“Tyler, who is Kara? Please tell me.”
The sheen of his nightmare dried and his breath misted the arctic air as he found the cabin’s pine walls, bureaus, counters and chairs. Everything in this strange world seemed made of pine. “This must be the coldest goddamned place on earth.”
Her head rested on the pillow as she studied him. “One of the highest anyway. Was she a lover?”
“Let’s discuss you instead.” He turned to acknowledge her inquisitive eyes. “I’ve been patient to wait this long.”
“I’ve been patient, you mean! Now who is she?”
He sighed. It didn’t take her long to rekindle the embers of exasperation. “A girl.”
“Madonna mia, what a revelation!” She jerked the covers around her neck. “She must’ve dumped you.”
“She didn’t dump me.” He yanked the covers back over his chilled body.
“Yes, she did. That’s why you won’t discuss her.”
“Let’s go back to sleep,” he sighed.
“No.” Folding her arms corpselike, she glared holes in the pine ceiling.
“Mayson, I’m cold.”
“Who cares?”
Drawing her back in his arms, they slept again.
Kara didn’t chase him from the darkness this time. He woke instead to the lengthening shadows on the cabin walls, the arctic air. He pulled on his jeans and reached for his football jersey, only to recall it was now hers. Throwing on his gray sweater instead, he went to the window as she still slept in the bed behind him. Four o’clock and night was already falling over the mountains, the bare trees rattling in a chilling breeze. Lou might call this place Rocky Peak. He called it Arctic Hell. But they couldn’t be more isolated and therefore, safe for the time being. Iron Ridge, the closest town, was eight miles down the mountain. And this was Flavin County, not Pine, which bordered it to the west.
He turned as she stirred. “Hungry?”
Rubbing the fuzz from her eyes, she nodded.
“Get dressed and we’ll pay our respects to Ma and Pa Kettle. Maybe wangle a dinner invitation.”
Minutes later they started across the deserted camp, a hodgepodge of cabins, stables, lodge and clearing for games and ceremonies. The Adkins cabin was at the opposite end, leading into the camp. The couple waited at the front window as they approached. “Look very satisfied,” he whispered.
“What?”
“We’re on our honeymoon. How else would my wife look?”
Before she could swat back, Lou opened the door. “Where the dickens are your coats? Don’t you know its fifteen degrees out there?”
“And I can feel each one,” he nodded. “Lucy?”
“Exhilarating, dear.”
Stoop-shouldered Earl appeared in his faded overalls. His glasses were bottle-bottom thick, his bushy hair, snow white. “Bob, why ain’t you got your coat on? Don’t you know it’s cold outside?”
“Told you he don’t hear nuthin,’” Lou sighed. “Don’t remember nuthin’ either, like that tar jack. Can y’all stay for supper?”
“Great,” he nodded. “If you’re sure you have enough.”
They soon sat over a meal of smoked ham, black-eyed peas, steamed cabbage and corn bread. Mayson had never seen such food, but ate everything, as did Tyler, she noted with satisfaction. He’d lost weight with their ordeal, his ribs more pronounced, his face thinner. A pleasant warmth settled over her as he shouted his stories into Earl’s ear, then winked at Lou when forced to repeat something. By meal’s end, both host and hostess were huddled around him. Poor Lou was obviously smitten as she giggled and blushed profusely. “Bob Compton, ain’t you a darn mess! How do you come up with such nonsense?”
His nonsense was nothing more than current events, enriched by his wonderful sense of humor. Like his beloved circus clowns, Mayson thought, he reveled in others’ laughter. But was his glow genuine or did it mask a deep, inner sadness? Yes, she sensed now, as she had that morning in his apartment, and again wondered how it was possible that he, with so much to live for, had risked his life to save a cold, ungrateful shrew? But was she that shrew any longer? Wasn’t she beginning to feel good about herself?
Her reflections were shattered by Tyler shouting, “Earl, how do you get news up here?”
“Mews?” the old man squinted. “We ain’t got no mews - doves and sparrows mostly. A few owls at night and them damn pigeons. ‘Cept you don’t want to put them in mews. Just shoot the ornery...”
“He said ‘news,’ you old fool!” Lou yelled.
“Oh, news,” he shrugged. “Well now, we get the Knoxville paper. And there’s the Sunbeam radio Lou’s cousin, Wally, give us last Christmas. And that confounded machine.” He nodded at the ancient TV. “At least when it has a hankerin’ to work.”
“We don’t miss nuthin’ up here,” Lou added. “Jimmy Dale tells us all we need to know. He’s the mail carrier for these parts. He was here this mornin’ same as every other. But I reckon y’all was too busy to notice his jeep.” She winked.
“Anything interesting going on?” Tyler asked.
“Nuthin’ but them doin’s over in Pine County. Jimmy says the place is crawling with John Laws looking for them two New York outlaws. Don’t know why they’d be hiding in Pine, of all places.”
Mayson’s eyes connected with his. “Lou, did you tell Jimmy Dale about us?”
“Course, Lucy. I told him how Bob here fixed my tar and how nice you two was to be foolin’ with an old woman, just after gettin’ hitched.”
“How about us staying here?”
“Sure did. But that’s all. I figgered you wanted your privacy. Ain’t none of his business nohow.”
“And we’d like to keep it that way,” Tyler winked.
“You devil!” she giggled, then remembered her baking pie.
Over coffee and dessert, they received their standing invitation to the Adkins’ table. “Colonel Masters overstocks the mess hall every year,” Lou explained. “It’s more’n enough to feed us plumb through spring.” She gave them each a Camp Eagle’s Nest sweatshirt. “I noticed you ain’t used the farplace yet. There ain’t no heat in the cabin, so don’t be bashful about startin’ a far tonight. Otherwise you’ll freeze your fannies off.” Hugging them, she remained at the door as they disappeared into the trees.
Back in the cabin, Tyler started a fire. “I thought it would create suspicion. Not having one creates more, I guess we just learned.”
Shivering, she put the camp sweatshirt on over her sweater. “You’ll get no argument from me. Do you think Lou will keep her word and not tell that mail carrier any more about us?”
“I think we’re safe as long as they don’t get too curious about the ‘doings’ over in Pine County.”
After a while the fire blazed and they roasted themselves with quiet satisfaction. “I was really proud of you tonight,” he said. “You were gracious and friendly. And don’t think I missed your smile.”
“I hope not,” her eyes lifted. “You were its inspiration.”
He studied her as the warmth rose. After scores of forgettable women, here was one finally with a face and lips that made him hunger again for life’s sweetness. Yet she couldn’t replace Kara... or was he afraid she could? The question was more than unsettling; it was dangerous. Their survival depended on many things, clear thinking being one. “We’ll stay as long as circumstances permit. But we need to be prepared to leave when the time comes.”
“And how do we prepare?”
“Tomorrow I’ll ask Lou to drive me into Iron Ridge to do some shopping. Be thinking about what we need. In the meantime,” he sighed. “I guess we should dig into those records we risked our asses to get.”
There were several thousand pages of petitions, orders, exhibits, depositions and briefs, which measured by their sheer volume should - if there was any justice - contain at least one clue to Morris’s murder. The review proved a tedious exercise, with documents scoured and notes jotted. Taking breaks to call Harvey, he hung up, grumbling each time, and then to Mayson’s increasing irritation, paced restlessly by the fire. “Why is some chirpy woman answering Harvey’s phone? He never mentioned a girlfriend.”
“Madonna mia, why don’t you just leave a message?”
“Shit, what if he gave us the wrong number?”
“And what if you took it down wrong? If you’d left a message, we’d have an explanation by now, instead of wasting precious time with your stupid suppositions!”
“Goddamnit.” He paced. “It must be the right...”
“Stop! Either get over here and help or take your mad rambling outside and share it with the trees.”
Grumbling, he crawled back beside her with a fresh stack of records. “That’s my boy.” She reached for his hand.
Another hour passed. Despairingly, Tyler gazed at the remaining records, then at Mayson beside him, a statue of intensity as she absorbed an endless stream of documents. “I guess that’s how you made straight A’s at Columbia.”
Her large, dark eyes lifted. “How did you know that?”
“Lamp; he thinks you’re pretty awesome. Me, I just can’t believe you’re human. How can you sit so still, digesting one document after another? You haven’t been off that bed in three hours.”
“You do what you have to,” she shrugged.
“No, Mayson, you do what lesser creatures can’t.”
“Then you’re saying I’m special?”
“I guess that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Her eyes fell to the deposition in her lap. “I never wanted to be special, just happy.”
“And you were. But something happened. What?”
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“Because I care about you, Mayson.”
“I... care about you, too.” She knew what this meant for her, no clue for him. “You’re not happy either, Tyler, I know that.”
“Then make me happy. Share your past. Is it really that diffi- cult to discuss?”
“It’s far more difficult to escape.”
“Are you afraid I won’t understand?”
Not understand. She was afraid he’d leave and she’d have to wait anxiously by another door. The realization was terrifying. “Please Tyler, I’m just not ready. Now let’s review what we have.” She scanned her notes. “Jasper Crenshaw served as Pine County Sheriff for forty-two years. Widowed, he then retired to Naples, where he died four years later.”
“Interesting,” he sighed. “And totally unimportant.”
“Be patient. His estate was valued at ten million dollars. That’s certainly important.”
“And something we already know.”
“We didn’t know his executor, Phillip Rothenberg, was given the power to designate the charitable institution to receive his large estate.”
“So Crenshaw hated his kids,” he said. “Maybe they were deadbeats, or didn’t visit him on Christmas. Or perhaps it was something really earth-shaking like not taking out the trash.”
“Will you be serious?” She returned to her notes. “Now, Rothenberg wasted no time in designating the Hope Mountain School in Pine County to receive the estate. Certainly this had been prearranged, although Rothenberg denies it in his deposition. Why the secrecy?” she wondered. “If Crenshaw wanted to benefit this school, why not just leave the estate outright, instead of hiding his intentions behind Rothenberg? Tell me that’s not an important question, one I’m sure Morris could answer, if he was alive.”
“Answering it most likely is what got him killed.”
“Then are we crazy to be attempting the same thing?”
“Hardly,” he sighed. “If answering that question can kill us, it may also be the only thing that keeps us alive. So what do we know about the Hope Mountain School?”
She scanned her notes again. “It’s an institution for mentally disabled children, founded thirty-four years ago by a woman named Lativia Norris. Until Crenshaw’s bequest, the school existed on private endowments and special grants from the state of Tennessee. By virtue of the bequest, it’s now guaranteed a perpetual existence.”
He considered the other implications. “It also means Crenshaw’s kids must work for a living unless they overturn the will. And assuming none are mentally disabled, what is Norris’s connection to all this?”
She dug back into her notes. “Mrs. Norris is a sixty-eight-yearold widow with a mentally disabled child, Edgar Jr., who’s now forty-nine and a self-employed carpenter.”
“Living proof of the success of his mother’s school,” he nodded. “But what’s her connection to Crenshaw?”
“I haven’t found it yet.”
With a renewed interest, he reached for more records. She smiled. “May I have some too, please?”
By midnight they’d finished, pages of fresh notes accumulated in the process. “At least we now know Lativia’s connection to Crenshaw,” Tyler said as he slumped back wearily.
The will contest Morris had filed on the children’s behalf alleged that Lativia Norris had exerted undue influence over Crenshaw in his last months, a period in which declining health made him particularly vulnerable. It was her relentless pressure, the suit charged, that had resulted in his execution of a new will just weeks before his death. There were voluminous exhibits to support the charge, including Lativia’s raging epistles in which she blamed Crenshaw for her husband’s execution for a crime he hadn’t committed, something Crenshaw had known when testifying at the trial forty years before. The trial concerned the rape and murder of a female student at Tennessee State University, where Edgar Norris had been employed as a maintenance man. She’d been white, Norris black, not an auspicious circumstance, considering the trial’s setting: predominantly white backwoods Tennessee in the early sixties.
But had the all-white jury sent the wrong man to the electric chair, as his widow claimed? If so, who had committed the crime? Crenshaw had been the chief prosecution witness in the circumstantial case, a credible one, given the guilty verdict. But had he known Norris was innocent? Why else leave his estate to a school founded by the man’s widow? Years of appeals had followed, until finally Norris had been strapped into the electric chair and the switch flipped.
Lativia’s correspondence war had endured the next four decades, intensifying sharply in the months preceding Crenshaw’s death. Her last letters were filled with biblical prophecies to prove Crenshaw would burn in hell for his sins. Certainly her assault had taken a toll on the cancer-ravaged man, as he crept closer to the grave. Sheriff, you lied on that witness stand! She charged. If you don’t recall your palm on that courtroom Bible, God does! He remembers everything... People must pay for the pain they cause, if not under Tennessee law then under God’s. And you’ll pay soon, you wicked monster, He’ll see to it!
“Crenshaw’s bequest to Lativia’s School is an admission of guilt,” Tyler said. “Unfortunately, her assault may also provide the undue influence necessary to throw the will out.”
“So are we thinking the same thing?” Mayson asked.
“If you’re wondering who, other than Norris, might have committed that murder forty years ago.”
“A fellow student?” she mused. “Or three? If my math is right, they’d be in their mid-sixties now.”
“Mann and Falkingham are sixty-six.”
“So is Lamp. They could’ve been graduate students. TSU has a law school.”
“Falkingham’s degrees are from South Carolina. Mann went to Purdue, Northwestern for law.”
“Lamp’s Bachelor’s is from Bucknell, his law degree, NYU.” Mayson gazed at the fire’s dying embers. “So when and where did their paths cross?”
“It could’ve been anywhere,” Tyler sighed. “A bar convention, wedding, funeral, the airport...”
“TSU.” Her spine shivered. “We can’t be sure they weren’t there. One thing we do know: they’re good friends and have been for a long time.”
“We also know something else. Crenshaw’s cover-up, if that’s the case, didn’t come cheaply. The real murderer, or murderers, must’ve been forced to pay some serious money.”
“Ten million is definitely serious,” she nodded.
“So is this new theory we’re building. Making Crenshaw a millionaire would’ve been easy for our trio’s wealthy families.”
“So what’s next?” she asked.
“Have Harvey find out if we’re on the right track.” Trying the agent again, Tyler quickly dropped the phone in frustration. “Don’t say it!”
“What, that you should’ve left a message?”
“Why do I bother asking? I should know by now you do what you please.”
Her glare followed him across the cabin. “I hate it when you get this way.”
“Then don’t get me this way.”
“Don’t blame your grouchy moods on me!” she shouted.
Stuffing the records back in the box, he shoved it under the bed. “Did it ever occur to you that this Madelyn Stump might be a Fed herself? For all we know, they’ve found Harvey and expropriated his number, just hoping we’d be stupid enough to call and leave a message: ‘Hi, this is Tyler and Mayson. We’re on some God-forsaken Tennessee mountaintop!”
His ridicule bruised her, yet he seemed indifferent to it as he wrestled out of his sweater and slung it on the chair. “I thought you cared about me, Tyler,” she said.
“I do care.” He finished undressing.
“If you did, you wouldn’t treat me this way. I guess you just didn’t mean it.”
His eyes hardened. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
“Of course you do. All men do.”
Striding into the bathroom, he quickly swung back out, toothbrush pointed. “I won’t be drawn into another tantrum, so just save the theatrical posturing.”
She became conscious now of her stiffly folded arms and pouting lips. “You also didn’t mean it when you said I was beautiful!”
“It won’t work.” He swung back out again. “And I mean everything I say.”
“Tyler, why aren’t you attracted to me?”
“Did you say something?” he asked as he gargled mouthwash.
“I said: Why aren’t you attracted to me?”
Again he swung out, jangling a piece of dental floss. “This is precisely the way you do it.”
“What — floss your teeth?”
“Suck me into your tantrums. You ask a question based on a false assumption: why am I not attracted to you? But who said I wasn’t?”
“Tyler, we’ve been sleeping in the same bed for a week and not once have you tried to kiss me.”
“Yes I have and been censured twice.”
“Those weren’t kisses! A kiss is on the lips.”
The bathroom glass clinked on the counter. “What difference does its location make?”
“In this case, that you’re not attracted to me. Otherwise you would’ve tried to kiss me like you have every other woman on the planet.” She sighed. “I’m afraid your nefarious reputation explains far more than your words just how you feel.”
Her arrogance now drew him from the bathroom. “I said you were beautiful and I meant it.”
“Stop saying things you don’t mean.”
“Goddamnit, read my lips: You’re beautiful.”
“Then why don’t you want to kiss me?”
With an exasperation only she could ignite, he swept her up and kissed her with a fierce satisfaction.