The Underground Lady (Book 8 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)

by JC Simmons

  The Underground Lady

  (Book 8 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)

  By JC Simmons

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without express permission of the publishing company is illegal and punishable by law.

  PUBLISHED BY NIGHTTIME PRESS LLC

  Copyright © 2012 Kindle Edition by JC Simmons

  All rights reserved

  Check out all 10 books in

  The Jay Leicester Mysteries Series by JC Simmons:

  Blood on the Vine

  Some People Die Quick

  Blind Overlook

  Icy Blue Descent

  The Electra File

  Popping the Shine

  Four Nines Fine

  The Underground Lady

  Akel Dama

  The Candela of Cancri

  Now available at Amazon.com and the other usual outlets

  The Underground Lady

  (Book 8 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)

  By JC Simmons

  ***

  PROLOGUE

  The little yellow Piper Super Cub, known by pilots the world over as a PA-18, sat at the end of the grass landing strip glistening in the early morning sun like a rare jewel. Dew ran in rivulets down the windshield and pooled along the engine cowling. It seemed poised, ready to do what it was designed for, soar above the earth like an angel.

  The old Willis Jeep, a relic from World War Two, drove up and parked behind the cub. A young woman got out and moved along the side of the airplane, running her hand across the taught fabric of the fuselage as if caressing a lover. She looked at the black lettering on the tail and smiled. N1HW. It was the registration number required by the Federal Aviation Administration, her call sign, and her initials.

  Preflighting the Super Cub as carefully as a surgeon looking through the abdominal organs of a patient on an operating table, she climbed into the cockpit and went through the pre-start checklist. After starting, the 160-horse power Lycoming engine purred like the woman's Siamese cat. Finding all was well, she took off into a sky so clear and blue it made one want to get on one's knees and thank God for being alive.

  The little town of Union, Mississippi, appeared under the nose of the airplane and the woman turned north to circle back around over her farm while climbing for altitude. She always liked to look down on the farmhouse and pine and hardwood trees growing on the eight hundred acres of rolling hills. The farm was her love, her life, and her reason for living after the death of her husband two years ago.

  Reaching one thousand feet, she picked up the mike and said, “Good morning, Meridian Approach. November One Hotel Whiskey is five west of Union, climbing VFR with information Charlie, inbound for landing."

  "Roger, November One Hotel Whiskey, squawk 4671 and Ident. Okay, we have you on radar four west of Union. Maintain two thousand, cleared direct Meridian. Information Charlie is current. Expect no delay."

  The woman acknowledged the transmission and looked down at the sparse traffic on Highway 492 between Sebastapol and Union. Then: "Meridian Approach, November One Hotel Whiskey, I'm going to need to return to my landing strip."

  "Roger, November One Hotel Whiskey. You have a problem? November One Hotel Whiskey, you read Meridian?"

  There was no reply.

  The little yellow Piper Super Cub and the young woman flying it were never seen again. After a long and extensive aerial and ground search, everyone assumed that the plane had crashed into the dense forest somewhere near Union. No wreckage was ever found. The disappearance remained a mystery for over twenty-five years.

  Chapter One

  The move was complete. The office closed, the house sold. Jay Leicester, Aviation Consultants was no longer located in Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital. The reasons for the exodus were varied, complex, and necessary. Now, a cottage in the rolling hills of northern Newton County, Mississippi, would be my office, my headquarters, my base of operations, and my home. It was my choice to make this move, and it scared me to death. I had no idea if the business would succeed or survive this far out in the woods. However, I could think of no reason why it wouldn't.

  For ten years the aviation consulting business had grown steadily. I worked as much as I wanted. Retiring after twenty-five years as an airline pilot, the only thing I knew truly well was aviation, hence the business. The big airlines manage their own operations. Small regional airlines, corporations, and individuals sometimes need help. Pilots with bad habits can be salvaged, returned to their families and cockpits clean and sober. Corporations need help setting up efficient, safe flight departments with the proper aircraft and highly trained crewmembers. Individual private pilots need advice on planes, training, and realizing their capabilities. The old saying that the most dangerous thing in the air during a weekend is a doctor flying a Beech Bonanza remains true. The Federal Aviation Administration and people like me are trying desperately to change that fact.

  ***

  I lay in bed reading a Hemingway short story by the moonlight. It is that bright. The young woman is agonized and torn over having an abortion. The boyfriend tells her how simple the procedure is and how happy they will be when it is over. They are sitting outside a train station between Barcelona and Madrid, and across the valley the hills are white in the sun and the girl said they looked like white elephants. The boy says that it is the right thing to do and the girl wants to know that if she does it, will the boy be happy and things will be like they were and that he'll love her. In the end nothing is resolved and the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusion.

  Laying the book on the table beside the bed, I watched the moonlight move through the room like a quiet thief, touching my face, my arms, and chest. The Hemingway 'critics' raged about the symbolism of the hills and white elephants, as they did in all of his works. I laughed when reading what he said about symbolism in his books, "The hills are hills, the elephants are elephants. The sea is the sea, the old man is an old man, and the sharks are sharks. So piss on the critics and their symbolism."

  Over the last few years, I have come to the conclusion that the books being published today are unnecessarily glum. I have decided, and rightly so, I think, to object to being made sad by my reading. From now on I will read only those publications that make me happy or teach me something. I have informed the bookseller who supplies my reading material.

  Sleep would not come, so I curled into the fetal position and let myself settle into the bed. I am barely breathing, practicing for the 'eternal rest.'

  Now she steals into my thoughts. It has been over a month since she left. I miss her. The breakup was my fault. She moved to Seattle and married a banker. I felt terrible. I had had relationships go wrong before, and had felt amazed, dismayed and at a loss, but this time the effect was much more intense, perhaps because the possibility of its happening never occurred to me. There are never any winners in a breakup, only losers. Guilt, like jealously, is an emotion that wastes life. I felt like a dog returning to its own vomit. Memory is a h
orrible mental swamp.

  Life has placed women in my path. I am not given to the bragging and bluster of a smoky bar, nor to lyrical nostalgia. I have loved a certain number of them, and recall others with tenderness, indifference, or – most often the case – with a happy and complicit smile. That is the highest laurel a man may hope for, to emerge from such sweet embraces unscathed, with his bank account little diminished, his health reasonable, and his esteem intact.

  I think nothing of interest will ever again happen in my life. All love has fled or been taken away. Only memory, rushing out of the dark with the anguish of heartbreak. A country song comes to mind – Oh the lonely sound of my voice calling/ is driving me insane/ just like rain the tears keep falling/ nobody answered when I called your name. Then a remembrance of her soft fragrance bringing tears, when for weeks all I've been is numb.

  Get a grip, Leicester. That's what Rose, my nearest neighbor would say. It's probably the fear caused by the move to the woods. That's an old lady fear. Real fear is the man who lies in the dark wondering if the damaged retina in his only good eye will detach and propel him into a black abyss.

  False dawn was approaching. I got up and made a pot of coffee. Stirring in a dollop of Fireweed honey, I take a cup of the black liquid out on the porch and sit in the cypress glider. It's so cold my breath is visible and so quiet that you can hear the faint whip of a bird's wings cutting through the air. If you listen, sound will teach you things beyond speech.

  Setting the coffee cup on the arm of the glider, I lean into my hands. Thoughts pour from me like the fading light from the winter moon. I want to wind down, here in this country quiet. I desire peace from the long years of lust and violence and death. There is a heaviness in this cold air that lends itself to gloomy thoughts.

  Dawn begins to break and I can make out features in the landscape. When I built this cottage, I oriented the front eastward toward the tree line and rising sun. It is a grand view. The oaks and hickory and pine, the chinaberry and crabapple. The cedars, green even now in the winter, and ragged to the eyes. Here there is a beauty and ruggedness and remoteness and mystery to my little cottage. A ground fog begins to form.

  If you are in the woods alone for some time, the land resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. The faces in the trees cease hiding and stare out at you. Shadows pass and you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then, sometimes an entire sentence. The ghosts reveal themselves without malice or prejudice. I see them receding before me, their shapes beautiful and sad. I would think something wrong with my psyche if not for Shack, the cattleman who lives a few miles to the north, who has experienced the same phenomena in his rolling woods. His father before him.

  When I first bought this farm and the building was complete, I felt like a plantation owner, wealthy and powerful. It was a new and uncertain land, and the cottage set inside the woods like a reflection in an imperfect mirror. There is a grandeur of life as seen from the porch of this cottage. It is interesting to contemplate the small scope of woods out front, teeming with many kinds of plants, with birds singing in the trees, thousands of different species of insects crawling about, all elaborately constructed, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, and fixed by the laws of gravity to continue evolving into forms most beautiful and most wonderful – all under the watchful eye of God.

  Something nudged my ankle. Looking down, I see that it was B.W., the big black and white Siamese my neighbor Rose English insisted I take after my German Shepherd died. I disliked cats and she knew it. B.W. was a six-week-old kitten when I got him and he has taught me much over the last four years. B.W. is a powerful and cunning hunter, and I knew that if he weighed four hundred pounds he would not accede to my existence for a single moment and would kill me without conscience to fulfill his immediate desire. Scratching him behind the ear brought that purring sound that I love so much and understand so little. He looked at me with those cat eyes. "Well, old boy, you do not weigh four hundred pounds and I can still kick your ass." He did not smile, but licked himself.

  Inside the cottage, I poured another cup of the honey-laced coffee and went back out on the porch, this time sitting in a chair on the south corner, propping my feet up on a cedar post. B.W. jumped into my lap and curled up. The fog was thickening, but I could still see out to the tree line, though the gravel road, another hundred yards further out, was hidden. To the south, the deep valley was filled with fog and looked smooth like the surface of a pond. It was in this little valley where I found the buck, badly wounded by some idiot hunter too stupid to track an animal he'd shot, but let wander off and suffer. It was lying on the ground too weak to move, its hind leg broken by a bullet, another in its belly, blood dripping onto the dark earth. The look in that buck's eye as it watched me coming to slit its throat made me swear never to kill another living thing.

  There was a dead quiet over the countryside. I suddenly felt B.W. tense, jerk in my lap, ears erect, neck stretched forward. He looked toward the tree line through the scope of woods. I followed his line of sight. There was a figure moving as silently as a cottonmouth slithering along an overhanging oak limb. At this moment I wished B.W. weighed four hundred pounds.

  Easing out of the chair, I reached inside the door, retrieved a pair of binoculars and focused on the figure. It was not a ghostly, smoky apparition; it was a person walking along the drive leading to the cottage. B.W. began to growl, a sound I had heard only on rare occasions. It was not a happy sound. Laying the binoculars down, I put my hands in the pockets of the leather jacket, fingering the magnum that is always there. "Calm down, old boy. We have things under control. Let's not panic, yet."

  The figure kept coming, but stopped forty yards away when spotting me on the porch. He seemed unsure whether to continue or turn and run. I made the decision for him. Pulling the magnum out and holding it by my side, I said, “State your business."

  "Are you Jay Leicester? Rose English sent me." It was a female voice. I put the magnum back in my pocket. Rose, I might have known.

  The fog had thickened and it was as quiet as a Robert Frost snowfall. B.W. watched the woman with the same alertness as I, his ears slanted forward, tail moving in erratic jerks.

  She came stealthily on, stopped a few feet away and tried to smile. There were lines around her mouth like cracks in old china, but her eyes were bright. B.W. went and smelled around her feet. She bent down and picked him up. He snuggled into her arms as if they were old friends. "You must be B.W.," she said, rubbing his head. "Rose said you were your keeper's protector." She walked closer. "I'm sorry. My name is Sunny Pfeiffer. I need your help. Rose told me all about you, said you were just the person to solve my problem."

  "What else did Rose tell you about me?"

  "She said that you were a lonely man."

  Her voice was light and quick with a slight twist in the sound. It was a way of speaking I had not heard before. It sounded as if she were from somewhere far away. Her voice was full of intimate portraits, expectations, and somewhere at the heart of it, a kind of dark inflection that only she knew or understood. Then it seemed to disperse like a wispy layer of the fog that surrounded us, leaving no meaning.

  "Come inside, Sunny Pfeiffer. There is fresh coffee. You can tell me why you are wandering around in my woods on a cold winter's morning."

  She started through the door, stopped, looked down at B.W. who seemed contented in her arms. "Is he allowed in the house?"

  "He has the run of the place."

  She took her coffee black and sat on the couch. B.W. assumed a formal pose on her knees like a guardian temple lion. Through half-closed eyes he stared directly at me with a Siamese expression that bordered on implied criticism.

  Building a fire in the stone hearth, I sat in a recliner across from her. "It is not B.W.'s habit to accept strangers. This guileless gesture may hold profound and fortuitous significance. If that cat, who is closer to the gods of insight and fortune than humans, c
an accept you, then perhaps it would be wise to hear why you want to employ me."

  A radiant smile suddenly appeared, transfiguring her features into an intimidating siren. She had green eyes of astonishing clarity, as bright and sparkling as ice, but much warmer. She was attractive in other ways too, and I found my own gaze returning to her both for this reason and because I wanted a close look at this woman who suddenly materialized out of the cold fog of an early morning at my cottage in the woods.

  She appeared to be somewhere around thirty years of age. And tall – I guessed just under six feet. Her hair was long and soft and the color of a Blue Bird's breast. Looking closely at her face, its severe aspects were strong, gaunt, and almost classical. Her features seemed to be aquiline and sensitive, except for her heavy passionate mouth. She wore an expensive-looking wool turtleneck sweater and designer jeans with a pair of tennis shoes that probably cost as much as my first car. She worried her fingernails as if they were some hard inflexible part of her psyche that people could cut into and she would not feel pain.

  "Miss or Mrs.?"

  "Miss."

  "Ever been?"

  "No, you?"

  "No."

  She looked into my eyes and I had an uneasy feeling that she knew things about me, things so deep inside that even I had not figured them out, and every time I blinked she knew more.

  "How did you get here?"

  "I walked from Rose's house."

  "That's over two miles."

  "It's beautiful country, even in the cold and fog. The hills and valleys remind me of scenes from the Deer Hunter, the one with Robert DeNiro. I would have loved to live in this country before it was invented."

  "I'm not much into movies."

  "Too bad."

  B.W. watched me and flicked the tip of his tail every so often as a display of implied irritation. He and the woman wore identical expressions, and one could almost believe that they were related by blood. Out the window behind where the woman sat two crows as big and sleek as black cats were strutting and cawing under the bird feeder attached to the post oak.