Authors: Cathy Pickens
“But why did Ash kill them?”
“He’s not talking, not about Wenda or Neanna. My guess, he came on to Wenda. She told him to get lost. He got violent. Ash has a problem sweet-talking ladies. As you found out last night.”
“He hasn’t learned anything about finesse despite hanging around with Lenn Edmonds all these years.”
Rudy snorted. “Finesse? Hardly.”
I thought about shop-worn Cela Newlyn and free-spirited Wenda Sims. I doubted Wenda would have given him a second look, especially if she’d already attracted Lenn Edmonds’s attention. Unlike Cela, Wenda had been a woman with options in men, even if she didn’t always have good taste. What had Cela put up with in the name of love?
Rudy’s mouth set in a hard line. “We’re just now finding out what a scary little shit Ash Carter is.”
I waited for him to elaborate.
“We’re checking on him, everywhere he’s been for the last couple of decades. Starting to wonder if these were his only two victims.”
“No.” The word rushed out in a breath.
Rudy shrugged. “Don’t know for sure. Some questions have followed him around other places he’s been. Girlfriends who left town suddenly. That sort of thing. Both SLED and the FBI are involved now.”
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, our state police. I shivered, remembering the photograph and how Ash had frightened Gran into giving up on her daughter. Had he done more than send the photograph? Had he threatened her? Or Neanna?
“You said Neanna had taken a lot of Xanax. You think he gave it to her?”
“Possible. If she wasn’t used to taking it, that would guarantee she didn’t put up much fight.”
“All he had to do was hold her hand near the gun when he fired it.”
The look on Rudy’s face said he hadn’t thought of that. “That would account for the gunshot residue. Or he could’ve just held the gun in her hand, fired into the woods, replaced the
cartridge, and shot her. With the pills, alcohol, and pot, she’d have been little more than a rag doll.”
“Why kill Neanna?”
“Why not? She was asking questions. Probably easy to entice her to meet him on the mountain, with the promise of information. More of a rush job than with Wenda. He took his time there, and he came close to getting away with it.”
“Why leave Wenda on that graveyard bench like that? That had to be dangerous, taking all that time.”
“Who knows? Because he could. Ash has always been a cocky little shit, as long as I’ve known him. Always thought he was smarter than everybody else.”
I shivered at the memory of Fran dancing with him, his tight embrace. It had been just mildly creepy last night. Now it was terrifying. Everything suggested Ash Carter had more experience than we knew getting away with murder.
“Would he have killed her? Fran?”
Rudy raised an eyebrow as if to say,
What do you think?
He reached to answer the buzz of his cell phone just as the waitress set down our plates of food. After a series of uh-huh’s, he said, “I’ll be right there,” and flipped the phone shut. “Dangnation.”
He slid out of the booth, signaling for the waitress. “Can you put this in a box for me?”
She didn’t roll her eyes, at least not where he could see.
“Got to go. We’ll talk later about you and that .38 of yours. You aren’t registered to carry concealed.” He stood over me as he fished bills out of his wallet, then strode off.
The waitress swept his plates away and carried two loaded take-out boxes to the register for him. I sat alone with my oatmeal and my thoughts.
Early this morning, I had driven Fran to pick up her car, and
reassured her that I’d keep her posted, given her Rowly Edwards’s number in Atlanta so she could follow up with him, if she wanted, and sent her off to Atlanta with a hug. Nothing more I could do.
I’d relished the thought of Sunday alone, with my house and my office to myself. I hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed not having to answer to anyone or fill an employee’s task list. Then Rudy had called about breakfast and disrupted my sanctuary with specters of things I’d rather not think about.
As I took a bite of my lumpy oatmeal full of blueberries and walnuts, my cell phone buzzed. I half expected it to be Rudy with something he’d forgotten to lecture me about or Aunt Letha wondering why I wasn’t in church.
Melvin’s radio announcer voice was the last voice I expected to hear. “Avery, you might want to head up the mountain to Stumphouse Tunnel, if you’re of a mind to help out our little ghoster friends, as you call them.”
“I call them your friends, not mine.”
“I’d call them in trouble.”
“I thought you were supposed to be fishing.”
“I am. Colin called my cell phone. How he got that number, I want to find out.”
His tone implied he might suspect me, but he was wrong on that score. “Maybe they’re psychic.”
He snorted. “I just know they’re getting to be a pain. Colin said they were filming at the tunnel and Sheriff Peters and the ambulance had been called. The reception was bad, so I didn’t get the details. Don’t know why I care, but I wouldn’t wish L. J. Peters off on anybody.” Melvin and L.J. had a history.
“Okay.” A drive up the mountain was always preferable to chores. Still, I sighed for dramatic effect. “I’ll go check on them.”
The tunnel wasn’t far. In horse-and-buggy days, taking a
picnic lunch to the tunnel had been an all-day affair, but fifteen minutes after I closed my cell phone, I pulled off the state road and swung down the double-back road to the tunnel.
The football-field-sized parking lot was jammed. I’d never seen so many vehicles here, even on the hottest summer days when people drive up to enjoy the natural chill of the never-completed railroad tunnel. I’d also never seen a fire truck here, or six pickups with mail-order flashing lights—members of the county’s volunteer Rescue Squad.
Someone had removed the barricades that usually block the road up to the tunnel entrance, and the fire truck was perched at the top of the short, steep hill. I didn’t smell smoke and suspected the fire truck had another reason for being here.
I ignored parking lot etiquette and blocked two of the Rescue Squad trucks. They wouldn’t be going anywhere until whatever had happened in the tunnel had been milked for all its entertainment value.
Stumphouse Tunnel had been former vice president John C. Calhoun’s key to a railroad that would connect the Charleston port with Knoxville and Cincinnati. He wanted to minimize Southern dependence on Northern trade as the economic ties between those two sections of the country tightened to the snapping point in the decades before the Civil War.
Unreconstructed Southerners still wistfully espoused, “If only the railroad had been finished in time . . . ,” even though that had been little more than a pipe dream. True, only nine hundred feet of the six-thousand-foot tunnel remained unfinished when war broke out, but other Southern states had already managed to build railway connections with the Midwest. South Carolina’s construction had been delayed thanks to muchballyhooed and characteristically shortsighted intrastate infighting over how to fund the enterprise.
In the 1950s, Clemson College had found a more pragmatic use for the abandoned tunnel, which mimicked perfectly the temperature and humidity of the cheese-making caves in France. The Continent came to the Carolinas, and Clemson bleu cheese was born. Nowadays, the tunnel was again abandoned, except for the tourists—and now a mob of sightseers.
I climbed the graveled embankment to the plateau entrance to the tunnel. I was used to being alone here, or one of only a handful of other visitors. I always stop to breathe in the damp earth smell and commit to memory the uncountable colors of green. The first waft of cold air from the yawning black hole always came as a never-quite-expected jolt.
Today, I didn’t anticipate a peaceful green interlude. Weaving my way past a gawking crowd planted on the old rail bed as if waiting for a parade to march out of the boxcar-sized black cave, my mild irritation evaporated in the heat, replaced by an ice cube of fear.
What had happened to draw the official and the idle in such numbers? Had the naive ghosters gotten into some serious trouble, something temporal and dangerous?
I eased between two men in hunting camouflage and past an imaginary line that encircled the opening at a twenty-foot distance. I didn’t acknowledge their disapproval of my pushiness or give them a sweet smile. Both were probably pleased when an official voice barked at me.
“Halt!” The deputy I’d been looking for. He stood to the right of the entrance, in the shadow of the overgrown rocks. I gave him a smile and started to ask a question when another voice, echoing from the tunnel, interrupted.
“Might as well go ahead and arrest her now, dep-ity. She ain’t nothin’ but trouble.”
Pudd Pardee, the head of the Rescue Squad, waddled into the
sunlight on his stumpy, spraddled legs, looking like some mutated mythological woodland character. All he needed was a leprechaun’s brocade vest instead of a khaki work shirt with his name embroidered in an oval patch.
“Pudd.” I sounded delighted to see him. And I was. “Is everything all—is anyone—?” What exactly did I want to know?
“This is takin’ am-ba-lance chasin’ to new lows, A’vry. What’cha gonna do, sue the state ‘cause somebody dug a big hole a hunnert years ago? Don’t want to break your heart, but nobody’s even hurt. Yet.” He paused for effect. “I get Cuke Metz down outta that shaft, I’m gonna make that ol’ boy wish he’d fallen down that shaft and died before I got here.”
Pudd referred to a broad, vertical shaft dug from the top of the mountain down into the tunnel, a 180-foot-tall skylight designed to provide light and air during the antebellum construction.
“Cuke? He fell down the shaft?” As soon as I heard his name, I flashed back to the campfire storytelling, the mismatched gathering of good ol’ boys and ne’er-do-wells. “You say nobody’s hurt.” I didn’t want it to be a question.
“Like I said, not yet.”
“Have you—are there three folks in there, from out of town?”
Pudd pursed his meaty lips and studied me. “Nope.” He nodded behind me. “We’re holding ‘em in the fire truck for the time being.”
Relief and irritation vied for first place. With a glance over my shoulder, I could make out shapes in the truck’s cab.
“Been lovely chatting with you, A’vry. But I gotta get around to the top of that shaft before one’a them nidgits drops Cuke on his dumb ass.”
“He’s still in the shaft?”
“Swinging there like a gong in a bell and begging for somebody to save him.” Pudd hitched up his britches with the air of one donning the inevitable mantle of greatness, knowing he was the only one to supervise such a harrowing rescue.
I gave Pudd a half salute and trailed him back through the crowd to where his battered pickup sat parked beside the shiny red fire truck. Once he’d driven around to the top of the hill, I had no idea how pudgy Pudd planned to get from his truck through the rough terrain to the air shaft’s upper opening.
The top of the hill had, in the 1850s, housed the imaginatively named Tunnel Hill, a booming metropolis of fifteen hundred people, one strong-willed Catholic priest, and seventeen saloons. It had been a one-trick town, home to the mostly Irish laborers who’d lucked into the backbreaking work of digging through solid granite with picks and black gunpowder.
Three completed air shafts had been dug through the top of the mountain. Today, standing at the bottom of the one remaining shaft was an eerie experience—part beam-me-up shaft of light in the darkness, part mystery. Water droplets always rained down the wide shaft. Far overhead, trees sheltered the shaft’s opening, green in summer, stark in winter.
As a kid, I’d heard that one of the tunnel’s fatalities had occurred in that shaft. A donkey being lowered in a harness for the day’s work fell and killed both the donkey and the man below who broke its fall. I’d never read that story in any official account of the tunnel, but I still can’t think about that ten-foot-wide shaft without imagining the risk of being lowered almost two hundred feet into the deepest darkness to begin a deafening day’s work hammering granite.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Rudy’s campfire chat hadn’t stopped Cuke Metz from getting himself in trouble staging another haunting for the ghosters.
I turned to the fire truck, climbed up, and wrestled with the driver’s door.
The three ghosters sat inside, sweltering in the heat.
“Why don’t you roll down the windows or open the door?” I asked.
Trini, sandwiched between the two guys, her hands clasped between her knees, said, “They told us not to touch anything.”
“Come on.” I motioned for them to follow me. I climbed around into the rumble seats behind the cab. At least here we might catch a breeze.
We attracted some attention from the crowd below us. Since my brush with fame, in the person of Pudd Pardee, and since they had nothing else to stare at but an empty black hole, some of them turned their backs on the tunnel to study us instead.
I leaned over close to the three of them, keeping my voice low to avoid curious ears.
“So what happened?”
They looked from one to the other, silently electing Trini as spokesperson.
“We were filming. Inside. We’d been told there’d been an accident when the tunnel was being built, that someone had fallen down the shaft and that people sometimes hear him.”
“Or even see him,” Quint added.
Cuke had probably figured it’d be too dangerous to lower a live mule down the shaft, so he’d changed the story and volunteered himself.
“At first, it was just cold and damp. And drippy. Water sounds everywhere.” She sounded really spooked.
“Then we saw these legs.”
“And a scream—”
“At first, we thought—”
Colin interrupted. “We soon knew it was real.” He needed some face-saving, given the goofy stunts he’d already fallen for.
“We ran out to call for help,” Trini said.
“From inside, we could see some guys on top of the shaft. But they couldn’t pull him back up.”
“Unreal.”
They fell silent. I glanced over at the tunnel opening, a scant thirty yards away, the edges hidden and softened by vines, bushes, and weeds. The tunnel, from whatever vantage point—on the ground or high up in the fire truck—was black, solid, both ominous and inviting.