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Chapter Two

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Julie (Ron & Julie on Egret Street) Tuesday, 9:00 a.m.

Ron’s physical therapist says the progress with his new knee is better than average, but he isn’t ready to go back to golfing yet. When he looked sad, the guy suggested he might ride along in the cart with his buddies. I have to say it: I felt like a kid let out of school. Four times a week now, a car pulls up outside, picks my husband up, and takes him away for a few hours. The others play their round, Ron gets to be with them, and for a blessed few hours, I have the trailer all to myself.

B-Bird Park, in Vienna Hills, on the gulf side of Florida, is a great place to spend the winter, at least it was until Ron had surgery and I had him underfoot every day for weeks. Trailers are small spaces at the best of times, but when one of you is limited in activity level and pouty because he’s bored, things can get tense. When Ron couldn’t golf, couldn’t shop, couldn’t carry out his usual home repairs, he turned his attention to “helping” me with the housework. Since his help usually consists of doing part of a chore, it makes me crazy. He might take out the trash by emptying two of the waste baskets and leaving the other two half-full. Or he’ll wash some of the dishes, and leave the rest in the sink. There’s no logic to what he washes and what he leaves behind. It’s apparently based on the whim of the moment.

The worst part has been Ron’s campaign to rearrange the trailer, making it more “efficient.” Last week I couldn’t find a single pair of scissors anywhere...until I located all four pairs hanging on hooks on the back of the pantry door. I’m supposed to keep the spices in alphabetical order now, though Ron has no idea how often I need rosemary or mace.

When I retired from the library, I swore I’d never have anything to do with the Dewey Decimal System again. One day while I was out, my husband brought Dewey back, at least according to his concept of book cataloguing. In a floor-to-ceiling unit in the living room, I had shelved our books in a balanced, eye-pleasing way, with colorful figurines and knick-knacks spaced among them for interest. Now the figurines are all crowded on the middle shelf and the books are grouped by genre: history on the top shelf, historical novels next, and then detective stories. A dozen miscellaneous books, the kind Ron picks up at flea markets and will never, ever read, fill the bottom shelf. The subjects range from how to grow vegetables inside to why the Russians are better adapted to the cold than we are.

What I’m saying is that the weeks since Ron’s surgery have been a trial. I try not to be grumpy about his attempts to be helpful, and he seems sad that I’m not more enthusiastic about them. Now that he’s able to get out of the trailer, I’m hopeful he’ll lose interest in where things are kept and go back to simply asking me to fetch them for him.

On Tuesday morning, Ron was out with the golfers and I was in the middle of folding laundry when someone knocked at the door. Expecting it to be Karen or Alice, I called, “Come on in,” and finished the socks I’d been pairing. When I went out to the lanai, I found the police detective who’d investigated a murder in the park a few weeks before Christmas. “Oh.” I pressed a hand to my chest in a gesture that was probably overly dramatic. “Detective O’Connor, right? I hope there hasn’t been a—”

He put up a hand. “As far as I know, everyone here is alive and well.”

I could have argued the “well” part. B-Bird is, after all, full of old people, which means many residents aren’t in the best of health. “What can I do for you?”

“Is your husband at home?”

“He’s out, which thrills me more than I can say.” I’d forgotten that O’Connor doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. He obviously didn’t know how to take my comment, so I added, “It’s good for Ron to get out in the fresh air.”

“Oh. Right.” He frowned, and I concluded he had something he wanted to talk with both of us about. He was trying to decide if he should tell me now or come back when Ron was home.

“Can you sit for a minute? I made oatmeal cookies.”

“Oatmeal?” O’Connor’s formal manner disappeared. Though probably in his mid-thirties, he reminded me of the serious little boys who used to come into the library, get right up close to my desk, and ask where I kept the books on dinosaurs. Apparently cookies brought out the boy inside the man. “They’re my favorite.”

“Have a seat. Would you like a glass of iced tea?”

“That would be great.”

As I plated some still-warm cookies I said, “Karen from Pittsburgh said she saw you at the park office yesterday.”

“Karen who?”

I turned to the fridge to get the iced tea out. “Around here people seldom use last names. It’s more about how we know each other.”

“Oh.”

He seemed confused, so I explained. “We have several Karens, so my friend is called Karen from Pittsburgh to distinguish her from Blond Karen or Karen on Gull Street. Alice across the street is stuck with being ‘Tommy’s new wife,’ because most people still remember his first wife, Ella.”

“What do they call you?”

“Most of the time I’m ‘Ron’s wife Julie.’” I gave him a wry smile. “Lately it’s been ‘Julie that almost got murdered.’ That kind of thing sticks with you.”

“You were lucky.”

“I was.” I set tea for each of our places at the table and the plate of cookies slightly toward O’Connor. “Will there be a trial?”

It turned out the detective liked his iced tea sweet and his oatmeal cookies in batches. The four I’d served up were gone before he finished updating me on the case that had led to our initial meeting. Rising, I set a few more cookies on the plate, recalling the days when I’d fed my son and his pals several times a week. Boys appreciate food like nobody else, and feeding them always makes me feel I’ve done something worthwhile.

After updating me as to whether I’d have to testify in court (It wasn’t likely), O’Connor turned to the reason for his visit. “Yesterday I talked with the park secretary, Miss Doyle, about what I’m going to propose to you and Mr. Rogers. I asked her to keep it confidential, and she will. I’m going to ask you not to repeat anything I tell you as well.” He paused. “Except to your husband, of course. He’ll have to be in on it if you agree to help us.”

“Help who? The police?”

“Yes. You two were pretty sharp during the events of last month. When another matter came up, I told my boss you might be able to find out things we need to know.”

I felt a shiver go down my back, half excitement, half fear. I’d almost died for sticking my nose into the recent murder investigation, so that wasn’t a pleasant memory. Still, O’Conner said Ron and I had been “sharp.” Since age often brings loss of mental acuity, it was nice to hear we still have ours. “I’d need more information, Detective.”

He nodded. “It’s a cold case, which is why my captain is okay with involving the two of you. We don’t think the guy we’re looking for is dangerous. He’s around eighty years old now, but back in the sixties, he killed two people.”

“The sixties? What makes it of interest now?”

“A woman who dated the suspect back when the murders happened died recently. In her unopened mail was a letter from an old coworker, claiming her old boyfriend lives here at B-Bird Park.”

“Oh.” What else was there to say to that?

“Knowing her mother had once dated a man who turned out to be a killer, the woman’s daughter sent the letter to the police.” O’Connor paused. “Not sure why a mother would tell her daughter about something like that.”

“I’d say it was meant as a warning to be careful who you associate with. Moms do that.”

O’Connor nodded, accepting my expertise on parenting, and took another cookie. Between bites, he told the story. “This woman, Kelly Ames, worked at a restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1967. That spring she took up with a trucker, Greg Miles, who used to stop in when he rolled through town. They got close, and soon he was showing up almost every weekend. After a few months, Miles told Kelly he planned to quit over-the-road trucking and get a job nearby so they could get married.” He finished his cookie and took a sip of tea. “One night she came home from work and found him waiting near her bus stop. He had blood on his shirt, but it wasn’t his and he apparently wasn’t aware of it. Miles said he had to leave for a while, but he’d send for Kelly when he could. She hardly had time to get what he was telling her before he was gone. She went on to her apartment building, where she learned that the young couple in the apartment below hers had been stabbed to death.”

“How did she react to them suspecting her boyfriend of the crime?”

“She was shocked, but the blood on his shirt and his wild behavior convinced her. She told the police everything she could about Greg Miles.” He sipped at his tea. “What she knew wasn’t much help, because almost everything he’d told her turned out to be false. He was a trucker, but he wasn’t from Kansas, he wasn’t related to Conway Twitty, and his name wasn’t Greg Miles.” He paused to let that sink in. “DNA wasn’t a thing back then, of course, and they didn’t find any unexpected fingerprints at the scene. Still, two witnesses told a pretty damning story. A woman saw Miles hanging around outside the building before the murders happened. The landlord saw him come out of the couples’ apartment at a dead run. He went inside and found the bodies.”

“The girlfriend—Kelly—had no idea how to find a guy she’d been seeing for months?”

O’Connor shook his head. “I gather communication was kind of in the Stone Age back then.” He glanced at me as if to see whether I took offense at that, but he was right, so I only nodded. “Kelly Ames didn’t have a phone in her apartment, and the landlord was fussy about letting the tenants use his. She said when Greg passed through Nashville, he’d simply show up at the restaurant, and they’d make plans from there.” Shaking his head, he added, “She didn’t even have a photo of him.”

“That wasn’t unusual before the advent of cell phones.”

“Right.” His expression hinted he had trouble imagining a world without at least a hundred pictures on a device in his pocket. “Anyway, the cops ended up with a pretty general description: medium height and weight, sandy hair, blue eyes. They had Ames work with a sketch artist, and they circulated the drawing all over Tennessee, but they never found the guy. He probably left the state that night.”

“It doesn’t sound like much to work with all these years later.”

“Right. But in her letter, Kelly’s old friend claimed Greg Miles is here at B-Bird Park.”

“And you think it might be true?”

O’Connor shifted in his chair, which led me to conclude he had doubts. “Frankly, Ms. Rogers, we’ve got plenty of current crimes to deal with. I can’t devote a lot of time to a fifty-year-old murder case.”

“But you need to check it out as a courtesy to the Nashville police.”

“Exactly.” Taking yet another cookie, he gave me a sheepish grin. “I won’t have to buy any lunch today.” Holding the treat at the ready, he made his proposal. “We can’t interview every man over seventy in the park, and even if we did, the guy could say he was someplace else that night. How would we know he’s lying?”

I saw the problem. It’s easy today to check which truckers drive which routes and who was in a certain area code on a particular night, but fifty years ago? That was a big, “No way, Good Buddy.”

“I suggested to my captain that you and your husband might do some digging for us.”

O’Connor chewed on his cookie while I chewed on his words. “What kind of digging?”

Holding up his free hand as if to stop me from panicking, he assured, “There’s no danger. All you’d do is ask around and try to find out if a man living here drove long-haul semis in Tennessee in 1967.”

“Why would he admit that if he’s a fugitive from the law?”

“He might not see any harm in mentioning in casual conversation.” He shrugged. “It’s all we can think of to do.”

I was struck by the idea that Ron and I might know a double murderer. It didn’t seem possible. “Park management does a thorough background check before they let people move in here.”

“Which is fine as long as the person is honest. This guy isn’t.”

“You’re talking about a lot of men, Detective. Several hundred.”

“That’s true, but there’s no time limit. Go at it any way you like.”

I nodded. “I’ll speak to Ron and see what he says.”

“We will appreciate anything you can do.” Taking the last cookie, O’Connor rose. “We hate to turn down a request from another department, even if it’s a real long-shot.”

I rose too and, feeling we’d become better acquainted, made a personal remark. “I understand you and our park secretary are seeing each other.”

He looked away in a classic “I’d rather not discuss that” manner. “Marlene and I do stuff together sometimes. It’s nothing serious.” He put out a hand, and we shook. “Let me know what you decide.”