Burying Daisy Doe

by Ramona Richards

  Sadness rolled over Roscoe again, the ache of deep loss. Juanita was gone. William too. But the rest of his family was safe, and maybe, just maybe, with Abner Patton gone, they would stay safe. His store was gone too, but the raids would clear out most of the dregs. Roscoe prayed that Pineville could find a sane center.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Pineville, Alabama, Present Day

  NOON HAD COME and gone by the time I left the museum, so I drove to a fast-food place, snagged some lunch, and went back to the Taylors to get the pink beastie ready to roll. On the way, I called Gran to let her know I’d be pulling into her back yard later that evening, and I left Imajean a voicemail asking about a time we could exchange box one for box two. Back at the trailer, I began locking down everything, making sure dishes were secure and that nothing would shift as I was driving. I ignored the remnants of Dean’s suicide. Cleaning up blood required some special care, and I didn’t have the time or energy at that moment. I knew Gran and I could do a better job once I got the beastie back to Birmingham.

  But even though I stayed busy, every moment of that morning swirled in my head, fermenting. I had learned a lot from a variety of sources over the past few days, and a lot of it made sense. A lot of it didn’t. At least not right now. And even if I could put it together, I would still only have a lot of information—and no proof, no evidence. Nothing to show that any kind of crime had actually been committed. I still hoped I would learn not only all the answers but where the proof was as well.

  That was the nature of cold cases, and I had known that when I took this sudden left turn with my career. After all, I got into this not only because of my own personal cold case but because I liked the nature of the game. Police work of any kind was never as flashy and dramatic as it appeared on television, and DNA was seldom the perfect solution. Even when it was, as with the solving of Marcia Trimble’s murder in Nashville forty years after she was killed, the answer lay in the tedious and meticulous work the Metro Nashville PD did in gathering evidence at the time of the crime. Without their careful work, there would have been no DNA to test.

  Solving cold cases was far more about gathering lots of information, talking to endless numbers of people, and slowly putting the puzzle together. Once the puzzle was complete, it would either direct you to the evidence or provide enough irrefutable information that no doubt remained.

  For now, I knew without a doubt that the murders—and far more than three of them—had been committed to protect and encourage an ongoing enterprise of theft, counterfeiting, money laundering, and political corruption. Many of the players, especially those from the last generation, were dead. The ones remaining were still culpable, but a lot of answers remained out there: What was Doc’s role in all this? How did Roscoe, as Hal had implied, bring everything to a screeching halt? Had he been more involved with my father and Alex Trawler than as a witness?

  As if by appointment, my phone rang. I stepped outside and sat in one of the lawn chairs. “Hey, Darius. Whatcha got?”

  “Hey, darlin’. What I’ve got is a hankering to come down there and protect you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Have you run into a guy down there named Roscoe Carver?”

  I sat a little straighter. “Yeah. He was one of the people I was looking for down here. I think he was my dad’s main contact. A witness to Esther’s murder.”

  “More than that. Alex had him down as a confidential informant in a counterfeiting scheme that was about to blow wide open. They had information from him, including some of the counterfeit money, leads on all the players—just about everything they’d need to make the case. Then it all went south.”

  “What happened?”

  “The bad guys decided to make one last big run. Everything in a big rig, coming south out of Tennessee on US 11. They had two escort cars. Just after they crossed into Alabama, the agents closed in. No one was sure what happened, but they all got tangled up. The truck went into a ravine and exploded. Everything was destroyed. Four agents were killed, along with two people in the truck, and two in one of the escort cars.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “The second escort crashed, but the driver survived.”

  Nausea swept over me. I leaned forward, bracing my elbow on one knee and resting my forehead in my palm. “Dean Sowers.”

  “Yep.” Darius paused. “You OK?”

  “No. But go on.”

  Darius cleared his throat. “Alex Trawler had not been in charge of the operation. He was working the Pineville side of it.”

  “With my father.”

  “Not officially.”

  I heard Darius clicking keys. “What is it?”

  “Did you know your father and Alex were college friends?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Alex left a note in his files that he had been helping out an attorney friend, a guy he knew from college, with a private matter, when they had run across this operation. They thought it might be connected, but they weren’t sure how. They met with Roscoe one more time after the accident. There was a delay in getting a team into Pineville, but Alex tried to light a fire under it. He requested backup and headed back to the town.

  “Apparently with my father in tow. And they didn’t wait for the backup.”

  Darius went silent. “I’m sorry.”

  “Anything else in the file?”

  I heard a few keyboard clicks, then pain shot through my head, turning my vision white-hot. My phone shot from my hand and slammed into the side of the trailer. I plunged forward, and my face hit the grass, shoving the pain to the back of my skull. I screamed, a far distant sound in my roaring ears.

  Then … silence. For a brief moment, I heard Darius calling my name. Then more silence. And darkness.

  The pain came back first, shooting sparks down my spine and into my hips, jerking me awake. My head felt like a throbbing raw sore. The pinching ache across my shoulders moved up into my biceps.

  Up?

  My eyes were caked shut, but as consciousness returned with intense agony, tears filled them, breaking through the gooey seal. I blinked a dozen times, finally forcing the lids to stay up. The dim light, a late-afternoon gold, filtered through a thick canopy of leaves overhead. Slowly the totality of my situation sank in. I was tied to a tree trunk, my arms pulled over my head and affixed to the trunk in some way I couldn’t see. I was sitting, my rear wet from the damp mud. My legs stretched out in front of me, my knees were strapped together by a belt. My ankles were bound with duct tape. The same kind of tape covered my mouth, its adhesive pulling taut and hard against my skin.

  I blinked again and again, trying to focus. An odd, undulating pressure crossed my leg, and I stared down to see a water moccasin slithering across my thighs. I froze, holding my breath, fighting the adrenaline-driven panic that surged through me. I waited, and finally it wandered away. I heard a wet rustle in the leaves, then a soft splash. As I listened, I could hear other soft splashes and bubbles. I was near water, which explained the mud under my rear. A stream? A creek?

  I let out my breath, then took six more deep ones, trying to leach the adrenaline away. In four counts, hold four counts, out four counts. It helped. But not much. The desperate itch to struggle, to fight, to try to claw my way out of this ran deep, even though I knew it would do no good.

  I looked around. In front of me, a barely graveled road came to an end, dissolving into a loop of sand. Beyond the sand lay a broad arc of mud and scraggly patches of grass and wildflowers. Trees and undergrowth covered the rest of the area—a lot of pines, but also a scattering of maples, pecans, and cottonwoods—as far as I could see. Even the road seemed to emerge from a tree tunnel.

  Over my head, squirrels fussed and chewed, their teeth making a familiar scraping sound on the nuts they’d found. I could hear crows, mockingbirds, and the occasional cardinal. As a light breeze cooled my face, the scents of decay common to creek banks stung my nostrils: dead leaves, earthworms, fish, and feces. The wildf
lowers growing from the mud did nothing to ease the fecund smell.

  This had to be the burial ground, the end of Ebenezer Carver’s field road. In the arc of mud and grass, the ground undulated, with the higher mounds the perfect size for graves. The perfect hiding place.

  A place I’d been left to die.

  The tears that had brought relief to my eyes now stung as more flowed. The panic ripped through me, destroying my resolve, and I yanked my hands, trying to pull them down. My body bucked hard, and I kicked with both legs, a mermaid thrust, determined to remove myself from the tree.

  Nothing worked. My torso was strapped to the tree with a thick rope, and my thrusts only resulted in aching ribs. Whatever held my hands to the tree refused to budge, and my wrists felt stretched and raw. My heels dug blunt-ended trenches in the mud, which gave me something to brace against but offered no help in escaping.

  My rapid, desperate breaths burned my nostrils, and I forced myself to make my breathing long, deep, and slow, finally calming again. I knew I could wait to be rescued—eventually someone would miss me. But it seemed unlikely that they’d put the pieces together before dehydration—or some of the woodland creatures less friendly than the snake—put in an appearance.

  Lord, is this it? Is this the way I’m meant to die? I thought about Gran being alone, the times I’d hope to still spend with her. I glanced upward, as if God really were hiding above the trees. Send help? Please?

  As the air shifted from gold to blue to purple, frogs and crickets filled the air with the noise of a night forest. A rabbit emerged from the woods to munch on the wildflowers, and it froze for a moment when it spotted me, the new denizen of the small glade. When it realized I wasn’t about to pounce on it, it ate a bit more and hopped into the undergrowth.

  I shivered, the moisture in my wet jeans causing a chill to spread through by body. My hands had no sensation left, and my mouth felt cottony and swollen. Cold and the dull ache of my joints kept me agitated and exhausted.

  Then as the dusk deepened, a tuxedo cat eased from the woods, its black-and-white paws padding carefully through the grass and strewn leaves, its white chest almost a beacon in the waning light. It paused and looked at me, eyes dark and solemn. Its tail twitched, then it continued on its way into the brush. A few minutes later, it emerged again, this time only a few feet away. Curiosity perked its ears, and it stepped closer and paused. It sniffed, and a few more steps brought it close to my legs. It began a serious snuffling investigation of my calves.

  Ratliff! It smelled Ratliff on my jeans. This supposition was confirmed by a series of headbutts and a slow rubbing of its jawline along my calves and knees. Finally, it stepped up on my lap and investigated my torso and face. Much smaller than Ratliff, but larger than Miss Snopes, it must have weighed about ten or twelve pounds, so I oofed when it put front paws on my belly and stretched up to sniff my face.

  Satisfied, it began to knead one thigh, its claws piercing the denim while I tried not to jerk or wince. Finished with its prep, it curled and lay down on my lap, front paws and head braced on my stomach. Its body was wide and long enough that it covered my entire lap, and its long, fluffy tail draped down over my calves. A moment later, the purring commenced.

  The effect was immediate. The cat’s body emitted a deep warmth that seeped through my body like a salve. The purring seemed to echo in my chest, as calming as ocean waves lapping on a beach. I braced my head against my bicep and slept.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Pineville, Alabama, 1984

  FIVE DAYS AFTER Abner Patton died, Roscoe Carver finally returned to the land of the living. He called his father in Birmingham and told him to come on home and bring the family. He called his insurance agent about the store fire and filed the initial claim. Then he dialed an emergency number that Alex had given him. The agent on the other end of the phone was curt but seemed genuinely grateful Roscoe had survived. The man promised to send Roscoe some paperwork to fill out regarding his part in the investigation and all it had cost him.

  Finally, Roscoe called a real estate agent about the house that he and Juanita had bought. He and Imajean would stay with his parents for now. No way could he ever return to that house.

  Covering his cast in plastic again, Roscoe drove his car up close to the house and used a hose pipe to scour his back seat and floorboard. Then he took another shower and fixed a proper lunch. As he cleaned up the dishes, his parents returned with his daughter in tow, and they all sat at the kitchen table, the misery of the past few days weighing down on them. Roscoe pulled Imajean onto his lap.

  She squirmed at first. “I don’t want to hurt you, Daddy.”

  He gave her a quick squeeze. “You won’t, baby, if you’ll sit still.”

  “Oh.” She froze, gazing at his face.

  “Listen, we’re going to stay here for a little while. Is that all right with you?”

  She nodded vigorously. “I love Nana and Poppy. I like it here.”

  “You’re OK with not going back to the other house?”

  She scowled, her brows coming together. “I don’t want to. That’s where everyone got hurt. It gives me bad dreams.”

  Roscoe glanced in alarm at his mother, who nodded sadly. He pulled Imajean close to his chest. “Well, we’ll see what we can do about that, OK?”

  She nodded.

  “All right, I need you to go play in the front room. I need to talk to Nana and Poppy.”

  She kissed him, then scooted off his lap, grabbed a bag of toys she’d been carting around, and skipped out of the kitchen.

  He straightened and faced his parents. His father nodded solemnly, then whispered, “Go through it again. Your mother needs to hear it too.”

  So he told them everything, his father nodding along with the details Roscoe had told him in the hospital, his eyes widening at parts he hadn’t known. From Bobby Doe to Vietnam to the counterfeiting to Alex to the fire. What William’s involvement meant and why it had led to the accident. Explained exactly what happened to Juanita and Maybelle’s baby and why. Told them why they had crime scene tape in the front yard.

  As he talked, his mother slowly reached for her Bible, which never left her side for long, and hugged it to her chest. Her lips began moving in silent prayer long before he finished. His father just listened, with the occasional nod. When Roscoe finished, his father muttered, “Evil people. I always knew those men were evil.”

  Roscoe, however, did not explain the last five days. He’d have to work up to that. But the knock he’d been expecting came that afternoon. He opened the door to find the oversized, mythic figure of JoeLee Wilkes standing on the porch. He did not invite the man inside. Instead Roscoe suggested that he and JoeLee sit on the front porch to chat. The old sheriff agreed readily and wedged his girth into a sturdy cane-bottom rocker. He accepted Mrs. Carver’s offer of ice tea with a grateful smile. JoeLee rocked. Roscoe listened.

  “Old man Patton has been missing almost a week now. You sure you didn’t see him when you came back to town?” JoeLee took a sip from the moisture-laden glass, but his eyes narrowed over the top of it.

  “I did see him. That night.” Roscoe continued as JoeLee set the glass aside. “I got a call about the fire, and I drove up. Got here about 2:00 a.m. Course, most everybody was gone by that time. ’Cept Mr. Abner.”

  JoeLee stopped rocking. “What happened?”

  “We talked. He said he was real sorry about the fire.”

  “Yeah, I bet he was.” JoeLee apparently had no illusions about how it had all gone down.

  “Said the fire marshal wasn’t sure what caused it.”

  “Right.”

  “Asked if I had insurance. Promised he’d make sure the bank gave me a good deal on a loan to rebuild.”

  JoeLee leaned back in the rocker but held it still. “Right generous of him.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. I got in the car and came here. I couldn’t stand to lo
ok at my burned-out store anymore. Staring at it wasn’t going to change anything. I was too beat up to do much about it. Leg in a cast and all. Could barely move.”

  “Right. So you left him there.”

  “Standing next to that beat-up old truck of his. I figured he was waiting for someone else when I showed up.”

  “Who called you?”

  “No idea. Thought it must have been one of your deputies.”

  “Not one of my men. I checked.”

  Roscoe shrugged. “Maybe Ellis. Or Andrew. It was a message left with a friend.”

  “You ever hear of a guy named Alex Trawler? Or Robert Spire?”

  Roscoe’s throat tightened. “Nah. Not from around here. Who are they?”

  JoeLee pointed at the crime scene tape.

  Roscoe tried to act surprised. He wasn’t sure he succeeded. “You mean the boys that were found dead out here?”

  JoeLee nodded, his eyes unblinking as he watched every muscle of Roscoe’s face.

  Roscoe took a deep breath. “Man, I wish you white people would stop dumping bodies on Daddy’s land. Makes the Klan jumpy and all jittery.” Roscoe watched JoeLee just as closely.

  “Well, whoever killed these boys won’t have to worry about the Klan. They’ll have federal trouble.”

  Roscoe widened his eyes. “Seriously?” JoeLee nodded, and Roscoe let out a long sigh of relief. “Then I guess it’s a good thing none of us were home when it happened. Mama and Daddy have been out of town since Juanita.”