A Murder in Mount Moriah

by Mindy Quigley

  Rob said, “Wait. The guy who died. Are we talking about the black rebel soldier guy, Vernon Young? From the reenactment?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lindsay nodded. Her mind flashed back to the smoke-obscured scene the previous Saturday, the confused shouts, the fallen reenactor being loaded into the ambulance, the drips and smears of blood on the sun-parched grass.

  “You worked on the guy in the ER, right?” Rob said to Anna.

  “Yeah, I was on shift on the day of the commemoration last year, too. And the year before. We usually get our fair share of ‘casualties’—you know, sun stroke, dehydration, overly enthusiastic ‘soldiering’ from these middle-aged reenactor types. But I think this guy had to be the first actual Civil War battle death since 1865.

  “It was surreal,” she continued. “A chubby black guy in a Confederate uniform rolls in on a gurney, and then this herd of loud, pudgy white people stream in saying they were his family.”

  “The police spent hours questioning all the guys at the reenactment after you left, Linds. They think the shooting was intentional,” Rob said.

  “Intentional?” Anna almost choked on a piece of bran muffin. She gulped some orange juice. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Why would someone murder him out there, surrounded by spectators and booths selling funnel cake and airbrushed t-shirts? It was probably an accident. Some Joe Six Pack probably loaded a real cartridge instead of a blank and capped his buddy.”

  “Rob’s right,” Lindsay said. “I can’t understand it either, but I was in the room with Vernon’s wife when the police told her. They’re treating the death as suspicious. They’ve opened a murder investigation.”

  “There were dozens of soldiers involved in that reenactment. Not to mention all the people watching,” Rob said. “And we’re not talking about a bunch of rednecks who just like running around with guns and waving the rebel flag, either. Some of them are pillars of the community.” He shook his head. “I sure hope the police have some good evidence to go on, because if it was murder, then half the people in the county are suspects.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “‘Half the people in the county are suspects’? You sound like Agatha Christie.”

  “Hey, I’m just trying to inject some color into the drab palette of your life,” Rob said.

  “Now you sound like an ad for paint.”

  Lindsay ignored their bickering and used her spoon to chase the last Froot Loop around her bowl. She thought back to her bedside vigil with Kimberlee Young. Lindsay had sat beside her until dawn, long after the unknown sniper’s bullet had taken Vernon from the world. As she took her leave, Lindsay had said that she wished she could have known Vernon.

  “Me, too, sugar,” Kimberlee replied. “You would have loved him. Everyone did.”

  Now, as she thought back, Lindsay couldn’t help but see the obvious lie in Kimberlee’s statement. There was most definitely at least one person out there who did not love Vernon Young.

  Chapter 3

  Lindsay woke up in the early evening, just as the sun was beginning to dip behind the row of pine trees facing her living room windows. Whenever she came off a night shift, she spent the following afternoon dozing on the living room couch in her sweatpants. Somehow getting properly decked out in pajamas and climbing into bed seemed like an admission of defeat, but skipping sleep altogether seemed like unnecessary bravado. An afternoon couch nap struck the perfect balance.

  Lindsay sat down in her small yellow kitchen, poured herself a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, and began flicking through her mail. The handwriting on an oversized, envelope caught her eye. It contained a card fronted by a cheerful cartoon drawing of a claw-footed bathtub filled with hippopotami. Inside, the message read, “Hippo Bathday!” The handwritten note below said:

  Dear Lin-Lin,

  Sorry this is a bit late. You know me—always busy busy busy! Things with me are good but I can’t believe I’m old enough to have a 30 year old daughter!!! Ha ha! Now I’m gonna have to start lying about your age as well as my own. Ha ha!

  I’ll be passing your way in a couple weeks and I’d love to get together and catch up. I hope you had a nice birthday!!!

  Xoxo,

  Mom

  There was a Glamour Shots-style four-by-six inch picture of Lindsay’s mother tucked inside the card. Sarabelle Harding’s image stared into the vague distance at the edge of the frame, avoiding Lindsay’s gaze. Her blonde hair was styled into an attractive cascade of loose curls. Ice blue eyes sparkled from beneath copious false eyelashes. Some kind of gauzy filter had been applied; it erased years of hard living from Sarabelle’s face. Lindsay wondered if, somewhere under that mountain of make-up and behind the photographer’s tricks, Sarabelle retained her fine-boned beauty.

  Lindsay examined the envelope. No return address. It had been at least a year since she’d heard from her mother—five or more since they last saw each other in person. A familiar hollowness gnawed at Lindsay’s solar plexus. When Lindsay was six, her parents had been arrested for running a small-scale marijuana operation out of their modest brick house. They were each sentenced to five years in prison, and Lindsay was sent to live with her father’s aged aunt on an island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

  The Outer Banks of Lindsay’s childhood was nothing like the sunny holiday retreat that Spring Breakers and well-heeled beach house owners rhapsodize over. Until the mid-1980s, there was no real road connecting their small community with the mainland, or even with the adjacent island enclaves of Duck and Kitty Hawk. The scattered full-time residents numbered in the low hundreds; the nearest house with children was half a mile away from Lindsay’s. The intrepid holidaymakers who ventured to Corolla in those early days were mostly middle-aged artists or fishermen, seeking solitude. On the rare occasions when they did make conversation with the locals, it was only to say how charmingly old-fashioned Corolla (they pronounced it ‘Kah-roe-lah’ like the Toyota Corolla) was, and that living on Bodie Island (they pronounced it ‘Bow-dee’ like the skier Bodie Miller) must be like taking a vacation all year round. The locals would snap back that Kuh-raw-luh and Bah-dee Island suited them just fine, thank you very much.

  Lindsay and her great aunt—who she called Aunt Harding, never Aunt Patricia—shared a weather-beaten cottage near the northern tip of Bodie Island. Each morning, Aunt Harding would trek off down the sandy path to preside over the sorting and delivery of mail in the island’s small post office. Lindsay would make her own way to the island’s little school, or, during the summer holidays, spend the days beachcombing. She would find little treasures in the flotsam and keep them in her own secret mermaid’s cave under the front porch steps. Her treasure trove contained everything from chunks of smooth green glass to the sun-bleached skull of a horse. Lindsay’s bleak, windswept childhood had been punctuated by bimonthly visits to the Raleigh prisons that housed each of her parents. On Saturday mornings, she called on her mother at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. At lunchtime, her grim-faced aunt drove her ten minutes down the road to the much-less-grandly-named Central Prison to eat sandwiches and Nutty Bars out of vending machines with her father.

  After four years of model behavior and a jailhouse baptism, Lindsay’s father was granted early release from prison and was eventually deemed fit to regain custody of his daughter. Her mother, meanwhile, had an extra year added to her sentence after getting herself involved in a jailhouse gambling ring. When Sarabelle was finally released, the damaged little family attempted to reconcile. Aunt Harding had kept up with the mortgage payments on their small brick ranch house in Mount Moriah, and the three of them returned to live in the now-marijuana-free space. They stalked around the place like caged lions: Lindsay’s father, puffed up with his new-found sense of responsibility and his new-found religion; Lindsay’s mother, with her furtive movements, still a prisoner in her own mind; and Lindsay herself, on the brink of adolescence, a sealed box of roiling emotions. The fragile union lasted eighteen months. Then, one February night, Sarabell
e disappeared. Since that time, Sarabelle had haunted Lindsay’s life like a ghost, floating in when it suited her and then vanishing with little trace.

  With a sharp snap of her wrist, Lindsay tossed the card, the picture, and the envelope into the trash. She went to her bedroom to change into her running clothes. A moment later, she walked back into the kitchen and retrieved the card, standing it carefully in the kitchen windowsill. Surely Sarabelle remembering Lindsay’s birthday meant something. And she was suggesting that they meet. Maybe she was finally ready to make amends. Lindsay looked at the cheerful hippos, their rotund little bodies distorted by slanting rays of late afternoon sunlight, and allowed herself the merest hint of a smile.

  ##

  Lindsay’s house stood at the frayed edge of Mount Moriah. The town itself nestled in a little valley among the rolling hills of the Piedmont, the area between North Carolina’s coast and the Appalachians—a collection of buildings and houses orbiting the twin poles of the Mount Moriah Regional Hospital and the Walmart Superstore. There was little hustle and even less bustle. Lindsay lived beyond these orbits, out where the buildings trailed off into an ever thinner sprinkling of mobile homes and dilapidated farmhouses. Her little white house stood alone on an acre of land surrounded on all sides by tall pines and a thicket of dense undergrowth. She thought of it as her own little ship, sailing on a sea of solitude. Only the ship was badly in need of a paint job. And the ocean was mostly made of kudzu.

  She stood on the front porch now performing some perfunctory stretches, in preparation for a run. Seven p.m. was the absolute earliest she would consider jogging this time of year. During the summer months, the air remained thick and humid well into the early evening—venture out any time before dusk and you’d feel more like you were swimming than running. The sun was low on the horizon, but there was still at least a good hour of daylight left.

  Quickly gathering speed, Lindsay moved out of her neighborhood onto a tree-lined, two-lane road. Within a mile of her house, the houses gave way to tall pines, clay-lined creeks, and the low, rolling hills of the Carolina Piedmont. She passed the last outcropping of Mount Moriah’s version of civilization—a trailer park optimistically called Malibu Village—and crossed the road toward the piece of scrubby pine forest known as the Richards Homestead.

  The Homestead, once a profitable tobacco farm, had been gradually sold off over the years to housing developers. What remained was spread over 40 acres and bordered on one side by the interstate. The Richards family, who had made a small fortune in tobacco during the nineteenth century, had long since given up farming and moved into more hospitable surroundings. The land had lain fallow for as long as anyone could remember. The current Richardses lived in an 8-bedroom house in town. There was speculation that they would someday relocate to somewhere fashionable and exciting, like Winston-Salem, or France. But so far the family seemed content to revel in their status as the social and political royalty of their own little Central Carolina fiefdom.

  Lindsay ducked through the wire fence next to the road, ignoring the No Trespassing signs, and picked up one of the old logging paths that crisscrossed the land. As she advanced through the trees, the air became cool and fragrant. The pine trees along the path bore strange scars and deformities, like veterans from some long-forgotten war.

  Lulled by the warmth of the evening and the rhythm of her breathing, she almost didn’t see the men at first. But there they were, up ahead, striding swiftly across the clearing—three men dressed in the summer uniforms of Southern white men, khaki pants and short-sleeved button down shirts. They stood very still, looking intently into the trees on the far side of their SUVs. In two years of jogging on these paths, this was the first time Lindsay had seen anyone out here. She stopped in her tracks, observing them almost in awe.

  One of the three men walked to his gleaming SUV and retrieved a rifle from somewhere in the back. He crouched next to his vehicle, out of the range of Lindsay’s vision. She wondered if they could be out-of-season poachers—a not uncommon occurrence on private forest land like this. She dismissed the thought quickly. They were far too brazen, and they were obviously not dressed for hunting. After a few moments, the report of the gun exploded through the heavy evening air. Lindsay involuntarily ducked, even though the shot was in the opposite direction of her. The men jumped up, whooping and high-fiving. They talked for a minute more and drove away in their separate, shiny SUVs, kicking up a dusty haze in their wake.

  Lindsay remained still until the sound of the engines was replaced by the chirp of crickets. Out across the meadow, a lone firefly glowed in the amber twilight. When she was quite sure that they were gone, she ran swiftly across the clearing toward the spot that the shooter seemed to have been targeting. She walked along the tree line, peering into the rapidly darkening stretch of forest. There was a rustling from a clump of bushes that stood at the base of a gnarled tree. Her pulse quickened. She moved toward the bushes as if pulled along by an invisible rope. Under the cover of the trees, there was very little daylight left. She crept closer, trying to still her pounding heart. The rustling continued intermittently. She was now within yards of the movement’s source.

  Suddenly, as if it had been shot from a cannon, a small, dappled doe burst out of the thicket of bushes and sprinted straight at Lindsay. Lindsay dove sideways, her body slamming hard into the ground. The doe, too, zigzagged to avoid a collision. Lindsay scrambled around on the ground and eventually regained her footing, but by then the animal had disappeared into the darkness of the forest. Lindsay began to brush the dust off of her bare arms and legs. She stopped as her hands made contact with something sticky. Blood. It dotted her body like gruesome confetti. She followed the trail of blood with her eyes. Some of it led toward the bushes, some of it away, in the direction the injured animal had bolted. Lindsay shivered in spite of the oppressive heat. Those men had shot the deer without care or reason. Worse still, they hadn't had the compassion to finish the job. As quickly as she could, Lindsay turned around and ran home. As she ran, she tried to forget the terrible fear in the doe’s eyes. She ran and ran, as the darkness swallowed up the daylight in ravenous gulps.

  Chapter 4

  When Lindsay arrived for her shift at the hospital the following day, Geneva Williams accosted her in the small, windowless office that, along with the sleeping room, made up the chaplains’ quarters.

  “Girl! I have found him! Don’t you say no, because he is perfect.”

  Lindsay’s co-worker wagged her finger forcefully to emphasize each phrase. Lindsay’s stomach sank. Geneva, a sprightly black woman in her late sixties, was determined to find Lindsay a husband. Every time a new man joined the hospital’s staff, Geneva would covertly investigate his marital status and his interests, all with an eye toward preventing Lindsay from ending up, as she put it, “A sorry old spinster living out your days with a dozen cats and sack full of knitting.”

  “I have married off three daughters and four sons,” Geneva said. “All happy. Fifteen grandchildren. No divorces.”

  “I know. You’ve mentioned that. Frequently,” Lindsay replied.

  “I just want to make sure you heard me. One-hundred percent happy. Zero percent divorces. You cannot argue with statistics. Now then, sit down and let me tell you about your future husband.”

  Lindsay groaned, but obediently took a seat at one of the two compact, wooden desks that furnished the office. Although Geneva only stood 4’ 11”, she was a formidable woman. The daughter of sharecroppers, she’d put herself through teacher’s college and taught second grade at the all-black school in New Albany, a larger town not far from Mount Moriah. After she married, she and her husband settled down to become the co-pastors of their own small evangelical ministry, The New Holiness Temple of Blessed Deliverance.

  After her husband’s death the previous year, Geneva had ceded full-time pastoring to one of her daughters and decided that instead of retiring, she would shift her focus to ministering to the sick and the bereav
ed as a hospital chaplain. As the head of the pastoral services department at the hospital, Rob had previously instituted a policy that all full-time hospital chaplains and chaplain residents at Mount Moriah had to hold a graduate degree in theology, be ordained in a recognized denomination, and have interned in a hospital, prison, or hospice. Somehow, though, here was Geneva, a recently-minted chaplain resident, with only a K through 9 teaching certificate and the formidable force of her personality. Geneva was undergoing the intensive, self-analytical process of chaplaincy training called Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. She had finished the first unit, which allowed her to begin her residency, and she was still technically under the supervision of the more senior chaplains. This technicality, however, did nothing to diminish Geneva’s unquestioned, vigorously self-promoted authority in matters of courtship and marriage.

  “His name is Drew Checkoway,” Geneva began. “Tall, dark, and handsome. He’s a brain surgeon, girl! Which means smart. And rich. Thirty-five years old, never married, no kids. It doesn’t happen every day that a quality man like this drops into our laps.”

  Lindsay couldn’t deny the truth of this last statement. Although Mount Moriah’s population had grown increasingly fluid and cosmopolitan in recent years, the arrival of a young, eligible man was still an occasion to be met with heightened interest. Clearly this guy was too good to be true. “Probably gay,” Lindsay said.

  “Don’t you think that that was the first thing I checked up on? What am I? Some kind of amateur? Not gay, girl. You got to get yourself that man. Carpe Brain Surgeon. I already seen some of the nurses batting their little eyes at him. Drew Checkoway. Remember it because that’s your future children’s daddy’s name.”

  “I’ll be sure to look out for him.”

  “Do. Now I gotta go. Rob’s been on me to write up an entry for my reflection journal. Wants me to reflect on my feelings about having to do a reflection journal. I swear the boy is trifling with me. Sometimes I have to pray to Jesus to help me restrain myself from whooping his little behind with a hickory switch. I really do. Maybe I’ll write about that in my journal entry.” As Geneva opened the door to leave, she turned her head back to look at Lindsay and said, “Mrs. Lindsay Checkoway. Even sounds good. Hope you aren’t one of those women who keeps her name when she gets married. Can’t stand that. Makes it too confusing to know who belongs with who. Mrs. Lindsay Checkoway, then.” Geneva spoke these last words with such conviction that Lindsay felt sure that, in Geneva’s mind at least, the future was as stone-solid as the Ten Commandments.