Written by RF Wilson – Detective Winston Fair is investigating the disappearance of  Phyllis Rivers, a partner in the real estate firm of Nyswanger and Rivers. She was last seen leaving her office to show an old house in the northern reaches of the county. In the course of his investigation, Detective Fair discovers that three other single women, all in their forties have disappeared within the past year and a half in other Western North Carolina counties.

Thursday, 7:30 p.m.

As far as Fair could figure, there were only two scenarios to consider. Phyllis Rivers was taken by force by a man who had abducted three other women over the past year. Or, she ran off with the guy she was showing a house to. Screw the job, she thinks, let’s go to the islands, or wherever couples who disappear go. In the latter case, surely, eventually, she would let her daughter know what was up. Fair wondered what the standard amount of time was to wait before telling your children you’ve run off with the man of your dreams.

At the house Fair changed into work clothes, then walked to the stables where he saddled Adelaide, his newest charge. He worked with her for the next hour and would have spent more time with her but sensed she was tired. Fair did not think of himself as a “horse whisperer,” since he spoke out loud directly to them. But he understood that the “secret” of training a horse was not by breaking it, not by trying to get it to bend to your will, but by engaging it as a partner. He returned Adelaide to her stable, groomed her, and put up the tack. These were all chores that his stable manager, Johnny Parsons, often reminded Fair that he would gladly do. Fair didn’t think of them as chores. They were part of his relationship with Adelaide.

Back at the house, he sat on the porch, feet on the porch rail, beer in hand. Looking out over the stables and his land, he considered the arc of his life, what had brought him here, thinking back to a conversation he’d had with Detective Reese a few days after he’d taken the job with the Sheriff’s Department.

Less than half a dozen words had passed between the two men in his first few week on the force. Fair understood that Reese had been the source of much conversation about the sheriff’s newly-instituted minority hiring policy. Passing Reese’s office, Fair knocked on the door frame.

When the senior detective looked up, Fair said, “I understand you own horses.”

With no notable expression, Reese replied, “I do.”

“We have something in common. I have a couple myself.”

“That’s what I hear. Your family owns the old Whitworth place down south in the county. That right?”

“That’s right. Except it’s just me. I’m what’s left of the family.” Fair pointed to the chair next to Reese’s desk. “Mind if I sit down.”

Reese’s expression hardened, but he nodded toward the seat.

Fair sat in the chair ordinarily occupied by suspects and stretched his legs out, making himself comfortable, waiting for Reese to say something.

“So, with all that, why’d you become a cop?” Reese asked.

The ‘all that’ was the aforementioned Whitworth estate. Fair’s father, Darius, had been the stable manager of the horse farm. When old man Whitworth died, he willed the property to Darius, much to the chagrin of his ne’er-do-well son as well as many other folks in the surrounding community.

“You may find this hard to believe, Detective,” Fair said, “but there are a lot of white people who don’t like black people and who will go out of their way to make life hard for them. When I was an MP in the Marines . . .” Fair paused and looked straight at Reese, let that settle in. “. . . I discovered that when I was packin’, it kind of changed the way white people dealt with me. That make sense to you?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah. Growing up, I had what was called an ‘attitude.’ I thought people of color were treated badly. I went to Chapel Hill which only made things worse. You know, people always bein’ surprised I had a brain and didn’t play ball – any kind of ball. Thought I was the go-to man for weed, probably knew somebody who could get pirated CDs. After I graduated, my father was still alive, running the farm, and he wanted me to come home but I couldn’t see it. Hardheaded, you know?”

Reese had leaned back in his chair, as if to put distance between himself and this disclosure.

“So, I joined the Marines after I graduated, figured it would keep me from doing something I’d regret back here.”

“Something you’d regret? Like what.”

“Like goin’ off on somebody who made some comment about who the hell do those black people think they are, trying’ to run a horse farm. So, I became an MP, then joined the Durham police when I got out. But, I am a country boy at heart. I had to get out of the city.”

“I heard your wife was shot and killed back there. Was pregnant when it happened.”

Fair then wished he’d not started this conversation. The weight of the incident came at him like  a wave. “Yeah,” he said, the flip, casual manner of speaking gone from his voice. “Yeah. And there was a job here and, as I’ve heard you note, the sheriff’s under the gun to diversify his personnel.”

Reese nodded some more, without expression.

“You ought to come down to the ranch some day,” Fair said. “Drink a beer or two. See what I do there.”

Reese nodded. “Might could do that.”

“Or,” Fair said, “I could come to your place.”

“Yeah. Could do that.”

“Let me know, detective. Other than I have kind of an attitude about racial issues, I’m a nice guy. Really.”

Reese had got it right. The real reason Fair moved out of Durham was that his pregnant wife had been killed in a drive-by shooting. It was never determined if she was an innocent victim of circumstance or if it was a way to get at Fair for his anti-drug activity. He knew – as his colleagues knew – that, if he stayed there, he would surely kill someone, or get killed trying.

A heavy sadness fell over him. He thought about the women whose disappearances he was investigating and what it must be like for their families.

 

Friday, 7:30 a.m.

Fair told the desk person to let the Captain know he was going to Martinton to investigate one of the previous disappearances. In the county SUV he played a Jimi Hendrix blues CD. “Ah, Jimi,” he thought, “Where are you when we need you?”

The uniformed woman behind the window at the rural county sheriff’s department gave no indication that the dark-skinned man standing before her wearing a gray suit, white cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, was in any way unusual.

Fair held out his badge as he introduced himself. They exchanged good-mornings.

“I’m investigating the disappearance of a woman in Buncombe County, a case similar to one which occurred down here some months ago. I was hoping I’d be able to see the file.”

Five minutes later he was in the office of Detective Jason Ramsey.

“Yeah, interesting case,” Ramsey said. “Like she disappeared off the face of the earth.”

They agreed that the two cases looked too similar to be coincidental, each involving as they did, a divorced woman in her 40’s, gone. Poof. The woman, according to Detective Ramsey, had a reputation for carousing at local roadhouses.

“She in the real estate business, by any chance?”

“No, but she did have a trailer she was trying to rent. That was the first place we went when her boss called to tell us she was missing. Problem was,” Ramsey said, “we didn’t know how long she’d been gone before we heard about it. She’d taken a couple of days off from her waitressing job along with her regular day off. Could have been gone four days before we got the call.”

“How near to where she lived is this trailer.”

“Couple miles. Used to belong to her ex-husband.”

“Ex-husband still around?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t do it. After they split a couple years ago, he went back to mama, found Jesus. The two of them got along good after that. They were a pretty strange lookin’ couple, anyway.”

“How’s that.?”

“She’s quite a looker, kind of medium height, put together good, and pretty smart. He’s kind of a doofus. Well, what can I say? He’s living with his mama. Nobody could understand what she saw in him in the first place.”

“Was he ever a suspect?”

“Sure. But a suspect of what? We never found any evidence of a crime.”

“Except the lady disappeared.”

Detective Ramsey turned his hands palms up and shrugged.R“Anybody see this guy, this person we presume is a guy, she was showing her trailer to?”

“Nope. At least no one’s come forward.”

“Probably not going to at this point,” Fair said.

“Safe guess,” the detective agreed.

 

10:00 a.m.

Fair exchanged Bob Marley and the Wailers for Jimi Hendrix in the CD player for the fifty minute drive to Berryville. Dogwood and redbud decorated the mountainsides. He wasn’t sure which was more inspiring, the beauty nature bestowed all around him or Bob’s call for revolution.

The story in Berryville was almost identical to the one in Martinton. A single woman went to show a house she owned to an unknown person. In this case, a neighbor got a look at a man who was walking around the house with the owner. The description in the case file could have been that of the man Phyllis Rivers had been seen with. Unfortunately, the man had no uniquely identifying characteristics. Average build and height. Hair hard to see under a baseball cap. The observer estimated that she’d been fifty yards away from the man. She had also seen a blue pickup truck.

Fair was convinced that the same man had been involved in all of the area’s disappearances and was doubtful that a trip to the next county west would provide any new information. He’d probably get a confirmation that it could have been the same man involved but with no more clues. He put a Derek and the Dominos CD on the stereo – Eric Clapton doing his white-boy-blues thing – and thought, what the heck? Drive around the mountains, listen to good music. Even if he discovered nothing new, how bad a job was that?

At a convenience store a couple of miles out of Fair’s way, back across the Buncombe County line, the young clerk greeted Fair as if they were old friends. A white boy, with long, stringy, dishwater brown hair, and tattoos down both arms jutting out from the shoulders of a cut off Metallica T-shirt, he treated Fair respectfully as opposed to the surly attitude the detective encountered in most similar places out on the fringes of civilization. Fair liked the young man in spite of his conviction that he dealt pot.

“Hey, Detective, what’s up?”

“Criminals are afoot, Darrell.”

“Glad you’re on the job.”

“Unlike a lot of people. How old’s the coffee?”

“Just made it. Must have sensed you were comin’.”

Fair took his coffee to one of the two booths inside the store and looked up the Weaver County commissioners on his lap top. As a group they looked to him to be the epitome of a good ol’ boy network, not the kind of people with whom he was unfamiliar, nor with whom he enjoyed spending time.

 

Friday, 11:30 a.m.

Sheriff Bo Green stood as Fair walked into his office.

“Detective Fair,” he said. “Or, should I call you ‘Cowboy’?”

“My reputation precedes me.”

“Sure does. You’re kind of an exotic in these parts. Nice boots. Where’d you get ’em.”

Fair noticed the sheriff also wore noteworthy footwear. “Mail order.”

“There’s this guy over to Dillsboro you might want to check out,” the sheriff said. “That’s who does mine. Not cheap, mind you. But, I don’t suspect yours are neither. You want to come outside with me? I want a smoke. Hell of thing, sheriff of the largest burley tobacco producing county in the state can’t smoke in his own office.”

They sat across from each other in a small gazebo behind the courthouse. Fair explained the similarity between the case he was working on, the one that occurred here, and the two others in the region.

“The one here was a really sad case,” Greene said. “Mother of two kids.”

“Young woman?”

“Forty-something. Her second marriage and the husband had died the year before in some freak accident. The kids were two and four when she disappeared. And, ya’ know, we thought we had the guy. A few months after that woman went missing, we arrested a man who attempted to abduct another woman. Same M.O. as what happened to the other lady. The woman’s showing this guy a house she has for rent. He tries to get her to get back in his vehicle, but she senses something wrong. The guy grabs her and drags her back to his truck but she manages to get out before they start moving, he catches her, she’s able to pull loose. Then she kicked him in the nuts. Guess she really let him have it. Managed to get to a neighbor’s before he could catch her. The neighbor, his wife, and the intended victim all rushed the guy.”

“What happened to him?”

“If you could still get away with lynching, that’s what would have happened. But since we’re more civilized these days, he was allowed to plead to unlawful restraint.”

“Not kidnapping?”

“Nah. He never took her anywhere. I believe he took the plea offer to keep us from spending too much time investigating. Might have found something that linked him to the other case.”

“You mentioned the vehicle of the guy you caught. Blue pickup, by any chance?”

“Yup. Thing looked like it had been around since Eisenhower.”

“You know where the guy is now?”

“Nope. Served his time down at Brown, the full ticket so he doesn’t have to report to parole or anything. Then disappeared.”

“Seems he’s in the area again.”

“So it would seem.”

“I presume you’ve got a mug shot and prints,” Fair said.

The sheriff nodded. “I’ll get you a copy of his file.”

Fair’s cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his suit jacket pocket and looked at it. “Receptionist at the real estate office this most recent lady disappeared from, says ‘call me.’ Probably ought to.”

“I’ll have that file ready for you when you’ve finished your business. Anything else I can help you with, Detective?”

“Not that I can think of. I’ll get back to you if there is.”

 

Fair walked down Main Street in the small town, aware of the looks he got, nothing he wasn’t used to. He smiled and nodded at folk in return. He imagined conversations at the cafe about the black man in town, all duded-up in suit and tie, wearing a cowboy hat. On a bench outside a drug store, he sat, and hit “return call” on his phone.

After exchanging “Hellos,” Dorothy said, “You know, or maybe don’t know, that old house was part of an underground railway.”

“Had no idea,” Fair said. “I know there were slaves in this area, more than people want to talk about. Never knew about the railway.”

“I’m the resident Civil War history buff around here. This railroad, as they called it,  wasn’t what most people think of as the underground railroad that helped runaway slaves get to the north. This one helped Federal forces who had escaped from Confederate prisons and were making their way north to Union states. And, of course, they weren’t railways at all, but a series of safe houses from here up through the mountains and on into Tennessee.”

Fair waited a moment before asking, “What does it have to do with Phyllis’ disappearance?”

“Maybe nothing. But there was, and presumably still is, a trail going from Pressley’s house through the undergrowth. They called it a tunnel because it was cut out of the mountain laurel and rhododendron thickets. But it was done in such a way that someone who didn’t know where it was would have a hard time finding it.”

“And you think it might still be intact so someone could move through there?”

“Might be. Legend has it that it was also used by moonshiners before repeal of prohibition. A still, or stills, were at the other end and they would send what they made over to the house and store it in the basement. If the revenuers showed up at the still they wouldn’t find any product. The story is that, although several stills got busted, they never lost a drop of whiskey.”

“Who was ‘they.'”

“Well, this is the interesting part.”

Fair said, “All of it’s been interesting, so far,”

“Not all of the soldiers who wound up at the house were what you might call honorable. Just plain deserters. They wanted to hide out, not interested so much in getting back to where they came from where they might be hanged or shot. So, some of ’em just hung around up there.”

“I heard about a band of gypsies supposedly up there, too.”

“We’ve talked about that at the Historical Society. What we think is that some Gypsies heard about this underground railway thing and thought it might be a way to get away from the persecution they faced – you know it was not just Blacks who were persecuted . . .”

Fair let that slide. In his mind, slavery was different from other kinds of persecution.

“. . . so, a few of them went up there and discovered that the outlaws treated them better than the, what would you call them, the law-abiding ones. So, they stayed.”

“Like I said, that’s interesting but I don’t get how it relates to the disappearances.”

“I don’t either. But I thought it might be helpful to know what’s gone on up there. I would have said something about it sooner. But, it never occurred to me until I was getting ready for a meeting tonight. Then, just the idea of the Historical Society jostled my memory.”

“Are you thinking Phyllis disappeared into that tunnel?”

“I have no idea. But, I did think you ought to know about the place.”

“Guess I better go up and have another look.”

On the way back to headquarters, Fair thought about Dorothy, the nice, white, lady receptionist who he had imagined went home, maybe tended a flower garden, watched TV. Never occurred to him she might have another, intellectually-challenging, life as well.

 

Friday, 1:30 p.m.

Fair accosted Sergeant Timmons in a hallway.

“Want to take a ride?”

“Where to?”

“The Pressley house. I’ll tell the Captain I’m taking you. Need your brains to figure some stuff out. It’ll be easy to convince him of that since he doesn’t think people with my complexion are well-endowed in that regard. Unlike in some other matters.”

Timmons worked at hiding a grin before he asked, “Even though you have a law degree?”

“Yeah. Even though.”

“I’m gonna let that other part slide,” Timmons said.

On the ride, they discovered they both liked old country music, Hank and Loretta, George Jones. Timmons couldn’t understand why the detective didn’t like NASCAR as well.

Fair explained that white boys used fast cars to evade the law while they were running moonshine around the mountains. On the other hand, black folk learned to run from the law the old fashioned way. “With our feet,” he said. “It’s why we have the fastest runners.”

“I know you must have to go through this with everybody you meet, but I’m curious why you’re working here. I was talking to Reese the other day, and he said you never mentioned a law degree to him.”

“Yeah, got that when I was working at the Durham P.D.”

“So, how come you’re a cop and not a lawyer?”

Fair’s expression hardened. He looked straight ahead.

Timmons said, “It’s OK. You don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.”

Fair explained the circumstances of his wife’s death. “Never found out if the bullet was meant for someone else, or if it was somebody’s way of getting at me. I was doing a lot of anti-drug work. She was pregnant.”

“Geez.” Timmons said. “I’m sorry. That’s hard.”

“Yes, it is. So, I decided I was going to catch bad guys. Let someone else decide what to do with them. The police department put me on a leave of absence and suggested I vacate the area. I knew I had to get out of that city or I would have killed someone. That’s not hyperbole. I came back here to chill at the farm for a while, deciding what I was going to do while getting PTSD counseling. Then an opening came up with the Sheriff’s Department. So, I stayed. And, if sometimes I come across as an angry black man, it’s because I am an angry black man. I’ve learned ways to manage it, but it’s always there, not far beneath the surface.”

 

Friday, 3:00

The fallen oak had been cut away from the driveway, although much of the trunk remained intact on the yard. Fair got a heavy duty flashlight out of the back of the car. As they approached the house, he saw the small man on the porch.

“Fancy meeting you here,” the detective said, not surprised at seeing the little guy, but wondering, as he had before, where he appeared from. “Shandor Squires,” Fair said, when they arrived at the porch, “this is Sergeant Timmons.”

Shandor grinned. “Nobody here now,” he said, ignoring the introduction.

“I didn’t expect anyone to be.”

The front door lock had been repaired. Fair punched numbers on the lock box, hoping the code hadn’t been changed. It opened, exposing a key. Shandor followed them in. The two men looked around the upstairs, Fair assuring himself that nothing had changed since his previous visit.

“You want that guy following us?” Timmons asked as they made their way down the steps to the basement.

“Won’t do any good to tell him not to.”

The two men inspected the room. Fair shone the bright beam of the flashlight on the bookcase. He’d notice on his prior visit that a wooden skirt covered the space between the lowest shelf and the floor. What he hadn’t taken note of was a metal handle about shoulder height on the inner left wall of the case.

“Now, why do you suppose that would be there?” Fair mused to Timmons.

“Maybe to hold on to.”

“But why?”

“To pull it open.”

“Okay. Let’s try.”

Fair pulled on the handle. The case made a creaking sound but didn’t move. He tried again, pulling harder, with the same results. “Shine that light behind this thing, see if anything is holding it in place.”

Timmons looked at the left side of the case, then the right.

“Looks like hinges over here.”

Fair took a look.

“Sure does. Okay, strong man, why don’t you give it tug, see what happens.”

When the sergeant pulled, the bookcase creaked again. The left side seemed to pull loose from  the wall, just enough to see space behind it. He pulled again, using all his upper body and leg strength. It creaked and moved – rolled – six inches. It didn’t pull away from the wall; it pulled the wall with it.

“Well, son of a gun,” Fair said. “A secret door.”

“And there’s wheels under it,” the sergeant said.

“Which we didn’t see because of the skirting hiding them.”

Together they were able to get the door open enough to see behind it.

“Looks like a room in there.”

“Sure ’nuff,” Timmons agreed.

“Damn,” Fair said, looking quickly around. “Where’s Shandor?”

The detective ran up the steps two at a time, arriving in the kitchen in time to see the little man in the yard, heading into the woods. By the time Fair got to the edge of the yard, Shandor had disappeared into a rhododendron thicket. Fair knew he’d never find the man in there.

“Damn,” he repeated.

Timmons was in the kitchen when Fair returned from the yard.

“Why’d you want to catch him?”

“Because he’s going to tell somebody that we’re pokin’ around and found a door we’re probably not supposed to know about.”

“And the problem with that is?”

“It’ll alert whoever’s at the other end.”

“How do you know anybody’s there?”

“I’m assuming somebody’s there and that the path through the woods, what is referred to as the tunnel, is still being used for something.”

“That’s a bunch of assuming.”

“I know.”

“You think this so-called tunnel has anything to do with the lady’s disappearance?”

“That occurred to me. Although, I don’t see how it would connect to the other three disappearances. Unless . . .”

“Unless, what?” Timmons asked.

“He brought them all back here.” The idea of some man collecting the women coalesced in his mind.

“Assuming this woodland tunnel goes somewhere,” Timmons said, “why not take them right to that place, wherever it is.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. It seems like it should all connect, but maybe it’s merely coincidence that one of the women who has disappeared, disappeared from this house and there is nothing else that connects the other abductions to this place. This simply happened to be where she was showing a house. A single woman showing a house to some guy.”

The two men returned to the basement. Fair looked around the room, hoping he’d see something that he’d not seen before. Something that would unblock his mind, help him see things differently.

“Okay,” Fair said. “Let’s check it out.”

The men had to squeeze between the bookcase and the wall to get into the other room.  The ceiling was not as high as the basement’s and both men had to hunch over. The walls were granite and rocky dirt. It smelled earthy. There were shelves along the walls. The floor space was about two-thirds that of the basement.

Timmons said, “This is – or was – a root cellar. Hey, shine that light over here.”

Fair turned the beam of the flashlight to where the Sergeant was standing.

“Look at that that,” Timmons said.

“What?”

“Rings. Stains. About the size of the bottom of a gallon jug.”

“Like a whiskey jug,” Fair said. He swept the light across the room. “Look there.”

The light shone on an opening in the far wall. It was only slightly wider than a large person’s shoulders. Standing at the opening, they could see a tunnel going off into the distance. Fair stepped into the space, took several steps and said, “Come on.” Timmons followed.

“Feel that?” Fair said.

“That draft?”

“Yeah. It’s warm.”

“Meaning that it’s coming down from above. Bringing in air from the outside.” Timmons eyes followed as Fair played the light on the walls and floor.

“Tracks,” Timmons said.

What appeared to be miniature train tracks ran the length of the visible space.

“For some kind of cart or wagon, don’t you think?” Timmons said.

The path slanted gradually upward. The walls became mostly dirt. Every several yards, support posts and boards had been erected.

“Where do you think it goes?” Timmons asked.

“Into the woods. Far enough into the woods that where it comes out would be hard for someone not familiar with the area to find.”

“Your imagination’s working overtime,” Timmons said.

“It’s the lack of oxygen in here. It’ll do that to you.”

 Look for Part Three next month!

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RF Wilson writes in Asheville, NC, where he lives with his wife, Beth Gage. He is the author of the novel, “Killer Weed,” recently published by Pisgah Press. His short story, “Accident Prone,” appears in the anthology “Carolina Crimes” published by Wildside Press, which has been nominated for an Anthony Award as Best Mystery Anthology of the Year.