A Murder in Mount Moriah

by Mindy Quigley

“Well, then, what gave you the notion that Kimberlee was involved in Vernon’s death?” Lindsay asked.

  “There were a few things that didn’t seem to add up. Kimberlee said that Vernon’s catering business was going great. But when we talked to her father, Buford, he said that the restaurant was just scraping by. Kimberlee says that she and Vernon had a perfect marriage, but a couple of the busboys at the restaurant heard them arguing loudly a number of times during the week right before Vernon died.”

  “Did they say what the arguments were about?”

  “No. Only that they kept saying something about Buford, and Vernon said something about him ‘finding out’ about something. All this might be beside the point, though, if Kimberlee’s whereabouts could be accounted for on the day of the murder. But neither her mother, nor anyone else, knows where she was during the period of time when Vernon was shot. Kimberlee herself said that she can’t remember exactly what she was doing. How can you not remember what you were doing less than a week ago? She says that she ran out to do some errands for about an hour at one point, but she’s very vague on the timeline.

  “Those things were already in my head when I went to talk to Kimberlee. Then I saw those poems and things that she had printed. I had looked at that threatening letter of Vernon’s and I noticed that there was a little smear all through the ink, like from a leaky cartridge. I saw the same thing on those papers on Kimberlee’s coffee table—the exact same pattern of streaking. We sent the paper off to the FBI lab in Virginia for their crime lab to look at. There was enough similarity to get a search warrant for the Young’s house. The lab ran some more tests yesterday when they got their hands on the printer itself. A lot of modern color printers encode their serial number into every document they print. The threatening letter definitely came off of Kimberlee’s printer.”

  “I can’t understand that.” Lindsay shook her head in dismay. For the first time, Lindsay experienced a niggling wave of doubt about Kimberlee’s innocence. Lindsay dismissed the thought as quickly as it came into her head. She had seen the grief on that woman’s face. She had been there in Kimberlee’s darkest hour and witnessed her devotion to her husband. There simply had to be some other explanation. “Did you say you sent the paper to the FBI lab? Why is the FBI involved?”

  “Well, the FBI can get involved in crimes that involve civil rights violations. Hate crimes and such. That all goes back to Jim Crow. Back then, local police forces, especially in the South, couldn’t always be relied upon to devote themselves all that diligently to solving racially-motivated crimes. Times were that this sort of thing might get swept under the rug. As soon as the Feds got wind of the fact that there was a Confederacy angle to this murder, they asked us, very insistently, if we wanted them to send somebody down here to ‘render assistance’—a real serious guy named Fleet. He’s got more experience with this kind of thing that all the cops on the Mount Moriah and New Albany forces combined. We’re lucky to have him, really. Plus, he’s black.”

  There was triumphant tone in his voice that made Lindsay instinctively roll her eyes.

  Warren glared at her. “The Mount Moriah and New Albany forces ain’t exactly a Rainbow Coalition. We got two women officers and one guy who was born in Kansas City. Our Rainbow is seven shades of white. Besides, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on out at that commemoration each year that doesn’t tend to promote racial harmony—Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Lost Cause, all of that. You remember the hoopla about the Confederate flag flying at state capitols in the South a few years back?”

  Lindsay nodded. In South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere, tens of thousands of activists had marched on state capitols, demanding that Confederate symbols be removed.

  “Well, that gives you some indication of how raw this still is. Everyone says that Vernon Young looked at things differently than most people. It didn’t matter to him that he was black and his wife was white. And as far as the reenacting, he was into the historical side of it. The guys in his regiment were like that, too, far as I can tell. But you do find some people who get into reenacting because they think that things would have been better if the South had won…” Warren trailed off, sweeping his upturned palm out in front of him and inviting Lindsay to finish his thought.

  Instead, she abruptly changed the subject. She had already been through all of this with Rob and Geneva, and she stubbornly clung to her opinion that Vernon couldn’t have been killed just because of his skin color. “So this Fleet guy is in charge now?”

  “He isn’t in charge, technically. Like I said, he’s ‘rendering assistance’. But we need to keep him happy. If he thinks we’re stonewalling, next thing you know we’re gonna have federal agents coming out of every impolite orifice in our bodies.”

  “And whose idea was it to bring Kimberlee in for questioning?”

  “Fleet’s. He wanted to see her for himself. He wanted to try to put some pressure on her about the printer and the letter. At this point, we have no solid motive, no murder weapon, and no witnesses. Not to mention that we’re sitting on a powder keg if the contents of that letter get out to the general public. I think Fleet was hoping that Kimberlee’d spill her guts when they confronted her with the letter.”

  Even though Warren had partially exonerated himself by blaming the interrogation on Agent Fleet, Lindsay couldn’t help snapping at him. “You should have known that she wouldn’t just fold.”

  “Tell me about it. I watched the interrogation. When Fleet showed her that letter, her blood set to boiling. And when they so much as hinted that she wrote that letter or had something to do with Vernon’s death, she about ripped their throats out with her teeth. For some of the guys, that was a mark against her, in terms of guilt.”

  “Some of the guys? So not you?” Lindsay said, raising her eyebrows.

  “Look, I have no doubt that Kimberlee Young is capable of killing. Watching her in that moment, I saw her as the type of woman who might commit a crime to defend someone she loved. Her whole family has a reputation for being fiercely loyal to one another. But I am having a hard time believing that she calculated this whole thing, and against her own husband. Whoever did this is slow and methodical.”

  “So you do think she’s innocent!”

  “Before you start doing an ‘I told you so’ dance, let’s be clear. I’m still not remotely close to counting Kimberlee out as a suspect. All the evidence still points to her and nobody else.”

  “Then where does that leave us? What’s this about me helping you stop something?”

  “The news about that letter could get out any time now. Nobody wants to see this county ripped open, with its stuffing hanging out for all to see. Being able to put Kimberlee behind bars quickly would conveniently make the racial motive disappear; this becomes a domestic murder story. As you might imagine, the powers that be in this county are very anxious to see that. A little too anxious, if you ask me. I like to build a case on facts. That’s where you come in.”

  Lindsay gave a little involuntary clap of her hands. The prospect of helping to solve the mystery made her indecently excited. She made sure that her voice came out calm and level when she spoke. “If this might help clear Kimberlee, count me in.”

  “Well, since you’re here, I reckon that you, like myself, began to wonder if there might be something important in this journal that Vernon was so interested in. I started to have a look at it, but I’m afraid that by the time I find anything out, it could be too late.” Warren paused, his face becoming stern. “Lindsay, you don’t need to get involved in this. You really don’t. An unsolved murder means that there is a murderer out there, running free. Someone who has killed already. I have no idea who it is, and neither do you. You could be getting mixed up in something very dangerous. For all you know, your new friend Kimberlee could be a cold-blooded murderer.”

  Chapter 17

  Lindsay brushed off Warren’s warning with a wave of her hand. She hated advice, especially advice from well-meaning men. And
most especially she hated advice that got in the way of her doing what she had made up her mind to do.

  “I take it that’s Samuel Wilcox’s journal?” Lindsay pointed to the large, leather-bound sheaf that stood open on the table in front of Warren. Lindsay leaned over. Densely-packed lines of cursive writing stretched from margin to margin across each thick, blue-gray page. The ink had faded to a dull brown with the occasional splotch where the thick-nibbed pen it had been written with had sputtered.

  “Yes. That,” Warren swiveled around and pointed to a shelf of identical books in one of the glass-fronted cases behind him, “and that, and that, and that.”

  “Whoa! How many are there?”

  “Eleven. Each one covers one year of his life from 1862 to 1872. I’ve been reading this for almost an hour, but I’m only up to the beginning of March in the first volume. The writing is tough to decipher, so it’s slow going. Now you can see why I could use some help.”

  Lindsay walked to the glass case and removed one of the heavy volumes. She opened it to a random page and began to read aloud. “24 February 1866. Rain. Flora sick with cough again. Stock room: ten pounds sugar, nine pounds suet, fifty pounds flour. Jeremy’s fattened pig eaten by a she-wolf in the night.” She looked at Warren in dismay. “Are they all like this?”

  “What you just read there is about as exciting as it gets, seems to me. It ain’t exactly the Diary of Anne Frank.”

  “I guess I pictured a diary like I had when I was in junior high, with a pink pony on the front cover and a little heart-shaped lock. I wrote all my very important secrets in there.”

  Warren seemed to relax and return to his usual good-humored self for the first time that morning. “Now that sounds interesting. Right after I finish this here page-turner, the secret diary of Lindsay Harding is my next project.”

  Warren explained that he had arrived as soon as the library opened that morning. He had questioned the librarian, hoping to find out what Vernon had been reading right before his death. She thought she remembered him doing some genealogical research using the North Carolina census records, and she knew she’d seen him read the Wilcox diary, but she had no idea which of the volumes he had read. She gave Warren the names of the other librarians, but didn’t hold out much hope of any of them knowing anything specific about Vernon’s studies.

  “You saw the set-up,” Warren said. “The librarian lets you in, but then you’re basically on your own in here. I got a little hopeful when I saw that people sign in and out using that log book over there, and mark down what all they read. But all Vernon wrote was ‘S. Wilcox journal’. No volume numbers or years. So I guess we’ll just have to start at the beginning. I’ve got 1862. Do you want to take 1863? Lindsay?”

  “Hang on a minute.”

  As Warren was speaking, Lindsay had been flipping through the log book scrawling a series of numbers on a small corner of paper she’d torn out of it. “1867.”

  “What?”

  “We should start in 1867. According to the log book, Vernon has spent nearly forty hours here looking at the journal. If it took you an hour to get through two months’ worth of entries, then that would mean that it would take six hours to get through a whole volume. The volumes are each about the same length, so that would mean that in forty hours, you’d get through somewhere between six and seven volumes, depending on how fast you read. It seems logical that anyone reading this would start with Volume One, 1862, so we can guess that that’s probably what Vernon did. If we want to read what he was reading just before he died, we should start in the sixth volume—1867.”

  Warren let out an appreciative whistle. “She’s not just a pretty face, folks.”

  “Well, I hope not. With this haircut, I don’t think I can count on my looks to get along in life.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything, but now that you mention it, you do have a Shirley-Temple-meets-electric-socket thing going on up there. What made you decide on that particular look?”

  “My father, a box of pastries, and a whole lot of thistle bushes. I’ll tell you the details some other time. Let’s get cracking.”

  Lindsay began with the 1867 volume; Warren took 1868. As Lindsay delved into the journal, she had the sensation of trying to touch a shadow—Samuel Wilcox, his family and his neighbors, the places they lived, all faint phantoms. Dry lists of possessions, mundane traces of everyday existence were all that remained of them. But it was the very palpable spirit of Vernon Young that kept Lindsay’s attention rapt. She was certain that his eyes had passed over these same pages, and in them somehow triggered his own undoing. Warren and Lindsay spent most of the next several hours reading in silence, taking notes on anything they felt might be important. Finally, Lindsay looked up at the wall clock and said with a start, “I’ve got to get going. I’m supposed to be leading Vernon’s memorial service in a little while. Have you found anything you think could be Vernon’s ‘big’ news?”

  Warren pushed his notes across the table. “Not unless there’s some deep significance in Wilcox bitching about the price of cotton sacking. You?”

  “There was a sad part when Flora dies. That’s his wife. I don’t think it’s anything to do with what we’re after, but he spends a fair amount of time writing about it here—how sick she is, how worried he is. Next thing you know, he’s recording the price of her coffin. Poor guy.”

  “Well, don’t you worry too much about old Samuel. By March 1868, he already has his eye on a pretty young lady by the name of Celia, who I’m guessing will be the new and improved Mrs. Samuel Wilcox before too long.”

  They smiled at each other for a moment. “How come you never got married? I remember hearing that you had a real serious boyfriend after college,” Warren said.

  “Timothy. Yeah. We were engaged.”

  “What happened?”

  “Gay, apparently. I started dating him my senior year of college. We moved to Columbus together after we graduated. He was studying for an MBA at Ohio State. I got my Divinity and Counseling degrees at a seminary up there and started working on my PhD. About six months before our wedding, out of the blue, he announced that he needed to explore his sexual identity. He moved to DC and that was that.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, I have been gifted with the ability to trigger profound psychosexual realizations. My friend Rob came out after he met me, too. You’re probably going to leave here this afternoon and drive straight out to a strip club called The Manhole or The Fireman’s Pole.”

  “Well, I was going to get some groceries and clean out my shed, but your idea certainly sounds livelier.” Warren winked at her. He closed the volume he’d been reading. “Look, Linds, even if we come across whatever Vernon thought was so important, who’s to say we’d even recognize it? And even if we recognize it, who’s to say it would even be relevant?”

  “I guess you’re right. I had such a strong hunch about the diary, though. You must have, too, if you came here on your day off.”

  “Let’s just put this on hold for the time being,” Warren said.

  “Just promise me that you’ll keep working other angles so the blame doesn’t fall on Kimberlee.” Lindsay looked at her watch. She popped up from her seat and said, “I’ve got to beat a path to Vernon’s memorial service. If I were you, I wouldn’t go within ten miles of there, or anywhere else where you’re likely to encounter the Bullards. They’re out for your blood.”

  Chapter 18

  Lindsay zipped along the two-lane road that led out to the country club. She had stayed far longer at the library than she had intended to, and she now found herself having to make up time by driving at speeds well in excess of the posted limits. Luckily, this northerly road through the scrubby pine forest was one that Lindsay knew well—well enough to test the limits of her ancient electric blue Toyota Tercel. She turned off the air conditioning, despite the baking heat of the day, in order to route more power to the car’s tiny engine. As she began to squirm uncomfortably in the slow cooker
of the car’s cabin, she couldn’t help but cast her mind back to another fateful trip along this road, in another kind of extreme weather, ten years before.

  ##

  A dozen years before on a frigid Saturday in November during their junior year of college, Lindsay and Rob had loaded up Lindsay’s little Tercel (a well-used car even back then) with a week’s worth of laundry. They had set out to drive the forty miles from their campus to Lindsay’s father’s house in Mount Moriah. They were already in the car by 7:30am. These trips had become a fixed routine: spend the morning at Lindsay’s dad’s doing laundry and watching professional wrestling on TV; graciously allow Lindsay’s dad to make lunch for them and to provision them with eatable sundries; return to campus in the mid-afternoon; nap; wake up refreshed and ready for their Saturday night social activities. For Rob, Saturday night social activities meant leading a Bible study group. For Lindsay, it meant running alone on the treadmills in the nearly-empty student recreation facility for an hour and then doing her homework. This was their Saturday ritual, and that particular Saturday had begun no differently than usual.

  Rob had flicked through the glove compartment, looking for a mix tape he accused Lindsay of having stolen. When he didn’t find it (she had indeed stolen it, but it was hidden in her dorm room, in a drawer, tucked into a pair of socks), he sank back into his seat and gazed idly out the window. “I think your car needs a name,” he said.

  “I don’t like naming inanimate objects,” Lindsay said, her eyes fixed on the road.

  “How dare you call Her inanimate!”

  “She is an it.”

  “How can you see that perky little trunk jutting out with her come-hither tail lights and call Her an it? Her name is Michelle. Michelle, Michelle the Toyota Tercel.”

  “No.”

  “Darcelle?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Chantelle?”

  “Obadiah Dong Larry J. Robinson Wu!” Lindsay said, reprimanding Rob with his full name. It was one of the few tactics she knew of that were almost guaranteed to annoy him, and she hoped, distract him from his quest to find a name for her car. Lindsay was the only person besides Rob’s own parents who knew that Rob had been named after his father’s three heroes: the biblical prophet Obadiah, his paternal grandfather Dong Wu, and Larry J. Robinson, deputy manager of the Woolworth’s discount store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Rob’s father had briefly worked during a sojourn in America.