MURDER IN NORTH CAROLINA
by
AGNES ALEXANDER
WHISKEY CREEK PRESS
www.whiskeycreekpress.com
Published by
WHISKEY CREEK PRESS
www.whiskeycreekpress.com
Copyright © 2015 by Agnes Alexander
Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-63355-767-3
Credits
Cover Artist: Molly Courtright
Editor: Merrylee Lanehart
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
For my friend, Lovey Russ with whom I first visited The Old Smithfield Burying Ground in South Port, NC.
Chapter 1
He opened the top of the chest style freezer and stared at the pajama clad body lying on the old frozen food. Her appearance hadn’t changed since he had stored her there, although her flesh had been slightly warm two days ago and was now rigid and cold. Normal rigor mortis had been aided by the sub-freezing temperature.
Even with the ghastly color of her now frozen flesh, she was beautiful. Her sandy blonde hair curled around her oval face, and with the slight grin he had formed on her mouth, she looked as if she were about to crack one of her corny jokes. At least, that’s what he’d called them. She’d called them witticisms.
If he hadn’t thought to close her huge brown eyes, they would have spoiled her appearance. They would have still contained the same fright and disbelief she’d shown when she realized he was going to kill her.
At some point in his past, he’d heard that the way to keep eyelids from coming open after death was to cover them with copper pennies. He hadn’t had any pennies at the time, but the two quarters he’d used had done the job. Her eyelids were still shut.
His first act was to remove the coins.
Though he was tempted to stand there and continue to reminisce as he gazed at her, he had work to do. Placing her body on the wooden work table, he removed her pajamas and drew the delicate new underwear he’d found in her dresser drawer from a plastic bag. The slinky garment still had a Belk Department store tag on it. Vanity Fair, he read on the label as he clipped off the tags with a small pair of scissors from her makeup kit. He rubbed the peach satin between his thumb and forefinger, then slid the panties up her long legs.
“Ah, Mindy,” he said. “It’s a shame you had to die. You could have done so much more, but I couldn’t let you go on living. It would have ruined everything.”
He let out a short sigh and continued his work. He had to stay on schedule.
To fasten the matching lace bra behind her back, he had to turn her cold, stiff frame onto its side. With this accomplished, all of his regrets about the murder were curbed and he worked on the body almost mechanically. Cream-colored panty hose came next, then a peach slip. The dress he’d chosen from her closet was one of his favorites. A pretty frock covered with blue, yellow, violet, and peach pastel flowers with mint green leaves mingled among them. He couldn’t help but remember how the full skirt’s soft voile had swirled as she moved her hips.
After he finished dressing her, he reached for her makeup. This would be the hardest thing for him to master. He struggled with it, but in a relatively short time had applied it to his satisfaction.
He closed the makeup case, slipped a pair of bone colored high-heeled sandals onto her size seven feet, and stood back to admire his work. “Not bad,” he murmured. “You’d be proud if you could see yourself, Mindy. I doubt a mortician could have done a better job.”
He returned her body to the freezer, flashed her a smile, blew her a kiss, and closed the freezer lid. Then he turned away and put his supplies and her pajamas into a garbage bag so it would be easy to dispose of later.
On the way up the basement steps, he was surprised he was in such a good mood. He wondered why he didn’t feel more remorse. After all, Mindy had been a special person. He was going to miss her.
On the other hand, he’d done what he had to do. If there had been another way out, he’d have taken it. But there wasn’t.
Mindy would have spoiled everything, and that he couldn’t permit.
He smiled as he topped the stairs. Now, phase one and phase two, the murder and dressing the corpse, had been accomplished.
Tomorrow night, he would complete phase three—getting rid of the body. He would then be through with the whole situation, and his life could get back to normal.
Or as normal as life would ever be without Mindy in it.
Chapter 2
Rebecca Davidson Armfield awoke before dawn. Though she hadn’t made a sound, tears streaked her cheeks. Remembering the dream, she brushed the moisture away and closed her eyes. As often happened, she had awakened in the middle of one of her baby dreams. This one had been different, though. For the first time, the baby had a face.
The face of her younger sister, Mindy, when she was a little girl.
As usual, Rebecca had been unable to save the baby. In each dream the child died a different death. This time, it had slipped from her hands and fallen over the side of a boat. She’d seen its little face disappear under the murky water.
The doctors had assured her these dreams would go away in time. She wondered how much time. They had occurred almost nightly during the weeks following her fall down the stairs. The fall that robbed her womb of her much anticipated child.
Now, six months later, she still had the dream almost weekly.
Rebecca wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried not to disturb Vernon. She was fighting a losing battle. Unless she took one of her sleeping pills, she always had trouble getting back to sleep after one of the baby dreams. Vernon would be of no help if she woke him. He’d already said he’d heard all he wanted to on the subject of her nightmares and had told her she should concentrate on other things. She couldn’t handle one of his logical lectures tonight.
Regardless of Vernon’s accusations, her mind wasn’t always on the baby. She did concentrate on other things. Tonight, until she had gone to sleep and dreamed, she hadn’t thought about the baby at all. She had been consumed with the whereabouts of her sister—and figured that was why she’d given the baby Mindy’s face.
She leaned over and looked at the bedside clock. Five-twenty-eight. Much too late to take a pill. If she did, she’d sleep half the day. After several minutes of internal debating, she decided to go downstairs and occupy herself until time for Vernon to get up. She slipped her feet into pink satin scuffs that matched the pink and white silk robe she threw over her shoulders as she left the bedroom.
Without turning on the light, she went down the winding stairs to the first floor, pulling her shoulder length brown hair back into a ponytail and clipping it with a pearl clasp she found in her pocket as she walked. Once she reached the foot of the stairs, she went into the library and closed the door. Only then did she turn on a light.
Rebecca loved the library. She’d spent many happy hours inside it with her father whe
n she was a child. She’d sit on the floor with paper and pencil and do business while he took care of company business at his desk. When she was six, he’d given her a ledger pad, and she had filled it with numbers. Some black, and some red. She always made sure there were more black numbers than red numbers, however, because her father told her it was best to have a lot of black numbers in business. She was determined to become as good with those numbers as he was.
By the time she reached high school, she often helped him with simple accounting matters. After college, he put her to work in the financial department at the family business, Davidson Industries.
“You have to start somewhere, Rebecca,” he’d said. “You could probably run the place, but for now I’m in charge, and I’m not yet ready to turn it over to anyone.”
Rebecca had loved working at the company, and even after her marriage had continued her job until her father’s illness. Now she missed being a part of it. She wanted to go back, but Vernon claimed she was still recovering from the accident and wouldn’t hear of it.
She hadn’t pushed the issue. “But I want to go back to work soon, Vernon,” she kept telling him.
“You will, my dear,” he promised, “but you don’t need to hurry things. I want to be sure there are no questions about your health.”
During their last discussion, Rebecca had reluctantly agreed with him, but she would insist on getting back to work soon. After all, her doctor had agreed she was her old self. He even said that going back to work might keep her dreams at bay.
Tonight, going back to the company was not the most pressing thing on her mind. She sat in a reclining, burgundy leather high-backed chair, closed her eyes, and recalled the tiff she’d had with Vernon earlier. They argued more and more lately.
This time, she had to admit he was probably right. More than likely it was silly for her to be overly concerned about her sister’s absence, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Yes, Mindy often left town for as long as a week without telling them. And yes, she was careless and forgetful, but after Rebecca had lost the baby, her sister had promised not to go away again without letting her know.
Vernon was sure Mindy had broken that promise, but Rebecca wasn’t convinced. As she often did when things were on her mind, she decided to make one of her famous lists. This time she would think of all the reasons why Mindy may have left town.
Rebecca brought her recliner to a sitting position, stood, and moved to the polished cherry desk in the center of the room. Vernon would make fun of her if he knew she was making another list.
“I think you’d make a list about anything,” he’d said when he found the one she’d made of the things she wanted to tell him when he got home.
At the time she’d laughed with him, but he’d been right. She was a compulsive list maker. She had a list of the clothes in her closet, even the ones that had gotten tighter in the last few months. She had a list of the books she’d read in the past year, a list of the movies she wanted to see, and many others.
She kept most of her lists in little leather notebooks. Often she had one of these notebooks in her pocket. In fact, she had had one in the pocket of her robe, but she had removed it last night to start the list of why she needed to go back to work. She’d put it on the nightstand when Vernon came to bed. It was still there.
Pulling open the middle drawer of the desk, she found stationary. It would do. She took the gold plated pen from the stand and tried to write, but the pen didn’t have any ink. She stuck it back into the stand and made a mental note to buy refills for it.
She looked in the middle drawer again and found some sheets of paper with notes and doodles, probably made during a telephone conversation. She also unearthed a paper with some shapes on it and a list of words beside the shapes. They made no sense to her. Probably just more doodling.
After a thorough search, she opened the left top drawer, then the second and the third. Still nothing. She moved to the right side of the desk and pulled out the bottom drawer and finally found a pen under a file.
“Success at last,” she said, moving the file.
Then she saw the pictures and forgot the pen.
Stunned, she picked them up and stared at each one. They were of Mindy. In some, she wore sexy underwear; in others she was nude. Most were shots of Mindy alone, but two pictures were of her and another woman posing in provocative positions. Rebecca didn’t recognize the other woman. Two shots were of Mindy and a man. His back was turned to the camera. Rebecca couldn’t see his face, but he had well developed muscles and dark hair pulled back in a three-inch ponytail.
Almost sick to her stomach, Rebecca threw the photographs back into the drawer and covered them with the file. In no mood now to make a list, she got up and moved to the window, her mind reeling. Mindy posing nude bothered her, but she knew Mindy would do it without giving it a second thought. Her younger sister had always played the part of the rebel.
When Mindy was in college, Rebecca had bailed her out of trouble more than once to keep their parents from knowing what her sister had been up to. Since their parents’ deaths, though they were complete opposites, she and Mindy had remained close. Rebecca accepted the fact that she and Mindy had different outlooks on life and lived by different sets of rules.
Rebecca couldn’t help wondering why and how the pictures had ended up in a desk drawer in her house. Had Mindy put them there? If so, when? Rebecca also wondered if they had anything to do with why Mindy was missing. Her sister kept company with some strange and possibly dangerous people. The fleeting thought that Vernon might know the pictures were here upset her a little. If he did know, why hadn’t he told her about them? Did he not want to let her know Mindy had modeled nude?
“No,” she muttered, shaking her head. “If Vernon knew about them, he would’ve destroyed them to keep me from finding them. It’s common knowledge I use this desk, and he’s smart enough to know that if he left them here long enough, I’d find them.”
She frowned and added under her breath, “Unless for some reason he wanted me to find them. He has been implying that I should try harder to lose weight so I’d have a perfect figure like Mindy…”
She frowned. No, that couldn’t be the reason. He’d know she’d be shocked to see them. He didn’t believe she could cope with worldly things. Someday, she’d have to show him just how strong she really was.
Another thought hit her, and she returned to the desk and removed the photographs from the desk drawer. Flipping through them, she took out one of Mindy and the man, one of Mindy with the woman, and one of Mindy alone. She put the rest back into the drawer.
She put the three pictures into her pocket and headed for the dining room. Vernon always came down for breakfast at seven. She’d be waiting for him.
Chapter 3
Vernon descended the winding stairway promptly at seven. He wasn’t a particularly handsome man, but he always turned heads by the way he carried himself and by the way he dressed. Today he wore a navy Armani suit and one of his two hundred dollar navy and red striped ties. His almost blond hair was cut the perfect length for a businessman, and his expensive black Italian shoes completed the image he wanted to project.
He paused at the door to the dining room. Rebecca sat at the long Victorian style table, her head bent over her coffee.
Vernon frowned. She didn’t look well. He wished he hadn’t argued with her last night. She’d probably had a hard time sleeping. When he had awakened, she was already out of bed. He didn’t like waking and not finding her beside him. With business as touchy as it was right now, he didn’t have time for her to have another breakdown. Worry over her sister was probably why Rebecca hadn’t slept. The best thing would be to let her check on Mindy all she wanted. He’d even offer to help. Mindy’s disappearance didn’t concern him as much as Rebecca’s wanting to return to work. The Mindy situation would work itself out in time, but Vernon didn’t want Rebecca back at the company. He’d changed a lot of th
ings since he’d taken control, and he didn’t think she would approve. Especially the ones he’d made out of necessity. If not the company’s necessity, then his. He couldn’t let her become involved again.
As he watched his wife, his mind slid back three years to when they had gotten married. He hadn’t been in love with the slightly plump, attractive woman three years his senior, but he had liked her well enough and found her to be pleasant company. Her younger sister Mindy, on the other hand, with her sexy body, was much more to his liking. Because he had sensed immediately that she wasn’t the kind of woman to settle down with one man, he’d put thoughts of her on hold and pursued Rebecca. That way he could still reach his goal—to marry and integrate himself into the wealthily Davidson family.
He was glad he’d played it this way. Within only a few months, he had accomplished part of what he had set out to do. And although he never planned to fall in love with his wife, he did care for her. At this point in his career, he couldn’t see himself married to anyone else. Their marriage wasn’t good, but it wasn’t always bad either, and it afforded him many privileges. In fact, it had made him what he had always wanted to be: an admired and respected businessman.
Rebecca wasn’t the suspicious type, and his on-the-side affairs hadn’t affected their relationship. He used those women only to fulfill the needs and fantasies she could never fulfill. She loved him deeply and apparently felt honored that he’d decided to marry her instead of her sexy sister. To accomplish his other goals, he had to keep her feeling this way.
Plastering on a smile, he strode into the dining room.
“Good morning, darling.” He bent over and kissed the top of her head. She smelled like lilacs. “I see you already have your breakfast.”
“Yes. Wilma brought it in a few minutes ago.”
He patted her shoulder. “Did you have a bad night?”
“Not too bad.” She smiled up at him. “I woke up early and went into the library to read so I wouldn’t disturb you.”
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