Historical Mystery
Date Published: 03-01-2022
Publisher: New Arc Books / Level Best Books
It’s 1954. The place is Prosperity, North Carolina, a small farming community in Bliss County. Three teenagers, the 1953 championship-winning offensive backfield for Prosperity High, are unwilling participants in a horrific event that results in a young man’s death.
One of the friends harbors a tragic secret that could have prevented the crime. Divulging it would ruin his life, so he stays quiet, fully aware he will carry a stain of guilt for the rest of his life.
The three buddies go their separate ways for almost a decade, before another tragedy brings them back to Prosperity in 1968. Now in their thirties, it is a time of civil and racial unrest in America.
They discover the man who committed murder back in ’54 is now the mayor, and rules the town with an autocratic iron fist. He’s backed by his own private force of sheriff’s deputies and forcibly intimidates and silences any malcontents.
Worse, now he’s set his sights on Congress.
A Kind and Savage Place spans half a century from 1942 to 1989 and examines the dramatic racial and societal turmoil of that period through the microcosmic lens of a flyspeck North Carolina agricultural community.
Excerpt
Chapter One
Clyde Dillard once witnessed a cat funeral.
It was a hot night. 1942. He slept in his bedroom on the ground floor of his parents’ house in Prosperity, North Carolina. The house was divided into two wings, separated by a breezeway with jalousie windows that opened on sweltering summer nights so people could sip iced tea with lemonade and listen to Lum and Abner or The Shadow on the radio without melting into skin puddles on the flagstone floor.
Clyde lay on the sheets in his skivvies, the window open so the breeze could waft across his pudgy, sweaty body. Outside, the glow from a streetlamp splashed in every direction, creating ghostly shadows on the trees.
It was after three in the morning. Dozing fitfully, Clyde didn’t hear the brief screech of brakes or the sudden death outside his window.
He awakened sometime later to a keening howl. He recalled the stories Aunt Kelly had told him of banshees, the ethereal beings who sat on a family’s doorstep and heralded death inside. His heart skipped a beat as he imagined a banshee had come to visit their home, the moaning screech rising and falling over and over.
Shaking, he drew back the curtains and rubbed his eyes. There was no ghost, no howling specter. Instead, he saw a circle of cats crouched under the streetlight, outside the brilliantly lighted circle on the asphalt. In the center of the circle lay the motionless body of a tabby, its head at a precarious angle, its scruffy body sprawled carelessly. The circle of cats took turns eulogizing him in their mournful, howling cries, each feline lamenting the tabby’s passing in turn.
As if on a signal, the circle of cats slowly dispersed. Each member of the funeral party slinked out of the spill until only a single, melancholy mourner was left. This last cat stretched, stuck its tail straight up, emitted a terrifying shriek, and—its piece spoken—stole into the darkness.
In the intervening years, Clyde hadn’t seen another funeral, human or animal, and he’d never seen a creature die, save for the occasional fish he pulled from Six Mile Creek. Death largely spared his childhood.
When he was drafted into the army at the height of the Korean War, he imagined he might be sent directly to the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The military had other plans for him. He whiled away his three-year stint in an office in Anchorage, reviewing and filing paperwork and developing a powerful devotion to alcohol that would stalk him like a jilted girlfriend for the balance of his life. When his parents died in the most unlikely of circumstances—their car stalled at a railroad crossing in Mica Wells as a Southern Railway freight train bore down on them at full steam—he was unable to get back to North Carolina before the funeral.
Having inherited the house free and clear, he naturally gravitated back to Prosperity upon his discharge and, in 1953, at the age of twenty-two, he settled into day-to-day life as a clerk in the local hardware store. He resigned himself to a life of obscure but dedicated work without ever contributing a thing of consequence to the world, after which he expected to be utterly forgotten.
Nothing in his life prepared him for what happened in 1954.
Chapter Two
Arlo Pyle imagined himself an enlightened man. He believed he was open to most ideas, as long as they weren’t communist or fascist. He’d left his wife and daughters behind to fight Hitler and his jackbooted thugs all over Europe and had no desire to allow those ideas to infiltrate his country. Otherwise, he perceived himself open to change. In truth, the southern roots of unreconstructed racism dug deep into his skull and wrapped themselves around his brain like tendrils of razor wire.
After returning from Europe, Arlo bought an auto shop in Prosperity. He was good with his hands, understood engine mechanics, and enjoyed jaw sessions with the various friends who’d drop in from time to time when business was slow. Word of his craftmanship spread. By the early 1950s people from as far away as the county seat in Morgan would bring their cars to Prosperity for Arlo’s meticulous attention.
In late winter of 1953, a Negro teenager named Everett Howard walked into the garage and waited patiently against a wall as Arlo adjusted the timing on a Hudson Hornet. It was common for curious kids from the town to drop in and watch. There weren’t five television sets in all of Prosperity. Hanging out in Arlo’s shop was worlds cheaper than taking the bus to Morgan for the picture show.
“Something I can do for you, Ev?” Arlo asked when he finally looked up.
“Yes, sir,” Ev said, almost a whisper, afraid to make direct eye contact. “I’m out of school. I’m not going back.”
Prosperity had an elementary school, a junior high, and a high school for whites. Colored children went to a smaller, rougher, poorly heated school from kindergarten until they dropped out at the earliest legal age. The graduation rate at the colored school hovered around zero. Nobody expected Ev to stay in school. Everyone regarded him as a bit on the slow side. He could read most words, and his writing was legible, but his command of more complex subjects went lacking.
“I…” Ev’s voice trailed off.
“Yes, Ev? What is it?”
Ev took a deep breath and blurted, “Would you give me a job?”
Arlo sighed. He pulled a couple of six-ounce bottles from the ice in the Coca-Cola chest, and handed one to Ev.
“Thank you kindly, Mr. Arlo.”
“Do you know anything about cars?”
“A little, sir. I can change tires good. And I’m good at washin’ them.”
“You ever worked on an engine? How about putting new tires on a rim? You know how to work an Iron Jack?”
“I can learn, sir.”
“C’mere.,” Arlo grabbed a speedwrench from his tool chest and fitted it with a spark plug socket. He pulled a box from the shelf and handed both to Ev. “Change the spark plugs on this Hornet here.”
As it happened, changing spark plugs was one of the things Ev understood. He laid the plugs side-by-side on the workbench, pulled the ignition wire from the front plug on the straight-six engine, unscrewed the old plug, and torqued the new plug in its place. He repeated this with all six plugs.
“Why’d you only unhook one wire at a time?” Arlo asked.
“Didn’t want to get them confused, sir. If I put ‘em back on the wrong plugs, the car won’t run right.”
“No, it won’t. You know that much, I reckon. I’ll be honest with you. Ain’t much mechanical work around here for you. I could do with a fetcher and an all-around chore boy, though. You fetch parts, wash cars, change plugs when I ask, sweep the shop, pump gas, and keep the shelves stocked, and I reckon I can pay you seventy-five cents an hour. That’s the minimum wage. I don’t reckon you’ll do better elsewhere with no high school and no training.”
Ev Howard went to work as a fetcher for Arlo Pyle’s auto shop. He picked up and delivered parts from warehouses all over Bliss County, or from whatever local junkyard would let a youngster of Ev’s complexion rummage through the inventory unmonitored. Ev proved to be a reliable worker, adept at ferreting out obscure parts for older cars that found their way into Arlo’s garage.
During Ev’s second week at the garage, Arlo said, “Hey, Ev. You like to fish?”
“I do, sir,” Ev told him. “I know a few nice places to catch brook trout on Six Mile Creek.”
“You got a tackle box for your gear?”
“No, sir.”
Arlo handed him a battered stamped steel toolbox he was replacing. When Ev opened it, a hinged shelf attached by rivets swung up to reveal additional storage below. The shelf was divided into compartments, the perfect size for hooks, spinners, weights, and bobs.
“I can have this?”
“Beats tossing it in the trash,” Arlo said.
“It’s a beauty.” Ev admired the dented, shopworn box. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Tell you what. Bring me a couple of brook trout and we’ll be jake.”
Later that night, Ev arranged all his equipment in the compartments on the hinged pop-up shelf. He stowed a scaling knife and a fish line in the bottom, and scratched E. Howard into the enameled face of the tackle box with a nail, so nobody would mistake it for their own and walk away with it.
_________
In 1954, about a year after Ev Howard came to work for him, five dollars went missing from Arlo Pyle’s petty cash box.
Arlo found Tom Tackett at the brake lathe, shaving thousandths of an inch of steel from the inner surface of a brake drum. Threads of iridescent metal spooled off the cutting head, pooling around Tackett’s feet like fine tinsel.
Tackett was in his middle twenties, recently mustered out of the Army after the end of the Korean War. He’d allowed his hair to grow long, and he tortured it into a pompadour, laden with enough pomade to lubricate a battleship. He swept it in from both sides in the back, to form a ducktail Arlo found contemptible. It was a rebellious style, copied from Yankee street toughs and Hollywood hedonists, and had become a raging fashion over the last year after the release of The Wild One starring Marlon Brando. Arlo swore, if he ever managed to get Adele to squeeze out a son, he’d never allow him to have a ducktail.
“Tom?”
“Yeah, boss?” Tackett said, grinning. Both of his top front teeth were chipped, as if someone had broken off the inside corners of his incisors with a BB gun. Sometimes, the gap whistled when he talked.
“Did you take petty cash for anything? Pay a vendor?”
“No, boss. Why? Some money missing?”
“Five bucks. Can’t recall using it myself.”
“I saw Ev come out of your office this morning.”
“I can’t imagine Ev would steal from me.”
“Cain’t never tell with them kind. My daddy used to say all they want is tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.”
“That’s enough,” Arlo warned. “I won’t have that talk in this garage. I’m a Christian man, river-dipped and born again. You keep a decent tongue in your head when you’re under my roof.”
“Sure thing, boss. Don’t mean I didn’t see him.”
Arlo returned to his office and recounted the money in the petty cash box. It still came up five dollars short.
His only suspect was Ev Howard. He had no hard evidence, other than the word of Tom Tackett. Tackett was openly prejudiced, but Arlo didn’t believe he’d falsely accuse another man—of any color—of a crime like theft.
The idea the young man he’d given an opportunity might steal from him grew inside his head like a carbuncle, until he could stand it no longer.
____________
Ev had taken Arlo’s truck to Morgan to pick up a load of alternators from a storehouse. It was early April, but Bliss County was under a heat wave. Sweat ran down his face and chest like rivulets of thawed runoff on a stone mountain cliff. He’d removed his smart gray and white pinstriped shirt while he loaded the truck, to prevent soiling it. He was proud of the shirt. On one breast was an embroidered Pyle Garage emblem. On the other was a patch with his name. Arlo had given him five of them, one for each day of the week. They were a recognition of the trust Arlo placed in him. The shirts hadn’t been cheap. If Arlo paid for them, it meant he trusted Ev and expected him to stay around for a while. Ev was determined to take good care of his work shirts.
As he drove out of Morgan, Ev watched the landscape transform from office buildings, shopping centers, banks, and grocery stores into fertile, rolling farmland. He pulled the truck into a parking space next to the garage. Tom Tackett leaned against the building, smoking a cigarette, his arms stained to the elbow with grime.
“Hoo-boy, you in the shit now,” Tackett said, smirking. He jerked his head in the direction of Arlo’s office.
Arlo walked out of his office and crooked a finger at him.
“Give me a minute, Ev?” His face was dark and hard. Ev couldn’t recall when Arlo had looked as stern.
“Yes, sir.” He followed Arlo into the office. Arlo sat behind his desk. Ev had never asked to sit in one of the office seats, and he wasn’t about to presume the privilege now.
“Got some money missing from the petty cash box,” Arlo said. “You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”
“No, sir.”
“Tom told me he saw you in my office this morning, and there’s five dollars missing now. You want to tell me why you were in my office?”
“I was emptying the trash, like I do every day. I don’t want to talk bad about Mr. Tackett, but I don’t think he likes me. I think he’d prefer to see me fired.”
“I know he would,” Arlo said. “Between you and me, Tom’s lied to me once or twice. But lying ain’t stealing. This is a serious thing, this missing money. I want to believe you, but I’m going to ask you to turn out your pockets.”
Ev complied without hesitation. The search yielded seventy-eight cents and a worn bone-handled pocketknife. Arlo examined the pitiable contents of Ev’s pockets again before he spoke.
“I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, Ev, because you’ve done good work, and as far as I know you’ve never lied to me. Hell, I don’t know if you’re smart enough to lie. What do you think?”
“I done told a whopper or two in my time, Mr. Pyle, but never to you. I promise.”
“I’ll take you at your word,” Arlo said. “Get back to work.”
Despite his reassurances to Ev, Arlo remained unconvinced. He truly wished to believe in the boy, but the missing cash had planted the seeds of doubt deeply in his mind.
Chapter Three
The smaller agricultural towns in northern Bliss County were clustered like grapes around the Morgan Highway, with boundaries more fluid than concrete. Prosperity was a farming community, as were most of the small towns that included Mica Wells, Tulip Springs, and Wolfville, names held over from Revolutionary War times. The land in Prosperity had been cultivated by families named Wheeler, Poole, Tackett, Burch, Craighead, Pressley, Broome, Mosack, and Newton for over two hundred years. Many farmhouses were in Prosperity but connected to land in Mica Wells. During a wedding inside one Primitive Baptist Church, the bride would stand before the preacher in Tulip Springs and the groom in Wolfville. A hike from the center of one town to the other would scarcely raise a sweat.
In Mica Wells, an enterprising young man named Rennie Poole converted an old hay storage barn into a bluegrass music hall. He laid a plank floor, covered it with peanut shells, and installed surplus gym bleachers along one long wall of the barn for seating. A kerosene heating system blasted hot, oily air in the winter. In the summer, he handed out funeral home fans at the door.
Poole, who owned the feed and seed in Morgan on which the farmers of Prosperity depended, called it the Mica Wells Bluegrass Barn. He puffed out his chest, and proclaimed he was giving back to the fine people in Bliss County, who’d bestowed him with such admirable business success. He conveniently neglected to mention the decent profit the Bluegrass Barn made itself each week.
People had a choice on Saturday nights. They could relax on their porches, listening to the Grand Ol’ Opry on a static-filled AM signal from WSM in Nashville, enduring the constant crackles and pops from thunderstorms hundreds of miles away. Or they could head to Mica Wells and catch some live bluegrass and country, played by some of the biggest names in the Carolinas.
On a warm Saturday night in early May 1954, Coral Pyle arrived at the Bluegrass Barn with several of her friends. She’d be seventeen in a couple of weeks. She was only an inch or so over five feet, with wavy blonde hair she pulled back in a ponytail, eyes the color of a robin’s egg, and a reputation for trouble. The baby of Arlo and Adele’s family, she’d gotten away with murder almost since birth.
Arlo and Adele had brought four daughters into the world before Arlo ventured off to Europe to vanquish the Hun. After the rampant angst of the first baby, the more relaxed approach to Daughter Number Two, and almost laissez-faire childrearing with the third girl, Coral’s upbringing had been left largely to herself, with her parents’ indulgence. Coral was the prettiest of the bunch, and the liveliest. She could sing better, dance better, and had more friends. Everyone loved Coral.
Two of the daughters had married and moved away as quickly as they could. Only the third daughter, Grace, remained in Prosperity to languish in the reflected glow of her younger sister. Grace was pretty enough, and smart enough, but she was no Coral. Everyone said so.
Sometimes they said it to her face.
Several of Coral’s friends had decided to come together and asked Coral to join them. It took her about ten seconds to overcome Adele’s objections, so she arrived at the Barn before her parents and Grace.
The first person she saw as she climbed from her friend Stacey’s car was Jude Pressley. He’d parked his rodded Willys Overland coupe in the gravel lot three cars down, and was chatting with his buddies Owen Wheeler and Billy Mosack. All of them wore Prosperity High letter jackets. Jude glanced across the cars at Coral and gave her a small wave. An electric jolt arced across her chest.
Jude graduated from Prosperity High the previous year after leading the football team to three county championships and scoring thirteen school records. Pictures of Jude at quarterback and Owen Wheeler and Billy Mosack filling out the backfield had been enshrined in the trophy case at the high school under a plaque proclaiming them The Trinity. Coral wasn’t interested in Owen or Billy. Her sister Grace had gone to a couple of school dances with Jude the previous year, and Coral had crushed on him ever since. He was tall and athletic, with jet black wavy hair and sky-blue eyes, and his crooked smile gave her strange sensations she could neither control nor completely understand.
Owen Wheeler apparently told a joke because all three of them guffawed. Billy Mosack grabbed Owen’s letter jacket and dragged him toward the entrance of the Barn. Jude Pressley stayed behind.
“Hi, Coral. You’re not with your family tonight?” he asked, after greeting the other girls.
“They’re coming. I rode with Stacey and the girls. I like your car.”
Jude glanced back at his Willys. He’d bought it for a hundred bucks, money he’d earned hoisting fifty-pound bags at Rennie Poole’s Feed and Seed during the summer, and had given it a flashy new Earl Scheib paint job. It was electric red, like nail polish, and glistened under coat after coat of hand-rubbed carnauba wax.
“Maybe I’ll give you a ride sometime,” he said.
“I’ll hold you to it. You headed inside? Billy and Owen already went in.”
_____________
Arlo and Adele Pyle arrived a couple of minutes after the girls and Jude entered the barn. By the time Grace and her parents made their way inside, the teenagers were clustered on the top tier of the bleachers at the far corner.
“You think she’ll be okay in that crowd?” Adele asked.
“I think she’d be okay in any crowd,” Arlo said. “At least, this way, we can keep an eye on her. She can’t take off without us knowing.”
Albert Allen and his Smoky Mountain Boys opened their set with Mule Skinner Blues. When Albert Allen showed up, Rennie Poole never worried about keeping the crowd until the end of the night. They always closed the third set with a seven-minute rendition of Orange Blossom Special that started slow and gradually built to a crescendo of foot-stomping, clog-dancing, and horsehairs flying off the fiddle bow. Nobody dared leave before Allen’s fiddler played those first wah-wah plink-plink notes.
Nobody except the teenagers. After the first set, they bypassed the refreshments to congregate in the parking lot. Many nights, it wasn’t uncommon to find the second set strike up with several automobiles in the gravel lot still rocking on their springs. Many of Bliss County’s youngest citizens owed their existence to the Mica Wells Bluegrass Barn.
At the first intermission, Coral found The Trinity standing next to Jude’s Willys, passing a pint bottle back and forth. Coral put on her most petulant face and waggled a finger at Jude.
“Does your dad know what you’re doing out here?” she asked in jest.
He handed her the bottle. “Does yours?”
She took a swig, made an obligatory face, and handed the bottle back.
“I’m bored,” she said. “They won’t play Orange Blossom Special for at least another hour and a half.”
“Wanna take a ride?” Jude asked.
About the Author
Richard Helms is a retired college professor and forensic psychologist. He has been nominated eight times for the SMFS Derringer Award, winning it twice; seven times for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award, with a win in 2021; twice for the ITW Thriller Award, with one win; four times for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award with one win: and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He is a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, along with other periodicals and short story anthologies. His story “See Humble and Die” was included in Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2020. A Kind and Savage Place is his twenty-second novel. Mr. Helms is a former member of the Board of Directors of Mystery Writers of America, and the former president of the Southeast Regional Chapter of MWA. When not writing, Mr. Helms enjoys travel, gourmet cooking, simracing, rooting for his beloved Carolina Tar Heels and Carolina Panthers, and playing with his grandsons. Richard Helms and his wife Elaine live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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