The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  “I know you want to sell the Clarion,” she said, “and I know you’re doing it for me. But would you consider selling just a part of it?”

  I wasn’t expecting that.

  “I don’t understand, Eloise, what do you mean?”

  “Kelly wants to buy in. She thinks we could turn the paper into a more profitable business.”

  “We, Eloise?” I said.

  “I know you want nothing to do with the paper, you’ve made that perfectly clear. I’m talking about Kelly and me, as managing partners—with your approval, of course. I don’t want to just sit out here and live off the income from a sale. Mackenzie will be off to college in a couple of years and then what would I do? I want to live a productive life, John David, and I want to earn it.”

  “Wow,” I said. “This comes as a huge surprise. “Does Kelly have the money?”

  “Inheritance,” Eloise said. “Quite a bit, I think. We could use some of it to pay down the debt, and some to make a few changes,” she said, her enthusiasm building.

  “Sounds to me like this isn’t just some spur of the moment idea,” I said.

  “We’ve been talking about it for several days,” she said. “Kelly has such great ideas. You know how Grandfather felt about advertising revenue—it was just a necessary evil to him and he never made it much of a priority. Kelly thinks she can double it. She also wants to add new sections and features that could build circulation, and put out a digital version of the paper. And I think I’d like to try my hand at writing some articles. You weren’t the only one to major in journalism, you know.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time I saw my sister this excited. I stifled a grin for fear that she would mistake my sudden flood of emotion for her as a rebuke of the idea.

  “Granddad left the Clarion to you, John David, and if you think it’s a bad idea . . .”

  I didn’t know what to think. But I couldn’t dash cold water on her enthusiasm, so I said, “I think the thing to do is for the three of us to sit down and discuss it. It just might work.”

  She seemed pleased with that, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Good. Kelly’s on her way out here.”

  “So, what do you think of our idea,” Kelly Mayfield asked me, as we sat in the den with fresh cups of coffee in our hands.

  “Well, on the face of it, it’s an intriguing idea,” I said. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. I really didn’t expect something like this.”

  Kelly gave me with a steely gaze. “So, does that mean your initial reaction isn’t positive?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just need to think about it. We should get some market research and numbers on the future of small town newspapers; talk to lawyers and the bank about things; look at the costs of capital investments. You know, due diligence.”

  I wondered if I was fooling them into believing that I knew what I was talking about—because I didn’t. More than anything I was stalling for more time to think about it.

  “So, let’s move ahead,” I said. “If it’s the best thing for Eloise and Mackenzie, that should prove itself. That’s what I care about most.” Kelly smiled at me. Something I wasn’t accustomed to. I liked it.

  That conversation over, she took a pad and a pen out of her purse, and said, “I wouldn’t be much of a reporter if I didn’t ask you about this Raines woman, and why you went to the coast looking for her? I understand you were there when the body was found. Is that right?”

  Eloise must have told her. It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling to suddenly be on the answering side of a reporter’s questions.

  “Yes,” I finally said, looking at Eloise.

  She gave me an “I’m sorry” look and shrugged.

  “What do you already know about it?” I asked Kelly, getting a question of my own into the mix.

  “I know you wanted to talk to her about a story you’re working on. I know it involves an assault by the golfer, Barry Beal.”

  “Alleged assault,” I said. “Now that she’s gone, there’s no way to prove it. So, I’d be careful about using Barry Beal’s name in anything you print. He likes to sue people.”

  “Was Garnet involved in this in any way?” she asked.

  I took a moment to answer, unsure of how much I wanted to tell her.

  “Grandfather was helping me locate her,” I said. “I’m going to have to leave it at that for the time being. I’ve been summoned back to Atlanta today for a meeting at SportsWord, so I need to get going.”

  I turned to Eloise. “I’m sorry to spring this on you, sis, but I just got the call. That’s why I showered and changed clothes. I’ll return tonight.”

  “Sounds like you could use someone to keep you company,” Kelly said. “Mind if I tag along?”

  The question surprised me until I realized that what she really wanted was to keep questioning me, and several hours stuck in a car together would give her that opportunity. I thought about it for a moment. There were worse travel companions. I found myself agreeing to her request, a mistake probably, but as the old joke goes, at the time I might have been thinking with the wrong head.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Kelly climbed into the Jeep, buckled up, and looked around the interior. “My brother had one of these,” she said, “but it had a soft top. The wind always whistled through it.”

  “The hard top is optional,” I said. “I bought the Jeep used and it came with it. And it doesn’t whistle.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  I didn’t think the hard top made any difference in what she thought of it. You could dress them up, but they still rode like Jeeps. I could see her imagining a six-hour round trip in it.

  “Still time to change your mind,” I said, smiling.

  She smiled back. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Then wagons ho,” I said, and we drove away.

  Several miles west on highway 11, I told her I was going to make a quick side trip into Eastatoe Valley. I explained that I needed to take a look at something there, and promised we’d be back on the road to Atlanta in fifteen minutes, tops.

  “Fine by me,” she said, giving me a puzzled look.

  I slowed down and turned right on Eastatoe Creek Road, the western entrance into the valley. As we came to Cecil Hood’s farm I pulled over and stopped by the gate. The chain and padlock were gone.

  “I’ll just be a couple of minutes,” I said, before walking up the drive.

  The place looked even more deserted than before. A peek through a window showed the rooms were totally bare. The garage stood wide open and empty. If a white Dodge Ram pickup was ever parked inside, it was gone now.

  I examined the tire tracks coming in and out of the garage. They looked to be all the same tread, and wider than a normal passenger car. It could have been a pickup truck, I supposed, but what did I know? A modern day Kit Carson, I wasn’t. The only thing I could detect from the scene was that Carl Hood was gone, and he probably wasn’t coming back.

  “Nobody home,” I said when I got back to the Jeep.

  “When are you going to stop treating me like an idiot?” Kelly said, as we drove off.

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  “This is Cecil Hood’s farm. His name is on the mailbox. What are you looking for at a dead man’s house?”

  “A white pickup truck,” I said.

  “And this pickup truck is important to you how?” she asked.

  I sat and watched the landscape flow by the window for a moment. In for a penny, in for a pound, I decided. After bringing up the white pickup, I didn’t see any way I could avoid offering an explanation, especially with someone like Kelly Mayfield.

  “Someone driving a late model white Dodge Ram pickup has been following me.”

  “Well, we know it wasn’t Cecil Hood,” she said. “So I’m assuming you think it was his son Carl, the ex-con. Why would he be following you?”

  “I don’t know for certain that he is,” I said. “I’m going through a process o
f elimination. Whoever drives a white Dodge Ram pickup gets tagged. I’ll tackle the why when I’ve solved the who.”

  I could almost see the questions sprouting behind her pretty, but now wrinkled, brow.

  “Why would anyone follow you?” she asked. “And why would you think it might be Carl Hood? You mentioned a ‘process of elimination.’ Who else is on the list? What’s going on here, John David?” The questions came out in rapid succession.

  “I keep forgetting you’re a reporter,” I said, looking across the seat at her.

  “Was I grilling you?”

  “Like a grouper filet.”

  “Well, I am a reporter. I can’t help it. So, answer my question. Why is someone is following you?”

  “Because someone wants to know what I’m up to. I don’t believe Grandfather was killed in the course of a simple robbery. I think he knew, or at least he suspected, that Cecil Hood’s accidental death was really a murder. And knowing—or suspecting that—got him killed. The robbery was just a cover up. Now the killer is trying to see if I’m following in his footsteps.

  She stared across the seat at me for a long time before she spoke. “Assuming you aren’t in the throes of a paranoid episode,” she finally said, “what proof do you have for any of this?

  “To quote a line from Catch-22,” I said, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”

  “Do you have proof or not?” she asked again.

  “There are different kinds of proof,” I said. “The kind you need in a court of law, what you need for validation to go to press on a news story, and what you need to simply believe in something. All I have is the latter.”

  I filled her in on everything. Barry Beal’s alleged assault on Melissa Raines and getting Grandfather involved. I laid out the steps of Cecil Hood’s convenient death and Carl Hood’s background and windfall. I told her about my fight with Bobby Paige and how he tried to run me out of town. We were well beyond the Lake Hartwell Bridge on I-85 and deep into Georgia before I was done.

  “Everything that’s happened leads back to Barry Beal’s development in Eastatoe Valley,” I said. “The only part I haven’t been able to connect to the development is Bobby Paige, but I’m convinced he’s involved somehow.”

  “The shot through the window last night,” she said, “you don’t think it was an accident do you? I saw it on your and Eloise’s faces.”

  “I think the only accidental thing about it was that they shot my reflection in the mirror instead of me.”

  I told her what I’d discovered on my second trip behind the house.

  “Have you told Sheriff Bagwell any of this?” she asked.

  “You sound like Eloise,” I said. “Bagwell has meth-heads on the brain and isn’t looking anywhere else. He thinks I’m a family-size box of fruit loops. The next time I talk to him it will be with something he can’t ignore, something concrete.”

  “What can I do to help?” she asked.

  I was flattered that she thought enough of my baseless theories to join in. Her respect obviously meant more to me than I realized.

  “Nothing,” I told her. “You shouldn’t get involved.”

  “You would have to be insane to think I’d stay out of this,” she said.

  The determination in her face defeated any argument I could come up with. I had a partner whether I wanted one or not. But hadn't I known this would eventuate when I decided to tell her everything? I would ponder my reasons for that decision later.

  “We start with Carl Hood,” I said. “I want to know if he’s the one driving that white Dodge Ram pickup. To do that, we need to find out where he lives in Atlanta and go look.”

  She fished a cell phone from her purse and I listened as she called Doris at the Clarion and asked her to pull up the file on Cecil Hood’s obituary.

  While she waited, she said, “If Carl Hood submitted information for the obit, we will have his address.”

  She turned her attention back to the call, listened for a moment then hung up grinned at me.

  “Peachtree Villa Apartments, Peachtree Street NW, apartment 3C,” she said.

  When she put her phone up, I reached into my pocket and retrieved the note page I'd found on Grandfather's desk at the Clarion.

  “I found this in Grandfather’s office,” I said, holding up the page for her to see. “They’re notes from his search for Melissa Raines. He has a list of hotels here that helped me find her, and Carl Hood’s name and number, which is what put me on to him. But there’s one thing I haven’t been able to decipher, the letters, or initials, WS. Do you have any idea what that stands for?”

  “I don’t know. Website? Although I doubt that, as Garnet was practically computer illiterate. There’s W.S. Merwin, a contemporary American poet I studied at Smith, but I don’t think Garnet would have liked him. Do you think it’s important?”

  “It was right in the middle of all this other stuff, which he wrote down on the afternoon that he died.”

  “Maybe there’s something in his address book,” Kelly said. “I’ll check when I get back. Perhaps after your meeting, we can swing by Carl Hood’s place.”

  As the mile markers on I-85 flew by, we fell into a pattern of small talk, spaced with comfortable silences. She learned that I had a hard time hanging onto jobs and girlfriends, and I learned that she was born in a small town in the North Carolina tobacco country, and joined the Clarion after seven years at the Charlotte Observer. I had the feeling there was a personal, and possibly ill-fated romantic reason why she left a major newspaper for a small weekly in Podunk. But she didn’t say, and I didn’t pry.

  She was brainy, but bore her intelligence with a self-deprecatory style that came off as anything but pretentious. I found myself liking her as a person. God knows I already liked how she looked. In fact, every time I could steal a glance at her, I noticed something new to like. A tiny scar at the corner of her mouth that dimpled when she smiled, the lone amber freckle on the tip of her nose, the visible rhythm of heartbeat in her slender throat. I was sitting there having some extraordinarily embarrassing thoughts, all of them involving reaching across the seat and grabbing her, when the skyline of Atlanta appeared on the horizon, and the traffic around us began to slow and stack up. We both gazed at the road ahead for a while, lost in our own thoughts.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  When we reached the offices of SportsWord, I pointed Kelly toward the lobby and hung around long enough to watch her select a magazine from a table, test the softness of a sofa, and settle in to wait for me. Out of everything I had told her, I omitted how badly I expected the meeting with Burt Lowe to go, probably because I was embarrassed to have her see me in such a predicament. When did I start worrying about what she thought of me?

  Upstairs, Burt Lowe’s secretary, Lydia Wells, barely glanced at me before motioning me into her boss’s office. Lowe, the magazine’s legal counsel, Stan Gilmore, and Joe Dennis were waiting for me, their faces grave.

  “Hey, hey, the gang’s all here,” I said, taking a seat across the desk from Lowe.

  I got nothing back but somber looks and silence. Whatever I was about to be charged with, I could already see that I’d been tried, convicted, and sentenced, with no chance of reprieve.

  “I’d like a cheeseburger, large fries, and an Eskimo pie if you’re taking last requests,” I said. “And make sure to honor my organ donor card after I’m gone.”

  “I see no humor in the situation, John David,” Lowe said.

  “No shit,” I offered.

  Burt Lowe shifted to a tragic face. “John David,” he said, “allow me to extend, on behalf of the magazine and all of us, our heartfelt sympathies for your recent loss.”

  Gilmore and Dennis nodded in solemn accord.

  “I appreciate that Burt, I really do, but I’m assuming you didn’t ask me to come all this way just to tell me that.”

  Lowe’s face colored, and the tragic look disappeared.

  “Okay. We�
��ll get straight to the business at hand if that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t think this meeting has much to do with what I want, does it?”

  “Oh, but it does. We’re here because you always do exactly what you want, with no regard to the wishes of others. And for that, we are terminating your employment, effective immediately.”

  Lowe looked at Joe Dennis for support, but Joe sat with his gaze glued to the floor.

  “You wouldn’t listen, would you?” Stan Gilmore said, slowly shaking his head. “You had to go to Augusta and rile up Barry Beal, and now you’ve mentioned his name as a suspect for this Raines woman’s murder—for which he has an iron-clad alibi. You have placed this entire corporation in jeopardy.”

  I waited for a wellspring of anger to boil over, with clever, biting words sailing off my tongue like poisoned arrows to impale the hearts of all three of them, but I suddenly lacked the energy. I knew this could have happened if I kept at the story, but I’d pushed that into a corner and pulled a rug over it. Now that the moment was here, I found I simply didn’t care. In fact, a part of me was relieved to be free of them.

  “We have a very generous severance package for you,” Lowe said. “More than policy requires. But before we get into the details of that, there are a few papers to sign.”

  He pushed several contract-size documents toward my side of the desk.

  “This is to protect the magazine if you continue to pursue this Beal foolishness,” Stan Gilmore piped in. “Since our earlier warnings went completely unheeded, you should understand our reasons for wanting this.”

  I looked at Joe Dennis, who as yet, hadn’t uttered a word.

  “It’s a good severance, John David” he said, his voice resigned. “But if you don’t sign, you don’t get it.”

  Gilmore assured me, in a rehearsed tone, that the magazine’s problem with me was never the quality of my work, but my unwillingness to embrace company dictates and policy—which resulted in irrevocable philosophical differences, etcetera, etcetera. I knew this was meant to cover their legal butts with an officially stated reason for my termination. I’d been there before.