Fallout (Joshua Stokes Mysteries Book 2)

by Lila Beckham

  “I picked up the stuff to make a pot of beef stew when I went to the store this morning. You need to get you one of those electric cook pots or some firewood, Sheriff. I had to scrounge through the woods to get enough wood to cook with,” she chided.

  “Yeah, I don’t do much cooking. Actually, I don’t do any cooking,” Joshua replied, “It’s easier to eat out or just pick something up,” he said, nodding to the plate lunch he held in his hand. He set the box on the table, opened the fridge and set the plate inside.

  “At least I found the clothesline while I was scrounging for firewood.” Emma elaborated, “I thought I would wash your bedclothes and bedspread. I found spares in the linen closet. If it’s okay with you, I thought I would straighten up the back bedroom and sleep there until I get your place good and clean, and then I can come ever so often and clean to keep it that way.” Suddenly, Emma remembered the voice that had whispered in her ear the night she hid there after escaping the Dixon brother’s hellhole. She hoped it did not whisper to her tonight when she decided to go to bed.

  Joshua told her that it was fine with him if she stayed; however, it really was not. He was used to living alone and after all the years he had been there by himself, he preferred it that way; he liked his privacy. He liked walking around the house naked. Occasionally he even sat out on the porch in the buff.

  “What you got there?” Emma asked, nodding toward the box and files.

  “A box of unsolved cases from the 1930’s and some mug shot books I thought I would look through.”

  “Are you trying to find out who all those women were; the ones that belonged to the heads that were in the mortuary?”

  “Yep, thought I would give it a shot. Surely, someone had to of missed them.”

  “I could help if you’d like. I did well with reading comprehension and problem solving in school. I haven’t been out long enough to forget,” Emma said innocently, however, he thought she was insinuating that his age may make him forgetful. I’m not that damn old, thought Joshua as he removed the lid from the box.

  Emma stretched to her highest height trying to see into the box. The phone began ringing just as he started to reach into the box.

  “You want me to get that?” Emma asked.

  “Nah, I’d better get it. Most likely it’s the station.” As Joshua moved toward the phone, Emma hurried down the stairs into the cellar with the armload of linens. When Joshua answered the phone, it was John Metcalf.

  “What’s going on?” Joshua asked grumpily.

  “Sorry to bother you, Sheriff, but Cook and Davis returned from Bayou La Batre with the prisoner. I don’t believe this boy is our perpetrator. For one thing, he is too young. The boy they brought back is not even a Mexican; he’s Vietnamese. Well, he’s half - his daddy was an American soldier, a colored man from what he says. It looks like the boys down in the Bayou would have known the difference. The place is filling up with Vietnamese and mixed blood Vietnamese since the Vietnam War ended. Most of ‘em are in the fishing business down there.”

  “Yeah, I figured it was a wild goose chase. That’s why I didn’t stick around until they got back with him. Anything else come to light about the killer yet?”

  “No sir, nothing except the separate blood types I told you I gathered from the crime scene. The sketch came in from Atlanta, but looking at it, he looks like a dozen other Mexicans that work around here. Many of them favor each other a lot. Well, they look alike to me.”

  “He’s probably long gone by now,” Joshua replied. “He could be in Texas if he jumped the right trains. Hell, for all we know, he could be in Mexico. If you hear anything new, let me know. And, John, get some rest.”

  “Yes, sir, I intend to do that as soon as I test the prisoner’s blood.” Joshua shook his head and said he would talk to him later. He hung up the phone and then walked back toward the box. He saw Emma coming up the steps from the cellar. The radio was playing the song Joshua heard the day before, the one about time in a bottle. As Joshua reached into the box, he thought that time was what the box held. Time had stood still for the cases contained within it. He stopped and poured himself a shot of whiskey and drank it, then lit a cigarette. Emma, was watching him, she noticed his hesitant behavior.

  “Do you want me to help you? I will gladly help any way I can. It is the least I can do after all you have done to help me.”

  Joshua responded by reaching into the box and pulling out the first of about a dozen folders and handing it to her. Emma pulled out a chair and sat down. The folder he handed her was labeled ‘Elsie Collier - April 1931’ eagerly, Emma opened the file.

  Joshua took the next file out of the box and looked at the label. It also had the month of April and 1931 written on it. The name on the folder was Glen McDuffie. He opened it and began reading. From what he read, he deciphered that Glen McDuffie and Elsie Collier had gone on a picnic together. They told Elsie’s parents they were going out Tanner Williams Road to the swimming hole at the camping area on the Escatawpa River. The investigators thought they may have run off the embankment in the dark and plunged into the lake. The county was in the process of damning Big Creek to make a lake for the city’s water supply. They were also building a spillway there.

  When they saw no signs other than the equipment tracks, they figured the teenagers had run away to get married; however, both sets of parents disagreed with their findings. They said that their children had no need to run away to get married because both families were all for them marrying. The teenagers never turned up. Joshua searched through the folder, looking for the type of vehicle the teenagers were driving. There was no mention of a make or model of a vehicle at all.

  “Was there a vehicle mentioned in that report?” he asked Emma. However, Emma did not respond; she was sitting, staring into the folder.

  “Emma?” Joshua called. Still, she did not respond; he reached out and touched her arm. Emma sat staring as if in a trance. He grabbed her arm and shook it. This time he got a response; she jerked her arm away. Joshua’s intense green eyes stared deeply into Emma’s soft brown ones; he saw fright in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma mumbled. “As soon as I read the word ‘campground,’ I was back to that night; the night they murdered those campers and took me.”

  Joshua could see that she was shaken, and he understood why. He did not know anything to say that would make a difference; what was done, was done.

  “I thought I could do this, but I can’t,” Emma said as she closed the folder and slid it across the table. She stood and walked out the back door. Joshua debated going after her, but then heard her moped start up. He hoped she would be all right.

  He opened the folder she had slid to him. As he read it, he discovered that there was no mention of a vehicle in that one either. Back in those days many people still used a horse and buggy to get around so they may not have been driving a vehicle; but still, there should have been some notation as to their mode of travel, especially considering the Authorities thought they ran away together.

  Joshua set those two folders aside and took the next one out. It was dated May 1932; this one had unknown female written on the label. When he opened it, a black and white photo of a nude, decapitated, mutilated body was the first thing he saw. Boy does that look familiar, he thought to himself as he removed the picture and began reading. He did not know how long he read before he heard Emma as she walked in and sat down at the table. He was deeply engrossed in the detective’s description of the condition of the body and the dumpsite. He knew it was not his mother’s body because it was too early in the decade to be her; however, he was now sure that Earl and Vernon Dixon’s father or grandfather was murdering women before his mother disappeared. His worst fear was as good as confirmed in his mind. He looked up as Emma sat back down at the table.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff.” she said, “When the pain comes, I have to do something to ease the memories. And when the pain comes from that, then everything is alright for awhile.” Josh
ua could tell from her eyes, that she was high on something. He looked at her arms.

  “What are you shooting?” he asked. He could see the fresh track mark on her arm. She was not yet a heavy user from the looks of her arm unless she was injecting somewhere besides her arm.

  “I just use a little Smack once in a while when the memories get to be too much to handle. I don’t want to drink beer or whiskey to relax; I’ve seen what that does to people. Bubba uses Smack all the time, and he never seems screwed up like mama or my uncles always did drinking.”

  Joshua decided he would not lecture her on drug use, yet, but he needed to find out who this ‘Bubba’ was so he could put him out of business.

  Joshua Stokes did not have a problem with the recreational use of marijuana; it was a natural herb. He enjoyed a joint himself occasionally. However, he did not approve of the manufactured stuff at all. It gave folks a false sense of wellbeing; it was also highly addictive, and it was dangerous. He knew Heroin and Cocaine was all the rage in places like Hollywood and New York. Hell, they were glorifying the use of it in movies these days, but he had seen what it could do to some folks.

  Little Joey Capps was one of them; he thought he could fly when he was high. If his friends had not of stopped him he would have jumped from the top of the fire tower on Firetower Road. That was a good 100 feet off the ground!

  “Please don’t be mad at me and freeze me out, Sheriff Stokes. I know that it is wrong, but I promise you, I only use it when it gets bad.” Joshua took a deep breath and looked into her eyes.

  “There is stuff you can use to relax that is not as dangerous as Heroin.”

  “Heroin? He told me it was Smack…”

  “Smack is Heroin, Emma, and it’s dangerous. I am not going to tell you what you need to do, you are smart enough to figure that out on your own; however, there are alternatives, marijuana is one of them. It’s not going to give you that immediate rush; it does not work that way, but it will definitely take the edge off. It’ll help you to relax and chill out. I use it myself when I get stressed.”

  Emma smiled. “I knew you were cool. Thank you for caring,” she said as she stood. She then came around the table and kissed him on the cheek.

  Joshua’s mind went immediately to what she had said at the cemetery. Poor kid, he thought, she has had a lot to deal with in her short years on earth, no wonder she turned to something to ease the pain. Emma excused herself, saying that she needed to lie down for a bit. Joshua just nodded and kept reading.

  12

  Photograph

  Joshua had consumed half the bottle of whiskey and smoked nearly a pack of cigarettes as he meticulously went through each file. When he reached for the next folder in the box, the year 1937 jumped out at him; his mother had disappeared that year. Written on the label was, Annaleigh Stokes, August 1937 - Missing - Unsolved.

  With shaking hands, he opened the folder. His mother’s face stared back at him. He lay the folder down but held onto the black and white 8x10 photograph. Slowly, his finger traced the outline of her hair. He traced her jaw down to her chin; his fingertip touched her lips, lips that would never speak to him again.

  He did not know how long he sat staring the picture, but he had avoided looking into her eyes. When he did, they were sad eyes. He could tell that she was unhappy when the photograph was taken; his heart ached for her unhappiness.

  The sting of unshed tears burned his eyes, then, suddenly burst forth. He cried much the same as he had when he was eleven years old and his mother failed to come home. He laid the photograph on top of the folder and then walked out onto the back porch. The night was cool, clear, and quiet. A hundred feet below him, he could hear the river flowing south; he stepped off the porch and began walking that way.

  When he reached the sandbar, it glowed eerily white against the surrounding darkness; the moon was bright enough to illuminate much of the river. Joshua sat down on a driftwood log that had come to rest on the sand and lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply.

  The vague, indefinable sadness he felt slowly solidified into a precise, deep burning anger. If only he could turn back the hands of time, he would somehow save his mother. He knew there was no way to punish the man who took her; too much time had gone by for that. The man was probably dead. However, Joshua felt that if he could go back to that time, he could have somehow stopped him from taking her. His anger morphed and redirected itself from the senior Dixon, who he thought took her, to his own father. It was the same anger he had felt toward his father when he was around twenty years old.

  A short while after his father passed away, he remembered the many times he questioned him about what happened to his mother. Each time he had asked, his father somehow avoided answering him. His father’s avoidance of his questions angered him. He realized that if his father did know something about where she was or any other details about her disappearance, he could never tell him now. His father was dead. Dead men do not answer questions. It was easy for Joshua to let the anger consume him.

  Back then, his grandfather noticed his sullen manner and inability to talk about his father without practically seething and he had questioned him about it. Once confronted, Joshua had unloaded all of his pent up emotions over his father’s lack of emotion after his mother disappeared. He told his grandfather that he did not believe his mother had simply walked away from them and began another life elsewhere.

  “You may be right, Son,” his granddaddy said “and we may never know the truth, but you shouldn’t feel so harsh toward your father; oftentimes, men feel inferior. Your father may have felt as if he was not a good enough husband, lover, or provider… we will never know for sure what he felt when your mother disappeared. He may have thought she left him and blamed himself.

  We humans are inferior from the get-go, Hoss; always remember that. Don’t let hate consume you. Your father had his faults, we all do, but he is dead and gone and cannot defend himself. There is no use in hating a dead man. He loved you; he did the best he could with a bad situation.” It had been over twenty years since he last spoke with his grandfather but his grandfather’s voice was as fresh in his mind as if he were speaking to him right then; and, he knew he was right. Dead men don’t talk; there was no use in dwelling on what might have been, what was past was past.

  He threw his cigarette butt into the river and stood. When he turned there was a woman standing behind him. At first, he thought it was Emma, but it wasn’t. This woman had a glow about her, much the same as the apparition that had come to him when Emma was missing. The woman standing before him appeared to be his mother!

  Joshua could not believe his eyes. Why was she coming to him now? Was it because of his finding out the information he had and his visit with Vivian, or was it just because he was looking into her disappearance? He was not sure, but before he could speak, she faded away. He wondered if he had conjured up her image because his wished so badly to talk with her. I must be losing my fucking mind, thought Joshua as he lit another cigarette. He actually held his hand over the flame to make sure he was not asleep and dreaming everything. The heat told him he was awake.

  Joshua began the uphill walk toward the cabin. He stopped at his cruiser to retrieve Vivian’s photo album and took it into the cabin with him. He wanted to compare the photographs. When he walked in, Emma was sitting at the table eating a bowl of stew and looking through the folder that contained his mother’s photograph.

  “Sheriff, this one, the one you left out, is another missing person… her last name is the same as yours.”

  He could tell that she was curious. Joshua hesitated a moment and then told Emma that it was his mother’s file. He saw a flash of pity in her eyes before she looked back down at the papers in front of her; he did not want her pity. He poured himself a shot of whiskey and tried to shake the nibbling anger that began to eat at him. He swallowed it as soon as he poured it.

  “No wonder you were hesitant about looking through the box. You had to have been just a child w
hen she disappeared. It says in here that it was not reported until she had been missing for several days. Her husband, your father, thought she might have run away with a man named Leroy Dixon. However, when they investigated, this Dixon man had also gone missing; that made them presume that the two had gone together. Dixon’s wife had not reported him missing. She said she was unaware that he was missing because he was a traveling salesman and was gone for weeks at a time.

  According to the report, Dixon’s father was also a salesman. According to Detective Jernigan’s notes, he felt that the elder Dixon was trying to mislead them about his son’s whereabouts. He thought the old man knew where his son was. Jernigan thought the brother was lying too; he made note of it in his report.”

  Joshua, who had been comparing the picture of his mother that was in the folder to the older ones in Vivian’s album, suddenly asked “Brother? I didn’t know he had a brother,” Joshua said it as if it was hard for him to believe.

  “Yes sir, he did; actually, he had several. Leroy was the baby boy of a brood of twelve siblings. Jernigan’s attention focused on Leroy Dixon’s eldest brother, Early Dixon. It says here that Early Dixon was well known over in Green County, Mississippi as an undertaker in his funeral home business.”

  “The Elder is the Cock of the Roost,” Joshua mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “It was something a friend of my mother told me this morning when I talked with her concerning my mother’s disappearance. She told me that an old Negro woman, a psychic, or soothsayer as some call them, had read her and Annaleigh’s palms; she also read the leaves from the teacups they drank out of, and then told their fortunes.

  My mother was concerned about Leroy Dixon because according to her friend Vivian, Dixon had been stalking her. The old psychic woman told my mother that Leroy Dixon was not as much of a threat as someone else was. That was when she said that ‘The Elder is the Cock of the Roost.’

  “Well, the elder could mean either the father or the older brother.”