Souls Lost (Appalachian Souls Book 1)

by Bonnie Elizabeth

  “How can I help you?” Stacy asked, her voice formal, slightly curt but not unfriendly. Stacy’s family was from Virginia, leaving her with a lower, softer, old-style Plantation southern accent rather than the Appalachian drawl that was more common in Corbin Meadow. Her husband had come in with Jack Lyle. Stacy had joined him, not as his wife, but in the last six months they’d married. Zoe had learned all of that from Donna when she’d asked what was new in town shortly after she’d arrived.

  Now, Stacy worked in the mayor’s office, his third secretary since Bethany Shields had been murdered. Zoe had no idea if the Mayor just wasn’t good at hiring people who would stay or if he was particularly difficult to work for. Bethany had been there forever and had had no problems with him, but perhaps she was unique.

  “This is Zoe Mason-Hyer Parker,” Zoe said, thinking again how glad she’d be when the divorce was final and she could drop the Parker. In Portland she was just plain old Zoe Parker. Here, Zoe Parker meant nothing. It was the Mason-Hyer name that got people’s attention and reminded them that she was one of them. In school she’d often thought of dropping the Mason and just being plain old Zoe Hyer, but now that her mom was gone, she didn’t want to lose that connection to her maternal family.

  “Zoe!” Stacy said, loudly and lovingly as if they were old friends, when in fact they’d met once at the grocery, introduced by Selma Wiggins who worked the cash register up front. The Wiggins lived not far from Zoe’s parents, and Selma had worked at the grocery forever. Her husband had driven the trucks that hauled the furniture made by the companies that had kept Corbin Meadow in business decades ago. Now he was retired, but he always said driving truck for the local companies was the best route he’d ever had.

  “I was just thinking that if I’m going to be in town for any amount of time, I needed to get involved. I’m wondering who sits on the council now and when the next council meeting is?” Zoe said.

  Stacy rattled off a list of names, most of which Zoe knew, at least vaguely. They were all people in her parent’s generation except for one, Andrew Carter.

  “I think the next council meeting is on Thursday this week. It’s usually Tuesday night but with the storm coming in yesterday, it got moved to tomorrow,” Stacy said. “It was on the website. Do you have the URL?”

  Zoe said she did. She’d looked it up but the date had seemed wrong. Now she knew why. Her momma’s night out had always been Tuesday when she was on the council.

  “Is there something you were hoping to get on the schedule?” Stacy asked.

  “I was just wondering what the status of Elaine’s proposal to bring in more tourism was,” Zoe said.

  Stacy was quiet for a moment, but Zoe heard the sounds of papers flipping and then a few clacks on the keyboard. “Okay, here it is. She was supposed to talk about a proposal to re-face the Main Street businesses, charging the landlords half and the town putting in half—no way that was happening—and then also looking at having a summer festival wrapped around handcrafted furniture and woodworking. She was thinking of calling it Timber Fest or something like that.”

  “Sounds interesting,” Zoe said. “Can I get notes on that before tomorrow? Can you email them to me?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Stacy said cheerfully. “What’s your email?”

  Zoe rattled it off, thinking. She had a feeling, an uneasy one. It wasn’t a black feeling like she had when Elaine had died, but there was something wrong.

  “I like the idea of Timber Fest,” Zoe said. “It picks up on the town’s history and can draw in new people. Plus it can educate them about handcrafted furniture.”

  “You sound just like Elaine!” Stacy laughed and then stopped abruptly as if she only just remembered what had happened. “I’ll miss her.”

  “Elaine was a good person,” Zoe said. “I bet she’d have accomplished a lot for the town. Think of the revenue something like the Timber Fest would have brought. I bet done right, in a year there’d be enough to pay for most of Main to get their fronts redone the way she was thinking about.”

  “Maybe,” Stacy sounded hesitant.

  They said their goodbyes, and Zoe sat and stared. She had a lot of ideas. Maybe getting the town on the map with tourism first was the way to go. Then she could continue her momma’s work on bringing more industry to the town so that it wasn’t dying. Not that Corbin Meadow felt like it was dying but it was sort of in stasis, as if nothing had changed since long before she was born. It was time for the town to come into the twenty-first century.

  The house dimmed slightly, clouds passing over the sun, though the rain wasn’t coming down quite as hard. Zoe looked at her phone to read the pages Stacy had sent her but she wasn’t quite able to get a decent connection.

  Zoe pushed herself off the sofa, frustrated. She walked out to the front room to see if the connection was better there, but she still wasn’t able to get anything. Looking up, out at the rain, the sky not quite as dark as it was an hour ago when she’d kicked Taran out despite his hints at waiting until the storm passed, she caught a glimpse of a shadow turning the corner near her garage.

  Zoe went to the back of the house to see who was coming around into back yard. Once back in the family room, she stood by the sliding door, looking out at the chair she had left angled towards the yard earlier this morning, but there was no one there. Zoe waited for some time expecting to see someone, perhaps a crazy meter reader or something, but no one showed up. Not even a dog running loose.

  Zoe rubbed her arms against the sudden chill she felt, not from the air which was far too hot for the season, but because of the sudden sense that she’d started something she should never have begun.

  Still, she was the daughter of two of the most notoriously stubborn people in all of Corbin Meadow. She’d see this through now that she’d decided to get involved, forgetting for a moment that until she’d made that call to Stacy she hadn’t really decided if she’d stay there for a few days while she worked out her situation with Tyler or if she’d move closer to home. She’d not really thought about actually staying in Corbin Meadow, had really just been considering moving to Raleigh or perhaps Charlotte, but now that she had a plan, she wasn’t going anywhere. She was lucky, she knew. As a lab tech she could probably find a job pretty much anywhere, just so long as there was a hospital. Hickory wasn’t a horrible commute.

  Zoe could imagine the discussion she would have with LeAnne over the move. Going from a city like Portland, which she had loved, to a small town like Corbin Meadow, which she couldn’t wait to escape. There was no way her friend wasn’t going to laugh at her and tell her she was nuts. At least LeAnne would understand about wanting to make a difference in the town and she’d understand that there was a greater possibility of doing that someplace small, like Corbin Meadow, than there was in a bigger place.

  Despite the slightly nagging feeling that she’d set something dark in motion, Zoe felt good about her decision. She couldn’t wait until later that night when she’d be able to call her friend and discuss it.

  Chapter 12

  It took Taran nearly fifteen minutes to get to the coffee shop where Ed Hyer had his morning coffee. Saunders Coffee House was an independent shop that had been in Corbin Meadow for twenty years. Taran was old enough to remember it going in just as fancy coffee had become a thing. Everyone was talking about Starbucks, but the company, like so many, didn’t seem to know Corbin Meadow existed. Not, of course, that they were everywhere twenty years ago, but they were in the news.

  Rather than lobby the large conglomerate to come to their town, the townsfolk, not being particularly hopeful that such a thing would work, particularly given that it rarely had in the past, Jay Saunders had rented space in one of the buildings on Main, where handcrafted furniture items had once been displayed. He hadn’t taken the whole building, just a portion of it, which had given old man Keller, who owned the place, the idea of sub-dividing the building into several smaller rentals. Now the coffee shop sat next to a printer
, which sat next to a toy store, which did surprisingly good business considering the size of the town.

  With the rain coming down, Taran could hardly see the signs for the buildings, driving from memory as much as anything, creeping along in case there was another person so foolish as to be on the road in the rain. He hadn’t been welcome at Zoe’s any longer, and although it had thundered ominously when he’d left, she hadn’t suggested he stay a bit longer, maybe have a cup of coffee, until the storm passed.

  Instead she’d shut the door before he was barely through it, forcing him to turn up his collar and make a run for the car. Even if he’d remembered an umbrella, it was just windy enough that he doubted he have managed to stay any drier under one than if he ran for it. Fortunately Zoe’s parents hadn’t had one of those homes that was set back too far from the street, merely two and half car lengths, and he’d made that run quickly. He’d been able to slide in without worrying about unlocking the door because the crime rate in Corbin Meadow was all but non-existent.

  Except for when women were killed.

  Taran had listened to Ed when Frank had interviewed him after Jodie had died. Ed hadn’t had much to add but Taran wanted to come at this differently. Did Jodie have some inkling of what had happened to Bethany Shields? Because it sounded like she had called her daughter to come because of her death. And if she had an inkling, had she said anything to Ed?

  It had been two years since she’d died. Taran wasn’t hopeful that Ed would remember, particularly if it had been just a passing comment, but he had to ask.

  He was lucky to get a spot, a nice angled parking spot put in perhaps five years ago in anticipation of some growth to the city, cutting the sidewalks in half and narrowing the main road. It put him nearly in front of the coffee shop, which was open, the red letters shining bright through the veil of rain. There were awnings over most of the sidewalk, too, so once he got to the sidewalk, he’d be good. Taran opened the car door, surprised at the drench of water on his leg before it was barely out of the car.

  There was a warm, humid smell in the water that he didn’t like. This wasn’t an ordinary fall shower. This was tropical. He had a feeling it was going to last a lot longer than the usual storm bursts did, dropping a half an inch in a few minutes. This would waterlog the streets and the hills. They’d have flash floods down by the creek, which was probably already about to burst its banks, though fortunately the homes nearby were on higher ground. There was one road that would be cut off. Taran would have to get someone out there to put up a few cones and tell people the road was closed or they’d cut through, thinking their trucks were raised high enough to get through the standing water.

  He made a run for the awning before switching on the radio that hung on his shoulder and talking to Mattie, telling her what he needed her to have Johnny take care of. Fortunately the call went through despite plenty of static, but Mattie seemed to understand. She lived out that way so he didn’t have to educate her on why he needed someone to go do that.

  The coffee shop, which no one called Saunders, it was always just the coffee shop, smelled of coffee beans and wet dog, though there were no dogs in the place. The smell was probably from all the hunting dogs that had left half their fur on the jackets of the old men sitting around the table towards the back by the wood stove. No fancy fireplaces there. The wood stove was real and they stacked real wood nearby so patrons could stoke it up as high as they wanted, which periodically caused some arguments.

  Ed Hyer was among those men, and like the others, his face turned towards Taran, a worried frown crossing it, almost as if he knew Taran was there to speak to him. Other than Ed and the four men he always drank coffee with and the girl working the coffee machines, the barista or whatever, there was no one else there. Even the group around Ed looked a bit slim.

  “Can I talk to you, Ed? Maybe over here?” Taran asked thinking it would be better if he did the interview in private.

  “If you’re asking about Elaine, maybe we can all help,” Derek Price said quietly. There wasn’t a challenge in the voice, though Derek could readily challenge any officer. There was just a certain level of sadness that made Taran wonder if he’d missed a budding romance between the old woodworker and the librarian.

  Reed Hudson pulled out a chair and pulled it over near the stove, which wasn’t going, fortunately, considering that it was already stuffy and warm in the place despite the air conditioning that was blowing from overhead. Taran gave in, taking it. He pulled out his notebook, tucked safely inside the plastic bag that he’d gotten from Zoe when he’d attempted to stay a bit longer.

  “What’s happening?” Derek asked. “Saw the sheriffs. Heard you were doing the questioning around town.”

  “I had to call them in,” Taran said, like an apology, although he wasn’t sure why he was giving one. Taran watched Derek’s hands, the most worn part of him, covered in scars as well as creases. His face was creased almost as much, and those lines seemed to droop down from his cheeks as if the thin bones of his body couldn’t quite hold the extra skin up. Even his navy blue T-shirt and worn blue jeans seemed to droop, an interesting feat considering he was seated.

  The men—Derek, Ed, Reed, Simon, and Matt—all nodded at him.

  “We were saying it was smart to do that,” Simon spoke finally. He had a thin voice that was hardly more than a whisper, probably due to years of smoking and then treatments for lung cancer. If Derek was droopy, Simon was skeletal, and Taran often worried when he saw him at the grocery that the poor man was going to fall over. Taran didn’t know where there was enough muscle there to hold the bones upright.

  “But how can I help?” Ed asked.

  “Just wondering if you remembered Jodie saying anything about Bethany before she died. If she had ideas about why Bethany was chosen,” Taran said. He waited while Ed thought.

  Ed was the palest of all of the men, although Simon was coming close. At one time Ed had been a redhead, a ginger they would call him now, with freckles all over the place, but age had just made him look faded, though you could always tell when he’d been in the sun because his whole head turned pink.

  “Jodie liked Bethany,” Ed said. “Beth. They went to lunch at least once a week, discussing city things. I know she was upset. But she had no idea why Beth was killed.”

  Taran nodded. “I was just wondering because I talked to Zoe and she mentioned that when her mom had called her, it was almost like she worried she might be next.”

  Ed sighed and leaned back in the chair. He reached for his coffee mug but it was empty, so he just turned it around on its spot on the tiny table that sat between his chair and Matt’s. He had one of the wooden rockers, as did Matt. The others sat in low Adirondack style wood chairs with no cushions. Only Taran had a plain chair, wooden and wide, comfortable for a few minutes but not half the morning.

  “Jodie worried about things a lot,” Ed said. “She was super excited because of the Jack Lyle thing which had happened a few weeks before Bethany was killed. She worried about the town and what it was coming to. She thought what had happened to Beth was something big, bigger than we knew and it was bad, but beyond that she couldn’t have said. Before Zoe got here, probably even before Bethany died, Jodie threw herself into contacting a bunch of other high tech companies, asking them what they needed to locate a new office in Corbin Meadow and then meeting with the mayor about how she could make the town more desirable. I think Beth was doing a lot of the research and Jodie was doing the contacting. They made a good team. I know they’d had their heads over a map of the city, looking at new places for re-zoning for another subdivision if they got more companies to relocate.”

  “And Amanda,” Ed added, “Amanda had been working with the women, offering advice on what they were going to need to ask for as far as money for a larger police force if all their plans went through. I always heard she’d have taken over for Frank if she’d hadn’t been killed. Had a good head for finances.”

  The last wasn’t
a diss, Taran knew, only a fact. He could do the work but didn’t take to it like Amanda did. She’d been something else.

  The others were shaking their heads in agreement but also in sadness for the loss to the town. The three women who had died, now four, were all important. All good, hardworking women. These were men who believed that they should have protected them better than they had. Taran wondered how many other women they would fail.

  Chapter 13: Before

  Emrys wasn’t being cooperative. Dixie had wanted to be head cheerleader, had given him the wish, but he’d cocked his head and then shook it slowly before saying no. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Dixie had realize that cold day in January that he had said he could grant her wishes in return for her protection, but now he was pulling back, always telling her what he couldn’t do. How was she supposed to run the town for him if she couldn’t even be head cheerleader?

  The spring day was pleasant, though the ground still felt soaked from all the snow they’d had, a record year with the snowfall in January totaling almost fifteen inches from that one single storm alone. Dixie’s house had been without power for four days, three days longer than Helen’s house down in town. School had been closed the whole week which meant makeup days in the summer when things were too hot to be comfortable and the summer sun would call them all with her bright rays and warm breath.

  For now the last of the daffodils and the first of the early tulips that lined the edge of the yard against the encroachment of the forestland wagged their heads at her, like Emrys wagging a finger. Dixie couldn’t really see them, of course, because she had to keep her eyes closed. Opening them, she’d see only the faintest of shadows, and Emrys would make it harder for her to connect with him the next time.