The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Edith gave him a skeptical look. “Won’t that let daylight in on the majesty?”

  “That I answer the door myself?” Bill smiled. “I’m hoping that if I let her in after she sees the house, she’ll be impressed by my unspoiled humility.”

  “Oh, right,” said Edith. “Unspoiled humility. That’s you. Well, if you don’t need me to polish your halo, I’ll just go back to typing up the bills.”

  Bill waved her away. “I can handle the clients, but if any more of Geoffrey’s workmen show up in coveralls, carrying paint cans or wallpaper rolls, you deal with them!”

  Danville had changed a lot in forty-odd years. Hillman Randolph studied the fleeting landscapes as he drove along the road that led to the Dolan place. There were just enough familiar landmarks to reassure him that he wasn’t lost. It had been a long drive up from Georgia, and a tiring one for a man his age, but perhaps the most tiring part of the journey had been forcing himself to remember the last time he’d been in Danville: 1953. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall that night with any clarity. By the time he woke up days later in the burn center of Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, he was too ill to be questioned, and too consumed with pain for rational thought. He had been fortunate that his accident was south of Danville, only an hour away from Duke University’s excellent medical facilities. Otherwise he wouldn’t have survived at all. Even with the best treatment available, it had been a near thing, and it had taken all the strength of his young body to pull him through. Sometimes he mused on the irony of the great efforts expended to save him. If the law enforcement people had known who he really was—or more precisely who he wasn’t—would they have tried so hard to save him?

  Somehow, between the pain, the sedatives, and the reconstructive therapy, he had let himself become the man they mistook him for, and his own past slid away into a blur of confused images. The only thing that stood out with any clarity was the memory of Jack Dolan, who was supposed to be dead, just as he had been presumed dead. In a way he was, he thought. Maybe the real Hillman Randolph had died in Danville that night, but after all, it was his life that continued, even if a stand-in was now playing the part. First fear and then apathy had kept him from returning to Virginia, and soon his old life had become part of the mists. Until now. Whatever happened, whether they arrested him or not, he was going back. Jack Dolan was still alive.

  Carla Larkin’s pretty face had hardened into a sullen glare. “All right,” she told her partner. “I made the phone call like you asked me to, but I still don’t see why we’re doing this. I mean, what have you got against this guy? It’s not like he’s some leering old drunk in a roadhouse. The guy I called is just minding his own business, working in his own office, so what’s the point of hitting on him?”

  P. J. Purdue shrugged. “He’s male, isn’t he? Besides, he’s not important.”

  “Then why do I have to do it?” asked Carla. “When I bought the handcuffs, you said one more, right? And so when we got gas at that truck stop on I-81, I picked up that big guy in the Kenworth. He was practically drooling into my coffee, and he propositioned me. So, okay, he had it coming, and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when his buddies found him naked, handcuffed to his steering wheel, but I thought we agreed that we were going to quit. As soon as the cops talk to that trucker, they’ll know who we are and what state we’re in. Sooner or later they’ll track us down.”

  “Not if we keep moving.” Purdue was sitting in the driver’s seat, eating a hamburger out of a paper wrapper. She looked tired, and in need of a bath and a change of clothes, but the look in her eyes said that they wouldn’t be taking a break yet.

  “I don’t want to go back to prison,” said Carla in a small voice. “You’re a rich kid with a law degree. You can probably talk your way into probation, but when they catch me, they’ll lock me up for good. Or at least until I’m old and ugly, which is the same thing. After that, no matter where I am, it’ll be prison.”

  P. J. Purdue opened a road map. “This time tomorrow we can be in Canada,” she said. “I promise, Carla. I promise.”

  Geoffrey Chandler never thought that he would owe his life to Louis L’Amour. Ordinarily he was not an admirer of Western novels—he wasn’t even sure that he’d ever read one—but this time he had been desperate. He had an eight-hour drive ahead of him, and he was already tired when he started. Elizabeth, under the influence of her sedative, had fallen asleep within a few miles of leaving the parking lot at Cherry Hill, so there was no hope of having conversation to keep him awake.

  Geoffrey stopped at a diner to get coffee—although he conceded that coffee could be a time waster on a long drive, since you do not buy coffee, you only rent it. On the counter beside the breath mints was a box of used audio books, a trucker’s lending library, he gathered: something to do with your mind when all the roads began to look the same.

  After carefully inspecting the tapes on offer and rejecting glitzy love stories and self-help tapes, Geoffrey decided to ride the asphalt trail with Louis L’Amour. He reasoned that forcing himself to concentrate on a spoken narrative would keep him awake, while soothing music from the radio would have the opposite effect. With a bag full of Louies and a couple of candy bars for good measure, Geoffrey climbed back into the car and headed north up I-77.

  He thought about calling Bill to warn him of their impending arrival, but after rehearsing several versions of the conversation in his mind, he could think of no explanation that did not make it sound as if he belonged in Cherry Hill as well as Elizabeth. Besides, Bill had been so relieved to see him go that Geoffrey hated to disappoint him by announcing that he was, in fact, returning.

  As the car began to pick up speed, Elizabeth stirred in her sleep. “Where are we?” she murmured, stifling a yawn.

  Geoffrey sighed and pushed the first tape into the dashboard cassette player. “Back in the saddle again, podnuh.”

  Bill MacPherson opened the door with a tentative smile, in case he encountered a door-to-door evangelist instead of a prospective client. The smile froze when he saw the scarred face of an elderly man glaring back at him instead of the attractive young woman that the voice on the phone had seemed to promise.

  “May I help you?” said Bill when he trusted himself to speak.

  “I’m looking for Jack Dolan,” the man said, peering past Bill as if he hoped to catch a glimpse of him.

  “Well, he’s around someplace,” said Bill. “Probably in one of the outbuildings, pottering around. He usually turns up at mealtimes, though. Are you a friend of his?”

  “We go back a long way,” said the scarred man. “The outbuilding, you said? Don’t trouble yourself. I can find them. Place hasn’t changed much.” He turned away before Bill could ask him anything else.

  Bill would have caught up with the man, to help him search for the elusive Mr. Jack, but before he could make up his mind to do so, another car swung into the circular drive, and Bill recognized the driver. At least, the long blonde hair and the lovely youthful face certainly matched his impression of the telephone voice of his prospective client. He hurried over to the car.

  “Hello!” he said with a much more genuine smile. “I’m Bill MacPherson. Did you call just a little while ago?”

  As she slid out of the car, the young woman returned his smile. She was wearing a short skirt with a twinset and a string of pearls, and she might have been anyone from a swimsuit model to a brain surgeon. Bill hardly cared. His instincts for gallantry were roused. She was so lovely that he decided to take her case no matter what. “I did call you,” she said. “You just have to do something about my car.”

  “Umm … I’m an attorney,” said Bill. He sounded regretful, as if he considered his years in law school a complete waste of time if what this enchanting creature actually needed was an auto mechanic.

  “Well, of course you are!” she said, laughing up at him as if that were the wittiest thing anyone had ever said. “And I want you to go after the mechanic that ch
arged me a fortune and then ruined my engine. Did you hear that noise it was making as I drove in?”

  Bill shook his head. His senses at the time had been focused on vision rather than sound. “I’m not sure I could tell anything if I did,” he admitted. “But that’s okay. We can get expert witnesses. Why don’t you come inside where I can take notes, and tell me what the problem is?”

  She shook her head. “I’d be just hopeless at trying to explain mechanical problems. Let me take you for a spin, and you listen to the engine, and then I’ll answer all your questions—if I can, that is.” She unsheathed another dazzling smile. “You’re not afraid of being kidnapped, are you?”

  “Of course not!” said Bill, without putting his brain in gear. As he got into the passenger seat of the woman’s car, he found himself thinking about his old roommate Milo Gordon for the first time in months.

  There was only one chair in the outbuilding that served as a storage shed for the big house. It was a battered aluminum lawn chair, whose webbing had begun to fray, so that sitting down in it was a form of gambling. When none of his guests expressed an interest in pushing their luck, Jack Dolan himself sat down in it, with his back to the one bare lightbulb dangling from an insulated wire in the rafters. Three men squatted in the dirt in front of him, getting up occasionally to stretch their legs—they weren’t what you’d call young, either, but compared to Old Man Dolan, they were teenagers. One of them wore jeans and a plaid shirt, but the other two were in shirts and ties. They looked as if they knew how out of place they were in a storage shed, but nobody spoke. They waited politely while the ancient man in the lawn chair picked up a mason jar full of colorless liquid, unscrewed the lid, and passed it to one of his guests.

  Dutifully, the man took a swig, wheezed, and handed it off to the man on his left, who sipped warily and pushed the jar toward his companion. “Well,” said the first man, a bit hoarsely. “That’ll take the paint off the wall, Mr. Dolan. I can see you haven’t lost the touch.”

  The old man beamed in the half darkness. “Give me a little backing and a lot of help with the lifting, and there’s still a fortune to be made with that stuff. It’s the best.”

  “I’m sure it is, sir.”

  “Takes a lot of sugar, though,” Mr. Jack confided. “More than I can carry.”

  The three men looked at one another. At last, the man in the plaid shirt said, “I’m sure it’s an art form, Mr. Jack, but the fact is, you know, bootlegging just isn’t the moneymaker that it was in your day. I mean, even a huge operation—not your little bitty still in the basement there—even a professional concern is just not going to be cost-effective these days. The money, I’m sorry to say, is in drugs, and I know that being a gentleman of the old school, you don’t hold with that any more than we do.”

  “Never could make plants grow,” said Mr. Jack. “Especially indoors.”

  “I expect it’s complicated,” the spokesman agreed, glancing nervously at his companions. “But what we’re trying to explain to you, sir, is that we’re not really interested in starting you up in business again. It’s still illegal, you know.” He softened his words with a chuckle. “If a man can’t retire at ninety-two, it’s a sad old world, and that’s a fact.”

  The man in the red tie spoke up. “I think my father may have given you the wrong idea about that when he spoke to you in Hardee’s the other day.”

  “What we do want,” said his companion, “is to interview you and to see—possibly even to buy—any photographs you may have of your operation in the late nineteen-forties.”

  Jack Dolan stared at the trio, mistrusting his hearing. “Pho-tee-graphs?”

  “And interviews. Tape-recorded interviews. We’re doing a project.” Having said that, the man felt even more like a teenager, but he hurried on into an explanation. “We have a couple of projects, actually. Jim here—” He indicated the short man in the red tie. “It was his dad who spoke to you at Hardee’s—Jim is starting up an exhibit for the history museum: Moonshining in Southside Virginia. He wants to do an oral history project, interviewing some of the old-timers, and he needs to borrow photos of stills that he can enlarge to illustrate the exhibit.”

  “Museum?” Mr. Jack blinked at them.

  After an awkward pause, the spokesman said, “We’re history professors, Mr. Jack. I thought you knew that. No? Jim’s father didn’t mention it? Well, he has a strange sense of humor sometimes. Anyhow, as I said, Jim is doing a moonshining exhibit, and Fred and I are working on a screenplay. It’s sort of a Butch Cassidy yarn, set in Virginia in the Forties. We’d like to base the main character on you. Sort of a last-outlaw-stranded-in-the-brave-new-world story. We’d have to make changes, of course, but basically we want to tell your story.”

  “Hadn’t you better wait and see how it ends?” said a voice from the darkness.

  Not even on his most competent days would Bill MacPherson ever be mistaken for someone knowledgeable about mechanical devices. Therefore, he was reluctant to tell his beautiful new client that she was wasting her time driving him around and expecting him to detect any engine problems in her car. To Bill, the motor sounded perfectly fine. It usually took smoke pouring out from under the hood to alert him to any difficulties in his own car, but he decided not to mention that, either.

  Throughout the drive of five minutes or so down the tree-lined country road leading away from Danville, the two occupants of the vehicle had maintained an expectant silence, waiting for the sound of mechanical disaster, but so far the car had purred along, defying all expectations. Bill glanced at his watch. It was nearly four o’clock, and if he wanted to take down the pertinent information about the case from his new client before quitting time, they ought to get back to the office and get started on the paperwork. He was fairly sure that a longer drive would not enlighten him in the least, although the scenery—by which he meant the driver—was not unpleasant.

  “We ought to head back,” he said. “I’ll be happy to take your word for the car problem until we can get an independent mechanic.…”

  Thunk!

  Suddenly he did hear it: a dull thunk of metal striking metal. He started to speak, but the young woman motioned for him to keep quiet. Scarcely daring to breathe, they listened.

  Another thunk.

  But it wasn’t coming from the engine. It sounded … it was impossible, of course, Bill told himself … but it sounded as if it were coming from behind them. From the trunk.

  “Stop the car,” said Bill softly.

  There was no other traffic on the road, and they were now on a level straightaway of two-lane blacktop bordered on either side with fenced-in cow pastures. Moments after Bill had spoken, his companion slowed the car and eased off the road. Just before she cut the engine, another thunk echoed through the car. Bill sprang out and went around to the back of the car. His mind had just enough time to register “Tennessee license plates. Odd.” when the young woman bent forward and put the key in the lock of the trunk. An instant later the lid sprang open, and Bill found himself face-to-face with another blonde, this one pointing a can of Mace directly at his face.

  Bill slammed the trunk and spun around just as the driver made a grab for his arm. Part of his brain registered the fact that she was not armed, except with a pair of handcuffs, which she was trying to use like brass knuckles. No problem, thought Bill. He had a sister nearly his own age: He’d had half a lifetime of experience fighting girls, and no compunction about it. He had to admit to himself, though, that perhaps his most useful combat training had been playing the dummy for A. P. Hill’s martial arts practice. From time to time Powell Hill would come back from class with a new self-defense move she wanted to demonstrate to Edith, and, in the absence of anyone actually dangerous, Bill would be drafted to play the attacker. These sessions always ended with him dutifully crashing to the floor, but, bruises aside, the experience had been an educational one. His instincts of self-preservation impelled him to learn the moves, and eventually he became so
hard to defeat that A. P. Hill had abandoned the demonstrations and enrolled Edith in the class with her instead.

  After months of being on the receiving end of A. P. Hill’s best moves, and learning to counteract them, the beautiful stranger with the handcuffs posed no problem at all. After a minor gash and one resounding blow to his shoulder that would probably turn purple in a couple of hours, Bill managed to subdue his assailant and pin her to the ground. Very considerate of her to provide handcuffs, he thought, fishing them out of the mud. He snapped the handcuffs on one wrist, and dragged her to the back door of the passenger side of the car. She wasn’t fighting any longer. Her face was smeared with dirt, and her breath was coming in quick gasps. She had hit the ground with more force than was strictly necessary, but Bill, who had no idea what was going on, was taking no chances.

  By the time he had slid the chain of the handcuffs through the door’s armrest and handcuffed her other wrist, she was crying softly.

  A phrase that A. P. Hill occasionally used rose unbidden to his mind. Testosterone poisoning. An apt diagnosis, he thought ruefully. He had been on the verge of making a possibly fatal mistake just because he had been bewitched by a pretty face. Powell would never let him live it down.

  “Don’t bother to cry,” he told the woman. “I know that trick. I have a kid sister. Now, are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  Through a curtain of tangled blonde hair, the young woman looked up at him with a misty, pleading smile. “I just found you so-oo attractive,” she murmured. “And I got this crazy idea that we could have some really kinky sex if—”

  “Oh, save it,” said Bill. “The porn film as documentary? I don’t think so. Do you mean to tell me that men actually fall for that line?”

  She shrugged philosophically. “In my experience: invariably.”

  He checked to make sure that the handcuffs were locked, and that she could not slip the chain out from beneath the armrest. Then he slammed the door and retrieved the car keys from the ground behind the car.