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Prologue

Spring, 1970

Lulu didn’t even try to hide her amusement about the young man’s fascination with her breasts. It was clearly the first time the kid had ever seen a bra-less woman in a see-through top.

The postal clerk was so rattled by Lulu Jefferson’s fashion statement that he almost forgot to stick the stamp she bought onto her envelope before posting and tossing it into the local mail bin. 

The bra-less look was all the sensation in California. It just hadn’t reached Chester, West Virginia, yet. With its cobblestone streets and churches on every street corner, some people would think the small town was still stuck in the fifties.

Singer-songwriter Lulu Jefferson kept up on all the latest fads. It was essential in her line of work. On her way to being the next Nancy Sinatra, Lulu wore her sun-bleached hair down past her waist and her skirts up above the middle thigh. Her bare feet were more of a statement of her generation than her country roots. Lulu preferred the Rolling Stones to Hank Williams.

The singer hummed her next would be hit (if it were ever to reach the ears of the right people) as she strolled up the Second Street hill to her rented room over the Langley’s garage nestled under an old maple tree.

Sometimes Lulu thought Chester was surrounded by a force shield, like something out of Star Trek, which kept the rest of the world out. Her friends were selective about the outside influences they let inside: like marijuana that tunes you in, miniskirts and hot pants that threaten to show more than thigh, and see-through tops that make postal clerks swallow their chewing gum.

Not that that was all bad.

Somebody has to stay sane in the midst of the chaos created by the changing times.

The small town way of life suited Lulu’s best friends, Claire and Johnny Thornton. Marriage and a kid worked for them. They were so into this Father Knows Best stuff that they ran off to the Grand Canyon to make another kid.

“Good for them!” Lulu thought. “But that Ozzie and Harriet Nelson stuff is not for me. Hollywood, here I come!”

She sighed in admiration of the green on the trees. “Wow!” she breathed. The blossoms were gone. Spring was over. “When did that happen?” she wondered as she crossed Indiana Avenue.

Time sure does fly.

Man, does it fly! The bus for her gig in Philadelphia was leaving at five o’clock in the morning and she still had to pack.

As she jogged up the shady street to her apartment, Lulu made a list for the first time in her life, even if only in her mind, of what she had left to do before leaving town. Mentally, she checked off her meeting with Reverend Orville Rawlings to go over the music for the wedding.

“What a trip!” Lulu giggled to herself. “Wait until Claire reads about that.”

Lulu reminded herself that she had to take all her miniskirts and halter-tops. Her long legs and breasts were her biggest assets, as the kid in the post office would testify. As much as the singer/songwriter wanted to believe that she would make it to the top in show business on her talent, Lulu couldn’t deny that sex sells. Good thing she enjoyed it as much as the next guy did.

Chester was still getting used to the open sexuality thing, Lulu observed, when she caught her landlady’s disapproving gape at her bare legs accentuated by her bright purple hot pants.

The mature woman shook her head at Lulu’s skimpy attire and made a “tsk, tsk” noise with her tongue before resuming the chore of weeding her flowerbed.

Kicking and screaming all the way into the twentieth century, Lulu giggled as she ran up the steps to her apartment.

Well, Lulu told herself, she could check another item off her list. She wrote and mailed that letter to Claire. She wished she could be around to see all the excitement when the Thorntons read it.

Lulu opened the door and stepped into her apartment. She didn’t bother digging out her key because people didn’t lock their doors in Chester. There was no reason for security in this burg. Lulu tossed her bag to the floor like she always did and slammed the door to make sure it latched.

That was the last thing Lulu did before the hand clamped the handkerchief over her face. The chloroform rushed up her nostrils, down into her lungs, through her bloodstream, and hit her brain like a bullet.

In her unconscious state, Lulu Jefferson was unable to enjoy the trip on which the hottest recreational drug, all the rage in California, took her. It was the trip of her life-and death.

Chapter One

Summer, Over Thirty Years Later

“Smile and say good morning,” Beth Davis ordered the reflection in her compact’s mirror when the bell over the front door signaled her first pharmacy customer of the morning. The druggist flexed the muscles in her cheeks to curl the corners of her lips into a smile.

On the corner of Carolina Avenue and Fifth Street in the heart of town, Chester Drug Store had been owned and operated by the Martin family since 1960.

Since the closing of the steel mills in the early eighties created an exodus of each new generation to the surrounding cities of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and even Washington, D.C., for financial survival, business ownership in the valley was in a state of constant turnover.

The 1990 census indicated that senior citizens were a majority in the small town. The 2000 census showed that the tide was shifting. Young families were moving into town to seek sanctuary from the very forces Chester’s eager younger generation was pursuing in the metropolis.

Another sign of life returning to Chester was evident in the landscape. Housing developments dotted the countryside where huge farms used to lie. An imaginative real estate contractor even managed to squeeze a townhouse development in place of some long abandoned railroad tracks behind Martin’s drug store.

Beth Davis had just finished her sixth mug of coffee and put on her white pharmacist robe when Joshua Thornton and his sixteen-year-old son Murphy came in and made their way down the center aisle to the pharmacy at the back of the store. Beth kept her back to them while she transformed her mood from sulky to perky.

Joshua tapped his knuckles on the counter. “Excuse me?”

Beth snapped the compact shut and turned around. When her sleep-filled eyes met Joshua’s clear blue ones, she shrieked.

The former naval officer, trained to always look perfect, had on the same rumpled clothes he had worn the previous day and slept in on a filthy hardwood floor. The day’s growth of beard was evidence that he couldn’t find his shaving kit. Despite his unkempt appearance, Joshua Thornton was still as handsome as he was the day he graduated valedictorian from Oak Glen High School. There were a couple of crow’s feet in the corners of his blue eyes and strands of gray hair at his temples; but he still had the same finely chiseled features that made Beth’s heart skip a beat when he first invited her to go with him for an ice cream cone.

It took a moment for Joshua to see the cause for the pharmacist’s startled reaction. Her long thick strawberry blond hair was lighter and shorter, but freckles were still splashed across her upturned nose.

“Josh?” the druggist whispered for assurance that the image before her was not a fantasy.

“Hello, Beth.” Joshua couldn’t help but smile back.

Beth lunged across the counter, grasped his shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth.

The sight of the woman’s open display of affection for his father prompted the teenage boy to raise an eyebrow. His father quickly explained the enthusiastic greeting by introducing Beth Davis as an old friend.

Beth laughed out loud at Joshua’s introduction. “Old friend? Is that all I am?” She confided to Murphy, “We almost got married the night of the senior prom.”

“You don’t have to tell my son about that.” Joshua studied the few changes he could see in Beth since the last time he had seen her. Tiny lines had formed around Beth’s mouth and there were dark circles under her eyes. The youthful pinkness in her cheeks had disappeared.

Well, he reminded himself, aren’t we all getting older?

Joshua told his son, “That was a long time ago. Beth and I dated before I met your mother.”

Murphy wasn’t going to let his father off so easy. “Dad, she said you just about married her.”

With pleasure, Beth noted the striking resemblance the boy bore to his father. Murphy had inherited their father’s brown wavy hair and blue eyes with his fair complexion. Joshua Thornton’s genes also showed in the boy’s lean athletic build. Just inches shorter than his father, the boy was still tall for his age.

Beth giggled girlishly. “You mean he never told you? Oh, we were the couple in high school. Your father was the quarterback, first string in his junior year -”

“Yeah, Mom told us about that.”

“-and I was varsity cheerleader.” Beth struck a pose with her hand on her hip and an imaginary pompom in the air. “Go, Bears! Oh, those were the days!”

The bell over the door at the front of the store jingled. In the security mirror, Beth saw Jan Martin studying the headlines in the morning paper while making her way down the aisle. She yelled louder than necessary and waved to her boss. “Hey, Jan, guess who this is. You’ll never guess.”

In an attempt to place a name with her face, Joshua studied the rail thin woman with a pair of brown wire framed glasses perched on her nose and long copper-colored hair tied back with an elastic band into a ponytail. She was dressed in a pair of khaki pants a size too big and a plain, white, button-down shirt.

Instantly recognizing her former childhood friend, Jan ripped off her glasses and smoothed her ponytail in one swift action. “Josh? Josh Thornton? So that moving truck did belong to you.”

“It wasn’t mine personally,” Joshua joked. “It actually belonged to a government contractor.”

“What moving truck?” Beth asked.

“Didn’t you see it?” Jan fingered her dowdy clothes. “Last night, the biggest moving truck anyone in this town ever saw was unloading all this stuff at the Grandma Frieda’s old stone house up on Pennsylvania. I saw it on my way home after we closed.”

Beth smirked. “Some of us have better things to do than watch movers unloading junk.”

Ignoring Beth’s biting comment, Jan told Joshua, “That black, antique Corvette must be yours, too.”

“Corvette? Nice, Josh.” Beth leaned on her elbows against the counter and swayed sideways on her heels like the carefree teenager she longed to be once again. “Tad told me that you quit the Navy.”

Joshua nodded his head. “Tad has been a big help since Val died. He met the movers yesterday to unload my stuff. We didn’t get in until one o’clock this morning and spent the night on the floor in sleeping bags.” He indicated his and Murphy’s bedraggled appearances. “That’s why we look like we just went on a forced march across the country.”

“I imagine that big, old house is going to need a lot of work,” Jan observed. “It’s sat empty ever since Frieda died.”

“Over ten years.” Joshua suppressed a gasp of recognition when he finally recognized her. “Jan Martin literally grew up down the street from me,” he introduced her to Murphy.

After a few pleasantries, Jan told Joshua solemnly, “I was sorry to hear about your wife dying. I’m surprised that you left the Navy though.”

“Valerie’s death forced me to examine my priorities. It is impossible to raise five kids alone while putting in eighty hours a week and traveling for JAG.”

“JAG?” Beth asked.

Joshua explained, “I was a lawyer assigned to the Judge Advocate General.”

Murphy told them with pride, “Dad convicted an admiral for murder and sent him to Leavenworth for life.”

Despite Murphy’s announcement, Beth appeared disappointed. “So you never saw any action?”

“Only in a courtroom,” Joshua demurred.

Beth abruptly changed the subject by stating in a perky tone, “Jan manages the store now.”

“Mom is semi-retired,” the store manager explained. “I write for the paper-”

Giggling, Beth interjected, “She writes these charming little articles for The Evening Review.”

“Where are the rest of your children?” Jan asked abruptly.

“They are sorting out all the furniture and crates back at the house. I left J.J.-That’s Joshua Jr. We call him J.J.- in charge. He’s Murphy’s twin. I also have two daughters, Tracy and Sarah, and another son, Donny.”

Amused, Jan said, “Figures that an orphan and only child would have five kids.”

Joshua chuckled at the irony of his life before telling his old friends, “We’re on our way to my new office. I bought Doc Wilson’s old place.” He didn’t miss Beth and Jan’s exchange of raised eyebrows.

“No one has been in that place since Doc died four years ago.” Beth giggled.

Joshua rationalized, “George warned me that it was a fixer upper. But the building is solid, and it is a good location right here in town.”

Jan reassured him. “I’m sure it will be a gem once you fix it up. Is there anything we can do to help?”

Reminded of what had brought him into the store, Joshua turned his attention to Beth. “My son Donny has asthma. Tad told me he called in a prescription for his medication, and I want to make sure you have it.” He was aware of Jan’s watchful eye on the druggist while Beth stood up from where she had been leaning against the counter to check her computer to find that she did have the prescription ready to fill.

After the father and son left the store, Beth mused, “He still looks great, doesn’t he?” She noted that since they were last lovers Joshua Thornton still had his slender waist and fit well into his worn jeans.

Jan groaned and slumped back to her office with her newspaper clutched against her flat chest.

Swoosh!

On the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifth Street, the box Joshua Junior (J.J.) held, propelled by the force of ten-year-old Donny Thornton’s blow aimed for his sister’s head, flew across the stone house’s attic. The collection of letters and pictures inside scattered like falling leaves in an autumn breeze. A stack of letters tied together with a pink ribbon hit the floor to create a mushroom cloud of dust.

Thirteen-year-old Sarah retaliated with a fist to the side of Donny’s head. The force of her blow knocked him into a stack of boxes. The whole stack tumbled to the floor and their contents spilled out across the floor.

It was an easy task for Sarah Thornton to win in the physical challenge from her plump, bookish, little brother. Sarah was an athletically muscular girl. She always wore her straight blond hair in a ponytail, and no makeup ever touched her face. Cosmetics were for prissy girls, like Tracy, her sister who was older by two years.

“Knock it off!” As J.J. inserted himself between his battling siblings, he mentally recalled the moments before the fight broke out to determine what had prompted it. Was it really just because Donny was standing in Sarah’s way when she was getting ready to go downstairs?

While her brother scolded Donny and Sarah after breaking up the fight, Tracy Thornton knelt in the thick dust that covered the floor to repack the boxes overturned in the brawl.

Tracy Thornton was a girl on her way to womanhood. Like her late mother, Tracy was petite and delicate looking. Even with only a touch of makeup, she was pretty. Despite the California sun in their last home in San Francisco, Tracy’s skin, exposed under the tank top and shorts she wore for relief from the misery of the summer’s humidity, was still the color of milk. She had pulled her long auburn hair back into a ponytail in anticipation of a day of hard work.

In the dimly lit attic, with the only light provided by a single bare light bulb and what sunlight that could make it in through the bug and dirt encrusted windows, it was difficult for her to tell if she was finding everything. 

“Sarah, why can’t you just let him go?” J.J. asked his sister.

Tracy retrieved an envelope out from under the dresser. Observing that the seal was unbroken, she studied the address and postmark.

“He took a swing at me!” Sarah stated her case for justifiable assault.

The postmark on the envelope was Chester, West Virginia. It was mailed from in town.

J.J. reminded her, “You knocked him down first.”

“I barely touched him,” Sarah scoffed.

“Hey, guys, look at this!” Clutching the unopened envelope, Tracy stood up and showed them the letters bound with the pink ribbon and the unopened envelope.

“These letters are all addressed to Claire MacMillan. That was Dad’s mom. They’re from overseas.” Tracy shifted through the pictures from the box. “And these pictures are of a young couple. I think they’re Dad’s parents.”

“These are Grandpa’s letters to Grandma,” J.J. confirmed as he read the front and back of the envelopes in the stack. “Dad will get a kick out of seeing these.”

“Let’s read them.” Sarah grabbed for the letters.

J.J. held them out of her reach. “No, they’re personal. We’ll give them to Dad, and, if he wants us to read them, he’ll let us.”

Tracy pointed to the front of the envelopes. “Look at the date on those letters. They’re the sixties.” She showed them the envelope she had found separated from those tied with the ribbon. “But this envelope is postmarked 1970. It is addressed to Claire Thornton from someone named Jefferson. The return address is Chester, West Virginia. It was never opened.”

“Maybe the humidity resealed it.” Intrigued, J.J. studied the envelope. He noticed the post date. “May 8, 1970. Why does that date ring a bell?”

“That was before you were even born,” Sarah stated.

“Yeah, but I heard that date about something before,” J.J. countered. “Why would someone write a letter to someone right here in town in 1970 when they could call them on the phone? It doesn’t look like a card.” He compared the writing on the envelope to the other letters. “This isn’t Grandpa’s handwriting. It’s from someone else.”

“So this is a fixer-upper?” Murphy tried unsuccessfully to lighten his father’s mood by asking the question in a Brooklyn accent.

Joshua failed to see any humor in the quip.

During the whole one-and-a-half-block walk to his new office, Joshua reassured himself that he was wise to invest in Dr. Wilson’s two-story office building in the heart of Chester. He had a waiting area and two examination rooms on the ground floor. Upstairs, there was his private office and a lab.

Dr. Russell Wilson had been an institution in Chester for over seventy years. When Joshua Thornton was in high school, the doctor showed his young patient a yellowed diploma to prove that he had graduated from medical school in 1918. In his later years, the town’s only doctor suffered from arthritis so bad that he was forced to give Joshua his physical for his Naval Academy application from a desk chair. Despite the breaking down of his body, the doctor’s mind remained as sharp as a tack. He never had to check his files. He could recalled every detail about his patients, right down to their parents’ and ancestors’ medical history.

One of Chester’s most respected citizens, Dr. Wilson was as much a role model to Joshua Thornton as his grandfather, uncle, and cousin. It wasn’t until Joshua went to Annapolis that he discovered that not all doctors were stout men who smelled of a mixture of schnapps and cigars, and made house calls in the middle of the night.

All of Joshua’s efforts at self-encouragement about his investment failed upon sight of the abandoned building. The wooden siding was discolored and weather beaten beyond repair. The windows were so caked with filth that they had become opaque.

In the front foyer, a moose head greeted Joshua and his son. A huge bookcase with a broken glass front sat right smack in the middle of the bare, splintered, hardwood floors in the reception area. Murphy counted three roll top desks overflowing with stacks of files and papers.

The young man watched his father from over the junk piled up between them.

Joshua firmly grit his teeth in an effort to control his rising frustration over what was clearly an unwise investment made from across the country during what had to be the most traumatic year in his and his family’s life.

“So this is a fixer-upper?” Murphy quipped in an effort to get a laugh out of his father, or at least a smile.

Joshua turned around in a complete circle as he took in the monumental task that lay before him to make the building suitable for his place of business.

He must be too stunned to hear me, Murphy concluded as he picked up an old ceiling lamp that sat on top of a scarred examination table. The teenager’s action caused an avalanche of junk from the table and two stools on either side of it.

“Leave it!” Joshua ordered his son when he attempted to restack the junk. “Damn it! George must have seen me coming from a mile away!”

“Betcha didn’t know Mrs. Wilson was a pack rat?”

Not recognizing the jovial voice that interrupted his father’s curse, Murphy sought to see who had joined them.

A man dressed in jeans and an oversized white tee shirt had come through the open door behind them. He strolled around the office while picking up files and studying their contents like a patron perusing a shop open for business.

Except for additional smile lines and a few extra strands of gray in his hair that added character to a handsome face, the visitor resembled Joshua in his coloring and features. The most notable difference was that while Joshua was muscular from a lifetime of athletics their visitor was a full head shorter and slightly built. Whoever the stranger was, Murphy sensed he was friend rather than foe due to the smile that came to his father’s lips upon seeing him.

“I’ve been dying to see what was in here.” The visitor petted the moose head.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” There was a note of affection in Joshua’s accusatory query.

The visitor reached out and patted Joshua on the cheek. “Because if you bought it; lock, stock, and barrel, then I could get my hands on these files.” He indicated the folders and papers overflowing from the roll top desks, boxes, and crates scattered around the room.

“What do a bunch of old files mean to you?” Murphy asked.

“Most of these patients, the living ones that is, are now mine.”

Joshua turned to his son. “You don’t know who this is, do you?” He smiled in response to the shake of Murphy’s head. “This is the guy I’ve been exchanging e-mails with for the last six months. Dr. Tad MacMillan, my cousin, your second cousin. He’s the town doctor now.”

From where he was studying the moose head between himself and Murphy, Tad MacMillan winked at the teenager. “I’m the only doctor who has an office here in town and will lower himself to make house calls.” He added jokingly, “when I’m not sitting around empty houses all afternoon waiting for moving vans. You know those guys didn’t show up until six o’clock last night? It was dark by the time they got all that stuff out of that truck.”

Joshua told him with sincerity, “And I thank you for being there to let them in.”

Murphy gasped at Tad. “Now I remember you. You were at our great-grandmother’s funeral. You had long hair then, and gave me and J.J. rides on your motorcycle.”

“If your dad will let you, I can give you another ride. The bike I have now is even bigger and badder than the one I had back then.” While Murphy grinned in anticipation of another exhilarating ride on his cousin’s Harley, Tad held up a file he had picked up from one of the desks and returned his attention to the boy’s father. “So can I relieve you of these old files?” he asked the building’s new owner.

Joshua didn’t answer right away. “Why didn’t you just have your patients request them after Doc died? Then, his office would have had to send them over.”

“I did that, but Mrs. Wilson refused to send them. She was very eccentric.”

“I don’t remember that.”

Tad swore. “Oh, Josh! Come on! She washed her hands every five minutes, if not more-”

“She was a nurse.”

“She was a compulsive personality and she never forgot about the sins of my youth.”

“One of the curses of being a legend.”

“Are you a legend?” Murphy interjected.

“You’re too young to know,” Joshua answered. “I’ll tell you about the infamous Tad MacMillan when you’re thirty-six.”

Tad rolled his eyes. “I’m a good guy now! Anyway, Mrs. Wilson never let me forget about my wild days. She wouldn’t let anyone else forget it, either. She always called me that junkie down the street. After Doc died and I told my patients to request their files be sent over, Mrs. Wilson claimed in every case that she couldn’t find them. Then, after she died, her daughter-You remember Paula?”

Joshua answered the sudden question with a nod of his head.

Tad resumed his explanation. “Paula moved to Baltimore. She came back home for the funeral, took one look inside that house, which Mrs. Wilson never let anyone in after Doc died, and about fainted. That was when Paula discovered that her mother was a major pack rat.” Tad gestured with a wave of his hand at the contents of the room as proof of his statement.

“So I see,” Joshua responded.

“Paula hired a professional cleaning crew to clean out all the junk at their house. She had them bring all the stuff they didn’t take to the landfill down here and sold it to George.”

“Who unloaded it on me-on your recommendation.” Joshua pointed a finger of blame at Tad. “I trusted you.”

Murphy and his siblings would be intimidated into compliance by the glare Joshua aimed at his cousin. They called it “the look.”

Instead of backing down into a gesture of passivity, Tad MacMillan responded to Joshua’s “look” with a smile that lit up the dingy room. “Josh,” he purred, “have I ever let you down?”

The glare flickered. A grin fought its way to Joshua’s lips.

Murphy could now see why his second cousin was a legend. Tad MacMillan was clearly one of the most charismatic men the teenager had ever met. He could even charm Joshua Thornton.

Tad went on to offer, “I’ll help you clean this place out and buy the stuff that you can’t use if you will let me have these files.”

Joshua smirked mockingly at his son. “Should we?”

Why would someone want to kill a hippie songwriter like Lulu Jefferson? What was in the letter she mailed to Claire Thonrton that she was going to get such a kick out of? Why does Tad want in Doc's old run-down office? Can Joshua keep his children safe while finding out the answers to these questions? Read A Small Case of Murder and find out!

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