David and Roxanne slipped out of the hospital room and huddled near the window. Roxanne asked quietly, “Recognize the place?”
“Sounds like Wattsville for sure, so that narrows things down a great deal. But a falling-down old farmhouse with an abandoned mobile home? There are more of those than you might think.”
“And the old cabin?”
“Before the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created, that was logging land. Hundreds of cabins were scattered across the mountains with hand-hewn boards for walls. But most of those have long since decayed and collapsed except for a few restored for tourism on park property, and no one could live in those undetected.” David stared out the windows at the mountain ridges between them and Wattsville. “And the cellar is very confusing.”
“I thought lots of houses had stone cellars?”
“Not here. Not the way he described it.” David turned to her. “Most places had what are known as root cellars or some variant—apple cellars, potato cellars. They’re typically outbuildings carved into the side of the mountain that maybe have a small wooden building built above ’em. But that’s not what he described. He talks about a cellar under the main house, dug so deep that the windows are at ceiling height from inside but ground level from outside.”
Roxanne pursed her lips. “So it’s deep, which took a long time to dig.”
“And with windows. Glass was expensive in old Appalachia, and it would only have been used for the main floor if at all. More likely, it was added later, which is an odd thing to do to an old house. Either way, someone went to a lot of time and expense. And that’s not a lumberjack.”
“So a lumber company foreman or even owner?”
David shrugged. “Possible, but I was thinking someone hiding a common crop… moonshine. Scotch-Irish families up here have been making it forever, even though it was illegal to distribute after the civil war because the government wanted the tax-stamp money, and the value skyrocketed further during prohibition. An old farming family could grow corn out in the open fields and look totally legitimate but haul part of the crop back into the woods to manufacture liquor and use the cellar for storage and hiding.”
“Which is why you tensed up in there. You recognized something.”
David looked back out the windows. “Maybe. One of the leads we followed out that way when we were checking up on sex offenders. And he happens to be the descendant of a long-time moonshining family.”
“We should pull his file again.”
“There is no file, at least not on him. Both his father and brother racked up numerous charges—drugs, alcohol, assaults. But this guy has never been arrested for anything.”
Roxanne cocked her head. “But if he was never charged, what made you think of him when you were checking on sex offenders? He wouldn’t be in the registry.”
“Because I went to school with him. He got expelled from high school, and the rumor was it was for touching a little kid. I didn’t really know the details, had only heard the rumors, but it’s not something you forget. I went out and visited him myself.”
“And?”
“He was mad I remembered the story. He confessed it really did happen and told me about it, but he swore it was something stupid he did as a teenager. Said he had always regretted it and never did anything like it again.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Wasn’t sure, but he didn’t act like a guy trying to hide something. He told me more than I knew about the thing that happened when we were teens. And he didn’t have any problem with us searching his place for any sign of Jaxon. Didn’t ask for us to get a warrant or anything. Kept saying he didn’t have anything to hide.”
“And you found nothing?”
“Nothing at all. Not a sign Jaxon or any kid had ever been inside his trailer. No porn, not even a computer.”
“His trailer?”
“Yep. A mobile home on his family’s old farm, behind their old farmhouse, which had been destroyed by fire a few years earlier.” David looked up. “A fire started by a meth lab, by the way. It exploded and killed his older brother. I stood outside that house as they pulled the body out, so I know what the house looked like, how it fell in.”
Roxanne stiffened. “Now I understand your reaction. But no old log cabin with a stone cellar?”
“None that I know of, but I wasn’t really looking for one, either. Until today, I’ve never heard of or cared about an old home up that way, but his family has owned that land for a couple hundred years, so there would have been old homes there at some point.” David pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “But I’m going to get the tax department to pull the plats and see if they have record of a house while we’re watching Jaxon get reintroduced to Harold.”
“You still think Harold was involved?”
David paused with his finger above the screen of his phone then shook his head. “No, probably not, but we’re about to find out. The kid’s reaction to him will tell us a lot.”