One Half Dozen of Luna City: Chronicles of Luna City, #6

By Celia Hayes

Welcome to Luna City, Karnes County, Texas … Population 2,456, give or take … Business at the Luna Café & Coffee is looking up for fugitive former celebrity chef Richard Astor-Hall. The owners – elderly schoolteacher Miss Letty, and the irascible Doc Wyler have approved hiring another cook and expanding hours at the Café. Joe Vaughn, chief of the tiny Luna City Police Department, is coping with the demands of parenthood … and both he and local ace reporter Kate Heisel are deep into untangling the mystery of a very old skeleton unearthed in construction of a brand-new facility at Mills Farm, the upscale resort just down the road. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Watercress Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386755500

Celia Hayes

Celia Hayes works as a restorer and lives in Naples. Between one restoration and another, she loves to write. Don't Marry Thomas Clark reached #1 in the Amazon Italian Ebook chart.

Book preview

One Half-Dozen of Luna City

The Continuing Comic Diversion

By

Celia Hayes

& Jeanne Hayden

GA Logo - Long version

San Antonio, 2018

Copyright © 2018 Celia D. Hayes & Jeanne Hayden

This ebook version contains all text and illustrations contained in the print edition

ISBN-13 978-0-9897820-7-8

ISBN-10 0-9897820-7-7

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, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover design by Alex of 3iii Graphics

Published by Geron & Associates

A Division of Watercress Press.

2018

Dedications and Acknowledgments

Thank you to the readers who love the series, and demanded a further chronicle of events, lives, and loves in Luna City. To my family, friends and the memory of those who have gone before. Semper Fidelis!

Jeanne Hayden

The Luna City series is dedicated with affection to those residents of Texas small towns who have not only welcomed us over the past half-dozen years of doing book events and markets, but who have also served as an inspiration by telling stories which are woven into this continuing chronicle: Fredericksburg, Boerne, Bulverde, Beeville, Goliad, Gonzalez, Comfort, Richmond, Junction, San Saba and Harper, Giddings, Llano and Lockhart, Richmond, New Braunfels and Kerrville. Thank you all for your continuing inspiration. Special thanks are due again to Larry H. for expert advice on the cooking, classic French kitchen-management, and catering aspects of this and the previous Luna City chronicle, and gratitude to J. Pouncer Melcher, of Lancaster, Texas for attentive beta reading.

Celia Hayes,

San Antonio, 2018

Contents

Luna City & Environs

Luna City Town Square

Cast of Characters

Seven Buttons and a German Bayonet

Winter Newsletter

In the Offices of the Karnesville Weekly Beacon

The New Hire

Luc in Residence

Radio Silence

Christmas Morning in Luna City

The Face from the Past

On the River in Spring

Spring Newsletter

The Deathly Wood

The Email

A Name to the Face

The Grand Opening

Grand Plans

Miss Letty Contemplates Her Garden in Spring

Mr. Dubois’ Grand Hotel

The Young Volunteer

The Pursuit of Love

Love, Etc.

Georgina Mason Rocks Inner Space

The Glorious 1912 Boathouse Opening

Luna City & Environs

Luna City Town Square

Cast of Characters

(An asterisk marks those who are deceased)

Seven Buttons and a German Bayonet

Richard stared into the box; like the others present, with a mixture of horror and curiosity. No one quite wanted to touch the skull; jawless, with the open eye-holes still partly-clogged with the damp earth from which it had been dug. The bayonet with the German maker’s initials lay to one side, and Joe Vaughn was quietly bagging up the deformed metal bullet in a small zip-lock bag which Jess had produced from the suit-cased sized diaper bag. There were about half a dozen small corroded metal items knocking around in the bottom of the box, objects about the size of a 10p coin. Allen Lee Mayne reached over Richard’s shoulder and picked up one of them.

A button, Richard observed. Allen Lee nodded, gently buffing away the grime and corrosion with a paper napkin. Looky here – it’s got some kinda raised design on it. Can you make it out?

Looks like military, Joe ventured. An eagle and an anchor, under an arch of stars. Navy, mebbe. You got another baggie, Jess?

Either our mystery man shopped at the Army Navy store, or he was a soldier, Richard ventured.

Allen Lee shook his head. Man, that’s an old Marine Corps button. Really old. Their buttons have had a globe on them now, along with the eagle and anchor. My old man was Marine in Vietnam, that’s how I know this shit.

Let me look, cher, That was Lew Dubois, his expression yet more serious. Ah, yes – what I thought; an old Marine overcoat button. My dear Grand-père Lucien for whom I am named served in the Marines. He fought in the great battle in the Belleau Wood, and he still had his old overcoat, one with buttons just like this! He used to wear it on cold mornings, when he took me duck-hunting on the bayou. He was very old, and I was just a boy, and his namesake – a special treat for me, to go hunting with my grandfather. That is why I recollect so clearly.

I don’t think that this is your grandfather, Richard belatedly wished that he hadn’t spoken, for Joe, Lew, and Allen Lee all looked at him with severely condemning expressions. Sorry; a bit of misplaced levity, chaps, for which I apologize. But the fact remains; this is a dead chap, of some vintage. Not, perchance, one of yours? That is – local to Luna City. You wouldn’t have misplaced one of your own, all these years ago?

Both Araceli and Jess shook their heads, and Jess answered, I’d have to double-check with Miss Letty, of course, but I am pretty certain that just about all the Luna City volunteers for WWI were for the Army.

Looks like whoever he was, he got his Purple Heart the hard way, and no mistake, Joe looked down at the deformed and scarred skull, with an expression which Richard found hard to decipher. Not from here, then. Drifted in, flotsam and jetsam; wasn’t there some local yarn about a scar-faced drifter? I’m sure Kate wrote about it, sometime back. Weird-looking guy, used to haunt the place, back during the Depression?

The Scar-faced Tramp, Araceli replied, and the light of blooming comprehension shone on every face. Katie interviewed Abuelita for that story! The Tramp frightened her into running home screaming. She was only five or six at the time, Araceli added hastily, for no one could imagine Abuelita Adeliza, the elderly absolute ruler of the sprawling Gonzales-Gonzalez clan, running screaming in terror from anything less than a fire-breathing tyrannosaurus rex. Her mother scolded her when she got home. The scar-faced man was only a poor vagrant, living in a camp in the woods, who got by on doing odd jobs for people in town. I’ll call Katie – she’ll be thrilled to know about this!

Must you? Joe finished bagging the buttons, all seven of them. Look, I don’t want to make a big media thing about this until we have some positive answers. Give me enough time to let me set up an investigation with the county sheriff’s office and whoever they have available for an emergency dig before unleashing the media hounds on us.

Katie isn’t a media hound! Araceli was indignant. She has better sense than that, and she is one of us: OK, second cousin by marriage – but she is one of us!

Indeed, Richard agreed, with a small clearing of his throat. Miss Heisel has been ... well, remarkably restrained and discrete, with regard to my own rather fraught position with the national press. I would be inclined to trust her, as being sensitive to local concerns. She’s a good egg, Richard finished, with a sense that he was being particularly lame. He strenuously ignored Araceli’s muttered footnote. Yeah, she’d love to jump your bones, Chef – given any sort of encouragement, as well as Allen Lee’s distinctly lewd chuckle of agreement.

All right then, Joe nodded, as he placed the two plastic bags in the cardboard box with the skull. Lew ... I’m sorry, this will put a crimp in your construction schedule. The work gotta be on hold until forensics can go over the area. Nothing I can do about a delay, but I promise, I’ll do what I can to instill a sense of urgency.

"It is not a problem, cher, Lew sounded extraordinarily mellow for a corporate executive whose’ multi-million-dollar project was now on the tipping-point of failure – or at least, an expensive delay – through being delayed by the inconvenient circumstance of a dead body found at the construction site. Even if the dead body was – by Richard’s estimate and his vague recall of Kate talking to him about her months-ago feature story – at least six or seven decades old. Now, Lew added, in philosophical tones, There is no urgency for this poor fellow. It has been a long time. Still, we should endeavor to find out something, I t’ink. Of who he was, and of his passing. If he was a comrade of my dear Grand-père Lucien? For the honor of that service a hundred years ago, I owe him that generous consideration. My time and interest are at your disposal with regard to this puzzle, Chief Vaughn."

Appreciated, Joe nodded, bundling up the box under one arm, and collecting up the baby carrier with his other. Hey – ‘Celi, make our order a take-out, can you? Jess is bushed, and I wanna get my family home and settled. ‘Kay, Babe? Gotta cold case to work, he added to Jess, who actually did appear pretty pale, frazzled and exhausted. (Perhaps only Richard noted the special emphasis with which Joe said those two words; ‘my family.’)

My time and interest, too. That was Allen Lee, most unexpectedly. My Daddy served at Khe Sanh. Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. Daddy would want this. Count me in. I gotta go back to California for the show production and spend the holidays with my wife and little girls – but I’ll be back about February.

Right, then, Joe said. I’ll put out the word.

Winter Newsletter

In the Offices of the Karnesville Weekly Beacon

Kate! Acey McClain, the editor and publisher of the Karnesville Weekly Beacon shouted in his usual abrupt manner. Kate! Get in here and brief me about the body they found last week! First unidentified dead body they’ve found in the county in fifty years! God, you gotta love small towns. Anyplace else where they find a stiff that nobody recognizes right away, it’s just a regular Saturday night/Sunday morning!

You bellowed, Chief? Kate Heisel, neat and prim in her working attire of skirt-suit and flat-heeled shoes, appeared in the doorway, pencil and reporters’ notebook at the ready. As a child, Kate was enthralled by the comic strip adventures of Brenda Starr. She resolved to be a reporter at the tender age of seven, just to prove that not having red hair and a glamorous appearance was no handicap for someone whose first coherent word was not ‘Mama’ but ‘why?’

Don’t be such a damned smart-alec, Acey returned. Of course, I bellowed – you never answer the intercom.

Because I’m never at my desk, and the office intercom hasn’t worked since the first Bush administration, Kate took a seat in the straight chair in front of the chief editor’s desk – an article of furniture nearly as ornate as the White House office Resolute desk, but in much worse repair. Besides Brenda Starr, Kate’s other reportorial role-model was Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Curiously, this ensured that she got on rather well with Acey, who was rather a throw-back himself, and had no patience with what he called the ‘sob-sister set.’ Strictly speaking, Kate elaborated as she opened her notebook. It wasn’t a body. More like ‘skeletal remains.’ I got the low-down from a drinking-buddy of Cousin Horatio’s who works in the coroner’s office. He wouldn’t show me the report, but he answered my questions over a burger luncheon. I turned in the receipt to Lola, since it’s a business expense.

You’re lucky that you didn’t take him to a high-class joint like Panera, Acey grunted. Whattaburger is more our speed. So – what’s the bottom line on our skeletal remains?

"A Caucasian male, in his late thirties or early forties, significant healed trauma to his skull, ribs, upper left shoulder bones, said old injuries having been inflicted at least fifteen years prior to death. It looked as if he carried a bullet,