Souls Lost (Appalachian Souls Book 1) Read online

  Zoe was still on the sofa, her feet stretched out, her hands wrapped around a mug of hot water. She’d wanted tea but it wasn’t something her father normally had in the cupboard. She’d have to go to the store tomorrow, which would hopefully carry something she liked, and if not, she’d have to go down the mountain to Hickory which was the nearest “large” city, although large was probably a stretch when it came to Hickory.

  The house still smelled of the BBQ they’d eaten earlier, the ribs that Ed had started marinating earlier that morning. Naturally there was corn to go with it, not homegrown, of course, because they hadn’t ever grown corn at the house, so close to the city. Beneath her father’s rough voice that was starting to hold the slightest hint of a shake, something Zoe didn’t want to focus on, she heard the television broadcasters talking about the weather that was coming through, bringing unseasonably warm temperatures for the next three or four days.

  “And you don’t believe in global warming,” Zoe interrupted looking at the numbers. By October it was never that warm up in the hills.

  Her father closed his mouth, his face turning the faintest hint of pink—a sign he was ruffled but not quite mad. Mad was a full on tomato red that covered his entire head, even beneath the hairs that still proudly covered it, though they were sparser every year.

  “Don’t go spouting that liberal nonsense here, missy. Even if the planet is warming, no proof that we’re doing it and we certainly aren’t doing it here,” Ed snapped. He crossed his arms, a sign that proclaimed as loudly as a billboard that he wasn’t going to discuss it further with her.

  Zoe sighed and sipped her hot water. “So the word about Ms. Wilcox?” Zoe said.

  Her father didn’t say anything about her use of Miz, which probably meant he wasn’t sure if Elaine had ever been married or not. If she had been, it had been years ago, though so far as Zoe knew, Elaine Wilcox had always lived in Corbin Meadow and had always been single.

  Ed shook his head, looking away, probably thinking how Elaine had died exactly like his wife, Jodie, whom, everyone knew, he had adored. “I don’t know if it was a good thing to bring in the sheriffs or not. That Sheriff Fellows is an arrogant ass from what I’ve heard.”

  “Down at the tavern where everyone would be getting Chief Rees’ opinion?” Zoe pressed. Not that Taran was someone who frequented the tavern too much, not really, but everyone knew someone who knew him even if they weren’t directly connected. It’s the way things were in Corbin Meadow.

  “He’s a good man,” her father said. “Would’ve done you good to find someone like him instead of…”

  Zoe loved that her father was taking her side in the pending divorce, even going so far as to not mention it around town, although her inability to sustain a relationship would be an embarrassment to him with his friends, but the fact that he’d never mention Tyler’s name struck her as amusing. As if by not saying the name he could erase Tyler from existence. Zoe wasn’t certain she wanted Tyler to be erased, at least not the Tyler she had first met, but who knew?—maybe life would have been better that way.

  “What else is going on?” Zoe changed the subject, not wanting her father to wax on about Taran Rees, who’d been a good three years ahead of Zoe in school and had been matched with Kay Pugh by his senior year in high school, though Kay was only a junior. The gossip about Kay’s leaving town and then demanding a divorce had made its way all the way across the country to Zoe’s ears.

  “There was talk about integrating the local library with the county library system to get more books,” Ed said. “Don’t know what’s on about that now that Elaine is gone. In fact, she was spearheading some sort of touristy thing here, you know, for folks who wanted a country weekend, getting publicity to the town, brainstorming all kinds of crazy things about the ways other small towns brought in tourism.”

  Corbin Meadow, like so many towns in that part of the state, had relied heavily on money from the furniture industry, particularly handcrafted furniture, but work like that was all but dead. Her father was lucky that he’d been a poor craftsman and had turned to working on cars, something that would never quite go out of style, even if he had to commute down to the nearest dealership in his later years.

  “What about that IT firm?” Zoe asked.

  “Still there. It’s why our property taxes went up like they did last year,” Ed said, his face turning that shade of pink, gearing for a fight with his daughter and her liberal leaning ways.

  Zoe said nothing, not in the mood to fight with her father about taxes and the need for them. In fact, the banking tech firm that had made a home in Corbin Meadow hadn’t brought in as many local jobs as hoped, and the people who did work and live there often didn’t bother to use the local services, going instead down the road to Lenoir, or less often, Taylorsville, both of which were on the beaten track, unlike Corbin Meadow.

  She sipped her hot water, letting her mind wander to the ways in which tourists coming to town might change Corbin Meadow. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea, not really, but it was an interesting mind game which took kept her from thinking too much about Elaine Wilcox and how she’d died just like her momma.

  What would Zoe do if the sheriffs found the killer? She didn’t know if she’d feel relieved—although she fantasized that she did—or if she’d feel angry with the person who had taken her momma from her. She’d been through these types of mind games when her momma had died. She’d played scenarios over and over again, driving Tyler further and further away until finally the threads of their marriage had unraveled into nothing, or at least nothing salvageable.

  Perhaps it was good that he was back home and she was here in her place of birth, that had once been home but hadn’t felt like it since she’d come back for her momma’s funeral. Even now, it still wasn’t quite home. There would be nothing quite home again, not with her momma gone.

  Chapter 6: Before

  Summer sun beating down on her now-lithe body, beginning to curve in the places girls wanted it to curve and luckily staying slender in those that shouldn’t, Dixie stretched. She enjoyed the sun in her backyard. Her friend, Helen, was off on vacation, her family taking the annual trek to Myrtle Beach where they could play in the ocean and enjoy the cooling breezes off the water. That meant Dixie was sunning on her own rather than down at Helen’s near the pool that Helen’s family had put in a few years before. It wasn’t a great, grand thing, just a round four-foot deep pool, but it had been sunk halfway down into the ground which gave it a permanence that other pools didn’t have.

  Dixie wiped the sweat from her forehead, took a drink of her lemonade which her momma made so sweet the flies were buzzing around it, forcing Dixie to wave a hand over the cup before she could drink. The lemon scent reached her nose before the sugar reached her taste buds, not that she cared much about how the drink tasted. She liked how it felt in her body, cooling her against the hot sun from inside to outside.

  A breeze came up, making the leaves in the nearby trees rustle. Dixie didn’t know if she liked the trees there because soon enough they’d put her in the shade and then how would she get a tan? Her momma was always on her about not getting too dark of a tan and ruining her skin, but Dixie loved the sun, loved watching the shows that took place in Southern California. She dreamed of being in a place like that someday.

  Except if she left, then she wouldn’t see Emrys again and she didn’t want that. Besides, Lorne Pugh was starting to look at her like he might think of her as more than just another girl in her class, something that made Helen giggle quietly every time they talked about it. To be honest, Dixie wasn’t at all sure she minded even if her momma thought that the boys here were all a little too “in-bred” to be good husband material and kept telling her to get a job as a secretary or something down in Hickory or maybe even Raleigh because she’d have a better chance of catching someone with a future.

  But if Dixie was going anywhere, she was going to California.

  Closing her eyes, Dixie lai
d back on the extra-large towel with the unicorn—something her momma had ordered from a catalog for her birthday back in May—and closed her eyes. She thought about Emrys, wondering what he would say about her moving to California.

  “Absolutely not!” Emrys said. He always had a sort of pinched-off face and too long nose. He was knotted and thin like an old tree and his skin was rough like the bark of that tree. He didn’t look like the pictures of pixies that Dixie had found in the library, and she often wondered why her momma called him one, or at least said that she’d seen pixies in the garden when she was a child. Dixie knew it was Emrys she’d seen because he’d confirmed that he had known her momma long ago.

  “Why?” Dixie asked, feeling frustrated. She’d always gone to Emrys with her hopes and dreams, and he usually found a way to make them come true. There were times when Dixie considered asking him to make Darius Hammett, three years ahead of her and a star on the football team who was expected to go play for the Tar Heels when he graduated, notice her, but she was slightly afraid of how that would work, or not.

  “Can’t leave,” Emrys said. “You, Child of the Blood, are the only one keeping me safe.”

  “Why is that?” Dixie asked, a thrill tingling down her spine at the thought that she had the power to keep Emrys safe when no one else did. It was one thing to be called Child of the Blood, the suggestion that she was special and could have Emrys grant her wishes, but it was another thing altogether to think that she held power over him, even the uncertain power of how she kept him safe.

  “You are a Child of the Blood, the youngest Child of the Blood. Your uncle and your momma are also Children of the Blood as are your cousins and second cousins, but they do not have the same connection to the land. You will outlive your uncle and your momma which means you must stay here. So long as you are here with me, I have the power to keep the others from overrunning the land with their wishes and dreams, and you would not like their wishes and dreams,” Emrys said. “Nor would anyone else.”

  Dixie chewed on that thought. Emrys waited on her for a few minutes, watching her, or at least she imagined he watched her. There were so many things she’d never really questioned about Emrys, pieces of story that she’d made up in her mind not having anyone else to ask, that she wasn’t sure what exactly what she knew to be true and what was made up. And now, although he could grant her wishes, Emrys was telling her she was trapped in Corbin Meadow, trapped because she needed to be there to keep him safe and in a roundabout way, keep the town safe. She wasn’t sure she liked that.

  Chapter 7

  Taran worked the whole street, knocking on doors at the not-so-uniform brick and wood homes, talking to everyone through the long afternoon and into the evening. He’d gone back and forth, catching those who weren’t home when he’d first canvassed. He had a pile of notes to finish and he’d do that in the morning, maybe.

  His shirt was wet with sweat and his belt dragged at him, making him feel like he was wading through a swamp. True to the swamp analogy, the mosquitos had found him, and he was slapping and swatting which worked up even more of a sweat.

  As darkness began to fall, he heard televisions come on and saw lights shine in living rooms. His stomach began to complain about being ignored all day. Taran settled into the cruiser and headed around down the road to the single fast-food offering in Corbin Meadows. The McDonald’s had stood in the same place since he’d been a child, had probably stood there since his father had been a child.

  Once back at home, Taran settled himself at his kitchen table, an ancient Formica and chrome thing that he’d inherited from his parents, an act that had made his older brother laugh with relief because apparently his momma had been trying to unload the table on him and his wife was having none of it. Taran didn’t care because while the white top was scuffed and a piece broken off at the corner, it had held up surprisingly well, all things considered. It was large enough to hold his extra value meal along with the notebook. The only sounds in the room were his chewing and the soft swish each time the pages turned.

  The air conditioner had done its work earlier, cooling the place to a bearable temperature, although Taran was tempted to turn the thing back on to make the air move. It was stuffy even though it wasn’t warm. The table itself sat beneath a vent where the cool air would have felt good against his still moist skin. A shower would be up next.

  Around him the kitchen was silent, the cream-colored refrigerator making the occasional fart or burp and then nothing. The brown wooden cupboards stared at him with their too narrow handles, which, like the narrow width of a tie, consigned them to an era long past. Even the countertops were a beige that came from an era before Taran had ever been born.

  Like most houses in Corbin Meadow, at least north of Main Street, his home had been built back around nineteen forty. South of Main Street the oldest of the homes, some of which dated back to the nineteenth century, still stood, narrow things that had once had large yards but during a decade of growth the yards had been subdivided, and homes decades newer squished in between.

  Then there were the shacks that looked more ancient than the mountains themselves, huddled on the hillsides up roads that went nowhere and often ended abruptly. No one knew how many times some of those shacks had been rebuilt. Taran’s first wife, Kay, had grown up at the bottom of one of those hills in a manufactured home that had been built around the time she was three, which had been a big deal then, given where it was placed. Now many of the shacks had converted to trailers and manufactured homes, single or double wide, depending upon the size of the family and how flush they’d been feeling when they bought their new place.

  Taran finished his Big Mac and picked at his fries while he read the notes. He could have summed everything up in one sentence: no one saw anything. If he was feeling verbose he could add that no one had heard anything either. In fact, had Mary Jo and Louella not gone looking for her, Elaine could well have laid there in her yard for weeks before anyone noticed they hadn’t seen her. Except the library patrons, Taran corrected, none of whom seemed to live on her street.

  Taran closed the notebook, a slight slap against the table. He leaned back, taking a long swing of his sweet tea, thinking.

  Like the other women who had been murdered two years and more ago, Elaine was a professional women. She cared about Corbin Meadow. She wasn’t particularly politically active but she was known. She held a position of authority. Was there some man in the tiny town who had a hatred for successful women?

  Taran knew he’d be naïve to think that there weren’t any men in town who resented powerful women. Like so many towns in the area, Corbin Meadow had been hit hard when jobs making furniture had been cut and shipped overseas. Even factory furniture had to have workers to finish and to run the factory. Corbin Meadow had done mostly hand-crafted items but a number of residents had commuted down to larger places where they worked in small factories.

  While they’d never been rich on the slopes of the mountains, they’d been comfortable enough, Taran knew. His father had been one of the furniture makers. The loss had been a blow. His dad had retrained in IT, something he hated but which he did. He still had tools in the garage and when Taran and Kay were married, he’d talked about building them their own furniture by hand. Kay had taken the dining room table with her.

  His father hadn’t bothered to build anything for him, so Taran had gone to Hickory and raided the Goodwill for most things and drove around picking up Craigslist items. Seeing the mishmash of furniture he was amassing, his momma had donated the old kitchen table to him.

  Taran got up and walked across the cracked vinyl flooring and down the hall, where the beige carpet was only a few years old, having been replaced just before Taran had purchased the house. Kay would never have lived there in a million years, but it was what he had purchased after selling their nicer home to give her half in the divorce.

  The tub-shower combo was clean and neat, the white tile now a dull gray white, the water pressur
e strong enough to relax his back and the shower head high enough to hit him above the chest. Someday he’d put it on the ceiling, Taran thought, a thought he always had stepping into the shower.

  Why was Elaine killed two years after the others?

  Had someone left town or been arrested and was now back?

  As small of a town as Corbin Meadow was, he should know if someone had left and returned. But the only person who had come back to town lately had been Zoe Mason-Hyer Parker. It was unlikely that Zoe was the killer, although she’d been visiting her momma before her death. If memory served, she’d had to turn around in Chicago to fly back to North Carolina, having made it only halfway home before she’d heard the news, but she was a link. Taran resolved to talk to her in the morning.

  Chapter 8

  Zoe sipped her iced coffee on the covered back patio. There were weeds encroaching on the bricks like tiny warriors ready for a confrontation. They’d been beaten back again and again when her mom was alive, but her daddy didn’t notice such things, hadn’t ever really noticed such things, fighting against the weeds only when asked.

  It was raining a little, not a huge downpour, more a steady light shower, the drops a rhythmic staccato that tapped out the beat of a relaxed ballad song by a country singer. Zoe tried to picture who would do the singing, coming up with five or six names and rejecting all of them. The rain wasn’t making very good music after all.

  The trees moved in a wind that Zoe couldn’t feel, not from her covered spot. You didn’t often feel a breeze there, cocooned as it was by the house. The rain smelled fresh and good, and there was a hint in the dark clouds that it would fall harder later on.

  Despite the rain, it was warm and stuffy for an autumn day. The only reason it felt at all comfortable was because the rain seemed to be keeping the extraordinary humidity at bay. Zoe knew her dad could have probably told her exactly what the humidity was and the dew point and anything else she didn’t really want to know about the weather. She didn’t particularly care, though he found all that interesting. Fortunately, she knew better than to ask, and even if she’d been so foolish, he was out at the coffee shop with his buddies.