I wasn’t a killer. You know me. The poster boy for nonconfrontation.”
So Frank DeMille didn’t sound like a person who would aggravate someone to murder him. Unless his nonconfrontation comment was ironic because Frank DeMille would take someone to the mat over the slightest disagreement. Nancy Gilmore would need to clarify his comment, but I decided to wait until we’d read all the letters before subjecting her to Q & A.
I passed the letters on to Cory, who handed hers to Nakayla. I got the remaining five letters that Frank had written to his sister. Again, I started with the oldest postmark, but now he referenced the pending visit of his sister and brother-in-law.
He encouraged them to stay at the Grove Park Inn and to take a tour of the Biltmore House. Frank hoped to take some time off and show Eddie a few of his favorite fly-fishing spots.
A later letter revealed Frank had found a girlfriend whom he was anxious for his sister to meet. He suggested that the four of them have dinner one night, Frank’s treat.
Nancy must have pressed him for details about the girl, because in the next letter, Frank wrote her name was Loretta Case and she was the secretary for the tracking station’s chief administrator. She was a native who’d graduated from a local secretarial school. “She’s smart beyond her limited education,” he’d written. “Very curious and yet very down-to-earth. I know you’ll like her.”
The last letter had been written after Nancy and Eddie visited Frank. Frank asked his sister if she could send him a copy of the photographs from their trip, especially the ones from Looking Glass Falls—the one of him and Loretta and the one of Nancy, Eddie, and him.
The paragraph that stood out read:
“Loretta sends her love, and I hope to bring her to Roanoke after the next Apollo mission in July. Can you believe she’s never been out of Western North Carolina? Her family’s not much for the outside world and outsiders. I’m afraid they’re not keen on Loretta seeing me, but Loretta tells me to pay them no mind. That they’re all talk. Finally, dear sister, would you send me whatever address you have for Eddie? I need to write him for advice regarding a matter at the tracking station. I meant to ask him during your visit and never got the chance. It’s probably nothing, but if there’s any intelligence in military intelligence, Eddie’s the one to have it. (HA HA). And let me know if there’s a convenient time for Loretta and me to visit in August. Love, Frank.”
I looked up to see Nakayla staring at me. She was ready to pass me the letters from Loretta, but she was also eyeing me for my reaction to the letter I’d just read. She must have drawn the same conclusions: a conflict existed between Frank and Loretta’s family, and something wasn’t right at the tracking station.
I gave Cory the second half of Frank’s letters and took the final batch from Nakayla. The first two were to Frank DeMille in care of Nancy Gilmore. They had been unopened for nearly fifty years until today. Each was brief and urgent.
The first was dated August 8, 1971. “Dearest Frank, I’m worried as I haven’t heard from you. Everyone here is concerned as there has been no word from you since the night of July 30 when the lunar module touched down. I’ve called the apartment many times and even talked the landlord into letting me in. It looked like all your clothes were still there. Dr. Haskford has filed a police report. I hope you haven’t left because of anything my brothers might have said. Or more importantly because I didn’t give you an immediate answer to your proposal. I do love you, and if this letter should find you through your sister, my answer is yes. Please come home. Love, Loretta.”
The second was dated a week later, August 15, 1971. “My dear Frank. Please let me know you’re all right. If I have done or said something to cause a breakup, just let me know. Or if you no longer want to talk to me, then tell Nancy. She is also worried sick. We want to know you’re safe. Love, Loretta.”
The third letter was addressed to Nancy Gilmore and had been opened upon receipt. It was dated August 22, 1971.
“Dear Nancy, I’m at my wit’s end with worry about Frank. I hope you would tell me if you know anything I might have done or said that caused him to leave. I love your brother very much and only want what’s best for him. I understand that I may not fit in his world and he’s realized he can do better than a plain mountain girl for a wife, as much as I’d try to please him. I just want to know he’s safe. I’ll not bother you anymore, but I’ll continue to pray for Frank, you, and Eddie. Sincerely, Loretta.”
I looked up as Cory finished reading Frank’s last letter to his sister.
She had tears in her eyes. “Let Aunt Nancy read the letters Loretta wrote to Frank.”
I got up and walked them over to Nancy. Then I returned to my place beside Nakayla. The three of us waited while Cory’s aunt read the letters she’d kept unopened for decades.
Nancy Gilmore wiped her eyes, refolded the pages, and gently slipped them back in their envelopes.
“Mrs. Gilmore,” I started.
“Nancy, please.”
“Nancy, do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”
“No. Anything at all, but I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”
I looked at Nakayla to see if she wanted to lead. She gave a nod for me to go ahead.
“When exactly was your visit to Frank?”
“The middle of June. I remember Eddie had to report back for duty on the Fourth of July.”
“Your brother asked for your husband’s military address. Did you give it to him, and if so, do you know if he wrote him?”
“I sent Frank the address. The last letter I received from Eddie mentioned he’d heard from Frank and was following up on his request. He told me to pass that along to him.”
“You don’t know what that request was?”
“No. I assumed it had to do with Frank’s work.”
“Do you still have that letter?”
Nancy shifted uneasily in the rocker. “Yes, but I’d rather not share it. Our letters were very personal.”
“I understand. What if after we’ve left, you review them and copy out anything like what you just told us your husband said about your brother?”
“All right, if you think it might be important.”
“I have to be honest, Nancy. Right now, we don’t know what’s important and what isn’t. We’re just gathering information, and we appreciate your willingness to help.”
Tears flowed, but she made no effort to wipe t
hem from her cheeks. “I just want to find out what happened to my brother.”
I turned to Nakayla, hoping she would take over. I’m not good at questioning weeping women.
Nakayla leaned forward on the sofa, drawing closer to Nancy. “What do you think about Frank’s relationship with Loretta? Did he want to break it off?”
“Nothing would surprise me more.” She lifted the letters from Loretta off her lap. “And these letters from Loretta reinforce that Frank asked her to marry him. That matches what she told me.”
“She talked to you about his marriage proposal?”
“On the phone. I called her after I received that letter from her. Her comment about being a plain, mountain girl outside of Frank’s world bothered me. I wanted her to know that Frank never expressed anything but the utmost respect and love for her. He told me he’d found his soul mate.”
“Was that because they worked together at the tracking station?”
Nancy shrugged. “That’s part of it. But Frank said he actually got to know her through music. There was a fiddlers’ convention on a farm near Asheville, and Frank ran into Loretta there. He knew her only to speak to at work, so that was the first time they’d hung out together. Frank was rather shy, and I doubt if he would have ever asked her out at work.”
“Who was Dr. Haskford?” Nakayla asked.
“The man in charge of the tracking station. Loretta worked directly for him.”
I remembered the question one of his letters raised. “Nancy, what do you think was going on with Loretta’s family? Was your brother one who would try to avoid a confrontation?”
“Definitely. He would work around a conflict rather than face it. Up to a point. Then when there was no other recourse, his backbone transformed into steel, and he’d go face-to-face with anyone.”
“Do you think that happened with Loretta’s family?”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe so. According to Loretta, all the pressure was put on her to break off her relationship. Her family didn’t want anything to do with Frank. They thought he was stuck up because he wouldn’t talk about his work. They interpreted that as his being too good for them.”
Murder in Rat Alley Page 4
