she could imagine what it would do to him in his weakened state. She had known him all her life, and he was too intense for his own good, always had been. This case would pull him off that mountain like a logging chain, and if he wore himself out trying to take charge of the case, there’d be hell to pay for it. He might be sick for months. He might even have to resign.
I don’t need him,she told herself. I’m the most recent graduate of the academy. I know all the latest methods of crime solving, and besides, the TBI is doing most of the work. All Joe and I have to do is present them with a suspect.
“Miz Ayers? Are you awake? Your coffee’s getting cold.”
Martha looked up from her contemplation of the counter-top. “Thanks, Fred,” she said to the old farmer who had sat on the stool beside her. “I guess I’m working too hard.”
“I heard about it,” he said. “You don’t expect a thing like that to happen in the country.”
“No.”
“Of course, it happened here before, didn’t it? Twenty years ago.” Fred Dayton stabbed his finger at the coffee cup. “Right near that old church it was. Another couple out in the woods, up to no good, like as not.”
“The couple in that case were hikers on the Appalachian Trail,” said Martha. “These two were grad students from East Tennessee State, studying rare mountain wildflowers.”
Fred raised his eyebrows. “At night?”
“Well, they camped out. They were making a weekend of it.”
“I saw the girl’s picture in the paper. Pretty little thing. Looked like the other one.”
“Uh-huh.” The female victim, a native of Cincinnati, had been five foot nine with long black hair and dark eyes. She was pretty enough, but that was all she’d had in common with the tiny, auburn-haired Emily Stanton. She had also been married, but the husband, a fourth-year med student, had a hospital full of witnesses to account for his whereabouts on the night of the killings. They had checked him out six ways from Sunday, but the case wasn’t going to be that easy to solve. Her partner was nobody’s idea of a wife stealer, either: a balding, chubby botanist whose interest in sex seemed to have been confined to honeybees. The case had sounded sensational at first: young couple killed on the Appalachian Trail. But they weren’t a couple; they were two botanists who happened to be of opposite sex, and they weren’t attractive enough to hold the public’s attention. Perhaps that was why the coverage of the case had been light, almost casual. That, and the lack of an advocate like Charles Stanton to keep the media inflamed, had made the interest in the case little more than perfunctory, except to those who had the responsibility of solving it.
“They weren’t from around here,” said Fred. He felt entitled to talk “shop” with her because he had helped her round up strayed horses on a road once, and since then he had engaged her in occasional conversations at the diner. This time he hoped to pick up some tidbits to enliven his trip to the barbershop. Martha was willing to humor him in the hope that something he said would be of value in the investigation.
“No,” she sighed. “They weren’t from around here.”
But the killer was,she thought.
Burgess Gaither
THE TRIAL Then let the jury come. . . .The words chilled me, familiar as they were to an officer of the court.
The trial had begun.
I duly recorded in my notes: Frances Silver pleads not guilty of the felony and murder whereof she stands charged and the following jurors were drawn, sworn, and charged to pass between the prisoner and the state on her life and death, to wit: Henry Pain, David Beedle, Cyrus P. Connelly, William L. Baird, Joseph Tipps, Robert Garrison, Robert McEirath, Oscar Willis, John Hall, Richard Bean, Lafayette Collins, and David Hennessee.
They were all upstanding men of the community as far as I knew, although I was not well acquainted with any of them. By chance, none of them came from the exalted ranks of the town fathers: indeed, I knew of no connections that any of them had to the Erwins, the McDowells, or any of the other prominent families in Burke County, although no doubt Elizabeth could have found a connection somewhere in the wide-ranging roots of Morganton’s family trees. No matter if there were connections,
of course; the luck of the draw could have packed the