The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  “I’m calling Mr. Medlin,” Eloise said. “He’s a good man. He’ll do more to them than the law will.”

  “I heard a vehicle back there,” I said to Eloise. “Can the Medlin boys drive?”

  “Jimmy can,” Mackenzie said. “He’s been bragging about having his permit to everybody in class.”

  We all watched quietly as Eloise strode to the phone, got Medlin’s number from 411, and made the call. She talked for a moment, her back to us, then placed the phone back in the cradle as if it were made of eggshells. She turned and looked at me, her lips drawn in a thin line.

  “Mr. Medlin says the boys haven’t been out since. Midafternoon. He says they were in their room playing video games.”

  Her eyes probed mine, the unease back in her face. This was no longer just my problem, I realized. Whatever was going on, if I’d brought it into her home and endangered her and Mackenzie, I had to do something about it. I caught Kelly staring at us, her expression full of questions she seemed bursting to ask.

  “I’ll call Sheriff Bagwell,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bagwell arrived with a deputy he didn’t bother to introduce, sending him out back to search the woods while he came inside to examine the den and listen to the rest of my story. After I went through the whole incident with him, he stood holding a baggy with the slug he’d just pried out of the wall behind the mirror.

  “Thirty-ought-six or thereabouts,” he said, showing it to us. “Deer rifle,” he added. “You were sitting way over there?” he asked me.

  I affirmed that I was, and knew where he was going with it.

  “It doesn’t look to me like they were shooting at you,” he said. “Unless you have some reason to believe different, it looks more like a stray shot.”

  My thoughts went to Bobby Paige pointing a gun at me, and then to Carl Hood, but I kept my mouth shut. I already knew what Bagwell thought of my alternative suspicions.

  He shifted his focus to Eloise.

  “What you were saying about the Medlin kids, or somebody like them, sounds about right,” he said, giving her a reassuring look. “These kids today will shoot at anything and call it hunting. I know you talked to their daddy, but I’ll go double-check his story, anyway. See what kind of rifles he’s got and if any of them have been fired recently.”

  The deputy came into the room, switching off the beam of a five-cell flashlight before sticking it into his belt. He shook his head at the sheriff; Bagwell nodded, and turned to us. “I’ll send somebody out in the morning when it’s light to get a better look,” he said. “See if we can spot something on that old road you say is back there.”

  The way he said it, it was obvious he thought nothing would come of it.

  Bagwell lingered a while talking to Eloise, reconfirming to her his belief that this was most likely just a wild shot from someone with no business possessing a firearm. The deputy replaced the shattered mirror on the wall and they turned to leave. Bagwell tilted his head ever so slightly toward the door as he passed me. I trailed him out to their car.

  “Mr. Bragg,” he turned and said, “Do you have any reason to believe there’s more to this than what it looks like?”

  “I guess I don’t, Sheriff,” I said, giving him the response I knew he wanted.

  He kept his eyes on me for a moment. “I heard about some trouble you had with Bobby Paige,” he said. “You aren’t thinking this has something to do with that, are you?”

  “I don’t know Sheriff. You seem to know him, what do you think?”

  “I think of all the girls to hit on in Pickens County, I wouldn’t have picked his,” he said, and grinned. “Bobby Paige is somebody to shy wide of.”

  I started to tell him that I wasn’t “hitting” on anyone, but decided it would be wasted words. I was tired of talking to him.

  “I don’t think Paige did this,” Bagwell added, “but if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll see if he can account for himself at the time.”

  He tipped his hat to me, got into the car with the deputy, and drove away.

  I grilled the steaks as Eloise tossed the salads and made garlic toast with help from Mackenzie and Kelly. The dinner conversation was subdued. Grandfather’s funeral and the shot through the window worked like a dismal, ground-hugging fog that dampened most attempts at lighter topics. However, a rare steak was a welcome change from the covered-dish and hamburger diet I’d been on. The only thing missing was a good bottle of red wine. But when in Rome . . . or Still Hollow . . .

  After dinner, Mackenzie helped stack the dishes in the sink and then went to her room, leaving Eloise, Kelly, and me to sit over our coffees and make small talk. Kelly caught me staring at her more than once, but didn’t seem to mind. I wondered if she knew just how beautiful I thought she was. Or more importantly, if she even cared. Kelly went home, and Eloise and I stood on the front porch watching her leave. We went back inside and I caught Eloise looking at me.

  “In happier times I’d be pleased about this,” she said.

  “Pleased about what?”

  “You and Kelly. You two seem to fit.”

  “I don’t see why you think that,” I said. “I’m not even sure I like her.”

  She didn’t believe me, and her face showed it.

  “You’re a funny guy, brother of mine,” she said. “I’m going to bed. It’s been a long and sad day, with a scary ending.”

  After she left, I went outside and walked across the lawn to the edge of the woods again. I found a spot opposite the den that offered a clear angle of fire through the window at the old stuffed chair. I noticed that I couldn’t see the mirror from there. When I moved to a spot that revealed the mirror, I then couldn’t see the chair. I thought about that for a moment. It would be impossible to aim at one and hit the other, which gave credence to Sheriff Bagwell’s theory of an accident, a careless hunter with a stray shot or a kid out with his daddy’s rifle. Or was it a warning? Maybe Bobby Paige was trying to drive home a point.

  Something made me look at the mirror again. Not at the shattered glass, but at the reflection in it. The chair I was sitting in was perfectly framed there—the bullet hole squarely on a spot where my head would have been. Someone had nailed my reflection right between the eyes. A cold, invisible finger lightly touched a spot in the center of my forehead, and I went back inside. I didn’t buy a coincidence, and I couldn’t see Bobby Paige being that subtle if the shot was just meant to be a warning. Was it Carl Hood? I didn’t really know him. My thoughts shifted to the worse case scenario. Whoever it was thought they were shooting at me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Early the next morning, I set out for the South Carolina coast to try to talk to Melissa Raines in person. First, I called the hotel and asked for her room. They put me through, which was a good sign she was still a guest. I let it ring a half dozen times, but there was no answer.

  Litchfield Beach is located northeast of the old city of Georgetown, and just south of Myrtle Beach. I’d been there once, long ago. It was about a five-hour drive from Still Hollow, and I remembered it as a little less glitzy and crowded than Myrtle Beach, but still part of the South Carolina coast known as the Grand Strand. There were a few more high-rises since my last visit, but the place was basically unchanged. Hotels rose in multi-color pastels along the beach, interspersed with private beach houses, condos, sea oats and sand dunes.

  I rolled up in front of the Litchfield Beach Retreat around noon. It turned out to be posher than I expected. It looked beyond the means of a young working woman like Melissa Raines—another indication that she may have found a recent source of supplemental income.

  I went inside the lobby and called her room from a house phone and again, got no answer. I called her cell but she didn’t answer. I searched for her but couldn’t find her in the lobby shops or restaurant, so I followed the signs to the pool out back. A couple of septuagenarians swam laps in the pool, but the poolside chairs sat empty, a cloudy sky and an earl
ier downpour having removed the sun-worshippers from their race toward skin cancer.

  I circled the pool and headed through the board-lined gap in the dunes toward the gray-green waters of the Atlantic. Wooden stairs led down to the beach, and I stopped at the top of them to look for anyone who might be Melissa Raines. Far to the north, a lone woman walked the water’s edge, stooping to examine a shell or some bit of aquatic refuse washed up on the shore. Even from a distance, I could see from her wide, squat shape that she wasn’t Raines. Down the beach, a couple tossed a Frisbee, leaping and bounding after it like antelopes at play. Other than that, the weather had left the beach as deserted as the pool.

  Below me, a row of beach chairs with bright blue canopies sat facing the position of the sun from an earlier, less cloudy day. The canopies on all but one of them were folded back, and I could see that they were unoccupied. To find out if anyone was sitting in the chair with the canopy up, I needed to get closer.

  I descended the steps and plunged into the soft sand, my shoes sinking above the heels with each step, causing me to walk like a man with leg braces. I walked around the covered chair to surprise a swimsuit-clad couple as young as my niece, Mackenzie, locked in a tangle of arms and legs. After a flurry of exclamations of “hey man,” and “rude, dude,” I left them to their previous activities, and headed back to the stairs.

  Up by the dunes, the couple still tossed their Frisbee back and forth. The woman, a chubby little bleached-blond, was not Melissa. I watched as she awkwardly sailed the Frisbee over the man’s head and past a large red and white sign that said “STAY OUT.” It landed in the environmentally protected hillocks of dunes and sea oats beyond. The man stood looking into the dunes for a minute, then sign be damned, threw up his arms in frustration and went after the Frisbee. Suddenly he cried out and came stumbling back. He yelled several unintelligible words at the woman and leaned over and threw up in the sand between his feet. She looked as baffled at his reaction as I was.

  I made my way over in a stiff-legged gate, and looked past them into the dunes. The first thing I saw was a mound of crabs. Dozens of them. Small brown ones and larger orange and blue ones and some spidery things that maybe weren’t even crabs at all. The woman was screaming for someone to call 911, as I took a step closer for a better look. As I did, the crabs scattered and the mound became the exposed head of a young woman, half buried in the sand. Stringy wisps of long dark hair matted her brow, her eyes dark hollow sockets. The skin on her face—what was left of it—was cracked and crusty with grit. However, I could still see a fading yellow bruise underneath one sightless eye, and an old cut marring her lip. I had found Melissa Raines.

  The news media, when they showed up, left me alone. The Frisbee couple got the credit for finding the body and became the center of attraction. I slipped into the background and avoided any interviews, never revealing to anyone other than the cops why I was there.

  They took me away with silent stealth, which I didn’t mind at all, given the number of news vans that continued to arrive. I didn’t want the publicity. My rule was “always stay on the journalist’s side of a story.”

  For hours, members of the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Department, detectives from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), and an officer from the Litchfield Beach Security Police, hung on my every word. Even Sheriff Arlen Bagwell back in Pickens County got in on the act by conference call.

  Another way of saying this, was that I was held in a small windowless room at the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office for hours, with nothing to eat or drink since breakfast but bad coffee and crackers from a vending machine, while cops from one end of the state to the other fired questions at me.

  The medical examiner had an early estimation of the time of death as between one and three in the morning. A maid at the hotel saw Melissa Raines walking to the beach a little after midnight, wearing a light jacket, jeans and tennis shoes, like she was going for a nighttime walk on the beach. At first, a couple of hard-nosed, cynical detectives from SLED gave me a rough time over my alibi, but their attitudes improved as Sheriff Bagwell personally placed me at Still Hollow last night, and my sister swore that I didn’t leave the house until this morning. I provided a gas and toll receipt that showed I drove down today.

  Only then did they let me take a break and use the phone, but they still kept me on a short leash, limiting me to a single call. I called Eloise, giving her a quick account of what happened, how I was doing, and when I hoped to be home.

  Afterwards, they made me tell my story again, from the beginning. Why I came looking for Melissa Raines, who I thought was responsible for the old bruises on her face, and how and why I thought she was hiding out here. As to who may have killed her, I admitted that all I had were guesses, but told them that a list of my “people of interest” would include the names of Barry Beal, Bobby Paige and Carl Hood. They listened, stared, pondered, made notes, made calls, but said little in return. I got the feeling from snippets of conversation between them that they were leaning toward a stranger with evil urges, a good-looking woman, the middle of the night, and a deserted beach. They were waiting on a report to see if she’d been raped. The “random murder” conclusion was a familiar one, and I wondered if they were getting pointers from Sheriff Arlen Bagwell.

  They turned me loose at around six o’clock. Over a period of about four hours, I’d gone from being a “suspect” to a “witness with prior knowledge,” and was expected to make myself available for further contact. I left tired and hungry, but after a black coffee and a roast beef sandwich from a Georgetown deli, I got a second wind and headed for the upstate.

  Eloise was sitting up waiting for me when I returned. It was almost two a.m. I went over everything that had happened sequentially and in detail, with the exception of the crabs feeding on Melissa Raines’ face. I didn’t feel like describing that. I probably never would.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Monday morning the Greenville newspaper covered Melissa Raines’ murder on the front page with a four-paragraph lead; the rest of the story appeared on page three. The headline read, “Pickens County Woman Murdered at Beach.” Eloise and I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and sharing the paper. Mackenzie was still sleeping.

  A Dan and Gail Ferguson from Columbia, South Carolina, were credited with finding the body. My name wasn’t mentioned, for which I was thankful. A statement from the authorities said that the investigation was going as planned and they were following a number of significant leads. It was almost exactly what Sheriff Bagwell said to me when I talked to him about Grandfather’s murder; same BS, different murder.

  I pondered the end of Melissa Raines. At the risk of insensitivity to the greater tragedy of a lost human life, her death had all but eliminated any chance I had to prove that Barry Beal assaulted her, thus—the end of my story. But whether the cops believed me or not, Raines had to be part of a bigger story, I was convinced of it. So I’d not only lost the chance to prove Beal’s assault, I’d lost the chance to discover any iniquitous thing she knew about anything else.

  The phone rang. I answered it and was surprised to hear the voice of Joe Dennis, my editor at SportsWord.

  “How you doin’, buddy?” he asked.

  “Peachy, Joe, thanks for asking.”

  He asked me if we had received the flowers they sent. “Yes we did,” I said. “My sister and I both thank you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t just from me. The whole staff pitched in. Including Burt Lowe.”

  “That was thoughtful.”

  “Look, J.D., I hate to ask this, but can you get back here?

  “I thought I gave you enough material to get you through a couple of weeks,” I said.

  “It isn’t that. Lowe wants to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “All I know is he asked me to find out when you’re coming back.”

  “C’mon, Joe, give me a clue. What does he want?”

  I could hear him b
reathing, laboring over how to best answer.

  “It’s Barry Beal. He says you came and hassled him at the Masters, and now the cops want to talk to him about a girl they found dead over on the South Carolina coast. They said you gave them his name as someone to talk to. He went apeshit. His lawyer came to see Burt and now Burt wants to see you.”

  “Tell Burt I’ll be down there this afternoon,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean you had to come right this minute, John David,” he said. “Later in the week will do.”

  “No, I want to get this over with,” I said, as I pictured myself standing in an unemployment line. “It’s not your fault, Joe. I appreciate everything you’ve tried to do for me. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  I hung up and went upstairs to shower and change into my best getting-fired clothes. While in the shower I heard the phone ring again. Eloise or Mackenzie obviously picked it up because it only rang twice. For about a second I thought it might be Joe Dennis calling back to tell me I didn’t need to come as Lowe had second thoughts and said that people like Barry Beal didn’t run SportsWord. Yeah, right.

  I was sitting on my bed pulling on my shoes when there was a tap at my door.

  “Are you decent, John David?” Eloise asked, and poked her head into the room.

  “No,” I said, “but I am fully dressed.”

  My attempt at humor was lost on her. She seemed to have something more serious on her mind.

  “I want to talk to you about something and I’m not sure how you’ll react,” she said, as she sat down in a chair by the window.

  “Nothing you could say would provoke a bad reaction out of me, Eloise. You know you’re my favorite sister.”

  “I’m your only sister,” she said, adding her part to the old running joke we shared since kids.

  She took a deep breath, as if what she was going to say required more than the normal amount of air.