The Underground Lady

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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PUBLISHED BY
NIGHTTIME PRESS LLC

Copyright © 2012 Kindle Edition by JC Simmons

All rights reserved

Check out all 10 books in

The
Jay Leicester Mysteries
Series
by
JC Simmons
:

Blood on the Vine
Some People Die Quick

Blind Overlook
Icy Blue Descent
The Electra File
Popping the Shine
Four Nines Fine
The Underground Lady
Akel Dama
The Candela of Cancri

Now available at
Amazon.com
and the other usual outlets

The Underground Lady

(Book 8 of the
Jay Leicester Mysteries
Series)

By JC Simmons

***

PROLOGUE

The little yellow Piper Super Cub, known by pilots the world over as a PA-18, sat at the end of the grass landing strip glistening in the early morning sun like a rare jewel. Dew ran in rivulets down the windshield and pooled along the engine cowling. It seemed poised, ready to do what it was designed for, soar above the earth like an angel.

The old Willis Jeep, a relic from World War Two, drove up and parked behind the cub. A young woman got out and moved along the side of the airplane, running her hand across the taught fabric of the fuselage as if caressing a lover. She looked at the black lettering on the tail and smiled. N1HW. It was the registration number required by the Federal Aviation Administration, her call sign, and her initials.

Preflighting the Super Cub as carefully as a surgeon looking through the abdominal organs of a patient on an operating table, she climbed into the cockpit and went through the pre-start checklist. After starting, the 160-horse power Lycoming engine purred like the woman's Siamese cat. Finding all was well, she took off into a sky so clear and blue it made one want to get on one's knees and thank God for being alive.

The little town of Union, Mississippi, appeared under the nose of the airplane and the woman turned north to circle back around over her farm while climbing for altitude. She always liked to look down on the farmhouse and pine and hardwood trees growing on the eight hundred acres of rolling hills. The farm was her love, her life, and her reason for living after the death of her husband two years ago.

Reaching one thousand feet, she picked up the mike and said, “Good morning, Meridian Approach. November One Hotel Whiskey is five west of Union, climbing VFR with information Charlie, inbound for landing."

"Roger, November One Hotel Whiskey, squawk 4671 and Ident. Okay, we have you on radar four west of Union. Maintain two thousand, cleared direct Meridian. Information Charlie is current. Expect no delay."

The woman acknowledged the transmission and looked down at the sparse traffic on Highway 492 between Sebastapol and Union. Then: "Meridian Approach, November One Hotel Whiskey, I'm going to need to return to my landing strip."

"Roger, November One Hotel Whiskey. You have a problem? November One Hotel Whiskey, you read Meridian?"

There was no reply.

The little yellow Piper Super Cub and the young woman flying it were never seen again. After a long and extensive aerial and ground search, everyone assumed that the plane had crashed into the dense forest somewhere near Union. No wreckage was ever found. The disappearance remained a mystery for over twenty-five years.

Chapter One

The move was complete. The office closed, the house sold.
Jay Leicester, Aviation Consultants
was no longer located in Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital. The reasons for the exodus were varied, complex, and necessary. Now, a cottage in the rolling hills of northern Newton County, Mississippi, would be my office, my headquarters, my base of operations, and my home. It was my choice to make this move, and it scared me to death. I had no idea if the business would succeed or survive this far out in the woods. However, I could think of no reason why it wouldn't.

For ten years the aviation consulting business had grown steadily. I worked as much as I wanted. Retiring after twenty-five years as an airline pilot, the only thing I knew truly well was aviation, hence the business. The big airlines manage their own operations. Small regional airlines, corporations, and individuals sometimes need help. Pilots with bad habits can be salvaged, returned to their families and cockpits clean and sober. Corporations need help setting up efficient, safe flight departments with the proper aircraft and highly trained crewmembers. Individual private pilots need advice on planes, training, and realizing their capabilities. The old saying that the most dangerous thing in the air during a weekend is a doctor flying a Beech Bonanza remains true. The Federal Aviation Administration and people like me are trying desperately to change that fact.

***

I lay in bed reading a Hemingway short story by the moonlight. It is that bright. The young woman is agonized and torn over having an abortion. The boyfriend tells her how simple the procedure is and how happy they will be when it is over. They are sitting outside a train station between Barcelona and Madrid, and across the valley the hills are white in the sun and the girl said they looked like white elephants. The boy says that it is the right thing to do and the girl wants to know that if she does it, will the boy be happy and things will be like they were and that he'll love her. In the end nothing is resolved and the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusion.

Laying the book on the table beside the bed, I watched the moonlight move through the room like a quiet thief, touching my face, my arms, and chest. The Hemingway 'critics' raged about the symbolism of the hills and white elephants, as they did in all of his works. I laughed when reading what he said about symbolism in his books, "The hills are hills, the elephants are elephants. The sea is the sea, the old man is an old man, and the sharks are sharks. So piss on the critics and their symbolism."

Over the last few years, I have come to the conclusion that the books being published today are unnecessarily glum. I have decided, and rightly so, I think, to object to being made sad by my reading. From now on I will read only those publications that make me happy or teach me something. I have informed the bookseller who supplies my reading material.

Sleep would not come, so I curled into the fetal position and let myself settle into the bed. I am barely breathing, practicing for the 'eternal rest.'

Now she steals into my thoughts. It has been over a month since she left. I miss her. The breakup was my fault. She moved to Seattle and married a banker. I felt terrible. I had had relationships go wrong before, and had felt amazed, dismayed and at a loss, but this time the effect was much more intense, perhaps because the possibility of its happening never occurred to me. There are never any winners in a breakup, only losers. Guilt, like jealously, is an emotion that wastes life. I felt like a dog returning to its own vomit. Memory is a horrible mental swamp.

Life has placed women in my path. I am not given to the bragging and bluster of a smoky bar, nor to lyrical nostalgia. I have loved a certain number of them, and recall others with tenderness, indifference, or – most often the case – with a happy and complicit smile. That is the highest laurel a man may hope for, to emerge from such sweet embraces unscathed, with his bank account little diminished, his health reasonable, and his esteem intact.

I think nothing of interest will ever again happen in my life. All love has fled or been taken away. Only memory, rushing out of the dark with the anguish of heartbreak. A country song comes to mind –
Oh the lonely sound of my voice calling/ is driving me insane
/
just like rain the tears keep falling
/
nobody answered when I called your name.
Then a remembrance of her soft fragrance bringing tears, when for weeks all I've been is numb.

Get a grip, Leicester. That's what Rose, my nearest neighbor would say. It's probably the fear caused by the move to the woods. That's an old lady fear. Real fear is the man who lies in the dark wondering if the damaged retina in his only good eye will detach and propel him into a black abyss.

False dawn was approaching. I got up and made a pot of coffee. Stirring in a dollop of Fireweed honey, I take a cup of the black liquid out on the porch and sit in the cypress glider. It's so cold my breath is visible and so quiet that you can hear the faint whip of a bird's wings cutting through the air. If you listen, sound will teach you things beyond speech.

Setting the coffee cup on the arm of the glider, I lean into my hands. Thoughts pour from me like the fading light from the winter moon. I want to wind down, here in this country quiet. I desire peace from the long years of lust and violence and death. There is a heaviness in this cold air that lends itself to gloomy thoughts.

Dawn begins to break and I can make out features in the landscape. When I built this cottage, I oriented the front eastward toward the tree line and rising sun. It is a grand view. The oaks and hickory and pine, the chinaberry and crabapple. The cedars, green even now in the winter, and ragged to the eyes. Here there is a beauty and ruggedness and remoteness and mystery to my little cottage. A ground fog begins to form.

If you are in the woods alone for some time, the land resumes its inner life and allows you to see it. The faces in the trees cease hiding and stare out at you. Shadows pass and you are able to pick out a distinct word now and then, sometimes an entire sentence. The ghosts reveal themselves without malice or prejudice. I see them receding before me, their shapes beautiful and sad. I would think something wrong with my psyche if not for Shack, the cattleman who lives a few miles to the north, who has experienced the same phenomena in his rolling woods. His father before him.