Murder on Calf Lick Fork

by Michelle Goff

  “Why do you think he wanted to move?”

  “He wanted a change. He needed a change. He was really embarrassed by what he did. You know, stealing from that old man. He even worked for free for him to pay for the tools he had stole. I was really proud of him for that, but he said that man was somebody’s pappaw and didn’t deserve what they had done to him. He said he wouldn’t want anybody to do that to his pappaws. Jay’s grandparents, that would be Gentry and my folks, just dote on him. You know how grandparents are.”

  “Yeah, if my nephews burned down the house, my parents would tell them that was okay, Mommaw and Poppaw could build another one.”

  Belinda laughed. “Do you have any kids?”

  “No, just the two nephews by my brother, Mark, and his wife. They live in Indianapolis.”

  “Really. Well, how about that?” Belinda exhaled smoke and said, “I’ll move back to Kentucky one of these days, but for now, I’m torn. Junebug is gone, but he’s buried here, so I don’t want to leave. But my family is there in Kentucky. And that’s where Jay wants to be.”

  “Belinda, you said earlier that you believe Jay is alive. Why do you think he left without contacting you or anyone else in the family?”

  “I believe he saw something that scared him and he lit out of there. He’s waiting for it to die down and then he’ll come back. And if you can find out what he saw, he’ll come back to us even sooner.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Maggie reviewed the notes she had made before the interview to ensure she had covered everything. “Gentry said Jay didn’t mention any specific friends he had made in Kentucky. Did he talk to you about his friends?”

  “No, I know he hung out sometimes with boys from school, but Jay didn’t have a lot of free time. He was usually working or studying.”

  “That’s what his girlfriend said.”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “Sydney.”

  Maggie heard Belinda exhale smoke and say, “She wasn’t his girlfriend. Jay broke up with her about a week before he left.”

  Chapter Nine

  Belinda’s news that Jay had broken up with Sydney surprised Maggie to such an extent that she forgot to ask her about Jay’s job with Curtis. Luckily, Maggie had secured the names and phone numbers of Jay’s friends in Indiana before Belinda’s news blindsided her. The request had not been fulfilled, however, without some resistance from Belinda.

  After Maggie had jotted down the contact information for two of Jay’s friends, she had asked Belinda, “Were either of these boys involved with the robbery?”

  “No,” Belinda had answered. “Jay hadn’t stayed in touch with those boys. He dropped them as soon as he realized they were bad news.”

  Instead of suggesting that Belinda might not have known everything about her son’s life, Maggie had asked, “How about you give me their names and contact information and I’ll call them anyway?”

  “Well, I can only give you the name and number for one of them. The other one is in jail.”

  Maggie called each of the three young men on Belinda’s list. For the most part, they offered more of the same information Maggie had already learned – Jay’s dad’s death affected him much more than he admitted, he loved living in eastern Kentucky with his pappaw, and he was serious about work and college, but not about Sydney. In fact, one of his buddies didn’t know he had a girlfriend. The others knew of Sydney’s existence, but couldn’t recall her name. As far as all of them knew, he hadn’t gotten into any trouble since the business in Indiana and they all agreed that incident represented out of character behavior from Jay. They couldn’t imagine him replicating such conduct in Kentucky. Then again, they said Jay primarily talked about how happy his new home had made him, a boast at least one friend found hard to believe.

  Sensing a clue, Maggie asked, “Did he say something that made you doubt him? Did you have reason to believe he wasn’t as happy as he let on?”

  “It’s not anything Jay said,” the young man explained. “But I’ve been to eastern Kentucky. I’ve seen how they live down there.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. I spent a couple weeks helping repair homes for poor people in a community a couple hours from where Jay lived. It was sad.”

  “Hmm.” Maggie wanted to ask him why he hadn’t stayed home and helped poor people in his own community, but she resisted her dark impulses and wrapped up the conversation.

  The next boy improved her spirits when he admitted he had considered following Jay to the Kentucky hills. “My family’s originally from somewhere around there,” he said, “and they’re always talking about how the jobs are leaving, but that can’t be so. Jay has two jobs. He told me to come on down there and he’d help me find work.”

  He didn’t share anything beneficial to the case and, as Maggie dialed the last number on the list, she wasn’t expecting much from buddy number three, either. At first, he met her low expectations by admitting that his conversations with Jay usually centered on pickup trucks and their fantasy football league. Then, he said, “The last time I talked to him, he seemed upset.”

  “When was this?” Maggie asked.

  “A few days or maybe a week before his mom called looking for him.”

  “What made you think Jay was upset? Was it the way he sounded? Or maybe something he said?”

  “Both. He said, ‘Do you ever wish you could start over?’ I told him he had already done that. And he said, ‘No, I mean start over where nobody knows you.’”

  “Did you tell Jay’s mom about this?”

  “No. I didn’t know if I should. I couldn’t make my mind up on what would be worse for her – if something bad had happened to Jay or if he had just split.”

  Chapter Ten

  Maggie pondered the possibility that Jay had simply walked away from his life, speculated on the reality of Jay’s relationship with Sydney, and brooded over the quagmire created by Seth’s official involvement with the case at dinner with Edie, Edie’s husband, Ben, and Luke. Just as she had done since learning that Seth was the investigating detective, Maggie worked her brain for a solution to this problem that did not involve breaking her promise to Luke, yet did provide her with answers to her growing list of questions relating to the official investigation. She had just taken another bite of chicken when Edie asked her, “Where are you tonight because you’re certainly not in my dining room?”

  “Yeah, you’re deep in thought,” Ben agreed.

  Maggie couldn’t share her true thoughts, so she evoked Edie’s reliance on theme meals and fell back on a familiar explanation. “You’ve stumped me again, Edie. Try as I might, I cannot figure out what gingerbread cookies have to do with this scrumptious chicken.”

  Edie beamed from across the table. “That’s ginger chicken you’re eating, Pumpkin. If you would expand your palette to include food not grown or raised up a holler, you’d be able to identify a variety of herbs and spices.”

  Maggie took Edie’s teasing in stride and, after they finished the main course, Edie produced a platter of miniature gingerbread snaps. “Some people,” Edie looked at Ben, “have complained about soft gingerbread cookies, so I’ve tried this new recipe to satisfy them. And true to their name, you can snap them like a twig.” To demonstrate, Edie broke a cookie into two pieces, feeding one part to Ben and the other to herself.

  “Yummy,” Maggie said, crunching a cookie. She wouldn’t admit it to Edie, but she agreed with Ben. There were few sweets Maggie wouldn’t consume, but she considered finishing an entire soft, regular-sized gingerbread cookie to be an arduous task. Edie loved gingerbread cookies, though, and every year at Christmas she baked and decorated several batches. She always gave Maggie a tin that contained iced gingerbread cookies on the inside and featured dancing and/or smiling gingerbread men on the outside. Maggie was enjoying her third cookie and wondering how many of those tins occupied space in her kitchen cabinets when Ben said, “Luke says you’re on the case again.”

  “Yeah, w
hat about that?” Edie said. “Why haven’t you mentioned anything to me?”

  Maggie looked to Luke, who said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was a secret.”

  “It’s not,” Maggie said. “Edie, I just hadn’t gotten around to telling you. It’s no big deal. And there’s really nothing to tell. From all appearances, it looks like Jay Harris fell off the face of the earth one day. He left for work one morning and hasn’t been seen since.”

  Edie clasped Maggie’s hand, “If anybody can find him, you can. You’re our little super sleuth.”

  Maggie pushed away the platter of cookies and said, “If I don’t refrain, I won’t be anybody’s little anything.”

  While the quartet engaged in a lively discussion about which board game to play, Edie’s phone rang. She checked the ID and said, “It’s my mom,” before answering the call and walking into the den. She returned minutes later carrying the anniversary edition of Trivial Pursuit and wearing a solemn expression.

  “Something wrong?” Luke asked.

  “Mom just saw on Facebook that people are asking for prayers for the Heyward family.” Edie clutched the box to her chest. “Seth’s mom died.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Maggie scanned the cafeteria’s menu for a reasonably-healthy offering. She had planned to order a salad, but the wilting lettuce and shriveled tomatoes on the salad bar changed those plans. She could have chosen a ham or grilled chicken sandwich, but she had eaten half a ham and cheese sub for lunch yesterday and chicken for dinner at Edie’s. She sighed and said, “I’ll take a water and a burger.” As she opened her purse in preparation of paying for her meal, she added, “Make that a cheeseburger with ketchup and pickles. I’d like some fries, too.”

  Once she paid for and received her lunch, Maggie found a table and waited for Sydney, who had seemed all too eager to meet with her again. But instead of mentally prepping herself on how to approach Sydney about her breakup with Jay, Maggie thought about Seth’s mom.

  Although Jasper was far from a metropolis, since childhood Maggie had recognized the differences between living within the city limits and living in the county. The seat of Geneva County, Jasper also served as the region’s financial, shopping, and healthcare center. For the most part, people who lived in Jasper considered any community more than five minutes from town remote. Maggie had never understood their superior attitudes. She knew that outsiders such as Tyler didn’t make a distinction between those who lived in hollows and those who lived in subdivisions. They viewed the entire region as backward and all its residents as hicks.

  But many of her fellow Geneva County residents did make a distinction. Maggie had been ridiculed by both town and county folk due to her family’s embrace of such traditional customs as gardening, canning, and keeping livestock. When Maggie talked at school and among friends about her parents rendering lard and canning sausage, she had been greeted with confused looks and requests for explanations. She assumed city dwellers would react with more pronounced histrionics and that often proved to be the case. So when Maggie started dating Seth, she thought he was exaggerating when he told her about his old-fashioned parents. She had grown up believing Jasper meant newer and, by eastern Kentucky standards, sophisticated. Those attitudes carried with her into her twenties and she couldn’t reconcile that a Jasper police detective who had lived in town his entire life had experienced a childhood similar to hers.

  Those preconceived notions disappeared when she met Seth’s parents, members of the Old Regular Baptist church. They had made their home in Jasper, up a little hollow that provided them enough space to grow a vegetable garden but not enough to raise livestock. Maggie was surprised by how much the two sets of parents had in common. Their dads had seasonal conversations. From October to March, they debated the individual merits of the University of Kentucky men’s basketball players. From April to September, they sat outside whittling and talking about green beans and corn. Every now and then, they’d discuss the bygone days they had spent mining coal underground, plowing with a horse or mule instead of a tractor, or cutting grass with a reap hook, all of which usually provoked Seth to whisper to Maggie, “They’re mixing it up today.”

  For their moms, most conversations centered on cooking and canning. Much to Lena’s disappointment, Seth’s mom didn’t quilt and when she admitted to not really liking to sew, either, Lena had frowned at Maggie and said, “Sounds like someone else I know.”

  As she sat in the cafeteria finishing her fries, Maggie could still see Seth’s mom in that moment, with her hair pulled in a tight bun and with a requisite denim skirt reaching her ankles. Offering Maggie an encouraging smile, she had said, “The good Lord blessed us all with different talents. Your talent is in writing, Maggie.”

  Maggie couldn’t remember the last time she had seen that sweet woman. It was after she had broken her engagement to Seth. She was sure of that, but she couldn’t remember where they had met or what they had talked about. Why didn’t I reach out to her? Maggie asked herself. Seth told me last year that she was sick. Why didn’t I call her?

  Sydney’s appearance at the table prevented Maggie from chastising herself further. When Sydney plopped into the chair across from her, Maggie stole a peek at her fingernails, eight of which looked like they had been painted the color of the red-violet Crayon. The other two reminded Maggie of the violet-red Crayon.

  “Thanks for coming to talk to me again,” Maggie said.

  “No problem. I’ll do anything I can do to help find my Jay.”

  Maggie cleared her throat. “Sydney, I spoke to Jay’s mom, Belinda.”

  Sydney laced the fingers of her hands together and laid them on the front of her oversized University of Kentucky hoodie. “How is she?”

  “As good as can be expected, I guess. Anyway, she told me something interesting about you and Jay. She told me Jay had broken up with you.”

  Maggie noticed Sydney squeezing her hands together. Her red-violet and violet-red nails dug into her skin. “That’s what he told her? That he broke up with me? Well, it’s not true. I broke up with him.”

  “Regardless of who broke up with whom, why didn’t you tell me you were no longer together? You just said you’d do anything to help find your Jay, but you kept something very important from me.”

  “Our breakup has nothing to do with Jay’s disappearance.” When Maggie raised her eyebrows, Sydney said, “It doesn’t.”

  “Then why hide the truth?”

  Sydney relaxed her fingers. “Because it’s so embarrassing.”

  “I know you’re young, Sydney, but in a few years, you’ll realize that your boyfriend breaking up with you isn’t always the worst thing in the world.”

  Sydney pulled her hands apart and slapped the table with them. “That’s not it. You’re not listening. I told you, I broke up with him. And it’s embarrassing because why I broke up with him. I caught him with someone else.”

  “Oh,” Maggie said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Neither did I. It was my dumb luck that I saw them together that day. They were in the parking garage. The parking garage in the middle of the day. How trashy.”

  “Stop.” Maggie held up her hand. “When you say ‘together’ and in the ‘parking garage in the middle of the day,’ what do you mean?”

  “Exactly what you think I mean.”

  Maggie’s mind returned to various parking garages she had utilized during her life. She scrunched her face in disgust when she considered the activities that might have occurred in the parking spots next to her car.

  “I know.” Sydney pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and squeezed together the strings until she resembled a baby swaddled in a blanket. “Right? I mean, get a room.”

  “Yeah, I think there should be an age limit for rendezvousing in public. Doing so in the daylight is just wrong no matter your age. Nobody needs to be subjected to that.”

  “Tell me about it. I still remember it like it happened this morning.
I had a test that day and when I drove from the top level of the garage, I was going over the test in my mind. You know, to figure out how I did. And that’s when I saw his truck pulled into a parking spot in the corner. And then I saw her. I stopped in the middle of the garage and confronted them. I broke up with him right then and there. It’s bad enough that he cheated, but why did he have to do it with an old, fat married woman?”

  Maggie, who had been visualizing the events as described to her, suddenly imagined Jay enjoying an afternoon assignation in public with a morbidly obese woman her mother’s age. “How old?”

  “Oh, at least thirty-four, thirty-five.”

  “Well,” Maggie laughed, “that is old-er.”

  “Believe me, it gets even worse.”

  “Worse than fat and old and married?” Maggie asked.

  “Uh-huh. I know her. She works here at the college. She’s a secretary. I did my work study in that office last year.”

  That’s convenient for me, Maggie thought. After learning in which department the other woman, who Sydney named as Gina worked, she said, “Sydney, if there’s anything else you haven’t told me, now is the time to do so.”

  “There’s nothing else. I saw him with that old fattie, I broke up with him, and I heard a few days later that he had disappeared. Hey, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t do anything wrong.”