Burying Daisy Doe

by Ramona Richards

  A slight movement of her head sent one of her curls astray. “No. And I appreciate you keeping her this weekend.”

  “Not a problem. Did Mike explain that he’d be coming over for a bit while I’m here?”

  Her smile became sly. “You two make such a cute couple.”

  “Now, don’t get carried away, Miss Doris. Right now we’re just friends.”

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t hope.” She patted her curl back in place. “You know I don’t mind him being here. He’s a good man, even if he is a Yankee.”

  “Now, Miss Dori—” The sparkle in her eyes stopped me. “Tease.”

  Her thin, high laughter rattled the leaves. “You are too easy, girl.”

  I sipped the tea. “What about Carly?”

  Miss Doris nodded. “You know her mama is my granddaughter Ellen, who belongs to my girl Charlotte. The middle one. Carly is named for Charlotte.”

  I didn’t know, but I nodded as if I did. All five of Miss Doris’s children had married and produced a slew of kids of their own, including two who had married twice and had stepchildren. Several of her grandchildren were following the same pattern. Keeping up took a flow chart. Most of the time, I just nodded and listened.

  “Well, Charlotte and Dean still work. He’s out most nights. She can’t take her.”

  “Her? Carly.”

  “Right. She called me—”

  “Charlotte called …”

  “Right. Ellen and Kevin are having a few … problems. Young couples always do, but most work them out. It seems to be getting worse for them. So they wanted Charlotte and Dean to take Carly for a few weeks, but they really can’t. They live way out, hard to get sitters, and they work—”

  “So they asked you to watch your great-granddaughter.”

  She sighed. “Carly’s a sweet girl, but she is seven.”

  “Been a long time, huh?”

  “It hasn’t been safe for a seven-year-old to live here since 1970. And I’m just a little old to be a soccer mom.”

  “So you’re thinking longer than a few weeks.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “That’s why I like you, Star. You get it.”

  “What can I do? Other than sitting on the occasional night out with your girlfriends?”

  She reached over and took my hand. “Thank you. Let’s start with the babysitting. If you and Carly get along, we’ll talk. I’ll pay you for the time.”

  “Now, Miss—”

  “Hush. I know you can use it, and you know we can afford it. Just look around!”

  I did, mostly to notice that the light was fading. “Miss D, I need to go. Finish my jog before it gets dark.”

  “Well, I need to get back in as well. There’s this pesky mosquito who’s been annoying my shins like they were ribs on a spit. Let’s go in before she makes supper out of my calf.”

  I picked up the tray of tea and cookies and followed her up the Italian tile path to the back door, picking my steps carefully. Dropping a cheap white mug at the drugstore could be forgiven. Centuries-old crystal and silver … not so much. But I loved Miss Doris’s house. The warm industrial-sized kitchen was one of the most welcoming I’d been in, with generous smells of cinnamon, basil, and sage blending easily. Black cast-iron pots and skillets hung from ceiling racks, waiting patiently for suppertime. I set the tray on a pine table in the middle of the room, well away from the edge.

  I gave Miss Doris a quick peck on the cheek, then beat a hasty retreat, closing the door quietly behind me. I had a lot of thinking to do, since my world had just shifted slightly.

  Carly, Miss Doris’s great-granddaughter. Ellen and Kevin. Charlotte and Dean.

  I picked up speed and hit the street, remembering suddenly Gran’s words about God’s timing and how things flow together as they are intended to.

  Dean was Dean Sowers. The deputy who’d once stood so still and white over my father’s corpse.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, 1969

  ROSCOE WATCHED THE young officer stop outside the USO and speak for a brief moment to another soldier, his actions as crisp and pristine as his uniform. Roscoe had been watching him for weeks now, since the lieutenant’s arrival at Cam Ranh, convinced that either God had a twisted sense of humor or the world had indeed become a very small place.

  Roscoe, who had carried Bobby Doe’s picture in his wallet for fifteen years, knew immediately that this was the adult version of the abandoned boy. He’d stared at that face—those black eyes, sharp cheekbones, and unrestrained curls—often enough to see it, even in the man whose hair had been cropped to within one-eighth inch of his skull. Roscoe had followed the officer frequently, his position in the Security Police allowing him to move randomly among the troops. Not that Lieutenant Robert Caleb Spire, his real name, had been hard to spot. The man who had been Bobby Doe took military precision to a new level with his behavior and uniform, standing out in the bay like a new penny in mud.

  Yet Roscoe had hesitated to approach him. Exactly how did you tell an officer like Spire that you’d been carrying his picture in your wallet for fifteen years? Not a great opening line, no. And with the segregation of the races, any approach to a white officer of his rank would be suspect.

  As the two men saluted and separated, Roscoe took a last, long draw on his cigarette, slid out of his jeep, and stubbed the butt out under his boot. He’d waited long enough. He had to make a move, no matter what the outcome. Obviously Lieutenant Spire was off duty, ready to visit the USO. Roscoe strode toward him, reaching Spire just as the lieutenant headed into the building.

  “Bobby Doe.” Roscoe intentionally directed the firmly spoken words at the officer’s back. To anyone else, they’d mean nothing. Amid the raucous noise of the street, an officer looking away would not even notice the words had been said.

  Lieutenant Robert Caleb Spire, however, froze. He completed a slow, steady, strictly defined about-face. The black eyes narrowed with a laser intensity that took in the man before him, examining every pore, every drop of sweat. Roscoe had sometimes debated his buddies about which was hotter in August, Vietnam or Alabama, but in that moment, Vietnam felt infinitely more searing.

  Silence reigned between the two men for a full excruciating minute. Roscoe could almost see Spire’s brain separating fact from speculation as the muscles in his face at first hardened, then slowly softened in recognition.

  “You’re the one who found my mother.” Unlike his face, Spire’s baritone held no hint of emotion.

  Roscoe had thought the lieutenant would only react to the name with curiosity. But the leap across the years, the rapid calculation separating Roscoe from among the people who would have known that name, startled Roscoe. He’d heard that the lieutenant was sharp, destined for JAG, but hadn’t seen the evidence until now. He stood a bit straighter. “Yes sir.”

  “Roscoe Carver.”

  Again, Roscoe tried to suppress his surprise, and he took a deep breath, resisting the impulse to snap to attention and whip a salute to follow the path of the lieutenant’s crisp words. “Yes sir.”

  “No need to be surprised, Carver. I know who you are.” Spire paused. “Or at least I know your name. I’ve collected evidence on my mother’s murder for years. I know the names of everyone involved. And I knew when the Pineville paper listed you as one of the men going to Vietnam. And I knew you were assigned here in Cam Ranh. I just haven’t had the chance to look you up. I want to talk to you.”

  “You do? How did you know I was here?”

  “It’s not that hard to find out. And I may have been a child, Carver, but a boy never forgets how his mother was murdered. Or who was involved. It’s why I joined the military, to pay for law school. I will never forget. You can help.”

  In that moment, Roscoe knew that, while he’d made the right decision in approaching Spire, the murder of Daisy Doe had not only changed his childhood. It had altered the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pineville, Alabam
a, Present Day

  MIKE LUINETTI STARED out one of Miss Doris’s bay windows, focused on the shadows that danced in grays and blacks on the sloping front lawn. The back of his neck remained as red as a bad sunburn, and in the night-darkened window, I could see the reflection of his narrowed eyes and tense jaw. He clenched his fists at his side, and his lips had paled almost to invisibility.

  I perched on the edge of the Queen Anne divan, motionless, resisting the urge to gather the papers scattered across the coffee table in front of me or pick up the remains of the take-out containers clustered at my feet. The faint scents of roast beef and chicken still clung to the air, but moving at that moment didn’t seem like the wisest idea. I was grateful that being at Miss Doris’s home had given us a private place to talk, but in that moment I also prayed that sweet little Carly stayed in bed and didn’t need attention from her babysitter.

  “You should have told me sooner.” His calm, low voice held a hard edge.

  I took a deep breath. “All I knew about law enforcement in this county is in those files. It didn’t exactly engender—”

  “This isn’t 1984, and I’m not JoeLee Wilkes.”

  Good point. “Mike—”

  He finally turned, and his eyes flashed with irritation. “We’re friends. Or I thought we were.”

  My gut clenched. This wasn’t going well. “We are! I mean, I did not just befriend you because of”—I waved my arm over the files—“this.” I stood up. “I like you. I would have liked you had I come here on vacation or moved here for a job. In fact, I waited this long because I was afraid of exactly this reaction.”

  I stepped from behind the coffee table and moved closer to him. “Look, I’m a cold case detective. This is what I do for unforgettable cases in small towns. I move into town, get to know the people. Eventually I figure out which member of the local officers I can trust. Someone always stands out. But I don’t date them to get their trust. I wanted to date you because I liked you. A lot. That I feel I can trust you with all this meant—”

  “—meant I was a friend … with benefits.”

  I stopped, staring at him, not believing that he’d crack such a joke. Then I recognized the amused gleam in his eyes, and a suppressed laugh exploded from me, a sound that was a cross between a hairball-retching tabby and a frightened lynx.

  “You walked into that one, girl.”

  “You set me up.” I took one of his hands and held it in both of mine. “But the truth is, if this goes the way I think it will, I’m going to need your help.”

  “You think my department was involved.”

  I nodded. “JoeLee’s, anyway. Not yours. If not in the murders, then in the reasons why they weren’t solved.”

  “A cover-up.”

  “Yes.”

  He squeezed my hands lightly, then pulled away, returning to the divan. He perched on the very edge of it and focused on the paperwork. “It does seem odd that no one followed up on your father’s claims in 1984. And you’re sure the files he brought with him vanished?”

  “I’m not really sure about too much of anything right now. They never sent the files back. Were they destroyed? Archived? What happened to them when the departments divided?” I sat next to him and pulled two sheets of paper from the splayed files on the coffee table. “Look, in his notes he made frequent references to ‘MW1,’ which my mother explained was his designation for his first material witness. She’d seen it in a lot of his trial work, which she’d helped him proofread.”

  Mike’s eyebrows arched as he peered at me. “He’d found a witness to his mother’s murder?”

  A familiar tingle of excitement shot up my spine, and I straightened. He’s catching it. The fever. “Possibly, if not an eyewitness, then someone who knew a great deal about it. We thought so, my mother and I. My dad did two tours in Vietnam, and the second time he came back, he attacked the case files with a new resolve.”

  Mike’s eyes narrowed, shifting from surprise to disbelief. “You think he found out something in Vietnam about a murder in Alabama?”

  I stood up and started pacing in front of Miss Doris’s big window. “Yeah, I know how it sounds. But in 1969 he started sending home packages full of his journals, asking Mother to keep them safe. He was in ’Nam until late seventy-two, then he still had to honor his long-term commitment to JAG. But he was crazier than ever about the murder after he got home. Late nights going over papers, military reports from World War II, personal histories, stuff that didn’t have anything to do with Pineville or his mother.”

  “So he was looking for cross connections.”

  “Or someone to confirm a story he’d heard while overseas.” I dropped back down on the divan and clutched his arm. “I think he crossed paths with someone from Pineville who filled in some blanks. He needed corroboration.”

  He glanced down quickly at my hand on his arm, then refocused on my face. “Did your mother ask him what he was looking for?”

  “She asked, but he never told her. Even worse, he never put it in writing except in one place, one file, and he had that file with him in 1984 when he came back to Pineville.”

  “The files that disappeared?”

  “They weren’t returned with his body or his personal effects. Mother made repeated requests, but the only answer she ever received made it sound as if they were part of an ongoing investigation. She stopped asking after five years.”

  “So you think they’re stored somewhere in the archives here or over in the sheriff’s department.”

  I leaned a little closer to him and whispered, “Y’know, one of the things I love about you is your unflappable faith in the Southern justice system to work exactly the way it’s supposed to.”

  His scowl told me he’d gotten the point. “You think they were destroyed.”

  “Almost immediately. Probably before the bodies were cold. If not, browsed through to see what he’d found out, then destroyed.”

  Mike turned cop on me, even more than before, eyeing me closely head to toe. I fought the urge to shiver. When his gaze settled on my face again, he leaned back. “So your plan is to find that witness again.”

  The crucial moment had arrived. I stiffened my spine. “Yes.”

  “What have you done so far?”

  “Mostly just get to know folks. Find out what the town is like now. What it was like then.”

  “Miss Doris.”

  “Yes. Getting to know her has been great on all sorts of levels. But I need to start the next step, and I know if I just start asking around, life could get a little dicey.”

  “Meaning you don’t want to wind up one morning with something cold and painful around your neck.”

  “Precisely. Obviously I’d like to talk to Roscoe Carver.”

  “He found your grandmother’s body?”

  I nodded. “And he was in Vietnam. I’d also like to talk with some of the Vietnam vets who might have been around during the time of my grandmother’s murder. See who else from this area served over there. One of my biggest hopes is that whoever my father talked to over there didn’t die over there.”

  Mike picked up the photo of my father’s murder scene and gestured toward the deputies. “Well, Dean’s too young to have been around for Vietnam. This is 1984, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one. He might have been in the military—”

  “—but not in Vietnam.”

  “Picked out any of the vets here in town?”

  “There’s a couple that I’ve heard about—”

  “Hal Prentiss and Trapper Luke Davidson.”

  “Right. Trapper Luke hangs out at the hardware store, but I couldn’t even get him to go there. Trapper is … um, a little, um—”

  “Bat-guano crazy.”

  “I was going to say reticent.”

  “Very PC of you. But no, he really is bat-guano crazy.”

  “And I haven’t been able to find Hal. Everyone seems to know about him, but not where he is. Like a recluse, but with no set add
ress.”

  Mike shrugged. “Rumor is there’s still a warrant out for him, for something he did years ago. Even without that, I’ve heard he was a very reticent character. Vietnam was just his first war. He became a professional soldier and didn’t come back to Pineville for years. And not a talkative person even then.”

  “So that leaves Roscoe.”

  Mike dropped the photo and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Humph.” He templed his fingers and pressed them to his lips.

  I waited, watching as his gaze wandered to some far place only he could see. He stared out the window and down the lawn, and I knew he was cataloging people and possibilities one by one.

  I slowly took in, with gratitude, that he intended to help. After all, if this got ugly, it could put his entire department on trial.

  He straightened. “Tomorrow I plan to sit with you at church.”

  I wondered if I looked as confused as I felt. “Beg pardon?”

  He grinned slyly. “Allegiances, Star. It’ll declare two things. One, that I intend to court you … officially. Two, that I’m behind you.”

  “And that will help because …”

  “You’re right to move slow on this, get people to trust you. Monday, we’ll go over to the museum. I’ll introduce you to the Hall sisters, who work there, and tell them you’re bored in your off hours and would like to get to know Pineville better. Volunteer to help them with filing, sorting, cataloging, anything they need.”

  “And this will help because …”

  “You’ll get to ask them about the statues on the courthouse lawn. Who served. Who didn’t. My guess is that they don’t yet have a list of the vets of the recent wars. The Hall sisters run the museum but are still pretty much stuck in 1864.”

  This time the light went on over my head. “And I can volunteer to go through all the newspaper and public records and pull together the lists of new vets without raising undue curiosity.”

  “All official museum business. Start this on your own, and by Tuesday you’ll be answering questions from everyone in the drugstore. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find any records from the 1984 or 1954 cases.”