The Grass Widow's Daughter

Barren Cemetery, Carter County, Missouri, July 6, 9:00 PM

The bottle whistled through the twilight, but hit the door with an unsatisfying thud instead of shattering on impact.  Kyle's follow-through tumbled him forward onto a tombstone.  Fortunately the patron saint of drunks, teenage boys, and other fools adjusted his trajectory enough to spare his face.  His bare chest took the brunt of the impact.  As he writhed in breathless agony wondering what had happened, his fellow inebriants whooped in delight.  The alcohol, that MSG of humor, made them think his painful mishap was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

Kyle got unsteadily to his feet still doubled over trying to regain the ability to breath.

"Give me my keys, Donnie," he said with petulant determination.

"No, no, no, no," sang his friend shaking his head slowly.  "You told me---"

"To hell with that!  Give me the damned keys!"

The novice drunks stood toe to toe.  Shaun stood aside, waiting to see if they were really going to come to blows.

Donnie teetered unsteadily a silly grin on his face.

"These keys?" he said, dangling them over his head.

Kyle swiped and missed as Donnie staggered back laughing.

Then he hurled the keys over his head into the woods.

"What did you do that for, you idiot?" gaped Kyle.

"He didn't really throw them," said Shaun.

"Actually, I did," slurred the boy, grinning at his own brilliance.  "You're too drunk to drive, Kyle."

"So what are we going to do now, genius?" asked Shuan angrily.  "Spend the whole friggin' night here?"

The smile slowly dissolved from Donnie's face as the consequences of what he had just done sank in.  Then he smiled.

"No harm done.  We can find ‘em.  No problem.  No blood, no foul.  Right?  We can find ‘em."

"In the dark!" screamed Kyle, swinging his fist wildly in the air, the punch aimed only at the situation.  "In the friggin' dark!"

A verbal tempest ensued that was as ineffectual as the punches Kyle continued to aim at capricious fortune.  He quickly ran through the limited stock of profane language, combining all the noun, verb, and adjective variants of anatomical parts, bodily functions, and sexual acts.  The results failed to adequately reflect the depth of his outrage, the permutations being more limited than one might imagine.  His slashes of violent profanity became increasingly ineffectual, descending quickly to the ridiculous.  His most effective epithets were single words shouted into the darkening woods.  Perhaps they would have been more satisfying had there been a decent echo.

A grumbling hour of scrabbling and digging through the brush bought the boys only briar scratches, mosquito bites, chiggers, ticks, and sullen frustration.  Then something happened that only a teenage boy approximating thought while under the influence would see as a possible solution to the dilemma.  Shaun, the youngest of the trio, found it.

"Hey.  There's a car over here!" he said.

"A junk car!  Who gives a rip?" Kyle interrupted his mumbled cursing to shout.

Shaun squinted and stepped through the brush for a closer look.  It didn't look like a junker.  He detoured around a blackberry thicket for a closer look.  The SUV's dome light came on when he opened the door.

"What's that smell?" he said.  Then, "Hey!  The keys are in it." 

"So what we gonna do?" fumed Kyle.  "Steal the damned thing?"

The idea struck Donnie as hilarious.

"Steal the damn thing," he said, laughing so hard he almost fell over.

"We can borrow it and go get keys for your car," insisted Shaun.  "It won't hurt nothing.  We'll bring it back before anyone even knows it's gone."

No one thought to ask what a car with the keys inside was doing parked amid the brush by the abandoned cemetery.  Instead an argument ensued as to who should drive.  The issue was decided by seeing which of them could stand on one foot the longest.  Shaun, the least wasted, won easily much to the disgust of the other two.  But a deal was a deal.

He backed out of the brush, miraculously, without hitting a tree too large for the vehicle to ride down.  The trip to Doniphan, however, was not so uneventful, and they never got back to pick up Kyle's car.

 

Rural Hawthorn County near Blue Creek, Missouri, July 7, 6:45 AM

Richard Carter adjusted the belt holding his taser and pistol, taking a last look at his wife before leaving.  His wife's voice carried easily as she instructed three family groups of novice floaters.

"Blue Creek has no white water, but you must use your flotation devices because if you find yourself in the water due to capsizing it is possible that you may become incapacitated.  Besides, it is the law."

The way she to brushed aside a strand of her long auburn hair as the morning breeze stirred and the sound of her voice rooted him, made him linger.  Jill made the set piece recitation sound both extemporaneous and polished.  No wonder the classes she taught filled early despite their rigor.  Her beauty, grace, and that wonderfully unaffected smile helped.  Of course he was a little more than biased.  Her soft commanding voice still sang to him after nine years of marriage and the birth of their daughter, Mirabelle.  He was a lucky man.

As if attuned to his thoughts, she flashed him that smile and waved goodbye.  He sighed as he descended the deck, opened the door, tossed his hat onto the passenger seat, and then paused for a final glance before getting into the cruiser.  Canoes slid into the current that would carry them around the bend for a leisurely twelve-mile excursion.  Mark, a teenager hired when Shane deployed for his second tour in Iraq, would ferry back canoes and floaters from the takeout point.  It promised to be a busy for a Monday. 

"Bye, Daddy," yelled Mirabelle, waving wildly as she squinted into the morning sun.  Lucky sat protectively near, his long yellow hair blowing as he sniffed the stiffening breeze.

One final wave and Richard Carter reluctantly drove up to the winding ridge road that took him to his official day.

 

It came stealing in almost indiscernibly like the dimming of houselights in a theater.  By town, he felt the familiar heaviness.  The cold echo of his footfalls made the courthouse stairwell a vast mausoleum.  Now even the air seemed thick, stale, oppressive.

Another ‘dark days,' he thought with a snort of self-censure.

The unreasoning thing never yielded to logic or will.  Fighting it directly was like rolling a rock up an ever-steepening hill.  It had come of its own and would stay until it was through with him.  He would cope, as usual, by losing himself in tasks and spending the day in sunshine if possible.  By the second floor he had decided to volunteer for the most detested task in the department, serving paper.  Trying to run down a segment of the population that was disproportionately transient and unemployed would keep him out of the office and, more importantly, busy.

"Is the boss in yet?" he asked before the door had rattled closed behind him.

"Go on in, Richard," said Betty without looking up from her computer.  "We got a call from Ripley County and he wanted to see you as soon as you got here."

"Do you know what the call was about?"

"A stolen vehicle I think."

It wasn't the usual assignment for a criminalist (not quite a facetious title, but close, given his limited training).  On the plus side, it definitely beat serving summons.

Like the outer door, the glass in the office door rattled, emblematic of the cash-strapped department.  Everything needed an upgrade, and had for years.  Shug held up a hand to forestall a question.  The ancient swivel chair protested as he shifted his weight.

"Just a minute," he said into the phone.  "The deputy you need to talk to just came in."

The huge hand muffling the phone made it seem like a toy. 

"An SUV was abandoned over to Barren.  DMV says it comes from here," he said as he slid a pad of post-its across the desk.

Written on it was "Silver, 2008 Escalade" followed by a VIN number.

"You want me to track down the owner," said Richard, stating the obvious.

It deflated his expectations more than it should have.

"Wait a minute.  Barren's not in Ripley County, is it?"

"It's a little complicated, Carter.  Here."  Shug handed over the phone.  "I'll let him fill you in."

"This is Deputy Richard Carter," he said.  "What have we got?"

"Hoyt Mallory here.  We stopped a car just north of Doniphan . . . it's registered to a forty-nine-year-old female from over yonder . . . Hawthorn County, I mean.  Name's Okinawa McGregor?  Want me to spell that?"

"No.  I've got it," said Richard.

"Your boss says you don't have the stolen car report?"

"Let me check if anything has come in."

"It hasn't, and I can't raise the McGregor woman on the phone," Shug said.

"No, nothing so far," said Richard distractedly.  "You say you stopped it over there, but I though it was found over around Barren."

"Yeah.  Seems we got us a mobile crime scene.  Some high school kids took it from where it was left and we picked them up with it.  At least that's their story.  The main thing is you need to find the owner."

The logical assumption was that the boys had stolen the car.  Either that or the car had been stolen twice.  The story seemed muddled so far.

Or maybe I'm just unusually dense today, he thought.

"I'll get back to you as soon as we contact her."

"I hope you do, but, like I told your boss, I think she might have been killed in it."

"Killed?"

"There's a lot of blood."

"Could you run me through all this from the beginning?  I think I missed something."

"Okay.  About two o'clock this morning one of our deputies spotted a car traveling way too slow and wandering all over the road.  When he tried to pull them over, the driver sped up, lost control, and run her off into the ditch---messed up the passenger side quarter panel, but didn't as much damage for the three boys inside as it could have.  None of them was belted, and they rattled around quite a bit but came out of it without much but bruises and cuts.  Nothing like being young and limber---so drunk they was real limber.  Anyway when we pulled them out, the kid on the passenger's side had blood on the seat of his pants, but it weren't his.  The seat was soaked in tacky blood, but it didn't come from none of them knot heads."

"What's their story---or aren't they talking?"

"They said they found the car over to Barren."

Barren was one of the numerous "named places" dotting the Ozark Plateau.  Most were former lumber camps, railroad stops, and post offices.

"There's nothing over there but an old cemetery, right."

"And a few old foundations.  It's part of the Wilderness area.  Anyways, the boys finally fessed up to being out there drinking last night---which was no big surprise to anybody---and they lost their car keys.  While they were looking for them they found the SUV and thought it was good idea to drive it back to town to get another key for their car.  Said they was gonna leave the SUV where they found it when they were through."

"So the keys were in the SUV?"

"According to the boys."

"Do you put much stock in their story?"

"They're sixteen.  How much stock would your put in it?"

"But you believe them."

"Between them they ain't got the brains to pour water out of boot if the instructions was written on the heel.  I don't think they're guilty of anything but stupidity and underage drinking---boys being boys."

"So you don't think they had anything to do with whatever put the blood in the car?"

"No.  These kids have never been in any kind of real trouble, but we're holding them until we get a handle on this thing."

Richard had a dozen questions, but it wasn't his case---at least not yet.

"Okay.  I'll see what I can find out on this end.  I assume someone is searching the area over at Barren?"

"I'm there now waiting on the Carter County boys.  This part of it's theirs."

"I'll get back with you after I check the residence," said Richard.

"You want us to take this case," said Shug as soon as he hung up.

The "mobile" part of the mobile crime scene was a case of musical chairs.  In whichever county the crime occurred lay the responsibility (and expense) of determining the nature of the blood evidence.  Financially strapped as the county was, the sheriff could be excused for trying to get out from under jurisdictional responsibility.

"We've got a stolen car case at this time," Richard said trying not to let his eagerness become too obvious.  "When we find out where the homicide occurred, the jurisdiction will take care of itself."

"Let's hope there wasn't a homicide."

"Right.  Let me get over to the McGregor's and see what I can find out.  Do you know the family?"

"I know the name, not her," said the sheriff, seemingly preoccupied.

Forty-one-year-old Okinawa McGregor's address was only four blocks from the courthouse.  On the way Richard realized with only a twinge of guilt that his dark mood had evaporated.  With police work in a small community, it was often impossible to function with any degree of objectivity, but this time there was no personal connection.  That was not to remain the case.