A Fragment Too Far

by Dudley Lynch

  Neurons crackled somewhere in my head. My blinders disappeared. And my perspective moved 180 degrees.

  My realization was this: We’d all been wrong!

  During all the years that the other two McWhorter sheriffs had served, the county had indeed harbored crowing cocks — very skillful ones. They had crowed and crowed and crowed. Sometimes in the daytime, sometimes at night — but always in the dark. The problem had been that neither of my predecessors had understood what they needed to notice. I’d missed it too. The sights and sounds — the signs — that we were dealing with cocks of a very different kind.

  Angie hadn’t noticed it, but my body had responded to my new insights with a jerk.

  And my hands.

  They wanted to go another ten rounds with the flotsam of information we’d stacked on my dining room table. Start by shuffling the pieces like playing cards. Pick and re-pick. Think and rethink. I wanted Angie’s reaction and the benefit of her razor-sharp mind and her skill at peering into the shadows and zeroing in on developments that I’d missed. And I wanted her blessing for my bombshell insight.

  Not until I reached for my dad’s campaign poster again and held it up for her to see did I have any inkling how unlikely that was going to be.

  She took one glance at the poster and sneered. “Dumb and dumber! Has to be college kids.”

  I felt sandbagged. “College kids? Surely, you jest.”

  Her head did that pivot I’d learned to expect when she was digging in. “No, some of the shenanigans were brilliant — they were! But they were the kind of stuff that you’d expect from fraternity types who were acting out.”

  I was trying not to sound incredulous but losing the battle. “For the better part of two decades? They must have set world records for hanging around the campus.”

  But she was off and running. “Take these other posters . . . please! Ridiculous! I mean, as if something called ‘Templars of a Deeper Sky’ would have been taken seriously. Or ‘Annunaki — The New Chronicles.’ Here’s my favorite: ‘The Flaglerati Forever.’” She was just getting started. “And that stunt with the Heaven’s Gate lookalikes? That was clever. But it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. I mean, it was a bunch of clowns. No way they were actually associated with Marshall Applewhite. And making the Abbot County Sheriff’s Department look like fools — that could have been a challenge passed on from class to class.”

  “Heaven’s Gate lookalikes” was Angie’s description. The words hadn’t appeared in the deputy’s memo about the visitors that I’d found near the bottom of my first box. The deputy had called them hobos in one place, hippie types in another, vagrants in a third. Whatever they were, a half dozen had hit town one day in September 1975 and stayed for about a week. They’d slept in tents and sleeping bags and begged on the streets. Said they were awaiting word from higher powers named Bo and Peep.

  My granddad — the Sheriff McWhorter one — had tried to send someone undercover with them, but they hadn’t stayed around long enough. After a few days, they’d disappeared with no more warning than came with their arrival.

  There was no need for Angie to explain who Marshall Applewhite was. Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. was the founder of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult. “Bo,” as he sometimes called himself, was a native of Texas, but most of his deadly mischief had happened in California. His claim to fame was that he’d orchestrated a mass suicide in 1997 that had taken thirty-nine lives.

  Angie and I were simpatico on the veracity, or lack thereof, of the visitors being members of the cult, and I told her so. “Their story sounds bogus. I’m not even sure that Granddad Luke would have heard of Marshall Applewhite and company anyway. And the mass suicide in California was almost twenty years later. So, I’d put that one in the category of deception and disinformation. Fact is, there are a lot of circumstances in these boxes I’d categorize that way.”

  This time, Angie looked triumphant, not disdainful. I was surprised. Not at her. Well, yes, at her too. But more at myself. Something had offended me.

  I let my mind revisit the conversation. Then I realized what it was: her comment about the sheriff’s department looking like fools. The thought brought its own instant self-reproof. Your skin needs thickening, McWhorter.

  I decided to tell her what I considered disinformation and strategic deception in our boxes and what I considered something else, but she got there first. “Write these down.”

  She held her own pen upright and started tapping it against the tabletop, point by point.

  First tap. “The silly magazine story mock-ups we’ve found, none of which were ever printed so far as I can see.”

  Second tap. “The rumor that Flagler’s rich and powerful were going to be invited to a bull testicle roast out on Horseshoe Creek.”

  Third tap. “All those strange holes that got poked in the ground around the county. Even your deputies got the giggles at the thought of ‘the digger’ being at work again.”

  Fourth tap. “The anonymous complaints to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards that your Abbot County jail was filthy. Regular as clockwork. Every three years. The commission found it amusing until they didn’t. Always said your jail was clean enough to starve a cockroach.”

  Fifth tap. “The break-ins at the local mortuaries. With nothing ever taken or damaged and no idea at all how the perpetrators got in. The only leave-behinds were all those silly notes left in caskets.”

  There was that triumphant look again. “Had to have been college horseplay. Couldn’t have been anything else.”

  She sounded light-hearted and dismissive. But if she’d bothered to glance at me, she’d be blind not to notice the way my face tightened around my eyes. I kept hearing the cock crow. If we ignored it, the life’s work of two men I had adored might be discredited. Either that or I was being selfish about my family’s reputation.

  I concluded that what we’d been seeing in the boxes was bigger than the McWhorters. My grandfather’s intuition hadn’t been far off the mark. For years after he’d started collecting evidence, confusing as it was, the cock had been crowing.

  Then the crowing had changed.

  Changed in pitch and in frequency.

  The sounds, the signs — they’d all changed. They were more serious, but until now, they were still the kind of circumstances that would not have caused my father or grandfather to detect the switchover.

  And then, for reasons I didn’t understand, they’d quit trying to detect the crowing at all.

  I wasn’t sure when it had happened. But it had to have been before I was appointed to fill out my ailing father’s final term. That was in June of 2002.

  And the ten victims at Professor Huntgardner’s house?

  They were signs that the cocks were crowing again.

  The two people best equipped to discover why were sitting in my dining room. Angie and I couldn’t afford to miss the meaning of these six boxes. The meaning and the clues. If we did, the cocks would continue to crow. And I feared with every fiber of my crime-fighting being that there were going to be more victims in Abbot County.

  By bequeathing us the records in these boxes, my two predecessors had done more than open my eyes. They’d given me a chance to set my people free.

  But from what?

  I still didn’t know. Tomfoolery that had gone on for decades? That, for certain. But I was willing to bet my career that it was something more serious.

  I knew only one way to get through to Angie when she was in the grip of one of her Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade tirades. Deprive her of the means and opportunity to browbeat me.

  I pushed my notepad to the side of where I was sitting and placed my pen in the middle of it.

  I reached over and took her pen from her hand and laid it beside my own.

  I entered her space again and slipped my fingers underneath the pile of materials she’d
been building. Being as gentle as I could, I moved the pile away from her and sat it off to one side.

  I used the same motion to move my own pile to the same end of the table.

  Then I reached for the box from where it had been resting at the other end of the table and moved it to the floor.

  Now there was nothing else to move.

  Nothing else was separating us.

  No files, no boxes, no writing implements, no personal paraphernalia, no guns, no badges, no unidentified objects, no buffers, no armor.

  The only things that Angie had in front of her were the total seriousness of my look, the unyielding urgency in my voice, and a naked persona intent on pushing the current discussion in a different direction.

  I’d never seen the look on Angie’s face before. It wasn’t a look I’d seen on anyone’s face before. I’d heard it described in novels. Talked to myself about people looking that way when I was being melodramatic. But I’d never seen a person go bug-eyed.

  Until now.

  The gravity in my voice was matched only by the solemnity of my gaze. “We’re sitting on a powder keg in Flagler, and you are caught up in the juvenile games you think you are seeing in these boxes. I have to go in another direction. Can you go with me?”

  I hadn’t the slightest doubt that we both understood how high-voltage this moment was. How we’d gotten to this point, and why it has come at this instant, and whether the way it had arrived was wise or necessary — all that was beside the point. We were staring into the looking glass.

  She made a fist and moved it up and down. American Sign Language for yes.

  And we were through it.

  Chapter 34

  I turned off the floodlights and stepped down onto my flagstone patio, in need of a stretch after hours of rifling through boxes. Daylight had disappeared.

  With no moon out, it was a proceed-at-your-own-risk night. I’d wanted the clearest possible view of the hills along the ridge tops to the west. My backyard offered a front-row seat.

  What I found myself watching came from somewhere else. You’ve heard of people screening a movie on the inside of their eyeballs? I was doing that now, with startling clarity. While it wasn’t a regular event, I’d had such episodes before. The images would always burst into my awareness with no warning, hang around at their own pace, and then dissolve, never to be seen again. Only wondered about.

  This time, I was envisioning a young Thaddeus Huntgardner slouched against his parent’s ranch house, hands thrust deep into his pockets. He was waiting for the desert’s tarry darkness to give way to the dawn. Waiting, observing, reflecting on the mysteries of life — with great patience. Or so it appeared. But then I wondered if I had it wrong. What if he wasn’t waiting for the sun to rise. Instead, what if he was daring it not to appear?

  I could only imagine what had triggered this little drama in my mind. Curiosity? Anxiety? Premonition? I kept waiting for the next scene. For movement, for a clue, for a reason. It never came, and I knew it wouldn’t. But my mind seemed reluctant to see its brief one-scene movie fade away.

  And it hadn’t been dramatic. No plot. No climactic ending. No earthshaking insights. Only questions, gnawing at the edges.

  It might have lingered longer if not for Angie’s touch. She’d slipped an arm through mine and pulled me tighter. I understood. We were both still shaken by how close we had come at the dining table. To what? A bottomless abyss in our relationship? An annihilating collision? A primal flaming out of our shared attraction?

  She leaned a cheek against my shoulder. “You’re checking for the Saturday Night Lights.”

  “You suppose they were real?”

  “As real as the Marfa Lights.”

  The Marfa Lights were a phenomenon often spotted midway between the desert floor and the mountaintops in deep West Texas. Witnesses said the mysterious orbs sometimes remain stationary as they pulse on and off at a wide range of intensities. Usually, they’re a yellowish-orange but sometimes they’d take on other hues. Reds, greens, blues. And sometimes they split into fragments, then recombine over the desert.

  Angie’s reference to the Marfa Lights was a wise crack. I found it encouraging. She trusted me enough to risk kidding again. I used the opening to get back in the conversation. “Some people say they can see the Marfa Lights.”

  “Exactly. The other sheriffs in your family said they could see the Saturday Night Lights too. And about half the rest of Flagler’s citizens. They just never found out what was causing them — or, maybe, who.”

  This time, I disengaged from her arm and stretched mine around her. Pivoted her so that we both faced the hills in the western ridge. Plenty of shimmering lights. But they were recognizable. Street lights, a few car headlights, backyard floodlights. But no sign of the Saturday Night Lights that had so mystified both my predecessors and a townful of witnesses off and on year after year.

  Abbot County’s lights were mentioned several times in the boxes. Always in the same context. And always without explanation. No cause had ever been found. Then they quit appearing. There had been no mention of them, at least to my knowledge, in years.

  Angie slapped at a mosquito. I’d already felt a bite on the back of my neck. She reached for my hand and tugged me toward the house. “You still haven’t told me what you think you should do about the boxes.”

  We returned to the dining room once again, and Angie sat down at the table.

  I had a question ready.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that the FBI has never descended on Flagler? Not once in all this. I mean, the whole tenor of the bureau changed after J. Edgar. Organized crime, watch out — here come the Feds. And, to me, what the sheriffs were up against during the time of the boxes was nothing if not organized.”

  There was a flicker of defensiveness in Angie’s look, and then, with a single swift blink, it disappeared. “Look, can we just cut to the chase? You see something. The other McWhorter sheriffs saw something. They had to — else why go to all the trouble of accumulating what’s in the boxes and preserving it for the ages? Kindly spell it out for the local FBI lady, will you? I mean, if you’ve been wanting the bureau to show up, well, she’s here.”

  I went to the kitchen and returned to the dining room with a different notepad. Legal-sized, not letter-sized. White, not yellow. With unmarked pages, not lined. When I squared it longways in the center of my dining table, it gave me more room for sketching. I intended to work on it upside down so Angie could follow. This was a skill that I’d mastered to save time in interviews and instructing my deputies, and I’d gotten good at it.

  I gave Angie a little context. “Don’t know much about what happened prior to seventy-two. No McWhorters on the scene back then. We could look for crime patterns in the earlier sheriffs’ records, such as they are, I suppose. But don’t think it’s necessary. Look at this.”

  I drew a horizontal line about a third of the way from the top of the now-elongated page.

  Writing upside down, I began to enter dates along it, starting on Angie’s left. Each time, I stopped to let her know what I was thinking.

  The first entry was 1972. “That’s when our No Cock Crowed boxes begin.”

  Farther down the line to her right, I placed 1988. “The year my granddaddy retired. Nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-eight — that was the span covered by the first two boxes. I agree with you in part about what they documented. To use your words, it was goofy stuff. Fake emergency calls. Holes dug in the ground for no apparent reason. False complaints. Silly vandalism. Nuisance stuff by the bushel. But I don’t think it was mostly schoolboy pranks. I’ll explain why in a sec.”

  Angie didn’t look up. Her eyes remained glued to my pad.

  I moved farther down my line and added another date. 2002. “Sheriff John Aubrey McWhorter’s term of office was from 1988 to 2002. During which, serious crime
s in Flagler quit being faked and started getting real.

  “Three major downtown fires — all thought to be arson. But nothing was proven.

  “Cattle rustled and butchered on crude stone altars out in isolated pastures. Numerous times. The case was never solved.

  “The break-ins at our mortuaries. No major damage but constant fear that bodies were going to be mutilated or stolen. Again nothing proven.

  “Dr. Wilson Carmichael, one of my Bible professors at the University of the Hills, disappears, never to be seen again. Never solved.

  “Signs of secret encampments that didn’t get noticed until the campfire ashes had cooled. Telephone threats to people who were clueless about why they were singled out. The Saturday Night Lights — clearly staged, if you ask me — but for what?

  “A lot of mischief, if that’s what you want to call it. A lot of felonies too. But nothing, nothing, ever solved. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Sheriff John Audrey and his deputies ran themselves ragged. We’ve seen the evidence for that in the boxes.”

  Angie took her eyes off the pad for the first time and gave me an affirming nod. “So the cock was crowing.”

  “The cock was crowing. Again and again.”

  “And then —”

  I pointed to the date closest to the end of my line. 2002.

  My companion did the honors. “And then, you took office.”

  I tapped the date again. “And the serious crime stuff stopped almost on a dime. There have been a few major incidents of criminal behavior during my term, and we’ve found the culprits for most. Put the perpetrators through the system — a lot of them in jail. Kept a lid for the most part on Flagler’s proclivity for nastiness and mayhem. Until last Friday.” I extended my line to within an inch of the right-hand edge of the sheet. Then added a single word. “Now.”

  I had the total attention of the FBI special agent sitting across from me. “When the cock started crowing again with a vengeance.”

  “That seems to be the case.”