by Ron Fisher
“As well as could be expected,” I said. “Taylor isn’t looking too good.”
“What have you been doing, little brother?” Eloise asked. “I want to hear about it, too.”
“Nosy as ever, big sister,” I said. We laughed and hugged again. The Braggs were big huggers. “I went over to see Taylor Johnson,” I said.
“That poor man,” Eloise said. “How’s he taking the news about his brother?”
“Not well,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later, but first, how are you? It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen you.”
My sister, as always, said she was fine, which she would say even if it weren’t true. Eloise was not one to dwell on the downside of life, even with all the loss she’d experienced. First our parents, then her husband, Billy, who drank and drugged himself into an early grave, and more recently, our grandfather. She grieved of course, but she always bounced back. She was better than me at handling tragedy.
My sister never held a regular steady job until now. From the moment we came to live with our grandfather as children, she stayed home and took care of grandfather and me. I flew the coop after college, but she remained the mistress of the household of the hundred and fifty-year-old farmhouse everyone called Still Hollow. But this new job at the Clarion, for which she was responsible for heading up business and advertising, suited her. She had a rosy color to her cheeks, a spring in her step and she looked particularly lovely today.
It was funny, but I rarely thought of my older sister as pretty. She was, well, my sister. But she was pretty. I wondered if she was seeing anyone, something she rarely did, although I knew of several eager suitors, one of them the bachelor Sheriff of Pickens County.
I asked about my teenage niece Mackenzie. Eloise said she was still at school. Mackenzie was working part-time at the paper until summer break, and then she’d be full-time until the fall when school started back. She was a special kid, actually a young woman now, and I tried to be a male presence in her life, given the fact that all the other men she’d ever known were no longer there for her.
I never knew if I was any good at that or not. I wasn’t trying to be a surrogate father for her, just family and a friend. She treated me more like an older brother than an uncle, which I liked. She was about the same age as Jamal, I suddenly thought, and a wave of heightened empathy washed over me for Taylor and his mother. I couldn’t imagine Mackenzie suddenly going missing like Jamal.
“How is she working out?” I asked Eloise.
“She’s doing great,” Eloise said. “She loves the job, and her grades haven’t slipped a bit for all the hours she puts in here. She’s developing into a good little reporter. A nose for news is certainly in her genes. I’m very proud of my baby.”
“You should be,” I said. “All that and good looks too.”
“Oh God, I know,” Eloise said. “I lose track of all the boys that call the house.”
“So, are we on for dinner tonight?” I said, looking to both of them for an answer.
“Does the Pope live in Rome?” Eloise said. “I’m making chicken and dumplings, especially for you.”
She knew it was one of my favorites.
“And I’ve got blackberries I canned last summer,” she added. “I’m making a blackberry pie, too.”
“Mrs. Mozingo will like that,” I said. “She thinks I’m too skinny.”
“Oh, but you’re just right for me, big fella,” Kelly piped in, draping an arm over my shoulder.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Eloise said. “It’s been a while since the whole family has dined together.”
Her words took me by surprise. I had never heard Eloise refer to Kelly as part of our family, and it was probably silly, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Eloise was automatically taking my relationship with Kelly a step farther than I had. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, I supposed, I was just a bit taken back when she threw the issue out into the cold light of day.
They went back to work, and I went downstairs to the paper’s morgue to read the issues of the Clarion with Kelly’s Jamal Johnson stories in them. The headline on the first one was, “Teenager sought for shooting prize horse.”
There was a picture of Jamal, a typical high school annual photo, showing a clean-cut kid with a broad smile and looking nothing like a horse-shooting thug. He didn’t have Taylor’s physique or once movie star good looks, but there was a definite family resemblance.
The story went on to say Johnson was suspected of killing a horse belonging to a Wilson Kroll, a wealthy horse breeder and stud service operator in North Greenville County. According to this Kroll, the horse was the prize stallion of his stables and valued at several million dollars. There were no witnesses to the shooting, which happened late at night, and they didn't find the dead horse until the next morning when the stable-hands showed up for work.
Kroll was out of town at the time of the shooting, but upon his return, he told the Greenville County Sheriff’s department Johnson had worked for him up until a few days earlier when he fired him for unsatisfactory performance. He stated that Johnson had vehemently disagreed with the charge and threatened to get even. Wilson Kroll believed Johnson made good on his threat by killing his horse.
Sheriff’s deputies searched Johnson’s home and property, where he lived with his mother, and found a bolt action 22 rifle hidden in a shed out back. Tests proved that this rifle, recently fired, was the weapon that killed the horse. The Authorities said they believed Johnson ran away to avoid capture.
I wondered if the cops would have done a ballistics test if Kroll had been some average Joe with a dead saddle horse?
The article ended by asking for anyone with knowledge of Jamal Johnson’s whereabouts, to give the Greenville County Sheriff’s office a call.
The Clarion’s next issue began as an update to the first, stating that Jamal was still missing. Where it differed, was this follow-up story was more about Jamal, and less about the crime. I could read between the lines that Kelly had come to believe in his innocence. Here she deliberately chose not to convict the boy with her story. Admirable, but arguably not in fitting with a journalist’s imperative to stay neutral. I’d have to rib her about that.
Kelly wrote that as far as the authorities could determine, Jamal went missing sometime after eleven o’clock on Saturday night, the night after Wilson Kroll’s horse was shot. The boy was last seen leaving a dinner party where he had worked as a waiter. The location of the party was a private residence in the Hunting Club Road area of Tryon, North Carolina, just over the North and South Carolina state line from Greenville County, where the boy lived.
There was an interview with Mrs. Johnson, who claimed passionately that her son was innocent. She said he had never owned a gun, and didn’t like them. As far as she knew, he’d never even fired one. He didn’t hunt, and was too soft-hearted to kill any animal, especially a horse. He loved them. She insisted that someone planted the gun.
She was grief-stricken and worried, claiming Jamal would never run away without telling her, and that something bad must have happened to him and the police weren’t doing anything to investigate that.
So, she and Taylor were both fearing the worst.
Others interviewed described Jamal as a good, gentle kid who studied hard, had high hopes for college, worked odd jobs saving for it, and was liked by everyone.
Evidently, Wilson Kroll wasn’t one of them.
Another story on the front page of the Clarion caught my eye. There was a serial killer loose in the upstate. His victims were all prostitutes, it appeared. The latest was a young woman in the neighboring city of Anderson, and the specifics of her death matched other unsolved murders in the Carolinas over the years. So far, the police had been unable to prove the killer raped these women, but they all had a similar modus operandi: strangled to death, with their faces disfigured post-mortem, mouth, and lips mutilated by a hammer-like object. They all had two-gallon clear plastic zip bags place
d over their heads—to avoid the blood splatter, the police speculated. The news media had dubbed the killer the ‘Carolina Stalker.’”
If this story had made the news in Atlanta, I must have missed it. I couldn’t remember a serial killer in this part of the country since Wayne Williams and the famous “Atlanta child murders case” back in the early eighties.
The article was particularly interesting to me on another level. It showed Kelly and my sister were expanding the coverage of the Clarion to include bigger stories than just the local news. They picked this one up, I saw, from a news service. When my grandfather ran the paper, he rarely did that. He focused strictly on local news. I was glad to see this happening and gave Kelly all the credit. She continued to show what a savvy newspaper woman she was.
I took no income from the Clarion except for the peace of mind that Eloise and my niece Mackenzie would have a stable financial future, and insure the upkeep of Still hollow and keep it in the family. I was happy to see them bringing new life to the paper.
I went to a computer and tried to find anything I could about this Wilson Kroll. I came across a story of him on an equine website. He was described as the son of a wealthy Lake Erie shipping magnate from Cleveland Ohio, now deceased, who had moved to the upstate of South Carolina a few years ago to breed and raise horses. He sounded like another one of Kelly’s friend Natasha’s trust fund babies.
Most of the story was about a prize stallion Kroll owned, named Emperor. The horse was a great steeplechase champion, now a sought-after and highly profitable stud horse for Kroll’s stud service business. Emperor sounded like the horse that was shot.
Shooting a horse for the insurance was nothing new to me. Some time back, I did a story about a big-time horse owner in Kentucky who killed several of his race horses for the insurance money. My story led to his arrest. This kind of insurance fraud was so typical that the first person the police usually looked at was the dead horse’s owner. But here, the alleged threat from Jamal, the rifle found in his mother’s shed, Kroll’s alibi, and the kid’s timely disappearance pointed the authorities away from Wilson Kroll and directly on Jamal Johnson.
If someone was framing the kid, the most likely candidate was this Wilson Kroll, the dead horse’s owner. The insurance on this horse had to be big bucks.
I sat and thought about it for a minute. The biggest problem with proving Jamal’s innocence was the rifle they found in his storage shed. As to everything else, the shooting and the threat, there were no witnesses. Just Kroll’s word. A “he said, he said” situation, usually hard to prove. But the police said they had no reason not to believe the man. He was a reputable and upstanding citizen of Greenville County.
And he was white and rich.
Kroll aside, everyone seemed to think this kid walked on water, but Kelly was the persuader for me. She was a damn good journalist who knew that even the good could go bad. Kelly wouldn’t buy into Jamal's innocence easily. She would approach this with an amount of skepticism, as would I. But something had convinced her Jamal didn’t do it, and in the absence of additional information, I tended to come down on her side.
So, I would go into this thing giving the kid the benefit of the doubt and assume he was innocent. By taking this approach, however, I was presuming he didn’t run away because he’d killed the horse. As I saw it, the most likely reasons for his disappearance were: one, he knew someone was framing him and didn’t think the police would believe him, or two, he didn’t go missing by choice—whether connected to the horse shooting or for some other reason entirely. The latter didn’t portend good things for Jamal or the Johnsons.
An idea had been rolling around in my head since I’d made my promise to Taylor. I gave Joe Dennis my NFL Stadium story to tide him over while I was away, with nothing else on the burner. So, why not write a story about this Dark Corner community of horse lovers and steeplechase enthusiasts? I wasn’t out to horn in on Kelly’s coverage of the Jamal news. I would never do that—and she would never put up with it. Jamal would still be her story. Mine would be more of a human interest piece. If I turned up anything newsworthy about the dead horse or Jamal’s disappearance, which I’d obviously try to do, I would pass it on to Kelly so she could break the story. I wouldn’t be working against her; we’d be working together. Only, no one over there would know. The upside was I would have a legitimate reason to poke my nose into things in the Dark Corner and ask my questions. The downside was I could end up with the most boring story ever written.
Maybe Kelly was right, and I was a reverse snob, because the thing about a story like this that stirred my interest the most, aside from the business of trying to find Jamal, was the prospect to bring a comeuppance to whomever in this elite little wealthy clique deserved it. I found myself setting my sites on the dead horse’s owner, Wilson Kroll.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kelly and I showed up for dinner at Eloise’s at 7:30 and we all sat around the table small-talking and enjoying Eloise’s chicken and dumplings, topped off with her homemade blackberry pie. I’d need to double my running and workout regimen while I was here, or I’d end up the size of an NFL offensive lineman.
I kept thinking about the comment Eloise made earlier at the Clarion, calling this a family gathering and casually including Kelly. The thought was like a fly in the room buzzing around my head, distracting me. I knew why it disturbed me; it was that old fear of commitment rearing its ugly head. I thought I was getting over that. Kelly was like no other woman I’d ever known, and I knew I loved her. But whenever I thought of a permanent future together, I still broke out in a sweat. Old emotional hang-ups die hard.
During a lull in the conversation, Mackenzie made matters worse by asking when Kelly and I were getting married. She asked it jokingly, but the look Kelly gave me across the table held more sadness in it than humor. It reminded me again of our conversation-in-waiting, the one we were putting off for practical reasons: living a hundred and forty miles apart. But what did that say about our relationship if it was driven only by practicality?
After dinner, Mackenzie went to her room to do her homework, and Kelly, Eloise and I went into the den with after-dinner cups of coffee. I told Kelly and Eloise the details of my visit with Taylor, and his asking me to find his little brother.
“What did you say to him?” Kelly asked.
“I told him to leave it to the cops as they can find him better than I can.”
Kelly was looking at me closely. “But he didn’t accept that.”
“Taylor doesn’t trust the police,” I said. “He says they aren’t giving it much effort, and he’s probably right. Finding a kid who shoots a horse can’t compete with other, more serious crimes on their plate.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Eloise said. “I hear that every policeman in the upstate is looking for that serial killer they call the Carolina Stalker. So what are you going to do?”
“He’s going to try to find the boy himself,” Kelly said, answering for me. “J.D. feels he owes Taylor for the part he played in Taylor’s injury.”
She knew me too well.
“Taylor’s my friend, and he asked me to do something for him he can’t do himself. I can’t turn him down.”
“That’s my John David,” Eloise said, her expression somewhere between smiling with pride and tearing up.
Kelly came over and kissed me on the cheek. “He’s my John David, too,” she said. “True blue. That’s why I love him so.”
“The key word here is ‘try,’” I said, pulling her down on my lap. “There’s no way I can find that kid. I don’t know a soul over there but his mother, and if she knew anything, she would have already told the police.”
“So what are you saying?” Kelly asked. “You promised poor Taylor you’d try, but you’ll just go through the motions? Maybe you’re not my John David,” she said, but smiled when she said it.
“Of course I’ll try. I just can’t guarantee how far I’ll get. I can help Mrs. Johnson out whe
rever I can, and bug the cops to do their job, but beyond that, I only have one idea. I can write a human interest piece for SportsWord about that little community of wealthy horse owners, which will at least give me a reason to talk to people. Jamal Johnson is your story, not mine. I’m not out to scoop you, but to find Jamal. Any news I find concerning Jamal and his disappearance, I’ll feed to you.”
“We’ll be working together,” Kelly said. “I like that. The timing is good, too. Next Saturday is the Upcountry Steeplechase, the big race they have over there every year. Twenty thousand people will be there, with the locals partying every night leading right up to race day—which is just a big party in itself. Everyone you need to talk to will be there, probably even people the cops didn’t question, but might know things.”
“That offers possibilities,” I said, “but other than crashing these parties, I’m not sure how I wrangle an invitation to them.”
“I have an idea for that, too,” Kelly said. “Natasha Ladd.”
“Who’s Natasha Ladd?” my sister asked.
“She’s a rich friend of Kelly’s,” I said. “Can she get me into these parties?” I asked Kelly.
“If anyone can, it’s Natasha.”
Kelly excused herself and went to call her old college friend. She came back twenty minutes later and said Natasha was excited to play a part in finding Jamal.
“She said she would meet you at noon tomorrow at her place if you can make it.”
“I can make it,” I said.
“She has an idea to pass you off as a new boyfriend. I’m not sure how much I like that, but she says seeing her with a boyfriend du jour on her arm is a familiar sight to her friends, which would make you easier to explain, and for them to accept.”
“Is that really necessary?” I asked. All I need is an introduction to the right people. I’ll do the rest.”
“That’s Natasha,” Kelly said, sending Natasha’s address and phone number from her cell to mine. “I learned long ago not to argue with her and to just go with the flow. But you can take it up with her tomorrow if you want. And J.D.? You watch out for her. She’s a terrible flirt, unashamedly outspoken, and is probably on the lookout for husband number four.”