Killertrust (3 page)

Knowing the
approaching holiday season
would increase the temptation to eat rich and
fattening foods, especially Mrs. Koblyk’s cookies and cobblers, Rhetta had
resolved to get back to running at least three times a week. Mrs. Koblyk was
her well-intentioned neighbor who baked constantly and brought treats over to
their house. Of course, the lure to partake in the sinful pleasures was often
too much for Rhetta to resist. She ran a lot, just to try and keep up with
Mother Nature, who seemed to have other plans for her. Especially when she
indulged in Mrs. Koblyk’s yummy treats.

Since hitting her forties,
she noticed that parts of her anatomy had begun to shift. Mostly to her hind
end. With that fact as a motivator, she peered at the clock that proved it was
only five, and woke Randolph. He didn’t share the shifting anatomy problem, but
ran with her to keep in shape. They donned their running clothes and sturdy
running shoes and headed to the park. After a brisk, three-mile run in the cool
morning air, Rhetta was invigorated, but breathing heavier than she liked. She
returned home for a quick shower, then a light breakfast. She wondered if her
lungs would ever truly clear up. She had quit smoking—well, almost—but
occasionally when she skipped running for a couple of days, she would get
winded easily. Or was that due to advancing years? After all, forty-five was
half way to ninety. Was she already past middle age? How many ninety-year-olds
did she actually know? When she answered herself, she knew she was in trouble.
She resolved to run more, and check out that new high dollar rejuvenating cream
she’d seen advertised on TV.

Delighting in the clear day, Rhetta
opened Cami’s sunroof as a last homage to sunny skies, cranked up the satellite
radio oldies station and sang along with The Beach Boys on her way to work. She
wondered how much longer she’d be able to drive Cami this year before succumbing
to winter. In past years, she always put Cami up for the entire winter and only
brought her out Memorial Weekend. This year, she decided she might just drive
Cami during the mild Missouri winter unless there was ice and snow. Then she
was prepared to switch to her four-wheel-drive Chevy Trailblazer.

She and Randolph had first
restored Cami a few years ago with the help of her mechanic and best friend,
Ricky Lane, owner and chief mechanic of Fast Lane Muscle Cars in Gordonville,
Missouri, a rural community outside Cape Girardeau. Ricky, short for Victoria,
defined Cami as a resto mod, meaning it looked original to the model year on
the outside, but under the hood purred a sleek LS 1 Corvette engine that
delivered four hundred horses. The white leather interior was Rhetta’s idea.
Fast Lane had recently restored and painted Cami for the second time following
a fire that nearly destroyed it. Rhetta shivered again when she remembered how
close she’d come to losing her beloved car.

She grinned as she pulled up
to work. She was early enough to nab the choice parking spot next to the
employees’ entrance. The area in front of the building was reserved for
customers, but the first one into the building in the morning got the spot
closest to the back door as a reward.

In the winter, it really was
wonderful not having to slip slide all the way across the parking lot.
Summertime, however, it was nice to get some exercise, so she didn’t mind
hoofing it some to get to her car. When she got there early, she liked to irritate
her assistant, James Woodhouse “Woody” Zelinski about it, since he prided
himself on usually being the first one to work.

Even with a detour through
Starbucks, she still managed to get to work before Woody.

Just as she set her tall
cappuccino grande light on her desk and scooted her chair up, Woody sailed
through the door, waving a newspaper. For a big guy, he moved with the grace of
a hunting cat. “It says here they’ve identified the victim of your hit and run.
Take a look.”

He tossed his coat on his
desk chair, never missing a step on his way to Rhetta’s desk. He didn’t even
chide her for taking his parking spot. Although they shared the small office,
privacy dividers separated their workspaces. Their receptionist, LuEllen Cole,
who hadn’t yet arrived, manned a receptionist desk up front near the waiting
area. Woody handed Rhetta the paper and pointed to an article. Although he
outweighed Rhetta by at least a hundred pounds, he descended gracefully and
soundlessly into a guest chair in front of her desk. He waited for her to scan
it.

She adjusted her office chair
from its low point, up to where her chin cleared the desk. The hydraulics on
the chair were wearing out, and it lowered itself every evening, requiring her
to adjust it in the morning or risk slamming her chin on the desk top.

She scooped up the newspaper
and began reading the below-the-fold front-page column that he’d pointed to.

“Holy smokes!” she said. She
yanked open the middle top drawer of her desk, grabbing the manila envelope
that lay there, opened. She riffled through its contents until she found an
official document bearing the seal of the United States Government. Inside the
folded papers was a copy of a death certificate. Her eyes locked on the
transcript:

Name: Caldwell, Alexander
Franklin

Rank: First Lieutenant

Branch: U S Army

Casualty Category: killed in
action, explosive device

Day of Death: 6 August, 1973.

Her father. She handed the
certificate to Woody.

He read it quickly, and
handed it back to her. He jabbed a finger at the newspaper lying on her desk.
“I don’t get it. This newspaper identifies the dead man as George Erickson.” He
tapped the paper. “It also says here that records indicate Erickson died in
Vietnam on August 6, 1973.” Woody picked it up and read aloud, “Further
investigation is underway to verify the conflicting information.” He set the
paper down, and drilled a stare at Rhetta. “He supposedly died the exact same
day as your father? Yet he died again in the accident?”

Rhetta returned her father’s
death certificate to the envelope, then tapped the newspaper. “There’s
something very weird going on here. How could the hit and run victim already be
dead? “And even more curious, he was a soldier who died in Vietnam,” she waved
the manila envelope, “on the same day my father died.” Rhetta’s neck hairs
stood on end high enough to tickle her earlobe.

Woody folded the paper. “Wait
a minute. I’m thoroughly confused. You told me you saw your father at the
hospital parking garage a while back. How can he be dead?” Woody rubbed his
palm over his shaven head. His head rubbing was a gesture Rhetta knew well. It
meant that he was upset or stressed. In this instance, it probably meant
confused. She thought about rubbing her head, too.

“That’s exactly what I’d like
to know. At first, I wasn’t sure I believed that old man who came to the
parking garage when Randolph was in the hospital, even if he did give me my
mother’s locket as proof of his identity.” She fingered the locket that she now
wore on a silver chain around her neck. “How is he still alive when I have a
death certificate?” She didn’t tell Woody that the same man had called her on
her birthday last month. She didn’t know what to think about it then, and was
even more confused than ever.

“What on earth’s going on, Woody?
I have a government issued death certificate here for my father, yet the man in
the hospital garage claimed he was my father. Although he didn’t appear very
healthy, that man was very much alive. Now, another man dies, and it turns out
he already died in Vietnam on the same day my father was supposed to have died.
That means that obviously, those two men didn’t die in Vietnam. So, why do they
have military death records with the same day of death? What’s going on? Who
are they? Did they know each other?”

She stared at her assistant.
“Woody, that dead man had one of my business cards. Do you suppose he could
have gotten it from my father? And if he did, why?”

Woody tugged on his
close-cropped whiskers. “There’s got to be an explanation for this. You know,
records at the end of the Vietnam War were probably pretty messed up.”

She bit back a negative
remark about her confidence in the government’s ability to keep any accurate
records. She had a strong opinion about how the government treated the military
personnel who returned from the wars. Although Woody was a former Marine who
served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was a year older than Rhetta, sometimes she
had to check herself from treating him like a younger brother. Woody had Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder and the VA wasn’t doing much to help him. She stifled
her comment.

Rhetta stared at the paper.
“Any which way I think about it, this doesn’t make sense. It’s too
coincidental.”

Woody sighed, and hoisted his
tall frame out of the guest chair. She noticed his once dark chin whiskers had
more and more grey peeking through.

He began
pacing. “I know, I know, you don’t believe in coincidences.”

“I
don’t believe in
coincidences
,” Rhetta said as she ambled around Randolph’s studio later
that evening. She’d changed clothes, donning well-worn jeans and an old
sweatshirt. She offered to help sort through his paintings and help load them
into his box-type art trailer that sat hooked up to his new bronze-colored
four-door Ford pickup truck that Rhetta had christened “Artmobile II.” The
first Artmobile, an older Ford F100, had been a total loss when Randolph was
run off the road the year before. Although he suffered a major head injury in
that accident and was hospitalized, he recovered completely. The pickup,
however, was a total loss. Randolph had a big art show coming up the weekend
after Thanksgiving, so she volunteered to help him pack the trailer.

In addition to naming
vehicles and pets, Rhetta even had a name for their detached garage. She called
it “Garage Mahal,” because the interior was finished out as nicely as the
house. She finally named their home compound,
Daylily Dreamin’
from the abundance of wild daylilies that had
surrounded the house when they bought it. In the spring and early summer,
bright daylilies turned the entire front yard into waves of golden orange.
She’d thinned them out to a manageable number, but they multiplied annually and
bloomed gloriously.

Randolph had enclosed part of
their barn into a well-lit studio where he spent most of his days painting. He
had yet to name his studio. She had a name in mind, but wouldn’t foist it on
him. He might not like what she’d come up with after she read the article about
him in a local paper called, “Trading the Bench for a Brush.” Her private name
for his studio was Master Strokes. She hadn’t discussed it with him yet, but
she rather liked the sound of it.

Randolph glanced at her over
the top of his reading glasses as he carefully cleaned the brushes he’d used
that day, massaging the bristles on each one with petroleum jelly to keep them
moist and ready for the next paint.

“I agree, it’s all very
mysterious, but I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.” He lined up the
brushes across a sheet of clean paper towel on his workbench. He was
compulsively neat in his studio, as he was with his office desk. Rhetta’s work
desktop, on the other hand, always looked like the aftermath of a tornado.

Rhetta gathered two framed
landscapes and disappeared into the trailer, which was parked alongside the
barn door. They’d talked about how he’d never dreamed how successful his art
career would become when he retired. His art was selling briskly at the Rivers
West Gallery downtown and through Etsy, an online art site. Creating beautiful
landscapes was his new full-time job.

She answered him while in the
trailer, but repeated it when she got back to the studio when Randolph claimed
he hadn’t heard her.

“I said, I think I’m going to
try to get to the bottom of this.” She wiped her hands on a clean towel.

“That’s what I was afraid
you’d said. I don’t see anything for you to get to the bottom of. The police
are investigating the dead man. You don’t need to do anything.” He paused to
give her a look she knew all too well. The look that said, “Mind your own
business.”

And, there was that tone she
hated. It meant he was on to her, and suspected she would go snooping around.
Again.

He added, “I guess if the man
claiming to be your father should call you again, you could ask him about all
of this. I’m sure if he knows anything about this George Erickson, he’ll tell
you all about it.”

“Was that a sarcastic remark,
since we both don’t know anything about this man who claims to be my long-lost
and already dead father? Especially since we don’t have any idea when said
father,” Rhetta made air quotes as she said
father
, “may choose to call me again?” She hoisted a large
canvas and trekked it to the trailer. “I know one thing for sure that I’m going
to do, though,” she said when she popped back into the studio.

“Oh, God, Rhetta, what does
that mean?” Randolph shook his head.

She hugged his neck. “Don’t
sound so worried. I decided that I want to pay for that man’s funeral if it
turns out he has no family to claim him.”