A Murder in Mount Moriah Read online

  A MURDER IN MOUNT MORIAH

  BY

  MINDY QUIGLEY

  Chapter 1

  Lindsay Harding watched her soldier—this man who shared her every interest, her every future goal—move across the body-strewn battlefield. He crouched and fired, moved behind a low earthen mound, and reloaded. She was close enough to see the delicate curve of his jaw with its downy fluff of beard. Yes, there was no doubt about it. Her soldier was swift, handsome, and courageous—and all of nineteen years old.

  A nineteen-year-old Civil War reenactor. She, a thirty-year-old hospital chaplain and ordained minister with a mortgage and two degrees, was here at Mount Moriah, North Carolina’s annual battle reenactment after having been “89% compatibility matched” with a teenager who spent his free time playing army in a Confederate uniform.

  The subscription to the online dating site had been a birthday gift from her well-meaning friends. Almost instantly, she had received a “wink” from Doyle Hargreaves. Lindsay had not yet learned enough about internet dating to be wary of sunglasses or dim lighting or shots taken from a great distance. Nor had she understood the importance of absolute specificity when detailing the acceptable age range for your potential matches.

  Lindsay and Doyle had arranged to meet at the entrance to the state park where the reenactment was held. By both temperament and training, Lindsay was a master of the art of maintaining a neutral expression when confronted with surprising revelations. When she first beheld Doyle’s baby-pink cheeks and wispy facial hair, her brain might have been screaming “Cougar!”, but her face remained a mask of Sphinx-like detachment. When Doyle responded to her polite inquiry about his profession with the statement that he was “finishing off some high school credits this summer so I can get my commercial truck driving license in the fall,” however, she could only stare at him in goggle-eyed, slack-jawed horror. Doyle became defensive. “I was going to join the Marines, but I lost three toes in a lawnmower accident last year. Now they won’t let me enlist.”

  “Sorry. It’s not the trucking part. It’s just that, well, you’re still in high school.”

  He pouted. “I only gotta pass Señora Smolinski’s Spanish class and then I get my diploma.”

  Lindsay bought him sarsaparilla, which seemed to appease him. As they wandered among the food stalls and the demonstrations of nineteenth-century arts and crafts, Doyle sipped his drink and chatted amiably. He told her about the battle he and his fellow reenactors were there to recreate, a small, unheralded skirmish that took place toward the war’s end in March of 1865. Union and Confederate troops had fought on and off for almost three days to an inconclusive outcome, with the Union regiment stymied and the Rebs retreating in the middle of the night. In the Mount Moriah reenactment version, however, the battle would be confined to a large, open field and would be neatly condensed into the space of an hour and twenty minutes.

  As Doyle spoke, Lindsay warmed to him. He was a nice guy. Handsome. Cheerful. He was very knowledgeable about the Civil War. Maybe the eleven-year age gap could be surmounted. Maybe they would look back at this meeting, years from now, grilling hot dogs in their backyard, little Doyle Jr. jumping through the lawn sprinkler, and laugh at the serendipity of it all.

  Then Doyle told her about the button peeing.

  She had expressed admiration for his uniform, a well-tailored jacket the color of butternut squash skin. He was delighted by her compliment. “Yeah, I buried the jacket in the yard for a couple of weeks to get it to look old and smell like dirt. And you gotta store the brass buttons in pee. Otherwise, they look too shiny.”

  “Pee?”

  “Pee. You know, pee?” He had mimed an action that would have been better left un-mimed. “It makes ‘em a little tarnished. They’re more authentic that way.” Doyle slurped the last of his sarsaparilla and tossed the paper cup in a garbage barrel. “Look, Lindsay, you seem really nice or whatever and your face and body are pretty good, but I don’t think I can date a chaplain. I mean, what about your vow of celibacy?”

  “We don’t actually take those. That’s more for nuns and priests.”

  “Yeah, but you’re basically a Christian minister, right? I don’t want you to try and convert me. You see, I’m thinking about becoming a Zoroastrian.”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied, nodding gravely. She was confused by the sudden conversational transition from urinating on your clothes to converting to an obscure Eastern religion. Before she could muster any kind of well-considered response, Doyle abruptly bid her goodbye and left to prepare for battle. Lindsay was left standing open-mouthed among the soldiers and belles.

  Her cell phone began to ring. She pressed the green button to answer and was met by the sound of hysterical laughter.

  “Shut up,” Lindsay said.

  “Can I come out now?” asked the caller.

  “Yes, I think the date is officially over,” Lindsay replied.

  Lindsay’s best friend, Rob Wu, emerged from behind a nearby stall that sold replicas of nineteenth-century ladies’ undergarments. He was wiping tears of laughter from his cheek. “Oh man, Linds. That guy was so young he was an embryo.” Rob was a slender and neatly manicured Taiwanese man, whose accent flipped back and forth between Chinese and Southern—sometimes within the same word. The chaplaincy supervisor and head of the Pastoral Service Department at the hospital where Lindsay worked, Rob spent as much time as he possibly could figuring out how to schedule her for back-to-back night shifts and then hiding from her wrath when the schedule was posted. He considered this pursuit both a hobby and a vocation.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have let you come. I’ll never hear the end of this.” Lindsay had asked Rob along for moral support in case she got stood up or her date turned out to be a total creep. She never would have brought him if she had known that he would be a witness to her humiliation at the hands of a teenager who pees on his clothes as a hobby.

  “Seriously, why did you let that date go on for almost a half hour? What were you guys talking about all that time? Couldn’t you have gotten rid of him earlier?” Rob asked.

  Lindsay hung her head. “Actually, he was the one who ended it.”

  Rob grimaced and put a consoling arm around her. “Oh, Linds. What do you want to do now? Do you want to go home?”

  “I might as well stay and watch the reenactment. We know lots of the guys out there, and don’t usually get to see them in action. It might be fun. Besides, I’ve gone through a lot of waxing and buffing to get here today. I can’t remember the last time I was this shiny and hairless.”

  They found a seat on the grass behind a yellow rope that demarcated the field of battle. By now, crowds of spectators had gathered and the artificial conflict was in full swing. The reenactors seemed to be drawn from all walks of life—everyone from diehards who arrived days beforehand and set up authentically Spartan bivouacs on the edges of the open fields to hobbyists who showed up for a couple of hours and strained to fasten their blue or gray uniforms over the twenty-first century swell of their beer bellies.

  Lindsay surveyed the scene before her. Groups of Confederate and Union reenactors threw themselves into battle with the heedless zeal of lemmings hurling themselves into the sea. Doyle had moved out of the range of her vision, into the haze of cannon smoke. She looked up at the bright, almost pure-white sky, allowing herself to lapse into a kind of heat-induced meditation. She was grateful that at least Rob hadn’t been standing close enough to overhear their conversation. No one ever had to know about Doyle’s summer school classes or his lawnmower accident or his religious conversion. Her dreamy thoughts were punctuated by the thunder of the cannons and the war cries of the Rebs. Gradually the sounds changed. The canon fire died away, rep
laced by confused shouts and the wail of an ambulance siren.

  “What happened?” Lindsay asked. Her gaze zeroed in on the field before her where an ambulance maneuvered over the ground, leaving waves of bewildered reenactors in its wake. Even the billowing smoke from the artillery seemed to get out of the vehicle’s way.

  “No clue,” Rob replied. “Probably just some fatso reenactor passed out in all the excitement and heat.”

  The ambulance stopped at the farthest reach of the battlefield, out where the cleared land gave way to thick woods. Two paramedics hurried out and knelt over a soldier whose prone form was barely visible through the haze and confused movements of the reenactors. Lindsay strained to make out the details of the fallen body. She noted with relief that the injured reenactor was a large man, far too large to be Doyle or any of her reenactor friends.

  “I don’t know, Rob. Something’s not right.” The paramedics worked with a dreadful urgency that Lindsay had sometimes witnessed in the hospital’s ER. The kind of urgency that gave her a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, knowing that she might soon have to break bad news to some unlucky family. A few frenzied moments later, the paramedics loaded the fallen man onto a stretcher, spirited him into the ambulance and drove away toward the main road.

  All the soldiers had by now ceased fire and stood staring at one another. Their choreographed movements interrupted, they seemed to have forgotten their purpose. There were confused shouts and suddenly the onlookers who had been standing next to Lindsay broke through the perimeter rope and hurried onto the battlefield, checking to make sure that their husbands and sons were safe and accounted for. Lindsay and Rob found themselves propelled forward by the surging crowd. It felt for a moment as if a frenzied mob scene might erupt. Instead of a mass panic, though, the crowd began to slow and spread out. What ensued wasn’t mayhem, but rather a fairly orderly process of wives and girlfriends gathering up their make-believe soldiers and forcibly leading them away.

  Lindsay and Rob soon found themselves standing alone, about a dozen yards from where the fallen soldier had lain. The grass all around their feet was spattered with a rust-colored substance.

  “What is that? Engine oil from the ambulance?” Rob asked, following her gaze.

  Lindsay crouched down and touched her fingers to a place where the substance pooled on the parched grass. She gasped and jumped up, holding her hand out to Rob with a horrified expression. “It’s blood.”

  “Jesus,” Rob whispered, wiping Lindsay’s hand on his shirt. “Hey, let’s get out of here.” He tipped his head toward three uniformed police officers moving quickly in their direction, carrying what appeared to be crime scene tape. Rob grabbed Lindsay’s hand and they maneuvered swiftly back into the crowd.

  They made their way back to the stalls. “Why would there be blood splattered all over the ground if the guy just collapsed?” Lindsay asked quietly.

  “Maybe he hit is head on the way down or something,” Rob said distractedly as he scanned the nearby stalls. “I need a drink. I’m going to find a lemonade stand.” Rob was famously teetotal. He had never so much as tasted anything stronger than black coffee.

  “Honey, I’m gonna need something a lot stronger than lemonade,” Lindsay said. “I’m going home to crawl into a nice, comfy bottle of wine.” Might as well call it a day. After all, this had been the most successful date she had been on in recent memory. Best to quit while she was ahead.

  Chapter 2

  Two days later, Lindsay found herself eating breakfast in the cafeteria of Mount Moriah Hospital with Rob and their friend, Anna Melrose. Anna, an emergency room doctor, was tall and athletic, her tan skin set off nicely by her white doctor’s coat and perfect white teeth. With light brown hair gathered into a loose ponytail, she looked like she would be as comfortable playing beach volleyball as mending broken limbs and bloody noses in the ER. Her good looks alone were enough to render her despicable in the eyes of most female hospital staffers. Worst of all, though, Mount Moriah was a Southern hospital, smack in the middle of North Carolina, and Anna Melrose had the audacity to be from Hoboken, New Jersey. She had a rotating cast of boyfriends—often older, sometimes married, always very handsome.

  “I don’t know how you can eat those,” Rob flicked his fingers toward Anna’s bran muffin. “I swear those muffins are made from wheat chaff and recycled newspapers.”

  “What can I say? My body is a temple,” Anna countered.

  “A temple, huh? Must be one of those pagan temples where they have obscene week-long orgies,” Rob said.

  “Oh, it’s a pagan temple all right. A temple in which they sacrifice their enemies to dark and powerful gods.” Anna took a huge bite of her muffin. Still chewing, she said, “Just ask my ex-husband.” Anna paused and surveyed Rob’s breakfast—a Tupperware container of chicken wings and a muffin from the commissary. “There is really no justice in this world. You and Lindsay both eat like twelve-year-olds at a slumber party and don’t put on a pound. I even whisper the word ‘Twinkie’ and I have to spend two days in the gym.”

  Lindsay vaguely registered this smirch on her eating habits. Rather than defending herself, however, Lindsay merely sighed and began distractedly dragging her spoon through her bowl of Froot Loops.

  “Lindsay, are you still depressed that things didn’t work out on your neonatal soldier date?” Rob said. “You look terrible. I mean really, really awful.”

  “Aren’t you sweet to be concerned about my well being,” Lindsay said, flashing Rob a syrupy smile while simultaneously kicking his shin under the table. “But it’s not because of Doyle. Doyle was top notch. In fact, I’ve decided that from now on, seven-toed, Zoroastrian teenagers are my type.”

  “What is it then? Seriously, you look like a hairball wearing a chaplain’s coat,” Rob said.

  “As a matter of fact, I do feel like cat barf. I was up all night. A really nice guy passed away.”

  ##

  The events of the previous night seemed like a dream. At the beginning of her night shift, Lindsay had fallen into a fitful sleep in the hospital’s tiny chaplain’s bedroom. Around 1 a.m. she had been awaked by a page from the ICU. She had zombie-walked down the dimly lit hallway and up two flights of stairs passing through the main intensive care room, where the beds’ occupants lay sleeping and still—a row of sarcophagi. At the end of the room, a little hall led to two private rooms. Lindsay knocked on one of the doors.

  “Come in,” a woman responded.

  Lindsay opened the door. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the fluorescent lights that blazed from the ceiling, illuminating vinyl seat coverings, laminate tables, and curtains that forged an unholy alliance between paisley and polyester. Vernon Young, a plump yet sturdy-looking black man in his early thirties, lay in bed, connected to an array of life-support machines and monitors. Kimberlee Young, his wife, looked up wearily from her sentry post at his bedside. She had an appealing chubbiness and freckles that dotted her pale white skin like confetti. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. “Hey,” Kimberlee sighed.

  “Hey,” Lindsay replied. Her natural inclination was to follow this with, “How are you?” but years of chaplaincy training had driven that futile question out of her repertoire. Lindsay joined Kimberlee at Vernon’s bedside. “Would you like me to pray with you?”

  “No!” Kimberlee held her hands in front of her as if she were warding off an onrushing mugger. She got herself in check and relaxed her posture slightly. “I mean, no, thank you. I mean, I don’t see how that’s gonna do him any good at this point.”

  “The prayer doesn’t have to be for him. It can be a way of pausing to take it all in.” For two long days, Lindsay had shared Kimberlee’s bedside vigil. She had tried in vain several times to encourage Kimberlee to reflect and spend some quiet moments in her husband’s presence.

  Once again, Kimberlee resisted. “I don’t need to pause. I’m fine.” The two women sat together in silence, watching the rise and fall of Vernon’s che
st. Finally, Kimberlee stirred. “Did you see that Momma brought Vernon his favorite strawberry rhubarb pie?” Kimberlee gestured to the side table. An untouched pie topped with cross-hatched crust glistened under the fluorescent lights. “The man is in a coma, clinging to life, with an IV and a ventilator, and she bakes him a pie. I guess that’s her way of helping, but it’s so depressing for it to sit there like that. It’s such a waste.” She began to cry with a sudden force, as if a giant fist was squeezing the air from her lungs.

  Lindsay patted Kimberlee’s shoulder and walked purposefully out the door. The squish-squish of Lindsay’s rubber-soled footsteps diminished as she moved further away down the hall. Her sudden departure silenced Kimberlee’s sobs. She sat staring in astonishment at Lindsay’s empty chair. After a minute or two, Lindsay’s quick steps could be heard advancing back toward the room. Lindsay entered and walked past Kimberlee to the side table, wielding a small, white plastic spork that she had acquired from the nurses’ station. Without saying a word, she plunged the spork into the pie and took a bite of the pink, gooey filling. “That’s the best damn pie I’ve ever eaten,” she said, her mouth stuffed with fruit and pastry. She offered a heaping sporkful to Kimberlee, who looked at her as if she had just squirted Easy Cheese on a communion wafer.

  “Would your Vernon want you to sit there crying about a pie?” Lindsay asked. Kimberlee was dry-eyed now, but she continued to stare—silent and slack-jawed—at the chaplain. Lindsay raised her eyebrows expectantly and moved the pie-laden spork closer to Kimberlee. It seemed to hang in the air like a question mark. Finally, unable to hide the beginnings of a smile, Kimberlee held out her hand for the spork. The two women sat in silence, taking turns sporking up pie.

  ##

  Anna interrupted Lindsay’s thoughts. “Oh. Did that guy die? Bummer. You were friends with his wife or something, right?”

  “Not really. I knew her a little from high school. Her family owns Bullard's Bar-B-Q Buffet.”