by Judi Lind
Harley stood up and dug around in the white bag for a doughnut, finally extracting a chocolate one. “Didn’t say he still lives there, although maybe he does. No criminal record. But until we do a bit more nosing around, we don’t know what he’s been doing since his discharge.”
“What about IRS records?” Trace asked as he handed the scant fact sheet to Mary.
Harley grinned. “Why, I’m surprised at you, Armstrong. You know we can’t go digging into IRS computer records. This has to be done properly, through channels.”
“Hmmph,” Trace snorted. “By the time the ‘proper channels’ get around to passing on any information, we’ll all be moldering in our graves.”
“As it happens,” Harley said after he licked the chocolate from his fingertips, “I know a little gal over in the IRS section. She might be able to do me a favor. Unofficially, of course.”
“Of course.”
Mary finished reading the computer-generated sheet Harley had brought on Milo King. Although a lot of the wording was in some cryptic government shorthand, she gleaned enough information to be more certain than ever that she’d had no previous connection with the man. Yet, she couldn’t forget that jolt of recognition she’d felt when she’d first seen his face on the night he’d died. If only she could remember where she’d seen him before...
After Harley took his leave, Mary amazed herself by suggesting to Trace that they take a quick trip to Kramer, North Carolina.
“What do you expect to find?” Trace countered. “Like Harley said, the man may not have lived there since his discharge. Let’s wait and see what else the bureau digs up.”
She shook her head emphatically. “I’m tired of sitting around waiting for the ax to fall. I’m not going to be a victim and just wait for someone to come kill me.”
“But this King person was the stalker and he’s dead,” Trace argued.
“Maybe, but somebody murdered him. I can’t accept the coincidence that King was mugged, or something. His death was connected to me. Until we find out who wanted him dead, I can’t believe I’m safe.”
Trace washed his weary face with his fingertips. He’d thought that if he could avoid the subject for a day or so, Mary might have some respite from the siege of terror she’d been under these past weeks. Sooner or later, though, she would have arrived at this conclusion. He was only sorry it was so soon.
“All right, let’s throw some stuff into an overnight bag and hit the road.”
Mary jumped to her feet and ran into the bedroom to pack before Trace changed his mind. She hadn’t expected to convince him to travel to North Carolina quite so easily and wasn’t going to give him time to reconsider. That he’d folded so quickly could only mean one thing: Trace had already reached the same conclusion.
She was still in danger.
Chapter Fifteen
It was already late afternoon by the time they pulled into Kramer, North Carolina. Because there was no airport in the small mountain community, they’d flown to Asheville and rented a car for the two-hour drive into Kramer.
A typical example of small-town America, Kramer was an orderly little town of white frame houses and tree-lined streets. They passed the library, an imposing structure of blue granite. An area apparently composed of fast-food restaurants. And, off on the left, the local high school. Mary and Trace exchanged a glance as they read the huge purple and gold banner spread over the front door: Kramer High School—Home of the Howling Wolves.
The profile of a wolf was embossed in gold on the edge of the banner. The same emblem was on Milo King’s purple cap.
Kramer also had a weekly newspaper, the Mountain Crier, and they located it easily enough on the main thoroughfare.
Marvin Hechler, identified by his brass desk plate as the publisher/editor, was sitting at a battered metal desk, entering data into a desktop computer when they walked in. “Afternoon, folks. What can I do for you?”
Trace walked over and extended his hand. “Name’s Armstrong and this is Ms. Wilder. We need to find out some information on one of your local residents.”
Hechler shoved his glasses up on the top of his head, barely mussing the few strands of thinning hair. “Who’d that be?”
“A man named King. Milo King.”
Hechler nodded. “King used to be a common enough name around these parts. Milo’s the only one still lives around here. He’s a decent old boy, lives out of town a ways. Married one of the Dulcie girls, if memory serves me right. What’d you say your business with Milo was?”
“We didn’t say.” Trace pulled out his federal identification. If anyone ever took the time to carefully examine his ID, they’d realize it only said he was retired from the secret service. Fortunately, Hechler, like most people, took a glance at the card and assumed he was still actively on duty. Trace didn’t see any need to correct the man’s assumption.
Hechler whistled through his teeth and returned Trace’s card. “Feds, huh? Can’t imagine Milo in trouble.”
“We don’t know that he is in any kind of trouble with the law, Mr. Hechler. His name came up in an investigation and we’re just here to check it out. I’d appreciate any background you could give us.”
Hechler scratched his balding scalp. “I was born and raised in these parts. Went to school with Milo’s kin. The Kings were mountain people, through and through. ‘Course, these days the mountains are loaded with overachievers from the city trying to get away from it all, but back then, mountain people were different. More clannish, tended to stick together. The Kings were mountain people.”
Mary leaned forward, placing her hand on the editor’s desk. “Please, Mr. Hechler, I can understand that you don’t want to say anything that might cause trouble for Mr. King, and I promise you, Mr. King won’t be harmed.” Not any longer, she thought as a shiver raced along her arms. “This is important. Truly a matter of life and death.”
Hechler stared into her eyes for a long time then rose to his feet. Coming around his desk, he leaned one hip on the metal corner and crossed his arms. He gave Trace a cautious appraisal. “Don’t suppose if there’s a story in this, you’d give me an exclusive?”
Trace considered. “If there’s anything I can release to the public, I’ll call you first.” He took a business card from a Plexiglas holder on Hechler’s desk and stuck it in his pocket. “What can you tell us, sir?”
Again, Hechler shook his head thoughtfully. “Except for a hitch in the air force some years back, Milo’s lived in these parts all his life. Works over at the Collins Sportswear plant. Good man. Matter of fact, he’s the shop steward over there.”
“What about family?” Mary asked.
“Milo’s wife, Betty, died in childbirth some years back. Baby didn’t make it, either. Like to broke Milo’s heart. He never remarried.”
“What about blood relations?” Trace knew the roots of some of the family trees in these isolated communities were deep and tangled. Surely King must have been related to half the people on this mountain.
Hechler scratched his head. “Not in these parts. Milo’s parents are both long dead. His dad, Wilbur, was one of the more well-known moonshiners around here thirty or forty years ago. Bit of a local legend. The whole family kept to themselves pretty much. There was a passel of kids, as I recall. Four girls, it seems, and, of course, the two boys. The girls all left for the city and got married. Think Elda is down in Charlotte, don’t know where the others ended up.”
Trace raised an eyebrow. “But Milo has a brother? Maybe he can help us.”
“Doubt that. Now if it was the brother you were looking for, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. He was always peculiar. Hasn’t been seen around here in years.”
A strange premonition caused Mary to ask softly, “What was the brother’s name?”
“Martin.”
Trace and Mary exchanged a glance. Milo had warned her to watch out for Martin, had used his last breath to utter the warning, in fact.
Wrapping an arm around
Mary’s shoulder, Trace said, “Mr. Hechler, we need to find out all we can about these King brothers. Could we buy you dinner somewhere?”
Hechler regarded them for a long moment. “I suppose that would be all right.”
Once they were seated in a cozy booth at the Kountry Kitchen Kafe, the newspaper editor gave them the rudimentary facts of the King “scandal.”
Martin King had received quite a bit of publicity twenty years before when his wife was killed in a fire that destroyed their home shortly after their marriage. Martin had told the authorities that his wife had received threatening letters and telephone calls shortly before her death. No arrests were ever made.
“For a long time, folks were nervous. Figured if it could happen to Mrs. King, it could happen to their wives, as well. Those were sad times for the King boys, both of ‘em losing their wives so close together. You’d think it might have made them closer. But, sad to say, the double tragedy seemed to drive them apart.”
“What happened after that?” Mary bit into a fillet of fresh catfish, excellently prepared, but tasteless in her mouth. The feeling of impending devastation she’d experienced earlier kept growing in her stomach, like a cancer, spreading its evil throughout her body.
Hechler shrugged. “There was some kind of falling-out between the brothers, Milo and Martin. Never heard a breath of what it was all about, but they stopped speaking altogether. One morning, Martin up and quit his job over at the factory and left town. Far as I know, no one in these parts have seen or heard from him since.”
He paused as if coming to a difficult decision. Skimming his hand over his head, he apparently reached the decision to continue. “Heard a rumor Martin had taken out a very large insurance policy on his bride. Caused considerable talk.”
“I imagine it would,” Trace concurred.
When he asked about the possibility of getting a photograph of Martin King, Hechler nodded. “Maybe. We might have run one during the scandal. Stop by in the morning and we’ll see what we can dig up.”
“This is very important, Mr. Hechler,” Mary said. “Is there any way we can find out tonight?”
He hesitated, while seeming to make up his mind. “Wish you folks could give me a hint what this is about.”
Realizing they might get more cooperation from the newspaperman if they satisfied his curiosity, Trace filled in the elementary details of their involvement with Milo King.
When Trace finished, Hechler shook his head and pushed his half-eaten food aside. “So, old Milo’s dead, you say? Too bad. But you know, now that I think about it, he’s been a mite strange for the last month or two. Ever since he went north on that business for the union.”
“What business?” Trace asked as the waitress cleared the table.
“Remember I told you Milo was the shop steward over at Collins Sportswear? Well, there was some big convention of union leaders in Washington a few weeks ago and Milo went as Collins’s representative. I wondered a few times if something had happened up in Washington, because he came back...I don’t know, different, somehow.”
Trace and Mary exchanged a meaningful look; the connection was made. Somehow, her path and Milo’s must have crossed while he was in Washington attending that convention. Except...except, where did Martin King fit in?
“Matter of fact,” Hechler continued, “I heard he took a leave of absence two or three weeks ago. Nobody’s seen him around lately. ‘Course, he never took a day’s vacation or sick leave in the twenty years since his wife died, so I guess he had some time coming to him.”
Again, Mary and Trace shared a glance that was full of unspoken meaning. Three weeks was just about when she’d first felt she was being watched. Everything dovetailed completely with Milo’s activities. Only one question remained unanswered: Why? What had caused a seemingly honest, mild-mannered man to suddenly begin stalking a woman he’d never met?
And what did his brother, Martin, have to do with it? Or was Milo’s warning simply the garbled thoughts and words of a dying man? Perhaps he’d only been trying to tell them to find his brother. Maybe in mountain vernacular “watch out for Martin” meant “look for Martin.”
If so, then perhaps the nightmare was over, after all.
After Trace paid the check, the threesome walked in silence down the street to the newspaper office. Darkness fell early in the higher elevations. Kramer was one of those quiet little communities that apparently rolled up its sidewalk at dusk. All the storefronts were dark, a few shuttered. Kramer had settled down for the night. Mary only wished she could enjoy the same peaceful slumber she’d taken for granted only a few short weeks ago. Before Milo King had come to Washington on union business. And, shortly after, set about destroying her life.
Back in the Mountain Crier office, Hechler flipped on the microfiche machine and searched through a dusty carton for a particular roll of film. “Had the stuff put on film about five or six years ago. Keeping old copies of the newspaper took up all my storage.”
Locating the roll he wanted, he threaded the film through the machine and began scanning several months of newspaper headlines. “Here it is,” he said at last. “Yep, almost twenty years to the day. Still got my memory, at least.”
Over the hum of the microfiche machine, Hechler read aloud the germane facts of Mrs. King’s death. The story was essentially what he’d told them in the restaurant, the only new information was the detail that Mrs. King wasn’t from the area. Martin had met her while on a business trip to Chicago. She’d been living in Kramer less than a week when she was killed in the tragic fire.
Mary and Trace stood in breathless silence while the genial newsman skimmed the stories. After a few minutes, he flipped off the machine and turned around. “Sorry. Not a single picture of Martin. Couple of his wife, but not one of him.”
Trace leaned over his shoulder. “How about showing us the ones of Mrs. King?”
“Sure thing.” Hechler flipped through the clippings until he located the shot that he wanted. “Let me use this newfangled contraption and see if we can enlarge this and print it out.”
He pressed a few buttons on the computer-type machine connected to the microfiche reader and, a moment later, a sheet of paper rolled out bearing the fuzzy image of a fair-haired woman.
Hechler glanced at the photo and handed it to Trace. “Isn’t that funny?”
“What?” Mary asked.
Both Trace and Hechler turned to stare at her, their faces set in identical expressions of bemusement. Wordlessly, Trace handed the computer-generated photograph to Mary.
Mrs. Martin King, deceased, bore an uncanny resemblance to Mary Wilder.
Mary’s fingers trembled as she stared at the likeness. The woman’s hairstyle was twenty years out of date, as was her makeup. Yet...yet she looked enough like Mary to be her sister, if they had been contemporaries. Both had large dark eyes, with straight ash blond hair that fell to their shoulders. Mary’s was styled in a contemporary blunt cut while Mrs. King wore her hair in a pageboy that was fashionable in her day. The two women even shared similar bone structure.
Folding the paper carefully, she slipped it into her purse. Once again, Mary felt those icy fingers of foreboding scrabble down her back. Was her resemblance to the dead woman mere coincidence? No, she couldn’t believe that.
Somehow, Mary was linked to these King brothers, but she just couldn’t imagine the connection. Nor did she know where to turn for more clues.
Here, in Kramer, she and Trace had reached the end of the trail and they knew very little more than when they’d arrived this afternoon.
After thanking Hechler for his kind cooperation, Trace and Mary walked out to the car. Stifling a yawn, he said, “I don’t know about you, but I vote for getting a motel close by for the night. I don’t feel like driving back down the mountain in the dark.”
Mary nodded. She knew Trace was deliberately refraining from commenting on the amazing likeness. He must have seen that she’d absorbed all the shock she could for
the moment, and she was grateful for his restraint. But then, Trace always knew the right thing to say or do to make her feel better.
Taking his lead and pushing the bewildering incident to the back of her mind, Mary said, “I’m bushed, myself. What about that place we saw on the edge of town?”
He started the engine. “It looked as good as any. Maybe if we get a decent night’s sleep, we’ll be able to think of another angle in the morning.”
Mary waited in the car while Trace registered them at the Sleepy Time Motel. In a small, conservative village like Kramer, she knew the proprietor would be shocked at an unmarried couple sharing a room. She wondered if Trace would say they were married. She smiled wryly. They’d already been living in the same apartment for over a week and sharing a room for the past three days. Why did it suddenly feel illicit and delightfully sinful to be checking into a motel together?
When he came back out to the car, flipping the room key in his palm as he walked, she grinned. “Did you register us as the Smiths or the Joneses?”
Rolling his eyes, he hefted their overnight bags from the back seat. “I have checked into a motel with a woman before, you know. I’m not completely without experience in these matters.”
Mary slammed her car door and moved to his side. “So what name did you use?”
Without breaking stride, he muttered, “Johnson.”
Stopping in front of room eight, he unlocked the door and held it open with his foot while Mary walked inside. “Your honeymoon suite, Mrs. Johnson.”
Deliberately keeping her back turned, she strolled over to the mirror. As she’d suspected, her cheeks were flaming.
* * *
TRACE LEANED BACK on the lumpy mattress and draped his forearm across his eyes, shielding himself from the provocative reflection in the mirror.
Completely unaware, Mary stood scrubbing her face in the tiny alcove that held the sink. She’d stripped down to her lacy bikini panties and bra, her honey-colored hair whirling like a cloud around her shoulders.