We were much more relaxed when we went to sleep.

Sally Allison’s story in the Lawrenceton Sentinel the next day said nothing about two big men from Atlanta. Martin left it folded open on the table by a clean coffee cup, waiting for me; he’d had to go in early for a breakfast meeting with his division heads.

Jack Burns, longtime member of the Lawrence-ton police force, was killed sometime early Monday afternoon. His body, thrown from a low-flying airplane, landed on the property of Aurora Teagarden and Martin Bartell, about a mile out of town on the Mason Road, at approximately 2 P.M. yesterday.

Burns, a native of Lawrenceton, was not known to have any enemies. His wife, former teacher Bess Linton Burns, expressed bafflement at the motive for her husband’s death. “I can only think it must have been someone he arrested, someone out for revenge,” she said.

“The means of his death are not known now,” stated Sheriff Padgett Lanier. “Only the autopsy can tell us that.”

Lanier went on to say the sheriff’s department is investigating how someone else could have entered the Piper plane, rented by Burns from Starry Night Airport yesterday, and overcome Burns. The plane was found returned yesterday, and no one at the tiny airport can identify the pilot.

See Obituaries, Page 6.

I could imagine Sally’s frustration at being given so little to work with. When she’d called me the night before to offer me the tidbit about Jack Burns himself having rented the plane that took him to his final landing place, perhaps she’d been in search of some additional detail to pad out the story. Accompanying it was the usual grim shot of the two medics loading the covered stretcher into the ambulance. You could tell the covered bundle was sort of flat… I gulped and pushed the memory away.