by Dudley Lynch
And they all had to accept that their membership in Huntgardner’s secret society was for life. They’d also had to acknowledge that the penalty for betraying its secrets was death. She wrote:
The name of the professor’s mysterious group is the Unus Mundus Masters, or “the Masters.”
I’ve never been able to learn how many “few” amounted to or the full extent of their crimes and machinations. But I’ve had reason to think there is something extraordinary about them. Why else would another secret society in Flagler have felt the need to mobilize to oppose them?
The Society of Ezekiel’s Wheel is every bit as secretive and deadly as its physics-oriented counterpart. I know little about its founder, but he was a Bible professor at the University of the Hills. He specialized in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel. And, in particular, Ezekiel 1 where Ezekiel describes his vision of a wheeled chariot descending from the skies.
The Bible professor viewed Ezekiel’s vision as a warning. Aliens had tried to plant a bogus Messiah on Earth once before. He claimed that Ezekiel, the prophet, had caught them in the act. Blown the whistle. And destroyed the infidels. The Society of Ezekiel’s Wheel planned to do that again if it found anyone trying to plant a bogus Messiah on Earth again.
She went on to note that the Ezekiel’s Wheel group, like the Masters, had operated from a series of hush-hush locations in town over the decades.
Sometimes, their physical headquarters had been hidden away in churches, sometimes not. Both groups, she said, were accomplished at doing what secret societies down through history have done: keep their memberships, their presence, and their operations secret.
She admitted that she lacked a shred of hard proof. But she was staunch in her belief about this: these groups had been at the root of Flagler’s ongoing outbreaks of civic disorder, vandalism, and occasional serious criminal acts for the past thirty or forty years. Each and every time, their actions were a response to something they feared the other group was doing or might muster the resources to do.
And she’d had no doubt that was what motivated their members most.
Fear.
The fear of each other.
Each group believed its counterpart to be devious and destructive. And dangerous. Not only to Flagler. To the entire world. And perhaps beyond.
I read that far in her voluminous missive without encountering anything that I felt actually touched on my own life. At least not yet. Then, with no warning, all of that changed with a single word.
My subconscious eye spotted it coming a few words in advance. So when my reading voice reached it, my imagination had already begun to race.
Roswell.
What flashed from my memory was the image of that note I’d found on my living room table. The one that read, “DON’T MAKE ROSWELL’S MISTAKE!”
To the best of her understanding, the Prairie Canary said what Huntgardner’s Masters feared was that Flagler would repeat the mistake made at Roswell: destroying the aliens without making any attempt to welcome them, honor them, listen to them, learn from them.
On the other hand, the Ezekiel’s Wheel group was rabidly opposed to greeting them. Its fear was that if this was done, the aliens would destroy Christianity. Install their own Messiah. And displace the very idea that humankind was the only model of intelligent thinking the universe was meant to emulate.
She told Sheriff John to watch his back — that double-cross was in the air. And that, more than he realized, he was in the crosshairs. The authority of his badge was one reason. Both groups had wanted him in their pocket. Neutrality had worked, she’d observed. Until he’d gone beyond it.
She promised to suggest a course of action for him based on her revelations. But she never did. At least I was not able to find any mention of strategies or tactics in the rust-colored folder with the accordion ends.
There were no further letters from the Prairie Canary.
Chapter 49
Thinking about it as I showered and ran my electric razor over my clefted chin, I had three very good reasons to expect a challenging day.
The three women on my schedule were the reasons. Before the day was over, I could expect all of them to be annoyed with me, if they weren’t already.
Annoyed?
Too docile a descriptor.
Furious?
More in the ballpark.
The person I most dreaded confronting was the one I cared about the most. Angie still wasn’t back in town. Her flight from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport had been late last night, and she’d missed the last flight to Flagler. She’d called from the airport hotel, travel-weary and homesick. Said she’d clutch a pillow to her breasts in bed and pretend it was a certain virile, rugged, cleft-chinned, one-eyed sheriff she knew.
I’m not sure whose need for a good cuddle had been most acute.
I’d asked her to send me a photo of what her pillow would see in a cuddle. Her laughter had lasted so long that I knew she was considering it. But better judgment won out. “Not a good thing for a special agent of the FB of I to do.”
She’d land midmorning but had to go straight to her office.
Said she’d pick up green-chili enchiladas from Casa Mariachi for dinner. Said she’d arrive at my place eager to display what an FBI special agent dared not feature in photos sent into the public ether.
I told her I was eager for an unveiling. Which I was. But I wasn’t optimistic it was going to happen. Not right away. We had too much to talk about.
Or to avoid talking about.
It was the latter that was most likely to bring me grief.
But the encounter of the day that I felt the most uncertain about was going to be the first one. I’d decided to show Helen the letters my father had forbid her to look at.
In a way, she was entitled to see them.
I’d said nothing to her yet about the contents of the six boxes of old records. Six boxes I would never have seen had she not edged aside her devotion and broken a promise to a man she’d adored.
She’d been a girl fresh off the farm, “greener than the last watermelon in heaven,” as she liked to put it, and he’d given her a job. A good one. And she’d thrived in it in no small part because of her shrewd handling of other people’s secrets and confidences.
When you get stung because you kicked the hornet’s nest, you have only yourself to blame. But she knew things I needed to know, so I had to do this. She was not going to be happy being asked to reveal still more secrets.
The other strong-minded woman I hoped to converse with at length before the sun went down, I wasn’t sure I could find. If I did find her, I wasn’t sure she’d even return my hello.
The last time we’d talked, she’d stormed out of my interrogation room hotter than a firebox on a steam train.
But Dr. Magdalena Simpson-Mayes might be the one person in Flagler who could put all the pieces together. Or at least enough of them to give me a real sense of how Thaddeus Huntgardner’s mind worked.
Not because she was going to talk to me about the professor. She wasn’t. But because she’d helped her clients explore what allowing Professor Huntgardner’s ego to affect your own could do to you.
She could talk about those minds under the rules that therapists went by because all their owners were dead.
* * *
I handed Helen the manila file folder with the letters without saying so much as “good morning.” She reached for it. Took it in her hand. But kept her arm outstretched, as if she wanted me to take it back.
Instead, I continued to my office.
I hung my hat on the usual peg on my hat tree. Reached for the pile of call slips on my desk. And entered into a charade of pondering who I’d be calling back.
At no time did I allow Helen out of my field of vision. What she did with the letters had ev
erything to do with what I did next. Not so much with my morning but with my investigation into Flagler’s morass of deadly mysteries. As I’d hoped, she’d opened the file, picked up the letter on top, and started to read.
I’d thought that we might play eye tag. Take furtive glances over our reading glasses at each other. Then slide our gazes elsewhere so as not to be caught spying. But after a couple of minutes, I quit the game. Helen wasn’t looking up, so I never took my eyes off her. I leaned back in my chair and monitored her every action.
There weren’t many. Except for the times when she rearranged herself in her chair, they were confined to managing the letters. She advanced through the first few letters at a brisk pace.
She’d read one, then turn it upside down and place it on the stack she started at one side of her desk blotter. Each time she added a letter, she’d take a moment to tidy the stack so that it remained square and trim. Then she reached for another one.
As the stack grew, her advance through the letters slowed. Several times, she stared at a letter before discarding it. Once, she laid a letter she’d read to the side of her discard stack as if to begin a second stack. But halfway through the new letter, she reached for the orphaned letter and placed it in the regular stack.
When she’d read all of them, she reached for the pile she’d made. Turned the letters right side up. Placed them back in the file folder. Closed it and looked up at me for the first time. She looked hollowed. Emptied. Carved out.
My training as a counselor said to go sit with her. Then be silent. Give her time to process. Let her know she wasn’t alone. Wait for her to make the next move. My training as a lawman said don’t squander the moment. Start the dialogue before the opportunity escapes. She needs to talk. She wants to talk. Go grease the wheels.
But this was Helen, not some stranger I’d brought in for interrogation. I was starting to doubt the wisdom of showing her the letters to begin with when she made my decision for me.
She motioned me into her office. Pointed to the hallway door. Indicated she wanted it shut and locked. Reached around to her credenza. Opened it. Took out a bottle of mineral water. Unscrewed it. Took a deep swig. Put the cap back on the bottle. And swiveled her chair to face me square-on.
“Now I know what the bank safety deposit box was all about.”
This time, both my counseling and interrogation training were screaming the same caution: Let her take the lead. I combined a slight head tilt and a quick head dip of understanding and said nothing.
She laid her hand on the file folder. Spread her fingers. Kept them in place. Kind of a maternal act. “I always wondered. The county paid for it, you see. But the letters . . . the envelopes . . . they always said ‘personal.’”
Say something supportive, Luke! “They did.” I gestured toward them. “They still do.”
“But I never knew what they were about. Only that once they started arriving, he tried to be here when the mail was due. If there was a letter like these, he’d take it to his office, close the door. Open it. Read it. Refold it and tuck it away somewhere in his clothing. Usually, he’d leave soon after.”
“So you never knew what was in the letters?”
“No, they were a mystery to me. I was a little embarrassed by them, you know. They were marked ‘personal.’ Your dad, a married man. Family man. Big man in the church. Pillar of the community. Getting letters from what was obviously a lady. Reading them and then rushing off.”
My mind was racing. How much more did Helen know? Was it possible that she knew too much? If so, I needed to think long and hard before I asked the question that revealed that. Because there’d be no going back. “Did you ever have suspicions about who the letter writer might be?”
“Not until after they quit coming.”
I reached for the file folder. “August 29, 1998. That’s the date on the last letter in the file.”
Helen tapped the air with her palm out like she was urging someone to go further. “It wasn’t that soon. When did your mother go into the nursing home? The late fall of ’98, wasn’t it?”
I pursed my lips. Thought about it. Dipped my chin several times after a spell. “Yes, and she was sick for a long time before that. After her stroke, she was pretty much incapacitated.”
“You’ll have to chalk this up to a woman’s intuition, but I always thought your dad figured out who this woman was. And this was why the letters stopped.”
“So you think he started meeting with her?”
“I was never sure, but I think I saw him with her once.”
People drop their jaw when they are surprised for one reason: opening your mouth wide is the quickest way to get a massive load of oxygen into your lungs.
So my jaw dropped. And I inhaled.
Helen knew I’d want to hear every detail, so she hastened to dampen my expectations. “Can’t tell you much. They were standing by a car in front of a restaurant. She reached for him, hugged him. No kissing or anything like that. Got in her car and left. I could be wrong about it all, you know.”
“Or you could be right. It would explain a lot of things.”
My dad was in no sense a lady’s man. I’d always had suspicions that my mom was the only woman he’d ever bedded. But my mom’s illness had changed him. He didn’t withdraw. He became needful. Vulnerable. Clinging, almost. And then all that needfulness had seemed to go away. I’d realized it even back then but had no idea what was happening.
“There’s one more thing. Or it may be nothing at all. But I wondered at the time.”
Helen looked into the distance. In our offices, gazing at the painting of ponies racing on the prairie that I had hanging on my far wall was about as far away as you could gaze. She had her eyes locked on the picture. Like she was revisiting a long-ago scene in her mind.
It turned out this was the case.
“Hadn’t thought of this in years. But your dad did something right before your mother died that I felt was odd. He’d never done it before. He’d always left such tasks to his deputies.”
Helen told me how my father had left the office one afternoon to escort a funeral procession to Flagler Memorial Cemetery.
She’d learned later from one of his deputies that he’d insisted on driving at the front of the procession. She made inquiries around the courthouse about the deceased person. No one knew much, but she learned it was a woman. Someone had thought she’d lived in Flagler as a child, moved away, returned as a young woman, moved away again, and, a couple of years before her untimely death, had returned. Someone else thought she’d been writing a book.
“The letters — anything else in them a surprise to you?”
“Just how little I really know about a place where I’ve lived all my life.”
Chapter 50
Dr. Simpson-Mayes wasn’t difficult to find. She was standing beside her seated receptionist when I entered her office suite. The look in her eyes wasn’t a welcoming one. “Urge to kill” gazes tend not to be. I’d not expected anything different.
I told her there were reasons I’d not called for an appointment. I wanted to be sure I’d have a chance to share some things I knew she’d want to know.
She kept her head — her whole body — as still as dead air on Sunday, but her eye contact was steady. Was she about to erupt and rage at me for entering her office without a warrant or an appointment? Or was something potent and eye-opening about to happen?
I knew it could go either way, and I thought I was handling the matter well. Then I realized my chest wasn’t moving. Holding your breath will do that.
She whipped her svelte body around in a half-circle like her hips were spring-loaded and headed for her office door. She walked through the threshold, leaving the door open behind her. Was it a sign that I was meant to follow?
One way to find out.
I entered her office and shut the door b
ehind me. Removed my hat. Took a seat on the couch. Crossed my legs to the extent that my jeans would permit and placed my hat on my lap. I figured the less she could see of my pelvis, the better. And decided that voicing a simple truth was going to be the best way to find out if a dialogue was possible.
“I have reason to believe that Professor Huntgardner is a serial killer.”
The déjà vu was instantaneous. She went still as a tombstone again. Kept her eye contact steely. Offered nary a clue about how she intended to react.
There wasn’t one until her chin slumped to her chest and she began to wave her head back and forth like a metronome. I gathered I was being asked what part of “no” didn’t I understand.
She threw me a glance I’d describe as one part consternation and one part revulsion and began shaking her head again. “We really, really need to get to the bottom of this.”
I wanted to mirror her newfound spirit of cooperation. Shifted forward to the edge of the couch. Put both feet flat on the floor. Straightened my back and leaned forward. “Then let’s talk about the old warehouse.”
“What old warehouse?”
“The one downtown. The one Huntgardner and his cronies have outfitted for their atrocities. I mean, torture chambers? Holding cells? Human experimentation?”
I’d read enough about Dr. Simpson-Mayes on the internet to know that she was a newer humanistic version of the old psychoanalyst. Straight talk between patient and shrink about root issues was her shtick. Her years of training and practice at handling surprising things people said in her presence were now failing her.
She wasn’t thinking much at the moment. I could see that in her face. It had lost most of its color. Her eyes were spacey. She was the victim of runaway emotions. If she showed signs of fainting, I’d have to go straight across the top of her desk. Hopefully, I could catch her before she hurt herself.