1 A Small Case of Murder

by Lauren Carr

  With her honey blond hair, deep blue eyes, and warm smile, Cindy Welch had won all the beauty pageants, which climaxed with Miss West Virginia Junior Miss. She was out of the motorcycle-riding, beer-swilling, and pot-smoking Tad MacMillan’s league.

  Things aren’t always what they seemed.

  Joshua recalled, “Back in high school, there used to be talk about you and Cindy Welch. Some people thought you two were a couple.”

  “Talk about the odd couple.” Tad laughed. “The rebel and the virgin.”

  “I remember you and her being over at our house, lying on the floor, and watching television together.”

  A thick textbook in his hands, Tad turned to him. “I was Cindy’s project. She was going to save me from myself.” He fingered the exposed end of a slip of paper sticking out of the volume while he recounted, “I can still see her that first day I laid eyes on her. It was the last month I had of freedom before starting my residency and adulthood. I was at Tomlinson Run Park, sitting on my bike by the creek, smoking a cigarette and talking to Crazy Horse. There she was, playing on the teeter-totter with this fat girl. Cindy laughed and threw back her head, and all this blond hair fell down her back. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”

  “Cindy was beautiful.” Joshua agreed.

  “So I tossed aside my cigarette and went over and said, ‘I’m a doctor. Will you marry me?’”

  “Did you really say that?”

  Tad chuckled as he recalled a turning moment in his life. “Do you think I would have stood a chance with her if I wasn’t a doctor?”

  “I think it was pretty much already decided that she was going to marry Wally.”

  Tad’s smile faded. “Cindy laughed when I said that. Her fat friend told me to get lost. I didn’t. By the time I was through, I knew her name and kept bugging her ever since. I figured I stood a chance. I did, but—” His eyes reflected regret, “I never got what I was looking for.”

  Joshua stated rather that asked. “You did love her.”

  “Now you know.” Tad opened the book and glanced at the sheet of paper tucked between the pages.

  “No, I don’t. There’s a lot you’re not telling me.” Joshua was about to ask about Vicki’s e-mails when he saw that Tad wasn’t listening to him.

  As he studied the paper in his hand, Tad’s eyebrows came together to meet between his eyes. He studied the page it marked.

  “What’s wrong?” Joshua asked.

  Tad laid the book aside, took another book out of the box, and fanned the pages. After dropping that one to the floor, he moved on to another, and then another.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The rest of this.” Tad handed the paper and medical book to him before resuming his search.

  Joshua read the paper in his hand. He had seen this paper before: not this specific piece of paper, but the type. It said clearly what it was.

  It was a death certificate.

  Joshua recognized his scrawled illegible signature.

  Dr. Russell Wilson had signed it as the medical examiner appointed by Hancock County.

  The name typed on it read in clear letters: “Cynthia Anne Rawlings. Maiden name: Welch.”

  Below her name was the information prompting Tad’s manic search. “Cause of Death: Homicide.”

  “What did you do with the rest of Doc’s books?” Tad’s voice broke through his thoughts.

  “They’re still in my office,” Joshua answered. “The kids are going through them.”

  “They didn’t throw anything out, did they?”

  “No. Why would Doc put a death certificate in a medical textbook?”

  Tad stuck the open book under his nose. “Look at it. It’s a textbook about poisons. Look at the page he put it in. Arsenic. He knew what was going on.”

  “Which is that anyone who gets close to the Rawlings ends up dying a premature death,” Joshua said.

  “In Cindy’s case it was a slow painful death over the course of a year.” Tad picked up a crate, turned it upside down, and dumped the books to the floor. He dug through them like a miner digging for gold after finding a single nugget. “I need to find that autopsy report.”

  Joshua leafed through a couple of the books before he told him, “It’s not here. It has to be at my office.”

  Tad yanked his boots back onto his feet and practically crawled on his hands and knees for the door in his haste to get to Dr. Wilson’s former office.

  Joshua followed him out the back door and down the steps. “That is what you’ve been looking for. Patient files were an excuse. You’ve known all along that Cindy was murdered.” He rushed to keep up with him.

  The clouds hung in the sky like a thick blanket threatening to drop onto them any second. The thunder rolled insistently.

  “Doc laughed at me when I told him Cindy had been murdered,” Tad recounted. “When I asked to read the autopsy report he wouldn’t let me see it. I had no authority to request it, nor did I have any proof. Doc said it was hemorrhaging from a bleeding ulcer.”

  As they turned the corner onto Carolina Avenue at the bottom of the hill, Joshua caught up to him, and they walked together. “I thought you two stopped seeing each other after she married Wally. That was at least ten years before she died.”

  “We didn’t even talk to each other,” Tad said. “You see, in the beginning, Cindy was the virgin ground I wanted to tread and, I think for her, I was the guy she couldn’t bring home to mother, sort of James Dean to her Natalie Wood: Rebellious, yet sensitive. Dangerous enough to be interesting, but not threatening.”

  “Then something happened,” Joshua prodded him to continue.

  “We got to know each other. She kept saying no, but I stuck around. At first, I had hopes that eventually she’d say yes. Then, after awhile I didn’t care so much if she let me get into her panties. I wanted to be in her life and, she saw that I had a problem that was going to kill me if I didn’t do some-thing about it. She set out to save me and I think—I know—she fell in love with me.”

  “But she married Wally.”

  “Because she didn’t have the guts to stand up to her parents. Wally was the guy any nice churchgoing parents would want their daughter to marry. They were too blind in their faith to see that underneath it all he was a hypocrite.”

  “What happened between you two?” Droplets warning of the oncoming downpour splashed into his eyes, causing Joshua to blink.

  “The last time Cindy and I were together was the night be-fore she married Wally. She didn’t want to marry him, but she didn’t want to disappoint her parents, who had planned the valley’s version of the royal wedding. She rationalized that her hormones were what was making her sneak around with me.”

  “So you two did sleep together!” Joshua accused him.

  “No!” Tad stopped trotting to face him so he could see the conviction in his green eyes. “Cindy was a virgin on her wedding night. That was important to her. Can you believe it? This was the eighties and Cindy Welch wanted to wait until her wedding night for the right man. Unfortunately, she chose Wally Rawlings for that man.”

  Tad resumed his jog. “She came to my apartment. Back then, I lived in that little efficiency over the garage on Second back behind the church. She didn’t look like an excited bride. She was scared to death. She came right out and asked me if she was doing the right thing. I was drunk because I was sick about her marrying Wally. We started kissing, and that night we went further than we ever had. I thought we were finally going to consummate this love affair we were having, but then, she got scared. I got mad. She cried and left. The next day, she got married, and I got drunk.”

  Tad stopped in front of the law office. Pawing the ground like a racehorse ready to bolt when the gate was opened, he waited for Joshua to unlock the door.


  “A couple of weeks later, when they got back from the honeymoon, Cindy called me. She had told Wally everything, and he forbade her from ever seeing me again.” Tad glared at the memory. “Needless to say, she vowed to obey rather than cherish.”

  “It’d be hard for me to vow to cherish Wally,” Joshua cracked while racing to beat the storm in unlocking the door.

  “I told her, ‘No problem.’ Like I was going to hang around as her toy boy. She burst out crying and hung up. Some happy bride.”

  “Was that the end of it?” Joshua opened the door.

  “For a while.” Tad waited for him to close the door and turn on the lights before climbing the stairs to the office. “I’d see Cindy around. This is a small town. We’d make eye contact but nothing more.”

  “She had Vicki not long after they got married,” Joshua said on his way up the stairs. “I recall hearing talk that maybe Vicki was yours.”

  “We never completed the act.” Tad passed him at the top of the stairs. After turning on the lights, overwhelmed by the volumes of books that lay before him, he halted.

  Joshua came in behind him. “I think I better call for reinforcements.”

  The clouds burst. Rain beat on the old roof above them.

  In the reception area, Tad warmed his hands on the coffee mug of fresh brew that Joshua had poured while they waited.

  “I was mad at Cindy,” he recalled. “I told everyone that she was a gold-digging bitch.”

  His cousin consoled him. “You were hurt.”

  “I was an idiot, that’s what I was.” After swallowing a sip of the hot coffee, Tad continued, “She wasn’t allowed to even speak to me and I didn’t want to talk to her. Then I got sober. I found God. I learned to love myself. I grew up.”

  “You weren’t the boy who had worked so hard to get into Cindy’s pants anymore,” Joshua observed with a small smile.

  Tad went over to the picture windows looking out onto the rain soaked street. “It was raining like this the last time I saw her. I had my office on Indiana for about a year. I did okay. Most everyone went to Doc Wilson, but my practice did grow steadily. I saw her outside my back window when I went up to the apartment for lunch. She was standing there under an umbrella looking at my back door like she wanted to come up. One of the steps in AA is to apologize to those you hurt, and I did owe Cindy one.”

  Joshua said, “I’m sure she understood.”

  As if turning his back on the memory, Tad turned around and leaned against the windowsill. “I didn’t even bother getting my umbrella. I got soaked, but I didn’t care. I came down with a terrible cold afterwards.” He laughed. “Funny, how you remember things like that.”

  “Isn’t it,” Joshua replied.

  Tad’s smile dropped. “She seemed more delicate than I had ever remembered her being. I asked her to come in, but she couldn’t. Then, I saw that she didn’t look well at all. She was so thin and her color wasn’t right. I asked her if she was all right, and she said that God was punishing her for her sins.”

  “God was what?” Joshua gasped.

  “Punishing her for her sins.” Tad’s voice raised a decibel as he spoke across the reception area. “That’s what Reverend Rawlings preaches. He tells these people in his church that God punishes us for our sins. If we get sick, if we lose our job, or if a kid of ours turns out bad; then that’s God punishing us for our sins. People are buying this crap Rawlings is selling them and paying a high price for it.”

  “What was Cindy’s sin?” Joshua asked.

  “Loving me.” Tad’s disgust was evident in spite of the pas-sage of time. “She hadn’t stopped loving me. Even though she had confessed to her husband about lusting after me, God was still punishing her because she couldn’t get me out of her heart. That was why she was unable to eat anything.”

  “And she bought that?” Joshua didn’t recall Cindy being so naïve.

  Tad’s expression darkened. “I grabbed her and tried to shake sense into her. It’s not a sin to love anyone. As for lust, we never did anything. How could God be making her sick? She said there was only one other explanation for why she was so sick.”

  “Which was?”

  Tad answered in a soft voice. “She was being poisoned.”

  “Did she actually say that?” asked Joshua.

  “She had no proof, but for over a year she had been get-ting sick every time she ate. From the way she described it, it sounded like gastrointestinal illness. Doc Wilson was treating her.” Tad indicated the town doctor’s former office. “She believed he knew Wally was poisoning her and wasn’t going to do anything to stop it.”

  “Did you examine her?”

  “I offered to,” Tad said. “I told her to order Doc to send me copies of the blood tests so I could take over the case. She really believed in this obeying your husband garbage, so she was afraid to do it.”

  “Going to Sheriff Delaney was out of the question,” Joshua said. “How did you leave it?”

  Tad told him, “I told her to tell Doc that she had come to me. That would give him a warning that someone else knew what was going on. I figured that might be enough to make it stop. We shook hands, and I took a chance and gave her one last kiss. She got into her car, smiled at me, and left.” He added in a soft voice, “She died that night.”

  Joshua broke the silence by saying in a soft voice, “I’m sorry.”

  Tad turned back around to look out the window. “I told Doc Wilson about her visit. He told me that I had to have been on drugs again. I knew someone killed Cindy, but I never had the authority to get the evidence to prove it.”

  “Until now,” Joshua said.

  Tad turned back to him. “Now, you know why I never married.”

  Chapter Nine

  Joshua went back home to his study to dive into the web of intrigue that lay before him.

  At first, his kids had refused to spend any more of their time searching through musty books that they had already been through. Then, Tad removed a handful of twenty-dollar bills from his billfold and offered it to the one who found the autopsy report he sought.

  With that, Dr. Tad MacMillan had obtained his search party.

  Tad’s account of Cindy Welch’s death gave Joshua a new sense of determination to bring Orville Rawlings to justice. He didn’t care if it was for Vicki’s murder, or Cindy’s, or being the valley’s drug kingpin.

  It was time to bring the Reverend down.

  The best place to start would be with John Doe’s missing body.

  Without the body, there was no proof that a murder had actually been committed, let alone that Reverend Orville Rawlings had been connected to it. Not only did Joshua lack a body or a name, he also didn’t have a motive for the Reverend killing him.

  Joshua suspected that Sheriff Delaney had been the trigger man. He had heard more than once from more than one person about the sheriff being Rawlings’ man.

  If Delaney had killed John Doe on Reverend Rawlings’ orders, they would be wasting their time pursuing John Doe’s murder because the former sheriff was dead and unable to testify against Orville Rawlings.

  Just because it was impossible didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.

  The best way to go after Reverend Orville Rawlings was to attack him from the rear. As long as the pastor didn’t know about the letter Joshua kept locked up in his wall safe, he believed he could do it.

  When he reread the letter, Joshua found Orville Rawlings’ vulnerable spot. He picked up the phone on his desk and placed a call.

  At his desk in the Judge Advocate General’s office in Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Bruce Crawford answered on the third ring.

  “You’re getting slow in your old age,” Joshua greeted his former assistant.

  “Commander,” Bruce sang out, “how are things in West
-By-God-Virginia?”

  “I’m a civilian now.” After a few minutes of talking about their families and gossip about the office, Joshua eased into the reason for his call. “Hey, Bruce, I need a favor, when you get a chance.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. What is it, sir?”

  “I need a list from the VA of all the men in a unit that served in the army during the Korean War,” Joshua said. “I don’t know specifically what year or unit.”

  Bruce replied, “That will make it tough.”

  “The person I am looking for is an army chaplain named Orville Alexander Rawlings. I need to know who served with him in his unit and what happened to each of them.”

  Bruce’s voice went up an octave, which made him sound like an adolescent boy. “What happened to each of them, sir?”

  Joshua elaborated on the information he wanted. “Who is dead? Who is alive? Those who are dead, how did they die? Those who are alive, where are they now?”

  Bruce wanted to know, “What are you looking for?”

  “A murder victim.”

  Jan was ready to quit and go home, except she couldn’t. Her mother owned the place. If she left, no one would be in charge.

  The pharmacy had been in chaos ever since Beth got fired. Busy training the new pharmacist while trying to keep her customers from deserting to the bigger, more modern pharmacy across the river in Calcutta, Jan hadn’t had time to mourn the loss of her friend.

  After escorting a new mother upset about how long it took to fill a prescription out the door, Jan put the closed sign in the window only to have Joshua thrust his foot across the threshold before the door latched.

  “What do you want?” she snapped.

  “Good day to you, too.”

  She caught her breath. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.” She held the door open to let him in before locking it.

  As they walked down the aisle towards her office, he reminded her that she had left a message with J.J. for him to call her.