“And this obvious pattern you speak of would be when she began to raise her breed mixtures?”
“Well, yes and no. It actually began before that, when I allowed her to have her own dogs. She preferred large breeds, so we adopted a German Shepherd from the place in Asheville.”
“Like the Humane Society or SPCA?” I said.
“Something like that. They rescued dogs and we went over there to find her a suitable pet. I wanted a smaller breed, but she fell in love with that large Shepherd. He was fully grown when we brought him home. At least I thought he was fully grown. He grew a lot more under K.C.’s care and attention. Anyway, the dog loved her as much as she loved the dog.”
“So what was the problem with her classmates concerning all of this?” Starnes asked.
“The kids in her school began to make fun of her because she could control any animal close to her. She could talk to the animals and they would stop and listen. They would obey her or they would run away from her. I imagine the children had never seen anyone do that with dogs and cats and whatever animal was around. So instead of making friends and being accepted, they made fun of her. She was weird, too weird to be accepted.”
“Kids can be cruel,” Starnes said.
“More than you can imagine. I tried to tell her to stop showing off with the animals, but she wouldn’t listen. Then, out of nowhere, and I knew this was going to happen, Rufus approached her one day and he up and tells her that he likes her.”
“She told you this or you saw this in a vision?” I said.
“I had a vision. I didn’t tell her that I had a vision, at least not at first. I simply warned her against believing Rufus or any of the kids. She had told me of their reactions to her abilities with the animals. But she did tell me that Rufus had a change of heart and that he no longer preferred Dottie. I tried to warn her about how changeable kids can be, but I couldn’t get her to believe me. Her infatuation with him was strong, very, very strong. You know how those things can be,” she said.
“Yeah,” Starnes said almost too quickly, as if she was remembering a bad experience once upon a time.
“She wrote Rufus a note; you know how kids are at that age. She passed him a note at school that asked him to meet her not far from here. She didn’t want him to come here, besides I had a reputation even back then. I suppose it didn’t do poor little K.C. much good that I was her guardian, that weird old woman who had the sight.”
“But if you saw something that was going to happen, why didn’t you stop her?” I said.
“What I saw was only a partial vision, which is often the case. What I saw in the vision was Rufus telling her that he didn’t like her as a girlfriend.”
“And that’s not all that happened,” I said.
“No.”
I could see Aunt Jo’s eyes water and then a tear trickled down her cheek. The memory was distant. The emotion was still present.
“When she came home that evening after she was to meet him, her clothes were torn and she had been crying. At first she wouldn’t tell me what had happened. She went straight to her room and was lying on the bed. I sat down next to her and we talked. I told her that I knew that Rufus had rejected her as a girlfriend. She asked me how I knew that, and I told her that I had seen it happen. She already knew that I had the sight, but she was surprised at my statement. She wanted to know why I had not told her that this was going to happen. I told her that it was sometimes necessary for children to experience some pain in growing, that a little pain made us strong. I remember that she sat up when I had offered my parental insight into her dilemma. She told me that there were others there besides Rufus. She said that Dottie and Randall Lee were also there. They had been hiding in the trees near some mailboxes.”
More tears ran down her cheeks and fell into her lap. I could feel some of her pain across the small room.
“Did she tell you what happened?” I said.
“Yes, and to this day I wish that she had not. It was hard for me to hear what she told me that they had done to her. Hard to believe that these 5th graders, ten and eleven-year-old children, would do such a thing to another child, and her being a little older. But I guess that age doesn’t really matter so much or at least the age difference between fifth and sixth graders. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Starnes and I waited while Aunt Jo gathered herself from the emotion that stopped her from telling us what had transpired. The two reasons I had for wanting her to continue were that I knew it was good therapy for Josephine Starling to share this story with someone who would care. The other reason was that I wanted to know what had compelled K.C. Higgins to murder all of those people since I now believed that she was behind all of the gruesome events of the last several weeks. I needed to know what possible motive was behind such horrible actions on her part.
“Her clothing was torn, like I told you, and when I asked about that, she said that they jumped on her and pinned her to the ground. The two boys did that. She said all the while they did that, they were laughing at her and calling her names. They told her to call the animals and get them to come and protect her. Get them to defend her since she had such special powers over them. While she was pinned down by Rufus and Randall Lee, Dottie took off all of her clothes and ran off with them. You can imagine that K.C. had lots of conflicting feelings about this—embarrassed, angry, hurt, and rejected by the one she thought might actually like her.”
“So, apparently, she tracked down her clothes,” I said.
“That’s the strange part of the story that I couldn’t piece together. When the boys let her up, she told me that they ran off in the opposite direction from the direction which Dottie had run with her clothes. K.C. ran after Dottie trying to get her clothes back. Running naked outdoors was not foreign to her in light of her early childhood before I found her, but since she had not done this to my knowledge since she had come to live with me, I think she somehow realized that what was happening was not a good thing.”
“She found Dottie and got her clothes back,” I said.
“She found Dottie who was walking along the road. She would have caught up with her, but a car showed up and stopped. K.C. said that she jumped into the woods by the road and watched Dottie give the clothes to whoever was in the car. Then Dottie went on down the road. The car was coming towards K.C. who was still hiding in the bushes. She knew that she could not walk home naked like she was, so she said that she yelled at the car when it came by her moving slowly. The driver seemed to be looking for her. The driver was Hack Ponder.”
“Well,” I said.
“She was still hiding behind whatever she could find and she told him what had happened. Since Old Hack was a SOB from the day he was born, he wasn’t going to let her simply have her clothing and drive off. He made her come out from her hiding place and dress right there on the road in front of him. Then he told her to get into the car, that he would drive her home.”
“And she trusted him,” I said.
“Since he had been a substitute teacher for the class, she did. She said he drove on a little ways, and then he turned off that dirt road and followed a wide path down to the river. The short version of this is that he tried to rape her under the guise of comfort and understanding. If you ask me to feel sorry that Hack Ponder is dead, then you are most certainly asking the wrong person for sympathy.”
“I understand that,” I said. “But somehow she got away from Hack.”
“Only because the guy was a fool and a clumsy man. He made her start taking off her clothes again and while she was doing that, he started taking off his clothes. K.C. knew enough to understand that something bad was happening and that she wanted no part of it. She did the only thing she could’ve done under the circumstances. She waited for the right moment, and then she grabbed her clothing and escaped from his car by running as fast as she could. She easily outran him. She told me that she ran all the way home from the river, about 3 miles from here. Probably walked the last half
mile, just enough time to stop crying and allow her anger to overtake her.”
“She ever talk about this with you again?” Starnes said.
“Never. She never mentioned Rufus, or Randall Lee, or Dottie. We did talk about Hack Ponder again, but not that first incident.”
“First?” I said.
“Yeah, he did something to her later that fall and she hit him. Knocked him on his backside. They suspended her for three days because of it.”
“She ever tell you what he did that caused her to react that way?” I said.
“No, she never did. There were no officials around when it happened, so there was no one to explain, at least not to me. But I knew that Hack Ponder had some serious issues, but he was so well connected … you know, I never expected anything to be done to him.”
“But here’s the thing … she had these horrible events in her life and she lived with those horrible memories from 1984 until now. What happened to cause her to explode? What was it that lit her fuse? In other words, why now and not years earlier?” I asked trying to understand.
“My birthday was in early January. She wanted to do something special for me, so she took me to Asheville for a supper, some fancy restaurant that she had heard about and wanted us to go experience it. I don’t generally do such things, but she insisted. On the way home I happened to mention that I needed some light bulbs since I had several to be replaced. We stopped at Walmart. We happened to run into Randall Lee Carter there. He was talking with her about the good old days; that’s what he called them, life in school. He was doing most of the talking as I recall. Then, of all things, he mentioned that day the four of them met on Old Fox Road. He started laughing about it, as if it was the funniest story he could remember from grade school. I had walked away from the conversation to allow them to talk, but I didn’t go so far that I couldn’t hear what was being said. I had moved down the long isle and pretended to be looking at something on the shelf. I pretended that I wasn’t paying attention to them, but now and again I would look at K.C. I wanted to see what her reaction was to his remembering. She wasn’t laughing. Rufus even said something about pretending to like Dottie back then. He laughed again. He was a strange man, that’s all I can tell you. I don’t know what to tell you about what I saw, but it seemed that K.C. was mulling something over while he was talking and laughing about those days in school and that particular incident at the mailboxes. Maybe he didn’t know what had happened after he and Rufus had run away.”
“You mean the Hack Ponder part of the story?” I said.
“Yeah, that part. We had a lovely time that evening. We both enjoyed it. The food and the company, you know, us together. We didn’t do much of that when she lived with me. Didn’t have the money to do that. But it was nice that evening, nice until we ran into Randall Lee. The talking and his laughter. She changed. Something happened inside of her, I suspect. All I can say is that she was different from that point on.”
“And that’s what you believe to be the trigger,” I said.
“That experience … and Randall Lee mentioned to K.C. that Dottie lived on Old Fox Road and he thought that was irony or such. It was funny to him that she ended up there since that was such a funny thing that had happened, them taking K.C.’s clothes and all. Then Randall Lee just walked away laughing. Maybe she believed he was still laughing at that gangly, weird sixth grade girl she had been back then.”
60
Josephine Starling refused to tell us where K.C. Higgins might be hiding out. I understood her reticence. Hard for a parent, even a surrogate one, to hand over their child, someone they had raised and nurtured for nearly two decades. If they had any feeling at all for them, any kind of love, then what Starnes and I needed from her was simply asking too much.
“Got any suggestions now?” I said as we were just passing the turnoff for Old Fox Road en route to our return to Starnes’ place.
“Stop the car,” Starnes said.
I pulled over to the side of the graveled road but left the motor running.
“Whattaya thinking?”
“We’re right here at Old Fox Road. Let me show you something. Back up and turn right,” she ordered me.
“How far are we from the river if we are on Old Fox Road?” I asked.
“Depends on which end of Old Fox Road you happen to be on.”
“Can we have a look-see?”
“A look-see.”
“Yeah, let’s have a look-see,” I said as I back up my Jeep and turned down Old Fox Road. It was yet one more graveled road in McAdams County. There were plenty of them for sure. I drove us down maybe a mile or so. I then noticed a long set of old mailboxes on the left hand side.
I slowed and stopped to have a closer look.
“Is this where it happened?” I asked.
“Probably. And probably hasn’t changed much in the last three decades.”
“Those mailboxes do have the appearance of some age about them.”
I moved the Jeep over to the side straddling a ditch opposite the row of mailboxes. I turned off the engine.
“I want a closer look-see,” I said.
“You and your expressions,” she said as she reluctantly climbed out of the Jeep.
We walked across the graveled road. One of the mailboxes belonged to Dottie Higgins. I walked slowly along the row examining each of the boxes.
“You lookin’ for something?” Starnes said.
“Always.”
“Anything in particular?”
I raised my arm and started to answer, but she beat me to the punch line.
“… you’ll know when you see it…yeah, I get that. You detectives, I swear … I’m not sure how you keep doing what you do. I have to have facts, evidence, something tangible with which to work. How do you just go out and look around until you find something?”
“Rhetorical question?”
“I’m just venting here. Frustrated by all of this … what do I call it? … Conjecture?”
“Whatever you want to call it…,” I stopped and read the name on the mailbox. It was the last mailbox in the row.
“Whatcha got?” Starnes said as she moved towards me. She was hobbling a little from her still fresh injuries. I figured she was yet sporting a lot of pain.
“A clue.”
“Oh, great. What is it this time?”
“A name.”
“Figures,” she said as she stopped next to me and looked at the box. “It’s what you expect to see on many-a mailbox.”
I pointed to the name on top as I looked at her.
“So,” Starnes said, “he lives out here. Gotta live somewhere.”
“First rule of detective school is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.”
Deputy Sheriff Walt Stanton’s name was printed on the last mailbox in large, block letters. His name was on top of another name. The second name was in much smaller letters but also in a block type print. The second name actually was covering an older, faded name on the box. I pointed to the second name. Benjamin Bevel.
“Okay, so they live together. Like I said about Walt’s name, people have to live somewhere,” Starnes said still pleading her case for coincidences.
“Can you make out that faded name underneath Ben’s more recently added name?” I said.
Starnes moved closer and studied the mailbox. It took her a few minutes since she was much more cautious about examining things. I saw it immediately, but then, I’ve been doing this kind of snooping around and finding out things a little longer than Starnes.
“Damn,” she said finally.
“Yeah. How ‘bout that?”
“Well, it doesn’t prove anything.”
“No, but it makes me more suspicious than a few moments ago, the moments before I read it,” I said.
“There’s that,” she admitted.
“Yeah, there’s that.”
The faded name on the mailbox on Old Fox Road was Hack Ponder. It was almost completely covered over by
Ben Bevel’s name. Almost completely, just not enough for someone like me when paying close attention to the nearly faded markings from some time ago.
I called Rogers and asked her to do some property searches. She said she’d call me back as soon as she found something.
“How far are we from the river here?” I said as we stood in front of the row of old mailboxes. Some of the boxes had been replaced, but three or more looked as if they had been around a long time receiving mail, giving mail, and providing a marquee for this remotely rural spot.
“It’s less than a mile that direction,” Starnes said pointing directly behind the boxes heading off in what I guessed to be a southward direction.
“You up for a walk across the field toward the river?” I said.
“I can manage. And the reason to walk to the river would be…?”
“To see what we can see.”
“Don’t be cryptic with me. I’ve known you long enough to know that you are up to something. I just want to know what it is you are getting me involved with during my time of convalescence,” Starnes said.
My cell rang before I had to answer her query. It was Rogers.
“The persons of record for that property are Walter Stanton and Benjamin Bevel. Joint owners. They purchased the house and ten acres from Stephen Zackary “Hack” Ponder. They bought the place five years ago. Ponder had been given the place by his grandmother Genevieve Chandler in 1980. It would seem that he had owned that property ever since that gift … until he finally sold it to Stanton and Bevel. Does that help?”
“Yeah.”
I told Starnes what Rogers had discovered.
“Another clue, right?”
“Major one.”
“So, you’re thinking ... what?” Starnes said.
“Too many connections that do not naturally fit our equation. What if Hack Ponder had some type of deal with Stanton and Bevel in regards to K.C. Higgins?”
Outcast In Gray Page 30
