Roots of Murder (18 page)

“Exactly,” Nell echoed. “Like the Jones brothers sticking with jailbird Junior.”

“You always got to see the bad side,” he chided her.

“Hard for me to miss it, given the latest turn of events,” Nell retorted.

“Something happen?” he asked. He wasn't a stupid man, for all his good old boy ways, and he had caught the undertone in her voice.

“Just my son going to the emergency room because two men in a red truck threw a broom handle into his wheel, telling him it was a message for me.”

“You should report it. Then we can do something about it,” he admonished her.

“I did report it,” Nell sharply replied. “Whiz Brown blew it off as a joke. If he or the other officer actually wrote anything down, I'll be glad to get you a copy of that report.”

He had either the grace or the political sense to look abashed. “Next time something like that happens, you call me direct. Them Jones brothers are trash, just the kind of trash to go after a boy. If Whiz is too busy planning his retirement, you give us a call.”

“Thank you, Sheriff,” Nell said, although she knew he was doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons. The cowardly acts of the Jones brothers was bringing out his latent, and as far as Nell was concerned,
little-lamented
chivalry. Children and widows were to be protected by the men. “I'll be calling,” she added, leaving it ambiguous.

He tipped his hat before placing it firmly on his head and heading off through a door that led back into the building, as if he were returning to his office. Nell suspected it was the quick way to where his car was parked. The TV crew was long gone, having not even stayed to hear her questions. They wanted a picture, they got a picture, it was time to go home.

Nell glanced at her watch. That wasn't a bad idea. Tomorrow would be hectic. She wondered what the reaction to the front page would be.

Her circuitous journey home first led her back to the Crier office. Carrie wasn't there, although there was a hastily scribbled note on Nell's desk to indicate the young reporter had breezed by:
“Notes from Harbor meeting jumbled, will have it written tomorrow.”
Pam also left a note:
“Harbor Comm. Meeting ended at 3:30. Carrie arrived at office at 4:35. Said she didn't have time to write things up.”

Jacko was still in the basement. Nell poked her head in long enough to tell him he should go home soon. Or at least order dinner on the Crier's account. She also asked him to look for the Crier's coverage of the civil rights movement.

From there, Nell went to get her kids and go home.

nine

With Josh's bike in
the shop, Nell taking them to school was a foregone conclusion. She wondered if Kate had plotted to keep the bike to prevent Josh from being an easy target.

When Nell got to the office, the door was locked and she had to flip on lights. She was relieved that Jacko wasn't still there, or so eager he'd arrived before her. She appreciated his enthusiasm and wanted to be careful not to take advantage of it. It was easy to lean on him instead of dealing with Carrie. With a sigh, Nell decided one of the things to do today would be to talk with her. She dreaded going through the long process of interviewing and hiring right now, with everything in flux, but she couldn't let the young woman's attitude seep into how she ran the paper.

With a start, Nell realized she hadn't locked the door. She crossed the newsroom to do it.

Just as she got to the door, it was shoved open.

Hubert Pickings, his face puffy and red from the walk across the town square, stood there.

“Nell, what the hell is this?” He shook the paper at her, his anger deepening the red in his face.

Nell worried he would have a heart attack right here. “It's today's paper,” she answered blandly.

“We went through all that shit about the paper plant years ago.” He again shook the paper as if trying to dislodge the story. “If you're going to point fingers at every place there's ever been a dead body, you'll have to point at every place in town.”

“I have no knowledge of anyone ever dying in this building,” Nell replied. She just couldn't feel threatened by this short, pudgy man with his balding, unruly cowlick. “And it's not dying, it's murder. Murdered and hidden for fifty years.”

“You just want to hand this election to Aaron Dupree and his liberal friends,” Hubert almost shouted at her.

“I want to report the facts. Is there anything I wrote that's untrue?”

That seemed to stump him. Either it was the light or his hairs were actually quivering in the effort to think. Finally he said, “Facts aren't always the truth. Why bring up all this stuff now? Why not after the election? Unless you don't want a fair election,” he accused her.

Not that Nell felt he deserved an answer, but he hadn't taken this off the record, so she felt no compunction on stringing it out. “Because the bones were discovered now. We report news. Waiting until after the election would be censorship. You do believe in a free press, don't you?” She knew that really didn't have much to do with anything, but given the man had burst into her office, she felt free to throw the Constitution and the kitchen sink at him.

“Free and responsible. Bringing this up now just isn't responsible,” he huffed back. “You want any more election ads from me, you'd better be more responsible, Mrs. McGraw.”

“Mr. Mayor, one month of ads from one candidate is hardly going to affect the Crier,” Nell pointed out. “Are you attempting to extort favorable coverage by withholding ads?” She did manage not to laugh in his face, but her words conveyed what she thought of his crudeness.

“No, nothing like that, and this is all off the record,” he said, his brain seeming to finally slip into first gear.

“Off the record isn't retroactive.”

He was again silent, the hairs quivering in thought. Finally he said, “Look, that mill stuff is way old news. We're working on cleaning it up, okay? And I'm not a state park kind of guy, so it's not like I've been hiking out in the woods all these years. I just want to get my side of the story in.” His political sense seemed to finally have caught up with his outrage.

“I have no problem with reporting all sides of the story. I do have a problem with suppressing information. If you write an
op-ed
piece, I will print it. Keep it under two thousand words and I'll run it in its entirety. Your side in your own words. Is that fair enough?”

“You let me say whatever I want to say?”

“Whatever you want. Unless it's libel. I'll run it next week.”

“And you'll run a
follow-up
story to this and say that the mill stuff is a long time ago and I didn't have anything to do with any murders?”

“I'll certainly run a
follow-up
story and I'll quote your response,” Nell said.

He seemed to think she was agreeing with him and nodded his head. “Okay, Mrs. McGraw. It's just going to be me, right? The other candidates don't get to write anything.”

“It seems only fair that I also give them a chance to air their views,” Nell replied.

“But I'm the mayor, they're just candidates.”

This is why I dislike the man; he's stupid and he whines, Nell thought. “Some candidates might be better off keeping their exposure to a rehearsed few seconds on TV.” As she suspected, Hubert Pickings had no clue this might most directly apply to him.

“Good, good thought. I get the top billing, right?”

“You'll be the lead
op-ed
piece,” Nell assured him. One of the pieces had to be at the top of the page; it might as well be his. Agreeing might get him out the door.

Hubert contemplated the offer. He seemed to know he hadn't quite won but wasn't sure enough how he had lost to come up with any argument. He settled for “I do appreciate your seeing it my way.”

“And I appreciate your concern in civic matters,” Nell answered as she opened the door, a strong hint that it was time for him to return to his mayoral duties.

Hubert couldn't think of anything to say except his standard campaign line: “Yes, indeed, you do have a friend in city hall.”

Nell hoped he could talk and walk down the stairs at the same time, as that was what he was attempting to do. She firmly locked the door but took his early appearance as a harbinger of things to come. Pam wasn't going to have an easy day of it.

She settled in her office to have a good look at the actual paper. Of course, she knew what was in it, or should be in it. She wouldn't read the whole thing, but she did want to get a sense of what the average person saw when turning the pages. As she glanced through it, it felt like something was missing. Finally Nell traced it to her solitary reading. Usually both she and Thom would partake of this ritual.

She almost stopped, halfway to the end. I can't run from everything we did together, she thought. She hurried through the rest as if speed could bypass the memories. Next week it won't be so hard, I'll get used to doing it alone, Nell told herself as she put the paper down. And the week after that and the week after that.

She turned on her computer. From her email address book, she picked several of the other reporters and editors she knew well enough to ask for any leads on three missing people. Some of them would do it because they were friends, some because they would see a big story and a way to get a scoop on all the others who could only relay on the wire. She wrote a brief note, attached the story, and sent the emails.

She sent the same email, without the story, to Marcus Fletcher.

As she hit send, Nell heard a key in the front door. Reinforcements have arrived, she thought as she got up to see who it was.

“Nell?” Jacko called.

She came out of her office. “Jacko, how'd you know I was here?”

“Saw your car in the lot,” he said. “Did some brilliant investigative reporting and deduced that you beat me to the office.”

“Very impressive. How late did you stay last night?”

“Only until ten.”

“Only? That's not getting your rest,” Nell told him.

“It's not like Pelican Bay has much to offer by way of exciting night life,” Jacko countered. “I was having a good time. Besides, it's easier to just do it in one long haul rather than breaking it up.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No report of missing persons, at least nothing that could be linked to our trio in the woods.”

“We shouldn't assume they disappeared together, or that they were reported together,” Nell said.

“I didn't. And even then the only thing I uncovered was for a young woman, but she was found.”

“Dead or alive?” Nell asked.

“Dead. Her husband was arrested for her murder. He reported her missing and was stupid enough to hide the knife in his workshop. Guess he thought he'd clean it up afterward. Her body was hauled up by a shrimper. Bet that was a surprise.”

“An unpleasant one,” Nell added. “Even a day or two in the warm waters of the Gulf would turn her into something grotesque. Was she the only one?”

“The only one remotely close to the ages we're looking for,” Jacko echoed. He hesitated for a moment, then said, “There were no reports of any missing
African-American
adults during that time.”

“None at all?”

“I couldn't find any,” he said, to soften the implications.

“How long a period?”

“From 1959 to 1965.”

“How many total reported missing?” Nell asked, somehow knowing he had counted.

“There were
twenty-eight
reported missing persons.
Twenty-six
were probably white.”

“Probably white?” Nell asked.

“Two were black. Two kids. They were the only ones whose race was mentioned. And … in other stories, if someone was black, it was always noted. So I'm assuming if it didn't say, they were white.”

“This from a paper with a reputation as a bastion of liberalness,” Nell said acerbically. “What did you find on the coverage of the civil rights protests? Or do I even want to know?”

Not directly answering her, Jacko said, “I've got a stack, you can look through them. It … may not look good now, but it probably wasn't too bad for the time and place.”

“Thanks, Jacko, you did good work,” Nell told him. “If I'm going to examine what this town did during the civil rights struggle, it would be hypocritical to leave out the local paper.”

He repeated, “It's really not too bad. No glowing descriptions of the KKK as the saviors of the flower of Southern womanhood. No N word.” He picked up a stack of papers he'd placed beside his desk. “Shall I put these in your office?”

“You might as well. I'll try to get to them this weekend. What are your thoughts as to what to do next?” she asked as he transferred the pile to a corner of her desk. In unspoken agreement, she sat down at her desk and he sat across from her.

“I might as well do the quick and dirty Internet search. I don't have much hope it's the best place to find old records. But it's easy and I might just stumble over something. Then I'm hoping either the paper or Pam's grandmaw network will turn up a good lead. If that doesn't work, then I'm going to call in favors with some law officers I know and see if they'll have a gander at the old files.”

“That all sounds good, but you might want to leave the official route to the sheriff. He can probably do better in getting into the old files.”

“Assuming he does ask. But if I get there, I'm going afield, out of state.”

“Let me know when you're at that point and we'll make the decision then,” Nell instructed. “Did you know that there was a black paper? I mean, a paper for the
African-American
community? The
Coast Advocate
.”

“Really? Does it still exist? That would be a fascinating place to look if they kept any of the old issues.”

“It would. I don't know if anything exists or if we can get access, but I'll work on that.”

“I'd like to help,” Jacko said.

“If I get us into their archives, you can be right beside me,” Nell told him.

“Okay, off to the Internet,” he said, standing up.

“Oh, Jacko? The mayor already paid us a visit. Said he considered our story slanted. He claims he's going to write an
op-ed
piece for the next issue.”

“Slanted? Do you think he has anything to do with the murders?”

“That's what I've been wondering since he left. He's not really old enough to have been anything other than on the fringes. Is it just political squawking or something else? Be careful out there.”

“I will. You, too,” Jacko said.

I will, Nell silently answered. And I know I'm not immortal. Jacko might be young enough to think he is.

The door opened again and Nell heard the voices of Dolan and Pam. She stuck her head out long enough to tell them about the mayor's visit, then had to repeat it for Ina Claire when she came in at the tail end of the first
go-around
. Nell suspected that “a friend in city hall” would be the office tag line for the day.

Ina Claire made the coffee; no one was fool enough to do it in her stead. Nell waited long enough to snag a cup before heading back to her office.

Not that much was likely to come back so soon, but Nell checked her email. In any case, it was better than trying to think of how she was going to handle Carrie. Most of it was the usual junk email. Nell quickly hit the delete button, not dwelling on the irony of advertising Viagra to a widow.

Marcus Fletcher had responded. “Talk to Penny March at the Whispering Pines. Let me know what she tells you,” was his cryptic note.

Nell felt frustration, wishing he would just give information to her instead of making her—as well as Jacko—jump through hoops. But, she realized, I wouldn't just give it if I were him. He needs to know he can trust me, and one story won't do it. Will I back off, or will I keep pushing? Nell wondered if there wasn't something more, if he wasn't pushing and goading her into finding and following the story to prove that she could do it—without Thom.

She hastily grabbed her jacket, then had to slow down to thumb through the papers on her desk to find Penny March and Whispering Pines. It had once been the local hospital, but technology had outpaced the building and it was now a “
long-term
care facility.”