1 Murder on Sugar Creek Read online

  Maggie joined Tyler in Joe’s office. With a nod of his head, Joe suggested she take a seat.

  “Maggie, Tyler tells me they’ve arrested a suspect in the Honaker murder, and he’s from Sugar Creek.”

  “Can you believe that?” Maggie asked. “I told Tyler I knew Kevin –”

  “You did?” Joe’s eyes settled on Tyler. “That would have been helpful information.”

  “Why?” Tyler asked. “Everybody knows everybody in small towns like Jasper.”

  “Actually, Tyler, Sugar Creek is not part of Jasper. It’s out in the county and is unincorporated, so it’s technically not even a town. And it would be impossible for me to know all seventy thousand people who live in the county or –”

  Joe held up his hand. “Maggie, tell us what you know about Kevin Mullins.”

  Maggie scratched her head. “Except for chatting at the store or waving at him when I’d meet his car on the road, I haven’t seen him for some time. The last I heard, he still lived with his dad on Little Elm Fork.” Maggie pronounced the three-word location as if it were one word.

  “Is there a Big Elm Fork?” Although Joe made an effort to prevent the corners of his mouth from expanding, he couldn’t suppress a smile.

  “I don’t think so,” Maggie answered.

  “Is that where you live? Little Elm Fork?”

  Although Maggie knew Tyler was making fun of her, she also recognized that his question represented the first time he had solicited personal information from her.

  “No, I live on Caldonia Road.”

  “What do you know? That’s actually a normal-sounding name,” Tyler said.

  “It’s what the Romans called Scotland. It’s misspelled, but it’s still paying homage to our Scots-Irish roots.”

  “Is Caldonia Road considered a holler?”

  The question itself didn’t bother Maggie. Many newcomers to the area struggled with geographic definitions. The way locals attached terms such as creek, branch, bottom, and fork to the names of their communities didn’t help matters, so she had no problem guiding transplants toward an understanding of the vernacular. She did have a problem with the way Tyler substituted his northern Kentucky accent with an exaggerated tone when he pronounced the word “holler.”

  “Yes, Tyler, Caldonia is a valley and, thus, a hollow or, as we say it around here, a holler.”

  “Ahh,” Tyler said. “Have you ever wondered about the origin of that word?”

  “Tyler,” Joe cautioned.

  “I imagine the term is a reference to the roads that were hollowed – or hollered – out of the hills.” From the corner of her eyes, Maggie noticed Joe smiling. “Anyway, when he was younger, Kevin was friends with my brother. They raised chickens together.”

  “Of course,” Tyler said.

  “Chickens?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah. Daddy helped them build a pen. They sold eggs and the occasional hen.”

  “To whom?” Joe asked.

  “Anybody who wanted fresh eggs or a frying hen.”

  “A frying hen?”

  “Come on, Joe, you’ve lived here for decades. This can’t be the first time you’ve heard of a frying hen.” When Joe met her declaration with silence, Maggie added, “But you live in Jasper. It must be a county-town thing.”

  Joe nodded. “Must be.” He cleared his throat. “Anything else you can tell us about him?”

  Maggie hesitated. “I’ve heard he’s on drugs. The last few times I’ve seen him, he’s seemed out of it. He’s a familiar presence in the police log, too. But it’s always been for theft. I’ve never known him to use violence. What evidence do they have on him?”

  Tyler flipped open his notebook. “A man fitting the suspect’s description was seen riding a bicycle up Lonesome Road – seriously? – shortly after Mac Honaker was shot.”

  “Lonesome Road is on Sugar Creek,” Maggie thought aloud.

  Tyler continued, “The police canvassed the area and learned the bicyclist visited one Ray Short. During an interview with Mr. Short, police learned that Kevin Mullins had stopped by that morning to give him money he was owed.”

  “I can’t speak from experience, but everybody says Ray Short deals drugs,” Maggie told Tyler and Joe.

  “You can count the police as everybody,” Tyler said.

  “Did they search his trailer?” Maggie asked.

  “No, they didn’t have a warrant.”

  “Did Ray say why Kevin owed him money?”

  “He said it was a loan, but I think we know the truth,” Tyler answered while closing his notebook. “Anyway, Ray said Kevin gave him two hundred bucks.”

  “That’s all they have on him?” Maggie asked. “I could come up with two hundred dollars. It doesn’t mean I killed Mac Honaker.”

  “Maggie, drug addicts don’t keep cash on hand,” Joe reasoned.

  “His dad could have given it to him,” Maggie countered.

  “Actually, he said he got the money by selling stolen weed eaters.” Tyler paused. “That’s a lot of weed eaters.”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Weed eaters are expensive. But I don’t think any of that justifies an arrest.”

  “Two witnesses picked him out of a lineup, the police found a recently-discharged gun in the house, and his hands tested positive for gunpowder residue. The ammunition matched casings found at the crime scene. They’ve sent it away for a ballistics test.”

  Maggie considered Tyler’s words and asked no one in particular, “Kevin? A murderer?”

  Following college, Maggie had moved home with her parents and her brother, who was then a high school senior. Although she didn’t feel suffocated by the arrangement, a year later, in a move that coincided with Mark leaving for college, she rented a small apartment in Jasper. Maggie enjoyed the three years she spent living in town. She loved walking to work on a pleasant day and watching the annual Moonshiner Days and Christmas parades from her apartment balcony. But she preferred county living and, following the death of her paternal grandmother, Maggie moved into the small white clapboard house her grandfather had built in the 1940s and in which her grandparents raised seven children. Aunts, uncles, and cousins inhabited the hollow and only sixty feet separated Maggie’s back door from her parents’ house. Every Saturday morning, Maggie made that short walk for a country breakfast featuring pork raised, butchered, and processed by her dad and fried to perfection by her mom.

  As was the case at most kitchen tables in the commonwealth, breakfast conversation focused on the University of Kentucky’s upcoming basketball season. But as Maggie scooped up the last of the red-eye gravy with a scrap of biscuit, the talk turned to murder.

  “I didn’t do much trading at Mac Honaker’s store, but I’d stop in there to buy a bag of chips or a pack of nabs if I got hungry,” Maggie’s dad, Robert, said.

  “You bought lottery tickets in there, too,” Maggie’s mom, Lena, sassed.

  “I thought the store might be lucky.”

  “Luck didn’t have anything to do with it,” Lena snapped.

  Maggie refused to become embroiled in her parents’ dispute over her dad’s casual lottery playing, so she asked, “Daddy, do you believe Kevin Mullins could kill somebody?”

  Robert had popped a biscuit dripping with homemade raspberry jam into his mouth just as Maggie made her query. Still chewing, his opened hands served as his answer.

  “The police must think he could. They arrested him,” Lena noted.

  “But we know him,” Maggie said. “He spent a lot of time at this house hanging out with Mark, and Mark doesn’t think he’s capable of murder.”

  “When did you talk to Mark?” Lena asked.

  “Last night.”

  “How was he? How are the boys? Did he say when they’ll be coming in again? Does he think they’ll make it in for Thanksgiving?”

  “He was fine. The boys are fine. He didn’t say when they would be visiting or if they’d made definite plans for the holiday, but he did tell me you t
alked to him yesterday, Mom. You could have asked him these questions.”

  “I did,” Lena answered. “I thought things might have changed.”

  “From morning to evening?” Maggie closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead, and counted to ten. “Never mind.”

  “He don’t think Kevin did it?” Robert asked.

  “No. He admitted that he and Kevin had grown apart and that they hadn’t spent much time together since freshman year of high school, but he described Kevin as a gentle soul and a good person. He thinks he would find money somewhere else before he would kill in cold blood,” Maggie said.

  “Everything changes when people get on that dope,” Lena said. “It turns them into thieves. Those druggies are robbing everybody blind. I knew something like this would happen. It’s why I’m terrified to be here by myself. But your daddy leaves me alone to hunt or to buy livestock or to stand down there at the hog pen and watch those hogs eat. If it don’t have four legs and a tail, he ain’t interested in it.”

  “I’m next door, Mom.”

  “Even if you were home, you couldn’t hear me scream –”

  “When was the last time you talked to Kevin, Daddy?” Maggie’s question had a dual purpose: To cut off her mom, who lived in fear of bands of marauding home invaders, and to further ascertain her dad’s opinion.

  “Let me see,” Robert tilted his head to the left and cleaned out his right ear with his house key. “It was back in the spring. I saw him at the feed store. He was picking up chicken feed.”

  “He still keeps chickens?”

  “Yeah.” Robert finished cleaning his right ear and moved on to his left. “He was Kevin.”

  “You mean he didn’t seem high?”

  “Not that day.”

  Her mom snorted, “But what about the day before that or the day after?”

  “Mom, you always liked Kevin,” Maggie said. “What’s with this attitude?”

  “I did like him – when he was a little boy. I don’t know Kevin as a man. And neither do you and Mark.”

  Maggie surveyed her living room and kitchen. She didn’t know how her mommaw and poppaw, their seven children, and her poppaw’s dad had managed to reside in the six-room house. Between furniture, books, movies, electronics, and appliances, the house barely provided enough space for her and Barnaby. Not that she planned to leave. Maggie hated moving. After she had taken up residence in the house, she had declared she would never move again and had performed needed repairs and renovations to modernize the house. She had replaced the white clapboard siding with vinyl siding, painted the kitchen cabinets, installed new windows, laid hardwood flooring, and hung new exterior and interior doors. Although the house looked and felt fresher, she had kept certain items for nostalgia’s sake including her poppaw’s hat rack and her mommaw’s ironing board.

  She honed in on the stack of dirty dishes that overwhelmed the kitchen sink and decided to get the cleaning out of the way so she wouldn’t have it on her mind when she met her friend, Edie, later for dinner. Maggie had started running the dish water when the phone rang.

  “Hello,” she answered only to be greeted by an automated voice asking if she would accept a call from the county detention center. Maggie had received such calls before and had never accepted, reasoning that those calls were probably wrong numbers. But this time, she said yes. A few seconds later, she heard Kevin’s voice.

  “Maggie? It’s me, Kevin Mullins. Mark’s friend.”

  “Hello,” Maggie knew her greeting sounded hollow, but she didn’t know the proper salutation to offer a man recently charged with murder.

  “Listen, Maggie, I know you work for that paper and you’ve got to tell them I didn’t kill that man. You’ve got to tell them you know me.”

  “Tell who, Kevin?”

  “Everybody. The paper ain’t showing my side of the story.”

  “What is your story?”

  “That I didn’t kill that man. I went to Ray’s cause I owed him money. That ain’t no crime. I tried to tell the cops that, but they wouldn’t listen. You can make them listen,” Kevin pleaded.

  “What about the gunshot residue on your hands?”

  “I shot at a coyote that was bothering the chickens.”

  “I don’t know what I could do, Kevin. I’m not that kind of reporter. I cover plays and pageants.”

  “Dad said you could help me. He said, ‘Call Robert’s girl. She works at the paper. She can help.’ Can you help me, Maggie?”

  “I don’t know, Kevin,” Maggie paused before adding, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

  Maggie dipped a chicken tender into ranch dressing and listened as Edie debated which color boots to buy.

  “Black will go with my entire winter wardrobe, give or take a few items,” Edie said, “but the gray pair is super adorable.”

  “Why not buy the black and the gray?” Maggie suggested.

  Edie furrowed her well-sculpted brows. “Unless I plant a money tree, that’s impossible. Five hundred dollars for one pair will –”

  Maggie choked on the chicken. “Did you say five hundred dollars? For one pair of boots?”

  Edie nodded.

  “Are they made of something special like iguana skin?”

  “No, I would never wear iguana. The boots are cow leather.”

  Edie continued to extol the virtues of the boots to an astonished Maggie. Although they had been friends for more than a decade, their unlikely bond continued to amaze Maggie. They had met a year into Maggie’s tenure with the Sentinel when Edie started working in the advertising department. Maggie regarded Edie as just another ditzy sales rep until she saw her reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in the break room.

  “It’s a good book,” Maggie had offered small talk as she waited on the microwave to warm her lunch.

  “It’s the best book,” Edie had said. “It’s my favorite. I re-read it every six months.”

  Out of that conversation, a friendship formed and a Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tour followed in Savannah. Maggie served as maid of honor at Edie’s doomed first marriage, encouraged her to take a clerical job at the bank that led to her becoming a departmental manager, provided a shoulder to cry on during her divorce, and watched as she dated a succession of losers before settling on her dream man, Ben, a co-worker at the bank. Maggie also witnessed Edie experiment with every shade of blonde at her hair dresser’s disposal.

  “This is the darkest I’ve seen your hair. It’s almost light brown. What’s the shade?”

  “Honey. For now.” She drummed her fingers on the table, “So, Ben knows a guy who would be perfect for you.”

  “Edie, no. I haven’t recovered from the last guy you fixed me up with.” When Edie failed to respond, Maggie said, “You know, the guy who repeated everything three or four times. We doubled with you and Ben at the 4th of July picnic.”

  Edie slapped her forehead. “No wonder I didn’t remember him. That was over three months ago.”

  “It was traumatic,” Maggie said. “Yeah, I was traumatized. Unh-huh, it was really traumatic.”

  Edie flapped her hands like a bird and said, “Okay, okay. We don’t have to talk about guys. We’ll talk about anything. What’s going on?”

  “Have you heard about the Mac Honaker murder?”

  “Well, yeah, who hasn’t?”

  Maggie proceeded to share her knowledge of the crime as well as Mark’s friendship with Kevin Mullins.

  “So, he was a childhood friend of your brother’s? You know what this means? You grew up with a murderer. If this case hits the big time, you could be interviewed by that creepy guy on Dateline.”

  Maggie eyed Edie. “First of all, Keith Morrison is not creepy. He possesses a distinctive voice that can sound foreboding or soothing, depending on the circumstances.”

  “Whatever you say. Didn’t mean to criticize your imaginary boyfriend.”

  “Second of all,” Maggie continued, “just because Kevin’s been arrested d
oesn’t mean he’s guilty. Dateline and 48 Hours cover overturned convictions all the time. Some of these people languish inside prison for decades because of botched investigations. And I know everyone in jail professes their innocence, but this morning when I talked to Kevin –”

  Edie’s mouth flew open. “You talked to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In person?”

  “Goodness, no,” Maggie reassured her friend. “I hope to live a full life without ever setting foot inside a jail, a detention center, or a prison. Kevin called me.”

  Edie slapped her forehead again. “So many questions, but we’ll start with this one – why did you take his call?”

  “I guess I wanted to hear his side of the story.”

  “You wanted to hear him proclaim his innocence?”

  Maggie shrugged. “They don’t have much on him, and Kevin’s always seemed too meek to commit a murder. Snort pills and steal Christmas decorations, sure. But murder?”

  “Why did he call you?”

  “He wants my help.”

  “Have you gotten a law degree without my knowledge?”

  “No. His dad suggested he call me because I work for the paper. Kevin kept asking me to tell everyone he’s innocent. They’re under the mistaken impression that I have clout, but I don’t know what I can do. It’s not like I have connections.”

  Edie smiled. “Yes, you do.”

  “Who?”

  “Your ex-fiancé, the police detective.”

  Chapter Four

  Maggie sat in the lobby of the Jasper Police Department. She couldn’t believe she had taken Edie’s advice and called her ex, Seth. Mac Honaker’s murder had occurred out in the county and the investigation fell outside the Jasper PD’s jurisdiction. She wasn’t sure what advice Seth could offer.

  More than that, contacting him made her feel uncomfortable and she didn’t know why. They had parted on good terms when she broke off their engagement five years earlier. In the ensuing years, they had exchanged friendly greetings when running into each other at restaurants or on the street. And it’s not as if she was jealous of the life he had made with his wife, Jamie. Maggie had ended their relationship for a reason and she didn’t regret her decision.