The Underground Lady (Book 8 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)
SPECIAL PREVIEW EDITION
by JC Simmons
Copyright 2012 by JC Simmons
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Check out all ten books in
The Jay Leicester Mysteries Series:
Blind
Overlook
Icy
Blue Descent
The
Electra File
Popping
the Shine
Four
Nines Fine
The
Underground Lady
Akel
Dama
The
Candela of Cancri
Now available at the usual outlets
(Book 8 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)
By JC Simmons
SPECIAL PREVIEW EDITION
(This edition includes the first 8 chapters for FREE)
***
PROLOGUE
The little yellow Piper Super Cub, known by pilots the world over as a PA-18, sat at the end of the grass landing strip glistening in the early morning sun like a rare jewel. Dew ran in rivulets down the windshield and pooled along the engine cowling. It seemed poised, ready to do what it was designed for, soar above the earth like an angel.
The old Willis Jeep, a relic from World War Two, drove up and parked behind the cub. A young woman got out and moved along the side of the airplane, running her hand across the taught fabric of the fuselage as if caressing a lover. She looked at the black lettering on the tail and smiled. N1HW. It was the registration number required by the Federal Aviation Administration, her call sign, and her initials.
Preflighting the Super Cub as carefully as a surgeon looking through the abdominal organs of a patient on an operating table, she climbed into the cockpit and went through the pre-start checklist. After starting, the 160-horse power Lycoming engine purred like the woman's Siamese cat. Finding all was well, she took off into a sky so clear and blue it made one want to get on one's knees and thank God for being alive.
The little town of Union, Mississippi, appeared under the nose of the airplane and the woman turned north to circle back around over her farm while climbing for altitude. She always liked to look down on the farmhouse and pine and hardwood trees growing on the eight hundred acres of rolling hills. The farm was her love, her life, and her reason for living after the death of her husband two years ago.
Reaching one thousand feet, she picked up the mike and said, “Good morning, Meridian Approach. November One Hotel Whiskey is five west of Union, climbing VFR with information Charlie, inbound for landing."
"Roger, November One Hotel Whiskey, squawk 4671 and Ident. Okay, we have you on radar four west of Union. Maintain two thousand, cleared direct Meridian. Information Charlie is current. Expect no delay."
The woman acknowledged the transmission and looked down at the sparse traffic on Highway 492 between Sebastapol and Union. Then: "Meridian Approach, November One Hotel Whiskey, I'm going to need to return to my landing strip."
"Roger, November One Hotel Whiskey. You have a problem? November One Hotel Whiskey, you read Meridian?"
There was no reply.
The little yellow Piper Super Cub and the young woman flying it were never seen again. After a long and extensive aerial and ground search, everyone assumed that the plane had crashed into the dense forest somewhere near Union. No wreckage was ever found. The disappearance remained a mystery for over twenty-five years.
Chapter One
The move was complete. The office closed, the house sold. Jay Leicester, Aviation Consultants was no longer located in Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital. The reasons for the exodus were varied, complex, and necessary. Now, a cottage in the rolling hills of northern Newton County, Mississippi, would be my office, my headquarters, my base of operations, and my home. It was my choice to make this move, and it scared me to death. I had no idea if the business would succeed or survive this far out in the woods. However, I could think of no reason why it wouldn't.
For ten years the aviation consulting business had grown steadily. I worked as much as I wanted. Retiring after twenty-five years as an airline pilot, the only thing I knew truly well was aviation, hence the business. The big airlines manage their own operations. Small regional airlines, corporations, and individuals sometimes need help. Pilots with bad habits can be salvaged, returned to their families and cockpits clean and sober. Corporations need help setting up efficient, safe flight departments with the proper aircraft and highly trained crewmembers. Individual private pilots need advice on planes, training, and realizing their capabilities. The old saying that the most dangerous thing in the air during a weekend is a doctor flying a Beech Bonanza remains true. The Federal Aviation Administration and people like me are trying desperately to change that fact.
***
I lay in bed reading a Hemingway short story by the moonlight. It is that bright. The young woman is agonized and torn over having an abortion. The boyfriend tells her how simple the procedure is and how happy they will be when it is over. They are sitting outside a train station between Barcelona and Madrid, and across the valley the hills are white in the sun and the girl said they looked like white elephants. The boy says that it is the right thing to do and the girl wants to know that if she does it, will the boy be happy and things will be like they were and that he'll love her. In the end nothing is resolved and the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusion.
Laying the book on the table beside the bed, I watched the moonlight move through the room like a quiet thief, touching my face, my arms, and chest. The Hemingway 'critics' raged about the symbolism of the hills and white elephants, as they did in all of his works. I laughed when reading what he said about symbolism in his books, "The hills are hills, the elephants are elephants. The sea is the sea, the old man is an old man, and the sharks are sharks. So piss on the critics and their symbolism."
Over the last few years, I have come to the conclusion that the books being published today are unnecessarily glum. I have decided, and rightly so, I think, to object to being made sad by my reading. From now on I will read only those publications that make me happy or teach me something. I have informed the bookseller who supplies my reading material.
Sleep would not come, so I curled into the fetal position and let myself settle into the bed. I am barely breathing, practicing for the 'eternal rest.'
Now she steals into my thoughts. It has been over a month since she left. I miss her. The breakup was my fault. She moved to Seattle and married a banker. I felt terrible. I had had relationships go wrong before, and had felt amazed, dismayed and at a loss, but this time the effect was much more intense, perhaps because the possibility of its happening never occurred to me. There are never any winners in a breakup, only losers. Guilt, like jealously, is an emotion that wastes life. I felt like a dog returning to its own vomit. Memory is a horrible mental swamp.
Life has placed women in my path. I am not given to the bragging and bluster of a smoky bar, nor to lyrical nostalgia. I have loved a certain number of them, and recall others with tenderness, indifference, or – most often the case – with a happy and complicit smile. That is the highest laurel a man may hope for, to emerge from such sweet embraces unscathed, with his bank account little diminished, his health reasonable, and his esteem intact.
I think nothing of interest will ever again happen in my life. All love has fled or been taken away. Only memory, rushing out of the dark with the anguish of heartbreak. A country song comes to mind – Oh the lonely sound of my voice calling/ is driving me insane/ just like rain the tears keep falling/ nobody answered when I called your name. Then a remembrance of her soft fragrance bringing tears, when for weeks all I've been is numb.
Get a grip, Leicester. That's what Rose, my nearest neighbor would say. It's probably the fear caused by the move to the woods. That's an old lady fear. Real fear is the man who lies in the dark wondering if the damaged retina in his only good eye will detach and propel him into a black abyss.
False dawn was approaching. I got up and made a pot of coffee. Stirring in a dollop of Fireweed honey, I take a cup of the black liquid out on the porch and sit in the cypress glider. It's so cold my breath is visible and so quiet that you can hear the faint whip of a bird's wings cutting through the air. If you listen, sound will teach you things beyond speech.
Setting the coffee cup on the arm of the glider, I lean into my hands. Thoughts pour from me like the fading light from the winter moon. I want to wind down, here in this country quiet. I desire peace from the long years of lust and violence and death. There is a heaviness in this cold air that lends itself to gloomy thoughts.
Dawn begins to break and I can make out features in the landscape. When I built this cottage, I oriented the front eastward toward the tree line and rising sun. It is a grand view. The oaks and hickory and pine, the chinaberry and crabapple. The cedars, green even now in the winter, and ragged to the eyes. Here there is a beauty and ruggedness and remoteness and mystery to my little cottage. A ground fog begins to form.
If you are in the woods alone for some time, the land resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. The faces in the trees cease hiding and stare out at you. Shadows pass and you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then, sometimes an entire sentence. The ghosts reveal themselves without malice or prejudice. I see them receding before me, their shapes beautiful and sad. I would think something wrong with my psyche if not for Shack, the cattleman who lives a few miles to the north, who has experienced the same phenomena in his rolling woods. His father before him.
When I first bought this farm and the building was complete, I felt like a plantation owner, wealthy and powerful. It was a new and uncertain land, and the cottage set inside the woods like a reflection in an imperfect mirror. There is a grandeur of life as seen from the porch of this cottage. It is interesting to contemplate the small scope of woods out front, teeming with many kinds of plants, with birds singing in the trees, thousands of different species of insects crawling about, all elaborately constructed, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, and fixed by the laws of gravity to continue evolving into forms most beautiful and most wonderful – all under the watchful eye of God.
Something nudged my ankle. Looking down, I see that it was B.W., the big black and white Siamese my neighbor Rose English insisted I take after my German Shepherd died. I disliked cats and she knew it. B.W. was a six-week-old kitten when I got him and he has taught me much over the last four years. B.W. is a powerful and cunning hunter, and I knew that if he weighed four hundred pounds he would not accede to my existence for a single moment and would kill me without conscience to fulfill his immediate desire. Scratching him behind the ear brought that purring sound that I love so much and understand so little. He looked at me with those cat eyes. "Well, old boy, you do not weigh four hundred pounds and I can still kick your ass." He did not smile, but licked himself.
Inside the cottage, I poured another cup of the honey-laced coffee and went back out on the porch, this time sitting in a chair on the south corner, propping my feet up on a cedar post. B.W. jumped into my lap and curled up. The fog was thickening, but I could still see out to the tree line, though the gravel road, another hundred yards further out, was hidden. To the south, the deep valley was filled with fog and looked smooth like the surface of a pond. It was in this little valley where I found the buck, badly wounded by some idiot hunter too stupid to track an animal he'd shot, but let wander off and suffer. It was lying on the ground too weak to move, its hind leg broken by a bullet, another in its belly, blood dripping onto the dark earth. The look in that buck's eye as it watched me coming to slit its throat made me swear never to kill another living thing.
There was a dead quiet over the countryside. I suddenly felt B.W. tense, jerk in my lap, ears erect, neck stretched forward. He looked toward the tree line through the scope of woods. I followed his line of sight. There was a figure moving as silently as a cottonmouth slithering along an overhanging oak limb. At this moment I wished B.W. weighed four hundred pounds.
Easing out of the chair, I reached inside the door, retrieved a pair of binoculars and focused on the figure. It was not a ghostly, smoky apparition; it was a person walking along the drive leading to the cottage. B.W. began to growl, a sound I had heard only on rare occasions. It was not a happy sound. Laying the binoculars down, I put my hands in the pockets of the leather jacket, fingering the magnum that is always there. "Calm down, old boy. We have things under control. Let's not panic, yet."
The figure kept coming, but stopped forty yards away when spotting me on the porch. He seemed unsure whether to continue or turn and run. I made the decision for him. Pulling the magnum out and holding it by my side, I said, “State your business."
"Are you Jay Leicester? Rose English sent me." It was a female voice. I put the magnum back in my pocket. Rose, I might have known.
The fog had thickened and it was as quiet as a Robert Frost snowfall. B.W. watched the woman with the same alertness as I, his ears slanted forward, tail moving in erratic jerks.
She came stealthily on, stopped a few feet away and tried to smile. There were lines around her mouth like cracks in old china, but her eyes were bright. B.W. went and smelled around her feet. She bent down and picked him up. He snuggled into her arms as if they were old friends. "You must be B.W.," she said, rubbing his head. "Rose said you were your keeper's protector." She walked closer. "I'm sorry. My name is Sunny Pfeiffer. I need your help. Rose told me all about you, said you were just the person to solve my problem."
"What else did Rose tell you about me?"
"She said that you were a lonely man."
Her voice was light and quick with a slight twist in the sound. It was a way of speaking I had not heard before. It sounded as if she were from somewhere far away. Her voice was full of intimate portraits, expectations, and somewhere at the heart of it, a kind of dark inflection that only she knew or understood. Then it seemed to disperse like a wispy layer of the fog that surrounded us, leaving no meaning.
"Come inside, Sunny Pfeiffer. There is fresh coffee. You can tell me why you are wandering around in my woods on a cold winter's morning."
She started through the door, stopped, looked down at B.W. who seemed contented in her arms. "Is he allowed in the house?"
"He has the run of the place."
She took her coffee black and sat on the couch. B.W. assumed a formal pose on her knees like a guardian temple lion. Through half-closed eyes he stared directly at me with a Siamese expression that bordered on implied criticism.
Building a fire in the stone hearth, I sat in a recliner across from her. "It is not B.W.'s habit to accept strangers. This guileless gesture may hold profound and fortuitous significance. If that cat, who is closer to the gods of insight and fortune than humans, can accept you, then perhaps it would be wise to hear why you want to employ me."
A radiant smile suddenly appeared, transfiguring her features into an intimidating siren. She had green eyes of astonishing clarity, as bright and sparkling as ice, but much warmer. She was attractive in other ways too, and I found my own gaze returning to her both for this reason and because I wanted a close look at this woman who suddenly materialized out of the cold fog of an early morning at my cottage in the woods.
She appeared to be somewhere around thirty years of age. And tall – I guessed just under six feet. Her hair was long and soft and the color of a Blue Bird's breast. Looking closely at her face, its severe aspects were strong, gaunt, and almost classical. Her features seemed to be aquiline and sensitive, except for her heavy passionate mouth. She wore an expensive-looking wool turtleneck sweater and designer jeans with a pair of tennis shoes that probably cost as much as my first car. She worried her fingernails as if they were some hard inflexible part of her psyche that people could cut into and she would not feel pain.
"Miss or Mrs.?"
"Miss."
"Ever been?"
"No, you?"
"No."
She looked into my eyes and I had an uneasy feeling that she knew things about me, things so deep inside that even I had not figured them out, and every time I blinked she knew more.
"How did you get here?"
"I walked from Rose's house."
"That's over two
miles."
"It's beautiful country, even in the cold and
fog. The hills and valleys remind me of scenes from the Deer
Hunter, the one with Robert DeNiro. I would have loved to live in
this country before it was invented."
"I'm not much into movies."
"Too bad."
B.W. watched me and flicked the tip of his tail every so often as a display of implied irritation. He and the woman wore identical expressions, and one could almost believe that they were related by blood. Out the window behind where the woman sat two crows as big and sleek as black cats were strutting and cawing under the bird feeder attached to the post oak.
"Well, Miss Sunny Pfeiffer, what is it that you and Rose English think I can do for you?"
"I want you to help me find my mother."
"Then there has been a huge mistake. I'm an aviation consultant, not a private investigator. I don't do people searches."
"I know what you are, Mr. Leicester. I have researched your background thoroughly. When you hear me out, I think you will be more than willing to help."
She was an intelligent lady. I could imagine men being afflicted by her very presence; not by what she said, but what she seemed to be thinking behind her smile. Then there was the way she spoke, slowly pronouncing each syllable, her green eyes fixed on yours, as if she fathomed all your secrets.
"I'm listening."
"You know, Mr. Leicester. You remind me of a man I knew in Alaska who hunted grizzly bear with a spear."
"Yeah. What happened to him? He get eaten by a bear?"
"No, he just got to looking like he'd seen too many of 'em."
"Tell me why I would help you look for your mother."
"This land where you have built this lovely little cabin once belonged to my mother, along with eight hundred acres of land. I inherited it after she disappeared."
"I only have two hundred acres, and there was no Pfeiffer on the deed."
"No, I divested myself of the farm many years ago. I was only six years old when my mother went missing. My grandparents lived in Arkansas. I was spending the summer with them when it happened."
"You want me to help you find someone who's been missing over what – twenty something years?"
"Twenty-five to be exact."
"Look, even if I…"
"You know that level piece of land along that fence row just to the south of this cabin?"
"What about it?"
"Did you know it was used as a landing strip for my mother's airplane?"
"I did not."
"My
mother took off from that grass runway one morning twenty-five years
ago and was never heard from again. She and her little Piper Cub
vanished into thin air as if they never existed."
At least now she had my attention. I had never heard this story. Rose never mentioned any of this, even though she knew all about my business. We will have to have a talk, Rose and I. It has always amazed me how time makes people forget history. My great grandparents owned a ten thousand-acre plantation with a three-story mansion in south Mississippi near the town of Osyka. They died; the land was divided between ten children. Eventually the house burned, the kids sold off the land, and they themselves died. When I drive by that location today it is as if nothing was ever there. The place is fenced for cattle grazing and the only thing left to say that the land belonged to my family is the mineral rights to five hundred acres that I own. Though virtually worthless, I vowed never to sell them.
"No crash site? No body recovered?"
"Nothing. She just vanished. I have an old newspaper clipping that tells about a search for the airplane. Nothing else."
"Why now, after all these years?"
"I have my reasons. Here is a check for five thousand dollars as a retainer. You can bill me at your usual aviation consultant rate. Here is the newspaper clipping." She handed me the check and a yellowed piece of paper. "I want you to find out what happened to that airplane and my mother."
"You realize the odds are…"
"I don't care about odds. I want to know what happened."
"You'll have to give me some time to think about this."
"Very well. I will be staying with Rose for the next two days. Let me know what you decide, and soon." She brushed B.W. off her lap like a piece of lint, stood, and headed for the door.
"Would you like for me to drive you back to Rose's house?"
"I want you to decide whether or not to find my mother." She walked out the door and disappeared into the fog.
Chapter two
Picking up the phone, I dialed Rose English's number. "I am not a lonely man."
"Sunny made it to your cottage. Are you going to help her find out what happened to her mother?"
"Do not be telling people, especially strangers, that I am lonely. I am not."
"You've been mopping around them woods like an old bull with his testicles lopped off ever since that woman dumped you and ran off to the northwest with that loan shark. So don't tell me what you are or are not. I know you better than your own mother, who I assume was a wonderful woman except for that one terrible mistake she made forty-four years ago."
This was Rose English, my neighbor, and for the last ten years, my trusted friend. There are few people in this world that I can truly depend on. She is one of them. The others, I can count on one hand. The second time I saw Rose, she was holding a bloody kitten that had been viciously attacked by a male cat. As she watched life ebb away from the small animal, she said, “I hate the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature." Tears rolled down her face, and I knew then that we would be friends.
Somewhere in her sixties, Rose has lived on her farm all of her life and, I suspect – though I have never asked – that she was born in the house she lives in. Highly intelligent, she is stocky built with no fat on her body. Never married, she claims not to have family in the area, and few friends, though friendly to all. She welcomed me as a neighbor, and I think the common thread that forged our friendship is that we are both loners by nature and prefer to be left alone. She is well read and has a vast and remarkable library in her home, of which I avail myself often. There is a collection of Zane Gray and Louis L'Amour, surpassed only by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. She prefers Faulkner to Hemingway, disdains Fitzgerald, and tolerates Steinbeck and Welty. She loves a contemporary writer named Jim Harrison, and thinks John Grisham should be shot at dawn, not because he is an evil man, but because he wasted a God-given talent for the almighty dollar. Who am I to argue with her literary suppositions?
"So you felt it prudent not to tell me, of all people, that an airplane took off from my farm and may very well have crashed somewhere in my woods?"
"It wasn't your farm then, and sometimes there are things that are simply none of your business. Besides it was a long time ago. Are you going to help Sunny?"
"Maybe. The disappearance does intrigue me. I'll do some research today, make up my mind by tonight."
"Good. Be at my house for dinner at seven o'clock. You can get to know Sunny a little better. It will be good for you."
"How much do you know about this? Were you friends with her mother?"
"In due time, Jay. Don't be late for dinner, and if you want some decent wine, I suggest you bring a bottle."
"It's hard to pair fine wine with fried chicken and turnip greens."
"There is a boneless leg of lamb marinating that I intend to grill over mesquite. Bring B.W., he needs the company of other cats."
"It won't do him any good. I had him fixed, remember?"
"I didn't say he needed sex, he needs company other than yours. God, men! Maybe getting 'fixed' is something we should consider for you."
"I love you, Rose."
"Piss off, Leicester. Don't be late for dinner."
Maybe some company would do me good. I've been alone for a couple of weeks and realize I'm starved for conversation. I have felt directionless like snowflakes in a swirling wind. There has been a feeling of unhappiness since my failed relationship. But then I can always trust unhappiness. Her face never changes. However happiness, ah she's slick, can't be trusted. She has a thousand faces, all of them just ready to turn into unhappiness once she has you in her grasp.
Pouring more coffee, I sat on the couch in the place that Sunny Pfeiffer had so recently occupied. I imagined that I could still feel her warmth. The check was made out on a bank in New Orleans and the newspaper clipping was from the Union Appeal, a local weekly now owned by an old friend. I can research their archives for more on the disappearance of the airplane. After the date and time is established, a check with air traffic control in Meridian may turn up the controller who worked the flight and a tape recording or a transcript of the conversation. It was a long shot, but one worth trying.
Rose. I wanted the full story from her. But once upon a time I wanted to be Johnny Weissmuller and swing from jungle vines and call elephants with a primal yell only African animals could understand. Life is a bitch.
An old friend owns a flying service in Meridian. Dialing his number, I thought that he might remember the missing plane.
"Sanders Flying Service."
"Hello Earl, Jay Leicester."
"Jay, how you doing? I haven't heard from you since that Mexico thing."
"Finally made the permanent move to the country. You and Annie must come up for a visit. Let me show you around God's country."
"That sounds like a plan. So what's on your mind, Jay?"
"Back in eighty-two, a PA-18 took off from a grass strip in Union, in fact from the farm I now own, and went missing. Never showed up, no wreckage ever found. You have any memory of that happening?"
There was a moment of silence. Then, “Hadley Welsh, I taught her to fly, sold her the PA-18. A real mystery. Why are you asking about her disappearance?"
"I have no memory of it happening. Everyone seems to know about it but me. Where was I when that happened?"
"Why don't you check your logbook, maybe you were out of the country. Or that daily journal you've been keeping for thirty years."
"Good idea, haven't thought of looking there."
"So, I say again, why are you asking about Hadley Welsh's disappearance?"
"Her daughter wants me to find out what happened."
"Sunny? I often wondered what happened to that little girl. Pretty thing, and so outgoing and full of energy."
"Well, she grew into a good-looking woman."
"You remember John Roberts? He worked her flight that day. He's retired, but I have his phone number."
"Thanks. Give Annie my love. I may come for a visit in a couple of days."
"Look forward to it."
John Roberts was an air traffic controller, and a good one. As a pilot for Southern Airways, I used to land at Meridian twice a day, five days a week. Roberts worked most of my flights. We got to be good friends. A true professional, I am glad he made it to retirement age. His was a high-stress job, and a lot of his contemporaries died early from heart attacks and other stress related illnesses. I would contact him later, but first a trip to the Union Appeal for some research was in order.
After a quick shower, I sat on the couch and read the yellowed article Sunny Pfeiffer provided. The disappearance occurred on Friday, the ninth of April, 1982. It went on to tell about Hadley Welsh, a widower who had lived in the community for a few years. Her plane mysteriously disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from her farm west of Union. A large air and ground search was conducted with no discovery of a crash site. The search was called off after three days. It was assumed, and rightly so, that a hunter or farmer would eventually find the wreckage somewhere deep in the woods. There were unconfirmed rumors her plane was spotted in Wiggins, Mississippi, and on Chandeleur Island in the Gulf of Mexico. There was no mention of a daughter, a fact that I found strange.
Leaving B.W. to tend to the cottage, I headed for my truck and the town of Union. It was mid-winter and cold. The fog had dissipated, the sky an aching blue. The wind had picked up and cut through my clothes like an icy blade. It was still early, and the shadows of the trees, cast by the winter sun, lay like splash-marks of black paint on the terrace row and gravel road and across the roof of my truck.
***
Bill Graham, the Managing Editor of the Union Appeal, looked through giant ledgers holding copies of the paper dating back to the thirties and found the article. We looked through several weeks, but there was no further mention of the disappearance of Hadley Welsh and her little yellow Piper Super Cub. He suggested checking with the Meridian Star, a daily publication that may have follow up articles. It was a good idea.
On the drive back to the cottage, it dawned on me that Hadley's last name was Welsh, Sunny's was Pfeiffer and, if I remember, she'd said she had never been married. A good question for dinner tonight.
Nearing the terrace row, which serves as the driveway to the cottage, I observed a tractor in my field across the gravel road. It moved deliberately under a sky empty of cloud, over hard ground from a dry winter. High overhead vultures circled patiently waiting for nature to claim their next meal. The tractor stabbed a huge round bale of hay with the front fork then turned around and backed into another bale with the rear fork, raised it up off the ground and moved away with the two bales whose combined weight would be at least a ton and a half. This would be Shack, the cattle farmer who lived a few miles to the north and mowed my fields for the hay. He insisted he needed the extra bales, but I knew better. He cut the fields to keep me from spending endless hours pulling a bush hog in order to keep my little farm from becoming overgrown. Shack was the kind of neighbor everyone needed. Ten years my junior he was stoic, lucid, caustic and courageous, generous with his friends, and unyielding to his enemies. He was a man comfortable kicking cow shit with dirt farmers and other cattlemen, or surrounded by philosophers, academicians, and learned men or women who treasured his wit and his company. He sometimes needed a clear direction pointed out to him or else he could become dangerous.
Shack, like Rose, accepted me into this close-knit and sparsely populated community shortly after moving onto the farm and building the cottage. I have no idea why they "took-a-liking" to me, maybe they didn't want it on their consciouses if a city slicker made some fatal error in what can be dangerous country. One has only to remember the recent past in this part of Mississippi to understand. For the most part, they have managed to keep me out of trouble. I waved at Shack, who waved back, and continued on with his business.
Parking beside the cottage, I observed B.W. worrying a field mouse, teasing it, batting it around, the fear oozing from the mouse like the gray fog from this morning. I hated watching the killing. Picking up a pinecone, I threw it at B.W., whacking him on the head. He glared at me, then lifted his tail and stalked off in such a high dudgeon that it made me laugh. The mouse ran under my truck and hid behind a rear wheel. I did not blame B.W. for wanting to kill the mouse. It was only his way. Nature is a cruel lady.
Inside the cottage, I stoked the fire, went to my flight bag and retrieved an old logbook. Every minute of a pilot's life is carefully recorded in his personal log. It is required by the government. A line was drawn through the entire month of April, 1982 with a notation that read: VACATION/TRAINING. Putting the logbook back in the flight bag, I went to a bookcase in the back and picked out a book with a stamp on the spine that read, 1982. The journals went all the way back to 1970. A wise man once told me that if you keep a daily journal, one-day it would keep you. There is enough ink used in these journals to fill a wine vat. It is a daily record of my life: smells, food, wine, flowers, weather, sex, people, art, friends who have died. All memories from the deep past best visited while sober.
Looking at the week Hadley Welsh's plane went missing, I found that I was on vacation and moonlighting, flying a doctor to Aspen, Colorado, in his personal airplane for a two-week stay on Snowmass Mountain. As soon as I got back from this trip, Southern Airways sent me to Atlanta for upgrade training on the newly purchased Douglas DC-9 aircraft. This was the reason I had not heard about the missing woman and her plane. I continued looking through the journal until I came upon a notation about a close friend who had crashed into Mobile Bay during a spring thunderstorm killing all aboard his airliner. That crash made me feel as if my own existence was a privilege with unknown obligations. Slamming the journal closed, I returned it to its place among the others. Back in the living room, I sat in a recliner. All was silent except for the little trance-inducing sounds of the wood fire, and I thought about the fact that we are all doomed to die. As an honorable act of defiance, I simply refuse to fear these general terms of existence.
Throwing another red oak log on the fire, I could not stop thinking about my friend who died in the crash into Mobile Bay. I was sad when hearing about it, and as with one's own death, grief cannot be shared. I could only think that a library closed the day he died, an immense library. Then another death of a true airman came to mind. My mentor and I stood on the ramp watching a Lockheed PV-2 take off with a load of Mirex fire ant poison. At the controls was a pilot with whom I shared a cockpit for many hours. Just before liftoff speed, an engine failed. The Lockheed, full of high-octane gasoline veered off the runway and exploded, burning the pilot and copilot beyond recognition. Later, standing beside the wreckage watching the removal of the charred remains, I heard my mentor utter, "God grant you and I, though we must be at our own death, and worm eaten at last, a more civilized exit." I have a hand scribbled list of twenty-nine airmen with whom I have flown that are now deceased. The list continues to grow.
I needed to get out of this funk, stop thinking of the recent dead. B.W. stretched and yawned in front of the fire. Going to a glassed-in bookcase where I keep my most precious collection of first edition books, I pulled out the only pristine copy of Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa that I have ever seen. It is a wonderful book about big game hunting, and illustrated by Edward Shenton. Due to some flaw with an ink process during production, the spine of the book tends to fade into an ugly green/yellow color. This copy is not faded and is inscribed by Hemingway to his friend from Key West, Charles Thompson, who had accompanied him on a safari to Tanganyika in 1934. This made the book even more valuable. Though I have never bought a book for its resale value, this copy is worth an incredible amount of money.
A friend once pointed out to me that of the thousands of writers from the last century the works of only four would survive; Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck. I tend to agree, and have added Welty to the list. Time will tell.
After reading a chapter of Green Hills, I thought that works of great originality are usually produced in a state of intense turmoil – a madness of genius. Creativity seems to emerge from extreme emotion, often at the edge of sanity, and sometimes brings about the physical wreckage of the person creating an artistic masterpiece. I knew Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two days causing severe injuries, but he also had other problems. Faulkner and Fitzgerald succumbed to alcohol, Steinbeck to a combination of tobacco and alcohol, Welty to old age. So, who knows? Right now, I had to prepare for dinner with Rose English and Sunny Pfeiffer and try to find out what happened to Hadley Welsh and her Piper Super Cub.
Chapter Three
Lamb? What wine would go with mesquite grilled lamb? Going down the steep steps into the cellar, a true wine cellar I had built under the cottage, both my knees ached. Too much football in my early years, fourteen seasons. Making the steps so vertical made it hard to climb and descend. I remembered the old Choctaw Indian working for the building crew pulling me aside with a warning that to dig deep into the ground would be coming close to the living world of the spirits, and I should be careful. For all I know this may be true. At the bottom, my head brushed against a spider web. I knew instantly from the strength of the silk strands that it was a black widow's web. They are prevalent in these woods and one has to be wary of them. It has always bothered me that I can never know the cold inner working of a spider's thoughts or those of the copperhead moccasin that follows me as I walk around the pond.
Looking at the diamond-shaped bins, each holding a case of wine, I thought that nothing has brought me such uncomplicated pleasure as a fine bottle of wine. Mine is not a great collection, but I do have bottles from the fifties, sixties, a lot from the seventies and eighties, and few after that. It dawned on me one day that for a great French claret or California cabernet, it would take thirty years for the wine to age and become drinkable. My life span would certainly not be that long. At any rate, I have enough to last.
Spotting a case of 1975 Pichon-Longueville, I picked two bottles. From the Haut-Medoc area of Bordeaux, this was an excellent year, was ready to drink, and would have enough tannin and fruit to hold up well with the lamb. I only hoped Sunny Pfeiffer enjoyed wine as it would be wasted on Rose, whose taste ran more to Budweiser and Jack Daniel's.
It was almost time to depart for Rose's house. For some reason, I decided to wear a turtleneck and blazer. Rose would probably make fun of the clothes, for my usual attire is sweat pants and khaki shirt. "Come on, B.W., your original mama wants you to do some socializing." Putting him in the truck, I looked down at one of the two ponds behind the cottage. It was winter and cold and there were ducks on the water. Suddenly there was an image of a hot summer night, and a naked woman in the pond lying on her back, floating, head tilted back, her throat long and pale, water pooling in the soft hollows of her body, the full moon shining on her breasts. She is suspended just beneath the water's muddy surface, her face impassive, staring up at the stars. Then, after a while, a smile began to form. Now, the cold wind felt as if it came from very far away. I slammed the truck door and drove toward Rose's farm.
The aroma of lamb roasting on a grill wafted around the corner of Rose's neat farmhouse as B.W. and I parked in the drive. It was a wonderful smell, mixed with that of wood smoke from the fireplace. Rose lifted an eyebrow at the jacket, but thankfully made no comment. Her eyes were a unique shade of gray, like the sky after a summer thunderstorm before it turns blue again, not the gray of a winter day when the clouds are low and heavy and damp.
"So you did bring B.W. and some grape juice. Good for you. Sunny is helping me set the table. There are decanters on the kitchen counter and a small candle if you want to pour the good off the bad."
"Ah, Rose, you are learning."
She took B.W. from me. "Come on boy, I want you to meet some new cousins who have come to live with us." Rose could never pass up a stray animal.
Entering the kitchen, I ran face to face with Sunny Pfeiffer. She was tall and angular and beautiful, and a warm light seemed to surround her like an aura and follow her when she moved. All men would find her charming in the extreme. She wore a white pullover sweater, black pants, and the same tennis shoes from this morning.
Without so much as a hello, she said, “So you are going to help me find out what happened to my mother."
"Yes."
"Good. Now let me see what your taste in wine is." She reached for one of the bottles, looking intently at the label. "Ah, a seventy-five. If I can remember that vintage – -yes, smaller than average crop with wines of great color and high intensity. The Medocs were rich in tannin and well textured. Other areas of Bordeaux also produced very high quality, elegant wines that year. A welcome vintage after the disastrous seventy-two, three, and four years. Would you like for me to decant these for you?"
"You know wine, then?"
"A little. Have these been cellared properly?"
"I think so."
"Then this will be fun. It should marry well with the lamb."
"We'll see."
Rose walked into the kitchen. "Oh, my God, am I going to have to listen to this wine snobbery stuff all night?"
The lamb was outstanding and the Pichon-Longueville was even better than anticipated.
Over coffee in Rose's living room, I asked Sunny about the differences in her and her mother's last names. It turned out to be a simple explanation: her mother took her maiden name back after the death of Sunny's father. I was hoping for something more sinister.
"I'm still curious as to why, after twenty-five years, you suddenly want to find out what happened to your mother?"
She seemed to go into deep thought. It sat well on her, softening the tense angularity of her posture. She turned, looked at me. Her face seemed to shrink in on its bones, making her look stern and formidable. "I received an anonymous letter two weeks ago that said my mother did not die in a plane crash. That she was murdered."
"Then someone knows you, your mother, and the killer. Or maybe the killer's conscious is bothering him and he's trying to confess for redemption?"
Rose sat her coffee cup on the table beside her. "I'm right in making the assumption that there is no statute of limitations on murder?"
"That's correct."
Sunny got up and paced back and forth in front of the fireplace. Her arms folded over her stomach and her long legs gave her a harlequin aspect, like a sad clown caught in bad light.
"Have you had any other suspicions about the disappearance of your mother over the years?"
"Except for always wondering what happened, none." She stopped in front of the fire. She seemed one of those people who couldn't bear to face a change in their life. Like one of those waiting mothers who sit beside the phone waiting for a call from a wayward child, but doesn't know what to say when the child finally calls.
"I'd like to see the letter."
"I didn't bring it with me."
"A lot of information can be gleaned from the document, where it was mailed from, fingerprints, DNA, things an investigator looking into a murder would be interested in."
"I never thought…"
Rose looked hard at me. "Why don't we let Jay look into your mother's disappearance, see if anything points to foul play before assuming murder."
"You do still have the letter?"
"Yes, I still have it." Her voice was flat. Her face was without expression, though it was marked by traces of past expressions around the eyes and at the corners of the mouth. She looked both young and old. Her eyes seemed to dull and turn the color of the darkness in the corner of the room.
"Tomorrow I will go talk to the man who taught your mother to fly and sold her the airplane and to the air traffic controller who worked the flight. Maybe I can get a copy of the accident investigation. Even though there was no crash site, some kind of report was filed."
"Then I will go with you. Rose would probably like me out of her hair for awhile."
Usually I do not enjoy company when I'm working, but this would afford me the opportunity to study Sunny Pfeiffer. "That's a good idea. There are many questions, and we can get to know each other."
Rose looked relieved. She knew that I worked alone, that I preferred it that way. She had witnessed me brush people off, even lose clients who insisted they tag along. She once told me that by the time I'd made enough mistakes to learn from, it would be time for me to die. One couldn't argue with that logic.
"You must know, Sunny, I don't think there is any possibility of solving what happened to your mother after twenty-five years. There's no aircraft wreckage, no body."
"I have to try," she answered in a voice that hung almost toneless between expectation and despair. There was a look of acceptance on her face as if she'd lived too long without endings.
B.W. wandered in and jumped up in Rose's lap. She stroked him from his head all the way to the tip of his tail, the big cat arching his rear legs up to meet her hand. It is another thing that I do not understand about felines.
"So, what have you heard from Alella?" I asked Rose.
"A letter from her came yesterday. She plans to return after the first of the year. She is having a wonderful time with her family, but misses me, the farm, and the animals."
"Who is Alella?"
"A young girl from Spain who had been battered so much by the world that she had only the faintest wisp of life left when Jay brought her to me."
"Oh, he brought her?" Sunny said with a lecherous smile.
"He spent a night with her in Mexico and decided to save her from herself."
"Come on, Rose, you know that was a platonic event."
"Then you are gay?"
"I don't think so, Pfeiffer."
Rose laughed. "Alella is now a citizen of the United States, and my adopted daughter. She lives with me and is a lovely, wonderful young woman who is learning to trust people again. You must come back for a visit and meet her when she returns."
"Yes, I would like that."
"We have a long day tomorrow. B.W. and I will take our leave."
"What time should I be ready?"
"Eight o'clock."
When we stood, B.W. jumped from Rose's lap and ran to Sunny's ankles. She reached down and picked him up. At the door, she handed him to me. "Perhaps you will get to know me," she whispered.
As she spoke those words, her enigmatic eyes never lift mine, and at the same time, a smile came to her lips. It was a smile so beautiful, so perfect, so filled with all the light in a Mississippi night sky that it took my breath.
Back at the cottage, I buttoned everything up, turned the thermostat to its lowest setting and climbed into bed. The full effects of the Pichon-Longueville were finally getting to my brain. I tried to think about what we would do tomorrow; however, when lost in the fumes of Bacchus' grapes it seems that I cannot choose the things I wish to remember. Memory is not continuous. It is not meant to be. Each time I remember the past, it comes in pieces. Each event seems something lost, fragmented. Perhaps the past does not exist at all and is only a fabrication. It seemed as if my brain, thinking about my life, had come to a long line of thunderstorms in the sky, had faltered, hesitated, trying to decide whether to fly over, around, or even go back the way I came.
As the restless sleep overtook me, I thought whoever it was that played life's little tricks on us always watches with amusement when through carelessness, pride, or ignorance, we find ourselves walking on the sharp edge of the knife.
***
I heard the muffled sound of a bird and knew the day was here. It seemed a gentle shift of time that you can only feel. You know it's happening, but you cannot pinpoint where it begins. My body seemed to settle and grow solid like the morning light. It was cold and I lay for a minute listening. Now there was only silence, no birds, no cow lowing, no coyote howling, even the wind seemed to stall in the air like the week's wash stiffened on a clothesline. There is a certain comfort in knowing nature's machinery is setup to run regardless of any human intervention.
I went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror at my face as if I could somehow read the future there. All I could read was my own past, in the marks of erosion under my eyes, the glints of gray in my hair.
After a hot shower, I dressed, made coffee, and fed B.W., who then wanted out. It was a bright morning. The edges of the sky had a yellowish tinge like cheap paper fading in the sunlight. The wind picked up and the dry shaking of the oak leaves sounded like rattlesnakes. Sunlight lanced through the trees in honed, piercing shafts.
As I headed for the truck, the sun eased up through the cold treetops. I watched light slide across the hollow on the upper end of one of the ponds, a wide swath that seemed to set fire to the brown grass. I had always liked this time of the year. The world seemed to shed its skin like the king snakes that lived in the big brush pile in the valley south of the cottage. Everything seemed new and stronger. Add that to the bawl of a calf, the smell of wood smoke, the iron-cold steel of a cattle gate, and you had a beauty in the landscape.
I watched the wind blow the dead leaves in a new dancing choreography as birds began to wheel and soar, and I hoped that the rest of the day in the company of Sunny Pfeiffer would go as well.
Chapter Four
Sunny Pfeiffer bounded out to my truck as soon as I stopped in Rose's driveway like a teenager on a first date. She carried a thermos and two ceramic mugs. Opening the passenger door, she jumped in, slamming the door hard, shaking the whole truck. She wore a turtleneck sweater with a sailcloth jacket, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. A pair of black slacks and the now familiar tennis shoes made up the rest of her attire. I, on the other hand, was back to sweat pants, a wool plaid shirt, and a leather jacket.
She looked at me with sparkling green eyes like highly polished gemstones. They were remarkable, piercing, and smoldering, and could stop a man's words, make them drop from the air like a flock of redwing blackbirds on a windy day. She had on a perfume, a familiar aroma, yet distant, like the scent of an almost forgotten flower.
"Rose had an idea that you might like coffee with honey. Something I've never heard of, nor tried." She handed me a cup.
"She had an idea, did she? Robert Frost once wrote an unfinished and undated poem that said, “An idea comes as close to something for nothing as you can get."
Sunny Pfeiffer laughed at that, opened the thermos and poured us both coffee. "Not bad," she said, tasting the honey-laced, licorice-colored liquid. "A little too sweet for my taste, but not bad."
The day was getting off to a good start.
As we eased along the gravel road, leading to the blacktop, trying not to spill our coffee, Sunny cocked her head at me, and with a sly grin, said, “Frost also wrote a poem about two women on a farm without a man. They had a milk cow named 'Lesbia."
Now that one I had not read. We both laughed again.
After turning onto the blacktop, we headed east toward the town of Union, a place William Tecumseh Sherman refused to burn during his devastating march of destruction across the south during the Civil War because of its name. There is a hotel in downtown Union that has been restored called the Boler Inn, which Sherman used as his headquarters for a short time.
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