The J D Bragg Mystery Series Box Set

by Ron Fisher

  “The Barry Beal? What’s he doing here? Does he have one of those new homes over on the lake?”

  “You know who he is?” I asked, surprised.

  “Of course I know who Barry Beal is, John David. I may not know much about golf, but I don’t live on the dark side of the moon.”

  “So do you know that he’s about to build a golf course and mini-mansions in Eastatoe Valley?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  I could tell by the tone of his voice that the hook was set. This news would guarantee his help, regardless of how little he had to go on. The prospect of someone carving such a place out of peaceful little Eastatoe Valley would be as horrifying to him as ethnic cleansing.

  “I just got wind of it myself,” I said, “and even if Beal hasn’t started construction yet, he would have been up there looking things over and making plans, probably a number of times. Time enough to meet and hire this girl I’m looking for.”

  “I find this news particularly disturbing, John David, but not really surprising,” he said. “They won’t stop until every square foot is graded over, built on, and fenced off.”

  I knew he was referring to the shores of Lake Keowee, the huge man-made lake just west of Eastatoe Valley, where gates and guards now protected multi-million dollar homes, closing off much of a spectacular scenic and recreational area that was once accessible to everyone, rich or poor.

  “Where is this Beal located?” Grandfather asked. “I want to talk to him.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I quickly said. “Firstly, I don’t think Barry Beal would accept a call from anyone named Bragg. I’m not exactly on his favorite-people list. And secondly, the magazine is overly nervous about lawsuits, and if they were to find out that I’ve shared this story with—of all people—another newsman, I could lose my job.”

  “If you ask me,” he said, “it sounds like a job that isn’t worth having in the first place.”

  His tone suggested there was more he could say about the choices I’d made in my life.

  “It won’t help me if you stir this up, Grandfather. Can’t you just help find the girl and leave Barry Beal to me?”

  He was silent for so long I thought he’d hung up on me.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll do what I can and get back to you.” Then he did hang up.

  I knew all too well that Grandfather’s method of pursuing a story was to wage an all-out frontal attack, and it went against his grain to accept any kind of restrictions, even if the outcome harmed his only grandson. But I had kindled this fire and would just have to take whatever heat came from it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I spent the next several hours at my apartment licking my wounds and feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t the first time a publisher pulled me off a story, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept. My only hope was that grandfather could work a miracle for me, and soon.

  At about five o’clock, I pulled myself out of my funk and decided to take Burt Lowes’ advice and go cover the Braves. The Mets were in town for the season opener and first pitch was scheduled for seven-ten. It was too late for a little locker-room time beforehand to jaw with the players and Manager Freddie Gonzales, but I’d try to catch them after the game. Not that I would learn anything. Freddie, like his predecessor Bobby Cox, kept team problems in-house. That made the job of guys like me more difficult, but I admired them for it. At worst I’d get to relax a little and enjoy a bit of America’s favorite pastime, which was a pretty good way to end a bad day. I climbed into the jeep and took 10th Street over to Interstate 75-85 south and merged into the usual bumper-to-bumper vehicular stream moving at a sphincter-tightening pace.

  “The Ted,” as Turner Field is lovingly called in honor of the former Braves owner, lay several miles south; I began an early move toward the right-hand lanes for the exit, having on several occasions over-shot it, thanks to the inhospitable refusal of Atlanta drivers to let me through.

  Lunch for me was the celery stalk in Upshaw’s Bloody Mary, and I was famished. I found myself looking forward to a couple of hotdogs with child-like anticipation. A warm spring evening, a cheerful crowd, and the crack of a bat could make a ballpark hotdog taste like a porterhouse.

  A Lexus SUV cut in front of me from two lanes over, forcing my attention back to the traffic out of pure self-preservation. Atlanta drivers have the reputation of being among the wildest in the country, and when the traffic will allow it, some of the speediest. Cars zoomed by me, switching lanes and tailgating like NASCAR veterans. I gritted my teeth, clutched the wheel, and glued my eyes to the road.

  The game kicked off with a ceremony honoring the 40th anniversary of Hank Aaron's 715th home run; this had the fans and the Braves amped for the home opener. However, the Met’s Bartolo Colon pitched seven quietly effective innings, and some timely hitting and an overturned call lifted them to a 4-0 win. The Braves’ Jason Heyward ended the game by watching his potential game-tying grand slam fall into Juan Lagares' glove approximately 7 feet from the center-field wall.

  My foray into the Braves locker room after the game was unexciting. I didn’t pick up anything juicy or untoward—in other words, nothing piqued my sensationalistic interests. I wondered if management was spiking the player’s Gatorade with Prozac. I never even heard a curse word. The Braves were a squeaky clean bunch.

  It was after midnight before I made it home to my solitary little apartment in Virginia Highlands, thanks to a stop along the way at a neighborhood pub for a couple of drinks. Two months ago I would have passed up drinks at the pub. At that time, I didn’t live alone. A fiery, pint-sized Latina named Rosita Perez, a dancer with an Atlanta Modern Dance group, shared my apartment and my bed. But like most of my relationships, this one eventually ran its course. That thing that always seemed to happen, happened. Something slowly changed between us in an almost imperceptible way, like shifting sands in the desert, until one day we found ourselves in a relationship of unrecognizable shape.

  Some things about her I did miss: those marvelous sculptured legs; the indecipherable Spanish she spoke when we made love; the passion in her face when she talked about dancing. But the stark truth was, whatever I felt about her leaving, I don’t think it was heartbreak. This was the narrative of my love life.

  As I went around switching off lamps, I noticed the message light on the phone blinking. I punched in the voicemail code and the AT&T computer told me that I had two messages. The first one was left at 6:37 PM; I played it. I heard my grandfather say, “John David, this is your grandfather,” as if I wouldn’t recognize his voice. An old Jim Reeves song played in the background. That is not something he would listen to by choice; Chopin was more his taste. I also heard the angry-cat sound of a pneumatic wrench, the kind a garage uses on lug nuts or plugs on oil pans.

  “I think I have a line on your young woman,” he said. “But there’s something here that has me troubled, and I’d prefer not to talk to a recording machine about it. Call me at home tonight.”

  That was the extent of his message. He had wasted little time getting a line on the girl. The old man still had game. But what was it that troubled him? He did sound upset; his tone was more severe than usual, if that was possible. Or was he just being Garnet Bragg, seeing a dagger behind every cloak, as he had a penchant to do?

  The second message was from 11:51 PM. The message contained five seconds of air, the faint sound of what may have been breathing, and a disconnect. The caller ID showed this number was the same as the first one, which meant that Grandfather had called again, but didn’t leave a message.

  It was way too late to call him back, so I doused the rest of the lights and went to bed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The ringing phone by my bed woke me up. “John David?” a female voice said. It was my sister Eloise.

  I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It wasn’t quite 6 AM.

  “What’s wrong?�
�� I asked before I realized that was grandfather’s exact response when I called him.

  “Granddad didn’t come home last night,” she said. “I don’t know where he is and I’m worried sick. He would have called if he was okay,” she added, the implication of the statement clear in her voice.

  There was probably any number of logical, harmless explanations as to his whereabouts, but at the moment I couldn’t think of any.

  “John David, are you there?”

  “I’m here, Eloise.”

  “I keep wondering if he’s had a heart attack or something. Or maybe he’s piled up somewhere in that damned old Cadillac.” Her voice suddenly broke. “What if he’s hurt and can’t get help?”

  I thought about the pneumatic wrench in the background of the message he left. Did he make the call from a garage or gas station? Maybe he had car trouble and couldn’t get home. But as Eloise said, he would have called if that were the case. Although he didn’t leave a message, he’d called me around midnight, so I knew there was nothing wrong with his cell phone then.

  “When was the last time you talked to him?” I asked.

  “I called him at the office yesterday afternoon. The electrical sockets in the upstairs hallway aren’t working. I checked the fuse box and that was okay, so I wanted to call an electrician, but couldn’t remember the name of the one we use. Granddad appeared busy and rather distracted, and in a bad mood. My call was an obvious interruption, so I made it brief. If he planned on coming home late, he didn’t mention it.”

  I wondered if his mood had anything to do with his “troubled” comment on his voicemail.

  “Were you expecting him for dinner?” I asked.

  “I always expect him, but I never know exactly when he’ll show up. You know him. He gets wrapped up in things and forgets about the time. So, I always cook for three, and if he’s not home when Mackenzie and I are ready to eat, we go ahead without him and I put his plate in the fridge, which is what I did last night. Mackenzie is sleeping over with a friend from school, so I ate alone and went to bed early to read. I fell asleep with the book open on my stomach. It didn’t even cross my mind that something could have happened to him.”

  “And you still don’t know that,” I said, trying to believe it myself.

  “Don’t think I’m crazy, but when I woke up this morning, I had a weird feeling that something was wrong. A premonition, I guess. And when I went down to start breakfast and saw the leftovers from dinner still in the fridge, I knew it. I checked his room and his bed wasn’t slept in, and his toothbrush in the bathroom was dry.”

  “Have you called the hospitals?” I asked.

  “Yes. They don’t have him.

  “What about the police?”

  “I started to call them, but I thought I would just sound like some silly, frightened woman. Men stay out all night, all the time. But they don’t know granddad like I do. They would just laugh at me for being such an alarmist.”

  She was probably right about how most cops would react, but maybe not in her case. “If Arlen Bagwell is still a sheriff’s deputy,” I said, “I’m sure he would take you seriously.”

  It was out of my mouth before I thought how inappropriate it was to tease my older sister at a time like this. Arlen Bagwell had been sweet on Eloise for years, but she refused to acknowledge it.

  “John David, you know there’s nothing between Arlen Bagwell and me. I wish you’d quit inferring that there is. And by the way, Arlen is the sheriff now.”

  “Maybe somebody at the Clarion knows something,” I said, as much to change the subject as to offer a helpful suggestion.

  “I called Doris Mozingo before I called you,” Eloise said. “She said Granddad left the office at about six, but he didn’t mention whether he was heading straight home or not.”

  He had called me and left his first message a half hour later.

  “What about the staff? Do you think they might know something?”

  “Doris volunteered to call them for me, but she doesn’t think that will help. If she doesn’t know where he went, she said, they won’t either.”

  Eloise went quiet, as if some new thought had entered her head. “Doris said that you called Granddad yesterday.” There was a hint of a question in the words.

  “Yes I did,” I said.

  “He didn’t mention that when we talked. You two didn’t get into it again, did you?”

  “No, Eloise. I asked him for a favor, that’s all.”

  “What kind of a favor?”

  “I need his help to locate a person who lives in the area for a story I’m working on. Around six-thirty he called back and left a message, asking me to call him at home last night. But I didn’t check my voicemail until late. I was going to call him this morning.”

  I could almost hear her mind at work. “That means that at six-thirty he was planning to be home. That scares me even more somehow,” she said.

  It didn’t comfort me either.

  “Did he sound okay? I mean, he didn’t sound like he was sick or anything?” she asked.

  “Not that I could notice,” I said. “He did say that something was troubling him, but I didn’t think he was referring to an illness. Maybe it was the same thing that had him distracted when you called him.”

  I’d dismissed the comment from the message as typical Grandfather theatrics. Was I right?

  “Who is this person he was helping you to find?” Eloise asked. “Could they be together?”

  “I don’t think so, Eloise,” I said.

  I would have smiled at the idea of Grandfather being out all night with an attractive young woman, if it were not for the seriousness of the situation.

  Eloise seemed to accept my reply and heaved a sigh in my ear. “I’ve gone out to the car to go searching for him several times,” she said, “but then I think he might call and I’ll miss it, so I come back inside. I’ve just been sitting here by myself, staring at the phone and waiting. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Is Mackenzie still at her sleep-over?” I asked, thinking of my teenage niece, the only good thing to come out of my sister’s brief marriage to a wounded soul named Billy Gibson, a union that lasted only as long as it took him to drink and drug himself to death.

  “Yes. I don’t want to worry her with this yet.”

  “Eloise, I want you to call the sheriff’s office just as soon as we hang up. I’m on my way. I should be there before noon.”

  “No, John David. I mean, I’ll make the call, but you don’t need to come yet. I don’t know what you could do here that I can’t. There’s no reason for both of us to sit around wringing our hands, we’ll just depress each other. I’ll call you when I hear something.”

  Her words held a familiar, steely ring that I recognized as her defense against unbearable heartbreak. This meant she was assuming the worst. She was already building a brave front, a survival mechanism she learned at a tender young age when a jack-knifing eighteen-wheeler swept our parents off a rain-slick highway like a giant mechanical broom, sending us to live with a grandfather we hardly knew, a man long past the patience it took to raise kids. What I heard from my sister was a combination of courage and common sense that said to heal, you first had to accept the unacceptable.

  “I’m coming anyway,” I told her. I heard her sigh, either out of relief or at my stubbornness. “I just need to drop by the office first.”

  I hung up and my thoughts went to the day long ago when Grandfather came to pick up my sister and me from the old lady who kept us while our parents were at work. He wasted no time telling us in his brusque manner what had happened to them, and that we would be living with him from that moment on.

  We had visited him at his big house in the country many times with our parents, but never really got to know him. He paid little attention to us and even at my young age, I had formed the opinion that he didn’t particularly like kids. That was okay, I didn’t like him either.

  I was determined not to let him s
ee me cry, as he and the woman who looked after us helped pack our bags. He later went back for the rest of our things, and I spent the first month holed up in an upstairs bedroom in his rambling old house, coming out only to go to our parents’ funeral, to eat, and to attend church on Sunday—which he insisted on. Sometimes, women from the church would come over with cookies and cake, and even toys. Eloise would talk with them, but I said very little beyond a “thank you.” Grandfather didn’t seem to mind, and mostly left me alone.

  With Eloise’s prodding, I eventually came out and joined my new abbreviated family, and things gradually leveled out to a routine of sorts—if anything could ever be routine again after the loss of both your parents.

  I would learn that Grandfather wasn’t a mean man, just a serious one, without much use for small talk or children’s games. I guess I had seen much of the same solemnity between my dad and Grandfather, but had paid little attention. At least my dad didn’t learn the same character traits. My dad would get down in the floor and play with my toys beside me, as much a best friend as a dad. Grandfather treated me more like an adult than a kid, and when he spoke to me it was usually to teach or lecture. I was scared of him, and called him “grandfather” from the first, rather than a less formal “granddad” or “gramps,” as Eloise called him. His aloofness and demeanor was more like a school principal than a parent, and “grandfather” just seemed more appropriate. I had never called him anything else.

  Maybe because she was older, Eloise ignored his gruffness, and forced him to talk to her about mundane things, even joking around and making him laugh at times. They seemed to develop a warmer relationship than he and I shared. Grandfather and I remained distant, and as the years went by nothing changed but my ever-growing resentment and rebelliousness.

  I showered and shaved, noticing that the hit and run collision with the baggage cart from the Palace Hotel yesterday had left a nasty bruise on my knee. There was soreness, but nothing that lived up to the ugliness of the bruise. I quickly packed a bag with my usual attire of sports shirts, t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, and then added a white shirt, tie, dress shoes, and a navy blazer. I stopped and thought for a moment about what I was packing. I was filling the bag with the clothes I usually took on a business trip—a suit and tie in case there was an event such as a fancy dinner. But this wasn’t a business trip. Was my subconscious packing for a funeral?